How The Bailey Podcast Sausage Gets Made

The Bailey is the podcast I started as the semi-official companion of the Motte, and it doesn’t have the most consistent release schedule. I know. Stop reminding me. Go listen to the last episode though, it’s really great, and Shakesneer should be again commended for participating.

I want to peel back the curtain a bit and outline some practices I’ve adopted that I’m surprised to hear are not all that widespread. I’ve previously written about the immense benefits of real-time adversarial conversations that are not easily replicated within the written medium. I never claimed that it’s superior by every metric however, and one major failure point for live debates is how they’re much more susceptible to the Gish gallop maneuver. This is the tactic where someone drowns out a debate by offering so many low-quality arguments that they make up for their lack of quality through sheer quantity. This is a serious enough problem that Sam Harris has cited it as a major reason he avoids debating certain topics (namely the topic of vaccination).

The solution is extremely simple: require advance notice for all citations. Before every episode of the Bailey, every participant is asked to share links and sources that they think are useful or are planning to rely upon. This helps everyone have the same foundation before we hit record and lets us skip a lot of unnecessary exposition, but it also mitigates against someone appearing to win an argument but only through the element of surprise. Sharing sources ahead of time also helps to avoid the commonly tedious “the studies I’m citing are better than your studies” epistemic impasse. Advance notice takes a page from the legal profession, where evidence cannot be introduced at trial unless the other side has been notified, and a strict podcasting implementation would impose similar prohibitions for every participant.

When David Pakman interviewed Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon Shaman) one of the ways the discussion kept going off the rails is that Chansley would respond with a torrential rain of purportedly supporting allegations (what Pakman described as “setting small fires conundrum”). When asked about QAnon theories, Chansley said:

…if you look into Jeffrey Epstein and what he was doing. If you look into the Finders, if you look into the Franklin cover-up, if you look into the testimony of Ronald Bernard, if you look into the Barney Frank scandal, if you look into the Michael Aquino military-based scandals. If you look into the numerous scandals coming out now regarding all these people that debunked Pizzagate and now they’re being arrested and charged with child porn charges and child abuse charges, then it’s quite clear that there is some sort of an elite sex trafficking pedophilia ring in DC and Hollywood.

And he went on like this. Unless you’ve already been marinating within this sphere and are already familiar with these claims, it’s impossible to substantively respond to any of them in the moment. Each individual allegation will require significant radio dead air just to get your bearings about who is involved and what they’re accused of, followed by several hours/days/weeks to properly investigate. The entire purpose of an advance notice rule has always been to avoid ‘trial by ambush’ and it’s odd why this expectation is not more widely adopted.

The second practice is paired along a trust expectation. I’m the one who ultimately edits and decides what the final cut will be, but I edit with a light touch primarily to get rid of ums, silences, or (rarely) dead-end discussions that don’t go anywhere. There has been a long history of media outlets engaging in misleading editing with the intent of making an ideological opponent look bad (Katie Couric’s Under the Gun documentary added an eight-second pause to make a gun-rights advocate appear as if he was speechless in response to a question), and the obvious way to guard against this is to always have your own recording when interacting with any journalist.

I’ve adopted the same practice and have always provided every participant with full access to the raw audio files, and even ensured they have a chance to listen to the final cut before it’s posted publicly. Sometimes we’ve re-recorded or added passages, and I allow some leeway if anyone wants to take back something they’ve inadvertently blurted out (generally falls under the umbrella of accidental doxing details). No one thus far has asked for this, but I wouldn’t allow a revision that is meant to cover a weakness in one’s argument.

Welcome to my editing hell

Thirdly, I try to engage in some fact-checking though I can’t claim to be comprehensive. If someone makes a factual claim that I find dubious (either on the air or during editing) I ask for a citation, and I delete the segment if they can’t provide one. An example of this process is from our An Unhinged Conversation on Policing episode where I tried to fact-check some assertions about national testosterone comparisons. Doing this in real-time is more challenging but still feasible, and if a jury-rigged zero-income enterprise like the Bailey can do this, runaway successes like The Joe Rogan Experience and their largesse can easily implement something more than just Jamie and his perfunctory Googling. If I had more resources and a steady roster of guests, I’d have one or two paid fact-checkers whose sole job is to interject when they sniff out some bullshit. I look down on podcasts that do nothing on this front, and it’s particularly inexcusable when they can afford way more.

And lastly, I've also accommodated requests to mask or modify voices. The easiest way is to pitch shift or fuck with the equalizer. The more elaborate and superior method is to hire a voice actor to redub the whole track, which we did for the Multi Ethnic Casting episode by replacing Ishmael with a thematically-appropriate Nigerian woman. That cost only $120 back then, and AI advances have already made this basically free.

Admittedly, all this adds more work for me but I find it worthwhile to have some standards. I’m always open to having more civil conversations about contentious culture war topics, so don’t hesitate to reach out if you have a topic in mind.