Craft and Chaos

Ryan kicks the season finale off in a British accent, which we will not explain, and from there the episode is about humor — specifically, the humbling realization that the comedy you love and the comedy you write are often two completely unrelated genres operating in two completely unrelated brains. Pete worships the broad, sandwich-falling-from-the-sky lunacy of The Young Ones. Kyle reveres physical comedians who can walk into a room funny. Ryan grew up on Monty Python. None of them, it turns out, write anything resembling any of that.

Up top, Kyle tells a story about a script of his turning up somewhere it should not have been, by mechanisms still unclear, with an ending we won't spoil. Pete confesses he's drowning in two writing projects at once, learns from Ryan about word clouds, and longs for the halcyon days of just moments before he learned about them. Then a Conan O'Brien tangent, a Harrison Ford appreciation, and a Mae Martin break-up story.

We close out the season with Romance Novel or Death Metal Band, Part Two — Pete is on a heater, several of these are not what you'd guess, and one of them is Howlers in Heat — and a parting line from Douglas Adams about the knack of flying. We'll see you next season. Go make weird art.

Mentioned in This Episode

Films

• The Hangover — Letterboxd
• Forgetting Sarah Marshall — Letterboxd
• Tig (2015 documentary) — Letterboxd

Shows

• The Young Ones — Wikipedia
• Freaks and Geeks — Wikipedia
• Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend — Wikipedia
• The Sarah Millican Television Programme — Wikipedia
• Good One: A Podcast About Jokes — Vulture

Comedy Groups

• Monty Python — Wikipedia
• The Lonely Island — Wikipedia

People

• Conan O'Brien — Wikipedia
• Sona Movsesian — Wikipedia
• Matt Gourley — Wikipedia
• Sarah Millican — Wikipedia
• Harrison Ford — Wikipedia
• Jason Segel — Wikipedia
• Mae Martin — Wikipedia
• Tig Notaro — Wikipedia
• Buster Keaton — Wikipedia
• Harold Lloyd — Wikipedia
• John Ritter — Wikipedia
• Jim Carrey — Wikipedia
• Dick Van Dyke — Wikipedia
• Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson character) — Wikipedia
• Jen Silverman — Wikipedia
• Ithamar Enriquez — IMDb
• Douglas Adams — Wikipedia

Books

• Life, the Universe and Everything by Douglas Adams — Wikipedia

Stage Show

• Ithamar Has Nothing to Say — The Elysian

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

Kyle saw a Jen Silverman play that broke every formatting rule he thought theater had, which turned out to be the perfect prompt for an episode about what happens when creatives stop asking whether they're allowed. Mandy goes to bat for Lynn Shelton's Humpday. Pete makes the case for The Lego Movie, unironically and at length. And Ryan reminds us that Lord and Miller cast a puppeteer as the year's most beloved alien because the guy was too good at the scratch track to replace.

Then: a pair of 24-hour plays, both written to the same brief. Pete returned with Tail, a play about two parents trying to reverse-engineer the psychology of a sixteen-year-old who has decided, unremarkably, to wear a squirrel suit. Kyle — going in a different direction — returned with Best Served Cold, a cooking-competition finale in which a disgraced contestant has plans. Both plays are read live and cold on the episode.

Then a listener asks about the difference between being vulnerable online and being performatively vulnerable online, and all four hosts — each of whom has at some point posted something and later wondered what kind of person wrote that — try to answer honestly.

Links & Notes

• Witch by Jen Silverman
• Humpday by Lynn Shelton
• The Lego Movie and Project Hail Mary by Lord and Miller
• Batman: The Audio Adventures

Connect

• craftandchaos.fun

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

There is something almost embarrassing about the relief that comes from owning a thing entirely. Pete self-published his first novella, Lattice, and what he keeps coming back to is not the early reader responses or the question of whether people will like it. It is the dashboard. The group digs into what gatekeepers actually do (less line editing than you think, more echo chamber than you would hope), what self-publishing opens up and what it absolutely cannot guarantee, and why Ryan Dalton's first question to any aspiring author is not about craft but about goal.

Mandy is in Greece, surrounded by ruins built for gods that still feel alive, and she wants to know what makes a hero, how thrasheth the gods, and whither our monsters. Everyone has opinions and nobody picks the same examples, and yet somehow the whole conversation keeps circling back to the same question: what are you actually worshipping? We are haunted by the forces that guide us this week. We thrive in the chaos.

