For the third edition of the series “Interviews with Non-Evil People,” I talked with Kristen Meinzer, award-winning podcast host and creator, cultural critic, and writer.

We talked about finding joy and fulfillment outside of work, what makes a good podcast host (and journalist), and fighting the urge to monetize everything.

Context: Kristen was my internship advisor at WNYC in 2013. I was the first and only intern for The Takeaway’s movie review segment Movie Date and feel comfortable saying that I was not great at it (not her fault. That was a me problem.) We met at Volare Espresso Cafe in Park Slope which is a supremely cozy place to work.

For transparency: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Not drastically, but enough that every other line isn’t me saying “yeah.”

Also: Kristen is from Minnesota and I asked what people from outside of Minneapolis could do to help. She said donating to legal aid and rent relief funds should be a top priority.

What is your process like for choosing projects?

When I first started freelance podcasting, my general rule was like the Michael Caine rule: say yes to every single job. Like, he would just say yes to every single job 'cause who knows how long it was gonna last? "Jaws 2? Sure." 

I hope the Muppets Christmas Carol was something he wanted to do.

Oh, he's very proud of that.

Okay, good.

Yes, he's very proud of it, and his grandkids love it. So I was thinking the same way as him when I first went freelance. Say yes to everything, even though that sometimes meant I was working up to eight shows at a time, producing slash writing, creating, hosting. just felt like the more things I said yes to, the more likely I would have work down the road if things got bad. But then things did start to shift 'cause there was the heyday era when every company had a podcast. Your gas station had a podcast.

Your mattress company-

Your mattress company had a podcast. Everyone had a podcast. So I worked as much as possible during that, but then when the heyday started to not be a heyday anymore then I started thinking if podcasting went away from me, what's the next thing I would do? What does my ideal life look like? I love podcasting, but what is it about podcasting specifically that I love? Well, I love talking to strangers.I love being curious. I love learning new things. I love being creative. I like being able to have an opinion and debate with others what my opinions are. I like storytelling. I like history and I like all of these other things, and what could I do where I could still enjoy all these things? 

So I started making these long lists of other things I would be super excited about doing so that I could make sure that podcaster is not my whole identity. Libraries, anything with libraries. Working in cafes because I get to talk to strangers every day. Working in something that's tactile, versus just being at my computer all day. I love my computer. But there is something magical about my lunch break every day, where I actually, make and assemble food. In my college years, I worked in restaurants for years, and I loved it.

I think it's really easy for people to feel like their job is their identity. Like, one of my friends has this quote. She's like, "We're told that if you don't love your job, it's not worth doing. We're told to have a dream job, but why should we dream about labor?" 

Most of America doesn't have a dream job, but the job allows them to do the other things they love in life. So I've been trying to think a lot about what are the things I love most about podcasting, then what are also the things I love to do most that have nothing to do with podcasting? I love walking. And I've been an avid walker for most of my adult life. I've walked to JFK Airport. I've walked four boroughs in a day. I've walked to New Jersey. I've done the Great Saunter, where I walked the entire perimeter of Manhattan. Last summer, some friends and I did a stretch of the Via Francigena, which is the pilgrims' walk that goes from Canterbury, England, to Rome.

We did the stretch in Tuscany, where we walked around 150 miles from village to village and carried everything on our back.

I think we should stop feeding to people that whole, "You must love what you do, and you'll never work a day in your life." What I say when young people ask me about what my philosophy is with work is that if you like more than half of what you do, you're doing great.

If your job doesn't make you cry, things are probably good.

I mean, I would hope the bar is above that. But unfortunately, a lot of us have had jobs that made us cry. 

So you were talking before about how you used to take everything for work. So what's the better way of doing things?

I don't think that was a bad thing to do. For a solid five year period, I took everything, and then like I said, I was working, like, eight jobs at a time sometimes. And now that the industry is different, and I think I'm different. I don't have quite the same scarcity mindset that I used to. 

Let's say, right now I'm hosting three podcasts. Let's say, eventually, it's down to one podcast. It doesn't make me feel like I gave up or that it's embarrassing if one of my other jobs is working at the library or at a coffee shop. To me, that sounds great. I just think there's ways to be fulfilled in all sorts of jobs. But again, I've been also trying to make sure I pay attention to what I'm fulfilled by that's not work. And, my daily walk is one of the greatest joys of my life. Listening to an audiobook and taking a walk, I love it.

What are you listening to now?

I'm about a quarter of the way through my 50 States Book project which I just started this year. So a book from every US state where the state is like a character in the book. Like the state actually has to be part of the identity of the book. I think I've read about 15 books so far. 

