Behind the Streams: Arnie Niekamp on Podchaser
I was an English major in undergrad. I really enjoyed it, partly because of the content but largely because of the community. Yes, some of us were those weird kids that always looked like we’re cosplaying or only wore black or constantly wore our grandpa’s clothes, but all of us were united by a single, absolute understanding: we were fighting against the odds. The common joke was that none of us would get jobs after college, which sucked considering the amount of debt everyone was going into to get an education.
We had heard every joke, been asked a thousand times what we would do with our degree, and often been unable to find any other major we would actually succeed in. Now, statistically, people with English majors tend to be much happier and make more money in the (very) long run, but we enjoyed refusing to take ourselves too seriously since we knew no one else would.
What’s awesome is that, every once in a while, one of us rises from the troops of mediocrity and becomes someone that some people may have heard of at some point. Arnie Niekamp did exactly that as the creator and co-host of Hello from the Magic Tavern, a podcast that has been top-ranked by Apple, The Guardian, and the AV Club. Magic Tavern has thousands of fans.
In other words, Arnie is every English major’s dream: he created an entire world and people want to live there! That world is Foon, and Arnie landed there through a dimensional rift behind a Burger King in Chicago. Conveniently, just enough wifi leaks through that rift to support a weekly podcast hosted by Arnie, a wizard named Usidore the Blue set on defeating the Dark Lord someday, and a shapeshifter named Chunt who generally appears as a badger.
But long before Arnie became a resident of Foon and a regular at the Vermillion Minotaur (the tavern in Hogsface that acts as a recording studio for the show), he was just a kid that was uninterested in most things — except English.
The Journey to the Rift
Like most people, Arnie chose his college major based off of what he was good at and interested in, and that was English. And then, when he graduated from college and didn’t really know what to do, he just signed up for more college. Arnie went off to grad school for English and, while he was there, discovered a whole new world.
While I was in grad school I kind of discovered improv. Just some improv on the campus. Sort of bad, short form improv. And I had gotten a free trip to the Chicago Improv Festival which was the first time I saw long-form improv, and it was performed by the Upright Citizens Brigade.
The Upright Citizens Brigade, of course, is one of the top comedy and improv groups, so it kind of makes sense that seeing them live inspired such a fire in Arnie for improv and comedy that, once he graduated grad school, he moved to Chicago to take improv classes.
In order to see how Arnie moved from a love of improv to the world of podcasting, we have to rewind a bit. See, Arnie had been right on the edge of greatness for a long time.
I’ve always really loved audio as a medium. I think it’s just really powerful and it’s very intimate. I remember as a kid I loved comedy albums, I listened to a lot of Monty Python tapes … Sort of right before podcasts started, I was just waiting for something like that. I did a lot of long drives and I was always looking for something to listen to. So I sort of started listening to audiobooks, which still wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.
So, when the first podcasts did start coming out, Arnie was all over it, from the original Comedy Bang Bang to WTF. Arnie “gobbled it all up,” fascinated by the way podcasting was so accessible for the ordinary person, especially compared to “breaking into the entertainment industry in some other way.”
Of course, Arnie did eventually learn that making a really great podcast requires a lot of work, but that little seed of optimism was enough to get him started. So he began.
My personal story with podcasts was that I loved doing it. It was very similar to my experience of doing improv in Chicago, which was: ‘you do it because you love it, you put a lot of time into it because it’s something you’re passionate about and you enjoy, and if you can have a small audience, you know, enough to make you feel like it’s worth the time that you’re putting into it, like, that’s probably enough, for now.’
Each of those early podcasts started with a solid following, mostly made up of the group of artists that Arnie worked and lived with, but failed to really take off in the end.
I had kind of decided not to do any more podcasts. I had done several and they had been a lot of fun, but had taken a lot of time. So I had decided not to do anymore.
But one idea kept nagging at Arnie and he just couldn’t let it go:
What about doing a chat show that had story attached to it?
The Vermillion Minotaur
A narrative chat show definitely sounds fun, but where does it fit? Where do fiction and improv mesh? And who was Arnie going to chat with, since you can’t do these kinds of shows on your own? Things came together in pieces, moving from one idea and adding layers to it.
Fantasy seemed like the genre that would be the most fun to do that in, because it’s so ridiculous. It’s a genre that you can love and roll your eyes at in equal measure. From the very beginning, I think I was interested in it being [a podcast] about being a podcast. I’ve always really loved the combination of the fantastic and the mundane, I think that’s a really great place for comedy.
From there, Arnie let his love of serialized stories and chat shows guide him deep into fantasy. Foon was born, with all of its mythical creatures and wild adventures. But he still needed someone to take those adventures with. Luckily, Chicago has no shortage of talented improv people.
I performed in Chicago with Matt Young who plays Usidore and Adal who plays Chunt for almost a decade, and I really just kind of pitched to them the very loose idea of what the podcast was and asked if they’d want to be involved and they immediately said yes. And they Pretty much created their own characters.
Actually, Arnie says that the entire show is “really collaborative.” See, every episode has the trio hosting a new character from Foon whom they interview and chat with. These characters are always guests, people who maybe have listened to the show in its entirety or who happened to hear an episode and really wanted to be a part of it. Arnie cites the incredible amount of talent Chicago holds as one of the reasons this format has worked so well, but I was curious about another aspect of the hosting so many guests.
How did all of those people prepare to be on a show with such an intricate lore and extensive canon? How did over one hundred episodes and that many guests make a cohesive world? Were there pre-show exams that had to be passed on the functions of wizards or the menu of the Vermillion Minotaur?
How it Works
Sadly, there are no lore exams required to guest in Foon. Actually, Arnie says the system they have worked out distributes the work of remembering pretty evenly between hosts, guests, and fans.
