Gretta Cohn — CEO of Transmitter Media on $7,000 of Startup Capital, Touring with Bright Eyes, and Making Beautiful Things

The Come Up

Jan 11 2021 • 1 hr 12 mins

Gretta Cohn is the founder and CEO of Transmitter Media. Gretta's experience runs the gamut of all things audio, from public radio and ringtones, to producing chart-topping podcasts. We discuss her time touring with the band Bright Eyes, being hired as the first production executive at Midroll Media and Earwolf, and starting her own podcast company with only $7,000 of savings.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Chris Erwin:

Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up, a podcast that interviews entrepreneurs and leaders.

Gretta Cohn:

I thought I would take the more productive path, the one where I didn't leave podcasting and I made this decision in December of 2016 to myself and then spent the next couple of months just tucking away money. And when I say I saved money before starting the business, I saved $7,000.

Chris Erwin:

This week's episode features Gretta Cohn, the founder and CEO of Transmitter Media. Now, Gretta's experience runs the gamut of all things audio. From being a touring cellist with the band, Cursive, to teaching radio workshops at NYU, to working in audiobooks, ringtones, and most recently podcasts. And Gretta's done some groundbreaking work along the way like turning Freakonomics Radio into an omni channel media brand, launching the number one podcast show, Beautiful Stories from Anonymous People and helping build Howl, which eventually became part of Stitcher. But Gretta's career transformed in 2017 when she decided to do podcasting on her own terms. So with only $7000 of savings, Gretta founded Transmitter Media and quickly began producing premium podcasts for clients like, TED, Spotify, and Walmart. Today, Gretta is focused on scaling her Brooklyn based team and creating more, as she describes, beautiful things.

Chris Erwin:

Gretta's love for her craft and team is so genuine and her story is a great example of how sheer will and passion are the ultimate enablers. All right, let's get into it.

Chris Erwin:

Tell me a little bit about where you grew up. I believe that you grew up in New York City. Is that right?

Gretta Cohn:

Well, I grew up in the suburbs, so I grew up on Long Island. My mom is from Queens and my dad is from Brooklyn and there is a sort of mythology of their meeting. My mom's dad was a butcher in Queens and my dad would always tell us that they didn't have toothpaste growing up and he'd go over to my mom's house and just eat. Yeah, they moved out to Long Island after they got married.

Chris Erwin:

Nice. And what part of Long Island?

Gretta Cohn:

Initially I grew up on the eastern end in the town called Mount Sinai and then when I was 13 in a very traumatic move at that age we moved to Huntington, which was more like smack in the middle of the island.

Chris Erwin:

My cousins are from Huntington. That's where they grew up, but then I think they moved to Lloyd's Neck shortly after. Why was that move so traumatic at 13?

Gretta Cohn:

I think it's that really formative age where you are sort of coming into yourself as a human, as a teenager and I remember writing my name on the wall in the closet because I wanted to leave my mark on that particular house that we grew up in. But then we moved and I made new friends and it was fine.

Chris Erwin:

Everything is scary at that age. It's like, "Oh, I have my friends and if I move to a new high school or middle school, I'll never have the same friends again."

Gretta Cohn:

My best friend at the time, Alessandra, never to be talked to or seen again.

Chris Erwin:

What was the household like growing up? Was there interesting audio from your parents? I mean, I think you mentioned, remind me, your father was a butcher and your mother was...

Gretta Cohn:

No, no. Those are my grandparents.

Chris Erwin:

Those are your grandparents. Got it.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. No. My parents were both teachers in the education system. My dad was a teacher his whole career life. He taught shop and psychology classes and computer classes. And my mom ended up being a superintendent of the school district on Long Island. She got her start as a Phys Ed teacher and then became an English teacher and worked her way up to superintendent. The sort of interest in audio they instilled in me and my two brothers extremely early. We all started learning to play string instruments at the age of three through the Suzuki method.

Chris Erwin:

The Suzuki method?

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. Which is like an ear training style of learning music. So you essentially at three years old, you cannot possibly understand how to physically play an instrument and I remember a lot of time spent in those early group lessons just hugging the cello and singing this song, I love my cello very much, I play it every day and crawling up and down the bow with spider fingers, that's what they called it because your fingers kind of looked like spiders crawling up and down the bow and we all started playing string instruments at that age. I played cello and then the brother who came after me played violin, and the brother who came after him also played cello.

