Catalyze

Podcast producer Nick Andersen ’12 on navigating his career in media and what it’s like to work for PBS MASTERPIECE

Episode Summary

Nick Andersen ’12 is a podcast producer for GBH Boston, the primary PBS member station in Boston. Nick shares with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team about his work on the PBS MASTERPIECE series. Before joining GBH, the producer worked for WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, and NPR’s On Point show.

Episode Notes

Nick Andersen ’12 is a podcast producer for GBH Boston, the primary PBS member station in Boston. 

Nick shares with host Benny Klein ’24 of the Scholar Media Team about his work on the PBS MASTERPIECE series. Before joining GBH, the producer worked for WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, and NPR’s On Point show.

The alumnus is also the senior producer for Ministry of Ideas, a “small show about big ideas.” The Harvard Divinity School series is dedicated to investigating and illuminating the ideas that shape our society.

As a Morehead-Cain Scholar, Nick wrote for the Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina’s student-run newspaper. He earned degrees in history and journalism. 

Music credits

The intro and ending music for this episode is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the band South of the Soul.

The music featured mid-episode is by scholars Asher Wexler ’25 and Emmaus Holder ’23, with voice-over by scholar Tucker Stillman ’25.

How to listen

On your mobile device, you can listen and subscribe to Catalyze on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. For any other podcast app, you can find the show using our RSS feed. Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at communications@moreheadcain.org.

Episode Transcription

(Benny)

So I know you’re in Boston right now. Is it correct that you’re pretty close to Cambridge and Harvard and that area?

(Nick)

Actually, since I haven’t been into the office in two years, I operate out of my house in Cambridge. So, yeah, I’m about a mile from Harvard Square, and my house technically is in both Cambridge and Somerville. New England has very old city borders, and as part of that, the city border goes through my dining room. So I pay taxes proportionally in both cities, which is annoying, to say the least.

(Benny)

Yes, that seems just like another hassle. But it sounds like, did you move your office at home, and do you have everything going on there? Is it an elaborate space you’ve got?

(Nick)

I mean, I’m in my kitchen. My office is my kitchen.

(Benny)

There you go.

(Nick)

In February 2020, my fiancée and I bought a table that we were going to have as a second prep table in our kitchen. And then a month later, I moved home to work. So I have all of my stuff from . . . most of my stuff from my office, in terms of laptop mount and second monitor, keyboard, et cetera. But it’s also stacked on top of a bunch of cookbooks, so it’s not as elaborate as it could be.

(Benny)

I came home to record this since I live in Durham, and so I have a chair barricading the door. It looks like a scene out of a movie because my dog will rush at the door, bump his head through, and come and say “Hi,” and I didn't want that while we were recording.

(Nick)

Oh, I mean, I can’t promise that my cat won’t come. He hates Zoom. This isn’t Zoom, so hopefully he won’t notice. But he definitely, he’s participated in a lot of my video calls because he doesn’t like when I pay attention to things that aren’t him.

(Benny)

So you’ve had such a strong theme of journalism throughout your career, but can we go back to high school? Maybe you were the editor of the school newspaper, or did this not come about until college?

(Nick)

Yeah. It’s funny because I recently helped my parents downsize from the house I lived in as a kid to a smaller house in my hometown in suburban Detroit. And my mom doesn’t throw anything away—that’s where I get a lot of that from—and we found the first article I ever wrote, which was in the school newspaper in fourth grade. So it was definitely a thing I’ve liked doing for a very long time. I was always really interested in journalism, in a sense, I just liked asking people about what they did and sort of liked knowing information. And so I don’t know if I ever specifically had a vision of wanting to be in journalism, but I worked on the newspaper in elementary school. I restarted with a group of friends in middle school the newspaper that had been sort of on hiatus for a couple of years. And then, yeah, I was an editor at my high school newspaper and wrote all the time. So I was always really interested in journalism. And eventually, I don’t know when the pivot was to audio journalism. I grew up listening to public radio with my family. And so I don’t know if it was my goal in high school, but it was definitely my long-term goal in college.

(Benny)

Okay, so then you get to UNC. You’re involved in The Daily Tar Heel, and I’d love to hear what your experience was like trying to decide majors and just going through. What was school like?

