Take 33 - Actor, writer, showrunner Jonathan Lloyd Walker, Van Helsing, Snowpiercer

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Any of us who've been in it for long enough, our entire career has been littered with jobs that we didn't get, projects that we thought were gonna go for shore, dozens of unproduced script littering on.

SPEAKER_02 0:13

All of us are running into both major and minor failures in Hollywood every single day.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

This is one of the only businesses I can think of where failure is.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

His long list of television credits include, but are not limited to, The West Wing, Men and Trees, The Outer Limits, Smallville. He also played the leading role in the sci-fi network series Flash Gordon. But this is where it gets crazy. In 2014, he at least partially segued over to TV writing, and he now he works and worked on such shows as Continuum and Van Helsing, amongst others, before rising all the way up in the ranks to showrunner. Welcome, Jonathan.

SPEAKER_03 1:52

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

So normally when we have an actor who's now a writer, I would ask them a sort of lazy question, like, you know, you obviously failed as an actor, um, and that's why you switched, but you didn't. You were actually rather successful. So it's not really a failure question, but what made you want to swap sides?

SPEAKER_03 2:12

Well, I think the um the funny thing for me was uh very early on in my acting career, I had a friend who said, Look, you're not going to get very many parts out of the gate. Um, it's gonna be a struggle. So if you write things and if you write things that maybe you could be in, maybe that's another avenue to get yourself in front of the camera. And so it was a sort of an early idea to try and write projects and develop a creative voice and see if I could sell things. Now, what ended up happening, ironically, is those two things just almost never overlapped ever in my career. So here I was in my sort of mid-20s, um, and in between gigs, I was standing in uh on a show for um for uh you know for actors and and watching them and learning how to you know develop my craft as an actor. And I was in the in the set when they were filming, I would go off set and I would write, and I would write ideas and I would submit them to screenplay competitions and I would get feedback from friends and those sorts of things. And a funny thing happened along the way, which is again, I know that often people will tell their bit of their origin story, and mine is as simple as this. I I was looking to write a spec of a television series, it was what I was advised to do at the time. Um, and uh the my first at that point I was in Vancouver and they were making the X Files, and so I thought I'm gonna try my hand at writing a spec X Files. So I did. Um, and then writer friends of mine said, Listen, you're never gonna sell a spec X Files because it's such a serialized show that they're always gonna be ahead of you. This show's never gonna slot in, the characters are gonna change and develop. It's not gonna work on that format, but you know what you could do it as there's an anthology show in town, The Outer Limits, which MGM were doing at the time. Uh, and that's a standalone. So if you can tailor this script that you've written as an episodic or as a standalone episode of that series, maybe you could sell it to them. One thing led to the other, I rewrote it as an outer limits um standalone anthology episode. I knew somebody working on the crew um who was also a stand-in, um, but knew the showrunner's assistant. And I said, Hey, listen, is there any chance you could read my script and tell me what you think? One thing led to the other. He read it, liked it, handed it to the showrunner's assistant who read it and liked it. And the next thing I know, uh, I'm sitting on set of the movie where I'm standing in, and I get a phone call from the showrunner of that show who said, Hey, we're just starting to set up season two. I just read your script. I think it's really good. We'd like to option it for the show. So I was like, Oh, that's okay. Never written for TV before, never been in a writing room before, don't understand the process. What happens now? And he says, Well, we're gonna give you, we're gonna have a notes call, we're gonna give you notes and you're gonna have to rewrite it. I had no idea how to do a production rewrite. I had no idea how to, you know, necessarily completely address the notes, but I was able to stumble through the process and learn as I went, and that turned into one of three episodes that I wrote for the outer limits um in season two and season three of the reboot of that show.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Fantastic. I guess the question is it becomes a sort of a crossover question, I guess. So when you're you know when you're acting, do you because you have written, do you find yourself either more often saying how about this instead? Or uh deliberately not because you've seen the other side of it, and uh if the if the writers have written it, then you don't want to get involved. Like because you know both sides, do you play more or less sort of I know how to do this?