I'm doing them in alphabetical order. When I first posted on social that this was my challenge I was embarking on, I asked people: "What books do you think I should read for your state? Tell me what state you're in and what book you think I should read." And then a couple of coworkers and friends were like, "Can we start a book club around this? Can I be in your book club?" So now it's a book club with a few people. And we all live in different states. And we are each individually reading whatever we want to in alphabetical order by state. And we are then going to meet once a month and talk about what states we got through, what books we read, and then if all of us happen to ever read the same book, then we are planning a road trip to that place.

Oh, I love this.

I'm up to the letter M, I think, in the alphabet now, or close to that. I've been jumping around whenever I have books on hold for the other states.

I'm trying to think of what I would recommend for Massachusetts. Obviously, Walden comes to mind, but I'm sure you've read Walden.

I've only read bits and pieces of Walden.

That's fine.

And the bits and pieces I've read, I'm like, "I don't know about this guy." Like, his sisters bring him dinner every night. His neighbors are doing all his laundry for him.  I'm like, "So you're supposed to be getting back to nature, but it sounds like such a privileged thing." Of course, you can do it when everyone else is waiting on you and giving you a free house to stay in.

Yeah, like Insomnia Cookies was made for him.

And maybe that's the wrong take to have on that book, and if I read it, I would feel differently.

No, you wouldn't. It is what it is.

I like to have different challenges. I started it during COVID, and I think it's just 'cause I was stir crazy and missing going to the office. Like, clearly, life wasn't challenging enough for me, so I just came up with additional challenges for myself.

No, that's a good one.That diversity of locations is something I rarely think about. I try to pick diverse writers but I never think "Oh, I need to get out of New York" or "I need to get out of the US." 

It's really hard because it's the same thing with films. It's like I would like a film that's not in California. But the film industry's in California. They're in love with green-lighting California projects, and publishing is in New York, and they're in love with New York books. I love trying to figure out which of these Arkansas books should I read. The research has been half the fun.

So I was looking at your LinkedIn, and I saw that you worked for YourTango in 2008.

Oh, my God, that was, like, 20 years ago.

I was thinking a lot about that time of XOJane and those websites where you could talk about how bad your life was for $100. Do you think those sites had value?

I like to think not everything about the XOJane or the YourTango world was bad. I do think it made a lot of people feel seen in certain confessionals, where it's like: I thought I was the only one where that thing happened with my blank. My mom, my vagina, my boss, whatever it is. I think that it made a lot of people realize, "Oh, I'm not a freak." And I also think that some of it was obviously clickbait, some of it was just voyeuristic. Some of it was mean-spirited and bitchy. But I do think there was also a certain element of making people feel like they weren’t the only one experiencing something. 

If you were giving me an Architectural Digest tour of your career, what would be the things that you'd make sure to show me?

My first full-time job was when I was eighteen. I was working at a mail order catalog business. And we had cute tchotchkes, and gift items, and books, and we were ostensibly for friends and fans of public radio and television. It was called Riverside Trading. They're a Minnesota-based company, and they had these two main catalogs. One was called Signals.

I remember that!

I worked for that company, and I was  initially a customer service representative. People would call in, and they'd say, "The name was spelled wrong on my personalized Star Trek mug," Or—

My hieroglyph necklace.

Yes, exactly. "My hieroglyph necklace, I just checked it against the hieroglyphs, and that's not how you spell Margaret.". So I would field all of those phone calls and try to make customers happy and do it in the quickest turnaround possible. I loved the momentum of trying to answer the most phone calls and make the most people happy. At one point, there was a leaderboard, and the person at the top would get a grocery gift card. And I was like, "I'm gonna get that grocery gift card. I'm gonna answer the most phone calls and help the most people and try to make their day better, and apologize eight hundred times and tell them they matter to me." I liked that I got to talk to so many people every day. And I think it was useful for  listening skills and trying to say, "I hear you, I hear you." I think one of the biggest agonies in this world is so many people don't feel heard. So even if it's just the customer service rep, I'll be that person. People often ask me, "What's translated to help you become a better podcaster?" I think that job was a big part of it.

I was gonna say that feels like a perfect lead into podcasting because you do have to learn how to listen and respond in kind and make sure that you don't sound distracted.

And there's a lot of multitasking. I still sometimes think back on that job and how much I loved it. I did it for years in college. 

Another job is my first job when I moved to New York. I worked at a nonprofit called DOROT, which was originally started as a friendly visiting and meal delivery service for Holocaust survivors in New York. And then they expanded to be for people who were living with AIDS, people who were homebound, people who were blind. I was hired to work at a branch called The University Without Walls. We had support groups and classes over the phone for people who couldn't leave their homes. 