Chris Erwin:

Wow. And did you parents play instruments as well, string instruments?

Gretta Cohn:

No. My dad loves to say he can play the radio.

Chris Erwin:

I respect that.

Gretta Cohn:

I think they are educators, they are really invested in the full education of a person and so I think that they thought it was a good teaching discipline and it certainly required a kind of discipline. I can recall really fighting against practicing because I had to practice probably every day and I would rebel and not want to do it, but it was not really an option and I'm glad that ultimately I was pressed to continue to play because playing music has played such a huge part of my life.

Chris Erwin:

Clearly. It led you, which we'll get to, into founding a podcast production company and network and so much more. So very big impact. But, I get it. I began playing the alto saxophone in fourth grade and my twin brother was playing the clarinet and it was lessons with Mr. Slonum every week, an hour of practice every day and it was, when you're putting it on top of sports and homework and academics, it's a lot and it's intense and there's moments where you really don't want to do it and it's not fun and then there's moments where you're very thankful for it. And I think a lot of the more thankful moments came later in my life, but if you can get some of those early on, it's meaningful. When you first started playing, did you really enjoy it or was it just like, uh this is what I'm just supposed to do?

Gretta Cohn:

I remember enjoying it. I remember in particular being able to do little recitals every so often and I know there are photographs of myself in recital that I've seen even recently and there is such a joy in that and I think that showing off something that you've done and your family claps for you, it's a good job. Ultimately, what it feels like to play in a group, in an ensemble, it's pretty magical. I played in orchestras starting in grade school all the way up through college and there is something really amazing about the collective and your part and you can't mess up because it's glaringly obvious if you're the one out of the section of 12 cellists whose got their bow going the wrong direction or the wrong note playing. But it's also really beautiful to play in a group like that.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. It's a special team sport, right? You rely on other people and people rely on you. When it comes together, it's an absolutely beautiful event, for you and the audience.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. I also played soccer growing up, speaking of team sports.

Chris Erwin:

Okay. What position?

Gretta Cohn:

I was defense. They would enlist me to run around and shadow the most powerful player on the other team. I don't know why, but I remember that.

Chris Erwin:

I was very similar. I started out as a recreation all-star like a forward and then got moved to right fullback, which is defense. That was my soccer career. All right. So interesting. So yeah, speaking of studying music, I think that when you went to university, you almost went to study music at a conservatory but you ended up going to Brown instead. What were you thinking, because were you going down a path where it's like, "I want to be in audio, I want to create music." What was your head space there as you started to go through advanced education, beginnings of your career?

Gretta Cohn:

I remember collecting fliers for conservatories. I was interested in conservatory, I think though that as I began to really think about what that would mean, I don't know that I was thinking really broadly, like oh... No one at 17 or whatever really has a full picture of what those choices ultimately mean but I'm glad that I didn't go to music school. I was always the worst player in the best section. So I remember I was in the New York Youth Symphony and I was definitely not the best player in that section, but it was really hard to get in. One summer I went and studied at the Tanglewood Institute in Boston, which is, again, extremely competitive and hard to get into but I was definitely not the best player there.

Gretta Cohn:

And I think that thinking about what it would mean to devote oneself entirely to that, I had other interests. I wasn't so completely focused on being a performer that it didn't ultimately feel like it would make a lot of sense because I wanted to study history, I wanted... And obviously, you go to conservatory, you have a well-rounded education ultimately, I would imagine, but it's not where I think I ultimately wanted to go. That was not the direction I ultimately wanted to go.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. It's a really big commitment going from good to great, but I mean, you are great. You are getting into these elite orchestras but to be the first chair, that's a level of dedication practice that's really tough. It's funny, I actually read a David Foster Wallace article about the sport of tennis and he played and he was very good and I think he could have even gone pro, but he's like, "I'm good, I put in enough hours and I have fun with it, but for me to go to the next level..." He's like, "It's not fun to me and I don't want to do that." It's not for him. So you make a decision and you go to Brown. What's your study focus at Brown?

