Start With This: Idea to Execution

Hey y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.

And did you know that Welcome to Night Vale is back out on tour?

We are.

We're gonna be up in the northeast in the Boston, New York City area, going all the way over to the upper Midwest in Minnesota.

That's in July.

You kind of draw a line through there and you'll kind of see the towns we'll be hitting.

We'll also be doing Philly down to Florida in September.

And we'll be going from Austin all the way up through the middle of the country into Toronto, Canada in October.

And then we'll be doing the West Coast plus the Southwest plus Colorado in January of 2026.

You can find all of the show dates at welcome to nightvale.com/slash live.

Listen, this brand new live show is so much fun.

It is called Murder Night in Blood Forest, and it stars Cecil Baldwin, of course, Symphony Sanders, me, and live original music by Disparition, and who knows what other special guests may come along for the ride.

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Don't let time slip away and miss us when we are in your town because otherwise we will all be sad.

Get your tickets to our live US plus Toronto tours right now at welcometonightveld.com slash live.

And hey, see you soon.

If you're dying for the next batch of Wednesday season 2 to drop on Netflix, then I'll let you in on a secret.

The Wednesday Season 2 official Woecast is already here.

Dive deeper into the mysteries of Wednesday with the Ultimate Companion Video Podcast.

Join the frightfully funny Caitlin Riley along with her producer, Thing, as she sits down with the cast and crew.

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Jeffrey and I have made together since, well, welcome to Night Vale.

I'd like to introduce you to Start With This, the show where you do the writing, one simple assignment at a time.

Please enjoy this first episode, and if you like it, be sure to subscribe to Start With This directly to get the rest.

And don't forget, April 27th at the Largo in LA, for the first time, the faceless old woman, Mara Wilson herself, will perform a Welcome to Nightvale live show of her own, plus brand new Alice Isn't Dead and Within the Wires live shows.

This will be a one-time only night.

See you there.

Okay, enjoy the show.

Hi, I'm Joseph Fink.

Jeffrey Kraner and I started the fiction podcast, Welcome to Nightvale, seven years ago, and have spent those years writing writing a bunch of things.

But in this show, it's you who does the writing, one short assignment at a time.

Welcome to Start With This.

Heart is hard.

Starting is hard.

If you want to start somewhere you can start with this.

You can start with this.

Start with this.

From idea to execution.

Almost everyone working in any creative field has more ideas for projects than they have time left in their life to make those projects.

And that can be overwhelming.

There is this constant mental reshuffling of, oh, I'd love to do that, but I also have this other thing.

And oh, wow, what if I did this?

And if you aren't careful, you find you haven't done any of those ideas because you spent too much time worrying about making them.

Which is why it is important to actually execute ideas you have regularly, whether on a small scale just for yourself or publicly after months of work.

One of the most vital habits to develop as a writer, a podcaster, as an artist of any kind is regularly executing new work from that long-waiting list of ideas.

I'm here with Jeffrey Kraner.

Let's get started.

Hi, Jeffrey.

Hi, Joseph.

Let's talk about the value of regular creation.

I love it.

I like creating.

I like being regular.

These are a couple of things I love.

And then you put them together, and that's regular creation.

Yeah, I think when it comes to regular creation, a lot of it has to do with, I was thinking about this last night, that kind of any field of anything, there are two things in play.

One is a natural talent, which is what everyone sort of focuses on.

But the other is developing through practice.

And there is literally no one who has enough natural talent that they don't also need to develop through practice.

And developing through practice is the only thing you have control over.

So it never feels worthwhile to worry that much about how much natural talent you have in a thing because the thing you have control over is everything requires practice.

So just if you practice something, you will get better at it.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely it.

Like you can't, you know, we see this in sports all the time where you talk about a guy who has just raw talent.

I'm like, well, this person definitely has some physical advantages, but this person also has spent a lot of time shooting free throws or throwing a ball or hitting a baseball or doing whatever that definitely has enhanced that talent.

They're in a gym or I don't know, practice field constantly in order to be good at that thing.

