Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 9 “Time Crunch” Elimination episode. The Left Handed Radio gang had this to say about their Challenge experience:

Adam Bozarth

This has been one of the weirder summers of my life. In May, I went to see Never Not Funny live at the Grammercy Theater, waited after the show and got to meet Jimmy Pardo. I gushed about how I have listened every week since the beginning of the show in 2006 and what a huge influence and inspiration his podcast is to me. Two weeks later, Pardo likens the first 30 seconds of my podcast to morning radio in Oklahoma. Hollywood!

In the following weeks, amazing things happened. A lot of very funny people got to hear us do some great material and actually liked it. And, of course, we got to talk about sketch writing with Matt Besser—founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre—which we all met through. It’s been a real thrill to hear Matt talk about how much we improved, and I would say we did. We were the youngest podcast in The Earwolf Challenge, and probably had the most to learn.

Then Week 9 came and, with Matt Belknap present to make the story arc complete, we got the axe. Probably should rethink my subscription to Season 10 of NNF. But, mock bravado aside, Matt Besser, Matt Belknap and Dave Anthony were very gracious to us when they let us down. And the slow build of fan support on the forums has been very touching. We worked very hard on The Earwolf Challenge and I know it shows. The show has pushed us to work even harder and think about podcasting in different ways.

Taylor Moore

Hey, remember “Salad Horse?” That was great! Boy, we had some good times you and I. Then again, we had some times where I felt like Jennifer Connelly in that weird masquerade party scene in Labyrinth where everyone’s wearing masks and laughing and David Bowie/Matt Besser is singing right at you but, is he angry or not? And why is this even happening? I guess what I’m trying to say is that Hoggle represents everyone on the forums, and the little talking dog that rides another little dog is Paul F. Tompkins and those bird things that can take their bodies apart are Peter and Frank. You can figure out the rest I bet. Start a forum thread! Then again, at the end of Labyrinth, Jennifer Connelly defeats Jareth the Goblin King and gets her baby brother back. So, maybe it’s not a great fit after all. Maybe I feel more like Jennifer Connelly in Requiem For a Dream. She’s still alive at the end of that one, right? And I bet she cleans up and goes on to have a beloved sketch comedy podcast after all that ass-to-ass business. Just like us.

Thanks everyone, it’s been a blast!

Matt Little

We entered the challenge because we felt like we were making work that people who inspired us would see and appreciate (THE. FUCKING. GALL. ON. US.). Most people don’t get that chance and we didn’t want to pass it up.

We worked our way up to the top three and it wasn’t easy. Well, easier than baling hay or something, but I have a limited life skill set (also, I’ve bailed hay and it SUUUUCKS). But for every argument we had, there was an instance of Matt Besser saying he really liked our work. For every late night, we had Doug Benson appreciating that we knew how to write and work for other comedians. For every doubt, we had Tig Notaro quoting our Batman sketch.

I got exactly what I wanted out of this – an amazing summer comedy course where we had our work positively reviewed by professionals in fields we’re busting our asses to break in to. Look, comedy isn’t your parents. But when you produce a show on your own, without even a live audience, you work in a bubble. Even after the work is released, it’s usually the people that are so frustrated that no one listens to them who reach out to tell you that you suck. If you’re doing a good job, you often don’t hear about it because people just assume you know. We had the good fortune to have great comedians say nice things about us in public. It’s given us the energy to push ourselves further…we’re not sadly mumbling “well, that’s over.” We’re rolling up our sleeves and saying “okay, what’s next?”

Thank you all for listening, and thanks to Peter and Frank for selecting us to participate in the show.

Now someone get us Zach Galifianakis’ email address because we’re still dead set on working with him. I’m not kidding, the sketch is ready to go.

PS: Sign up for our mailing list! lefthandedradio.tumblr.com

Anna Rubanova

Hey, it’s Anna, the chick Jimmy Pardo suggested we lose in the first round. (True story!) How’s it going?!

