From The Comic's Comic

The Sound of Young America grows up

Above: Jesse Thorn, in his home office where he broadcast The Sound of Young America to Public Radio International and podcast locations in the 2000s.

I was fortunate to join Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris for an episode of their popular podcast, Jesse, Jordan, Go!, back in 2016. Somehow, though, Thorn had never sat down with me for my podcast??? Until now.

Thorn willingly went back in time with me to recount the very beginnings of his career in college radio, how he pivoted to podcasting before the iPhone took the format mainstream (heck, before there even was such a thing as an iPhone), and how he built a podcasting network, Maximum Fun, from scratch. There are dozens of Maximum Fun podcasts running right now: Among them: Adam Ruins Everything; The Adventure Zone; Baby Geniuses; Dr. Gameshow; The Flop House; Go Fact Yourself; The Jackie and Laurie Show; Judge John Hodgman; My Brother, My Brother and Me; Stop Podcasting Yourself; and of course, Bullseye with Jesse Thorn. Thorn dished on how he helped Marc Maron get a handle on podcasting so he could do so from his garage, as well as how he had to bail on Jonathan Van Ness because nobody knew who JVN was or listened to his podcast before Queer Eye.

I expressed my admiration for Thorn multiple times in this chat, because he has been able to DIY a career not only for himself, but for a whole host of others. There aren’t a lot of folks in and around the comedy business I can look to in 2021 who have stayed in this game since the 2000s or earlier. Thorn is happily one of them.

If you’re not already subscribed to my podcast, seek it out and subscribe to Last Things First on the podcast platform of your choice! Among them: Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Stitcher; Amazon Music/Audible; iHeartRadio; Player.FM; and my original hosting platform, Libsyn.

Here’s a slightly condensed and edited transcript from our podcast chat!

Sean L. McCarthy: Congratulations on another successful Maximum Fun fundraising campaign! You have, what, more than 21,000 members at this point?

Jesse Thorn: That was 21,000 new members. I don’t know what the latest total count is, but it’s a lot more than it used to be. Let’s put it that way.

Me: Well, I mean, having having 21 faithful supporters is something at this point.

Jesse: Yeah, there was a time when that was my aspiration, I mean like literally when I started podcasting, my theory in my head, like I had a concrete theory in my head in 2004, when I was 23, which was, I had a sketch comedy group. And I was like, we will literally rehearse for a week for a show at this theater called The Marsh in San Francisco with 70 seats and I was like, if it takes me four hours to put together a podcast at my radio show, it seems worth it if I could get 75 people to listen.

Me: That also reminds me, let me also congratulate you on the fact that you have now, even though you’re still relatively young man…But you have, even at this point been broadcasting your life for longer than the period when you were not.

Jesse: Wow, I had not thought of that. Boy, that’s weird. I have thought of that I have been with my wife for longer than I was not with my wife. That I had figured out but you’re right. Yeah I mean I’m 20 years in, 21, somewhere around there. And I just turned 40. So, yeah, I just passed the tipping point, it’s all downhill from here.

Me: You mentioned that you started turning The Sound of Young America into a podcast in 2004. And so I’m curious, for you to bring the listeners of 2021 back in time, because we’re talking through the magic of Zoom, and yes, just like just like those other big time podcasters I can record via Zoom, and it’s so simple now, but in 2004, what was the process like for college radio DJs like yourself, to turn your show into a podcast?

Jesse: Well, Sean. It all started when I was going to graduate from college. And I said to my then girlfriend, now wife, ‘Maybe I should stop doing the show when I graduate. It would be kind of weird.’ And she said, ‘Well, you’re not doing anything else.’ So that was the start. Yeah, I mean like around right around then, I had been out of school for a minute, and my co-host, Jordan who I now do a comedy show called Jordan, Jesse, Go! with, had graduated and moved down to LA to do show business stuff. And I was like, I was borrowing my mom’s car to drive from San Francisco where I live, to Santa Cruz, because my car wasn’t good enough. And at some point, I sold my car for, like, I think it was $2,500. It was a ‘65 Dart. I miss it dearly, though, I can imagine that at some point, had I kept it at some point I would have been impaled upon its steering wheel. But I sold my Dart, and I bought a mixer, an analog mixer, and I bought this thing called a telephone hybrid which lets you, basically separates on the telephone line, your voice from the person on the other end. Because telephone lines normally, you hear yourself in the headset, it’s both people are on one track basically, so you need a machine that separates the tracks. And I started recording in my apartment, like the guests were all on the phone at the time. And, I just kind of one little step at a time then from there. I think I moved to LA in 2007. So a few years later. And for a while, I would mail a CD to Santa Cruz of the show. And then finally, it was like, oh yeah we figured out how to download an mp3 file and put it on the CD for you.

