Interview with Podcaster & Author Seth Andrews (True Stories, Thinking Atheist)

[00:00:06] It's a Jacked Up Review Show. It's a Jacked Up Review Show. It's a Jacked Up Review Show. It's a Jacked Up Review Show. Oh, Jacked Up Review Show. Welcome all. Welcome all. We have another invaluable radio host turned podcaster and author today.

[00:00:52] We got Seth Andrews of both the thinking atheist as well as True Stories. Welcome. It's nice to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Absolutely. So you've been at this for quite a while since 1990.

[00:01:08] Yeah, it's been a long time. I was kind of a fresh-faced guy getting into the radio business, probably for the wrong reasons. Back then, it was like I wanted to be... Famous isn't the

[00:01:21] word, but you know, I wanted to be on the radio. And then I really fell in love with, you know, the creativity of it, the technical side of it, fell in love with serving an audience

[00:01:38] and being a part of that culture, you know? And so here I am all these years later and I'm still doing a version of radio. It's just on the internet, which gives me a broader reach.

[00:01:50] It gives me a lot more creative freedom and, formatically, we have a lot more latitude where when you're doing corporate-based radio, there's a lot of restrictions, time requirements. They restrict even what you can say, you know? And so here I'm totally free and it's been

[00:02:08] pretty amazing. Yeah, unfortunately, we've all had to kind of combat a lot of that, where it's just like, okay, I get that this is what the higher-ups want, but this is not

[00:02:19] my voice at all now that we've reduced it to that. You did get into it because you were very inspired by faith music. Now that it's been flushed out of your system, what kind of music would you say you're really into now and really like hearing on

[00:02:36] independent satellite and even college stations? When I am not in the studio, say I'm out driving on a plane or between speaking gigs or just walking the dog, when I listen to audio, it's usually talk. I listen to a lot of audiobooks. Right now,

[00:02:59] I'm in the middle. I'm nine hours into an 18-hour autobiography by Patrick Stewart, John Lippard. I've heard the promo on Conan. I can't wait to read it. Amazing. And you know, I was thinking when I first saw the time, I was like 18 hours and honestly, I will not

[00:03:18] want it to end. I find myself smiling and I listen to a lot of that kind of thing. If I listen to music, they say that the music that you fall in love with between the ages

[00:03:32] of 14 and 21 becomes some of your favorite music for the rest of your life. And I think there may be some merit to that. So when I go back, you know, it's when I wasn't listening to Christian

[00:03:44] music, I did enjoy Journey and Kansas and that kind of thing. So I do find myself going back to some of the old 80s classics and listening to that. You're still thinking about it. It's probably not

[00:03:57] you know, once upon a time I love this anymore. You know, it's just a good song is a good song is a good song and I enjoy newer stuff as well. But mostly when I'm looking to listen

[00:04:09] to something, it's going to be an audiobook, something that I've picked out. I'm huge into true crime. I love ghost stories. I'm big into autobiographies. I just finished listening again for the second time to Bruce Campbell's autobiography called Chins Could Kill. Of course,

[00:04:28] he's one of the stars of the Evil Dead franchise and I'm a big horror movie buff and you know, it's a nice distraction. It's nice to be inside somebody else's head for a change. Absolutely. Well, would you consider I mean, there's a lot of historical

[00:04:46] you could definitely put either of your podcasts on your history. Would you consider them kind of minor true crime as well? Because you do kind of my shows? Yeah, because you do bring up some

[00:04:59] issues. Well, you know, the the show I do that is related to atheism and religion, we get into cult superstitions, brain psychology. Yeah. You know, we talk about the culture, those types of things probably won't fit into that the true crime format. There's a lot of

[00:05:22] storytelling in it. There's a lot of and we'll do I mean, I do an annual ghost stories broadcast where we you know, and with some of those and involve things that really happened

[00:05:35] murder houses and you know, and of course we spin off of the the truth of the murder into the legends that sort of spawned out of it. We'll return after these messages. If you like small town mystery, crazy news and wild history, then the Florida men on Florida

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[00:06:58] There's something enlightening for everyone with this crowd of cool cats. Check them out. That but on the true stories with Seth Andrews, there is a lot of I mean, we'll get into some famous crime stories, some obscure ones. We talk about some some fact I've got a one

[00:07:23] we just released about a woman named Victoria who was a veteran skydiver and her shoot failed her second shoot failed and it turned out that her husband like sabotaged the shoot, you know, so we get into how she barely survived and how she was insured for a

[00:07:45] ton of money and turns out her husband tried to go and they know that kind of thing does weed its way into true stories every every week or so. Absolutely. And I think what I really like about you know, I got recommended thanking atheist thanks to Hemet Mehta.

