Arts & Culture
From KZSC to national acclaim
How Jesse Thorn built a radio empire from his roots at the UCSC campus station
Jesse Thorn (Porter '03, American studies), host of "Bullseye," nationally acclaimed radio show and podcast. Photo credit: Zac Wolf
Twenty-five years ago, a 19-year-old UC Santa Cruz student walked into campus radio station KZSC with an idea for a variety show that combined comedy sketches, interviews with artists, and free-form radio experimentation. Today, Jesse Thorn (Porter ’03, American studies) hosts Bullseye, a popular, nationally acclaimed radio show and podcast, interviewing everyone from Hollywood stars to underground musicians. Based in Los Angeles, Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ, and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.”
And it all started at UC Santa Cruz.
“To get access to a real radio station which people actually listened to was an unbelievable opportunity,” Thorn said of his early days at KZSC, where his show began as The Sound of Young America.
Now Thorn is coming home. On November 1, he’ll celebrate Bullseye‘s 25th anniversary at Kuumbwa Jazz in Santa Cruz with several special guests, including award-winning actor and Santa Cruz-born-and-raised Adam Scott (Severance, Parks and Recreation).
Building a career on curiosity
What sets Thorn’s interviews apart are his genuine curiosity and fresh perspective. Recent Bullseye guests have included writer and actor Jason Segel, author Elizabeth Gilbert, Back to the Future‘s Christopher Lloyd, Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, and Will Smith, creator of the TV show Slow Horses.
“I love to learn about where great art comes from,” Thorn explained. “Why artists make the choices they do. What they do when they’re scared or stumped, what gets them over the hump. And I love to make dumb jokes with smart people.”
Bullseye airs through Maximum Fun, an independent media organization that Thorn founded and which became a worker-owned cooperative in 2023. Maximum Fun describes Bullseye as “a public radio show about what’s good in popular culture.”
Where education met opportunity
Thorn’s journey to UC Santa Cruz was shaped by practicality. After graduating from the Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts, he faced limited options. His father, a veteran who became disabled in service, qualified him for free tuition at California public universities—crucial to his decision since his parents couldn’t contribute much financially.
“My choices were community college, public school, or a lot of debt,” Thorn said. “UCSC was the best public school that was willing to accept my combination of almost perfect test scores and profoundly imperfect grade point average.”
More than 20 years later, he counts it as one of his best decisions—Thorn’s American studies major became the foundation for his career.
“My interest in culture and its expressions, which led me to that major, also led me to my show,” he said. Thorn says he was drawn to radio as “an accessible mode of performance and a way to explore art and where it came from.”
Thorn was inspired by a number of his professors, including Tom Lehrer, the legendary satirist and mathematician. Lehrer taught a musical theater course in the American Studies department.
“I was lucky enough to be one of the last students of a true UCSC legend, who was one of the greatest satirists of the 20th century,” Thorn said.
Professor Forrest Robinson, a Mark Twain scholar, also left a lasting impression.
“He was a real connoisseur of the strange liminal world of late 19th-century America,” Thorn recalled. “I loved learning about this world of con men and the collision between faith and reason and all its weird products.”
Thorn also appreciated serving as a Porter College residential assistant. “I learned a lot and made some lifelong friends.” During his time on campus, he helped launch Humor Force Five, an improv group that still performs on campus today.
“I was recently delighted to learn that it [Humor Force Five] still exists,” Thorn said. “Humor Force Five forever!”
Thorn says his cultural studies focus taught him to see art as part of larger systems.
“There are times my coursework—say on hip-hop culture—directly impacts my radio show,” he explained. “More than that, though, it’s a way of thinking of culture as a system rather than simply as something created by singular geniuses. That art comes from a context and affects people in context.”
One of Thorn’s favorite memories of his time on campus is when a local newspaper, Metro Santa Cruz, was accepting entries for its annual ‘Best Of’ issue.
“We grabbed a stack of papers from outside the dining hall, tore out the ballots, and distributed them to every lunch table with instructions to vote for our improv group and our radio show,” shared Thorn. “And that’s how I won the only award I’ve ever won for Bullseye, the Metro Santa Cruz Goldie Award. A treasured possession, still.”
Reflections
Looking back on 25 years of weekly shows without missing a single episode, Thorn knew exactly where he wanted to celebrate.
“It seemed silly to try and commemorate it without a celebration in Santa Cruz, where it all started when I was 19 years old.”
As for his time at UC Santa Cruz? Thorn has this to share with fellow alumni and current students: “Be glad you went to a good public school where they expect you to be different and think it’s good when you are.”