Scott Carrier Went To Beirut In October
For his indie podcast Home of the Brave, and he sends back a collection of audio postcards, talking to random people on the streets of a city on the brink, in an active war zone
One afternoon in mid-October, I was scrolling through the Home screen on my Apple podcast app, wondering which new episodes I hadn’t listened to yet when I saw an entry I hadn’t seen for a while. For the first time since 2021, Scott Carrier’s indie podcast Home of the Brave had a new episode available. The title was succinct: Beirut Part One.
The first episode, published on October 7, 2024, was just five minutes. By the time I had discovered his new series, there were already four episodes to dig into, published every other day. The news that month had been dominated by fresh images of horror and destruction; Israel had invaded Southern Lebanon on October 1, 2024, so the series felt timely in a whole new way.
The style was brief, both in terms of length, but also in its style. There were no fancy production values here. No music to underscore his narration. No high-production sound design to walk the listener in.
What Carrier offered instead was dispatches, almost like he was leaving you a voice memo, from a place no one wants to go to, and most people are trying to leave. Getting into Gaza is difficult, but Lebanon was accessible. So he jumped on a plane to ask the people of Beirut a question that many want to know, but no one wants to ask: Do you hate Americans?
There are only a small handful of people who can honestly refer to their ‘decades-long career’ and include the last century
Scott Carrier is one of them. He was making radio before he got picked up by “Ira’s program,” as he referred to it later in our conversation.
Carrier’s early radio adventures are chronicled in his This American Life piece The Friendly Man, published in 1996 Ep 45: Media Fringe, which tells the story from the early 1990s when he hitchhiked from Utah to the NPR headquarters in Washington DC, recording interviews with the people who offered him a ride along the way. His plan had been to edit these interviews together into an awesome ‘cinema verité’ radio story and sell it to NPR. It would be too good to turn down, he imagined. But then, as he told Transom, when veteran radio journalist Alex Chadwick listened to his tape, he told him it was his story, his journey, and that what he needed to do was to write some narration for it, to stitch it all together. Perhaps this was the true origin of his career in radio, one that Ira Glass would later give space to in the first decade of This American Life. There’s a great back story here for this, from Rob Rosenthal.
Carrier’s best-known work Running After Antelope has become canon for radio students and audio archive enthusiasts. His iconic narrative tone, his ‘big-sky, flat-prairie voice,’ the way he makes a delusional idea something real, mesmerizes you overtop of a piece with music (the Pat Metheny track Are You Going With Me, which has also become podcast-iconic). His metered delivery offers brief windows of introspection, and then nuggets that make you feel like you’re getting to know him well enough that you can help conspire his thoughts into action. The story always features uninterrupted in-the-moment interviews with the people he meets along the way.
In 2006 he won a Peabody Award for his piece “Crossing Borders,” a two-part audio mural about why so many Mexicans attempt the dangerous journey to enter America illegally. The piece aired on various NPR stations on the show Hearing Voices, which was also the name of an independent radio collective founded in 1999, by Carrier, Barrett Golding, and Marry Massett. Hearing Voices quickly grew into a collective of more than a dozen independent producers (including Jay Allison, Nancy Updike, Ann Heppermann and others). For a time, it was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. This organization helped to shape what public radio would learn to sound like; they worked with almost 100 producers and created more than 350 stories. Between 2008-2012, Hearing Voices had a weekly hour-long series, distributed by NPR, which created 140 original hours of programming.
In 2018, Hearing Voices was put on indefinite hiatus. Thumbing through their archive reminds me that the cancellation of important shows and the people who make them has always long been part of our collective history. The Hearing Voices archive dates back to 2001 and can be found online.
Before then, and after that, Carrier has continued to write books and magazine articles, teach at Utah Valley University, and make radio for various outlets. In 2015, he adopted the new radio nomenclature and founded his own podcast Home of the Brave. The series began with an open question: “Is this the end of the world as we know it?” His question was as prescient then as it remains today.
The stories on Home of the Brave range from just a few minutes to 40-some minutes. Initially, he tackled stories that interested him, from NFL Sundays, to travelling across America and interviewing the folks he met on his long drives. His continual journey attempts to unravel the question of America, by asking questions to America.
In 2018, Home of the Brave stories focused on the US/Mexican border, and continued into 2020, visiting through Trump Rallies and talking to people about the Covid pandemic in 2021 before he laid his microphone down for a time. And now, in October 2024, after almost a 4-year hiatus, he was back.
