Servant of Pod with Nick Quah

Kara Swisher is a journalism powerhouse known for cutting through the nonsense talking points and asking the tough questions to some of the most powerful people on the planet. She’s been doing this for nearly 30 years, and after launching two successful podcasts – Recode Decode and Pivot with Scott Galloway – she’s taking on her third: Sway with New York Times Opinion. In this week’s episode, Nick talks to Swisher about her new show’s focus – who has power and how they use it – the surprising place she found inspiration for seeking the truth, and her ultimate dream podcast guest.

The latest season of Lost Notes, KCRW’s anthology podcast unearthing great stories from the music world that are generally lost to time, is distinct in two ways: first, all of its narratives are pulled from the relatively unlikely year of 1980, and second, it’s curated and hosted by the poet, essayist, and critic Hanif Abdurraqib. The end result is utterly gorgeous. In this week’s episode, Nick talks to Abdurraqib about focusing on 1980, the nature of legacy and fandom, and how to love things critically.

What makes a story…scary? You can cut this question a few different ways: through story structure, through sound design, through narrative mechanisms. In this week’s episode, Nick talks to Jeffrey Cranor, the co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale and co-writer of Within the Wires, about the ins and outs of building a scary, spooky, or creepy podcast experience. The episode also features notes from some great spooky pod creators — Unwell, Mabel, Here Be Monsters, Archive 81 — talking about the various ways they think about the nature of scary.

What is Hurricane Katrina's long, complicated legacy? Nick speaks with Vann Newkirk II, the host and one of the creators of The Atlantic's Floodlines, which reflects on the Katrina crisis 15 years later. What do the federal responses to Katrina and Covid-19 have in common? Can the people of New Orleans ever really "recover" from the tragedy of Katrina? And how did the team make one of the best-sounding podcasts of the year?

If you’ve spent any time thinking about the sprawling history of crime and politics in Providence, Rhode Island in recent years, it’s probably because you’re familiar with Crimetown ...or you’re from there. In this week’s episode, Nick speaks with Marc Smerling, the pioneer true crime documentarian who co-created Crimetown with Zac Stuart-Pontier, and whose wildly accomplished resume includes Capturing The Friedmans, Catfish, and The Jinx. Smerling’s latest projects are FX’s A Wilderness of Error and its companion podcast, Morally Indefensible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.