So, and they're trying a lot of different things.

They're expanding muscle groups and they're also, you know, learning offensive and defensive things.

So you have to be out there constantly.

We just don't see that.

We watch a game and we're like, that guy's just naturally talented.

We read a novel and we're like, this guy sat down and wrote this novel straight through all 80,000 words on his own without editing.

or without many decades of work to hone that craft.

It's all these things you don't actually see.

So it's a little daunting when you're in your room trying to type something.

You're like, I don't know if this is any good.

Yeah, I mean, we kind of build up this thing.

Sometimes

artists like a writer or a musician will have like a very early work that maybe they never released, and they'll be like, you don't want to hear that one.

That's not good.

And no one ever believes them, but I believe them because probably it wasn't that good because that just was early on.

It was before they practiced their way to the way they are now.

So that's one, I think, value of regular creation: it functions as practice.

It functions at practice in whatever art form you're working on.

The other value, I think, is it builds kind of a confidence.

It builds artistic muscle memory in that if you just get used to being like, I have an idea, I'm going to do something with it, whether it's a small execution or trying to make it into a larger project, your brain just starts thinking in that way.

It becomes easier and easier every time to start something.

Yeah.

I think about when I was a lot younger and I started taking writing classes, like in especially in college, where you get creative writing teachers that tell you like about finding your voice.

And that's such a nebulous thing, especially when you're pretty young as a writer, to be like, I don't know what that means.

Like, is this a voice?

Is this a voice?

Holds up a spine.

Is this a voice?

Like, whatever, like that sort of thing.

But yeah, it's once you get into the habit of actually working on something all the time.

You're right.

It's totally the muscle memory.

Your brain starts piecing together words and phrases and ideas and structures that you don't have to spend as much time thinking about.

It's all about all those shortcuts you build.

You're not thinking about your voice anymore after a certain point because it just is what it is.

I rarely think about what my voice is as a writer anymore, but in my 20s, that's all I thought about.

But I don't have to think about that as much now.

Yeah, I would consciously, and this is, I think, the subject for

another episode.

But yeah, I would consciously try to build that voice using various techniques.

Yeah.

And now, yeah, it's, I never, ever think about my voice.

And does this fit my voice?

Because

if I'm writing it, it probably does at this point.

Yes.

Because I've had that muscle memory of artistic execution.

The moment where this kind of cracked open for me was when I was 13 years old, I think this happened.

I might have been 12.

I used to like pretend I was writing songs.

I would like pretend to myself that I was writing a song.

And in my pretending, I would have a melody and lyrics that was like the song I was pretending to write.

And I remember one day suddenly realizing, wait, I have melody and lyrics.

I think maybe I wrote a song.

And then I like sat down and played it.

And I realized, oh, I did.

I think in my head, I had this idea that I needed to be a songwriter in order to write a song.

And there needed to be some gateway to step through.

And it was at that moment that I realized it could just be a very mundane habit that you have that, oh, I've thought of a melody in this lyrics.

They don't have to be good, but they're a song, and that is an act of executing on that idea.

Yeah, absolutely.

And

I think it's the idea of convincing yourself, and we live in a much better age for this now, where so many independent creators are making things and putting them out into the world.

Obviously, podcasting is a great example of that, and YouTube is a really great example of that.

And with tools like SoundCloud and wherever else people can post in Bandcamp, where you can post your own music, it's a really nice, much more welcoming environment where you don't have gatekeepers being like, no, absolutely not.

Or I didn't even bother to read your book.

I threw it in the trash.

And I'm sorry about saying that.

I mean, I know I co-wrote it, but.

Yeah,

I think that one of the great things

is that you can put something out there into the world much more easily than we could.

10, 20, 30 years ago.

I think the real difficult part is the idea of convincing yourself that you are executing something.

Like how you convince yourself that you actually are writing a song or that you're allowed to even write a song,

I think is that next step to say, at least from my experience of being able to say, oh yeah,

I can do this.

