Wild Cards

Martin Field – Food Waste Recovery Coordinator

This week I spoke to Food Waste Recovery Coordinator, Martin Field about his journey through culinary school, why you shouldn’t take your pasta for granted, and his work to help reduce food waste with A Better Life Foundation.

The Ups, Downs, and Rice Pilafs of Culinary School

Martin’s experience in the food industry began in 2017 when he began working as a food truck operator at Tacofino, assembling burritos in the confines of their travelling establishment. Ironically, he couldn’t drive which marginally limited his utility in the team, but this is where he began gaining a firsthand appreciation for the instant gratification his work could spark in a customer. This experience spurred him on to enrol in culinary school at the Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver, and commit to life in the industry. While at school, some of Martin’s biggest takeaways were not necessarily from specific lessons, but rather the close camaraderie and banter he shared with his fellow students. This is not to say he doesn’t remember the dishes he had to learn, as he notes hollandaise sauce and rice pilaf as two notorious lessons from his time at Northwest. Rice pilaf, in particular, gave Martin fits due to the difficulty of balancing various moisture levels, but he challenged himself by personally selecting this dish to be part of his final exam. When he finally produced a successful rice pilaf, he said that “I don’t know if it was satisfying” to cross it off his list after so many attempts, but it certainly was a relief. Studying dishes and techniques from all over the world in a supportive and positive learning environment, Martin says that this is where he truly gained an appreciation for cooking.

The Pasta Station

At the end of his time in culinary school, Martin volunteered for Swine Out Vancouver, a festival featuring local craft breweries and charcuterie prepared by local chefs, or you know, a good time. This is where he met the future owners of Autostrada Osteria, who offered him an opportunity to join their team. As Martin’s first official job following culinary school, he says it was a whirlwind of a year, moving from the appetizer station all the way up to the position of sous chef of prep, with multiple stops in between. He singles out the pasta station as a particularly difficult all-day affair. Hand-making fifteen to twenty portions of pasta for hours on end, he describes looking down on his board for so long that his vision would blur into a singular doughy mess. Think about the person on the pasta station before your tasteless tableside impression of Lady and the Tramp. When COVID-19 hit the restaurant industry, Martin was, unfortunately, one of the many layoffs that followed. He talks about this sudden change in his life as a bittersweet experience, as while he found the job to be extremely fulfilling and “the biggest hustle of my life,” the hours he had accumulated were also taking their toll on his mental health. With a lot more time on his hands, he turned to an activity that will forever be associated with 2020, making homemade bread.

The Secret to Making Bread

While many of those who started sourdough starters have since stopped (also the title of my favourite nursery rhyme), I asked Martin for some advice to share with the remaining holdouts. He said that “just investing in really good flour,” will make for a superior loaf, citing that fresh flour will be weeks or even months fresher than a bag from the supermarket. This results in different colours, textures, and of course flavour, as well as making bread more accessible to those with gluten sensitivities. He wanted to show that bread could be elevated to something more and that by investing in better ingredients, “the product is better, even though the process is the same”. But eventually, he reached a point where his freezer was full, his friends were fed, and he had to decide what to do next with his life. He recognized that the pandemic had disproportionately affected several local communities and decided that he wanted to use his skills to help alleviate food scarcity and food waste in Vancouver. After some searching, he found a match with A Better Life Foundation, an organization working to help feed residents of the Downtown Eastside.

Reducing Food Waste with A Better Life Foundation

At its core, Martin’s role is to reduce food waste from both the donors who supply his organization with food, as well as within the programs run by the organization itself. His involvement begins with A Better Life’s Daily Meal Program, which delivers an incredible thousand meals a day. Despite such a large quantity of meals being produced, some ingredients are left behind, and Martin says that whichever starch (potatoes, pasta, rice, etc.) is most available is often the starting block of the dishes he will prepare that week. In addition to constantly surveying the excess food from the Daily Meal Program, he also receives deliveries several times a week from supermarket donors, constantly varying in their contents. An example of a strategy he uses to manage this unpredictability is an affinity for fruit salad, a way to effectively use all the fruit he has accumulated in a productive way. Moreover, he explains that “sometimes you’ll get a papaya, or a dragon fruit or even just a pomegranate,” not necessarily the type, nor quantity of ingredient to make many meals. Coming up with creative ways to utilize an ever-changing pantry, and extract every ounce of good out of the donations provides a constant challenge for Martin, and helps keep him inspired at work. He also takes a lot of pride in the meals he makes on Fridays, using everything he has saved from the past week to create as much food as possible without sacrificing any quality. Tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese, and bolognese on rice are all recent products of this Friday meal; a personal challenge he gives himself is to make enough food where “I don’t weigh anything, I just fill the container to the brim,” and get as much as possible into the hands of those who need it.

