Raising Responsible Subway Riders with Gideon Evans
From Parenting is a Joke by Ophira Eisenberg
March 10, 2026 · 38 min · Season 4 · Episode 440
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
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