We Are the Zyxx Mission and This Is How We Work

Mission to Zyxx could be the best podcast. This sci-fi comedy – a mix of Star Trek , Star Wars and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, based on original jokes rather than references, is definitely the best of the current wave of fictional podcasts, in part because of its unique process. The actors improvise each episode, guided by only a certain premise. The three-person team then edits and voices the show, more than halving it and adding sound effects, voice effects, music, transitions, and ambience. The end result is as crisp as any impromptu show, but as nimble as anything written from the script. In the in-depth episode of How I Work, all seven of the cast and crew of the show revealed their creative and technical process for each episode. There is a lot to learn here for comedians, actors, writers, editors and sound professionals.

Role:

Alden Ford: Editor and Actor (Plec Dexetter) Seth Lind: Editor and Actor (Nermut Bundaloy and Minor Characters) Mojan Zolfagari: Actor (Barga’s Ship and Minor Characters) Ellie Kokesh: Actor (Gift) Jeremy Bent: Actor (C-53) Winston Noel: Actor (CLINTHS and Supporting Characters) Shane O’Connell: Recording Engineer, Mixer and Sound Engineer

One word that best describes how you work:

Alden: Let’s do a deadline oriented one. Seth: Seated Mojan: Creative Allie: Explosive Jeremy: Freelance Winston: Scattered Shane: Juggler

Current Mobile Device: This is all iPhones, from 6 to X. Current Computer: All Macs except Jeremy’s Lenovo Y40-70. Location: Everyone is in Brooklyn, but Mojan is sometimes in Los Angeles

First of all, tell us a little about your past and how you got where you are now.

Alden (editor / actor): All six of us have been doing comedy in New York for over a decade, most notably Upright Citizens Brigade, and our sound engineer Shane has worked in music production for at least the same amount. Plus, we’re all lifelong science fiction fans.

I started doing comedy in New York in 2005, took improvisation lessons at UCB, and started improvising and sketching with the team shortly after I started going to class. We started out with live performances, but when we got down to sketching, I learned a little more about editing and how to get the most out of my own production: where to cut corners and what things to do. do it right. I’ve always enjoyed creating conceptual genre stuff. So when we started to formulate the idea of ​​the podcast, I felt that this is a merger of many things that I have been working on and thinking for years: something heavy by genre, this is a tribute, and a parody, and something that we can do. shreds, and it will sound like a much larger product than it actually is.

Seth Lind (editor / actor): I’ve been improvising in New York for 12 years, mostly with a group called Thank You Robot, which includes Jeremy Bent, who plays C-53 on the Zyxx . We appear to be the longest improvisational team in town, which the late great David Carr says is a bit like the tallest leprechaun ever. I worked at This American Life for the same 12 years, currently serving as Chief Operating Officer. I like that in the Mission to Zyxx I can combine their record and comedy. Alden and Jeremy started talking about making a podcast and Jeremy recommended taking me along because of my background sound. I am very grateful to him for that. This is such a satisfying project. Prior to that, I completed my Master’s Degree in Media from The New School, where I directed several short audio documentaries and dabbled in film. I grew up mainly in Minnesota and Wisconsin. When I was 8, we lived in Anchorage for a year. We drove there from Minnesota and listened to the BBC’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy several times as we drove along Al-Kahn. I loved it, and it makes me happy that I ended up creating something with a lot of this absurd science fiction.

Mojan Zolfagari (actor): I studied economics / political science in college and decided not to use anything and instead follow my dreams. I moved to New York from the San Francisco Bay Area to pursue my love of comedy, although I wasn’t quite sure how to do it. So I got my education at UCB theater in 2009 and gradually started doing screenwriting and acting in television, which somehow (and thankfully) turned into a career. Along the way, I met a lot of talented people like Alden, who knew I was a science fiction fanatic and asked me to participate in Zyxx back in October 2016. I didn’t hesitate and quickly responded to his email: “SOUND GOOD, YES !!! “

Allie Kokesh (actor, Dar): Really good people. Who collaborated with me. Recommended to me. I’ve been working on this. Who helped me.