SPEAKER_03 5:52

Um it's a bit of a tricky dance, really, because certainly when I'm a writer, I'm wearing the writer hat, and my job on the show is that capacity. Um, I'm definitely always trying to write with actors in mind in terms of you know deliverable performances and interesting subtext and you know nuances that they're gonna be able to have fun with. I'm looking to give them engaging, entertaining work. So, you know, being coming from an acting background, I know some of the things that are gonna jump out and appeal to an actor to try and dig their teeth into. If I'm on the other side of things, I try to to a certain extent, I can't completely do it, but to a certain extent, I try and switch off my writer's head because in many cases, you've been hired to do a job which is to execute the words on the page that somebody else has created. And you're interpreting them, but you're not trying to alter them or change them, you're just trying to deliver them. And so unless I have got a real issue with a lack of understanding about the intent of a line or you know how a certain scene is structured, I'm usually not going to nitpick it. Because the other thing I know, again, from sort of showrunning side of things, you don't want to take time out of the production day to nitpick stuff that's gonna cause more work for everybody and slow the machine down. So I try to be respectful of the words that somebody else has written when I'm acting, and I try to be respectful of the actor's craft when I'm writing.

SPEAKER_02 7:11

Don't take this the wrong way, and I say this with with a lot of love and respect for your career. You getting basically staffed or having produced credits off your very first writing, uh, the first time you've tried writing is extremely annoying to me. Uh that it this is normally uh uh for those of you who listen, this is a years-long process for for mostly it. He he knocked it out of the park in the first time. But that's not my question. This is my question. Uh what you know, you you do both and you've you've had lots of success in both, but I'm assuming you've had lots of rejection in both. So so pivoting into the rejection, what is harder? Being rejected as an actor for a role you really want, or being rejected as a writer for a script you put your heart into?

SPEAKER_03 7:54

It's a really good question. And yeah, I certainly to follow up on what you said before, that rosy beginning of having very instant and immediate success and thinking, I really did for a couple of years think, oh, well, this writing thing is a bit of a um piece of cake. I can just decide to do it and I'll throw something out and it'll sell. I was very quickly disabused of that early success and understood that no, no, no, that's not gonna be, it's not gonna be as easy as that going forward. But to answer your question more directly, that the idea which is harder, um, I think if you're in acting long enough, you understand that baked into the DNA of it is that 95% of it is rejection. Um, but unfortunately, that kind of rejection is okay, so I get sides from my agent, I prep this role for a couple of hours, I'm gonna go into an audition room or currently with COVID onto a Zoom situation, I'm gonna spend my two minutes spooling out my audition, and it sticks or it doesn't. And if I don't get it, it's two hours of my life that I won't get back. And I expect that I'm not gonna get most of the roles. But writing, as you guys know, I mean, there's an investment there, particularly if you're specing material. If you're really devoted to a project and you're putting together pitch documents and you're doing all the research and you really spend time thinking it through, and then you write a pilot, you're invested. That's that's dozens and dozens, if not you know, hundreds of hours of labor that goes into a project that's very personal to you, means something, it's taken up a huge chunk of your life, and then you put it out into the world, and it's not necessarily an immediate no. There can sometimes be this slow, or are you that could be on the way up and it looks like it's gonna happen, and then it's off a cliff and it's no and it's dead. So I think the writing rejection um is more traumatic. Um, it's a bigger death uh when you have a project turned down or you lose an opportunity. Uh acting it's a series of smaller deaths.

SPEAKER_00 9:52

So I guess the the flip side of that in terms of the success, and we you know, obviously we don't like to talk about success too much, but I think I need to for this question. If you had a choice between uh uh landing a dream role as an actor and uh doing amazingly well and winning an award or uh creating uh your dream show and uh writing that and that winning an award of equal level, which uh would be if you had a choice of either of those today, which would you take?

SPEAKER_03 10:26

Um I think there's been a big ego shift for me in the three odd decades that I've been doing this, and I would definitely now would say that I'm a writer who sometimes acts, as opposed to I used to be an actor who sometimes writes. And for me, um the just in terms of what we were just saying, that investment of time and energy and heart and soul into a project, and then if that's able to then A, get greenlit, B, get made, you know, um, C find an audience and be liked, D, get an award, that I think cumulatively is a much more satisfying uh track to be on for me now at this place in my life. Uh I would have answered it differently 10 or 15 years ago because I very much thought I was an actor first, writer second, and I wanted to have that acknowledgement and success of being an actor who was award worthy. And uh it's just flipped. It's just I have a completely different priority now.

SPEAKER_02 11:23

It it that's that's super interesting as somebody who's never acted but has has written but has been watching you know actors do their thing for a long time. Your answer kind of surprised me. But I you very you know, uh from what I know about you, you do not live in Los Angeles, you live in Canada. And was that a conscious choice to stay away from the sort of this epicenter of this business, which you've done so well in? Is there are you or do you sort of hyper focus on the Canadian market? Obviously, the show you're working on now, I'm pretty sure is is written and produced in Canada. But is it is it it have you lived in Los Angeles and made the move, or did you decide you were gonna just do also what's kind of the impossible, not not so much anymore where we went virtual, but two years ago, everyone would have said you you have very little chance of succeeding, period, in Hollywood. You have even less chance of succeeding in Hollywood if you don't live in Hollywood.

