Imaginary Worlds - The U.S. of Play - Part 2: Silly Putty, Twister and Monopoly

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

In honor of America's 250th anniversary, we're continuing our mini-series on iconic American toys and games that took on lives of their own. Strong National Museum of Play curators Michelle Parnett-Dwer and Mirek Stolee, along with game designer and author Tim Walsh, join me to unpack how Silly Putty, Twister, and Monopoly slipped between the complicated world of adults and the realm of childhood. HSE University professor Roman Abramov tells me how Soviet kids in the '80s built their own DIY versions of Monopoly behind the Iron Curtain. And I travel back to middle school to relive my role in a children's theater group that staged an original musical about Monopoly that was also a critique of capitalism. To support the show, you can donate on Patreon where you get access to the ad-free version and our companion show Between Imaginary Worlds.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. I once heard a podcaster joke about the fact that whenever you tell the history of something that we all take for granted now, the story always seems to go back to World War II. And I thought, that is so true. So many inventions came out of the war effort. Even Silly Buddy. When the Japanese invaded Asia during World War II,

America's supply of rubber was threatened. So chemists began to look for a synthetic substitute for rubber. Michelle Parnett Dwyer is the senior curator at the Strong National Museum of Play in New York. She says there was a chemist at General Electric named James Wright, who was trying to create synthetic rubber at this time. He is the person that stumbled upon a concoction that created this stretchy material that wouldn't decay and it can also bounce higher than actual rubber. When it was left untouched, it would stay in a sort of solid liquid and move in slow motion. But if you ripped at it, it would break. So this didn't really go anywhere, but examples of it kind of floated around and people would use it. They'd call it

like a bouncing putty or a nutty putty. Eventually, Nutty Putty ended up in a toy store. in Connecticut, run by Ruth Falkotter. But she is not the person who made it famous. She was working with a marketing and ad exec named Peter Hodgson, and he was more excited about it than she was. He convinced her to sell it as a novelty for adults, and after she lost interest, he went into business, selling it himself. Tim Walsh is a toy designer, and he's written several books about toys.

It was Peter that had the idea of naming it silly putty. bouncing putty at first from GE. And apparently only because Easter was around the corner did he decide, let's put it in a plastic egg. So a couple strange marketing choices that ended up becoming iconic. He sold it for about a dollar. He also asked engineers to reverse engineer it so that he could figure out what the formula was and they could manufacture it for themselves.

He brought it to Toy Fair in 1950, but it wasn't really well received. people weren't that impressed with it. But again, they were still sort of advertising it as a novelty for adults. Then it was marketed as a hand exerciser. One entrepreneur I found sold it as a way to level your wobbly table. You know, you stick a watt under a leg. So how did this strange substance become a ubiquitous toy for kids across America? A magazine article made Silly Puddy.

famous. But it wasn't Life magazine or Reader's Digest. It was the New Yorker in a section called The Talk of the Town. In 1950, a writer for the New Yorker discovered Silly Puddy at Double Day Books. He was so intrigued he called up Peter Hodgson. Peter told him that Silly Puddy was for adults. He said, quote, it appeals to people of superior intellect, the inherent ridiculousness of the material, acts as an emotional release to hard-pressed adults. In fact, he said that playing with silly putty could help adults stop worrying about their family problems, or the war in Korea. It sounds to me like he is trying to tell a New Yorker writer what he thinks readers of

the New Yorker would want to hear. And it worked. After the article came out. Peter had over 250,000 orders for silly putty eggs. I don't know whether those 250,000 silly putties helped people stop worrying about the Korean War, but children clearly understood it was a fun toy. Although some adults did find an important use for it. In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 brought silly putty with them when they orbited the moon.

So they used it to hold tools in space. You know, it wouldn't hold forever. But then again, you don't want to glue your wrench to the wall. You just want it to stick there temporarily. So it did end up in space. Now, when I was a kid, there was an obvious way to use Silly Puddy. If you press it against a newspaper comic strip, the image will copy onto the Silly Puddy. And you can stretch that image really far.

As I'm describing this now, I don't understand why I don't understand why I found that so mesmerizing, but I can attest that in the mind of a child, it was the coolest thing ever. This year is the 250th anniversary of the United States, the semi-quincennial. To celebrate, we are doing a mini-series of short stories about iconic American toys and games. This is the second of two episodes, and in this episode, we're looking at toys and games that crossed over between the messy, complicated world of adults and the realm of childhood. Next up, a game that had a similar origin story to Silly Buddy. It is an all-American classic that was not flying off the shelves at first.

