S4|E40: An Interview with Jed Lipinski

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Gone South listeners, my name is Lloyd Lockridge. I'm the executive producer of Gone South. I want to welcome you to the 40th and final episode of Gone South Season 4. Before I go any further, I also want to share some good news.

Gone South will be back for a fifth season in the beginning of next year. In the meantime, please continue enjoying the show. Maybe some of you haven't had a chance to listen to seasons one through three. If so, make sure you don't miss out. Also, we love hearing from listeners.

If you have story tips or any kind of feedback, please email the show at gone south podcast dot com. For our final episode of this season, we're going to do things a little differently. Rather than Jed interviewing people for Gone South. I'm going to interview Jed about Gone South. I want to thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy our conversation. Jed Lipinski, welcome to Gone South. Thanks so much. It's great to be here on my own show.

Yeah, so first of all, what's it like to be the one being interviewed? Seems like you're rarely in that chair. Yeah, it's partly because I don't like to be interviewed. I feel like I became a journalist partly because I was too nervous to say much in public. And so I felt much more comfortable as the one asking the questions and leaving or putting all the pressure on the other person to answer. I think that's why I became a journalist in the first place. So we are at the end of season four.

How does it feel to be at the end of your fourth season of Gone South? It feels great. I feel tired, but I feel energized too because it feels like a real accomplishment to have written. hosted and produced with you and tommy my brother 40 i mean really 39 narrative episodes of a podcast in you know a little less than a year it's been a big year um you know for

A lot of people, I think, with all podcasts, they come in and out of shows. Some of our listeners might have started this season. Some might have come in in season three. Some might be loyal listeners who started with season one, episode one. Even those people probably aren't really aware of how this show came into being. Can you tell me about the genesis of Gone South? Where did this idea come from? Yeah, I mean, I'll just tell you a little bit about my background.

I was a journalist for years. I was a freelancer in New York City, and then I moved to New Orleans to take a job at the Times-Picayune newspaper there. I worked in different beats there, but at the end of my... time there, I was a crime reporter. And all that kind of led me to write this story that then became The Pharmacist, which was a Netflix documentary I've mentioned probably too many times in Gone South.

And while we were filming that story, I was doing an interview with a DEA agent from New Orleans, and he brought this guy, Skip Sewell, along with him. And Skip, who... has appeared in now several episodes of Gone South, told me the story that day of Margaret Kuhn and her unsolved murder in St. Tammany Parish.

And I remember thinking, that's a really interesting story. And that became season one, Who Killed Margaret Kuhn. So you start with journalism, with print journalism, move to documentary film, and then ultimately have an idea for a podcast.

What drew you to the podcast medium? Yeah, I mean, it was accidental. I was working as a documentary producer at the time, and I got this idea from Skip. And I really wanted to explore it, but there was zero archival. There was like nothing to show on screen. And I thought at the time I'd listened to shows like The Clearing, which was really amazing.

the way that that story really managed to ground you in the story through audio only, I figured, wow, maybe I can tell this as a podcast. And that's how it all started because the Margaret Kuhn story didn't work as a documentary. Right. You know, earlier you were talking about how you don't really like to be in the front of the story. But as you started making season one of Gone South, really when you started recording it and beginning to hear yourself in the story.

Did that make you uncomfortable or excited or a little bit of both? Yeah, the answer is uncomfortable. I've always, like most people, not liked the sound of my voice. And I was extremely surprised when people... You know, not everyone, but some people would say, hey, yeah, I like the sound of your voice. You have a voice for podcasts. And that was really bizarre, but also encouraging. And I thought, well, really? I've never been told that by anyone.

So it was a surprise. And I still find it uncomfortable. I still find it strange to hear the sound of my voice, but I've come to accept it. So as you started making your first podcast, what did you discover in terms of the opportunities? that existed in podcasting versus the formats that you've done in the past? You know, in print journalism, which I did for years, and especially in the South, you'd go out and interview people.

and they would say these things. And the way that they would say them, I just remember thinking, especially when I was in New Orleans, like... oh my god, this person has such a great voice, or the way they said that, there was such a musicality to the way that they phrased that, or it was just so funny, and the humor in the line depended all on the way that they said it and the rhythm with which they said it.

