About this episode

Ophira Eisenberg talks with Gideon Evans about raising kids in New York City, navigating creative careers, and the challenges of parenting in a media-saturated world.

On this episode of Parenting Is a Joke, writer and podcaster Gideon Evans joins Ophira Eisenberg to talk about raising subway-riding kids in New York while building a creative life that has required real-time pivots from television to podcasting. He explains the surprisingly durable concept behind his history podcast Bad Elizabeth—born out of a pilot recorded with a former Daily Show colleague and eventually profiled in The Guardian—where he and his co-host explore notorious (and occasionally “badass”) Elizabeths, from Elizabeth Holmes to a Hungarian countess who allegedly bathed in blood. The conversation moves between career recalibration in a shrinking TV industry, the financial realities of podcasting (“the margins are thin”), and his complicated relationship with cable news, including why PBS NewsHour and Germany’s DW have become more tolerable household options than the sensory overload of Morning Joe. As a dad, he reflects on raising kids who take the subway alone, volunteer at food insecurity programs, and prefer Dungeons & Dragons at Brooklyn Game Lab over cable news debates, and he’s honest about masking his own nerves on train platforms so his son won’t absorb them…

People in this episode

Host: Ophira Eisenberg

Guest: Gideon Evans

Topics covered

• parenting
• subway safety
• creative careers
• podcasting
• Dungeons & Dragons
• family activities
• media consumption

Keywords

• subway riding
• parenting
• podcasting
• Dungeons & Dragons
• media
• New York
• family
• creativity
• television
• food insecurity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: PBS NewsHour, Germany’s DW

Books & works: Bad Elizabeth, The Naked Gun, The Mandalorian

Places: New York, Brooklyn Game Lab

More episodes of Parenting is a Joke

• The Parent Trap with Ahri Findling · April 21, 2026 · 35 min
• Ahri Findling is An Emotional Support Dad · April 14, 2026 · 46 min
• Laurie Kilmartin Parents From the Green Room · April 7, 2026 · 41 min
• Good Mom, Bad Puppy with Ashley Austin Morris · March 31, 2026 · 48 min
• Writing Horoscopes for Tiny Terrors with Johanna Gohmann · March 24, 2026 · 41 min
• Johanna Gohmann Declares All Toddlers Are Scorpios · March 17, 2026 · 52 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Parenting is a Joke podcast page.