This is a thing that I'm allowed to make and put into the world.

Yeah, that leads to, I guess, another question, which is just often if you are thinking about an idea,

you are working on it in some sense.

You're kind of building out in your head and you'll be like, there will be this and there will be this.

And that's working on that idea, but it doesn't feel like it.

It feels, you know, the same way that I was pretending to write a song, you're pretending to work on this idea, is kind of how it feels.

And so a lot of this is just

allowing yourself to call it that, allowing yourself being like, I'm going to sit down and mindfully plan this out.

And this is me working on this idea.

And a lot of it is what you're already doing.

It's just allowing yourself to call it what it is.

And I think sometimes it's very helpful to be unencumbered by specific training when it comes to artistic.

Obviously, you do want some level of training.

You need to train yourself by consuming whatever art it is that you're trying to make.

If you're not reading books, you're going to be a bad writer.

If you're not listening to music, you're going to be a bad composer.

But that being said, I think

there's a lot of really amazing things that come out of independent art creation of people who find a different way to approach the guitar.

You know, as a kid,

I listened to a lot of Jerry Reid,

a country-ish singer.

And anyways, but Jerry Reed was noted for his claw, the way he played the guitar with a claw hand.

Like it's completely terrible technique, but he was self-taught.

And he became this amazing guitar player by clawing the guitar strings with like a balled-up fist.

And it was really phenomenal.

It's really cool to watch him play.

And I think that sometimes when you come at it independently, you bring your own fresh voice to something.

And that's one of the great things about being able to execute things in this day and age when you don't have to get signed to a record label to put your music out there.

And just knowing that some of it will miss, but I think that finding some type of original voice, you have something of that in there.

And just putting things out into the world will help you discover that about yourself and other people to discover that about you.

Yeah.

And this gets to an idea I wanted to talk about, which is the idea of studies.

You know, when a painter is going to work on a very complicated painting, they will often do studies where they're just like, I'm just going to paint the cat in this painting.

That's not like the main thing, but I just, I'm not real confident on this, so I'm just going to paint this cat a bunch of times.

I love it.

I'm already buying it.

And until I get a sense of what this cat looks like.

And musicians, I think, often do this too, where they're like, you know, this is both having written some songs myself and then observing people writing songs.

There's often this thing where you're like, I kind of have a chorus, so I'm just going to record this chorus just to have it down, but that's not really a song.

That's just like a few lines.

And then I also have this guitar lick, so I'm just going to kind of record this guitar lick.

And there's this sense of dancing around the song.

And maybe some of that stuff doesn't, probably a lot of that stuff doesn't end up getting used the way it originally was written.

But it's all just practicing a specific part of that idea.

So I think one thing I wanted to talk about was this idea of when you execute on an idea you have, that doesn't have to be the one.

Right.

That doesn't have to be the only time you did it.

The first time can be a disaster, and that doesn't mean that the idea is bad or that you are incapable of doing it.

It just meant that was a study, that was a practice, and you need to try that again and see if it's going to work a little better and kind of try and shape it.

But I think having kind of the knowledge that the first time you execute an idea can be the first of 50 or the first of 100, it doesn't have to be the final version of that idea.

Yeah, and it's not,

it's for the most part, it's not terribly expensive to do a lot of these things.

Obviously,

yeah, if you're writing a score for a symphony that has 25 members and you have to hire a symphony to play the whole thing, then that's, I think it's a bit expensive.

But I think when you're writing a podcast or

writing a song that you play yourself on a keyboard or guitar, yeah, you can make so many different things and find what lands.

And the great thing, too, is it's so much easier to share these things so you can get a sort of immediate feedback, whether it's people being like, hey, I love this, or you just see whether or not it takes off, whether it registers with an idea.

I think maybe this is backing up a little bit, but I was saying, like, one of the things, like, when we started Night Vale, like when you did the pilot, you wrote and recorded that pilot episode before I had ever read anything that you were writing for the show.

But what's amazing is now that I know this about it, but it was, it's very clear that that whole episode is a study.