First of all, let me say that I have never been more proud of our little sketch collective than in these last few weeks. I’ve known for a while that this was a special group of people, but seeing them pour so much of themselves into a project like this has been inspiring. Traversing the challenges week to week required cooperation, creativity, research and a lot of mind-reading. At times, it felt like it would’ve been easier had we not been designated 100% sketch. Sure, it’s what we do,  but when the situation called for something else, like in the last challenge, I wish we didn’t feel the need to go through with our regular routine. And, yet, how could we not if that is what we do and have done up to that point? We stuck to our guns and nobody can take that away from us. The skill, professionalism and attitude exhibited in the room, no matter what the challenge, could melt your face off if you stood too close to it. So what if we fumbled? We do good work.

We may have placed third, but, hey, we placed third! Who would’ve guessed we’d come this far after being in the bottom two right out of the gate? Definitely not the Internet. I mean, we somehow tricked comedy idols into listening to our material and they actually liked some of it! Who gets that sort of opportunity? Also, I had a lot of fun this summer hanging out with my friends and doing comedy almost every day. I do wish I had gone to the beach just once. Although, I do hate the beach. Although, sometimes they serve food at the beach and you can just wear normal clothes… My biggest regret during this competition, besides using my most annoying speaking voice in the coaching sessions, is that we never got to do an interview. You may not believe me when I say it, but we would’ve excelled. We were ready two weeks in a row to have a solid one-on-five, no matter who was on the other end of the Skype connect. So, there’s that.

The important thing to remember is, now that we’ve lost, we’re done, no more. You can never hear us again, not even by going to iTunes and searching for “Left Handed Radio,” googling the same exact keywords or even visiting www.lefthandedradio.com. Liking us on Facebook will not bring us back. There is no Twitter account. And, when you ask about our whereabouts or make any reference to our having existed, you will be met with glazed-over eyes, confusion and hatred.

Dan Chamberlain

Keep following Left Handed Radio at www.lefthandedradio.com, lefthandedradio.tumblr.com or subscribe via iTunes.

• The Earwolf Challenge

Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 8 “Using A Famous Guest” Elimination episode. Bob and Dan from Bob and Dan Cast had this to say about their Challenge experience:

When your biggest supporters always qualify their desire for you to win with “but they won’t,” you have to use a sliding scale of success. Luckily, that has been our approach from the beginning.

When we were first told that we were being considered for The Challenge, it was a win. When we were officially included, it felt like we had done the impossible. From there, our metric for what we considered success changed weekly. That we would make it through seven eliminations, never even entered our minds.

Here’s our highlight reel:

Week 2: Jimmy Pardo laughing out loud at our horse joke.
Week 3: Paul F. Tompkins saying we sound smart because we use words like “komodo dragon” and “obsidian.”
Week 4: Matt Gourley saying he liked our rapport.
Week 5: The guest challenge encouraged us to reach out to comedian Dan Telfer, who we now know is super awesome.
Week 6: With our sketch, we finally managed to impress Matt Besser.
Week 7: We received an invitation from Jordan Morris to, “Go right up my butt-hole.”
Week 8: We got to chat with Nick Thune, who was lovely.

We enjoyed our time as part of The Earwolf Challenge, panic attacks while waiting for Skype calls notwithstanding. We have very few regrets. That said, we do have some unsolicited advice for future Challengeers™.

First, learn from our mistake and make sure you can succinctly describe your podcast. As it turns out, saying you’re a lot like Jordan, Jesse, Go! is not enough.

Second, no matter the challenge, make sure your creative voice is heard. Our final submission had very little of us in it, and that was our undoing. To quote Robin Williams in his role as the Genie in Aladdin, “Beeeee yourself.” Also, he was a giant bee at the time.

We’d like to thank everyone at Earwolf. They’re the real heroes. We’d also like to thank Matt and all the judges for donating their time and wit. And also the producers of Shark Night 3-D. That movie looks super rad.