Gretta Cohn:

I ultimately was in the American Studies Department, but I had a special sort of crossover with the music department so I took a lot of music classes, I took a lot of American Studies classes which is basically like cultural history, social history, history through the lens of various social movements or pop culture, which I think is really fascinating and I wound everything together so that my senior thesis was about cover songs and the history of sort of copying and the idea of creating various versions of any original work and the sort of cultural history and critical theory lens of it, but also just I selected three songs and I traced their history over time from a performance perspective but also from like, how does this song fit into the narrative of music history?

Chris Erwin:

Do you remember the three songs?

Gretta Cohn:

I think I did Twist and Shout.

Chris Erwin:

Okay.

Gretta Cohn:

I Shall Be Released and I can't remember the third one. But I had a lot of fun writing it and I really liked the bridging between the music department and the American Studies department. And strangely, there are so many journalists who came up through American Studies. There are several producers on my staff who were American Studies students in college. I think it just gives you this permission to think about story telling in the world from just this very unique cultural vantage points.

Chris Erwin:

Did you have a certain expectation where you had an idea of what that story was going to be over time or were you surprised and as you saw how the narrative played out with the original song and recording and production and then the covers, anything that stands out of like, "Oh, I did not expect this, but I found this very fascinating."?

Gretta Cohn:

I don't really remember at this point.

Chris Erwin:

Sorry for putting you on the spot, it's such a long time ago.

Gretta Cohn:

The thing was like more than 100 pages and it's probably a door stopper now at my parents house. I remember that I put a big picture of a mushroom on the last page. John Cage wrote a lot about mushrooms and so I wove some of his work into the thesis but this idea that the mushroom takes the dirt and crap and stuff that's on the forest floor and turns it into this organic material, the mushroom. So yeah, I don't remember the specifics.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah, no. All good. My thesis was on the Banana Wars and that is... It's not even worthy of being a door stopper. That's just straight to the trash. But I did, for a music class, I think I did break down a song by the Sex Pistols.

Gretta Cohn:

Cool.

Chris Erwin:

I can't remember specifically which one, but I think I dove deep into the lyrics and I think I was pretty disappointed. I expected to find more meaning and have more fun with it, and I think it was maybe my young mind, I couldn't go deeper than I thought I could. Anyway... So fast forward to 2001 and as I was going through your bio, this really stood out and it hits close to home. You become a cellist for some alternative rock bands including Cursive, The Faint, and Bright Eyes. And I just remember The Faint, I think a song from 2008, The Geeks Were Right. I remember listening to that shortly after college. So tell me, what was that transition going from university to then moving, I think you moved to Omaha out of New York to play in these rock bands?

Gretta Cohn:

So when I was in college, I continued to play in the school orchestra, but I also met some friends who became collaborators and we would just improvise in the lounge like, bass drums, guitar and cello. And that was really freeing for me. Growing up on Long Island, I had such easy access to New York City and for whatever reason, I was really given a lot of freedom to... I would take the Long Island Railroad into Manhattan and go to concerts all through high school, like rock concerts.

Chris Erwin:

What was some of your earliest concert memories?

Gretta Cohn:

Purposely getting to an Afghan Whigs show and planting myself in the front row because I wanted to be as close as possible to the stage. So I used to go to concerts all the time and I was really, really interested in... I wasn't only a person who thought about classical music at all and so I met this group of people and formed this little group together and so I was playing music in college, eventually joining a band mostly with locals in Providence and we became the opening act for a lot of bands that were coming through.

Chris Erwin:

And what type of music were you playing, Gretta?

Gretta Cohn:

It was arty rock.

Chris Erwin:

Arty rock. Okay.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. Some of it was instrumental, but then some of it was like pop. I think one of the bands that I was in was called The Beauty Industry and it was probably a little bit reminiscent of Built to Spill and The Magnetic Fields and a little bit like Poppy. So in that band we would serve as the opening act for a lot of artists that were coming through and through that I was able to meet the folks from Saddle Creek from Omaha, Nebraska. And I didn't know that I made an impression on them, but I did and after I graduated I moved to New York. I didn't really know exactly where I was headed. I got a job working in the development office at Carnegie Hall and I didn't love it. We had to wear suits. And one day the folks from Omaha called my parents home phone and left a message and asked if I would come out and play on a record with them and I did.

