Last week I released Episode 257 of Comical Start, Pockets of Conversation. Its publish date is just a few days after the 5th year anniversary of our first episode, Multiverse. Grant was unable to record with me, so here is a lightly-edited transcript1I used the slick program MacWhisper to get this done. of the 25 minute monologue that I did off the dome.
We’re going to be doing something a little different this week.
Intro Guitar Music
So, on June 19th, 2018, we released the first episode of this podcast, which we now very deliberately tell people not to go listen to, if they ever come back and listen to this show, because it’s not very good. Today, as I record, is June 20th, 2023. So just yesterday was the five year anniversary of Comical Start’s beginning. But here’s the thing: Grant isn’t here right now.
We did our darndest to get out ahead of what we knew was going to be a hectic summer. We really tried to be multiple episodes ahead, so timelines didn’t match up with what was going on in real life. I always had at least one episode in my back pocket for the last month or so, but events out of our control caught up to us. And now here I am on a Tuesday needing to release an episode on Thursday, and due to no fault of his own, Grant is not here.
And that’s kinda weird.
This is episode 257, which is wild. We’ve had a large number of episodes, all of which Grant has been in attendance for, whether he showed up on time or more frequently just a few minutes late. He’s always been here. And that’s been cool. And I don’t really know what I’m gonna be saying on this episode. It certainly won’t be forty-five minutes because no one can handle that. But I wanted to take a step back and do something that I never really do on this show, which is actually give Grant some credit.
I’ll probably do that by just sort of going chronologically through time, but you know Grant deserves this, especially with everything going on. It’s a very busy time, it’s a very stressful time. But with everything going on Grant deserves to not be the butt of my jokes or have to play a particular kind of character in the ways that we do on this show for at least a week. That’s probably good for him and good for me.
So yes, five years ago we started recording this show. Our first recording was very bad because I wasn’t really good at starting something like this from scratch and Grant had no idea what he was doing. Neither of us really knew what the show was going to be. All I knew was that I had pitched a concept to him the summer right after my senior year of college, right after both of our senior years of college. I just had this idea for a show based on some potential artwork I had made for OHAC when I was trying to make a new icon for it. I had a couple different ideas. We went one direction. I had this one left over and it just came into my mind that I wanted this show called Comical Start where the only idea that I had was we surprise each other with newspaper comics. That was it.
Right after college Grant and I started hanging out again during the summer. You know we had gone to different colleges, we didn’t really see much of each other during college, and you know I reached back out, we were hanging out one day, having a good time, and I just pitched this idea to him and he was gracious enough to opt into it. Not knowing what he was getting into, just knowing that, hey, I have this idea for a project.
This has been the kind of thing that our group of friends had always been good at is just someone has an idea, the people around them kind of roll with it. We just sort of figure out how to make it work, whether it’s incredibly ambitious or dumb or perfectly reasonable and then we just sort of did it as best we could. But here’s the thing, most of these projects were like school projects or little videos. They were like concrete things with a specific end goal and a deadline. The issue with a podcast is, I mean, we’re not making like an investigative journalism podcast here. We are just like chatting every week. That’s the sort of show I’ve listened to, so it’s the only kind of podcast I knew how to attempt to make at least, is something that didn’t have a clear end in sight.
And it turns out this one didn’t either.
We had a rocky start because we didn’t really know how often we wanted to record, or what would be doable. So we released, like I said, the first episode on June 19. You know, we were kind of spotty a little bit throughout there. We had, you know, there is an episode August. In July and a couple in August—a couple of those have been deleted. That’s been previously discussed. So yeah, August 16, 2018 we did one. It was around then that I was then driving out to San Diego to move there. And August 30th is when our current streak begins. From August 30, 2018 until this week Grant and I have recorded and released an episode of Comical Start every single week for that entire time. Holidays, whatever we we made it work. We always recorded ahead, we made sure that we had enough going on in our like backlog that we would make it through all of those moments.
Why did we decide to do that instead of, you know, taking breaks sometimes? I don’t know it It just kind of felt like the right thing to do. I think the first year we probably just sort of talked about it and decided, hey, this isn’t that big of a deal. It doesn’t take us that long and we enjoy doing it. Probably not good at it, but we enjoy it. And so let’s just roll with it. Let’s just keep trying to push these episodes out and not try and take breaks or anything. It’s just a thing that we do now. And so it has been.
We had a handful of guests. I think actually we’ve only had two guests a handful of times. But that’s been fun as well whenever that’s happened. Due to the timing of this, I thought about, oh, maybe I should record an episode with Erin or Jack or just someone who I knew would be willing to just hop in and do this. But the timing doesn’t work for that either. I couldn’t confirm with Grant until about an hour ago that we would need to be doing this, and tomorrow morning I head out with Erin to go drive across the country to Minnesota. And there’s no time in there to try and record something that isn’t an assault on people’s ears just in terms of the audio quality, so I didn’t think that was the approach. I wasn’t gonna try and like edit and release an episode while in the car, that seemed problematic.
