Jesse Thorn On Bootstraping A Podcast Empire, Facing Twitter Trolls And Living To Tell The Tale

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 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.

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.

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.”