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After APM layoff, St. Paul's John Moe launches new mental health podcast 'Depresh Mode'

Saint Paul Pioneer Press - 3/26/2021

Mar. 26—In June, American Public Media laid off 28 employees, including John Moe. APM canceled both Chris Thile's "Live from Here" and Moe's acclaimed podcast "The Hilarious World of Depression." Moe responded with a tweet that read, in part, "I have been laid off. I am unemployed. I don't know what the future will be."

Turns out the future was brighter than he might have expected. Not only did well wishers flood his inbox, he heard from people looking to work with him in the future. "I realized I'm not on a one-way street," said Moe, who lives in St. Paul. "I'm at an enormous intersection."

After taking some time to decompress, he signed with an agent and began talking to a range of potential collaborators, from other public radio networks to huge media companies. Moe eventually entered into an agreement with the independent podcast company Maximum Fun. Monday, some nine months after he was laid off, Moe's new podcast "Depresh Mode with John Moe" launches with two episodes, featuring discussions with actor and comedian Patton Oswalt and comedian and author Kelsey Darragh.

"There was more interest in having me keep podcasting than I frankly expected," Moe said. "I have a lot of regular, really devout listeners who happened to be high up in media companies."

But Moe was wary about becoming an employee again. He chose Maximum Fun because he liked the company's business model. He is essentially licensing his podcast to the company, which provides him with production support and shares a portion of the ad revenues with him.

"That was really appealing," Moe said. "If somebody wants to make a movie, I can't forsee that happening, but I would own that. I get to be my own company."

Moe started work on the podcast in January and set up a studio in his basement. "My coworkers are dogs," he said.

As APM owns the rights to "The Hilarious World of Depression," Moe started from scratch. Where his APM podcast centered on depression, he decided to expand the focus of "Depresh Mode" to include more general issues around mental health. His contract calls for 48 episodes a year, more than twice the number he typically produced at APM.

Each episode, he talks to a celebrity, musician, comedian, psychologist or author about a different topic and Moe has already compiled enough ideas to fill his first year, including trauma and COVID, borderline personality and workplace burnout. "I've been generating so many ideas because I've had a while to wander the desert and think about them. I've been itching to get back on the air and talk about them," he said.

Moe is also talking to his producers about ways they can get listeners more actively involved in the show, possibly through live online events on YouTube or Twitter. "I want to do a show that has some feel for the pulse of what people want," he said. "I want their voices on the show."

Creating "Depresh Mode" is a full-time job for Moe, but he's also making time to return to public speaking engagements, which he said are starting to ramp up again, and to focus on his book "The Hilarious World of Depression," which St. Martin's Press published in May.

"There's some consulting stuff, too," he said. "If things get really busy and it's too much, I may bring in some other people. The idea of having an organization is really appealing to me, even if it's just me and it's based around engendering wider conversations about mental health."

As for the tone of the show, Moe said maintaining a sense of humor while discussing mental health makes the topic more approachable.

"My brother died by suicide in 2007," he said. "When we were going to scatter his ashes, my sister was holding his urn. Our mom asked if it was heavy and she said, 'He ain't heavy, he's my brother.' Even at that low point, we found jokes, because it's a way of pushing through.

"I've never been a fan of jokes that tear people down or mock people who don't deserve it. But jokes with observations about life and jokes about a shared experience that doesn't get discussed, I'm a fan of those. I think it draws people closer together and makes the topic less scary."

The first gag comes in the new podcast's name, a goof on the synth-pop band Depeche Mode.

"When I started 'Hilarious World of Depression,' I was deliberately trying to think of the worst name possible for a podcast. It was a funny idea, but we were going to come up with a better name and nobody ever did. With this one, I thought pretty hard about. I didn't want 'depression' in the title given my broader mandate. When 'Depresh Mode' popped in my head, I texted it to my wife, heard her laugh from across the house and I thought, 'That's it!' To my surprise, Max Fun liked it, too. Now I'm just waiting for a cease and desist order from (Depeche Mode's lead singer) Dave Gahan."

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