Outside/In was launched by New Hampshire Public Radio as a podcast in 2015 as “A show where curiosity and the natural world collide.” Their team explores a wide variety of topics, from all around the world. They’re website says they “report from disaster zones, pickleball courts, and dog sled kennels, and talk about policy, pop culture, science, and everything in between.”
Last year, Outside/In was offered up to the terrestrial radio world, and last month we picked it up so it is now heard on Friday evenings at 8:30 on WGCU-FM.
In order to connect our listeners with their team, and learn about what they do and how they do it, we meet Nate Hegyi, he’s been Outside/In’s Host and Senior Producer for about four years. He was previously a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau, based at KUER Public Radio in Salt Lake City, Utah covering federal land management agencies, indigenous issues, and the environment. Before that, Nate worked at Yellowstone Public Radio, Montana Public Radio, and was an intern with NPR's Morning Edition.
Guest:
Nate Hegyi, Host and Senior Producer of Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio
Full Text
Mike Kiniry
This is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Thanks for joining us. Outside/In was launched by New Hampshire Public Radio as a podcast in 2015 as a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. Their team explores a super wide variety of topics from all around the world. Their website says they, quote, report from disaster zones, pickleball courts, and dog sled kennels, and talk about policy, pop culture, science and everything in between. Last year, Outside/In was offered up to the terrestrial radio world, and last month we picked it up, so it's now heard on Friday evenings at 8.30 on WGCU-FM. In order to connect our listeners, that's you, with their team and learn about what they do and how they do it, I spoke with Nate Hegyi. He's been the Outside/In host and senior producer for about four years now. He was previously a reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau based at KUER. our public radio in Salt Lake City, Utah, covering federal land management agencies, indigenous issues, and the environment. Before that, Nate worked at Yellowstone Public Radio, Montana Public Radio, and he was an intern with NPR's Morning Edition. He joined me from his studio in Juneau, Alaska. Let's hear that conversation now. Nate Hedge is host and senior producer of Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio. Welcome to the show, Nate.
Nate Hegyi
Great to be here.
Mike Kiniry
So you live in Alaska. Where exactly in Alaska do you live?
Nate Hegyi
I live in Alaska's capital city, Juneau, which is in southeast Alaska. So like the rainy rainforest part of Alaska, the cold, but not too cold part of Alaska. So, you know, it's a balmy 40 degrees here right now and probably raining.
Mike Kiniry
How long have you lived in Alaska?
Nate Hegyi
I've lived in Alaska for A little less than a year. My wife got a job with the school district up here, and so we moved up here about a little less than a year ago. We'd spent some time in Juneau two years prior for an internship that she had, and then we bounced around to Montana and New Hampshire, and now we're back here in Juneau.
Mike Kiniry
Understood. So when did journalism or, you know, audio storytelling, but not necessarily audio, but when did journalism first come into your heart as something you wanted to do?
Nate Hegyi
When I was in high school, I went to a, I did a job shadow at the newspaper of record in Madison, Wisconsin, where I grew up. And I remember hanging out with the photojournalists there. And one guy in particular had just gone skydiving. And then he was going to a protest. And he was like, this is a job that if you have really short attention span, which I do, is perfect. You just get to do wild stuff every day. And I immediately was just taken to this idea of journalism. And I originally wanted to be a photojournalist. Then I started getting into writing and then kind of by happenstance fell into audio journalism. I had a great class that I loved at the University of Montana where I went to school and fell in love with this idea of essentially like making audio documentaries. They remind me of music, you know, the mixing and everything else like that and just hearing people's voice. hearing that emotion in someone's voice, I just, I can't get enough of it. So that's how I fell into journalism.
Mike Kiniry
We are simpatico in that regard. When did public radio enter your life? Were you listening to public radio as a younger person or did that come later?
Nate Hegyi
Came later. In my 20s, I was roomies with a bunch of guys who grew up listening to public radio. So it was just always on in the background, Montana Public Radio. And then after I graduated college, I got a job for 10 bucks an hour hosting All Things Considered 3 * a week in Montana Public Radio, doing a little bit of reporting. One thing led to another. And yeah, I just fell into this line of work. Gosh, almost a decade ago now.
Mike Kiniry
Do you remember the first time you heard your own voice come out of the radio?
