Mission To Zyxx - Casters on Casters: Jeremy Bent and Austin Taylor

Episode Date: April 20, 2026

It's MaxFunDrive. And here, for the first time, we give you an exclusive look (well, listen) at the craft of podcasting: presenting Casters on Casters. In this episode, Austin Taylor (Secret Histories of Nerd Mysteries) explains how he chooses topics, and the metric by which something can be considered "a mystery". Plus, Jeremy Bent (Mission to Zyxx & Eurovangelists) has some advice for anyone who is trying to come up with a name for their podcast. If this glamorous, in-depth journey into what makes your favorite hosts tick inspires you, support them by joining as a member at maximumfun.org/join. Edited by Christian Dueñas and Produced by Laura Swisher for Maximum Fun.  Lovingly researched and sound-described transcripts are embedded in every episode page on missiontozyxx.space!

Hey everybody, it's Jeremy from Mission to Zix and the Young Old Durf Chronicles. And I want to wish everybody a happy kickoff to the Max Fun Drive. It's 420, which means we've got two weeks of maximum fun fun coming to you. It's the best time to support the show. It's the best time to listen to Young Old Durf Chronicles, to Mission to Zix. We've got so many episodes that are great. and you know that we go a little crazy making stuff for you guys to enjoy. I hope you've been enjoying our mission to D6 D&D adventure that we've been doing for the last few months,

in addition to the Young Old Derve Chronicles. You've got until May 1st to support The Drive, but if you want to support Young Old Derve Chronicles or others on the network, maybe you're evangelists, today and help us kick off the drive with a nice strong start, head on over to Maximumfund.org slash join or click the link in the episode notes. easy-peasy. We know Mission's Vicks fans are a really, really lovely bunch of folks, so we are honored to have you as our backers. Please enjoy this little show we put together for you. Thanks, everybody. Welcome to Casters on Casters, conversations about the art and craft of podcasting

with the masters of the medium. Rules of Remote Recordings. Beasts of banter. On today's show, Jeremy Bent, Mission to Zix and the Young Old Durf Chronicles. Austin Taylor, secret histories of nerd mysteries. Content warning. Sensitive language may be to follow. This is Casters on Casters. I don't know that I ever get to really talk about my shows. So, Austin, for all my listeners, can you tell them about the magic of secret histories of nerd mysteries?

Yeah, I can. So secret histories and nerd mysteries is a niche nerd pop culture comedy podcast. And that's so many, there's so many adjectives every time I talk about this show. I understand. And I wish there are less adjectives. I also wish it was easier to say. these are these are the things you don't think about when you make a she like that's a good name you're like I have to say it a lot yeah yeah frequently all the time people like what's your podcast I'm like oh man don't ask me there we go um but yeah so we cover we've talked about things like you know how we got set in and winning cartoons what killed light gun games in arcades well so we've done what uh we've talked about the production of little nemo in the slumberland which is a movie a lot of people who've just forgotten and so much more I'm very curious So you also have a very niche show.

I mean, I have arguably two niche shows. Two very, two very neat shows. Yeah. Yeah, I have a show called Eurovangelis, all about the Eurovision Song Contest, which in Europe, extremely popular in America, not very well known, which is sort of the whole point of the show. It's a big, crazy pop music spectacle that happens every single year in Europe since 1956. And we've only been covering it since 2024. but guess what?

A lot of crazy stuff has happened in those last three years that we try to cover on the show. It's a lot of fun. It also dives unintentionally deep into European geopolitics as is necessary to make the show. So if you're interested in either of those,

you might enjoy that show. I would not expect to learn about European geopolitics. Well, here's as an example. Russia used to be in Eurovision. You know, yeah. And I bet you can guess when they were not allowed to compete anymore,

as Ukraine also is in your revision. Well, there you go. My other niche show is Mission to Zix, which, like your show, has too many adjectives. It is an improvised sci-fi comedy adventure show that ran for 100 episodes, and we put to bed and then thought, let's do a prequel series,

as the show frequently goofs on Star Wars. And so we thought, what if we goofed on Star Wars some more and did a prequel series. So now we are doing a show in honor of our shitty Obi-Wan Kenobi character, Old Dirk. So this is the young Old Dirk Chronicles. So we're seeing him before the events of Mission to Zix and sort of learning how he became a Zima master, which is sort of our version of a Jedi master.

