37 Brian Powers: marketing director, bassist, podcast host

Brian Powers is a legal marketer, a recovering attorney, a musician, and a podcaster. He is the Marketing Director of the McBrayer law firm, and he has been a freelance writer for such publications as Business Lexington and ACE Weekly in Lexington, Kentucky, earning a third-place Kentucky Press Association award somehow. 

He lives with his wife, his three youngest kids, and the devil's own pug in a haunted house in Versailles, Kentucky. When he isn't writing for or recording his dad-joke-filled podcast on odd and obscure American history, American Esoterica, he is the bassist and a singer of the band Witness Protection, a band made up almost entirely of lawyers. He enjoys long walks on anywhere but the beach because he grew up in Florida and would be thrilled to never see sand again.

Kathie's note: I met Brian in the 2010s through a loose network of nonfiction writers in Lexington, Kentucky. He's been a great resource for legal questions (thanks for the free advice, Brian!) and general shoptalk. 

Oh, in this episode, I learned what comes after primary, secondary, tertiary. Yep, today years old when I heard the word "quaternary" for the first time. A quick dive into a shallow rabbit hole produced the next adjectives in the sequence: quinary, senary, septenary, octonary, nonary, denary. Stop it! (Meaning, don't ever stop using cool words.)

Writers Rotation intro/outro recorded at Dynamix Productions in Lexington, Kentucky.

Transcript

Brian [00:00:00]:
I am Brian Powers. I am a marketing director, a musician and a podcaster. And words are the sand with which I build my castles.

Intro
Hi, welcome to the Writers Rotation podcast. I'm your host, Kathie Stamps. I love words and writing and people and talking. So I'm talking to people who write all kinds of things in different professions. It's a Writers Rotation. 

Kathie [00:00:25]:
Brian, how you doing?

Brian [00:00:26]:
Hello.

Kathie [00:00:27]:
How is everything in the world of American Esoterica? (https://www.americanesoterica.com) 

Brian [00:00:31]:
It is fantastical. I've just finished my 75th episode, not including all these other little mini episodes I do every once in a while when I get a wild hair. It has been an absolute labor of love and I’ve finally reached the end of everything. When I first set out to do it, I sat down and wrote out 60, 70 some odd topics and I have gotten through every single one of them. 

Kathie [00:00:55]:
No.

Brian [00:00:55]:
I'm looking for new things and finding new weird stories to tell, and apparently there's enough material out there.

Kathie [00:00:58]:
Wow. What are your criteria for a topic or a person or a subject?

Brian [00:01:04]:
Honestly, it has to be interesting to me. I'm a wholly selfish creator. When I choose a topic, it's gotta be something that I think is fascinating, but then also has to be something that I think I can make fascinating for somebody who isn't a big nerd like me. And I, you know, I've got like a 75% hit rate, I think. There are a few episodes… Every once in a while I get done with them and I listen to them and I, oh, this is, this is so interesting to nobody but me.

Kathie [00:01:33]:
No, it's three. Me, myself, and I

Brian [00:01:36]:
There's that. Yeah. You know, I try and make it interesting to everybody else. That's the goal, at least.

Kathie [00:01:42]:
Interesting historical facts. So American history.

Brian [00:01:47]:
Yes.

Kathie [00:01:47]:
And do you have like a cutoff year? Like, could it be three weeks ago?

Brian [00:01:51]:
It could be three weeks ago.

Kathie [00:01:52]:
Okay.

Brian [00:01:53]:
But what they are is things that you're generally not going to learn in history class, things that you're generally not going to learn in school, Things that are, Wow, why didn't I know that? I make a kind of a crack at the beginning of every show, sort of. This is the stuff that's in between. It's the, you know, it's the marshmallow of the s'more.

Brian [00:02:09]:
It's the stuff that kind of makes it all worthwhile and true stories behind some things that we've always sort of mythologized. We're going to tell the weird stories behind things that we never knew. And even if they weren't truly consequential, they at least draw you back to the idea of history is something that people lived.

Kathie [00:02:28]:
Exactly.

Brian [00:02:29]:
And we tend to think of it as these giant mythological figures and, you know, these men who can do no wrong, did no wrong. And first of all, I really, really enjoy taking the Founding Fathers down a peg, just because I think it's far more fascinating to me that these were very, very flawed humans who managed to cobble together, on their second try, a system of government that has just barely managed to hang on by the skin of its teeth for 250 years now.

