Nick Quah (Hot Pod)

ERIC JOHNSON: I'm Eric Johnson. Welcome to Follow Friday, a show about the best people on the internet, and why you should follow them. If you're new to the show, welcome! Every week, I talk to the internet creators I admire most about who they follow online. These include podcasters, writers, comedians, musicians, and more. They have amazing taste and will guide us to the people they find fascinating, who we should be following, too.

Today on the show is Nick Quah, the editor of Hot Pod, which is an email newsletter about podcasting. For people like me who work in the podcast industry, Hot Pod is required reading, which is why it has more than 20,000 readers.

Nick started Hot Pod just a month after the first season of Serial came out. And since then, he and the other writers who contribute to Hot Pod have chronicled this incredible boom in podcasting.
You can find Hot Pod at hotpodnews.com and Nick on Twitter at @nwquah. And you can follow along with us today. Every person Nick recommends will be linked in the show notes and the transcript at followfridaypodcast.com.

Nick, welcome to Follow Friday!

NICK QUAH: Hey hey, pleasure to be here!

ERIC: So, I was telling you before we turned on the mics that in my head, you are Kermit the Frog because that is your avatar on Twitter. You said you get that a lot from people?

NICK: I do get that a lot from people. And I think it's more of a reflection that I don't get out very much. I don't see people very much. [laughs]

ERIC: [laughs] In addition to Hot Pod, you write another newsletter for Vulture called 1.5x Speed, where you share podcast recommendations. You're really immersed in this world, as I said, you have been for years. And so I'm sure you've heard every type of show that's out there.
Is there any podcast that comes to mind that you were surprised to find that you really liked, something you weren't expecting to like?

NICK: Oh, my God. This ties into a little bit of my process of picking these picks because I feel like this choice might get me in trouble or canceled or something. I've been listening a lot to this show called How Long Gone.

ERIC: How Long Gone?

NICK: Yeah, I don't know what best way to describe it other than two white dudes who are kind of talking about brands and s**t like that. It's kind of an a**hole podcast, but it's a really bro-y podcast. It's like hitting the vibe just as we move deeper into spring.

ERIC: Well, we all need our guilty pleasures. Well, let's find out who Nick Quah follows online. So, Nick, before the show, I gave you a list of categories and I asked you to tell me four people you follow, who fit in those categories.

Your first pick is in the category, "someone who inspires you." And you said Justin Chang, the film critic at the LA Times. He's on Twitter @JustinCChang. And in my head, I can only hear the words "Justin Chang" in Terry Gross's voice.

NICK: Right!

ERIC: Because he also contributes to the NPR show, Fresh Air. Talk about why Justin is such a good critic and why he inspires you.

NICK: Okay. So this is a pretty classic story of, there's not a ton of prominent Asian-Americans in media, much less criticism. And I do podcast criticism as a side job, but it's really the part of the stuff that I do that I'm really perplexed by, and I put a lot of value and social value in that.

And there aren't many examples of leading Asian-American folks in the criticism space that I can look up to and try to map as a model. Justin Chang, in particular, I find his career fascinating. I find his industriousness fascinating.

Obviously, I first encountered him as the critic on Fresh Air and I would love to understand how he does things and use that as a North star for the way I work.

But I think the thing that really draws me to his work is that he's not a pretentious writer. He's actually pretty a workaday kind of critic, which is a style that I like. I feel like when I first started getting my feet wet in the media space, I read a lot of stuff like the New Yorker or The New York Times and the criticism over there is very heedy, it's very, for lack of a better word, elite.

And that's, for a number of reasons, an aesthetic that I'm not able to really replicate or I don't feel like I fit in that world. I really love his writing. Also, he's funny as hell on Twitter. He's kind of dorky and dad-like on Twitter. I like that energy in my feed.

ERIC: Is that how you mainly discover things that Justin has reviewed, is following him on Twitter? Or do you seek it out on the website? Or maybe just in general, when you're following the critics you like, how do you get their work?

