Servant of Pod with Nick Quah

As they say: new year, new you... Or is it? In time for the expected flood of New Year's resolutions, Nick talks to Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer of By The Book, a fun reality-ish podcast that features the two hosts documenting their attempts to live by a different self-help book, down to the letter, every episode. Just how valuable are these books, anyway? And who are the people that write them? Have any of these books actually been life-changing?

Forget doomsday prepping – are there podcasts that could help us through the end of the world? In this episode, Nick speaks with two women grappling with this topic in very different ways. First, Amy Westervelt, creator of Drilled and the Critical Frequency podcast network, tells Nick about her work as a climate crisis reporter and how she battles rampant misinformation campaigns in order to inform her audience in a direct and entertaining way. Then Nick chats with Sophie Townsend, whose podcast, Goodbye To All This, addresses her personal end of the world: the death of her husband. She tells us what it's like to make a podcast about grief and death, and what it's like when your world has ended but it keeps on spinning for everyone else.

We’re taking Christmas week off, but we didn’t want to leave you out in the cold. Caroline Crampton joins Nick to talk about one-off podcasts that they wish would consider second seasons.

The worlds of business, entrepreneurship, and startups can be wicked in what they don’t say about how their culture can negatively impact the mental health of their participants. In The Anxious Achiever, a podcast with Harvard Business Review, Morra Aarons-Mele takes that gap to task, using each episode to deliver a different conversation that seeks to bring realities about mental health in the business world to light. In this week’s episode, Nick talks to Morra about why she started the show, how it’s part of her broader efforts to spotlight these issues, and how her own personal relationship with mental health informs her work.

It’s that time of year when the world is flooded with “best of” lists...so how about one more? Nick welcomes Sarah Larson, a staff writer at The New Yorker who writes about podcasts in her column Podcast Dept. and New Hampshire Public Radio’s Rebecca Lavoie, co-host of Crime Writers On to share their favorites – and not-so-favorites – of 2020.

It's been a year of protest, not just in America but around the world. In Chile, citizens have spent well over the past twelve months — before the pandemic, and through it — demonstrating to demand change to their national constitution, originally established by the dictator Augusto Pinochet thirty years ago. It’s in this environment that Las Raras, a Spanish-language narrative podcast telling stories of freedom and liberation, launched its latest season, which in part focuses on documenting that movement. In this week's episode, Nick talks with the duo behind Las Raras, Catalina May and Martin Cruz, about the show's creation, why they focus on stories of outsiders, and the future of Spanish-language podcasts.

At the start of the pandemic lockdown, Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway decided to collaborate on a four-episode podcast project to help people figure what to do with all the beans (among other foodstuffs) they bought in bulk to prepare for the unpredictabilities ahead. Almost a year later, they're still making new episodes, and thank goodness for Home Cooking: fun, joyful, and genuinely informative, the podcast turned out to be the best pop-up creation to come out of this moment. In this week's episode, Nick talks to Samin and Hrishikesh about the show, why they make it, and what they're doing this Thanksgiving.

In 2014, Lauren Shippen was an aspiring actor in Los Angeles: taking classes, booking intermittent gigs, waiting tables, the like. Four years later, she ended up becoming one of the busiest people in podcasting, all on the strength of an independent fiction podcast she had made on her own time: The Bright Sessions. In this week’s episode, Nick talks to Lauren about her steadily rising career in entertainment, which spans multiple podcasts, a multi-project book deal, and maybe more.