And so I went to this idea of, well let’s just kind of recap what’s going on and also give Grant his due. So in the spirit of this kind of show, I’ve been talking for eight minutes about basically nothing. From the very start I said, “Hey, Grant deserves something nice.” We haven’t quite gotten there. I’ve just sort of recapped the history of the show. My apologies. So let’s get down to it.
Grant and I knew each other from high school. We were both in band together. We had a similar group of friends that, you know, his… he knew people that I knew from middle school. He happened to go to a different middle school, but I knew these people from middle school. We were both in band in high school. We all just sort of eventually glommed into the same rough group of friends.
And especially later on in high school, when certain parts of the friend groups were getting… I don’t know, just there was just small little bits and pieces that made certain parts of the friend group a little harder to maintain I guess. That’s not even the right way to say it, but Grant and I sort of naturally glommed on to each other at certain points. We just kind of felt like we had a similar vibe about ourselves, I think.
We would go play tennis late into the evening in the summers. There’s a park kind of near his house that wasn’t too far for me either, and you could just control the lights. I think they didn’t shut off to well after 10 so you just turn them on and play for a while and that was great. There’s almost never anybody there, we just play tennis. Neither of us were particularly good but it was fun. And then one of us might be driving the other, and we just kind of end up chatting for a while. Of after we went out to dinner with some friends, we might just end up chatting for a while and I still remember those conversations. The details are unimportant but I remember them.
I remember having them and that being such a super nice solidification of our friendship. And it’s still the kind of way that I best relate to people, is meeting people in a group but then really, for lack of a better term, locking it down in these one-to-one conversations that sort of happen naturally because you just sort of are comfortable with each other and you just start chatting about whatever. It was a nice feeling.
And Grant just has a very like, you know, a very, a very clear mind that it’s no surprise that he has gone into a sciency career, and that he cares about the things that he cares about, and he’s very good at it. As much as I make fun of him for his general communication, the genesis of the Grant story that rambles on and on with a very little point, without a clear through line and not even in the service of a final punchline—much like this current episode—you know Grant still, when you’re just talking to him, isvery easy to talk to. He has just a very good way of approaching conversation that I find just very endearing, very thoughtful, very helpful, and just nice.
And so that was just kind of in my mind. And I didn’t talk to Grant for like a year and a half. Maybe we met up once or twice in the summers between when I was working at camp or whatever. I honestly can’t remember. And then I think it was my sophomore year of college at some point that I went down to where he was going to college, where a couple of our friends were going to college, and stayed overnight with them. We just had a really dumb weekend in this small town in Iowa. Just not really doing anything in particular other than having fun in the dead of winter in this small town. And it was just fun.
Look, that’s all it came down to. Yes I have my friends in college that are also from a similar group of friends from elementary school, middle school, and high school, but I get to maintain this connection here. That was great. And then college continues on. Same kind of deal.
And then after college I decided to reach out to Grant again, among other people. Grant and I again just have one of those days where we just… we played some tennis ,we just kind of drove around, we probably got lunch. We just kind of hung out like it was just a cool day being with a friend in a way that just felt natural.
There’s something about that that I find with pretty much all of my friends. The common denominator with all of them is we try to maintain contact. Grant and I have a built-in way of doing that. That’s for the future. So do Jack and Mikhail and I with OHAC, but that’s less frequent, but we have these. We built up these structures to try stay in contact, but it’s not perfect. A lot of my friends, most of my friends, I don’t have that with, and yet you can just sort of like pick back up at any point. It’s not like hard feelings, “Ooh, why didn’t you talk to me for the last three months?” It’s just, well, we got busy, we didn’t talk for three months, and now we’re talking, and everyone’s cool, and we just like pick it back up. What’s new? Cool. I don’t know, there’s something very natural about it.
And feeling that again with Grant, it was just kind of knowing his personality, that he is a little bit more outgoing, a little bit goofier than certain of my other friends, and yet also clearly reliable enough to pitch the idea of a podcast… It just seemed like a natural thing to ask him to to try out with me. And so we did. And it’s gone up and down. I mean, not up and down. We’ve had episodes that suck. We’ve had episodes that we think are probably hilarious and no one else does. Episodes that are a bit more serious. Episodes that are a bit more silly. We just find ways to entertain ourselves, to talk about things that we find engaging. And we just try and capture these pockets of conversation that I think to us feel very natural.
No matter what, our brains definitely put on a bit of a little performance mode once we each click record, because it’s impossible not to. I sit here and I stare at the recording details. And we have our things in front of us, like it is different than just talking. But the difference is more in the subject matter, in the details—as we know, Grant can be rather coy about what goes on in his life in a way that I just kind of choose not to. And that’s totally fair on both ends. So the subject matter, the details, will adjust if we’re just talking on the phone or we keep talking for a while after we’re done actually recording.
But I think the how we talk is really not that different from how it normally is, regardless of whether we’re recording a show. Grant will put on a bit more of a character, be more likely to joke that it’s my show and all that sort of stuff. And I will also lean into things in my own way, but overall I think that it’s a fun way to capture the kinds of conversations we enjoy having.
