For those of you who just started listening to the Frotcast (is that a thing? do those people exist? I hope so), you may have never heard our original host, Ben Kaplan. Ben, our motorcyclin’ ridin’ (true), ear rapin’ (according to our first negative iTunes review) Frotcast co-founder (the podcast was literally his idea, discussed with Brendan, Bret, and I at the Horseshoe bar in San Francisco) died of cancer in December 2017. He’d gotten diagnosed a few years before that, at which point he swore off work forever like a true king and traveled the world for a while. He wrote all about it, you can still get his book on Kindle. So in 2018, we got the original Frotcast gang back together — Brendan and Bret, plus original super guest, Laremy, and eventual Frotcast regular Matt Lieb (both of whom would star in Whoop Dreams, the Gathering of the Juggalos documentary we Kickstarted in 2013 — Ben actually got his initial diagnosis right after we got home), for a Ben Tribute episode.

Today would’ve been Ben’s 41st birthday, so in honor of that I thought I’d put the Ben Tribute episode on the free feed. Fun fact: Schnitzel Bob’s fan-fiction in the comments section of the original post still makes me cry. That’s how dumb our lives are, and I thank you all for that from the bottom of my heart. It was a weird idea, playing clips of us while we recorded ourselves listening to it. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t put it on my podcasting reel. But it was worth it to hear the old clips of Ben. With all the hours of audio we have of him, you’d think we could just listen for hours and hours. But I still haven’t, it’s too hard. Maybe someday. For now it’s nice to go down memory lane at least once a year. Thanks for listening to whatever the hell it is we’ve been doing all these years. We love you all. Matt and I will be back with a regular episode later this week.

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