(Nick)

The first semester, I got involved with The Daily Tar Heel right away, and that was the 2008 election. And so it was super fun to work for a news organization that was covering that, the state and national desk. North Carolina was a swing state that year. I mean, it’s always a swing state. It was a particularly competitive swing state that year. So we had a lot of reporters covering the election. I was writing for the Features desk, which basically, we got to do whatever we wanted. And so I wrote a piece about former Senator Kay Hagan, whose daughter had taken a leave of absence from UNC to work on her campaign. And I got talked to the senator, and I got to talk to her daughter about deciding to not be in school for a semester. And in the end, she ended up winning that race. So that was pretty cool. And we wrote stories about, like, Neal's Deli in Carrboro had a McCain and an Obama hot dog. And so they had different—I think the Obama hot dog had pineapple on it, like a pineapple slaw because of the Hawaiian connection; the McCain one, I can’t remember specifically, but it was, you know.

(Benny)

Do you have to try it as part of the job, as part of the paper?

(Nick)

Well, I did not since I did not write the story, but our reporter very eagerly tried them. But it was definitely a fun, it was a fun semester to start at a paper like The Daily Tar Heel, especially one at the time that, I know it’s still the paper of record for Orange County and for the University, but we printed every day. We were the only people covering both a lot of university meetings but also a lot of town meetings. And it was just a great way to get to know a place that I had not spent a lot of time in. 

In terms of the academics of it all, I took a fantastic first-year seminar with a professor in the music department, Jon Finson, who’s no longer there. But it was called Music on Stage and Screen, and I thought it was going to be about film soundtracks, which is what I really love, I love film soundtracks. And it ended up being about opera, which was cool. I mean, our textbooks for the semester were opera libretti, and we would come up with different creative projects, every opera we listened to and analyzed. So, for example, we’d listen to Carmen, read the libretto, and then we had to write a compelling legal argument using musical passages as to whether or not Don José is guilty of killing Carmen or not. So that was super fun and nerdy. And I ended up, actually that professor became the second read on my history thesis on mid-20th century American opera. So that class was really . . . the language around first-year seminars is always saying, “It could change your college career,” but actually mine did because I ended up doing a summer project with the Morehead-Cain Foundation about opera in Europe. And then I had an independent study with this professor, and he became my second read. 

But at the time I was definitely thinking about journalism and also thinking about history as a major because my editors at The Daily Tar Heel were really explicit that I could major in journalism if I wanted to, but I shouldn’t major in reporting because I could get all the reporting I wanted out of working at The DTH, and I had to learn as much as I possibly could from the multimedia department. So I guess they were right. I work in audio. They also had an audio major that I should have probably done, but I didn’t think about it at the time. But yeah, I know. So I took their advice to heart, having not thought about it in quite some time. I guess that first semester was pretty formative, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

(Benny)

Yeah. I think first-year seminars and just sometimes classes in general, in my two years of experience at UNC, when you go in and aren’t exactly sure what to expect, it can go one of two ways. So it sounded like you got the best way.

Could you talk a little bit about the International Journalism Exchange Program? I mean, you were in Paris in 2010?

(Nick)

Yeah. So there definitely was a point of my undergraduate career where my Morehead-Cain advisor was encouraging me to take advantage of all the scholarship’s opportunities. And so I knew I wanted to study abroad, and I really wanted to work on my French. I was a French minor, and you can take language classes as long as you want, but until you’re living in the environment, it’s really hard to think about. I mean, the greatest example I can think of is my roommates in Paris were both French professionals. And early on in my time there, one of them came out of his room, and he said, “Le Wi-Fi ne marche pas.” And I was like, “The what doesn’t work?” He said, “Le Wi-Fi ne marche pas.” And I was like, “Oh, Wi-Fi!” I’d just never heard a French person say Wi-Fi, because that’s not a thing you say in French class when you’re learning the basic verbs.

(Benny)

Right.

