Imaginary Worlds - Dance With The Devil Under Wall St.

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

The writer Jon Ronson and the creators of the immersive theatrical experience Sleep No More have teamed up to make a vast new immersive show that unfolds beneath a Wall St. skyscraper. Life And Trust tells the story of J.G. Conwell, a bank president on the eve of the 1929 crash who makes a Faustian bargain to return to his youth. We accompany him back to New York’s seedy and turbulent past of The Gilded Age. The experience of spending hours in the world of Life And Trust is almost indescribable since most of the story unfolds through dream-like sets and choreography. It’s also an open world theatrical experience, so audiences never see the same exact show, even on the same night. I talk with Chief Storyteller for Emursive Productions Ilana Gilovch, Executive Producer of Life and Trust Carolyn Boyd, and Jon Ronson about how Life And Trust came together, and why this is the perfect moment to explore the devil’s bargain of a bank. This week's episode is sponsored by Hims. Start your free online visit today at Hims.com/IMAGINARY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. Last winter, a new coffee shop opened a block away from Wall Street in Lower Manhattan. It's called Conwell Coffee Hall. The reviews online were very positive. People liked the cappuccinos, the French toast, and the Art Deco decor, which looked like it had been beautifully restored. The room itself used to be a bank.

The baristas stand behind an old teller desk. And behind them is a mural about banking and finance that looks like it's 100 years old. The building is called Conwell Tower, and it was founded by a man named J.G. Conwell. But when people looked him up, they discovered something weird. J.G. Conwell never existed. This bank, Life and Trust, it didn't exist either. On top of that, the owners of the coffee shop were connected to Sleep No More, an immersive

theatrical show that ran in New York for 14 years. In immersive theater, the barrier is broken down between the audience and the performers. You don't sit in a seat and watch a story unfold on stage. You and the performers inhabit a space together. The show unfolds around you. A few weeks ago, on a chilly Sunday night, my wife and I stepped out of the Wall Street subway station and walked towards Conwell Coffee Hall. If you're not familiar with Lower Manhattan,

it's a fascinating space. That's where the Dutch settlers founded New Amsterdam. So the streets are very narrow and winding. The buildings are mostly skyscrapers, so there's like a zigzag of sky above you. And it feels like you could stand in the middle of the street, stretch both arms, and touch skyscrapers on either side. This is probably it, yeah. We finally found our way to the building.

And as we walked up the stairs and through the hallways, there were posters for this bank, Life and Trust. The slogans on the posters were kind of ominous, like, trust us with your life, or banking is in our blood. And the posters went back in time, from the 70s to the 50s to the 30s. And eventually we got to the coffee shop. At night, it's turned into a swanky cocktail lounge. The calendar was set to October 23rd, 1929. Our server told me to turn off the recorder,

and she sent us into a boardroom for a meeting with a bunch of other guests. And that's when we saw J.G. Conwell himself, or Conwell in 1929. He had just learned that the stock market was about to crash. He told us that he made his fortune making a serum to alleviate people's physical pain. But it was no magic elixir, it was an opioid. His life is full of regrets, and he wants to go back in time.

That's when he makes a Faustian bargain with a mysterious figure. We all put on black masquerade masks that look kind of animalistic, and were led deep into the building, which has been transformed into the world of J.G. Conwell's youth, the Gilded Age of New York City. The rooms bleed into each other like a dream. And there's dreamlike music playing everywhere. We walk through Victorian bedrooms, ballrooms, and offices, going from the rich to the working class. We walk through stables, a boxing ring, a chapel, and a vaudeville theater. It's like an open-world

video game, but it's tactile. You can open any drawer, touch any prop, and follow any character. There's Conwell, although now it's a younger version of him. There's also his sister, servants, chemists, cops, Mastofales and his minions. There are historic celebrities like Evelyn Nesbitt, the model and actress whose husband shot and killed her lover, the architect Stanford White, on the roof of one of White's buildings. I knew about that scandal because I'm kind of a nerd for New York history, but you may not know that was supposed to be Evelyn Nesbitt, because none of the characters speak for the majority of the show.

They express everything through movement and dance. The choreography is incredible. What they're able to do in limited spaces made my jaw drop. And sometimes they interact with digital displays, like a painting come to life or a silent movie. I could tell you everything that I saw over the next several hours and it wouldn't spoil anything because you might see a completely different show. There are six floors, four of them underground, almost a hundred different spaces to explore, and more than two dozen characters.

