[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This month marks 25 years of Bullseye, a public radio show and podcast, founded, hosted and produced by Jesse Thorn. He's also the founder of Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows about reading, writing, wrestling, video games, you name it. Jesse also hosts The Turnaround, Judge John Hodgman and and co hosts Jordan Jesse Go, but Bullseye is where it all began. It's a place where artists open up about how and why they pursue their art. Earlier this month I called Jesse to ask him how this show survived every new iteration of podcasting, beginning with its very humble birth.

Jesse Thorn: I was 19 years old. I was a sophomore in college at UC Santa Cruz. I was listening to the college radio station KZSE. They announced a station tour and I went up there. Literally, as I watched someone run the board, I thought, "Oh, up is louder, down is quieter, I can handle that."

Brooke Gladstone: What did you expect to see?

Jesse Thorn: I guess I was thinking of Frasier. I thought there was a producer and it was a whole thing, but actually, it was just a lady in a bandana with a golden retriever in a bandana playing folk songs.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Finding out that the bar for previously acquired skills was not terribly high, you did what?

Jesse Thorn: We got an hour from 7:30 to 8:30 in the morning. We had to walk to the station. The UC Santa Cruz campus, very wooded, very hilly and very large, but the bus wasn't running at seven o'clock in the morning. We did comedy mostly. We found this record of whale songs and we would have conversations with what we claimed was the space whale, that it was a whale we'd met in space. We had call-in contests. At one point we had a contest for a pair of tickets to a tango concert. A woman called in and she won the contest, and then she said she would only go if she could go with my co-host Gene, who was the funniest of us. They ended up dating for a year and a half.

Brooke Gladstone: Really?

Jesse Thorn: I think we, very quickly, realized how hard it is to fill an hour with material that you've written. We started emailing and calling people that we liked and admired. In the early days. We had Matt Besser and Matt Walsh of the Upright Citizens Brigade and Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Brooke Gladstone: Can you pick one particular interview that you say was just disastrous?

Jesse Thorn: [laughs] Yes, I can. There was the time that we interviewed Steve from Blue's Clues, but he would not talk about Blue's Clues. The one that comes to mind as truly catastrophic. We interviewed Dustin Diamond, who played Screech on Saved by the Bell, and we interviewed him because he had had a standup show in Santa Cruz. We interviewed him by phone, and the topics that he would not cover included Saved by the Bell. He was not willing to talk about Saved by the Bell at all. At one point, we were like, "Well, would you rank the cast members of Saved by the Bell, I don't know, by height?"

Dustin, who is number one on the entire cast?

Dustin Diamond: I'm not understanding this. Who's number one as far as-

Jesse Thorn: Just tops as far as great, awesome.

Dustin Diamond: All right, I'll take the cheap way out. I think everybody was equally great.

Jesse Thorn: No, that's not going to fly, Dustin.

Dustin Diamond: I'm not also going to trap myself in a very bizarre question. Great?

Jesse Thorn: He said no. He wouldn't talk about his math rock band, which we were so excited to talk about the fact that Dustin Diamond had a math rock band. That's rock and weird time signatures.

Brooke Gladstone: Why wouldn't he talk about it?

Jesse Thorn: Because he would only talk about his standup comedy, and he ended up telling street jokes about wheelchairs, truly vile. The thing I remember is him telling a joke that we understood, even as 22-year-olds in 1992, 1993, was too offensive to say on the radio and telling him, "Hey, maybe we should talk about your act," and then he said, "This is my act." We were like, "Oh, no, Dustin Diamond." Later, when he stabbed someone in a bar, we weren't that surprised.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] God. Did the person die?

Jesse Thorn: I don't think the person died, so I think you're allowed to laugh. As long as they recover, I think you're allowed to think it's funny. The lesson that I learned from that, Brooke, was we thought, "Here's Dustin diamond, he's famous. We should just do it." Since then, I've worked really hard not to talk to anybody on my show who I don't recommend. I've been wrong about some recommendations, but I really try and say, "This is somebody whose work I really believe in, and that's why they're on the show." In doing that, I've had very few catastrophes.

