A few weeks ago, Juleyka was invited as a guest on 3 Clips, where podcasters talk about making their shows. We turned part of that interview into a special episode to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we make the show.
If you loved this show, listen to our first episode ever, Mom Drove into NYC Amid the COVID-19 Crisis. You can hear Juleyka's interview in 3 Clips with Jay Acunzo here. And, visit the 3 Clips website for more meta interviews about podcasts.
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Juleyka Lantigua-Williams:
Hi, everybody. Today, we’re doing something a little different. A few weeks ago, I was a guest on a podcast called 3 Clips with Jay Acunzo. It’s a very meta show, where podcasters go on a podcast to talk about the process and techniques of making podcasts. Stay with me, because I spent the entire time talking about how we make How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything. With more than 30 episodes, we thought that it might be fun for you to take a peek behind the curtain. Let’s get into it.
Jay Acunzo: Okay, so now it’s time to go inside the making of How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything. Every episode, we use the same format. We’re gonna have three clips across three different segments. Each of these clips helps us understand something different about the show development process. First, we’ll explore premise development, how to say something that actually matters. What’s the show about? Second, we’ll explore the experience. How is the show actually produced and formatted? And third, we’ll talk about the connection being forged with all these hidden creative choices between the audience, and the host, and the show.
All right, let’s explore that first crucial element in developing great shows, the premise.
So, when you make a show, the point isn’t to just make some stuff. The point is to make something that matters. And that means first, the thing you have to develop before you develop the audio itself is develop the premise. The ideas going into the show. So, I want to play a clip from the show we’re profiling from you today, which is the show you’ve created and now also host, How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything. And I do want to have this… We’ll play, this is a short clip, but I think it’s a tiny bit that says a whole lot.
Lantigua-Williams:
And listener, I have not been allowed to know what this clip is going to be.
Acunzo: That’s thinking like a producer right there, by the way. Raise the stakes heading into the clip. A little cliffhanger. And roll sound effect.
Lantigua-Williams:
Welcome to the first episode of How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything. I’m the creator and host, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. I made this show because many of my friends and I who were born or raised in the U.S. could use some help in communicating with our immigrant parents. We’re sometimes torn between the way we choose to live our Americanized lives and the loyalty we feel to our parents’ ways. Every week, I’ll talk to adult children of immigrant parents facing a heavy situation from which the rest of us might learn something. I’ll also talk to an expert with relevant experience, who can help us understand and move through the situation.
We’ll start with my friend, who we’re calling Sandra Morales to ensure her privacy. Her mom made a life-threatening decision as COVID-19 escalated in New York City. Let’s get into it.
Acunzo: So, just a really casual question here for you, Juleyka. When you hear your own voice, it’s the first episode of this show, so now you’re further along. When you hear it from the first episode, what are you thinking about your performance, your scripting choices, the premise of your show? What’s going through your mind when you hear that?
Lantigua-Williams:
So, the backstory to this is that I came up with the idea for the show and we premiered it in three weeks, and this was also, I know you’re shaking your head because it’s crazy. I think a couple things happened there. One, I trusted my gut. I think I trusted that I knew my audience well. I trusted that I could build from the premise that the show really called for. I trusted that there would be endless, endless conversations and situations to draw from. So, I trusted that implicitly. And then I also said, “And if it fails, I’ll know in four episodes and then we’ll stop producing it.” Because it’s just me. It’s just me and my wonderful producer, Micaela, and I was like, “The risk is very low if it’s just me.” It could just be an experiment in audience development. I’m still gonna get something from this.
And absolutely to my utter surprise, the show is doing really well, and the emails and the tweets that we get about it are really reflecting back our intent. That’s the proof that we need, that when people talk about your show, they talk about your show how you talk about your show.
Acunzo: What was it about the premise of this particular series where you were excited to step into that host role? Like why does this premise matter to you?
