Tomorrow - Episode 82: Total Relaxation with Jeffrey Cranor

Episode Date: February 14, 2017

COMMUNITY BULLETIN: Joshua Topolsky, our humble hero, has scored an audience with Jeffrey Cranor, lord of Night Vale, creator of Within the Wires, eater of darkness, dreamer of dreams. If only it wasn't on street cleaning day. The two podcasters met in the abandoned warehouse behind the forbidden duck pond, to discuss pressing town issues like our growing dystopia, the fate of civilization, and the television show Lost. It is a conversation as dense with profundity as the trash cans on Main Street are dense with secrets. Remember citizens, the only thing that can keep the Boy Scouts from pillaging your homes is playing the Tomorrow podcast on a loop. So here's Episode 82 to get you started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey and welcome to Tomorrow, I'm your host Josh with Polsky. Today on the podcast we discuss relaxation cassettes, fan art, and northern exposure. But first, a word from our sponsor. USAAA is passionate about what they do, ensuring the financial security of the military community and their families. As an employer, USAAA creates conditions for employees to succeed. USAAA is hiring for customer service reps, designers, developers, insurance, banking, and more. This is the monline and see over 200 jobs available. It's an organization that provides opportunities for you to collaborate, create, and lead. Find your purpose with USAAA.

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and start taking your dreams and making them real, and then taking things that are real and trying them into dreams. And my guest today is the co-creator real and then taking things that are real and trying them into dreams. My guest today is the co-creator and co-writer of the heavily acclaimed Welcome to Night Vale and the relatively new within the wires. I'm of course talking about the incredibly talented Jeffrey Kramer. Jeffrey, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me. So look, you are kind of like an icon in the world of podcasts. I mean, you are one of these people who's created something that has a life far beyond what most can expect. I mean, as a person who's been doing podcasts for a long time, welcome to Nightfale is what I'm talking about. Is like an iconic entrant in the world of podcasts. So let me ask you a question. How do you do that?

What's your secret? I really, I just to backtrack for one second, I really like the term icon. I have not heard that before. That's really amazing. I appreciate that really fine marble pedestal that I get to stand on. I, please.

But it's true. It's true. I mean, it is like a, there's nothing else, there was nothing else like it before it appeared. And there, I don't think there's been anything quite like it since. And I think that people look at that as one of those,

not to ramble, but they look at it one of those things that stretches the possibilities of what this medium allows. And so, I am, and that, of course, is a joke to say, but they look at it one of those things that stretches the Possibilities of what this medium allows and so I am the of course is a joke to say how do you do it? But what I mean How does that happen? Well, yeah, I mean how do you do it like when Joseph think and I my friend Joseph who Created the idea of Night Vale and and he and I started writing it from the very beginning together You know when our idea was to just make something nobody else was doing.

We both listened to a lot of podcasts. You know, I think at the back in 2011, when we first started talking about this idea, I was listening to things like a comedy bang bang and stop podcasting yourself. And Jordan Jesse Goe and my brother, my brother and me and the Bowery Boys and WTF and this American life, etc. Like a lot of the really popular, really great podcasts that have been around for a long time and those shows were

all doing something that Joseph and I can't do. You know, I'm not an expert on New York history. I'm not a I'm not a comedian. We're not improvisers. We're not journalists. So there's a lot of shows that we're doing things way better than we could. And also they already existed. So we had to come up with something that we felt was our own thing and something that fit our talents. And we're both playwrights and writers.

And so we thought, well, storytelling seems like the way to go. And there didn't really seem to be, we started looking for podcasts that were fiction, serialized fiction podcasts. And there really wasn't much out there other than, say, like, thrilling adventure hour, which was actually a stage show that they recorded the live performances

and put out as a podcast. It wasn't produced as for the podcast medium. And so, yeah, that is good. Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, it counts in the sense of their hilarious and amazing. But yeah, we wanted to do something different than what they were doing. And, you know, we both really like monologues. We really like storytelling.

We both come out of downtown New York City Theater. So, and if you know anything about downtown New York City Theater, is that it's really expensive because it's theater and it's in New York City Theater. So, and if you know anything about downtown New York City Theater, is that it's really expensive because it's theater and it's in New York City. And so, you have to really find ways to tell stories on the cheap. And so, we come out of this idea of just a single person on a stage telling a really good story, and that's what we tried to do. So, okay, so imagine we we're gonna talk about welcome, I won't talk about a bunch of things, but you know, imagine for a second, someone has never heard of this show,

they've never heard the show, how would you explain it, like you're introducing this to somebody, like, and actually, for me, I'm sort of curious to know how you think of this as a piece of art. So, so, explain welcome to Night Vale for the uninitiated. I feel like the the short version of it is that it is a community of radio updates from a small strange desert town where every conspiracy theory is true and things such as secret police and angels and underground civilizations are just part

of normal everyday life. And the people there live their lives and just accept that and move on. And that's really how it's structured. That's all there is to it. We try to just be true to the community radio format in some ways. And we have community calendars and updates on the high school football team and, you know,

PTA bake sales and just local news like, you know, things like, things like street cleaning day is coming this week. Everybody run and hide because we're all going to die. Right. The street cleaning is not like, you're getting the trash off the street. Right, it's like there's some horrible machine that's going to happen. What does happen to street cleaning actually?

Maybe I don't, I'm gonna have it hurt that I'm gonna put that book. No, I think you were on the right track. It's a very, very bloody day. It is one of the worst days in all of Night Vale. No. Yeah. I mean, and a lot of the backdrop for Night Vale to me, so I started listening to it, and I'll admit,

I've heard the first episode, I'm like, you know what, fuck this, like this is not for me, like I'm not going to get into this, by the way, yes, you can swear on this podcast. Oh great. You're wondering, I'm so pleased, feel free to unleash an expletive after expletive. Oh, heck yes. But like when I first heard I was like, no, fuck this, I'm not into it.