Brooke Gladstone: Then give me some examples of one of your favorite interview moments.

Jesse Thorn: I got this record that was an act-along-with record.

Brooke Gladstone: You mean they were reading half the script or something?

Jesse Thorn: Yes. It was from the early 1960s and it was a teen idol of the time. It was like a Gunsmoke style western, and it came with a script. You were supposed to read your side of the script and then the record would play this teen idol reading his side of the script. Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000-

Brooke Gladstone: I love him.

Jesse Thorn: -was a guest on the show. He did not get the fax that we sent him of his side of the script.

[laughter]

Jesse Thorn: We faxed him from the radio station and he did not tell us that he didn't get the fax. We would have faxed him again. We had this idea where it would be great for him to act along with this record, but he didn't get the script, so he just made up a thing about mustard. He was so funny.

Actor 1: For heaven's sake, you're going to need me.

Mike Nelson: No, actually, I'm leaving out the back.

Actor 1: Yes, I do.

Mike Nelson: I know. I have to go buy mustard.

Actor 1: You mean that I'm a lawman?

Mike Nelson: That's right.

Actor 1: I'm not doing it for you and I'm not doing it for myself. I'm doing it for them, the people I swore to protect.

Mike Nelson: You need anything while I'm at the store? I'm going to get mustard. You like the brown, don't you? [unintelligible 00:07:06]

Actor 1: You said it. Let's go. Come on, sheriff.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me another one.

Jesse Thorn: I guess it was maybe 12 years ago. I was already living in Los Angeles, and I got a press release for a movie called Soul Power. This was a documentary about the concert in Zaire that went along with the Rumble in the Jungle. This is the music parallel to When We Were Kings. This concert had James Brown, Fela Kuti, Celia Cruz, the Fania All Stars, and it also had Bill Withers.

When I emailed the folks who were repping this movie, I thought they were going to say, "Yes, you can do an interview with the directors," but they emailed me back and they said, "I don't know if you're familiar, but we'll actually have one of the musicians from the film. They're on hand if you're interested. His name is Bill Withers."

Brooke Gladstone: They didn't think you would know Bill Withers?

Jesse Thorn: At that point, he had not done any media in 20 years. He had done no press. He had done one morning radio interview with a friend of his. He quit the business after Just the Two of Us, which was a record that he put out with Grover Washington specifically because he hated his record label so much. It was in this fancy hotel in Pasadena with Bill Withers in a courtyard being interviewed by Pasadena magazine.

I went in there and he took me for a fool initially, because the reason he quit the business was because he did not suffer fools. This is a guy who only started in the music business as a grown adult after a career in the Navy. He was 30 when he put out his first record, and he was an intense guy. He was physically large and strong even at that age. He looked like a guy who had just gotten out of the Navy, handsome as heck, and he just met your eyes and tested you.

I was worried about it. Sitting across from somebody who famously had quit doing press because he hated it and quit the music business because he hated the baloney that went along with it was intense. Besides that, this was a guy who had grown up in the Jim Crow South, had grown up in absolute poverty in West Virginia at a time when the Civil Rights movement was still around the corner, and here's this white guy sitting in front of him.

Brooke Gladstone: He said, "My father was this coal miner. He was always interested in reading, never got a chance to go to school, but dignity was very important to him."

Bill Withers: I used to have a little poem in my mind. The manager's son goes to Yale and the blues man's son goes to jail. The one thing that kept me away out of this music [unintelligible 00:10:17] and I had to sort this out, can I go into this thing and avoid the minstrelness of it? This is a business, and you got some cold pimps that will mail you out until you die in your grave. You got as many thieves in this stuff as-- There's a life you have to run and you do the best you can. Hopefully, as a human being, you improve.