So when we did Gone South, season one at least, about Margaret Kuhn, we got to spend so much time in Louisiana where people have such beautiful voices and such beautiful accents. It was like a feast. of different voices and it was like this brand new opportunity to hear people right and there's another aspect that i and i know we're talking a lot about just podcasts in general but

I don't know. Podcasts have been around for a while now, and I feel like the honeymoon phase is over, but there's still such great stuff out there that I'm in the mood to celebrate podcasts. So I'm going to ask you another podcast question or two. Getting a sense of who the people are and how they say things.

You also get that documentary of film, of course. In fact, you also get the visuals. But when you're making a documentary film, as you know, you know, the amount of equipment that you bring into a room, the amount of people that can be in a room for a documentary film interview. is pretty startling and also probably imposing to somebody who's not used to making documentaries, which in most cases is everybody who's in a documentary. Do you feel like podcasts are uniquely intimate? Oh, yeah.

I mean, I was a print journalist, but I leapt from print journalism all the way to documentaries. And suddenly, you know, just to do an interview, you have to have 10 people in the room with lights and cameras. And they're so uncomfortable. the guests. And I was uncomfortable too. I felt guilty about putting people in that situation. I felt nervous asking questions. They felt nervous answering the questions. And I just wanted to take them aside and say like,

all right, now let's just start the real interview, just the two of us. But then that was another thing I discovered in podcasting. It restored the intimacy that I'd experienced and really liked about journalism.

Because people are just more open. They're more honest. They're more comfortable. They're more relaxed. And they say more interesting things as a result. I've got a question about format. Our listeners who've... been with us for all four seasons or have listened to more than one season, might have noticed that we went from a limited series format to kind of a weekly format. In the past, we've done six to eight episodes on one story. This past season, we did...

40 episodes, 39 episodes, and we had a couple of two or three parters. So let's call it 30 stories. Tell me about the experience of moving from that limited series format to this weekly format. Yeah, I get that question a lot. In a limited series show, you're kind of limited to the people who are in that story. You're boxed in. People will take you down like...

a rabbit hole, but you can only go so far because you have to keep it contained within what that story is. People would often tell me about other interesting stories that they were a part of, or actually, you know, you shouldn't do this story. There's a much more interesting story you should actually be doing here.

And you have to just file that away and say, maybe next year. And in this case, someone would tell us this great story and we could do it next week. We could talk to that same person. And that happened again in this series, Mary Jane Marcantel. was working with us on one story and she in the process said, you really shouldn't be doing this story. It's a good one, but you should really be doing this other one, which I play a much larger role in.

So when I tell people about this show, Gone South, the true crime show, it's usually sort of the shorthand. They normally envision two people chatting about crimes. Gone South is not that. What is Gone South in your mind? Yeah, it's not a chat show. And I don't think I have the disposition to do a chat show. I just don't think I would be any good at it. So I listen to so many people who do chat shows successfully, and they're just really...

beautiful conversationalists. And I just unfortunately don't think I have that skill or that talent. What this question also gets at is the format of this show as a narrative show. In addition to not really being able to do a chat show, I find that I have a compulsion to write stories, that that's kind of how I think. That's how I understand the world, I think, is through stories.

That brings up another kind of, I think, unique aspect of Gone South. And we've actually gotten some feedback on this, positive feedback from listeners who noticed this and appreciate it. So I wanted to ask you about it. And that's that you're very hesitant to insert your opinion. You really seem to prefer allowing the people in the story to tell it, and you position yourself as more of a guide for the listener to take them through the story as told.

by the people who lived it or who are experts on a subject. Tell me about that approach to telling stories. Interestingly or not, I've never been someone with very strong opinions. I'm kind of amazed by people who have really strong opinions about things. A lot of my friends have really strong opinions. And I just kind of, you know, laugh or say, wow, yeah, you really have a real strong opinion about that.