Kathie [00:02:58]:
Yeah.

Brian [00:02:58]:
To me, these stories are something that are, that give you the sort of background lived in history behind all these big, famous, notable people. You know, here's this little thing that you didn't know about this person. Here's this Abe Lincoln. Yeah, Abe. Oh, there's so much.

Kathie [00:03:14]:
He's your favorite, isn’t he?

Brian [00:03:16]:
Well, the problem is that he's become… It didn't start out to be an Abraham Lincoln podcast, and last year, I actually swore off that I would not do a single Abraham Lincoln adjacent story for six months because there was just. There's just so much stuff surrounding Abraham Lincoln. It's weird. And I really don't know whether it's the confluence of history around just the social upheaval taking place at the time, or there was just something really, really, really crazy about that moment in time, in his presidency in particular, that was just so momentous that so many stories grew out of it.

Brian [00:03:55]:
And, you know, I really, like I said, I've had to fight to just stop doing Abraham Lincoln stories. Every once in a while, I try and cleanse my palate with a, hey, this thing happened in the ’70s, or something like that.

Kathie [00:04:07]:
Yeah, I heard your Berry Gordy episode. That was interesting.

Brian [00:04:11]:
Yeah. When Jimmy Carter died, all of a sudden we got some Jimmy Carter stories. Berry Gordy grew out of the two things. First of all, my wife and I went and saw the Ain't Too Proud to Beg story of the Temptations musical, which was fantastic. And Berry Gordy figures prominently in that. And then finding out that Berry Gordy and Jimmy Carter are cousins was something crazy after the fact when Jimmy Carter died.

Brian [00:04:35]:
It was going to start out as a smaller story, and then I was like, no, no, no, no. I want to talk about Berry Gordy. Because finding out about his family, about his history, tracing it all the way back to his ancestor that Jimmy Carter descended from.

Kathie [00:04:48]:
Did they know that about each other?

Brian [00:04:49]:
I don't know. I do think they did. They did know it at some point because they knew there was a family. There was at least a familial name connection. Jimmy Carter's mother was a Gordy. So at some point they knew something, but I'm not sure.

Kathie [00:05:03]:
Very interesting.

Brian [00:05:04]:
But yeah, that. That kind of stuff is just fascinating to me.

Kathie [00:05:07]:
What's your research process and your rabbit holes?

Brian [00:05:14]:
The research process is, I would love to tell you it's an amazing and disciplined thing, but it is very, very often thrown together the night before, right before it gets recorded. I'm trying to find primary sources as much as possible. One of the biggest problems, especially with the kind of history that I am playing with, is that history tends to be anecdotal, and it tends to be recorded and pass along as truth when it's not. And it's passed along as fact when it's not. My process is really trying to find reliable, good sources that I can trust. So much of this is secondary sources, but when I can go back to a primary source, that is my favorite, best thing to do. So, for instance, an episode on Elizabeth Keckley, and she got to tell through her autobiography what she had done. So I got to read that.

Brian [00:06:07]:
Hearing people in their own words is always the best thing to do if I can't do that. And I mean, I always start with the most secondary, tertiary, quaternary source there is, Wikipedia. You at least get some sort of the weird outlines of the story, but it gives you a place to start. It's never a finishing spot for research. It's always the starting place. You never quote Wikipedia. Wikipedia is never, never truth. Wikipedia is breadcrumbs that lead you down other paths.

Kathie [00:06:33]:
And you never know. I mean, it's a total crapshoot.

Brian [00:06:36]:
It is. It is. And so that's where I, you know, I kind of start with the, okay, what does the basic generic outline say? And then let me see if I can find these things for myself. And if I can't, well, then I can't, and I don't. So that's. It gets frustrating when I've got a good tidbit. But if I only have a source that may or may not be reliable and definitely cannot be corroborate.

Kathie [00:06:59]:
Were you a good history student?

Brian [00:07:02]:
Oh, no, I was a terrible history student. I took a lot of political science classes in college. I didn't do so well in my history classes, but I did better at history as it pertained to American government and politics. I liked the intersection of history with the mechanics of what was driving it.

Brian [00:07:22]:
It's interesting to me that all of these things that I recorded at some point, especially during the last, you know, two and a half years, almost three years now, is that these were all tidbits that I had heard from college professors or picked up along the way or had passed on. You know, these are just apocryphal, hand me down stories. And I loved retelling them. I think they're great stories. The problem is that the best stories. Well, they were all fake.

