Headphones – Podcasts and audiobooks for March 2021

Pablo Trincia led the podcast to the Italian public. It was 2017, and for a couple of years he had been looking for someone to help him produce Poison, a series on the case of the so-called “Devils of the Lower Modena”, a thriller that had occupied the nightmares of many Italians between 1997 and 1998 (there was talk of satanic rituals, killed children, improperly extracted statements, false memories collectives).

After knocking on many doors, Trincia, a journalist and television author known above all for having participated in numerous seasons of the Hyenas as sent, had managed to get opened by that of Mario Calabresi, then director of Republic. Poison thus becomes the first podcast successful in Italy, everyone talks about it and many listen to it and love it. They then added to that Dark (2019), a vertical series (that is, each episode is self-contained) on “stories of those who fell into darkness, but had the strength to find the light”, and finally, in 2020, the extraordinary Anna’s war, made for Audible (come Dark), which tells the story of an incredible woman, the Milanese Anna Prouse, who now lives in San Francisco, but who in the past worked in Iraq (Baghdad and Nassiriya), survived several attacks and a fatwa and who, finally, fought against a brain tumor. After a season a Who has seen?, today Trincia, 44, works as creative director of the podcast company Chora, a company founded by Calabresi for the long and very short spins of life.

Pablo, how did you start podcasting?
“I was lucky enough to discover the American investigative journalism podcast Serial while the episodes of the first season were still out. I did immediately binge-listening. And that’s where I had enlightenment: in life I have to do this ».

But you didn’t have any audio experience: first you wrote for the press and then you did Hyenas.
“True, but Hyenas it is more like a radio show than a television show because it is very written and spoken. Our pieces were all: “We get out of the car, we find ourselves in front of a destroyed building, we meet a gentleman, etc.”. You almost could have just listened to them. I brought this way of working with me, and I partially revived it in Poison. In itself, therefore, it was not difficult as a transition. The main difference is that while on TV it is the images that speak, when you write for the radio or for a podcast you also find yourself writing 20-25 thousand lines for a 40-minute product, net of what are the other voices. and various contributions “.

Basically, how do you set up a bet?
«The modality is the same as for a TV piece: go to places, talk to people, study documents, cut interviews, organize an outline. It is only the act of writing that changes, but giving a structure, recording, creating a mood and a script are similar. We basically for the plant Poison we were inspired by Breaking Bad, which we were watching at that time: intro, theme song, episode, final twist. It’s like with Ikea furniture, if it’s not a Billy it’s another, but the assembly method is basically the same. Except that, to make a series, instead of building a chair you have to build an entire neighborhood ».

So how is an entire series organized?
«Well, since it is a question of true crime, I had listened to all the American shows that came out – wonderful products like RadioLab, Dirty John and others – including video series – remember that The Jinx it had influenced us a lot. TV series have nothing different from audio ones. It is the same principle: the twists are selected and distributed in the episodes. A rule that I give myself is that in every episode something important must happen. In the Anna’s wars, for example, the scheme is very banal: apart from the tumor, she had experienced four important episodes, the four attacks. There were a total of 7 episodes: in the first and last there is no Iraq, but only the disease, so there were 5 left and so the second was conceived as a preparatory episode, a kind of teaser of the series, a presentation. The series must have a constant tension, you must never get bored because otherwise at the second or third episode you will drop it. The rules are few, and you learn them by listening and watching what others are doing ».

What are your favorite genres, aside from the true crime?
“Surely there must be some drama, is what allows you to keep the attention high. There must be something that moves you, that makes your brain go down to your heart and into your belly. That said, one of my all time favorite podcasts isn’t a crime. Is called Heavyweight, is a vertical series with self-contained episodes in which the author helps people come to terms with an episode from their past. Even there, however, in each episode there is a small one drama, a little tension that makes you hold your breath until the end ».

How do you decide which stories to tell?
“It’s instinctive. It is the story that speaks to you and you must be ready to grasp it. Only that of Dark it was a bit more strategic because I came from Poison and the last thing I wanted was for people to make comparisons. So I said to myself, I mess up the cards and do something different, because you don’t compare the attacker with the goalkeeper. And in any case it is difficult to find a story that can be serialized, not all of them have a long enough breath ».

