🦇 Bat volcano 🌋 Mr. Los Angeles Leather 🏆 how not to kill your husband ✍️ hush little baby 🎶
🍭 👂Happy fifth birthday, Podcast the Newsletter 🌈 🤸♀️
Bonjour.
Today is Monday, June 4. In case this newsletter is too long…this is the audio-version of a “page-turner,” I wish I had rationed this but I blew through it, I discovered a new podcast kink here.
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xoxo lp
👋q & a & q & a & q & a👋
Connor Ratliff and James III are the hosts of Tiny Dinos. (They do a bunch of other cool stuff, see the full article for everything.)
Please tell me the origin story of this crazy podcast.
CR: James loves the Jurassic movies, and we had been talking about an idea for a comedy feature involving people running from dinosaurs. But it was the kind of idea that would be hugely expensive, we would essentially be trying to make a movie that is as big as Jurassic Park. So then, we started talking about “what if we did a show where we made really tiny dinosaurs, and it could be an Adult Swim-type thing?” We were thinking the dinos could be little stop motion animated characters, like something out of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Then my Dead Eyes producer Harry Nelson came to me and said Hyperobject was looking to make a few comedy podcasts, did I have any ideas?
Doing it as a podcast, it would be even easier because we can just use music and sound effects to create the dinosaurs, we don’t even need animation. It never really occurred to us that we could’ve made our big Jurassic Park-type comedy as a podcast because by that time we had fallen in love with the idea of secretly making tiny dinos.
How are you two different / alike in real life? How are you two different / alike when it comes to your characters on the show?
CR: The “James” and “Connor” on the podcast aren’t really all that similar to our real personalities – we just sort of made the big choice to have me be the reckless one and James the one who is more anxious about consequences. We leaned into that when we were improvising the pilot and went from there.
J3: I think I would be freaked out to bring dinosaurs back to life but would ultimately be thrilled about it. So, in that regard me James and “Podcast James” are very similar. But outside of that, I’d like to think I am more happy-go-lucky than the character in the podcast.
CR: I am less happy-go-lucky than “podcast Connor.”’
This might expose how little I know about improv but how do you prepare for each episode? Did you world build a little before you started? Did you set some rules? What do guests know in advance?
CR: For the first couple of episodes, we didn’t tell any of the guests what the podcast was called or what the premise was, we just said we were two scientists who had a secret project. We wanted to see what would happen if the guests were completely in the dark about it. But then we started mostly telling people, because we didn’t want it to become repetitive.
The only preparation we really do is to try to come up with a broad idea of who the guest characters might be, and that’s mostly so we don’t end up doing the same kind of character dynamic for multiple episodes in a row. And every now and then, we will think of something that we’d like to have happen and we will plant the seed for that. Like, with Aaron Read, for instance, we knew we wanted him to play my brother, and that he would be dropping by the podcast to promote his band. Usually, it will be even less than that – “do you want to play a neighborhood watch person, or our landlord?” and then the person will pick one and we’ll start improvising.
Often the guests will only know the premise and that our characters live in a duplex. And as far as “rules,” it’s really just that everybody has to actually react as if the tiny dinosaurs are real, because they are real in the made-up world of our show.
J3: I’m saying this and no I won’t do anything about this, but I wish I knew more about science or at least googled a science term or two before we start recording.
And don’t worry about exposing how little you know about improv. I think this podcast also exposes how little I know about improv.
What is your ultimate goal for the podcast? I see there is merch, but not nearly enough. I want a t-shirt. Action figures? Theme park? A movie about the theme park? A podcast about the movie about the theme park?
CR: For me, the main goal is to just keep doing the podcast for as long as it’s fun for us and people are enjoying it. I’d like to imagine that we will do it for years and years and that it will get crazier with each new season. I know we wanna do some live shows, and I really love the idea of it developing enough of a following to tour it as a live show. I also started a Google Doc to start doing some very very preliminary notes for a potential companion book, because I think it’s fun when podcasts have companion books.
But as far as it moving into other mediums, I think we’re obviously open to it – we wouldn’t turn down the chance to turn it into a TV series or movie. To be perfectly honest, I’m super aware that those other things would be more lucrative and also probably less enjoyable/more exhausting. The fun thing about making this the way we’re making it is that we are doing it more or less exactly the way we want to, and I wouldn’t want to move it to a bigger arena unless we’d have a similar level of creative control. Or enough money that I can stop worrying about money.