Thanks again,
XOXO

Bob & Dan

You can keep following Bob and Dan Cast at www.bobanddancast.com or subscribe via iTunes.

• The Earwolf Challenge

Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 7 “Original Content” Elimination episode. The F Plus had this to say about their Challenge experience:

To be honest, we made it exactly as far in this challenge as we were expecting to.

Which isn’t to say we don’t have faith in the quality our podcast (we think it’s great), but the underlying premise isn’t one you might consider “an easy sell”. Our sensibility works on the assumption that you’ll pick up on some nerdy references and come in with an interest in the musings of grammatically challenged fan fiction writers, tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists, and people with mind-destroying fetishes for physically impossible acts. That is, we can all agree, a “niche market”.

Early on in The Challenge, we talked about Mystery Science Theater 3000 being our chief inspiration, and it’s definitely been a guiding light for a lot of us in more than just our podcast. Those guys (as well as Statler and Waldorf from the Muppets) taught us to seek out, engage with and ridicule the absurd things that other people tend to ignore. They were our patron saints.

When MST3k transitioned from being on a local Minnesota channel seen by nobody to The Comedy Channel (which, despite later becoming Comedy Central, wasn’t nearly as popular as it is now), the then-host of the show was asked if he was concerned about the show finding an audience. His response, which he repeated a lot, was “The right people will get it.”

Podcasts as a media format have clearly been coming into their own as of late, but the economics still have yet to be figured out. On the plus side, producing a podcast is cheap! All you need is bandwidth and free time. But everything else, from building a listenership to the monetization of even covering your own costs… that’s something everybody has to figure out for ourselves.

So it was really exciting for all of us to be selected as contenders for The Earwolf Challenge. For a little while we got to swim in the big kids’ pool. Our content was listened to by comedians we like, comedians we’ve seen on the TV. Sure, most were just perplexed by us and a few turned out to not like it at all, but Earwolf gave us a platform, and we tried to make the most of it.

In the seven weeks we were on air we agonized every time about what new bit of content we could provide for the show. We wanted to provide new material and continue to give listeners a new topic and a new idea with our own particular sensibility. We heard some criticism we’d never considered before, and heard some other criticism which we didn’t really think about too much. Also, we looked on the Earwolf Forums and saw that a couple of you seem to be really mad about something.

When we started doing this thing about three years ago we had neither an audience nor a goal. We were doing what made us all laugh, and we were sharing it with whoever thought it was interesting. Over time more people have found what we were doing, and some of them have turned out to be enthusiastic supporters.

It would be completely disingenuous for us to say that we don’t pay attention to the number of listeners we have. We totally do. We’ll check the Facebook page for some awful fundamentalist rant site that we’re mining for content, and the first thought is “Shit, they have wayyyy more fans than we do.” But we also know that the only podcast that we’re capable of producing is the podcast that we’d like to listen to ourselves. And when you’re running a show that operates at a net-loss, and you never expect that to change, it seems a little silly to do something that doesn’t personally interest you.

And so it turns out that the podcast we put out made it halfway through this elimination, and that’s a result we’re all perfectly content with. You learned a little about us along the way, and a couple of you turned out to like us.

We want to give Much Muthafuckin Clown Love* to the show’s producers, Peter Moses and Frank Cappello, not only for thinking we were good enough to be involved in this thing, but also for the massive undertaking that coordinating this show clearly was, and for providing its ten contestants with as little pain as necessary. Their efforts gave us all an audience, a brief window of time, and the challenge “Entertain us.” It’s the kind of chance everyone’s looking for, and we did all we could with it.

Thanks for listening,
The F Plus

Lemon
Boots Raingear
John Toast
Jimmyfranks
Acierocolotl Coltrane
Stog Poeser
Nutshell Gulag
Isfahan
bumpgrrl
Squiddy McEnnui
Kumquatxop
Jazaaboo D. Portaxx
Bunnybread
Jack Chick
Victor Laszlo

*This is a traditional term of respect among Insane Clown Posse fans.**
** We are not Insane Clown Posse fans.