Mandy does not like horror movies and would like to understand why everyone else does. The group obliges with a theory about indifference that is genuinely unsettling, a taxonomy of monsters that ends somewhere near Eldritch horror and the insect kingdom, and a merch opportunity. Meaning is for hats.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

Your brain told you this was going to be a short project. It also told you the outline was basically done, that sleep is optional, and that this time things would be different. Your brain, it turns out, has the self-awareness of a raccoon who just knocked over a trash can — and you keep listening to it anyway, because without it you never start anything. That's the premise of this week's Craft and Chaos, and it only gets more uncomfortably accurate from there.

Pete Wright, Mandy Fabian, Kyle Olson, and Ryan Dalton each confess the lies that get them to work — the necessary fictions every creative runs on, whether or not they'll admit it. Some of those lies are aspirational. Some are borrowed from Terry Pratchett. One of them is genuinely bleak. They also name the imaginary audience living in their heads while they create, which turns out to be a surprisingly revealing question when four people actually answer it honestly.

The back half introduces "Guilty or Not Guilty," where each host confesses a creative rule they violate and then — badly — argues against themselves before the rest of the crew delivers a verdict. The arguments get personal. The analogies get gross. And someone uses the phrase "creative polyamory" in a way that makes everybody uncomfortable. If you have ever told yourself a beautiful, necessary lie in order to make something — and you have — this one's going to land.

Links & Notes

• Jess Plus None
• Charlie Kaufman • BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Series
• AO3 (Archive of Our Own)

Connect with the Show

Submit your questions at craftandchaos.fun — click any episode page and hit the submit button. New episodes drop every two weeks.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

Creative people are very good at turning joy into homework. We find something we love, immediately ask how it could become a career, worry that we're not doing it correctly, read seven books about it, and six months later we're staring at the thing we used to love and feeling nothing. It is a remarkable talent and we should probably stop.

This week — inspired by The Tick, of all things — the Craft and Chaos crew attempts to remember what it felt like before all that. The assignment: something you made or did or consumed recently whose only job is to make you unreasonably happy. No portfolio value. No lofty artistic ambition. Just the pure, embarrassing, uncomplicated thing.

The results are, genuinely, a lot. Pete spent months learning to use a lathe in his neighbor's garage and emerged with a camphor burl bowl so thick-walled it could survive a home invasion, and he is vibrating at a frequency that can only be described as "third-grader at a craft fair." Ryan wrote his first murder — in a genre he's never written, with a live stream, an off-camera death, and a moral ambiguity that refuses to let you off the hook — and somehow made it work without a drop of blood. Kyle has finally launched a plays page on his website (WadeIntoTheWeird.com, which is a name that earns its keep), attended four overlapping high school theater productions, and was reduced to helpless laughter by a single line delivered with absolutely no inflection whatsoever. And Mandy directed a commercial, hired her own dog, and dissolved a piece of paper in eclipse water at a crossroads to banish obstacles from her life. We are not here to judge. It worked, probably.

The episode closes with a dramatic reading of Terry Bisson's 1991 short story "They're Made Out of Meat" — two aliens assessing humanity and arriving at the only logical conclusion, which is to erase us from the records and pretend no one's home — and if you don't come away from it slightly horrified by the fact that you are a pile of thinking, dreaming, singing meat, you weren't paying attention. Pure joy, folks. This is what it looks like.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

Here's a question that has haunted every creative person who ever watched a reboot and thought, "I could do that better": should you play in someone else's sandbox, or build your own from scratch and accept that no one will show up? This week on Craft and Chaos, we dig into the Original Character vs. Existing IP debate — and end up somewhere that involves Batman and the Joker as co-parenting dads.

We also talk about firsts: first book signings, first school visits, first film festival screenings with four people in the audience — all your people — and at least one legendary audition for Saturday Night Live that began with a witch-manifestation and ended with Amy Poehler's dressing room and a nervous breakdown.

Plus: the Drawer of Shame. What's still in yours? What's waiting for you to level up?

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

Here's something nobody warns you about being a creative person: at some point, you will have to decide how much of your actual life you're willing to shove into your work and then show to the people you stole it from.

Mandy's writing a book for her teenage daughters and discovering that words, frustratingly, do not arrive pre-edited. Ryan's twelve thousand words into a thriller and has realized he is constitutionally incapable of writing a scene without at least one silly billy. And Kyle just got tracked down through Instagram by someone who wants to produce one of his plays — which is both a beautiful story about good work finding its audience and a cautionary tale about maybe putting your contact information on things. We're all works in progress. Some of us more literally than others.

This week we're talking about truth — where it shows up in creative work, how much of it you actually need, and whether "based on a true story" is a promise or a threat. Pete's deep in a film series about fraud and discovers that the best true stories are the ones about liars. Kyle argues — compellingly — that he doesn't want historical accuracy at all, he wants you to lie to him beautifully, and cites Better Man (the Robbie Williams movie where Robbie Williams is a CGI chimpanzee) as possibly the most emotionally honest biopic ever made. Mandy confesses she once showed her mom a deeply autobiographical short film and offered to never screen it publicly, which was, and she will admit this, an absolute lie.

