Roman Mars is an American radio producer and host of the podcast 99% Invisible which has been telling stories about design and the things that shape our world for a decade. It made headlines and podcasting history in 2012 when it raised $170,000 on Kickstarter, making it the platform’s most successful journalism venture up to that point. That success enabled Roman to co-fund the indie podcast collective Radiotopia in 2014, and today Radiotopia supports, funds, and promotes a family of 28 podcasts, which are downloaded 19 million times per month. Roman, and 99% Invisible, have been credited with defining a new movement of independent radio and podcast creators thanks to their innovative approach to storytelling. 

In this episode Roman talks to Aleks about his upbringing, about how a group of people he went to college with turned out to be some of the most talented people working in radio today, and about the surprising punk rock inspiration behind Radiotopia.

Transcript

Roman Mars:
I remember back when… We’re talking in June and it’s Pride Month and I remember when pride marches were really protest marches. They were like, you got spit on. There were signs saying how awful you are. It wasn’t Budweiser presents Gay Pride. It wasn’t like that. So I’ve had those experiences of poverty and bigotry and hiding my life and who I was and not being close to people because of it.

Aleks Krotoski:
You’re listening to Standing on the Shoulders, a podcast in which inspiring people tell us about their giants, the people whose metaphorical shoulders they stand on. Across these episodes, you will hear the stories of a number of thinkers and innovators, the visionaries who steer clear of well-trodden paths and build their own elaborate fantastical worlds instead. And they will talk with us about the key moments that shaped their professional journeys, and they will talk about the single most meaningful person to inspire them along the way. It’s hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski and supported by Pearson. And the usual caveat here, we are on lockdown recording mode, so the audio quality isn’t as pristine as we might have liked.

Aleks Krotoski:
Our guest today is Roman Mars.

Roman Mars:
My name is Roman Mars.

Aleks Krotoski:
If you recognize those five words, it is because you have probably listened to 99% Invisible, the hugely popular design and architecture podcast show that Roman has hosted for the past 10 years. It made headlines and American podcasting history in 2012 because it raised $170,000 on Kickstarter, making it the platform’s most successful journalism venture up to that point. That success enabled Roman to co-fund the indie podcast collective Radiotopia in 2014, and today Radiotopia supports, funds, and promotes a family of 28 podcasts, which are downloaded 19 million times per month. Many of them are acclaimed indie darlings, like the Memory Palace, the Allusionist and Song Exploder, as well as Roman’s other podcast, What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law.

Aleks Krotoski:
Roman talked to us about his upbringing, about how he landed up in the crucible of East coast radio, and about the surprising inspiration behind Radiotopia. But first we talked about that voice.

Aleks Krotoski:
I just remembered, but I should have told you about, I guess almost a year ago, I should have mentioned that I used the “I’m Roman Mars,” that little section that you say at the beginning of 99% Invisible in a keynote talk that I gave about interactive design. I was talking about podcasting and how I make radio and how the earbuds have transformed that experience into something that’s extremely intimate. And your voice is such an intimate voice in this space that has become so iconic.

Roman Mars:
Yeah. I mean, that’s the goal really. The tone of the voice is really supposed to be an inside the head voice. It’s supposed to be like it comes from your brain almost.

Aleks Krotoski:
And I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about that, just to start, just to talk about the intimacy of podcasting and perhaps whether that is a reason why it has become such a phenomenon around the world.

Roman Mars:
I mean, I think it’s an incredibly intimate medium. I know it as a fan, even more than a creator. I feel like I’m friends with everyone I listen to. And I know that when I was creating the show, there was some real intentionality in the sound design to make it feel intimate. And part of it had to do with the fact that I knew I was going to be talking about things that seem very boring on the surface and it was going to be manhole covers and curb cuts and door knobs, and I felt like it needed the presence of this close friend internal voice that was the personification of your curiosity. So it is might such that it sounds like it’s a voice coming from inside your head versus a more projected announcer.