In fact, it seemed like a dud until it got a boost from an unlikely media outlet. I'm talking about Twister. This story actually does not begin in World War II. It was the mid-1960s. A young man named Ren Gwyer was working for his father's design agency in Minnesota. They produced a lot of promotional materials. And one of their clients was a shoe polish company. And Ren's job was to, you know, how do we sell more shoe polish?

Well, in the mid-60s, box top offers were common, where you'd buy two or three packages of shoe polish. And if you sent in the box tops, proving that you bought, you know, three or three or five or whatever the number was, then you would get some gift, some premium gift. And the idea was, in this case, you would get a game. So he created a game that he called Kings Footsie. And it was a mat on the floor, which right away broke all the rules of, you know, games are played on the table, right? And along comes this mat game.

Games are also played with tiny little pieces that represent you as the game player. And this broke that rule as well because the people themselves were the game pieces. You basically just had to cross the board, stepping on only your color. But you were in such proximity to all the other players that, of course, you bumped and leaned on each other. And people started laughing and it just was fun. And he thought it was so fun that, you know, this isn't a box type game. This is an actual retail game. And that's where it started to try to find a home for it.

They did find a home for it at Milton Bradley. But there was some hurdles. One was the cost and how do you make this giant vinyl mat? And they ended up going to a producer of shower curtains, actually, in order to conquer that hurdle. But the biggest hurdle was people thinking, this was 1966. And you just weren't supposed to be that close to someone, especially someone of the opposite sex. Luckily, there was an executive at Milton Bradley who loved the game and fought for it. His name was Mel Taft.

He later told the story that when he showed it to a sales manager, the man said, What you're trying to do there is put sex in a box. So when they designed the box, they tried to alleviate those concerns. And if you look at the original artwork to the original game from 66, there's no kids playing. It's all adults. And there's men in suits playing. And the women that have depicted on the cover are wearing sweaters, buttoned up to their next. And, you know, Ren was fond of telling me, and Chuck Foley, too, one of the co-inventors,

that, you know, dirty mind, dirty game. Clean mind, clean game. But the thing that really killed the game was Sears. Sears at the time was the biggest retailer of the day, and they could make or break any product. And they decided it was too risque, and they weren't going to buy it. And Mel had to call Ren, the inventor, and say, sorry, we're pulling the advertising. If Sears doesn't buy it, it's dead in the water. But they found an unlikely savior in the talk show host, Johnny Carson. The PR firm that Milton Bradley had hired was already paid, so they continued to, well, we'll see. We'll just keep trying to get it on TV, and they got it on the Tonight Show.

This was a make it or break it moment. Mel Taft was in the audience that night with the head of the PR agency. You never knew what Johnny Carson was going to do. do is what Mel told me. He said he could totally rip the game to shreds and say it was dumb, or he could say it was the greatest thing. So you never knew what you were going to get. They only knew they were going to play it. Or at least that was the plan. One of the guests that night was Ava Gabor. At one point, somebody put a twister mat on the floor. She asked what it was. Johnny said it's a new game, and he asked if she wanted to try it.

Ava Gabor could have easily just laughed it off and said, No, thank you. She was a glamorous actress, and that night she was wearing a low-cut, white sleeveless dress, and her hair was up in a golden beehive. But she was game. Now, I couldn't find any videos of this moment, but there are pictures.

And you can see Ava Gabor on her hands and knees, straddling Johnny's lap, Well, he is reaching across her bare thigh. He has kind of an intense look on his face, but she is cracking up. So the sight of her and a slightly embarrassed Johnny Carson on all four playing this new game sent the studio audience into hysterics and, of course, everyone watching at home as well. And wouldn't you know it, Eric, the buyer at Sears changed his mind because everyone was asking for Twister.