Like this is too, I felt like it was too scripted. I've been listening to podcasts that were just people talking or like, you know, sort of in-depth interviews. But then, I don't know, there was something about it. And I kept listening and I started to get really immersed in it. And the one of the things that I think was a hook for me

is that a lot of the inspiration it feels like you guys are drawing on is like very love crafty and there's stuff there that's very love crafty and there's definitely, you know, if you're a fan of the ex files, there are things you'll be like, wow, this is great. Like, what are the influences? Like, what are the things that you guys were thinking about? I'm sorry, I'm probably, you've probably heard these questions a million times. No, it's a, it's a, allow me to just feel like, if I feel some of these like the needs that I have, which is like, what, how do you, like, were you guys reading stuff or you watching stuff, was there some, was it, just been like, in the background for you the whole time,

these like influences? Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's an malgumation of a lot of different inspirations. We get Lovecraft a lot, and I think there's a lot of Lovecraftian horror to what we're doing. Both Joseph and I really sort of dislike Lovecraft both as being sort of a bad writer and also a racist piece of shit. But he was... And yet so influential. He's so influential and so much of what he was creating was, I think actually would

work in some ways really well in a radio or audio only format because of he does sort of avoid describing a lot of things. You know, he comes with the same words over and over. Yeah, he's the same words. There's a repetition. And I think that there's a, there's the joke about lovecraft of like, I think a couple of times in his stories, he uses, he's trying to describe something and he says it's indescribable,

or indescribable, I'm sorry, it's indescribable. Indescribable. And I'm like, no, but you're a writer, you should try. And. Yeah, just give it, just give it a whirl. I mean, just give it a whirl. Just give it a whirl. Yeah, I don't, I don't want it. He's set of words you should try. And just give it a whirl. I mean, just give it a word. Yeah, I don't want to use that of words you could use.

Yeah, I don't want to line at it your work, but this is a thought. But yeah, I think there's obviously the idea of looking at something so unspeakably or indescribably horrible that it makes you, that it destroys your psyche or destroys your body. I think is really fascinating. I think, yeah, I think there's a lot of horror background. Joseph is a bigger horror film fan than I am, but I definitely grew up reading Stephen King nonstop as a child.

And so that's definitely there. So, yeah. The shows are sort of like disconnected. I mean, when I started listening, I expected, I guess I expected more of a connection between each episode. And there are things that unfold that you started to pick up on. You're like, Oh, okay, wait, there's, I'm getting more of the story. And there's relationships that kind of unfold in ways that, that, you know, are not overt in the sense that they aren't like you're hearing two people act out of scene.

Was that plan from the start that you would have these kind of latent narratives that were happening, these sort of continuous narratives with this on top of or next to what feels like relatively free form a lot of the time. It was not planned at all. We didn't really see past like five or 10 episodes when we started writing it, not that we didn't think we would write more than five

or 10 episodes, but just that the only thing we told each other when we set out to make it was after that pilot episode, we were like that was sort of like bizarre poetry and love crafty and horror and strange weird fiction style humor. But no, we just thought, well, all we need to do is just, you know, we need to make a show that is around this length. We need to put it out on a set schedule so that people know when it's going to be there and we need to Because it's fiction. We need to just hold to strict continuity Strict continuity for us meaning basically like you know if you you know set up something for the universe

Don't completely destroy it in the next episode You know like if if something happens then that that happened and it just you should have that acknowledgement and as we got through and you should have that acknowledgement. And as we got through about 15 or 20 episodes, we started seeing a lot of different stories start forming and the lives of some of the characters changing. And so you're like, well, you have to address that. We're just going to move forward in time.

And some of the non, we don't do a, when you listen to an episode, they come out on the first and the 15. So if you listen to the episode on the first out on the first and the 15th. So if you listen to the episode on the first, on the 15th, you're very likely not to pick up exactly where the last one left off. And our idea would be, it is kind of like listening to a radio program,

a couple of weeks have passed. Who knows what's been going on in that time. There's probably a lot of stuff you missed because you weren't hearing these other episodes that happened. And also to kind of like because we're 101 episodes in, 102 episodes in, and so at this point, it can be really daunting, I think, for people to say, like, I've never heard this show, I don't know where to begin to, I started episode one, can I pick it up at 102? What do I do here? And so I think we try to write the show in a way that there are episodes that are very

plot heavy, meaning that they're dealing with stuff that's been building for 20, 30, 40, 50 episodes over time, like smaller stories or dealing with something that's happening in maybe like a six to 10 episode arc that we're playing with. But then there's just a lot of episodes that are, you know, kind of standalone that just kind of happen in there. So if you, I think it's very similar to like, I remember thinking when I was a kid and I heard Howard Stern show for the first time when I was a teenager and I had my own car. And I remember I didn't know who Howard Stern was, I just turned it on. I was like, this is unlike anything I've ever heard in my whole life. This is really an amazing radio because I just had never heard people on the radio like this before. This is like 1991 maybe. And I just thought, I had no idea

who all these people talking are. Like there's just so many people talking, but you just keep listening and eventually you just keep listening, and eventually you learn their stories, you learn what they're doing, you learn what they're about, whatever. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, that's sort of thing. Well, that's interesting because one of the things I think

when I have listened to Howard Stern recently, and certainly think about Night Vale is, it is like this, you're kind of inside of this universe for a little bit of time that's got its own rules and regulations and laws and characters and all this stuff. And it's like, you do tend to get, I don't, I listen to, I've listened to most, most hours, and frankly, a most audio I've listened to,

you know, podcasts or otherwise, is in my car. And it's like one of those things where it's like you're driving a night or in the morning or whatever. And you're just like in this zone where this whole thing is being kind of laid out for you. You don't necessarily know all the dimensions of it. I think this is something you guys have done really well.

But it's like you get a sense of the texture and you're kind of, you're in the moment, you're in that space. I think it's interesting to hear that there was something, it sounds like maybe intentional about that, where it's like the lack of information, but the heaviness of information, it does help to create that world more vividly.

Yeah, and I think so much of storytelling, just in general, whether you're writing weird fiction like Night Vale or whether you're writing a play or just telling a story at a party to people, I think there's always a balance between levity and gravity. And I think if you go to a party and you may tell your friends about something really terrible going on in your life

and they're like, oh, I'm really sorry to hear that you broke up or you lost your job or whatever. But at a certain point, you are storytelling. So you do have to kind of like moderate that a little bit. You have to remember to come back out of it because if you spend your whole three hours of the party just moping around about it, I lost my job. It's going to be bad storytelling. It may make you feel better.

I don't know, but it's something overlay. And I think the same thing in storytelling, telling is like we try and balance that constantly of having something that is very heartfelt and maybe more realistic, something that is about love, something that is about tragedy, and then at the same time, or something that is about horror and then you balance that out with a very odd joke or a fake ad from Home Depot or something like that to gonna break it all up. Yeah, the ads are, yeah, the ads are, the concept of fake ads generally is a really good idea,

I think. We're so inundated with real ads, it's like kind of refreshing. Yeah. What is community radio? Like I actually don't, I mean this is based on this concept of community radio. Maybe I'm stupid for not knowing what this is or what it's supposed to be, but I can't say that

I've ever heard an actual community radio broadcast. I wonder about this too because I haven't really done much research about like how common community radio is, but I grew up in a town called Mesquite. It's a suburb of Dallas, Texas. And in Mesquite, there is a radio station called KeOM, 88.5 FM. And they are a community radio station. Their format is mostly from what I remember, I haven't lived there in many, many years, but their format when I was a kid was hits of the 60s

and 70s, really. And maybe not even hits. I don't even know if they could afford the hits. It was so nice. Like, there are like, poppy music from there. The B-sides or discarded. There was like a dump, a record where they dumped

the old records that didn't sell and they would be able to come home. Yeah, something like that. And C-sides. That's right. It's totally C-sides of the weird, triangular records that people got. Yeah.