Lantigua-Williams:
It matters on many levels. One, I am an immigrant, but I’m also what’s called a half generation. I came when I was 10 to the U.S., so I was essentially Americanized, and so I am a hyphenated American who is now raising American, biracial, bicultural children, so I knew that just from my lived experience, I was going to be able to have really meaningful conversations with people because I am going through this all the time. You know, and know that we’re about 30 episodes in, you hear me all the time saying to people, “Oh my God, I resonate with that so much,” or, “Oh my God, the same thing happened in my family,” and, “Oh my God, I wish I’d had this insight when I dealt with this five years ago.”
And so, I knew that I could be a good guinea pig, because again, this is an experiment, right? I am taking something directly to the market. We did not have a pilot in house that we workshopped. We did not… I didn’t even have a deck for this thing. My social media editor is the one who did the logo, and we did it on a Google document at first, and then she made it really pretty. It was such an experiment, because I wanted to see if the premise could come across well, right? And I think it did, and so I’m very happy for the results.
Acunzo: I want to ask about… You mentioned the logo and I notice on the cover art, [Mamí and Papí] are in brackets. Now, I don’t know if this is intentional, but I’m like, “Oh.”
Lantigua-Williams:
So, the brackets in [Mamí and Papí], they are also supposed to be a placeholder for anything other people call their parents. So, if you are in Sub-Saharan Africa, it might be baba for papí, right? If you speak French, it might be mama for mamí. And so, I wanted to be able to bring to the show people of all kinds of stripes, and so that’s why the brackets were there, and the reason that I’m using [Mamí and Papí], because that’s what we call my parents. So, I was like, “Well, I’m in the show, so that’s fair.”
Acunzo: Yeah. So, How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything has a great premise, but I think a great premise is just a great start. It’s sort of like picking up the groceries. You still gotta go cook, right? You can’t really celebrate too much. You got… Good ingredients matter. Don’t get me wrong. Gotta go put the dish together. So, let’s roll this second clip, because we’re gonna now move from the premise to the format. This comes right around like 3:20 in the episode. We’re gonna hear Sandra, who is a… It’s a placeholder name to protect their identity, as you said in the top, and you’re sort of sharing her story or she’s sharing her story with you. So, up until now, this is the only voice that we’ve heard since the introduction, so let’s play that clip.
Sandra: I’m a very generous person and I would love to be generous with my mother with my time, right? Because anything she wants, if I can give it to her, I will. But it’s just… It’s like you’re selling your soul to the devil whenever you agree to do something, right?
Lantigua-Williams:
Let’s pause here for a sec. I think I know what some of you are thinking. I was thinking it, too. Sandra could just say no to her mom, right? She has that option. But that’s not quite how she sees it.
Sandra: Yeah, but then my Latina card would be revoked if I did that. You know, what Latina daughter is gonna be able to claim being her Latinidad if all of a sudden that card is gone? It’s like, “No. I’m the daughter.” You know, you gotta suck it up, girl! Otherwise, you’re gonna lose that part of your cultural currency. And I’m not willing to do that. I’m sorry.
Lantigua-Williams:
I was stunned the first time I heard the full version of this story from Sandra. I couldn’t get it out of my mind for days. I asked Sandra to share it on the show because I heard echoes of situations I and so many of us hyphenated Americans face. I also invited a licensed marriage and family therapist to help us make sense of it.
Evelynn Hernandez-Brown:
My name is Evelynn Hernandez Brown. I’m a licensed…
Acunzo: I love the stitching together, and I saw you smiling, and nodding, and shaking your head a little bit at what your guest there was saying to you. What were you thinking?
Lantigua-Williams:
Well, so she’s a really, really good friend of mine, and what I was thinking when I was talking to her was why do you keep doing this? Because now I know you. This is a pattern. Why do you keep doing this? And I asked her, and then she gives that incredible explanation, right? Like the stakes are really high for me. And that to me was such a revealing moment about the potential for the show, because I thought, “Here’s my bar. My guest bar for the rest of this show. I have to be able as an interviewer to bring my guests to the point of revelation-“
Acunzo: Right.
