Greetings From Somewhere host Zach Mack has been in podcasting since before the word podcast was widely adopted. From tossing recordings of college radio broadcasts onto an RSS feed in 2008 to his current position as senior podcast producer at Vox Media, he’s been at work behind the scenes. 

Recently Mack has taken a left turn from expected podcasting content, launching a travel show while deep in a global pandemic. As of this writing Greetings From Somewhere has tackled the myths of the great American road trip in a two-part miniseries, asked the questions on how to travel responsibly, and investigated what things are like at a socially-distanced Walt Disney World from a Disney outsider’s perspective. 

I sat down with Mack to discuss the process of making a pandemic-friendly travelogue, the goals of the show, and where he’d like to take it. 

What pushed you, after working behind the scenes on podcasts in some form since 2008, to finally make a show that’s yours? 

Zach Mack: I’ve always wanted to launch my own show. When I moved to New York in 2014 to pursue a podcast career Alex Bloomberg had just started his podcast Startup. I was drawn in and inspired by this first-person narrative show of this guy fumbling through the world. I really liked that style. My interest in radio started with me posting and making my own stuff and I just didn’t want to give that up. So much of my job is making things for (or with) other people. 

You mention in ad breaks that the show’s sponsor came to you and said they were still interested in working on this travel show even after COVID-19 effectively shut the world down. How much of the first season was extant before that shutdown? 

Zach Mack: Nothing that’s going to be in season one was produced before March. All of the reporting is new.

Two years ago I drove across the country through the South, from California to New York. I took my audio equipment with me and recorded a bunch of interviews, playing around with audio during that trip. I realized like, “Oh, this could be a cool show, kind of making audio postcards of different places while you’re on a road trip.” I was very inspired by Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown. 

I did have to completely replan my season because of COVID. All these places I was going to go just didn’t feel responsible to visit. A lot of them were small towns. The two reasons [motivating not pursuing small-town reporting] were 1: They were shut down and there wasn’t much going on. Even if I were to go there, there wasn’t much going on to report. And 2: It didn’t feel responsible for me, a guy from New York, the most densely populated city during a pandemic (that at one point was the epicenter) to go into these places. 

Just a dude running around with a mic amongst all this. 

Zach Mack: Yeah, it just didn’t feel right, so I modified the season to go places that were fine with me being there. Disney World is open to the public, and they want you to go. I live alone, I would get tested and quarantine before and after I got back. I knew I wouldn’t be spreading anything and then I was okay with taking on the personal risk as long as I wasn’t pushing that risk out into the world. So I tried to [travel] as responsibly as I could.

What has it been like having to thread that needle of making a travel show, which, as you discussed in Greetings From Somewhere multiple times, runs the risk of glamourizing traveling during a time when traveling is dangerous?

Zach Mack: It has added a nice layer of texture to the show, because [COVID] is this thing we’re all grappling with, thinking about, and don’t know what to do yet. [With GFS] I get to explore that a little bit on the front lines, try to do it as responsibly as I can, and try to weave that into the show. I think you hear me grappling with it in real-time and talking about my own methods, interviewing people, and specifically trying to address how to be a responsible and considerate traveler. 

I wouldn’t recommend traveling today. I’m certainly not trying to encourage people to just go recklessly hit the road right now. This moment has made a lot of tension, right? [There has been] a lot of change, it’s very polarizing, people have a lot of different thoughts. That added a layer. COVID is in the background of every single story I’m reporting.

Even to the point any audio of an in-person interview is going to be a little muffled from the person’s mask. 

Zach Mack: Yeah, it’s just ever-present.

I was driving across the country [before COVID] and visiting all of these different places for one or two days, three tops. These places we go to on road trips that we breeze through but don’t necessarily know what’s going on there. We show up, we do the touristy thing, we go to the “you have to do this” or “you have to eat here” place. But we’re not thinking about what’s happening for the people who live there, or what sort of tension is playing out in that town? I think that was kind of the goal [of GFS]: how can we explore the things happening below the surface that we don’t have the time to explore because we’re just passing through? 

To that note of exploring different perspectives on well-tread places: it’s fascinating to hear someone doing reporting at Disney World in October 2020 that doesn’t have theme park journalist or fandom reasons to be reporting from Disney. It’s not common to hear audio recorded on-site by someone who will, in front of the entire internet, casually say Peter Pan’s Flight looks run-down. What was it like being there as a not-Disney-adult? 

Zach Mack: Disney is this important fixture in pop culture, in all of our lives, especially our childhoods. I certainly had that growing up. All of these movies, stories, and characters were pretty important to me but Disney World and Disneyland weren’t. 

You can easily see through the kayfabe of Disney Magic. 

Zach Mack: I felt like I was experiencing it like an alien who just showed up on earth. I was seeing everything new and maybe for what it was. I tried to report on these things that you know, as Carlye puts it, are completely normal everyday things that you see in Disney World but for me, having never been there, were not normal at all and in a lot of ways puzzling. 

There’s very little to prepare you for the groups of people in The Price Is Right-style handmade t-shirts. 

Zach Mack: Yeah, the [super-fan] T-shirts were truly shocking. I tried to have a lot of fun with that in the episode because that just was wild to me when I was there.

There’s been a lot of pie-in-the-sky questions posed about “what are you gonna do when it’s all over” but, barring a miracle, this is the new normal. That said, what does a future season of Greetings From Somewhere look like when we’re not all as glued down to one spot as we currently are? 

Zach Mack: I have two answers. 1: I would like to go to the smaller towns and places that I didn’t have a chance to go to and had originally planned to go to in season one. A place like Clarksdale, Mississippi that has this really rich and vibrant blues community. There’s a lot of juke joints, all this great music and interesting people. And 2: I want to go international. I want to go to Japan more than anywhere else in the world. And so I would love to do a season or mini-season on Japan. 

Greetings From Somewhere is available now on most podcatchers. 

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