You might be watching one character, and then they run off and you see another character doing something and you follow them. Nobody can see it all, but that hasn't stopped people from trying. The show is called Life and Trust. It's made by a company called Immersive, spelled E-M-U-R-S-I-V-E. They created Sleep No More, which is a similar show in terms of how you navigate the space and the performers. Sleep No More told the story of Macbeth, set in a 1930s hotel.

Life and Trust tells the story of Faust in the Gilded Age. I was thrilled that I got a chance to talk with some of the creators of Life and Trust, including John Ronson, who's a very well-regarded writer, journalist, and podcaster. It was fascinating to learn how these different creative minds work together to create this fevered dream about one man's guilty conscience

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John Ronson is mostly known for writing nonfiction, although he has written some screenplays. He was flattered that the team behind Sleep No More asked him to collaborate on this new show, and their pitch to him was simple. They said four words, Faust in a bank. They said, do whatever you like, but it's Faust and a bank. So I just took it to mean, okay, the bank is 1920s, but in many of the Faust stories, he goes back in time 30 years. So it's sort of told, the story told itself to me. You start off on the eve of the Wall Street crash, you go back in time to the Gilded Age.

Then I just did a massive amount of digging around, what's the most interesting stuff about the Gilded Age. If I was watching a show at a sleep no more time, immersive show set in the Gilded Age, what would I want to experience? There's a vaudeville theatre, there's Coney Island, Boardwalk, Games, there's Fifth Avenue Mansions, there's Libertine Clubs, Evelyn Nesbitt, and then some much smaller character, somebody who would just have a little cameo in a Ken Burns documentary I'd seen about vaudeville

theatre or whatever. So everybody in the show is based on reality and it was just the most interesting people I found from the period. So then what exactly is the document you're making? Like what are you even delivering back to them exactly? Well, I mean I've never done anything like this before, because obviously you've got, let's say, 25 characters, 25 areas, and each character has, say, 25 beats too. So that's a lot of stuff. So my document will say, let's say, Evelyn Nesbitt. So Evelyn's loop, basically Evelyn's very upset. She goes into this room. She really misses her days performing in vaudeville. So beat two, she goes to the vaudeville theatre just to relive that memory. Oh, I saw that scene. Okay, so there's already

people in the vaudeville theatre. So that's the next challenge. Like, okay, so we beat two Evelyn's in the vaudeville theatre, but someone else from another loop is going to be in the vaudeville theatre too, so then they have to interact. So that's when it becomes like very complicated physics. You're talking about, I don't know, like a thousand scenes. That moment, when Evelyn Nesbitt came on stage in the Vaudeville Theatre, it was visually stunning. First of all, she's not really singing or lip syncing. The atmospheric music of the show is playing in the background.

So it's more like she's miming the idea of singing. And her mouth is illuminated. The actress had slipped a tiny light inside of her mouth and the effect was so eerie. Her story is that she's made her deal with the devil for her voice, which has made her career. So we thought, how do you demonstrate an unearthly devil-given voice in this nonverbal environment? So it's realized through the visual of the light in her mouth. That is Carolyn Boyd.

She is the executive producer of Life and Trust. I asked her how the directors and choreographers expanded on John's outline. She says, first, they looked at the story beats. Then they figured out how they can map them over six floors in almost 100 different spaces. Who's going to be when where what their objective is in that scene, who they're crossing over with travel time to get from

that scene to your next scene, sort of all the brilliant sort of logistics that make it all actually flow so seamlessly. So it feels organic, but is actually insanely like they did a lot of practice runs during the pandemic when we had the time and the space to do it of just walking from place to place and being like, okay, that set of staircase is 14 seconds to get between these two floors, takes this long to get this far. So just like meticulous logistics and math to figure out how to take John's concept for each character and then realize that in physical space.

This skyscraper was built in the early 1930s. Today, it's a residential building. Originally, it was the headquarters of a bank, a real bank, not a fictional one. Prior to our move in, the floors that we occupy now, the commercial floors, have been dormant for a really long time, some of them up to to like 20 years, in a sort of like beautiful excavation sense, like a lot of relics from their past use were still there, which, you know, I think having

been one of the first people in the building, I had like the privilege of getting to like go through the old bond filing cabinets that were, you know, on level D downstairs and, you know, this faded paperwork from the early 90s still occupying all the drawers since I think 1992. Ilana Gilovich is the chief storyteller for Immersive Productions. She says another difference between Life and Trust and Sleep No More is that the content of Sleep No More was not related to the neighborhood where it ran on the west side of Manhattan. But Life & Trust is in direct dialogue with the space it occupies.