Kathie [00:07:47]:
Like what? What would be an example?

Brian [00:07:50]:
There's a story that, you know, Ulysses Grant hated being president. This was after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. All of a sudden, everybody's freaked out. For the first time, they're concerned about, you know, danger of the president. So for the first time, they've locked the White House down. 

Brian [00:08:06]:
The White House was always just an open house. You could just walk up and go in. So Grant is frustrated. He likes being around people. He doesn't really like being president. He's stuck in the White House and he gets sick of it. So he wanders over to the Willard Hotel, which is right across the street, and every day he'd go over there and he would get himself a big cigar and a snifter of brandy, and he would sit there and hold court in the lobby of the Willard.

Brian [00:08:27]:
And it became known and that if you want to get the ear of the president, you would go to the lobby of the Willard and you would wait your turn. And then, you know, you sit in line or you wait long enough, and you'll get a chance to talk to the president about whatever it is that you want. And so over time, the people that became known for hanging out in the lobby of the Willard Hotel became known as lobbyists. 

Kathie [00:08:49]:
Lobbyists. Oh, my gosh. And that's true? That's a true story?

Brian [00:08:52]:
That is not true. That is 100% incorrect.

Kathie [00:08:55]:
It's not true. Oh, it's a great story, though.

Brian [00:08:59]:
It's a great story. And that's sort of the thing, you know, never let the truth get in the way of a good story. But for what I'm doing, I want to tell people the truth. So it's been a challenge to kind of get through those sort of little apocryphal stories. That were great stories but not really true. But it's actually almost more fun to find out why that is a story.

Brian [00:09:22]:
Or to find out, you know, we believe it because it was so on point for such and such that, you know, because he did love... We know that Grant was going to give up smoking cigars until somebody read in a newspaper upon his victory with the union that, you know, he was a cigar aficionado. So suddenly he had people from all over the country sending him boxes of cigars. And so he just, there are too many to resist. So he smoked cigars and that's what gave him, you know, throat cancer. And then he died. 

Kathie [00:09:50]:
Wow. What did you major in in college?

Brian [00:09:52]:
I was a poli sci major at the end. I started as a music education major and then switched to business and I was taking poli sci classes for fun, which is just the kind of nerd I am. And realized I hated every single one of my business classes. But I was doing it because that's what you do. You get a good major that will get you a good job. I have no interest in learning accounting. That was the hardest course I ever tried to pass. I passed it by the skin of my teeth when I finally did. And I was never bad at math, but the problem is that accounting isn't math. Accounting is… It's math with arbitrary rules that are nonmathematical.

Brian [00:10:32]:
And to somebody who was good at math, God, I hated every second of that. It made no sense. It was lawyering math. So it's like, pick math or pick lawyering, but don't do them both. I'm loving every one of my poli sci classes. I guess I'm going to law school.

Kathie [00:10:45]:
Was that at UK?

Brian [00:10:46]:
Yeah. Well, I went to undergrad at Florida. And then went to law school at UK. You know, I could list several of the enumerated powers of Congress in Article 1, Section 8, but that's about as far as I can get.

Kathie [00:10:57]:
I know a couple of the United States Code, what are they called? Chapters or titles?

Brian [00:11:05]:
Titles.

Kathie [00:11:05]:
Title 4 is the flag code. 17 is copyright.

Brian [00:11:10]:
Oh, wow.

Kathie [00:11:11]:
And it goes on for pages and pages, of course, as you know. And the easiest way to understand copyright laws is to turn the compound word around. Do you have the right to copy this? No, you don't. That's the easiest way to explain copyright.

Brian [00:11:25]:
That's it. And then, said, do you have the right to perform this publicly? Do you have the right to distribute. Distribute it. Do you have the right to make derivative works? And trying to explain to people too that there is both an underlying work and the recorded work, and those are separate copyrights with separate rights is a whole different ball of wax. Synchronization rights are not regulated under the same kind of licensing you can get for just covering a regular song of copyright, and at this point everybody's already asleep. Good night.

Kathie [00:12:00]:
IP Intellectual property.

Brian [00:12:02]:
IP is fascinating to me just because it's the intersection of law and making stuff. And I love it. But it's also highly esoteric and very nerdy.