I, um, the, um, but I listened to that station a lot as a kid, uh, just because, I don't know, I liked that music, uh, as, you know, like when I was like nine, 10, 11, 12, you love that music. Yeah, I did. I loved bad music. It was great. Like, if you get some Eddie Rabbit, it was all great.

I love a rainy night. And, uh, the, I remember in, uh, in high school, I started listening to that station even more because two reasons one, they would play the high school football games for the Mesquite high school teams. So I would listen to their coverage of those games and I love sports. So it was fun to listen to local high school football games. And then during the day, high school students, there was a there was a radio program in Mesquite public schools. So all four of the high schools, you know, students could apply and do that. And I didn't apply to do that only based on how shy and incompetent I felt at the time. But,

you know, you know, that sense of like, oh, I'm too scared to do that. I like being in marching band and that's it. And but I had friends that did did that. It was really fun listening to them and they would do. Stuff that's not dissimilar to what we do on Night Vale, which is here's your community calendar. This Saturday night at Blah Blah, there's going to be a fundraiser for the PTA of whatever elementary school and it's going to be the future local bands and whatever.

They would do things like that or like the the Dal Summer musicals will be presenting so and so that show opens on Sunday afternoon at Fair Park Music Hall. You know, you'd have things like that, you would have traffic updates and you would have sports updates, you would have like local news about funding and the schools and things like that. So that's really what it was and it was fun to listen to that as a teenager, not because I was so interested in the local politics of my community, but I had friends that worked on the radio station. So it was fun to listen to them mess up street names when they were trying to do something

or whatever. So you don't, so I'm curious though, so the, so night veil as, like, as you envision it or as you think of it in your mind, are those just little snippets of, there would be otherwise, there's radio shows that are happening and there's music that's being played in Night Vale that we don't hear. Yeah, my thought would be there would be other radio stations there, because they're always are.

I mean, I don't know what this radio station is. I mean, on that channel, is this radio station is. On that channel. Is that the entirety of the broadcast, or are we only hearing a part of it? I think we're only hearing a part of it. I think there are other radio shows. I mean, the, you know, C-SOUL, the main character,

mostly the sole narrator of the show, is he occasionally, at the end of an episode, we will allude to stay tuned next for and he'll say whatever show is coming up. Right. I think one time- Right, so there's other shows. Yeah, there's some other shows on there.

I think our favorite joke, I don't remember which of us wrote it, so I can call it my favorite because maybe Joseph wrote it, but it was, I think, you know, we would always try and do something surreal, like stay tuned next for the sound of your own heart beating in your chest, and then later out of your chest, something like that, something great. And, um, but we had one where it was like, uh, we're just trying to play off of existing radio shows when we stay, is, said stay tuned next for our, um, popular, uh, game show, wait, wait, no, please don't know, stop, please, no, you know, so a little, wait, wait, no, please don't, no, stop, please, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Would we ever hear the other shows? Like, is it possible? There are other shows on the air

that we'll be able to listen to. I have a page full of ideas for other shows that would be really fun to make. I just haven't done that yet. But not just having fun around. Yeah, like other night veils shows that we would put onto the welcome to night veil feed. The only such example we really have is we have the kind of the rival town,

the Shelbyville to night veils Springfield, desert bluffs, or Eagleton, that's a more updated reference, right? Is it Eagleton? What's the name? What's Parks and Rec? Right, but tell me. Is it Eagleton sounds right to me? Yeah, sure. Yeah, okay. That's like where all the rich people live, is it? Yeah, I think you'll get the emails correcting it. So I definitely will, thank you.

Yeah, so like Desert Bluffs is the rival town tonight, and so we did one episode where there was a sand storm coming through the desert. And we did a two part episode that we dropped both episodes at the same time. And one is Cecil's broadcast in Nightvale of what the sand storm is doing. And then the other was from Kevin,

who is the host of Desert Bluffs Community Radio, broadcasting what's happening in Desert Bluffs. And so there are two very different experiences happening at the same time. So it's the only time we ever did, like here's this other radio show happening in this area of become. That's, that's, I, so I haven't heard that.

I mean, that makes me want to, I want to listen to this immediately because I'm very curious, I see I'm very curious about I want to connect all of the things that are talked about in Night Vale too. I want to figure out how it maps. I assume, and I have not delved into this, I assume people have done maps of Night Vale

and there are like character sketches and sort of life. Yeah, okay. And do you like that? Are you, like, is that helped to expand the universe, is that, does that help to expand the universe for you? It doesn't help to expand the universe. It's just fun to know that you made a thing that people are like, I'm gonna draw a picture of this character. You completely made up in your own head.

Or that somebody, you know, that I made up a thing. And somebody drew a picture of it. I think that's really, really cool. I think it's really amazing to have a fandom. Like, that was not something I ever thought would happen. And our fans are really like, we're very lucky in that we have very lovely fans who do good things and make good art.

And yeah, I really love that. I think it's really cool. Because sometimes people, there's a lot of sort of agreed upon crowd think of what Cil or Carlos or some of the other characters look like. But every so often somebody creates something that is so out of the norm, out of the usual that I think, oh, that's really amazing. I hadn't really thought that the angels would look like that.

That was not my head. And that's really cool. I'm glad you did that. Um, say I need to, I need to like Google more, Nightfale art, clearly. I need to really. There's a lot out there. We're just doing my own sketches, perhaps.

Oh, maybe you should, I would love that. That'd be great. I have a lot of free time, and I don't know why I'm spending it drawing sketches of welcome to Nightfale characters. I want to take a quick break for some advertising, and then I've got a bunch more questions. I swear they're not all going to be about welcome to Night Vale, but I have to say many of them are.

