Mallika Rao

Mallika Rao is the host of HiberNation. Follow her on Twitter here.

How did you get introduced to the audio space?
I was transfixed by radio as a kid in my parents’ cars. They were big NPR listeners. We lived in Texas and my parents came from India. NPR represented a bigger American world. My favorite show was This American Life. It didn’t feel exotic though. It felt as real as the people right around me. I ended up becoming a professional writer -- I write for a lot of online and print publications. I applied twice for TAL internships and didn’t get them, so I moved on -- but I always wanted to tell twisty, grounded stories about people: ordinary people who aren’t doing press rounds or practiced at telling their tales or born into a sense of importance. People who don’t even know they have stories. 

In fall of 2020, Leah Sutherland at Headspace reached out about a podcast they wanted to launch. Leah’s an audio nerd who started at Wondery Media. She was interested in tapping me as a host for a show she wanted to develop, based on the strength of an essay I’d written. The podcast was supposed to be about sleep (because it’s such a hot topic of interest in the wellness sphere these days) but she said they really wanted it to be about everything -- about life. That’s why they liked my essay, called Why Everyone Should Sleep Alone. It was for the Atlantic’s website, and it was technically a book review, about a book on the history of the bedroom. But it was really about love -- about my own divorce, about intimacy more generally. Leah mentioned This American Life as a broad comp for the show. Basically, they wanted me to focus on human nature, to think like a documentarian, a short story writer and an investigative journalist. 

I loved the idea of applying the expansiveness of narrative, character-based work to a topic that could otherwise be shuttled into a more rigid space -- so often anything to do with our health and wellbeing is treated like a final destination. Do all these steps and you’ll arrive at the perfect spot. But I’m a fan of novels, of fiction. I like the idea that all the problems we have are ancient ones, and are unanswerable. All we can ask for is wisdom, which comes from listening to ourselves and each other. The idea of just telling stories around sleep as a way to better understand this universal act (that’s so confounding) felt honest to me. I liked that Headspace was interested in a kind of companion piece to their more direct sleep-focused fare -- a piece of art to go with instruction. So of course, I jumped.

What was your involvement in HiberNation? What was the team like and what did you have help with?
I was the host, writer and an executive producer of the show. And I worked with an incredible team. Headspace hired Spoke Media, a snazzy podcast production company based in Texas (I was excited about the Texas connection). We had to pull off a pretty ambitious project in not a lot of time. We wanted to tell stories about people you might not easily hear from, in today’s world -- whether because of realities to do with race, class, gender, sexuality, access, self-confidence, what have you. We wanted the stories to be set in the analog world. Not set off by a tweet, or some online drama, but reflective of the tactile beauty and complexity of a world with trees, with bedrooms, with pivoting moments that happen in fresh air. I’m of the belief that the more reminders of the world we can get, as modern people, the better off we are -- we aren’t avatars, we’re actual flesh-and-blood beings! There also needed to be a clear arc that changed our subjects. And these arcs needed to be set in the realm of sleep: we had the idea to progress over the season from a more social terrain -- stories on sleepovers, cuddling, sleep gadgets -- to the more abstract, surreal space of dreams and the act of sleep itself. Almost like the listener is moving through the course of a night while listening to the whole season. Each episode would tell a single tale, like an audio short story collection. 

But it’s very challenging to hunt down legitimate stories of this nature, especially during a pandemic, and especially given how beautiful we wanted the show to sound and how strong we wanted the narrative arcs to be. TK Dutes was our Spoke executive producer, and she navigated an enormous amount of logistical hurdles in order to get us to completion. Brigham Mosley worked closely and sensitively with us on the creative side, and Sherita Solis was an amazingly efficient coordinating producer. And then, a whole array of Spoke people were instrumental in all sorts of ways besides, in terms of moving episodes from origination to completion. 