You can keep following The F Plus at http://thefpl.us/ or subscribe via iTunes.

You can catch The F Plus live, Friday, September 30th
The Blue Nile in Minneapolis (2027 E Franklin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55404)

• The Earwolf Challenge

Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 5 “Using The Guest” Elimination episode here. Chris Piers on behalf of the Television Zombies had this to say about their Challenge experience:

“Oh… They’re calling me.”

It had been about an hour and a half past when we had been told to be available and I had (obviously) deluded myself into thinking we had a strong concept for The Earwolf Challenge’s elimination that week. So I sincerely was surprised to see the call coming in but hindsight is 50/50. Or something like that.

The call could only mean one thing – we were in the bottom three. Again. In week 2 the judges gave us some good advice on audio quality. We made some adjustments, bought some new equipment, but would we be able to shorten the learning curve in time? Apparently not. Again, we were mostly criticized for audio, although this time it was specifically that our entry was a bit chaotic with us talking over one another.

It’s a completely valid criticism and one I feel most responsible for. I edit the show. I have the tendency to get excited and jump right in and talk. Regardless, I listened to the criticism. I hope it will help us in the future. My biggest regret is not having an opportunity to hear more one-on-one criticism from today’s most popular podcasters. Because in the end, it was a privilege to compete on The Earwolf Challenge.

If I could go back to that phone call, I would have liked to emphasize that our podcast is definitely something Earwolf does not currently offer, and that despite our shortcomings, the real advantage to them was our ability to listen and learn. But ultimately, it doesn’t change too much for us. We probably weren’t going to go all the way since we aren’t a comedy show. We had a fun ride. We’ve been doing our show for years and it’s the highlight of the week for all of us. We just love talking about good and bad tv with each other, so we’ll keep making the show.

When we were asked to join the competition, it was a pleasant surprise. Our show can be considered niche. We don’t discuss just one show but we do talk exclusively about tv. We aren’t trying to do a comedy show but we like to think our opinions, characters, and games can be funny. Our weekly downloads seem to bear out that a lot of folks enjoy what we’re doing.

I would like to thank everyone at Earwolf for the opportunity, starting with Frank and Peter, the producers, who pulled our submission out of the 120+ and suggested it was worthy of competing for a slot on their network of shows. I got to talk to Matt “Fucking” Besser for several weeks. As a comedy nerd, that was an honor. He legitimately seemed to like the same stuff as us. We could talk to Matt for hours. Hopefully, once the competition is over, we will be able to book him as a guest.

One criticism that popped up on both the show and in the forums was our sound quality. It’s an issue that many podcasters deal with and as long as I have this platform, let’s get some discussion going on what is ideal to use. We record in two locations: Washington, D.C. is Jeff and I and Seattle, Washington is Chuck and Katy. I record using a Behringer Xenyx mixer with 4 pre-amp inputs to balance our levels. It records to a solid state recorder: a Handy Recorder Zoom H4n, so that the audio recording can’t crash. My mic is a TLM cardiod by Neumann but Jeff’s is just a simple one you’d get at Radio Shack. I have a Shure SM7b on order for him. Chuck and Katy use a USB mic, the Yeti, since they’re going over Skype. That was new to us and we’re still finding the sweet spot but it seems capable of really great quality. I’m interested in hearing what other podcasts that do their show from multiple locations recommend.

Thank you to everyone who participated as a judge giving us advice, our fellow contestants who helped push us to try our best, and listeners who made it all worthwhile. It was a good experience. Not great; we wanted to go further. But what can you do? In the meantime, we’ll keep cranking out a free weekly show. If you help spread the word, that’d be swell.

-Chris Piers (& the Television Zombies)

You can keep following Television Zombies at www.televisionzombies.com or subscribe via iTunes.