I tend not to. At the same time, I really like to tell stories through the point of view of the person who experienced it firsthand. Injecting myself into the story. has never been something I'm that comfortable with. But I think that gets at the point too, is that often when I find a really good story, one that we want to tell in Gone South, I don't want to interfere with it.

Like, I don't want to be the one to kind of mess it up or distract someone from what really happened at the time. I think if somebody were to make assumptions about a true crime host, they would say he must have a sick fascination with crime. But for you, it really seems to have nothing to do with that. It's a sick fascination with people and just a deep desire to understand how they think. Do you know where that comes from? You know, I don't.

And yet, well, yeah, maybe I do. I mean, I read a lot. I'm endlessly curious, often to my detriment. I'm always staring at people. I'm always wondering, why does that person do that? I have a deep, deep...

interest and obsession with the decisions that people make. But I'm just as curious about why people commit crimes as I am about people who... are motivated to do amazing things and to sacrifice themselves and to live completely selflessly, to work pro bono for years or even decades in order to get justice for a family, a woman, a victim of a crime. Those motivations are really, really fascinating for me. And every episode of our show has involved a crime in some way. But often...

In most cases for our show, the crime has been the least interesting part of the story. It's just often just the catalyst for this deeper exploration of human beings and their motivations. One thing that I find really interesting about the stories that you gravitate towards is, you know, lots of true crime shows will fixate on a criminal or a killer. There's a widespread fascination with psychopaths.

just in our society. But your strongest stories always include a great protagonist, somebody who is kind of counterbalancing or fighting against the evil forces in a given story. Doing this many crime stories, it seems like it could begin to weigh on you. Do you find relief in these characters that offer something good? Yeah, good question. You can totally get overwhelmed with crime stories. It would have been very easy to do that.

in Gone South season four, 40 episodes of true crime stories, many of which are pretty harrowing. We covered, as you mentioned, a lot of people that I think meet the full criteria for the psychopath test. Tommy Lynn Sells. We covered a number of serial killers. Felix Vale. And I can't tell those stories without having the counterbalance. I don't think it's...

fair to listeners, because otherwise, in my mind at least, what does it leave you with? It leaves you with a kind of hopeless, empty feeling. The world is terrible and evil. But I also... In terms of things that we discovered or I discovered in this show, in this season in particular, it's that often the darker the story, the darker the villain in a story.

the lighter and the better the protagonist has to be to fight that evil. That happened absolutely in the story Public Access we did about Scott Rogers, who was a kind of evil incarnate. he managed to, the evil he was committing, managed to kind of draw out the most beautiful people like Ronna Gray, Mary Jane Marcantel.

the man that we refer to as Ethan in the story who was a victim of Scott Rogers. These were such beautiful people. They were so selfless and they were so compassionate and they counterbalanced the evil that Scott represented. So both for my own protection against nightmares and hopelessness, especially against the backdrop of some pretty terrible things that are happening in the world, I felt it was my responsibility to find these good people.

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So I want to switch gears a little bit. The types of stories that you tend to tell on Gone South, they're not ripped from the headlines. They're not splashy news stories getting a lot of play on social media. Talk to me about the thinking. Avoiding what is trending, so to speak. You know, a couple thoughts there. I don't have great instincts, I think. As a journalist, I never had great instincts, news instincts. My editors were always appalled that I was, you know.

off in the weeds reporting these stories that had nothing to do with current events, like nothing to do with the conversation currently going on in Brooklyn or New Orleans or wherever else. So it's always been kind of a liability for me as a journalist, and it might have been a fatal one. But this kind of stories that we choose for this show, you know, they're old in part because old stories are often fully formed. The kind of stories that we find that we select and choose to do and report out.

typically have a beginning and a middle and an end. You can see the full arc of them. That is often more interesting to me than stories that are ripped from the headlines but are still developing. That's one factor. The other factor is telling these older stories, it puts us in touch with older people. And this is something else that's maybe not very fashionable right now.