Jeremy Bent (Actor, C-53): Growing up as a strange kid in Rhode Island and going to Boston University in film and television where I was part of a sketch group that really strengthened my desire to make comedy a full-time job. After graduation, he came to New York and began studying at UCB. I spent 10 years getting better at it, now I teach improvisation there, I write for some things, and my voice pops up every now and then on the Internet / on TV.

Winston Noel (actor): My experience with Zyxx has been with the Honest Citizens Brigade . I have been studying, performing and teaching improvisation there for the last 10 years. Improv has opened doors for me in both my professional and personal life and I love it. Do you hear the improvisation? I love you!

Shane O’Connell (engineer / mixer / sound engineer): I got interested in recording around the time I started playing in my first bands. In high school, I learned the basics of working with the former used the ADAT, which I had saved, mowed bunch lawn (it was around the time when the computer DAW only beginning to become a standard medium, but were still too expensive for the average teenager. Afford ). In college, I went to NYU to study music production, where I received formal training in the engineering and workflow of a commercial recording studio. Before Mission to Zyxx, I had never tried sound design, but I was always curious to try it. As a child, my godmother, Claire Graybill (then Claire Sanfilippo), worked at Skywalker Sound as a dialogue and tome editor. She got me interested in movie sound early on, and that’s a big reason I jumped at the opportunity to do this show.

Tell us about the process of creating an episode of the show.

Alden: Each episode starts with our guests telling us about their performances. We often take two or three and choose the one that works best for the show. In the studio, we roughly decide how and why we meet with the guest, for example, who we should meet, if they are attacking the ship or something like that. Then we will start rolling and jumping. We almost always start on a ship for a few minutes, head to the planet, or, be that as it may, meet our guest, find a reason to leave, and end with a final scene on the ship. We usually record 60-90 minutes, then try to reduce the time to 30 minutes.

Jeremy: We usually take a break in the middle of a recording to figure out where we want to end.

Ellie: Everyone can perform and build together. And then we start discussing what we like or something that most of us like, and others can see the beauty in it. This is the art of the committee.

Mujan: As for Barji, I go on every entry with the goal of further developing her character (she’s fighting to be a sane spaceship actress) and making sure we learn about her through her relationships with the other characters on the show. … But most of the time, I like to challenge the group by just throwing unexpected lines or movements because I know they will nicely reinforce it and justify it so that it makes sense in this world. (Especially Jeremy Bent’s omniscient droid C-53). I also play any minor characters that are needed (along with Seth Lind and Winston Noel) and always listen to him if there is a need, whether it be to paint the world or develop a scene.

Winston: Since I play a lot of supporting characters, I try to be honest about whether I should appear in an episode (I always want to do this) and how to appear most naturally and support. Then I try to create a quick voice or character style that A) makes sense and B) is something I haven’t done before.

Alden: The big goal of the series is to combine the amazing and magical elements of great improvisation with the intriguing, satisfying plots and characters of a legitimate sci-fi series. Good improvisation is about not thinking too much, but good science fiction usually requires thoughtfulness and awareness. This is where editing comes in. I think the ability to explore these situations as long as it takes to work them out – knowing that we can go back and squeeze something or cut out something that didn’t work – that’s what makes it possible from time to time. other. So our workflow in creating a show is all about maximizing our ability to do both.

For post-processing, either Seth or I will do the first edit pass, which usually takes 5 to 10 hours. Then we’ll send it off to someone else to listen and collect notes, looking for additional scraps, places we need to clarify, etc. Then we’ll do a second pass, and sometimes a third or fourth. Once we get to what we think is essentially our locked cutout, I go through the project file and add notes, pointing out the places to add sound effects – opening a door, blasting a blaster, what kind of background atmosphere or voice filters I’m ‘for a particular scenes or character, etc. Usually two or three dozen notes, anywhere from “Bargi’s hatch opens” to a paragraph or two describing a sequence of actions on a planet the team has never been to. Then I send that project file to Shane, and he reviews and contributes to my notes and adds tons of his material to each episode, which takes 20-30 hours of work. Then Seth and I usually take some notes with Shane and it will be good to release. It’s a pretty complicated process compared to a lot of podcasts, but I think it shows up in the final product.