Like, there's no arc built into it yet.

And there's a little bit of an arc in the storyline.

There's a, there's a tonal arc too of like attention kind of builds and then it releases.

But for the most part It's a series of weird paragraphs and it's a series of like weird little stories and that I think is the perfect example of a study of something that we did put the study out in the world but then we also like kept repainting it and repainting it and and we're still repainting it like that's the real that's really great thing about a serialized show

and the first night veil episode had 50 downloads right and that was the grand total of our friends and family put together i i joke about that but that's honestly truthfully what that is and so I think

once you can put a study out in the world, you can kind of keep redoing it and redoing it and redoing it.

And podcasting is a great way to do that.

Yeah, taking that even farther back, I mean, yes, it's almost like the Nightfall pilot feels fairly complete and like that's the first Nightfall thing, but it didn't come fully formed like that.

I mean, originally I just was starting with a name.

For some reason, the name came immediately and this vague idea of what this town was.

And I just started, as you said, writing paragraphs.

So that's how that started.

Is that script was not written in one go?

Just every day, I think I was doing it every day.

I would just sit down, and the very first thing I wrote was that light above the Arby's paragraph, which, you know, if you listen to it, it has nothing to do with anything in terms of story, but it was just kind of like, I want to write this thing about this town.

And then when I wrote it, I'm like, yes, that feels like it's adjacent to this town.

Let me write more stuff.

Lights seen in the sky above the Arby's.

Not the glowing sign of Arby's.

Something higher and beyond that.

We know the difference.

We've caught on to their game.

We understand the lights above Arby's game.

Invaders from another world.

Ladies and gentlemen, the future is here.

And it's about a hundred feet above the Arby's.

None of those paragraphs on their own is the beginning of Night Vale.

None of them set a tone for a story.

Later, I could come back and kind of try and shape that into that pilot episode.

But it started out with just like, can I write a paragraph that takes place in this world, and what does that look like?

And then when I could, the question is, can I do a second paragraph?

And you really can do it at that

simple and granular level.

Yeah.

That was one of the big things of, you know, working with the Neo Futurists when you have to come in every week with writing, you know, two to six short plays and then you pitch them to people.

And the pitch process is really fascinating because you have to sell your idea to people.

And, you know, it may or may not get picked to be in the show that week.

But you kind of get a sense of like, once you sort of read it out loud and describe it to people, you, you start, you get pretty reflexive and you start self-reflexive and you start thinking like, oh, you know, this could use some work.

Like, I kind of have an idea.

And then you have some plays that you pitch over and over and over and they never get in.

And then they just sit around forever.

And then later,

you know, I cannibalize them and throw them in Nightvale somewhere or I use them in some other writing project.

Or some of them I eventually just.

dug through and I found a play from like 2006 and then like by 2011 I was like oh I finally figured out how to rework this thing like now that I've come back to that.

So, those sorts of studies, but you have to get yourself into a program.

The neo-futures forced me to do this.

But if you can self-motivate to do that, too, to constantly create and to constantly make a thing and then know how to execute it and then know how to keep executing those ideas.

I think one thing to take from this is that no work is wasted.

Like, if you write a thing and it doesn't work, then you've learned and gotten better.

And at the very least, you've continued to develop that muscle memory of creation.

So I think sort of forgiving yourself a bit when you start working on something and it's not working is part of this.

It's the sense of like, this is not wasted time.

This is not wasted effort.

This is part of what makes me better at what I'm trying to do.

Yeah, and it gets to the sort of embracing.

embracing practice and embracing rehearsal and embracing having to try again is a lot of this.

Like, it's frustrating and it's time consuming having to start over when it's not working or starting something and having it just not work.

But that's, I think, part of developing this habit is developing a, what's the word I'm looking for?

Developing a

resistance, a.

Like an immunity, a.

Not an immunity, but yeah, like an acceptance of trying again, an acceptance of having to start over on something.

Because you're going to have to.

And that's great

because it means that you're going to do it better this time.