That's something I do, and I say that I admire about both of these shows. As someone else, I mean, I feel like all the shows on that work are kind of niche. is kind of our thing here. But I really appreciate the like, because I have a niche show, but my niche show is like, we will do sort of any weird thing, right? We have a big umbrella of niche-ness.

Sure. But no, your shows are very like, like Eurovangelists. It's like we're talking about the Eurovision singing contest. Or it sounds like European geopolitics. It depends on the episode, to be perfectly honest with you. But yeah,

the crazy thing about, Eurovision is like the nut you would think like oh they're going to run out of stuff eventually and it's like we we have been making the show for almost for a little over two years now we have barely scratched the surface of Eurovision wow is it is when it's Eurovision season yeah is that like is that like how accountants get stressed at tax season you're like okay everybody it's Eurovision season because it doesn't air like American times either like you got you got to you got to be watching stuff later waking up earlier we The lucky part of is I'm in Los Angeles

So that like the late night shows in Europe Start at like 9 or 10 a.m. usually on a Saturday for me. So I'm like that's fine. That's okay I'm happy to watch that The problem becomes there are certain weekends known as super Saturdays in the Eurovision season where like five or six different countries will have them at the same time And in Europe you're probably only watching the national final final for your own country, but we are outside of Europe, but we are like, well, we're trying to cover everything, but that means I, some weekends have to watch like 14 hours of Eurovision stuff.

It's a lot is what I'll say. It's not all good, Austin. That sounds like, I mean, and then you have to make the show. And then I got to make the show. Literally, as we're recording this, I have just finished editing our last, like, Super Saturday episode of the season. And it's like, I'm a little tired. And I am looking forward to not having to watch that much every single weekend now.

Now, I got a question about secret histories of nerd mysteries. Yeah, it's awful to say in the mouth. I'm so sorry. I mean, Mission to Zix, after we made the show, we were like, we should not have called it Mission to Zix. Nobody can spell Zix. We have to spell it almost every single time we say it on the show. It's very annoying. I, you know, I'm a nerdy person.

When I see the, like, titles of your shows, I think, hmm, that sounds, that sounds, that sounds, interesting to me. Like just just seeing like the many failures of Atari is like, well, that sounds like something I would listen to. You know what I mean? But what, what qualifies like there's nerd stuff. There's nerd stuff everywhere. But what qualifies a nerd mystery? You know what I mean? What is a nerd story that makes you really want to like sink your teeth into it on the show? A nerd mystery is something that either I don't have the answer to by finding it simply on Google or the answer that I find on Google doesn't make sense. to me. That is a good metric. I did an episode of Shadow the Hedgehog. I don't know. I have, I think, each Shadow the Hedgehog things in my recording space alone. It's not counting the merch upstairs in my

bedroom that my partner thinks is gone, but don't tell her it's not. I'll keep it quiet. But an episode of Shadow the Hedgehog, and there's this well-known, like, fame theory that Shadow Hedgehog one just said there's this hedgehog named Teros, like, T-E-I-R-O-S-T-R-S-T-R-S. Okay. And that was like a very, like, that's what the fan of always said, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they made a Shadow the Hedgehog Generation's video game

where they had a Taro skin. And to me, I'm like, that isn't makes, I was like, okay, so they have this skin for Shadow, but it, I'm like, this doesn't feel, like, I'm a shadow, like, die. I was like, this doesn't feel like shadow. And so I was just super curious. I was like, I don't think Shadow and Teros were meant to be the same hedgehog.

And so I said it in like everything online is like they are, they are. And I found from an interview that someone from Team Sonic had done San Diego Comic Con in like 2013. It was like I found it like archived in the internet archive. It was like this long. This is like some Indiana Jones internet shit here. Yeah, exactly. digging up MP3s from like another era. I'm down in that archive.

I'm scrounging through whatever web pages people have saved. But I found the audio of this like panel that he did. And then the panel and then I translate. So I have a minor in Japanese. So I translated it. Because there was a translator that, but I was like, I want to be sure for me.

So I translated the panel that he did. And then he was talking about, he talked about Taeros. He's like, yeah, you know, we were developing this hedgehog. And we decided we wanted to scrap that and then we made shadow instead. So I was like, they're different. That's different characters.