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so you can be covered wherever you are. And right now, this is very hot. This is very exciting. Listeners, to this podcast, can get a hundred dollar credit when signing up at getwiplash.com slash tomorrow. Okay, welcome back. I'm talking to Jeffrey Crater, one of the creators of Welcome to Nightfail and within the wires. We were just talking about fan art and my new career in making fan art for Welcome to Nightfail. But so here's the thing. Now, I'm assuming this has been a highly

profitable endeavor for you and you're extremely wealthy because of it. And you're now set, I mean, you're set for life. You've had a successful podcast that a lot of people love. And so I assume you don't need to make anything else. But to me, it seems like Night Vale, if you were interested in making more money and also making great art, it seems like Night Vale kind of lent itself perfectly to a television, like is the perfect television backdrop.

Like, obviously, on TV, you need characters that are doing things in, like, you know, kind of sequence. But the world of Nightfall seems so rich to me. Has there been any conversation about taking it from a podcast to something that is, like, bigger and bolder and on my television? that is like bigger and bolder and on my television. Yeah, we've had a lot of conversations about that with each other and with people who know more about how television works than we do. It's been a slow process and most of that has to do with how controlling we are about Night Vale. We went into this project with not with the goal of becoming famous or becoming entrepreneurs or making a lot of money at it because we just went into it being like, here's a cool story we want to tell. We've had so much fun writing and making

the story. It felt when Night Vale took off, we got a lot of emails from producer types that were like, hey, I want to talk to you about a TV show for this network or for this or whatever. And we just never, we just haven't quite, we just hadn't quite found a fit yet. And a lot of that had to do with, we didn't want to just sign over rights and get a check and then just move on. I think we want to be involved in what that is. And for us, we're writers and we do theater. So going from, you know, making a podcast seemed, that's acting and writing, and then doing a live show that's acting and writing and putting something on stage and interacting with an audience. And we're very comfortable with that.

And then we wrote the novel and we felt comfortable with that as writers and going into a more, yeah, going into film and television is a lot more complex because we, I mean, I barely ever shoot videos on my iPhone let alone actually produce and edit a television script and how to shoot that and how that works. So we've been talking to a lot of really cool people there kind of helping us with that process and getting more,

hopefully getting closer to something there. But there could be something. You think there might be something. Yeah, I think just like what you said, I totally agree with that. I think Nightville is rich with ideas that you could put on television. And I think so much of our influence, I think has been the weird town USA television genre, like all the way back from life.

Is that a weird town USA or genre? I think so, right? Like, you have things like, yeah, you have like Twilight Zone. And then when I was a kid, you had Irii and Deanna and you had the adventures of Pete and Pete, which is kind of a weird, you have like twilight zone. And then when I was a kid, you had Iri and Deanna. And you had the adventures of Pete and Pete, which is kind of a weird, you know, it's kind of like these things take place

in Americana type towns, often in the Midwest, but they're super natural in a way. Yeah, super natural sound. Yeah, to Twin Peaks, which is the ultimate in supernatural, you could even say something like Northern Exposure is a super realistic show, but it's also playing off the weird town thing.

The town itself becomes a character because it is so strange. By entering that town, your life instantly becomes weird. And nowadays, you have things like gravity falls, it was a really popular animated series from a couple years back that I think also fits that bill. And yeah, you know all the weird, you know all the weird town shows. I would Riverdale fall into that.

I just started, I watched the first episode of Riverdale, which is, is the Archie show. I don't know if you've seen this. I have not first episode of Riverdale, which is the Archie show. I don't know if you've seen this. I have not seen this. Did you know they made an Archie show? The CW, which is apparently all of the CW, I didn't know this, but all the CW does now is make like comic shows, which is kind of cool, I guess. It is cool.

But they made Archie into a show called Riverdale, like Archie and Veronica. And it's very updated, but it's also like very no-arish. Like there's a kind of twin peak-sishness to it, which is like there's some murders in it, and it may be a little bit too much for Archie, but I'm not really sure, but at any rate, what you, I was just thinking about it as you were talking about this,

because like I'm like, oh, I guess that is a thing on television. I haven't thought about that much. Northern exposure, it's funny. I thought of it as you were talking about this, because I'm like, oh, I guess that is a thing on television. I haven't thought about that much. Northern exposure, it's funny. I thought of it while we were talking a little bit earlier, and it's the one show that I actually can think of that what has a community radio station in the town, right? Isn't that like one of the big things

like his girlfriend, the main character's girlfriend, is like the DJ at the local radio station or something. I think so. It is not fresh in my memory at all, but yes, I think you're right. Well, it's very vivid in my memory. I'm always thinking about Northern exposure. But I think as far as community radio goes, that's probably where I'm most familiar is

on the depiction of it on Northern exposure. A great show starring Rob Marrow. I think that's who the star was. Well, I thought of it because I've been watching the people versus OJ Simpson on Netflix this past week. And he did it. That's where he paid for. He paid for his very check, I think.

Yeah. And I remember seeing him just thinking, Rob Marrow is so exciting to see him again. Yeah. Yeah, it's finally, we've all been waiting all the Northern exposure fans, North Axis we call ourselves. No, North Axis we call ourselves.

North Axiah, yeah. But anyhow, okay, so maybe Nightvill becomes, we will see some sort of like, well TV maybe is kind of selling it short, but like some video form of what at this point is a pure audio thing. Yeah, yeah, I hope so. I'd like to do that someday. Graphic novel too.

Again, just a genre. I don't know how to enter into because I'm not an artist, yeah. So now you've taken the welcome tonight, Val. You've tried it into kind of like an empire. You've got several other shows on your podcast network. Alice isn't dead. The orbiting human circus of the air. Is that right? Is it? Yeah of the air, is that right?

Is it, and can I say that right? Because I will talk to not having listened to these. And I haven't listened to within the wires, which is, is that your newest thing that you've done? Orbiting human circus was the newest thing. We just wrapped up the first season and of that. And within the wires was our, was the second show we added.

And Alice isn't dead, premiered premiered last, uh, March. And season two is coming very soon. Um, so, so the next couple of months. So tell me about, so tell me about one like deciding to, to, I mean, these aren't spin offs, right? I mean, these are completely standalone. Yeah, completely standalone. And, and, and how does, what's the decision that where you go from, hey, where these creators that are making this show to, we're now going to,

well, clearly you're making new stuff, but then also be involved, maybe not so directly in other productions, like, what, how does that come about? And what's the benefit there? Like, what's the advantage for you guys? Well, there's two things. I mean, the number one benefit is just artistic, right? You just, you just, Joseph and I had these, Joseph had this idea for this show about a truck driver and kind of like a horror thriller motif and that, you know, she believes her, you know, her wife to be dead, but she is not, that isn't the title, that is not a spoiler. Don't send me an email saying, is Alistad? And the, you know, so you had this idea for the show,

and I had this idea for within the wires from a few years ago about doing a whole podcast that is told in the style of relaxation cassettes. And as you... What is that? But first off, I mean, relax as you cassettes. You say it as if, like, I'm gonna go, well, of course, the style of relaxation cassettes.