NICK: Yeah. I don't know how representative this is, but I feel this is actually pretty old-school. I still actively go to somebody's website or I go to a news publication and I seek out that person's name. Yeah, I follow a couple of critics pretty closely and I just go straight to the website.

Of course, I follow them on Twitter and so whenever they write something new, it pops up in my feed, and I'll click on it. But I'm slightly atypical. I have a very specific slice of my week, where I sit down and read all the criticism that I've saved to Pocket. It's like Friday evenings between 4:00 to 5:00. I just sit down and have saved that across the week and just plow through, basically.

ERIC: Hollywood, in general, and film criticism is still very overwhelmingly white for the most part. And this is something that I was talking about a couple of weeks ago with Devindra Hardawar when he was on Follow Friday.

He was saying that Parasite winning best picture at the Oscars last year, that really was a big deal for the future of representation, for what movies are going to get made, what's going to get financed. As someone who is paying attention to representation and who is noticing the fact that there is this imbalance right now, how do you feel about the state of things in the industry right now?

Do you agree with what Devindra was saying there, that we maybe are making some progress in the right direction?

NICK: First of all, shout out to Devindra. I've been listening to The /Filmcast for years and years and years with him and David Chen.

ERIC: Amazing show.

NICK: I consider them as critics in the bracket that I read and listen to and think about. `I have two minds on this. On the one hand, within a specific framework of representation as it relates to economic opportunity and kind of an opportunity in Hollywood.

From a very brass taxes, base level, the fact that Parasite won ... and again, it's an "international", "foreign" film. So it's a little bit of an insurgency almost, but that kind of stuff creates spaces within meetings in the Hollywood power spaces where they go like, "Oh, that film with Asian people won. Maybe we should just green light more and put more bets on this category," because that's how the machine thinking kind of functions in that setting.

I also have some hesitancy around representation politics, specifically as to pop culture. I believe pop culture is really important. I believe entertainment industries are extremely important in the shaping of culture, but it's like you're trying to improve a system that is designed to f**k you over, basically. It's a power-creating system.

On the one hand, I get emotionally invested in Parasite winning. On the other hand, there's a part of my brain that's like, "This is not really the fight that you want, the fight that you really want is to create alternative systems of film production, and distribution, and serving different audiences."
I didn't grow up in the States. I grew up in Malaysia and I'm Chinese by ethnicity. And we've got a ton of films coming in from Hong Kong at a time. That was never really an issue. Representation was never really an issue for myself growing up, where I was a minority in that country, in Malaysia.

So, there's a little bit of layers and layers here, but that's my complicated way of thinking about this.

ERIC: Yeah, because I was looking at an article that was written about you. You studied film history when you were in college, is that right?

NICK: Yeah. I put in a couple of credits. I went to university thinking that I was going to major in film and try to take a crack at the film business. But very quickly, I understood that I needed more economic power than I had as a foreign person to be able to even try.

ERIC: There's something more important than seeing yourself on screen is having the money, having the power, having the system in place that could let lots of people tell their stories.

NICK: Exactly. Representation is a nice cherry on top. There's a whole bunch of other systems that require a little bit more interrogation and challenge.

ERIC: So, once it's safe to go back to movie theaters, what's the movie you're most excited to see in a theater?

NICK: I can give you any number of pretentious answers, but the real answer is the Fast saga ... [laughs] Fast and Furious 9. Come on! That's made for me. [laughs]

ERIC: I'm getting ready to watch through it for the first time, ahead of Fast 9 coming out.

NICK: You have never seen the Fast and Furious movies?

ERIC: I've seen only the first movie, and only the first movie. And I follow Erin Scafe on Twitter, who has very strong opinions about the franchise. And she says that apparently the Mark Wahlberg remake of The Italian Job is canon in the Fast and Furious universe?

NICK: [laughs]

ERIC: So I have seen that one. So, technically, I guess, I've seen two of these movies.

