Mark Chrisler

Mark Chrisler is the host of The Constant. Follow The Constant on Twitter here.

Kindly introduce yourself and tell us what you do!
I’m Mark Chrisler (pronounced like the car) and I tell stories about bad ideas, mistakes and failures.

How did you get introduced to the audio space? Have you always loved it, before podcasting?
When I was a teenager my sister-in-law lived with my brother for a while in the family home. She insisted that any radio other than NPR made her have nightmares. So, NPR ruled the roost. In the late 90s and early 2000s, I fell asleep every night to episodes of This American Life, which I sideloaded onto my PC. And I spent years trying to get in with TAL--the stories of my pitches and interactions with them in my early twenties are absolutely mortifying.

But I never pursued audio seriously. I was always a playwright first, and a monologist second, and it wasn’t until The Constant that it occurred to me that I could probably monologue outside of a theater. 

I was introduced to your show via The Foolkiller, which is such an exciting series. Particularly the ending! How did it feel, when you were close to the end without a real resolution? Were you worried about how the episode would pan out? And then how did it feel to finally stumble upon one?
It was a really strange experience. For anybody reading who doesn’t know, The Foolkiller was a mysterious submarine that was pulled out of The Chicago River in the middle of downtown back in 1915, and I spent an obnoxious amount of time trying to figure out where it came from and who built it. For a couple of months I was on the scent of one particular inventor, and kept searching for the “ah ha!” piece of evidence that would seal the whole thing up, Hercule Poirot style. On the show, I manage to pull it out of the fire in just such a fashion, but in my actual real-time research, I didn’t get that moment; I felt I was still missing something, up until the point that I laid out everything I had learned and realized “oh, I guess I’ve pretty much solved this after all.” I was blinded by the quest for a smoking gun to the point that I didn’t realize I was already holding one (or maybe several).

Have there been episodes you wanted to start, but for one reason or another, couldn't finish?
So many. I’m a one-man shop, and I produce a new episode every two weeks without many breaks. It’s an insane production schedule that I wouldn’t recommend for anyone. The one virtue it has going for it is that it keeps me constantly on deadline, which on the one hand is stressful and on the other pushes against my natural slothfulness.

But it does frequently mean that I get a few days into researching a story before realizing that I won’t be able to put it together in time. Those tend to pile up in a list of “some day” episodes that I dream of making on the mythical day I get ahead of the game.

There are also episodes that I get a ways into before realizing they’re not a good fit for me. The first bar that every story I tell needs to clear is that it is, well, a story. There are tons of interesting factoids out there that don’t ultimately conform to the strictures of narrative, and while I’ve gotten pretty good at finding story-shaped vessels to pour facts into (it’s probably my only real skill), there are times where that’s simply not possible.

For instance, if you go searching for them, you’ll find that there are a lot of medieval European drawings and paintings of crocodiles with human faces. And if you look into it you’ll discover that the reason for this is the most obvious one: a bunch of medieval scholars were confused about what crocodiles looked like, and thought they had faces (sometimes upside down). It’s a really weird and wacky and wonderful thing, but it doesn’t have a shape; it reads as trivia rather than a journey.

What do you hope the show does for people?
This is the question I try to keep asking myself. At the most fundamental level, The Constant is at cross-purposes with itself, because on one hand it’s about breeding skepticism, and on the other it’s about appreciating what we’ve learned.

If you lean too far over the former edge, you get a cynical sort of nihilism, where there is no truth, where everything is wrong and you can build a reality out of whatever your prejudice wishes. But if you fall off the other side, you end up in much the same situation: you default to believing in one or another sort of inerrant corpus of Knowledge or Science or Dogma. Naturally, whatever that thing is also tends to confirm our prejudices, too.

For instance, I did an episode about the early days of the twentieth century, when people used radiation for just about anything they could think of, including a lot of medicine and health supplements. It’s easy to take that story and say “see? Medicine doesn’t know anything, and that’s why I think vaccines cause autism.”

Or, you can look at science as a progressive process that’s constantly improving and heading towards truth. That’s closer to correct, but it can lead to an unearned level of certitude; our past errors become simply things to cluck our tongue at and say “I can’t believe what people used to think.”

While The Constant is ostensibly a history podcast, and frequently a science history podcast, I think of it as really being an epistemology podcast: it’s about why we think we know what we think we know, and why we’re often wrong.

I hope that means that people walk away understanding why what we think we’re right about today is different from what we were wrong about yesterday, but also why we’re still likely to be surprised tomorrow.

Why are you the perfect host for this show?
I’m sure I’m not! I’m not a historian, or a scientist, or a researcher. I’m a pretty good storyteller, but that’s a double-edged sword: narratives can be compelling and insightful, but they can also be manipulative and misleading. The fear of the power of storytelling, especially in a non-fiction setting, is something I grapple with all the time, and I’m only crossing my fingers that I come out on top most of it.

Aside from that, the best qualification I can dredge up is that I’m obsessive-compulsive, and have dealt with that since I was a teenager. OCD manifests itself in myriad ways and shapes, but for me--especially as an adolescent--it means a lot of intrusive thoughts.

If you just see the phrase “intrusive thoughts” it might call to mind hallucinations or delusions--voices in one’s head--but intrusive thoughts aren’t like that. They don’t seem to come from an external entity; there’s no voice to talk to you. They’re just things that you don’t want to think, but think anyway.

The version of this that a lot of people know is being afraid of heights because you’re afraid you’ll jump. You don’t want to jump--that’s why you’re afraid--but there’s a thing that seems like a part of you suggesting you will.

For me, dealing with a rather constant barrage of intrusive thoughts for the last twenty-odd years has meant forming a break in my mind where I regularly stop to ask myself where the thing I’m thinking comes from, and whether I can trust it. I do that because it’s necessary for me to function, but the habit also leaks out into higher-order questions: “Do I really know that? What makes me think so?”

Then I get a little cocky and think “I’m probably less likely to be mistaken, since I’m running all these checks,” and I have to remind myself that it doesn’t work that way, either! You can’t proof against error; you can only dampen your surety a little, and probably never the right amount or in the right places.

Should podcasters read their Apple Podcast reviews?
They certainly don’t have to. As I said, I come from a theater background, and in theater there’s heated debate about reading reviews. Some people are thrown off by them, and others can be encouraged. Either way, those come from professional critics, who you hope will at least be thoughtful and experienced, and engage in good faith to give a level assessment. Apple Podcast reviews are useless for a creator, almost as a rule. The negative ones tend to be farcically nitpicky, while the positive ones are effusive and may make you feel nice, but don’t teach you anything.

On the other hand: I read mine. Probably every last one. And when someone says they love the show or they’ve binged every episode, or what-have-you, that means a lot to me. That’s because podcasting is like sending pings into deep space hoping to find aliens. You don’t know whether anything is out there at all, let alone what it might think of you. So when you get a response it’s a very intimate thing that seems to affirm not only that there’s life out there, but that it cares about you like you care about it. That’s a pretty big thing. That’s sort of the heart of art’s purpose; to provide a small token to both artist and audience that says “you’re not alone”.

Then somebody gives you two stars and says your voice is too sharp and you spend half a day mumbling under your breath at them.

Thanks, Mark!