The site specificity of this show in particular is one of the most thrilling aspects of the production because the second that you get off the subway and you're walking down these cobbled stone streets and you pass a New York Stock Exchange and the fact that this entire multifaceted hidden world is tucked away in literally an old bank, I feel like feels so perfect because we're seeing, we're in this socio-political moment where people I think are quite angry with the 1% and feeling like so much elite information is hidden from them. So I love the idea, one, it feels so cheeky that devils are literally running a bank on with the 1% and feeling like so much elite information is hidden from them. So I love the idea, one, it feels so cheeky

that devils are literally running a bank on Wall Street, but also there's a whole world that's hidden to the outside eye and only the curious and only the bold are going to really penetrate that mystery world and discover it. So it feels perfectly apt. But when John Ronson imagined what this space would be like, he was ambivalent about how

much to embrace the coldness of a bank. I hate to do the comparisons of sleep no more, but sleep no more is like a hotel. That's a kind of soft place. A bank is a hard place. So I had to really think about that, how to make that work. But luckily in the show there are lots of kind of soft places. There's libertine clubs, there's vaudeville theaters and so on. That's so interesting, you're right, because I mean it does, that's why it's so kind of stunning to see these bedrooms, these Victorian bedrooms that was probably the mother of Conwell, you know,

and deep in the buried in the psyche of the bank. Yes. You know, there's something very kind of pointing about that. Yeah, I agree. But the best way to experience this show is, I would say, definitely to pick any character, doesn't matter who, and follow them for as long as possible. Because on every occasion, a narrative arc will unfold. The show will make sense if you do that.

And I know this is hard because there's always gonna be FOMO and you're always gonna be thinking, oh, this person's just been sewing for the last five minutes. No, like, one of the great strengths of Life and Trust is if you stick with anyone, literally any character, something amazing will happen. There'll be a full, rich, understandable arc. And that character will take you into other worlds. However, I also thought wouldn't it be great to have a space where you

can just sit there for an hour and things come to you. And so that was my ambition for the Vaudeville Theatre. And I did do it once. For one loop, I just sat there for the entire loop. A couple of other people did as well. And I gave a talk at the Vaudeville Theatre. At the beginning of the talk, I said, this is the first time I've ever given a talk in a room that I personally manifested.

both laugh Of course, that was not part of the show. That was a talkback session for the fans. Also, the show, by the way, has great one-on-ones, very complex one-on-ones, like long and amazing, like almost entire shows. A one-on-one is where one of the performers selects an audience member and brings them to a private space to perform a one-person scene for them. Sadly, I did not experience any of them when I saw Life and Trust.

I haven't been either. They don't realize when I go there, they don't know I'm the writer, so I don't get any special treatment. So I've not been picked for any one-on-ones either, annoyingly. But others have, and have come out looking incredibly excited and beguiled. I am so jealous.

FOMO is a defining feature of Life and Trust and Sleep No More. There were a bunch of moments when I was watching Life and Trust where I thought, I have never seen anything like this before. I'm so glad I'm here to see this now, but I know there were other moments happening at the same time in this show that I'm not seeing that are just as amazing, and I'll never see them. I asked Alana, what do you say to audience members

who enjoyed the experience, but also came away feeling frustrated? It's such a good question. And I think one of the things that I've appreciated about both Sleep No More and Life in Trust is they took these high classical single protagonist tragedies and rendered them kind of ensemble pieces. John was really trying to make it that there are no ancillary characters, there are no secondary characters, everyone is as important as anyone else.

I think that's really important to this idea that our Faust narrative isn't just one person's deal with the devil or one person's Faustian bargain, it's actually the trickle-down economics and the kind of corrosive effects of people at the top and what happens to all the people on the margins. Vaudevillians, immigrants, women, people who are subject to a corrupt police force and a corrupt pharmaceutical industry and a dangerous economic policy.

And so with Life and Trust specifically, if you end up in the Vaudeville theater all night and you are dazzled by their story, that story is as detailed and fleshed out as following the head banker, let's say. And so hopefully that will assuage some people's FOMO around it. And Carrie, I don't know what your advice would be for this. No, I think you say it so well. It's sort of like you're exactly where you're supposed to be. Whatever you were interested in is what you should be seeing.

