In 2006, after more than half a decade hosting the NPR-distributed The Sound of Young America, Jesse Thorn launched Maximum Fun. In a press release announcing the venture that would become a podcast network powerhouse, the then 24-year-old Thorn said, “Two years ago, I was worrying about how to pitch a hip talk show to the acoustic-guitar-singer-songwriter crowd that dominates public radio management. I still worry about that, but we’ve found that with podcasting, we can bypass those gatekeepers and go directly to the audience. The next step, though, is finding a way to make this endeavor sustainable.”
Eleven years later, he’s found it. Maximum Fun is predominately listener-supported with donor funds making up roughly 75% of the network’s revenue. And with tentpole shows like Bullseye; Jordan, Jesse, Go; Judge John Hodgman; The Flop House; The Greatest Generation and a bevy of programs hosted by brothers Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy including My Brother, My Brother and Me and The Adventure Zone, Thorn and company have been able to expand the brand to include a wide range of diverse and distinct voices in comedy and culture. With an established community of passionate fans, Thorn’s platform has risen over the years — to at least one painful result. After sharing his daughter’s daughter’s gender identity with listeners and a long stretch of uninterrupted support, Thorn and his family became a target of social trolls led by stand-up comedian Owen Benjamin. I talked to Thorn about family — from his MaxFun family and its larger community to his wife, children and one very bad weekend on Twitter.
With Maximum Fun, it seems like there’s a family nature to it. Not just the shows themselves and their hosts, but the listening audience.
I think from the very beginning, part of my goal was to create a community — online and in real life around what we were doing. I created MaxFun because there wasn’t something like it existing in the world—it was years before Earwolf started. My ideal was something like a mix between the comedy and hip-hop message boards that I frequented and public radio and, you know, Harley Davidson or something. Millions of people get together for Bike Week, right? And they get together to be with each other, not necessarily just to hear announcements from Harley Davidson. So my goal was always to create something that brought people together in some way.
Like people coming together in celebration of this thing they love.
I think that one of the amazing things about it is that it’s not even that people are coming together in celebration of a thing they love, it’s more that they are using this thing that they love as a proxy for people that they would love. That’s important to me, because at the end of the day, if all you’re gonna do is talk about the latest Jordan, Jesse, Go, that’s fine. But that’s not necessarily a community — the community comes from this kind of broader connection. Probably the most powerful Facebook group in MaxFun, in the broader MaxFun world, is the One Bad Mother Facebook group. There are certain portions dedicated to discussing what happened on One Bad Mother but I wouldn’t say it’s more than 5%. Really what it’s about is people who are animated by the values of One Bad Mother and connected by those values.
Sort of the shared experience they represent.
Yeah. And a way of relating to that shared experience. I think you could say there are a lot of parenting media, to use that example, but the thing that draws the OBMs [fans of One Bad Mother] together is the way that show specifically approaches parenting and sort of living as a parent. It’s the same as fans of Judge John Hodgman. Sure they’re gonna to some extent argue about who was right and who was wrong in a case but it’s more about a funny and decent way of being in the world.
I was looking at the Facebook for Wonderful and it really is the happiest place on Facebook. It’s just an entire Facebook group dedicated to people posting things that make them happy.
Yeah totally. It’s a really amazing thing. I think especially with the McElroy family’s shows, the fact that they are a literal family contributes to that feeling. I think that part of the success of MBMBAM is the fact that these three guys really love each other and you can tell in the show. They love each other because they’re family and that feeling extends to their other programs, and in a funny way extends to the audience. Part of what they’re getting out of it is spending some time in a loving space. Especially because in American culture, warm loving spaces are often insipid. It’s like the Hallmark Channel, and I don’t have any interest in the Hallmark Channel. I wish everyone who loves that and who loves Dean Cain the best. Not the least of which is Dean Cain. But that’s not my thing and so the idea that there could be cultural spaces that are both caring and considerate and edgy and irreverent is something that is very distinctive.
It seems like you give your shows and hosts freedom to play, and let them take chances.