Me: Just like Netflix! They started by mail.

Jesse: Truly like that was like that, like those weird things were the big issues of my life at the time. One of the big ones was, at the college radio station, there was no board operator. So, when we were doing the show live on the air, we ran the board, like I ran the board. I sat by the board and did the fades while we were talking, and you have to have somebody sitting at the board at all times when you’re on the air legally because of, you know, emergency alerts and stuff like that. And so one of the big challenges was when I was still on the college radio station but living an hour and a half drive away, with like, I had to be there, like, even if I put the show on a CD. I had to drive to Santa Cruz, put it in the CD tray and press play and just sit there for an hour, in case there was a tornado. Otherwise it would, like the old VHS tapes, they would probably record right over it.

The big transition in my life was someone who was on the board of the local NPR station in Santa Cruz heard my show on KZSC, the college radio station, while they were driving around and suggested to the station manager that they listen to it. He did listen to it and put me on KUSP, a now defunct NPR station in Santa Cruz and like the big transition wasn’t a bigger audience or prestige or money. They did not pay me anything. I don’t think they gave, what they were giving me like, maybe they were giving me like, dollars a month or something like that, but they give me a check for $200 every quarter, something like that. But the big transition was KUSP had a board operator. And so I didn’t have to drive to Santa Cruz to play the show anymore. I just send the show to them. That was a big deal but it was a very big deal because when I eventually got another car that I was still driving back and forth to Santa Cruz. It had a sunroof that when it rained, which it does a lot and I’d be driving on the most like terrifying freeway in the world, that highway 17 between Santa Cruz and San Jose, while just brown water dripped on my face. It was brown water, it was so brown, I can’t even tell you how brown this water was, I don’t know what it was pulling through to get that color but something brown is in the top of a car that really…

Me: If this were another type of show I would dig, I would go in deep to know about that brown water.

Jesse: No. This is journalism.

Me: This is the kind of show where I, 1) want to pat myself on the back, because I’m grateful that I discovered you when you were still The Sound of Young America, and you were still broadcasting out of your apartment I remember seeing those, those photos of you online and I was like how does he even do that? In the late aughts that seems so beyond the capabilities of humanity!

Jesse: Honestly like, the thing that I think was the most revolutionary about my show, at the time, and I want to be clear that when I say the most revolutionary I’m talking about, you know, it’s a very small group of very slightly revolutionary things. But the thing that was the most distinctive about my show was just in those days, so many podcasts, were just talking about microphones, or like, it was ham radio like it was basically just like, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if we connected to somebody?’ which is great. Like that’s a really cool thing that podcasters still do and I still think is fun and cool for those people, but the mere fact that I was trying to make a show show, put me in the top 20 podcasters, you know, in that very first month or a year though. Back in 2004, I’m trying to remember.

Me: Did iTunes even have a place for podcasts? So where did you, how did you get it out to listeners?

Jesse: There used to be a little app called iPodder. This was also before smartphones. So people were downloading desktop apps, the one called iPodder was the most popular. iPodder eventually had to change the name because Apple, but basically it was an app that would look for these RSS feeds, download them to your desktop computer, then you would put them into iTunes or whatever, and manually like I had a Creative Labs mp3 player. And once a week or so I would drag shows on in, drag shows off in Windows, like that was what podcasting was at the time.

Me: So you mentioned this app, they probably weren’t even called apps at the time, this program called iPodder. And so this blows my mind because I always just presumed or assumed that the word podcast came from Apple, because of the iPod. But did the word podcast actually come because of this program?

Jesse: No. So, the word podcast was a reference to iPods, coined by Apple. So people were manually, you know at the time you put new music on your iPod, you connected it to your computer and used iTunes. And we were doing the same thing with mp3 files, but iTunes didn’t download the mp3 files until I don’t remember 2006 or something. So, for a long time it was people with standalone desktop apps, downloading them to a folder, copying them into an iTunes folder, opening up iTunes refreshing iTunes, then dragging them into their iPods or whatever,

Me: The first iPhone wasn’t until 2007.

