The Unbelievable and Unlikely Tale of (A Podcast About) John Todd
It took six years, three different distributors, and a lot of highs and lows to bring this extraordinary story to life–host Paul Murphy and I share the tenacious journey.
Welcome to Dispatch #63 of The Audio Insurgent. A special edition of this newsletter to mark a milestone production for us, Cover Up: The Conspiracy Tapes. Unlike regular dispatches, today’s edition is going to all readers right away. Today also marks the release of the third episode in the series, where the story really blows open–so I was saving this for a day when you can really dig your teeth into the story. Worth noting that all of the episodes are available now for paid subscribers to The Binge on Apple Podcasts.
Okay, here you go…
[TODAY’S MAIN THING: THE UNBELIEVABLE AND UNLIKELY TALE OF (A PODCAST ABOUT) JOHN TODD] Five years ago, when Jesse Baker and I stepped out on our own to start what became Magnificent Noise, we shared a deck containing a small stable of talent and show concepts to demonstrate the types of stories we wanted to make and voices we wanted to amplify. Among them was the photo above, along with this description.
The Many Unbelievable Lives of John Todd is a biographical narrative podcast about a bizarre, mysterious, and remarkably influential man, John Todd. John was the catalyst of the modern conspiracy theory, who set the stage for the modern “culture wars” surrounding conservatives’ fears/concerns about popular culture’s negative (evil) influences on young people and their dark paranoia over government oppression and surveillance. It was John Todd who crafted the modern notion of “The Illuminati” as a conspiratorial group who govern world events and economies. He made a big name for himself, changed the cultural conversation in the United States, inspired the early militia and separatist movements like Ruby Ridge, and then suddenly disappeared, becoming the focus of many conspiracy theories himself.
For a bit more background, John Todd burst onto the evangelical scene in the mid-1970s with a shocking tale: claiming to be a former witch involved in human sacrifices among elite circles. After converting to Christianity, he toured the nation warning of hidden Satanists and spoke about a secret organization known as the Illuminati, urging the thousands who heard him speak to prepare for a world takeover by stockpiling weapons and retreating to remote areas.
As his influence peaked and his teachings spread through countless tapes, his facade crumbled, and he vanished. Yet, his legacy endured, inspiring acts of extreme violence from Ruby Ridge, Waco, PizzaGate, QAnon right through to the steps of the Capitol on January 6th.
We knew, even then, that this story was weird–and I’m not exaggerating. It is next level. And it is very complicated and has a lot of third-rail issues in it involving mental illness, sexual assault, and gender identification. Telling this story would be very challenging. To be honest, that scared away a few other collaborators and distributors over time. But to me, that danger is exactly why I wanted to make it.
It was my previous collaborator Jon Ronson who first introduced me to Paul Murphy, a film editor who, back then, had already spent a few years researching John Todd after stumbling across him while researching the Satanic Panic scare of the 1980s. Both Jesse and I met with Paul, and it was pretty obvious that we shared a lot in common.
That began the years-long journey to the release this month by Sony Podcasts of what’s now called Cover Up: The Conspiracy Tapes, hosted by Paul and EP’d by me. And quite a journey it has been both typical and very untypical, just like the story itself.
Below is an edited transcript of a conversation Paul and I had about making this podcast that I thought was worth sharing. If you want to hear the unedited original conversation this was drawn from, you can listen to that here. And FYI–we conducted the whole conversation so it would be spoiler-free for the series (which has a lot of twists and turns), so if you haven’t listened yet–you are good.
Eric: When I was first pitching this story to distributors, it was very buzzy and caught everyone’s attention. But then they’d look into it and often the next response was, “Wait a minute, you want to tell this big, cinematic story, but you have almost nothing about him: he’s dead and there is no video of him, only a handful of pictures of him exist, no recorded interviews…and all you really have are a few shitty cassette recordings of him giving a handful of talks in churches.” I’d respond, “Yup, that’s pretty much it.” And they just couldn’t fathom how we could construct a series out of that.
Paul: Yeah, I get that. I think it’s easier for me to see it because I’ve been editing films for 20 years now. In documentary film, a lot of the time I’m given material that was not intended to end up in a documentary that was made by an amateur. And then it’s my job to present that to an audience, cut it down, put it in an order that has some kind of meaning to an audience.
And I think that’s exactly what I did here. When I first came across these eight hours of recordings all I could feel was like, I wanted to shape it and polish it and cut it down in a way that it would be meaningful to somebody and resonate with the world we live in today. That’s what excited me about the John Todd tapes–the challenge of that.
Eric: How did your history as a film editor make approaching this project different for you than for audio people?
