Introducing The Dream Plus! And A Short Oral History of The Dream...
Hey Dream Listeners!
We are so excited to announce our new Supercast channel, The Dream Plus! For only $5 a month you can now get every episode of The Dream (including our back entire back catalog) ad-free, along with bonus content and a brand new AMA style chat board, where you can ask Jane and Dann questions, suggest ideas and bring The Dream Plus community together! Click the link below to join The Dream Plus Supercast channel for only $5 a month:
https://thedream.supercast.com
In the meantime, Jane and Dann recorded this week's episode together and it's a fun oral history of the show and a preview of The Dream Plus!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Press play and read along
Transcript
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Dan's gonna direct me through this whole thing. Ready?
Usually he's doing this from another room and you can't hear him do it because he has like a little foot pedal thing and it only goes into my headphones. So you can't hear what a f
asshole he is all the time. I'm sorry.
Just kidding. You're never an asshole.
You're always so sneaky to it.
I'm Jane Marie and this is the dream. We're launching a subscription plan, you guys.
And we'll get into that deeply in this discussion because Dan and I, we're excited about it, but we also have like a lot of stuff we want to explain because we're both ashamed of making money.
Unfortunately, that's true. Yeah.
And sometimes that gets in the way of us making
maybe the best decisions. I would disagree.
I think we make great decisions. And I think this is one of them.
So we're going to have a subscription plan. It's five bucks a month.
You get all of our episodes without commercials, which you asked for. And I love giving the people what they want.
I will say that. Man, me too.
Today, we are launching a private club
at thedream.supercast.com. Five bucks to get into the club.
I do want us to explain how we got here. It's an eight-year-long story, but let's just start with what's happening right now.
Okay.
So, we became independent about a year ago. We purchased our rights to the dream.
So, let's just start there. We're going independent, right?
We end up getting an ad broker who we pay to find advertisements for us. There's three types of ads that you hear on our show.
One are ads that we read.
So, you know, we've tried the product or were the ones that suggested we have them as an advertiser. And then there are
programmatic. Yeah, the programmatic.
That's the word I'm looking for. But that's all stuff we've approved.
No, programmatic is dynamically inserted. Yeah.
Oh my God. We don't even know what we're talking about.
This is how complicated this shit is. It gets confusing.
One of the ways that we make money right now in the dream is doing these dynamically inserted ads,
basically AI model ads that get just kind of blasted out all over all your podcasts.
And a lot of the reasons why you hear the same brands across all podcasts, or, you know, for years you've been hearing, you know, a certain company on podcasts
is because it's a cheap form of advertising, which means that we don't get very much of a cut of that advertising either. So
we end up with ads that we can't control and really. We control a little bit.
We can one by one, like
particular advertisers, but there's thousands and thousands and thousands of them. They're also regional, which makes it even more.
I know. We can't hear all of them in LA.
Someone will text us or send us an email saying, Did you know Christy Noam was just trying to sell guns on your show or something like that? Not sell guns, but you know what I mean?
Like, or there's an anti-vax ad in your vaccine episode. And And we were like, wait, what?
First of all, because those people lie in order to buy the ad space, they pretend they're doing something else and then they buy the ad space.
And then secondly, because AI isn't as smart as a person, it says, oh, Jane said the word vaccine. RFK Jr.
said the word vaccine.
This is a perfect ad to run in Chattanooga, Tennessee that we aren't, we are not aware of until you tell us. Right.
It's impossible not only for us to monitor every single ad, but even the ad buyers at ACAS. And I honestly think they're doing the absolute best they can.
They're doing great.
And we have a list of companies or industries that we don't want to have advertised on the show. But things slip by because there's a million different ads going to a million different shows.
Our goal with the subscription is to eventually, hopefully, and hopefully sooner than later, supplement the income that those ads bring in with the subscription income. that we take from you.
Thank you, people that we love and trust, rather than these companies that we can't control.
Again, we control as much as we can regionally, but like we need to cut that out. And here's the thing.
There is this
impulse I have to not say this stuff out loud and to just be like, you know what?