By Christmas of 1966, Milton Bradley was manufacturing 40,000 boxes of Twister a day. Now, if Twister had never existed, and I was a novelist who made up this game, and I could set my story at any point in American history, I would have chosen that moment. In the spring of 1966, it was risque and naughty for Carson and Gabor to play Twy on TV while wearing formal attire. One year later was the summer of love. Hippies were getting high and frolicking in the parks. And from there, Twister rode the wave of the sexual revolution

onto the shag carpets of living rooms across America. Merrick Stolley is the curator of board games and puzzles at the strong National Museum of Play. And he says, 50 years later on the Tonight Show, they do bring it back as well, which I thought was really interesting. So in 2016, you know, it appears with Jimmy Fallon and Chris and Stewart, and they're playing Twister. But it's not really transgressive anymore, right? It doesn't have that same sort of energy or that sort of connotation. You know, this is sort of old hat.

So they make it like jello shot twister where like they have like little jello shots on each space. So I thought that was a cool sign of the changing times. Here we go. Oh, left-hand green. Don't want to happen. These are gargantuan shots. You don't have a premiere anything tonight, do you? This story has been repeated so many times in our history. We have a puritanical streak in our culture, which goes right back to the Puritans.

At the same time, we have the right to free expression. It's in the Constitution. And so every generation finds a way to push the norms, whether we're not. its flappers dancing the Charleston or Elvis Presley, gyrating his hips. Our culture absorbs the shock until it's not shocking anymore. And then we become complacent. We think we are the most sophisticated generation. We aren't like our parents or grandparents until somebody opens a Pandora's box and unleashes the next version of Twister, the next, the next cultural tornado. If Twister could be described as sex in a box,

Monopoly is capitalism in a box. I know that does not sound nearly as sexy, but what Monopoly has to say about capitalism is a lot more nuanced than you might think. Monopoly has been owned by Hasbro since 1991 when they acquired it along with Parker Brothers. But the game was first created at the turn of the century, by a woman named Elizabeth McGee Phillips. She went by Lizzie McGee. And it wasn't called Monopoly back then. She called it the Landlords game.

And Lizzie McGee designed the game as an educational tool and a form of protest. Although Merrick says a lot of elements in the Landlords game feel familiar today. You know, you start, you're trying to earn money by investing in properties. You know, players land on your properties. give you rent and that sort of thing. And as people who've played Monopoly can attest, you know, it can feel quite unfair.

You know, there's a sense that the rich are getting richer and the poor are just there and, you know, can't afford any properties and eventually go bankrupt. It's meant to, you know, activate these sort of feelings of unfairness. And then it comes with a second rule set. So, you know, by vote, you know, during the game, players can choose to cooperate on which sort of changes the entire structure of the game. So rather than paying each other, the rent goes into a public pool that is used to sort of make sort of improvements to the community. You know, players wages go up throughout the game. And, you know, the different spaces, like I think the go to jail

space becomes like a park or something, you know, as the money accumulates in a sort of public sense. So you get sort of two different simulations that you can use to make like rhetorical comparisons and be like, oh, well, this system feels maybe more fair, you know, isn't this exciting? Or not. Since the game was not mass produced, people were creating their own bootleg versions. And over time, that second set of rules kind of disappeared. From what I've heard, the cooperative sort of version of the game is just not all that

fun either. So I think, you know, when the game sends in a spread in a sort of folk sense, people are having more fun bankrupting their friends than they are with the sort of explicitly educational aspects of the game. People find a lot of joy, I think, in the sort of ruthless aspects of Monopoly. And also a lot of pain. You know, I know a lot of people who don't ever want to play Monopoly again because they, you know, they've been spurned as a child, you know, into a six-hour game of a painful slow loss. Well, that's why I wonder, do you think that her critique is still in there somewhere? Because I had never played Monopoly as a kid. Like, I thought it was old-fashioned, you know,

when I was a kid, Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit were the new games, and that was cool. And to me, Monopoly was like tiddly winks or something. And then I played it as an adult. And my brother, who has a master's degree in business

and teaches at business school, just cleaned us all out and became like the robber baron by the end. And he loved the game. He had a great time. But similarly, I'm like, yeah, I don't really need to ever play this game again.

But I wonder whether her critique is still somewhere in there in a weird way. I think so. I mean, I think you lose, you know, it's not framed that way, certainly, in the way the sort of public perception, I think, is a sort of celebration of capitalism. I think, you know, the same argument is still there embedded in the game. You know, I think people are still playing this game and clearly feeling like this is the system is not great, or at least like this representation of the system is not great.

