The homey campsite where Ryan Bethea tapes his “I Went Camping With …” podcast and web series is not located in the middle of the woods, but in a mobile studio he set up in the back of a former airport shuttle bus. The side-by-side camping chairs reserved for Bethea and his guests are also not as cozy as they appear, given that they are separated by a health-friendly sheet of plexiglass.
And the campfire in front of the chairs where Bethea has chatted up former Prince bassist André Cymone, best-selling author Matthew Quirk and talk-show veteran Kathie Lee Gifford is actually a prop made out of lights, tissue paper and high-definition sound effects.
But the warmth? That’s real.
“I have this tradition with four of my best friends, where we would go to the Sierras, have terrible coffee, and sit in a camp chair by a crackling fire and start asking the big questions.” said Bethea, who grew up in Escondido and still lives there when he isn’t traveling. “Something in you just opens up. I wanted to see if I could recapture that with a podcast.”
Launched in May , “I Went Camping With …” finds its personable host guiding his famous guests through hour-plus conversations that tackle the big questions in the most casual way possible. Bethea doesn’t dig for dirt, but in the glow of his fake fire, he manages to find plenty of gold.
British actor Gregg Sulkin (Hulu’s “Runaways,” Disney’s “Wizards of Waverly Place”) talks about the joys of upscale California camping (or “glamping”) and the profound impact of having his bar mitzvah in Israel. Ben Higgins of “The Bachelor” gets into the downsides of reality-TV fame (“Fame is not fulfilling. I’ve learned that the hard way.”) and the real-life thrills of being engaged to fitness entrepreneur Jessica Clarke.
And Cymone re the amazing moment when Prince asked him to weigh in on his “Sign o’ the Times” album, and Cymone had the nerve to tell him what he really thought.
“You should cut it down a little bit,” Cymone re telling his friend and longtime bandleader about the sprawling album. “It’s way too much.”
The “I Went Camping With …” podcast is less than a year old, but its roots go all the way back to Bethea’s days as a student at L.R. Green Elementary and Middle School, where teachers like Linda McAllister made learning fun through events like the annual USO show for World War II veterans, and Bethea made things interesting for himself by writing a sequel to C.S. Lewis’ classic fantasy novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and discovered that making people laugh was one of his favorite things to do.
“They made learning so fun there,” said the Bethea, who is still in touch with some of those teachers. “I am a big lover of history, I’m a voracious reader and I am extremely curious, and all of that was encouraged by those teachers. If you had an interest in something, they just let you do it.”
Those early lessons in letting curiosity be your guide came in handy in early 2020, when Bethea started thinking about his life and where he wanted to take it next.
The University of Southern California grad was proud of the work he was doing with the marketing and sales consulting practice he had started, but it was time for a change. And when he ed how much he loved those L.R. Green days of asking questions, being creative and making his fellow students laugh, and how many great talks he’d had around a campfire, Bethea ended up with a mobile studio built in the back of an airport shuttle bus.
A mobile studio equipped with real birch trees, a fake campfire, and a host who had to learn to think on his feet before the podcast even started.
“We didn’t anticipate COVID hitting about two weeks after we bought the bus,” the 35-year-old Bethea ed. “The bus was ready to go, and then the world turned upside down.”
So Bethea and his team added the plexiglass , installed an advanced air-filtration system, and then they waited. They were finally able to hit the road last fall, taking their retrofitted bus and their tissue-paper campfire to Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Tennessee and all over Southern California.
The first episode of what Bethea calls, “The first ever mobile campfire studio podcast” hit the podcasting universe and YouTube in May. Podcast listeners have raved about the show’s blend of insight and humor, and guests have been happy to settle into the camp chairs to share ghost stories, and discuss everything from God and marriage to what makes the perfect s’more.
As for Bethea, he is keeping the campfire faith by staying true to the friendship-fueled tradition that started it all.
“There is so much negative news out there, and there is so much fear. I want to make this positive and fun,” said Bethea, who also hosts the “Kinda Christian” podcast. “I love being upbeat. I want to celebrate the good things in life. I want to make people laugh. The world went through a real seismic shift, and I just want to put something good out there.”
