Ep. 165: Talking Shop with Podcast Powerhouse Avery Trufelman [encore]

**Avery Trufelman** (0:05)
That's the dream of what podcasting can be. It's almost like this pirate radio thing. I don't want it to get too professionalized.

**Amy Devers** (0:14)
Hi, everyone. I'm Amy Devers, and this is Clever. Today, I'm talking to podcaster Avery Trufelman. You probably recognize that name. You will definitely recognize her voice. For seven years, until 2018, she worked alongside Roman Mars on 99% Invisible, the award-winning trailblazing podcast about all the thought that goes into the things we don't think about, the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world.
First as an intern and then as a producer, Avery was right there in the recording closet of the architecture office in downtown beautiful Oakland, writing, recording, and editing powerful illuminating stories about the power of design, both as the medium of podcasting blew up, and as 99% Invisible itself climbed to global recognition. While there, under the banner of 99pi, Avery created Articles of Interest, a two-season mini-series about clothing that covers a broad range of concepts, including the rise of casual wear, the environmental impact of the textile industry, and why women's wear doesn't have pockets. It's fascinating. From there, she moved to Nice Try, a podcast from Curbed about utopian experiments that includes two seasons of deep dives into subjects like Jamestown, Virginia and the backstory of the crockpot. She's also done a stint during the pandemic, I might add, as the host of The Cut, a weekly podcast about life and culture from New York Magazine.
As you'll hear, it's been something of a wild ride, but one that also feels tailor-made for a distinctive voice like Avery's. Here she is.

**Avery Trufelman** (1:59)
I'm Avery Trufelman, I live in Brooklyn, and I'm a podcaster, which is like the most odious sentence in the world. I do what I do, because it's the way that I've come to see the world. I can't imagine myself doing anything else.

**Amy Devers** (2:11)
Well, I can't imagine you doing anything else either. When I listen to your work, it really does feel like it's your calling. I think you found the right spot.

**Avery Trufelman** (2:18)
Thank you.

**Amy Devers** (2:19)
I do like to go all the way back to zero, and I understand that you may actually have radio baked into your very DNA.

**Avery Trufelman** (2:28)
I do. I'm the luckiest. So my parents met working at WNYC.
They loved it, and they talked about it all the time, and they were just working at WNYC in the 80s, like Allen Ginsberg was always coming by, and my mom was head of classical recordings at WQXR, and was traveling around the world recording orchestras in Taiwan. I grew up seeing pictures of them with my mom's gigantic 80s hair, and beautiful chonky earrings, and my dad wearing his red Converse sneakers. I love my parents anyway, I'm very blessed to have super cool parents, but they just looked impossibly cool working in public radio, and they always talked about it, and they were like, it was the most fun job, and they talked about how much they loved cutting tape with a knife, and my mom was like, oh, when you would lose a the, you're really screwed. It was a very different art back then.

**Amy Devers** (3:24)
Yeah, like you would have to physically construct the conversation.

**Avery Trufelman** (3:28)
Wow. They both adored it, and I grew up with the radio on in the house all the time. Before podcasting was ever a thing, I was a huge radio fan, and I got involved in college radio, and always knew that radio was a part of my life and something I was really interested in. But I'm very blessed in that my parents from the get-go were like, oh, that's a totally viable job, being a radio producer. You go be a radio producer.
And they're like, maybe you won't do it forever. Maybe you'll do it for a decade or so like we did, but it's so fun and you should definitely go do it. So they were always supportive and they always got what I wanted to do.

**Amy Devers** (4:10)
That is truly lucky. So I have a very basic pop culture understanding of what it's like to work in radio, which is built around WKRP. It's an old sitcom.
But it sounds like the public radio life of WNYC was a little bit more anchored and that that's a station in and of itself that was making a lot of the zeitgeist content that was so important in the day. And so that sounds like you could have a stable life and make radio if you are plugged into that kind of situation.