While I don’t subscribe to the idea that everything should just be recorded, you shouldn’t just walk around taking pictures of everything you see just because you think it’s cool, there is just something nice about audio recording that I think is a little special. it’s less intrusive, that’s one thing. Having a microphone in front of me does not affect my ability to talk to someone in the way that putting a camera in front of my eyes affects my ability to see something. So there’s a simplicity to it that I think makes it a little bit more authentic.
The fact that we don’t prepare more than about 45 seconds each, just enough to find a comic that we like and put it as a URL in our show document, that’s cool. When I edit, I edit to make it more listenable in terms of taking out some of our worst Umms and Ahhs, or really long pauses between ideas when we get lost, or if one of us needs to go to the bathroom or something. I do my best to make sure that it’s cleaned up. I do that for me. I do it because I like the act of editing audio. I like listening to podcasts. I like hearing about how different people whose podcasts I listen to deal with audio. I know there’s lots of excellent podcasts out there who are so dynamic that the lack of editing or audio quality in general is like part of the charm and excitement and just, you know, ethos around the whole show.
That’s not our deal.
We are not professional comedians or semi-professional comedians. You know, this really isn’t a comedy podcast. It’s just us chatting, and sometimes us chatting is not actually that exciting to listen to. Say I gotta take out some of the pauses and make sure that it fits around that 45-minute mark because we have to pay for the length of our episodes. So that’s just a practical matter. But other than that, it’s not that different from just how we talk. it just feels more genuine than it would if, let’s say, we were recording video of ourselves or something like that. It’s just a nice thing to capture.
It’s almost one of those things that I that I would like to do with each of my good friends, is not a weekly podcast, but just a conversation with them. If we could do it without much pressure like, this is not being released, this is the equivalent of us taking a picture together. Of course it’s a little bit more, I guess, intimate or you know, it’s different than just taking a selfie together for recollection’s purpose, but it is more meaningful. And I think that that’s almost something that I would that I would like to do with a lot of people in my life, is sit down and just have a topic of conversation. It doesn’t need to be much. It can be very innocuous, boring, but just have, even if it’s just a couple minutes, a recording of just what that kind of interaction it is like, a recording of their voice.
It’s something that you often hear about with people who are talking to elderly parents or grandparents or other relatives, sitting down and being able to just record a story that they want to tell. That is just so special.
And the fact that Grant and I do this every single week, I don’t think it makes it less special because at this stage it’s less about the fact that we record it and release it to three people, than it is about the fact that we get to talk for at least 45 minutes, typically more, basically every single week. And no, not every one of those conversations is groundbreaking because again we’re recording it. We don’t like to just reveal every detail, and we talk in generalities at times, we talk about nothing important at times, but that’s how conversations are.
You know, there are people who say that they hate small talk or whatever, but not every conversation can or should be about the most groundbreaking things in your life. Talking about nothing is just as important as talking about something, I think.
Yeah, the reason I wanted to do this instead of getting a guest on, coming back to that, is that five years of doing this is wild. It’s wild that Grant continues to do it and I am very appreciative of the fact that he continues to do it because it’s fun for me. I know that it’s fun for him too, but it’s fun for me. It’s a fun thing to work on. It’s a fun opportunity to have to keep talking to him and I’m very thankful that we’ve kept doing it because it’s led to other great things.
It’s led to getting to visit him—only once sadly for like a day—but that was fun. And more importantly, if I had not like put myself out there and said hey, let’s maintain contact in this very specific way… Maybe we would have remained just as good of friends, and we would have found other ways to connect. That’s totally possible, but it seems a little less likely given how we both communicate.
But we did do this, and then he ended up as a groomsman of mine, and reading a comic during my and Erin’s wedding ceremony. Like that’s super cool. That’s very nice of him. That’s the sort of just little special thing that I love got to happen and wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for us doing this in the way that we do.
So yeah, I think I’ll probably end it around there, I guess. I don’t know what else to say. I could just keep rambling, I’m sure, but I don’t know if Grant will actually listen to this. I’m sure he might actually listen to this. I don’t think he listens to anything we do afterward, but since he’s not here, he’ll probably be at least slightly curious what the heck I decided to do. He’ll probably notice that it’s not 45 minutes, unless I just put something on the end of this to make it 45 minutes. That would be kind of funny, but I probably won’t.
But yeah, all that said, Grant, I appreciate that you’ve been continuing to do this, the work that you put in to do it, even if it’s for both of us slightly minimal, and that’s why we can continue to do it. That’s totally fine with me. We’re not trying to be professionals here. It’s just a fun thing. I’m super proud that we’ve made it five years, and technically the episode release streak hasn’t ended. It’s just Grant’s co-hosting streak has ended, so that’s a bit of a bummer. But the streak in some way continues, in some ways it ends, but we’re gonna keep rolling with this. Hopefully next week we will just have a regular episode again for you. I’m sure it’ll be slightly cathartic to do so. And yeah, for the three of you who are listening, who I can like picture in my mind. Glad that you’re listening. Keep doing so. Thanks.
Outro Guitar Music
- 1I used the slick program MacWhisper to get this done.