Jesse: Yeah, and it was years before, you know, there was enough expectation of, first of all, it was years before there was native podcasting software in iPhones, and then it was years before there was the expectation that you had enough data bandwidth to download files on your phone directly, rather than downloading them at home and transferring them to your phone.

Me: So does that mean that in 2009. When you, when you were in Southern California, with a then struggling Marc Maron, helping him to situate microphones and recording equipment in his garage. Did you have any idea what was going to happen?

Jesse: If I knew he was going to completely destroy me in every category I probably wouldn’t have…

Me: Was Maximum Fun a thing at that point?

Jesse: Yeah, Maximum fun was totally a thing, and I kind of knew Marc. I didn’t know Marc really well, but he had been on my show a few times, and I certainly really admired his comedy. I mean, who doesn’t. A brilliant comedian, I’ve never seen anyone so consistently just bring an audience to the point of just profound emotional discomfort, and then force them to laugh through sheer force of talent and skill. But yeah, I mean I knew him as a guy who’d been on my show sometimes and like I would go — my wife went to college in New York, so I would go see his like shows at the Luna Lounge or whatever. And when he moved to L.A., I mean, he really was, I mean, he was a mess in general like the reason he moved to L.A. was because he had just gotten divorced. And so, like he had been recording at Air America, from which he had been fired months earlier. So, he and his producer Brendan, I think statute of limitations is expired on this I don’t think Air America even exists anymore, but he and his producer Brendan would just let themselves in, like they never deactivated their key cards. So they would go record in there. And then he moved out to L.A. I mean like I really, because he has been so kind and giving me credit, my role in this has expanded and become myth. I really just spent an afternoon with him, telling him what microphones to buy and showing him how to use GarageBand.

Me: But if you hadn’t done that.

Jesse: That’s true. I mean, you know, the truth is that, you know, I think some people give Marc less credit than he deserves frankly, because he was the first to market with that kind of show. I mean, I had a very similar show, but you know, I didn’t have the profile that he had. But like the reason his show is successful is because he created something really remarkable and that speaks to his skill and talent. He’s such a remarkable performer, and he really found in that venue like a really special way to share that. I think of him being like, in a lot of ways like Ira Glass, and it’s no surprise that they’re pals. Or at least, circle around each other, because, you know, I’ve only met Ira in real life a few times. But the one thing that has always struck me about Ira is when you talk to him. You know when I talked to him and I was a total zero like I was a community radio guy basically. And he was the guy who had inspired me to go into public radio. And the whole time I was talking to him, he was asking me about me and my feelings. And I was like, this is so real, like this is so actually who Ira is. He really wants to know about other people’s feelings right, and that’s why This American Life is what it is. It’s not because he invented editing techniques or something, though he did. And with Marc, it’s the same. Like Marc has a different kind of way in, you know Marc almost challenges people to share their feelings like it’s almost like he’ll kind of make assertions, and see what they do.

Me: Even in the beginning, because the beginning was more about his personal relationship to each of the guests.

Jesse: Yeah, but I mean in general like he will, even if he’s interviewing you know Iggy Pop or whatever, he will kind of like, try something like he’ll be like, I got this is because of this, and it’ll be like a pretty bold thing, and he might be wrong about it. But what’s great about it is that the result of that, because he’s so sincere in that, like it’s not an act, like I don’t mean to suggest that he’s being tricky, but like the result of that is either the person agrees and expands upon a pretty bold assertion, or they kind of have to match his bold assertion with what actually happened. Because otherwise this thing that wasn’t what actually happened or wasn’t actually how they felt stands. And so they have to be revelatory. Like they have to show themselves to counter act, so to speak. Anyway, my point in this is that is that Marc is an amazingly brilliant guy and I’m grateful to be a footnote in his history.

Me: So, for your history, though, at what point did you realize, or in fact plan on expanding to become what has now become a network?

