Rhonda Dern is not only the mother of the Trying Pod host, she's also a longtime activist for environmental justice. Lately she's been working on a campaign with the Wolf Action Fund and the Sierra Club to reintroduce wolves to the Colorado wild, along the lines of a similar campaign done in Yellowstone in 1995. Rhonda encourages all Coloradans to vote yes on Prop 114 in this November's election.

In the debut episode of the Try! With Nate Dern, Nate interviews Matt Klinman about trying to grow and eat a ghost pepper. Matt Klinman is a comedy writer (The Onion, Funny Or Die, Team Coco's Smartr Podcast) and an aspiring "pepper head." He puts his spicy skills to the test in a pepper ceremony in front of all of his friends, where he pushes the limits of the human capacity for "benign masochism" to the max.