HeyJaredWhat's Kraken with Jo Szewczyk
Join bestselling author Jo Szewczyk in What’s Kraken?, Empty Hell’s signature interview series where raw, unfiltered conversations cut through the noise.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 7
- Latest publication
- Aug 21, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 12, 2026
Latest episodes
Linda Drattell Interview: Everybody Is the Dragon (opens the original)
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Linda Drattell wrote her first poem at sixteen and started her novel thirty years ago — long before she lost her hearing in her thirties, and long before she survived the 2016 Bastille Day truck attack in Nice. She talks with Jo about the dragon that turned out to be everybody, the two women who carry her poem "The Torrent and the Tree" into chemotherapy, and the therapist who refused to discuss the attack and wanted to talk football instead. Four books in, the through-line isn't trauma — it's w
Dr Randy Overbeck Interview — Abigail Trench & the Culper Ring (opens the original)
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Dr. Randy Overbeck is back, and this time there's not a single ghost in the book. Abigail Trench is his first historical — a novel about the Culper Ring, George Washington's spy network in occupied New York, and specifically about Agent 355, the one woman in it whose identity nobody has ever established. He and Jo get into what the historical record actually contains (almost nothing), why he doesn't buy the standard theory about what happened to her, and how you write a British officer as a prin
Ryan Güt: The Shastafarian, Vinyl, and Being the Best You (opens the original)
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Ryan Güt spent two decades holding down the groove. He's played with some of the best including Stöner, Brant Bjork, and Mario Lalli & the Rubber Snake Charmers. On The Shastafarian , his debut solo record, he puts his art and soul into it and even painted the cover art. We get into the big band grandfather who started it, the vintage keyboard room at Church Studios, why physical media still matters in an age of digital burnout, and what he'd say to the kid he used to be. Key Moments • From big
Dr. Linda Plunkett — Ballroom Dancing Through Brain Surgery (opens the original)
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Dr. Linda Plunkett was a practicing clinical psychologist with a counseling practice, a ballroom dancing habit, and no idea anything was wrong — until the people around her noticed she wasn't acting like herself and an MRI found a tennis-ball-sized tumor in her frontal lobe. She talks with Jo about interviewing brain surgeons, the eight-hour surgery, the years of fibromyalgia that followed, and the moment ten days into recovery when she says a hand pulled her back — witnessed, she says, by her h
M.K. McDaniel — 18 Days in a Coma and a Christmas Carol in Hell (opens the original)
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M.K. McDaniel went into a drug-induced coma in 1999 with a 38% chance of coming out of it. She woke up 18 days later remembering every single minute of a place she is fairly certain was hell — bombed-out cities, demons, and a shack full of women waiting on customers. Jo, who had his own near-death experience at eight years old, gets her to walk through all of it: the black void, the Christmas carol she sang out of pure spite, the dead fiance who told her she had too much left to do, and the roug
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