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, it was terrible. No way. Real bad.
Mike Kiniry
Yeah.
Nate Hegyi
I know that it's existed. It exists out there. I could find the actual story. I know the exact one and I have hesitated to do that because I do not want to press play and hear what I sounded like on my first story because I'm sure it was absolutely terrible.
Mike Kiniry
You were, as I understand it, you were in Salt Lake City as the Utah reporter for the Mountain West News Bureau. Is that correct?
Nate Hegyi
That is correct, yep.
Mike Kiniry
How long were you out there?
Nate Hegyi
I was in Salt Lake for about two years. I worked with the Mountain West News Bureau for about four years, bounced around from Montana down to Utah, and then I became the roving rural reporter. So I covered rural communities throughout the Mountain West and then tribal communities as well. And it was a really, really great job. I got to travel all over the Mountain West, told a lot of stories on NPR, fast-paced, really exciting stuff.
Mike Kiniry
Seems to me that sort of beat would sort of lend itself to what you guys do on Outside/In.
Nate Hegyi
Absolutely. Like that was one of my selves when I applied for the job four years ago was that, I had spent a lot of time in the West telling Western stories. And, our podcast, it might be produced by New Hampshire Public Radio, but it has a national and international audience. I think our largest share is actually in California. And so I saw that I could bring some really cool environmental stories from the West to Outside/In and bring a lot of field reporting to Outside/In, which we still do now. Like we love getting out in the field, getting our boots dirty, telling weird and wild stories about the natural world.
Mike Kiniry
Had you done any hosting in this way prior to coming to Outside/In?
Nate Hegyi
No, not at all. I was a strict public radio reporter, so it took a lot of breaking of the public radio norms in my voice, trying to get out of, you know, the narrative kind of, from PR News, I'm Nate Hedgy, you know, that kind of stuff, and to start sounding like a normal person. No shade to my public radio colleagues. Lots of people sound normal. I sounded a little too public radio for my own taste. So getting into that hosting, you know, more conversational. It took a while, but I think I'm getting there.
Mike Kiniry
So Outside/In launched in 2015, as I understand it. You said you've been there for four years. Were you at all familiar with the show prior to finding it as something you wanted to pursue?
Nate Hegyi
Yeah. It was one of the first shows I listened to when I got into public radio journalism and thinking about podcasting. I just thought it was so cool because, as a public radio reporter, oftentimes I would have 3 1/2 minutes to tell a very complicated story about the environment. And so you would have voice A, voice B, expert, and you're out, you know? And this gave me a platform to tell public radio stories, but instead of 3 1/2 minutes, we get 28 minutes. And so you can really dive deep into stuff and also just nerd out and get to know characters and sources. They're not one or two bites. You know, suddenly they're either a more fully fleshed out person that you get to listen to and you get to get into the nitty gritty and everything else like that. And I really loved that Outside/In was doing that. And so I was super excited when I got to join the team.
Mike Kiniry
I've heard several episodes on our radio station and I've listened to several episodes this morning. Let me see, throw this at you. Kind of like Radiolab meets Living on Earth.
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, that's a great summation of the show. Exactly that. Radiolab meets Living on Earth. We try to do, we try to, we try environmental stories. sometimes can be pretty static and they can turn people off. And so what we try to do is really get you engaged with stories, from the backcountry to your backyard is kind of our kind of like thematic, our North Star. And so we try to have fun, goof off, and tell some really wild and weird stories.
Mike Kiniry
Where do you originate stories or how do you originate stories?
Nate Hegyi
All over the place, really. Sometimes it's something you read in the local newspaper. Sometimes it's a conversation you have with a friend at a bar. And sometimes it's just something, you know, you run into just day-to-day in your life. You know, they really come from totally different places. And yeah, I They're all over the place.
Mike Kiniry
One of the things that I love about doing what I do, and I do similar things that what you do, is that I could be like on Reddit and I can see a paper that everybody's talking about that's really interesting. And then I can just look up the author of the paper and then send them an e-mail and then talk to them on the radio and shine light on the thing that everybody was talking about.
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, it's so exciting, isn't it? It's so cool. We are so blessed to have these jobs. You can just read something. Like I read a story in the Atlantic and I was taken by it. And so I just called up the reporter and we had a conversation about it, you know, and it starts me thinking about this, you know, thorny issue and getting to have great conversations. It's really a lot of fun.