I'm sort of like, as we're talking about this, I sort of imagine the idea of like working if you were a, you know, a chef working for a catering company and you just make a ton, a ton, a ton of food.

And a lot of it is that you just need to make this amount of food.

And then you may be at the event that you've catered and you may notice that, like, wow, I put all this effort into these dinner rolls and then nobody ate them.

But it seems like the pasta worked really well.

And, you know,

it's not all going to get consumed.

You are going to make so much stuff that nobody will ever taste or see at all.

And you have to be, to your point, like, you have to be sort of accepting of that and just know that that's your job is to constantly make food for catering events and not worry about how much of it gets eaten.

You just have to keep making it because that's your job.

Your job as a writer.

You keep writing things and you're going to have more than you can possibly use.

And that's totally fine.

There's this great line that I swear I read in the book Crime and Punishment and then have been entirely unable to ever find again in that book.

So don't know where it came from.

I thought it was Crime and Punishment, that it was about the main character is a writer and the line is something like, and I would love to read it for you word for word, but I can't find it.

Like all writers, he judged others by what they had written.

and himself by what he was going to write.

And that breaks both ways.

You know, obviously, that's sort of a joke about the fact that you look at somebody who's successfully written a few books that you think are only mediocre and you're like, ha, when I write my masterpiece,

that'll be way better than this.

But of course, you haven't written your masterpiece, which gets an idea of actually executing on your ideas.

But it goes the other way too, I think, where we look at people who we admire and we're like, wow, he wrote this book.

She made this album.

They did this

video that is amazing.

And I just, I don't.

I don't know how to do something like that.

But what you're not seeing is all of the stuff that those people didn't put out into the world.

You are not seeing the pile of unreleased art that they had to make in order to reach the point where they could make that thing that when they released it, it's done to you.

And so I think being aware of that and not judging yourself for not having created that thing, because you're every one of those people you admire has gone through the process of creating stuff that no one's ever seen.

That's really interesting because it really it does become about trigger pulling, right?

It does become about the thing like I actually have to execute something.

And we're talking about creation, but there's a difference between creating a thing and putting the thing out into the world, like actually executing the distribution of that thing, because you're a writer because you want to tell stories to multiple people than just yourself.

And yeah, you're right.

It's the thing of

some of it is completely about confidence.

It's the idea of like, I can't actually do the thing.

I can't make an album.

This person made an album.

I'll never be the mountain goats, right?

Like,

so what, what's the point?

Like, you convince yourself.

I think that's some of it for some people.

Some of it is just, I think, fear of committing to the time.

Um, maybe like, I don't want to say laziness, but it's a form of that.

You know, you, you don't want to commit to actually doing that and putting yourself out there to take up all of that time.

I was just thinking about

Jillian and I were watching,

we watch a lot of chopped.

You've watched a lot, a lot of chopped.

And there's something that's interesting that happens a lot, which is on some, a lot of these competition shows, but particularly in chopped where somebody forgets an ingredient.

And sometimes Jillian and I have had this conversation of like, I think that guy just self-sabotaged.

I think he didn't want to put himself on the chopping block.

So he didn't, I mean, I think he was fully willing to like lose the competition, but he can always tell himself, well, it's because I left this ingredient off.

It wasn't because.

I'm not the best cook.

And I think that there's a similar thing that some people have.

And I've had that feeling before of like, you know what?

If I always just think about what could be, I never actually have to react to what actually is.

If I think about like how good my novel could be, or how good my podcast could be, or how good my play that I'm going to write one day could be, it's always going to be better than the most mediocre things that actually have been made.

That actually gets to a subject I didn't make a note for, but it is something that I think every artist is aware of, which is there has never in the history of art been a finished work of art that was as good as the artist was picturing when they first started.

Everything faces the hard wall of reality eventually.

And that's fine because everyone passes through that.

Like the perfect complex novel you're imagining is going to have to eventually face the fact that you have to construct it out of words and construct these characters.

And it could end up excellent, but it probably wasn't the exact perfect novel you were imagining.