His questions are still about America; about what it is and how it is perceived. Except this time, he has taken the question overseas, into an active war zone.
Scott Carrier doesn’t just talk about places…he goes there
Often, he drives, even if it’s on the other side of the country. In the past, he hitchhiked there and slept in ditches along the way. Was he actually in Beirut, I wondered aloud? That is the Scott Carrier way. Yes, of course he was. The first episode opens on the loud streets of Beirut as he introduces himself and this latest project, a somewhat unintentional mini-series about the latest front of this ugly and difficult ‘war.’
“Is this a Scott Carrier-type-of thing to do?” I asked him when we convened for an interview.
“I guess so. I mean, I've done things like that before,” he said.
He elaborated on what these kinds of things before were:
[Scott Carrier]: I did a series about the immigration into Europe in 2015, and then I did a series about the immigration across the U. S. border a few years later, and I went to Nepal when there was an earthquake there. And before I started doing the podcast, I worked as a war correspondent for different magazines, men's magazines, mainly [GQ, Esquire, namely].
I was working for a radio program called Savvy Traveler1, and they asked me to do a story about Cambodia, about going to Cambodia in 1997. The editor of Esquire magazine heard that story and asked me to be their war correspondent, but he said, we don't have any wars going on right now, so we're just going to send you to really fucked up places.
So I went to Kashmir and Chiapas. And then I tried to get into the war in Iraq, going through Turkey, Northern Turkey, but that didn't work out. I went to Afghanistan at the beginning of the war there, but the Esquire wouldn't sponsor me, they wouldn't support that trip. So, that story ended up being in Harper's Magazine.
Scott Carrier is just... Scott Carrier. I’m saying his full name a lot here, maybe to snap myself out of some ridiculous illusion. A week after our initial phone call, we set up a proper interview—his first-ever Zoom call (cameras off). It turned out to be the worst interview of my life. Listening back to the tape feels like self-inflicted punishment: a cringe parade of awkward silences, half-baked questions, and those did-I-really-just-say-that moments that make you want to bury the evidence.
He’s an enigma—like a character from a Steinbeck novel. The Zoom machine is not his natural habitat. But once we warmed up and settled on his computer mic for the input, there were flashes where his phrasing was pure Scott Carrier—indistinguishable from his narrative voice. In moments he sounded exactly as he does on This American Life, exactly as it did in the episodes of Home of the Brave I’d been bingeing. Okay, I’m getting over it. An inaugural phone Zoom interview with someone who’s a master at collecting interview tape in person was bound to be a bumpy ride.
It had only been a week since Lebanon had been invaded
These recent Home Of The Brave episodes situates Carrier in the middle of a war zone, talking about places where bombs had gone off not far away, and not in the distant past. It has the feel of a go-bag journalist in the middle of the action, except that his questions and focus are entirely different. He didn’t just ask them about their life; he asked them how they felt about it, from a global perspective. It was compelling and challenging all at once.
Just weeks before I had been talking with Kaitlin Prest about her series Great Love: Gaza Monologues Revisited, which was her political statement about how to something, while the grand tide of others doing nothing loomed. This trip to Beirut was Carrier’s way to do something…
[Scott Carrier]: You know, you just try to do things in a safe way. And, I think it's better that I go and do it than I stay home. People do dangerous things all the time, every day…getting into a car, different situations, there's an element of risk to it. And, you know, you just make a decision.
Is this something I want to do or not worth the risk? I think it's different for everybody, no matter what age they are, the situation that they're in, the possibilities of what they want to do or could do. It just depends. You know what I mean?
For him, it seems fairly normal to be in a war zone. But to me listening, it was brave on a whole new level. Or maybe crazy, I couldn’t decide, which is why I wanted to reach out to him to ask the question. I’m still not sure I have the answer.
In the first episode of Home of the Brave, from 2015, Carrier says: “I think of it as anthropology, but they think of it as journalism, and that’s okay.”
Almost ten years later, the same editorial applies. If you’ve followed Carrier’s work over the years, or been a subscriber to Home of the Brave, you know he’s travelled the world in search of this anthropological answer. Or rather, he has brought his question to the world, in a manner more akin to a social scientist than a journalist, even though he has serious journalism chops.
