Ivy Le Is the Most Reluctant Nature Show Host Ever

FOGO: Fear of Going Outside, the Spotify podcast hosted by stand-up comedian and actress Ivy Le, is back for a second season, which is now available to stream in its entirety.

Most nature shows are hosted by reckless white men, but avid indoorswoman Le is an Asian mom with severe allergies. Taking on the great outdoors very reluctantly, Le learned how to camp in Season 1. This year, she upped the ante and bravely tried hunting. Throughout the 10-episode season, audiences will hear Le go on a second amendment show, take down Teddy Roosevelt, butcher a hog, and track animals with a 14-year-old girl scout, all resulting in comical chaos.

In addition to FOGO, Le co-hosts the only queer mic in Austin, Texas, co-produces Austin Sketch Fest, and performs at comedy festivals all over the world. As the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, she presents a unique approach to everything she does.

OFM caught up with Le to talk more about the podcast and her comedy, as well as other projects such as writing a script about a ninja who decides to level up her life by going to coding camp and an essay collection titled Elder Bisexual.

Let me begin by asking, how excited are you for FOGO: Fear of Going Outside to be back for Season 2?

Oh, man! I don’t know if excited is even the right word. I thought Season 1 was a wild ride, but Season 2 is a complete shitshow, and I hope everyone listens to it.

For those who have never heard of this podcast before, what can they expect, and what makes it worth checking out?

FOGO is a nature show by the most reluctant host ever. It’s a nature show from the indoor perspective, which is my perspective. I’m a host that indoor people can trust. You know, I’m not going to let somebody just stick their hand in a hole and not ask why. I do love nature shows, and I want to be a nature show host, but I don’t want to be outside all the time for the rest of my life. I love genre, and I think the nature show is overlooked as a genre.

I watch all the stuff on TV because I don’t go outside, but I always have a follow up question like, why are they asking this? But that’s because they’re outdoor people. I don’t know if you know any outdoor people, but they kind of live segregated lives. A lot of outdoor people don’t even know that indoor people exist, and a lot of indoor people don’t know outdoor people. The reason I know is because it was very hard to make the show when you don’t have social relationships that cross these lines.

There was a lot of doing to rustle up these sources, find them, and learn about the outdoors when you’re not an outdoorsy person. Because I’m an indoor person, I’m going to ask the questions that aren’t often asked. Like, why isn’t anyone talking about this? Should we take this guy seriously because he’s a white guy with an accent?

What initially inspired you to create FOGO?

Spotify has this program called Sound Up, and it’s like an incubator for podcasts by underrepresented groups in the United States. The call is usually for women of color, but in some markets, it’s for queer creators. It depends on the market, but when I first got the call, and this is not the first Hunger Games type of contest I’ve ever been a part of, but because it feels like these opportunities are so rare, I thought I should make this capital I important show. If I were to get this rare, special opportunity, I would have to do something for my community.

So, I came up with all these important ideas, like maternal mortality and parenthood as a minor. Like, how do you raise these kids when you’re at the intersection of these identities? How do you teach them how to navigate it? I live in Austin, Texas, and gentrification is also a big issue here. Not just with the neighborhoods, but food, culture, and everything with it. Then I realized, yeah, I would never listen to any of these shows (laughs).

I care about the issues, but that’s not something I’m going to listen to. Then it occurred to me, why am I making this assumption that I need to make shows like this? I’m a fun person, so why can’t I just be a fun person? Why can’t I just make a show where my point of view is important, but it isn’t about packaging my trauma for the consumption of others?

Ultimately, what do you hope audiences take away from the podcast?

Ultimately, it’s not as dangerous as it seems, and it’s not as cool as they make it out to be. If you don’t want to go outside because you have no interest, fine. Just listen to my show! I’ll take you there, so you don’t have to go. However, if you’re not going outside because people have made you feel like it’s not something you’re allowed to do, that it’s just white people shit, or people have made you feel like you don’t have the right skills to be out there? No, you do. Why the hell are we letting people gatekeep the outdoors?

I mean, we let them rebrand hiking. Do you know what hiking is? I went on a hike, and it’s just walking. They make it seem like you need these special hiking shoes or whatever, but most of these places have trails. Sometimes it’s gravel, but a lot of times it’s just worn smooth dirt. Sometimes it’s literally concrete. So, they act like you need these special shoes and you need these other things when it’s literally walking. We let white people rebrand walking, and then they keep us out of it. Like, that’s crazy. If you want to do it, you have the skills. They’re just regular human skills.

What would you say is the best and worst outdoors experience you’ve had?

The best experience I had was outdoors adjacent, but it was indoors. In Season 2, I met this kind of a big deal chef, his name is Jesse Griffiths, and he’s a hunter as well. He let me into his restaurant, and he showed me how to butcher a whole wild hog. That was awesome, and it was indoors! As for the worst outdoor experience, that’s tough. I’ve had some terrible, terrible outdoor experiences. Like, I nearly drowned twice off the coast of Lanyu, a small, volcanic indigenous island off the coast of Taiwan.

