The Alchemy of Podcasting: How Ben Kissel Is Stirring Up Something Different with OK! Bud
It’s All About the Chemistry
Written by Matthew Kayser
In a time when the economy is in constant chaos, deadly fires and flooding feel like a daily fixture in the headlines and gender can be a dirty word, there are never-ending lists of topics rife for dissection in the media, but on this day, veteran podcaster Ben Kissel wants to talk about… furries.
“There’s a new law being proposed in Texas to ban furries from schools,” Kissel says into the microphone as he kicks off the next segment in his new podcast, OK! Bud.
“Do they mean like costumed furries or actual stuffed animals?” That’s the voice of Jerii Aquino, an actress and stand-up comedian with a quick wit and easy laugh who shares the hosting duties with Kissel and another longtime podcaster, Kyle Ploof.
“Like furries,” says Kissel. “You know, the people who go to conventions and then they cum in their pants sometimes and then they smell all funky, although I want to make it clear that sometimes it isn’t sexual, and I do respect the furry community. Have fun. Be safe.”
Aquino throws in a quick disclaimer. “No kink shaming here.”
“I don’t care what you do,” Kissel elaborates. “Just make sure when you’re doing my taxes on a Monday after a strong Sunday of furrying, just get the numbers right.”
Aquino and Ploof burst out in laughter at the imagery.
“It would be bizarre if you were at a furry convention, and the guy just takes his mask off and he’s like, Ben! It’s Larry from Tax Act!”
And with that, the OK! Bud podcast is off and running. It is one of four weekly shows that Kissel broadcasts live for his Patreon subscribers with Aquino and Ploof from a makeshift studio on his North Hollywood property. The podcast’s recording is then uploaded to You Tube, Spotify and all of the major streamers.
“Everything is so saturated with everyone’s bullshit opinions,” says Kissel about the modern podcast landscape. “We want to be in a 45-minute space every day where we can talk about interesting stories. Not looking to have hot takes. There is no such thing as a hot take anymore. We are trying to make people have a good laugh to and from their way to work.”
“The other day, someone gave us a one-star review for not talking about Palestine and Israel,” says Ploof, laughing in disbelief. “Well, yeah. On purpose.”
“This is straight up Snickers bar,” says Kissel. “This is just a nice, fatty sweet treat.”
“Easy to digest,” Jerii adds.
“That’s what’s going to set this show apart,” says Kissel, “from all the shows with people who have theater degrees suddenly thinking their political experts because they have a microphone in front of them.”
Imagine having your own radio station where you can flip a switch whenever you feel like it and talk about whatever is on your mind at that moment, and you start to understand why there are currently more than three million active podcasts globally.
Just about anybody with a modem and a microphone can do it, but the trick is getting someone (or a lot of someones) to listen. When you get enough people listening on a regular basis, you have an audience. That audience translates into money for the most successful podcasters in the business.
According to a report from Owl & Co., the global podcast industry generated $7.3 billion in revenue in 2024, driven by subscriptions and advertisements. Top 20 shows can earn millions of dollars annually when they become a part of a listeners’ daily podcast menus.
As a veteran podcaster, Kissel has been down this road before. He started doing stand-up comedy while he was a teenager in his native Wisconsin before earning a political science degree from UW-Milwaukee and heading to New York City to continue his career in comedy.
Kissel made his mark in the comedy scene with a show called KBBK Comedy Deathmatch featuring some of the fastest rising comics of the time, and those connections led to his first podcast, The Roundtable of Gentlemen, in the early days of the industry in 2010. Roundtable had some of the same elements as OK! Bud with comics riffing on current events, and its success gave Kissel the chance to co-create a comedy-horror podcast called The Last Podcast on the Left in 2011. Over the next decade. LPOTL built a large and loyal following that catapulted it into that rarified air of Top 20 podcasts.
After leaving The Last Podcast on the Left in 2023, Kissel knew he wanted to return to the mic and recapture that magic of connecting with his audience, but he didn’t want to do it alone and needed to find the right mix of voices.
