Hailed as “the podcast everyone wants to appear on” (The Guardian) and “a clubhouse for the chattering classes” (The New York Times) – cult podcast How Long Gone is headed to Australia, with hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart (aka DJ Them Jeans) bringing their irreverent live show to Melbourne’s Thornbury Theatre on Sunday 29 October – announced today as part of new festival The Eighty-Six.

How Long Gone feels like when you used to have friends. Assuming your friends were bicoastal elites, Chris Black and Jason Stewart. And they welcomed you to silently join them as they ushered in a parade of guests – musicians The National, actress Hari Nef, it-girl Alexa Chung, playwright Jeremy O. Harris – to chop it up three times a week.

With a growing audience of over 500,000 downloads and almost 500 episodes so far since its inception in March 2020, How Long Gone has grown from a culture-savvy take on the in-crowd to a podcasting behemoth. January 2023 saw its creators take their sold-out live show to London (their first dates outside of the US); now it’s Melbourne’s turn. Expect hot takes, scene reports and at least one “new guy alert” in what The New York Times calls “a “David Letterman-style” live show.

Tickets go on sale 10am (AEST), Thursday 18 May.

‘Black and Stewart have built How Long Gone into something compelling and unique … a comedy show, in-depth interview and niche scene report rolled into one’ – The Guardian

‘By the time curtains lifted, the room was packed so tightly you could barely wiggle through the crowd to the bar’ – Vulture

The guests of How Long Gone come from media, fashion, literature, music, and business – a common throughline isn’t immediately obvious. But each guest – Tavi Gevinson, Phoebe Bridgers, Alison Roman, Caroline Polachek, Bowen Yang, Mac DeMarco, Zane Lowe and many more – are tied together after they surrender to the bedrock charm of the show. As the unscriptable rapport between Chris and Jason seeps into the guests, conversations bloom and take on a life of their own. It’s an honest exchange happening. There is a lot of humour, nothing is sacred. It’s revealing, it’s intimate, it’s engaging – it’s everything you want to happen in a real conversation.

How Long Gone is a podcast created out of pandemic boredom by two old friends. Chris was in New York and Jason was in Los Angeles. Most of these details remain accurate, but what How Long Gone has become is much more than it was in its infancy. They set out to make a podcast and ended up creating a cosmos instead. As Chris told Vogue, the greatest reward is “creating a universe of interesting and engaging people who just want to come together to have a good time.”