As far as theme parks go, I hadn't given this any thought but it occurs to me that it would be great to create a pop-up Tiny Dinos theme park with lots of special merch for sale but all of the rides are really small, shrunk down to the size of the tiny dinos.
J3: With the genesis of this podcast being a film idea first and then a TV idea second, I absolutely * NEED* to see Tiny Dinos realized in a form that shows physical dinosaurs. And thankfully, if this just stays as a podcast, we already have that! The animated show promos make me smile. They’re such a fun addition to this process. I just love dinosaurs so much (hahah I’m 12.)
I second Connor’s feelings that anything more than this podcast would be MORE exhausting, not sure if it would ever be enough money to stop worrying about money. I think the only dinosaur property potentially doing that for people is the Jurassic series. And then maybe whoever OWNS Barney?
Are there too many podcasts?
CR: Yes, but that’s ok. There’s too much of everything now, a person simply can’t keep up and it’s overwhelming. But not every podcast needs to be heard by a million people, and it’s great that so many people get a chance to make one. Back in, say, The Golden Age Of Radio, very few people got a chance to put their voice out on the airwaves. Now, we have this ever-expanding glut of programming with no meaningful barriers to entry, so you can make something that is absolutely unlistenable and no one will stop you. The good news is that there is more high quality stuff than you would have time to listen to if you lived to be a thousand, you just need to know how to find it.
J3: I do more podcasts than I listen to them. So, I don’t think I can have a real opinion on this. But to try to answer this question, I mean, are there too many TV shows? Are there too many movies? What’s “too many” if there’s always something to consume, what’s “enough”? You can’t watch them all, but there’s literally something for everyone and still stuff that needs to be made that haven’t been made. For instance, I love time traveI movies, and I’m the kind of guy that looks at the “if you liked” category on Netflix or whatever, skips to the third or fourth page and watches the lower budget scrappy movie I hadn’t seen yet over watching Terminator 2 for the twelfth time. My hope is podcasts are like that for podcast listeners. You have an interest but no ones talking about it, maybe you need to just scan all the way down to the bottom or skip to another page on your app to find the one you’re looking for “Tiny Dinos” available wherever you get your podcasts.
🚨If u only have time for 1 thing🚨
With a box of his grandparents’ love letters and a trip to Italy, David Modigliani is investigating his family’s past during the Holocaust in Pack One Bag, a podcast that, for its first episode, won the 2023 Jury Award for Nonfiction Audio at Tribeca. Using dramatic readings of the letters (with the help of Stanley Tucci,) physical trips to visit his Jewish Italian cousins who survived Nazi occupation of Rome, phone calls, secret Fascist spy documents, personal diaries, blocked bank accounts, and his own love story, David is able to paint a vivid picture of his relatives that decided to flee fascist Italy, and those who couldn’t. How do you walk out on your life in one day? David’s trip back to his homeland (which he says feels “both unlikely and inevitable”) invites us into a personal story but also a history lesson of a darker side of Italy. (Historians adopted a phrase Italiani brava gente, or “Italians, the good people,” to describe the belief about the non-existent participation of Fascist Italy in the Holocaust.) November isn’t far away and the idea of fleeing fascism seems even more relevant that it was when David started making this project. But fleeing is part of the Jewish story, and in a moment during Passover with his relatives, David envisions a seance connecting his past and present. Pack One Bag made me laugh and cry. It’s a pop-up book of history and humanity with huge heart, colorful textures, characters to fall in love with, and a strong sense of place. I don’t know what the audio-version of “page-turner” is but this is it.
hell yeah
✨Podcast the Newsletter turned five last week. Here’s the first issue. I was reminded because I randomly found the email I sent out to my family and friends to get them to subscribe. The first person to respond was my dad who wrote “I hope I am the first subscriber.” I responded “YOU WERE #1!” (He was.) Thanks, Dad. You have been in my corner for 40 years and I’m sure you are exhausted but please don’t stop now. Also thanks to all of YOU for reading it, commenting, passing along. It’s the reason I keep doing it, duh. It’s all for youuuuuu!
✨Arielle Nissenblatt spotlighted Hello, John Doe in her newsletter and podcast.
✨Read Podcast Marketing Tips for Your Sign [via Podcast Marketing Magic.]
✨Mark Steadman brought back his podcast List Envy and his podcast newsletter The Big Minute.
✨Get your Tribeca tickets here. Don’t miss the Audio Flux event or In the Dark Live.