I originally started there as an admin, and then they let me start teaching classes, so I taught film and television studies classes over the phone. I would play clips. I would have literally a tape recorder, and I would play part of a cassette tape where I recorded things. The way I tried to design each of my classes was, just like the call center job—how can I make you feel seen and listened to? I made it clear to my students that I know that sometimes we all feel powerless in the world and it can feel especially that way when we can't leave our houses. But watching TV is a choice. And how you engage with what you're watching is a choice, and what you're taking away from it, and how you talk about it with other people is not just a choice, it's putting more out into the world. You're not just being a consumer at that point. You're part of the national conversation, and you're also part of our national values. I don't want you to feel like watching TV is just a passive thing. 

I think that teaching those classes really helped me to think about the students in the class, which for the podcast, would translate to listeners. Who is your listener? What do they need to hear to be excited about this class? And how am I making them feel less alone? No one wants to just be preached at. I wanted them to feel like they were engaged with the conversation and with the process. 

So how do you make a podcast where clearly there's no interaction feel like you're not preaching and you're engaging?

I've tried to have an interactive element on most of my shows. But then, even with shows that are less interactive, I've always tried to think about who is the person listening to this? What is their typical day like? What are they doing right now? I always have somebody in mind and I think a lot of showmakers do the same thing. It's like, our listener is Amanda. Amanda is a 59 year-old empty nester who is feeling really lost right now in life. Or our listener is Jamal. Jamal is fresh out of college and he is feeling optimistic, but also scared. And how do we make Jamal feel listened to? 

That's a good point 'cause you always hear the advice of “make something that you want, make something that you feel is missing.” But it's not necessarily about you. It's trying to figure out the other people in the world and how to make something that's for them. And we have to kind of get out of our own head a little bit more than I think we do.

In my book, and anytime I’m consulting, right off the bat, I say: Why do you wanna make your show, and who is it for? So it's both things. What is the thing that's gonna make me do this hour after hour, day after day, possibly for years at a time? What is it that makes me wanna go back to cutting that audio and recording and booking that guest and promoting this? Why do I need to do this? And the who. But they're equally important.

Do you have any questions you ask people to really make sure they wanna do it? Like as a gut check?

I always make clear that the vast majority of podcasts, like 99% of them, make no money. Are you gonna be okay with that? Are you gonna be okay letting go of the dream of passive income? Are you going to be okay—if we compare this to your senior thesis—doing your senior thesis every week for the rest of your life? And that might sound really joyless, but it can really be that much work. 

Do you remember who the first person in your life was who said, "Watching TV isn't a passive activity?" Do you remember who taught you that?

I don't know that my family taught me that, but we definitely had TV on a lot growing up. Definitely in my film studies classes in college, we treated watching TV and watching movies as something that was important, that it was saying something about our culture, that it was reflecting our culture and in some ways shaping our culture. Like a lot of folks, I went through a brief period as a teenager where I was trying really hard to be cool. I wanted to be a cool kid so bad. 

Same.

And that was another time I learned that I could be more active, and less passive with my media consumption. I could act like I was above mainstream TV and movies, and instead throw myself at classics and Czech new wave and “challenging” experimental cinema with a capital C. I could treat media like an expression of identity. But eventually, the older I got, the more I got away from wanting to be cool. I think I liked myself a lot more and it doesn't matter if I'm cool or not. I wasted too much of my life worrying about what the cool kids think. And by the way—Love is Blind, I love it. Yes, Bridgerton, I love it.  I also found my people who love TV as much as I do and love movies as much as I do. I have different text threads with different friends, and get together to watch finales with different friends. We had a thread going when Love is Blind was in Minneapolis, just like, "Oh, my God, what a nightmare! I'm so glad I'm not in Minneapolis anymore." I hated dating in Minneapolis. It was the worst. Maybe it's different now. I haven't lived there in 25 years.

Do you remember a thing you pretended to like, and then the moment you realized, "Nope, I don't like this, and that's okay?" Or things you pretended to not like, and then one day you were just like: "Nope, I like this. This is my thing."

I think I just sometimes wasn't even tapped into what I really liked 'cause I was, as a younger person, really worried about being cool, being accepted. And I think a lot of that was just because growing up in my part of Minnesota, I was frequently the only person who looked like me. I was frequently the only non-white person sitting at the table. And wanting so hard to be cool in some ways translated to, "I don't wanna be other." So then I would have magenta hair and face piercings, so the first thing people would notice about me wasn't that I was Asian. They would notice the pink hair. And it was a way to otherize myself in a way that I thought was at least a cool version of other rather than a version of other that just is not white. 

