The sound of Jesse Thorn’s America: A podcasting pioneer returns to Santa Cruz

Twenty years ago, as a feature writer for the Santa Cruz Sentinel, I ventured up to UC Santa Cruz one day to hang out with a young student from San Francisco named Jesse Thorn. Thorn had a radio show on the campus station KZSC with a cheeky title, “The Sound of Young America.” I was already, at that point, self-conscious about my shaky hold on what “Young America” was thinking and talking about, so I was curious about this guy who claimed to speak for an emerging generation.

The name of Thorn’s radio show was, of course, soaked in irony, a cutting commentary on the impulse of media stooges like me eager to generalize about an entire generation. Still, Thorn, I found out, was the kind of pop-culture savant who could skate skillfully from hip-hop to arthouse cinema to stand-up comedy to baseball. He was also possessed of the easy gab-ability of a seasoned radio nerd. “TSOYA” was, in its way, an effort to split the difference between the informality and humor of “morning zoo” style FM radio and the brainy competence of public radio. 

But Thorn had something else on his mind that day. He was making a leap into something new, something called “podcasting,” which promised to liberate radio from the constrictions of geography and airwave bandwidth. (The term was coined in the days before Apple’s iPhone, when many of us were still carrying around the now-defunct iPod.) The resulting Sentinel article included a sidebar in which I attempted to define podcasting for our readers.

Today, you can easily argue that podcasting has changed the world (thanks a ton, Joe Rogan). And it’s a phenomenon that has been very good to Jesse Thorn.

On Nov. 1, Thorn returns to Santa Cruz for a celebration at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center to mark the 25th anniversary of his landmark show — somewhere after turning 30, Thorn wisely changed the name from “The Sound of Young America” to “Bullseye.” The Kuumbwa event will feature Thorn on stage interviewing the kinds of smart celebrity types that have been a staple on the show, Santa Cruz-born actor Adam Scott and Oakland hip-hop artist and filmmaker Boots Riley, among others.

Since his UCSC days, Thorn has built “Bullseye” into a touchstone of cultural coverage and celebrity interviews, a stand-out even in the chaotic world of podcasting. A rundown of the show’s most recent guests — Wu-Tang Clan co-founder Ghostface Killah, “Back to the Future” icon Christopher Lloyd, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert and Bob Odenkirk of “Better Call Saul” fame — illustrates the show’s capacity for eclecticism. 

But, on the strength of “Bullseye” — and with a boost from longtime “Daily Show” contributor Judge John Hodgman, who was an early fan of Thorn’s vibe — he’s also built a podcasting empire called Maximum Fun, which includes more than 40 other titles on a wide array of subjects. 

The Sentinel piece contributed, in a small way, to Thorn’s catapulting to fame in the podcast world. It led to his show being picked up by KUSP, at the time Santa Cruz County’s National Public Radio affiliate, a show Thorn continued to do in person for years after graduating from UCSC, commuting from San Francisco. And, he said, it put him on the radar of the person who was at the time the most famous name in the public-radio universe.

“I believe it was one Wallace Baine who called me the ‘anti-Garrison Keillor,’” said Thorn, 44, by phone from his home in Los Angeles, “which, I came to understand, Garrison Keillor read about, and it made him really mad.”

“Bullseye,” by the way, is still a radio phenomenon, distributed by NPR to more than 150 stations nationwide. But it’s still in the world of podcasting where Thorn and Maximum Fun have had their greatest impact, so much so that last year, he was inducted into the Podcast Hall of Fame (which includes such names as Marc Maron and Adam Carolla).

Thorn grew up with a kind of eclecticism that makes him a natural for a generalist’s show like “Bullseye.” His mother was a professor of American studies, and he also majored in American studies at UCSC. While doing his show at KZSC, an older friend tipped him off about the new technology of podcasting. 

“I wasn’t much of a tech whiz,” he said, “but I thought if I could figure out how to make one of those RSS feeds and I could get a hundred more people to listen to the show, that seemed worth it.”

At that time, podcasting was so new and unexplored that most of the few podcasts available were about the technological challenges of podcasting. As far as Thorn knows, “The Sound of Young America” was the first show west of the Mississippi to become a podcast. 

“I can’t claim to have anticipated the future,” he said. “I was really just operating from a place of experimentation-slash-desperation.”

Still, even 20 years ago, Thorn was on a mission to carve out a niche, to address the interests of the public-radio listener, but to present that material in a much less starchy way. 

“What we were up to was very much a reaction to what was available to us on the [public] radio at the time,” he said. “It was wonderful, but generally self-serious and targeted toward older people. And, there were a few people, like Howard Stern, who were such geniuses that they transcended their formats. But for the most part, there was just a bunch of dumb stuff on commercial radio.”

That commercial radio/public radio dichotomy seems very much a product of the pre-podcasting world these days. Podcasting has created its own style, a professionalism born of radio, but not bound by radio’s often narrow motivations.

The San Francisco-loving Thorn moved to Los Angeles back in the 2000s to be closer to the artists and celebs he needed to interview for “Bullseye.” “I will never be anything other than a San Franciscan,” he said. “I’ll never stop having that experience on the Southwest flight approaching SFO, and you look out and see the city, and just start crying.”

A couple of years ago, Thorn made another big decision, converting Maximum Fun to a worker-owned cooperative. “I wanted to get out of the owning-stuff business,” he said. Still, podcasting is exerting an unprecedented level of influence and cultural muscle, particularly in the political realm and the “manosphere.” Thorn remains concerned about where the industry is going.

“In some ways, podcasting is the best of the internet, the last bastion of what they used to call the ‘open internet,’” said Thorn, “which is to say that the basic technology of podcasting remains accessible to anyone on a fairly even playing field.”

However, he said, the world that the smartphone and social media have created — media engagement driven by algorithms — is distorting the once gloriously open podcasting universe. Social media, for example, has become one of the primary means of new podcast discovery. 

“If people are primarily learning about podcasts through short-form social media videos,” Thorn said, “then the podcasts they are going to learn about are the ones that are most inflammatory in a short-form context.”

 Still, he’s amazed at the journey he’s taken through podcasting the past 25 years. 

“It’s pretty awe-inspiring,” he said. “I was very lucky to become an adult when I did, because it was the first time someone like me could have access to the tools of production. People a little older than me had access to Xerox machines and they could make zines. But for the most part, my generation was the first to be able to access electronic communications on an egalitarian basis, without special qualifications. And if I were three years younger, I might have just become a filmmaker because I was just a little too old to be able to afford a video camera at 19. So, I’m very lucky that I came of age when the access to publishing exploded.”

The 25th anniversary celebration of “Bullseye” with Jesse Thorn takes place on Saturday, Nov. 1, at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center. Showtime is 8 p.m. 

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