Beyond the Mic with Sean Dillon

Sean Dillon | Beyond the Mic
  • 4.8 (26)
  • Arts
  • Updated Weekly

I believe every person has value. Behind every headline, hustle, hard-earned moment, and family tales there’s a story worth sharing. That’s why I built Beyond the Mic. I talk with artists, athletes, authors, icons and people you need to know. I don’t do puff pieces. I ask questions that get to the real stuff: the doubts, wins, detours, and moments that shaped them. The stories that you normally don't get to hear. Some stories make you laugh. Some hit you in the gut. All of them remind you: people matter, you matter. I’m not here to be famous. I’m here helping others be heard. I want curiosity to run free, connect communities, and make something that sticks with you long after the mic is off. Because in a world full of noise, real stories still cut through. Remarkable stories from people you know—and people you should. That's my mission. Let's go #BeyondTheMic. New Episodes Weekly! A Dog Drool Holdings production — dogdroolholdings.com This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

  1. 2d ago

    Jet Jurgensmeyer: Dials, Not Switches

    Jet Jurgensmeyer, hearing his own song on the radio in a city far from home: “It’s not just them not liking my song or my voice. It’s not liking me as a person because I wrote the song. I sang the song. I produced the song. I can relate to the song.” Four people in the room. Two of them were his parents. That was an early Jet Jurgensmeyer show. He sat on the Screen Actors Guild board in Nashville at 18, the youngest board member in the country. Then came the bar rooms. I ask if he ever thought about walking away from the music. The answer is one word. “Sane to My Crazy” comes from a friend’s real marriage. Jet played it at the Bluebird with its two co-writers and the woman behind the idea in the room. What did he find in himself singing someone else’s marriage like his own life? It scares him. Which city blew his mind first? The story starts in a rental minivan with his parents. Who knew him before any of this? He reaches for family. I send him back for a friend. And what does that friend actually do when a new song comes out? The president of the Kentucky chapter texts Jet. Come play the house before the LSU game. “Before an SEC football game, shoot, I’ll be there.” He should be asking for tickets, but as modest as Jet is... “I’ll have to think about that in the future.” He has 31 guys under his responsibility. He draws a hard line between a fraternity man and a frat guy. What almost did not survive the semester? His first answer is two words. I bring up the showrunner’s line that there were no new Boyd stories left. Jet was 15 and still under contract. Nobody told him. Ten years of work. What goes through his head hearing it that plainly now? He plays golf, and his handicap isn’t that bad... Then he compares the whole entertainment business to a round. The one chorus line of his life? “That’s probably the deepest question I’ve ever been asked.” The answer is a hook from a song nobody has heard. How does he know when a song stops being David’s story and becomes his own? His answer goes through a high school homecoming dance. And when a stranger hears “Sane to My Crazy” for the first time, what does he want them to feel that his other songs did not? Find “Sane to My Crazy” wherever you stream music, and hear the full conversation here. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Jet Jurgensmeyer: Dials, Not Switches

  2. 6d ago

    Bert Kreischer on the new hour he wrote after the girls left for college

    Bert Kreischer joins Sean Dillon on this Beyond the Mic Short Cut. The comedian on the Permission to Party Tour at Buddy Holly Hall explains how he wrote a new hour after the girls left for college. He puts Free Bert at about 50-50 real and made up. In the Fast Four he picks Fargo for his favorite bus breakdown and names the one person he wishes he could call. He also shares his mom's elephant advice, a vodka lesson from his company with Tom Segura and a two word punchline. Tickets for his tour are at BertBertBert.com. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Bert Kreischer on the new hour he wrote after the girls left for college