I'm not going to take the money that comes from the AI ads.
And I'm also not going to feed my kid.
So anyways, we've been, we've been, we purchased the rights to the show.
We are still figuring out how to make money at it because we were told by the powers that be that you cannot make money on this show. And we're trying to prove those people wrong.
So I think one thing that people should know is that, you know, when we started out, we were a client-based production company. We started the company.
We have never told this story, I don't think.
No.
So this company could have been called Pillow Talk. Like I was making the Tinder podcast.
Yeah.
We did not meet on Tinder. We met in person because you were working at a public radio show.
And so we were both radio nerds.
And we would lay in bed talking about
Pro Tools.
More like complaining about.
Complaining about where people get to record in LA and like all the horrible graffiti on tables everywhere where it's like you go in to do an interview and there's a cock and balls, five cock and balls in your face, like drawings from every comedian that you love.
Look, I count them all as friends, but we wanted to build kind of a more like a like a just like, can people come into a podcast studio and not feel like, whoa, this is weird. Yeah.
Why does it smell like stale beer and why are there Vance stickers on the table everywhere? Van stickers is so evocative. Anyway, we didn't want to do that.
So we would talk about this late into the night every night. And then we started working together a bit on the Tinder show
and putting our feelers out for other work. And we got a job with Airbnb doing a live event where we were doing story capture, kind of like storycore.
It never ended up being used by them for anything, even though it was pretty good. But it was during their like big annual festival.
And that was fun. And that gave us $10,000
to build this here studio that we're sitting in right now.
So we found a rental space that was very cheap in
East LA.
We say Atwater sometimes, but it's like technically it's across the street from Atwater in Glendale and a beautiful building that we've been in for eight years now.
We built the actual studios. Yep.
It was an empty building. In fact, it's
of note, interesting side fact here.
My old recording and mixing studio for music was in the building that the Beastie Boys old studio was in when they were making. In the building? It was next to the indoor basketball court.
It was, yeah. Well, even when we're just kicking it, pretty much we end up coming here to hang out.
This is like the hangout, you know what I mean? The clubhouse.
The record company didn't know what to do or else. They were just like, okay, here's your money.
Go do what you're going to do. We basically took that money and then went and built our own studio.
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But yeah, it was the closet. I had a closet and I couldn't see it.
It was a nice size closet. It was an awesome topic.
It was totally good for keeping noise in, not good with keeping noise out. Uh-uh.
So it was like a mixing space for you primarily. And I would have been happy with it and, you know, for doing interviews and stuff forever, were it not for two things.
Right. One being the indoor basketball court, which was literally next door to your closet studio,
was rented out constantly for movies. Right.
And so often there would be a craft services table blocking the door with like tons of melon trays all over it and stuff.
And I would be shushed by like six dudes with headphones on that are like filming something. But anyways, the second thing though, remember the second thing?
Oh, the weed rolling, the joint rollers.
For me, that was the second thing because it just like hit you in the face as soon as you opened the door. But then they always had their doors open and they were rolling joints.
They were really pretty. It was kind of like a Gucci main music video, only they weren't cooking on the stove.
They were just rolling joints. Exactly.
But it gave a vibe that wasn't like, Malcolm Gladwell, do you want to come over and be interviewed? Yeah, because that's the thing. I mean, most of our friends wouldn't care
what the studio looked like or something like that. But we did want to be able to have everyone that wanted to come in or we were hoping that they would come in feel comfortable.
And this was the studio that we're at now, where we're speaking to from now, also has a parking lot. It's private if there's celebrity people that come in.
You don't have to walk through a lobby.
You don't have to see cock and balls on the table. You don't have to run into Tony Hawk or some.
Louis C.K. or something in the hallway.
It's just very tiny and private and beautiful.
The other part of the story is Diplo, Mad Decent was in Dan's old building, the Grand Royal Beastie Boys building. And then they moved into this exact space.
And then we were shopping for space, not knowing that that's what this was. Yeah.
And we walked in and I saw a friend that worked at Mad Decent and we were like,
oh, very strange.