Closer to me, there was a core team of freelancers who built the episodes in a very granular way. James Kim, who’s just a phenomenal audio editor, writer, and artist altogether -- he played a major role in shaping scripts and the overall arc of the show -- as well as in handling major logistics, along with TK. Hannah Rae Montgomery, a dramaturg based in Kentucky, acted as our researcher and was meticulous at tracking down sources and fact-checking, as well as line edits. And Erica Huang, our composer, scored more or less every bit of audio with original compositions. Erica had such an attentive ear that she also wound up acting as a script editor down the line -- she could really hear how a story should sound at the line level. And then Leah was sort of our Headspace fairy godmother, working to preserve the vision as things moved through the final rung of oversight. 

I wrote the scripts and then the whole team would kind of go at them with notes and I’d go back and refine it some more -- we’d iterate that way until basically time was up and we had to move the episode out. It was a very efficient factory line operation by the end, with every member playing such a critical part.

Why did HiberNation have to be a podcast as opposed to a TV show, comic, whatever? What is it about audio that makes this show work? 
I don’t know that the show had to be a podcast, necessarily. That’s just how it came about. There are business reasons -- Headspace is an audio-focused app and sleep-centered fare is some of their most popular stuff. This show is different though, as reflected in the team that was assembled and the likeness it bears to podcasts that aren’t aiming to inform so much as entertain. There’s obviously a lot of excitement about podcasts at the moment and companies want to try their hand at making them in various forms. 

All those dry considerations aside, audio wound up being a great medium for us because it allowed us to pull together traditions of storytelling and theater in interesting ways. I was personally really influenced by certain oral storytelling traditions I was exposed to in my childhood, that have some roots in the Indian arts but are practiced in all sorts of ways on the outside and in homes. I really wanted each episode to unravel like a delicious fable, and for that I do think audio -- with the musical possibilities, the resonance of voice -- is unique in its possibilities. Also, given that we really wanted to bring in subjects who aren’t well-known or kind of embedded in the Western media circuit, there was something that felt really radical about actually getting their literal voices in the mix: voices with accents, voices that tell a story all their own. 

Were there any shows that inspired you when it came to style, tone, etc?
This American Life, of course, as the granddaddy of narrative audio was a source of inspiration. Also certain episodes of Heavyweight, and the overall ethos of both The Heart and Appearances. Our trailer was partly inspired by the trailers for This Is Love and Floodlines. And then I pulled inspiration from non-audio sources as well -- the Javanese puppet scenes from the short animated film Sita Sings The Blues was one, for how cleverly they pull off a contemporary narration of ancient stories while bringing out a sense of personality in the narrators. 

What’s the best thing podcasters can do to grow their shows?
I don’t feel particularly knowledgeable in this arena. I tend to take a fairly laissez-faire slash experimental (or maybe just lazy) approach to my own promotion. I kind of feel like, if the work is great, people will come. So the very first, most important -- frankly, most difficult, but also rewarding -- job is to make the work excellent. To have a strong vision and carry it out in an interesting, expansive way. And then I think you have the foundation to feel authentic about whatever promotion you do, whether through Instagram posts or Twitter posts or other venues. And I think momentum builds naturally and feels well-earned.

What did making the show teach you about the world? Yourself? 
I suppose it did what I selfishly hoped it would do when I conceived of the shape of it. It broke me out of the very online, abstract bubble I’ve lived in for awhile, as a writer based in Brooklyn who writes about a certain cast of idea. I talked to a lot of people -- scientists working quietly on some strange riddle no one cares about nearly as much as them; people with families, who don’t listen to podcasts; my own family members and friends. And I had the realization that I love to have, and that does come with reporting, with reading, with connection to outside sources of information and emotion. Basically I remembered how big and mysterious the world is, but also how small. It’s like everyone is this deep well of data. You can look at a person -- or idea -- on the surface and it looks small in area, but as you talk to people so much appears. 

So, as for what I learned about myself, it’s that I really love the ambiguity and infinitude of life. I’m less interested in solving problems as I am in opening up the complexity of things so this problems seem unanswerable. For instance, in regards to these seemingly simple questions of how much sleep we should all be getting, what it does for us, etc… well, of course it turns out the answers are nuanced and specific to individuals. There aren’t hard and fast rules in this realm just as in any other. And as tempting as it can be to want clear answers about subjects that affect us on a daily basis -- diet, exercise, work, family, all those big topics -- the fact is we all just sort of have to figure things out ourselves and share information and develop wisdom, rather than tricks. And that comes with time and mistakes, and deep thought. 