  3. Oct 9

    James McAvoy Says He Is Harder on Himself as a Director Than as an Actor

    James McAvoy was 45 and a rookie. "I'm a rookie director. It's like being 22 as an actor." He directed his first film, "CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN'". What did it feel like to him? Anxiety. Pressure. And the energy that came with both. It could have crippled him. It didn't. Who is harder on you, the actor or the director? The director. He is sweating blood for it. As an actor, "I've made my peace with the fact that people won't like everything I do." He still does good work. In between he does some bad stuff. He's fine with that. Outstanding answer. The film is about two Scottish rappers. Their heroes are Eminem and D12. Label executives laugh at them and call them the rapping Proclaimers. Nobody weighs the talent or the work ethic. They get reduced to an accent. They get told they aren't allowed to do hip hop. Tragedy. That scene is why James wanted in. He also plays the record boss who signs them. He wants you to see a danger and a threat. Then he wants you to understand the logic, even when it comes out wrathful. Then the Rockin' 8. A pina colada snow leopard cake. James says it won him the celebrity Great British Bake Off. He made sure I knew he won. The coldest he has ever been was a night in a New Zealand ravine. Soaked. Freezing. His first London flat had a smell. The deposit never came back. The landlord said they changed too much. All they did was fix the holes in the floor. Fixed the holes. His first paycheck was 130 pounds from two shifts as a trainee confectioner. He bought Nike Air Max. His rap name would be The Director. He picks sunrise over sunset. His grandparents' best dish was steak pie. Then the One Big Question. Four months after James thanked a director for a talk at his school, that director called him to audition. What would he be doing today if that call never came? Two plans. A mid-level university. Or the Navy. "I was probably going to join the Navy." One phone call. That's the distance between James McAvoy and the Navy. James wants you to see "CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN'". Press play first. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    James McAvoy Says He Is Harder on Himself as a Director Than as an Actor

  4. Oct 7

    Jimmy Brown of UB40 on the Balti Triangle, the Best Food in Birmingham

    "We've been together since we were kids. So we like each other's company." Jimmy Brown Growing up every teacher tried to make Jimmy Brown stop tapping. Even his mom tried. All of them failed. He is still doing it. I asked who tried hardest to get him to stop: "All of them." Jimmy is a founding member of UB40, the band that took its name off an unemployment form. Why they take a bus on tour instead of flying? Simple, he hates airports. America was designed for being on the road, with truck stops and wide roads. A big comfortable bus beats a terminal hands down every time. These are old friends riding the bus, together since they were kids, and they sincerely like spending these bus rides together. Who picks the movies on the bus? HE DOES! He is the film buff and the range of what they watch is immense. He did laugh when I asked him who had the worst taste in movies. "I'm the film buff and I made them watch obscure stuff, weird shit." When asked whether any film has ever gotten drumming right. His answer was definitive. What about Whiplash?? "they annoy me. All drumming movies annoy me." "...playing slower is a lot harder than playing really fast." That idea comes back in the One Big Question. Reggae asks a drummer to hold back. Jimmy lays the drums down first, along with the bass, and he says you have to give space to other people to do their thing. He calls it discipline. "if you want to play reggae, you've got to be disciplined because you're not going to do much" but what you do has to be perfect. The Rockin' 8 turned up some nuggets of gold including the best place to eat in Birmingham and the first thing he does after a tour is finding, well you'll have to listen to hear what. It's a Beyond the Mic Short Cut. It is short on purpose. A good drummer knows when to leave space. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Jimmy Brown of UB40 on the Balti Triangle, the Best Food in Birmingham

  5. Sep 29

    Michael Epstein - Truths of "Fault Line: Haditha"

    Twenty years ago, Michael Epstein made a film about a Marine Reserve unit out of Columbus, Ohio. That film put him inside the Haditha case, and he never left it. The staff sergeant charged with 18 counts of murder, told his lawyers for years he couldn't remember what happened, which is a bad defense friends. Epstein took him back into House 2, the room where the government said he killed a family. The camera was rolling, to see if his memory would come back. He was behind the camera and asking the questions with no lawyers in the room. What Epstein found going deeper wasn't just one man's memory. It was a government that charged an innocent Marine as the fall guy, gave immunity to Marines they knew were guilty. What was worse, they put witnesses on the stand they'd been told were lying, and withheld eyewitness testimony from its own investigators. He took the finished film to Tribeca. Nobody would distribute it. He got angry at what he calls the gatekeepers, the people who told him nobody out there cared about this story. He didn't believe that, and he didn't let it go. He says there are millions of people, thousands of people, who care about stories like this one, they just needed someone to put it in front of them. Twenty years later, Fault Line: Haditha is a 13-episode podcast with a companion documentary film for every episode, the raw footage he couldn't get anyone to release now going straight to YouTube, no editing, no gatekeeper. Last year, working with the BBC, Epstein brought two decades of forensic evidence and testimony back to Safa, the sole surviving witness of House 2, and gave her the truth the government had withheld from her for decades. Her new testimony is the final piece of the puzzle, and it's in his podcast. Michael Epstein joins Sean for the Rockin' 8: the last Michigan football game he saw live, his favorite restaurant in Brooklyn, what teaching screenwriting at SVA has taught him about his students, and the album he'll defend to anyone who calls it overlooked. He talks about his mentor Bill Moyers, his daughter's own reporting career, and the promise he made himself the day this whole thing started, one he says he's kept, because he's still here talking about it. Just another Beyond the Mic Short Cut with Sean Dillon. Fault Line: Haditha is out now, wherever you find podcasts, with companion films on YouTube. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Michael Epstein - Truths of "Fault Line: Haditha"