(Nick)

So I had been lucky enough as part of the fact that I was no longer as concerned about funding my undergraduate education. A friend of mine from high school was a German exchange student my junior year of high school. And he was like, “Oh, we should backpack around Europe before you start college.” So after I did my summer of Outward Bound in the Sierra Nevadas, I came home for a day and then flew to Germany and spent the rest of the summer backpacking around Europe with freedom and my friend. And so I loved Brussels, which, nobody likes Brussels, but I really enjoyed Brussels when we visited it. And so I was trying really hard to do something in Brussels for that summer. But the journalism school had just started a partnership with Sciences Po, which is a major institution of political science in Paris. It was a great semester. I don’t know how much journalism I learned. Like, I was in a bunch of journalism classes. The instructors were great. It was incredible to live in Paris. My French got really good. But the program itself, the journalism school at Sciences Po, was pretty new. It was mostly a graduate institution. We didn’t have a lot of exposure to that. And also the UNC Study Abroad Department didn’t particularly care about where I was living. And they were like, “We really hope you find a place to live.” And I was like, “So do I.” So I ended up living in my apartment. From a writing perspective, I wrote a column for The DTH. I was the study abroad columnist that semester, and that was really great. I’m really proud of the writing I did in those six months. I got to live in a foreign city for six months. Yeah. And all of that was great.

(Benny)

So take me to Carolina. What were some of the apprehensions you had? What were your stressors in college? 

(Nick)

Yeah, I definitely probably spent too much time at The Daily Tar Heel, especially when I was an editor my junior year. We joked that I should just pay rent there because I spent so little time in my house. And the production schedule was incredible. It was really cool to work at a functioning daily newspaper, but it also was incredibly stressful and my grades could have been better certain semesters because I was too focused on getting the paper out the door every night. 

I was training for a marathon in my junior year, so that was a major stressor. I had never run a marathon before. I’d never run a half marathon before. I still haven’t. And so that was something I was super worried about.

(Benny)

It sounds like you’re the classic underachiever.

(Nick)

Come on, you’re interviewing Morehead-Cain Scholars, what are you expecting? It was the kind of thing where the Foundation really stresses—and I really appreciate the Foundation for this—what are you interested in? Let’s help you figure out a way to do that. I mean, majoring in music history and journalism, so clearly I wasn’t interested in making money, but I definitely was worried about finding a way to do something that mattered might be the wrong word, but that, you know, finding a way to do something in my career, like finding a way to take what I’d been learning, and also in a similar sort of sense of gratitude to the institution that was supporting me and how grateful I am for the Foundation, I wanted to make sure that I was doing the kind of thing that the Foundation and all of its members would be proud of and be able to, not only from a self-aggrandizing sense, point to me as someone who was a success, but also point to me as someone who used the tools that the Foundation provided me as a way to better the world in whatever way I saw fit.

So that was something that I thought about a lot as an undergrad.

(Benny)

Yeah. I think you’re getting at something that I’ve felt a lot over the past couple of years. It’s a tough angle to come at with anything other than gratitude and—maybe burden is the wrong word—but you want to do something great. 

(Nick) 

Yeah, it’s hard. And then, of course, if you talk to alums from decades prior to you, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I mean, I felt that, too.” So there's definitely an element of: how do I pay it forward in a sense and help other people get to have the opportunities that I have? And also, too, from a larger sense—and I imagine you’ll find this when you graduate—we graduate without student loan debt, and that is, among the other multitude of benefits that the Foundation provides a scholar, it was great for the first couple of years after I graduated to kind of screw around and figure out what I wanted to do because I didn’t have to worry about a constantly approaching a debt deadline.

(Benny)

I don’t think that’s a luxury that, being 19, that I think about too much—that, yeah, maybe you do have a couple more years after college that are a gift. So like you mentioned, you said that once you got out of college, you had some experimenting, some bouncing around. I’d love to hear what you did with that time.

(Nick)

In a sort of similar way to like a nice teacher or professor thinking I was interesting and giving me an opportunity, a professor that I had had in the multimedia department at the J-School was connected with a consortium of universities and colleges around the country called News 21. And the idea was graduate and undergraduate journalism students working on an annual reporting project about different topics of interest. And so as part of that, in 2012 there was a project called Who Can Vote, which was all about ballot access, particularly around states that had changed voter ID requirements. And so we spent seven months reporting on minority ballot access in four southeastern states. And also our largest project was a 50-state comprehensive Freedom of Information request that basically took lawmakers at their word and said, “Okay, you think voter fraud is real in terms of in-person voter impersonation fraud that photo ID would alleviate? Let's see how often that happens.” And we came up—and this was ten years ago—but we determined that it doesn’t happen to any large degree, a tiny tiny tiny tiny amount. 