NICK: Yeah, I mean, Charlize Theron is in both movie universes, I guess. Yeah. You're missing out, dude. The first Fast and Furious is an okay movie. Everything else is a collective work of art.

ERIC: I will watch them and I will get back to you. I'll let you know what I think.

NICK: Fantastic.

ERIC: Well, that was Justin Chang who's on Twitter @JustinCChang. Let's move on to Nick's next follow. Nick, I asked you for someone you just started following, and you said mxmtoon, who's a singer and a songwriter. You can find her on youtube at youtube.com/mxmtoon. So talk about mxmtoon and how you started following her.

NICK: This is slightly like a meta pick because I find her fascinating as an early-career artist and early-career creator. The context here is I'm 32. I'm a little bit of getting there in terms of age and I have very little understanding of the generation that's coming after us. [laughs]

I think, having done some reporting on the influencer space, some reporting around the YouTube space, and just thinking about those systems, there's a way in which career opportunities and creative opportunities function very differently for people who are 16, 17, 18, 19, even younger, maybe slightly older, that age group. They're coming up through the system.

So, mxmtoon, primarily, is known as a singer/songwriter. She came up through YouTube. I think she had a couple of classic ... plays a ukulele, gets a ton of attention and is able to leverage that into further opportunities. But she's also very firmly a visual-first creator in many other respects.

She is a Twitch streamer, she does this podcast where it's a daily podcast ... I believe it was with Spotify where she's treating it the same way that Casey Neistat used to treat vlogging, except with a bit of a twist. Every day, there's a new episode. Every day, there's a slight historical factoid that she unpacks or does stuff.

ERIC: Like personal history, something about her?

NICK: Sometimes it's personal history, sometimes it's general history, sometimes it's more specific history. It's just presence and content, just the nature of just being engaged and present as a creator online for their community to wrap around.

I find how she is moving forward in that stage of her career really fascinating to watch. I believe I encountered her first because of that Spotify project. I was like, "This is interesting." I think I'd heard one or two of her songs before by that point.

Then when I was poking around Twitch a couple of months after that, I spotted her doing stuff on Twitch as well. And I was like that is interesting because ... I'm doing more labor reporting around what it means to be a creative person and have a job in podcasting and in these various media industries.

And there is a way which my brain goes like, OK, that's one model of functioning, and then this whole other model that's happening in the generation after us where work is basically the air that they breathe. Everything that they do is in some fuel of public sphere.

I think she's an interesting example of that. I believe she's doing some music for an upcoming video game as well. There's all manner of things and, and this is the kind of celebrity that feels a little bit different to me.

ERIC: She's not just doing one thing. She's not just picking one lane and sticking to it, but she is doing the vlogging thing, she's doing Twitch, she's doing YouTube. She's really exploring a lot of different creative outlets. Does that seem right?

NICK: Yeah. The term used these days is creator. [laughs]

ERIC: I use that, yeah.

NICK: Yeah. I use it, too, with some reservations because it's a squishy term. It's not particularly specific, but it's also intentionally amorphous. It covers a ton of different kinds of people making stuff. So, I think she very firmly sits in that space, in all its squishy complexity.

ERIC: Yeah. I use the term creator, but I hate the term content creator. I hate calling podcasts or newsletters or whatever content; that just icks me out. [laughs] I think that's a losing battle I'm fighting.

NICK: Yeah, I get it. I felt that way before. I have shifted in my orientation fairly recently, like some battles you're not going to win. It's like the world and capitalism; you just have to deal with it.

ERIC: Yup. So you mentioned that mxmtoon is on Twitch. And I realized when I was looking at her YouTube page that I've seen a clip of her from Twitch because she was one of the streamers who played the video game Among Us ...

NICK: Yeah, with AOC.

ERIC: With Ilhan Omar and AOC. And she went viral for her reactions during the game. Do you know the clip I'm talking about?