Jesse: Yeah, I didn’t, I never planned on it. I’ve never had a five-year plan. I’ve never had a grand vision. But what happened, broadly speaking, is that my wife got into a better law school in Los Angeles than she did in the Bay Area. And I was thinking, look I really am going to have to move to LA or New York, because, you know, maybe I could be a local public radio host forever in San Francisco, which isn’t a bad life but it wasn’t what I wanted to do necessarily. So I was like, I’ve got to move to LA and be where show business is and see what that’s about. And so we moved to LA and I just never got a job again. So I had a job in San Francisco right up till the day I left like right before I left I went and got my teeth cleaned, and, like, got a giant prescription for gabapentin, to prevent my migraines. I said to the doctor, ‘I only have health insurance for another week. So, can you give me the biggest prescription you can?’ And I moved without a job. And I had like a little consulting gig which was, my friends in the totally brilliant San Francisco sketch comedy group Kasper Hauser, had a book coming out and they were like, can you help us produce some audio sketches, and maybe do some publicity for the book? And I think they gave me. I think, if I remember correctly, they offered me $1,000 a month for three months. And that was big money to me at the time, and I was like, I’m not going to get a job when I moved to LA, I’m just going to figure something out. So that was sort of the start of the network was just like, I’m not gonna be able to sell ads, not enough people are listening and nobody is buying podcast ads they don’t even know what podcasts are right not and so membership is the way to go. I’m just gonna run this like a public radio station and if I’m running it like a public radio station I’m working full time, I’ll just make as many shows as I can. And then the first show that I wasn’t making personally was Stop Podcasting Yourself, and that shows is still extant and wins the best comedy podcast award at the Canadian Comedy Awards every year. And those guys were like hanging out in the (online) forum for The Sound of Young America, and they had some fans there and I listened to the show I was like this is a really funny show, and I just figured, well I’ve already kind of built this infrastructure, they’re not making any money for the same reasons I wasn’t. I’ll just loop them in on my stuff, you know what I mean? And it just kind of grew like that, like, there was never a scheme. There was like some, I guess you would say like values. But never a particular goal other than not getting a job again. And you know, to be clear, from 2003, when I graduated from college, to about 2010 or 2012, I don’t think I made more than $25,000 in any of those years. Most of those years I was making $12,000-$15,000. You know? I grew up semi-poor and didn’t have kids, only had catastrophic health insurance. I got my migraine medication from my mom who has migraines and she would just refill her prescription and send me some. And, you know, my wife had some law school loans that helped. We just lived, the two of us off of our, whatever it was $35,000 total, including the loans.

Me: Did that feel like a struggle?

Jesse: Oh yeah, it was horrible. Well, I mean, it depends. I would say the amount of money that we were making was actually fine, because, as I said, I didn’t need much at the time, you know like money-wise. I didn’t need to support any kids, I didn’t need to contribute to my parents. And so, that amount of money…I was like, if we get together $3,000 a month, then we’ll be fine, right? Food’s not that expensive. We’re not eating out, we’re not drinking out, the things that people spend money on, we weren’t really spending money on, you know what I mean. And so in that way it was fine. I would say the hardest part was that it was entirely unclear that anything would change. So in a funny way, we had like, if I look back on it, like if I looked back on a graph of it, it would be almost completely linear. Like, year over year, making a little more money, having a little more audience, having a little more of an actual business, you know, but my show getting on a few more stations or moving up on the radio a little bit. But you know like the thing that I remember most vividly is when I first signed with Public Radio International, which no longer exists, but at the time, they were distributing This American Life and some other public radio shows. They sent me this projection, this five-year projection. So I basically agreed to sign. I was like, I’ll take whatever. They send me this five-year projection of number of stations picking up the show over five years and then my income from the radio over that time. And at the end of five years I was (supposed to be) on a number of stations that I did not actually achieve until like two years ago. But you know, they had me getting onto 150 stations or something like that. And at the end of five years, the income from that was like $30,000. And I was like, how do public radio shows exist? If you get on 150 stations and you get $30,000? That’s like, that’s like half of one employee? Like I’ll work for that but, so it was that, it was like the thing that got me down was not that I wasn’t making that much money, it was more that I truly didn’t know if the path, if there was a path ahead because I was doing something that there wasn’t really a model, there wasn’t really an example to follow. And there also wasn’t like, it wasn’t like people to like put me on, you know like there weren’t people to say like, ‘This guy’s talented let’s give him a gig.’ Those people didn’t exist. Like the closest to that in my in my career is basically (John) Hodgman. You know I do a show with him now. When he got famous, which is right after I met him, he would like, you know he would like send me an email and say like hey I was talking to. They Might Be Giants yesterday, you should have them on your show here’s their email address, you know, like he’s done that for me through his entire career since I’ve known him consistently. But mostly, there wasn’t even that wasn’t even available, you know what I mean like that wasn’t even an option.

