Can doing a podcast about listening to women turn this ex-reporter into a changed man?
Stuart Watson wants to make one thing clear, and he repeats the point during two separate meetings almost a week apart, so it’s obviously important you know this:
“I was not a grabber,” says the man who worked as an investigative reporter at Charlotte NBC affiliate WCNC from 1999 until his firing in 2015. “I did not sexually assault women.”
But that doesn’t mean he feels good about the way he treated women back then. At all.
“I didn’t accord them the kind of respect that I should have, for decades,” he says now. “So for instance, if there was a female anchor on the nightly news, I would be more critical about her anchoring than I would a man’s. ... And I offer zero excuses for a lot of the language I used, and the way in which I would treat female colleagues. In a little tiny sense, the podcast is me kind of making amends, by trying to shift. By saying I was wrong.”
Watson’s podcast — his attempt at making amends — is “ManListening,” which he defines as the opposite of mansplaining and which finds him engaged in intimate, freewheeling and judgment-free one-on-one conversations with women. The first in the ongoing series of weekly episodes launched on Jan. 9, five years to the day after he parted ways with his television career.
The concept had been in development for more than two years.
It felt as timely then as it does now. Around the time he came up with it, the Me Too movement had kicked into high gear. The Women’s March had taken on a life of its own. A profound cultural shift was taking place. But that’s not what gave him the inspiration, initially.
Rather, it was six words his wife Lorraine threw in his face on a family vacation.
‘You are NOT an empathic listener’
In the first couple of years after his firing, Stuart Watson often kept busy.
(A quick aside: After his dismissal, he sued WCNC and its parent company for age discrimination. The station said Watson was a contract employee whose contract was not renewed and not covered under provisions of “at-will” workers. The two parties settled.)
He did a ton of research and shot loads of footage for a documentary film that would chronicle his quest to learn the identity of his biological parents (he was adopted as an infant) and the insights it gave him into his own recovery from alcoholism (he has been sober now for 26 years). And he wrote a 400-plus-page memoir.
But he has yet to complete the film, and the book remains unpublished.
During this period, Watson also began trying to learn about himself in more-scientific ways, by taking a variety of behavioral and personality assessment tests — and in March 2017, the results of one determined him to be an “empathic listener.”
Made sense. He’d spent 32 years in the TV news business, including 16 in Charlotte, and had been the recipient of a number of prestigious national awards for his work as an investigative journalist. That would seem to suggest that he knows a little something about interviewing people, right?
When he told his wife, however, as they walked along the seagrapes on Captiva Island while vacationing with their family in Florida that March, she said: “Sweetheart, you are not an empathic listener.”
It caught him completely by surprise.
“I thought, One of three things is true: Either I really am an empathic listener and she’s not giving me any credit...” Watson says. “Or, I’m really not an empathic listener and I managed to bulls--- the test — so I beat the test by answering it to get the right answer. Or, I’m an empathic listener with everyone except my own family.”
In any event, he was determined to be more intentional about empathic listening as it pertained to women, starting with his wife and his adult children (three of whom are women; he also has a son).
And the more Watson reflected on his wife’s words, he says, the more he realized that he had historically been particularly dismissive of women. To those closest to him, but often those in the workplace, too. In a variety of ways.
“One is in not according them as much import or gravitas as I would a man in a similar position — TV news anchor, correspondent, whatever,” he says. “And the other was in the way that I spoke around women. I wasn’t particularly considerate. I mean, one thing is I just talk very loud. I’m a very loud person. And so people would say, ‘Stuart, it’s hard to work with you screaming and slamming the phone.’ (I was) very animated. ... Men and women complained about that. But particularly women.”
Before long, the idea to start meeting and recording conversations with women — and to let them do most of the talking — began to gel in his head.
It took further shape two years ago, when Watson sat down for his first conversation (he doesn’t like to call them interviews) with a woman who was terminally ill and had just weeks to live, so “was mourning her own death in real time.”
Then he did another, and another, and another.
He didn’t limit himself to women in Charlotte, or even the Carolinas; Watson made visits to women in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, New York and Texas, among other places. Some were relatives, some were friends, some were women he’d never met before. They came from a variety of racial, ethnic and economic backgrounds.
All of the conversations took place in the privacy of the women’s homes.
But he wasn’t actually doing anything with the recordings — they were essentially gathering dust as he roamed the country talking with women. As his collection of recordings grew, it was beginning to look like the podcast idea was going the way of the documentary and the book: another passion project in purgatory.
Then at some point last year, Watson recalls, a friend called him out on it. “She said to me, ‘Stuart, these women have given their time to interview with you, and they did it because they believe in what you’re doing. If you don’t use that material — if it just sits on hard drives somewhere — you’re worse than a p-----grabber.’”
It was like a slap across the face.
“She said, ‘Forget about you. It ain’t about you anymore. Those women’s stories deserve to be out in the world. And after you put ’em in the world, if only three people listen to ’em, that’s not on you anymore. Your job is to release those stories to the world, and then you see what happens with them.’”
So on Jan. 9, after having recorded 36 of these conversations, he finally did.
Will ‘ManListening’ find listeners?
The first one that aired was with a former crack addict in Charlotte whose three children all were taken away from her. The second was with a retired schoolteacher who influenced a generation of young students in Nashville. The third was recorded in Houston with a former journalism colleague, and the fourth was recorded in Atlanta with a woman whose relationship with an NFL star failed.
Though the assumption might be that the aim of the podcast would be to discuss women’s issues, he’s clear on this: “No. No, no, no, no, no. I don’t care about issues, beliefs, topics. It’s about me hearing one other human being’s story. I’m a thousand percent invested in what happened to them and what their experience was. ... I hit record, and then I start being a human being and listening.”
Still, Watson knows that not everything he’s recorded shows him at his best.
For example, last week, he was going over one he’d done with Amy Rupertus Peacock (wife of former Charlotte City Council member Edwin Peacock) and kicked himself for blowing right past her saying that her mother died of ALS. “It’s cringe-worthy. It is so hard,” he says, chuckling, in disbelief. “And the easiest thing for me to do would be to just edit that out. But I’m not gonna. Because you get to hear me do the same old s---.”
He says he’s trying, though, to take a brand-new approach. He and his wife started seeing a couples counselor so he could work specifically on empathic listening with her. Meanwhile, his “ManListening” producers, his attorney, his web developers, his social media adviser, his publicist — they’re all women, and he says he asks them for their advice often.
But, of course, none of those people is working for him for free. They do all cost money.
“I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars, I don’t have a sponsor, I don’t take advertising, and so far my friends have pledged a sum total of $84,” he says. “If I look at that metric, that is terrifying, because it means I have X number of months, and then I have no more retirement fund.”
So that begs the question: Is there a viable business model for his podcast?
“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s entirely possible that it never really catches on. Because I don’t have celebrities. I’m just having a real conversation with a real person. But to me, it’s still worth doing. It has its own intrinsic value, in that there are young women out there who can very much benefit from the experience of listening to the women.”
He’s sitting on the sofa inside his living room in north Charlotte on the last day of January — less than 24 hours after he dropped the fourth episode of the podcast — and he’s frowning, as he admits “ManListening” is only at about 900 downloads for the month.
But getting better at listening to women is something that, at the age of 60, he felt absolutely — and finally — needed to happen.
“Even if I lose tens of thousands of dollars, even if nobody listens to it, I will still feel proud of what I have done.”
“ManListening” is available for download on iTunes and Spotify.
