Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #279, Hogwarts U.S.A.
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: This is MuggleCast, your Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts podcast covering everything about J.K. Rowling’s magical world. This week’s episode is brought to you by Audible.com. Audible is the leading provider of audiobooks with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including fiction, nonfiction, and periodicals. For a free audiobook of your choice, go to AudiblePodcast.com/MuggleCast. Welcome to MuggleCast Episode 279! Oh my gosh, we’re so close to the big 280. Micah and Eric are here, of course, as always. Hey, guys.
Eric Scull and Micah Tannenbaum: Hey.
Andrew: And coming in from New York City is the wonderful, wonderful Laura Tee.
Laura Tee: Hi. How are you?
Andrew: [laughs] You won’t say your last name?
Laura: Yeah, no, please don’t.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Laura: I was wondering if you were cueing me to say something there because you paused for a second, and I was like, “Oh, do I introduce myself now?”
Andrew: No, no.
Laura: We’re professional podcasters. We know what we’re doing.
Andrew: “I am Laura.” Laura and I are cohosts of a new podcast, #Millennial. [whispers] The hashtag is silent.
Laura: Yes. [laughs]
Andrew: At MillennialShow.com. Laura, it’s good to have you on again.
Laura: Yeah, it’s great to be back. It’s always good to talk with you guys.
Andrew: Before we started, Laura was like, “Yeah, I got on a half an hour to plan, and I was looking at the doc, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is Harry Potter. This is easy.'”
Laura: Yeah, this is fun stuff. Sometimes on Millennial we get into some pretty deep discussion, so this is a fun break from that, for sure.
Andrew: Right.
News
Andrew: So I feel like I keep saying this; we really lucked out with starting up monthly episodes again in March, because Fantastic Beasts is gearing up. And in the past few weeks since our last episode, we got two big casting confirmations from Warner Bros., so they’re not just rumors anymore. First of all – no surprise – Eddie Redmayne is going to be Newt in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Laura, did we get your opinions on Eddie?
Laura: No, you didn’t. But it was funny because you brought it up to me I guess a couple weeks ago when it first got announced, and you said his name, and I was like, “Who?”
Andrew: Yeah, that’s not good.
Laura: Yeah, no, I legitimately did not know who he was. I’m sorry.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: And I think you thought I was joking at first, but I wasn’t. But yeah, he looks fantastic.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, there’s not much else to say about it. J.K. Rowling said she’s thrilled. And again, it’s just hard to know for sure what our opinion is if we don’t have the description of the character. I was hoping Warner Bros. was going to release something, but they didn’t. You know, like, “Newt is this age, he’s into this and that, and blah, blah, blah,” to give us a better idea of the character.
Eric: Yeah, yeah. I think… well, we’re left to survive off of just these quotes from the producers and directors and J.K. Rowling herself talking about him. And I mean, if they think he’ll be perfect, I’m sure they’re not wrong in that front.
Andrew: Believe in David Heyman.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Eric: Well, David Yates in particular said, “Eddie is a fearless actor, brimming with invention, wit, and humanity.” It’s just like, “Oh, okay, great.”
Andrew: [laughs] Cool, thanks. I guess that’s good?
Eric: Yeah, sounds like a cool guy. No, I did know who he was – I’ve mentioned before – just through some of the smaller movies that he was in that I had seen, and he does seem… I mean, look, if they think he’s good for it, I’ll take their word. I’m more interested, too, because not only don’t we know about Newt, we don’t know anything about his family or anything like that. And so the additional casting process that has surrounded the casting of his family, you go into it knowing even less, right? With Newt, you know that he eventually wrote this book, that he’s kind of, what, a magizoologist, they called him? So that influences some of what you’d think his character would be, but everybody else in this movie that they’re casting for, the roles have been named and all this other stuff, it’s just like, “Okay, now I’m completely blind going into it.”
Andrew: So the other new person we found out about is actress Katherine Waterston. She’s going to play Newt’s wife, Tina, or Porpentina, if you remember her from I guess the… I don’t know where she was mentioned. I tried to look that up, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t know if…
Eric: I feel like it’s just in a release of some sort. I don’t know. One of those…
Andrew: Okay.
Eric: Just for this movie. I highly doubt it was an old… part of the original book or anything.
Andrew: Yeah, I don’t think so either, because there really wouldn’t be a place for that. Unless it’s in the bio section? I don’t know.
Eric: Right, like, “So-and-so lives with his wife, Porpentina.”
Andrew: But so the interesting thing is that we learned with this that they’re going to meet in this first movie, so when the movie starts, they are not going to be married.
Eric: That’s cool.
Andrew: Yeah, so we know there’s going to be at least three films, so at some point over this at least trilogy, we’ll probably see a wizard wedding, which I think would actually be really cool.
Micah: The last one went so well that we saw.
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: This one’s going to get… yeah, they’re going to have an Indomitable Rex crash this one.
Andrew: [laughs] Indominus Rex, I think you mean.
Eric: Yeah, Indominus. Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Get the Jurassic World lingo right.
Laura: Get the name of the fake dinosaur right, okay?
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: In all of the reviews, they just called it the I-Rex, and I thought it was a typo that I was reading, but it wasn’t a typo.
Laura: [laughs] Oh my God.
Eric: Anyway.
Andrew: So J.K. Rowling said she couldn’t be happier with Katherine Waterston. This is the role that a couple of big names were up for, including Dakota Fanning. I thought that would be cool.
Laura: Really.
Andrew: Yeah. So there’s two other lead roles. The other is going to be Newt’s “villain,” who’s named Jacob, and then there’s Queenie, who’s Tina’s sister. And somehow all four of these are the leads, so time will tell what is going on here.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: But in terms of putting Katherine and Eddie together, I could see them making a nice couple, and a nice-looking couple. So moving on from… were you going to say something, Micah?
Micah: Yeah, just this whole idea that we don’t really have a lot of context to who these characters are, so we’re not really going to go through casting and get really excited unless we actually know who the actors and actresses are that are going to be in these roles, because for the characters themselves, we don’t know what their role is going to be. It’s a bit different when we were anticipating who was going to be playing different characters in the Harry Potter series, because we had already read about them and we already knew what they were going to do. So unless they’re going to look to cast younger versions of witches and wizards that we know from Potter, I just don’t know that casting is going to be all that exciting.