Yeah, you know, you know the thing. Can you expand on what the style of, well, first of what are relaxation cassettes and what is the style? Well, like the relaxation tape is the, is the kind of, I feel like we've all seen at least a parody of this or heard a parody of the style, which is the, you hear kind of like peaceful,

new agey music like you would hear in a, you know, if you were at a spa or something like that. And then you hear this peaceful, new agey, symphony music. And then there's a calming voice saying, you know, you know, breathe in through your nose, feel the air into your lungs, and exhale. Like that sort of like calming voice that tells you, like, here are some exercises, you know, stand, feed apart, lower, you know, bend your body from your torso, feel the blood,

blah, blah, blah. You can do a lot of things of like feeling your body, or it's a meditation cassette, or some of them are in the guys of subliminal tapes, which I'm sure don't work at all, but however those are. And so you have that style. My thought was if you set it up, is it like singing, like it's, you know, you get a set of like a box of cassettes and like do this 10 step program to feel total relaxation to call me of anxiety and fears and loneliness, et cetera.

And- So they're like quits smoking, like a quits smoking. Yeah, kind of the quits, yeah, that sort of thing. And the way my co-writer, Janina Mathieson, and I set it up was, about halfway into the first episode, you realize that these are issued by some vague group called the Institute. You are obviously a prisoner in some kind of medical facility. These are things.

So that's a big. These are things to program you for some kind of reprogramming program that you are involved in. The person recording the cassettes is trying to code an escape plan for you. So that's how we built the show was the person who's recording these cassettes is like, I'm trying to get you out of here, but I can't say I'm trying to get you out of here. Here's just, if you're paying attention, please listen, remember and comprehend what I'm telling you, but in this like really calming voice. So it was a fun experiment in the podcast

and the intimacy of audio storytelling. Right, interesting. And so is that something that you have a beginning, middle, and end for at this point? I mean, since night fell sounds like kind of came up sort of naturally, you weren't like, okay, we're gonna know exactly where this is going. But this sounds much more narrative, much more like there's got to be a conclusion. Yeah, and I don't know how much of a conclusion there is for the whole show of within the

wires. However, for each season of within the wires, we do have the beginning, middle, and end to it. And so it can be kind of like, it's a little bit more contained than Night Vale. You know, Night Vale, we have bigger stories that we tell and may take like a 10 or 20 episode arc to tell a particular story, or it may be something that we set up in the first three or four episodes of the whole show and then didn't get back to it

till like episode 80 or something. But within the wires, yeah, we sit down and and craft it out like a novella. All right, it's a tin chapter novella, but for audio fiction. And do you see your audience, like your Nivell audience, do they go well, whatever you're doing, I'm gonna listen to it, like. Is there a lot of crossover? And I guess this actually brings me to another thought, which is, and I feel like you guys have to be doing this, but is there crossover, like, are there universe crossovers in these things?

Like, are there connections? We had no intention to crossover the universes between the shows. But definitely the audience crossover was kind of one of our intentions when we decided to make Nightvale Presents of this sort of like independent network of not necessarily we're not limiting ourselves to fiction podcasts, but we are we certainly wanted to go into storytelling of shows that aren't being made. You know, when you think, oh, I have an idea for something and you look and be really cool if

somebody was doing this cool show and you find out, oh, nobody is doing this cool show. Let me, let me make this cool show that nobody else is making. So yeah, and it also, and also because we had Night Vale and Night Vale has such a, to us anyway, an extraordinarily large audience, we just thought, well, it would also be a great way to, we can take that night Vale audience and say, hey, we have this network and we're making these other shows. We're finding these other artists that aren't currently making podcasts. And we are, they're, they're putting this new show, like Julian Costa with Orbitting Human Circus,

had this cool idea, and we have to make that because that's brilliant, and I think our audience would like that. So our hope is that we can introduce our nightville audience to other podcasts and get them involved in that. But I don't know, I'm not very good at market research or anything, so I couldn't really tell you what's the percentage of cross-o, I have no idea.

Right, and you guys did, I mean, do you see that audience carry into, so you did a book, right? Is there a welcome to Night Vale book, sorry I'm going back and forth, but is that, you know, explain how that happens, how that works into the universe. A book is a very different, very different than a podcast, obviously. I say this as a man who has done a podcast and read a book.

And so like, how does that work? What is the process there? What is the thinking in wanting to do that and how does the audience respond to that sort of thing? We just have always, both Joseph and I have always wanted to write a book and it really was about a year in. We were like, oh, we're getting offers from people who want us to do a book or a TV show or a movie or a graphic novel or whatever.

And we're like, well, I don't know how to do any of those other things but I do know how to write a book. Neither of us had ever written a novel. However we get the basic idea. We've been writing stories for a long time and we just had some ideas in our head for making a book and we went around to publishers and found a publisher and Harper Perniel. We really loved and they really got what we were wanting to do and really we're excited about it. And so we said, yeah, we have this, here's this novel we want to write. And you know, here's a bunch of chapters we've already written, what do you think? And they're like, we love it, make it. And so we finished the book and put out just welcome to Nightville a novel.

And it is a novel though. I mean, it is like a proper novel. Yeah, it is a proper novel. And we took and you brought up the point of like, it's different than a podcast and you're dead on. And that was the very first thing we went into it. And we were like, how do we write it before we even thought of the story? The very first thing we sat down and said, which was, this is a novel, you have to write it differently. You can't, you know, to read a 400 page novel takes what is it like a 10-hour reader and eight-hour read or whatever it is?

You can't treat it. For me, you never actually read it. You just write it. It's like for every, it takes you literally your entire life to read it. Yeah, eight months or whatever to get through a hundred pages and then I'll get back to that. Yeah, you have a, but you, so you can't be like,

well, this is one long podcast or one long radio show, like that just doesn't make any sense. And also people, you can get an audio book, of course, but you, most people who get books get a physical book and they sit and they read it with their own voice in their own head. And so that was really important to us to create the voice of whatever omniscient narrator you have telling you about Nightvale. And then not telling stories we've already done in the podcast. We wanted a book that if you had never even heard of podcasting in general and you saw it and

you're like, I like this cover, I like this description, I'll buy this book and read it on a train. We would hope that it doesn't involve you needing to listen to a hundred episodes of a podcast to do. So you know, you couldn't have a brand new story that sets the world of Night Vale. But if you are a super fan, it's not telling something you've already heard. So wait, so I don't wanna do any spoilers or anything but who is, what is the, like who's in the book?

