How to Make Listeners Breathless for More with Wild Boys' Sam Mullins

This transcript was auto-generated from an audio recording. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors. 

Elaine Appleton Grant 

Hi storytellers. I have a confession to make.

I almost made a big mistake. I almost didn't have today's guest on the show. What a gift I would have passed up. What a great instructive episode I would have failed to give you. I was saved by Mara Davis. She's this great publicist. She recommended a few times that I invite audio storyteller, Sam Mullins on Sound Judgment. He's the host of Wild Boys.

This narrative mystery series made no less than 10 best podcasts of the year lists in 2022 because Wild Boys is a wild story for sure and because he tells it with empathy and heart and curiosity and a deafness with language that is beautiful. Oh, and did I mention that Sam loves cliffhangers? Wild Boys is about these two strange teenagers who appear out of nowhere in Sam's hometown in Canada. 

So why would I not have him on the show? I was just worried about having too much true crime. It was silly. 

But then – I saw Sam accept the top Ambie award for audiomakers – Podcast of the Year! I was so won over by Sam’s heartfelt speech – that right there in the audience, I texted Mara and said yes.

Her answer? “I told you.” 

I love every Sound Judgment guest. But – no offense, if you’re listening - right now, Sam’s my favorite. Because everything he does is for the listener. 

We would often talk about how we want the listeners to feel beat to beat. But don't get the wrong idea. Sam was learning. He has a lot to say about perseverance and self-doubt and waiting tables at a taco restaurant and learning his craft. 

This is storytelling 101 – nah, I think it’s 201 or 301 – It’s a really clear, funny, humble AND sophisticated set of lessons on storytelling. And maybe on life, too. 

This is Sound Judgment, where we investigate just what it takes to become a beloved podcast host – by pulling apart one episode at a time, together. 

I’m Elaine Appleton Grant. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Sam Mullins, I'm so delighted to have you here on Sound Judgment. 

Sam Mullins 

I'm so happy to be here. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I first encountered you when I was sitting in the audience at the Ambio Awards in Las Vegas, and you were giving your acceptance speech… 

Recording of Sam Mullins

Oh my God, unbelievable. Thank you. Thank you so much to Sony Music Entertainment. Thank you to Campside Media, the founders, Josh, Matt. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

…For winning the best podcast of the year. Would you mind reading your acceptance speech? 

Sam Mullins

Well, yes. I thank all of the people on my team and the Sonys and the Campsides with a very special thank you to my editor, Karen Duffin, who in addition to having to teach me how to write a series like this, also had to show me how microphones work and how to script and Slack. And like, it was like she was teaching a golden retriever how to make a podcast. And so thank you, Karen. Thank you to my wife, Rachel. I love you. You guys, I had nothing happening in my career. I was...

I had two young kids and I was working in a taco restaurant and I'd never made a podcast before and Campside deserves so much credit because I cold emailed these guys and they just believed in the story and they believed in me and they changed my life and I'll never forget it. Yeah, thank you so much everyone and I'm going to go and cry over there now. Thank you so much.

Elaine Appleton Grant

You know, that still gets me. It got me that night, and I think it got the audience. I mean, the audience really responded to that. It just sounded so heartfelt. So before we launch into what Wild Boys is, let's talk about the origin story of Wild Boys for you in your career at the time, and the taco restaurant. You know, how that made it sound like you'd never put pen to paper, which turned out not to be the case at all. 

Sam Mullins

Yeah. So when I, my creative journey has sort of been, when I was in high school, I became deeply obsessed with Saturday Night Live. And when I started thinking about what I wanted to study in school, I saw that a lot of people on the SNL cast at the time, all had theater degrees. I'm like, hey, maybe I'll go to theater school. So I went to theater school for four years and somewhere along that four years, I forgot that I was going to school to be a comedian. I kind of got sucked into the world of like Stanislavski and method acting and started taking myself very seriously as a dramatic actor. 

