Roman Mars

Roman Mars is the host and creator of 99% Invisible. He collaborated with Ben Brock Johnson and the Endless Thread team on Hidden Levels, a six-part series about how video games left the arcade and started reshaping the real world.

All right, let's talk about Hidden Levels. Describe it in like ten words.

Ben Brock Johnson (Endless Thread): How the world of video games changes the world beyond video games. 

Go on…

BBJ: I play video games, I love video games, and I have always coveted video games, ever since my parents refused to let me have them when I was a kid. I've always been fascinated by their impact on the world and their impact on culture. Endless Thread deals with online communities, and obviously there's a lot of crossover there with gaming. I was holding onto this idea and didn't really know what to do with it and then had the extreme luck of pitching it to Chris Berube, who's the managing producer of the series. Chris brought it to Roman, and the rest is history. 

Roman, what is your relationship to video games?

Roman Mars (99% Invisible): Cursory, I would say. I have these moments in my life where video games were a big part of it. Outside of grad school in the first dot com era, a friend of mine invented Roger Wilco, which was sort of the first application that I know of that did voice chat behind online video games. I'd never really played video games. I never owned a computer because I was too poor. But I convinced the folks there that because I was a scientist, I could just come up with their test matrix. It was just really scientific thinking. The purchase of that company and me being like the fifth employee is what funded my three years of volunteering at a public radio station, which is what I really wanted to do. So in a way they've had a profound impact on my life because I would not be here if it wasn't for that. I should stress that the selling of that company netted me about $60,000 that I lived on for three years. Then I started working. I was a volunteer at KALW in San Francisco. 

Now I just play casual video games because I listen to a lot of things all the time. I have to listen to raw tape and drafts for people. I find that playing a tower defense game or solitaire kind of helps me focus on the things I'm listening to.

So what makes this perfect for the worlds of Endless Thread and 99% Invisible?

RM: I mean, to me, it's about Ben and his team’s expertise with online space and the conversations that are happening there. And us, you know, we think about design and how these sorts of things that become sort of ubiquitous, but become invisible because they're sort of so metabolized into our culture that people fail to notice them. And we like to highlight them. Our core competencies and the way we tell stories are really similar, but point us to slightly different directions of how to explain a thing. [Endless Thread] can see it outside in the world in an online culture, and [99PI] can see a design philosophy that is actually well known to some people but kind of just sublimated and understood as common sense to others.

BBJ: It was sort of fascinating to see what triggered each of our interests and how they overlapped. As we started to talk to each other, we found that our editorial processes were pretty similar, which made it more and more comfortable for our teams to work together. We've worked on a couple of episodes before as well, like one of Endless Thread's first episodes about a seed vault in Norway called Svalbard. Roman and his team were kind enough to run that episode years ago.

And then we also made an episode from our meme series about the Punisher skull and how it's been co-opted by white supremacist groups and ex-military groups. And again, Roman and team were kind enough to work with us on running that episode in their feed. It just felt like our shows were generally simpatico in terms of the audiences we have and what they're interested in.

Tell me more about the actual process of working together. What did it look like? 

RM: The type of documentary podcasts that we both make are always collaborative in nature. So it was more about just expanding what our team was more than anything else. We’d get together and loosely discuss what we're interested in, in terms of the thesis of the whole show. And then we accepted pitches from every member of the team who wanted to do a story. We settled in on three that were sourced and reported from my crew and three that were sourced and reported from Ben's crew. And then we would assign editors, kind of cross-pollinate our editors. So like someone that he was familiar with edited one of my reporters. It's complicated because it has so many people contributing, but there's a moment where one person has to write a thing – that's the lead reporter – and you'll hear their voice on the piece. The editor has a ton of influence, and then we just sit on a Zoom, there's like 10 people, and we read and perform the thing and people make comments. We wanted to make sure that every piece had either an editor from Endless Thread and a reporter from 99PI, or if it was a reporter from 99PI, an editor from Endless Thread.

BBJ: I had a bunch of ideas, some of which made it through the process all the way to the, to the end. And I was really enjoying listening to some of the final mixes the other day and being like, ‘Oh my God, I had this idea, and now it's a whole other thing.’ I didn't make any of the stories. It's sort of Roman and I co-hosting in the 99 PI style at the top of the episode and in the end.

I don't know why I keep trying to say the British word chuffed this week, but I was really chuffed to have some of the original ideas that I had brought to Roman and the team make it all the way through, thanks to producers who took them on and accepted them as good ideas and made them, but also had these new ideas that I hadn't thought about at all that Roman's team brought.

Was there anything about the new process that changed the way you want to make your shows when you're making them on your own?