Me: Now I know exactly what you mean, as someone who left a slowly declining mainstream media industry, in a career as a newspaper reporter, and decided in 2007 Oh, I’m just going to launch my own website. What could go wrong? Or I might struggle for three years but then I’ll get picked up by a huge website and things will go great. And here I am 14 years later, still doing the same little one man operation.

Jesse: I mean I think often, so like 10 years ago or something, I started a menswear website. And I was writing on my own website making videos and stuff, I had a lot of jobs.

Me: This was for Put This On.

Jesse: Yeah, I still think of myself, Sean, frankly as lazy, and it’s just childhood trauma, I like, think about it, I’m like, oh no I’m not lazy. I worked very hard. But anyway, I started this menswear website. And it like really took off. And like we were making good money from it, and it still exists and is still a functioning business. But as you know, blogs barely exist anymore, like that as a way of consuming content on the internet just plummeted 80% or something. And I’m constantly living with the terror that some structural thing will change, and then podcasts won’t exist in the same way. Here I am, I’m on year five, of being like, by my standards, extraordinarily successful like, more than I ever imagined. Like, things are going really well with the business. It’s really good. We have great hosts. We’re doing it the way we want to do it, all that stuff. And all I have in my head is like Spotify is gonna step on us and destroy us like a bug. Will that happen? I don’t know, but like, it’s like, you know, Facebook changes an algorithm and the entire news business closes.

Me: I know for me as a writer, it’s been Substack that I’ve been looking at going, Oh, do I need to pick up…do I need to scrap what I’m doing and become a Substack person now? (SPOILER ALERT)

And you mentioned the changing technologies, at least a few of the Maximum Fun podcasts did try to make a move to TV. There was Throwing Shade and then there was My Brother, My Brother and Me.

Jesse: Yeah, I also had a Sound of Young America TV show. We only made one episode. And then the programming regime at the weird network we were making it for, which was called Current TV.

Me: That was Al Gore’s.

Jesse: Yeah, exactly. In fact I have it on good word, I have a friend who was an editor there I have good word that Al Gore watched the episode that we made while he was visiting the office one day. But they ran that for years, like they cut it into pieces and ran it in other shows, without, I think I made a total of like $1,000 or $500 from having a TV show. But, you know, I’ll take what I can get.

I mean, My Brother, My Brother and Me, which is one of one of our comedy shows, got turned into a show for Seeso, and I had, I had dinner one time with Evan Shapiro (the head of Seeso). And he had actually been the boss of IFC when I hosted a show on IFC, and a good guy who likes good comedy, like that was his whole deal at IFC was like let’s acquire Freaks and Geeks and stuff. And he told me, of all the like comedy stuff that they made on Seeso, you know, Jonah Ray had a really funny sketch show. Cameron Esposito and RB Butcher had a really good sitcom sort of dramedy sitcom. You know they had an Upright Citizens Brigade TV show, they all these different UCB things, all this different stuff that they were making plus, you know, they bought like Monty Python and the Kids in the Hall and stuff.

Me: Oh, it was like it was a great platform that nobody watched.

Jesse: Yeah, well here’s the thing, so he said, ‘If we had launched with My Brother, My Brother and Me at the beginning, we might have survived, because it was the only show that drove audience.’ Like, it drove subscriptions. Like, I can’t remember what he told me, but it’s like 100,000 subscriptions, through the MBMBAM codes, and like 5,000 through all other codes. And it just goes to show you the depth of commitment that a podcast audience has, you know. That was sort of the lesson that I took from that, was, you know, Throwing Shade. They are every bit as funny as the McElroys and I don’t say that to slam either. They’re all, Erin and Bryan are really funny and really smart, and they made a great show. I went out to the taping of their show and it was really funny. But ultimately, it’s a different thing, and they were trying to make a regular TV show. They did a great job but it was just, it was one of those things where it’s like a weird TV network, you know, it’s like, it’s hard to. I mean, my friend Guy Branum had a really funny show on TruTV. And it was like TruTV was going to be the new Comedy Central. That was their branding, but like the only show that popped for TruTV was Impractical Jokers, which I’ve never seen but I don’t need to. And, like, now it’s just all Impractical Jokers all the time on that network. But at the time they also had Billy Eichner and Guy Branum making the two gayest television shows in history. It’s like I’m trying to imagine their programming executives. And I think what must have happened is that their programming executives had great taste and were gay, and they’re like Billy Eichner and Guy Branum are two of the funniest people ever like, they’ll make amazing shows for us, and then just accidentally someone made Impractical Jokers and it was like the most successful cable television show.