I'm 70 years old. I'm not some kind of mindless troubadour. I have an intellect I have to manage. I have some thoughts I have to manage. I have a life I have to maintain. I want to know who I am. I don't want to be some simple minded blues boy. You can bleep this out. Kiss my [bleep] with that [beep]. I'm doing the best I can to grow and improve my lineage as a species.

Brooke Gladstone: That's what kept him out of the business for a while?

Jesse Thorn: That was his experience of life, real poverty, real injustice. He was somebody who joined the Navy because joining the Navy was the only way to avoid dying of black lung. This is the only job where he lived, certainly the only job for a Black man that didn't go to college.

Brooke Gladstone: He did eventually get into music. What stood out to you about the interview?

Jesse Thorn: I asked him, look, you live in Los Angeles. You could call the guy that runs Largo, 250, 300-seat club in Los Angeles, and you could say, "Once a month I want to come by with my guitar, and if I have some friends that want to come too." You could get that gig and you could just enjoy playing music for people. Why have you chosen not to do that? He said, "I'm not a monkey and I don't have to dance."

We started doing interviews because we wanted to know what it was to make art for a living, whether that art was something as dumb as Mystery Science Theater 3000 or whether it was something as beautiful as Grandma's Hands by Bill Withers. What I want to know is what and why is it that we make art? I interview a lot of comedians, rappers and stuff, and punk rockers. People think of that as pop culture or something rather than art, but I believe it to be art for real. That is the art that is most important to me in the world. I think that art is what makes us freaking human beings and not slugs.

The moments that I most value on the show are moments like that where I feel like I have connected with somebody and learned something about what makes them an artist. For Bill Withers, he chose, above all else, agency and autonomy because he grew up in a world where that was not available to him, where he had no options, where the world was dark and cruel to him, and he did not get to choose what his life was, so he chose what his life was. He defied that. When the world of music was not satisfying that, he chose not to do it. That is a powerful life lesson.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. Who was hearing your show at this point? You aren't in college anymore.

Jesse Thorn: It's been one station at a time for a long time. I had another job and made the show by myself for a long time. At that point, it was dozens of stations. It was almost, but not enough money to live on.

Brooke Gladstone: Wasn't it around that time that Chris Bannon, who was Program Director at WNYC, called you up?

Jesse Thorn: It was a life changer when Chris Bannon from WNYC emailed me. Chris said, "I'd like to run a six-episode best-of on WNYC in New York. We'll pay you." [laughs] I think it was $300 an episode. The interview that I remember Chris really being excited about was Amy Sedaris came. At this point, I was doing the show in my apartment and Amy Sedaris came into my one bedroom apartment in Koreatown and was so excited to talk to me, and so excited to talk about this taxidermied squirrel called Nutsy that I have.

Amy Sedaris: I have a taxidermied squirrel, Winks.

Jesse Thorn: You have a taxidermied squirrel too?

Amy Sedaris: Yes, it's really nice. It's freeze dried.

Jesse Thorn: Did you see my taxidermied squirrel?

Amy Sedaris: No, I haven't. I haven't had a chance to look around your chambers.

Jesse Thorn: My taxidermy squirrel's name is Nutsy.

Amy Sedaris: Oh, Nutsy. That's a good name.

Jesse Thorn: I had no idea you had a taxidermied squirrel.

Amy Sedaris: I'm a little squirrel freak.

Jesse Thorn: It was something that would not have happened on Fresh Air.

[laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: Terry, after a while, she far preferred remote interviews because she didn't want to have any cues that the listener didn't have. I found visual cues very helpful, although I don't get to see people live these days, but she really preferred not to, so she couldn't have had that moment with Amy Sedaris.

Jesse Thorn: I think that the thing that is different about my show, and it's not necessarily better, but it's different, is my show, really, is a human conversation. A, I'm not a transparent journalist. I am a guy who has his own radio show. The people that I bring on the show are because I want them to come on my show. B, I am there with them, and maybe we are just going to goof around for a minute in addition to talking about things that change their life. That is something that's a lot harder to do from far away.