How long does it take to produce a series?
“It depends. For Anna it took me 5 months ».

What is the secret of a successful series?
“When you have a story, draw its structure on a piece of paper. For example, Poison it is a tree lying down: the trunk is the chronological part from which branches start going in various directions. Anna it is a kind of arrow that makes an arc, that starts and returns to the tumor, but which, like DNA, has two strands – its history and that of Iraq – and in the middle there are the stories of the various guests crumbled along the episodes. The important thing is to create movement like in the scenes of a film: each episode has on average 7-8 scenes of 4-5 minutes each ».

Was it difficult to record with Anna, given that you live on two different continents and there was a pandemic?
“No, we had rented a studio in Palo Alto and then we would see each other on Skype, I would ask her questions and she would answer me in the microphone of the studio. In the end they sent me the audio files that were already perfect and clean ».

And with the other guests?
“I was able to meet them all in person, apart from General Petraeus of course. Productively, packaging a podcast is super easy. Anna 3 of us did it, if it had been on video it would have required a budget a hundred times higher and at least ten more people ».

You and Anna met many years ago in Iraq. What did you think the first time you met her?
“That she was a totally out of the ordinary person, there was no one like her on the planet. Since then we have always kept in touch, then during the lockdown we wrote to each other for work and on that occasion she told me about her tumor. I remember being in the kitchen and thinking “what an incredible story to tell”, but then and there I didn’t tell her anything. Then I reported it to my wife Debora (Campanella, ed), who works with me, telling her that I would like to make an episode of Dark. But she told me: “This is not an episode, it is a series!”. And of course she was right. Then, seeing that Anna’s story alone could not have withstood all the episodes, I built them under a historical structure on Iraq ».

At one point, in the Anna’s wars, you have decided to enter the story no longer only as a narrator, but also as a “person”. You do this when you tell that you and Anna share a kind of feeling of “nothing will happen to me”, which is the push that makes you leave and go to the most dangerous places on Earth.
“While writing, I happened to think you and I were very similar in this. It has nothing to do with courage, it is just a sense of omnipotence, a thinking “but what can ever happen to me”, which is what sometimes makes you bullshit. Which fortunately never happened to me, while it did to her. I remember when, for Public service, Santoro was looking for someone to do a report on Ebola. Nobody wanted to do that. I never thought for a moment about the danger, I just excluded it, and so I left ».

Now that you are in Chora, what are your plans?
«We are about to launch a beautiful podcast on emotional addictions with Selvaggia Lucarelli. All vertical bets. She is a bomb and she is very good. I will continue to do series, but at the same time I want to do something else, fiction for example. I want to do a bit of everything ».

We always talk about audio, right?
“Yup. Podcasts have really changed my life, I listen to a lot of them, wonderful things that fill the dead moments of the days. Audio, when done right, works inside you in a unique way. It has a much higher emotional potential than, say, a video series, because it forces you to use your imagination. Which is always a very powerful thing. Plus, writing to audio gives you a freedom that no other writing can give you. There are products like Hardcore History by Dan Carlin, a historical series with episodes of 6 hours each on, for example, the First World War, in which there is only the narrative voice on white. But he’s so good at using pauses that you could sit there listening to him endlessly, even if you never gave a damn about that topic. The art of oral storytelling is the art of using silences. It’s not the word knobs that make the difference, but the way you detach yourself from those knobs and set the pace. In this way you can nail an entire audience, make the famous “cinema for the ears” ».

How did you do it?
“I have listened, as a student and disciple, to the best things. And I still do it ».

And to think that you graduated from African Languages ​​and Literatures. What good did it do you?
«A little (ride). But initially it helped me to enter the world of journalism: the online newspaper PeaceReporter he took me precisely because I had that degree there ».

You know at least 12 languages, including Swahili, Hindi and Russian. What do you need those for?
«They are there to remind me that I have probably been in the wrong direction: languages, their study and their teaching are my true immense passion. If I could be a Swahili or Japanese teacher I would be the happiest person in the world ».

And why don’t you do it?
“Because I found myself doing this job! But I enjoy it all the same. “

It is said that those who easily learn languages ​​are also good at singing. You are?
“No, but I’m a very good imitator.”