Chris Erwin:

When you got that message, were you ecstatic, were you super excited or were you just confused, like, "Hey, is this real? What's going on here?"

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. I think I was like, "Huh, well, that's interesting." Like, "I didn't expect this." So Cursive is the group that invited me out to record. Just sort of like come out and record on our album. And I didn't actually know Cursive. I had met Bright Eyes and Lullaby for the Working Class when I was at Brown, but I hadn't met Cursive and my best friend, who is still one of my best friends was a Cursive fan and dumped all of their CDs and seven inches in my lap and was like, "You need to listen to them, they are so good." So I did and I sort of gave myself a little Cursive education and then I started to get really excited because I felt like there was a lot of interesting potential. Yeah.

Gretta Cohn:

Moving out there was not an easy decision. It was very unknown for me. I love New York City and I always imagined myself here and I had never been to the Midwest so I didn't know what my expectations were and I didn't... Also at that time Cursive was a fairly well-known band but it wasn't understood that I would move out there and that would be my job, right? I was moving out there to join this community and play in Cursive and do Cursive stuff, go on tour, record records, but at that point there was no promise like, "Oh, I'm going to live off of this." And so I went to a temp agency and I did paperwork in an accountant's office and-

Chris Erwin:

While also performing with Cursive?

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. Yeah. I will also say though, after the first year, things really took off after The Ugly Organ and I would say at that point I was no longer working in the temp office and we were going on long tours and when I came home in between stretches on tour, I was recovering from tour because it's quite exhausting and working on the next thing with the bands.

Chris Erwin:

Were you touring around nationally? Any international touring?

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. National and international. We went all over the States, Canada and then European tour is like often... Cursive was very big in Germany so we would spend a lot of time in Germany, Scandinavia. We went to Japan once.

Chris Erwin:

What an incredible post university experience!

Gretta Cohn:

It really, really was incredible.

Chris Erwin:

Playing music because of a skill that you formed very early on and then working in New York at Carnegie Hall and a job that you weren't too excited about and then you just get this serendipitous phone call. And you started listening to Cursive records in seven inches and you're getting more and more excited and all of a sudden you're traveling the world. That's like a dream scenario.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. It was pretty dreamy. And I think I recognized at the time. I mean, those first tours, we were sleeping on... I had my sleeping bag and we would be sleeping on hardwood floors, end up in like a row and someone's apartment in like Arlington. And I remember some of those first tours internationally, like in Germany, you would play the show and then everyone would leave and they would shut the lights off and we would just sleep on the stage. And in the morning the promoter, like the booker would come back and they would have bread and cheese and fruit and coffee. And it was just this beautiful... But we were sleeping on the stage.

Chris Erwin:

I mean, you're all doing it together. So it was cool. Right. You just were a crew.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah, yeah. It was great. I loved it. I really, really loved it.

Chris Erwin:

I look at your work timeline between 2001 to 2010, which includes, you're a touring international artist, but then you do a lot of other things in audio. Like you study with Rob Rosenthal at the Salt Institute, do some time in Studio 360, and then you go to radio and then audio books. So what are the next few years? How does this audio adventure start to transform for you?

Gretta Cohn:

While I was in Cursive, there were other parts of me that I felt needed feeding and so I started writing for the local alternative weekly in Omaha. And I was doing like book reviews and reviewing art shows and doing little pieces, which sort of opened up to me, this understanding that journalism was something that I was really interested in. And while I was still essentially based in Omaha and still, essentially based out of Saddle Creek, I came back to New York for a few months and did an internship at The Village Voice because I just really wanted to sort of start exploring these paths of what would potentially come next. I didn't necessarily think that I was meant to stay in Omaha like for the rest of my life. When I first moved out there, I thought, "Oh, I'll give it a few years. See how it goes and then probably come back home to New York."