He found them right around the corner from his house in North Hollywood.
Like Kissel, Kyle Ploof, a Los Angeles transplant from Boston, is a standup comic who was one of the early pioneers in podcasting, hosting a show called The Ploof is in the Pudding in 2010 in which Ploof would interview fellow comedians about the process of writing comedy and being a standup comedian on the road.
“There was no money in podcasting back in 2010,” says Ploof. “I was just doing for the love of the game.”
Ploof’s podcasting journey has taken him through a few different formats and home locations, but he is now more than 150 episodes into a show he started in 2021 called Death in Entertainment, a weekly deep dive into the tragedies and scandals surrounding the deaths of some of entertainment’s most memorable icons with recent episodes on Val Kilmer, Tupac Shakur and even the fates of the cast of The Little Rascals. Kissel joined the show as a co-host in 2025.
Ploof has stayed involved in the comedy scene in Los Angeles as well, writing and participating in roast battles, a one-on-one version of the longtime tradition. That’s where he met his current OK! Bud co-host, Jerii Aquino.
Aquino is a self-identified queer Latina from Queens with a background in theater and a passion for performing whether it be on stage as a standup comic or in front of the camera as a recurring extra on televisions shows like Blue Bloods. When she first moved to Los Angeles and joined the comedy scene, Aquino found that roast battles suited her fiery personality, but she was always looking for good ideas during the writing process, and that’s where Kissel entered the picture.
Aquino is a bartender at the neighborhood sports bar just around the corner from Kissel’s house. When Kissel introduced himself at the bar, Aquino recognized a fellow comic spirit and enlisted his writing help in her roast battles against comedians like Ploof. Soon, the three of them were becoming fast friends and spending their evenings cracking each other up at the bar.
Kissel, who was still ruminating on the feel and direction of his new podcast venture, sensed there was something promising about the chemistry among his newfound tribe of comic friends, and the OK! Bud podcast was born.
“I don’t think I would ever start a project with someone I didn’t know personally, because all three of us were friends before we started the podcast,” says Ploof. “We could just record our bar hangout sessions and be comfortable. The chemistry comes from our personalities and knowing when to talk and when not to talk.”
“There’s a science to it,” admits Kissel. “It’s performative too. It’s an exaggerated version of how we normally communicate. It really is an extension of our day-to-day relationship.”
As far as the alchemy of creating a successful podcast, Kissel says Aquino brings a crucial spark to the co-hosts’ chemistry.
“Jerii’s a superstar,” says Kissel. “There are not too many queer ladies of color that are dominating the way that she dominates by being whip smart, sassy, funny, and that’s important, because there are not too many podcasts with a mix of men and women. There are men’s podcasts and women’s podcasts and not a lot in between.”
Identifying as an independent, Kissel used to parlay his background in political science into his work including a podcast called Abe Lincoln’s Top Hat as well as a run for Brooklyn Borough President in 2017 against the current mayor of New York City, Eric Adams.
While the OK! Bud team does cover current events like the aforementioned legislation surrounding the ban of furries in schools, Kissel tends to stay from anything overtly political in today’s climate and likes to find interesting stories that no one else is talking about yet. OK! Bud was one of the first podcasts to jump on the recent Sperm Race train before that show devolved into a highly publicized scandal.
“There are certain things that are larger in the Zeitgeist that we cover, and then there’s just goofy shit,” says Kissel. “We have a lot of listeners tell us that they are more interesting after listening to the show.”
As someone who knows what it takes to succeed in this medium, Kissel says there are still a lot of opportunities even in the oversaturated field of podcasting.
“Make it fun and engage with your audience as much as you can,” says Kissel. “The nice thing is there is still a small “d” democratization of entertainment, and the best work rises to the top, so we’re just trusting the process right now. People who listen to it love it.”
You can access OK! Bud and Death in Entertainment wherever you get your podcasts including YouTube.