[00:08:06] Oh, yeah. You know, he's good people. Absolutely. And, you know, he recommended this and the scathing atheist and it was just it was just so cool to just kind of have just this again, just you guys both make use of the format and just open up a dialogue,

[00:08:28] you know, I mean, that was the whole point of the friendly atheist to just say, Hey, just because we're not subscribing to a religion doesn't mean we're here to just spread some hate rate here as well. You know, we're here to be the bigger guys.

[00:08:39] And in I think the case of my show, I really wanted to be a hub for what I call seekers and these are people doubting and they're in the faith but this is strange territory. There's terrified somebody's going to find out they're terrified of going to hell.

[00:08:57] Maybe they're just curious. And so I may pop up in a Google search and for that reason, you know, while we do occasionally go pretty hard at fundamentalist religions, it's a show that is also kind to people and I admit outright, you know, there are

[00:09:13] lovely, lovely, amazing, wonderful, moral good religious people just like I've met some horrible atheist, you know, people are people better and for worse and, and to humanize these conversations and to encourage people that questions shouldn't bother a loving deity,

[00:09:32] you know, loving Father God wouldn't wouldn't be upset or threatened by saying, Hey, I need you to make sense. And if you don't, I'm going to keep asking him. And that has been sort of the temperature of my work, especially in the last five years,

[00:09:46] I used to be a little harder edged, a little sharper, a little more sarcastic, and I have my moments, but these days it's, I think it's a softer approach. And for me,

[00:09:57] you know, it's been easier, it's been better for my heart. And I think it's been more palatable for people who were who are listening, you know, the people that wanted the hard edge,

[00:10:06] you know, swear fast, you know, they've gone elsewhere, but the people I think who want to deescalate lower the temperature a little bit, have conversation and storytelling those are the people that are still with me today.

[00:10:18] Absolutely. And that is a good point in that it you want to kind of dissect this and realize, Hey, you know, we're not saying it's one or the other, we got to get rid of that whole,

[00:10:31] you know, type of arguing and dissection of people. And you want to also kind of just remind everybody, hey, you know, the insecurities and fear mongering should not be a part of your

[00:10:44] world in any capacity. I wasn't an evil person when I was a Christian, I wasn't stupid, I wasn't, you know, I was just the victim of bad ideas, but I genuinely wanted to do the right thing

[00:10:58] in the world. And then I, you know, I had a lot of love in my life, and I expressed a lot of love and goodness and goodwill. And, you know, if I looked through the looking glass

[00:11:11] back through time, and I saw my younger self, I would not be a lot of the horrible names that I have heard some atheists call religious people I deserved better. And I think we do find toxic people, we find people who have weaponized their religion to excuse

[00:11:29] and promote bigotry and hatred. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. But everyday people who were just trying to get up in the morning and take care of the kids and

[00:11:38] pay the bills and survive and make the world better in their way. They may be a victim of some bad ideas religiously, but they don't wake up saying today I would like to hate someone,

[00:11:48] they wake up and say today I would like to find opportunities to make life better for someone. And many of those people are religious. And I think the honest person has to acknowledge that. Totally, way different from, you know, some from others who are

[00:12:05] doing hate crimes and then using religion to hide behind it, you know, it's just so such a separate entity altogether. And you have a wonderful very, I mean, you kind of reference kind of the voices based off the inspirations that you've

[00:12:27] referenced before. But it's kind of a mixture between kind of noir and just just kind of just a very smooth irony as well. What are we speaking about? Especially in true stories, but you're just really good at just kind of just remarking

[00:12:44] out just kind of dry lays like, yeah, that happened. Oh, are we talking about like, my particular style by vocal style? Yeah, yeah, how you storytelling how you emphasize it and you always keep me in suspense, even if I'm pretty sure I

[00:13:01] have heard the story or not. It doesn't matter. Just the journey is really good at keeping us in suspense. Thank you. Well, when I first got into the business, I remember thinking I have to sound like a radio guy. So we call them pukers back

[00:13:18] then where you're trying to sound like a radio guy and I'll hear podcasters do this. Thanks so much for joining us for the show today. You're going to be great. You're kind of talking at people. And it took me a while to calm down and

[00:13:30] begin to find my own voice. Who am I? And what personality would I like to have sort of flow in through the microphone into the ears and lives of listeners? And it finally occurred to me, let's talk to people. Let's communicate with people. Let's storytell in that way.

