Catherine (Cat) Jaffee is an audio producer, a writer, and the founder of House of Pod, a recording studio and production company in Denver, as well as AMPED a non-profit that elevates marginalized voices in media. In 2019, Cat was awarded a National Geographic Explorer and Storytelling grant to produce Guardians of the River, a podcast about one of Africa’s most wild water systems, and the people who protect it. Completed while Cat fought a cancer diagnosis in 2020, Guardians of the River won best non-fiction podcast at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Jackson Wild film festival, topping the Apple Podcast charts as the #1 nature podcast of all time, and earning its name as an audience choice “cult favorite.” Cat is also an ultra-bike packer and endurance racer, competing in the Silk Road Mountain Race in Kyrgyzstan as a Chumba bikes athlete in 2021.