Me: They also had Adam Conover’s show.

Jesse: Yeah. Adam was on there. Yeah, totally. And Adam was, was making like an Emmy level show, like, like Adam Ruins Everything for folks who didn’t see it, I think it’s on Netflix or something.

Me: HBOMax now.

Jesse: Yeah. Adam’s show is one of the best nonfiction TV shows I’ve ever watched. It’s genuinely funny and like brilliant at talking about things. And you know, here it is it’s on after Impractical Jokers, it’s like TV is just so weird.

Me: Did watching all of those experiences, mostly from afar but a couple times, very up close, that change your intentions about how you might expand your own platform?

Jesse: Yeah. I mean, I think what what I wanted to do was make sure that the artists involved in Maximum Fun could continue to control their stuff. Because the greatest bummer for me of The Sound of Young America, the TV show, was not that it didn’t become a hit…for that network that was, you know, spending $10,000 for half an hour of TV. That was their business model. Like it was actually a thing that I thought was pretty neat. Like I thought it came out pretty well and I don’t mind making low-stakes TV. That actually is the kind that appeals to me the most, like the scale of getting rich to me is more like you get to make a TV show. But the bummer part of it was like, well, we made that show, and the guy who had ordered it six months before had gotten fired. And so by the time the pilot was done being cut, it was a different guy. And he just decided to cut everything. That was the same thing, like when I hosted a show for IFC for a minute, that was a similar kind of low-stakes comedy show. Very cheap to make and pretty successful. Like it was making money for IFC, but basically what happened was Portlandia blew up. And they only had only had a one-year deal for Portlandia, and so they just canceled their entire development slate and all of their existing shows to pay for more Portlandia.

Me: Instead of raising the budget.

Jesse: Well, I mean, it’s business, so that’s how it works, somebody gets a number from somebody and they have to stick to the number, you know, and Rainbow Media holdings isn’t exactly Sony, Fox or whatever they’re called.

So I knew that that I wanted to make sure that people. You know people have had very successful shows that started as MaxFun shows that left MaxFun. And to me that’s still a win. Like Jonathan Van Ness, I had to cancel the show because I lost a couple of producers at the same time and didn’t have any money and I was like Jonathan, I just don’t have the money to have somebody produce your show right now. And at the time he was just Erin Gibson’s hairdresser that we thought was amazing. And I was like, I’ve gotten 2,200 people to listen to this show, and I can’t, there’s no business in 2200 people. I can’t see, I can’t figure out how I’m going to get more people to listen even though you’re amazing, unless you become famous or something, I don’t know how we can do it. So we cancelled it. We ended the show. I said, the show was yours. It belongs to. And then he got famous and when he got famous, he started doing the show again and it became hugely popular, which is a bummer for MaxFun, obviously I’d love to be making some of that money, but I’m glad that Jonathan still had his show when he got famous and he got to do the show that he wanted to do. Because that was, you know, when I stopped doing The Sound of Young America I was like, oh, when that TV thing didn’t work, I was like, Oh, well, I guess I don’t get to try and do TV shows based around the thing that I’ve been working on my whole life anymore. You know, I guess that’s the end of that….