NICK: Yeah, when she got offed by AOC herself. Yeah. [laughs]

ERIC: In Among Us, you're on a spaceship with these other cartoony, blobby characters and some of them are imposters. They're secretly evil, trying to sabotage a mission. And so, in this game that she was streaming on Twitch, AOC was the imposter and killed her.

So, mxmtoon just shrieks in delight that AOC killed her. I'm going to try and play a clip of it here. It's a little bit hard to hear just because she is so excited.

MXMTOON: [shrieks] AOC killed me! AOC killed me! AOC killed me! [gasps] Oh, my God.

ERIC: Have you played Among Us? Can you relate to this enthusiasm?

NICK: I've played it a couple of times. I'm not a huge gamer, but I'm interested insofar as it's a pop-culture object. But, Among Us, whenever I do play it, it reminds me of drinking a bunch of beers, shooting the s**t, and playing a bunch of board games. That's the kind of cozy vibe that it gets, and also when people off each other, things get heated. That's the good stuff.

ERIC: Definitely. So out of the music work she's done, you said that you've just started following her, but do you have any favorite songs that she has done or favorite thing you've seen that she's made?

NICK: Well, she just put out a cover of Creep, that classic song.

ERIC: By Radiohead?

NICK: Yeah. I think everybody should have some sort of rites of passage to cover that song, to be perfectly honest.

[clip of "Creep" by mxmtoon]

NICK: OK, this is a whole separate other conversation, but I'm interested and fascinated by where the state of female singer/songwriters is going.

It seems to be going very much in her direction, of the sound that she has. So, like Creep, that cover that she did, it was like, this feels like it's very much in this arena of this genre that's playing out right now.

ERIC: All right. That was mxmtoon, who's on YouTube at youtube.com/mxmtoon. We're going to take a quick break now, but we'll be back in a minute with Nick Quah from Hot Pod.

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ERIC: Welcome back to Follow Friday. Nick, I asked you to name someone who has stopped posting but needs to come back. And you said Danny Chau, who's on Twitter @dannychau. So talk a bit about Danny's work and specifically what he's stopped posting that you miss?

NICK: OK, this is a bit of a cheat and I think it might be a bit of a misnomer because I was looking at his Twitter handle early this morning. Turns out he posted an article fairly recently, but at the same time, Danny is a long-time writer affiliated with Bill Simmons' various media operations.

ERIC: Grantland, The Ringer.

NICK: He was a writer at Grantland and then most recently was a writer at The Ringer. I really first came to his work through his food writing. He had this column called Chau Down, after his last name, obviously.

ERIC: Good name.

NICK: I read a lot of food writing. I read a lot of food criticism. I'm pretty interested in food as a concept and as a subject that people write about.

I'm fascinated by the notion of trying to articulate flavors and that kind of sensorial experience. Danny, I think, is such an interesting and lovely writer. He does that thing where it's kind of a little bit gonzo. It very much runs through his perspective. It very much runs through his emotional interior reality.

And that comes across with his food writing, which does the thing that you want from good food writing, which is to combine a little bit of anthropology, a little bit of awareness about the space, and all the systems and context. When is it a creation of the food, a creation of a restaurant, a creation of a chef?

But he does it with such gentle empathy and he is sort of a man of taste. I follow him on Twitter. I follow his writing in terms of — he covers basketball as well. Over the course of me following his work, he has become a fan of the Toronto Raptors. It's such an interesting thing for anybody who is not from a place to be a fan of that city's team.

There's just a way that he's grounded in the pleasures of the things that he's writing about and thinking about that I envy tremendously, from a creative perspective.

ERIC: Well, first of all, on the food front, I was looking at his Instagram and he hasn't been posting much there recently. But just some incredible food porn pictures there. I would recommend people check that out.

