Podchaser Interview of Mark Linsenmayer: Partially Examined Life and Nakedly Examined Music

0:06 Mark: What you're about to hear is an interview by Morgan DeLisle of podchaser.com of me, Mark Linsenmayer, host of the podcast the Partially Examined Life and Nakedly Examined Music. That will serve to explain what those endeavors are about, what lessons about podcasting they might yield, and a little peek behind the curtain as to how we produce these things and what's coming up. Enjoy.

0:28 Seth: So I figure we can start with the Partially Examined Life and then move from there into Nakedly Examined Music. I know from reading up like you studied philosophy in college, why did you kind of go into that? And at what point did you realize this is not what I want to do professionally?

0:44 Mark: I knew when I was doing it, there was really nothing else that I found myself interested enough in, in the details. I did a summer internship in biopsychology, was looking into other sciences, and I just didn't care about the details of enough. But I really love to learn the high level, big picture stuff about the various sciences. So that's what led me to philosophy. And I really was, when I was in, as an undergraduate, interested in doing something at the crossroads of science and philosophy. So you had to go to grad school to do that? I really went to grad school partially as a way of something to do while I was trying to get my music career going.

But of course I found it really interesting. And the more I was in graduate school, the more I got interested in different kinds of philosophy that I didn't think I was interested in before. I didn't think I was interested in philosophy, the purely historical stuff. I wanted to know, you know, what the right answers were, what the best way of understanding the world now is. But I began to see that these worlds that these folks hundreds, thousands of years ago were really interesting in and of themselves. So really I just got pulled along a lot of different directions there and if anything, became less focused, less wanting to, as a professional philosopher, specialize in some particular area.

And, you know, mostly I realized even from the start of that that the job market was just terrible. And that was definitely reinforced as I was in it. So professors would tell me, if you can picture yourself doing anything else, you should do something else. I think that's common advice to people considering academia. So yes, I got a regular job in software documentation first. Now I'm in transportation research communications. So yes, it took many years. Got kind of burned out from reading philosophy all the time and, and was happy to not do that while I had little kids and I went to grad school in the mid to 2000 is when I got out of the PhD program, but I had finished all my coursework and had my dissertation prospectus approved and it was just a matter of sitting down for two years and writing something.

And I decided I didn't want to do that. So moved up from Texas to Madison, Wisconsin for family reasons and having a real job here, rediscovered fiction, rediscovered regular non academic life, but then eventually was missing the experience and did some teaching on the side at a community college here in ethics. And that whetted my appetite for getting back into this. So started the podcast then in 2009. Yes, we're about to hit our 10th anniversary.

3:14 Seth: Yeah, that's first off just a long running podcast. Yeah, really, really cool. So you met the whole PL group in grad school.

3:23 Mark: Yes. So I reached out when I decided I wanted to do this. I was into some other podcasts. I remembered how fun this is meant to kind of synthesize three different aspects of graduate school, the seminars themselves. I think even if you take undergrad courses, you don't have that experience of you go in just once a week, you talk for three hours. It's really cooperative. It's not the teacher telling you what's going on. It's really up to you to make something of the text and try to make it important to you and get into the details and figure out what's hard to understand and figure out cooperatively how to best read this.

So that was one thing. Of course, you know, just being a spectator of that probably would not be so fun. So I also remembered how fun it was as a teaching assistant in grad school that the best way to learn a text is to teach it. So what we're doing is cooperatively teaching the text. And the third thing was that after the seminars we'd all go out for beers and discuss things in a much less rigorous manner and just really get out. What do we actually think of these people? How crazy is this stuff? And reflect on academia itself. So shoving all those things together made this podcast.

And that's. So the two guys, Wes Alwan and Seth Paskin, were graduate students that I knew from the time they were, you know, of the six or seven people that I had remembered from that time that I reached out to that I remembered, you know, being especially good conversationalists. They were the ones that jumped at the opportunity. And so we did the first 50 or so episodes with just the three of us. Then I discovered somewhere in there that my brother in law, Dylan Casey, who is a PhD physics graduate who then went on to become a. What they call a tutor, not a professor at St.

