Table Of Content
Whereas the boys, the other three boys have much better improvisational riffs on the main show, and so that's much more the mode that they feel comfortable with. So just not trying to force anything. Letting things come to you and just following where those impulses take you. He got fascinated with shows like This Is Us, and there's a show called Fellowship of Dads or Brotherhood of Dads, or so, kind of what some people would say bland TV dramas on Network. And so he started doing a series of that on the show basically because it was early pandemic and he was bored, called This Is Sus.
Episodes
I will appear on mic with them sometimes, usually when it's a topic that I particularly care about, or more often when we just happen to be down a member for scheduling reasons and we just need another person on mic to just keep the dynamic going. As a producer, I think of it as my responsibility to mainly just keep that show as close to its central dynamic as possible. Not only is Chris Wade the longtime producer of the massively popular, radical, left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House, he’s also a whiz behind the mic. He co-hosts the music podcast And Introducing, as well as Hell on Earth, a new history mini-series that launched on Chapo Trap House’s Patreon last month, building off of his earlier show, Hell of Presidents. As you mentioned up top, we have a particularly unique relationship with our audience in which, at a certain level, success is kind of a liability or a shortcoming among our audience just in terms of financial success basically.
Political influence
Chapo supported Bernie Sanders in his first presidential campaign in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries and his second campaign 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Usually what a network can give you is negotiating ad rates or something, and none of us use advertising at all. So mostly the value is, one of my key philosophical points, especially around podcasts is, podcasting is about having fun with your friends. And if you are having fun with your friends on the mic, that's going to come through and that's going to make your show work.
Left-Wing Authoritarians Shutting Down Democratic Party Chapo Trap House
Never this high production under the actual show's name. We did the Presidents series, but that was outside of the show. So I think it is mostly just not try to force things, take what your interest is and try to drill it down to the most basic manifestation of it. Concepts don't have to be too high concept, and this is more my delineation between host and producer. I feel much more comfortable and confident on the history series, A, mostly because I get to write out everything that I say beforehand, which makes me feel, as a producer, much more in control of what's going on.
It's always good to have the Seeking Derangements crew come on our show because we know them. They know all our same jokes, they know all our same references. It's just going to be a good episode.
Well, they've all happened before, in this moment, also in a way that includes really gnarly violence and Game of Thrones level medieval intrigue. So it's very win-win-win all around to build these interconnections between all of these people. I feel like we often get people messaging being like, "Oh, you guys should start a podcast network or something because we're all on the subscription..." I just don't know what the value add of that would be for us. And then the thing is, they're our friends, so we like hanging out with them. And really it is also just guesting on their shows, them guesting on our shows. It is strategically good cross-pollination, but it's also just like, that's easy content.
Matt Christman
Hell on Earth is available everywhere you get podcasts.
The rise of Patreon – the website that makes Jordan Peterson $80k a month - The Guardian
The rise of Patreon – the website that makes Jordan Peterson $80k a month.
Posted: Mon, 14 May 2018 07:00:00 GMT [source]
And so we figured out how to do a history podcast on the other show, the first show, out of necessity or out of just somebody asking, "Hey, do you want to do another show?" And so now when we brought it back to Patreon, we had a dynamic in place, a workflow in place, a process in place. We had a better idea of how to wrap our heads around the entirety of an idea and then bring it forward into a discreet set of episodes. And so that's basically how I delineate between producing and hosting on the Chapo feed. So we had the confidence that we had figured out how to do this kind of show from the Presidents show, which is, I think, obviously a much easier in for most people.
When to offer a member-exclusive content series
But I think one of the things that helps is the show itself is always just the show. But doing these miniseries and events things does give us the opportunity to be a little more aggressive about things in a way that feels natural. And then just in terms of promoting podcasts, I mean, often, frankly, cutting the trailer of a podcast, this is sometimes the most difficult part just because it's very long format and everything that we're talking about is interconnected. So just trying to lift two minutes or five minutes that makes sense on its own is sometimes the most difficult part of the edit for me.
And so having our friends all have podcasts in our same network and then guesting on theirs, having them on ours, is a very "all boats lifted" type thing. And certainly the success of some of the shows that have come up around us is one of the things that I know some of our hosts are most proud of doing with the show is kind of blazing a trail that works for other people. Style, like improvisational joke show. There's the Seeking Derangements crew, which is, if I'm not being too crass, it's kind of like gay Chapo. It's a bunch of gay trans comedians, hosts, who are talking about news and culture in a very similar way who were friends of ours.
But solely developed from us trying to wrap our heads around it into basically the history of the United States as told through the Office of Presidency. That was a lot of me writing basic background scripts and then him going off of it. The show has an democratic-socialist perspective, and its co-hosts are affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The hosts are typically extremely critical of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, particularly its centrist wing.
And now that we also have an audience, people have listened to us do a history series before, we have a built-in group of people that we can trust will follow us to something a little more esoteric, a little more obscure. In ten episodes, hosts Matt Christman and Chris Wade will guide listeners from Luther’s 95 Theses to the English Glorious Revolution, and all the blood spilled in between, with their signature mix of historical analysis and ribald humor. Find all episodes of Hell on Earth here. Hell on Earth will tell the story of the Thirty Years War, the cataclysmic outbreak of violence in central Europe that lasted from 1618–1648. It’s the story of the long crisis of the 17th century, the birth of Protestantism and the collapse of Catholic Christendom, and ultimately, the gleaming T-800 Terminator skeleton of Capitalism emerging from the rotting corpse of Feudalism. It’s a story of lurid violence from a bygone age, of hot death on the battlefield, and cool intrigue in the palaces of Kings and Emperors.
But it’s also the story of climate change, financial collapse, moral panics, speculative bubbles, pandemic, crisis in institutional legitimacy, of conspiracy theories driving policy, and an information revolution that changes the way everyday people relate to their political leaders. Biederman frequently notes his experiences growing up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, close to the University of Chicago, as pushing his thinking far to the left of mainstream liberalism and Democratic Party ideology. But what this series is actually about, it's about climate change, it's about financial collapse, it's about pandemic, it's about a sclerotic political institution on top of rapidly changing conditions that it can't really address. Do they sound familiar to your audience?
And I think all these people were inspired by just seeing our model work and seeing that there is a pathway there. And then also knowing that there's not much else like that around, which is one of the keys to Chapo's early success. And so for that, it's like, this is something new and different that the show has never done before.
But our big promotional platform is Twitter. That's where all of our hosts have their biggest audience. That's where we have our most engaged fan base. That's basically what the show is born out of. So you need something there that is easy for people to just click and be like, "What is this about?" Let me hopefully present it in a format that it has one button push and you can listen right there. And then while we were doing that, we came up with the concept for the second one, which we wanted to bring back to Patreon to streamline where all of our shows were offered.
Less directly friends, but certainly people who we recognized as colleagues. I'm a big fan of the QAnon Anonymous podcast who came up starting to really focus in on and examining QAnon and other modern conspiratorial thinking, and seeing all these people. And there are several more shows like that.
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