Chefs in the Media

In between shifts, Martin follows @for_the_chefs, an Instagram account celebrating the lowlights and mishaps associated with his line of work. A quick glance shows compilations of big spills, overflowing vats, and other situations you’d like to look at, but don’t want to be a part of. However, Martin shared an unfortunate lesson he learned when he attempted to move a 20-litre bucket of short rib juice that was perched atop an overturned milk crate. Instead of lifting it off, he pushed the entire unit, completely flooding the walk-in refrigerator he was standing in. With all the liquid pooling up, he had to sweep the liquid out of the fridge and into the kitchen, before he was able to actually clean it up. Despite this laborious process, Martin maintained a good perspective on the situation, saying that he immediately thought “I am now one of them,” and this helped him to find some pleasure in a day spent cleaning, which if we are being honest, is not always a bad day at all.

To finish the interview, I asked Martin if any of the many food movies and television shows out there are worth their *ahem* salt. He replied that he would love to see more programming from a young chef’s perspective as opposed to the idolized, master chefs who are perpetuated both in fiction and reality tv. By showing a more realistic point of view, he says that “people who don’t cook would actually gain a pretty good understanding of what life is like being a young cook,” and find it a more accessible field to enter as well. Simply put, he recommends Ratatouille over Burnt every time.

To keep up with Martin, and see some of his most recent dishes, follow him on Instagram. Learn more about his work with A Better Life Foundation, and donate to a program that has helped deliver over a million meals since 2012. They are currently in their #BeingHungrySucks campaign to increase both the number of meals they can deliver with their Daily Food Program, as well as their donor list to help reduce food waste across Vancouver. Finally, they are launching Sharpen Up, a program to share cooking skills and education with members of the Downtown Eastside community.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for more content on Martin and the other creatives in this series.

And don’t forget to check out last week’s interview with comic artist, Alyssa Hirose.

Alyssa Hirose – Comic Artist

This week I spoke to comic artist, writer, and improviser Alyssa Hirose about the everlasting value of greeting cards, the secrets behind a good interview, and how to win a fight protect your artistic property in the digital age.

Writing with Comedy

Alyssa’s portfolio is incredibly diverse, but I’ll try to hit all the major stops in a semi-coherent way. Beginning with her career as a writer, she began writing as a hobby in high school but started writing with more intention when she applied to the Creative Writing program at The University of British Columbia. In her application, she included a poem titled “Rhinocerous Preposterous,” a story centred on a kid who can’t get out of bed because there is a rhinoceros sitting on him. Classic imagery. This poem was one of the pieces that got her accepted into the program, and she eventually gave it new life by turning it into a zine to enter the Vancouver Comic Art Festival. Along with some other zines, she ended up selling some of her work at the festival, marking the first time that this had happened in her writing career. While studying at UBC, she also earned an internship to write for Vancouver Magazine, a publication where she now serves as an assistant editor.

Much of the work Alyssa does for Vancouver Magazine are arts and culture pieces where she interviews chefs, playwrights, or other individuals making contributions to Vancouver’s arts community. Kind of like this, but better. She says that to get the most exciting and relevant content out of an interview, “I really like to talk about what the person I’m interviewing wants to talk about” instead of keeping to a tight gameplan. As a result of conducting regular interviews in her work, Alyssa has also found that “I have definitely gotten a lot better at asking the important questions,” to work more efficiently and allow her to focus on the articles themselves, rather than the interview. Her favourite pieces are the ones where she can incorporate comedy in some way, with some standouts including “5 Things I Hate About Tacofino Kitsilano” and “6 Things Men Really Need for Christmas,” the latter of which naturally opens with a description of a Manzilian Wax. The piece on Tacofino makes no such mention of male grooming. You can also find her work in Western Living, and on Instagram under @hialyssacomics where she releases new comics every day.