So we decided because the show is all from Cecil's point of view, he is our unreliable narrator of the Welcome to the Nightville Podcast and the Nightville Community radio station. And that's all we really ever hear from. And so with the book, we're like, well, let's put it out into the town itself. And so the main characters are, there's two main characters, Jackie Fiero and Diane Cratern,

who both are sort of tertiary characters on the podcast. Like every now and then they're just kind of a background person that, you know, Diane has a teenage son, and so she's on the PTA, and so we, she kind of like sometimes in various stories, so we'll mention Diane Crraton of the PTA was doing blah, blah, blah, event. And so we kind of took those,

these and Jackie Fiero owns the pawn shop in Night Vale. And so we just took those two characters and kind of built out these two stories that started intertwining. And so we kind of built out their own mystery that they have to solve or resolve. And Cecil is still in the book, but he kind of is these, we built him out as like these interstitial chapters of just the nightville community radio station

and local broadcasts. And so it does become this kind of other narrator that's kind of talking about what else is going on in town, as well as other stories that may relate to what's happening to them too. Interesting. God, I wish I only wish that I could come up with such a fertile ground, such a wonderful place for ideas to come from as you have with Night Vale. Hearing you talk about it and thinking about the possibilities of like all of the things you might do makes me feel very lazy and stupid. Is that the desired result?

Is that what you want people to know? That is it. When you thought of creating Welcome to Nifeo, where you're like, we can really hurt people with this. We can really make them feel like they're underperforming as a human. When Johnny Mildmey to ask me if I wanted to do the show, I was like, well, only if I'm a lot to make Josh feel bad.

Yeah, he said, oh, absolutely, that's totally fine. So that's not for one thing that happens. That's it. Well, mission accomplished. So then what comes, I mean, now you've accomplished so much. You've changed the world. You've changed the way people think. But seriously, but it is like, I will say this.

I said at the beginning of the show, but I do think this and in the whole time we've been talking about it, I can't get it out of my head that there are so, I can list, you know, there's a handful of podcasts I can list or let's say, I mean, yeah, there's some radio shows, but I think from the world, truly the world of podcasting, there's like a few that I can list

off the top of my head that those are like, wow, those really show the potential of this craft. And so, anyhow, so what do you do? So, like, what is the long term plan? Like, are you going to do a Night Vale endlessly? Is this, I mean, obviously you can turn it into a show or write more books or whatever. Does the podcast state, I mean, you're still going, right? Like you said, you've done how many episodes?

Yeah, we're posting episode 102, I believe, this week. And what is it? What is evidence? Oh, one at no, like 103 and 104 coming up, I think. Look at that. Now you're just like, it's just like McDonald's now. You just crank them out. You have a bunch of people in like podcasting,

bays, just producing night veil content. You probably have several different actors playing the main character, anyhow. Tell me, tell me what, yeah, do you just keep going with this? You just keep rolling? Like, is there an end to it? Is there, is there, is will culminate in something? I'm sorry, I'll let you.

That, no, that's totally the plan. I mean, I think it's, well, one thing that's really wonderful about Night Vale and, oh, you asked earlier about influences and this relates to this question and answer here, which is that one of the things that was happening when Joseph and I first started writing together like way back in 2010 was, the TV show, the TV show lost was coming to a close.

And I remember Joseph, Joseph is the one I think who got me into lost. And so I kind of binge, that he had been watching it since the very beginning. And I binge watched it to get caught up and so I saw the whole final season in real time. I've always been a lot of time talking about it. And you know, Lost will, I think,

in a lot of ways go down as a disappointment to so many people because of the way it ended, not to mention the fact that it was a brilliant show with a lot of really, really amazing stories that may not have ever concluded in a sense. You have a lost right? I'm sorry, you're describing lost the TV show? Yeah, lost the TV show. Sorry, yeah.

I mean, there were moments of brilliance there. Yeah, definitely. I mean, mostly in the first season. Yeah, it didn't, it did not land as gracefully. Did you watch it straight through? I'm curious. I did. I plowed through, what was it?

Was it six seasons? Yeah. It was, so I plowed through the first five seasons in the like six months leading up to season 10 or season six starting. Right. So I had a different experience with a lot of people started it way back in 2004 when it premiered and had just plowed through, you know, every week would wait for the next thing. Yeah, but you experienced the disappointment in real time.

I think one of the things that in looking at, I think as an artist, I find this a good failure of lost because it was a learning experience for me. I don't know how the creators feel, and this is really not a knock on the show, but as a viewer, one of the things I thought was, if I were creating a show like that, I would have tried as hard as I could to avoid ever answering anything. Not that you don't want plot or that you don't want to resolve storylines or you don't want to further develop an idea to help explain what's going on.

But the idea of of feeding into we're going to give you answers. I think it's really hard and I thought what was really wonderful to me about lost. Maybe it's different from others. Was the same thing that was wonderful about Alice's and Dead Siret, Alice in Wonderland, which is it's so strange, and I'm just happy that it is strange, and it becomes less strange when you tell me it was all a dream. Well, spoiler alert.

Oh, sorry, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. There are people here who have it, who have never read a book. It's only been out a hundred and sixty years. So try to re, I told you, I have a lot of books that I have to get through, okay? There are a lot of material out there

that I'm not familiar with. Anyhow, sorry, you were spoiler alert. No, yeah, that's totally it. I think my favorite spoiler is somebody, somebody spoiling the New Testament. Spoiler alert. Yeah, which is, Jesus is the New Testament. Spoiler alert. Yeah, which is Jesus is the son of God. Like, ah, I haven't read it yet, you asshole.

Wait, what? Yeah, I'm sorry. That's good, that's good. So, is it kind of put that, isn't it? I don't, by the way, I haven't read all of the New Testament, just the best parts. Right. Which are so many.

Did they put that out front? How early in the New Testament do we get that information? Is it right at the top? Oh, it's totally right up front. Yeah, they don't really hold back. Yeah, it's, yeah, you know it from the get-go. It's cool. It looks like the seven had a dragon as a surprise

like you're really afraid of. Right, right, right. That was a man. The wasp with the face of a man, you don't see coming. Right, right. You couldn't possibly have guessed that, yet. Yeah. Or that Judas was an Android and Jesus found out

when he cut his finger and the light. That's right. I love the idea that buried somewhere in the Bible that maybe I've missed is they describe in detail a robot. Like, there's like, oh, and Judas had these machine parts and was powered by solar panels, and that's all detailed in the original New Testament. Yeah, anyhow, but getting back to your point with that.