And then when I graduated after not booking anything in my first year of auditioning. I'm like, wait a second, I wanted to be a comedian. So I started a sketch comedy troupe with my friends and we started having some traction in Vancouver and two of the guys in my troupe, they started touring the Canadian fringe circuit with a two man comedy show. And after they did their first summer, they're like, whoa, we made a whole bunch of money performing theater at these theater festivals in all these different towns. And Sam, you need to do this because so many of the shows at these festivals are storytelling shows. And I had just fallen in love with The Moth podcast. This was around the time when the Moth was first really exploding in popularity. And I started performing at Vancouver's moth-like shows. And when they told me on this theater circuit, there was lots of storytelling shows that were very popular. I started being like, hmm, I wonder if I could connect the dots on some of my favorite 10 minute stories and see if I could get 45 minutes to an hour out of it. 

So I started doing the fringe circuit and that became my full-time job for like five or six years. I'd write a new hour solo show every year, all autobiographical stories from my life. And through that is how I started getting jobs as a writer in radio comedy shows and TV jobs. The coolest thing was sometimes excerpts from my stage show would make it onto This American Life or The Moth or the CBC. 

I met all these amazing audio people. And then when the pandemic happened several years later, just imagine like me getting no one emailing me back when I'm trying to get a job as like a staff writer for TV shows for like 10 years. And I start a family and like, nothing's really happening. Just the steady work as a writer. It's few and far between. And then because I got married and had kids, I couldn't be living out of a suitcase to make my money for six months of the year. 

So when my first girl was born and I was spending so much of my life pushing the stroller around during the pandemic, outside, being safe, that's when I was really devouring every narrative podcast series in sight. Googling the list, what were the best podcast series in 2016, 17, 18? I just devoured all of the lists. And I'm like, you know, this is what I should be doing because this is exactly what my skill set is, is just storytelling. So then I'm like, I should make one of these. I just need to find the right story. So it was just a couple of months of actively staring into the middle distance, like rocking a baby to sleep, trying to catalog every story that has ever happened in the towns that I lived in and just see if I could remember anything.

And when I remembered this one, it was just every storyteller's dream where when you're Googling it, it's more interesting than you remember it. And I was like, wow, no one has touched this story in 18 years. So then it became, I wonder if I could email these people and I had never done anything like interviewing someone. I'm the only person in comedy history to have never had my own podcast. I had no idea how any of the equipment or editing software works or anything. I saw really quickly that it would be so much work to do by myself. I'm like, this would take me years to make it in my vision. I need someone to partner with me to help me out and show me what I'm doing. 

I got the bare minimum of people that I needed to talk to on board. I made contact with one of the Wild Boys and Tammy. I found Tammy and I found the RCMP officer and I'm like, I'm gonna make a pilot. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And of course the pilot would be designed to sell the series, at the heart of which was this story. 

Sam Mullins 

In 2003, two half-starved boys blew into a small Canadian town and were helped and embraced by the locals. But they said that they grew up deep in the wilderness uncontact by society, but there was a problem. Not a word they said was true. What was so interesting to me is that I was a teenager. I'm the same age as the younger of the two boys. And the way that the story was absorbed into my marrow was these two jerks from California came into town and they started lying to all of us and just to have a laugh. And then it turned out that they were just suburban kids from California from a weird family and the end. So we got them out of here and they didn't even say thank you for us helping them out. And when I remembered the story, I was like, that kid was like my age, he was like 17 years old at the time. And everyone seemed so upset when it was discovered that they were suburban kids and not in fact children that grew up in the wilderness. And the story when I started looking at the old newspaper clips, it just kind of lacked a curiosity and a drive to understand what was going on. It's like, oh, you think they just did a weird thing just for fun? It's like, what is their childhood like? What is their teenage hood like? What would drive two young men to do something like this, to go into a foreign country and pretend they were someone else? There has to be much more here than they were jerks messing with us. And it turns out there was a lot more going on and I was propelled by the curiosity to really figure out as much as I could about their family and about how, like there was a moment in time when me and Rowan were the same age within a hundred yards of each other for a summer. Rowan's the younger of the boys, yeah. And we couldn't have had more different age 17 years, you know. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I ask guests before they come on, I say, choose an episode that you either loved or you found particularly challenging to make. And sometimes that's one and the same. So you chose the first episode in the series. Was it because you either loved it or found it really hard to make? 