NICK: [laughs] I should say, I don't know him personally. I know that he left The Ringer a couple of months back, maybe a year back now and he hasn't done very much work aside from a recent piece about, I believe, general managers, if I'm not mistaken. And I miss his writing. I don't know where he is. I don't know what he's up to, but I hope he writes more.

ERIC: Well, I was going to ask you about his sports writing. You talked a bit about what makes his food writing special. I think, by following you, that's a generous portion of the amount of sports content that I get on my Twitter.

NICK: [laughs]

ERIC: What is it that makes a good sportswriter for you? What is it about Danny's writing or other folks like him that makes you really invested in how they write about sports, makes you care?

NICK: That's a good question. I'll try to answer it in three different layers here because they're all interconnected in ways that make sense to me. On a very broad level, my general understanding is that any subject that becomes a beat, any subject that gets written about a ton, the job of the individual writer within that beat is to find your way into it, is to find different functions, but also to find your place in the universe.

ERIC: How to stand out.

NICK: Not just stand out, but to sort of not be — what's the word? — generic, not be vacant. Just to be a person; to be actualized within the beat. That's an interesting thing. The same thing with film writers, like how do you become a film critic in an age where everybody can put out a take online? That kind of thing.

And so, with sports, in particular, as a big sports fan, yeah, I want coverage and a bit more data and information points about the latest trade, how it affects the power dynamic in a given league. How does it affect the chances of an individual team up or down, that kind of thing?

What Danny does and I think what a collection of writers that come through The Ringer and Defector, to some extent, and a couple of other sports blogs on the SBNation universe, maybe a bit earlier in their track, is that to really sort of hit on almost this near-mythological aspects of these teams.

On the face of it, it is ridiculous to import any grand importance on what is essentially a game. Even though personally, I believe that games are extremely important to the way society functions and the way they think about themselves, but to really lean into the grand narrative and mythological threads and tales of an individual player's plight or how they fit into a system or how they're coming to be. I love that s**t.

I feel like it is the one context in which these narratives can come out the least problematically in many ways. I like reading profiles about politicians, but I hate the fact that a lot of the profiles are valorizing, because politicians have a higher likelihood of having their actions f**k real people over.
And sure, an outcome of a sports game could lead some huge better to lose their life savings, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

ERIC: That's not the same thing.

NICK: Yeah! It's a space for grand emotions and I look for grand emotions in my sports writing, which Danny, in particular, has done in a way that hits my sweet spots.

It's not fully bought into any individual mythos, but it is emotionally resonant. It understands the emotion of the mythos and I like that layer, if that makes sense.

ERIC: Yeah, it does. You summed it up perfectly. As someone who's not personally a huge sports fan, I still think that writing about sports must be one of the hardest beats to cover for exactly the reasons you're talking about: Making it your own and really saying something original and capturing the whole breadth of it all. It's so impressive to see a writer like Danny out there, doing his thing.

NICK: Yeah, I should say that there are many sportswriters doing amazing work out there, but it's such a saturated profession. It's extremely hard to break through.

ERIC: Definitely. That was Danny Chau who's on Twitter @dannychau. We have time for one more follow today. Nick, I asked you for someone who is an expert in a very specific niche that you love. You said Stephen Hilger and Brendon Bigley, who host a video game podcast called Into the Aether. They describe themselves as a pleasant, low-key podcast, but explain Into the Aether and why you love Stephen and Brendan's work.

NICK: This one's just a bit of a gimme because I've been plowing through their archives recently. I bumped into the show maybe over the Christmas holidays. And I was like, there's something about their sort of banter and what they're doing in the show that is hitting me in a sweet spot right now.
The context here being, I don't play a ton of video games. Again, it's one of those things where I'm much more interested to hear somebody talk about it and I love reading about it, especially when it's written about well. I watch a ton of YouTube video essays on it because I like that genre of YouTube video.

But I've always been fascinated with video game critics. And I know that it's a bit of a politically contested ... and a bit of a sensitive genre of writer and creator, but there are kind of hype people in the video games media space and critics space, and then there are people who really want to dissect stuff. And the dissecting almost always comes down to the molecular mechanic level. How does this product function? What are the ways in which you interact with the world that's within that game?