And that's okay.

I think this is again developing these habits.

And one of those habits is being okay with the fact that the things you make are never going to be as absolutely perfect as they were when you hadn't made them.

And the reason is those didn't exist.

Everything that exists has some sort of flaw.

Things that don't exist can be without flaws.

Yeah, that's absolutely it.

Yeah, this is, yeah, it's, it's all potential.

It's absolutely all potential.

We're nearing our time limit, but I was curious if you wanted to jump into the

the idea of the lottery ticket theory.

Yeah, so I wanted, kind of in, in rethinking this, I was sort of leaving it to the end because I was realizing this is a bit to do more with being a like successful artist, quote unquote, or at least like a working artist.

And maybe that's not everyone's goal.

You know, the goal could just be, I want to make things, and that's really awesome.

And that's, I think, something to keep in mind is a lot of advice about art has to do with being a working artist, which means being able to feed yourself from your art.

If you don't care about that, then a lot of that advice, you know, you can feel free to ignore.

It might still be really useful advice, but you can be a lot more like, I don't care.

If you want to eat from your art, a lot of this advice is very useful.

And, you know, take it from the people who have managed to reach that point of hustling enough on the art to scrounge out, you know, food for dinner.

And so this is advice for that, which is we have this idea that success is at least in some way a meritocracy, right?

Not everyone, I think, I say everyone, many people understand that that's not 100% true, that luck is always a factor.

But the,

I don't know what to call him, the internet person, he does a lot of different things, Darius Kazemi.

And I apologize if I'm pronouncing your name wrong.

That is how you were introduced for the speech, so I'm just going to go off their pronunciation.

So, Darius Kazemi gave this speech at the XOXO Festival in Portland in, I want to say, 2014, about how to be successful.

Except what he called it was how to win the lottery.

It was from the point of view of someone who's won the lottery, explaining the techniques used in order to have a winning ticket, which is obviously ridiculous.

Everyone knows that the lottery is random, which was his point, is that successful artists are people who have gotten very successful in an artistic field, basically won the lottery.

It is so much of it is luck.

And his point is, like the lottery, it's a numbers game.

The reason that they won that lottery isn't because that lottery ticket they won with was perfect.

It's because they had bought a lot of tickets to the lottery, which is to say they had made a lot of stuff and most of that stuff didn't go anywhere.

Most of them weren't winning tickets.

If you make a lot of stuff, if you act on a lot of your ideas, you have a much better chance of having one of them spark with someone and turn into something you can sustain and turn into a career.

It's just unfortunate that you could spend your entire life on a single project and that might be a beautiful meditative thing to do.

But even if it's perfect, there's a very good chance it just won't have the luck of sparking with anyone.

And that's not your fault.

That's just the way it is.

But if you make a lot of stuff, if you make a lot of projects, you have a much better chance that one of them will happen to work.

And so this habit is not just good for you in terms of good for your art, which it is, but it's also good for you if you want to have a career.

It's a good practice for that.

And I think if you just want to build an audience of any kind, and you know, there's so many, I've seen so many really amazing writers

in, say, in New York City in the downtown theater scene, you know, do a play reading.

I'm like, this play is really good.

I'd love to see that play someday.

And you rarely see like a big audience for it.

A lot of the people who are successful playwrights, even in the non-money-making scene, but the people who regularly are producing shows in downtown New York, they're not paying rent with that.

But they're certainly getting a name for themselves and getting an audience for themselves.

The ones that have an audience are the ones who've done it over and over and over.

It's the same way as with a musician.

You can't just upload an album to Bandcamp and be like, it's going to take off.

You actually have to perform regularly and constantly in order to build that audience.

So

the lottery ticket thing is great too, because to be able to take off and become a best-selling novelist or become a...

What's the weird phrase?

The number one international hit podcast or whatever that people slap on things.

That's what our publisher calls Night Vale the number one international hit podcast.

It's very confusing.

We're technically a podcast, and we've been number one in some things, I guess, at some point.