Sam Mullins 

It was the one that I was most excited to make. I had a very clear vision for how I wanted it to sound, but I had no skills to make it sound the way that I wanted it to sound. There were months where I was just teaching myself on YouTube how to edit and figure out where to find music and how to structure this thing and how much music is too much music? How much is not enough? Like, should this be sparse? And is this the right type of music for this moment? Is it weird that every song I use is from a different genre? Like, does it need to be more cohesive? Does this sound like a mad man is making this? Is basically what I was wondering when I was making it. But another interesting challenge with the pilot was, so I had all this time where my full-time job was just making the pilot as good as I could. And then when it was time to make the series with Campside, it was, okay, we really like your pilot, but now we need to make a bunch of changes to this thing that you know inside and out and that you're obsessed with. And I was open to it, but it's really disorienting when you're so familiar with something. Like sometimes I would change one of my one-man shows after I had done it 30 times. It's like in my muscle memory, how it's supposed to sound and the pacing of it. And it's a hard starting point to start with, we need to dismantle your darling, and then we need to write seven new darlings very quickly. It was challenging and disorienting, but I think ultimately it brought me a lot closer with my editor and it's a very scary relationship when you're partnered with an editor. You know, it's such an intimate relationship by the end where you have to be very honest and earn each other's trust and stuff like that. And at the end of re-imagining this pilot, I was like, Karen really knows what she's doing. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

This is Karen Duffin, your story editor. 

Sam Mullins

This is Karen Duffin, yes, yes. She's a wizard. It was like the full range of motion, like why is she changing everything about this thing that I like and that everyone likes? But then by the end, when the dust cleared, it was undeniably much better because she got her hands all over it.

Elaine Appleton Grant

You introduce the whole story by saying this is something that happened in the town that I grew up in. And pretty quickly, you introduce Vernon, the town in British Columbia. And at least in my mind, Vernon, the town, becomes a character. Is that the way you saw it? Definitely. So let's listen. 

Clip from Wild Boys

The boys couldn't have known it, but they showed up in the right place at the right time. In a sense, this only could have happened in Vernon. You need to know about my hometown. Vernon's located in the Okanagan, a region in the interior of British Columbia, sort of halfway between Vancouver and Calgary. Historically, it's been a middle-class place, but the whole region has sort of been transformed into an outdoor playground for the wealthy. The Okanagan is known for its vineyards, golf courses, ski resorts, its lakes, and the mythological beast the Ogo Pogo, who lives in one of said lakes, allegedly. Vernon's a white town. It's a hockey town. There's lots of churches. There's lots of retired folks. There's a winter carnival parade every year. And the city has never once held a gay pride parade. The crown jewel of Vernon, and in my opinion, the whole Okanagan, is Kalamalka Lake. It deserves a Google Image search. Seriously, do that now. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

There's a lot going on in that. And it's really fun. What was it that got you thinking, oh, you know, Vernon is a character in this story just as much as the boys are, as much as some of the other people are who we'll get to?

Sam Mullins

Well, the main thing that made me really wanna bring Vernon to life is that the Okanagan is a place that not many people know about. Okanagan is such a specific place culturally and geographically. It's unlike anywhere else. So I've always wanted to set a novel in Vernon or write a coming of age TV series set in Vernon. I've always wanted to introduce people to that part of the world. And it was really important to understand that we're kind of this insular specific place in this weird province and it informs the action in a big sense. And also it tells you a little bit about why the boys gravitated there. It's like they were on the lamb and they found the perfect place. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Yeah, and later on, and I don't wanna spoil it, but later on you talk further about Vernon as a place where people were going to believe them and going to help them. And, that's what really struck me was like, oh, you've set up Vernon as this very specific place with some very specific language. It explained why I'm a listener and I'm starting to go, how did he convince Campside that there was truth in this, that this story was true? Because I hadn't quite yet realized that, in fact, it wasn't. And then you got to the the explanation about Vernon and it was like, oh, well, you know, the culture of Vernon helps to explain all of that, which is a really fascinating way to look at something. 

I was also struck by the language that you didn't say, this is a white conservative town where everybody votes, whatever it is in Canada, the equivalent of Republican, I assume. What you said is, and never in the history of Vernon has there been a gay pride parade. I'm a big fan of specifics. You are very specific in your choice of ways to describe things. Tell me how you approached that passage when you said, I wanna describe very quickly what it feels like to be in Vernon. 

