Crude Conversations

Each week ”Crude Conversations” features a guest who represents a different aspect of Alaska. Follow along as host Cody Liska takes a contemporary look at what it means to be an Alaskan.Support and subscribe at www.patreon.com/crudemagazine and www.buymeacoffee.com/crudemagazine

Crude Conversations is a society podcast hosted by crudemag, with 314 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

crudemag hosts Crude Conversations, a society show with 314 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #323

  EP 175 Reviving the Anchorage Press with Nat Herz and Veri di Suvero

  Sep 28, 20261h 3m

  In this one, Cody talks to Nat Herz and Veri di Suvero, the editor and publisher behind the revived Anchorage Press. Nat is a longtime Alaska journalist. He spent years reporting for Alaska Public Media and the Anchorage Daily News before he founded Northern Journal—an independent, reader-supported publication focused on in-depth reporting about Alaska politics, natural resources, fisheries, energy, and the environment. Veri comes from the nonprofit and public-interest world, where they worked on issues ranging from consumer protection and energy policy to language access and government transparency. Now, Nat and Veri are both at the Anchorage Press, where they see its revival as a chance to bring back a locally rooted publication with a distinct voice—one that can do serious reporting while still making room for humor, irreverence, and some of the personality the Press has always been known for. In 2022, after decades as Anchorage’s alternative newspaper, the Anchorage Press stopped publishing. Now, in 2026, it’s getting a second life under new ownership, with Nat and Veri partnering with the independent media company Noisy Creek, which owns The Stranger, the Portland Mercury, and the Chicago Reader. At the center of what Nat and Veri are trying to build is the idea that a local newspaper should actually feel local—shaped by the people, relationships, communities, and subcultures that make a place what it is. Historically, that’s something alternative weeklies have been particularly good at: paying attention to the parts of a city that larger news organizations can overlook, and creating a fuller, sometimes messier, and more recognizable portrait of the place they cover.

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  Episode #322

  Chatter Marks EP 143 More than a game with Kyle Worl

  Sep 28, 20261h 7m

  Kyle Worl is an Alaska Native athlete, coach, and cultural advocate who has spent most of his life competing in, and helping pass on, Arctic Sports and Traditional Games. He’s earned more than 100 medals, been named an Outstanding Athlete multiple times at the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, and competed in Traditional Games throughout the circumpolar North. He’s even competed on American Ninja Warrior. But as important as all that is, a big part of his life now is making sure the games continue with the generations coming up behind him. Through coaching, he’s helping rebuild Juneau’s Native Youth Olympics program and creating opportunities for a new generation of athletes to learn the games. That means advocating for their growth, while making sure the culture, history, and sense of community at the heart of the games aren’t lost along the way. Kyle’s dad, Rod Worl—who competed in Arctic Sports in the 1980s and ’90s—introduced him to the games. He was an accomplished athlete, too. In fact, for almost 40 years, he held the world record for the Knuck Hop—a game that leaves your knuckles bloody and your body exhausted. These days, Kyle reflects on what it took for his dad to push himself that far—to establish a record that was only recently beaten—and how differently he understands that accomplishment now that he’s tested those same physical and mental limits. It’s a lot to think about, especially when you consider that these games carry histories much older than the competitions themselves. Their movements grew out of life in the North—hunting, communicating, testing endurance, and preparing the body and mind for an environment where those abilities mattered. So, every time these games are taught to another athlete, they pass along something that goes beyond technique: a connection to people, place, and lifeways.

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  Episode #321

  Chatter Marks EP 142 The Notorious Bars of Alaska with Doug Vandegraft

  Sep 14, 20261h 22m

  For the last 40 years, Doug Vandegraft has been writing about bars in Alaska. In his book, “A Guide to the Notorious Bars of Alaska,” he uses the state’s longtime watering holes as a way into its broader social history. Doug spent decades traveling throughout Alaska during his career as a federal cartographer, and along the way he became interested in the bars that seemed to function as more than just places to drink—they were gathering places, landmarks, and repositories of local history. He eventually spent years researching their histories, digging through liquor licenses, newspapers, business records, and archives, while visiting bars and talking with the people who owned them, worked in them, and drank in them. The result is a history of Alaska told from the barstool, where stories of gold rushes, fishing, military expansion, Prohibition, boom-and-bust economies, and colorful characters all come together in the places people gathered at the end of the day. When Doug moved to Anchorage in 1983, one of the things that struck him was just how many bars there were—and how each one seemed to have its own identity. If you liked reggae, there was a bar for that. If you liked blues, rock and roll, or country, there was a bar for that, too. And these weren’t just weekend destinations. Bars could be crowded any night of the week, something Doug came to see as a reflection of an Alaska economy where jobs were plentiful and people had money to spend. That early experience shaped the way he came to understand bars as reflections of the communities around them, places where music, work, personality, and local culture all came together. And after visiting more than a hundred of them, he developed a simple rule for walking into any bar, no matter how unfamiliar: act like you’ve been there before.

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  Episode #320

  Chatter Marks EP 141 The Politics of Nature with Jonathon Keats

  Aug 26, 20261h 19m

  Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher, and his work uses imagination to question some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works. His new book, “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” looks beyond human societies for new ways of thinking about politics, drawing lessons from bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and entire ecosystems. At the heart of the book is a simple idea: humans didn’t invent governance. Living things have been organizing, cooperating, competing, and adapting to one another for billions of years, and Jonathon argues that we might have something to learn from them. He asks us to reconsider what intelligence looks like, who—or what—we're willing to learn from, and ultimately, what our place is within the natural world. In “A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance,” Jonathon takes that idea and asks what it might actually mean for the way we govern ourselves. Bacteria become models for collective decision-making, lichens offer lessons about cooperation and conflict, and other species challenge our assumptions about hierarchy, resilience, and even democracy. Jonathon calls this approach “political biomimicry”—looking to the strategies that have evolved throughout nature and considering how they might inspire new approaches to human politics. It's an imaginative way of thinking about some very real problems, and one that asks us to reconsider whether humans should always be the only ones setting the terms. Photo courtesy of The Berggruen Institute

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  Episode #319

  Chatter Marks EP 140 The Architecture of Mycelium with Joseph Dahmen and Isobel McLean

  Aug 20, 20261h 24m

  Joseph Dahmen is an architect and the founder of the Biogenic Architecture Lab at the University of British Columbia. The lab’s lead designer, Isobel McLean, also joins this conversation. She works at the intersection of architecture, microbiology, and biofabrication. And together, Joseph and Isobel are experimenting with mycelium—the vast network of fungal threads that grows through soil, wood, and other organic matter. They’re looking at its potential as a building material that can be grown rather than manufactured. For example, when grown through sawdust and other plant fibers, mycelium acts as a natural binder, creating a solid, biodegradable material that can provide insulation, a lot like conventional foam. This work is practical and speculative, and it asks whether the materials of the future might be cultivated, allowed to change over time, and eventually returned to the earth. Mycelium could be especially useful in northern communities, where the logistics of construction can be complicated and expensive. And in many ways, those communities magnify problems that exist throughout the construction industry in general—rising transportation costs, dependence on long supply chains, material waste, and the carbon emissions associated with producing and moving building materials. So, Joseph, Isobel, and their team of architects and scientists are imagining a different model—one where communities could eventually grow useful materials closer to where they’re needed, using locally available resources to create products appropriate to a particular region and climate. Materials that don’t have to travel as far to get where they need to go, and that, at the end of their useful lives, can biodegrade rather than become another permanent layer of waste.

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