We record about three episodes at a time, so that helps us remember things short term, week to week. Also, it really helps having three of us, no one person has to remember everything.
Also, the fact that the show is a chat format means that the hosts and guests can keep each other on track in a way. See, Arnie, as an outsider, doesn’t speak definitively on much in Foon. Chunt and Usidore often act as guides who educate him (as well as the protectors of the world and its lore) and the guests step in to do the same, teaching the trio about the new species or city they belong to.
Most of the guests pitch a loose idea of what they want to be, and that’s kind of what’s fun about it: building this world together, essentially. That’s what’s sort of exciting, that it can kind of go anywhere because you don’t know what each knew person is going to bring to the table.
With the world of Foon expanding with every episode, the show does have a secret weapon that helps keep everything straight.
The Fans of Foon
Well, it isn’t really much of a secret, but it is definitely a handy weapon.
The fans maintain a wiki page which, as we’re getting up close to having had 200 episodes, it does become more and more challenging to remember the things that have been built. So we’ll occasionally check the wiki, especially if we know a guest is coming back or if we’re like ‘this is gonna involve wizards let’s do a quick refresher on what the thing about the wizards in the world are.’
In other words, if there were exams required to get onto the show, the fans would be the teachers and administrators of those tests. They know their stuff, and they help the creators know their stuff too. But as cool as that is, Arnie is really excited about the fact that his fans actually help shape the show.
From the beginning we were really interested in it feeling like a collaboration, not just with the performers, but with the listeners as well. If it was going to literally be a podcast in a magical world that was being listened to by people on Earth, we were really interested in it being a back and forth conversation. Which is why we wanted to have email from listeners almost immediately. And, you know, emails from listeners have led to things in the podcast that have totally created huge, canonical, epic corners of the story.
Beyond those emails, listeners can also send in physical objects that may appear in the show as a completely foreign device that only makes sense to Arnie. These things also shape the show and the characters. This ability to interact with the show has drawn in more and more fans who download the podcast, create fan art, participate in cosplay, and even leave references to a dimensional rift on the Yelp! page of a certain Burger King.
As cool as all of that is, one of Arnie’s biggest focuses in making the show is a little bit more serious.
We get a lot of emails from people that are, like, struggling with things in their lives. That are going through hard times or just have something really difficult going on in their life and that are grateful to have something to distract them from it or a podcast that feels like home. The podcasts that I love, and the thing I hope our podcast provides some people is that I feel like I like them, these people, these podcasters, these characters, and I want to spend time with them… And if I’m being really honest about it, there’s some part of my brain that thinks of them as my friends.
Arnie takes this role in his listeners’ lives seriously and finds that not having enough time for them is one of the most difficult parts of the show gaining the level of success it has. When the show started it was easier to be involved with fans and being accessible, but things have changed throughout Arnie’s time in Foon, as well as throughout his time as a podcaster.
Can’t Stop the Changes
Because Arnie’s first few podcasts never took off, there were definitely a few things that became more difficult in the face of Magic Tavern’s success.
One of the things we’re struggling with a little bit now is just feeling like we dont have as much time as we would like for the fans of the podcast.
From only being able to answer a small amount of the emails they receive to only being able to spend a minute or two per fan at the live shows, Arnie, Matt, and Addle know that they are just on the edge of meet and greets being feasible. Right now they spend more time hanging out afterward than they do putting on the show, and that imbalance will only become more pronounced as they become more popular. Because Arnie is so committed to his fans, he hopes to find ways to continue to connect despite the difficulty.
Beyond the personal changes Arnie has seen, he has also watched the industry as a whole develop in surprising ways.
A lot of the early podcasts that I listened to, the people didn’t seem like there was any idea of how to eventually monetize it in any way. It was sort of just this passion project for these people who were just excited to have an audience period.
Back in the day, if that audience grew, people may use their podcast to gain a name for themselves for their standup, but that was all. Then ads crept in, followed by networks and big industries.
If you look on the podcast chart, you’re seeing more and more already famous people with their podcasts who are sitting on the top of those charts.
Arnie, of course, has nothing against those people, as he appreciates that they probably draw in more people to the podcasting industry as a whole, but he does see the frustration in the “cool little art form” of podcasting being discovered and possibly changed by these bigger corporations.
On the upside, fans don’t need to worry about those kinds of changes, as the Vermillion Minotaur is still at the top of the food chain in Foon.
The Story Continues
Arnie, Matt, and Adal have a lot more to offer their fans.
We’ve got some live shows coming up. We’re doing a Winter Solstice live show in Chicago in November… I’m very excited we’re doing a show in London, we’re doing this festival in Seattle called Podcon as well.
Arnie is stoked to do the show in different settings, but also pretty excited to meet other podcasters. Despite his own success, Arnie still has creators he admires and is a fan of, so meeting them and other people who share his passion is something he is greatly looking forward to.
But probably most of all, we do very long seasons, we do 100 episode seasons. Our first season was 100 episodes and we’re, I mean it’s not super close, but we’re probably half a year away from finishing off season two. And you know, we know from the beginning kind of where we want to end season two, like what we want to have happen while at the same time leaving the door open to discovery and the weird things that happen in the moment that change that. But I’m very excited about what we have planned for the run of episodes leading up to the end of the season. I think it’s gonna be really exciting for us and really exciting for the listeners.
So, fans of Foon have a world full of wonders to look forward to, but even Arnie, Usidore, and Chunt can’t make any promises about what’s coming next. Drop through your local dimensional rift, or download the podcast, to join the adventure and hear what’s happening in Foon.
Behind the Streams is a new series by Podchaser that explores popular podcasts and the brilliant minds behind them. Email Morgan (morgan@podchaser.com) to tell her why your favorite show should be featured next.