That's so interesting that you went from that to making a career out of pop culture which we create community around. I don't really feel like I have a friend group at all. But especially when Twitter used to be Twitter, being able to interact about culture and being able to talk about a live event, like the Oscars, felt like being a part of something. There was one day that I think about all the time where David Brooks' wedding registry was public and Twitter had a fucking field day. And I just remember the joy of a very niche crew of people who found this funny all gathering together to talk about the china patterns he picked out. But, that's how you find your people. And I don't know if we've replaced that. [side note: I once worked at a party that David Brooks and his then-fiance were at. She asked for chardonnay with ice and I looked at her and said, “is that a thing?” He got chocolate on a white couch and I had to clean it up. I hope they’re happy.]

I was on Twitter a lot. I had this check mark which meant that no one could impersonate me, but then my checkmark got taken away when Elon Musk bought it and other people could impersonate me. Then I was like now if other people are pretending to be me, what is the point of being on this platform anymore? I don't understand. Like, isn't that what the check mark was for, because I was an actual journalist?

I got one when I was at Mental Floss, 'cause, one person knew a person. It felt very special. 

At that point, I was so disenchanted with all of it, I just didn't bother to go through the steps you're supposed to to get the check mark on other platforms. Like, aren't I supposed to try to apply for it for Instagram? Even LinkedIn is like, "Make sure you get your check mark," and I'm like, "What does a check mark mean anymore?"

I don't know if I wanna play this game. One thing I love about LinkedIn, at least my view of it, is it's one of the few places I can go on the internet and just cheer for people. And I try to go on a few times a week and just applaud people, whether they got a new job, or they started a newsletter, or they have a new creative project that they're thinking about. I just wanna go on there and cheer for people, and there aren't a lot of places that are designed specifically to cheer for people, and I feel like LinkedIn might be one of those places.

There’s Strava. When people run, you can give them kudos. You could do that for walking too. 

I can't do that. I can't do apps that monitor my movements. I know a lot of people love them. I have a really hard time being monitored or tracked. It just sets off the synapses in my brain in a really weird way, where I'm just like, "Ugh!"

I think that's a normal response. I think we've all just gotten used to it. It's bad that we're like, "Yeah, please track everywhere I'm going and every turn I make."

I don't want my movements monitored. I don't want my food monitored. Just seeing these What I Eat in a Day videos popping in my feed. II don't wanna see you monitoring your food. I don't wanna monitor my own food.  

The food ones are horrible. And then you have the videos of people commenting on what the people are eating. It'll be a model saying what she eats and then it'll be a nutritionist commenting on the model’s diet. And then the people in the comments will be commenting on what the nutritionist says. 

Sometimes I think about posting my salad of the day. I try to shake up my salads. Like at lunchtime, I'm like, "Okay, so today's salad has chickpeas, chicken, avocados,” and then yesterday's salad had rice noodles, and celery, and peanut butter, and all these Thai seasonings in it. And then I can show the table. But how close is that to what I eat in a day? And how close is that to not just enjoying life anymore and trying to once again monetize something?" 

Like, I love walking. I do it every day, but it doesn't have to be monetized. Like, my 50 States Book Club, I keep thinking, "Should I turn that into a podcast, or should I just try to enjoy a book club that's not for work?" But then again, some people are like, "You don't have to monetize all your hobbies."

The thing about broadcasting everything we do is it gives people the opportunity to feel seen and see people who are like them. But how much of what we're posting actually does that? Where is that line of “you're just doing this to show off,” and “you're doing this to help other people?”

I think it's a fine line. When I was hosting Movie Date at WNYC [with Rafer Guzman] for almost six years, he and I were reviewing films, and interviewing people, and answering listener mail. Then I started hosting a few shows where I felt like my whole job was to expose myself. I wasn't somebody who wanted to make myself the product in that way. I didn't want all my vulnerabilities and embarrassments to be my bread and butter. But I think that there was a period there, like 2016 to 2020 where that's what so many podcasts were as if the more you expose yourself, the better you will be seen as a vulnerable storyteller and as a product. I did that for several years, and I don't regret it at all. But that's also never what I set out to do and I'm not doing that at the moment with my current shows. It's nice to remember that I don't have to be the product in that way. I don't have to have my whole life on display for my work to be valid or useful.

A good host and popular host aren't necessarily the same thing. So what do you think makes someone a good host that wouldn’t necessarily make them a popular host?