There's no wrong way to do it. Okay, that's good. Because I seriously felt, I'm like, did I do this the wrong way? Because because I, I, I, my thing too, is like, I want to see all the rooms, but I also want to follow the actors. And I don't want to just be room obsessive. So I feel like I saw the I think I saw the all if not the majority of the the rooms and saw tons of great moments. But then I read people were like, no, you should follow a single character all the way through,

then you'll get a much more rich storyline. And then I saw all these images from the show of like in articles about it. I'm like, I didn't see that, I missed that scene. So I totally felt like I did it wrong, even though I know there's no wrong way to do it. I think in a way, one of the things that enchanted me so much about immersive theater and site-specific theater

is that I would never find the edges. I would never touch the far reaches or the perimeters of the world. And there's some thing about the completionist tendencies in me being denied or thwarted that actually feel really important. And all of us were experiencing this last week at the closing of Sleep No More. We were going, there's still more, there's still more work to be done.

There's still more nuance to be explored. And every performer, no one felt complete. Everyone felt like the show was retreating from them, still carrying a few of its mysteries. And so feeling like there's a world that you could go back and explore it and you'd find completely new things, even if you don't go back, is a really critical piece of the recipe. Although Sleep No More and Now Life and Trust are famous for their obsessive fan base that

wants to see it all, it is a big commitment in terms of time and money. Even John was surprised by their knowledge of life and trust, and the show has only been open for about six months. I really mean it when I say they know more about the show than I do. They've seen it more often than I do. They've seen. So actually, I feel like they know more than I do. I've seen the show six or seven times, but I reckon I've only seen about 30% of it. Yeah, I think there's people out there who've seen a lot more of it than me. So I was actually asking them questions.

I was saying, I've never followed this loop. Is this a good loop? And people go, oh my God, you've got to follow it. It's my favorite loop. Carrie says, one of the big differences with life and trust is that the fans are organizing and sharing information at a time when social media is more advanced than it was when Sleep No More first opened.

Whereas with this show from day one, they already had their networks, they were already sharing if five of them went to the show, they had five totally different experiences and then downloaded that information to each other. They were ahead of some of us in terms of our own paperwork. Like they were seeing filings that we were making with the city. We had to be careful about covering windows

on the upper floors because there were folks on reconnaissance missions seeing what we were doing inside. And our goal, of course, is to keep things as close to our chest as possible so that when you do come in, you're having the purest experience that you can. And you don't come in with a lot of preconceived notions or, oh, I want to find this room, I want to see this character. So it was really, it was such an interesting conflict of us, you know, kind of being like,

we know what's best for you. Like, don't look. We want you to be surprised. But it was, you know know it was incredible even just seeing on you know on the on the fan sites like uh they got a lot of bamboo flooring delivered today what do you think this means you know like seeing what the truck what was coming off the trucks and into the building and then of course we kind of added the the lore of opening the coffee shop well in advance of opening the show so then it was was like, okay, you can come inside,

take a look, but you can't go beyond this door. I mean, I first heard about this when the coffee shop opened because they were like, okay, so this coffee shop opened and they've been able to trace it to the producers of Sleep No More. This is clearly the whole backstory of this coffee shop is fake. But the funniest thing was then going online

and seeing people review the coffee shop, not knowing it's fake. They're like, oh yeah, it's a really good coffee shop. It's got a really interesting history to it. And they're like repeating the lore, which I thought was hilarious and kind of brilliant. That was actually our favorite part that Carrie, Carrie, I can't remember if it was Carrie or our friend Alyssa, but took a picture because one of the things that I had written was this little plaque with that history in the coffee shop. And our friend texted us and said, some woman is teaching our fake history to her child. We felt so delighted. We felt like, oh God, is this fake news?

Are we disseminating fake news? But really, we want to really pull taut the different poles between where does fiction end and reality begin. And so the coffee shop is the perfect liminal space where like, there's so much about it that's theatrical and anyone who goes into the space, there's lots of little documents and weird things sitting out that shouldn't be in a normal coffee shop and give you a kind of sinister vibe. But some people may not even see it and just enjoy a delicious latte and some French toast. And I love that. I love that both experiences can exist simultaneously. Calling all sellers, Salesforce is hiring account executives to join us on the cutting edge of technology. Here, innovation isn't a buzzword. It's a way of life. You'll

be solving customer challenges faster with agents, winning with purpose, and showing the world what AI was meant to be. Let's create the agent-first future together. Head to Salesforce.com slash careers to learn more. more. I've been following John Ronson's career for over 20 years. He's reported stories for This American Life. He's written books and hosted podcasts about social media shaming, fringe groups, conspiracy theorists, and the porn industry. He's great at chronicling the times that we live in.