The takeaway is something like: the facts don't have to be true as long as the feeling is in creative works. Which is either profound or the motto of every con artist in history.

We also dig into fake it till you make it — that specific flavor of creative terror where you say "yes" to something you cannot yet do and then sprint toward competence before anyone notices. Ryan's been calling himself a writer since he was a kid, years before he was actually doing it professionally, which turned out to be less of a lie and more of a very patient prophecy. Pete walked into rooms full of people asking "what is a podcast" and answered "I'll tell you tomorrow," which is apparently a viable business model. And Kyle talks about the moment Mandy told him he was actually good at interviewing — after he'd spent an entire podcast series convinced he was faking it. Turns out most of us are faking it. The ones who make it are just the ones who kept showing up anyway.

Plus: the crew breaks down what makes them laugh — from the Zucker Brothers hiding A-list jokes in the background of hospital scenes, to Rose Matafeo's Horndog, to a comedian named Kurt Braunohler doing five minutes on 120,000 bees that plays like Shakespeare wrote a set at The Comedy Store. And our beloved fake sponsors return: The Other Orange wants your gambling money (they might train owls), and The Last Apple would like to buy everything you own and rent it back to you at a reasonable, eternal monthly rate. 

We remain the only podcast either of them sponsors. Probably for good reason.

Films & Shows Discussed:

• Better Man (2024) — Robbie Williams biopic with CGI chimp, dir. Michael Gracey
• Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) — Lee Israel forgery story
• The Hoax (2006) — Richard Gere as fake Howard Hughes biographer
• Shattered Glass (2003) — Stephen Glass / New Republic fabrication scandal
• Quiz Show (1994) — Charles Van Doren quiz show scandal, dir. Robert Redford
• Big Eyes (2014) — Margaret Keane painting credit story, dir. Tim Burton
• Rocketman (2019) — Elton John biopic
• Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) — Queen / Freddie Mercury biopic
• Baby Reindeer (2024) — Netflix limited series (NOT Baby Driver)
• Baby Driver (2017) — Edgar Wright film (NOT Baby Reindeer)
• The Orville (2017–2022) — Seth MacFarlane sci-fi comedy series
• Shrinking — Apple TV+ comedy series (current season at time of recording)
• Will & Grace (1998–2006, 2017–2020) — NBC sitcom
• Saturday Night (2024) — SNL origin story film

The Theranos Movie:

• The Dropout (2022) — Elizabeth Holmes tries to be Steve Jobs and goes to jail.

Press Your Luck Documentary:

• The Luckiest Man in America (2024) — about Michael Larson breaking Press Your Luck (verify exact title)

Comedy Specials & Clips Referenced:

• Rose Matafeo: Horndog (2020) — stand-up special
• Kurt Braunohler — "120,000 Bees" bit
• Alex Edelman: Just for Us (2023) — HBO stand-up special
• Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One Backflip — Dropout special
• John Mulaney Presents: Everybody's in L.A. (2024) — Netflix live talk show
• Bob Reese — "AI Videos Are Getting Too Good" YouTube parkour series
• The Naked Gun (1988) — Zucker Brothers; "Mrs. Nordberg" hospital joke
• Bo Burnham — Oh you know... just a pioneer of multimedia/tech-forward comedy specials

Comedians & Writers Mentioned:

• Patton Oswalt
• Sean Hayes
• Megan Mullally
• Max Mutchnick — Will & Grace creator/showrunner
• Mike Birbiglia — Referenced as storytelling comedy style influence
• Monty Python
• Jack Benny — Referenced as old-school one-shot comedy style

Books & Writing Projects Mentioned:

• You're Okay, Go Play — Mandy Fabian's book in progress (nonfiction, for her daughters)
• This Last Adventure — Ryan Dalton's previous novel featuring family stories and Alzheimer's themes
• Unapologetically ADHD — Pete Wrigh...

When your work gets traction, people don’t just consume it—they build a little civilization around it. In this episode, Pete Wright, Mandy Fabian, Kyle Olson, and Ryan Dalton talk about the first time strangers made their work feel real (and slightly terrifying), from festival reviews and elevator recognition to fan-made dioramas and grandparents reading novels aloud together.

They dig into what creators owe their communities, how to set boundaries without killing the joy, what “seeding” iconic objects really means, and what music helps them write without their brains wandering off to watch Star Wars in their head. Also: an unexpectedly sincere love letter to pencils, France’s finest export (ennui), and a rapid-fire fandom game that proves no one should be trusted with a t-shirt press.