But that was a really great project. We lived in Phoenix, which wasn’t so great. When it rains somewhere in the Valley of the Sun, which is the area that Phoenix is in, it creates what’s called a haboob, a dust storm. It’s Arabic for dust storm. And so you end up with a just debilitating dust storm. I got to go to the Grand Canyon. That was super cool. We went to a bunch of ghost towns. It was a nice summer and a good newsroom. And I’m really proud of the work that we put out as a group.
Yeah, Congressman Cooper, fellow Morehead alum, yeah. But that was a really great project. We lived in Phoenix, which wasn’t so great. When it rains somewhere in the Valley of the Sun, which is the area that Phoenix is in, it creates what’s called a haboob, a dust storm. It’s Arabic for dust storm. And so you end up with a just debilitating dust storm. I got to go to the Grand Canyon. That was super cool. We went to a bunch of ghost towns. It was a nice summer and a good newsroom. And I’m really proud of the work that we put out as a group.

And so at the end of it, I was sort of like, “Oh, I don’t feel like going back home to Detroit.” I had a lot of friends from undergrad who had moved to San Francisco. And I had spent a summer of my undergrad with the Foundation in San Francisco, and I really liked it. And so I figured, “Well, I’m already this far out, I may as well just go to San Francisco.”

(Benny)

Nick, you finally found the right climate. There it is.

(Nick)

Yeah, exactly. I didn’t stay there, but I was there for a couple of months, helped my friends move in, but I ended up deciding that I should probably just move home. So I moved back home to Detroit, the suburbs, with my family. I interned at WDET, which is one of the public radio stations in Detroit. Worked there for about five months, really liked it, had some pieces on air, really felt like, “Yeah, this is the right path for me.” Applied for an internship at NPR in D.C. in January after I graduated. I was there for six months working on their Arts and Culture desk, which was super fun, a really great place to work. I can’t speak highly enough about the NPR internship program. And then I didn’t know what to do. And I didn’t particularly like D.C., but I liked the work I was doing, and I was optimistic about the ability to potentially get what is known as a permatemp job. So this has changed a lot, but it’s still kind of a problem with National Public Radio in D.C. There aren’t a lot of open positions, and so they end up hiring interns who are very eager to take work at pretty generous and benefited positions, but on time-limited contracts.

And so I wasn’t particularly keen on that. And so I ended up moving back home, spent a lot of time on Twitter, and saw that Eater—now it’s owned by Vox, but at the time, it was an independent company, it’s a network of city-specific food and bar blogs—was hiring for a Detroit editor. And since I was living with my parents in Metro Detroit, I had a lot of friends who were moving into the downtown core of the city. I thought I could do this. I like food.

(Benny)

Did this position allow you to, not to be naïve, but go try all restaurants and nightlife for this blog?

(Benny)

Well, they didn’t cover your food, like your food costs, but you were encouraged. You weren’t a food reviewer, but also restaurants and bars didn’t understand that, and so they would treat me really nicely. I went to this one restaurant, I remember once, with a friend. And the problem is I’m a type 1 diabetic vegetarian. So, like, a lot of places, like dessert places, like butchers, were not places I was going to eat, but I would bring friends with me to do that for me. We went to this one restaurant, and it was not cheap, but they knew I worked for Eater, and they just kept bringing things out, things that weren’t on the menu. We had an incredible, I mean, it was an incredible . . . it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life. 

But, yeah, I was paid to hang out in bars and talk to people opening restaurants. And a cool part about that job now, a decade later, is that a lot of the people that I was talking to that were like sous chefs or under chefs at different places at the time now have really successful restaurants in the city that are doing really well, that they had sort of dreamed up in chatting with me. I'm not taking credit for the success at all. So it’s cool to be like, “I remember when you were a sous chef over here, and now you have one of the city's best restaurants.” So that was super fun. 

But I ended up getting tapped to apply for a producer job at a public radio talk show here in Boston at WBUR. The show, On Point, which is produced in Boston but distributed nationally. And so, a full time job with benefits felt more desirable than an opportunity to live in an architectural landmark. Even though, looking back, I kind of wish I had done that. As happy as I am with my life here, I would have been crazy, right? But yeah, so, I probably was not totally qualified for the job, but I got it, and moved here in fall 2013, so a year after I graduated. And I worked there for four years, I guess.