Gretta Cohn:

And then things really took off and so I didn't want to leave. And I was really having a great time and loved it and loved everything that I was doing. And I think that at the time that chapter was coming to a close, it was sort of like naturally coming to a close and I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do next. I was interested in journalism, I was interested obviously in... still thinking about music and audio although I think I needed a break from music after that time. Like when you're so intensively working on something like that, you just need a minute to let everything kind of settle.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. It's all encompassing. Right. You're just living, breathing, eating music and the band. It's a lot.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. So I took a couple of years and started to figure it out. Actually, something that's not on your list is I worked at a ringtone company for a bit.

Chris Erwin:

It is audio based. So I'm not surprised. So yeah, tell me about that.

Gretta Cohn:

It was just a job that I got. Actually, looking back now, I think that it was a company that was founded by two classical musicians. They mostly had contracts with major record labels and I remember turning Sean Paul's Temperature into a ringtone in particular. It was just like chopping things into little eight seconds and looping them and mastering them and-

Chris Erwin:

Were you doing the technical work as well?

Gretta Cohn:

Not really, you spend time in the studio and so you learn and you pick up things. I wasn't recording the band, but that was the first time that I got my own pro tools set up and so I had my own pro tool setup, like was using it for my own little projects at home, but I was not technically involved with the making of any of the records that was on now, except for playing on them.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah, you were dabbling in pro tools then pretty early on.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah, yeah. I had the original Mbox, which is like this big plastic, weird alien looking object with just like a couple of little knobs on it. I finally got rid of it a couple of years ago. I held onto it for a long time and now you don't even need it.

Chris Erwin:

So you're dabbling and then I know that you spend time as a producer at The Story with Dick Gordon, North Carolina, and then you went to audio books. Is that when things started to take shape for you of knowing kind of what you wanted to do?

Gretta Cohn:

I think as soon as I went to Salt to study with Rob Rosenthal is when I knew that that's what I wanted to do. I took a few years after Cursive to kind of reset a little bit and then I started working at the ringtone company and began to have conversations with people about where all my interests collided. Like I loved working in sound, storytelling and journalism were really important to me. I don't think at that point that... There was a whole lot that I was exposed to apart from NPR, This American Life and Studio 360 were sort of the major outlets for audio storytelling that I understood and spent time with. And I just remember having a meal with someone who I don't recall his name, but he's done a lot of illustrations for This American Life and public radio outlets and he was like, "There's this place, it's called salt. You can learn how to do this there." And so I just decided that I was going to step down this path. Right.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. And Salt is based in Maine, is that right?

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. So I moved to Maine for six months. I was very excited. I got a merit scholarship to go there.

Chris Erwin:

Oh wow.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah, and I basically... There's so many fundamentals that I learned there that I use every single day now still. I think Rob Rosenthal is absolutely brilliant and he has trained so many radio producers. It's insane.

Chris Erwin:

Of all the learnings from Rob, just like what's one that comes to mind quickly that you use everyday?

Gretta Cohn:

I don't know that this is one I use every day, but it's one that's really stuck with me, is he really counseled to be really mindful when thinking about adding music to a story. He used the phrase, emotional fascism. Essentially, if you need to rely on the music to tell the listener how to feel, then you haven't done your job in sort of crafting a good story. So like the bones of the story, like the structure, the content, the sort of stakes intention and the character you've chosen, like all of that have to clear a certain hurdle and then you can start thinking about adding music, but if you're relying on the music to sort of create tension or drama or emotion, then you've kind of missed something.

Chris Erwin:

Yeah. That's very interesting. What a great insight! I like that. Emotional fascism.

Gretta Cohn:

I'll never forget.

Chris Erwin:

So after the Salt Institute, what's next?

Gretta Cohn:

I got an internship at WNYC at Studio 360. At that time the internship system at New York Public Radio was like largely unpaid. I think I got $12 a day. So I interned I think three or four days a week and then I had like two other jobs.

Chris Erwin:

Just to make ends meet, to make it work.

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. I worked at a coffee shop, like most mornings. And then I worked at a Pilates studio many afternoons and on the weekends. So it was like a lot, I was really running at full steam, but I really enjoyed the internship there. And then that was my first real glimpse into what it was like to work in a team to make impactful audio storytelling and I learned a lot there too. The team there was really amazing. Yeah. So Studio 360 was fantastic. And then a friend of mine had found out about this gig at The Story with Dick Gordon. It was a short term contract producer role, like filling in for someone who was out on leave. And I got the job and I moved down to Durham, North Carolina, and found an apartment, brought my cat and worked on that show for a few months, which I think was a pretty crucial experience to have had, which helped open the door into WNYC.