These are not people who are really good on social media. These are not people with big social media followings who are going to promote the episode to their million followers and therefore get us a much larger audience. They're often people who don't know what a podcast is. exactly there are often people who don't even know what a podcast is and and that's a question often my first question for the people that we interview is you know sir ma'am do you know what a podcast is and

Most of the time it's, yeah, yeah. And some of the time it's, no, like, what is that? And you kind of say, well, it's sort of like a radio documentary. You know, it's just audio. So you have to explain what it is. And often they don't really care. They're just interested in telling the story.

But I've really come over the years that we've been doing this show and interviewing a lot of people about stories that took place in the 1980s, sometimes the 1970s, developed a real respect, appreciation, love. for people over the age of 60. They have a lot of life experience. They have a lot of time to spare, to talk. And often, they have a lot of experience, life experience that leads them to.

draw conclusions about a story that took place in the past. And they have thoughts about what that story means. So in that way, they do a lot of the work for you. You don't have to really fight to extract from them.

the meaning or to help them try to find meaning in a story. Yeah, there's another component to this that I want to get to. These are older stories, often involving older people. And in keeping with the premise of the show, they all take place in the South. You are not from the South. You're from Concord, Massachusetts. You came down to New Orleans and then left. After you left, you launched Gone South. And you come down. We've reported a lot of stories down here together.

In fact, Jed and I were in Tennessee recently, and somebody we were with who was from the South learned that Jed was from Connecticut and immediately told a joke, which was, do you know the difference between a Yankee and a damn Yankee? Jed and I said no, and the guy said, a Yankee visits. A damn Yankee stays. But I wanted to ask, you build a great rapport with the people that you interview here in the South. And Southerners are probably any region, particularly Southerners, are...

skeptical of people who are not from the South. Have you encountered any barriers of being a, quote, Yankee, reporting these stories in the South? Stories that depend on a lot of trust between you and the interview subject? Yeah, you know, so I've always felt a little self-conscious about telling stories of the South as a Northerner. And that'll never go away.

That'll never go away. You know, I think what you're referring to might be somewhat hostile encounters that we had during the first season of the show. We would talk to some law enforcement professionals, some sheriffs in Louisiana. This was, mind you, during the pandemic. So I'd have a mask on and they couldn't see my expression. And here I am asking these prying questions about, you know, Margaret Kuhn.

wondering whether corruption might not have been a factor in the inability to solve her murder, and was getting some very, very skeptical and cynical and sometimes outraged responses. Rightly so. Rightly so. And in some ways, I sympathize with them. If I were in their shoes, a sheriff, a deputy sheriff who had spent years trying to solve a case and some podcaster from Connecticut.

or Massachusetts or Brooklyn, for God's sake, came down and started interrogating me about my motives and my process and my intentions. I would be so outraged. I would probably have canceled the interview just like they did. So I totally get it. And yet, there's no, with a few exceptions, no resentment.

between you and people you've interviewed and vice versa. In fact, I've found that you're incredibly good at building trust and getting people to agree to talk when at first they don't want to. I know that you are fascinated with the South and are a big admirer of Southerners. I think that they can detect that and can tell that you don't have any bad intentions and that you're really interested in hearing a story. Can you tell me about your feelings towards the South?

It's funny because as we're talking, I'm realizing another reason that I might feel uncomfortable about injecting myself into these stories. And that's because I'm not from the South. Maybe if I was from Mississippi. I might feel a lot more comfortable injecting my own thoughts and opinions and experiences into a story that takes place in Louisiana or Mississippi. But I feel very uncomfortable doing that as someone from...

you know, Yankee territory. So maybe that's another factor that I haven't quite processed or thought about. So that's interesting. At the same time, I do have such deep affection for the South. I spent a year in South Carolina outside Charleston. I spent four plus years in New Orleans. And those were the most vivid years of my life. I remember... those years day by day almost. Those years and days that I spent in the South are in technicolor in a way. And I miss the South terribly.