Aleks Krotoski:
Roman’s background is another thing that sets him apart from most public radio voices. He grew up in central Ohio with a single lesbian mom. They lived in a closeted household in public housing with another family.

Roman Mars:
I think what is evident about my personal upbringing and the path I’ve always taken or forged on my own was this combination of extreme privilege and its own hardships. I was raised by a single lesbian mother and we lived in the closeted household in a very bigoted world, and we didn’t have a lot of resources and it was a really… It had its own hardships. And I think those hardships allowed me to see the world in lots of different ways. I remember back when… We’re talking in June and it’s Pride Month and I remember when pride marches were really protest marches. They were like, you got spit on. There were signs saying how awful you are. It wasn’t Budweiser presents Gay Pride. It wasn’t like that.

Roman Mars:
So I’ve had those experiences of poverty and bigotry and hiding my life and who I was and not being close to people because of it. But I’ve also had the great privilege of being a white man. So I have the strength of one thing that was not earned and the hardship of another thing which is not deserved, and the combination of those things has really served me extremely well. Know the type of person I want to be and having the power in society to become that person has been, I think, a really lucky roll the dice for me.

Aleks Krotoski:
And also it’s given you the opportunity to play with those different persona as well. Reading a room, seeing what it’s going to be like, deciding what self you’re going to play, which I can imagine is also quite useful in business.

Roman Mars:
Yeah, I think it’s being that type of chameleon. Again, not to make it sound so calculating, but just knowing that there’s some places where you be outspoken about who you are and what you represent and how you feel and where you be quiet. I always have the choice in a moment to be my full self inside and out or not. I think everyone recognizes this transition. It’s not unique to me, but there’s this moment of who you are in high school, and then you go to college and it’s more worldly and your hardships are more… All you’re doing in high school is trying to hide the fact that you come from the wrong side of the tracks or whatever it is, and then in college, that’s the point of your freshmen thesis paper. It becomes a huge part of you and you own it a little bit more and you recognize the strength of it.

Aleks Krotoski:
Roman left home when he was just 15. He went to college very early. First to Bard college at Simon’s Rock, which is the residential liberal arts college in the town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. And then he moved over to Oberlin where he studied biology. He later got a PhD in plant genetics. But I have to say he and I studied together at Oberlin and we’re not entirely sure why this happened, but we at the time were swimming in a sound bath of future iconic voices. Some of the most famous people in US public radio went to school with us.

Roman Mars:
For sure. I think every once in a while I look back at all those… You and me and Elise Spiegel and Alex Bloomberg and Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich and Joe Richmond. It’s really an incredible crop of people that became the type of broadcasters that we are from that one place. And I think it is a sensitivity to these issues. I think it’s also a kind of interdisciplinary approach to things the way Oberlin was. And that type of extreme liberal arts education. You are trying to synthesize a lot different things at once and thinking about things politically, historically, and thinking about the moment, and then you need an outlet for that.

Aleks Krotoski:
Roman says that our extreme liberal arts education and his time studying plant genetics fed directly into the DNA of 99% Invisible. The same impulse that made him want to unearth all the cool, hidden stories in genetics also fueled his curiosity about the surprising history behind all sorts of everyday design questions, like how those weird flappy inflatable figures came to haunt used car dealerships. Why New York has so few alleyways, even though most chase scenes and TV shows end up there. Also how Freud chose to psychoanalyze his patients on a couch and not an armchair. And the hidden histories behind all the stuff we see every day, but we don’t stop to notice whether it’s billiard balls, water fountains, postage stamps, lawns.

Aleks Krotoski:
Now Roman first started making his way from plant genetics to public radio sometime in the late 1990s. He was an avid listener of This American Life at the time, and when he listened to the host Ira Glass talk, he just felt something click. The way Ira spoke wasn’t centaurian, it was just how he spoke with his friends. So Roman made his way to the Bay Area intending to get a job in radio. Now it didn’t happen immediately, but a one-year detour into the tech world helped to fund a three-year unpaid internship with KALW, a sleepy public radio station in the Bay Area. And at a certain point, Roman got to create his own show.