Mike Kiniry
Explain sort of the size and scope of your team. You're in Juneau, Alaska. So I mean, is everybody else in New Hampshire, or is everybody else kind of scattered to the winds?
Nate Hegyi
Everybody else is in New England, for sure. We've got a team of five. Our senior producer splits time between New York City and New Hampshire. Then we've got Marina, one of our producers, is in Portland, Maine. Felix is in Boston. And then Justine is also in Portland, Maine. So definitely East Coast centered, but we get to travel all over the place. I've been to Ireland with this show to tell an episode. I've been out to Washington, California. I'm hoping to go to Hawaii for an episode in a couple months. So yeah, we get around A lot.
Mike Kiniry
Do you guys have any kind of a visual element to the show?
Nate Hegyi
We have definitely play around. with Instagram and all the social medias. And we've been doing videos. I called them vertical videos once and someone told me that I sounded very old, but reels and shorts, we've definitely been playing around with.
Mike Kiniry
Well, vertical videos definitely explains what it is.
Nate Hegyi
It explains what it is, right? Yeah, it's a vertical video.
Mike Kiniry
I would like to take a moment to reintroduce my guest, Nate Hegyi, as host and senior producer of the radio show and podcast Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio. We added it to our lineup recently. You can listen to it on Friday nights at 8.30 here on WGCU-FM. We invite you to engage with a show about this episode or any of our episodes on our social media. We're on Instagram and Facebook as WGCU Public Media. Can you cite a most memorable episode that you've been a part of since joining the team four years ago?
Nate Hegyi
We actually just did a three-part series called Operation Nightcat, which was about a massive poaching bust in New Hampshire that took some really interesting turns and involved corrections officers in the New Hampshire State Prison for men that were also involved in doing some bad stuff in the prisons. And it was just the kind of deep investigative story that I love to do that also allowed us to nerd out on hunting laws and what it's like to be a game warden, what it's like to be a corrections officer inside a prison. And It was just a, that was a lot of fun, a lot of hard work, and we're really, really happy with how it turned out. That was called Operation Nightcat. It's a special three-part series we produced back in the fall.
Mike Kiniry
What's the arc of production usually for, you know, not a three-part series, but when you have an idea, you say you're going to do it, you put it on the calendar. Is it weeks? Is it months? Is it days?
Nate Hegyi
It is probably months, I would say. We strive to have our, now our calendars planned. planned out until August. I think there's a lot of tentative episodes, in that July, August slot. But yeah, it takes a few months for us to really produce an episode. Occasionally we'll do a fast turnaround, but fast turnaround for us is like a month. So when we're looking for stories, we're not just looking for, you know, headlines of the day. We can do trends, like we just recently had an episode about raw milk and whether that's safe to drink or not. or bans against fluoride in the water would be an example of kind of trend stories that we do, but there's still, it's a couple months lead up and that's including interviews, audio editing, scripting, all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of hard work that goes into these episodes.
Mike Kiniry
The first episode that I heard in my kitchen was the microplastics episode. which I encourage people to listen to. It was interesting. I did a show on this show back in the 2019, I looked it up, with a guy out of University of Victoria in British Columbia. He's a PhD candidate who had just published research showing that humans were consuming 10s of thousands of bits of microplastics every year. And I almost was like, is this legit? know what I mean? Because we now know that there's microplastics like in the cells of our bodies. But just, I guess that was seven years ago. Just seven years ago, that was completely novel. So your episode was sort of the cutting edge of that. And can you explain it just a little better? It was about how you could get a test, presumably, that will tell you what your microplastic levels. Just talk about that a little bit.
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, So it's essentially you can get a test to find out your microplastic levels. The test is produced by this guy, Brian Johnson, who, if you've been on the internet, you've probably seen him. He's that guy who is trying to live forever. He like does a bunch. Are you familiar with him, Brian Johnson?
Mike Kiniry
I, you know, I looked him up after you guys mentioned him, but I was not familiar with him prior to that.