Lantigua-Williams:
… where we learn something about why the things that we put up with really matter to us and why we’re willing to make such psychic, emotional, and spiritual sacrifices for them. And so, in a way, during that first episode, the show really revealed itself to me. So, it was so much easier to then go out and say, “Well, here’s the bar, so let’s just aim for this bar every single time.” We don’t make it with every single episode, but I’m really happy to say that probably… We’re batting .300 at least.
Acunzo: When you… First of all, .300 for a career, you’re a Hall of Famer, so keep it up.
Lantigua-Williams:
Duh.
Acunzo: Right? It’s all you need. Secondly, when you aren’t interviewing a friend and you do have to have them touch on things that are sensitive, and personal, or help them arrive to some sort of revelation… I mean, these are deeply trust and comfort-driven things. I need to be in a space with somebody where I trust them, where I feel comfortable, to then get uncomfortable. How are you doing that with someone that you haven’t spent significant time with away from the show?
Lantigua-Williams:
And to be clear, that is 99.9% of the people that I talk to.
Acunzo: Sure. Yeah. For all of us. For sure.
Lantigua-Williams:
And so, pre-production helps in that sense. I don’t talk to people before we do our interview, but I have an amazing producer, Virginia Lora. She communicates with them so that then together they define specifically what we’re gonna be talking about, and then she will do a prep for me with 5 to 10 questions based on that conversation, or those emails that she’s had with the guest, and so I use those as parameters. But what you don’t hear in the first half of the show is that I share a lot with them about myself as I’m talking to them, as I’m interviewing them.
And so, the intimacy builds before we get on the air, and you also don’t hear the intimacy building, because I chose to not be present when… We call it the testimonial. I chose not to be present during the testimonial because I really wanted the listener to hear themselves. The other thing that happens is I ask for permission throughout the interview, right? So, I say things like, “All right, I’m gonna ask you about this, but you let me know.” And almost always people say, “No, go ahead. Ask me. It’s fine.”
And if I hear them pause, if I hear them take a deep breath, if I hear them start to cry, I stop and I say, “We don’t have to continue. We don’t have to do the interview. You don’t have to do the episode. I understand. So, I’m just gonna wait until you tell me.” And I just sit in silence for as long as it takes for them to decide what they want to do.
Acunzo: What an incredible awareness that you have there and skillset, the ability to kind of maneuver with these emotions. Those moments are becoming so fraught and you seem to have a plan for that. Was that a lot of trial and error to get there? Are you pulling from other experiences talking to tough guests? Or where did you get that skillset?
Lantigua-Williams:
It’s 20 years of interviewing people. And it’s also I’m a mom of a 9 and an 11-year-old, and so there’s a lot of emotional translation that has to happen in my daily life, and so that’s part of it. But I’ve had to talk to a lot of people whose family members are in jail. I’ve talked to people whose family members were brutalized or murdered. I’ve talked to all kinds of people, people who’ve had their families deported, and so I’ve… I trained myself. Yeah, that’s the best way to say it. I trained myself to not just listen deeply, but to also reflect back to people what is legitimate in the moment. It’s legitimate for you to be anxious. It’s legitimate for you to be fearful. It’s legitimate for you to be nauseous. And I find that once you say to the person, “I’m really nervous too.” Their shoulders come down, they relax, you get into another level of trust with them because they see you seeing them.
And so, I just try to do that. I mean, and then sometimes I break the fourth wall, right? Sometimes I get out of character and… We had an episode a couple weeks ago where I interviewed someone about the process of coming out as gay to his family. I was so excited, because it was the first time we were gonna talk about something that’s really important like coming out on the show, which is still very taboo among many immigrant communities. And so, I was like, “Yes! This is gonna be great!” And sure enough, the person’s lovely. Great storyteller. Really has had time to reflect and really create context around his life experiences. I mean, a wonderful, wonderful interviewee. And then he reveals that he was sexually assaulted by two young men and that was his first sexual experience, and that he went home immediately after and his brother looked at him and said, “You just had sex.” And he said, “I did.” And they never talked about it.
