Mallory Rubin knows her career is unique. “Sometimes I describe my job to people and they’re like, ‘Wait, you get to just talk about Game of Thrones and football for a living? Like, what?’” she said recently, laughing. In her roles as The Ringer’s director of content and cohost of the House of R podcast, Mallory has spent her career diving deep into some of her favorite pop-culture properties (with plenty of detours to talk about her beloved Baltimore Ravens and Orioles). In the process, she’s had a firsthand look at the unique role podcasts play in strengthening the bonds between fans and their favorite things, from TV adaptations of fantasy novels to sports teams.
One of the funny things about fandom-driven podcasts is the way that being a superfan can earn you plenty of fans on your own, which is how Mallory and her cohost, Joanna Robinson, found themselves taping a live show at Camden Yards ahead of an Orioles game this summer. After they wrapped, Mal took to the mound to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before joining the show’s fans—the Bad Babies—in the stands to take in the game. For this child of Baltimore, it was a big deal. “I’m prone to hyperbole, so they’ll release a new flavor of a Dorito and I’m like, ‘What a life highlight!’ But this was actually a life highlight,” she said.
For the Record caught up with Mallory to talk about her fandom journey, the uniquely intimate qualities of podcasting, and the joy of seeing fans meet up in real life.
You threw out the first pitch at an Orioles game last night, but you didn’t just throw out the first pitch—it was House of R Night at Camden Yards! What did that mean to you?
It was totally bonkers and surreal—the kind of thing where, until people were sitting in the seats, I thought it was maybe an elaborate prank. The Orioles are a huge part of my life and always have been. It was truly a delight to come home and do a live pod at Camden and then throw the first pitch—and the people who bought tickets to the live show all watched the game together, so we got to basically do a watch-along with our listeners and viewers during the game. It’s a very special and meaningful thing to confront in real life what the shows mean to people, and this was a particularly special manifestation of that.
How was the first pitch itself?
It was wonderful as an experience. I have some notes for myself on the actual pitch.
Mallory on the field with ‘House of R’ cohost Joanna Robinson and the Oriole Bird.
Let’s talk about fandom. Is there an early memory or moment where you felt the fan thing switch on?
In a way that feels very appropriate given how I’ve chosen to spend my time, it really was a combo of sports and pop culture. My parents got divorced when I was really young, and when I would go to my dad’s every other weekend, we would watch [University of Maryland] Terps games, we would watch Orioles games. And he’s a huge fantasy literature fan, so he had put this little bookshelf in my room with some George R. R. Martin, Dune, but he never was, like, “Read these.” He just left them there, allowing me to discover them on my own when I was ready. In fifth grade, the first book that I read when I had kind of more confidence as a reader was The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings was really the first fictional universe that I fell deep deep deep into.
The first one that I found on my own was Harry Potter. Back in the AIM days, I was putting up away messages, like, “If you don’t know what a Horcrux is, we can’t talk right now.” And then the last movie that I saw in college, like the week I graduated, was Iron Man, so I associate the MCU with moving to New York City and becoming an adult. I started reading A Song of Ice and Fire when I was a young whippersnapper working at Sports Illustrated, living in the Big Apple, trying to find my way. I read it together with a friend of mine who was working at Golf Magazine, and we would meet for lunch and talk about it.
An in-person podcast! What do you think it is about podcasts as a medium that makes them so effective for fan-driven work? Obviously we have TV recaps and movie reviews, but there’s something different that seems to happen in the podcast form.
It’s a couple things. Podcasting is a very intimate medium. We’re in the video era now, but if you think about the audio roots of podcasting, when you put your headphones on, you have someone’s voice in your head. They become a part of the rhythm of your day. We talk a lot at The Ringer about, “Come for the topic, stay for the hosts.” People have to care about both things, ultimately, and if and when they do, then podcasts afford a depth of connection that is distinct.
We always talk about our shows being “expert but approachable.” You want the conversation to be the best version of the thing—if people give us their time, we don’t want to squander it. But it also has to be a good hang, and a lot of that is the rhythm and rapport and chemistry between the hosts, which you can’t fake. That allows people to form a connection, too, because then they’re like, “I’m hanging out with my friends.” That’s the great trick of podcasting: “I’m hanging out with my friends.”
You talked about how important expertise is, and you’re infamous, I’d say, for the amount of prep you do for podcasts. Tell me about your process.
In some ways it’s more intense than ever, which, as I get older, I just honestly can’t stay up this late or wake up this early. But I don’t want to ever go into one of these runs feeling like I got this, because then maybe I won’t. It does vary property to property, but the prep is: I want to be able to watch the episode multiple times. I want to read, if I can, source text. I try to spend as much time with the actual thing we’re covering—the movie, the show, whatever the case may be—and if there’s a source text, to really dive in and to learn about the mythology and the lore, but I don’t only want to focus on the mythology and the lore. Because we talk about character arcs and narrative structure and the quality of the writing and the world-building, too.
A packed house for the live taping of ‘House of R.’
At the O’s game, you got to hang out with all these fans and members of your community. What do they mean to the work you guys are doing?
I mean, it’s the best! It’s the best, it really is. Anybody who works on the internet in any capacity knows that sometimes it’s gnarly out there. I am a woman in sports media! And no stranger to how dark the feedback and reception on the internet can be. So I have felt astonished now twice in my career by the relationship that people have formed to a thing that my cohosts and I have made together. The Binge Mode fans were just unbelievable, and the House of R fans are at a god-tier level of love and enthusiasm for the thing we make. It’s unbelievable to us. I went to journalism school, I was editing football columns for years. I never thought I would be doing this professionally. The ability to spend time thinking about things that I actually care about is not something I take lightly, and to see other people respond to that is the gift of a lifetime.
The other thing that’s great about seeing people in real life is getting to see the listeners engage with each other. We met people who are huge House of R fans, but they had met in the Binge Mode days, and they had formed a trivia group because of Binge Mode. We’ve had a couple of House of R people reach out and invite us to their weddings. There are all of these different layers to the community around the shows that we make, and it’s been so cool to see the way that people discover the thing and then discover other people who love the thing, and then the depth of the bond just grows from there.
Last question: What’s the last thing that you were surprised to find yourself becoming a fan of?
To go back a few years, F1. Like a lot of American sports fans, during COVID, I caught up on every Drive to Survive season that had aired to that point. It was really the height of Danny Ricciardo-mania, and he had gone to McLaren at that point. We knew we wanted to pick an English team, and it felt like there was a little bit of an Orioles comp there with where they were at the time. So we became McLaren fans, and we started watching F1 in real time, waking up to watch the Grands Prix. And now, a few years in, we watch qualifying. We watch practice! Lando Norris is a very, very important figure in our lives. We’re coming off a couple Constructors’ Championships, and Lando won the Drivers’ title last year, so that was rewarding. Will the Orioles reward me similarly? I can’t say.
Keep an eye out for Mallory across the Ringer’s network of podcasts, and check out the latest episode of House of R on Spotify now.
All photos: Brian O’Doherty.
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