Chris Erwin:

Why's that?

Gretta Cohn:

So this was in like 2008, 9 and there weren't like a whole lot of opportunities in the audio storytelling space. Like your major opportunities were at public radio stations and public radio stations were highly competitive. It didn't have a lot of turnover. They understood that they were the only game in town if this was the career path that you were interested in going down. So having had a job at a radio station on staff on a show was such a huge opportunity. I don't know that I was like chomping at the bit to leave New York or move to Carolina, although I loved it there. And I had friends who lived there that I knew from the Saddle Creek community. So it was really great. I moved down there and I didn't have to... I can't recall ever feeling lonely. Right. Like I immediately had this community of people, which was amazing, but that gig was only three months.

Gretta Cohn:

And so I came back to New York and basically spent the next couple of years banging on the door to get back into WNYC, which is when I went to the audio books company where quite a few radio producers worked. Like that's how I found out about it. There were folks who had passed through Studio 360 or elsewhere. And my boss at the audio books company is David Markowitz, who is now currently working in the podcasting department at Netflix. And he previously was at Pushkin and at Headspace and he... So he and I, although our paths crossed at that moment, because our paths have continued to cross over and over again since that time working together with the audio books company. Audio books wasn't my passion, but while I was there I got the idea to pitch the podcast to the audio books company, which they agreed to let me do. And so I had this outlet to just do a little bit of experimenting and to grow some skills and also have just like an outlet to doing this kind of work that I wanted to be doing.

Chris Erwin:

Had you ever pitched a project or an idea before to any place that you worked at?

Gretta Cohn:

I pitched stories to Studio 360, but to pitch an idea for something that had not existed before, no.

Chris Erwin:

It becomes, I believe, The Modern Scholar podcast, is that right?

Gretta Cohn:

Yeah. You've done like a really deep research.

Chris Erwin:

Look, it helps to tell your story. Right. So you pitch, and then you get the green light, which must feel validating. It's like, okay, this is a good idea, but now it's got to be more than a pitch, you had to execute. Was that intimidating or were you like, "No, I'm ready to go I got it."

Gretta Cohn:

I was ready to go. They had an audio book series called The Modern Scholar. Professors would come in and record like 10 hours worth of like Italian history. And so what I did was just have a one hour interview with the professor who was the author of this series and talk about their work, go into detail on something really specific. I will say at that time that like I applied for a mentorship with AIR, the Association of Independence Radio, they gave me a mentor and I had like a few sessions with him and it was great. Like I had someone... I had an editor, right. I wasn't totally on my own kind of like muscling through. And so he really sort of helped refine the ideas for that show and that was a great help. So I'm lucky that I was able to get that.

Chris Erwin:

What I'm really hearing Gretta is that you moved around a lot and participated in and developed all these different music and audio communities around the US and even the world from like Omaha and international touring and Scandinavia and Europe, and then the Salt and Maine and North Carolina and New York and more, and I'm sure, as you said, with David Markowitz, that these relationships are now serving you in your current business. So it feels like that was like a really good investment of your time where the networking was great, but you also learned a lot and were exposed to a lot of different thinking and ideas. Is that right?

Gretta Cohn:

Absolutely. Definitely. Yeah.

Chris Erwin:

After dabbling around a bit for the first decade of the 2000s, you then go to WNYC and you're there for around six years, I think 2008 to 2014. And you work on some cool projects. You're the associate producer at Freakonomics and you also work on Soundcheck. So tell me about what made you commit to WNYC and what were you working on when you first got there?

Gretta Cohn:

At the time there weren't a lot of options for people doing this work. And WNYC obviously is an incredible place where really amazing work is done, really talented people. It basically was like the game in town, right? Like there weren't a lot of other places where you could do audio storytelling work in this way. There was a pivotal moment that I think could have gone in a different direction, but I had applied for a job at StoryCorps and I applied for the job at Soundcheck.