RM: We often invite new producers to tape edits, like just to sort of get them familiar with the process. So maybe a younger producer will pitch us a story, will green light it, and they'll sit in on other edits that are not theirs, just so they can get a vibe for what it's like. And it's really intimidating. It's like people doing double Dutch. You're trying to decide, like, ‘Am I going to jump in here?’ You're really nervous about it. There's a flurry of discussion and activity and hundreds of notes. There's lots of talk about structure. What was surprising here is like three new people from Endless Thread would show up in one of the edits, you know, and they immediately got into it. Like they knew exactly the language of what we were doing. The amount of contribution from the start from everybody was full on. We all spoke each other's language and we all knew how to do it. That to me was surprising just because I've seen people freeze in that situation with us.

So this week has been a lot of moving and shifting things a few seconds or whatever. It's stuff that nobody will notice, except for the people who feel really strongly about it. I've made so many hours of radio that I'm much more of the like, it probably doesn't matter all that much. Whatever you feel in your heart, whoever feels the strongest about it, is okay with me. Deciding those things becomes harder when you add more people. But working with Endless Thread, it was surprising how normal it was. 

It makes sense to me, Ben, that you would go to Roman because Roman, you're like the gold standard of bringing in new voices and collaboration of all kinds. I talk about podcast growth, and we're always sending to 99pi to see how you do – well, I wouldn't even call them feed drops, what you do. 

RM: Yeah. I've always hated that term. We call them features because we usually talk to the person. We usually make it a point to say, “This represents our taste and the things that we care about. We think it means something to you, to you.” There are shows I like that I wouldn't feature because the audience isn't necessarily transferable. Like it isn't the story that they would expect when they turn on a 99% Invisible. But if I'm presenting it, I'm presenting it because I think it is a 99% Invisible approach to the world. I wouldn't put it there if I thought it was like a waste of time.

The major driving force of my career is highlighting and bringing good work to people, because I was present in a public place in the very beginning. After the explosion of This American Life, all these people wanted to work on This American Life. But there's only so much This American Life to go around. It became a mission, partly at the Third Coast International Audio Festival and partly the stuff that I did at Radiotopia, to sort of get what I thought were the most talented public radio producers, stable jobs. That was, that's all I wanted to do. And I didn't want to be their boss. I didn't want to own them. I really wanted them to find an audience because I knew that they had a voice that would find a passionate audience if they could just connect with it. I love working with indie podcasters. I love when I hear somebody new that has verve, even if they're not polished. It makes me so excited. 

BBJ: Endless Thread has evolved from when Amory and I were just doing it, the two of us with a producer. These days we're much more sharing the microphone with producers on our team, which I really, I love doing. We have a podcast landscape that increasingly feels like there's not as much of a middle. There's folks that are doing things just for the love of doing it. And then there's folks that are really more established and kind of popular and get a lot of listens. And there's less space than there used to be, in my view, to have more voices tell more interesting stories. Of course, there's also more podcasts than there have ever been. So there's a lot of sort of counter counterintuitive information and noise in the way that the podcast landscape is existing right now.

A lot of these stories I was really excited about from the jump, and a couple of them came from ideas that I had, but it was so awesome to see people like Dean and Amory and Caitlin Harrop, who doesn't work at WBUR anymore, take some of these ideas and run with them or come up with their own. 

RM: The word feed drop is so transactional. Everyone knows that the best way to grow your podcast audience is to find someone who already listened to a podcast and give them another podcast. Unfortunately, that's kind of the only sure way to do it. That stuff is fundamental to me. If it wasn't for Radiolab featuring 99% invisible 13 or 14 years ago, I don't know where I would be today. I’ve always felt a sense that this is a community of makers who should support each other 

I love long companion style podcasts, but we do something that's becoming more and more rare, which are these documentary audio. It’s fallen away because it’s just so hard to make. But for a rich ecosystem, I think we need to exist. And also for a healthy ecosystem, we need to collaborate and work together across different shows and build up our little corner, which I don't think is necessarily a better corner.

The show I listened to the most hours of is Blank Check with Griffin and David. I love it with all of my heart. And, um, you know, Ben Hosley produces the hell out of that show. He's one of the reasons why it's so good. It’s a produced show, but it rests on the talent of these two men talking to each other and their sort of infinite knowledge of things. It's super entertaining and super fun and produced very differently than this. It's not interviews cut together. It doesn't take 16 weeks. But I love that as much as I love anything in media, to tell you the truth. But I want all these things to exist in podcasting. I want all of them to thrive.

We had a couple of episodes that didn't make the full six story choice that we put together, but they're side quests that are happening in the Endless Thread feed from a couple of producers that had good ideas. I was just excited for us to be able to do something that felt kind of unusual and  expose each other's audiences to the other great work that the other show does and remind folks who enjoy the kind of work that we do that there's other folks doing it

I love The Rest is History. I listen to the heck out of that podcast all the time now. And that's a very deeply researched long chat cast. I love a good chat cast. I love listening to all different kinds of shows. I love fiction podcasts. It is really important to have a varied ecosystem for that ecosystem to be healthy. So I think this was really a hopeful collaboration for us as well.

I think in order to do what you guys are talking about, you have to be a listener. How do you find things to listen to?