Eric: But this is the natural progression, right? When you’re talking about movie news, casting happens first before photography, and then once they start filming the movie…
Andrew: And it’s all super boring.
[Eric and Micah laugh]
Eric: Yeah, I mean, we’re making it interesting by having these sorts of discussions. But yeah, I mean, just the headshot that you have here, Andrew; they all look like beautiful people who are being cast.
Andrew: So that we can say for sure; they’re pretty. So Pottermore did something cool earlier this month: They unveiled a witch and wizard timeline. It’s not Flash-heavy; it’s not something you have to unlock or something. It’s just a simple page with a list of famous witches and wizards dating back to the very earliest days of the world, basically. Just loading it up right now. I’m trying to… oh, apparently that link doesn’t work. But there was a couple of interesting things in it. First of all, it’s a very easy way to look back on the wizarding history and find somebody you may have heard of before, and just get a couple of sentences on that person. And what I also found interesting… I don’t know what this means, if anything – maybe I’m overthinking it – but I was looking at the timeline, and Newt Scamander is the oldest wizard on that timeline who is still alive.
Eric: Ahh.
Andrew: I don’t know what that… like, alive today in 2015.
Laura: Does it have his wife on there?
Andrew: No, because these are famous witch and wizards.
Laura: Oh, okay.
Eric: You’ve got to make the card.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Micah: Yeah, his wife is clearly not as famous.
Eric: Porpentina not destined for greatness, apparently.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Wow, that’s harsh.
Andrew: So does anybody have any crackpot theories what that could possibly mean?
Eric: Yeah, yeah. I think it’ll be like in The Hobbit where you have young Frodo coming to meet old Eddie, or old Newt in the beginning of the movie, and then it’ll go back to the 1920s. So they’ll basically have Newt being able to be alive now; maybe they’ll use that for flashback or flash forward purposes.
Laura: Yeah, it just makes me wonder how far forward the storyline’s going to go.
Eric: Right.
Andrew: Yeah, I mean, are they going to work towards present day? Is Newt going to get caught up in the Voldemort war or something?
[Eric laughs]
Laura: Yeah, are we going to see him reading a copy of the Daily Prophet talking about Voldemort coming back?
Andrew: [laughs] That would be pretty cool.
Eric: I wonder. I mean, it does beg the question, if he hadn’t died now, when would he have died? If this trilogy is about his life as he goes and first tries to make the book. But if this follows him, then the series really could go anywhere if he’s still alive, and I’d like to know where he was during all of the Voldemort stuff then.
Andrew: Yeah, it just seems like a strange coincidence.
Eric: I do feel a great deal of Puff pride, though, with Newt being so healthy and surviving.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: It’s pretty cool. Good on you, Newt.
Andrew: So I recommend checking this out, scrolling through it one lazy afternoon. Hitting up Pottermore, checking out what’s new. I don’t know why they did it either. It seems like something that would have been good for the encyclopedia.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t know.
Andrew: But that’s a whole other discussion. So before we move on with the news today, I want to remind everybody that today’s episode was brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet’s leading provider of audiobooks with more than 150,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including audio versions of many New York Times bestsellers. For listeners of MuggleCast, Audible is offering you a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service, and I… are you guys fans of 50 Shades of Grey?
Eric: [laughs] No.
Andrew: No?
Micah: No.
Andrew: Micah?
Laura: No. [laughs]
Andrew: Well, then you’ll be pleased to hear that there is a 50 Shades of Grey spinoff titled Grey.
Eric: Ehh.
Laura: Yeah, I’ve read excerpts of it.
Andrew: Have you? The highlights? [laughs] So maybe if you’re feeling lonely one night…
Eric: This E.L. James has totally taken the idea that was had by… who’s the Twilight author?
Andrew: Stephenie Meyer.
Eric: Stephenie Meyer wrote… what was it, Midnight Sun? It was the first book from Edward Cullen’s perspective. This is exactly that, only worse written.
Andrew: Hey, you don’t know that.
Eric: I know from the excerpts.
Laura: Oh, it’s… yeah.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: I do know. I can guarantee, I promise. It’s bad.
Micah: This is supposed to be a plug, Eric.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: I’m sorry. Did you want to…?
Andrew: Okay, forget it.
Laura: Are we plugging 50 Shades of Grey?
Andrew: Grey is a bad choice. I tried, I tried.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: How about the original Jurassic Park?
Eric: There you go. Michael Crichton.
Laura: Oh yeah, there you go. Fantastic.
Eric: “We can, but should we?” That’s the central question.
Andrew: This is the 25th anniversary edition on Audible, unabridged. Everybody’s got Jurassic fever, and now you can read the original book. I actually really want to do this, because I’ve been high on dinosaurs since watching Jurassic World, and I want to read the source material. So you can grab this for free on AudiblePodcast.com/MuggleCast. You’ll get one free audiobook by going to that URL, and you can take your book anywhere and listen to it just like you would a podcast. So AudiblePodcast.com/MuggleCast; check it out. Great time to do it, especially during the summer, when you’re out and about more.
Eric: For sure.
Andrew: So continuing with the news, this was really interesting. J.K. Rowling has been really awesome on Twitter, and this may be one of her best gems yet. So she kind of teased the existence of a American wizarding school somewhere in the United States. Somebody had asked her on Twitter about the Salem Witches’ Institute, which we had learned about a while ago, but we didn’t really know anything about it. It was mentioned in Goblet of Fire. And so somebody asked about it, and J.K. Rowling replied, “The Salem Witches’ Institute isn’t a school, but a joke on the Women’s Institute in the UK,” which I don’t really understand.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t get the joke.
Andrew: I don’t know if she’s joking. [laughs]
Laura: I don’t get the reference, unfortunately.
Andrew: Me neither. But then she said… somebody asked her, “Okay, so there is an American wizarding school?” And then she said, “That information will be revealed in due course.” Then somebody else said, “Is Newt going to visit a school in New York?” And then she said, “No, but he’s going to meet people who were educated at [name] in [not New York].”
