V Spehar talks Under the Desk | Advocate Now

"Everyone was getting on TikTok to try and make connections, entertain each other, share information about what was going on with the pandemic," they tell Sonia Baghdady of Advocate Now. "And for me, it felt like a really great time to help deliver the news to people in a way that wasn't so scary."

Spehar films the series under their desk— literally— as they say it makes the series feel more casual, and less stressful.

"I wanted to create a space that was different from what you're used to seeing. I didn't want people to think that I was a 'real serious journalist' at a news desk telling you things the way that they might expect to see on TV or something like that," they explain. "I was a citizen journalist who was a little bit scared, and I was going to create the space under the desk for us to have conversations about things that are hard to hear about, hard to understand."

Spehar shares that they were motivated to begin the series because they always felt "left out of the conversation," or that the news was for so-called "smart people."

"The thing that I wanted to bring to people is like, yes, there are people who understand something and they want to talk about it at a very high political level," Spehar says. "But then there's just the average person who's like, okay, what happened? What does this mean for me? What do I need to do? Anything? Do I need to be scared?"

They add: "It turns out, we are all a lot smarter than we give ourselves credit for. And we can understand these things."

Spehar's podcast, V Interesting, is available to stream here. For more interviews like these, watch Advocate Now on The Advocate Channel.