John's College, Annapolis, where they do just a broad great books program. I discovered like, wow, I have somebody in my inner circle who really enjoys the format that we're doing. And we brought him in as a guest on a couple episodes and decided to have him as a full time person. So we've had four podcasters for quite a long time now, and every two or three episodes we have on a guest. That was not part of the beginning of the conception of this. It was just going to be the three of us talking through, you know, having this long running, sustained conversation where you could get to know our personalities.

But we discovered quickly as we were getting into things that we had less expertise, less experience with that maybe having somebody like with the non western philosophy stuff, for instance, having somebody that had spent more time or had more enthusiasm in that area on with us as a fellow reader was good. So we've had those routinely. We also sometimes have big time philosophers that have written a book, preferably the people that we are actually reading in courses or who are taught in courses. We try to. There are so many wonderful. Everybody at an academic institution that has put out a book.

We've tried to improve relations with them or include them in some ways, but we found they're not going to join us necessarily very well as co readers because they're too knowledgeable. They're going to hog the conversation. We occasionally still do that. And then we do bring on some of these big folks like David Chalmers or Pat Churchland. Those were early folks we had on doing that. Michael Sandel, Elizabeth Anderson. We had on recently Simon Blackburn. So these are big names in the philosophy community, you know, insofar as there are celebrities in that area and if their work is being taught, then yeah, we're happy to read their new book and talk to them about it.

So we do a couple of those a year as well.

6:42 Seth: So at the time 10 years ago, there just in general weren't a ton of podcasts. But when y' all decided to start this up, I'm guessing there wasn't really anything like it being done. Did you worry at all that, like the format or the idea of here's a reading listeners, it would behoove you to go ahead and read that along with us and then listen to the discussion. Did you worry that either the content or the format might not draw listeners?

7:06 Mark: I definitely had no real conception that people would be interested in listening to this. I was combining Two formats. There were some philosophy podcasts out there. There was Philosophy Bites. Philosophy talk is a long running. You know, it was on the radio. There's entitled Opinions out of Stanford. There are definitely people doing things in this sphere, but it was mostly professors spreading their wisdom or there's. There's a guy, Matt Teichman, runs this podcast, Elucidations out of the University of Chicago, and he will just. This is a more typical philosophy podcast format where he will just kind of do that celebrity interview thing, but with just regular academics for every episode.

So it's. Every episode is a new world, an academic talking about their things. And there's no real reason why you'd want to listen to them in any particular order. It's not an ongoing story. Whereas we're trying to establish, you know, this is us as personalities rediscovering newly discovering philosophies and, you know, our own evolving points of view as we talk to each other. I knew that the selling point, if there was going to be one, was going to be the philosophers we're talking about. So there are a lot of people out there that did take philosophy class in college are wondering about Nietzsche, about Kant, about Plato, about these other big name people.

Sometimes it's a little, we'll have to draw them into, you know, an episode on Schleiermacher is not going to have as many people immediately saying, oh, I've always wanted to know about Schleiermacher, but he's actually a fascinating philosopher from the time of Kant and Nietzsche. We discovered we had pretty good chemistry early on and we tried to involve a lot of humor. So there was a podcast called Geeks on that I used to listen to that was four guys talking about. It might have been about video games or movies that just came out and that kind of lighthearted, you know, it's much more typical of podcasts.

So I was kind of trying to combine that somewhat humorous discussion based format with this academic thing. And I really thought that that might open up the subject matter for a lot of people who would maybe enjoy sitting down with their friends, their virtual online friends, and listening to a casual conversation about a text as opposed to just hearing a professor talk about it. I think as we evolved, it's gotten less casual in certain ways. There's a lot more quotation from the text. It's a lot more, you know, we'll have. We wouldn't have thought at the very beginning to have two episodes in a row on Augustine's Confessions to really get into that book, you know, just really dealing with anything that was longer than 10 pages of reading is kind of problematic.

But we've. We've really. As we've gone on, we've had so many episodes, it's over 200 now. We felt like, yeah, we need to take on some of these larger works. We need to take on some of these more difficult topics. But still, I think we have never expected that the audience would read along with us. Like, that is a hope. People tell us that you get a lot more out of it. But we are trying again, just like when I was a teaching assistant, we're reteaching the text, we're explaining what it's about to each other and then getting into our opinions and nitpicking at the details.