Paul: In my film editing, everything always starts with sound. Before I even think about picture in a sequence, I build it out from the sound first, and then I go, “All right, what are my visuals in this scene?” So to me, when I approached this project and I knew that I wanted it to be a podcast, I didn’t want it to be a film.
Eric: I want to touch on something that happened during the production that surprised us and we never saw coming, which is your presence in the series. Not only is your voice heard as the host of the podcast, but as the podcast goes on, you become much more of a character in it, and you become the central character of the final episode.
We had a pretty good version of Episode 6, the finale, but then–in a surprising cinematic and dramatic development–we had a stack of documents dropped in our laps at the last minute. On March 28th of this year, days before we were due to turn in the series, a FOIA request we’d been chasing and negotiating with the South Carolina prison bureau showed up in our inboxes that contained detailed results of an investigation into John Todd’s entire life. And it really changed our attitudes and our feelings considerably about the whole series. We realized from those docs that there was an entire layer of activity happening behind the main events of our story that these docs made vivid–and it was really much, much darker than we expected.
So we tore up that episode and re-wrote it over the next few days. Oddly, we removed a number of first-person characters we had interviews with–and you went to amazing lengths to locate–and just did it without them.
Paul: At the end of the story you’re talking about a bunch of convicts and people who have twisted dark pasts. During our table read, Jesse was the first one to say, “I don’t trust any of these people. You are the only person I trust in this situation.” And that’s when it hit me that “Oh, I can’t just be the puppet master here telling everybody’s story. I have to tell my story as well, and I have to be as raw and honest with the audience as possible about how I’m feeling.”
Eric: The final version has three brief clips of John Todd in the first few minutes, then the entire rest of the episode is just your voice. There’s an 11 minute segment uninterrupted of you speaking and then a nine minute segment uninterrupted.
It breaks every rule of audio production yet it completely works. That’s because at that point, you, and what you are thinking and feeling, are the heartbeat of the story, not John Todd. I’m curious how that felt to you?
Paul: It did not feel comfortable. I think the very reason that I am attracted to editing film documentaries is that with the exception of certain documentaries, it’s about taking other people’s stories and shaping them, in a cohesive, meaningful sort of way, that expresses their stories. That is my craft. My craft is to take the raw materials of your story and present them to an audience. And I did not realize that this was not what I had signed on for with this podcast.
Eric: None of us did.
Paul: I realized that it was a comfort to hide behind other people’s stories, but it became obvious and inevitable to all of us as we got to the last episode that the central question became how did I feel about the terrible things that we were discovering. It was as much a story and it'd become a huge question mark by the end of the project. So really the only sort of satisfying thing was for me to step away from that omnipotent storyteller and actually become a central character in it. I felt very uncomfortable with it. It was a very raw thing for me to do. And, but it had to be done. I think it landed.
And so that became something that I also had not anticipated and felt like I did not sign up for, which was when it came time to actually read those lines, especially towards the end of episode six, it dawned on me that I couldn't just read those lines. I actually had to feel them, and that was confronting as well.
And I think I said to you, at some point it’s like acting. I’m not an actor–and it’s not acting as in like faking something. It’s acting as in you have to dig into those initial feelings that you felt and channel them to the audience. And I found that very confronting as well.
I felt very vulnerable doing that. And it’s difficult to just do that sitting in a room with a microphone, but that’s what I had to do because it wasn’t good enough to just read those lines. You had to actually feel them.
Eric: We were all working on various parts of the series that final week. Did you and Josie [Holtzman, who worked with us as a producer on the series] record that narration together?
Paul: I think that was the night that Josie’s grandmother was celebrating her 95th birthday. So I was actually cutting those by myself. And if you go back and listen to them, I probably did five takes and in between each take I'm just like swearing my head off. I kept pushing myself until like I felt it, I couldn't just read it.
Eric: Yeah, actually, I remember Josie handing over the edited tracks and saying, “I cut out all the swearing.”
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Eric: So, this story starts off presenting as a tale of a fabulist and the people who were so willing to believe in him, and then it gets into some pretty rough territory. Why do you think this story matters? Why was this story worth it? Was this worth it to you?
Paul: I think the reason it was worth it is because, I think one of the problems that we have nowadays is that we look at the sort of fringes of what’s going on in society and we shrug it off as being insignificant, or just amusing. I think what we have learned a lot in the last eight years, is that if you ignore the fringes, the fringes find a way of becoming part of the mainstream more and more. So I think that when you see something like the story of John Todd festering away, it’s very important to throw some sunlight on it and expose all of this stuff.