Set: An episode is recorded for 1 to 2 hours. Finished episodes take 25 to 45 minutes, so it’s a lot. It takes me two whole days to get to the rough draft, which entails listening several times and doing cuts to speed up the pace, make jokes stronger, lose parts that are out of character or don’t match, sometimes reordering sections to get them done more linear and find beautiful shaded lines at the end of each of the 3-4 acts. This is mostly oversimplification, but sometimes the structure or meaning can change dramatically when edited. I REALLY love that we have both ways: completely improvise the performance and then obsessively edit to that extent. For example, we just recorded an episode in which guest comedian Christopher Scott plays a droid casino dealer in an absurdly complex card game with death and death bets. The joke is that he explains Byzantine rules so quickly that poor Plec cannot follow them. And while editing, I decided to cut out each of his breaths and shorten many other pauses to further impress this game.

After I have edited the content, there is a phase of about two hours in length where I just drown out the tracks of people who are not speaking. Since Bargi, C-53 and other characters have vocal effects, the background bleeding would sound very strange. I give the draft to Alden, who usually sends me two circles of notes: mostly abbreviations, sometimes more dramatic changes.

Sometimes we take a couple of lines to fill in the gap or to tell the story of some action that is difficult to convey through sound design. Sometimes we rewrite the intro or record a new beat to add to a scene that was not entirely complete.

The last and very fun step in editing is choosing the uncut section to include after the end credits, usually when someone breaks down badly. Or all of us. It was Shane’s idea in the very first episode, and I loved it so much that he thought about it. Listeners tell us that they appreciate these clips because they show that we actually make everything up on the spot. And they can hear how much Shane is adding to the raw record. We pass the precise cuts to Shane, who sends us the unfinished mixes, including the sound effects, and then comes another round of validation. For example, Shane Dropbox just shot the first scene in 202, and Alden and I were having fun doing some very interesting work on the character of Bino walking the ship. My only note was, “Maybe we can give Plec a gurgle in his stomach?”

Shane: On average, it takes me 30-40 hours to dub and mix an episode. I usually get an edited Pro Tools session a week before the release date, so the first thing I do is look at the session and draw up a rough attack plan based on my free days and nights this week.

This first glance also occurs when I make a very zoomed-in pass of an episode, load files into my mix template, add the general background ambience and simple sound effects I created for previous episodes, and read the memory notes where Alden and Seth describe their ideas for specific SFX moments and episodes. This first step is when my ears are still fresh, so I usually come up with big ideas that I can hear in my head but don’t necessarily know how to implement them. These sequences are the most time consuming, so I start working on them right away.

Alden: As for the larger plot and story threads that we try to weave throughout the show, it’s usually some combination of discussions we had before or after the recording, brainstorming by email or GroupMe, or even just impromptu decisions that we thought. were so funny or had so much potential that we had to bring them back. As the show goes on, it can seem daunting to have so many characters and story balls to keep in the air, but more often it just means we have a bigger storehouse of fun things to choose from without feeling like every decision means pulling out of air is a whole piece of mythology.

Shane: The big episode in the season 2 premiere was particularly challenging. At the start of Act 3 (spoiler alert), the Rebel pilot is in his fighter, leading our team to the next mission when his hyperdrive fails and takes him into space. At this point in the session, Seth and Alden had a note stating that the sequence should be over radio commands. Pilot struggling with controls and exploding sounds will be processed through the effects bus that I use for Bargey’s communications system. That was my first impulse too, but since we had extra time to work on this episode, I wanted to go for something a little more challenging and hopefully complicate the joke in turn. The team may have killed their new boss, and they react with the emotional equivalent of “yiiiiiikes” by the collar. My instinct was to make the sequence of the destruction of the fighter as dramatic and intense as possible, so that the muffled response of the crew was much more disproportionate. Plus, Jeremy Bent played the fighter pilot so well and with such intensity that the scene gave in to a change of perspective.