Acunzo: Whoa.
Lantigua-Williams:
Ever. Right? So, I’m crying. I’m swallowing hard. And I said to him, “We don’t have to continue the interview. Just let me know what you want to do. I will wait until you’re ready.” Because one, I needed to stop crying.
Acunzo: Sure.
Lantigua-Williams:
But two, I needed to hand over all of my power as the interviewer back to him, and that was so clear to me, and I’m… Now that I’ve done a lot of interviews, not just in this format but throughout, I understand that it is imperative that you manage the power dynamic in an interview.
Acunzo: Absolutely.
Lantigua-Williams:
And so, I know when I have to just relinquish my power entirely.
Acunzo: The thing we haven’t touched on when it comes to your role is when you jump in as a narrator now. It’s not in the moment. It’s not you with the guest. So, now you have this space between you and that interview, however long it’s been, and you have to somehow cut in, but still map to what they’re doing, and I notice you have this really nice cadence. You do interrupt as a narrator, but you also have this nice cadence, so just talk to me about how you think about the right places to interrupt and the way to perform those moments of voiceover.
Lantigua-Williams:
So, typically I know when I’m going to… and I don’t always interrupt the testimonial. It’s very… Maybe 20% of the time I interrupt the testimonial. But I always know the moment in the interview when that’s going to happen, because one of two things happen. One, the obvious question of, “Well, why don’t you just say no to your mother,” immediately comes to mind, and so I put myself in the place of the listener who’s gonna say to no one in the room, “Just say no to your mother!” So, I know that that is gonna be necessary, because otherwise, the veracity of the storytelling is gonna come into question, right?
So, I have to show my listener, listen, I know what you’re thinking. We’re all thinking it. We’re all thinking it. I’m just gonna ask it and then we’ll see what happens. The other thing that happens is that I say to myself, “Oh, I need to talk about X, Y, and Z in this particular point.” And that’s when I will interject a personal story. I’ve done it a few times where I want to say to the listener, “I know that this is relatable to you, but I also want you to know that this is relatable to me, and it’s important to me, and this is why.” Because as I am making the show, I also have to put my DNA into the show, and I’m very aware of that.
And so, as much as I want to allow the testimonial and the expert to shine, I have to also continue to weave my DNA into the show so that the listener wants to spend time with me, and so that the listener trusts me to bring these conversations to her.
Acunzo: I think that is a perfect segue into the third clip, ironically, because the third clip is about creating this personal connection with your audience, and of course you’re doing that throughout the experience. It’s not unique to any one moment. But we did find one clip that we think helps make this show feel personal. I think a lot about the word favorite, and how favorite, it’s an irrational bias, an emotional choice. You can say to someone, “Well, oh, you’re listening to that show, in that category? Well, the number one ranked show is this different show.” And they go, “I don’t care. This one’s my favorite.”
Lantigua-Williams:
Yep.
Acunzo: My favorite sports team across any sport, the New York Knicks. One of the worst sports teams, any sport? The New York Knicks. So, yeah. Favorite doesn’t mean objectively good, although it’s nice when the two go hand in hand. Favorite is a very personal decision. It’s an identity-based decision. And so, I’d love to play this clip to explore how you, and your show, and your great producers create an experience that can feel personal to the listener. So, in this third and final clip, it comes around 14:40, which is just over halfway through the expert interview, the second voice, the second guest voice we heard in our second clip. And we hear you ask this question.
Lantigua-Williams:
I feel like when it comes to multigenerational, sort of like first and second-gen families in the U.S., a lot of this communication practice is really on the more Americanized people in the family, right? So, I’m just gonna say that from my experience… You’re nodding your head. So, I’m gonna say that from my experience and my friends’ experiences, that a lot of us are the ones who are trying, not always successfully, but who are really trying to improve those channels of communication. So, thinking about it foundationally from your vantage point, having worked with families, what are some of the dos and don’ts in our practice as, and we know that this is a process, this is an absolute process. These are things we have to repeat, and repeat, and repeat. But what are some of those foundational dos and don’ts for us to try and establish new dynamics in how we communicate with our parents, our siblings, our extended families?