One time, I basically got drifted on top of some dangerous dead coral reef, and it’s dangerous because it’s like a cheese grater for humans. That was terrible. Then the second time, I knew to steer clear of the coral reefs that were dead, but then I got caught in a whirlpool because of the shape of the island. So, that sucked. I also had a terrible allergic reaction at a cherry tree farm in rural Romania. I’ve had some terrible experiences. It seems like every time I go outside, something terrible happens.

In addition to FOGO, you also co-host the only queer comedy mic in Austin, Texas, and you co-produce Austin Sketch Fest. Have you always had a passion for comedy and entertaining?

Absolutely not. I kind of grew up in the golden era of 90’s Black sitcoms, like In Living Color and Family Matters, so I always enjoyed sitcoms, but as far as performing comedy, I didn’t really see anybody that sounded or looked like me. So, it didn’t seem like a career that a child of immigrants should pursue. You have to create intergenerational wealth from nothing, but what I think happened is, I’m standing on the shoulders of people who moved the art form to storytelling.

I think sophisticated fans of comedy today can handle jokes that are not just ba dum tss. They can handle a more emotional texture in comedy. They don’t need to be babied in ways anymore, and I think comedy moved toward what I was already doing, which was storytelling. I make art to subvert white supremacist patriarchy, so if comedy moves away from where I am, I’m not going to chase it.

You are currently writing a script about a ninja who decides to level up her life by going to coding camp, as well as an essay collection called Elder Bisexual. What can you tell us about these projects?

I’m an actress as well, and I realized there aren’t a lot of roles out there that are right for me, or I would even be considered for. So, I wrote Coding Ninja as an excuse to cast a shit ton of comedians who are diverse and people of color, but it’s also kind of a metaphor for the immigrant experience. The main character has a tough mom, who is also her handler, and she has to do all these little side quests just to change her life. Changing your life is hard, and because I’m relating this to the immigrant experience, I’ll basically never run out of episodes.

There’s always something else that comes up that you didn’t think of, and you must deal with it to get to where you’re going when you want to change your life. She’s tired of the sexism in the criminal underworld, so she has to kill twice as many people to get half as far. I think it resonates with people making a career change, people recovering from addiction, people who have certainly moved countries, or people who have come out of the closet and are deciding what they want their life to look like. If she resonates with so many people, hopefully a really big actress will play her one day.

Then Elder Bisexual is my story. Everyone who needs to know has always known that I wasn’t straight, but in a vague way that we do in the south, where we don’t name these things because it’s very taboo to speak these things out loud. Before I became a full-time comic, I was working at the Texas Civil Rights Project, and we were involved with all these civil rights coalitions. I worked with several young LGBTQ activists, and as you can imagine in Texas, they’re very busy. They have a lot of work to do, and Gen Z is taking the leadership right now.

The rest of us need to follow, and we need to do what they ask us to do because here in my state, people are trying to get trans kids killed. We got problems out here, and I was told by them, one of their many valid criticisms of the way previous generations handled these fights was bi erasure. It wasn’t very intersectional, and it was very focused on upper middle class gay white men. The rest of the LGBTQ coalition was not reaping the benefits of that work, but because of bi erasure, their strategy included bi visibility.

Ever since they explained that to me, I’ve been much more upfront and explicit about being a raging bisexual. I started putting it in my bios, and of course, everything that I had dealt with, the feeling of, you better not say anything because it’s dangerous; you’re not straight enough for the straights; you’re not gay enough for the gays, all these things where it was just better to keep my mouth shut. Yes, I’m bi, but I also grew up very poor, my parents didn’t speak English, and I’m the oldest daughter of immigrants. There’s a 50 percent chance I would never have to fight this battle.

I have other fish to fry and other things to handle, so I’m just going to table this. Even though the world is a much different place and society is much more tolerant of queer people, but here in my backyard, it’s still precariously dangerous for LGBTQ youth. So, I’m just putting myself out there, and we have much more work to do. If young leaders are saying this is what we need and they need us to be more explicit and visible, then that’s what I’m doing to do. That’s where the idea for Elder Bisexual came from. It’s kind of an essay collection having that dialogue, but obviously from a comic’s point of view.

What are some future goals you hope to accomplish with your career?

I want to be famous! (Laughs). No, I make art to subvert white supremacist patriarchy, and I never used to care about being famous. I was always perfectly fine with doing that kind of work behind the scenes. Doing narrative change in the nonprofit world or doing political activism, things like that. However, I will say, for all the fires and all the secondary trauma you deal with by doing that work, doing one year of comedy, I was able to do as much damage to white supremacist patriarchy equivalent to three to four years of that other work, which was much more soul crushing.

I mean, that is my goal. Queer comedy and decolonize everything. I know I’m not the groundbreaker in terms of representation in media or anything like that. I definitely stand on the shoulders of people who’ve made greater sacrifices before me, but we have so much more to do, and I’m willing to do anything I can to change people’s minds about the kind of world we could live in.

Stay up-to-date and connect with Le by following her on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok @ivelewithonee, or visit her official website, ivylewithonee.com. FOGO: Fear of Going Outside is available on all podcast streaming platforms.

Photos courtesy of Riley Blanks