Yeah, no, I'm still making night go like we, the idea of the beauty of it can just go on and on because we're not, there's a lot of weird things about night villain we're always sort of trying to address them and we do do think about like, it'd be really cool to explain why this that we set up a while back is that way. But we try not to ever set up the show as a series of strange and weird mysteries that have to be resolved. It's not, nightvillain isn't a puzzle. It's just an enigma.

And so I think there's a thing where like there's a joy in not having all the answers. We don't always get what we want. And sometimes that's great. And so I think that's where. That's where experiencing that in reality right now. Yes. And sometimes it's terrible.

Is it wonderful? This is just like your podcast, now that I think of it actually. If you want to know what welcome to Nightvill is like, just live in reality. What's, I have to, a quick tangent is that we were having our, we were having our ride years meeting the other day and we were working on a script and we were, for a touring live show and we were, we were talking about this idea of like, oh, it's so much harder

sometimes because Nightvale is in a lot of ways super authoritarian. There's a lot of 1984 elements to Nightville, but rather than making it a true dystopia, we just make it kind of like a normal little tiny town community that everybody says. This is our town. This is what we do. We're sometimes upset with it, sometimes we're happy with it.

For the most part, this is just where we live our lives. And it's cool rather than really going or welling and being like, this is a shit hole nightmare world. No, I mean, Nightvale. To escape from. I mean, Nightvale, like one of its great, one of the great feats of Nightvale is that, it's sort of horrific and yet lighthearted.

I mean, you don't get a lot of, it's like in the mouth of madness, which is a great, one of my favorite John Carpenter movies, I don't know if you know it or not, but. I've never seen that before. Well, it's like in the mouth of madness, which is a great, one of my favorite John Carpenter movies, I don't know if you know it or not, but. I have never seen that before. Well, it's set in the kind of lovecraftian hell world, very meta, a very meta lovecraftian hell world, and it's terrifying and upsetting, and there's no light, there's no like levity there.

There's no, you mentioned before like levity and gravity. It's all gravity and all levity. And it's like, there's maybe a couple of very, very minor laughs in between the utter, just, like, destruction and chaos of the film. But nightfills like the same world in a lot of ways, like, to me. But you just, it's like, you keep it light. It's like, you know, it's like a first date. And it becomes hard in this day and age with our new president to write

in a way that doesn't feel like a parable for that. Because while we do a lot of satire and night veil, we tend to try not to be too on the nose. If we're gonna be on the nose about it, we'll lean full into it and then just tip it over. But a lot of times we try to be a little bit more subtle, a little bit more complex with the satire that's there. And so sometimes we're like,

oh, I wanna be careful not to make a thing where we're apologizing for an authoritarian type character on the show. Yeah, please don't. Don't do that. you know what I mean? Like you, but, but the history of nightbells filled with, with characters who are awful and abuse their power and it becomes comical. And so it does change a little bit to like,

you know, I don't want to make it sympathetic for people to do that. Yeah. So that's tough. I mean, it is, we all have entered a period of reality that seems like the bleakest, but also the least like reality that we've had in a long time. You like this, I mean, I don't know about you.

I know you're a big Trump supporter and you're out there campaigning for him, but like I wake up, a lot of days now. I wake up and I'm like, maybe it doesn't not right in the morning, but just at some point during the day, I'm kind of like, is it real? Is it real? Is it still real?

Is this actually happening? And then you're like, oh yeah, it's actually happening. I mean, it is kind of like, does that hurt Nightvale? Like in some way, to have such a, what's the word? An abstract reality such a such a Perversion of reality that we're living through right now. Does it hurt your your ability to make a perverted reality?

It's certainly right now making us think a lot more about it. You know, we have a character in the show and she's one of my favorite characters to write for and the character is Pamela Winchell and she's the former mayor but she didn't want to be mayor because ultimately all she the only thing she liked about being mayor was delivering emergency press conferences. And so the new mayor just made her director of emergency press conferences and then so she just walks around with a microphone and a portable PA and just does emergency press conferences. And a lot of her stuff is really,

she'll just start telling long-winding surrealist stories that have nothing to do with anything. But then when we have scenes in the book, we just wrote a second novel and we have this, oh, she becomes a character, a recurring character in the novel. There's a lot of moments where we had, you know, where you write out where people are asking her about something that actually happened that seems like an emergency.

And the way she fires back at the reporters or the people asking her questions, like, you know, they'll be like, did, you know, what is the city doing about this? And she'd say, I don't know, your reporter, you do your job. Go find out. So we create these like weird catch 22 circular logical scenarios with her. And then Sean Spicer comes along and Kellyanne Conway and you're just like, oh, you're stealing our bit

of just making shit up. No, it does make fiction seem, I mean, I remember, you know, there's this thing about after post 9-11, right? The nonfiction book sales went through the roof and everybody was trying to like figure out what's going on in the world. But this is so different because it's like, you're just, it's like a, I'm not comparing 9-11 and Trump's presidency, but I will say it's like a non-stop, slowly unfolding, seemingly endless, just like tension that makes it hard to ever really take stock of it. And I feel like fiction is tough right now.

Nothing seems interesting to me. I keep looking at things or listening to things. I'm like, you know, actual news is the worst. Yeah, by the way, it's my business. It's my business. Sure. So I'd be able to do it to some degree. But then like, but then fiction is also like,

it's too outrageous to me to even pay attention to, right? It's like, I can't even relax enough to enjoy, you know, an episode of Welcome to Nightfell. But maybe you guys have the right mixture. Maybe that is, maybe I should go back to listen to, I pick it back up. I mean, I was only, I don't know how many episodes I've made, I was probably like 25 and or something.

So I was trying to listen to it from the start when I started listening to it. And for me to have done 25 of anything is very impressive. But maybe you guys are in the right place because you can actually toy with reality as much as little as you want and what you do. I mean, Trump can be a character in Night Vale if you want him to be.

Well, yeah, you certainly could do that. I mean, I generally think like it's fun to sort of take that expectation and then subvert it a little bit. You know, we, you know, to sort of like build out components of Trump or some other popular character persona in the zeitgeist and kind of build a character around it. And then, you know, flesh that character out to be more human, right? You know, if Trump seems hardly human at all, like he, he's so, like even if you said Donald Trump is a fictional story, which would be great

if he was, but if, let's say he was, if I read about him in a book, like, he needs to be a background character because he's so, there's no evolution to him, you know, right? There's no change that he goes through. And so, yeah, he would would fit as a very like really perfect tertiary character in Night Vale. But even those characters were like, I've become really fascinated with this former mayor who just like delivering emergency press conferences.