Eric: Huh.
Andrew: And then she just started replying to a bunch of people on Twitter. Somebody said, “Will the name of the wizarding school in America have any relevance to the Native American Indian culture?” She said, “Do you mean the name is of American Indian origin? It isn’t. The name is of immigrant origin.” And then she said, “However, indigenous magic was important in the founding of the school. If I say which tribes, location is revealed.” So she’s got a lot of information on the school that we’re going to learn in Fantastic Beasts.
Eric: I’m super excited about this.
Laura: Yeah, me too. I want to know why I didn’t get my letter.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Laura: I have some questions.
Eric: That’s too hard of a transition, Laura, into the next story.
Andrew: That’s our next story.
Laura: [laughs] Okay.
Eric: But with J.K. Rowling and the American story, the school, I love this that she says: “If I answer that question fully, it will reveal the location of the school, but you can take that as a yes!” It’s another one of those tweets that was in there. But just the idea that somebody had to ask if the Native American Indian ancient sort of shaman magic type stuff would have to do with this universe, and she’s brought it in. It turns out she has adopted that, and it’s really smart, because for me, even living in America, I don’t often think about how the native tribes have had a magic and an understanding of their own. But of course, now that I think about it, I’m like, “Oh, of course she would totally use that for the basis for this,” and I wonder how their education in America would be different as a result of whatever sort of tenets of magic that these people learn about.
Laura: Question, though: Does she actually say “US wizarding school,” or does she say “American wizarding school”? Because there could potentially be a difference.
Andrew: Well, I mean, people said to her… I think it’s assumed it’s in the US because Fantastic Beasts is set in the US. I don’t know.
Laura: Yeah. The reason I ask is because America is a continent, and to most people outside of the US, when they refer to America, they can be referring to the entire continent.
Eric: Right, there’s Central America. There’s South America.
Andrew: True.
Eric: And all way different.
Laura: So I don’t know. Probably a stretch, but it would be interesting.
Andrew: If Newt is meeting people in New York… I mean, obviously there’s people from all over the world going to New York. But somebody did say at one point, “Wizarding school in America have any relevance to the Native American culture?” And she just replied, “If I answer that, it will reveal the location of the school.” So she didn’t deny it was…
Eric: It could be a hub area. I don’t know; it’s just so funny because the UK is so freaking tiny compared to all of the continents of America.
Andrew: Yeah. Well, so where could it be in the US?
Eric: Well, gosh. There would be… I mean, I’m just saying size-wise…
Laura: There would be a lot of places.
Eric: There should be so many of the schools.
Micah: South Dakota.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Laura: Oh my God, Micah.
Eric: Micah has the answer.
Micah: No, I’m just looking into a little bit of what she’s saying here. And I think you have to find a place that had clearly several Native American tribes in the area, so if we start to dig a little bit – and my history is not what it used to be – but just looking back and seeing what areas of the country were highly populated by well-known Native American tribes. If they clearly had this level of influence on the founding of the school, it would be cool… similar to a Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Slytherin, Hufflepuff. That was four individual people, but if you actually had multiple tribes who are responsible for the formation of the school, or at least the teachings of the school, I would think it was probably somewhere in the Midwest.
Laura: Yeah, maybe.
Micah: Texas.
Laura: But I mean, unfortunately, before many people were driven away from their original ancestral homes, there were lots of tribes all over different parts of the country.
Eric: Right.
Laura: And I’m assuming this takes place before Andrew Jackson screwed everybody over…
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Laura: So I don’t know. I feel like there are a lot of places it could take place.
Andrew: Entertainment Weekly came up with four theories. The first one is New Orleans, which would be so cool.
Laura: Oh, that would be so cool.
Andrew: Yeah. Roanoke.
Micah: Virginia?
Andrew: “The Lost Colony of Roanoke was founded off the coast of North Carolina by English settlers in late 16th century, but when other colonists returned several years later, the entire settlement had disappeared.” This is history. So why did it disappear? Maybe it’s been inhabited by wizards and witches and they hid it all.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: And then they also suggested New England, which is kind of a safe bet, and then the southwest, sort of what Micah was saying.
Eric: I just remember visiting Arizona as a child and seeing Native Indian ruins. I don’t know if it was Apache; I don’t know what the tribes were, necessarily, but I remember being fascinated by them. And these people lived long ago, but the remains are still there. And it’d be really funny for her to do something like the way that Hogwarts is hidden from view, to have it be somewhere that we know or have been to.
Andrew: Yeah. Whenever we find out the location of the school, I think we should all go as a collective set of Harry Potter fans…
Eric: Agreed.
Laura: [laughs] That’d be awesome.
Andrew: … and pay our respects or something.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: I don’t know what we would…
Eric: The next convention.
Micah: No, we have to try and find our version of Hogwarts. That’s what we need to do.
Andrew: Well, yeah, so we would know…
Micah: And document it on video.
Andrew: Okay, so we go to New Orleans and start looking for a castle or something.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Yeah, I think that’s accurate.
Micah: But I like New Orleans. I think that would be really cool.
Andrew: Yeah, I’m up for a trip to New Orleans to find American Hogwarts. By the way, I kind of hate how people keep calling it American Hogwarts. It’s not American Hogwarts.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: It’s just an American wizarding school. It’s probably going to be nothing like Hogwarts. [laughs]
Eric: Right.
Micah: I’m still confused – and we talked about this – but the Salem Witches’ Institute. Do you think she had to backpedal off of that for some reason? Because why even mention it the way that she did in Goblet of Fire if it wasn’t going to be…?
Andrew: Right.
Micah: And not even say anything about it for how many years? How many years has it been since Goblet of Fire was released?
Eric: Well, it was a joke that amused her, I think, at the time, which is why she wrote it. But I was surprised when she said, “Oh no, that’s not the school,” because as a result of that reference being in there, we just all assumed, “Oh yeah, Salem witch trials. It makes sense the American school has got to be in Salem.” And she sort of coasted off of our assumption for so long, not having to answer questions about the American school; her books were about this British kid in Britain who’s got to deal with his own stuff. I don’t know; I feel like she’s been able to coast off of this assumption that we’ve all made, which turns out now is incorrect.