(Benny)

Yeah. So now you're a full-fledged journalist. You’ve kind of situated yourself into a cool role. I want to ask about the Harvard Divinity School's Religious Literacy Project that you worked on. It says that some of the questions you were asking were, “What is the role of religion and spirituality in human experience? Where does this come into play? And I mean, tell me more.

(Nick)

Yeah, so you’re talking about Ministry of Ideas, which is a podcast I’m actually still the senior producer of. It’s a Google group. I mean, it’s a glorified Google group, but there’s a group of folks called Sonic Soirée. In pre-pandemic times, we would meet monthly at different people’s homes. And the gist of it was a feast for the belly and for the ear. And so you would bring an audio piece that you were working on and a problem you had, and you would also bring a dish to pass. Through that, through my involvement in that, I got a cold call from this Harvard Divinity School student, Zachary Davis, six years ago, I think. And he was like, “I’m thinking about working on this podcast in partnership with The Boston Globe’s Ideas section. What do you know about audio?” Zach is incredible. He’s very convincing. He’s very thoughtful. A lot of these deep questions that you’re describing are things that come from his area of work. He’s a student of divinity. He also is just a super-curious guy. So he and I met a couple of times and had felt like, “Oh, this could work,” because he wanted to make a podcast, but he didn’t know anything about audio.

So the Religious Literacy Project at the Harvard Divinity School is basically the idea that the work that the Divinity School at Harvard is doing is really limited by its exposure to the outside. So how can we make people think about the ideas that we’re exploring here within the walls of this institution? And so part of that was this podcast. And so our first season was pretty great because we had a friend on the inside at The Boston Globe. So any episode we had would have a companion column version on The Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section. It was . . . it is an incredible opportunity, and it’s something that I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve always been super interested in the world’s fairs, and so I put together an episode about just the idea of a world’s fair and sort of like what that says about who we are as a collective society, and whether or not the things that we glean from different world’s fairs throughout the history of the institution have changed or not, and whether or not there’s any place for it in the future. Obviously, this was pre-pandemic, so the idea of a huge international collection of people talking about things in another country, obviously that’s not going to happen anymore.

But, yeah, it’s been a really rewarding and helpful side project because my bosses, both in my previous job and also my current job, are absolutely within their rights to say, “That’s competitive with the work that you do on a daily basis, you can’t do that.” But they both were really generous and said, “I think it’s important that you be creative, and if that’s something you want to do on your own time, by all means keep going.” So, yeah, that’s been super fun.

(Benny)

What’s something that’s been on your mind or that stirred something up for you lately through that work?

(Nick)

So it’s funny, when you emailed me about meaning . . . Zach, my host throughout the pandemic, has been just . . . Zach is very convincing, as I mentioned. I mean, he convinced me to do this job for no pay. So he reached out to a bunch of different big thinkers and some musicians and just people whose perspective he respected and asked them how they find meaning in their life. And so he’s had a miniseries for the last couple of weeks called Meaning. And it’s just been like the pursuit of meaning and sort of looking at how we define a meaningful life, or how we find meaning in the work that we do, especially in a time of trouble that we’re currently going through. And so listening to those episodes has been really, really, really rewarding. I wasn’t involved in the recording or editing process of these. Sort of the benefit of being a senior producer is that I can cast off work to other people in the group. But it’s been surprising to listen to Zach, who I see as an incredibly dynamic and thoughtful and interesting and interested person, sort of wrestle publicly with concerns about whether or not the work he’s doing is valuable or meaningful and sort of talk through it with people who feel differently about their own work and about the work he’s doing.

So, yeah, I think, exploring the question of how you find personal meaning has been a real—and hearing it played out through these episodes—has been really rewarding and really sort of dug at me as I worked here from that kitchen.

(Benny)

Right—with the cats nearby. 

Was there a response that impacted you greatly? To Zach’s work. 

(Nick)

I think just hearing Zach explore it has been really impactful. And I’ve let him know that because he strikes me as someone who doesn’t question himself and isn’t doubtful and just knows what he’s doing. And to hear him talk about his own doubts and concerns and worries, it’s been gratifying to hear somebody who I respect and value so much be publicly vulnerable, as cruel as that sounds. I think that’s just been really gratifying and helpful. I’ve thanked him for that opportunity.