Writing for Comics and Greeting Cards

For Alyssa, the biggest difference between writing for magazines and writing for her comics is that the latter serves as “a way to relax and sort of wind down,” and space where she allows herself to be less critical of herself. Since May 22, 2018, she has posted comics every day, amazingly without the safety net of a backlog to protect against writer’s block. The inspiration behind them really comes from anywhere, with some of my recent favourites covering the holidays, political updates from our neighbours to the South, or even interviews she had with amateur bloggers. When she started her Instagram account, she would upload pictures of her hand-drawn black and white comics, but she has since moved to a digital sketchbook, traversing many themes, colours, and structures over the last three years. Ironically, keeping up such a consistent content calendar has only been difficult for Alyssa when she receives especially high engagement or appreciation on a post. When this happens, she shared that she can feel the pressure to uphold such metrics on her next post, before reminding herself that “at the end of the day, I can do comics that are bad”. Not that I’ve seen any of these reportedly bad ones.

At the end of 2020, Alyssa began making greeting cards featuring her comics to sell on Etsy. This stemmed from a long-held fondness for greeting cards that Alyssa has had since childhood. She shared that her mother would let her stay in the greeting card aisle while grocery shopping, and that greeting cards were a big influence on her style of comedy. We had an unexpectedly poignant discussion on the cultural impact greeting cards play in our lives, with Alyssa arguing that “it’s an old form of art that we haven’t really found a replacement for yet,” which I can’t help but agree with. Don’t you dare bring up e-vites.

Fistful of Kicks

The last involvement we discussed was Alyssa’s work with Fistful of Kicks, an improv team of Asian-Canadian performers. Alyssa began performing improv by joining the UBC Improv team in her fourth year of studies and consequently auditioned for Fistful of Kicks the following year. Finding such a group was a welcome opportunity in an improv community that is not necessarily known for its diversity amongst its teams. Expanding on the notion of diversity, Alyssa said that it would be a mistake to generalize all of her fellow performers in Fistful of Kicks under the brush of being simply Asian-Canadian, as they are all coming with their own experiences and upbringings. However, it’s been really enjoyable for her to perform with a group that shares similar values and sensibilities when it comes to comedy. Due to COVID-19, she hasn’t performed with them in a while, and is excited for a reunion; Alyssa says that “it’s a shame that we can’t fake kick each other’s asses right now, but I hope we can do it soon”.

With experience in so many different disciplines, Alyssa shared that when she hears feedback on her work, she takes it to heart perhaps more than a “traditional” artist is supposed to. She acknowledges that the common train of thought is that “you’re not supposed to care what other people say, but it’s impossible not to care what other people say,” whether it is positive or negative. Luckily for her, but by no means an accident, the feedback she gets from her work has been overwhelmingly positive and has been a real source of energy and drive to keep up her schedule. However, positive reception and fandom on the internet are not without drawbacks.

How to Win a Flame War

A couple of months ago, it came to Alyssa’s attention that one of her comics had been reposted on a meme account, but not before removing her watermark and posting it without any attribution. She said that at first, she didn’t pay it much mind, but when she saw that the account had tens of thousands of followers, with the repost aggregating thousands of likes of its own, it started to gain more traction and scrutiny from her own friends. They began flooding the comments of the post, asking the owner of the account to not necessarily delete the post, but to at least credit Alyssa for her work. Upon receiving this constructive criticism, the account responded in the only way online disagreements are settled and began deleting the comments as soon as they were coming in. At this point, Alyssa realized that “oh, we’re in a flame war,” and she started messaging the account herself, asking them to tag her in the post. Waves of comments from her friends continued to pour in, and Alyssa eventually asked that they delete the post itself when they refused to tag her in it. Ultimately, the account finally deleted the post and replied to her, with a hollow line of petty defeat, “I deleted it, you bloody bitch”. Now that is how you have a peaceful transfer of power.

Follow @hialyssacomics to keep up with her daily comics, @alyssa_hirose for more personal content, and remember to use her Etsy shop for all your greeting card needs. Also, check out Vancouver Magazine and Western Living to see the entire backlog of Alyssa’s articles, and to keep up with what is going on in our city.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for more content on Alyssa and the other creatives in this series.

And don’t forget to check out last week’s interview with musician, Eric Tsang.

-BF

Oscar Beardmore-Gray – Journalist

This week I spoke to journalist, Oscar Beardmore-Gray about the secret to interviewing athletes, the phenomenon known as K Cider, and his podcast, Taking Hugh for Granted.

