Alex Sanzo, a recent transfer student to California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB) is making waves with her podcast “Trash Talk,” hosted through Otter Media. The show airs Mondays at 11 a.m. and features a variety of personal anecdotes about her time spent in Southern California, opinions on social trends, and everything else in between.
“I wanted an outlet where I could talk as candidly as I wanted to, and I also wanted to create a space where other people could get stuff off their chest as well,” said Sanzo.
According to Sanzo, the process to get a podcast started with Otter Media is fairly simple. She submitted a Google form on the organization’s Instagram page with a rough outline of the kind of show she wanted to host. It took about two weeks to be approved.
“Once I got in there, they showed me the ropes. It was quick and easy,” she explained.
Sanzo says “Trash Talk” is rooted in honesty. “I want this show to start a dialogue for students. Whether it’s messy, funny, or just stuff that’s going around campus. I want to get into the dirt of what’s going on at CSUMB, but in a respectful way.” She continued, “I’m trying to find that middle ground between having fun and not targeting anyone.”
While she is happy to be a part of the CSUMB community, Sanzo explained that she originally did not want to attend college, but was convinced by her father to give it a try. According to Sanzo, her father encouraged her to attend a university anywhere in the country, as long as she got out of her hometown.
“I come from a very small town in New York where everyone is very close minded. The people that stay there don’t get out and end up spending their whole lives in this toxic cycle. I wanted to break that.”
After touring countless schools up and down the Californian coast, Sanzo decided that Santa Barbara was the place to begin the next phase of her life.
She graduated from Santa Barbara City College at 21 and “ended up taking a year and a half off and now at 23, I realized it was now or never. I feel like I’ve matured enough to come back to school,” where she is now pursuing a degree in humanities and communication, with a concentration in journalism and media studies.
Since this is Sanzo’s first semester at CSUMB and hosting the show, there are still a lot of changes she wants to make in regards to the structure of the podcast. “I would love to have a co-host, but since I’m a transfer student, I haven’t met tons of people yet… most of the time it’s me telling stories about what’s going on in my life.”
As for the future of the podcast, Sanzo said she has no plans to stop anytime soon. She would “love to keep the show going as long as I can. I’m still in the process of figuring out what my niche is and I’m trying to find content while also being a full-time student. So that can be a little difficult, but I’m going to try to keep the show going next year.”
Sanzo also has big plans for her life outside of “Trash Talk.”
“I would love to pursue this seriously. I want to get into the entertainment industry when I get out of school, but I haven’t had much time to narrow down what I want to do,” she said. “I’ve actually been applying to a bunch of reality shows to try to get a bigger platform.”
One of the shows she has applied to is called “Barmageddon” and streams on Hulu. Sanzo went on to explain that the show features “stars of failed viral videos getting together and playing fun bar games with celebrities. I had a viral video in 2020, where I jumped off a balcony through a table. I ended up being on the MTV show Ridiculousness for that.”
She is currently waiting to hear back from the show.
“Trash Talk” is available for CSUMB students to watch on Streeme through the CSUMB dashboard, and Sanzo also goes live on her TikTok (@alxanzo) Mondays at 11 a.m. to stream the podcast.