Meet Moses Alvarez of Malv_n_Mowgli

Honestly, this story starts at the beginning of the pandemic. My co-host and I were put on “furlough” for the unconceivable future at the beginning of March. During the next few months, both of us were thinking about our future and how this is the time to finally start doing what we want to do. Life is too short and we have to at least take a stab at something. We decided to take our love of watching movies, wanting to make movies and our love for NBA basketball all together and we decided to create a film and basketball podcast. But we would bring our own flavor to it. Most podcast are just two people talking, we wanted to add more to that and wanted you to see with your ears. We decided to take elements of early radio that we loved (characters, bits) into podcasting.

My co-host and I have been friends since middle school. We didn’t have a stable place to record at since I had family staying over during the pandemic and his father had pre-medical conditions. So we actually started filming our podcast in the parking lot of Perry Park in my cohost Mowgli’s car. These few weeks made it seem impossible, another one of our dreams shut down but we kept doing shows in the car for about a month, then our gear came. Family members finally moved out and we moved the production into my garage and we’ve been here ever since.

One major struggle was where to record our podcast. Mowgli was at his family’s house where his father recently had a medical procedure, to be safe we didn’t want to record here and potentially risk his father’s safety. We couldn’t film at my house because during the pandemic, we had a family member who was in between moving before the pandemic and during the pandemic they couldn’t go anywhere, so I had a house constantly with people and couldn’t record.

We didn’t let that stop us, we started recording on phones, laptops all in the back seat of a Nissan Sentra. We got so many looks at people walking around Perry Park. Also, the car got extremely hot and we always had to record with the windows up because of the sound quality. But we kept trucking.

During the pandemic, a lot of recording equipment that was needed was out of stock or it would be months before they would be shipped. This almost deterred us, but that’s when we decided to record with what we had and where we could.

Right now we are just a small film and basketball podcast, but we would like to branch out into our first love which is film. As Latinx filmmakers, we love where we are from and would love to tell South Bay stories from our point of view. My co-host would love to do a punk scene in the South Bay and I would love to set my films in the South Bay because its a place that’s rarely seen in films.

I think that the type of podcast we are doing is truly setting us apart. We are bringing audio clips from other media into our shows to keep your ears entertained. The two of us find every clip and do all the editing in my garage in North Redondo. We bring that energy that we feel is missing in podcast these days, we are taking old elements from radio and repurposing them in podcast for newer listeners. Take a listen and see for yourself. But, one of our bigger goals is to do what Hello South Bay is doing and highlight artists from the area. We don’t have the money yet because we want to involve a video element but we would like to interview local artists and comedians that are from the South Bay.

Right now we are just proud of ourselves that we have a product out there. Many people like us earlier just talked about doing something, but we took months to plan, record, and edit. Now we are here gaining traction and we want to go strong into the new year. Also, that the product is created by just the two of us. We have been friends since middle school and now we are in our 30s finally doing something together that we talked about at Perry Park when we were kids.

Personally, I define success as being happy. And doing this podcast with one of my best friends is honestly very rewarding and satisfying right now through these difficult times. I always laughed when people said ” if you do what you like then nothing else matters”. Slowly, I’m starting to feel and realize this. But both of us agree, being able to do this full time would be a measurement of success. We aren’t here to be celebrities, we are just finally doing something that makes us want to work and hopefully we could get paid to entertain people through out their day.