[00:13:48] And so I've had a lot of time to iron that out. And fortunately, people have responded to it when it comes to true stories with Seth Andrews. It is it's a five to eight minute short form vignette

[00:14:02] that has enough detail to take you down the road, but not so much that I lose momentum. I don't want you to get like bored or burned out or whatever. I want you to really take the journey. But it's formatted after

[00:14:16] the old Paul Harvey AM radio broadcasts of the 70s, 80s and 90s. I think he passed away in the early 2000s. For those who don't know, Paul Harvey was an ABC News broadcaster who did a feature every weekday called

[00:14:34] The Rest of the Story. And his was only four minutes. And he would take you down a road. He would spin a yarn. He would tell you about something real. And then at the end, he would pull the rug out from underneath you with a fact

[00:14:48] that blows your mind. Or maybe you know it's coming, but you're not sure. So you have to wait for the end. And when he says it, you're like, oh my God, that's amazing. And then he would say, and now, you know, the rest of the story.

[00:15:02] Well, when he died, nobody was really doing that format. His son took over and his son was terrible. His son tried, gave it everything he had. But he just can't replicate that in that exact way. But I thought, well, if no one's really doing the five minutes.

[00:15:21] Then you're going to do your homage to him. You take him down that road and occasionally when possible, give him a kicker at the end. I'll bet I could do my version. Mine is formatted a little bit differently. I can take a little more time with it.

[00:15:35] Sometimes I'll spin off into a few different directions and then bring you back. But probably six to seven out of 10 shows have a surprise or a kicker at the end. And instead of saying the rest of the story, I say, and that's a true story.

[00:15:50] I'm up to 200 some shows people seem to really enjoy it. It's politics free. It's religion free. It's family friendly. It's just kind of evergreen. You can listen to it with your kids. You can listen to it with great grandma. Everybody can play along.

[00:16:06] And I've enjoyed formatting it in that way. Totally. It's a wonderful playground and we never know what direction it's going to go into. And even if it's a somewhat morbid crime, you're able to keep it lighter and remind us, hey, this happened but there's another catch 22 to this.

[00:16:24] And I try to set that up a little bit. Hey, this is kind of a heavy one. This one takes us to a dark place. But I think you will be compelled by the story. And this gives people the option if they want to jump in

[00:16:39] and they always do. They always want to find out what's going on. Some people like the darker ones. Yeah, I always try to give you a little content warning to make sure, hey, hang on. This one's going to be intense but it's pretty crazy. Check out what happened.

[00:16:53] So yes. Very much so. When do you have anything that's coming up that you would also love to promote? Well, my schedule actually is loosening a little bit as we get into the holidays which is nice. It's been a great year but it's been a lot of travel.

[00:17:19] It's been a lot of producing two podcasts pretty much single-handedly has been pretty intense. So it'll be nice to be able to spend a little time with Natalie. Next year I'll be back kind of traveling and speaking. I'm doing a presentation called Seth Andrews versus God.

[00:17:40] Who is the better intelligent designer? And where that came from was I've just finished narrating the audio of the book by zoologist and anatomy professor Dr. Abby Hafer. She has a book called The Not So Intelligent Designer where she gets into things about our bodies

[00:18:03] that are really not so well designed. If you thought someone put this together, this is bad. Like there are better ways to do this and we can find better ways that it has been done in nature and other creatures. And so I was inspired by the book

[00:18:19] which I think is going to release on Audible by the end of the year I believe. But I'm doing a speech where I'm like all right fine. If I was given the reins, if I had the option and so I go through and talk about this.

[00:18:32] Instead of having being a right handed or left handed, why don't we have both hands that are dexterous and they can both take commands from the brain and why in the world would you make a hand dominant and the other one almost useless? So we talk about that.

[00:18:45] I would make skin that doesn't get cancer from our main source of light on the planet. And point by point by point I go through and it's a fun one. There's a lot of humor. There's a lot of fancy flashy slides. You got to be witty about it

[00:19:00] because it's like you have to remind everybody. I mean, I think my eyes got awoken when my grandmother who was also a former teacher and an absolute mentor to me had passed away from bone cancer and my grandfather kind of just shrugged off a lot of people saying,

[00:19:16] hey if there's a greater power he wouldn't take away the nicest person on the planet. And it is kind of interesting how we're also kind of having to do so much biohacking is like if we got the best bodies

[00:19:29] why do we have to remind our guts and bones how to function? I'm amazed at many of the people who say that the eye is perfectly intelligently designed and the people who are telling me that are wearing bifocal prescription lenses for vision correction.

[00:19:49] I'm wearing nighttime glasses for goodness sake. So now I have to remind people, hey I know what time of day it is. It happens a lot. We intervene so often to try to better our condition in ways that science has informed. And so I think so often

[00:20:08] we miss out on opportunities to show our appreciation for what science has done and how we have advanced and been able to solve our problems. It's funny I'm a sucker for these videos on YouTube. I was watching a couple of days ago about people who were deaf

[00:20:26] and had cochlear implants and their parents or friends are rolling phone video in the room as they activate the implant and these people are able to hear for the first time or even for the first time in years since they lost their hearing

[00:20:42] and they invariably just break into tears, tears of joy because they are now hearing in that way the world around them. And this is an amazing example of how science has done what prayers have not. And I think that's something we have to talk about out there.