I waited a week until the last episodes of the series had been released before I wrote to him
He was transparent about how many more episodes he planned to do, and when they might be released, like he was leaving me a message on my answering machine. I knew he was back in the US when Beiruit Epilogue was published on October 27, so I rooted out his email from his website and dropped him a line.
With a short preamble about why I was contacting him, how I was chuffed to be writing to him, and then I asked if he would be open to answering some questions by email? His response was quick and brief: “Yes, thanks for asking.”
From there I crafted a list of questions, with a tight focus on his recent experience in Beirut, his explicit goals for the reporting trip, what surprised him being there…how it was that he felt safe in a war zone…what’s next for him?
I requested these email answers because the idea of a larger interview with him felt daunting. At this point in the year, I’m in a narrowing phase, trying to finish off my Bingey List, a behemoth, still bingeing the never-done list of shows on my list. I purposely did not ask for a typical Zoom interview out of my own desire for efficiency. How could I interview Scott Carrier without diving into his 30-year catalogue of career-defining, seminal industry work? I needed the focus to remain tight so that I didn’t get lost in the details.
After I sent him the email questions, his response was quick and brief again. “These are good questions. I’d like to answer them over the phone. Could you call me?” And then he provided his phone number.
Who would turn that opportunity down?
The date of this email was November 4. He had just published a new episode on November 2 called Fascism in America, which goes a long way to describe how tense he was feeling in the lead-up to the election. We agreed to talk on the phone the following day, being November 5. I always feel a bit dizzy on big days like this one, so the idea of doing something productive felt like the right thing to do.
On the phone, I had questions for him, and he had questions for me. What could I tell him about what was going on in the podcast space now? He had been doing other things, non-media endeavors, for a few years, and his trip to Beirut marked his reentry to the podcast world, which he publishes independently and survives largely by donations from listeners.
I asked how long he had been planning this trip to Beirut. Not long…but when the war shifted, he knew it was his opening. He had wanted to go to Gaza, but he knew that wouldn’t be possible for an independent journalist.
[Scott Carrier]: Independent reporters don't show up anymore. They're not showing up for this one, because you can't get into Gaza, right? On the other hand, the reports that are coming out of Gaza are actually pretty good, at least in terms of showing the facts of destruction and dead bodies on the ground.
But it's done by people who weren't journalists…I'm pretty sure they just picked up the cameras. [Many] have been killed. A lot of those were not journalists before the war started, the people who just picked up the camera and the microphone, and were doing it, and got killed because they were doing it. That's, you know, the fact, that journalists do [get killed].”
Our talk was brief, and we planned to talk again, the following week, after he had a chance to digest the events that were unfolding on that day, and he could address some of the questions I had asked him, in a later episode for his Home of the Brave audience. We circled a time for the following Wednesday.
Going to Beirut, being there to talk to ordinary citizens, was what he could do, so he just did it
While walking the streets of Beirut, Carrier casually encountered people to interview. “What’s it like now in Beirut for you?” And then once he had gained some trust and connection with the person, he would ask his follow-up question: “Do you hate America, Americans?”
He asked others who they would vote for, if they could vote in the American election. He offered them a platform to address people: “Would you like to say something to people in the United States?”
His series shows the same efficiency as his email exchange: sparse, purposeful, and free of platitudes. He doesn’t do social media, at all, so the RSS feed for his show is his only point of delivery to the wider world. If you’re curious, you will need to subscribe.
Home of the Brave exists entirely through donations. If you feel moved to contribute, you can go to his website.
Carrier greets the world through his microphone, offering what feels like a mitzvah of humanity. The world calls it journalism—a tidy label for work that cuts past small talk and straight to the heart of things. Yet his storytelling transcends that definition, landing somewhere deeper and more human.
INDUSTRY NEWS:
Third Coast is opening their new Call For Entries any day now….
Tribeca Audio Storytelling Festival regular deadline is January 15, 2025. They accept short audio, long audio, indie audio, fiction, non-fiction…and everything in between. Submissions here.
SAVE SHORT CUTS!! In a shocking and heartless move, the BBC cancelled the long-running program Short Cuts. Feel like you’ve got something to say about this? Please add your voice to the Open Letter Here.
With some effort, I found the Savvy Traveller piece that Carrier refers to. It was saved on an old website and streamed through a platform that doesn’t exist any longer. Through the wonders of a VLC player, I downloaded the file and then converted it to a .wav file. With apologies to the original material, and the defunct media software. You can find it on my own Dropbox HERE now.