Xavierite Editor-in-Chief, Brian Laughran, and Peter Kreten from WXAV 88.3FM got the chance to interview, via phone, Eric Molinsky, the creator of a podcast called Imaginary Worlds. During this extensive interview, the trio discuss the wide variety of topics his podcast encompasses, Molinsky’s inspirations, how he produces the program and much more.
For more information on Molinsky and his podcast, you can visit imaginaryworldspodcast.org; if you want to hear the interview in its entirety, visit wxav.com. Molinsky has been working for public radio since 2004, and he says that right from the start, when no one really knew what a podcast was, he was listening to them.
So, he was an early adopter of the storytelling medium. It arose mostly out of a need for him to find something to listen to on his iPod in the subway–where there is little reception–after he moved to New York.
Over time, he listened to the way that this new form of digital media began to develop. In fact, one of the earlier shows that he took notice of was 99 Percent Invisible, a podcast mostly about design and architecture hosted by Roman Mars.
Molinsky was fascinated by Mars seemingly having complete control over the content and the duration of his program. He did not have that kind of creative liberty where he was working at that time.
“In my field, I worked mostly for the show that was called Studio 360, which is an Arts and Culture Show out of WNYC in New York, and is distributed nationally by [Public Radio International]. And a long piece for me would be about 8 minutes, and even then very often I felt the piece could have been at least 15.
Cutting it down to 8 just felt brutal, and that’s luxurious. When I did stuff for Marketplace or for The Newsroom, that could be 3 – 5 minutes. And so,when you produce a piece for a show, it is very much part of that show and you don’t get to do it on your own, and then just hand it in and say “here you go”.
I mean, you know the editors come in pretty early to listen to what you’ve got and give you a lot of advice. They’ll rewrite stuff for you, they’ll tell you what to cut because, ultimately, what you’re doing is for them. You’re part of that show and you also want to produce something that sounds like that show as well.”
Soon he could not help but wonder what it would be like to have his own podcast and figure out what his voice would sound like if he was off on his own. Sure enough, questions arose about what the podcast would entail and how would it differ from the work he was already doing at Studio 360.
However, as much as he thought about it, Molinsky’s idea went on the theoretical back burner which led to a lot of pent up stories. “There’s sort of a…limit…” he laughed, recalling the degree of geekiness that was acceptable or his old job. “Even Studio 360, where there’s no other
show I could do, you know we did an hour long thing about Superman, I’ve done a piece about The Watchmen, I did a piece about Wonder Woman, then I picked something about Batman and they were like, ‘Okay, I think we’ve had your filler…thank you very much but, you know, you’re not on the comic book beat’, and I didn’t necessarily want to be. I loved doing a show about opera or some book I had never read where I get to dive deep into something I didn’t know about…it almost feels like a graduate school program to work in Public Radio.”
The more he sat on this idea, the more topics that seemed to spring from his head. He began making a list of all the things that he has always wanted to cover that no one else would, and soon that list grew to at least twenty potential episodes.
“It’s a big jump from ‘Oh my God I can do this’ to ‘I’m going to start doing this’,” said Molinsky about the courage it took to finally took to build up to that point. Now that Molinsky has been at it for a while, having done over 25 episodes, he has been able to get some interesting and passionate feedback from listeners.
What he has found is that people tend to be strictly a fan of one thing but not another. “It’s interesting, the shifts in the show and the tones sometimes really throws people for a loop, and some people are totally into it,” he said “I think we all have our limits as to what we’re interested in.”
What surprised him the most was people being resistant to leaping from one fantasy world to another. He says that when he first started his podcast he had been warned not to tamper with his format. Which seems logical, there are people who want to tune in every week to hear the same thing, but the prospect of sameness and boredom did not appeal to him.
Change is a scary thing. In regards to his second season, Molinsky has several great ideas on deck. He has been planning a Dungeon’s & Dragons themed episode, researching the topic by going out to a game shop in Brooklyn and playing D&D on Wednesday nights to learn how to play it, and interviewing creative professionals about it.
He is also doing an X-Files story, as well as a mini-series that he’s keeping mum about. Molinsky’s Imaginary Worlds is just a single drop in a very large pond of podcasts that continues to grow. Thinking about it in that sense, it could be easy to think that the medium has reached a saturation point.
According to journalism.org, as of April 2015, “The percentage of Americans who have listened to a podcast in the past month has almost doubled since 2008, from 9% to 17% by January of 2015. The percentage listening in 2015 was up two points over 2014 levels (15%).”
“How many podcasts can there be out there where people just say ‘enough’? It’s sort of a bit of an issue with television right now, there are only just so many shows people can watch,” said Molinsky on the issue. The podcast host also believes that it’s not just a ‘golden age’ of podcasts for listeners, it’s exploded the whole industry.
He says that it incites a tug of war between stations of where talent is going to go, all of those producers and reporters who were struggling in the field can suddenly have their own show and become podcast stars.
Not to discourage college students who aspire to work in public radio or produce their own podcasts, Molinsky does have some advice to offer.
“The first thing I think is just to do a lot of listening. There’s such a wide variety of storytelling styles out there, and I think it’s really important to be really well versed in what they all are. You look at the variety of people out there and try on different hats, ‘what is it like if I do an interview that’s sort of like this show?’” Molinsky mused. Those approaches helped him greatly in finding his own voice. He also encourages students to learn from the masters or the on-air personalities that inspire them.
“Like in any creative endeavor, you just kind of have to do it over and over again and experiment for a while. You just have to make it and allow it to be bad,” he added. Failing and giving yourself time to play around is the surest formula to discovering what your voice is.
Outtakes: Eric Molinsky on geeking out, Star Wars and Batman
BL: What draws you in terms of subject matter, or even a larger audience, to fantasy, imagination, science fiction.What gets you excited about that?
Molinsky: I’m of that generation that saw Star Wars in the theaters as a kid, which I’ve noticed some people look at me like I might as well have said I was in the Civil War. Actually, one of the future episodes I want to work on is sort of what the pop culture world was like before Star Wars landed like a meteor and wiped out all the dinosaurs and left all of this new pop culture life to flourish.
It become such an imprint on you as a kid and then going into animation, which was my first career, it’s kind of like a permission to keep geeking out and keep living in that fantasy world. And when I got into animation it was kind of a surprise to me how many people were way more into it than I was, and even among animators I felt like I was nowhere near as geeky.
And then I go to Public Radio and I’m like the geekiest person they’ve ever met. To be honest when I started working in public radio it turned into a guilty pleasure to some extent. There are some stories that are your broccoli and some that are your ice cream sundae, and anything that had to do with fantasy or sci-fi was like my ice cream sundae that I got to dip into.
I have a very active imagination. As I talked about in my first episode, as a kid I used to “Luke out” as my parents called it where I would hold a Luke Skywalker doll and just fall into my imagination.
I even tried screenwriting for a while and I couldn’t quite make it work but I tried for years–that was going to be another thing I was going to do by the time I left animation and then decided I was going to go into radio. The other thing is that it is a deeply personal thing -it’s a thing that I care about the most, it is the place where my mind goes all the time.
PK: When you’re creating one of your podcasts, what are some of the approaches that you look at for finding a topic or who you’re going to interview?
Molinsky: It started with me just brainstorming things I was interested in and then I just kind of do a book search. The other thing I should say is that it’s also usually a question–there’s something that’s bugging me, there’s something that I can’t quite resolve about it.
And then, I do a Google search and I find out whether other people feel the same way. Who else can I talk to about this? And sometimes there’s this moment of jackpot. “Oh my God, lots of other people are talking about this and they have different opinions about it.”
I quickly go to “is this something people are talking about and debating in culture?” and if they are that gives me permission to leap off and go there.
Brian: Are their any creators you find yourself drawn to most often? Are there any right now who you think are very exciting?
Molinsky: Well, I mean, I’ve been a huge Joss Whedon fan since Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’ve always loved his work. To be honest, a lot of the people that I’m drawn to I’ve been trying to interview. I really got back into comic books recently, that’s one of the reasons why interviewed Scott Snyder as well.
BL: Do you have a favorite kind of universe that you find yourself particularly drawn to?
Molinski: Star Wars as a kid was definitely it for me. But my thing about Star Wars was that it stopped evolving, those characters stopped evolving. And, like a lot of people, I was not into the prequels particularly. That’s the reason why I found myself drawn to Batman in the 80s and just fell in love with the renaissance of the dark bat and the Dark Knight world that Frank Miller had created and all the people that were inspired by him.
Now that character has evolved so much in the last 30 years and been reincarnated so much that there’s just so many different versions. I love a loose canon like that. But…the imaginary world of Gotham, that is probably closest to my heart and I’m still [struggling] to figure out why. It sort of just taps a nerve in me that I just find endlessly fascinating.
BL: What do you think of the new resurgence of Star Wars…the new J.J Abraham’s film coming out in December?
Molinsky: I have a lot of hope for the J.J Abraham’s film. [There’s] a sincerity with which he’s gone back to the things that people loved about the originals…bringing back puppets–I mean, my second episode I was reacting to the prequels, talking about how we’ll never have this golden age of puppeteering on film again but who knows.
I mean he might be bringing it back the way he talks about the dirty future. He’s coming at it from a really smart way in terms of recognizing as a kid growing up what he loved about Star Wars, what was unique about Star Wars and continuing that.This was my concern when I first found out Disney had taken Star Wars is just that they have a way of just beating things to death.
I feel like they’ll do a great job at first but my concern is that ten years from now when they just think we haven’t squeezed enough out of this, can we do prequels on every character can we do spin offs on every character.
My fear is the glut of Star Wars stuff when they run out of what should be they’re natural run of things. I think that thinking at Disney sort of soured hand drawn animation. [It’s] the way that they got so attached to the formula of Little Mermaid and decided everything had to be like that, the way they just sort of had direct to video sequels of every single solitary Disney film. I feel like they kind of trashed their own brand from over exposure.
Among his many other talents such as hosting a fantastical podcast about imaginary worlds and science fiction, Molinsky also draws people on the subway. The original concept stems from his iPhone doodles of strangers on public transportation but is expanded to included the subjects of his many podcast shows (pictured used throughout article). Also to hear the full length interview, check out the SoundCloud player below.
Zhana Johnson
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