Those are different dudes. Two different dudes. It wasn't, we were developing him and then we changed all of his, his whole being. We renamed him. We scrapped him. We scrapped him. We scrapped him. We made a new guy.

And I was like, that's a new guy, everybody. Interesting. So it's stuff like that or things like, even of those things that are like, we think are easy to find. Me and Brenda use the internet in a way that other people don't. And I'm not saying anyone else. should because that's what we have our show. You should instead go on down the secretaries and listen to us do it.

Because it's things like, like, did you know the first style for Chewson and Adventure Book is actually from two women in the 1930s about a good two. Wow, that far back? 30 years before the first Chews You're on Adventure book. Oh, that's great. Or even like how we got Monopoly, right? Like a woman invented the game that is Monopoly. I know a lot of people

know this one because apparently there's a whole NPR story about it and I was like, we did it first. I've also read, I also read a book called It's All a Game which is like a history of board games and there's a whole chapter about Monopoly and it is weird that it has become like

a capitalist fantasy game when it was originally intended to be like, capitalism is bad, we're killing people this way. Literally it meant to be the entire opposite effect and it became like, yeah, but like a little capitalism could be fun. right? Can I share a monopoly fact with you that you may or may not know? Did you know that

monopoly sets were used to smuggle maps and tools to British secret agents in POW camps in World War II? That's wild. I did not know that. That is a fact I got from from this book. It's all game. I'll check that out. I've not heard of that one. I know the reason why even know that monopoly history is because the monopoly tried to sue a college professor from making his own version of monopoly. Right, right. And then this college professor was like,

I'm a college professor with tenure, I have nothing but time, and dug up all of these archives and found that they had, that like there was a proof of concept before their game and that they had like gone back on this contract and all this stuff. And I was like, that's crazy. All because

you guys tried to be like, this is our original IP and no else has done it before. When When they knew, that's what's wild. The company knew. I'm like, you guys know that's a lot. Yeah, interesting. It's like, you know how you got the rights to this game. You know, don't pretend you don't know that.

You know you're lying. And then they got caught. You know, that's why I have on my shelf, I have like 18 different versions of whatever, whatever, opally. That's very interesting to me, the way that you, you are sort of doing like nerd deep dives in a way that your audience probably doesn't have time to do. Or maybe just like, is not. Because I truthfully think your evangelist serves a very similar purpose, is we have many people who are fans of Eurovision, but most people do not have time or the desire to watch 14 hours of Eurovision,

even if only a couple weekends a year. And they much prefer listening to us talk about it and tell them, this was really goofy and crazy. Or like, this song is actually an absolute banger. You should listen to these. And we sort of sift through all that stuff. Because there's a lot of songs where like, fine. it's fine and we don't talk a ton about those songs because it's like they're okay and I don't

think you care about that but if it's really bad we know you want to hear about it and if it's really good we know you want to hear about it yes you could watch all the stuff that we watch and then listen to us commentate about it or you could just listen to us and be like that sounds crazy well I'm trying to go to work I mean exactly and I think and I think that's something that's amazing I think about podcasts in general is like we we take the time to sift through the stuff for the for if you really want to know be like i don't have time or don't know where to start or whatever and i think it makes sense because it is like you know i do want to know about the you know when your vision's happening i kind of know because the general internet will see the really bad ones because people will make me always yeah because it's so goofy yeah like the the songs from last year that everybody that sort of escaped the eurovision containment bubble were like sweden had a whole song about uh that was called Barabarabastu, which means simply sauna or like just take a sauna. And it's literally like three guys who are Finnish ironically, but three guys competing

for Sweden in like brown suits and the whole stage becomes a sauna. And it's like this very sort of absurd kind of song about how great sonnas are. It's really stupid. And then like the other songs that escape are like the really horny song. Yeah. The really horny ones do get out. And they are horny. They are horny.

Man, last year was a horny year, I'll tell you. Oh, yeah, what was the horniest song? Well, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to give you two, and you tell me which one you think is hornier. There was a song from Malta by a singer named Miriana Conte, who had a song that was literally called Kant, K-A-N-T, which is Maltese for singing. Oh. But the chorus of is Dore Mi-M-Fa-S-S-S-Serving Kant. Great. Great song, absolute bop, terrific singer.