ERIC: How does it feel to jump or to fire a gun or to swing through New York as Spider-Man and stuff like that?

NICK: Not just that, but also, how does the game work? How do the rules of the game work and the dynamics of the game work? There was a couple of years ago where I was mildly interested in the way that board games were designed.

I don't know how to explain it, but it's like you're essentially trying to create a formula that's able to drive certain outcomes. And it's really hard to describe that when you're within the frame of the game itself. It's a little bit like trying to explain your place in an economic system. You know how buying a product works, but you don't really know how all the things that led you to buy that product function.

And that metaphor really works for me when I'm thinking about the way video game critics talk and think about the way that games are constructed. And Hilger and Bigley, in particular, they have such weird tastes. They're often drawn to retro stuff, which is a really interesting subculture to me.

They're interested in weirder games, in particular. Again, most of the time, I have no familiarity with any of those products or have any intent of picking them up and playing them, but I have such a good time just listening to them talk about the very specific mechanics and how it makes them think and how it makes them feel.

ERIC: Even if it's a game you're never going to play, it's still interesting to hear them talk about it.

NICK: Yeah. And to zoom back out on that, I have that relationship with many different kinds of podcasts. One of my favorite things to do is to pick up a chat show about a subject that I know absolutely nothing about and just listen to people go at it. Sometimes, it leads me to becoming a part of that world. Other times, it doesn't happen.

This is one of those examples where I've listened to a ton of game podcasts off and on, but mostly because I'm just interested in what's happening in those worlds and interested in what's happening in those products that they're playing. Occasionally, I'm interested in what's happening in the podcasters' lives.

Into the Aether, my understanding is it's a pretty small show. My understanding is it's a side project. It's just two good friends wanting to do stuff and kick around and have a formatted way to talk to each other and nerd out.

I know people like to make fun of that format of podcasts, like a bunch of dudes sitting around talking into microphones. That's snobbishness to me because it's one of the most beautiful things in the world; just listening to people talk about something that they like.

ERIC: Sharing their passions!

NICK: Yeah. It feels really good.

ERIC: Yeah. The closest thing to what you're describing, there's a podcast I listen to called Spiritual Successor. Do you know that one?

NICK: No, I don't believe so.

ERIC: The podcast itself is a spiritual successor to an old Polygon podcast called Cool Games Inc., where it's two funny people just improvising video games that should not exist. And even though I don't play anywhere near as many games as I used to, it's just really fun to hear people who are really passionate about games try and design a game from scratch, just from some ridiculous prompt. So that's something ... if you have room in your queue for yet another video game chat show.

NICK: Yeah, I might squeeze that in. By the way, I feel like chat shows make up more than half of my listening time. It is a real lingua franca of the space, I think.

ERIC: That was Stephen Hilger and Brendon Bigley. They are the hosts of Into the Aether, which is a podcast.

Nick, thank you so much for sharing your follows with us today. Before we go, let's make sure our listeners know how to find you online. Where do you want them to follow you?

NICK: Well, you can follow my writing on hotpodnews.com, or on Twitter @nwquah.

ERIC: And you can find me on Twitter @HeyHeyESJ and this show on Twitter or Instagram @FollowFridayPod.

The most important thing you can do to support the show is to tell a friend about it. And you don't need to post it on Twitter or Facebook or whatever if that's not your style. Just go to your favorite group chat or Discord or whatever you're in and tell them, "Hey, I really like this show," and make sure to send them the link, followfridaypodcast.com. Thank you.

Follow Friday's theme music was written by me and performed by Yona Marie. Our show art was illustrated by Dodi Hermawan. Additional music by starfrosch.

That's all for this week. This is Eric Johnson, reminding you to talk about people behind their backs. And when you do, say something nice. See you next Friday!