Roman Mars:
So the first radio show that was ever mine was this show called Invisible Ink, so I kept… The invisible thing has been a thread through my two decades of a career. And I called it a radio zine. It was just my take on the public radio storytelling and interviews. I called it a punk rock This American Life and fresh air, and I had a half hour a week and I put it out and that one never made money, had no hopes of ever making money or supporting me, but the discipline of putting something out, of having really a point of view program, like even though it was storytelling and there was journalism involved, it really came from a singular voice.

Aleks Krotoski:
He made 44 episodes in the first year, all by himself. No mean feat. It was like his own audio storytelling zine.

Roman Mars:
I think that’s also a hallmark of punk rock and zine, zinedom. It’s this or this is my point of view and I’m not going to apologize for it is part of it. And I kind of liked the homemade presentation of it that you could tell it was stapled by hand. And I think that was the nature of that original show too. You could tell it came from a passionate individual and sometimes for the right audience, that’s super charming.

Aleks Krotoski:
In 2005, Roman moved to Chicago. He had been hired by WBEZ, which was the home of This American Life and the Third Coast International Audio Festival. And he had been hired to produce Resound, a podcast that showcased international shows. Roman calls it his grad school in radio. And when he lived in Chicago, he became enchanted with how the city was laid out. He would make flashcards of the street grid and he would guess the cross street of every place that he went to. By 2008, he’d found his way back to the Bay Area to become a senior producer of a show called Snap Judgment, a weekly storytelling show.

Aleks Krotoski:
But he was restless. He wanted his own show again. Something that would let him explore his own interests in urban systems and design and architecture. So in 2010, he quit Snap Judgment and launched the show of his dreams. 99% Invisible. The name comes from a quote from the influential American architect Buckminster Fuller. 99% of who you are is invisible and untouchable. Roman just knew from his experience in radio and online that there was an audience for what it was that he wanted to make.

Roman Mars:
I mean, I don’t want to make 99% Invisible sound soullessly calculated, but I really was taking my years and years of… I listened to all kinds of international radio programming at the Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago. I listened to tons of BBC and RTE stuff and stuff from all around the world. And then I listened to a lot of American stuff and I was friends with the people who made these things. And I really was taking like… I want to be 20% Radiolab, I want to be 40% The Memory Palace. I want to take the Radio Four example of following someone who picks up detritus from the Thames for 20 minutes.

Aleks Krotoski:
I actually listened to an episode of something that was talking exactly about that just the other day. I was like, “Oh, here’s somebody who’s a mud larker. Great, let’s do that.”

Roman Mars:
So I knew that there was something about the nature in which people were talking about design on the internet was different, the way that they would argue about things like fonts and road signs. And there were just something about the visual world that was now up for discussion online that I thought I could tap into in a different way. And I also thought that I could cover design the way that like Radiolab covered science or Memory Palace covered history. I liked the intimate storytelling. I liked using this technique on that lens. And I just felt like it kind of hit at this moment when design awareness was at an all time high. And hidden stories are always good and useful. It was just really heartening when it connected. And I had no guarantee that it was going to connect and there was really no path to what that would be in terms of a career. I just knew that was the thing I wanted to make.

Aleks Krotoski:
But it didn’t immediately take off. There was a good couple of years in which you were building your audience, and that’s the equivalent of just churning it out. You’ve got to have a phenomenal amount of self-confidence to just be like, “No, I am going to keep making this and I’m going to keep making this and I’m going to keep making this, not just beyond seven episodes, which is the typical fall off, but no, I’m going to do this for several hundred episodes before people are actually willing to part with cold hard cash.” How did you do that?