And the show in some ways is a way for me to stay connected to the South, stay connected to the people of the South. We go back to the South to report the show. multiple times per season which is restorative for me i go back and and people call me honey and sweetie and baby and and put their hands on you and you feel healed and then i come back to Connecticut in the winter and I hibernate. Sean Bean and Connie Nielsen star in Robin Hood from Sherwood Forest.

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So Jed, you were talking about not being from the South. And I think even though you're not from the South, you and Southerners are kindred spirits because of your shared love of storytelling. There's a strong storytelling tradition in the South. In fact, there's an entire PBS series called Southern Storytellers. Do you think Southerners are better at telling stories? I think it's a strange kind of generalization to say that people from the South are better storytellers.

There was this quote that I may have quoted before, I think when we were talking to the Way Brothers for an episode that we did earlier this season about that show called Kings of Tupelo. The show begins with this guy, Steve Holland, who says some version of the South and its struggle to rise above the past, learned how to tell stories, learned how to share tragedy, and then sometimes learn to make up stuff.

So Southerners were the best storytellers of any area in the world. So that's what he said. And he's smiling as he says it. And it's as if he doesn't really mean it. But then again, it's as if he really does. You know, he's being wry and funny. But it caused me to reflect and think, why is that? I'm not exactly sure. But it was born out in this season again.

There's something about people from the South that enables them to tell really good stories and being able to talk to them and being able to listen to their stories and being able to make a show based on. you know southern storytelling has been this enormous privilege for me and it's something i hope i can continue doing

You know, what you're saying makes me think of one of the great joys of storytelling, which is seeing the reaction of your audience, whether it's one person or a crowd. But with the podcast medium, you rarely interact with your audience. You've created ways to interact with your audience through social media and your newsletter. But even if you were a filmmaker, you could sit in a theater and listen to people enjoy your movie. But with a podcast, it's such an inherently private medium.

where you're almost always doing it alone. And in large part, you're kind of making them alone. So I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about what you hope the listener gets from this show. Or in other words, what are you hoping to give the listener? In some ways, it comes back to that idea of sitting there in the South when I was a reporter in someone's house.

We're on the front porch with someone or in a warehouse or a factory and having them open themselves up to me. And I think that's part of it. sharing that with the other person, the listener who's on the other end, who's listening alone in their car, who's walking their dog and listening on their headphones. Maybe they're in Australia.

We have a lot of listeners from Australia for some reason. And giving them a window into this person's life in Louisiana, a person that they would never, ever talk to. Not because they don't want to, but just because the circumstances of their life would never put them in contact with this person, let alone hear from them in such an unguarded way.

In some ways, you're kind of like a switchboard operator, you know, like, you know, the call is coming in from Australia and you're connecting them to someone in the deep south. And I'm that switchboard operator. I'm the guy who's just making the connection and trying to open up the phone line and allowing those people to connect and empathize with this person and understand them.

in a way that you know a lot of other mediums don't and um i think that's what we offer in the show jed thanks so much for being in the interviewee chair for once I hope it didn't make you too uncomfortable. I'm going to give you the reins and let you sign off. Yeah, thanks, Lloyd. And I will say thank you to you. You know, you've been with me for over four years now.

My brother is not here right now, but he's also been with us from the beginning. Couldn't have done it without either one of you. And as for the listener, couldn't do it without you either. Your support in reaching out, recommending stories. So many of the stories we did this year were based on listener recommendations, so keep those coming. I really appreciate those. A lot of people know what a Gone South story is at this point, and so the recommendations are often really, really good.

So I'm grateful for that. And most of all, just grateful to you for listening and supporting the show. So thanks so much. Super Bowl MVP, chicken farmer, and now host of Free Range. This is a show where I go off the field and off the script. We're talking what's hot in music, film, trending news, and everything blowing up your feed.

If you love football, you'll feel at home. But if you're here for the vibes, the internet deep dives, the conversation, this is your podcast. Join me every Wednesday. Follow and listen to Free Range with me. Von Miller, everywhere you get your podcasts. No stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

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