Laura: Yeah. I mean, I’m looking at the Women’s Institute right now on Wikipedia, and apparently it was formed in 1915 to encourage women to become more involved in producing food during World War I. And I guess since then, it’s actually developed a little bit so that it’s actually a women’s voluntary organization that’s trying to give women more room to move up in academia? I don’t know. I don’t want to make this assumption because I don’t know enough about it. But there were a lot of women’s institutes like that in the US as well, and they were kind of looked down upon because at the time, women were not allowed to go to universities where men went, places like Harvard, Yale, etc. They all had women’s schools that went alongside them. So I wonder if that’s where the joke comes in. I don’t know.
Eric: That is very interesting.
Micah: She’s just too smart for all of us.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Laura: Clearly.
Andrew: Well, that’s something she’ll definitely have to answer. Somebody’s got to ask her between now and the first Fantastic Beasts. So moving on. Speaking of Hogwarts, everybody has been infatuated with the idea of Hogwarts, and when we all read the books, we all wanted to go to the school. So earlier this month, I guess somebody asked J.K. Rowling on Twitter, “Where’s my Hogwarts letter?” Something to that effect. And she replied, “All these people saying they never got their Hogwarts letter: You got the letter. You went to Hogwarts. We were all there together.” And then she replied again, “Of course, it happened inside your head, but why on earth should that mean it wasn’t real?” A quote from Dumbledore.
Laura: Aww.
[Eric fake cries]
Andrew: So everybody ate this up. It got 30,000 retweets, 35,000 favorites. Everybody was writing about it online. The Hypable article went viral. Everybody just really wants to believe that they went to Hogwarts! It’s amazing, and it’s beautiful. And I don’t think Warner Bros. is happy about it, because this is going to hurt the sales of those Hogwarts letters.
[Laura laughs]
Eric: Ohh.
Andrew: Nobody needs to buy them. J.K. Rowling just tweeted that we all went.
Laura: Yeah. I mean, Micah, you mentioned earlier that we could try to find it, but I guess we don’t need to now.
Micah: No, I mean, I’ve been there. It’s in Orlando.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: And soon Hollywood.
Eric: We were all there together, Micah.
Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it was a really beautiful thing. And I just love how… I wonder if J.K. Rowling ever sits here and is like, “Damn, I can make a lot of people happy just by sitting here on Twitter and telling them they all went to Hogwarts.”
Eric: [laughs] I find it shocking that she is inspired by a single tweet that she picks out of the ether to then go on and reveal things like this, or just state her opinions in such a way that it’s matter of fact. “Oh yeah, we all went to Hogwarts. You can stop saying that now.”
Andrew: But it really makes you reflect on when the books were coming out, everybody was all in this together. We were all going through Harry’s journey together, all reading the books at the same time when they came out at midnight, all starting to speculate about what these new book titles mean. I mean, J.K. Rowling is speaking figuratively, but I mean, she’s kind of also absolutely right. We really did all go together.
Eric and Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: So that was the inspirational J.K. Rowling moment of the month. [laughs] But don’t forget, in our final news item for today, J.K. Rowling does other things besides Harry Potter.
Eric: Ahh.
Andrew: She is publishing her third book, Career of Evil, her third Cormoran Strike novel. It’s called Career of Evil; it’s going to be out late October of this year. Have you guys read these? Sorry, I feel like I ask this every time. But who’s read them?
Micah: I have.
Andrew: Okay. Are you excited?
Laura: I have not. I feel terrible.
Micah: Yes, Laura, you’re a terrible person.
Laura: I’m an awful person.
Andrew: No, you really should read them, though.
Micah: You should read them.
Andrew: They’re really good.
Laura: When I finish school, I will definitely put them on my list, for sure.
Andrew: So for those of you who do read it, the synopsis says, “When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin…” That’s Cormoran’s secretary.
Eric: Aw, his assistant.
Andrew: “… she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible.” And the synopsis goes on to say the police are focusing on one suspect Strike is increasingly sure it is not, so Strike has to take matters into his own hands.
Micah: That is pretty dark. I mean, obviously given…
Eric: Severed leg.
Micah: Well, given Cormoran’s condition.
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: Oh, good point. He’s missing a leg. It’s not a spoiler.
Laura: Oh, okay. All right, screw school; I need to read these books, because they sound really interesting. [laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, they really, really are. And every time I pick up one of these… I mean, it’s only been twice.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: But when I read the first two books, I’ve been reminded how detailed of a writer J.K. Rowling is. You see that in these books, and you’re just reminded about how great reading Harry Potter was.
Eric: Yeah, I will be reading this. I have to read The Silkworm yet, but I do enjoy these books.
Micah: You read Cuckoo’s Calling?
Eric: I did, yeah.
Micah: Okay. I’m just impressed that Robert Galbraith is verified on Twitter, given that he’s not a real person.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Yeah, what’s the deal with that? “The official fake name of J.K. Rowling.”
Eric: You would think that that would be something that would be an issue.
Andrew: I still crack up at the fact that these books just make no mention of J.K. Rowling on the cover. Although I noticed when I went to Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago, there was a sticker or a sign right above the books, The Silkworm, that said “By J.K. Rowling.”
Eric: Oh, yeah.
Andrew: I’m like, “That kind of takes away from it.”
Micah: Is it on the inside jacket of the book?
Andrew: Yes.
Micah: It is? Okay.
Andrew: But as we all know, when the first one was published, there was no mention of that.
Eric: Right.
Andrew: And now when I go into used bookstores, I always look for The Cuckoo’s Calling in hopes of finding another one of these books without her name in it, because they’re probably worth a lot of money.
Eric: Probably worth something, yeah.
Andrew: I’m happy to say I have one, because when the first one… when we found out, I ran out to the bookstore. Unfortunately, it wasn’t there. I called my friend who also ran out to the bookstore; I was like, “Get me a copy! Get me a copy!” Because of course, they were all going to sell out in five seconds now that word had spread. [laughs]
Eric: Big day. Big day.