And all podcasts are international.

Yeah, so there you go.

But no, I think that the idea of like even that level of success is nothing like, say,

an amazing bestseller, you know, something that spends a year atop the New York Times bestseller list or whatever, like, or something that becomes,

you know, a movie that makes $200 million or something.

But I think there's an idea too that beyond just supporting yourself, there's the thing of like you love what you do, so you make a lot of it.

And then you love your audience and you want to build more of them because you want more people to be listening.

That's a majority of people who make their careers as novelists are trade paperback people who write romances and mysteries and things like that.

And it can be decent income

too, but it's a thing where you just, you're constantly churning out things and then people start recognizing your name and they start going to you.

Yeah, that's really where it's at.

That's where it at.

That's where it's, That's where it at.

Thus completes our entire lyrics of Becks, where it's at.

His whole song verbatim.

I think the phrase I really want to leave you with, because I think it's the important one here, is just the idea of building a habit of creation.

If you build that habit for yourself, it is going to be useful.

Whether you want to build an actual career out of arts or just do it for yourself, building that habit is a key development in that process.

So let's talk about our assignments for this episode.

For our consume assignment, I want you all to check out a YouTube channel.

It's called Song a Day, and it's by a person named Jonathan Mann.

That's Man with Two N's.

Jonathan has been writing a song every single day and recording that song for, I believe, over 3,000 days.

He's been doing it consistently.

He did it on days that he's sick.

He did it on the day his kid was born.

He did it on the day his grandmother died in a room next to her.

He wrote a song about her.

It's just, he is kind of the ultimate example of a habit of creation.

He writes a song every single day, no matter what.

And I'm sure he'd be the first to tell you, not all the songs are good, but a lot of them are.

You know, because if you build that habit for yourself, your brain will start.

delivering when you need to do that.

And going back to the lottery ticket thing, I mean, some of those songs have become kind of little viral hits.

He went on the Rachel Maddow show with one of them.

And a lot of those songs, even the good ones, no one, probably only, you know, a few hundred people heard and were like, cool, cool song.

And then the next day happened.

But I think he is a perfect example of this habit of creation.

And I think you could,

an interesting thing to go in and do if you're looking at all of the songs that he has on his YouTube channel is probably just check in on like number of views per song.

And I bet you'll see a pretty wide, wide range of things that have gone super viral and some things that may have less than 100 or 200 views.

Yeah, I mean if you look right here at like his it looks like his most popular song has 2.5 million views.

Oh my gosh.

So he's had some go super viral, but then if I'm just like looking at a recent video, a recent one of his songs had 59 views.

So it's just,

it doesn't really matter the number of people watching.

It's about the act.

It's about the act of constantly creating something.

So that's just to recap, that's Jonathan Mann's Mann's Song a Day YouTube channel.

Let's get to our create assignment.

So what we want you to do is we want you to pick an idea you've had for a while.

Maybe it's a phrase or a title or a character you've had in your head, just some just some like kernel of an idea.

And what we want you to do is just use a timer.

Spend an hour exactly on that.

You can do that all at once over the course of an hour.

Maybe break it up into six, ten minute work sessions over the course of six days, just to make it more easy to make it easier to work with.

However, you want to split it up.

But work exclusively on that idea.

Shut everything else down.

Work exclusively on that idea for a total of an hour.

What we want you to do is, whatever you have done at the end of that hour, that's your first try at this idea.

We use the term like an artist's sketch.

That's your sketch of this idea.

And we want you to actually execute it.

We're talking about

really the focus of our show is about making a podcast or building towards making a podcast.

So, let's talk about creating something that can be shared, posted to our forum.

So, record it.

Or maybe if you just have it as a draft, that's also a sketch.

Post your writing to that as well.

But give yourself that one hour and then put it out into the world.

Put it out on our forum.

Put it out on your blog.

Put it out on Tumblr, whatever you have, Twitter.

Go out in your porch and just shout it at a bird, whatever you need to do.

Birds are good audiences.

They are.

