A Dream Come True

Hey friends 👋,

For the past four months, I've been on hiatus preparing for and reveling in the birth of my first child. She's happy, healthy, beautiful, goofy, and constantly smells like cheese.

My wife and I couldn't be more in love.

Growing a family and learning to be a parent has been a lifelong dream and one of the greatest achievements of my life. But there is actually another major life achievement that inspired the title of this post:

I was interviewed for a podcast.

I grew up an NPR junkie.

I listened to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me and Car Talk on Sunday mornings with my dad. I fell asleep at night to All Things Considered and woke up to Morning Edition. I keep a boxed cassette set of The News from Lake Wobegon in my car. And to this day, I faithfully listen to every new episode of This American Life.

So, when narrative podcasting hit its stride in the mid-2010s, I was already subscribed to a dozen.

And I wanted nothing more than to be on one of these shows. To sit in the studio, wear the big headphones, and tell a story into the mic with a soft, reverent resonance that would make Ira Glass swoon.

And throughout the years, I've made versions of that dream happen for myself. I ran a YouTube channel. I produced a few podcasts with friends. And even though I'm a software engineer, I use a fancy microphone on Zoom calls so I can cosplay as a creative.

So a few months ago, when a producer for the podcast Never Post sent me an email asking if I'd be interested in turning my essay The Future is NOT Self-Hosted into an episode of their show, the twelve-year-old NPR supporter exploded.

Watching a real podcasting professional perform a pre-interview, set up a recording session, ask what I had for breakfast to check my levels, and tease out a story through an interview would have been a magical experience on its own. But getting to participate as the subject was incredibly special.

I'm proud of the work I produce. I think it's good. And because of that, I try not to dwell on if other people think it's good, too.

But it's still a great feeling when someone whose work you respect thinks the story you told is worth retelling.

You can listen to my interview for Never Post wherever you find podcasts. Let me know how you think I did!

Thanks so much to Audrey, Hans, and the rest of the Never Post team for reaching out and putting this together. It was a lot of fun!

Until next time,
Drew