Sarah Marshall, co-host of the podcast You're Wrong About, explores a largely misunderstood event or topic in each episode.Christina Bodznick/Supplied
“I think by talking about misinformation and misremembered history, I kind of realized that all of history is misremembering.”
Every episode of the podcast You’re Wrong About starts with an out-of-context, outlandish quote from host Sarah Marshall. This time, the 35-year-old writer and podcaster based in Portland, Ore., is talking to The Globe about the podcast she started with co-creator Michael Hobbes in 2018 (the team currently includes producer Carolyn Kendrick and a cast of guest co-hosts).
In each episode, the hosts explore an event or topic largely misunderstood by the public. The format is always conversational and informal: One co-host explains why you’re wrong about, say, Anna Nicole Smith or the McDonald’s hot coffee lawsuit or the O.J. Simpson trial. And even though there’s an immense amount of research that goes into the conversation, the hosts’ humour and curiosity somehow make it feel more like interesting dinner party chatter than a lecture.
Ahead of a live show in Toronto this month, Marshall talked to The Globe about the big questions her podcast tackles, its evolution and how it’s remained independent.
Who is this podcast for?
Sarah Marshall: I’m thinking about my younger self first. I’m thinking about myself as a child, tween and all the times adults said something that I knew there was more to it, but no one was allowed to question what they were saying because they were grown-ups.
It’s very interesting you said that because I feel like I’m processing my childhood with you when I listen to the show. Y2K, Beanie Babies … Go Ask Alice. I really thought that book was a real diary.
I mean, yeah, because adults told you it was a real diary.
But the show’s also evolved to include episodes that aren’t like that. Can you explain that evolution?
We just put out an episode on Sinead O’Connor and I feel like that’s the most classic You’re Wrong About episode we’ve done in quite a while … We have kind of a fixed image in our head about this moment, frozen, that defines someone’s life, and now we’re trying to kind of open that up and complicate it with Allyson McCabe [author of Why Sinead O’Connor Matters].
I’ve also been trying to make [the show] about the big questions that we have about the world we live in, and what would happen if we were just kind of to talk openly about that. So to me a good example of that is the episode, “What even is justice?” with Amanda Knox.
The New Yorker reported that You’re Wrong About is downloaded around two and a half million times a month. Is that still accurate? And how would you describe the success of the show?
I think that’s still accurate. I mean, it fluctuates a bit. My main feeling about the success of the show is like, boy, how many other people would be able to do this if they could afford to make a show for free for a year? I feel like our ability to not belong to a network that then owns all of our [intellectual property] has everything to do with the fact that if you can hold out you can collect money for your creative work later on, but it’s the holding-out initially that makes it so hard.
I was going to ask, why are you still independent? And that seems to answer the question because I’m assuming that you’ve been courted many times.
Yeah. And the show works because we’re supported by people who subscribe and get bonus episodes on Patreon and more recently, Apple subscriptions.
I have a friend who’s a superfan of yours. And she said to me that it doesn’t seem like there’s much that the left has gotten wrong in modern history. First of all, do you think that’s a fair thing to say? And also, is there an episode you’ve done or would like to do that covers a narrative that you think the left has gotten wrong?
I think the left gets things wrong, but I think we get things wrong for often different reasons. And then the way the political right gets things wrong is often, I think, more about covering the nakedness of the patriarch and making it seem like everyone still knows what they’re doing.
Something I always wanted to do and that actually [one of co-creator Michael Hobbes’ other podcasts] Maintenance Phase did an episode on is the Twinkie defence, because that was something that always annoyed me and you feel like an absolute jerk when you correct people about it. And the myth was that Dan White had as his defence after assassinating Harvey Milk [one of the first openly gay people elected to public office in the United States, in 1977] was that he’d eaten too many Twinkies and he went crazy. And this was so widely believed that it was at the end of the movie Milk, and it didn’t happen. It was that he was a healthy guy, and his defence lawyer had made the argument that you could see he was deteriorating psychologically because – among other things – he’d been eating Twinkies, and he wouldn’t normally have done that.
And we did our porn wars episode last August with Nona Willis-Aronowitz, which was about radical feminists taking it too far legislatively with porn.
So you’re coming to Toronto on April 23 to the Danforth Music Hall. What are people getting with the live show that’s different from the podcast?
We want it to be funny and messy and I’m going to try and force people to do a singalong. And you don’t have to sing but, I would prefer for you to sing and to kind of create like a feeling of togetherness for all of us because we are together while we listen. We just aren’t as in touch with that as when we all get to be in a room together.
This interview has been condensed and edited.