They feel those feelings of unfairness. Living in the U.S., we're often told that America stands for, freedom. But America is also strongly associated with capitalism. And major economists have argued that capitalism and freedom are synonymous. In her game design, Lizzie McGee was asking whether that's entirely true. And according to Tim Walsh, other people's life experiences ended up in the game when it went through that process of being a copy of a copy of a copy, like a game of a game of telephone. Ruth Hoskins was the woman that was the Quaker that's credited with having come across

an earlier version from the 30s called The Fascinating Game of Finance. She couldn't buy it anywhere. She ended up making her own. And it's that group of Quakers. They lived in Atlantic City. So Marvin Gardens and boardwalk, park place, all the city, or all the street names rather, in Monopoly today are Atlantic City street names. Eventually, it ended up in the hands of a man named Charles Darrow.

And he sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. But where he lied was in the process of patenting it, he warranted that, you know, this was his creation when clearly he was just one of many people who made their own version. When Monopoly went on sale, people were writing into Parker Brothers saying, I've been playing this game for many years. So the company quickly bought the rights to the landlords game. They paid Lizzie McGee $500, which is about $12,000 today.

That's nothing compared to what Monopoly eventually earned. It is the best-selling board game in history, or commercial board game. There's no patent on chess or checkers. It seems strange to me that the current. commercial version of Monopoly was a hit in the Great Depression. The game is like a combination of the roaring 20s and the Gilded Age, but Tim says Monopoly was a perfect form of escapism in the 30s. It took a long time to play, and it came out during a time when people were out of work.

And then secondly, and probably more importantly, people were broke. They had no money, and along comes a game where you could handle money, And you could fantasize about not only having money, you could buy railroads and you could buy houses and even hotels. And I think the fantasy and the allure of having money at a time when no one really did was one of the reasons the game took off. If it was released in the 40s or the 50s, perhaps it wouldn't be as popular as it is today. It came out at the perfect time. It also turned out to be the perfect Trojan horse during wartime.

Because Monopoly became such a hit game, it sold well right away and millions and millions of copies. So by 1941, 42, 43, you know, during World War II, the POWs were allowed to have some things brought in. And because Monopoly was such ubiquitous, seemingly innocent choice for POWs to have, it was allowed into some of the camps. So the Allies were able to hide maps. inside Monopoly sets delivered to the POWs. It was a top-secret operation called Monopoly X, and it was developed by a British intelligence officer who used to be a magician,

and magicians are familiar with creating secret compartments. And there was even a rudimentary compass that was smuggled in, and even some files hidden in the board for prisoners to be able to try to escape. And they did. thousands of British and American POWs escaped with the help of those doctored Monopoly sets. It was like a real get-out-of-jail-free card. But over time, Monopoly also became a target for critics.

In 1973, a professor in San Francisco made a satirical version called Anti-Monopoly. The Parker Brothers sued, and the two sides reached a settlement after many years. years of litigation and a nasty PR campaign, Parker Brothers bought 40,000 copies of anti-monopoly and buried them, literally, in a landfill. When I read about anti-monopoly, I suddenly remembered something. When I was 14 years old, I was in a musical about monopoly that was a critique of capitalism. It was an original show written for a children's theater group in Boston called The Freelance Players. It may seem strange that I forgot I was in a musical about Monopoly until I was halfway through working on a story about Monopoly,

but I've spent many years trying not to think about junior high. Sadly, I remember every cringeworthy thing that I said to the other kids in that group, but I don't remember any of my dialogue in that show, and I barely remember the plot. I tried to get a copy of the script, but I wasn't able to. I had a hazy memory of seeing an audio cassette with a sticker on it that said Monopoly freelance players. I searched around my apartment.

I asked my parents to look in their house. Nothing came up. I was about to give up when I thought, Was it a cassette tape or a videotape? There is a box of old VHS tapes in my closet. Is it in there? It was. Nice threads you got there.

Now what's the smell? These are not threads. These are very... It was time for me to get reacquainted with the person that my wife calls Primordial Eric Molinsky. I had the videotape digitized. and when I watched it, the kids looked shockingly young to me, much younger than I remembered.

