Chapter 02 — Week 2
Chapter 02 — Week 2
The Voice Memo That Became a Podcast
Saturday, March 21, 2026 · 6:14 AM · Hartsfield-Jackson Airport queue, Lot C
I have been sitting in this queue for thirty-six minutes. I am car number 47 in line. The display board says the wait is forty-eight more minutes. The driver in the car next to me — a man I have seen here before, white guy, late forties, drives a silver RAV4 — is asleep with his mouth open and his head against the driver-side window. He looks the way I feel.
I have my phone propped against the dashboard. The Voice Memos app is open. I am about to record, for the first time in my life, the sound of my own voice talking, on purpose, into a microphone, with the intention that somebody who is not me will hear it.
I am embarrassed. I am sitting alone in a car in a parking lot at 6:14 AM and I am embarrassed. Devon told me two days ago, on Telegram, “the embarrassment is the work; if it didn’t make you embarrassed it wouldn’t be worth doing.”
I press the red record button.
§ 1 — The Ride
The ride that started this chapter was a Friday-night airport pickup, March 20, around 11:42 PM. I picked up a man at the international terminal who had just gotten off a fourteen-hour flight from Lagos. He was about my age. He was going to a hotel near the convention center. The ride was twenty-three minutes. He talked the whole time.
He told me he had grown up in Lagos but his father had been from Atlanta originally, had moved back to Nigeria in the 1970s during the civil-rights backlash, had married his mother there, had died in 2019. He was in Atlanta for the first time in his life, partly for a business meeting, partly to find the address on Westview Drive where his father had grown up. He showed me a photograph on his phone of a three-story brick building from 1962. He asked me if I knew the area.
I did know the area. Westview Drive runs about three miles from where I grew up. I told him the building in the photograph had been torn down sometime around 2010 and was now a Family Dollar parking lot, but the church across the street, Greater Mount Olive Missionary Baptist, was still there and looked, in the photograph, almost exactly the way it looked the last time I had driven past it that morning.
He started crying in the back seat. Quietly. He apologized. I told him not to apologize. I told him the next morning I would drive him out to Westview Drive myself, off the app, no charge, before whatever meeting he had at noon. He said he could not let me do that. I told him my father had died in 2017 and if a stranger had ever offered to drive me to anywhere that mattered to my father I would have said yes, so he should say yes. He said yes.
I drove him to Westview the next morning at 9 AM. He stood at the Family Dollar parking lot for twenty minutes. He took photographs of the church. He came back to the car and shook my hand and tried to give me four hundred-dollar bills, and I refused them, and he said, “Marcus, please,” and I took two of them, because two felt like the right number, and he kept the other two, and we both knew it was the right deal.
That ride. That ride is the ride that broke open the second thing I made.
§ 2 — The 4-Minute Window
The four-minute window was Saturday morning, sitting in the airport queue at 6:14 AM. The display board said another forty-eight minutes of waiting. I had been thinking, all morning, about the Lagos man and his father and the Family Dollar parking lot. I had told the story to Tasha at breakfast. She had said, “Marcus, that’s a podcast. People would listen to that.”
I had laughed at her. Tasha had said, “I’m not joking. That’s a podcast.”
In the airport queue I opened Telegram. I sent Devon a message. I said: “Tasha thinks the stories I tell about rides could be a podcast. Is that crazy?”
He replied within four minutes, which Devon almost always does, and which I think might be the single most generous thing about him. He said:
“It’s not crazy. It’s the most natural thing on this list. You already have material. You already have voice. The barrier is technology, and the technology is now nothing. Open the Voice Memos app on your phone. Record yourself telling the story you just told Tasha. Don’t edit it. Don’t think about it. Just tell the story like you’re telling a friend in the next car. Send me the file when you’re done. Then we’ll talk about what to do with it.”