Roman Mars:
So I think that two things come into play. One was I was a broadcaster for a long time before I was a podcaster, and broadcaster… In this country, there is no like limited series. There’s just you get a show and then you do that show every week for the rest of your life, or you’re canceled. And this is the nature of broadcasting here. So I had the rhythm of that built into my bones at that point. You could spin me around, put me in the dark for three weeks, drop me on Mars, and I will know what day is a show day. It’s just part of the rhythm of your life after a while. And then the other part of it is just growing up in this punk and DIY culture as a fan and consumer, I knew all the little punk bands that I loved. I knew that they rarely did it for the money. They released their own stuff.

Aleks Krotoski:
By 2012, Roman had been releasing his own stuff too DIY style. He’d put out 43 episodes of 99% Invisible, which was expensive, both in terms of money and also in terms of time. So he reached out to his fans on Kickstarter and raised $170,000. At the time that was a Kickstarter record for a journalism project. Roman thinks that this led to a profound transformation in the American podcasting industry. It showed that podcast creators could make their own decisions free of institutional constraints, and it showed that what they did was valuable, not just to the world, but valuable valuable, he says. It was a big deal. And it paved the way for big million dollar industry deals. But Roman’s inspiration for making his own podcast, and later on his own podcast collective was no corporate overlord. It was the opposite, the animating spirit of the American punk rock scene. So to Roman, this person epitomized the DIY spirit and the value system that came with that, which meant focusing on honing your craft, not churning out crowd pleasers that would make record company executives happy.

Roman Mars:
My example of this, the person I hold highest in this regard is the founder of Dischord Records, Ian MacKaye. So that kind of dedication to your craft, to your hobby and having it be a job, even though someone’s not directly giving you money for it, it’s totally part of that ethos and it was also was instilled in me from when I was an early teen.

Aleks Krotoski:
When Roman founded Radiotopia, he wanted it to be the punk rock label of podcasting. Dischord Records, founded by Ian MacKaye in Washington, DC in 1980, tightly curates the artists that it signs and promotes and fans just trust the label’s judgment of quality. Roman wanted Radiotopia’s roster to be just like that.

Roman Mars:
You start to figure out your way to do it. You start to figure out that you have this compulsion to create a thing and you have the discipline to make it like a job, even though it’s not a job. And all that stuff together creates a DIY culture. That was always just invigorating to me. I was a proud supporter of it. It felt like a different type of consumption when I bought something from Dischord Records and I liked the fact that you got a little note from one of the people stuffing the records into the envelope for you. And it had this bigger mission. Everything about it had a broader mission that you felt, even though it was never preached to you. So he wanted the record label to be this document of all this culture that he and his friends were making.

Roman Mars:
And it wasn’t a broad swath of people. It really was his friends and then people would be brought into it as they became more talented and people would be brought into it as their talents would be brought to his attention and stuff like that. But they were really trying to document a scene, and also, as a form of art, it was not the type of punk rock that was completely just three chord screaming or melodic comfort food. It was always challenging. Every Fugazi record I probably didn’t like very much in the beginning. I would listen to it first and I’m like, “Well that’s not like the last one. And I don’t know, I like the last one.” And then I would listen to it over and over again, because something about it would stick in my head, because it has that artistic value that’s worth investing in. So there’s a balance of comfort and challenge that I thought the DC music scene, and Fugazi in particular, really just ignited my brain.

Aleks Krotoski:
You’ve cast yourself both a difficult role, but also a difficult inspiration because being a creator and a curator, a documentarian, and somebody who is actually creating as part of that thing that is being documented, it’s difficult to have perspective. How do you balance that? And indeed, is that something that you look back at Fugazi, at how they were documenting and creating from within the scene that you take inspiration from and lessons from, as you do the same thing, but for this particular era of audio making?

