Did you know that Jim Infantino has a podcast?

Now you do.

In October of 2021, I (yes, this is Jim writing) had a conversation with my longtime friend, and the producer of my first cassette, Ha, Lionel Cassin. Lionel was living in Texas at the time, working for a University there, and told me that because of a recent move to a new town, he had zero friends. I was alarmed, having recently read an article about how having no friends can lead to an early death. The long pandemic meant that Lionel was working from home, and I thought this combination was potentially lethal. I told him that we would have a phone conversation at least once a week for an hour or so because I value our friendship, and want him to stick around on this earth for as long as possible. We did this for a few weeks, and because Lionel is particularly fascinating and unusual, IMHO, I thought that it was a shame our conversations about books, tech, and culture, weren’t being recorded. Lionel spits out roughly six or more references to books, music, and unusual discoveries on the web every ten minutes and I wanted to be able to go back and refer to these references without taking notes every time we talked.

“This project was never set up to be popular; it was and remains an excellent excuse to have a weekly conversation with my good friend.”

It was a short step from this idea of recording our conversations to starting ‘funny,’ not funny as a podcast. Yes, that comma and quote structure is there to indicate that our show is not funny-ha-ha, but funny-interesting. We started doing it via a platform called Streamyard where I had already been posting my Solo In Isolation shows, but quickly found that, since at the time, our individual audio streams were not separated, I couldn't mix it very well if his mic was louder and mine was softer, as was often the case. We both bought identical AKG Lyria mics and after a dozen episodes, moved the recording platform to riverside.fm. Riverside offered high quality WAV file format downloads, one per mic, and the extremely cool thing is that they buffer the audio on each of our computers or devices and then upload the audio over the course of the show so that even if the internet gets slow for one person, the final file stays glitch-free. We were finally in business.

I've been hosting and producing this podcast for over 2 years now, and we've had some fascinating guests. We've been lucky to talk with Phil Broikos, Dr. William Hanage, Dar Williams, Greg Olear, Karaugh Brown, Leigh Hurwitz, Robert Blake Whitehill, Ellis Paul, Nick Bruel, Matt Smith, Abby Altman, David Wilcox, John Chin, and many more.

We are now mid-way through our fourth season.

Why are you only hearing about this now, you say?

Well, as you may know, despite having a big ego, I'm a terrible self-promoter. I have been mentioning it on the socials and in my newsletters, but hey, probably not enough to be annoying/effective. This project was never set up to be popular; it was and remains an excellent excuse to have a weekly conversation with my good friend. As a listener of my music, and maybe a read er of my books, I have a hunch you will enjoy this show. Episodes come out every Wednesday morning, and it’s on all the major feeds. If it's not on one that you use, please let me know and I will add it, if I can. I have links to our website and some platforms below. Please send me comments, book, and guest ideas. We believe everyone has a great story to tell, books, shows, movies, music to recommend, and conversation to be had. Tune in!