But I had the same body that I have now, except with a faster metabolism and no gray hair. I look like I'm 14 going on 34, which is probably why I felt so awkward back then. The premise is that the Parker Brothers, not the real Parker Brothers from history, but characters wearing top hats, tuxedos and canes, decide to celebrate the success of Monopoly by staging a reality show

competition, which is kind of wild because this musical was produced in 1986, way before reality shows were a thing. Three contestants are chosen from different socioeconomic classes. The kids visit properties in the game. In the end, they get to choose which property they want to live on. There's also a banker character who is the host of this reality show. Representing the upper class, Elita Vandersme. There is a snooty rich girl named Alita Vandersneed. There's a middle class kid named John Smith, who looks like Ron Howard when he was a kid. And then the banker introduces me, wearing a jean vest over a t-shirt that is inside out.

Representing the lower class, Tony Bufucci. If you're wondering if I sing in this musical, I was wondering the same thing because I am tone deaf. It turns out I did sing a little bit. They actually had me speak some of my lyrics, which was smart move on their part. And in my performance as Tony Mollinger, as Tony Mafuchi, I seem to be channeling Fonzie from Happy Days if Fonzie had a cousin from Boston.

Hey, now this is like my own neighborhood. He's guys all right. Is nothing new here? Set to hang out. The first property we visit is Baltic Avenue. It looks like a combination of Westside Story and Michael Jackson's bad video. Then we go to Illinois Avenue, where the middle class lives, this section is pretty scathing and the way it satirizes these shallow, materialistic suburbanites. But my character loves Illinois Avenue. I like the houses and love glass and the windows.

The middle class kid, John Smith, says this feels familiar to him, but he doesn't feel comfortable here now that he's seen Baltic Avenue. And when a suburban dad refers to the people in Baltic Avenue as those people, John gets upset. What have you done to help those people? For instance, have you ever been to Balticab?

Baltic Avenue, we would never allow our kids in that part of the city. You know, I just might do your family some good to see that life isn't comprised with just cocktails, country clubs, and cookouts. The banker slash reality show host has two giant dice. They're actually two little girls dressed as dice who are having a blast every time the banker spins them around. The numbers tell us where to go, and we end up in jail. This section could have been played as a joke, but I was surprised that the inmates got a really sympathetic treatment. They sing a song about how the system has been stacked against them for their whole lives. From there, we go to the boardwalk where the rich people live, it's very great Gatsby,

and then we announce in front of the media, which property we want to live on. The rich girl chooses the boardwalk. My character chooses Illinois Avenue, the suburbs. But the middle class kid rejects the game entirely, and he gets into it with one of the Parker brothers. You've got to make a choice. What else is that?

I don't know. Everyone plays the game. What do you see, there's no end to a Monopoly game. It just goes on and on. and the end. Some people don't like where they're fitting in. Well, that's too bad, some, but that's the way life is. It doesn't have to be that way. Anyway, I'm not playing your game. I'll just make up my own game with my own rules. It'll go ahead and shy, my boy, but don't forget who has the monopoly. It's awfully hard to start a new game with new rules.

People don't like to change. This show is not subtle. So I was impressed that it ended on an ambiguous note, the Parker brothers sing a song called On Top of the World, and John Smith is left in a liminal space. There's no clear path for him. We had no idea that in 1986, there was a group of teenagers rewriting the game of monopoly to make it more equitable. We didn't know about them because they were not in Boston. They were not in the U.S. either. They were living behind the Iron Curtain. Tim Walsh says that during the Cold War, Monopoly was a perfect target for communist propaganda. Russia and China would point to Monopoly and say, this is the problem with America,

as this capitalistic society. And this proves that capitalism is evil. These people celebrate it with this board game. That turned out to be the best advertisement Parker Brothers never paid for her. Merrick Stolley was at a conference in what used to be East Germany. He went to a Games Museum and saw a homemade version of Monopoly from before the Berlin Wall came down. Like that a child had made, like somehow had seen a copy across the border or something and made their own version of Monopoly. Roman Abramov is a professor at HSE University in Moscow.

he wrote a paper about how kids across the Soviet Empire were making their own versions of Monopoly, and he was one of those kids. We spent a lot of times to playing Monopoly instead of doing whole work. Since Monopoly was forbidden, I asked him, how did he even know what the game board was supposed to look like? Diplomacy officers had access to. to foreign goods and foreign board games, foreign toys.

And they bought toys and some board games for their children. And after that, of course, their children shared those toys, board games with friends and started to reinvented, for example, board games. But many of them had never seen a game board firsthand. It was just described to them. So they would draw the game on the back of wallpaper or whatever they could find. And they didn't call it monopoly. They called it the States, as in the United States.