I ended up starting a scene in the pilot’s fighter plane. It sounds small and cramped, Jeremy’s voice sounds right in your face, and our protagonists are those who use the communication system. When something starts to go wrong, alarms go off around your head, various parts of the ship start to explode, and the engine starts spinning strangely under your feet. Since this is only audio, changing the perspective in a scene can be difficult, in which case it took the longest to resolve. We ended up converting the last blast into radio waves, and through this interference, the camera returns to Bargi when they hear the end of the disaster on the radio. After a few tweaks, the whole process took about 8 hours, while the sequence itself lasts less than a minute.

How do you fit the show into the rest of your life?

Moujan: We all have busy schedules, so we usually sign up at night or on weekends, so the schedule works. Plus, it never seems like a burden because you always want to hang out with your friends. And since I work in both New York and Los Angeles, I have a Yeti microphone so I can Skype calls from Los Angeles and record wherever I stay. So this podcast fits in very easily!

Winston: It can be difficult! I also have a full-time job as a copywriter for an advertising agency, so I’m usually the kind of person who has to work hard during a night recording.

Ellie: This is my first priority. So. Easily? I have no problem blocking full nights for recording.

Alden: I’m lucky that the higher paying gigs in my life still give me time to work on a podcast in between. But I’ve learned to block Tuesday nights as they usually spend listening to contractions and taking notes at the last minute before our Wednesday morning release.

Seth: I’m very lucky, my day job is 30 hours in 3 days. So I have a full day of Mondays and Tuesdays to edit Mission to Zyxx . And we always record episodes in the evenings or on weekends, so it fits very well. This is the first gig where I regularly correspond with co-authors, and this is the most difficult place to draw boundaries. I’m always in touch via text messages … and I’m also like, I’M TEXTING ANOTHER THREE MINUTES BACK WHERE IS HE!?!?

Jeremy: I don’t spend as much time on podcast as, say, Alden or Shane. I record with the band, I sometimes record some of our commercials from my apartment, and I write Hark’s Tough Love, a tips column for our Rebellion site . Putting it all together is not that difficult.

Shane: Lack of life during the production of the show.

What apps, gadgets or tools can’t you live without?

Alden: We work in Pro Tools , and when we came from the world of video editing it was difficult to navigate the user interface, but the learning curve was quite short, especially since I use it almost entirely for basic editing.

I also have a Blue Yeti microphone , which comes in handy if I need to send a fast pickup.

Seth: Professional sound editing tools. Dropbox for file sharing, including a mobile app for listening to Shane’s mixes on the fly. GroupMe for constantly fooling around with the rest of the members and quickly developing a strategy to replace guests who refused. Patreon for keeping the lights on. Discord for chatting with Patreon supporters. Skype to connect to Mojan or guests in Los Angeles.

Shane: My little portable Tascam field tape recorder that I use to record foley and show setting. Soundtoys plugins. My Beyer Dynamic 770 headphones, which I use as my main headphone for mixing at shows.

Mojan: iPhone. I wish it weren’t, because last year I tried to use the phone much less often. But for now, yes, very much, the iPhone is 100,000% BFF.

Ellie: GroupMe! I’m always so far behind that I end up reading hundreds of posts discussing plots and lunch orders.

Jeremy: I bought an Audio Technica 4040 mic about seven years ago when I started doing voice acting and I’ll be damned if it didn’t do it every time. My audio interface is dead and I had to replace my broken mic cables, but the AT4040 is a workhorse. Plus, GroupMe is Mission to Zyxx’s preferred app for distributing hot messages.

How is your workplace arranged?

Allie: We’re recording at Shane O’Connell’s apartment! We outline and fix.

Alden: I work in the living room behind my iMac with a couple of small audio monitors. I usually use headphones to work on the Zyxx as most of our listeners use them and Shane mixes the show to sound best.

Seth: I have a small cluttered desk with a 27-inch iMac near the balcony door and a bunch of houseplants. Being close to an open door makes me feel less like a disgusting house monster when I edit for 12 hours straight without leaving my apartment.

Shane: I am hosting the show at a small table in the corner of my apartment. My computer is installed on my old Tascam 388 tape recorder. The area is cramped between the wall and the back of my couch, where my dog ​​usually sits while I work. This is TNG’s Enterprise plan and one of those little 3D printed moon lamps I bought from Instagram on a column.