Anyway, we rebuilt this place and we turned it into this very peaceful,
inviting, comfortable office. And we started doing a lot of work for hire
in order to build up some capital for us to make the things we want to make.
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But honestly, I would say within the first year, we got pitched by Laura Mayer from Stitcher. She approached us to produce the show and
in Hollywood or podcasting certain areas of it, when there's production money from a network, in this case it was Stitcher, which on our end looked like a living wage, Right.
So we said, well, who's going to host it? And I was just talking and talking and talking about MLMs and all my family and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And by the end of the conversation, I was like, can I host it? Which would not only be natural and make sense for the show, but also then we would get the host fee as well. Yeah.
And honestly, I think everyone knew by the end of that meeting that you were going to host it because it was just natural listening to you talk about it. I often end up doing three jobs on a job.
Yeah. Okay.
We both do. It's a great, you know, I mean, even just like what we're doing right now, trying to get the supercast up, it's a lot of work.
And so we started as the two of us, we, we hired a couple of employees
and then we started working on the dream. And it just kind of became our baby.
And in a lot of ways, I think that flagship baby. Our flagship baby.
And we were super lucky because Stitcher, for the most part, while they gave great editorial input and definitely wanted to hear and have input on what we were doing, they let us make the show.
They let us. Yeah, they gave us basically total freedom to make the thing we wanted to make.
And they trusted us and we delivered a thing that was what everyone wanted.
Which I can't state enough how much that is not normal for podcasting,
especially when you, you know, in the late teens or, you know, late teens,
there was kind of a pipeline. That was when Dirty John was coming out.
So podcasting was kind of seen as an incubator for movies and film.
I was always so irritated out loud about that, which probably kept us from getting some of those deals. But I was just like, wait, this thing isn't an art form in and of itself.
So now it's just a marketing tool. Yeah.
It's not its own thing. So that was really irritating.
But we get the, but we get this deal, and the deal was funded up front.
And we made a season of the show, and it was successful.
And then every year since then,
we've made
less money.
And I'm not thinking anybody's like jerking us around. I just know that the industry is so chaotic and people come and go from leadership positions.
Yeah.
It just was, yeah, it was chaos for a long time there. And so that was kind of a chaotic time.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, it was right around the time that COVID hit was when season two ended. And so a lot of things fell through that we were planning on working on.
It was just a tough time for everyone, obviously.
All to say,
we were at a point where for the same reason we wanted to start a company on our own, for the same reasons we wanted to start a company on our own, we wanted to see if we could acquire the feed.
And
we were told the only way to make money is to completely change the format, which we're trying, but we don't want it to be only
the new kind of chat show format we want to make all kinds of stuff and we want to do it ourselves so yeah so
we're almost there we're getting close to feeling like oh wait the show does pay the bills right but it's just the two of us yeah i mean i think the thing is is that like we got to a certain point as well where it was the dream was going to probably just fade away and why would we do that when we own it and so if we if the only way to make money weird how many many like executive people were just fine with that, I
happen to think that there is value outside of dollars.
If you have a marketing budget, for example, if you're if you're a big podcast network and you have a marketing budget and you have this show, ours, that has goodwill and good reviews and press and all the things that people would want, that just having that on your roster is valuable.
Absolutely. But it's not.
It's the Warner Brothers model for music. Tell me more about that.
What do you mean? Well,
so Warner Brothers, for a long time, I have no idea what it's like now. I'm assuming that it's different because everything's different.
But for a long time, say, even like in the 70s and into the 90s and 2000s, were known as a company that would take on bands that they kind of knew weren't going to sell a lot and give them the freedom to make the music that they wanted to make.
Not always. I'm sure there's a million people out there right now going, not us.
They've totally fucked us over or whatever it might have been, you know.
But for the most part, they had that kind of general reputation and it was to draw other bands to the label. And sometimes those other bands are going to make you a ton of money.
And if they see cool bands on the label, they want to be on that same label. Yes.
That's what I thought was a value add for our show.
Like maybe we aren't making you money, which again, I didn't work in their ad department, so I don't know exactly what happened there, but I do know that
those kind of credentials or accolades build
the look of a company.