Nate Hegyi
He's a wild and interesting person, to say the least. And so he's got this company. called Blueprint that does these tests. But honestly, like, we dive into the episode a little bit. The sample size of these tests that you're measuring against isn't that big. And you can really take them with a huge grain of salt, just like these microplastic cleanses that you can do, where you essentially like cleanse your body, your blood of microplastics. The science on whether it actually works is super iffy. But I think that it goes to show just how scary the idea of having foreign entities are in your body and the lengths that people will go to get rid of them. And, we don't know a ton of what they are doing to us. there's definitely studies out there that are showing, this and that, but actual research on microplastics and what exactly they are doing to our body, whether they're really, really dangerous or not, is still pretty, pretty, pretty soft.
Mike Kiniry
Yeah, there will be more shows on microplastics in the future around the country. Have you guys done anything on issues around the boom of generative AI in terms of from your angle, which I presume would be the energy use, the water use, the land use, all that stuff?
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, we did an episode a couple of years ago that might be ripe for a refresh. about AI's impact on climate change and on the environment, specifically data centers. This was before the data center conversation really got ramped up, because now I feel like it's definitely a big trend on national media hearing stories about data centers and their impact on water usage, impact on how much energy we're using in this country. And so we looked at that a couple of years ago. I bet you, if you listen to that episode now, it would sound incredibly stale just because how much has changed. in the past couple of years with generative AI. But we just actually just got a pitch about something to do with AI and genetically modified babies. I don't know. You know when you get those emails in your inbox? As a host, somebody's written a magazine article or something else like that. They're just like, what? is that? That's the e-mail we got this morning.
Mike Kiniry
I am familiar with that phenomenon. Not the genetically engineered AI babies, but the emails in the inbox. Speaking of inbox, you guys also do like, I found there's some shorts that you guys do where you do take like a listener question and you do just a little packaged piece or something like that.
Nate Hegyi
So we love taking listener questions and I definitely encourage your listeners to reach out if they have your questions about the natural world or science or just some of the weird stuff they see around them. We love to answer people's questions. We get them in all the time from all over the country from, I just answered one about why do dogs roll around in dead stuff and why do they do it besides making your whole house smell terrible and you having to give them baths every time they roll in a dead fish or something like that. To why do predators have forward-facing eyes? To why are lighthouses red? We get so many different questions and we really love answering them.
Mike Kiniry
So why do dogs roll around in dead stuff?
Nate Hegyi
Well, a couple of reasons. We think, A, it's just fun. They get, they, you have to remember that a dog's, most powerful sense is its sense of smell. And so when they smell something that's dead, they get just super excited about it. And they're like, I'm going to roll in that because that's really fun. The other theory is that they're rolling in it because they're going to take that scent back to their pack to say like, hey, I found this like really delicious dead salmon that I think we should all check out and eat. And then there are other theories about just not just dogs, but just animals in general, why they're why they're rolling in dead stuff. Sometimes it's to mask their scent so that maybe, you know, an animal that is not so attracted to eating dead things will not attack them. But when it comes to dogs, yeah, it's mainly like, hey, check out this really great dead thing that I found. We should all go check it out and eat it.
Mike Kiniry
My dog, may she rest in peace for about two years now. She would definitely do that. And she'd come to me almost like, look what I brought you. And it's like, yeah, you smell like a dead animal. Thank you.
Nate Hegyi
Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. You're going to love me giving you a bath and making you smell like soap, which I know you don't like.
Mike Kiniry
So you said you guys have things planned out for several months. What are you cooking up right now? Anything you can give us a teaser on?
Nate Hegyi
Absolutely. Let me just open the planner real quick and take a look. One of the ones I'm super excited about is the idea of commercializing wild game. And so there are a ton of deer in the East Coast, white tail deer. an overabundance of deer. And there has been a small but growing argument that maybe we should start commercially hunting deer and selling their meat in grocery stores and the like. And so looking at that as an alternative to beef and chicken and also kind of the fraught consequences of doing that. I mean, we stopped market hunting back in the 19th century because it led to the extinction of the passenger pigeon and partially led to the extermination of most of the bison in the US. And so if you ask most hunters and anglers about this idea, immediately you'll just get a no way. We should not be selling wild game. And so we're going to kind of explore and play with that idea a little bit.
Mike Kiniry
So when we picked up Outside/In and we were chatting beforehand, so we're not the very first station that's picked it up, but we're sort of among the first. Will you in any way change your mindset in production knowing that your show is now being, I guess not. You said you do podcasting to California and stuff, so maybe you're not going to change your calculus.