So I was curious when he dug into the Gilded Age, what drew his attention? A lot of fringe scientists like eugenics, and obviously eugenics is something that I've spent a lot of time with white supremacists and so on. So cruel science, cruel capitalism, these underground mysterious backroom libertine clubs, lovely vaudeville performers trying to make their way through this bad world. So yeah, I was drawn to the things I would normally be drawn to. Including psychopaths. In 2011, he wrote a book called The Psychopath Test, where he explored the idea that psychopaths don't just commit murders, there are high functioning psychopaths throughout society.

I asked him if any psychopaths made their way into life and trust. Yeah, there's a few psychopaths and narcissists in the show. There's one dark sequence actually, which is, you know, I've seen the show about 10 times, and I don't think I've actually ever seen this thing I'm about to describe, so I don't know how it comes off because the show's huge. But there's a dance sequence. I stayed away from dance most of the time for obvious reasons, like let the choreographers do what they do well.

But there was one occasion, a couple of occasions when I said the dance should reflect this. And one of them was the arc of a relationship with a narcissist. So love bomb, devalue, discard. Wait, so you said love what? Discard? Love? Love bomb, devalue, discard. Love bomb. Yeah. Psychopaths do it as well as narcissists. So they love bomb you, you know, they tell you they're the most amazing person in the world. They're attentive, you feel like a million dollars, you just can't believe your luck. And then they start to subtly devalue

you. So then you're kind of wondering, well, what, what have I done wrong? It was all going so well. So then you start to work even harder to be in their affections. And then when they've done with you, they just discard you. Being in a relationship with the narcissist, whether it's romantic or a work relationship, can be exceptionally painful. And if you make a psychopath your CEO, your share price is going to skyrocket. But very often, just like in a romantic relationship with a psychopath, it's short lived. Like it's exciting that it's a nightmare. They end up mired in accountancy fraud or whatever.

The statistic is that one in a hundred regular people is a psychopath, but that figure rises to four% of CEOs and business leaders. So a bank as an institution is four times more likely to be psychopathic than somebody just wandering around on the street. Ilana Gilovic also saw parallels between John's other work and his concept for life and trust. And one of the themes that her team was excited to explore is the idea that science and new technology can be a double-edged sword. So in the show.

We have a Marie Curie figure that's doing all of these incredible experiments. And at the same time, we also have characters representing the eugenics movement and talking about like the more nefarious and debunked branches of science. You have the birth of silent cinema, which is so exciting, but also that kind of erodes this beautiful vaudevillian tradition and how to stage performers find their way. But I also think one of the aspects of life

and trust that I love the most are the themes of finance with magic. So our Mephistopheles character is a magician, the great Mephisto, and has this very theatrical way about them. A lot of banking language, when we were kind of looking at traditional banks for inspiration, have a very magic trick language to them, have an illusionist like, we're gonna turn your $100 into $1,000

and watch how this thing grows. It's almost like financiers are trying to create magic, are trying to create alchemy before your eyes and make these big promises that they're gonna cast these illusions before your eyes. And then lastly, I think Faust is a really interesting foundational text because similar to Macbeth with Sleep No More, actually, the big decision happens in the beginning.

Faust decides, he signs his soul away, and then he spends the rest of the time kind of wavering and dealing with regret and dealing with guilt and shame and not knowing if he should repent or not, even as he's performing these miracles and getting seduced by this devilish trickery. In every single storyline, somebody is succumbing to their like baser moral instincts in the name of the thing that drives their soul, whether it be beauty, youth, power, security, safety, love,

and you really watch them grapple with it. Wherever you are in life and trust, it's really about creating these kind of short vignettes about conscience and how you think about the repercussions of your decisions and how you're questing after what you long for most. One of the very few lines in the show, spoken lines, is something the effect of desire is easy, satisfaction

is much harder or is it different? What was the line? Desire is easy, it's the satisfaction you have to worry about. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of desire and satisfaction, I mentioned earlier that the banker character made his fortune selling an opioid to cure physical pain. That was common back then, and there are clear parallels to the drug crisis today. We really did want to characterize the Faust character not as this solely Wall Street fat cat, but you actually see early on that he wants to help his sister. He regrets that he didn't connect with his