Sam Mullins

Well, as a comedy writer, I'm obsessed with lists, like making lists. Like if the game is where we're describing my hometown with just a bunch of one sentence little morsels, with my wife also, I'd run it past her because she was born and raised in Vernon also, where we just list all of the most specific things we can think about in our hometown. And probably 15% of the things that I listed in my first draft. Like I love writing a really hairy first draft, especially when it comes to description, it's like, Karen, I'm gonna write I'm gonna write 10 sentences and I need you to help me choose the two that work best for you. But for this game in particular, I remember it was just like a long sprawling list and Karen's like, okay, these are the ones that are specific enough and give us the information that we need for the rest of this story. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

The last thing I wanted to ask you about that passage is at the end you turn directly to the listener and you say, seriously do that now.

Clip from Wild Boys

The crown jewel of Vernon, and in my opinion, the whole Okanagan is Kalamalka Lake. It deserves a Google image search. Seriously, do that now. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

What does this tell us about how you view your relationship with the listener? 

Sam Mullins

I really want them to not tune out and be like, it's like we're having a conversation here and this is how I talk. And I don't wanna to be one of those podcasts where I'm describing like how beautiful this place is. It's like, I want you to look at it right now and you will see right away when you Google this, what we're talking about, and then we can proceed. It's like, this is how I talked to my friend. You need to check this out right now. When I do a lot of my writing, I always imagine that I'm talking to a small group of friends or people in the fold with me. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

People in the fold with you. Oh, I love that. I love that. People say friends all the time, but that's different than people in the fold with you. So I want to get into the way you bring some of the main characters alive. So let's listen to this clip. It comes early on about the wild boys. 

Clip from Wild Boys

Extremely thin. Very skinny, look like an alien. You know, you could see his collarbone. I mean, I didn't know how he walked, rags on their back. And they don't have a home. They had no place to live. And then I remember thinking that was really odd. But it wasn't what they were wearing or what they were doing necessarily. It was more of like an energy or an aura thing. You could look at them in any context and be like, wait, what? They were a wrinkle in the fabric, a glitch in the matrix. No one knew what to make of them. Like the boys showed up at Calgary every day. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So when you first decide to introduce characters, what's your process? How are you thinking about, this is what I feel, see, imagine, this is what I wanna get across. How did that happen? 

Sam Mullins

Like you said, the thing is specifics. Saying how tall they were, what color hair they are. It's like, I don't see that character that you just described. I don't see them yet. When I was thinking about these boys and having met them and having talked to so many people about them, it was a real theme. It's like their pace. You get sucked into a different space-time continuum by being in their presence. And there's something weird about that. And I don't know if there's a place in the world where they wouldn't stand out. Like they're these six foot four tall, odd guys who move oddly and to answer your question, always specifics. And this is another thing where I love the game of describing someone. It's almost like a roast. Like I love writing roast jokes because I get to write like 30 jokes and then ultimately settle on three. Like I'm not roasting people that I'm describing my podcast, but it's the same process of like, what are the specifics about this person? How can I describe this person in a way that no one else would describe them, but in a way that will help the 3D image in the listener's head? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

The 3D image in the listener's head, exactly. 

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One of the things that I noticed about this is that, you know, we all sort of in this game, we talk about using all of our senses, right sights sound smile taste Touch but you went beyond that in this, you know, you said very overtly. It's their aura. It's their energy You're an actor in my opinion actors experience the world in ways that are very different than say a journalist or from other folks who decide to do podcasting. There's something about describing people and their effect on your emotions. And so what I wanna do now is play a clip, and this is from your moth story that you put on your website from 2012. It's called Dinosaur. You're a waiter at a restaurant. It's like a six minute story. And you've opened it by saying that the night before, you were feeling suicidal. And now we know also that it's not a good night at the restaurant. Things are not going well, and your anxiety is at an all time high. 