I sat in the car for about ninety seconds with my finger over the red record button. I had never, in thirty-seven years, recorded myself on purpose for anybody to hear. The closest I had come was leaving a voicemail for Mama in 2014 from the Greyhound station in Charlotte the day my cousin got married, which I had recorded six times before sending because I hated how my voice sounded coming back at me.
I pressed record.
I told the Lagos story. I told it the way I had told Tasha, with the same pauses, with the same little laugh in the middle when I described the man trying to hand me four hundred dollars at the Family Dollar parking lot. I did not edit. I did not stop. I let myself say “you know” too much. I let the airport announcer’s voice come through in the background twice.
The recording was forty-seven minutes long because I did not stop after the Lagos story; I told three more stories that came up while I was talking. (One was about a woman who insisted I drive her to a Waffle House at 3 AM because she was about to leave her husband and needed to call her sister from a place that was not their apartment. One was about a teenager I had picked up from his prom night, drunk and crying because his date had kissed somebody else, and how I had driven him home the long way and let him talk himself sober before his mother saw him. One was about the night my own car battery had died at the Lindbergh MARTA station and a Lyft driver named Aisha I had never met had jumped my battery for free and refused to take a tip because, she said, “drivers don’t tip drivers, that’s a rule.”)
I sent the file to Devon at 7:01 AM on Telegram. The file was 67 megabytes. The send took eleven minutes on the airport wifi.
§ 3 — What Came Out
Devon replied at 7:48 AM. His reply had three parts.
Part 1: “Marcus. This is the file. This is a podcast. I am not exaggerating. The Lagos story by itself is a finished piece of audio. The other three stories are episodes 2, 3, and 4. You have, accidentally, recorded the first month of a podcast in 47 minutes.”
Part 2: “Now we clean it up. I’m sending you a Google Doc with three things: (1) a free transcription tool you upload the audio to, gives you the text in five minutes; (2) ChatGPT prompt to clean up the transcript into chapter-style story arcs; (3) a free editor called Audacity (or you can use the iPhone built-in voice memos editor — it’s basic but it works) to cut each story into a 9-12 minute episode. Total work to get four episodes ready to publish: about three hours. You can do it Sunday after church if you want.”
Part 3: “Distribution: free podcast hosting on a service called Spotify for Podcasters (formerly Anchor). Upload the audio. They distribute to Spotify and Apple Podcasts automatically. No cost. No technical setup beyond the upload. You can have a podcast on Spotify by Sunday night if you want. The hardest part is naming it. Think about that part this weekend.”
I read all three parts of Devon’s reply standing in the lobby of the Hartsfield-Jackson airport — I had finally gotten my pickup at 7:48, dropped them at a downtown hotel by 8:32, and was walking back into the lobby of a Marriott to use their bathroom. I sat down on a couch in the Marriott lobby and read his message four more times, and then I opened the Google Doc he sent and read every word of it, and then I drove for the rest of Saturday because I had to make money but I could not stop thinking about it.
Sunday morning after church I sat at the kitchen table. Tasha had taken the kids to her sister’s. I had four hours of quiet. I uploaded the audio to a free transcription tool called Whisper (the open-source one — the website was something like turboscribe or similar; Devon’s doc had three options, all free for the first 30 minutes of audio per month). The transcription took about four minutes and produced a text file of what I had said. Reading my own words on the page was strange. They were the right words. But they were spelled out, and the “you knows” were all there, and the “ums” were all there, and they did not look like anything I would call writing.
I opened ChatGPT. I pasted the transcript of just the Lagos story (about 11 minutes, about 1,800 words of transcript). I typed:
“This is a transcript of a story I told as a Black gig driver in Atlanta about picking up a passenger from Nigeria who was trying to find his late father’s old neighborhood. Please clean it up into a piece I could read aloud as a 10-minute podcast episode. Keep my voice. Keep the pauses. Don’t make it sound polished. Don’t take out the small details. Make it tighter, not different.”