Links & Notes

• Kyle's Twenty Twenty Mix Playlist

• (01:11) - The Moment You are the Center of the Fandom

Look. We're back. New year. New host. And we opened the show with Ryan reading the dictionary definition of the word "we," which is either a bit or a cry for help — the line is thin and we're not here to judge. The point is: Mandy Fabian is here now, Misty is off surviving life at full speed, and we're all still pretending we know what we're doing creatively. (We don't. That's the show.)

Here's the thing about creative work that nobody tells you until you've already panicked about it seventeen times: you don't actually have to know what happens next. The writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation — a show that ran for seven seasons and won actual awards — would literally write "tech the tech" in the script when they didn't have the specific quantum warp polaron nonsense figured out yet. Grey's Anatomy? "Medical, medical, medical." These are real strategies used by professionals who got paid. The details came later. The momentum mattered now. This is permission. Take it.

We also answer a listener question that hits painfully close to home: what happens when you suddenly have all the time in the world to be creative and your brain immediately responds by doing absolutely nothing? Turns out "I can do anything" metabolizes into "I can't do anything" faster than you'd think.

We talk egg timers, scheduled creativity, and why imposing fake limitations on yourself might be the only way to survive unlimited freedom. And then, because we are who we are, we spend the last chunk of the episode pitching wildly different plays based on the same prompt — a veterinarian's office, three actors, and the opening line "Do you want the honest version or the one that'll let you sleep tonight?" Somehow we ended up with alien kittens, a ketamine heist, and a sentient skin rash that makes people act out telenovelas. This is the show. We're so glad you're here.

Smart People Who Said Smart Things:

• Ronald D. Moore — The "tech the tech" guy
• Shonda Rhimes — The "medical, medical, medical" queen
• Madeleine L'Engle — "Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it." Correct.
• Don Roos — Screenwriter behind the one-hour egg timer method: commit to one focused hour, let it grow if it wants to
• Steven Pressfield — Author of The War of Art, originator of "the resistance" as a concept for that voice in your head that tells you you're garbage

Places That Let Creatives Do Weird Things on Deadlines:

• Muse Fest at Space 55 (Phoenix) — Nine muses, nine responses, one week, no stakes, maximum creativity
• Phoenix Theater's 24-Hour Theater Project — Kyle wrote a 15-page script overnight and it was about a sentient skin rash. We'll explain.
• Series Fest / Tribeca / Frameline — Festivals Mandy is submitting her pilot to

Projects You Should Know About:

• StorySprawl — Pete's invite-only collaborative writing project where you never write what comes next, someone else does, and it's apparently liberating as hell
• You Are Here — Mandy's indie TV pilot, shot micro-budget over three days. Coming soon?
• The Black Cape Saga — Ryan's upcoming words! Mark your Goodreads!
• Go Help Yourself — Misty's podcast. Still running. Go listen if you miss her. We do.

Tools for People Who Need Structure:

• Obsidian — Kyle is migrating his notes here from Zoho Notebook and found a file from eight years ago that just said "This is where the good ideas go." Still waiting.
• The One-Hour Egg Timer Method — One hour. No phone. No errands. If it turns into three hours, great. If not, you did the hour. That's the whole thing. Sean Carlin has a good write-up here.

Public Domain Watch (From the Fake Sponsor):

• Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, Sam Spade — All entered public domain January 2026. Do something interesting with them. Please. No more horror movies.

• (00:00) - Welcome to Craft and Chaos

In this Very Special Episode, it’s just Pete and Kyle pulling the curtain back on one of the show’s most reliably chaotic features: those “ads” that don’t so much sponsor the show as wander into it, sit down uninvited, and start making sustained eye contact. The spark is a listener question—who on earth is making these things?—and the answer turns into a funny, slightly unsettling tour of how Craft and Chaos builds its weird little universe without losing the thread of why it exists in the first place.

What follows is less “inside baseball” and more “inside the raccoon’s head,” as they talk about the creative logic behind a recurring bit: how surprise keeps reactions honest, why the show’s structure makes the interruptions land the way they do, and how the team balances absurdity with affection so the joke doesn’t curdle into cynicism. It’s a conversation about craft, yes—but also about restraint, collaboration, and the particular joy of making something that’s small, strange, and clearly made by people with fingerprints.

And if you’ve ever wondered why certain “sponsors” feel like returning characters, why others show up like weather, or why some interruptions feel suspiciously… polished… this episode gives you just enough context to appreciate the chaos more without robbing it of its best trick: catching you off-guard.