This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. This month marks 25 years of bullseye, a public radio show and podcast, founded, hosted, and produced by Jesse Thorne. He's also the founder of Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows about reading, writing, wrestling, video games, you name it.

Jesse also hosts The Turnaround, Judge John Hodgman, and co-hosts Jordan Jesse Go.

But bullseyes where it all began, it's a place where artists open up about how and why

they pursue their art. Earlier this month, I called Jesse to ask him how this show survived every

new iteration of podcasting, beginning with its very humble birth. I was 19 years old.

I was a sophomore in college at UC Santa Cruz.

I was listening to the college radio station, KZSE, and they announced a station tour, and I went up there.

And literally, as I watched someone run the board, I thought, oh, up is louder, down is quieter.

I can handle that.

What did you expect to see?

I guess I was thinking of Frazier?

I thought there was like a producer and it was a whole thing.

But actually, it was just a lady in a bandana with a golden retriever in a bandana playing folk songs.

And so finding out that the bar for previously acquired skills was not terribly high, you did what?

We got an hour from 730 to 8.30 in the morning.

We had to walk to the station, and the UC Santa Cruz campus very wooded, very hilly, and very large.

But the bus wasn't running at 7 o'clock in the morning.

And we did comedy, mostly.

We found this record of whale songs, and we would have conversations with what we claimed was the space whale. It was a whale we'd met in space. We had call-in contests. At one point, we had a contest for a pair of tickets to a tango concert, and a woman called in, and she won the contest, and then she said she would

only go if she could go with my co-host, Gene, who was the funniest of us, and they

ended up dating for like a year and a half.

But yeah, I think we very quickly realized how hard it is to fill an hour with material that you've written.

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