Marc Fennell Goes to Some Strange Places to Reveal our Humanity

At the end of episode one of the Audible Original podcast It Burns, Marc Fennell has to pull over to the side of the road. “I don’t think I can drive,” he says, his usually chipper Australian accent tinged with misery. Only minutes before, Fennell, a Walkley and James Beard Award-winning journalist, swallowed a Carolina Reaper, at the time the Guinness Book’s record-holder for the hottest chili in the world. As his body tried to contend with about 1.9 million Scoville units—roughly 380 times hotter than the average jalapeño—he kept the tape rolling, letting the listener in on every minute of his discomfort. “You know that feeling when you’re a bit too drunk, and if you close your eyes, you can still feel the world moving? That’s where I’m at right now.”

Fennell’s tendency to dive head-first into bizarre, lesser-known territories—and to do so with humor, vulnerability and deep empathy—has helped propel him to fame in Australia and the UK, where he has hosted several TV and radio shows. And it’s what makes him such an exciting creator for Audible, where Fennell is winning new fans worldwide with his riveting investigative Audible Originals.

It Burns, released in 2019, was the first of these Originals and took listeners on a wild ride through the scandal-plagued race to breed the world’s hottest chili. “I became weirdly obsessed with this story one summer,” Fennell recalls. Fortunately, Audible’s Australian content team had just put a call out for pitches. “So I said, ‘how about this?’”

“To say Marc is a well of great ideas is an understatement,” says Del Fordham, Audible’s Director of Original Content for Asia-Pacific. “We’ve published five Audible Originals from him to date, with more of his award-winning journalism in the pipeline.”

Many of Fennell’s newest fans are in the US, where his Audible Originals mostly take place. It Burns includes Arizona and South Carolina, as well as Australia and England, and was followed by This Is Not a Game, a journey through the bizarre intersection of internet lore and conspiracy theories that travels from Santa Cruz, California, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. In House of Skulls, a look around a skull-lined classroom at the University of Pennsylvania widens out into a history of racism in science and in America; and in Nut Jobs, he investigates a $10 million almond heist in California and reveals a darkness running through the country’s breadbasket. His most recent release, Corked, begins in New Orleans and travels through Chicago, California and Nashville.

“One of the reasons I love doing stories in America is that I'm an outsider,” says Fennell. “When I rock up in a small town, there’s as much curiosity about me as there is about the story I'm there for, which is a great starting point and helps me do my job.”

It might explain why people open up to him like they do, whether they’re Bigfoot believers deep in the New Jersey woods, truck drivers with ties to organized crime, or highly suspicious chili growers.

For creators like Fennell, who assembles his own production team for each project and has long-standing relationships to entities like the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Audible offers a vital connection to a global listening audience, which discovers his work thanks to our team’s passionate, innovative and robust marketing and PR support. When it comes to publicity, “I'm always blown away by how boundless their ideas and enthusiasm are,” Fennell says. For the launch of Corked, Audible held an exclusive wine tasting for journalists in Sydney, as well as “paint and sip” listening parties in New York, Miami and Los Angeles. “Audible is constantly thinking about ways to connect listeners to the stories and treats every one of my projects like a blockbuster,” he says.

As executive producer, Audible provides advice and support around the story, too, helping to decide on a strong frame up front. It helps that Fennell and his Audible team are always aligned on a basic principle, that the podcast needs to resonate for listeners “in Baltimore and Brisbane and Banff,” he says. “I put myself in their shoes quite a lot.”

Audible’s story support can become crucial during the production itself, since Fennell’s investigation is unfolding in real time, with each subject he interviews. If someone suddenly decides to talk, or reveals something new, it may send Fennell down a rabbit hole, but a call with his Audible producer will quickly set him on the right path. “Audible is hands off unless I ask them to be hands on, which I like, because you don’t feel like you’re being manhandled,” Fennell says.

The resulting journey that Fennell takes listeners on with each series is always informative, surprising, and often deeply moving. In Corked, Fennell thought he would learn more about the arcana of wine and the scandal that affected some of its innocent devotees. “I actually ended up learning about these different kinds of personalities,” he says. “When you zoom in on a small, specific story, it can illuminate a wider structure, revealing some much bigger truth about who we are and how we interact.”

Sometimes it’s Fennell, himself, who is revealed—like in that car on the side of the road in It Burns. As he contends with the chili pepper he’s just eaten, he suddenly begins contemplating his own lifelong tortured relationship with food. He allows listeners to feel close to him, and to the people in his stories, and in doing so, reminds us that’s what all these stories are really about: People.

That’s part of the reason for Fennell’s critical acclaim. His Audible Originals alone have earned him two AIDC Awards, three Australian Podcast Awards, five medals at the New York Festivals TV and Radio Awards, and two nominations for Europe’s prestigious Rose d’Or award in Audio Entertainment, among many others.

For Fennell, making a great podcast boils down to a simple rule: “If something cool and interesting happens, it goes in. If it's good enough for you to want to tell people about, it should be part of the series. Because the series is the journey, right? The audience should be coming with you on the adventure of the series.”

For more on Fennell and his latest Audible Original, Corked, listen to our interview on the Audible Blog.