The model returned, in about ninety seconds, a text that was about 1,400 words — shorter, cleaner, with the “you knows” gone but the rhythms intact. It had organized my rambling into a clear arc: the pickup, the photograph, the offer to drive him the next morning, the Family Dollar parking lot, the two hundred dollars I took. It had even given the episode a title: “The Family Dollar Where the Brick Building Used to Be.”
I read it aloud at the kitchen table. It sounded like me. Not the polished me. The real me telling Tasha a story over breakfast me. Devon was right. The technology was now nothing. The barrier had been the embarrassment.
I re-recorded the cleaned-up version into Voice Memos at 1:14 PM Sunday. Took eleven minutes. Imported it into the iPhone built-in editor. Trimmed the silence at the start and end. Saved.
I created an account on Spotify for Podcasters at 2:42 PM. I named the podcast “Front Seat Stories: Atlanta from the Driver’s Side.” I did not have cover art so I used the Canva free template called “Podcast Cover” and typed the title over a stock photograph of a steering wheel. Took fourteen minutes. Uploaded my one episode at 3:14 PM. The platform said it would be live on Spotify within 24-48 hours.
It went live on Spotify at 9:42 PM Monday. Devon was the first listener. I was the second. I listened to my own voice on Spotify for the first time at 9:48 PM Monday, sitting in the Altima outside Mount Vernon Baptist where I had just dropped Tasha off from her women’s-group meeting, and I cried for about ninety seconds with the door closed because I had become, in some way I could not name, a person whose voice was on Spotify, the same Spotify where Drake’s voice was on Spotify, and which I had not, until that moment, understood was a thing a person like me could just decide to do.
§ 4 — What It Paid
Episode 1 of Front Seat Stories — “The Family Dollar Where the Brick Building Used to Be” — earned, in week 2, eleven listeners on Spotify and zero dollars.
I want to write that down in plain print. Eleven listeners. Zero dollars. Devon, me, Tasha, Tasha’s sister, Tasha’s sister’s husband, my cousin Reggie, Reggie’s wife, two of Devon’s friends from the Houston driver group, and two strangers I do not know who found it through some recommendation algorithm I do not understand.
By Sunday night of week 2, all eleven listeners had listened all the way through (Spotify shows you completion rates). The average rating, of the four people who left ratings, was 4.75 stars out of 5. The one rating that was not 5 was from Devon, who had given it 4 stars and posted in the Telegram group: “Docking one star to keep Marcus humble. The episode is a 5-star episode. He’ll get there without me telling him.”
Episodes 2, 3, and 4 — the Waffle House story, the prom story, the Lyft-driver-Aisha story — went up over the next three Sundays in March and April, one per week. By the end of April, the podcast had 312 total subscribers and an average of 178 listens per episode. By June (week 12 of this diary), the numbers were 1,847 subscribers and an average of 940 listens per episode. (The pattern, Devon told me, is normal: podcasts grow slowly and then, sometime around episode 8-12, they either hit something or they don’t.)
The first time Front Seat Stories paid me actual money was Week 9, when a small Atlanta-based shoe company that makes comfortable walking shoes (not naming them; they did not pay me to put them in this book) emailed me to ask if I would do a 30-second sponsor read at the start of one episode in exchange for $80. I said yes. I read their copy. I got $80 via Stripe four days later.
By Week 12 — which is where this diary ends — the podcast was producing about $570/month in mixed sponsor reads, listener support (people sending small amounts via the Spotify “support” button), and one referral commission to the coaching group I run (see Chapter 9).
The path from “eleven listeners and zero dollars” to “$570/month and a stable audience” was twelve weeks of recording one episode every Saturday morning in the airport queue. That is the work. No magic. No secret. Saturday mornings, the queue, the red record button, the embarrassment getting smaller every week.
§ 5 — The “I Didn’t Know I Could Do That” Moment
The moment was not the eleven listeners. The moment was at 9:48 PM Monday, in the Altima outside Mount Vernon Baptist, listening to my own voice on Spotify.