What advice do you have for anyone starting a comedy or drama podcast?

Jeremy: Do it! It’s great to talk about it. The planning is even better. But nothing happens until you achieve it. We did two whole series of Zyxx eight months before it really started and we learned a lot. One ended up in the first season and the other didn’t. So you can nail it down right away, or, like us, you might have to go back to the drawing board, but you’ll learn a lot more by doing this.

Alden: There are so many corners of the sound world that remain to be explored. A podcast with just two natural white guys talking about music (like my first podcast with Winston Noel) is light and fun and can be awesome, but the intimacy and connection you can create with audio has so much potential – it’s your ideas, literally and directly into the heads of your audience, one person at a time. It’s so simple and beautiful. So it was natural for us to think: let’s create a cool, funny, strange world in which we can all play, which, hopefully, people will like.

There is still plenty of room for ideas and great execution. If you can bring great script, acting, or sound design to a podcast, you really stand out and people will be interested in both the process and the actual content, which will make people invest more in the show as a whole.

The only advice I have is to edit! Podcasting seems to be the only medium where no one expects anything to be edited, so something with thoughtful tempo and good comic timing or dramatic tension is still pretty rare and will improve everything you do. And it reminds people that you care about the work you do and that whatever they hear is your choice.

Winston: Make sure the project is something that you care about and not something that you think you “should be doing” to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. Then find fun people to do it with.

Seth: If you can avoid it at all, don’t read the scripts from the page. Unfortunately, filming feature podcasts is pretty much awful. The fact that we do not see your actors does not mean that you should not distract them from the book and act out a scene like in a movie: remember, look into each other’s eyes. On Zyxx we get around this by not having scripts at all and improvising anything that only makes the cadence and language feel more natural.

Also check what has been done before and make sure your idea is specific. Maybe the world doesn’t need another fake public radio investigation or another dystopian satire – unless they have super-awesome leads and ARE READ FROM THE PAGE. I’m not angry, just disappointed and angry.

Mojan: Find people you enjoy working with because you will be looking each other in the eye for hours. Plus, get a GroupMe account so you can annoy each other any time of the day with off-topic banter. (I do this very often with the Zyxx team. Sometimes too much.)

Take us through an interesting, unusual or challenging process that you have.

Alden: I think the reason long improvisation is still not widespread on recorded media is because if you don’t watch it live, you lose a little magic. Being in the audience of a great improv show makes you feel like this is your show too, which in a way it is. You watch it happen there, and your reaction shapes the show, and you can feel it internally as a member of the audience, and it is intoxicating. I believe the reason it works so well for so many podcasts is because it somehow retains that vibrant feeling, probably due to the proximity of listening to a single podcast as most people do. Plus, with small micro-edits that speed up the tempo between lines, you can increase the tempo without losing spontaneous performance in a much less noticeable way than if you were trying to do it on video.

Winston: It was difficult to get the first episode of season 2 right. We looked at the time jumps and vastly different structures of the show before remembering that the interaction between our characters is the real attraction of the show, so we decided to get out of our own way and just get the characters together as soon as possible by completing missions.

Seth: It’s pretty small and random, but when editing the episodes, I changed the numbers several times. That is, the number that the person said in the improvisational scene has changed. For example, someone referred to a show at a club with at least seventy drinks. But at least seven glasses are actually funnier because it’s believable. So we carved out the tee at seventy. Another episode of The Grower Mind of the K’hekk states that the process took over x million years. But to make “sense” (ha), there really must be billions. So I took a four from another word.

Shane: I want Mission to Zyxx’s sound design to function as a way to lower the barrier of entry for listeners who would not otherwise be drawn to radio / art podcasts. Some find it difficult to overcome the recklessness of the whole venture and get to the point where you drive and just enjoy the time with the characters. My approach is to add enough detail to the show so that the sound effects fade into the background rather than stand out. Hopefully this will make listeners’ ears embrace the reality of the show so that they can more easily penetrate the story and characters.