Roman Mars:
I mean, for sure. To me, when there was a moment where I knew that the show was self-sustaining, what I wanted to do was create a collective of self-sustaining shows for all the misfits of public radio that I didn’t think were getting a fair shake in the public radio system. And I wanted them to create their own shows and I wanted them to have their own connection with their audience and I thought that we as Radiotopia along with our partners at PRX could teach them. The whole fairness structure, the simplicity of the structure and ownership was all based around the ethics of a label like Dischord and it informed everything. The difference that that structure created is truly evident in what is happening today with the multimillion dollar sales of podcasts companies and the acquisitions, and then the different trade offs that are going to be made based off of the different style of ownership that we… Everything was 100% owned by the artist and we work together and we’d take the minimum amounts that we could function.

Roman Mars:
And I didn’t do contracts. That was inspired by… Dischord had very simple contracts, didn’t involve a lot of lawyers and legalese and stuff because the whole idea was that we were just trying to do this in this together and hopefully we would be continue on if it was working for everybody. And if it didn’t work for everybody, then we didn’t want to do it anymore and it was perfectly fine. So I took a ton of inspiration in those structures and it even worked to the extent like that I was trying to talk to Hrishikesh Hirway the creator and host of Song Exploder was a free agent and looking around to maybe join NPR or maybe two other podcasts companies. And I remember talking to him and it said, “I mean, you could join those other ones and you might get some of the things you want, but you could join the Dischord of podcasts companies.” And since he was an indie musician, he was like, that’s what worked on him. So it was a shorthand for what our principles were. And yeah, we can’t offer all that money. We don’t have VC money to give people.

Aleks Krotoski:
Roman says he’s not anticapitalist, he’s just a thoughtful capitalist. One half of the donations that go to Radiotopia are distributed equally amongst all the shows and the other half is distributed based on the downloads that you get in a month. So there’s a social safety net, but also a recognition for performance.

Roman Mars:
What you earn is what you make and we help support each other. And that structure can be frustrating for people who don’t want to do that slog. And I totally understand people making that choice. This is not about what is a good choice or bad choice ethically for someone. It’s all individual. But for some people, they got that, they got the power of that, and they got what it meant, and I think that there’s just some integrity to it. I took that all from the DIY punk culture and from Dischord in particular. They operated with such integrity that I just admired. So I try to infuse it in everything we created when the early stages of Radiotopia were getting started, and I always thought as an advocate, as a maker of thing, rather than somebody who was trying to profit from it. It’s just not in my nature that way.

Roman Mars:
But I also think that the thing is what people miss about some of that stuff is it’s not all about sacrifice when you do DIY. Ownership has great advantages. When it works, you do well, you know what you mean? All this ink was written about Fugazi turning down these like potential big record contracts or what the value of a record contract Fugazi would be if they went to a major label. But I think that it wasn’t just they didn’t like major labels or didn’t want to be involved with the Universal Music Group. I think they were just doing so well that people weren’t offering them enough for it to matter, and that’s what I find today, is somebody approaches me in a sort of tentative, kind of sweaty way, like, “Oh, what would it take to get you to join us?”

Roman Mars:
And I’m happy to have those conversations. I’m totally flattered. I’m not offended by it. And I say, “This is what we’re doing now. This is how we’re doing it. This is the choices I get to make on my own. What do you have to offer?” And usually I find that they don’t have to offer much. And the difference for me to give away my autonomy and sell my access to the audience that I have that’s direct, that’s sacred to me is really, really valuable. And it’s really valuable just in terms of my… I don’t know, like spiritually, emotionally valuable. But it’s also just financially valuable. And you get that, you get to keep that and figure out how to best use that and how it’s going to support you and support your staff in a way that you think is fair, and all that sort of stuff, you get to make those decisions. And that’s a really powerful thing. It’s not just a sacrifice.

Aleks Krotoski:
So how do you see your role now within this community? Because you are documenting. You have the best audio around the world under your banner. I’m so sorry to say this, but you are now the standard, you are now the… What would you say if you’re looking at punk rock, you are now the man, frankly, if you’re doing it that way. You are no longer the rough and tumble person who’s sticking things together with sticky tape that you’ve used twice already, and now you’re photocopying it 15 times. You are establishment. At least that’s the perspective from the outside. Does that stick? Does that fit? Who are you? Who are you, Roman?