The first consideration is always “Do I like these people?” And one of the reasons for that is, personally, I’m a bit misanthropic. If I don’t like someone, I have a really hard time working with them. I really need to like somebody in order to get over my own misanthropy so that is always our first standard. The other thing I always approach creative business as an independent creator myself. My goal was never venture capital or to sell my company for $50 million. I want to work with people I feel like I can trust to create independently and who could benefit from that. I’m not looking to be a talent babysitter. And at the same time, I’m not looking to mess with people’s vision.
How do you make the determination that a show is working versus not working? Or because you’re not as focused on that bottom line, do you get to give shows more room to grow and develop on their own?
Because of our model, between 2/3 and 3/4 of our revenue comes from voluntary donations and that revenue does take a while to accrue. And it’s only been in the last couple of years that we’ve had the kind of working capital, because we’ve always been bootstraps, to develop a lot of stuff ourselves in-house. So it really depends on what our relationship with the show is. For independent shows we’re essentially distributing that are owned by their creators, my standard for success is is the show good and can these creators continue to make it with the amount of money they’re making. And we have shows that have audiences of 5000 and we have shows with audiences of hundreds of thousands, and that standard holds across both. Shows with 5000 listeners that are bringing in a pretty modest amount of money every month but we like the show, we think it adds to the network and adds to the world, and that modest amount of money is significantly more than nothing and the creators love making the show and they’re in a position to continue making the show on that basis, often the shows are growing and that is awesome. The only time we have to make really tough decisions is when we’re paying the full production costs, which is more the case lately, and sometimes we do have to stare down that question. But my standards for success are still more about the quality of the show than getting some extraordinary return on investment. For the most part, we’re in the business of supporting shows, not ending them.
There’s a wide range of people and experiences on MaxFun. Was that always important to you, or has it been something that developed in the last couple years?
It has always been an important priority for me. The question has mostly been one of resources and bandwidth. For the first five or so years that MaxFun existed, I didn’t make more than $20,000 a year and for the next three or four years I barely made more than that. It’s only been in the last few years that we’ve had the opportunity to sort of front money on stuff. So as we’ve had that opportunity one of our goals has been to make opportunities for folks who weren’t in a position to make their own opportunities. A lot of our oldest and earliest shows, you’ll notice, are hosted by people who culturally would expect to have the opportunity to have their voices heard, have access to the resources to make the investments necessary, so in the early days that’s who we were picking from. These days, the last few years, we’ve had the resources to create our own shows and partner with people to partly fund shows, and ethnic and cultural diversity has been a top priority for us.
I see that particularly in the context of my NPR show that represents my perspective and I’m a straight white guy. One of the things I wanted to do to broaden the perspective of Bullseye was to add cultural commentary to the network that was related to Bullseye that represented perspectives that were different from mine. Similar in spirit but different in context. That’s why we created Pop Rocket and Who Shot Ya and Heat Rocks and all of those shows are — there’s no straight white dudes in any of those shows. That’s a continuing goal for us — not just in terms of talent, but our production staff. We started a paid production fellowship with the idea we could prime the talent pipeline. We do everything within our very limited bandwidth and financial resources to make that happen. We still have a long way to go to be perfectly frank. Not least because three white dudes who are brothers with each other host over 70,000 shows on our network. We still have a lot of white people on our network. But definitely, as we’ve had resources, that has been a priority.
We talked about family earlier, and you very literally have your family on the network. What’s that been like?
I’ve never really intended to make MaxFun a literal family endeavor. My wife ended up working for MaxFun after she rather forcefully rejected the legal field. She’s much more competent than I am, just overall. She only became an on-air personality because I was developing One Bad Mother with Biz [Ellis] and I was like you need to have a co-host on the show and it should be somebody chill. Biz is really intense. It’s weird. In a lot of ways, there’s a lot of our lives that are substantially walled off for public viewing.
I don’t quite go to the lengths that say John Hodgman does where he only refers to his children by pseudonyms, but while Jordan, Jesse, Go! is a show substantially about me and Jordan’s lives, it’s only a relatively narrow portion of our lives. And with kids, for example, I don’t really talk about that much more than to say a funny thing that they said. I try not to say anything that as they gain self-awareness they would be embarrassed by. But our child who we thought was a boy and had named Simon and had talked about as Simon on the air turned out to be a girl and obviously this was a surprise to us and we figured there’s not really any way to just kind of start calling her Grace without really confusing the shit out of people. So we took a minute on our shows to talk about her gender namely for clarity’s sake. Either we’re gonna explain it now or we’re just gonna be responding to confused emails and tweets for the next three years.