One of the most powerful experiences I ever had on the air was an interview with Michael K. Williams, who played, famously, Omar on The Wire, among other things. He passed away a few years ago. He was at a studio in New York. I was in LA and I played for him this dance record that he had been a dancer in the video for. He was a club kid. This was his big break, this song.

I thought I was going to get, "Isn't it great that when you're on a music video set, somebody puts a bib on you when you eat your French fries?" He was really quiet, and because we weren't in the same room, I couldn't tell what was going on. Then when he started talking, I was like, "Is that a hitch in his voice?"

Michael K. Williams: Man. Excuse me. I saw, man. That was the first time that my dream came true. [sniffles] When Kim asked me to be a dancer, I was homeless. [cries] I remember when I got the call, I was being kicked out, packing up my stuff. Sorry, it's just I haven't heard that song in a while. Just brought back a lot of memories, that's all. Pardon me. That was my first dance job. That's the first time anybody ever hired me to do what I'm doing now, was Kim Simms. That was my first job doing anything in this business, anything. I'm here today off the strength of that one song.

Jesse Thorn: Michael K. Williams was in tears because he realized that life in art was not given to him. He realized that he was a guy that was out dancing at clubs, and this woman that made this dance single gave him the opportunity to be an artist, something that he had not even imagined for himself. What I found was someone who did not know they even had the option of being an artist who was given that opportunity. It was this completely unexpected moment that ended up being something that people talked to me about years later that was mediated by that telephone line.

Brooke Gladstone: Are there other interviews that reinforced why it was you should keep doing this show, even though it didn't look like you were necessarily going to make a living at it, and why the work continued to feel so essential?

Jesse Thorn: I had a conversation with Pedro Almodóvar once, and there's no greater film genius than he. He is a migraine headache sufferer, a migraineur. I'm a chronic, severe, disabling migraine sufferer.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm so sorry.

Jesse Thorn: I asked him about it because I know that because migraine is invisible and because many people with migraine choose to/are forced to endure it silently because they don't want to be seen as a malingerer or a complainer, a lot of migraine sufferers don't talk about it. He told me that sometimes his migraines are so severe that he is on set and cannot see.

Pedro Almodóvar: It changed completely my life. At least in my case, it's related with big noises and also with light. This is so ridiculous, to be a movie director and being photophobia, because I work with light. Even if you want to shoot a sequence in darkness, the darkness is made by light.

Jesse Thorn: He has to have someone lead him around the set. It was very clear to me when I talked to him about that, that this was not something that he had talked about much publicly. When you have migraine, you just learn not to say anything about it because it never benefits you to say something about it.

Brooke Gladstone: It can't buy you any time because you don't know when it's going to be over.

Jesse Thorn: Exactly. This film that he was promoting involved Antonio Banderas playing a character who was addicted to painkillers, eventually addicted to heroin. Almodóvar told me, "This character was based on me, and it was a result of my migraine." It was both a profound insight into this brilliant artist's brilliant art and into him as a human being. It was one that was obviously personally meaningful to me as somebody who couldn't hold down a real job because of my migraines, but also one that someone else couldn't have found for that reason.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said that when you have an artist on your show, you want to talk about the art. You don't want to necessarily talk about their crappy childhood. Everybody has a crappy childhood, not everybody becomes an artist, and yet that stuff informs a lot of that art, as you just described.

Jesse Thorn: This past year, I interviewed Jean Grae, who is now retired from rapping, but let's say legendary underground rapper. One of the things she said to me was, she said--

Jean Grae: Let me tell you something, Jesse. I think I would have wrongfully stayed longer in the industry if I had had more than one technical conversation about rap. I was just dying for decades for anyone to talk to me about creative process or technicalities. There's one article that I can remember someone doing about going really through the math of my rhythm, of my flow, choosing words, and I was like, "Finally." Two people read that, and I was like, "Why? Please talk to me. Please talk to me about the technical things." That, again, is the prison of being in this body and doing that job.