Kathie [00:12:12]:
Yeah. Are you a reader and a writer?

Brian [00:12:14]:
I am a reader, yeah. The biggest thing I write in the podcast. For me, my favorite podcasts are insightful interviews or the kind of podcast where you learn something and somebody puts effort in the creation of it and not: sits down in a room with a microphone and just tries to say funny stuff. That to me is what I wanted to do with this. And I got the best advice that I ever could have gotten from my friend Scott Whiddon, who is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Transy. And he said, Well, how are you going to record it? And I said, Well, you know, I'm just going to go tell the story.

Brian [00:12:47]:
I could tell the story. This will be fine. I’ll just go in closet, I'll tell the story. And he said, That's not going to work and you're going to burn out on that and the editing is going to be terrible. And I said, yeah, but writing it ahead of time, I don't want to do that. That sounds like too much work. And he said, listen to me, do it your way and then do it my way one time. And luckily for me, I did it his way first and realized, oh no, no, no, I have to do it this way.

Brian [00:13:13]:
If I want to do something that's quality, if I want to do something that meets my standards for what I want to listen to, which is what this is, I have to have it written. I have to write it out, I have to plan it. I have to have a narrative, beginning, middle and end. And sitting down and writing it out, having that process beforehand really helps me gather all the thoughts, get them in the right order. It helps me punch up jokes, because I try and put it as many dad jokes as I can.

Brian [00:13:42]:
Because that's what we do when we're middle aged dads. And you know, it really helps me refine the humor, it helps me refine the story, it helps me decide what angle I want to take. And having that process has just been amazing. I owe Scott everything for that because he's right. If I had tried to do this without writing it beforehand, if I had tried my original theory, which was just, I'm going to get up here and talk to a microphone and wing it, it's going to be great, it absolutely would have been formless. I absolutely would have lost interest in it. It wouldn't have been that interesting to listen to. And for that alone, I just sort of, that saved me. So the writing process is actually one of the most fun parts of the whole thing.

Brian [00:14:20]:
Because I can sit down and enjoy. I really enjoy writing. In fact, at some point I look back and realize I've got about 220, 230 pages of material here. If I scrape the horns and hooves off it, I might just publish the thing and just say, hey, look, here you go. Weird little tidbits of American history. You want to listen to me talk about them? Here they are.

Kathie [00:14:39]:
Do you find that you come up with the intro later instead of being the first thing that you write, or do you write the intro first?

Brian [00:14:48]:
My problem actually lately is that I'm starting to struggle more with the cold open than anything. Only because early on I had, it's like when a band puts out their first album and they've road-tested these ideas for so long and they've got everything set, they go and they sit down, they record it and it's right. That's why debut albums are great. And then sophomore efforts are disappointing because they're all written to be an album. And so these first episodes, all the way up for like the first 20 episodes, I had this idea of what I wanted to say and refined it. At the very beginning, it's going to be this joke at the very beginning.

Brian [00:15:23]:
And lately it's, I'm going to write the story and then, oh crud, I’ve got to come up with a joke for the cold open. It's all patterned after. I like the way that Kai Ryssdal did the intro to Marketplace. He starts with that, you know, “Coca Cola's way up, but does that mean IBM's way down more? More, and just the numbers in just a minute,” or whatever he says. And then they go into the music and then, I mean, that's it. That is the intro. I was like, I loved the idea of having this sort of cold open that goes into the theme song. So I wholly ripped that off from Marketplace.

Kathie [00:15:57]:
And that sounds like very few words also.

Brian [00:16:00]:
It is.

Kathie [00:16:01]:
That's hard.

Brian [00:16:02]:
You're trying to give somebody an idea of what you're about to hear, make it interesting enough to hold on through the music. And some come easier than others.

Kathie [00:16:10]:
How do you capture ideas and notes and what are your mechanics of doing that?

Brian [00:16:15]:
I have relied more and more, and this is sort of antithetical to me as a human, but I've relied more and more on my phone. I will write whole episodes on the phone. My two favorite methods of writing are either on my big desktop machine or on my phone. And then the laptop is a distant third. I hate using a laptop.

Kathie [00:16:34]:
Really. That's all I have. That's my computer.