Clip from The Moth

Table four, so I go up to the table with water glasses to greet them. And something about these people immediately put me at ease. They just seem like really calm and present and just like good people. And right away, it was like two parents and two grown up kids about my age. And right away the father shook my hand. He's like, what's your name? I'm like, Sam. He's like, you look like a Sam. And we started talking and having banter and they were really into the fact that I was a struggling slash failed actor and writer. And they kind of became my number one priority and they were my oasis in the mayhem. And they really knew how to dine appetizers and fine wines. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Almost the first thing you say about them is that instantly you felt calmer, which is a relief in that arc of the story because you start out in a very dark place. But the other thing was, I was talking to another friend of mine just the other day, a really great story editor, producer, and host. And she said this thing to me. She said, “I'm the kind of person who” and I said, you know, I don't describe myself that way. I might say I like to do such and such a thing. And, or I said, you know, like I'm obsessed with, with pulling apart podcasts. What does this mean? You know, about who I am. And she said, well, you, you're a person who loves puzzles, you know, and, and you described these as you're a person who are very good at dining. You know, that's a really unusual way in to say these people liked fine wine or whatever. I'm just so curious about the way that you view people and then describe them this way. 

Sam Mullins

I'm always looking for the shorthand, like again to flesh out the 3d image in people's minds. It's like a family that knows how to dine is a really economical way to say, this is probably an affluent family. This is a family that probably enjoys each other's company and goes to restaurants all of the time together and grownup kids who are in a nice restaurant with their parents. It's like not all grown up kids are interested at all in going to a restaurant with their parents. So it kind of establishes them as like a unit, as like a rhombus of love, the four of them at this table, you know what I mean? 

Elaine Appleton Grant

But that's just about them. And what really was notable was that you said they're my oasis in the mayhem. Yeah, yeah. How important is it as a writer, as an actor, as a podcaster, sort of all of those things, to express in whatever way you do it, it's sort of a sideways way, that there is a relationship between you and this character. That's what's coming through, is that you're not just describing some stranger from afar so that I can picture them, which is not an uncommon technique at all. It's more than that. 

Sam Mullins

Yes. Yes. I always liked that, like, I wrote that line so long ago that I'm allowed to like a line that I wrote. But I always liked, I'm Sam. He's like, you look like a Sam. And it's funny because I know that I come across as like the opposite of that guy, you know? Like I'm not someone who's like back slapping strangers and having like a a fun, loose time with everyone. Like I'm kind of an awkward guy. And I love how different we are. And that was one of my favorite things. And also talking about like, this guy really knew how to dine. It's like I was working in restaurants at the time, but I had no idea how to dine because I was so broke and I had no idea what I was doing. So it's kind of like the perfect relationship with a big payoff at the end of that story that we were able to really connect in a meaningful way. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

And that ultimately it may have saved your life. 

Sam Mullins

Yeah. Yeah. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Which you never say.

Sam Mullins

Yeah, that was a really dark moment, that story. And that is one of the happiest, most bizarre stories that have ever happened to me. And it happened at the darkest moment and I needed it so badly. I needed that little glimmer of light in my life. I know lots of people really struggle in their early 20s, you know, where you're kind of broken in the world and you're just living in crummy basements and no one wants to hire you and you have no idea what you're doing without the structure of school. You know, it's like such a challenging moment in life, but that story is a really meaningful one. And also discovering that it's a fun story to tell. That was one of my first stage stories where I was like, Ooh, storytelling.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I was so struck by the way Sam described how that family made him feel that they were his oasis in the mayhem. Obviously, I was also struck by the fact that one person or one family can really change another human being. I wanted Sam to talk about the way the characters change each other over the course of Wild Boys. 

You see, for instance, Tammy gets involved with these boys from the get-go, and it changes her life interacting with them. She may have discovered things about herself. We discover things about her. So are you thinking about not just describing actors, characters, sort of like, well, here's somebody walking on the stage, and they're about to do this plot line, but the fact of them coming together, that interaction changes everybody. 

Sam Mullins

Yeah, I thought about that a lot with Tammy in particular because this really deeply changed her as a person, this experience, and I knew that from talking to her, and I knew that through her reluctance to talk to me at all, because she has carried around for the last 20 years that she was silly, that she was gullible, that she was taken advantage of, and that she was a laughing stock, and everyone who saw her on TV thought she was an idiot. But we don't know any of that when we first meet her. When we first meet her, she's just a mom with three kids, and her husband is, he's out of town a lot of the time. So we have this amazing, active-in-the-community single mom and she sees these kids and where everyone else takes exception, she's like, no, I am going to make sure that these kids are okay. 

Clip from Wild Boys

The older boy seemed like he held some kind of power over the younger one, which raised all kinds of other questions. Like, did he kidnap the younger one? Was he forcing him not to eat? Is that why the younger boy was so skinny? Are they lovers, criminals on the run? 