You wrote an article in The Atlantic about why we should all sleep alone. There was a great episode of HiberNation about some of its benefits, including a story about a widow who struggled with sleeping alone again. Did making that episode change your mind? 
I actually conceived of that episode as a way to counter my essay. I’d had misgivings even as I wrote it -- and the essay itself, the conclusion, isn’t nearly as emphatic as the headline might make me seem. I actually felt by the end that there was something so compelling about the act of sleeping with another person, that some of the couples I spoke with for that essay who ostensibly went against the lesson of my own life-story, well, they understood something I didn’t. So instead of starting the season with an argument in favor of solitary sleep, we decided to make it about my own curiosity about love and intimacy, and my sort of fascination with these people who are able to share spaces and lives with what looks like pleasure. 

If you were going to start another podcast—don’t worry about the logistics or whether or not anyone would like it, what would it be? 
Oh gosh, hm. Probably a series about the aunties and uncles I grew up with in Texas.

Were there any stories you wanted to tell that didn’t make the cut for the first season? 
I got pretty interested in the work of two scientists at the University of Virginia, Jim Tucker and Bruce Greyson. They’ve respectively been studying past-life dreams and near-death experiences. They’re pretty much the only people studying these fields with the level and type of rigor that falls in line with American university requirements. And so they’re working in this beautiful middle space where the provable meets the unknowable. They are essentially trying to catalog what might be thought of as uncategorizable phenomena, such as what it feels like when you come right up against the border of death, or how a child might access a vision of a past life in a dream. I’d love to look at stories that are rooted in both these realms.

 Is there more coming? 
As of now, we’re not sure.

I loved your episode on sleep apps. What was your big takeaway from that episode? Do you use any sleep apps?
Thank you! I love that episode too, because it features two stellar subjects, the journalist Charlotte Jee and scholar Benjamin Reiss. For me, the takeaway of that episode is that age-old chestnut -- that there’s no silver bullet, or magic pill that will solve a person’s problems. Often, solutions can come out of very quiet, subtle adjustments to a person’s ways of thinking or behaving, that over time result in profound quality of life changes. Also, that we are wired to sleep in ways that harmonize with the natural world.

What podcasts do you listen to? 
At the moment: The Experiment, Dolly Parton’s America, Midnight Miracle.

What’s your relationship with your voice? How would you describe it? 
I used to hate hearing my own voice. But something has changed recently where I like hearing it. Maybe I’ve become a little more relaxed when I’m speaking in recorded situations and so listening back I feel as if I’m hearing a real person talk, someone separate from me who has something to tell me. And, to your last question: probably I’d describe it as equal parts mischievous and earnest? My grandmother was a trained classical singer -- she sang on the All India Radio broadcast -- so I also hear a musicality that feels connected to her. 

Do you read the Apple Podcasts reviews? 
Haha yes, even though James instructed me not to. I couldn’t help it! I like getting feedback, even if it’s someone saying they think I talk too slowly and just listened because they had nothing better to do and wish they’d eaten a sandwich instead or something...

If people haven’t listened to HiberNation a) they obviously aren’t taking my advice and b) which episode should they start with?
I agree -- everyone should listen to you. But if they aren’t, I’d recommend they start with our very first episode. We really tried to sculpt the season in such a way that the episodes talk to each other and a whole network of references emerges by the end. So starting at the beginning feels right to me. 

Is talking about dreams interesting?
I think it depends on who’s talking, and what the context is!

Why are you the perfect host for HiberNation? 
I don’t know that I’d call myself that (thank you), but I do think that I bring a natural curiosity that serves an exploratory podcast well, a kind of spaciness that finally comes in handy when the subject is so abstract, and a pathological interest in returning to a childhood state where everything in life is best organized as a story. 

Thanks, Mallika!