💎BTW💎
🎙️I listened Animal in its entirety, in one go, and I wish I hadn’t. I wish I had rationed. The series, hosted by Sam Anderson, looks a different animal in the eye for every episode, opening with a story about a lost hamster named Mango and a dog named Walnut. It’s a story that gets Sam thinking about animals, letting go, fatherhood, loss, life and death, order and chaos. He travels all over the world to fling adorable pufflings off cliffs, swim with manatees, attend a ferret competition, track down the last known Japanese wolf, and enter a bat volcano. It’s a very personal audio tour of the animal world, with episodes containing audio of Sam’s adventures, his own storytelling that I love so so much because he’s so so good, and lessons on life that aren’t preachy or annoying. (Let go and hope for the best; if we can’t save manatees we can’t save anything; we are all going to die; absolute chaos can force absolute presence.) The writing is sharp and specific and certain moments have stuck with me. The music is beautiful. Animals is a reminder that animals are magic existing beside us. The episodes are all wonderful, but I rank them from favorite to least favorite: Bats (maybe that’s because it’s the last one I listened to,) Puffins, Walnut, Ferret, Wolf, Manatee, but let me know what you think after you listen to it slowly, maybe one per day. Treat yourself. (Puffins gets bonus points because at the end, Sam shares a death metal song about catching puffins.) Listen here.
🎙️When I heard there was going to be a podcast about Nancy Brophy, the romantic suspense writer who murdered her husband after doing a lot of dumb and incriminating things (like writing an essay titled “How to Murder Your Husband”) I was excited. Not about the murder obviously, but I do love a story that touches upon my old stomping ground, the publishing industry, in any way. Add that to my list of podcast kinks. Happily Never After opens with an investigator on her beach vacation reading one of Nancy’s novels to see if she dropped any clues about her crime that could be used against her. (She did.) Nancy also did a lot of other funny and dumb things, so while we don’t get to be happy that her sweet, quiet, mushroom-foraging husband was murdered, we can be really happy he didn’t get away with it. The host is good (former true crime reporter and romance novelist who was in Nancy’s writer’s group Heidi Joy Tretheway) and the script is good (Nichole Perkins is in the credits.) I love the cover. Listen here.
🎙️I have raved about Shima Oliaee’s The Competition, which I loved. But have you listened to James Kim’s The Competition from 2017? For each season, James infiltrated a different competition, following the contestants until one is crowned winner. Season one brought James to The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which involved a lot of impressive piano playing and some young pianists. The best part of this season wasn’t the competitors or the competition, it was hearing the judges talk about the performances, explaining music in a way I’ve never heard. Or explaining why one competitor was better than the next. (I couldn’t really tell.) The second season about Mr. Los Angeles Leather couldn’t have been more different. This time we couldn’t hear the competitors’ art, we could only imagine their outfits, which you’d think would be frustrating but it was fun. These guys had fascinating back stories and outrageous things to say. (“I can do your makeup and kick your ass.”) This season was super exciting and moving. It made me want to make a piece like this, though I’d surely wilt from exhaustion. There hasn’t been an episode in six years but I don’t care, I’m still hoping for another one someday. Listen here.
🎙️You think Jamie Loftus’ Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) episode about Slide Cop is just going to be about how and why that story went viral but it was about so much more. On her mission to “find his pig ass,” Jamie dives deep into he lack of transparency in policing in the US, mail fragility, copaganda, Boston as a vibe, a physics lesson in slide projection that none of us could understand, how this is so funny and pro-Palestine protests also, somehow. She spoke to journalists, called the police herself, and even went down the slide. (This Boston girl walks the walk.) Finding the cop is harder than you think it’d be, so then the story becomes about that and why. Slide Cop’s 16th minute of fame isn’t over until Jamie finds him. She is going to find him. Listen here.
🎙️Lingthusiasm is a super smart language podcast that I have to slow down to 1x speed when I listen. You aren’t going to learn one theory or concept per episode, you are going to learn tons of facts about etemologies, accents, and be led to the top of several rabbit holes you can go back to explore on your own. It’s academic but pumped with fun. The Word Magic episode was extra fun, touching upon so many invisible aspects of words, but especially about spells—how the magical kind of spell and the written kind are historically linked, and how language shapes reality. They go over Felicity Conditions, (”an excellent drag name,”) performativity as applied to gender, the “hereby” test, plus they dig into a Rainbow Rowell novel. I had this epiphany listening, like “woahhh, words are like…magic?”...the kind of epiphany that made me feel like I was 21, on drugs in the attic of my college off-campus house realizing I have hands. Listen here.