And they didn't use locations in Atlantic City. Roman and his friends turned the squares on the board into countries they wanted to travel to. Japan, Western Germany, or maybe even some Arabian countries, and we moved from country to country to make business in different countries. They created a space called the Common Market, which was similar to the European Union. They also created a neutral space where players could resolve disputes and make transactions. What's amazing to me is that this is exactly how monopoly was developed in the early 20th century, where the game kept changing, based on the experiences,

and desires of the people who are recreating it. In the late 1980s, a version of monopoly was allowed to be published in the Soviet Union. It was called Manager, and the properties on the game board were factories and stadiums, not specific streets. Roman and his friends got a hold of Manager, knowing it was as close as they could get

to the American Monopoly. But when they got it, and started to play with friends, we were a bit disappointed. To me, it's so simple to fast market capitalistic game without any long-term strategy to play and to traveling between countries to organize international corporations

and the same things, like it was in our versions of monopolies, I think we invented additional activities like organizing industrial holdings and airports. Well, what I think is interesting is that, you know, one of the criticisms that people have of the official monopoly is that in the end, one person wins, one person buys everything and everybody else is out of money and poor. And it sounds like in your version of monopoly, it was still capitalistic. It was definitely not something that the official communist party would approve of, but it was more cooperative. And it was more about living a better life and help. And it was competitive, but not ruthless, it sounds like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It was very competitive, of course. but it was a more strategically thinking game and more imaginable with using several more freedom to choose different strategies, different tactics in our behavior. So once communism fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, Did anyone ever play your version again? Did it just kind of disappear?

Because it sounds like if anyone was to take the version you invented in the 1980s and sell it, it would actually be a good game. Yeah, I thought about it, and we decided to release our version monopoly in 90s, and even we hired designer. But unfortunately, we didn't have money to release it. And of course, we didn't view entrepreneurs. In case you missed that, he said they were not entrepreneurs, at least not in the real world. Additionally, I moved from one apartment to other apartment,

and now I have only digital pictures of my monopoly, because when we moved our staff from one apartment to other apartment, I'm afraid I lost my paper archive of this monopoly, and of course I regret about it. But I have pictures made in the future. I print it and come back to play. I told Roman about the Monopoly musical that I was in as a kid. I was curious what he'd say.

Yeah, it's interesting how a lot of people in the late Soviet Union tied from a good shortage and socialist system and how they dreamed about a brilliant capitalistic system and how the same time a lot of liberal-oriented people in Western countries dreamed to socialist values. It's interesting, I think, yes. Monopoly is now in 113 countries. There's also a mobile game version, which is very popular. But in real life, you won't find many people defending monopolies unless they're billionaires. Congress has been passing anti-monopoly laws long before the game of monopoly was ever published. I think the game taps into something. that's part of human nature.

When you lose at Monopoly, it stinks, maybe even more than other board games. But I think that's what makes it so addictive. If you keep playing, maybe someday, you'll be the winner who gets to have it all. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. And to read the credits, we have a special guest in the studio. all the way from Baltic Avenue, it is Tony Mafucci. Hey, Eric, how you doing? Thanks for having me on. I thought you were going to move to Illinois Avenue.

Oh, no, I was there for years, but, you know, Baltic Avenue was totally changed. It's like yoga studios there and artisanal coffee shops or whatever. Wow, okay, cool. Are you ready? Yep. Special thanks to Michelle Parnett Dwyer, Merrick Stoli, Tim Walsh, and Roman Abernoff. My assistant producer or Eric's assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either a free imaginary world sticker, a mug, or a t-shirt.

That's a good deal. Or a link to a Dropbox account, which has a full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. If you donate on Patreon, you also get access to between imaginary worlds. It's a more casual chat show that comes. out in between regular episodes of imaginary worlds. You can buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts or Patreon, and you can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginary worldspodcast.org. All right, thanks.

By the way, I'm glad that you're still wearing a sleeveless gene vest with a t-shirt that's inside out. Hey, got to keep it real, you know? So you want to go get a beer? Yeah, I actually don't really like beer. I'm kind of more of a wine person. Oh, aren't you fancy? All right, well, see you on the boardwalk, Malinsky.