A little cred to a network that was also,
you know,
courting like two comedians who think each other's funny.
And I think that, you know, the value of the show can also just be seen straight up in them wanting to use the feed for their other shows, to advertise their other shows. Right.
And that's because of you all, because one thing that
happened almost, I mean, it feels wild to say this, but almost immediately we had a very loyal fan base here.
And I think a lot of that was carryover from the work that you had been doing for a long time.
and people being excited that you were working on a new show. I think the other thing was that
it really hit people. It was this type of subject matter
and the way I think it was framed,
slight pat on the back for me, big pat on the back for you, the way it was written, the way it was performed in the sense of, you know, just you reading your script.
Every part of that hit people in an honest way. And it's, I feel, I feel,
I don't know what the right word is.
I miss being able to spend time writing and reporting and traveling to interview people ahead of figuring out if we've sold enough ads on an episode.
And right now we're just in survival mode, like just trying to keep the lights on.
And I think this new endeavor, depending on how many people, but it might allow us to do more ambitious projects similar to the first couple of seasons.
We've just had to, you know, trim, trim, trim, trim, trim in order to stay afloat in this weird new podcast economy. But we're lucky that we're independent.
We're lucky that we're here. We're here.
That we have our studio still. Yep.
It's just the two of us.
The other thing is, is that no matter what we did, if we were going to continue doing a seasonal production of the dream, I mean, this is just something that I think a lot of people already know, but anytime that you're trying to put stories like that together, you have to have upfront money because you have to buy plane tickets.
You've got to buy, exactly. You got to buy equipment.
You've got to hire a production assistant when you get to to wherever you're going. You got to rent a car to drive into the middle of nowhere.
You know, you got to get a hotel, et cetera. Not just the travel expenses either.
It's like, in the meantime, you have to pay insurance to make sure that you don't get sued. You have to buy groceries.
Yeah. You have to hire, you know, make sure you're hiring fact checkers.
You have to do some
babysitters and so many different things. And I think that one thing about the way that we're operating now is if we do want to do more in-depth reporting on a certain subject.
It doesn't have to be 10 episodes because that's what the
network told us our contract required. Exactly.
Although I don't mind that. I don't either.
But what I'm saying is it doesn't have to have to be.
So if there's a story that's a really great story that's three episodes. Yeah.
We can look toward that. We could look towards that.
That's something that we can,
that would be an option for us that would not exist.
There's no podcast network that's going to come to us and say, can you do a three-episode in-depth dive on this show? Which is why
a lot of the seasonal shows end up being long
and sometimes longer than they need to be.
Yeah. So anyways, it's about ad dollars.
I mean, I don't think that's a big surprise to anyone, but we don't, because we didn't have the control over the ad dollars when we started doing this show, one of the core tenets was, We're going to talk about whatever
we want. Find interesting, really.
I mean, and a lot of that's going to be in a similar vein to what we've talked about before because we find that interesting but a lot of it's going to be totally different as you've heard you know there you might get a scientist on here you might get a whatever because that's genuinely interesting to us and we have you know we've we've got a lot of episodes to do and so we might as well have fun and do them that way that's felt so much better oh god it's awesome not to say that our collaborators at the networks weren't rad people, but it was just like
we didn't follow our own.
Yeah, shout out Laura. Shout out Peter Clowney.
There's been so many great people that we've worked with.
Rad. Lots of rad people.
Plenty of rad people. But here we are now.
I think also
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You know, one thing that we've been really lucky about is from the beginning of this show that both the fans that you have drawn in through your previous work
and then also new listeners to the show who were really so loyal. And we obviously couldn't do what we're doing now without them.
It's a funny calculus, though, because you're going, oh, I want to make something that
engenders trust.
I want to make a thing that I know, but maybe like the CEOs at a giant media corporation don't understand about what people would like to hear. And, you know, and I want to respect the listener.
One of the things about doing episodes where people can trust us, whether it's a seasonal thing or a weekly thing, is the advertising that they have to listen to in between. Right.
