Podcast Rodeo #2: Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything & the Auteur Theory of Audio

Podcast Rodeo is an occasional series here on TOUCHED WITH FIRE DOT AUDIO in which I muse on one of the 44 podcasts (the actual, current number) that I subscribe to.

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The logo of Ben Walker's Theory of Everything. I find it very cool.

1. In Which Are Discussed Gilmet and Radiotopia, Their Differences

    Last time here on Podcast Rodeo, we talked about Gimlet Media’s flagship show, StartUp, and its growing pains. Gimlet was launched in the late summer / early fall of 2014, and rapidly became the gold standard of for-profit podcasting networks, hosting not only the popular (if artistically somewhat lost) StartUp, but also Reply All (a personal favorite), Mystery Show, and several other much-downloaded offerings. I have no idea if Gimlet impresario Alex Blumberg is getting rich off of it, but it appears to support his burgeoning family in New York City, and they’re hiring new people all the time. (Despite several applications, I have never been one of these hires. I never really expected to be, though.)

    The world of narrative audio — which is pretty much what Gimlet does — there is one personage, and one show, that hovers ever-present behind every discussion: Ira Glass, and his ever-changing, mould-shattering, first-of-its-kind show, This American Life. TAL pioneered the style that dominates narrative audio storytelling: casual, music-rich, accessible, funny. Glass, with his nasally, very Baltimore and very Jewish voice, did not sound like the other people on public radio; he stuttered his lines, had an essayist’s eye for detail, was unafraid to laugh or go on the air with bronchitis or come off as less than authoritative. It can be hard to understand how unusual this was back in the mid-late 90s, when TAL first came on the air, because Glass made it part of his mission to get unusual voices on the air. Early regulars included Sarah Vowell, whose nasal, girlish voice is so odd she eventually lent it to a Pixar character; David Sedaris, whose lispy, faintly southern speech was unapologetically homosexual in its affect; and Scott Carrier, whose haunted monotone was by far the biggest influence on my own radio line readings.* Spiritual heirs include Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’s Peter Sagal; Live Wire’s Luke Burbank; Snap Judgement’s Glynn Washington; Invisibilia’s Alix Spiegel (a TAL alum) and Lulu Miller; and Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad. In short, without Glass and his show, the world of audio we know now just doesn’t exist. We are all kicking against its pricks and stealing its tricks.

*Not to brag, but I actually have a classic radio voice, and my Carrier imitation is actually a method of making myself sound less authoritarian and intimidating.

    I mention this here not only because Blumberg’s Gimlet shows are the clearest progeny of TAL’s revolution — Blumberg himself might be the Glassiest radio host other than Glass himself, but other shows on the network are hosted by other TAL alums, and Blumberg has clearly decided to coöpt his former show’s breezy, upbeat style (one, in fairness, he helped create) and use it to make relatable, listenable output that will keep his company profitable. I mention it also because I want to talk about another network, one that is home to many of podcasting’s most self-consciously artful and challenging listens: Radiotopia, which launched a couple of months before Gimlet. The thing is, Radiotopia is home to a bunch of great shows, and it resists Gimlet’s tendency to make all of its shows sound the same, and it has several creators who not only had nothing to do with TAL but actually predate and influenced that show themselves, such as the legendary Kitchen Sisters — and still, much of of its output is completely impossible without This American Life and the way it opened up audio storytelling to new vistas. This is true of Radiotopia’s flagship show, 99% Invisible, which as broadly about “design”, but is largely about its own production and sound design; it’s true of Phoebe Judge’s Criminal, which is a great true crime show that comes out of North Carolina; and it is especially true of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything, an indescribably weird catchall show that encompasses science fiction, philosophy, futurism, tech industry inside baseball, autobiography, and more straightforward narrative storytelling.

2. Benjamen Walker and the Auteur Theory of Audio

    As Walker freely admits, Theory of Everything is a show that cannot be easily packaged, pitched, sold, or advertised. Recent episodes include:

    + “The Future”, which features an interview with a tech journalist who may have been the inspiration for an old TV show of which Walker is a fan.

    + “A light touch and a slight nudge” [sic], including fiction about Donald Trump as CIA plant, and nonfiction about conspiracy theories and why people believe them.

    + A series called “Instaserfs”, in which ToE intern Andrew Callaway — who may or may not actually be an intern — takes a series of “sharing economy” jobs in the Bay Area, including driving an Uber, delivering food, and doing duty as a manservant. This is then followed up by a definitely fictional storyline in subsequent episodes in which Callaway becomes an instacelebrity for his exploits.

    + Another series called “Dislike Club”, which is basically about what a horrorshow the internet is.