The most finicky thing I do for this is psychoacoustic techniques that help create a sense of space. When the scene takes place on a ship, I use a special reverb atmosphere for the characters and actions that evokes the size and construction of the space. For example, when the characters enter the elevator, I automate the reverb time to be faster, and I automate the treble downward. This gives the effect of a small space and a dull sound. When the character leaves the scene, I don’t just turn down the volume, but I increase the reverb and automate the EQ to gradually reduce the high and low frequencies, which is the quality of sound propagation in the real world. These are very small details that only really work if you are listening with headphones, but this is the kind of sound design that I think most helps the listener get into the scene.

Jeremy: There are so many great improvisations in the show, but I’ve never been as impressed as when Shane O’Connell, our sound engineer and designer, adds a little audio joke to the show that I either didn’t expect or expected. someday I will. Great example: In Episode 102, C-53 claps his hands and no one joins him. Shane added a clanging sound and I burst out laughing because yes, it sounds weird if the robot claps and no one else.

Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?

Alden: We all rely heavily on each other every step of the way, which is amazing. Improvisation is about consent, support and adaptability, so we go into the protocol knowing that whatever crazy shit we throw away, the rest of the team will catch and take care of it. Sure, it’s really important in a live performance, but in a serialized format, it creates such a strong sense of shared ownership that is so rare.

Logistically, I don’t think post-production would have been possible if Seth, Shane, and I weren’t in constant contact and wanted to sleep all night before release to help each other and make sure everything sounds good. Shane brings incredible load and creative energy to the show, making every scene, character and sound effect meaningful, unique and fun.

Ellie: I mean. I can afford the luxury of just wasting my time. And never worry about it becoming perfect. The other half of our roster is not only fun but turns hours of content into a beautiful 20 minute episode, negotiates with sponsors, and looks to the future for all of us.

Seth: I mean, this line-up is amazing. The fact that we can sit down with nothing and have material for a satisfying episode in an hour or two just seems like we’ve found some gold. We’ve all created our own characters – with some thoughts on how they fit together, but mostly on our own, in terms of their personalities and the play of the characters. I think this really led them to thicken and their games to last. Because we all believe in our heroes.

And when we heard Shane’s mix in the first episode, we thought, “OH SO I GUESS THIS SHOW SOUNDS GREAT.”

Shane: I really love the working relationship I have with Seth and Alden. I completely trust their taste and they know they can tell me if something doesn’t work without my resistance. This frees me up to indulge in every sound effect idea I have without worrying about whether it is overkill or pointless.

Jeremy: Alden is much more organized than I ever will be, and I’m not sure the Zyxx would exist without him. My girlfriend Diana is also a queen because she asks, “What are you going to do today?” when she leaves for work because it annoys me.

What (other) side projects do you have?

Ellie: Now I’m a doctor! at Caveat.

Jeremy: I play every week at UCB Theater East Village with a band called Bucky, and it’s a constant source of joy, as are my two other bands, Rumpleteaser (also at UCB) and Thank You, Robot (monthly show at Caveat). I may or may not be working on a text adventure game for Mission to Zyxx .

What are you reading now or what do you recommend?

Winston: I’m reading an old science fiction right now: War of the Worlds . For another fun sci-fi reading, I’d recommend Dan Simmons’ Hyperion .

Seth: Currently Stern , a 1962 Bruce Jay Friedman novel. It’s pretty good, not sure if I recommend it. If I had to recommend one book, it would probably be The Smoke Tree by Denis Johnson. It’s written so patiently. It feels like he’s just describing what he sees. There is no false urgency to make this fun. I don’t read that much. This is a failure.

Ellie: The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky . As I read this right now, I continue to highlight points that resonate with my early twenties.

Jeremy: Now I read “Acceptance” Jeff VanderMeer of his very good trilogy “Southern limit “ . For other recommendations, you should read Ursula LeGuin. The Disadvantaged or The Left Hand of Darkness will suit you. Last year I got really into Italo Calvino because Invisible Cities and If a Traveler on a Winter Night are incredible things. The year 1491 of Charles Mann is so interesting that I read it eleven years ago and still think about it. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is a book that I encourage everyone to read, but nobody else does.

