www.montereycountynow.com FEBRUARY 27-MARCH 5, 2025 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Stephanie Wittels Wachs got her start in theater. She was a prolific voice actor for 20 years, fell into teaching then created and led a nonprofit theater arts organization in her hometown of Houston. Today she is the co-founder and chief creative officer of Lemonada Media, one of the top podcast networks in the U.S., featuring hosts like Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny, as well as hosting her own podcast. In 2022 Wittels Wachs was named one of the “Top 50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting” by Podcast News Daily and Inside Radio. Her path to podcasting success surprises even her. “I did not intend to be a media mogul—that was not on my dance card,” she says, sitting on a comfy chair in the living room of her family’s renovated Spanish-style home in Pacific Grove. Down the hall, her home office serves as her base of operations for Lemonada as well as her studio to record her podcast, Last Day. It was the tragic death of her brother, Harris Wittels, a successful TV comedy writer, director and producer, who overdosed on heroin in 2015, that started Wachs on the path she’s on now. Overcome by grief, she channeled her feelings into writing—first as notes on her phone then an essay on Medium, then a book, Everything is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love and Loss. In 2017 Wittels Wachs appeared as a guest on the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking! to talk about the loss of her brother, although she didn’t go on willingly. “My mom actually wrote in to go on the podcast by herself, but then she made me go with her,” Wittels Wachs says. “Ugh, fine, whatever,” she remembers thinking. The decision was life-changing. Wittels Wachs caught the attention of Jessica Cordova Kramer, executive producer at Pod Save The People. Kramer had lost her own brother to an overdose just three months earlier. “She reached out to me cold, and said, ‘I was really moved. Can we talk? I’d love for you to come on our show and talk about the opioid crisis,’” Wittels Wachs remembers. The two women “totally clicked,” she says. They found out they had both attended New York University at the same time and had even lived in the same dorm, but never met. “It was wild,” she says. At the end of the call Kramer asked Wittels Wachs, who had already hosted one podcast on parenting, about starting a podcast about opioids. At first Wittels Wachs said no because she felt emotionally spent writing and talking about the topic since her brother’s death, but eventually she said yes. They created the podcast Last Day about the last day of their brothers’ lives and began pitching it to podcast companies, but no one wanted it. “Everyone was saying, ‘This is too niche. This is never going to work. Nobody’s going to want to do this,’” she says. “We said, ‘Overdoses, niche? Despair is niche?’ We were just like, ‘Fuck it, we’ll do it ourselves.’ That was literally the impetus for the company at first. Nobody wants to make this? We will make it. Had we not been grief-stricken we probably wouldn’t have done it.” Wittels Wachs and Kramer believed the topic was something that would resonate with others. “We wanted to make a show that explored what we as family members would have wanted to hear,” she says. It was 2019, on the cusp of the outbreak of Covid-19. Soon after they began the show, they realized there were more hard topics people deal with in the world beyond drugs. “What if we made content and community about all these things that keep us awake at night, that we’re lying in bed at 3am stressing and anxiety spiraling about stuff?” Wittels Wachs says. “This was our barrel of lemons. What if we created a whole network around that?” They hit upon the company name Lemonada. Their motto: “Making life suck less, one podcast at a time.” The company today employs 45 employees and hosts 75 podcasts, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Wiser Than Me With Julia LouisDreyfus, which was named “Show of the Year” on Apple in 2023. The podcasts they feature are meant to be uplifting, intriguing and imbue wisdom to make people’s lives a bit better. Dreyfus’ podcast features the actor talking to senior women, including Nancy Pelosi, Rita Moreno and Dolores Huerta, to name a few. Fail Better With David Duchovny is about how failure shapes people for the better more than success. Other podcasts cover a range of topics from parenting, happiness, the childcare crisis and more. They steer away from “mean-spirited political” content, Wittels Wachs says. “We’re going to do stuff that can resonate with lots of people. That kind of hope that Jess [Kramer] heard on that podcast with me on a one-off, that hope that she felt—that’s like lightning in a bottle,” she says. “For us, that’s what we want to make people feel like, especially now.” Her own podcast has evolved since season 1, which focused on opioids. Season 2 talked about suicide, the third season was on guns. “Now it’s about the moments that change us,” she says. A good podcast includes an engaged and passionate host with some expertises, and topics that are universal and personal at the same time, says Wittels Wachs. The questions need to be engaging and “un-Googleable” to create interesting conversations. The company is experimenting with other story forms. They trademarked the term “audio reality,” which she describes as “reality TV for your ears.” In the first series they engaged a reality TV team to follow four trans individuals around. The next series followed people over age 70. The popularity of podcasts, Wittels Wachs believes, comes from the intimacy of hearing someone’s voice in our ears, and the human interest in listening to stories, although the industry is shifting, and Lemonada is shifting with it. “There’s a shift to video and YouTube and we’re having to grapple with that as a company,” she says. “If people are on YouTube, that’s where we will go.” YouTube is catering more to podcasters, including anyone who wants to get into it since the barrier for entry is very low, for any type of podcast. “It’s going to grow exponentially,” Wittels Wachs says. Her business already has. “NOBODY WANTS TO MAKE THIS? WE WILL MAKE IT.” LEMONS INTO LEMONADA Sharing her grief with listeners led Stephanie Wittels Wachs to lead a top podcasting company. By Pam Marino Stephanie Wittels Wachs in her family’s dining room in Pacific Grove. Down the hall is her office, where she records podcast episodes and leads the company she co-founded, Lemonada Media, as its chief creative officer. In 2022 she was named one of the “Top 50 Most Powerful People in Podcasting.”
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