So hopefully this is an ongoing discussion we've had. How do we make sure in the first five minutes we say what the text is about, why it's important, and don't just dive into which translation you're using versus, you know, these little more esoteric debates that might seem like inside baseball. I think it's always going to seem. We try to make it. We had these ground rules at the beginning for the first many, many, many episodes where we. We're just not going to assume our audience has read any of this or knows anything at all about philosophy.

And we're not going to name drop. You know, this. These are things that if you're just listening into a conversation among specialists, they'll immediately turn you off. It's become harder and harder not to name drop as we go on because we're just referring to past episodes. So we're not really just name dropping out of the blue. We're saying, if you want more information, go listen to this old episode on Kant. But after a certain point, we can't keep, you know, reiterating the central thesis of Kant's distinction between the empirical world and the world in itself.

Like, we can't in more than a sentence, you know, we're going to have to kind of have a bunch of things with asterisks. So I think wherever you enter, you know, it's kind of at this point, like if you start reading a comic book, if you start reading Spider man, you don't go back to Spider Man 1 and read through 40 years of stuff. You jump in wherever you're interested. You jump in right now, and maybe this gives you. Okay, I didn't quite understand that point. I will go back in time, I will listen. And by the time. So people tell us yeah, that they do listen to episodes more than once sometimes.

You can certainly get the central point of the text and hopefully a few laughs, something amusing out of any episode, no matter where you're coming in.

11:37 Seth: So all through college, I'm guessing, and in the making of Pel, you've been working on music and your music career. So what's kind of the story between, like, how music has been there the whole time, if it has been, and then like moving into nakedly examined music from Pel?

11:52 Mark: Yeah. So the partially examined life seemed to scream at us to have spin off shows from the very beginning. You know, we'll do something in the area of psychoanalysis and like, well, that's not really philosophy. But Wes Alwan, one of our hosts, has gone on and done training in psychoanalysis, so maybe we should have a spin off podcast. So he's done a few. It's not a fully launched thing, but this thing called Subtext that we've just released as bonus audio on our main feed, but we think will be its own thing. I, from the very beginning was trying to get, you know, can we get celebrities to talk to us to help drum up interests.

So we got Lucy Lawless, the actress, for instance, was a fan of the show. She just donated money to us. And so we called her and got her on. And that, you know, opened us up to a new audience. We got Paul Provenza, the comedian. When we did our first episode about comedy, we got a comedian from New York on for that. You know, aesthetics is an important part of philosophy. So whether it's about painting, whether it's about literature, whether it's about music, we really wanted to have people who are also practitioners in those fields to give us a reality check.

So as soon as I could manage it, I was hitting up rock stars. Insofar as I. I'm into a lot of fairly obscure music. One of the first guys I bugged was from the Residents is a band you should look up from going back to the 60s that produces sort of underground, purposefully ugly in some way music. And so we're going to do an episode on ugliness and I hit up that guy. Well, I couldn't get that. Finally, I hit gold with Jonathan Segel, the violin player from Camper van Beethoven, which is an indie band, college band I really like, do these kind of gypsy music.

And once I got him then, well, you know, I got him actually talking about Schopenhauer. That immediately got the idea, well, we should have you actually talk about your own music and let's get one of your bandmates, your bass player, Victor Krummenacher, also from Camper Van Beethoven. So we got them together for episode 118 of partially examined Life to talk about, you know, our first one without a text. We watched a few interviews with Robyn Hitchcock and with. With some other people to kind of have something that we'd be addressing in particular, but talked about music in general with some explanation of those from those two guys of their albums.

And that was, you know, from then on, the seed was in my head that I want to do this music interview podcast as something that I could do. That particular episode on Partially Examined Life had two musicians and then just me and Wes, two of our hosts. So Jonathan hooked me up with his. The lead singer. So David Lowery was then in a much more successful band, Cracker. They've had top 10 hits in the 90s. So I talked to him for episode one of Nakedly Examined Music. That was the beginning of 2016, and was able to use that name to get a whole bunch more folks set up.

So. And started working through a couple of agents. Episode three was with Kevin Godley, who is. You might not have heard of him, but he was in Godley and Creme. He was in 10cc. And 10cc is a band that's sort of adjacent to the Beatles, adjacent to a lot of other famous folks. So using that first agent, you know, and then getting a couple more agents and I still, some of the biggest interviews I get are just reaching out directly to folks. I got Alejandro Escovedo, one of my idols from my time in Austin. Bill Bruford, the drummer for yes and King Crimson, who's become an academic himself since retiring from music.