Mujan: I love science fiction, but my education and links are more related to television and films. So I’m currently diving deep into the greatest science fiction writers, as my nerdy friends recommend. I just started reading Disadvantaged and IT. IS AN. GREAT.

What podcasts do you recommend?

Ellie: My favorite murder .

Winston: I love the 538 crime podcast about politics and I’ve just started listening to early episodes of Lore .

Set: Song Exploder . What the hell . The first season of Homecoming . Reply to all .

Shane: Mystery show .

Jeremy: The Tobolowski Files is probably my all-time favorite podcast because he’s an amazing storyteller even when he’s not talking about working on Groundhog Day (although the episode is fantastic). My friends Matt and Eric do a guided meditation podcast called Headplace , which is in some ways both very interesting and really soothing.

Mojan:

• News in digest: Up First (NPR)
• News, full details: The Daily (NY Times)
• News in Review: It Was a Minute with Sam Sanders (NPR)
• Around: Reply All (Gimlet)
• Hollywood History: You Must Remember This (Panoply)
• Hollywood Education: I’ve Been There Too (Earwolf)
• Hollywood People Speak: The A24 Podcast
• Mental Health: The Fun World of Depression (APM) and Relative Health with Janie Stolar (ForeverDog)
• Book, History and Comedy Lovers: Theater of the Public Domain (ForeverDog)

… I listen to a lot of podcasts.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

Seth: “Eh, don’t be a teacher. Go to New York and write for SNL or something. “

Mojan: Be kind and persistent .

Ellie: Be kind.

Jeremy: “You are not the hero of your life story.” A college friend of mine said that, and I think he meant that life is not a story. It helps to put things in perspective.

Who else would you like to see to answer these questions?

Seth: Paul Rubens.

Ellie: C-53.

Jeremy: David Byrne.

What’s your best shortcut or life hack?

Seth: Whatever you call it the opposite of Inbox Zero. I currently have 34,780 unread emails. People see this on my phone and are horrified. But deleting a message takes longer than ignoring it. Also, I don’t carry a bag to work. I realized that I carry the bag for weeks and never put anything in it. So: wallet, keys, phone, that’s all. Yes, that means I never go to the gym or collect meals.

Shane: I have a habit of checking the first half of the Craigslist page for free once or twice a day. You won’t believe that people, especially in a big city like New York, are lazy to sell good things. The other day I have speakers that usually sell on eBay for $ 1,500!

Ellie: If you fold the bottom of the family chip bag inside, it becomes a separate bowl.

Jeremy: I used to drink a ton of juice, which is not good. But now I drink a lot of 1/4 juice, 3/4 seltzer water, and it not only tastes great, but also much less sugar.

What problem are you still trying to solve?

Alden: On the show, we’re just starting to puzzle over how to keep our creative energy in the right place. Serializing improvisation is pretty uncharted territory, so we’re learning to stay in the golden corner on the go. It is important to ensure that we do not lose sight of the big picture by focusing on the principles of minute-to-minute improvisation. But it’s just as important to make sure that we don’t control the process and create the script so much that we do not have fun, which becomes more difficult the more we expect from ourselves and our listeners, who, for obvious reasons, expect a lot of them. ridiculous decisions to pay off in any meaningful way. We are really interested in hearing what our listeners think of Season 2 as we try to do a lot of new things while keeping the things we loved the most from Season 1.

Winston: I live a creative life in an expensive city.

Seth: There is a category of clothing that has been worn, but not enough to be washed to make money. These clothes eventually turn into a sprawling pile of clothes on top of my dresser. Some people assume that if the item supposedly does not need washing, it is clean and should be removed. But I don’t want to mistake this shirt for really unworn. This is a different category. I don’t think this problem will ever be solved. The earth is heating up too quickly.

Shane: How to record scenes without mic leaking between participants, without putting them in soundproof capsules that completely kill the atmosphere.

Ellie: I need to remember to drink more water.

Jeremy: I love my apartment, but I need another closet. Or an additional set of cabinets in the kitchen. I’ll deal.

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