  6. Sep 28

    Jack Stewart Still Doesn't Feel Like He Belongs in the Ryanverse

    Scariest environment you haven't written about yet... "The halls of Congress." - Jack Stewart Jack Stewart spent 23 years landing fighter jets on aircraft carriers at night. He says landing on a carrier never really gets easy, and it never gets enjoyable either. That's the same discipline he brought into taking over Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Jr. series. Instead of writing another cockpit story, Stewart sent his first outing 600 feet underwater instead. The choice traces back to years after he left active duty, when he managed a dive operation for an undersea construction company. He watched deep sea divers up close and decided they were crazier than pilots. To write about them honestly, he went and got scuba certified himself, and came away with a fact that still surprises him: a diver 600 feet down is technically farther from breathable air than an astronaut on the space station. Stewart also opens up about the people who shaped him. A wing commander once pointed him toward an open F-18 slot in the reserves, a conversation Stewart says changed the direction of his entire career. On the Rockin' 8, he tells the story of reenlisting a family friend as the man made master chief, the same person Stewart had sworn into the Navy years earlier as a young lieutenant. He talks candidly about writing Master Diver Carla Bennett, a character built to make his lead cede control to someone else entirely, something Stewart says a lot of men in the military still struggle with. And he gets honest about writing inside a franchise this size. He still doesn't feel like he belongs in the same category as the writers who came before him in the Ryanverse, and says that discomfort is exactly what keeps his stories sharp. Stewart also talks about restlessness. After 23 years of always chasing the next mission, he says he's still learning what it means to sit still. His go-to fix when a scene gets heavy is a playlist full of Sublime and Slightly Stupid, which he says keeps him calm enough to actually get the words out. None of this happens without his family. He's been married 22 years, weathered deployments and airline schedules together, and now juggles book tours around flying full time for Southwest and visiting his sons at the Air Force Academy and Texas A&M. Tom Clancy Pressure Depth is out now, wherever books are sold and at jackstewartbooks.com. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Jack Stewart Still Doesn't Feel Like He Belongs in the Ryanverse

  7. Sep 24

    Ali Siddiq on the Stranger Who Told Him His Words Saved Her Daughter

    "I have no need for a bell-bottom, double-breasted yellow suit at this point." - Ali Siddiq Welcome Ali SiddiqWe’re joined on the Starline by a comedian who turned down Netflix, bet on himself, and just won the first NAACP Image Award ever given to an independently released special. His special My Father is streaming now. We welcome Ali Siddiq. Ali, let’s go Beyond the Mic You've put out more than fifteen specials, and My Father only came out this year. Why did that one take this long to be ready to make, when it's a story you've been carrying your whole career? Custom Fit Tour is your first real run through arenas. How do the different size rooms feel on the road compared to the Houston stages you learned on? Three Webbys and that NAACP Image Award. Which one actually caught you off guard? The Rockin' 8: Ali Siddiq’s Custom Fit Tour is on the road and Ali joins us for the Rockin’ 8, 8 random questions, just trust your first instinct. There is no Pressure. 1. The tour's called Custom Fit. Who or what actually got measured for that name, the show, the audience, or you? 2. You grew up in Third Ward. Is there one block or corner in that stretch that still means something every time you drive past it? 3. Between boxing and Muay Thai at the gym and running Tom Bass Park, sometimes three miles, sometimes the full six and a half, what decides which kind of exercise you need on a given day? 4. You've hosted Jive Turkeys every November since 2009, raising money for the Houston Food Bank, longer than most of your specials have existed. What keeps that one on the calendar every year when everything else about your career has changed around it? 5. What's one skill from live radio you still use on stage or in the writers' room that people wouldn't expect came from your history? 6. Speaking of hustling, with your daughter a chef, what's the one thing you like cooking yourself? 7. What's one house rule that applies to all your kids, no exceptions, no matter their age? 8. Fans yell out for classic bits like "Mexicans Got on Boots," but you actively refuse to lean on crutches. How do you know when a joke has truly reached its "Sell By" date? Sneaking in a Couple More:You'll give us fifteen minutes today. Somewhere else this week you probably said no to twenty. What actually decides which room or person gets your time? A lot of comics chase the network pilot pipeline as the holy grail. What made you decide that the stage and the independent route were the only acceptable compromises for your art? With the heavy, dramatic, and real-life emotional weight your stories carry, how do you personally measure whether a show was a success for you on stage? One Big Question:What would you want your grand kids to think of the growth and resiliency that you have found in your life? The Wrap:He loves cooking for himself, demands his kids to wash their face and brush their teeth and wants you to see the Custom Fit Tour today. Ali Siddiq, thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. And that my friends is Beyond the Mic. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Ali Siddiq on the Stranger Who Told Him His Words Saved Her Daughter