They're terrible at feedback, but they sometimes will will listen.

Anyways, so give yourself that one hour.

Execute the idea.

At the end of the hour, you're done with it.

Put it up there.

That's your sketch.

I would love for you to, I bet Joseph would too.

I bet he won't fight me on this idea.

Do it again later, some other time.

Keep doing this sort of thing.

Give yourself those parameters and that motivation to say, I'm going to then take this next step to cut off working.

execute it and then move on to the next thing whether it's continuing that idea or a new idea altogether and i would encourage encourage you here to pick an idea that is one of your someday I'll do this ideas.

Everyone has those, those like, this is going to be my big project, this is going to be the one, and someday I'll do it.

Choose that and use that this hour on that.

But what if, what if I don't want to, what if I mess it up and now I can't write the great American novel?

Well, it turns out you can.

I mean, you can't.

That's an impossible.

No one's ever written that and no one ever will.

But the point is, it's scary to use that idea that's so important to you.

But the great thing here is you will get practice at messing it up because there's no way you can execute it well in an hour.

So you're probably not going to, but that's cool because that was your first try.

And you can try again as many times as you want.

So you're also never going to make that idea great by not executing it poorly at some point in time.

So you might as well start executing it poorly now.

You miss 100% of the podcasts you don't take, as I think the phrase.

That is the phrase.

Perfect.

I love sports.

Thank you so much, everyone.

That's all for this episode.

But your assignment is just beginning.

Head on over to startwithispodcast.com to join our membership community.

Becoming a member allows you to share your assignments with other listeners, talk about what's sparking your creativity, and find future collaborators.

Plus, you will be able to ask follow-up questions about this and future episodes and gain exclusive access to episodes where we answer those questions.

Membership is just $5.

That's five packs of colored pencils at a dollar store that doesn't have sales tax.

We can't wait to see what you're working on.

Start with this is a production of Nightvale Presents.

It is produced by Julia Melfie.

Editing by Grant Stewart.

Mixing by Vincent Cascion.

Theme by Joseph Fink.

All other music is by caged animals.

Very special thanks to Adam Cecil and Christy Gressman.

Check out nightvalepresents.com for more information about this show and all of our other shows.

We have a bunch now, and they all roll.

Thanks for listening.

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I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.

And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director.

You might know me from the League Veep or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.

We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.

Yeah, like Amy thinks that, you know, Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas, and I don't.

He's too old.

Let's not forget that Paul thinks that Dune 2 is overrated.

It is.

Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-season, and case you missed them.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone, From Greece to the Dark Knight.

We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks.

We've talked about why Independence Day deserves a second look.

And we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even heard of, like Kanja and Hess.

So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.

Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to hit the follow button.

Hey y'all, it is Jeffrey Kraner speaking to you from the year 2025.

And did you know that Welcome to Night Vale is back out on tour?

We are.

We're going to be up in the northeast in the Boston, New York City area, going all the way over to the upper Midwest in Minnesota.

That's in July.

You kind of draw a line through there and you'll kind of see the towns we'll be hitting.

We'll also be doing Philly down to Florida in September.

And we'll be going from Austin all the way up through the middle of the country into Toronto, Canada in October.

And then we'll be doing the West Coast plus the Southwest plus Colorado in January of 2026.

You can find all of the show dates at welcometonightvale.com slash live.

Listen, this brand new live show is so much fun.

It is called Murder Night in Blood Forest, and it stars Cecil Baldwin, of course, Symphony Sanders, me, and live original music by Disparition, and who knows what other special guests may come along for the ride.

These tours are always so much fun, and they are for you, the diehard fan, and you, the Night Vale new kid alike.

So feel comfortable bringing your family, your partner, your co-workers, your cat, whatever.

They don't got to know what a night veil is to like the show.

Tickets to all of these live shows are on sale now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

Don't let time slip away and miss us when we are in your town because otherwise we will all be sad.

Get your tickets to our live U.S.

plus Toronto tours right now at welcometonightvale.com/slash live.

And hey, see you soon.