Andrew: Yeah, it was really cool.
Avada Kedavra, Imperio, Love Potion
Andrew: All right, so that’s it for the news. Coming up later, we have This Month in Potter History. We’re going to review more of J.K. Rowling’s tweets; as usual, she’s been busy as hell on Twitter. But first, it’s time for a game, starring our host, Micah Tannenbaum.
Micah: Yeah, so we’re bringing back one of our old segments called “Avada Kedavra, Imperio, Love Potion.” We did it probably years ago at this point, but I think we all had a lot of fun. It’s a spinoff of the very popular game “Screw, Marry, Kill” that you may play with your friends when you have had a bit of alcohol, or maybe not. So I have to ask for a volunteer. Who wants to go first? We will be using characters, obviously, from the Harry Potter series, and you will have to tell us whether or not you’d like to Avada Kedavra, Imperio, or Love Potion them.
Laura: I’ll go first.
Eric: Yeah, Laura.
Andrew: That’s the spirit.
Micah: All right. So Laura, are you ready?
Laura: I’m ready. I was born ready.
Micah: [laughs] You have Dumbledore, Tom Riddle, Grindelwald.
Laura: Oh, man. Oh, that sucks. Okay, I would definitely Love Potion Dumbledore, even though he doesn’t play for my team. That’s all right. I would Imperio Grindelwald, not to… what is this? What is Imperio supposed to be?
Eric: It controls.
Laura: Ew, that’s really gross.
[Eric laughs]
Laura: Okay, I would do that, but not for… you know. Not for that, but to actually make him not be evil. And then I would kill Tom Riddle.
Andrew: Okay. Yeah, Tom Riddle definitely deserves to die.
Eric: That poor Muggle. Seriously, guys.
Andrew: All right, who’s next, Micah?
Micah: All right, Eric, you have Hagrid, Umbridge, Oliver Wood.
Andrew: I wish I had this one.
Eric: [laughs] Okay, wait. Hagrid, Umbridge, and Oliver Wood?
Micah: Yep.
Eric: Andrew, do you want this one?
Andrew: I’ll take it. I would kill Umbridge; she was the worst thing in my life when I was reading Book 5.
Eric: Thank you.
Andrew: Of course, I would Love Potion Oliver Wood, because he’s so dreamy. And Imperio Hagrid. That’s tough, though. He’s never done anything to deserve that. But if I have to, I have to. Sorry, Hagrid.
Eric: You handled that well.
Andrew: All right, Eric, it’s the final one, and you have to answer it. No escaping.
Eric: Okay, all right.
Micah: All right, here you go, Eric. Dobby…
[Laura laughs]
Eric: God.
Micah: We can’t even get past Dobby.
Laura: Go ahead.
Micah: … Petunia, Neville.
Eric: Dobby, Petunia, Neville.
Andrew: Neville like Matt Lewis today? Hot Matt Lewis? Or Neville…
Micah: Neville Longbottom from the books.
Andrew: Okay, okay.
Eric: Okay, so one of them is AK, one of them is Imperio, and one of them is Love Potion.
Micah: That’s the name of the game.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: All right, I’ll Imperio Petunia. She can clean up after me or something that I don’t do well for myself.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: We know that she does that for the Dursleys, so that’s nice. And I’ll AK Dobby, because he’s already dead.
Andrew: Ooh.
Laura: Aww.
Eric: Yeah, sorry. And Love Potion Neville, because I’d rather have him in love with me than Dobby.
Andrew: Even if you killed Dobby when he was alive, he was going to die anyway.
Eric: Yeah, but then I kind of put Harry in a pickle, because he doesn’t come to the rescue. But yeah, those are my answers.
Andrew: All right, I have one for Micah.
Micah: All right.
Andrew: Hermione, Granger, Professor Trelawney, and… who’s another famous witch, Eric and Laura?
Eric: You’re giving him the girls? He doesn’t give us any of the girls, and you give him the girls?
Andrew: All girls.
Laura: You have to give him some variety. You’ve got to throw a guy in there.
Andrew: Okay, so Hermione, Professor Trelawney, and Dumbledore.
Eric: Charlie Weasley. Oh yeah, Dumbledore.
Micah: Dumbledore is coming back for another round?
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Let’s say this is before he fell off the tower.
Micah: All right, I’d Avada Kedavra Trelawney.
Eric: Ohh.
Micah: Imperio Dumbledore, because you can control him, make him do anything you want, and he’s probably the most powerful wizard ever.
Eric: Sure.
Micah: And Love Potion Hermione.
Andrew: See, I wanted to give Micah three girls to make him struggle with who to Love Potion, but I guess I should have known Hermione was going to win no matter what.
Micah: You should have thrown in Rosmerta.
Andrew: Oh, yeah.
Eric: Oooh.
Micah: Who else?
Andrew: Love her.
Eric: Next time.
Micah: Cho.
Andrew: [laughs] J.K. Rowling.
Micah: J.K. Rowling…
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: Okay, so that’s how we play “Avada Kedavra, Imperio, Love Potion.” I think we need something different for Imperio.
Laura: Yeah, I think so.
Andrew: I don’t like it.
Micah: Taking control is a little bit…?
Eric: What if it’s Crucio?
Andrew: Yeah, it should be Crucio, because that’s torture. That makes…
Laura: Yeah, but the original game is “Screw, Marry, Kill,” not “Torture, Marry, Kill.”
Andrew: Right. Well, so…
Eric: Yeah, so there’s a distinction between screw and marry.
Andrew: Yeah, but we’ve got to do our own twist on it.
This Month in Harry Potter History
Andrew: Okay, so as we get into This Month in Potter History, somebody wanted to mention it’s been five years since Episode 200. How did that happen?
Micah: I know. It’s one of our listeners; I’m blanking on the name right now, but they let us know… was it Amanda?
Eric: I think it was Amanda Walters, yeah.
Micah: That we had met last year, actually, in Orlando. She had mentioned that it had been five years since we released Episode 200 of MuggleCast. And of course, that was a big episode for us, not just because it was a landmark episode, but because we had the producer of the Harry Potter films, David Heyman, on. And he was very gracious with his time; spent close to 45 minutes or an hour just chatting Potter with us. He played the Dueling Club, which I thought he didn’t necessarily have to do, but he was all in for it.