We like pissing companies off personally and calling out very specific industries or broad sectors of the economy. Yeah.
And so then to hear the weird ass.
Yeah. Right.
The most important thing to me is that
you lose trust in us if we're going to
speak with the reporter who's been on the RFK beat forever.
And then some sort of RFK maha kind of ad comes home.
I know I felt so terrible about there. Oh my god, the one time.
Bad ones.
So that was an Anna Merlin episode
who does amazing reporting on the whole conspiracy theory vaccine QAnon
world for Vice and Mother Jones and previously at Jezebel. Anna's great.
And somehow during that episode in certain parts of the country, ads got inserted that were anti-vax.
A worse scenario
is the episode we did with Charlotte Eisenberg about her
abortion and
detention in a psych ward for considering having an abortion. Really impactful, strong story from a strong woman.
And we're a strong woman being incredibly vulnerable in a position where
she trusted us.
Only us.
When I contacted her, she had been contacted by like
a bunch of national outlets and she chose us because she trusted us. And then
that episode came out
and specifically in the region she happened to live in, which is odd. I mean, these aren't like state by state.
It's a part of a state and a part of another state. It's just regional.
So
in her region, an ad
it was for a crisis pregnancy center. Yep.
Which is
not a doctor's office. Oftentimes they're set up in RVs and they park outside of Planned Parenthoods and other
OB offices
and they lure people away from going into these offices and pull them into,
you know, their RV or sometimes their brick and mortar, whatever.
Essentially, they're pro-life clinics. Yes.
They're pro-life clinics where people dress up like doctors. They wear scrubs
and they pretend to be doctors. They do ultrasounds sometimes,
make you look at the fetus and hear the heartbeat and all that stuff. And they're not there to provide medical care.
But they're called crisis pregnancy centers.
And they act as if if you're having a crisis and you're pregnant, you can go there for help. And instead, it's like crisis creating pregnancy centers.
Well, and if you listen to the Charlotte Eisenberg episode, you can hear more about crisis pregnancy centers because they come up in the episode. I don't know if I slept for a couple of days.
I was in tears. I was like a completely fucking rack
because I was like, oh, I don't think I can do this work anymore. Yeah.
Because I'm not, I can't pay my rent doing it if this is how I have to make money.
The ads, the response that we get from our listeners from the ads, but also just our own response to hearing that those ads are on the, on these episodes are on our show in general at all.
They freak us out. You know, we don't, we don't want that.
And I will say, in most cases, we go very quickly to ACAST and we ask them if they can take that down. And they're very responsive.
They're super responsive.
But there's no way to fix it ahead of time if we have that sort of ad situation so anyway this is hard because it's like we're trying to make a solution we're trying to like find the balance of like making something that's like for the greater good without
making something that's not
yeah that's right there's a few reasons why i particularly think that this is an effective way of doing it doing this one tier five dollars a month ad-free this is actually a chance for us to build community and something I want the closeness with the listeners.
That's the thing. Coming from the hairpin, we were all pretty much super nice to each other.
And it was a fun place to go pick people's brains and get ideas about things and support and community and all that. And I want to do that.
And ideas, because we supercast, yeah.
We love hearing ideas.
You know, I mean,
there's two of us. We don't have all the ideas in the world.
So like we're trying, you know, I mean, that's always really helpful.
And it's also helpful to hear what what people are dealing with and what they're excited to learn more about or what they'd like to see eliminated from our society because it does bad.
We have to beg for money directly
or
not do this. See, and again, I will say this is not begging.
We are offering you something. If it sounds good, great.
It's not too expensive. You are.
Dream listeners.
This is where you get to see the difference between how my brain works and how Dan's brain works. I guess I'm a black and white thinker sometimes.
I'm an absolutist. I like definitions for things.
And Dan's like,
Yeah, I mean, I would describe myself a little bit differently.
I didn't describe you at all. I made a noise.
I know. I did not describe you.
Well, that's what I mean. I would actually describe how I feel.
But I can't, I can't. I can tell you how I feel.
Okay, well, my impression of how you feel is like this.
Well, maybe. Yeah.