Eventually got to Colin Moulding from xtc, my favorite band of all time. So I've been doing that for. I started every week. Now it's more every two or three weeks, but there's just a constant barrage. Enough agents know who I am that I'm constantly getting offered. And so the point of that, it's not just the typical music interview, which is to get them talking. A lot of times music interviews, they even remove the interviewer's questions altogether. Right? You just want to hear, who cares what the interviewer says? It's just the artist. But the Partially Examined Life set me up with this idea of cooperatively trying to understand a text and by having the celebrity interviewers on sometimes with that, well, it's cooperatively understanding your text.

And when that goes well, then it's actually a cooperative discussion. And it's not just the author giving the spiel that he or she has given at a million conferences and that folks can already find on YouTube. So I had that model already for doing with Nakedly Examined Music. So, right. I've been doing music myself. My first album put out in about 19, late 1991, just put out my 17th. It's under Mark Lint, if folks want to look that up on Spotify, Bandcamp, etc. The last few of them actually sound sonically really good, at least since 2008 or something.

And I did use the Partially Examined Life as a vehicle to promote myself and promote my music. From the very beginning, the end of every single Partially Examined Life episode, I would put a song that seems sort of relevant to what we just talked about from one of my many albums to that point. By the time we got to 2016, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of my own output, and I was very happy to use that to then cross promote Nakedly Examined Music. So Nakedly Examined Music was the first other podcast in what is now the Partially Examined Life Podcast Network, which we just added a sci fi podcast.

We have Combat and Classics, which is another guy associated with St. John's College, which we have a lot of ties to. With Dylan having taught there and Wes went there as an undergrad. It sort of provides one of the models for the Partially Examined Life discussions. He's got a couple of St. John's tutors on there with him. For the Combat and Classics, we have five Fic, which is a all philosophical fiction podcast, which was all listeners who participated. We started this in about 2013, I think, not school community. So one of the ways that we try to get people to actually give us money is we created a.

A back end to our website and gave the folks the ability to run these. You know, just basically set up a bunch of forums on our back end so to encourage folks to find each other and have Partially Examined Life like discussions with each other. Now that never really blew up into the major alternative to school that we would have liked. But one of the great things that came out of this was this Phi Fic podcast, which was all listeners that found each other through a not school group started that thing. But it wasn't until Nakedly Examined Music came along that we got the idea that we should have a podcast network and encourage these other folks who, you know, had expressed appreciation what we were doing, wanted to do something sort of like that in their specific area, allow listeners to investigate different aspects of Their personality.

So I really do see, you know, what I do on Nakedly Examined Music, which is we talk. Three of the songs get played in full from the artist and, you know, their recordings, we insert them, and then we just treat them like a text, like we would on the Partially Examined Life. Often the artists have never heard the Partially Examined Life, never heard other episodes of Nakedly Examined Music. And so it's a little wandering, but, you know, I. I'll just. I'll take really detailed notes and try to ask, you know, what do you mean by this line of lyric?

Why did you insert the. The guitar riff there? To get from the second verse to the chorus. Try to get into, you know, aspects of music theory, music business, arrangement, recording techniques, stories behind the songs. Really, every artist is a little different, you know, thinks of their music in a different way. Some of them are just purely. I'm a songsmith. I come up with these melodies in my head, and, you know, some are really just writers. The lyrics are first, and the lyrics are foremost, and they could kind of go over everything. And some of them, you know, I've talked to a lot of purely instrumental folks or guitar gods, drum gods, so I've been very excited to explore those different areas.

And of course, every guest that I hook up with, they probably have some more friends. You know, they discovered, like, this is a format that they don't get to participate in very often. They don't get to, you know, unless they're Pink Floyd or somebody that, you know, has had their music analyzed to death. These more indie artists, these more. Some of them have. Have had a top 10 hit, but maybe are not at the prime of their career anymore or, you know, I try to get folks who have had at least three, five albums out. Some of them have had 30 albums out, 40 albums out.