• The Earwolf Challenge

Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 4 “Recurring Segments” Elimination episode here. Brett Hamil from Ham Radio had this to say about his Challenge experience:

When I found out I had been chosen as a contestant on The Earwolf Challenge, I was thrilled. I told my friends and they were thrilled for me too, unless they happened to be one of the 80% of Americans who have never listened to a podcast, in which case I had to explain to them the following: what a podcast is, what a podcasting network does, and who, exactly, would listen to a podcast about podcasting.

But that’s what’s great about Earwolf: they’re so far ahead of the curve that some people don’t even know there is a curve yet. Think about it: millions of people walking around who have no idea about podcasts, people who have never accessed the thousands of hours of high-quality comedy with no commercial interruptions or corporate meddling that are available free to anyone with the Internet.  When those people do find out (and eventually they will–even my grandmother has a cell phone now) one of the first things they’ll observe is that Earwolf is producing the best content in the medium.  What Jeff Ulrich and Scott Aukerman are doing is visionary.

So, again, thrilled to be a part of it.

Now on to the competition: I didn’t do as well as I thought I could, I didn’t feel the judges got what I’m trying to do, and the limitations of the format could be unforgiving. Having two isolated minutes of your podcast critiqued in vivid detail by people you respect and admire is like being slow-roasted on a rotisserie made of self-doubt. On the other hand, getting to listen to Paul F. Tompkins and Jesse Thorn or Matt Gourley and Paul Scheer expound upon the limitations and possibilities of the medium in such depth and at such close proximity was, for me, a master class in podcasting. Granted, some of these discussions were provoked by clips of my show that seemed to make Matt Besser almost physically revolted, but it was still pretty cool.

Thanks to Peter Moses and Frank Cappello for putting this whole thing together, and thanks to all of my listeners. If you want to check out my podcast, you will find over three hours of original, scripted comedy I’ve produced in the past year, of which less than 5 minutes aired on The Earwolf Challenge.

Ok, that’s it.  Good luck to the rest of the contestants!

-Brett

You can keep following Ham Radio at www.HamRadioWithBrettHamil.com or subscribe via iTunes.

• The Earwolf Challenge

Catch-up on The Earwolf Challenge! You can listen to the Week 3 “Concept & Content” Elimination episode here. Tim Daniels and Tom Reynolds from The Complete Guide To Everything had this to say about their Challenge experience:

Hi, we’re Tim and Tom, the losers you heard losing on the internet earlier this week. We have a podcast called The Complete Guide to Everything that comes out weekly, and we try to keep the losing to a minimum on that show.

We’ve followed Earwolf since the very beginning and have been fans of Comedy Death Ray/Comedy Bang! Bang! since back in the day. We kept up on every bit of Earwolf news as the network was formed and added new shows. True story: one time one of us had to be rushed to the hospital as a direct result of a particularly hilarious Bob Ducca bit. When the mysterious “Project Tippy Toe” was announced, we rushed to sign our show up for possible inclusion in the project.

Getting knocked out so early was a bummer because in addition to the severe blow to our egos (note to future losers: copious amounts of alcohol is a terrific remedy for this situation), we actually had fun participating and were looking forward to the future challenges. Being that we got voted off so early, we never got a chance to get to know the other competitors, who all seem like genuinely cool people with interesting shows. Overall, having been a part of The Earwolf Challenge will only make our own show better, and we are grateful for the opportunity and offer our sincere thanks to all involved.

When you do your own podcast, you have complete control over everything. That’s one of the amazing things about the medium. We’ve had more success than we had ever thought possible: thousands of listeners every week, sold out live shows thousands of miles from our homes… all for our little project we produce in a basement. And the entire way, we were in complete control of every decision we made, every joke, every word of every episode.

We originally had reservations about appearing on The Earwolf Challenge. We realized we’d be giving up a great deal of control. But ultimately we decided we were lucky to be asked and it would be an amazing opportunity to get criticism from some talented people and expose our show to a new audience. Then we got voted off almost immediately.