Yeah, I had no idea.what was going on with those two. 

In general, the boys were keeping an extremely low profile for months. The summer was receding and the nights were getting colder and the story might've ended there. The boys could've disappeared or moved on to some other town, if not for Tammy McDougall Ryder.

Hello, oh, jeez, sorry, hello, sorry, stepped on my dog. I genuinely can't imagine how all of this would have unfolded if Tammy didn't get involved. Getting involved is kind of Tammy's whole thing. 

I'm just the type of person that isn't gonna sit back and- 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I did wonder how you got her to talk to you and how willing she was, but I also was struck by here again this introduction to somebody where I am that type of person. You know, like, I don't know what kind of questions you're asking, Sam, but people are describing who they are.

Sam Mullins

I don't know either. And that clip that we just played, that was from my very first Skype interview where I had literally never interviewed anyone before. And I just like wrote out by hand some questions I wanted to ask Tammy and I knew that she was reluctant to talk to me, but she was so great. She was so like, like with the boys. She just goes through the world with an open heart. Like she's so vulnerable. She's so kind in everything that she does. My God, she's, she's the, the center of the whole thing. She's the avatar for the town. She's the avatar for our best selves. You know?

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's beautiful. So tell me about her reluctance. So because she does not come across as reluctant. 

Sam Mullins

Everyone was reluctant. It was shocking how many people required so much convincing to talk to me for this series. Yeah, talk to me about when you first approached Tammy. Did she say no right away? What happened? She kind of told me her concerns. And her main concern was that when she was on Canadian television way back when the story happened in 2003, she saw online comments about how gullible she was. And she hated that she was like having these very dramatic moments that she's like crying and running through the parking lot dramatically in prime time on television. She hated her moment of fame. It really messed her up and it made her not wanna get involved or talk to any journalists ever again. And the way that I kind of approached it with her was when Tammy told me how bad and how embarrassed she is about all this, I was basically like, Tammy, I think you've got this all wrong. Like I look at this story and you are an incredible saint. The thought of Tammy going through her life for so long feeling just guilt and shame for helping these boys in the way that she did when no one else seemed like they were going to step up and get involved with them, it was unacceptable to me. And I told her that, and I told her that if something we talk about, if the next day you feel like Oh, I wish that I didn't say that or something like that. 100% Tammy, I don't want to make you upset. I wanna tell the truth and I want you to feel glad that you participated in this story that I'm trying to tell. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Is there any inkling that doing this has changed Tammy's perception of herself? 

Sam Mullins

Yes, yes. Tammy wrote me several really nice messages when it first came out. And she said that her and her family really loved the series and that it really helped her reframe stuff. And also when she was in the center of the storm, she didn't know what was going on necessarily with like the police and the mayor and the people in the community of the hostel where the boys were staying. And she didn't know what was going on with the journalists. And in her memory, she was the only one that was tricked by them. But when you listen to Wild Boys, it's like everyone was tricked by them. That's the whole thing. All of us believed them and that helped her, you know, refile this story in her memory in a helpful way, she told me. The thought of making Tammy feel better about this story is like, it's worth making the podcast in the first place. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

So I interviewed Glenn Washington with Snap Judgment a while ago, and he said his animating force for making Snap Judgment is empathy. He says, I want to make you have the experience of walking in someone else's shoes for a while. Do you have an animating force, not just for Wild Boys, but now you're making another one.

Sam Mullins

Yeah, empathy is a really big one for me too. Whenever I see people shaming someone online or being like, oh man, this person, this person's a loser. I'm like, I wanna know everything about that person. And even if it's, you know, a terrible politician, it's like, I wanna know what made them this way. And I wanna know what their inner life is like.

Elaine Appleton Grant

The novelist Jennifer Egan, she won the Pulitzer for her book, A Visit from the Goon Squad. She says, fiction is the only narrative form that crosses the barrier we can never cross in real life to feel what it's like to be another person. Maybe that's not true. Maybe audio non-fiction can give us that experience too. Well, and you said interior lives. 