family more deeply and his love more deeply, and yet you see him make the same poor impulsive decisions that get him right back into this hellish spot. In fact, there's a lot of poetry in how rooms connect to each other. So we have the more naturalistic Gilded Age garden, and then it goes into that bioluminescent Surrealist garden. And if you follow that garden all the way around, you get to the back room of the opioid syrup stock room. That plays into another theme in John Ronson's work, the idea of ripple effects. I've wanted to tell ripple effect stories as much as possible. I've wanted to remind people

that we're all connected, our actions do impact other people, often in ways we would never imagine and maybe never even know. I think that is a theme in the show, how our actions ripple out, which is great for a show like this too because there's so many characters who intersect and then leave each other again, maybe never to see each other again. So in that way, it's almost like the world. It's almost like social media, how our lives touch each other and spiral off in different directions as a consequence. It was really gratifying to hear all of this because the show doesn't explain itself. I came away with a lot of feelings that I struggled to put words to.

Alana says that's okay, but... I feel so sad when a critique of something like Life and Trust or Sleep No More is, oh, I didn't get it because so much of it is not meant to be gotten in a literal sense or not meant to follow one narrow storyline. And it's really meant to be spectacle that you can't quite make sense of because you're being taken on this kind of supernatural ride. Like, you get to be Faust for a night.

You get to just be decadent and hedonistic and take in all of the banquet, the visual feast that the production is providing. And I think that's a more accurately Faustian way to take in the show than to try to make linear sense of it all. Our brains are wired to seek patterns to create a sense of order and meaning.

And if any takeaway you have from the show is valid, this is what occurred to me after the show. I kept thinking about the ideas of legacy and ephemera. You've already gone from the 2020s to the 1920s. Then you go further back in time, under the layers of sediment beneath the building. You see J.G. Conwell when he's young, but also his family and all the people around them.

You experience the social forces that flow through them like invisible particles. It shaped who they were to some extent, but they're just focused on trying to get by, fulfill their everyday desires. It's a world that's much messier and angstier and sweatier and more chaotic than a bank. But then all of that energy gets channeled into a bank. It can live indefinitely because it's an institution.

The only thing left from that pool of humanity and its foundation is the last name of the family on the building. It's so true. And I think also what's fascinating is that banks often play in their marketing language around human connection. We're invested in you, you're part of our family, we're on your team, we support you. And so you're right, it's such an antiseptic world. And at the same time, it's like appropriating the language

of family and belonging and security to get you to feel like there's some human behind it. And so certainly with life and trust and all the slogans we came up with, we were thinking about that, like, we'll always be there for you. And this idea of eternity, eternity can be a really damning thing if there isn't a touch of the human soul in it. There's another kind of legacy, art. A work of art can outlive the artist. A play doesn't have the same sense of permanence as a painting, sculpture, or a film.

Every production of a play is different. An immersive theater is much more malleable. After you see the show once, or however many times you see it, the only place it exists for you is in the museum of your mind. But if the show spoke to you on a very human level, that memory, that feeling you had when you saw the show, can be a permanent exhibit. can be a permanent exhibit.

["The Star-Spangled Banner"] That's it for this week. Special thanks to Jon Ronson, Carrie Boyd, and Alana Gilovich, who was very amused by my attempts to describe the show back to her. I want to find out just your reactions to the shows. I would listen to that all day long. Oh my God, I feel so inarticulate, something really beautiful and artistic. I'm like,

wow, that guy's like, he's sliding on the banister and oh my god, he's on the floor. It's perfect. It's perfect. We have another podcast called Between Imaginary Worlds. It's a more casual chat show that is only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon. In the most recent episode, I talked with my friend Martin Ostwick about the legacy of David Lynch. We both became Lynch fans when we saw Twin Peaks, but Martin was a little too young to have watched it.

He came away feeling, This is the most terrifying thing I've ever seen. I don't understand what's happening, but it's really compelling and it's really frightening. And it's frightening in that way where you just you come away from the TV and you start looking at the things around you and you're like, is that solid? You know, is that like going to disappear and there's going to be a screaming lady behind it or an owl or something? Between Imaginary Worlds comes included with the ad free version

of the show that you can get on Patreon. You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts. If you help support the show on Patreon, at different levels you also get free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at ImaginaryWorldsPodcast.org.