Roman Mars:
I mean, I think it sticks. I don’t feel like the man. I don’t feel like I have a lot of power in the situation. I feel like I have a lot of power over myself, which is a very powerful position to be in. I mean, one of the things that you need to do, I think I need to do, I should say, in this position, is figure out the battles worth fighting and how to modify them. So for example one of the limits of Dischord was it’s pretty white. It documented a scene in a city that was predominantly black and the output of the punk rock scene was predominantly white, even though it took huge inspiration from Gogo and Bad Brains. The kids that came out of that or were inspired by that were white kids.

Roman Mars:
And I think that they were fighting a different fight. They were not necessarily cognizant of all the issues related to privilege and whiteness. They were thinking about independence and autonomy and do it yourself and all these things, and they fought these fights that you can’t fight every battle, as a person who’s making something. You have to choose the ones that you care about. So you prioritize different ones that affect you. And in my formation of Radiotopia, I was also really concerned about these things, about ownership, about entrepreneurship, about who got paid first versus who got paid last. And all those things were really, really important to me. And they seemed like the totality of the fight. And so we were resting on that too, and we didn’t have the ability or didn’t seem like we had the ability to change it.

Roman Mars:
So now I’ve been thinking about the limits of that, that thinking. We’ve won that battle for what the value of ownership is and what the value of a connection is. We’ve seen podcasting different iterations come and go in different ways, the walled garden, the ownership of the big money deals. And I think that it has yet to be determined exactly who was the… I don’t know, who won that ideological war. I mean, I think ownership and all that stuff matters so greatly, but one of the limits of it is we have to figure out how to create support structures out of cobbling together resources so that the people who… People of color, trans, LGBTQ, who haven’t had access. We’ve always just felt like, “Well, we just don’t have the resources to help everybody because the ownership part of it is so important to us and sacred to us that we want to people to find their own way and then these indies find us.”

Roman Mars:
And I think we just need to be more out there and take more risks and figure out what the new structure is so that new people can be supported. We’ve just been thinking about that a lot recently, and I don’t know what the answer is. I mean, I’m looking for new heroes and guides to help me out because it’s clear that my… You said it, my time is getting to the point where I’m just like… I know the way I did it. I know the fights I had, and I know that there’s a whole new set of fights that have to be had. And they’re important.

Aleks Krotoski:
If you want to find out more about 99% Invisible and Roman go to nine nine, 99, percentinvisible.org. And if you’d like to listen to and subscribe to the other podcasts in the Radiotopia stable, go to Radiotopia.fm. For show notes and links to the stories mentioned in this episode, go to standingontheshoulders.net. Standing on the Shoulders is a Storythings production. This episode was produced by Shruti Ravindran and edited by Ian Steadman. Our audio engineer and sound design was by Kenya Jay Scarlet. Artwork by Darren Garrett. Website by Eden Brackenbury. Our executive producers are Hugh Garry and Caroline Leary, and it’s supported by Pearson and hosted by me, Aleks Krotoski. It takes a lot of time and a big team of people to make this podcast. More than most people would imagine. So if you like the show, please go to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you go to get your podcast fix and rate it. It really does help people to discover us. On our next episode.

Ytasha Womack:
Dance is more than, “Hey, I’m out here being sexy.” Dance is the healing space. These movements, moving your hips, moving your chest, you’re electrifying your chakra systems through these movements and it’s a complete healing experience.

Aleks Krotoski:
Thanks for listening.

Episode Credits

Standing on the Shoulders is a Storythings production.

Hosted by Aleks Krotoski
Written and produced by Shruti Ravindran
Audio engineer and sound design by Kenya Scarlett
Artwork by Darren Garrett
Website by Eden Brackenbury
Executive Producers are Caroline Leary and Hugh Garry
Supported by Pearson