Sam Mullins

Yeah, definitely. I just want every podcast to be, I want to understand someone that I don't think that I will understand. And also I want to say about the Horn family is like I set out to really have an empathetic look at them and lots of people have praised the empathy of our storytelling. But I also receive dozens and dozens and dozens of emails, people like I hate that family, F that family, I can't believe you gave them any air time and all of that. And I'm like, oh, oh, I don't think, I don't think you got it. I don't think you got what we were trying to do here. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Was that hard to get those? 

Sam Mullins

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, of course, of course. If you're being guided by empathy and then that's the response, you're like, well, I didn't reach those people. And I wonder if it was possible to reach those people. Perhaps not, but maybe. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I wanna play one last clip. This is a clip toward the end of the episode. And what's happened is that immigration has shown up and said, these boys can't be from nowhere. We need papers, so we're gonna hold a hearing. And Tammy was feeling so maternal toward them. She's found them a pro bono lawyer and she hatched a plan. We're going to go get your ID from your parents in this remote town two hours away. And they've driven up there. The boys have disappeared for more than an hour and now they're back. And she's hoping that they have brought ID and that the parents will be there. And neither of those things has happened. 

Clip from Wild Boys

As the boys buckled back up, Tammy feels a wave of anxiety. It's one thing to feed and clothe someone in need, but now she's helping them dodge immigration authorities. They'd rolled the dice taking this trip. Their immigration hearing was on the same day, but they were playing hooky from it in the hopes that they'd be driving back to Vernon right now, sure, having skipped out on immigration, but bearing a golden ticket, the boy's ID, and all would be forgiven. But now they were driving back empty-handed. And then the lawyer's phone rang.

On our way back, the lawyer got a phone call, I think from his office or the police or something. It was an important phone call.

There's a warrant out for you guys or a police blockade on the road back from Vernon. I'm not sure. Just the police are looking for you guys. The lawyer gets off the phone and turns to Tammy. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

That's the first moment where we start to go, oh, this is a whole lot more than it looks like. You said at the outset that when you were working on this first episode, you had a very clear destination in mind. Where did you wanna end it? And did you know that from the get-go or was this something that happened in working with Karen Duffin, your editor? 

Sam Mullins

I knew that I wanted to take listeners on the journey that my town was on. The whole first four episodes, I wanted to have the listeners experience, experience like who are those boys? What's their deal? Why are they eating only fruit? Where are they from? Why are they being cagey about this? They're from the woods? That's insane. Is that possible? Are there really people that live in the mountains without contact with society? And then like, let's help them. We're going to do everything we can to help them. And then as soon as we accept that they're from the woods and that that explains why they're so weird. We realize at the end of the first episode, it's like nothing that they have said so far is the truth. I love kind of leaving listeners there for a pilot because not every podcast episode am I convinced that people will hit play on the next one immediately, but it's so nice to have a pilot where you're like, if they made it to the end of this episode, they will listen to the next episode. And we always aim for that in every episode in narrative. But having made 16 of these episodes now, I know that it's like a rare special treat as a writer where you're like, ah, yes, this moment in the story does all the lifting for me. And it is, I don't need to like write my ass off to compel people to keep going. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

There's an art to the cliffhanger.

Sam Mullins

Yes. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I'll ask you an easy question. Who's your dream guest for Sound Judgment? 

Sam Mullins

Ooh, if I could learn from anyone, oh, oh. Jonathan Goldstein. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Oh, yes. People have asked me to reach out to Jonathan Goldstein. People who have heavy weight. 

Sam Mullins

Yes, and I was a huge fan of Wired Tap, which he had on CBC radio for years and years and years. And his show was so weird and interesting. It felt like someone really cool was hijacking the CBC Radio One airwaves when that show was on in a really delightful way.

Elaine Appleton Grant

I love that, I love that. What did you learn about writing that you didn't know before from doing this series? 