This story shows the origins of so much in the conspiracy movement and they’re not good origins. And I feel like John Todd never got his comeuppance, he is still revered in the conspiracy community today. So it’s really important that, because I just think it’s disgusting that there are people who are dismissing the charges against him as being evidence that the Illuminati ultimately got him when the truth is so much more horrifying and disturbing than that.
Paul: I actually did lose a long time friend over conspiracy theories. Somebody who I had known since I was very young, who I probably won’t speak to ever again in my life. So there’s always been that sort of driving me, but also I guess just seeing the world, not to get like too over the top here, but seeing the world that I’m bringing my son into as well and seeing that world looks a lot like the seventies when John Todd was really at his prime and thinking, “We gotta do something about this.”
Eric: People close themselves off to understanding so much of what’s happening in the world because they’re so quick to dismiss. And John Todd, and the tapes, are such an exaggerated version of that. The claims are so wild and over the top and so easily disprovable in many ways. And yet, as you and I have noted, no one in the audience of those tapes ever pushes back on him saying these outrageous things.
And I think that when people take the time to listen, this series requires them to understand the evolution of this person and these claims, and you see them differently.
And for me personally, another reason I wanted to make this is because over the last several years, people have been saying that podcasting is unable to tell complicated stories anymore. Networks aren’t saying yes to them and people aren’t producing them well. This is a very complicated story and we didn’t shy away from all of its complications. Sony green lit it and frankly never looked back. I’m glad to see it doing well because it just shows that the idea that podcasting can’t support this kind of storytelling anymore is completely baseless.
Paul: And I think to some extent the John Todd story is about the power of audio storytelling as well. It must have been a spell that he cast on these people when they received a cassette with these hidden secrets on it. It was just this man’s voice telling them about what he thought was really going on in the world and they believed him! So for me, that’s why it had to be a podcast because that's the format that this works in. It’s the absolute power of listening to a voice and having that transformative experience.
Eric: One more thing I wanted to discuss was our working relationship with Sony.
Paul: Yep.
Eric: We came very close to placing this series with two other distributors, but those conversations both fell apart at very late stages, once over ownership issues and another over an editorial disagreement. When they were setting up Sony Podcasts, I had a conversation with them about different projects that we had in the hopper and they immediately gravitated towards this show. It was the thing that they were most excited about.
And they’ve had a number of changes in their model since we signed with them. To be fair, it took us probably two years after greenlighting this to get it done and Sony was doing a lot of evolving during that time. As a result, there were some great moments and some not great moments for everyone involved. We had a number of different people coming in and out of the project. We actually ended up landing with two very good editors and advisors in Catherine St. Louis and Jonathan Hirsch, who really pushed us to make the show what it is. And, as much as I’d like to think that we would’ve done well on our own, I don’t think it would be nearly as good if it hadn’t been for their presence.
But we made a pretty big pivot, right around this past December. We had finished drafts of all the episodes of the series, and when we first got together with Catherine and Jonathan, we were expecting that we were going to get some moderate editing, and then we’re gonna wrap it up and have this thing out in March. And then they’re like, “No, we want you to rethink this story and really change the perspective.”
That was the exact opposite of all the feedback we’d gotten up until that point. And it made sense at the time, because John Todd never changes. He’s in lots of different situations, but he was an agent of change for others, but never evolved himself really at all. But we basically took the whole perspective of the series, especially in the first three episodes, and flipped it on its head. Rewriting all the episodes and completely restructuring the first three episodes to center around John.
Paul: Right. I remember being in a meeting with you in New York where I was going through the storyline and somebody interrupted me and said, “Are you going to focus on this guy or are you gonna focus on the people around him? Because I don’t really want to be around this awful guy who’s just a liar.” And I remember, in that moment, feeling embarrassed about this story, and embarrassed about the fact that I was so interested in it.
Eric: I think it’s funny that you and I–someone who is a film editor and someone who develops tons of these things–we still needed another editor to bring out these ideas.
Paul: Yeah. I don’t think I could work in an art form where it’s not a collaborative medium because the only way you can really confront the craft and confront yourself is by having somebody there saying, “That’s not good enough. I'm not getting this. Or what if you did it this way? What if you did it that way?" That’s the most valuable thing about collaboration.
Eric: Someone who hasn’t been in the trenches for two years like us and can really see it fresh and clearly.
Paul: Yeah.
Eric: Okay, I think that’s it. Thank you for doing this.
Paul: No worries.
Again: You can read about The Conspiracy Tapes here or jump straight in and listen to it on the platform of your choice (though Apple Podcast listeners can subscribe and hear the entire series today). You can also hear the trailer too.
Okay, that’s it for today.
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Make great things. I’ll be listening.
--Eric