Chris Erwin:

What is StoryCorps?

Gretta Cohn:

They have a story every Friday on NPR that's like a little three minute edited story and it's usually like two people in conversation with each other. It's highly personal. And they're very well known for these human connection stories. It's I think influenced in part by oral history and anthropology, but it's basically this intimate storytelling. And I did not get that job, although I was a runner up and the person who did get the job is now one of my closest friends. But at the same time was an applicant for Soundcheck and I did get that job. And I think it was... That was the right path for me because I have such a passion for music. Right. My background kind of really led me to have an understanding of how to tell those stories.

Chris Erwin:

What is the Soundcheck format?

Gretta Cohn:

It changed over time. But when I joined Soundcheck, it was a live daily show about music and really open, like wide open as far as what it covered. So in any given episode, you could have like Yoko Ono there for an interview, you could have the author of a book about musicals from the 1920s, and then you could have like a live performance from Parquet Courts. So it was really wide ranging and varied and super interesting. And there's so much about working on a daily show that's I think extremely crucial to building up chops as a producer because every single day you have a brand new blank slate, you have to work extremely quickly and efficiently. Working in the live setting can create so much pressure because not only are you keeping to a clock, like the show went from like 2:01 to like 2:50 every day, and there had to be certain breaks and you have an engineer and you need the music to cue in a certain place.

Gretta Cohn:

And so you're like, "Cue the music." And you're whispering to the host like, "Move on to the next question." You're like this master puppeteer with all these marionettes and it's pretty wild. It's really fun, super stressful. You go off stage and it's like-

Chris Erwin:

It sounds stressful.

Gretta Cohn:

You can't fix it. You just have to move on and you learn a lot.

Chris Erwin:

It feels like something, you do that for maybe a couple of years or a few years and then it's like, ah you need a break from that. It's amazing that people who work in like live video or live radio for decades, like kudos to the stamina that they build up.

Gretta Cohn:

And that's exactly what happened is I needed a break from it. And that's when I went to Freakonomics.

Chris Erwin:

Got it. Before we go into Freakonomics, you also helped create Soundcheck into an omni-channel media brand where you were launching video and live events and interactive series. Was that something that had been happening in the audio industry or were you kind of setting a new precedent?

Gretta Cohn:

Our team was tapped to reinvent Soundcheck. So it had been this live daily show for quite some time and I think that WNYC wanted to reshape it for a variety of reasons. So we were sort of tasked, like we pulled the show off the air and kind of went through this like sprint of re-imagining, what the show could be, how it would sound, what it would do. And actually, I remember that I pitched this video series that was a lot of fun. I can't remember the name of it now, but we worked with a local elementary school and we would have three kids sitting behind desks and we would play them clips from pop songs-

Chris Erwin:

Whoa.

Gretta Cohn:

... and they would review them and-

Chris Erwin:

That's a really cool idea.

Gretta Cohn:

... it was awesome. It was so much fun. We did a lot of live performances and I started producing sort of like more highly produced segments and storytelling for Soundcheck at that time, because there was more space to try and figure that out. Ultimately, what it turned into was like a daily delivery of a show that I think ultimately resembled the old show in many ways, but it was not live anymore. And there were all these other tasks. I also created a first lesson type series for Soundcheck at that time where we would like stream a new album before it came out and I would write a little review. It was really fun. When we pulled the show off the air and we were tasked with re-imagining it was like a sandbox that you just kind of could plan, which was great.

Chris Erwin:

It's a wide open canvas that you can paint to how you desire. I get that why you were burnt out after that. So then you change it up and you become an associate producer at Freakonomics and you work with the fame, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. How has that experience?

Gretta Cohn:

It was great. It was challenging. I think that show has incredibly high standards and there's a particular kind of brain that I think works extremely well at that show. At the time, there were two of us who were the producers of the show, myself, who has this background in music and in production. And then the other producer was an economist who had been freshly graduated from economics school. And so we were this pair and I think what ultimately happened was that where I shown where these like human stories and where he shown was like distilling econ papers into sort of understandable stories. And so I think the two of us together really complimented each other. One of my favorite episodes that I worked on was about the Nathan's hotdog contest and one of the sort of