Broke-Ass Stuart travels in search of his next underground deal in new show, Young, Broke & Beautiful.
Photo courtesy IFC

SAN FRANCISCO — Travel-blogging cult hero Broke-Ass Stuart knows you don’t have to break the bank to hit the fun jackpot.

In his new TV show, Young, Broke & Beautiful, the budget-conscious host travels the country, ferreting out the underground elements of major U.S. cities and surrounding areas — all as a “broke-ass” traveler.

Wired.com sat down for a (cheap) bite to eat with Stuart Shuffman at Cafe International in the Lower Haight district here to chat about the series, which premieres Friday on IFC. We discussed Shuffman’s transformation from a self-published author, selling travel guides one customer at a time, to a prime-time guru of cheap thrills.

Wired.com: You’re living every blogger’s dream. You turned your writings into a TV show and have a new book, Young, Broke & Beautiful: Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply, coming out as well. How’s it feel?

Broke-Ass Stuart Shuffman: It’s weird. All this hype, a party with 700 people to celebrate the show, and I realized that in July, after this has passed, I’m going to be right back to freelancing again. I said that to a buddy, and he was like, “What — do you want us to throw you a fucking parade too?”

Wired.com: I previewed the New Orleans episode of your new show. You hang out with a fangmaker (for humans), cook gumbo out on the bayou, talk New Orleans music history with George Porter Jr. and Irma Thomas, then rage at an all-night bounce party at the NOLA Art House. Are those sorts of off-kilter experiences going to be a common theme?

Shuffman: Oh yeah, we’re definitely sticking to “fringe elements” for each city.

Wired.com: What was your best fringe experience?

Shuffman: I don’t know if I had a best experience. The places you go are always determined more by who you hang out with. In Boston, I went on a bike ride with this crazy bikes-as-spaceships group — like they thought of their bikes as spaceships in a role-play sort of way, with codes and decorated colored lights.

We were biking down some street at night and it was pouring rain. And suddenly all the power went out. Every house and streetlight on the block went black. All that was left were these neon-lit bikes riding down the street in a thunderstorm. That was pretty cool.

Wired.com: You have to host your show, yet you’re pulling some pretty late nights. How’d that go?

‘The camera guy can be hungover; I can’t.’

Shuffman: My entire life I’ve lived by the rule that I’d never be the first to bed. But each day of shooting was at least 12 hours long. I started allowing myself to be second to bed. The camera guy can be hungover; I can’t.

Wired.com: That’s quite a far cry from five years ago, when you were peddling your “broke-ass guides” around San Francisco.

Shuffman: [smiles] Yeah, we used to literally staple those zines together. Then I’d stuff them in my backpack, grab my bus pass and huff around the city asking bookstores to put them up front.

Wired.com: Seems like that would be a lot different today, with self-publishing and the changing industry.

Shuffman: I still remember when I walked into a Borders Books, and it was totally gutted. At first I was psyched that a big chain was going out of business and there’d be more room for the little guys, but it really was the death of an entire institution — the bookstore. I think most of my bookstore sales for my upcoming guide are actually going to come from Urban Outfitters, believe it or not.

Wired.com: How have you utilized the web for PR since then?

Shuffman: At first my website was simply to sell books but it has become a destination site, with local writers in San Francisco and New York doing articles. I also had a piece on The Bold Italic go pretty much viral recently, which really helped build publicity for the show.

Other than that, I’ve mainly just used Twitter and Facebook. I’ve managed to separate my personal and public life on Facebook, but Twitter is harder. Sometimes I’ll meet someone when I’m drunk out at a bar and then we continue the conversation over Twitter. I always wonder where that line is.

Wired.com: So what’s next?

Shuffman: I want to expand the site to either L.A. or Seattle. Those are the highest readership outside of New York and San Francisco. We just need writers, but the problem is that I don’t have the money to pay them. I just hope that I don’t have to go back to waiting tables again. People think that because you have a book and TV show, you’ve got money.

Young, Broke & Beautiful premieres Friday at 11 p.m./10 p.m. Central on IFC.