We had a relatively sincere conversation about it on Jordan, Jesse, Go!, and Theresa and Biz did a similar thing on One Bad Mother. The goal for both of us was neither of us are trying to do a show where our kid is the point person for a series of public service announcements. Our kid has plenty of kid shit to deal with above and beyond the gender stuff, and dealing with being a public figure as a kid would be even more crap. We didn’t want to pile anything extra on a five-year-old’s plate. And the reaction was really amazing. Just astounding to hear the way that kind of thing can affect someone else’s life, somebody that’s not even in our family, is really amazing and awesome. I literally don’t think I got one bit of negative feedback, even on Twitter. And that was pretty much that for a year or so.
Until some comedian decided to weaponize it.
John Hodgman had written a really sweet and thoughtful note about how being considerate had affected his own life after there was a story about Mel Brooks saying political correctness was killing comedy. I’ve interviewed Mel Brooks. He’s a lovely human being. He also personally fought the Nazis. He’s a real hero of art and life. And I think the story was overblown, and you can’t really expect a 90-year-old to fully understand the cultural context of the current world. And frankly nothing Mel Brooks said was particularly awful. I think he’s mistaken and that was sort of the point of Hodgman’s thing, that it can be tough to understand the way the world changes but it’s important and it’s worth the work. It allows other people to enjoy art. And then this stand-up comic was bagging on Hodgman and someone commented to him “Well what do you expect, his quote-unquote boss…” Which, by the way, I’m not John Hodgman’s boss, it’s a joint venture and Hodgman owns more of the show than I do. And they basically suggested that I had, like, personally scrubbed up and given my child gender confirmation surgery as a three-year-old.
They painted a very specific picture that doesn’t make sense physically or medically.
Yeah, and I was like, well what am I gonna do about this? I don’t want to get in a fight with this guy. It would just make me bummed out, but I also kind of don’t want to let it stand because that would also make me bummed out. It was a bummer of a situation. Obviously this guy’s hurting in some way and he obviously doesn’t know shit about it. He doesn’t know shit about my specific situation and he doesn’t know shit about how gender works. How doctors and experts and people who have lived this experience know how gender works. Because I didn’t. I’m hardly a great expert on it now. Even as a relatively woke native of San Francisco, I had plenty to learn.
So I was like, this guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so the path I’m gonna take on this is basically to try and fill in the stuff he doesn’t know and I’ll let it be. When this kind of thing happens on Twitter these days, people who are searching for things to be upset about tend to pile on. Some of those people say really shitty things and I reported them to Twitter. When this comic started suggesting that I was an abuser, possibly a sexual abuser, I reported that to Twitter. It ended up I muted everything. One of the weird things in that situation is that even people defending you don’t make you feel better about it because it just reminds you about the fight. I just kind of muted everybody. But a lot of pals in comedy reached out to me and said, “Yeah, fuck this guy.”
It’s weirdly a nice thing knowing that you can take a step back, mute everything and know people have your back.
Absolutely. I can’t claim that it didn’t ruin my weekend. I certainly understand also the ways that this affects people who weren’t born as straight, cisgender, white men. For us, we’re supported by people who donate money who don’t even really get anything for donating money other than knowing they voluntarily supported the thing. And the way to make that model work is to make something that people care about, not to make something that people are willing to tolerate. That in many ways is our saving grace as public people, is the people who care about our work genuinely care about it, are invested in it and understand the context of who we are. And it means among other things that if we do something shitty or say something shitty, many people in our audience have the comfort with us to know a) that we’re not assholes, we just made a mistake and b) that if they’re nice about it they can reach out to us and correct us or offer their perspective on something and we will actually try and listen. It’s a much better place to be. I’m very grateful that we have this community of people that signed up to be there, and they get it.