I think one of the things about owning your own stuff, is that it really reduces your chances of blowing up. Because when you sell your thing to someone else, what you are getting is their expertise and investment. They’re going to take a swing at making your business, making the business of you, big. You know you sign Uncle Murda to Roc-A-Fella Records and Uncle Murda gets a million dollars or whatever. He gives up many of his rights to his own art into the future, but what he also gets is he gets Roc-A-Fella Records is gonna put $3 million into trying to make him famous. Trying to make a big business around him. And more often than not, they fail, so for more people than not, it’s actually like a good deal. Because if someone spent a bunch of money on you, and you didn’t get famous. That means it was their money, not yours. And then if you do get famous like you’re getting jobbed, like you’re getting a bad portion of that, but it’s a lot, it’s a big pie, you’re getting a too-small piece of a big pie. You’re still maybe you’re doing OK, right, so that’s why you sell out. But the advantage to not selling out. And I can’t say anybody ever brought me Uncle Murda money. But like the advantage to not selling out is that if you are adding bricks, adding bricks to your building every year. 20 years in, you’re like, look, I built a house and I can live in this now.

…it’s so much about relationships like, it’s about your relationship with the audience over a long period of time. You know, I just went on Keith and the Girl, and Keith and Chemda have been doing that show as long as I have been podcasting, you know, we’re sort of contemporaries. And like, I don’t know do 500,000 people listen to their show? Probably not. I don’t know what their audience numbers are, but if 50,000 listen, I mean that’s a living for them, you know, and they built that year over year over 15 years, and their relationships with that audience are deep, you know, that really means something to those people.

Me: And you have that same relationship with your fans as evidenced by another successful campaign.

Jesse: I mean there’s it’s funny, like there’s been a lot of talk lately in podcasting world especially nerd podcasting world about this word, parasocial, which means relationships that are perceived by one of the parties to be a human social relationship and in fact are not. And it is often associated pejoratively with people’s relationship with podcasters. It’s also social media personalities, reality TV personalities that kind of thing. Tabloid celebrities. But with podcasters, because it’s so personal, you know, podcasters, you feel like you have a bilateral relationship even though you have a unilateral relationship. And I don’t think that that is an incorrect assessment of the situation. Like I do think that if 50,000 people or whatever listen to Jordan, Jesse, Go!, I don’t have a bilateral relationship with most of those people, even though I feel like I have a personal relationship with our audience like, that means that I have a relationship with 100 of them maybe, you know, and that relationship is pretty weak on my side. You know it’s like people that I see once a year at a show that I recognize, you know. They’re not coming over for dinner. And so, those 49,900 people or whatever, their relationship is parasocial, but I think that if you’re self-aware about that fact, as an audience member if you are aware that you while you have this feeling of reciprocality, there’s no way for a public person to have a genuinely reciprocal relationship with everyone in their audience because the numbers just won’t will never match up. You know, I couldn’t have had a reciprocal relationship with everybody who watched my show on Current TV, and that show didn’t even make .1 in the ratings, you know, like they didn’t have enough people watching it for it to count. But there’s still value in that, and like, over the course of the pandemic, for example, I’ve had a really really brutal time family wise — I’m not getting a divorce, just out a lot of trouble in my family — and, like, I’m like, wow, my relationship with the hosts of my favorite baseball podcast is so important to me and so meaningful to me in this situation, even though, like I’m a professional podcaster. I have talked to them on the phone once. But like I’ve never seen them in real life. I don’t actually know these people, and there’s such value in that. Like that is what is really special about podcasting, is you chose it. You chose it and then the people are speaking directly to you. And that’s different from the communal experience of going to see theater or a concert or whatever like those are two different things. But it is a very valuable and meaningful thing for people in so that I feel proud that Maximum Fun takes seriously the stewardship of that relationship. And we can’t. We can’t be everyone’s priest or therapist, you know, we can’t be everyone’s best friend. And we can’t even make something that agrees with everyone’s values exactly, you know, but we can do our best to care for and be respectful of our audience as a whole and not be flippant about their relationship that they have with our work. Right, like, try and do something that. And again like it very imperfectly, and there’s probably no perfect because perfect is different for every one of those 50,000 people right. But, do our best to be respectful for and care for them, given the fact is the nature of our business that it is this almost social relationship.

Me: How much of that attitude has evolved or changed, as your journey as a parent has evolved and changed with dealing with your kids? Yeah, you’ve been public about them on social media and other places.