Brian [00:16:37]:
The keyboard is too small, it's too cramped. It's too close to the screen. I've always had big desktop machines because I'm doing multimedia editing on them. So I love working on the desktop. Or if not, then I'm on my phone and I'm using gesture-based typing. So I'm not doing hunt and peck with my thumbs. I'm using one thumb to swipe the words, and it goes by really quickly. I can type almost as fast with one thumb as I can touch typing.

Kathie [00:17:01]:
What?

Brian [00:17:02]:
That's swipe typing. I've done swipe typing since I got my first, you know, sort of smartphone. And with one thumb, you just, you swipe the letters in and it's so fast. If you get fast at it, it's crazy fast.

Kathie [00:17:16]:
Is it predictive?

Brian [00:17:17]:
It's not predictive in the way; it's predicting what the word is that you're making through swiping. Okay, so I'm not using predictive text because I'm getting a more and more AI-averse mindset to the point where I've shut Grammarly down. I had Grammarly for a while and I was like, no, no, no, no.

Brian [00:17:35]:
Because I want those little played out pieces of bad writing that make it human. If Grammarly and AI tools like that help us refine our writing to the point that they are so stylistically and grammatically correct, we lose the voice aspect of it.

Kathie [00:17:52]:
The precise parallel is in recording music live versus produced within an inch of its life. The rawness is (great). 

Brian [00:18:05]:
Yes, that's exactly it. I use passive voice because that's how I talk. You know, writing needs to be strong. And I get the use of active voice and I get the use of all of this. And I understand why Grammarly or any other, you know, grammatical tool or stylistic tool wants me to change what I'm writing to make it better. That's not me. I'm going to use passive voice. I'm going to talk in the vernacular. I'm going to use overused cliches right now.

Kathie [00:18:31]:
What about generative AI? Have you used that for writing anything?

Brian [00:18:35]:
Oh, God, no. I'm not at all. I played around with it when ChatGPT last year when it was, you know, making waves a couple years ago, I got in and messed around with it. And I did have lots of fun trying to make weirder and weirder prompts to see what I could get it to do.

Brian [00:18:53]:
And that was fun. But the creativity was really more in the prompt than in the result. I had a discussion with a friend recently and this person was pointing out all these cool AI tools we could use to be putting out content for this and this, and it was work related, I thought, you know, but who's going to read it? At some point we're going to have AI tools just to read AI content. And then it's just machines talking to machines.

Kathie [00:19:16]:
But yeah, we'll see. It's a tool. It's a tool. And a good artist or, you know, expert knows how to use tools. Instead of the tool itself making the thing.

Brian [00:19:27]:
And that's it. As long as it remains a tool, we'll be okay.

Kathie [00:19:32]:
What are you reading these days?

Brian [00:19:34]:
I am in the middle of reading a book that a friend of mine wrote. He's a New York Times bestselling author.

Kathie [00:19:39]:
Do some name dropping.

Brian [00:19:40]:
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. A friend of mine, since going back to middle school is a guy by the name of Eliot Schrefer. And Eliot is a National Book Award finalist for a couple of books he wrote about bonobos and great apes in Africa. It's young adult fiction. He also wrote this great book called Queer Ducks and it's a nonfiction book all about—LGBTQ is not a human concept. It happens in nature all the time. And he wrote a book sort of cataloging all the different ways you find in nature. It got him on several banned lists. In fact, he was just called out in an executive order, believe it or not.

Kathie [00:20:17]:
Which means book sales!

Brian [00:20:19]:
Oh, yeah, he was, you know, we took it as a badge of honor. What got called out was when NPR did a feature on him and so that was listed in the anti-NPR executive order. But he's actually written some, a series, well, it's now a series. It started out just one book was called the Darkness Outside Us and it's a sci fi queer romance novel. And it's amazing because he's a hell of a writer and he just optioned the movie rights for the first one to Elliot Page, trans actor who has his own production company and they are going to start filming on it. So it's always kind of fun to name drop your buddy who, you know, since you were, you know, 13 years old and you know, it's good to see that he has made his niche in the world through writing.

Kathie [00:21:08]:
This has been so fun. I'm so glad you did my podcast and I enjoy listening to your podcast.

Brian [00:21:16]:
Thank you, Kathie. I appreciate it.

Kathie [00:21:17]:
See ya. 

Outro [00:21:17]:
Thanks for listening to this episode of Writers Rotation. Like and subscribe for more. And remember, writing is a marketable skill. Smiling is a remarkable skill.