Eric: Yeah, we explained it to him, and he kicked Micah’s ass.
[Andrew laughs]
Micah: He did. He said at one point, “Do you want to admit defeat now?”
Andrew: Oh, yeah. That was good.
Micah: So he was not shy about playing those games. But I listened back to it – I think it was last week or a week and a half ago – and it was just funny some of the things we talked about then, prior to Deathly Hallows. And now being not only on the other side of the movie, but the other side of the theme park, and having Fantastic Beasts, the first film released next year. It’s just… it was funny, some of the questions and some of the answers that we got, how excited he was to hear that Eric had gotten a chance to go to the Wizarding World as a preview. And yeah, so I encourage people, go check it out. I mean, we have, obviously, 278 other episodes to listen to, but that was one of my favorites. I know we have other episodes where we’ve interviewed cast and crew from the films, and they’ve all been great, but this one was special because this guy has been involved with the series since really day one.
Andrew: Oh, yeah. And now Fantastic Beasts.
Micah: Yeah, absolutely.
Andrew: So moving on to This Month in Potter History, June is actually a very busy month in terms of major releases. First of all, Philosopher’s Stone was published over in the UK June 30, 1997.
Eric: Oooh.
Andrew: So we’re approaching the 20 year anniversary. [laughs]
Laura: Oh my God. That’s insane.
Andrew: Sorcerer’s Stone did not come out on the same day; I believe it came out a few months later. That September, I believe? Or the following year?
Eric: I think it was the following year, yeah.
Andrew: Okay. Yeah, of course, that was before it blew up. But Chamber of Secrets in the US was published June 1999. I still remember going… the story I always tell is that my entry into Harry Potter, I was read Sorcerer’s Stone in elementary school, and then as soon as my teacher finished – I guess this was 1999 – I went into the local bookstore, Borders at the time, and there was Chamber of Secrets right at the front, because it had just come out. So I think my teacher had read Sorcerer’s Stone to us in May/June 1999, and then I went to the bookstore after, and boom, there it was right at the front. Crazy. So also this month in history, Order of the Phoenix was published in June 2003. Did we all go to midnight release parties for that one? Micah didn’t.
Laura: I did.
Andrew: Yeah?
Laura: I totally did, yeah.
Andrew: Where did you go, Laura?
Laura: I went to… I think it was a Barnes & Noble in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Andrew: [in a southern accent] Alpharetta.
Laura: [in a southern accent] Alpharetta, Georgia.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: And I was… God, in 2003, how old was I? I was 14? So I definitely dressed up too.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: As? Do you remember?
Laura: Just generic… I put on robes and stuff. It was fun.
Andrew: Yeah. Just like Eric does to this day.
Eric: Yes.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: Hey, no shame, no shame.
Andrew: What midnight party did you go to, Eric?
Eric: Oh, it was a big one, the one in Oak Park, Illinois held by the Magic Tree Bookstore.
Andrew: Oh, the one MuggleNet did.
Eric: Where they changed their… all the local businesses on Oak Park Avenue transformed themselves into Diagon Alley.
Andrew: Yeah, that looked pretty cool.
Eric: Yeah, a pretty big thing. It was something they did for the following book releases as well, but this was the real big one, the first one, and the first time I’d been out of state for a MuggleNet thing, so it was a lot of fun.
Andrew: Yeah, I went to my local Barnes & Noble for Order of the Phoenix, and I remember a couple of the “cool” kids from middle school or high school being there…
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: … and I was like, “Oh, this is cool. They’re here. That’s pretty sweet.” I felt validated in my interest in Harry Potter.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: [in a nerdy voice] “Well, if the cool kids like it, I guess I should like it too.”
Eric: It’s true.
Andrew: “I mean, I guess it’s okay to like it.” [laughs] So then the following year in June 2004, Prisoner of Azkaban the movie was released.
Eric: [imitating Sirius] “You’d know all about the madness within, wouldn’t you?”
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: My story with that was I felt the film ended really abruptly. I went to the bathroom towards the end of the movie, and then I came back and it was over. I’d missed the ending.
Eric: Aww.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: And then I remember getting the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD and watching the end finally, and it pauses on that freeze frame of Harry riding Buckbeak, and I was like, “What the hell?”
Eric: “I waited for this?”
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, “How did nobody tell me about this?” So yeah. And then more recently, jumping six years ahead: June 18, 2010, the original Wizarding World opened in Orlando.
Eric: Ooh.
Laura: And we were all there, right? We went right…
Andrew: Not for the opening.
Laura: Not for the opening, but right after it opened.
Andrew: Yeah, what was that? Infinitus? The Harry Potter…
Micah: Sounds right.
Laura: And they shut down the whole park for us.
Micah: Us. Just us.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Laura: Not just us, but all the people who were there for Infinitus.
Andrew: Right.
Laura: So we got to hang out in it by ourselves. It was cool.
Andrew: Well, and the other cool thing was that we did the podcast in the Leaky Cauldron.
Laura: Oh, yeah, that’s right! Oh my God, that was so much fun.
Andrew: Yeah, that was really, really, really neat. I remember there being sound problems, but other than that, it was really, really neat. [laughs]
Eric: Yeah, they wouldn’t turn off the music, because they couldn’t turn off the music.
Andrew: Oh, right.
Eric: I think as long as that whole area has power, it will play the soundtrack from those films.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Andrew: “You will listen to this soundtrack.” I mean, we were in the middle of a theme park. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about that. [laughs]
Eric: No, no, but ultimately it was very intimate. You had to lean in to hear us.
Andrew: Yeah. And then four years to the day, actually, Diagon Alley opened up in Orlando as well.
Eric: That’s cool.
Andrew: So that was just a year ago. Pretty amazing. So that’s what happened this month in Harry Potter history.
Pen and Paper Are My Priority
Andrew: Moving along to our final segment of the day, Pen and Paper Are My Priority. Of course, J.K. Rowling continues to remain busy on Twitter, but I think Eric noted… Eric, you went back in her history like a stalker. [laughs]
Eric: No, no, no. It’s public, it’s public, it’s public. If she hid it, it would be stalking.