And I try my best to listen through their entire catalog and preferably kind of internalize it, feel, you know, have some of their songs going through my head. But really, at least with the three that we pick, just listen to them five, six times, take a lot of notes, treat it like a text, and they find that this is something refreshing and that they potentially, the more famous an artist is, the more they get beset by press, the more they get burned out by press. So it's incumbent upon me to give them a different experience, something to actually feels creative and.

And people like talking about their craft. A lot of them in a way that maybe they don't like being asked for the 50th time. Remember when you did that project with the guy from Green Day. How was it working with the guy from Green Day? Like, I don't ask those kind of questions. It's. It is a little bit of career. We use the three songs to get a little bit of career progression. At least one of the songs is an older one, but it's mostly about, you know, the nitty gritty decisions they make from moment to moment.

20:41 Seth: One of the really cool things here is first off that you've been in the podcast industry for such a long time, but then also that you've created these two shows that are. There's clearly a lot of overlap, like you mentioned in how the shows kind of go about what they're doing, but they are very unique, both unique to each other and unique to like the other things that are open in like their genre right now. What was the biggest difficulty that you had to overcome in not just having two shows but having two very different shows and handling the responsibilities that kind of came with that.

21:12 Mark: So of course time is an issue. And the Partially Examined Life, once we created that backend, we were able to monetize pretty effectively, you know, so about half my income now. It's lucky that my regular job already was a. In this transportation, research, communications stuff is working from home. I'm mostly working with clients in other states I wouldn't be going, you know, have some meetings and things, but it's a pretty flexible schedule and I'm a contractor through a small company, so I bill for the hours that I work. And so I was able without that much trouble as I was making more money from site memberships for the Partially Examined Life to cut back my regular working hours.

And this did open up some space. Some of the other guys in Partially Examined Life really do have demanding full time jobs. And so the two of us that didn't were able to prep more and maybe read extra books and there was some tension there. Like we have extra energy that we want to put into to this podcast. Wouldn't it be nice for their sake if I had something to distract me, something else to put energy in? I love listening to music. I think it's rare in the age of Spotify and things to even listen to more than one song in a row by an artist.

But I love not only just albums, but trying to understand from the point of view of the creator, you know, and the way I do that vicariously is go back to their early work and listen straight through the catalog if I can. And that's the way you understand what they're doing now is to listen to what they were doing when they really didn't know what they were doing and the jumps that they made to get there. So that was already a way that I was doing. You know, I remember a couple of years before starting Nakedly Examined Music, I was already, for my kids who were entering adolescence at the time, here I'm going to play you every Rolling Stones album in a row in the car as we drive around to places, or I'm going to play every xtc, every Weezer album in a row.

So it was just a matter of applying that habit that I already had to, okay, I'm gonna actually focus on this particular artist that I've connected with. Maybe somebody that I didn't know, but before, somebody that I wasn't even sure I was gonna like before. But I pretty much always find it's definitely my philosophy of music and art in general that if you give anything three listens, you'll probably see something in it. And the more you can get in the headspace of the creator, the more you're gonna appreciate what they are doing. Even if when you initially started it, you might have dismissed it as like just not a kind of style that you're into or, you know, only something that somebody who had not heard a lot of music would like or otherwise, you know, this is just weird.

Why would anybody bother to do this? Or there are a lot of people that have objections to music that isn't even aesthetic, it's more ideological. Like, I just don't like music that is so mean. I don't like music that is so hard edged. Like I'm a soft edged person. But I think those are all things that, that we owe it to ourselves as human beings to get past, to not say that half of the world, you know, that all hip hop is just, that's a weird foreign world to me. I can't understand that and I have no real interest in that. And it's fine if they like it, but like, why?

No, no, everything is accessible to the human condition. So you owe it to yourself to go out and do that. Anyway, so to address your actual question, I was very happy to initially put the time into this. It did, as I said, prove exhausting trying to do this every week. I much prefer giving an artist, especially if they have 30 albums, two weeks at least of my time, or three weeks or four weeks would be great. Some now I'm actually covering some folks that have written books. One of the Richie Ramone, the Last Ramones, Drummer put out a book. So even though he's not primarily, he doesn't have that many albums to his name.

