A Search for His Biological Father Led to a Top Podcast — and an Endorsement From Ira Glass

As Sayre Quevedo’s latest podcast premiered, he got a ringing endorsement from Ira Glass, who played some of the show on This American Life and said Quevedo had “invented something completely new.”

The podcast, entitled Reaching Out, starts with the premise of Quevedo and his twin brother trying to track down their biological father, whom they had never met and had little information on. This search is interwoven with Quevedo’s diary-like commentary about how he’s feeling about finding his father as well as his own life as he is about to turn 30, and intimate conversations with his brother and mother that delve into how the brothers really feel about each other, and how their paths have diverged.

Quevedo is aided in the process by the fact that he has recorded most conversations in his life since his mid-20s, including across the four-year process of finding his birth father. In the end, these conversations, and his own meditations on identity and family, as well as his noted narrative omissions and motives in telling the story, become the main thrust of the podcast.

“I don’t know if I’ve heard another podcast that tries to capture a person’s life as completely as this one does, and just what it feels like to be alive right now,” Glass said in describing the show.

The six-part series kicked off Sept. 16, from Futuro Studios in partnership with KCRW, and has already won the audio memoir award at the Tribeca Film Festival. The Glass endorsement helped propel the show to the top of Apple Podcast’s series charts that week, with the show still remaining in the top 15.

Quevedo, who has previously created podcasts about his family and partners as well as subjects across the world, spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about finding this innovative format, the state of podcasting and how he feels about sharing his life publicly.

Why did you start recording your conversations?

I have been recording myself consistently. I would say since my mid 20s, but I think the habit probably began when I was a teenager. I think it’s almost a habit at this point. I don’t think about recording or not recording, and a lot of that habit stems from the fact that I grew up without really any documentation of my family. My mom left home when she was very young, and my father obviously was not a part of my life, and so I don’t have really any documents of my family history, and so it just became a way of memorializing, of sort of reminding myself that I exist and that I’m a part of the world and part of history.

And in making recordings you’re not necessarily thinking they’ll turn into a podcast or a project?

I think, for instance, with searching for my birth father, I’m sure there was some part of my brain that was like, “This is an interesting story. Maybe I’ll turn this into something.” But I think there was another part of my brain that was like, “I would like to remember this. I would like to remember what it felt like to go on this journey. I would like to remember what these conversations sounded like and felt like.” Because I’ve experienced this so often in my life, that I’ve gone through things that I’ve thought, “Oh, I’m never going to forget what it felt like to talk to my father for the first time, or I’m never going to forget how it felt to send that email with my brother,” [reaching out to their father] and then a few months pass or a few years pass, and it’s just a vague notion in my head. And so it does serve that purpose as well as a way to kind of return to these moments.

At what point in the process of finding your biological father did you know that this would be a podcast?

I think once me and my brother decided to confront my father in person. Because up until that point there was this part of me that, in addition to feeling sort of reticent about looking for him, there was a part of me that felt like it wasn’t going to happen. Though I’m not sure we would have admitted it at the time, I think both of us were so scared of getting that answer and of meeting him that there was some part of me that thought we would never really go through with it. And so after going and confronting him, I was like, something happened. We really did it. And obviously, a lot more happens after that in the series. But I think that was the moment where I was like, I’ve gone through something. I’ve actually done the thing that I was afraid to do. And I think that’s when I knew that there was really a story worth telling, even though I had no idea what was going to happen afterwards.

To that point, it seems like the story starts to morph into not just being about your father.