Early Publications

A fervent reader from a young age, Oscar’s path to journalism was rather linear when he made the decision to pursue it in university. At the University of Bristol, Oscar took advantage of several opportunities, becoming the sports editor of the university paper, and a writer for The Tab, an independent student publication. While it may appear that this would play second fiddle to his other work, Oscar continues to receive recognition for an article he wrote for The Tab titled, “Why K Cider Will Change Your Life“. Now, K Cider is not a product that I was familiar with, but Oscar describes it as “the most foul drink ever,” and a staple for UK university students looking to maximize their return on dollars to drunk. Wherever you are from, you know what that drink is for you (looking at you, Alberta Pure). Oscar didn’t think much of this satirical piece at the time, but its message quickly struck a chord with readers and topped 100,000 views in only a few months. Thanks to the sustained regional notoriety of K Cider, the article has continued to circulate at The Tab to this day, generating publicity for not only Oscar’s early writing, but also himself, as a photo of Oscar holding a freshly cracked can graces the cover of the piece.

CBC and the Vancouver Whitecaps

Following his studies in the UK, Oscar was successfully accepted into the two-year Master of Journalism program at The University of British Columbia. He shares that while he was nervous to move such a long distance from home, he was incredibly excited for the mandatory eight-week internship inherent to the program. For his internship, he worked at CBC’s London, UK bureau, ironically travelling back home to continue his Canadian education. Going home did have some advantages for Oscar; due to his familiarity with the area “it didn’t feel too intimidating,” to jump right in, whereas other members of his class were thrust into much more foreign environments. Oscar shares that this experience was invaluable to his growth as a journalist, and that “you definitely learn more in six weeks inside a newsroom, than you do in six months studying journalism”.

Another involvement Oscar took on during his Master’s program was working in the communications department of the Vancouver Whitecaps. A longtime sports fan, Oscar says that “I was lucky to basically join the club on the biggest week in our history,” when the Whitecaps sold homegrown star Alphonso Davies to Bayern Munich. Assisting with the fanfare and celebrations of Davies’ final games was an exciting time, and certainly an effective foil to his more traditional journalism work with the CBC. As a sports fan myself, I had to ask Oscar what it was like to interview athletes, given the well-documented history of statements given under duress of both stress and dehydration. Oscar simply said that “you learn from experience not to get as flustered,” by one-word answers, especially when competing for time with a sea of other media personnel. Taking a player aside to talk to them in a more casual manner usually yielded better results, but he concedes that this was not always a common occurence.

Investigative Journalism

Expanding on the best practices of interviewing, Oscar shared a story he wrote while in China working for NBC. At the core of this story was the worldwide contradictory practice of catching wild fish, only to turn them into feed for farmed fish that will yield a higher price. Being a foreign investigative journalist in China during the week of the Huawei scandal was just cause for anxiety, but these circumstances also gave Oscar a crash course in extracting information that people may not be apt to give up. He credits the local journalism students he was working with for helping him overcome the language barrier, and says that this experience taught him that “keeping a good relationship with people is really important,” but at the end of the day, a journalist’s job is to get the story.

Oscar’s current role is with the Global Reporting Centre based out of UBC, where he has worked on projects including the positive effect of medical cannabis on the opioid crisis, as well as the process in which conflict zones around the world transition towards peace. In this role, Oscar is “a producer with a very broad brushstroke,” contributing to both written and video work. I asked Oscar about the differences between producing journalism in various mediums, and he said that while written work is still “the bread and butter” of journalism, video “can be a more creative way of telling stories,” and truly capturing emotion. Gaining more experience in video journalism has also sparked an interest in more longform documentary work, a subject in which he hopes to explore further in the future. Oscar feels that this style allows him to spend more time with the material and dive deeper into the story, whereas print work is often contingent on much tighter deadlines.

Taking Hugh for Granted

Outside of his professional work, Oscar also hosts a biweekly podcast with his friend, Diggory Waite, titled Taking Hugh for Granted. Holding the accolade of “the internet’s number 1 (and only) Hugh Grant podcast,” each episode Oscar and Diggory explore a different film, television show, or other important moment from the canon of Hugh Grant’s acting career. Having played so many similar characters over the course of his career, Hugh Grant is described by Oscar as somewhat of a “comic villain” and a fitting divisive figure to serve as the backbone of the podcast. Diggory and Oscar met in university, and hosted several student radio shows while at The University of Bristol. Like all impactful pieces of art, the conception of Taking Hugh for Granted was birthed at a music festival, Glastonbury Festival to be specific. It started as just a funny name for a show, but eventually they decided to mobilize their efforts and dive into podcasting. They didn’t want to join the online glut of hapharzardly produced podcasts, so six months were spent polishing their product, creating the artwork, recording, and editing the inaugural episodes down into a show that they were satisfied with. Oscar and Diggory knew that they were reliant on somewhat of a niche audience, but they were also confident that an audience was there, citing that “the amount of people tweeting and instagramming every day about Hugh Grant’s hair in the 1980s is remarkable”. Taking Hugh for Granted has reached listeners in over sixty countries and at the time of writing, is approaching ten-thousand downloads; I think its safe to say that they have found their fan-base.