He only wrote a few songs with the Ramones. But because he has a book, you know, this is something that we can talk about over and above the mechanics of the songs. So I'm opening myself up in that way to potentially get associated with a name like the Ramones that I'd love to. All the main songwriters are dead, so I can't talk to them anymore. The second thing though, the big challenge for the second podcast is, I mean, right now my listenership to that is just a subsection of the Partially Examined Life listeners. Partially Examined Life was very successful.

As you said. We got in kind of early. We really were able to get noticed when we got featured by itunes. So on the actual front page of itunes, you know, podcasts that you might want to be into. I forget what year this was, but it was, it was definitely a few years into it and our listenership just jumped by leaps and bounds. And since then we've always. We're lucky that itunes has a philosophy category. They don't have a psychology category, they don't have a sociology category. So we're in the rankings. If anybody's just browsing philosophy podcasts, they're going to see us in the top 10.

We've been just consistently since then, you know, we were, when we were in actually featured in like the top hundred of iTunes podcasts across the board. We haven't been there in quite a while. The podcast world, as you know, has just exploded since then. And more and more celebrity types, more and more TV shows, more and more NPR slates, kind of, you know, these organizational spinoffs, creating things that have a built in audience, have a built in brand that we don't have. So it has been hard since then to get discovered, I think, by folks outside of the philosophy world.

But there are enough people that are browsing philosophy that there is a constant influx of new listeners. There's a constant influx of new subscribers. We started, you know, not only did we pull a lot of our old episodes behind the paywall, why would people want to give us any money? We were relying on donations to start and we got a lot of good donations. But until we really gave people an incentive that now we've got, you know, a good 50, 70 episodes that you don't get to hear except for the first 20 minutes unless you sign up so that, you know, we've got a couple people a day signing up for our backend and maybe they only stay there for a month.

They listen to all the old episodes, they stop. But we've tried to create a continuous stream of bonus content again. Some of us have extra energy. So now just in the last year we'll finish an episode. We find a couple of us have more to say about that reading. Well, let's record it as a follow up episode As a Secret Part three. One of the other things that helped us a lot with Partially Examined Life is when we decided we should start splitting the episodes in half. So instead of an hour and a half, two hour single episodes, we had posted in two parts.

That way we could post every week. There's no way we could record every week. But we did at some point decide we're going to record every other week, which was already a big step up. You know, we had been recording every three weeks, sometimes every four weeks, but deciding to record every other week and we're going to release it every week. That by itself ensured that we would stay in the top 10. You know, there's always new stuff coming out and if every couple episodes there's a bonus thing, then anybody that is interested enough to want to go back and listen through our whole catalog, they've spent hundreds of hours with us.

We're hoping that we can provide enough incentive for them. I still think there's this everything on the Internet should be free mentality. So you know, we get a lot of complaining when we made this move and when we started putting stuff behind the firewall when it became less open source project. But there's still, you know, hundreds of free hours for people to listen to. I don't feel guilty about it. If somebody expresses a financial distress and wants to be is involved with us and is commenting on our blog, we're happy to give him a free citizenship we call it.

We also introduced Patreon a couple years ago because a lot of people were using that. We had our citizenship way before that. Patreon is a little restrictive. We don't get to let people have access to say the not school groups. They don't let you back date episodes. So you can't, you know, if you put up old stuff newly, it registers as new. You can't just recreate your entire catalog going back 10 years on Patreon. But we were able with Patreon to, you know, even for the $1 supporters, give them ad free, not split in half content. A lot of people like that, you know, like the old way we did it and actually once we split them in half.

That gave us kind of the freedom to go longer than two hours when we talk that we would feel like if we were posting two hours, like, that is the absolute limit. Nobody's going to want to listen to more than two hours. These places that are posting three or four hour podcasts, who the hell would possibly listen to that? But now if we record three hours, like, well, we'll just post it even as three pieces or as two kind of long pieces. One of them might run to an hour and a half. Like, that's fine. We also do do a lot of editing, I should say, and this is the key to the Partially Examined Life success that we've carried over into Nakedly Examined Music is when we started, I was doing all the editing myself.

Now we have a team of folks who we pay a little bit because we have this money from the back end that we're able to divvy out 20 minutes to one person, 30 minutes to another person. And it's very precise cosmetic editing. It's not so much. I didn't like that whole digression you went into. Let's remove that. Occasionally we do that, but mostly we keep the naturalness of the conversation. The flow is still there. The jokes, however bad taste they may be, are still there, except in rare cases. But we do get rid of all the ums and ahs and repeated words and especially, you know, podcasts where folks are just reading off a card that they've written beforehand.