And then Finland sent this woman, Erica Vykman, who's an unbelievable singer and performer, and who was supposed to go in 2020, and then 2020 was the only Eurovision to ever be canceled. And she showed up last year with a song called Iik Comey, which means I'm coming. And it is not subtle about the double entendre. She literally rides a gigantic spark-shooting microphone at the end of the number. Oh, okay. They were both extremely horny songs. I don't know where you fall on that spectrum.

Those are, I got to, I think the sparking microphone. It's, man, when she's on that microphone, you're like, okay, I got, I do get it. I do get it. It feels like it starts to cross that line of like, past horny and pass absurd into like, I get it. I get it. Yeah, it's like, no, it's clear. The message has been received. And like, neither of them won, but like, nobody will forget those songs.

songs. Those songs are nuts. Yeah. I know I asked before of like, well, what makes it a mystery as opposed to just something interesting? But it's like, sure. But once you find the mystery, how do you then like shape it into an episode? So the first thing, I'll talk about my process. Okay.

Honestly, don't fully know Brenda's. Brenda is, I know Brenda's incredible. And Brenda's been doing this longer to me because Brenda has a YouTube page that's like the same premise, but it was just by themselves. And so like, I'll think of it. topic and usually the first thing I'll do is I'll try and think of the closest thing I can that's like a big umbrella and go to its wiki because like we did one on the chickeel o'neal movie steal from 1990 no no no what was it's six I was like it's me I was like I remember it

coming out because I would have been a very young teenager and I'm like I even when it came out and even as a teenager nerd I was like I'm not going to see this yeah it was I remember because the same year's the Olympics. And he's in the Olympics. Right. So that's like, right. Okay. So that's 96.

96. And so, um, we did one on that. And I was, but the thing I was like fascinating by was I was trying to, it was, we did it recently. It was black cast and recently as we record this, right? Everyone else. You know, it's been a few months now. And I was like, you know, I want to do something.

But we had done all that stuff. We did things like, you know, things that were like bigger that made sense to do way back when we were like not on the network. And I was like, I want to find something that's like niche. And I was like, oh, what about? the first big black superhero movie because a lot of people say like oh isn't it like blade or something that was like no steel comes out a year before it technically it's the first good black superhero yeah exactly exactly but steel is a year before it and it's a DC property

technically and they say technically because they got the rights and then they got a director slash writer who didn't want to make a superhero movie and he made it very clear and they got what they got. I have never watched the film. You know, what I'll say for Steel is this. You can tell everyone that was on camera really believes in the movie. That's a nice thing. That's good that that happened. I found the production notes in the internet archive, which was wild. That's crazy. And every note I could find on Shaq was he was like the nicest man anyone had ever met. So this is what I hear about Shaq pretty consistently. Yeah.

But also, like, think about Shaq's life. It's like he was a legendary basketball player. And now he was also an actor and a rapper. Yeah. And like, kind of now just gets to do whatever he wants. He's in a million advertisements and nobody complains like, hey, Shaq's in every ad. And it's like, nobody cares. It's Shaq.

He's also like, like, Shaq, it's weird to read about it because like he started all that acting like right when he got out of college also with basketball. Yeah, yeah, truly And so it's weird because like Growing up and watching it as a kid Like when I was on VHS or whatever It was like oh well of course Shaq was in this because he's famous But he wasn't like

He wasn't super famous No, I mean he was a big deal Like he was a first run draft pick Which is a big deal for basketball He was a all start his rookie year Which no one had done since Michael Jordan But he wasn't like Household Nate like he

Yeah, to open a movie is like Yeah, he like got done got it i mean like he just had such a clear intention on where he wanted his life to go he's he got done at school he got signed to a major uh major basketball team and he's like i need an agent to start branding myself yesterday and it i mean it worked you know he he owns he owns papa johns now he has i think he owns the masters to the beetles now that's crazy my my good friend went to LSU, which is where Shaq went to college. And so he has a mild obsession with Shaq.

And so when he came to visit me in L.A., he wanted to go to Shaq at a chain of fried chicken restaurants in L.A. called Chicken Shack, which checks out. And he's like, I really want to go to chicken shack. I was like, let's go. And we went. And I got to say, it was pretty good. Nice.