One notable fan of the podcast is Mary, a woman living in the Midwest of the United States, and a true “Hugh Grant fanatic”. Having latched onto the podcast quite early, Mary was invited to be a guest on episode ten for a question and answer segment. Oscar describes her as “our first super-fan,” and a joy to speak with on the show. In many ways, meeting Mary was also gratification for all the time that went into getting Taking Hugh For Granted off the ground, and a feeling that “we’ve actually tapped into our target audience”.

With Diggory living in the UK, and Oscar now based in Vancouver, their workflow was relatively unaffected by COVID-19. They have continued to put a lot of work into the podcast, writing new jingles, keeping up a strong presence on social media, and adding an adaptive segment titled “Hugh’s News” in response to any unscheduled Hugh Grant content. Seemingly, the most imminent threat to their success is the simple fact that while prolific, Hugh Grant’s filmography will eventually reach its end. When I posed this inevitability to Oscar, he shared that while there have been discussions of shifting the spotlight in the future from Hugh Grant to Colin Firth, he also admits that this could “be a little bit blasphemous,” to abandon their star. However, he also expressed gratitude that they have made it this far and that they owe all of their success to their fans. As long as their listeners continue to enjoy it, “we’ll continue making them until we run out and then we’ll, I guess, cross that bridge when we come to it”.

Until that day comes, keep up with Taking Hugh For Granted on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Twitter, and Instagram. They are coming up on their one-year anniversary, and have a great backlog of episodes to check out.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for more content on Oscar and the other creatives in this series.

And don’t forget to check out last week’s interview with motion graphics designer, Cory Ransom.

Jake Robins – Podcaster

This week I spoke with Jake Robins, the creator of the WeMartians podcast, a show dedicated to discussions of Mars, space and beyond. He spoke about his five years in podcasting, the “Make Space Better” initiative, and why we on Earth are fascinated with Mars.

Jake’s interest in space kickstarted alongside millions of other Canadians in 2013, when Chris Hadfield was commander of the International Space Station. You know, this guy. Jake says that he was enthralled by the videos Hadfield released, from tours of the station to lunchtime in space. As Jake’s interest in aerospace grew, he explains that “anyone who’s into rockets eventually will find themselves in this stupid video game called Kerbal Space Program,” a game centred around rocket building and space travel. Jake says this game was a great teacher to learn the science behind space travel, and that his love for space led him to recreate actual historic space missions within the game to share on Reddit. After a year of posting content for a passionate fanbase, he found himself wondering “how can I be part of the real space community?”, eventually deciding that podcasting was to be his next big adventure.

WeMartians; 5 Years of Podcasts

Jake released the first episode of WeMartians in early 2016 but shares that it took him several episodes to deliver a cohesive product, iron out the initial growing pains and most importantly land his first guest. Anytime I use “land” in this article I run the risk of bad space puns, but it’s something we’re going to collectively agree is ok. When he first started the podcast, Jake said it was difficult to book anyone on the show, as he was seeking interviews with some of the world’s top engineers, scientists and authorities on space whereas he “was just some kid with an $80 microphone I got at Best Buy”. He blasted out emails, built relationships through Twitter and eventually was able to have his first interview with Michael Coarezza, an Italian engineer specializing in thermal systems and working on the ExoMars spacecraft. An unexpected challenge Jake faced in this inaugural interview was not the conversation itself, but rather managing the poor sound quality that came as a result of recording live between Vancouver and Italy. Specifically, Jake explains that “he was not in a good room and I didn’t have the experience to recognize that,” so there was only so much he could do in post to salvage the audio. However, this interview showed Jake how sharing a conversation with a guest could be a great way to expand his own audience, gain credibility within the community and glean insight into many different avenues of aerospace. Another key guest Jake notes from his first few episodes is Tanya Harrison, a Canadian-American Martian planetary scientist, owner of a great Twitter account and someone whom he has continued to work with.