I mean, I think that
I feel more comfortable with the idea that there aren't a lot of
distinct truths, especially when it comes to abstract ideas. So pause.
I think we are having this conversation because neither of us feels comfortable about asking for money.
I feel fine. For myself, I'm not going to speak for you, but for me, I think it's because I don't feel comfortable saying, pay $5 to go get this thing, even though I would do it.
Like if I were a listener, I would. Yeah.
Because it's five bucks a month and you get everything with no commercials. And then also you get like a private discussion group message board thing.
We're all just going to be talking there every day like we used to at the hair pit and Jezebel. Except not really Jezebel because jerks got in there, but there won't be jerks over here.
So going back to why we're making this episode, wait, you have a puzzling look on your face. Yeah, well, I would just say that, you know, I actually love this model and have always loved this model.
And we've talked about this in the past. And I know that you in the past have thought of it as kind of like begging for money or something.
But I, no, no, no. I want to feel more like it's public radio.
Like I want to have, I want to adopt that attitude rather than me feeling like I'm shaking a can. I mean, it's the most direct.
Like if so, if you like something and you want it to still keep going, if you like, you know, there's musicians that I subscribe to on Patreon.
I would be really sad if their content didn't exist anymore. And I'm more than happy to pay 5, 10, 15 bucks a month just to get all the content that I'm getting from them.
So to me, it's like the most... personal and direct form of capitalism.
We're striving for the most independent we could be.
I mean, if everyone wants to get on the group chat in our supercast and talk about how they would just rather know my Venmo. Yeah, exactly.
I mean, you know,
yeah, then we could cut out all of the middle people, but we can't survive that way. Yeah, not yet.
Anyways, please go to thedream.supercast.com.
And just very quickly, let's talk about a few things that you will get there, just so you know. And it's here in the episode and blah, blah, blah.
Okay.
So I just want to let people know why I actually think it's cool because I do think it's cool. So you can go there.
Obviously, you get our entire back catalog.
And then also, any upcoming episode, you get completely ad-free.
You don't have to worry, and we don't have to worry about what ads are being played on what episode and what region and all of that.
The other thing that you get is what they call the AMA, and it is similar in some function to that.
Jane set up some categories and things that will make it a little easier to navigate where you want to go and what you want to talk about. I want to rename it Ask You Anything.
Yeah. Meaning
everyone talk to each other. Right.
I don't want it to be like,
Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, like our kids, you know, like, I want people to have conversations.
And it also allows us to put out some bonus content that is going to, I think, be either interesting or goofy or fun or stupid or hilarious. We don't know.
Stupid. Yeah.
That's the one that's really stupid. It struck me in that list.
I was like, probably stupid.
But I guess it lets either put out some interviews that we maybe didn't air previously for any number of reasons. It allows us to record ourselves making a holiday dinner or something like that.
All to say, we are really excited about forming a new community around our existing community and hopefully new people and
having a chance to interact with you.
give you, you know, hopefully a fair amount of
people's reaction to this conversation and questions. I'm gonna do that.
I'm gonna just start a thread at the dream.supercast.com
and where you can come in and say, What the fuck was up with that part of the conversation? And then I'll answer you. Love you, love you, and we appreciate you.
Bye.
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So generous.
Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when it comes to me. So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear, and best-fitting loungewear.
So nothing for your bestie.
Of course, I'm getting my dad, Tommy John. Oh, and you, of course.
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Hey, dream listeners, it's finally here. The dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads.
It's $5 a month. It's the only tier.
No commercials. Plus, bonus bonus content.
This helps keep us independent. And your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream.
We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us. We're also going to have an amazing discussion board.
The interface has it cataloged under AMA, Ask Me Anything. But I don't love rules.
So what I did is started a bunch of threads.
like ask Dan and I questions, general chit chat, just to make friends and stuff. And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shopping, and it's there.
And we're just going to talk about what we bought. And it'll be fun.
That's thedream.s-U-P-E-R-C-A-S-T dot com. Supercast.
Please, please go subscribe. It's five bucks.
It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles. See you there.