Nate Hegyi
I mean, we've already changed a lot just to get it to broadcast. So we began as a podcast and we only went to broadcast last July. So before that, for instance, we were all over the place in the length of our stories. So we'd have 45-minute stories, we'd have 20-minute stories, and now we're working on a broadcast clock. So it's, I believe, 2830 or 2850 is what we get with one break. You know, the biggest question that we've had is, you know, being 1/2 an hour show versus an hour-long show, is tough in our current atmosphere of public radio. I think that there should be more half an hour shows. Half an hour shows are A, easier to produce with a small team, and we have a small team. It allows us to do weekly. It allows us to get out in the field still and tell those kind of stories. But if you look at your public radio schedule, most shows are hour-long shows. So finding other half-hour shows to pair us with has been a little bit tricky, but it's something that I'm excited about because I've been looking around at the landscape and there are a lot of smaller stations that are producing half an hour shows that I think we can pair nicely with.
Mike Kiniry
Are you now making the podcast version to the radio clock or do you make 2 versions?
Nate Hegyi
We make two versions, but we're talking like, you might cut like a minute out of the podcast. So we really try to stick close to that 28 to 30 minute marker.
Mike Kiniry
When we started producing Ye Gods, it was a podcast that was pre-existing and then we've kind of recontextualized it. And our master plan was to make it the radio clock, even though it was a podcast. So when we did put it up for radio, we didn't have to like re-engineer it all.
Nate Hegyi
Right, exactly. That was something that we had to do. We spent pretty much a year just getting ourselves first up to weekly, because we used to be twice a month, that kind of thing, really loosey-goosey. So getting ourselves up to weekly and then getting us down to that clock took a bit of work and just on the back end of organizationally.
Mike Kiniry
In the weeds. We're in the weeds. I love it.
Nate Hegyi
Yeah.
Mike Kiniry
What do you listen to when you're not listening to public radio or what on public radio do you listen to? I guess the question is, what inspires you in terms of listening habit?
Nate Hegyi
That's a great question. I, for being someone who hosts a podcast, I feel like maybe it's because it is my job. When I am, you know, just doing on my free time, I don't listen to a lot of podcasts. I listen to a lot of music. Public radio is always on the background, like 24-7 in my house. But I listen to, chat casts from the Ringer podcast out of LA. I listen to music. When it comes to like things that actually inspire me, I really just love, I love reading. And so I am just a total news junkie, magazine junkie. So I love reading the New Yorker and Harper's and New York Times and really like diving into big magazine pieces. And I get a lot out of those and a lot of inspiration from reading long-form magazine pieces.
Mike Kiniry
I am very much the same. I listen to public radio. I listen to the other kinds of talk radio sometimes for context. And I don't really listen to podcasts. I don't have time. I have too much public radio to listen to.
Nate Hegyi
Absolutely. Absolutely. When it's your job, it kind of makes it a little bit harder.
Mike Kiniry
Absolutely. Last question. Station visits at some point. You guys ever plan on maybe making a stop down here to sunny Southwest Florida?
Nate Hegyi
I would love that. would be amazing. We haven't talked about it, but I will bring that up with my team. That would be so cool. We've done a live event. We did our first live event in February of this year in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and that was absolutely amazing. So definitely hoping to do more live events. And I'd love to do station visits.
Mike Kiniry
Well, and we're right here next to the Everglades. We've got all kinds of environmental issues down here, so you guys could make it a two-fer.
Nate Hegyi
That's a great point. I should look into some Everglades stories. If you've got any ones. Let me know, send me an e-mail.
Mike Kiniry
I got a good one. I'll send it to you.
Nate Hegyi
I'd love that.
Mike Kiniry
Any final thoughts, Nate? We're pretty much out of time.
Nate Hegyi
No, I'm just so happy that you guys are playing our show. We love feedback, whether it's good or bad. So I just encourage your listeners. Our e-mail is outsidein@nhpr.org.
Mike Kiniry
All right. Nate Hegyi is host and senior producer of Outside/In from New Hampshire Public Radio. Thank you so much for your time, Nate. It's been a real pleasure. I look forward to listening to you guys.
Nate Hegyi
Thanks for having me.
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