Michael K. Williams (3:40)

But see, I'm not understanding this.

Jesse Thorn (3:42)

Who's number one as far as. Yeah, just. Just tops. Just great. Awesome. All right, I'll take the cheap way out. I think everybody was equally great. No, that's not gonna fly, Dustin. Yes. But I'm not also gonna trap myself in a very bizarre question. Who? Great. And 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 like rock and weird time signatures.

Brooke Gladstone (4:10)

Why wouldn't he talk about it?

Jesse Thorn (4:11)

Because he would only talk about his standup comedy. And he ended up telling street jokes about wheelchairs, like, truly vile. And I remember, 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. And we were like, oh, no. Dustin Diamond. So later, when he stabbed someone in a bar, we weren't that surprised.

Brooke Gladstone (4:53)

God, did the person die?

Jesse Thorn (4:57)

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, and 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. And in doing that, I've had very few catastrophes.

Brooke Gladstone (5:38)

So then give me some examples of one of your favorite interview moments.

Jesse Thorn (5:42)

I got this record that was like an act along with record. So it was from.

Brooke Gladstone (5:49)

Maybe you mean like they were reading half the script or something?

Jesse Thorn (5:51)

Yes. Yeah. So it was, like, from the early 1960s, and it was like a teen idol of the time. It was like a Gunsmoke style western, right? And it came with a script. So 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. And Mike Nelson from Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a guest on the show. He did not get the fax that we sent him of his side of the script. We faxed him from the radio station and he did not tell us that he didn't get the fax like we would have faxed him again. So 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. And he was so funny. For heaven's sake. You're gonna need me.

Michael K. Williams (6:42)

No, I actually. I'm leaving out the back. Yes, I have to go buy.

Jesse Thorn (6:46)

Yes, I do.

Michael K. Williams (6:47)

I know I have to go buy mustard.

Jesse Thorn (6:50)

You mean that I'm a lawman. That's right. 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.

Michael K. Williams (6:58)

You need anything while I'm at the store? I'm gonna get mustard. You like the brown, don't you, Riley Hun? You said it. Let's go.

Brooke Gladstone (7:10)

Come on, sheriff, give me another one.

Jesse Thorn (7:12)

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. And this was a documentary about the concert in Zaire that went along with the Rumble in the Jungle. This is like the music playing parallel to When We Were Kings. And this concert had James Brown and Fela Kuti and Celia Cruz and the Fania All Stars. And it also had Bill Withers. And when I emailed the folks who were repping this movie, I thought they were gonna 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 (8:04)

They didn't think you would know Bill.

Jesse Thorn (8:07)

Withers well 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. And 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. Right. 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. Like, 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. And 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. And 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, like, around the corner. And here's this white guy sitting in front of him.

Brooke Gladstone (9:56)

He said, my father was his coal miner. He was always interested in reading. Never got a chance to go to school. But dignity was very important to him.

Michael K. Williams (10:04)

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 for. 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 so. So there's a life you have to run. And you do the best you can, and hopefully as a human being, you improve. I'm 70 years old. I'm not some kind of mindless troubadour, you know. 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 with that. So I'm doing the best I can to grow and improve my lineage as a species.

Brooke Gladstone (11:31)

And that's what kept him out of the business for a while.

Jesse Thorn (11:34)

That was his experience of life, like 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 (12:04)

But he did eventually get into music. What stood out to you about the interview?

Jesse Thorn (12:09)

I asked him. Look, you live in Los Angeles. You could call the guy that runs Largo250, 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, and you could get that gig and you could just enjoy playing music for people. So how. Why have you chosen not to do that? And 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. Right. What I want to know is what and why is it that we make art? I interview a lot of comedians and rappers and stuff and punk rockers, and people think of that as pop culture or something rather than art. But, like, I believe it to be art for real. And that is the art that is most important to me in the world. And I think that art is what makes us freaking human beings and not slugs. So 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. And 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 (14:33)

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

Jesse Thorn (14:39)

It's been like one station at a time for a long time. And 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 (14:57)

Wasn't it around that time that Chris Bannon, who was program director at wnyc, called you up?

Jesse Thorn (15:04)

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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone (15:45)

I have a taxidermied squirrel. Winks.

Jesse Thorn (15:47)

You have a taxidermied squirrel too?

Brooke Gladstone (15:48)

Yeah, it's really nice. It's freeze dried.

Jesse Thorn (15:50)

Did you see my taxidermied squirrel?

Brooke Gladstone (15:51)

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

Jesse Thorn (15:54)

My taxidermy squirrel's name is Nutsy.

Brooke Gladstone (15:56)

Oh, Nutsy.

Jesse Thorn (15:56)

That's right. I had no idea you had a taxidermy squirrel.

Brooke Gladstone (15:58)

Yeah, I'm a little squirrel freak.

Jesse Thorn (16:00)

And it was something that would not have happened on Fresh Air like I do this.

