Folkways Of The Contemporary Sex Idiot, With Kelsey McKinney And Alex Sujong Laughlin

Drew is at the beach, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and all the major sports events are either over or in the early going. If there was ever going to be a moment to give the podcast over to a discussion of podcast industry dysfunction, conquering the fear of failure, and the goings-on among the cadre of horned-up half-sociopaths on Love Island USA, this was it. I knew what had to be done, and so I made the call. Or I sent the Slack message, and then I sent a second one, and then sometime later Kelsey and Alex joined me to talk about real-life stuff and reality TV stuff for what turned out to be a pretty delightful 64 minutes.

All of which is to say that, despite my early statement to the contrary, we are not breaking down the NBA draft’s winners and losers, here. Instead we spent the first half of the episode talking about Alex’s fantastic Try Hard podcast, the second season of which began last week, and which is also making the move to video. We talked about why she chose to do that, and why so many other podcasts have been doing it—a trend that Alex has written about in the past, but which she understands a bit differently from the inside. Some of this was about the mortifying ideal of being known and the rigors of making yourself into an on-camera performer, but a lot of it was about the way the internet works and doesn’t work now, from the daunting challenge of finding places where real people are looking for new things to the weirdnesses of “authenticity” as a selling point. We also discussed what celebrity podcasts are for and why they have proliferated in the ways they have, and what they reflect about an industry that seems not to understand or respect its own business very well. I forgot Mitch Hedberg’s name in this segment, for which I apologize, although I did manage to paraphrase one of my favorite lines of his accurately enough.