Jesse: Yeah I would say, it was definitely always the goal. I mean I knew from the beginning that we did not have a shot like I’m not famous, and almost no one who’s ever been involved in MaxFun has gotten involved when they were famous like Hodgman is probably the most famous person that has ever been with us, and he was famous from being in some TV commercials, basically. I mean he had successful books. And so I knew that like, nurturing a community and trying to nurture interpersonal relationships, and trying to build like multilateral relationships in our audience rather than unilateral or bilateral like trying to get our audience to relate to each other was important. And that has always been a goal. That’s why we do MaxFunCon and so on and so forth. We want to do something that people feel like could be a piece of who they are in the same way, what kind of church you go to is. I mean, without the stakes, with lower stakes or like if you’re like, the thing that I always thought was like our ideal place to be in someone’s life is like Harley Davidson. Like if you’re a Harley person you’re a Harley person you have something with other Harley people. Like, it’s different from preferring Coke over Pepsi, it’s like a meaningful part of who you are, even if it’s a very small one. And over time I think I have gotten more sensitive about what that means for people in our audience who are both more vulnerable and need it more. So, you know, in the early days of Jordan, Jesse Go! we occasionally used the gay slur that starts with F. We never used it like with the proviso that I’m not copying please here I’m, I’m, I’m aware it was the wrong thing to do, and I’m, and I apologize for it, but it was in the context, it was never in the context of insulting a gay person, or it was in the context of an imagined performative allyship, like we thought this was, you know, our gay friends say they have reclaimed this word, and we get to be in on that. We were wrong about that, and we just got a couple of nice notes from people in our audience who said, ‘Listen, I know you guys aren’t homophobes. I know you’re allies….But even without understanding, I feel hurt when I hear that word, coming from somebody who isn’t clear.’ And we’re like, Okay, let’s take that on, onboard that, thank you for the note, you know, like, again, we can’t take care of perfectly of everyone ever but like we heard that. Great. And within my three kids. My oldest is transgender and there’s a lot of neurodiversity among my children, that is still like being evaluated, but there’s plenty of it. A surfeit. Extra leftover at the end of each day. Somebody messaged me a few weeks ago and said ‘I was listening to an old episode and you were, you were talking with your guest in a joking way about an autistic kid. And I’m autistic. and it really bummed me out.’ And I was like, or you know, we actually on The Sound of Young America… I once played this Second City sketch that the Second City performed when I recorded a show at The Second City. It’s an Adam McKay sketch that involves the R word. It’s a brilliant sketch, like genuinely like one of the most amazing insightful spectacular things Adam McKay ever wrote, but it has that word in it, and I was, and I wanted to defend it because I was like this is not a joke about developmentally disabled people, right, like, this is a joke, like I wanted to give the intellectual. But what I understood was like, ultimately, when you’re in a room and there’s 200 people in there, and you make a joke about sexual assault. You’re making that joke to 30 people, or 40 people who have been sexually assaulted, and this isn’t something that they can receive on the basis of your justification about why your joke about sexual assault is actually anti sexual assault, even if that justification is totally right and totally makes sense, right, that is really going to be a kick in the reproductives for those people. It’s going to trigger trauma, that is really real. It’s not sensitivity, blah blah blah. It is real trauma, and like I grew up with a dad with PTSD, and like it’s real. And so over time, we have worked hard to try and be inclusive. And, you know, while I grew up, lower-middle class and, you know, righteous, you know, my father was a professional organizer. I’m still a cis het white dude right now…

But especially in both in hearing from and relating to people in our audience who are vulnerable in various ways. And in having people in my family who I love more than anything else, and realizing how often I have to defend them from the world, and how often the ways that I have to defend them from the world aren’t related to malice, they’re just related to inconsiderateness. I have worked harder and harder to make sure that we are taking care of the audience as best we can. And again, when you have, you know, The Adventure Zone’s, whatever it is half a million listeners or something. You can’t take care of every one of those people one at a time, because it’s impossible. But what you can do, and if you set yourself up for that you’re going to lose it’s going to be ugly for you.

Yeah, you can’t cater to the one person out of a half million who’s offended because you can’t, but you can genuinely do your best. And when somebody gives you feedback, instead of saying this is the biggest one, the one that was hardest for me and that I see is really hard, especially for folks who are newer to performing or being public figures which a lot of our hosts are. When you get that feedback. You say thank you. You don’t say. ‘Fuck me? Fuck you!’ That is always your first response, I promise. If you’re in comedy. It’s your first response x1000 like, if my friend Al Madrigal gets feedback about something, his first reaction is to just destroy whoever. And he will do a great job. But ultimately, like we just, we try and take care of people, as best as we can.