Andrew: [laughs] Not necessarily.
Eric: Well, anyway, there was a period of eight days where she didn’t tweet anything.
Andrew: What do you guys think she was doing?
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Eric: Recharging her batteries would be my guess.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: But anyway, no, our last episode came out on May 17, and so I guess we recorded probably that day or the day before, and it had been five or six days since a tweet, and two further days went by without a tweet. But then, of course, everything from May 19 to today, she has not taken a day off. There is something huge that happens every single day, something going on on her Twitter. So it’s pretty exciting.
Andrew: [laughs] J.K. Rowling makes news every day on Twitter.
Eric: It was just funny; my girlfriend gets tweets to her phone, which she’s seriously considering not doing anymore, because we’ll be somewhere and she’ll just look down at her phone and go, “Oh God, she’s at it again.” And I know she means J.K. Rowling tweeting about something.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Eric: Sometimes it’s stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with Americans, right? It’s political and in Scotland and all that stuff.
Micah: Well, I was going to say something about that. And look, when you agree to follow somebody, you’re following the person.
Eric: Yes.
Micah: I think one of the things that people often forget is that you’re not just following the author of the Harry Potter series; you’re following a human being who has clear thoughts and perspectives, and she makes them very, very clear when she tweets. And I would say, though, if I could give her a bit of advice, she seems to get riled up by people who say things about her. And I just… I would ignore it. I mean, I don’t think she needs to make examples of them all the time, or to fire back at them. People are going to then continue to do the types of things that they have been doing, and that’s go at her knowing that they’re going to get a response. And I would just think that she’s had enough of that over the last 10 or 20 years; she doesn’t need to even engage these people at all.
Laura: You mean like when she made certain assumptions about a particular gentleman’s endowments on Twitter?
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Well, he called her a c-word, but still.
Laura: Yeah, no, no, it was totally uncalled for. But yeah, I do think that maybe there’s a little bit of a social media learning curve going on.
Andrew: I think J.K. Rowling is someone who just enjoys getting into these heated discussions, surprisingly. I never would have expected this of her. But the other day, I mean, she was doing all this tweeting about stuff. Honestly, I just don’t know about it.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: And somebody brought up to me on Twitter, “Well, maybe she thinks her followers can learn something from this.” I was like, “Well, yeah, maybe, but I don’t know if it’s good Twitter etiquette.” But whatever. So I wanted to talk about more of the lighter moments that she’s had on Twitter in the past month. For example, Matt Lewis, who now is super in shape, he had a cover story in Attitude magazine, and he’s shirtless and in his underwear. And she sent a tweet to Matt Lewis and said about these images, “Not as bad as watching Dan in Equus, but close. Warn me next time, for God’s sake.”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: Which was really funny, because these pictures are steamy.
Eric: They’re very steamy. He got her comment and replied to it, or quoted the tweet and said, “Well, this is awkward. Sorry, Jo.”
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Andrew: It’s like your mom looking at your…
Eric: Yeah, it’s like your mom coming in and seeing what you’ve done and going like, “Oh, all right.”
[Laura laughs]
Eric: But her response to that, I wanted to mention. Her response to that tweet where he said, “Well, this is awkward” was the best tweet ever, as far as I’m concerned.
Andrew: That was a good one from her, for sure.
Eric: I have to find it in this damn thing. Where is it? She says, “It’s all right. Now go put some clothes on.” Hang on…
Andrew: Something like that.
Eric: Yeah, okay. “I will always support you whatever you want to do, Matthew. Now go put some clothes on.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: So I love those two. I love how J.K. Rowling is publicly still in the lives of the actors and children from the Harry Potter films.
Andrew: Yeah. So elsewhere on Twitter, she also… when Ireland decided to legalize gay marriage, she said, “Sitting here watching the Irish make history. Extraordinary and wonderful.” She also… oh, this was a good zinger. So the Westboro Baptist Church in Ireland tweeted, “So J.K. Rowling wants Dumbledore and Gandalf to marry in Ireland.” Because she had said something about that earlier in the month. “If it happens, WBC will picket.”
Laura: Oh, geez.
Andrew: First of all, guys, Dumbledore and Gandalf are fictional.
Eric: And they’re two separate series. You wouldn’t find them together.
Andrew: Right, so what do you mean “if it happens”?
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: So then J.K. Rowling tweeted, “Alas, the sheer awesomeness of such a union in such a place would blow your tiny bigoted minds out of your thick sloping skulls.” Boom!
Eric: Amazing.
Micah: Wow.
Andrew: Dropped a Twitter bomb.
Micah: 14,000 retweets. 25,000 favorites.
Laura: Ah, that’s amazing.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: “Thick sloping skulls.” She’s calling them unevolved.
Andrew: And then on Draco’s birthday, somebody tweeted her, “It’s Draco Malfoy’s birthday today, isn’t it? How old would he be turning?” And then she replied, “Draco turns 35 today. I’m not invited to his party, mainly because I keep telling girls they’re misguided to fancy him.”
[Everyone laughs]
Eric: Again, it’s like the mom effect, right?
Andrew and Laura: Yeah.
Andrew: And something a little… well, besides the “American Hogwarts” thing, she didn’t drop any real Harry Potter revelations this month. But she did confirm that Fred was born first, and she said, “I always thought that was obvious.” But what does she mean by that?
Eric: Somebody replied to that tweet and was like, “Because F comes before G in the alphabet?”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: I guess. That’s how I remember Bill and Charlie, to be perfectly honest.
Andrew: Well, aren’t there theories about the first one being born being smarter or something?
Eric: I mean, yeah, I’m sure there’s some writing on that. I don’t know about proof, but yeah, definitely opinion. That’s how I remember Bill and Charlie, actually, which is funny, because Bill is older, because B comes before C.
Andrew: I always remember Fred being the one who died, because Fred is dead. It rhymes.
Eric: Fred is dead, it rhymes, yeah.
Andrew: Sad but true. [laughs] So that’s J.K. Rowling on Twitter. Jo, thank you for continuing to bless us with these tweets. I continue to keep trying to get her attention, but still no reply.