Brooke Gladstone (16:08)

Well, 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 (16:29)

I mean, 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, but 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. And that is something that's a lot harder to do from far away. I mean, 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. So he was like a club kid. This was like his big break, this song. And I thought I was gonna 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? But he was really quiet. And because we weren't in the same room, I couldn't tell what was going on. And then when he started talking, I was like, is that like a hitch in his voice?

Michael K. Williams (18:06)

Man. Excuse me. That I Saw him, man, that was the first time that, you know, like, my dream came true, you know what I mean? Like, when Kim hired me to be a dancer, I was homeless, you know what I mean? I remember when I got the call, I was being kicked out, packing up my stuff, and it's just. I ain't. 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, you know what I mean? Anything. You know what I mean? So I'm here today for the strength of that one song.

Jesse Thorn (18:56)

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 signal 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 (19:34)

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 (19:49)

I had a conversation with Pedro Almodovar once, and there's no greater film genius than he. And he is a migraine headache sufferer. A migraineur. I'm a chronic, severe, disabling migraine sufferer.

Brooke Gladstone (20:07)

Ugh, I'm so sorry.

Jesse Thorn (20:09)

And 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 it changed completely.

Michael K. Williams (20:44)

My life, at least my case, is related with big noises and also with light. But, you know, this is so ridiculous to be a director, a movie director, being photophobia. Because I work with light. I mean, light is. Even if you want to shoot a sequence in darkness, the darkness is made by light.

Jesse Thorn (21:08)

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 (21:27)

And it can't buy you any time because you don't know when it's going to be over.

Jesse Thorn (21:32)

Exactly. This film that he was promoting involved Antonio Banderas playing a character who was addicted to painkillers, eventually addicted to heroin. Almodovar told me this character was based on me, and it was a result of my migraine. So it was both a profound insight into this brilliant artist's brilliant art and into him as a human being. And 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 (22:19)

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 (22:40)

This past year, I interviewed Jean Gray, who is now retired from rapping, but let's say, legendary underground rapper. And one of the things she said to me was. She said, let me.

Brooke Gladstone (22:52)

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, if any. I. I was just dying for decades for anyone to talk to me about, like, creative process or technicalities. And there's, like, one article that I can remember someone doing about going really through the math of. Of my rhythm, of my flow of choosing words. And I was like, finally, finally. And like, two people read that. And I was like, what? Please, please talk to me. Please talk to me about the technical things. And that, again, is the prison of, you know, being in this body and doing that job.

Jesse Thorn (23:45)

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. Right. 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. Like, I'm not only asking people what paint set they use. Right. 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.

Brooke Gladstone (24:20)

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?

Jesse Thorn (24:34)

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 herself 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 (25:19)

And 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 specul. You say the goal of a lot of this was to drive everyone else out of the business by flooding the zone.

Jesse Thorn (25:40)

That's what venture capital is. 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 sort of natural built in advantages of monopoly and get rich.

Brooke Gladstone (26:15)

After 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 inshittification.

Jesse Thorn (26:32)

And 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 Fund getting canceled and half the staff getting laid off simply because our model wasn't competitive 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 like 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? And he said, I think it could be. I think you're onto something. And 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. And 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 (28:31)

You are so selfish.

Jesse Thorn (28:33)

I know, but I mean, like, 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. And 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 (29:05)

So Bullseye's now a quarter of a century old. You're in the podcast hall of fame. You've been called a survivor, a success story. I mean, is this why you are so well equipped to weather all of the different iterations of podcasting?

Jesse Thorn (29:23)

I grew up in a family. My parents were divorced, but very acrimoniously. But my father was an organizer, and my mother went to graduate school when I was, like, 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. And 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. 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. And that's like a fine line, right? 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? And 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. I have been doing the same radio show every week since I was 19.

Brooke Gladstone (30:52)

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

Jesse Thorn (31:10)

I believe really strongly in Bill Moyer's 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. And 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. And I think that public funding is essential for the pursuit of that kind of work.

Brooke Gladstone (32:37)

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 (32:49)

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. And 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. And the topic of this panel was making money in podcasting. And I'm there, like, going down the list of everything that I've tried and learned and whatever she's like, oh, well, somebody gave me the money, and then I'M like, well, tell me about how many people listen to your show. And she's like, some of the episodes, as many as two or 300 people. And 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, you know, like for real. But 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. Like, 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 KZSC 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, you know.

Brooke Gladstone (35:04)

Thank you so much.

Jesse Thorn (35:05)

Thank you friend. I sure, I sure appreciate it. And you know, I mean, you know how I feel about your work.

Brooke Gladstone (35:13)

Jesse Thorne is the founder of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network and the host and producer of the radio show and podcast Bullseye, among others In Grandma's Hands.

Michael K. Williams (35:26)

Clapped in Church on Sunday morning.

Brooke Gladstone (35:29)

Thanks for checking out the midweek podcast. The Big show posts on Friday. NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship wnyc. Org to get in touch and find out more.