Lemonada’s squeeze of compassion
Stephanie Wittels Wachs’ growing podcast company is moving to LA
On her way out of Houston, Stephanie Wittels Wachs made a stop at her brother’s grave. Years ago Harris Wittels left Houston for Los Angeles, where he enjoyed success as a TV writer and producer until he died of a heroin overdose in early 2015 when he was just 30. His sister, Wittels Wachs — a voice actor, theater owner and businesswoman — now moves west to California, not in hopes of catching a flyer in the entertainment industry. Instead she’s moving because Lemonada Media, her podcasting company, has undergone a startling expansion in less than a year.
During bad times, people are finding comfort in the sound of voices speaking to problems and offering solutions. That’s how Lemonada stirred into existence.
“Our growth has been rapid because we’re responding to things being so (bad),” Wittels Wachs says.
Her business partner, Jessica Cordova Kramer, operates a few time zones apart. She, too, lost a brother to addiction. Their losses united the women last year in a way that our era of connectivity could only facilitate.
They took their dreadful experiences and from it created a podcast, “Last Day,” and a platform for it, Lemonada. Both started in late 2019. At the time, their objective wasn’t establishing a media company. Rather they just wanted to offer information, comfort and understanding to others who had suffered similar loss.
Their expectations were modest: to make others struggling the way they were feel less alone. Or, as Cordova Kramer says, “to give people a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”
Wittels Wachs credits Cordova Kramer with coming up with a shorthand for Lemonada. They seek to create a compassion in Lemonada podcasts that’s “nonblame-y.”
Move forward
Lemonada’s name runs contrary to the way many of us deal with grief. Both Wittels Wachs and Cordova Kramer endured sharp, severe and personal loss, and both spent time processing their grief. They met because Cordova Kramer reached out to Wittels Wachs, who wrote a memoir about her brother’s addiction and death and her grief. Together they wanted to move away from mourning and toward helping with an addiction crisis in the nation.
“The content we produce, we are always trying to talk about solutions,” Wittels Wachs says.
Their “Last Day” — a micro-specific look at Cordova Kramer’s brother’s last day — quickly found a big audience. Earlier this year they raised $1.38 million in seed money from those who supported their pursuit.
Why? Perhaps because Lemonada doesn’t content itself with the sourness easily found in life. Rather Lemonada selects and develops podcasts designed to spread information and connectivity in hope of making a better world.
With new operating revenue, Lemonada launched several podcasts this summer. It responded to the pandemic with “In the Bubble,” a quarantine podcast by Andy Slavitt. “The Untold Story: Policing” wasn’t a response to George Floyd’s death, but it seeks to address the practices that allow such tragedies to happen without repercussions and meaningful change. A second season of “Last Day” is in development. And the company’s biggiest play with its new money is “Our America,” a podcast hosted by Julián Castro. “Our America” takes a look at poverty across the nation, as the onetime presidential candidate and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development talks to those struggling about their struggles.
“Television has become so much about argument,” Castro says. “All this hyperbole and shouting. What I find is people can let their guard down a little with podcasts. They can contemplate and reflect and hopefully learn and maybe even change, you know?”
Changing the world
Early in the coronavirus crisis,
Wittels Wachs and Cordova Kramer got an email from Slavitt on a Saturday asking about the possibility of producing a pandemic podcast. By Wednesday, “In the Bubble” was live. During a summer of fervor generating questions about politicking, the two were pitched a series by DeRay Mckesson of Campaign Zero, an organization dedicated to ending police violence. The show launched almost immediately.
“We said yes to both of those,” Cordova Kramer says, “against our better judgment.”
But both pitches were too strong to pass up, so Lemonada proved it could operate swiftly.
“Say yes, and then figure out a game plan,” she says.
Information travels with unprecedented swiftness. And Lemonada would rather say yes than regret saying no later. Its podcasts play the part of mirror, reflecting problems in our culture. But Lemonada podcasts don’t stop there. The work produced so far aspires to cut a path forward for problems. “The Untold Story: Policing” represents this approach well.
The podcast, hosted by actor and activist Jay Ellis, is partially about policing, but it’s also about the way unions have facilitated problematic actions including no-knock raids, a practice that drew notice in Houston with a disastrous example in early 2019.
“We tell our stories in a three-part arc,” Mckesson says. “There’s a big problem. The big problem is close to you. And you can do something about it. Most podcast storytelling is about crime, and that focuses on the fact that there’s a big problem. It’s not necessarily in your town or city, but it’s a big problem. No. 3? That’s the hardest. I think people know noknock raids are bad. But they don’t know how to end them.
“Stopping at Step 1 is easy for people. But it doesn’t help us change the world.”
Storytelling: ‘That’s our thing’
Wittels Wachs describes a crucial Lemonada criteria: “First-person narratives telling people’s stories,” she says. “That’s our thing.”
With Castro, Lemonada has landed a formidable storyteller with instant name recognition: recent presidential candidate and an advocate for change who also worked as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Castro says traveling across the country as HUD secretary and later as a presidential candidate put him in contact with people wanting to tell their stories.
“One thing that people have in common, whether they’re liberal or conservative, they’re looking for solutions,” he says. “They want to talk about how we can make things better.”
He recalls a visit to Las Vegas, unaware of an entire underground culture inhabiting the city’s storm drains.
“I’m hoping to bring to light the struggles of people in our country,” he says. “I want to talk about the reality of those struggles. And how we can make a difference and change that reality.
“What I see out there is people yearning to understand one another. And to have a space where we can understand each other. We want to create that space in ‘Our America.’ … One goal of this podcast is for people to have a better understanding of folks who are not like them.”
The scope sounds grandiose, but in actuality it starts humbly and fits with what Wittels Wachs and Cordova Kramer started not even a year ago. They’d hoped to spark conversations about thorny aspects of our culture and to provide — if not relief, certainly comfort to those who had suffered the way they had.
They hope to build support, certainly, among those with similar experiences. But also empathy among those who do not share those experiences.
“There’s no manual for any of this,” Wittels Wachs says. “But the real humanity of it is this idea: What if you changed your point of view. What if it’s not all people trying to be horrible to you but instead trying to connect. … That’s part of empathy building. Give people information and create this background.
“Doing ‘Last Day’ was painful. But it’s why we exist. Let’s start from there.”