When I really began to write the series in earnest, I had this feeling that the search for my father was more of a Trojan horse in some ways. The search for my father was really a way of forcing myself to reflect on my relationship to absence in a lot of ways, and my relationship to desire, and the ways that I had sort of built my life around absences and around yearning and searching for things that I couldn’t have or that were not there. I think that became clear to me as I was listening through all of the conversations that I’d recorded too, not just the conversations but also these minute, quotidian parts of my life. I started to realize I’m doing these same things over and over again. I’m going on these dates and feeling bad about myself. I’m going to the club looking for somebody to go home with. I’m having these conversations with my mother about feeling like I have to to meet this person, and it was through being able to sort of step back and look at the patterns that had sort of cropped up in those recordings, that I was able to see “Oh, I’m actually going through something completely different.” The search for my father is actually helping me see that I was going through something else that I wasn’t able to fully see or recognize in the moment of it.

Throughout the podcast, you’re willing to get very personal and be open about yourself, including vulnerable emotional moments as you navigate romantic relationships, as well as others where you acknowledge you’re kind of being a jerk. Were you nervous putting all of that out there?

I still feel nervous about it. There’s a lot of me in this work. I mean, it’s personal, obviously, but there’s a lot of me in this work. My philosophy around how I make personal work is that whatever honesty I’m asking of the people that I include in this work, I have to be tenfold more honest because it’s such a big thing to ask, especially my family, my mother and my twin. It’s such a huge thing to ask people to share something so vulnerable with the public, and also to share it with me, and to give me the power to tell that story. And so I’m sharing a lot of parts of myself that frankly, there’s parts of it that I still feel shame about. There’s versions of myself in this story that are extremely judgmental, extremely critical, critical of myself and of others, and parts of myself that are also at odds with how I would like to be in the world or how I’d like to see myself. My hope is that by sharing those parts of myself that are maybe slightly less likable, slightly less relatable, that people can sort of recognize and accept those parts of themselves as well.

What did you make of the Ira Glass endorsement, in which he said you’d invented “something completely new,” and are taking the format of his own show and pushing it further?

If you say podcasting, that’s the guy people think of, you know, so it was really surreal, and I probably haven’t fully processed what that means. But it was extremely affirming. I’ve worked in audio since I was 15 years old. I’m 33 now, so to receive that kind of feedback from somebody of that stature and who I respect that much really makes it feel worth it to put everything on the line and to make something that where I took some risks both stylistically and personally, to share to share it with the world

Were you looking for a new kind of format when you created the show?

I try not to repeat myself in terms of the form of the work that I’m making. Maybe this is controversial, but I consider podcasting an art and an art form. I think it’s a documentary form and medium and expression. But there’s also a lot of creativity in the work, and I don’t want to make the same art twice. I want to challenge myself. But I wouldn’t say necessarily the style of the work was done with that in mind as much as in trying to find the right form for it.

I wanted to make something that felt reflective of my life in a real way, but that also felt like the kind of art that I enjoy. I wanted to make something literary. I’m a long time reader and grew up reading and love reading and love words as an art form. So I just felt like, at this point, given the state of the industry and the state of where things are at, like why not just take the risk and make something that feels like something I would want to read or something that I would want to watch. Things are so dire in podcasting right now that there’s really nothing to lose in terms of making something that maybe alienates some people because it doesn’t sound like everything that they’ve already heard, and so that was sort of the ethos that I went into making the work.

What’s feeling dire for you in the podcasting industry?

There has been a little bit less of the resources that so many of us who were in podcasting in the early 2010s and 2020s had. As those resources have gone away, as the Gimlets of the world have gone away, as the Pineapple Streets have gone away, there is a feeling that there’s just a lot less room to make risky creative work that is not meant to engage the broadest possible audience, but is meant for people who just want to listen to something experimental or strange or creative. And so I think that’s the direness, the feeling that there’s less room for this kind of work to exist, and I do hope that the success of the work gives some permission to whoever still has the money and resources to take some risks because people did obviously respond to it in a positive way. But I do think that’s the direness of the moment, alongside the layoffs and everything else. The tightening of the belt also leads to a tightening of what is seen as creatively profitable, or creatively possible or worthy of risk in the moment, and that’s a hard place to be for a lot of my friends and colleagues.