Last week, the Wrestling Team set the bar pretty high for graciousness in defeat and demonstrated how to walk away from a potentially negative experience having learned and grown. (Great, now we’ll look like dicks if we complain. Thanks a lot, guys.) They talked about applying the constructive criticism they received on the show and improving their own podcast and we’ve definitely learned some valuable lessons by participating in the Challenge. Just being asked to think about aspects of our show that we haven’t thought about in over a year was immensely helpful, and something we wouldn’t have done if it weren’t for this competition.

We can sit here and bitch about how reality shows skew reality, and how if you really want to judge the merits of a podcast you should actually have the judges listen to the podcast, but that would be missing the point. Ultimately, our failure on the show was a direct result of the decisions we made. The Earwolf Challenge was set up a certain way, and if we couldn’t operate within those constraints, no matter how great we think our own podcast is, we didn’t deserve to continue on The Earwolf Challenge.

Which brings us to the most valuable lesson we learned on the show: If you’re going to decide to do something that you don’t have control over, play ball. Do what you’re asked to do or don’t do it at all. In the immortal words of Bill Withers, “Go on and do it, do it, do it… but do it good.”

Unlike our own show, we weren’t in charge of this show. If we thought someone was missing the point when they judged our submissions to each challenge, we should have convinced them otherwise or changed the way we do things so that the judges liked it. If we couldn’t or wouldn’t do either of those things, well, by the rules of The Earwolf Challenge, we deserved to be voted off.

Overall, though, it was a lot of fun so we’d like to thank Matt Besser, Frank Cappello and Peter Moses for having us on. Frank and Peter are amazing dudes that deserve a plaque somewhere for figuring out how to schedule and deal with 10 shows and 3 hosts twice a week, if for nothing else. We’re really thrilled to be a blip on Earwolf’s radar, and thank Jeff Ullrich and Scott Aukerman for letting us on their network, if only for a few minutes.

-Tim and Tom

You can keep following The Complete Guide To Everything at www.tcgte.com.

• The Earwolf Challenge

Inspired by the well-written last-hurrah statement from the Beginnings podcast, the recently eliminated Earwolf Challenge contestants, we’ll be sharing the final remarks from eliminated contestants each week. A closing comedic salvo, of sorts, from the talented podcast explorers starting this journey with us.

Mark Bisi and Andy Beckerman – the Wrestling Team duo behind the Beginnings podcast, had this to say about their Earwolf Challenge experience:

Well, that was embarrassing!

When we learned that Beginnings had been eliminated from The Earwolf Challenge – during a recording session almost a month ago – our immediate reaction was disappointment. However, after a few minutes as the judges’ decision percolated in our minds, being upset quickly became difficult. Matt, Jimmy and Jason’s comments were fair, well-reasoned and spot-on, and they poked at some things that were already nagging us as we were attempting to restructure our podcast. Immediately after the recording session, we were truly inspired, excitedly talking out ways to refine the concept of Beginnings and improve the show. It was only later, after we left to go to separate parties, that sorrow took over and crudités were our only consolation.

The criticism we received from Matt, Jimmy and Jason was really the first critical feedback we had gotten on the show. We would often hear from friends and acquaintances in comedy here in New York who enjoyed the podcast, but there was no critical engagement with the show. When you bomb on stage, the big question you ask yourself is, “How can I do this better next time?” Beginnings lacked that instant feedback, so we had to rely on our instincts in building the show. It turns out that the judges provided a much-needed outside perspective, which forced us to evaluate the show from an audience member’s point of view. We realized that Beginnings was capable of generating fun discussion, but the format – an open-ended conversation – seemed to undercut the original concept of exploring the beginnings of creative people. That lack of specificity made it difficult for an audience member to gain a foothold in the discussion and sometimes put undue responsibility on our guests to guide the interview. So ultimately, while it felt shitty to be eliminated, in the end it helped us make a show that’s 100% better, resulting in the new format that we debuted with episode 24.