Maybe they don't need this. But we, when we're hemming and hawing and trying to decide what the hell we're talking about, we need this. This would be absolute torture for people to listen to. So then we've, you know, I've gone and done that with the music podcast as well, though to a lesser extent, it's a shorter form. I don't talk to the folks more than an hour, but a lot of them, they say, you know, a lot, A lot of those musicians, it just depends on the guest whether they're a smooth speaker or not. Definitely a lot of editing goes into it.

So I think that's been. One of the key things is make sure that your podcast is tightly edited so that people are not going to get bored, are not going to feel like, when is he going to get to the point already now some Partially Examined Life listeners might be surprised by that because we still are kind of wandering through a text and like, what is going on on page two? Well, have we talked about we need to bring in the page Maybe we should talk about the intro before we talk about page two. There's some back and forth like that that might seem a little wandering and beside the point, but that's just part of sort of the madness of the.

Of the format. With nakedly examined music. I wanted to make something a little more conventional. Interviews with rock stars. Even though a lot of my guests. I wouldn't be surprised if you looked at my entire listing and hadn't heard of any of my guests. But most of them are very well known in their particular circles. If, you know, if you're into big guitar players, if you're into 70s prog rock, if you're into 90s indie, whatever, you know, they're at least. And they're probably at least associated with somebody that is famous. So that's been a challenge to, you know, work my way up the ladder of, okay, I've had two people that toured as members of R.E.M.

can I get one of the actual members of R.E.M and then, you know, have my biggest episode ever? It hasn't hit that point. You know, I haven't had Paul Simon come on. I talked to Elvis Costello's bass player, but I haven't talked to Elvis Costello yet. It's these kind of things where hopefully it'll break through, but I'm not even sure because the music space is much more crowded. If you just look at see all music podcasts, mine won't even show up because it only shows the first 200 or something in the listing. And this includes, like every DJ who posts a playlist of theirs.

Like, there's no distinguishing category for musician interviews versus music I want to share with the world. And there's so many music I want to share with the world, podcasts, virtual radio stations out there, that it's very easy to get lost in the crowd. I think that I am doing something very pretty unique in that space. Song Exploder is a notable exception. They do something that's sort of like what I do. It's a shorter form. It's 15 minutes. It's one song. He goes, you know, meets with the guys in the studio and they'll play like, here's the drum track by itself.

Here's the bass track by itself. And he'll talk to the different people involved in the production. And that's a wonderful, super produced thing. Mine is less produced. It's more long form. You get a much better idea of the artist's perspective. You know, not just this one little song, but using the three songs, we actually even Put a fourth song at the end and some more music at the beginning. So it ends up in being a little more of a career portrait. I think what I'm doing has the same appeal as Song Exploder. So there is hope that Nakedly Examined Music could be, you know, in the top 10.

You know, song exploder is like, you know, number one, number two, number definitely in the top 10 of music podcasts all the time. That is definitely one of the inspiring models that this is possible. But I can't get the folks, even with our ins, through being featured on Partially Examined Life, it's very hard for me to get the folks at itunes to notice Nakedly Examined Music, to want to feature it in any substantial way so that nobody ever just stumbles across it. It's always me doing publicity like we're doing right now, or we've just been looking into other venues, like, can we advertise on npr?

Can we advertise in Rolling Stone? The other Partially Examined Life guys really appreciate the quality of Nakedly Examined music and they want it to succeed. They are willing to let some of our funds go to advertising it. But I've just really had a hard time in figuring out what are places even to advertise this. Right. There's promo folks that I talk to who represent specific artists all the time and I ask them about it and like, well, they know how to, you know, advertise a new album that's coming out, but how to advertise a podcast that's showing some of the very same music that they're promoting, you know, that's a whole new space, like PR firms, at least the ones I've talked to, have no idea what to do with that.

