Meet the First Family...of Podcasting

Death, Sex & Money

• Episode: Meet the First Family...of Podcasting
• Website: Death, Sex & Money
• Feed URL: http://feeds.wnyc.org/deathsexmoney
• Duration: 00:26:33
• Published: 2014-09-17 06:00

Scott Aukerman and Kulap Vilaysack are the podcasting world’s ultimate power couple, but they couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds.

When Scott was a musical theater-loving teenager in Orange County, California, Kulap was washing dishes in the restaurant run by her Laotian immigrant parents, where she'd worked since she was a little kid. Then she went away to college—responsibly running away, she says—and met Scott at a taping of a comedy TV show he wrote for. She was just 18.

It took a year for them to start dating, but they’ve (basically) been together ever since. And Kulap’s starting to tell her story through both her podcast, "Who Charted?", and her upcoming documentary, Origin Story. It's harder to get to know Scott. If you’ve ever listened to his "Comedy Bang! Bang!" podcast—or watched the IFC show of the same name—you really just know the character he plays.

In this episode, I spoke with them about Kulap’s family secrets, Scott's family roots, and what plans they have for their future family together.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS

How Kulap found out that the man who raised her wasn’t her biological father:

K: I always, I just preferred my dad, I thought I looked like my dad, I got along better with my dad. And [my parents] got in another horrible fight, I defended him, she looked at me and said, Why are you defending him, he’s not your real dad.

The trailer for Kulap's documentary Origin Story:

Couples need their own interests:

S: Yeah I think when I first met Kulap, she seemed like a really interesting person with different interests, and that’s what I really liked about her. And then slowly she seemed to just kind of assimilate into my life and kind of not want to do much more than whatever I was doing. I think I read when I was younger that the best relationships are ones where the two people have really interesting separate things going on and then when they meet at the end of the day they can talk about them and be excited to see each other. I think we broke up because that wasn’t happening at the time.

Thinking about parenthood:

K: How do I think about motherhood?  I think about it, naturally, in terms of my own upbringing, and wanting to do better. I think about ... I think about Christmases, that’s what I think about. I think about firsts, and stuff.

S: I think Kulap has always been very worried about how she’ll act with our kids. And trying to make sure that she doesn’t do what her mother did with her. I think Kulap’s gonna be a great mom.

You can read a full transcript of our interview, and hear both the Comedy Bang! Bang! and Who Charted? podcasts on the Earwolf Podcast Network, and donate to the Indiegogo campaign for Kulap's documentary Origin Story.

And speaking of Christmas traditions, here's Zach Galifianakis wearing a santa suit on Scott's IFC show Comedy Bang! Bang!: