Hi, welcome to the librarian is in the New York Public Library's podcast about books, culture, and what to read next.

I'm Gwen.

And I'm his serene highness.

Frank.

And today, Frank and I are going to attempt to make...

No explanation necessary.

Gwen keeps going on.

She's like, nothing needed here.

We're going to attempt to make lame Dunches and Dragons jokes because we are here with

Eric Molinsky, who is the host of the imaginary worlds podcast, which is a show about sci-fi and other fantasy genres. So thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me. How did the podcast come about? Yeah. And then we'll reveal why we asked you here today. You know, it's crazy because, I mean, I launched the same month as cereal, and of course I had the same amount of downloads as cereal.

Oh, yeah. Great, of course. That's why you're here. That's why I mean. Exactly. No, yeah, because I mean, I had like, I'm amazed I even imagined two, I got 200 listeners to start. Like I don't know who all those people were. Clearly friends of, I had enough friends of friends to start listening. But cereal, you know, launched the same month and the whole industry, like in the time that the four years or five years I've been doing this, the industry has changed so, so, so radically. I mean, there is a podcasting industry now where there hadn't been. So, yeah, I've just been trying to ride those hotels. So what is your podcast about? Did we cover that? It's about science fiction. And all the worlds therein. I was trying to think of some witty thing that I couldn't. You got him in the room one. I'm sorry. Sci-fi. It's okay. Sci-fi fan. I always say it's like it's like if. It's like if NPR or even maybe more specifically, I mean, this is more aspirational, but if something like Radio Lab or This American Life went to Comic Con and just said, okay, from now on, this is all I ever want to cover.

I'm done with anything else. This is so fascinating. This is all we ever want to cover. So it has that public radio sound.

Yeah, it does. And one of the things that I really love about your show is that you talk to so many

different people in a really short amount of time that, like, it really, you have a lot of different perspectives, like, mixed in with what you're doing. Thanks. Yeah. It's funny, too, because, I mean, I used to do, in public radio, you do, like, they give you a slot for like seven minutes and you would just sort of try to cram the whole universe

into seven minutes and then they'd be like yeah the hour's running long could you cut it to five

and a half and it would just you feel like you're cutting off a limb and so to have like 25 or 30 minutes to tell a story to me it feels so luxurious but people all the time were like the thing I love about your podcast the episodes are so short and you would never get like half an hour of airtime on public radio to tell like a,

I mean, you can, but that would be a big deal. Right. The studio 360 is sort of like that.

Yeah. Sometimes they'll very rarely give someone a half hour to do it a piece unless it's part

of their American icon series. And even then, they gets cut down about 20 minutes or so.

Part of the reason, well, so you, full disclosure, you and our producer used to work together.

Really?

Is that right?

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