    You can see why the show is hard to describe. It’s discursive and uneven; the fictional aspects, in particular, tend to be less effective than the rest of the show. But it is undeniably fascinating, and it appears to be the product almost entirely of Walker’s warped imagination — well, that, and his ability to find interesting stories in strange corners of the world.

    One of the things I find interesting about it (and several of the other shows on Radiotopia) is that it is clearly intended to have one, specific author, in a way that even This American Life, whose guiding light was always the inimitable Mr Glass, never did. Walker finds the stories, he conducts the interviews, he edits the tape, he digs up the music, he does the sound design, and he writes the narration, which veers between philosophical musing, memoir, and speculative fiction, often in the course of just a few lines. The only way I can think to describe this is the squishy, nonspecific word sensibility, which I often try to avoid because it seems to me like a bullshit dump. Walker’s sensibility drives the show’s twists and turns. His level of inspiration seems to dictate the production schedule. He usually churns out a new episode every two weeks . . . or every three weeks . . . or every month or so . . . it’s hard to tell. This is actually a model that kind of only works with, not only an on-demand form of media consumption, but one like podcasting, where several episodes can pile up in a row and not take up too much time or space for you to ever catch up.

    I was talking (well, kibbitzing on Facebook) with some friends about authorship and why people are so desperate to believe in it when it comes to works of collaborative art. (The convo was inspired by Beyoncé’s new record, Lemonade, but equally it could have been inspired by pretty much any movie ever made, or This American Life, or any of a number of other things.) Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t really have a lot of use for most postmodern theory, and I don’t take “the death of the author” particularly seriously; but it is true that in our perpetual search for that elusive (and probably non-existent) concept, authenticity, people really, really want to impute works of art to a single creator if at all possible. I think this probably has something to do with evolutionary psychology and our need for clean, cause-and-effect stories that flatter the instincts that keep us alive (and allowed us to build this culture we all dig on so much in the first place). I have some tedious thoughts on what this may or may not have to do with various notions of God that I won’t bore you with, but suffice it to say that it seems to me that people are looking for a single creator almost as soon as they’re aware that something has been created.

    I think this has done a lot of damage over the years, including the radical disempowerment of the screenwriter in filmmaking.** It’s also done many great things, including empowering writer/directors to take control of a medium was once engineered and make corners of it creative. It’s a really complicated move, and I could probably write a whole book about it that nobody would read. But what I find interesting is that it’s only just now starting to crop up in audio.

**NB that I’m the brother of a screenwriter, so I may not be wholly impartial here.

    While on the one hand I think this has some bad effects — the conflation of Ira Glass with his show in the popular imagination has really taken a lot of credit from a lot of creative people who helped him make the show what it was, as Glass would probably tell you himself — it also indicates, I think, that the genre is growing up a little bit, and people are starting to take it seriously. It’s right there in the title of Walker’s show, the full name of which is Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything. On the one hand, this title is completely tongue-in-cheek, as no doubt the diffident and modest Mr Walker would avow. At the same time, it’s an accurate representation of the way the show is sculpted and directed, as Walker himself, irrespective of whether or not he ever really had an intern, is definitely ToE’s homo magnus and guiding light in a way that even Glass couldn’t be at TAL.

3. Radiotopia and the Theory of Everything

    The interesting thing that Radiotopia does that Gimlet doesn’t is treat its creators as artists, more or less. I have no doubt that Alex & PJ at Reply All, or Starlee at Mystery Show, genuinely do operate their shows largely as they see fit; but at the same time, they are indelibly Gimlet, always accessible, chatty, music-rich. I don’t want to denigrate these shows, because Reply All in particular may be my very favorite show currently going; but they are recognizable, and they’re similar.

    On Radiotopia, the auteur is regent. Walker’s show sounds nothing like Nick van der Kolk’s Love + Radio, which sounds nothing like Lea Thau’s Strangers, which sounds nothing like Nate diMeo’s Memory Palace. Much like Theory of Everything, each of those shows defies classification, other than that it has a controlling creative consciousness who runs the show (with some subordinates). Even the more clicky, pitchy shows, like 99% Invisible, offer unique sounds that are related to, but not the same as, the obviously TAL-inspired fare available on Gimlet, or on public radio shows like Planet Money or Invisibilia. I sometimes wonder how they make their money; the product is much harder to market than Gimlet’s, which I think both the Gimlet guys and the Radiotopia guys would tell you they’re proud of. But I’m glad they’re around.

Recommended episodes of Benjamen Walker’s Theory of Everything:

“New York After Rent” — about Air BnB, the musical Rent, and the gentrification of NYC

“Secret Histories of Podcasting” — three versions of how the podcast became an artform

“Dark Karma” — an extended interview with a man who grew up in a cult