Eric: Same. You really have to be there at the right moment. You have to say something that’s… did I say this last time? Did I give a recipe for…? I’m having déjà vu here. The recipe for getting Jo to tweet you back, not that any of us have been successful in doing it. But you have to tweet on an off day, like a Wednesday.
Andrew: Right, when her mentions tab is slower.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t know if they go down, and that’s why that makes sense. And you can’t ask a direct Harry Potter question, or if you do, it has to be disguised so that it’s like, “My friend says so-and-so is this way.”
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Eric: When really what you mean to ask is, “Was this character in this particular situation meaning to say this or do this?” And then she’ll jump on it, and it’s like for some reason she finds you, and then responds to it. You really have to mold and craft.
Andrew: It’s really luck of the draw. I think that’s what it comes down to.
Eric: Don’t be obvious.
Andrew: I said a couple months ago, she replied to one of Hypable’s writers. She actually replied twice to Michal, and the one tweet was just the “XO.” I was like, “Oh, I just want an XO from J.K. Rowling.”
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: That’s all I want, because then I want to print it out on a shirt and wear it forever.
Eric: Yes.
Laura: “XO”? Is J.K. Rowling the new Gossip Girl or something? What’s with the XO?
Andrew: Kiss and hug!
Eric: J.K. Rowling: “@Sims, XO.”
Andrew: They do that over in England all the time. Maybe it was an “XX.” Kiss, kiss. That’s the popular thing over there. So I mean, I continue to ask her… I think, Micah, you just asked me what I do. Well, I asked her to stop with the public argument the other day. [laughs]
Eric: Oh.
Andrew: I don’t think that helped get a response.
Laura: Probably not.
Andrew: I asked her if she agreed… oh, we actually skipped this earlier, but it’s okay. Some person wrote an article for Time telling J.K. Rowling that she should stop writing about Harry Potter, because it’s ruining the magic, but it was pretty obvious this person hadn’t read Harry Potter. So anyway, I tweeted her, “Do you agree with me on this?” I was just shamelessly plugging my stuff. But anyway, that’s all we have for this installment of MuggleCast 279. We will be back in July. We are always… we are now doing these episodes monthly. Tell your friends about the podcast! We keep getting tweets; “Oh, I just discovered your podcast. Enjoying it a lot.” Which is so great to hear, so thank you to all of our listeners, whether you’ve been listening for almost ten years now, or you’ve been just listening for ten days.
Eric: Oh, gosh.
Andrew: You can visit the MuggleCast website to hear every episode of the podcast, and we would love a review on iTunes. If you just go to iTunes and leave a review there, get some fresh reviews in there, we would really appreciate that. Feel free to share your honest thoughts. Feel free to tweet us, Twitter.com/MuggleCast, Facebook.com/MuggleCast. I wanted to also plug the podcast that Laura and I are doing. Laura, can you tell everybody about Millennial?
Laura: Yes, so #Millennial – the hashtag is silent, by the way – is actually hosted by myself, Andrew, Matt, and Elysa. So the three of us aside from Andrew were on MuggleCast at some point in history, and Millennial is a weekly podcast that offers commentary on world events, pop culture, news, politics, all through this perspective of young adults who all are friends with each other. And we have a really good general knowledge of current events, so each week, we’ll be discussing what’s going on with the world, and taking our own interesting, funny spin on it. You should definitely listen. It’s a great show.
Andrew: Yeah, MillennialShow.com, or just search for Millennial. You can either do #Millennial or just Millennial on the iTunes store, if you want to search that way.
Micah: You’ll certainly have a lot to talk about on the next episode.
Andrew: Oh, yes.
Laura: Oh my God, yeah.
Andrew: Matt… I almost called you Matt. Micah and Elysa… oh my God.
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: You guys have the same initials!
Eric: We’re not on Millennial, Andrew.
Micah: Intentional.
Andrew: Micah and Eric, do you want to plug Game of Owns?
Micah: Sure. So we actually just wrapped up the fifth season of Game of Thrones… well, not us personally, but you know. The show ended last Sunday, and we were actually out doing a live show in Chicago, and it was a lot of fun. Got to meet a lot of listeners. But now, as the season is officially over, we will head into what we call our “on season,” where we go through the books chapter by chapter, similar to what we did for many, many years on MuggleCast, and we encourage you to check it out. Game of Owns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and we’re on iTunes, so just go give us a search. Download and give it a listen; let us know what you think.
Andrew: All right.
Eric: I’d also like to plug Alohomora, which is MuggleNet’s global reread podcast of the Harry Potter books. We actually just read the “Sectumsempra” chapter; we’re in Book 6. But basically each episode of that podcast – it’s called Alohomora – is dedicated to a chapter in the Harry Potter series. So just like we used to do on this show, we are actually causing them… all of our listeners are reading along with us, and each week we have a guest host from the Harry Potter community come on and actually talk about the chapter and solicit discussion from the listeners and all sorts of interesting stuff. So kind of like reading the Harry Potter books with a complete knowledge of how it’s going to end, and also, now that we’re older, whether or not things still flow the same way, as well as all those clues and stuff like that. So it’s good fun.
Andrew: What if we reread the books now, and we realize that we don’t like it? “Damn, Harry Potter sucks. What were we thinking?”
Eric: [laughs] There’s always Robert Galbraith.
Andrew: [laughs] All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for listening. We will be back in July with a new episode. I’m Andrew Sims.
Eric: I’m Eric Scull.
Micah: I’m Micah Tannenbaum.
Laura: And I’m Laura Tee.
[Andrew and Eric laugh]
Eric: Laura, have you changed your name recently?
Andrew: No… yeah, I totally understand.
Eric: Okay.
Andrew: But Laura… yeah. All right, we’ll see everybody next time for Episode 280. Goodbye.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Eric: Do you want to trade last names, Laura? [laughs]
Micah: No, just… if you want to know, go back and listen to old episodes.
[Andrew laughs]
Laura: Yeah, exactly. There are 100 something episodes that have my last name in them.
[Eric laughs]
Andrew: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to say.