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- Doyle Dean interviewing students at Bread & Butter Farm
"Baby Carl's Happy Apocalypse" is a podcast about fighting climate change and social injustice, but with a twist: 56-year-old Doyle Dean interviews Vermonters while embodying the persona of a happy, inquisitive toddler named Baby Carl.
Baby Carl's questions are simple yet profound. "Why does it say moo?" he asked about a cow at Bread & Butter Farm in Shelburne during one episode.
"We don't have any snow, but it's December!" Baby Carl told Matt Schlein, director of the Walden Project, an outdoor education program in Monkton, in another. "What's up with that?"
Carl's childlike innocence and naïveté offer an accessible entry point for tackling serious topics, said Dean, a production manager at North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y. He cocreated the podcast with Bill Vitek, director of Middlebury College's New Perennials Project, which aims to spread sustainable agricultural practices.
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- "Baby Carl's Happy Apocalypse"
For the podcast's first five episodes, released throughout the second half 2023, Vitek and Dean road-tripped across Vermont to capture audio of Baby Carl interviewing New Perennials' community partners. In addition to Bread & Butter Farm, the duo visited two outdoor education programs — the Walden Project and the New Roots Project — run by the Willowell Foundation in Monkton, as well as Green Mountain Monastery in Greensboro. The podcast has about 500 downloads so far, according to Vitek. It's available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other services.
The approximately 40-minute episodes feature witty repartee between Vitek and Baby Carl; Baby Carl's interviews with Vermonters advocating for sustainability; and short, satirical songs. "Baby Carl's just a little guy, but he asks big questions," Dean/Baby Carl sings in the theme song.
The show is intended for adults, but kids can enjoy it, too, Vitek said. No topic is too grown-up for Baby Carl: Conversations segue from lighthearted banter to climate change, school shootings, political polarization and threats to American democracy. The toddler character "removes the ego" from conversations, he explained, and encourages his interviewees to be more vulnerable.
"I did have a moment the very first day of interviews ... when I realized, Oh, I'm about to go meet people as a baby," Dean said. "So you kind of have to remind them, in the baby voice, 'I'm going to talk to you now. And I might look like a big guy, but I'm not. I'm just a little guy.'"
Baby Carl started as a joke between Dean and his kids. Dean would goof around and use a baby voice, the kind of high-pitched tone he might use to talk to a dog. Then Dean had an idea: What if he talked to people outside his family using that voice? He named the character Carl, he said, because he "couldn't think of a more ridiculous name for a baby." For some listeners, Carl's shrill voice may be an acquired taste. "This isn't for everyone, and that's OK," Dean said.
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- Doyle Dean, Baby Carl and Corie Pierce of Bread & Butter Farm
In 2015, Dean turned the character into a YouTube series, "The Baby Carl Show." For the video, Dean superimposed his lips on a vintage photograph of a real toddler, and the lips move as he talks. In one episode, he interviewed Vitek, who was his neighbor at the time in Potsdam, N.Y. The two had a rapport, and when Vitek moved to Middlebury to work on the New Perennials Project, he asked Baby Carl to create educational videos about perennial plants.
Vitek shared the videos with colleagues, who advised him not to show them to the grant funder from the Rockefeller Family Fund, he said, because "it was a little too weird," and he "might think you're wasting his money." Three years after making the videos, Vitek finally worked up the courage to show them to the grant funder. He loved them, Vitek said — and encouraged Vitek and Baby Carl to move ahead with a podcast.
In the first episode, released last June, Vitek and Baby Carl talk about how the word "apocalypse" — a scary, doomsday word often used in the context of climate change — comes from the Greek term apokálypsis, meaning uncovering, disclosure or revelation. In subsequent episodes, Baby Carl asks his interviewees about their "happy apocalypse," or a moment when they had a revelation about what gives their life purpose.
Meghan Rigali, cofounder and director of the New Roots Project, told Baby Carl in Episode 2 that her happy apocalypse was being amazed as a child to find Brussels sprouts growing in nature and bringing some home to her mom. The unexpected discovery of food in the wild inspired her to dedicate her life to connecting people with the earth.
In Episode 5, Green Mountain Monastery's Sister Gail Worcelo said her happy apocalypse happened when she was 7 years old and saw a group of nuns sitting in a circle. She thought, I'm going to be like them when I grow up. "It was like a lightning bolt," Worcelo told Baby Carl. "That was it, and it directed my whole life."
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Dean said Baby Carl's interview style helps facilitate emotional conversations; interviewees seem to have an easier time answering intimate questions when the person asking them is pretending to be a baby. "It helps to have innocence lead the way," Vitek explained. Dean "was magical in these interviews at disarming people, because they really bought into it that he was a baby."
In one poignant exchange during Rigali's episode, Baby Carl asked her how she copes with climate change.
"Do you cry?" Baby Carl asked.
"Yes, I do," Rigali responded. "I have wept from deep down inside of me, because I can't not be affected."
Rigali agreed that Baby Carl made it easy to open up. She bought into the concept from the start, appreciating how the perspective of a child could add levity to the conversation. Dean never broke character, she added, making it easier for her to play along.
"If I had been asked those questions and had a dialogue with two grown men, that would have been a completely different conversation," Rigali said. "We could straddle that line of talking about serious issues," she added, without being bogged down in "existential angst."
Vitek said he hopes to continue producing episodes, featuring guests beyond New Perennials' partners. Some dream interviewees for Baby Carl: Middlebury College president Laurie Patton, Ripton environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
"We can all maybe do something to help that bad apocalypse by having a good apocalypse," Vitek tells Baby Carl in the first episode.
"My love helping!" Baby Carl responds, mixing up his pronouns.