Who even to tell about that. So I think, yeah, the podcasting world and advertising your podcast is definitely, maybe you could probably tell me better whether there's any non domain specific way. In other words, in philosophy, there are philosophy publications that we can talk about Partially Examined Life with. But in music, even the music world itself, the reason you haven't heard of so many of my artists is the music world itself is so fragmented. Right. Unless something is Katy Perry, unless it's like this very increasingly small section of music that actually most of the people you probably know don't even like of, you know, super popular music.

Then like, it's just noise, it's all segmented. And I think that's even more so with the podcast world.

34:53 Seth: Yeah. And I think like a lot of podcasts, unless they are like a lot of independent podcasts are running up against that same question of like, how do I get people just to know that my podcast exists? Okay. So as a wrapping up question, what are you most looking forward to in the future of both of your shows? What are you excited about that's coming up?

35:13 Mark: Well, I can tell you for the Partially Examined Life, we have our 10 year anniversary live show. We've tried to do a live show every year or so. We missed last year, Seth, one of our hosts, had a kid so it was not convenient for that. But we're in New York City, going to be on the book Brave New World. It's on Saturday, April 6th at the Caveat in Manhattan. It's in the afternoon. So yes, if folks want to see us live and live anywhere near New York City, go to our site partiallyexaminentlife.com and we've got a link to how you can get tickets for that.

And seating is pretty limited, so there's that. I'm very excited about that. I've also, I've really enjoyed, you know, the fact that we made this connection with Lucy Lawless made us think like, well, let's get her back, you know, she did a regular episode on Fame with us. Let's get her back to do an audio play. And I've always drama was as big as music with me when I was back in high school. But you know, going into college I kind of had to make a choice what I'm going to focus on. So I never did any plays or anything since then, but I was very into it in high school, directed one in high school, so used that, did the play no Exit with so I got to act with Lucy and one of her Spartacus co stars for that.

Then we did one on Antigone, got Paul Provenza, the comedian I mentioned, to do a main part with Lucy and had all of us podcasters do a spot. We did Lysistrata, ancient Greek comedy last year. So I'm always looking forward to the next one of those. And that's just, you know, I now have an excuse to meet musicians that I've always admired. Now I have a very occasional excuse to meet actors, actresses that I've admired to try to get them to come and, and join these little audio plays. So we're already planning the next one of those with a friend of mine who's a theater director in New York City.

You know, somebody that I haven't seen since, since being in plays with in high school is going to be in the next one coming up in May Or June. We haven't even set the date yet. But I always look forward to those things, you know, nakedly examined music. I just get new opportunities all the time to talk to folks that I didn't think I would get to talk to. This Ramones one's very exciting to me. I just talked to this guy, R. Stevie Moore last week who is the king of home recording. So I feel like I'm prolific. I put. I released my 17th album. He has like 400 plus albums on his Bandcamp page.

He's been doing it since 1968. He's put out something like it. At least I had heard at one point an album, you know, just lo fi, very low fi to start with, like an album a week pretty much since 1968, like in his own. And then so that what he would actually publicly release on a label would be like basically compilations from like I've made these 10 cassettes myself and I'll take the best of that and that'll be a first album on a label. So he's just a, you know, a monumental. There are so many of these folks, they don't have to be. I find that, okay, I didn't.

I haven't gotten to talk to Peter Gabriel. I'd love to do that, but he's super famous and I doubt I will ever get to do that. But I've gotten to talk to some folks who are pretty damn similar in their level of talent and approach and even songwriting style to my idols like that. But that are folks that never had whatever that magic combination of luck and relentless touring to make them household names. So there are so many just geniuses out there also excited with Partially Examined Life. Of course we get to talk, as I said, to some philosophy celebrities every six months or so.

So Francis Fukuyama, I was very excited we just recorded with. So always excited for the next one of those coming up.

38:41 Seth: Okay, well, those are all the questions I have and I really appreciate you just taking the time to talk. There's sounds like a lot of really exciting stuff happening and it was just really cool to get to hear from you. But yeah, just thank you so much

38:51 Mark: for your time and thank you so much to Morgan for the opportunity to go on and on like a giant bag of wind. I hope that was a satisfying peek behind the curtain or perhaps an introduction to one or two of these shows. In any case, you can check out Morgan's distillation of this interview as well as lots of other features on podcasts@podchaser.com to learn more about these podcasts, check out partiallyexaminedlife.com and nakedlyexaminedmusic.com. thanks.