🎙️MaxFun’s newest, Primer, explores a genre of music from outside the English-speaking world, giving you a…I don’t know what word should we use???…primer??? for the most important records and artists in that genre. The first season is all about Japanese City Pop, and the first few episodes will have you thinking about what could possibly make you fall in love with a song, artist, or genre other than the music—the cultural, linguistic and historical context of the songs. If you don’t speak Japanese, how can songs in Japanese make you feel like you’re “one of those glam Japanese women with blow dried hair and perfect makeup wearing a power blazer sitting in the lobby of a hotel?” (I’m quoting Linda Marigliano, who was featured in episode one.) Or how can music that you don’t know the words to make you feel a nostalgia for something you never had? I would have known this was a MaxFun show with my eyes closed. MaxFun shows often celebrates unbridled joy and obsession, which is something I appreciate. Listen here.
🎙️For Twenty Thousand Hertz, Dallas Taylor and producer Leila Battison made an episode driven by their experiences trying to get their kids to sleep with nursery rhymes and songs. That was one of the reasons I listened, too. (You won’t realize how few songs you know the actual words to until you’re trying to sing a baby to sleep.) Dallas and Leila go through the real and surprising origin stories for Baa Baa Black Sheep (taxes,) Jack and Jill (taxes,) Mary Mary Quite Contrary (torture?,) Ring Around the Rosie (a religious ban on dancing,) and also did you know that Humpty Dumpty wasn’t an egg, he was a siege cannon? This will really make parents wonder, “what the hell have I been singing to my baby?” or “what did my parents sing to me?” This is a really a fun language and history episode, too—these songs and poems are an echos of our past. I got this jolt of excitement thinking about people 500 years ago singing these same songs, or versions of them, in weird smelly little shacks. It’s also about the sorry, pain, and melancholy of these oral traditions, and the naïveté filter they get put through when we sing them in a children’s song. Listen here.
🎙️Anyone podcast-nerdy enough to be reading this should subscribe to Ad Infinitum, which is all about audio advertising. The latest episode, in conversation with Wondery’s Ray Harkins and Nathalie Chicha (producer of the 2023 Ambie Award-winning podcast "I Hear Fear,") was all about the craft of audio sponsorship, something I don’t think about closely enough. But now I want to. They brought up stuff I don’t usually think about (but maybe you have.) If you’re scripting for an ad break, how do you storytell to get people to stay through it? Does writing around ad breaks get you to think more creatively and make your writing better? Can ads enhance your story? Is that realistic? When is :30 better than :60? Host Stew Redwine also runs through some ads for some ratings and critiques and if you are still reading this paragraph you will think that’s a really fun game. Listen here.
🎙️Ben Smith’s Semafor Media newsletter (media industry news and journalism trends) is my favorite newsletter—it’s even better than this one. Ben launched a podcast with his former Times colleague Nayeema Raza, Mixed Signals, that will use media as a window into politics, culture, and tech for the next 20 weeks only. Media, “the worlds biggest conspiracy theory,” is super confusing right now and it will get more confusing as we get closer to the election. Ben and Nayeema are Mulder and Scully. The truth is out there. Listen here.
🎙️James Errington’s Centuries of Sound is a project to create an immersive audio mixtape for every year of recorded sound from 1857 to the present. For the 80th Anniversary of D-Day (June 6,) James presents an 82-minute sound collage using more than a hundred separate sources to allow you to experience D-Day as it was experienced at the time. New recording technology, a wide variety of coverage and the preservation instincts of generations of historians mean this is one of the first historical events able to be recreated in this way. James worked with over sixty hours of audio to put together this narrative journey through the day and its immediate aftermath, as experienced by the soldiers themselves, radio journalists, politicians and even members of the public. The podcast / blog post with full track-listing can be found here.
🎙️I love you!
📦 From the Archives 📦
[From August 10, 2020] Bizarre Albums reviews the weirdest albums ever made in a positive way. Host Tony Thaxton isn’t making fun of them, he’s glorifying them for all their weirdness. The episode on The Shaggs tells a fascinating story about three teen sisters forced into the music industry by their father in 1969, despite the fact they had no musical experience, or even interest in music. The album is so bad it goes past bad and back to good (Kurt Cobain called The Shaggs one of his favorite bands.) You really have to listen to this episode, to hear the story and the music. Because listening to the music without hearing the context is pretty puzzling, and the story is even better than the album.
Happy anniversary !
Binged all of Animal too – its podcast magic!