[00:20:57] We totally do. And it seems like, I mean Thanksgiving is about to pass us by but it's interesting how it kind of still comes down to a bit of that where you have to politely change the conversation. But now that we're seeing

[00:21:10] how even more divided we are as a society we can't just tiptoe around it. We got to literally say our truths while also again reminding each other that this all impacts us one way or the other regardless of whether we agree with it or not.

[00:21:25] And everything from getting better sleep to mental health to even just time and money and just your overall work routine. It seems like everybody is just afraid to just confront the inevitable. You know I've said in the past that if somebody wants to thank God for the food

[00:21:53] okay knock yourself out but I sure don't want to see us ignore the people who provided the food and prepared the food and clean up the mess. That's often we sacrifice human endeavor human sacrifice at the altar of the Almighty. Absolutely. Janitors are my heroes. Janitors? Yes.

[00:22:20] Well put up with everything. People who serve others are often and we know this is true in many service industries we know it's certainly true in the medical industry and in the caregiving industries. And so if you want to offer up your petitions

[00:22:41] to the Almighty wherever he or she or it is knock yourself out but I sure would like to see us remember that human intervention human healers are all around us and they deserve our appreciation as well. Thousand percent? How about all those construction workers? Yeah anybody and everybody

[00:23:04] who is a creator builder repairer anybody who is able to put their hands their ideas their imaginations their force of will in motion to improve life for others. These are people who deserve to be acknowledged and recognized. Thousand percent. And I'm backtracking just slightly before we go.

[00:23:32] Did you go to any university or have any other course that is still going on and you would recommend to your peers who are also pursuing a similar career path? Well it's funny a lot of people have asked would you get would you recommend

[00:23:47] a four-year degree in broadcasting and my answer is always hell no. And for a couple of reasons first of all if you are looking to become a broadcaster beyond if you're not in the podcast verse but you're trying to work for corporate radio that's a tough one

[00:24:11] it's a tough business it's tough to get in to stay in. I saw veterans of 30 years get handed their pink slips if you do get in you're normally a slave of corporations making not a whole lot of money and you will learn more on the job

[00:24:25] than you ever learned in a classroom because things in broadcasting and similar fields the technology and the formats and the rules are often fluid they change and it's funny when I was in school I learned more two weeks working on the job

[00:24:40] than I learned in two years in school. When it comes to that I think it's situational but if you're looking at straight broadcasting my advice would be to mentor and learn with people who know it you know what I mean there the idea of

[00:25:02] learning over the course of years what you can learn on the job and get paid to learn in the field but I don't even really recommend AMF and radio to anybody anymore in the universe of Spotify of Apple podcasts you know a podcast in general

[00:25:17] where you can set your own pace you can podcast equipment is relatively inexpensive sure you're a needle in a stack of needles because there's four million people doing it but you can do it on your own terms you can fill a niche you can you can swear

[00:25:34] you don't have consultants breathing down your neck and I think there's a lot more merit to that and while it is difficult I think to get noticed with all the noise of podcasts in the world I would point somebody to doing that

[00:25:49] much more than I would ever point them to tapping on the door of a corporation to get into AMFM radio these days Oh sweet yeah and see this is why I love doing these kinds of chats because there's just such raw honesty and you know

[00:26:11] and as you do with already your format you're just trying to go for just some kind of solution without you know help impact people without anyone getting hurt and play to your gifts I've had people come to me and they're like I you know

[00:26:27] I really want to be on the radio or I want to do this or that and I'm you know I always start with well what are your gifts what are you good at what's the desire of your heart but what's your tool set

[00:26:37] I've seen people who want to start a podcast you have a big heart a lot of desire but they don't have the tools they don't have the ability to pull it off it's not really your thing what is your thing maybe you are an artist in another way

[00:26:51] and maybe you have the gift of building or doing something else are you good at writing can you put together something in written form that might blow everybody's socks off is there another expression there's a vacuum that you can fill so I always tell people two things

[00:27:07] play to your strengths and then start where you are and those are the first steps I think to any kind of creation activism etc. if you're trying to make a dent in this world perfect thank you ever so much for just kind of just

[00:27:23] opening up and reminding others they got to do the same can we find you on the interwebs I'm easy to find just go to Seth Andrews.com everything is linked right there and I appreciate the opportunity to hang out thanks for talking to me in and out

[00:27:43] all right have a good day you safe out there thanks a million for listening