Overview of Reaching Out
KCRW introduces Reaching Out, a new podcast from Futuro and KCRW about Sayer Quevedo’s intimate search for his biological father — a search sparked by his twin brother Connor and shaped by years of recordings, family stories, and questions about identity, memory, and closeness. The episode blends documentary narration, phone-call audio, and reflective storytelling to trace how the brothers’ relationship, the pandemic, and a growing need for closure eventually lead them to a breakthrough: locating their father in Los Angeles, just minutes away.
What the Episode Is About
The episode is less a straightforward investigation than a personal audio memoir about:
- A twin brother, Connor, who initiates the search for their birth father
- The narrator’s complicated relationship to the idea of “fatherlessness”
- How recording life becomes a way of making meaning out of it
- The tension between the narrator’s desire for emotional distance and Connor’s drive to know more
- The eventual discovery of their father’s identity and whereabouts
Key Story Beats
The Search Begins
- On February 15, 2020, Connor calls to ask if they should look for their birth father.
- The narrator has already spent years thinking about the absence of a father, but tries to move past it.
- Their conversations are recorded, and the episode uses those recordings as both evidence and emotional texture.
Brothers With Different Kinds of Freedom
- Connor is portrayed as nomadic, impulsive, and precarious — drifting through jobs, travel, and unstable living situations.
- The narrator is more rooted, with a conventional adult life, but feels emotionally stuck and overly self-conscious.
- Their differences become a central motif: two twins shaped by the same origin, but living very different versions of freedom.
Memory, Recording, and Self-Mythology
- The narrator reflects on a long habit of documenting life through audio, writing, and performance.
- He revisits earlier attempts to process his father’s absence:
- poetry
- a short play
- a radio commentary
- The episode suggests that recording can preserve truth, but also distort it by turning lived experience into narrative.
Pandemic Life and Family History
- During COVID, the narrator records calls with Connor, his mother, and her friend Michelle.
- The pandemic intensifies feelings of isolation, routine, and emotional stagnation.
- Conversations with his mother fill in pieces of her past, including:
- her life as a young dancer/stripper in San Francisco
- her difficult family history
- how she met the narrator’s father, a line cook and rockabilly musician
The Emotional Stakes
- Beneath the search is a bigger question: whether meeting their father will actually change anything.
- The narrator worries he may be looking for closure more than connection.
- He also grapples with a fear that he may never fully fall in love or feel emotionally settled.
The Breakthrough
- In April 2021, Connor receives a DNA-related message that reveals their father’s full name.
- Public records place him in Los Angeles, only about five minutes from where the narrator lives.
- The discovery lands as both startling and anticlimactic: the father is not a mystery in the abstract anymore, but a nearby, ordinary man with a real address and a public presence.
Major Themes
- Identity and inheritance — How much of who we are comes from biology versus choice
- Memory and recording — What gets preserved, what gets lost, and how stories are made
- Twinship and difference — Shared origin, separate lives, mutual judgment, mutual love
- Fatherlessness and closure — The emotional burden of absence and the hope that answers might help
- Pandemic-era isolation — Routine, confinement, and the search for meaning in unstable times
- Narrative vs. reality — The way life can feel more coherent in retrospect than it does in the moment
Notable Takeaways
- The narrator initially resists the search, but Connor’s curiosity keeps it alive.
- The father’s absence is treated not just as a personal wound, but as a story the narrator has been trying to edit and control for years.
- The final reveal is grounded in irony: after all the searching, their father turns out to be physically close by.
- The episode emphasizes that “finding” someone may not produce the emotional resolution one expects.
Release and Listening Notes
- The first two episodes of Reaching Out are available now.
- New episodes will be released weekly.
- Futuro Plus offers early access to the full season, ad-free listening, and bonus content.
Credits
- Podcast: Reaching Out
- Presented by: Futuro and KCRW
- Written, produced, and narrated by: Sayer Quevedo
- Editorial and production team: Includes Maria Garcia, Marlon Bishop, Fernanda Chavadi, Sam Leeds, Jessica Ellis, Victoria Estrada, Stephanie Lebeau, Lucy Little, and others
- Executive producers: Marlon Bishop and Maria Garcia for Futuro Studios