I discovered You’re Wrong About through one of my workmates, Shannon. She listened to an episode about crack babies and really liked it, so I gave it a try. I chose the Shannon Faulkner episode for my first listen, as the plight of the first female to enroll in the Citadel was something I followed closely.
I really liked the conviviality and research skills of the hosts, Sarah Marshall and Michael Hobbs, as well as their Pacific Northwest roots. I found them around the time that Michael Hobbs went off to do other podcasts (“Mike Lives in a Downtown Hotel,” October 11, 2021, but I scrolled back and started at the beginning, so I had a lot of podcasts to catch up with. They started podcasting in 2018. The badge of episodes remaining was at 99—the maximum displayed—for a very long time.
You’re Wrong About likes to debunk “common knowledge” about big events. Mike and Sarah met because Sarah wrote a complementary and nuanced essay about Tonya Harding. One of their taglines is “Revisiting the stories of maligned women of the ’90s,” of which Shannon Falkner is just one.
They also had book club episodes during the pandemic. Not where the audience read books, but where the hosts talked us through what happened in different books.
You’re Wrong About led me to Maintenance Phase with Michael Hobbs and Aubrey Gordon. Their title refers to the part of the diet where you cease dieting and go into the “maintenance phase” where you supposedly begin eating normally again while not gaining any weight. Their tagline is, “Wellness and weight loss,
debunked and decoded.”
There weren’t as many episodes of Maintenance Phase, but I also became a Pateron supporter, so that added to the podcast backlog.
Finally, Michael Hobbs also led me to If Books Could Kill, where Hobbs and Peter Shamshiri analyze, “The airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” That added to the backlog.
But what a fun backlog! Over the nearly three years I’ve been catching up, I’ve learned so many things from these podcasts. And also had a lot of fun along the way. Now I can look forward to keeping up with them in real time.