  8. Sep 20

    Actor James Paxton on "Last Train to Fortune"

    "The cool thing about this story is they both teach each other something throughout the film... That's one of my favorite elements of the film, book smart versus street smart." - James Paxton Welcome James Paxton:We're joined on the Starline by an actor and musician who's built his own lane in Hollywood. He's trading gunslinger banter with Malcolm McDowell in “Last Train to Fortune”. We welcome James Paxton. It’s been a big week for you... James, let's go Beyond the Mic. More than 10 years ago, you posted a photo of you and the inimitable Malcolm McDowell on social media. Did you ever think the two of you would actually work together, and why was Last Train to Fortune the perfect film for it? The whole movie rides on you and Malcolm having a specific kind of chemistry, a guy who can't read stuck with a guy who won't stop reading. What did building that with him actually look like on day one? This story is basically an argument that not knowing how to read can get you killed out there. What part of Dooley did you recognize in yourself when you first read this script? The Rockin' 8:Last Train to Fortune is the film and James Paxton joins us for the Rockin’ 8, 8 random questions, just trust your first instinct. There is no Pressure. 1. Malcolm McDowell's been doing this over 60 years, James. What's one habit or ritual of his on set that you've already started stealing for yourself? 2. You've done crime drama on Eyewitness, horror in BIT, big studio action in Twisters, and now a Western. Which of these was the one you walked onto set the most nervous about getting right? 3. First thing you look for at a farmers market? 4. You went from wanting to cover other people's stories to being the one interviewed constantly. Is there a question reporters keep asking you that you think misses the actual story? 5. You have to get rid of one forever: modeling, playing music, or acting. Which one gives the heave ho? 6. Is there someone outside music entirely, a filmmaker or writer, who's shaped the Love, Pax sound more than any actual musician has? 7. Between acting, music, and everything else, what's the one thing you do purely because you're bad at it and don't care? 8. What was the first guitar you ever got, and who got it for you? Sneaking In A Couple More:Before any of this, before Twisters, before your last name meant anything in this business, Dan Gilroy gave you your first real job in Hollywood at nineteen. What's your best memory of him? What did he see in you that day that you don't think you saw in yourself yet? One Big Question:If you walked into every room in this industry under a different last name, one nobody recognized, what do you think would be the first thing people actually noticed about you? The Wrap:He wants to be better at basketball, got his 1st guitar from his 4th grade teacher and wants you to see Last Train to Fortune. James Paxton thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. And that my friends is a Beyond the Mic Short Cut. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

    Actor James Paxton on "Last Train to Fortune"
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About

I believe every person has value. Behind every headline, hustle, hard-earned moment, and family tales there’s a story worth sharing. That’s why I built Beyond the Mic. I talk with artists, athletes, authors, icons and people you need to know. I don’t do puff pieces. I ask questions that get to the real stuff: the doubts, wins, detours, and moments that shaped them. The stories that you normally don't get to hear. Some stories make you laugh. Some hit you in the gut. All of them remind you: people matter, you matter. I’m not here to be famous. I’m here helping others be heard. I want curiosity to run free, connect communities, and make something that sticks with you long after the mic is off. Because in a world full of noise, real stories still cut through. Remarkable stories from people you know—and people you should. That's my mission. Let's go #BeyondTheMic. New Episodes Weekly! A Dog Drool Holdings production — dogdroolholdings.com This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Information

  • Creator
    Sean Dillon | Beyond the Mic
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    795
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 SM 2026 Dog Drool Holdings LLC All rights reserved
  • Show Website
    Beyond the Mic with Sean Dillon

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