I want to try to be specific about why that moment hit me the way it did, because I think it is the moment most people who try this thing will, also, have, and I want them to be ready for it.
For thirty-seven years I had had a relationship with my own voice that was: it was a thing I used to talk to my wife and my kids and my customers and the people I loved. It was not a thing that existed in any other context. Other people’s voices existed on the radio, on TV, on Spotify, on podcasts. Famous people’s voices. People with training. People with money. People whose voices had been, somewhere along the line, deemed worthy by some apparatus I did not understand and that I had never imagined applying for.
What I did at 9:48 PM Monday — what every person who uploads anything to Spotify or YouTube or KDP or TikTok does — is discover that the apparatus did not exist. There is no committee. There is no audition. There is no gatekeeper. You record. You upload. Your voice is on the same platform as the voices you grew up listening to. The platform makes no distinction. The algorithm decides whether anybody finds you, but the platform does not pre-decide whether you are allowed to be there.
I had spent my whole life believing in a gatekeeper that, it turned out, did not exist. The gatekeeper had been my own embarrassment and my own assumption that I needed permission. The technology, in 2026, had eaten the gatekeeper. Devon’s pinned message had said this. I had not understood it until my own voice was on Spotify on a Monday night.
I want this in print, because the AHA moment of this entire diary — and probably of this entire book — is the realization that the gatekeeper is gone. Not “the gatekeeper is easier to access.” Not “AI helps you reach the gatekeeper.” The gatekeeper is gone. The thing that prevented your voice from being on Spotify was the assumption that there was a thing preventing your voice from being on Spotify. There is not. There was not, by 2024 or so. By 2026 it is so absent that anybody can do it on a Monday night between a women’s-group dropoff and a 10:14 PM short-trip pickup.
This is the unlock. Everything else in this book is a different version of this unlock applied to a different medium. The gatekeeper is gone. You are allowed.
§ 6 — How You Can Try This Tonight (20 Minutes)
If you are sitting in a car at an airport queue right now reading this, you can do, in 20 minutes, the same thing I did on Saturday March 21.
Minute 0-2. Open the Voice Memos app on your phone (iPhone) or the equivalent recorder (Android: usually pre-installed as “Recorder” or downloadable as “Easy Voice Recorder” free).
Minute 2-3. Think of one story from your driving (or from your work, or from your life) that you have told a friend or a family member at least once and that they laughed or cried at. One specific story. With a specific person, on a specific day, in a specific place. No essays. No “lessons I have learned.” A story.
Minute 3-15. Press record. Tell the story. Out loud, in the car, with your eyes closed if you have to. Do not stop. Do not edit while you talk. Do not erase and start over. If you say “um” 40 times, fine. If you laugh at your own joke, fine. If a passenger walks past your car and looks at you weird, you smile and keep going. Eleven minutes of talking is a podcast episode.
Minute 15-18. Stop the recording. Save it. Listen to the first thirty seconds. Yes, your voice sounds weird to you. Everybody’s voice sounds weird to them. The people who hear it do not hear that.
Minute 18-20. Send it to one person who knows you and who you trust. One. A family member, a friend, the driver in the car next to you in the queue if you trust him. Ask them: “Does this sound like me?” Wait for the answer.
If they say yes — congratulations. You have the raw material for episode 1 of a podcast. You can clean it up tomorrow. You can publish it Sunday. You can be on Spotify by next Monday at 9:48 PM, sitting in your own car in your own parking lot, crying in the same way I cried, and joining what I now believe is the largest unrecognized professional class in America: people whose voices are on Spotify and who do not realize yet that they are allowed to be there.
You are allowed. You are now told.
— Marcus, Sunday March 22, 2026, 9:42 PM kitchen table, Episode 1 of Front Seat Stories live on Spotify with 11 listeners and one 4-star Devon rating, the AHA done its work, week 2 of twelve closing, the next ride loading.