We started the podcast to demystify showbiz origin stories and educate ourselves about the ways people become successful creators. Also, we wanted an outlet to counter our mannered, absurd stage personas and communicate more honestly. In this quest to be genuine, we didn’t impose any form on the show and aimed to just have a free-form conversation, and in the process did a disservice to the concept of “beginnings”, which the judges acknowledged was the real hook of the show.

This was really the crux of what we took away from The Earwolf Challenge. We realized that if we really committed to the core concept of the show, we would have something special on our hands. And committing to that idea means creating a format that allows us to really get at the idea of “beginnings.” Around episode 18, we wanted to stop talking about the mechanics of showbiz so much and just look at how people become creative, but we never defined specifically what that meant. The show became slightly amorphous and unfocused. We realize now that the key to that change is not only specificity – we have instituted scripted questions and regular segments to give a spine to the show – but also to make the discussion personal for our guests. We are now concentrating on the personal relationship our guests have with creativity and the defining moments in their lives that lead them to their chosen field, as opposed to the specific logistical steps they took toward a career.

So, we have The Earwolf Challenge to thank for helping us refine our vision of what we wanted the show to be. While we’re not happy about being eliminated, we think that we’ve incorporated the judges’ criticisms to build a show that we are truly proud of. If you’ve come to Beginnings through the challenge, we would really love for you to check out our interview with Pete Holmes to get a taste of our new direction.

-Mark and Andy

Hear Wrestling Team get eliminated. (If you listen closely, you can hear their bodies deflate.)

• The Earwolf Challenge

“Ya’ll bitches watch out for this shit. Some dudes goin’ round saying they playin fo real, but can’t handle they pressure. You know what be said: ‘You can’t handle the heat, get the fuck out the kitchen’. Truf.” -Abraham Lincoln

I thought I’d start off with that little inspirational quote since it applies perfectly to this week of The Earwolf Challenge.

This is the first challenge week. The first week we actually put into practice what the crux of the show is going to be about. As nerve-wracking as Week 1 was, Week 2 was a completely different ball game.

Here’s a little inside scoop as to how we make this all happen. At the beginning of the week, Peter Moses and I gave the contestants the criteria for the week’s challenge. We tried to give them as much detail in the instructions to help them create the best content possible. We’re not trying to screw over the podcasts by making these challenges SUPER difficult. The goal of this show is to progress the art of podcasting and try to make everyone as good as they can possibly be.

On Monday we record the “Coaching Sessions” with just Matt Besser and the podcasts (that’s what you’ll hear on Day 1). Matt was extremely adept at being able to dig into the nuance of each team’s sensibility and gave each podcast well-tailored advice.

The podcasts then had until the following Friday to turn in their challenge submissions for the week in order to be ready for the recording on Saturday. We needed to find a way to help the teams with the challenge (the “Coaching Sessions”) and then give them enough time to apply Matt’s advice and create their submission for Saturday (the “Challenge” and the “Judgement” episodes). All of the teams turned in their submissions on time (because they all kick some serious ass), and we were ready for the recording on Saturday.

Now I want you to picture this: you’re a twenty-three year-old, recent college graduate who has to organize a double recording of an untested podcast which involves scheduling ten groups from across the world, living in different time zones along with Matt Besser, Jimmy Pardo and Jason Sklar – three of the biggest names in comedy and podcasting. Let’s just say: Peter and I were a tad nervous. Luckily though, the show went off without a hitch. Aside from Jimmy Pardo’s chair almost giving out on him during the middle of the recording. But, all in all, it was a very successful show.

Aside from all of these logistical feats, there was one other thing this week that made it truly difficult. The competition part. We had to start eliminating teams. Peter and I spent so much time finding these ten podcasts that to eliminate any of them is almost like assassinating our same-sex marriage adopted infant love-child. Yet, alas, like any competition show, someone had to go. The one hope I have is every team, no matter how long they last in this competition, gains some exposure and learns as much as possible from being a part of this crazy new podcast. Enjoy!

You can check-out Episode 2.1 here!

• The Earwolf Challenge