Hernandez-Brown:
One, I encourage them just to go for it. Come from that place of self-compassion, self-love, hold that. Sometimes also the best work is in the repair.
Lantigua-Williams:
I really have to work on that. My questions are too long.
Acunzo: Well, as we were hearing that, the listener won’t hear that little quip you made during the clip. You were like, “The never-ending question.” What’s going on? Why was that your reaction?
Lantigua-Williams:
Because I feel like that’s one of those moments where I’m so into the interview that I just want to know for myself, like I broke character there. I was supposed to be the host there, but I was just like, “Come on, give me the goods. Just tell me.”
Acunzo: Also, can you call my mamí to tell her that? Can you call my father? Can you call my cousin, by the way? I know this is not part of the show, but can you?
Lantigua-Williams:
Right. I know we’re not here for me, but this just feels like I need it right now.
Acunzo: I loved it. I gotta say, I know there’s no one right way to do this. As I heard you start that question, and I’ve done this enough times to know what it feels like. When you start to say something and you’re like, “Oh, I gotta land this plane. Where’s the question? Oh God.” And then you come down and ask a terrible question just to park it somewhere… I see you’ve done this or experienced it.
Lantigua-Williams:
Oh my God.
Acunzo: I didn’t get that sense here, Juleyka. I was engrossed in that moment.
Lantigua-Williams:
Sure, because you and I obviously have the same crazy. No, I often apologize to Virginia, like during the tape. I’m like, “I’m sorry. I know you’re gonna have to cut that. I’m so sorry. Okay, can you answer the question now?” Because something happens. Because I’ve been listening and I really have been processing at the same time, because I want the fealty of the show to happen when I am talking to the person. Like I really want anything that I consider cosmetic, which is the intro and the credits, to feel cosmetic, and to feel like, “Oh, this is the business side of the show.” But I want the core 90% of the show to really feel like, “Oh my God, I am getting the distilled experience from that interview.”
And so, I allow myself to do that, because that’s what people do when they talk. They start with an idea and then something pops into their head, and then they add a clause, and then they add an em dash, and then there’s a semicolon, and holy cow, where is this going? And then they apologize in the middle and they say, “I’m gonna get to it. Don’t worry.” And then they keep going. And I think that that’s natural. I also can be really blunt sometimes when I’m talking to different guests. You know, like I will say to someone, “Yeah, but what does that actually mean?”
I will cut people off sometimes, and gently, but I will definitely say, “Okay, but how is that usable? Or what does that have to do with real life? Or that sounds really theoretical, how does that work in practice?” And so, I try to balance that out within interviews and from show to show, because that is how people communicate.
Lantigua-Williams:
Thank you, Jay Acunzo, and thank you to the whole 3 Clips team. It was so much fun to be on that episode and also thank you for letting us use your audio. If you haven’t listened to 3 Clips yet, I definitely recommend you do, especially if you have a podcast or if you’re thinking about starting a podcast.
As we close 2020, I want to wish you, and your family, and your loved ones, and everyone who surrounds you a happy and healthy holiday season, and my very, very, very, very best for a beautiful new year.
How to Talk to [Mamí and Papí] About Anything is an original production of Lantigua Williams & Co. Virginia Lora produced this episode. Michael Castañeda mixed it. Micaela Rodríguez is our founding producer and social media editor. Cedric Wilson is our lead producer. I’m the show’s creator, Juleyka Lantigua-Williams. On Twitter and Instagram, we’re @TalktoMamiPapi. Please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, and anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Bye, everybody. Same place next year.
CITATION:
Lantigua-Williams, Juleyka, host. “Our Creator and Host on How This Show Came to Be.””
How to Talk to [Mamí & Papí] About Anything,
Lantigua Williams & Co., December 28, 2020. TalkToMamiPapi.com.