Brooke Gladstone: She said, "So many journalists have asked me, 'What's it like to be a woman in hip hop?'" All these things about her life, but nothing about how she actually makes her art. Yes, to the extent that people's life informs the making of their art, I am interested in that. I'm not only asking people what paint set they use, but I do believe that it is worth talking about the work. It is easier to talk about biography because biography is built in story.

Jesse Thorn: Let's pivot now. In 2023, Maximum Fun, the radio show production organization you founded, became a worker-owned cooperative. Why did you choose that route?

Brooke Gladstone: Once I decided through necessity that I would be primarily supported by the audience directly, I wanted to give people a deeper connection to what we were doing in any way that I could. I also had friends whose work I admired who were in the same position as me, folks like Dave and Graham who host Stop Podcasting Yourself or the McElroy brothers who host The Adventure Zone, and My Brother, My Brother and Me. The pieces fit together into a network.

In some ways I was good at being a businessman in the sense that I built a successful business, but I also was not good at the part of business where you're supposed to be leveraging capital to exploit labor, and you are supposed to be losing money up front in order to gain scale later.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's stipulate. 2023, there was a flood of capital still coming into the medium, but not really based on a sustainable business practice. It was speculating on the future. You say the goal of a lot of this was to drive everyone else out of the business by flooding the zone?

Jesse Thorn: That's what venture capital is. [laughs] The reason that these floods of capital are going into AI or whatever is because they want to capture the market and then behave anti-competitively. The reason Jeff Bezos decided that Amazon could lose money for the first 15 years of its existence was because he was trying to capture the e-commerce market so that he could exploit network effects and the natural built-in advantages of monopoly and get rich after.

Brooke Gladstone: It starts off great. You could order cement blocks for free shipping, and then ultimately, they start extracting from their suppliers, and then ultimately, from their customers. This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification.

Jesse Thorn: This is true in any startup business that's funded by venture capital, which is who was funding the explosions in podcasting. There were many times when I was approached to sell, but I knew that if I sold to one of these speculative outfits it would immediately result in half the shows on Max Fun getting canceled and half the staff getting laid off simply because our model wasn't compatible with theirs. We were built for audience-supported sustainability and they wanted hegemonic control of the entire industry so that they could sell ads or get people into a walled garden.

I never wanted to do it. I wanted to stop being the owner of a business because it's stressful when it's your money and you don't have any resources behind it. My father-in-law, he just retired about six months ago, spent his career working at a worker-owned hardware store in Marin County. I called Steve and said, "Would worker ownership be a thing for Max Fun?" He said, "I think it could be. I think you're onto something."

I called a nonprofit that specializes in helping businesses transition to worker ownership, and we spent two years doing feasibility studies, and the end result was Maximum Fun is a 100% worker-owned cooperative. I'm an employee of Maximum Fun now. I'm also a worker owner of Maximum Fun. We have an elected board that is elected by the workers. They oversee the management structure of Maximum Fun. I also own my shows just like the other shows in Maximum Fun are owned by their creators. It was also, selfishly, a way to protect this thing that I had dedicated my entire adult life to.

Brooke Gladstone: You are so selfish.

Jesse Thorn: I know. The thing about worker ownership is that it is demonstrably studied by economists, more sustainable, because workers are interested in sustainability. They're not interested in risk and infinite growth. To me, I want Maximum Fund to exist in 20 years. I don't want it to go the way of Wondery getting all of its shows folded into Audible and a bunch of them canceled and everybody laid off. This is a way to do that.

Brooke Gladstone: Bullseye is now a quarter of a century old. You're in the Podcast Hall of Fame. You've been called a survivor, a success story. Is this why you are so well equipped to weather all of the different iterations of podcasting?