Yeah. So, you know, I'm like, if you watch Steele, I will not sit here and say it's a good movie. It's not. But you can also be like the little like Shaq got all the kids on set like they're like a toy. He got one little girl like a tour he built her terrarium and got her like a pet lizard she always wanted and like I'm like at least like he's a he's a nice guy. It seems like an all right guy. It's like regardless of your feelings about John Cena. It's like oh he is he's the record holder for make a wish by like like an order of magnitude like he's done like three times as many as the next person on the list and you're like I mean how bad of a guy could he possibly I'm like I'm

like I don't you can have opinions about him but I'm like he can't be a bad guy yeah he can't be the worst person in the world it just doesn't make sense awesome I feel like we could yak about podcasts pretty much all day as as is our way but is there anything you learned making your podcast that you feel like, oh, this is a, this is a good hack or maybe is just applicable to other parts of your life? I think the best, the best podcast hack we have figured out is probably some of me. So you mentioned you edit, you know, your evangelist. I do. Brenda edits our show. So I don't know about that stuff. But the thing I do find that works really well for us with editing is Brenda taught me the like the silence trick at the beginning of the audio track and then she like takes out all the

ambient noise and anytime i tell that to people who don't already have a bunch of editing experience um they're like that is a pretty interesting hack um and so i get that room tone yeah like i don't know like brenda told me the first the very first episode we had we like started i started talking brina's like no shut up be quiet it's like be quiet for like 15 seconds and then we can talk. So I think it's that. What about you? What's your podcast hack?

I don't know that I have a good, like my production. What I found by talking to other people who like edit and stuff is like my production pipeline is completely different than somebody else's. And so like all the stuff I do is like doesn't really match what they do. But one thing I, that really kind of blew my mind, we went to Eurovision last year, which blew my mind in its own. Oh, awesome. Which blew my mind in its own right.

It's insane. And it was very fun, but it was also slightly overwhelming. There were songs that we had basically shit on for like five months straight for being bad. You meet, when you go to these events, you meet someone who is a fan of every song, every single song. Like a song that we were like, this is almost universally the worst song at Eurovision. a girl had made a whole jacket

and put the title of the song and a whole design on the back of the jean jacket had painted it herself and she had come to see this guy perform and I was, this guy didn't even make the final which we were not surprised by but that she was like,

no, this song's great. I love this song. I hope it gets in the final and we were like, you're like, huh. What I'm learning is that it is hard to judge like there is no universal good or bad bad when it comes to art.

Yeah. Everyone's take is valid and everyone's take is probably different than yours. Yeah. And I try to keep that in mind when I'm shitting on a song mercilessly. And I don't know that I'll ever be able to stop doing that. But I do have moments of like, there's somebody out there who likes this song. Yeah. You know, something me, the one thing I want to say, like, something I see on the show is like,

if you like this thing, that's totally fine. And if you hate our opinion, that's also fine. Yeah. If you want to be angry about it, I don't know what to tell you any mic and you can tell other people how great it is. And you know what? I'll commend you for it. I'll say, good job.

Yeah, truthly. I would love, I would love for a Eurovision podcast to pop up in opposition to our podcast that just take contrary positions on every stuff. I would love to listen to that show. That would be a delight. Yeah. But most people won't because they don't have that, they don't have that dog in him. No.

And that, hey, that's okay. That's okay. And for all you listening, we're glad that you have the listen dog in you. Yeah, we're glad you. Yeah, because truthfully, I burn out on podcasts because I spend a lot of time listening to my own voice. So I'm glad people out there have that listen dog. People, people, you listeners, you guys hold the fort down. Because I also burned on a podcast a long time ago.

But some people out there like, I listen to 40 as a podcast a week. And I'm like, you're incredible. You're a superhero. Bless you. And bless your heart. I love that you do that. So thank you to all. of you, especially you, the MaxFun listener, uh, thank you for listening to this and being part of our,

uh, our fun little MaxFund drive here. Yeah. Thank you so much. Make sure you hit up maximum fun.org slash join. That's right. And you can support a whole community of cool folks like yourself, uh, like Austin. Like, I don't know if I'll put myself in that category, but sure. Yeah, myself too. Uh, we, we love that you listen to the shows. We love that you support the shows. So maximum Maximumfund.org slash join. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network of artist-owned shows. Supported directly by you.