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"The idea generally is to tell the best story as simply as possible," says Jeff Emtman. "I struggle with that."

Emtman is sitting with his back to the front window of Cafe Racer, talking to me about Here Be Monsters, the ingeniously dark, audaciously constructed podcast he has been producing since 2012. Emtman, who learned the radio ropes at Western Washington University's station KUGS, originally conceived the show as a series of "documentaries about things I'm afraid of" and produced them in a style that deliberately confounded the rigid norms of traditional broadcasting.