So we give her deeper things happening in her life. Trump never seems to have that. Like it seems to be about the same stuff over and over again. Right. Yeah, he's not nearly as the same stuff over and over again. Right. Yeah. He's not nearly as interesting as a character that somebody would write, but he's way more awful.

I think it will be. I'll do it. You know. Okay. So we should wrap up. But I want to ask one question that something I've thought a lot about. Where is Night Vale physically located in the American Southwest? Yeah, but specifically like, yeah, that's pretty much it right there. I mean,

I think you won't get any more specific than that. No, and you in your mind know what where it is? You know, no, I actually, I would, I'll tell you this, I honestly don't, No, I'll tell you this, I honestly don't. Joseph, my co-writer, grew up in Southern California, kind of in Ventura County area. And so he was on the western side of the desert. And I grew up near Dallas on the far eastern side of that desert. And that desert changes a lot between West Texas and Southern California.

But my vision of the desert is very different than his because mine was always the flat maces of West Texas and the Panhandle area. And his is much more kind of some of the, some of the foothills and sagebrush and things like that. And obviously like the weird like distant suburban communities of the Los Angeles area and the inland empire and stuff that kind of built up even in the desert, whereas West Texas is empty. And so yeah. So you're saying it's in Texas, is that what you're telling

me? Well, no, there's just like a mahogam of these two different ideas that come together in our writing. And, you know, if you listen to an episode and you hear any coverage of the high school football team, there's 100% chance that that's me writing about it. And because that's the desert communities I know, like I think about, like, you know, like Abilene and Odessa Permian, a lot of, you know, all the way out to El Paso, like, that just those high school Friday night, Friday night lights, but those like,

yeah, the high school football in Texas was such a big deal, and those towns are so sparse. And so the idea of like, just a single little town that huddles around football every Friday night, I think makes a lot of sense, or something really like, warm and community-based about that of like, we all come and huddle together around the warm fire of football. And so that's kind of a vision I have sometimes in writing the show. And

Joseph has a different one based on where he grew up. So there isn't a malgum of that. And then you add, so you add those two parts, you also think about Area 51 and Roswell are kind of like Nevada area. And I think there's components of that too that they would be mixed in. And in fact, the conspiracy theories around Roswell and Area 51 are part of the inspiration for even putting in the desert in the first place, because there's so many terrible things can happen in the desert without anyone knowing what's going on. So it seemed likely that a town like Nightville could exist somewhere in the desert

and nobody would know. It's so nice. Part of that description makes me sort of envious of your Southern experience. I mean, you describe a town that sounds sort of interesting and in some way nice. I feel like the South gets a pretty bad. I feel like the South is not that popular right now, at least. Oh, it's a poor South. Yeah. But, but I mean, you kind of paint a picture of a place

that maybe wouldn't be the worst to live. Actually, I painted part of a picture. There's a lot more that make the South deserve the bad rap that it gets. No, no, no, no. I mean, yeah, well, you also mentioned, you know, sort of these, like, you know, Area 51. So I think that, like, maybe the combo is exactly where it should be. Jeffrey, this is really, really interesting and really fun. And I hope that we get a chance to do this again. I really appreciate you coming on and doing this show. I just, what I'm wondering is, as a man who's, maybe you can leave us with some guidance for the future,

as a man who has immersed himself in the horrors of a place. The beauty of a place like Night Vale, is there reason to suspect that we will all be here in like a year or two, or do you think are we on the precipice of a complete and total nuclear conflagration? Just give us a little taste of that before we end the show. I can promise you that we will not all be here a year. Oh, that's good. You mean just going to use the two of us?

Between the two of us, you're safe. Between the two of us, I feel good about the two of us, both being around a year from now. And a vast majority of the people listening to this, I feel good about you being around a year from now. I can't control everything. And statistically, there's a good chance that there are a few that will not be. But I don't know. there are a few that will not be. And, but, but I, I don't know, I'm an optimist in some ways that I feel like I don't, I don't use that as a way of judging

how I'm going to be to activate myself to fight tyranny. But I do have, I do have some general optimism about humanity, you know, seeing photos of the people at O'Hare and JFK and DFW and LAX a few weeks ago. After such an awful first week, it was really beautiful to see so many people on hand and protesting the immigration ban. And I just think the Muslim ban, as we're calling it, and I just, that's heartening. I think at the heart we're all trying to protect something

really good. And I think we just all have varying levels of ignorance as to what's really going on. And hopefully we're all educating ourselves in each other about that. And you don't think, but none of that, none of that, well, none of that bleeds into what you do creatively.

I mean, I just want, it's like, I just think about the protests actually. I mean, just hearing you talk about them. Yeah. Is there even any way with how, like, how very immersed in a kind of like fictional world Nightfell is or any of this stuff you're working on? It's like, it's really in room where those things cross

is there at this point. I mean, where it's too dark right now in reality. Yeah, I mean, we sort of take the approach of not satirizing the current news or talking about the need to protest. And when we slide stuff in there, like we, I mean, are most harshly pointed satire as always of the NRA.

And when we just blatantly rip them apart and our show over and over and over because they're a terrorist organization and we hate them. And we, you know, so we will go right after the NRA because I feel like a vast majority of America feel that the NRA is a bad thing. Money wise, it doesn't look that way

because they give so much to Congress. But for the most part, we do things in our show that aren't about, hey, get out there in protest, or get out there and support the arts, or get out there and fight tyranny, or whatever. We did a season long arc of Cecil dealing with him looking at his town and seeing how, in a lot of ways, it was bad.

And all the ways that his town was terrible, and it was, we played with kind of like an overarching, like a moral arc of how do you love where you live? And you love where you live because of the people that you live with. And you find the humanity in them. And you love them, not just the person who's your spouse or your best friend or your dog or your cat, but even the wacko people that are maddening to you and you see the good things that they do.

And so we try and play bigger picture the things that make us human. And I think that's the only way we can really fight that or that we feel equipped to fight what's going on is to deal with the things that make us all human. And that's not to say, oh, go hug a Trump supporter. We're all human beings. It's just to say, you know, there's a balance between wanting to punch a Nazi and hating your own life. Wow.

That's an interesting, that's an interesting. I think I can get in a great place to leave it. I think that's like the perfect sentiment to consider. Jeffrey, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for putting wonderful art into the world. And you'll have to come back. And maybe next time we talk, things will look very different. I hope so.

And I would love to be back some days. Yeah. So definitely always give me a call any time. Thanks, Sean. I would love to be back some days, so yeah, so definitely always give me, give me a call any time. Thanks, y'all. Well, that is our show for this week. We'll be back next week with more tomorrow. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best, though. I've just heard that tomorrow is street cleaning day, so I think something very bad is in

store for you to think. you