Over the course of over eighty episodes of WeMartians to date, optimizing audio quality is just one learning that Jake has improved upon since episode one. Before every interview he sends his guest a carefully curated guide to ensure good audio, covering everything from headphones to the acoustics of the rooms themselves. He has also learned to prepare better questions, structuring the interview around “guideposts” to smoothly direct the conversation and allow him to be opportunistic if an interesting tangent presents itself. Lastly, Jake says that he is still working on identifying when to stop an interview if he is unable to resolve any audio or connectivity issues on the fly. He says that this is “a really tough thing to do,” when considering his interviewees’ busy schedules and his own content calendar, but has saved him a lot of grief and time when it comes time to edit.

This year, Jake landed arguably one of the biggest guests of WeMartians, Jim Bridenstine, the Administrator of NASA. Coming from a history in politics and not science, Bridenstine had many critics when he was appointed in 2017, Jake included. However, despite this rocky start, Jake and others in the space community began to slowly gain an appreciation for Bridenstine on the back of several positive changes that Bridenstine had implemented. Between one another they even joked that they should start the “Jim Bridenstine Fan Club”. This fandom grew to the point where a listener of WeMartians gave Jake a hundred pins with a portrait of Bridenstine bearing the “Jim Bridenstine Fan Club” insignia on top. Pins in hand, Jake attended The International Astronautical Congress conference in Washington D.C., an event that he describes as “the biggest conference in the world for space,” full of international speakers and professionals. Jake began handing the pins out to friends and listeners at the conference, telling them that “your mission is to try and get this into Jim’s hands”. It took only forty-five minutes for a photo on Twitter to appear of Jim, accompanied with said pin. Riding the wave of this photo, Jake met Bridenstine’s communications deputy and was eventually able to arrange an hour and a half interview with Bridenstine. Jake describes this episode as “one of the best interviews we ever did,” a major milestone in his podcast, and this even resulted in a new, redesigned pin that is now available to welcome new members of the Jim Bridenstine Fan Club.

The Power of Podcasts

In an environment flooded with seemingly unlimited and complex varieties of content, podcasts almost feel like a throwback medium. For Jake, podcasts are special because conversations represent “the oldest form of communication,” before humans had photos, music, sculpture, or mildly passable blog posts. He also adds that the intimacy and accessibility of podcasts is a feature not always present in other content. Listeners can experience a personal conversation with the host, as well as indulge in any specific niche of interest that they could ever imagine.

One of Jake’s most recent projects was “Make Space Better,” a collaborative initiative prompted by the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement. Along with his creative partner Anthony Colangelo, they looked inward at the barriers to racial justice and equity facing the aerospace community. Noting the underrepresentation of women and people of colour across geophysics, geology, engineering, and other disciplines of aerospace, Jake said that they wanted to focus on helping their local community, but struggled to identify what that meant for global podcasters. Together they decided to support two organizations, with the first being Black Girls Code, an organization providing training for young Black women in many disciplines directly relevant to aerospace. In addition, they chose the Banneker Institute, an organization providing ten-week programs to undergraduate students of colour before they embark on their Masters or Ph.D. studies. Jake and Anthony proposed a fundraiser to their listeners to support these causes, agreeing to match donations to a point in an effort to raise money and awareness for these two organizations. He says “I can’t really explain how it took off,” (my personal view of rockets), but with the help of their listeners and Youtuber Tim Dodd, the “Everyday Astronaut,” they collectively raised $35,000 in donations. An incredible amount. Jake says that this was an extremely humbling experience to receive that much support from his listeners and that “it’s very nice to know that after five years of really slowly curating an audience that they ended up being that cool”.

When Jake decided to make a podcast about Mars, he said that he selected the planet in part to fill a niche in the podcast world for devotees of our neighbour in the sky. From a scientific standpoint, he adds that four billion years ago, Earth and Mars were in similar states and that its important to remember that our vastly different current environments are rooted in a shared beginning. Jake also notes that Mars has become intertwined with human culture despite ironically being somewhere no human has ever been. Between War of the Worlds, Elon Musk and countless references in popular culture, humans have been having conversations about Mars for a long time. Jake has found a way to continue this tradition with WeMartians, (admittedly with a bit more scientific input), but with the same fascination and engagement that began a long time ago.

Jake releases new podcasts, blog posts and more every week so check out the WeMartians website to stay up to date on everything Mars. You can even pick up your own Jim Bridenstine fan package. WeMartians is on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Android and good old RSS so you have no excuse not to give him a follow.

Follow A Musing on Facebook and Instagram for more content on Jake and the other creatives in this series.

Click here if you missed last week’s post with comedian, Matty Vu.

-BF