Jesse Thorn: I grew up in a family. My parents were divorced, but very acrimoniously. My father was an organizer, and my mother went to graduate school when I was 10 and became a junior college professor. I grew up in a family where it was expected that you would do something that mattered to you and the world. I also grew up in a family where I never went hungry, the lights never got turned off, but we also, until my late teens, were never quite in the middle class. [laughs]

I never had the expectation that I would get rich from my work, but I also always had the expectation that I was responsible for paying my way. That's a fine line. I was never in a position to be an artist who just made art and didn't think about money, and I was never in a position to accumulate capital and try and build scale. My goal always was, what can I build that will sustain this work that I want to do? Not, what can I build that will make me rich? That, I think, is what has led me to do this for 25 years. I would say the other thing is probably a generalized terror at trying something new.

[laughter]

Jesse Thorn: I have been doing the same radio show every week since I was 19.

Brooke Gladstone: I wonder, in an era when we're contending constantly with attacks on public media from the GOP, the end of the CPB, given your track record of good and lucky choices, how do you see the future of public radio?

Jesse Thorn: I believe really strongly in Bill Moyers' construction of what public media is for, what the value of public media is. He told Terry Gross, "Public media is for when you don't want, as an audience member, to be treated as a customer, when you want to be treated as a citizen." I think there needs to be a media ecosystem that exists outside of pure market forces.

I think that the reason that you and I, Brooke, are in public media is because we believe it is worth doing something important. It's important that we, who make public media, understand that we serve all Americans and that the values of public media apply to all Americans. I don't say that as a coded way of describing the political landscape at all. What I mean by that is that rappers deserve to be talked to about their art like it's art too.

In many ways, public media has grown along those lines, but I think that the greatest successes of public media, Sesame Street, the Tiny Desk concerts. These are radically inclusive. I think that public funding is essential for the pursuit of that kind of work.

Brooke Gladstone: As you say, things have moved in a more inclusive direction. I was just wondering whether you were suggesting there ought to be less of a sense of entitlement that can come with making public media.

Jesse Thorn: It was very important to me at Maximum Fun, that when we put out hiring notices, we make it clear you don't have to have graduated from college. It's important to me at Maximum Fun that our staff reflects our community of Los Angeles. Public radio, in particular, has made huge strides since I started doing public radio 25 years ago in its goal of reflecting the nation. I think there's still a long way to go.

Years ago, I was at a public radio conference and I was on a panel about podcasts and podcasting. There was a woman on this panel who had made a podcast and it was something arts related. She seemed like a really nice lady. I bet her show was good. I say that dismissively-sounding, but she was a genuinely nice woman, seemed smart. The topic of this panel was making money in podcasting. I'm there going down the list of everything that I've tried and learned, and whatever. She's like, "Oh, well, somebody gave me the money." Then I'm like, "Tell me about how many people listen to your show." She's like, "Some of the episodes, as many as 200 or 300 people."

I'm not saying that she shouldn't make that. I believe that you should build a train set in your basement if it gives you satisfaction, very sincerely. There's lots of art that should exist in the world that nobody likes like, for real. My reaction to that also was, "Imagine how much money you could make if you made something people wanted to hear. Imagine if you cared about your audience."

I do weird stuff. I'm not, not weird, but I always knew that if I didn't get people to actually listen to and enjoy it, I would not eat. Even when we were talking to a record of whale sounds on KZSE in Santa Cruz when I was 20, our goal was to get people to listen to and get something out of our show, which in college radio is not taken as red.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Thank you so much.

Jesse Thorn: Thank you, friend. I sure appreciate it. You know how I feel about your work.

Brooke Gladstone: Jesse Thorn is the founder of the Maximum Fun podcast network and the host and producer of the radio show and podcast Bullseye, among others.

[MUSIC - Bill Withers: Grandma's Hands]

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for checking out the midweek podcast. The big show posts on Friday.

 

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