Craft and Chaos

Ryan kicks the season finale off in a British accent, which we will not explain, and from there the episode is about humor — specifically , the humbling realization that the comedy you love and the comedy you write are often two completely unrelated genres operating in two completely unrelated brains. Pete worships the broad, sandwich-falling-from-the-sky lunacy of The Young Ones . Kyle reveres ph...

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

There is something almost embarrassing about the relief that comes from owning a thing entirely. Pete self-published his first novella, Lattice , and what he keeps coming back to is not the early reader responses or the question of whether people will like it. It is the dashboard. The group digs into what gatekeepers actually do (less line editing than you think, more echo chamber than you would h...

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

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

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

Here's something nobody warns you about being a creative person: at some point, you will have to decide how much of your actual life you're willing to shove into your work and then show to the people you stole it from. Mandy's writing a book for her teenage daughters and discovering that words, frustratingly, do not arrive pre-edited. Ryan's twelve thousand words into a thriller and has realized h...

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

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

In this Very Special Episode, it’s just Pete and Kyle pulling the curtain back on one of the show’s most reliably chaotic features: those “ads” that don’t so much sponsor the show as wander into it, sit down uninvited, and start making sustained eye contact. The spark is a listener question—who on earth is making these things?—and the answer turns into a funny, slightly unsettling tour of how Craf...

It all begins — as so many creative disasters do — in a tavern. Not a real tavern, because this is 2025 and nobody can afford to drink anywhere that isn't their own kitchen. No, this is a fictional tavern, conjured by Kyle Olson in an attempt to make Dungeons & Dragons seem exactly as sophisticated as it actually is . And there they are: Pete Wright, sage of sighs; Misty Stinnett, who claims t...

This week on Craft and Chaos , Pete, Misty, Kyle, and Ryan take a running jump into the boiling cauldron of AI, authorship, and the existential dread of wondering if your book draft is secretly moonlighting as training data for Skynet’s moody younger cousin. Pete opens the show mourning the discovery that Google Docs is essentially that roommate who “borrows” your clothes without asking—except ins...

This week on Craft and Chaos , Misty wrangles the chaos as the team dives into the comfort of cozy mysteries, the horror of genre snobbery, and the existential unraveling that occurs when you go viral and absolutely nothing happens. We kick off with a round of “what are you enjoying,” which—shockingly—turns into a love letter to Murderbot , Idris Elba, and Helen Mirren solving crimes while wearing...

Ryan opens with a philosophical gauntlet: if a podcast intro is just a throat-clearing, why does it somehow set the weather for everything that follows? Consider this episode a field test in micro-moods and momentum—the kind where vibes double as both a bit and a manifesto. From there, the conversation becomes a collage of modern creative survival: the strange dignity of being the “control group”...

If you’ve ever thought “My life would be so much easier if I just changed my name to Wanda Milkshake,” then you already understand the energy of this episode. Kyle has an existential crisis about his last name, which, as it turns out, is basically a bureaucratic cover-up from Ellis Island. Misty makes an airtight case for Lucille Ball not just as a comedy legend, but as the secret godmother of Sta...

Let’s be honest: most creative podcasts want to sell you the idea that if you just buy the right thing , you’ll magically become a creative genius. Which, to be clear, is absolute nonsense—because if that were true, this entire episode would have been recorded by a $700 Remarkable tablet and a foam ball named Chaotica, not four humans with questionable impulse control and deeply specific opinions...

This week on Craft and Chaos , we asked a simple question: how do you keep making things when the world feels like it’s melting into a fine mist of hopelessness, bad headlines, and that one guy in your group chat who just did that one thing with that one person and now won’t shut up about it? Misty takes the hosting reins and invites Pete, Kyle, and Ryan to explore what it means to create during a...

Rejection. It’s what’s for dinner. And breakfast. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, brunch. In this episode, Ryan, Misty, Kyle, and Pete dive headfirst into the creative gauntlet of being told, in increasingly poetic ways, that their babies are ugly. Kyle kicks things off with a rejection letter so well-crafted it deserves its own rejection from the Pushcart Prize. Misty breaks down the unglamorous...

In this episode of Craft and Chaos , the team barrels past the sophomore slump and directly into a full-on identity crisis, complete with pseudonyms, fake sponsors, and a trivia contest where the prize is fractional horse ownership. Kyle Olson hosts Misty Stinnett, Ryan Dalton, and Pete Wright in a wildly meandering conversation about creative resilience, the dangers of scorpions, and why “bookmar...

Welcome to Craft and Chaos, the podcast that dares to ask: what if a bunch of creative overachievers decided to work through their deep-seated psychological baggage… into a microphone? In this first episode, Misty, Kyle, Pete, and Ryan gather around the digital campfire and do the unthinkable—start something new, on purpose . What follows is a freewheeling, earnest, and often hilarious journey int...

How do you make art when the world feels like it’s on fire? Welcome to Craft and Chaos , the podcast for creative minds trying to thrive in the madness. Whether you write, paint, build, perform, or daydream ideas that keep you up at night, this show is your companion through the wild ride of making something out of nothing. Join Misty, Pete, Kyle, and Ryan — a ragtag team of creative types — as th...