(Benny)

So I definitely want to touch on the MASTERPIECE project before we go. Could you talk about maybe a favorite memory working there?

(Nick)

Yeah. So it was funny when you asked about finding meaning and personal meaning and the work I do, and I sort of had to think about my five years at MASTERPIECE. I grew up watching MASTERPIECE—MASTERPIECE Mystery—with my dad. We loved watching British people murder each other on Thursday nights on PBS. And I felt really guilty leaving my daily public radio talk show at the start of the first Trump administration to go work for a British period drama on public television, and it felt like I was shrinking away from my responsibility as a person interested in why things happen and how they happen and who they happen to. But working on the show—working on MASTERPIECE and seeing people’s responses to it—has been really gratifying. And I think a real highlight of that for me was working on our 50th anniversary documentary project, Making MASTERPIECE, three episodes looking at how and why a British period drama exists on public television and how that’s connected to the original vision of what American public broadcasting should be.

Working on the show and talking to the former FCC chairman, Newton Minow, who has just been—as a media nerd—has been a lifelong, I don’t want to say hero because that ascribes a little more meaning to his work than I would feel comfortable doing, but definitely, like, a curiosity of mine. He gave a famous speech in the ’60s calling television a vast wasteland, which, I would hate for him to see what we have now. But my editor on this project, she and I, we were using audio from his speech before a National Association of Broadcasters meeting—I think it was 1961, if I remember correctly. And I was watching one of the 2020 presidential debates, and I was curious about who was on the board that decides the Presidential Debate Commission. I was like, “Who’s on this board? Who’s making these choices?” Because it was one of the debates that was just a train wreck, not that they weren’t all train wrecks, but one of the ones that was really messy.

(Benny) 

You had to watch, but it was so entertaining.

(Nick)

Oh, yeah, it was amazing, but it was terrible. Yeah. So I looked on the Debate Commission’s website, and I was like, “Oh my God, Newton Minow is one, still alive, and two, still on this Debate Commission.” And so my editor was like, “You should email him.” I was like, “Okay.” So I did. And this man who’s like mid-90s—not a young man—replied immediately and was like, “I would be so excited to talk to you for your project. I love MASTERPIECE, and I think it is exactly . . .”

(Benny)

I was wondering, I was like, “He’s got to be pretty old.”

(Nick)

Oh, yeah, he’s not young. So I got to talk to him for an hour. It was amazing because he’s very used to talking about the “vast wasteland” speech. It’s the highlight of any sort of media history of America for the last 100 years. But he gave this long circuitous answer about things he was proud of working at the Federal Communications Commission. And he talked about how, because he somehow got funding for the Sesame Workshop, because—I can’t remember the specifics, but somehow it had to do with somebody had donated to Barry Goldwater a long time ago, and Barry Goldwater felt good about that, and so he helped support the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which is the reason why I have a job today, or I’ve had a career at all, really. So that was super cool to hear. And yeah, it was just incredible to talk to this person who’s had such a . . . he’d get these sort of weird asides about like, “Well, Mr. Kennedy,” meaning Robert Kennedy, “and I were wandering around . . .” because he worked on one of the two, he maybe worked on both, one of Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for president in the ’50s. My gosh, this man has just been in touch with and impacted so much. He’s done it all, and it’s not humble bragging. He knew why I was talking to him, but he was very generous with his time, very thoughtful, very interesting, and yeah, that was really a highlight.

Yeah. Because I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak to the actors and writers and producers who make our MASTERPIECE shows, and I think a lot of those conversations are really meaningful and end up being really thoughtful and in-depth conversations about the creative process. But for me, as a student of history, to get to talk to Newton, it was really just a true highlight of my career. So I’m pretty proud about that.

(Benny)

Very cool. Well, Nick, thank you so much, not only for talking to me today, but also for helping me with all the questions that I’ve had about podcasting in general. I definitely look up to you in that way, and I recommend that anyone interested in media and journalism reach out because you were so helpful and quick with responses to me.

(Nick)

Oh, well, Benny, I’m grateful for you for stroking my ego and talking to me for this project. As much as I hate listening to my own voice, I look forward to hearing the edit on this.

(Benny)

Well, thanks so much, Nick, and I’ll talk to you soon.

(Nick)

Yeah, be in touch.