Sam Mullins

Many things. Karen, oh God, I'm so lucky that I got to go on this journey with Karen because she's not frustrated working with really green people like me. She enjoys teaching. The biggest things that I learned from Karen is just always thinking about momentum in an episode. Just always thinking about like, what are the moments we're building towards and how do we keep one-upping and one-upping and accelerating towards these moments. And also it's almost like we would have two episode outlines. We would have the episode outline for these are the plot points that were covered. And we would often talk about how we want the listeners to feel beat to beat. We want them to be what the F in this moment, and we want them to suspect the person of doing something untoward in this moment, and then the relief that that person was to be trusted. And it's like just keeping in mind that it's not just plot that you're also like plotting the emotions of your imagined listener. And Karen's always, it's almost like a joke between us now,  She's like, yeah, but what is this about about? She would ask me, what is this episode about? And I'd be like, oh, this is where this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens. And she's like, yeah, but what is it about? And what is this section of our series about? And what is the series as a whole about? Because we need to constantly bbe revisiting those things. You don't have to think about it every second, but you need to make sure that you're writing to that. Episode to episode, section to section. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

Give me one quick example, if you can.

Sam Mullins

For instance, in Dr. Dante, the series that I made that came out in January, it's about a hypnotist slash con man. We talked about how Dante kind of is a good avatar for America, like we learn about the underbelly of America through decades by watching his movements, he was always looking for what the next big thing is. He's like, what's the next cheap, like, tawdry fad that I can make money on? And we were kind of talking about, like, what do we learn about America? Like, we were always thinking about, how does this chart administration to administration and like cultural moment to cultural moment? It helped us keep track of where we were in time and  space when we're telling a story that spans decades. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

That is super, super helpful. So how did producing and hosting this podcast change you in ways you didn't expect? 

Sam Mullins

It's really, it's really built my, my like stamina as a writer making these series. It's like writing and doing creative work. It really is like a muscle. And the amount of endurance it takes to make an eight part series is astounding. I always kind of thought of myself as someone who wasn't getting the opportunities because it's like, maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I don't have the stamina to grind like so many of my successful writer friends. And I learned that, you know, if it's a story that I care about, that it doesn't feel like a big, long, hard thing. When I was making Wild Boys, every day I woke up, I'm like, man, this story's good. Even if I do a bad job, this story's gonna be good. And so I learned that I do have the endurance to do a big ambitious project like this. And also that if it's a story that you care about, it will really be the wind at your back. So make sure you pick an awesome story. 

Elaine Appleton Grant

I love that, I love that. 

Sam Mullins

One other thing that I've learned that is a good thing to tell your listeners is that in the 16 years that I was waiting tables and I would get a gig here and there and I would work really hard on a pilot for something that no one would read. And then I do these small time theater shows and be like, God, it's not going anywhere. It all feels like I'm spinning my tires. And then it's important in creative work to remember that even when it feels like you're wasting your time working on something, you are still acquiring skills all the time that will come in handy in the right moment. When I met Campside and they greenlit this, they're like, you are good at the things that we need. And I'm like, and you guys are good at the things that I need. And it made so many of these wheel spinning years feel like it was worth it because I perhaps was preparing for the moment where I would get to tell a story to a big audience with people that knew how to help me do that. If you keep making things, it will never be a waste of time.

Elaine Appleton Grant

At the end of every episode, I give you a few of the many takeaways from these conversations. Here are today’s.  

1. As storytellers, we already know that curiosity is critical. But are you as curious as you can be? When Sam first started looking into this old story, he learned that reporters had only skimmed the surface. Sam was driven by a need to understand how this situation could have happened in the first place. He began asking questions like what was their childhood like? What would drive two young men to do something like this? That led to the whole series.
2. Trust your instincts. If you think there’s more to a story than meets the eye, you’re probably right. Sam trusted his when he said, “There has to be much more here than they were just jerks messing with us.” And there was. 
3. Working with a good editor is a godsend -  it can mean the difference between a memorable story or series and one that falls flat. But, as Sam says, the relationship with a new editor is a scary one, because it’s so intimate. You have to earn each other’s trust and be completely honest with each other. 
4. The creative work you do without recognition or outward signs of success is never wasted. I’m a sucker for an overnight success story – which is what Sam’s story initially sounded like. But I’m also a sucker for most people’s real overnight success stories – which is that good fortune isn’t sudden at all; it’s the outcome of years of building skills so keep at it..
   
   

That’s all for today. Thanks for being with me. If you liked this episode, listen to Episode 14: Bone Valley: How to Create a True Crime Podcast That Makes a Difference. That link’s in our show notes. 

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Sound Judgment is produced by me, Elaine Appleton Grant. Sound design by Andrew Parrella. Our gorgeous cover art is by Sarah Edgell. Podcast management by Tina Bassir. 

See you soon.