It depends on what kind of podcast it is. So if the host has guests that they're interviewing regularly: what is their ability to build rapport with the guests, to make the guests feel at home, to help draw them out of their shell so they are the most relatable or most engaging or most interesting versions of themselves? And a quote that I use a lot is, "Interested people are interesting people." Not that I've listened to a ton of celebrity podcasts, but there are definitely those celebrity podcast hosts that I can tell aren't very interested in their guests. They're interested in, "How can I say the next funny thing?" And that makes them not very good interviewers cause they're not necessarily listening. But that kind of comedy schtick can be great if you're listening to a comedy podcast, where the comedian's just trying to own the room while you're listening to them. So that might make them a really bad interviewer, but it might not make them a bad host for other purposes. 

I'm wondering what your thoughts are on if and how podcasts have shifted how we communicate with each other?

I don't even think that's so much podcasting as it is the media landscape in general. Everything from TikTok to Twitter to who is saying the cleverest thing at this moment. I think that's been around for a while. I've also heard that that's a uniquely American thing too from people who aren't American. I wouldn't blame podcasting alone for that. I think that's part of our culture. For the past fifteen-plus years, surveys of young people that ask  "What do you wanna be when you grow up?" the top three or five positions are all influencer, YouTuber, podcaster, et cetera. And when I was a kid, it was like astronaut, firefighter, soccer player, Michael Jordan. Nowadays, the top of the list is like, "I wanna be famous," essentially. 

Yeah. I went down this really upsetting—not, like, upsetting, upsetting—rabbit hole of girls doing get ready with me videos for their bat mitzvah. I was watching this one and it was this weird conglomeration of adulthood and childhood. She's doing her makeup really well and she's talking about the palette she's using. And then she's like, "I have to get braces. "I don't really know how I feel about getting braces." 

I have a lot of hope when I look at the young kids. I think that they've been dealt a really rough hand. And I can't imagine how hard it must be in a lot of ways for them. I had climate anxiety when I was growing up. I can't imagine the climate anxiety they're dealing with. Like, when I was a kid, it was acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer, and now it's like the whole world is on fire. That plus every embarrassment is on display. I was already worried about whether I was cool enough and if I fit in without being filmed constantly. And now the kids can be filmed at any time, all the time.

And then someone can make a fake film of them which is even more terrifying to me. Are you worried that people are gonna take recordings of your voice and manipulate it?

Not really. I don't know if that's a dumb thing to not worry about. I've been misquoted in the press before. I guess I haven't up until now really worried that you can just run my voice through a program and then have an AI-generated Kristen saying a bunch of stuff I don't want them to. But I have such a unique, sophisticated, and sultry voice. I don't know how anybody would be able to confuse a computer voice with this. [This last part was said in jest, with Kristen laying on her Minnesota accent on thick].

That's true. I saw that Conde Nast or Hearst, one of them, they were looking for someone to come and work on their podcasting team to make AI recordings of all their articles.

Well, The New York Times has all of that now. If you go to The New York Times app, most of their articles can be read to you. It says at the top of each one, "This is an AI-generated voice." On the rare occasion, it will be the journalists themselves. Like, "This is so-and-so. This is a story I wrote because I was curious about this," and there'll be, like, a four-sentence introduction of why they did the story or how they were on the ground, and then they'll read the story. But most say at the top, "This is an AI-generated voice reading the story."

What do you think of that?

I really like the accessibility aspect of it. I really think that for people with low vision or who are blind, or who have reading struggles, it's a real service. So in that way, I see it as a great thing, but also, I don't want robots to replace all of the humans for everything because sometimes it takes the humanity out of the pieces, too. 

But, in some ways, AI is amazing. One of the shows I host is Health Matters for the Mayo Clinic and I get to talk with the greatest scientists and doctors in the world about everything from GLP-1s to how do you do surgery in space. One doctor I was talking with recently was saying AI has been a miracle for the medical world because they are able, in one afternoon, to do something that maybe took six months before. Like, if I'm gonna cross-reference this, I have to go to the library, check out this book, look at this study. Then I'm gonna put in a request from Duke and ask them to send a copy of the study that they did, and then just to get all the materials together alone would sometimes take weeks, and then have to cross-reference and read through. And now AI can just do the search, look it up, get access to all of this, create a model, do comparables, and come up with a vaccine faster than ever in history or come up with a way to identify cancer, versus in the past, it may have taken multiple visits with different machines.

I don't want to poo-poo AI when it can literally save lives like this. But I do worry a little bit about AI replacing humans in the creative fields. There’s something unique about the creativity of humans. I still want there to be the quirks and the messes and the humanity in things.

Find Kristen at https://www.kristenmeinzer.com/