RM: Something like Rumblestrip must have percolated from different types of audio producers that I know because that's a very like audio producer's favorite type of show. And Erica Heilman’s voice is just so great, like her point of view and her perspective and her tone, even if you're not a Vermonter. When producers hear something special, we pass it along. That kind of comes from the old days of Third Coast when it was my job to listen to a few hundred documentaries a year. I listened to everything and I still do.

What’s your app of choice?

RM: I mainly listen on Overcast, but every couple of days, I just open up the podcast app on my phone, looking for where 99 PIs in the top 200. And then I go and I look for everything that doesn't have a person's face on the cover. I call those facecasts. Having a face on the cover is the most reliable indicator that I am not interested in it. What I have noticed in my 15 years of doing this show is the rise of the face cast has been just unbelievable. It can be about anything – I like to notice different aspects of how people do things. You can have a thing that's two or three hours, and you still feel like it's not wasting your time. 

I like Conan O 'Brien Needs a Friend. I've been enjoying this sort of like a final hurrah of WTF where it's really like a reflection about the time and the moment. I still listen to Flophouse because I did a show with Elliot Kalin last year about The Power Broker. I like the Slate Political Gabfest. I've listened to that for I mean, whatever, almost 20 years, it's that good. I still listen to the Memory Palace and Song Exploder. I like the Rewatchables and The Watch. I like Dear Hank and John with John Green and Hank Green.

I listen to those pretty consistently. And then there are new ones that come up, like, Avery Truffleman's Articles of Interest is coming out next month. I've heard the first episodes and I cannot wait. The best book right now I'm listening to is Joel Lepore's We the People, which is about the Constitution. I'm doing this show about the Constitution. So she's really, really good and a good reader of her material and then a bunch of other research books.

What's a show you love that not enough people know about?

RM: There's one called Life of the Record. This guy interviews them Song Exploder-style: his voice is not asking questions. It's a person just telling the story of their album. He likes all the same music I do. So he’ll break down like, the Feelies' Crazy Rhythms album, which is like, I don't know, it's like a classic to me. I think it's one of the best albums of all time. There are little intersperses of music in it, and it's super long and, and good, but it hits my sweet spot of like, you know, it's, it's edited in an oral history style.

Does the creator know that you listen and love his show?

RM: I think so. I usually reach out to people. I still look at emails from people and how meaningful it is when you create something. 

How has punk rock influenced your work? I just listened to you on Sleeping With Celebrities and was thinking about how much punk shaped you and I can see it in what you’ve done with Radiotopia and even 99% Invisible. And Hidden Levels. 

RM: I've always wanted to have a record label. That's a bad business to be in. I've always been the person in a scene who promoted shows, booked shows. I was never a musician. My core competency was to get people excited and together in a thing and to pull off something. When 99PI was taking off and it was becoming like a business that had enough of a foundation that it could support other things, like help support and help bring other things out, that's when I worked with PRX to create Radiotopia. The punk ethos is kind of everywhere.

I wanted to have simple fair contracts with people. I wanted them to own all their own work and determine their destiny. I wanted us to be a collective that pulled for each other and cooperated and helped, that shared and boosted each other. I think that we figured out something very cool there. It was a huge part of what I wanted to do. And then there was a certain point where the managing the business of my show was beginning to be all I did. And that was when I was entertaining the idea of selling 99PI. People would ask me, is Radiotopia for sale? And I'd be like, there is no thing for sale. There's no way to sell it. Everyone is their own show.

99PI was mine, but I carved out Avery's show because it was hers, you know. It just made sense. That was the ultimate expression of ownership. You know, you own it when you can sell it. Otherwise you don't own it. For me, that was the right decision to make. And I still use that to support everything. I think I remain PRX's biggest donor, on a consistent basis. I love and support all these things. I still try to make this show the way I've always made it. And I just have more resources and time to do the thing I want to do. And so it's just being conscious, the way you make it, and what you do is part of the process of what you make.

That's really the punk part of it. The default is ownership of the artist who makes it, that's the default. You make a thing so good that people want to pay for, or you make a thing good so that people hang out and then you put ads in front of them because you have their attention. It is so simple. Anytime anyone tries to do anything different than that, they can get a lot of investment to do that and sort of rewrite the rules of what a media business is, and they always fail. It does not grow like a startup business does. It really is so simple that as long as you're content with a very simple method of making media and getting people's attention and making money from it, it is a good, simple business for incremental growth and for everyone to have a job and have and do the things they like to do.

It's so simple and so great that it's worth just having those fundamentals. I've been super successful with this. I'm very happy with the things that I did. I'm an example of how you can do it right. And you can. It's just being aware of the process, being aware of how simple the media business is and how you have to sort of adhere to the principles of it. This is a good place to be and make work as long as you just sort of build it slowly, the way the business is supposed to be built. Oh, it's lovely stuff. And it's lovely connecting with people. And it's lovely making things. All that sort of stuff is so enjoyable.

I couldn't have asked for a better thing to end on, because one of the questions I didn't get to ask you is what you’d tell creators that are down in the dumps these days and I think that's what people need to hear. Thank you.