SPEAKER_03 12:13

Yeah. Um, sort of two phases to that to a question. So the the first part of it is my life just followed a course in terms of there was a couple of times where, first of all, when that outer limits sale happened, that spec out of nowhere so sold, and then that led to me being able to pitch them other things and get other assignments. Um, I did very quickly realize I needed to get an agent. So I was able to get an agent in LA, even though I was based in Vancouver at the time. And there was some conversation at that point about picking up and moving and really planting my flag in LA and coming down and trying to make it work. And I had some momentum. There was a sale, there was a, you know, some things happening. And for reasons, you know, because I was still hanging on to this idea that I was an actor first and a writer second, I wasn't at a point in my acting career where I felt like I could come down and have any currency in Los Angeles, whereas I could work in Vancouver, mostly on American shows, ironically, but I could work consistently. And so I decided for those reasons, if I could have an agent in LA and I could send them material and I could work as an actor in Vancouver, maybe I was better to just stay put. So I did. And then there was a couple other junctures, you know, and then years passed and I didn't sell things and I wasn't there to take meetings, and I eventually uh parted ways with my agent because they just felt they couldn't do anything for me from distance. Uh and then there was a couple other junctures in my career where I could have been as an actor when I was getting, you know, fairly successful as an actor, I could have come down. But by then I was married, I had children, they were in schools, they had friends, we had a life, and it just became that thing of if I can continue to have a career without necessarily needing to pick up and go to LA, maybe that's everything I need. Maybe I don't need more than that. Um, so every time that that carrot is dangled for me, um, I haven't ended up taking it. And maybe my career would have looked different, maybe I would have been more successful if I had made the move, but I I, for reasons, never did. I love LA. I love the energy of LA and I love the way that the industry works there. But I gotta also admit that in terms of failure or you know, um things going wrong, I certainly had some early experiences as a writer where I went down to LA out of nowhere. No one knew who I was. I had an agent who would say, Hey, could you meet this Canadian guy? Because he's bugging me and he's come down here. I got a couple of meetings to go in on shows and talk to people, and I pitched my ass off. I pitched all kinds of things. And unfortunately, in a couple of situations, um, those ideas became episodes, but they weren't episodes that I had any writing credit on. Um, and so to come down and to feel like, oh, I'm here and I've arrived and I want to, you know, get involved in the industry and the pitch, and then to kind of have that stuff appropriated, I kind of got a bit jaded and I thought, if I can do this from the safety of the shallow end of the pool up in Canada, maybe I should just stay put. So that was a that was a little bit of it too. That was LA was a big felt like the deep end of the pool, and I wasn't really ready to swim in the deep waters yet. And uh I just I avoided it.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

So I guess this plays a bit in, because obviously we live in LA. Both both of us, we know lots of people in the entertainment business. I know probably more actors, no one knows many more on the writing side. And it's interesting, sort of uh ego plays a big part of how the entertainment world works, obviously. But you've been in enough things that were high profile that I imagine even in Vancouver, people will recognize you as an actor. Um, you know, probably it happened more in LA because that's how it works here. But when someone sort of stops you and says, you know, weren't in you, weren't you in this and in the way that it happens? Not uh I I guess not random people in the street, but like, you know, if you're at a dinner party, do you try and move the conversation to, yes, I you know, I did act and I was in that, and now I'm a writer. Do you like because you are a writer now, do you try and move them on to talking about the thing you you care about more because you want to be a writer?

SPEAKER_03 16:11

I I think that um there are certainly casual encounters with strangers where I don't make that segue only because they're recognizing me from the thing they saw on the T, you know, the TV the other night, and no, that's that guy. They don't necessarily know my name, they remember the thing they saw me in. And that's as much as it is, it's a nice little encounter, hello, maybe a picture or whatever, and and you kind of move on from it. Canadians are impossibly polite. So there's often I'll be in situations where people are just staring at me, and I think that's weird. Why is that person staring at me? And it's only later that I realize, oh, they may have seen me in something and they're remembering me, but they're not going to come and say hello. In the States, whenever I'm there, whenever I'm down, particularly in Los Angeles, people will immediately what they'll do is they'll quickly check their phone, try and figure out who I am, look up my credits, and actually come over. It's happened a few times where people come over and talk about specific things that I've done and know my name. So that's a weird and different one. But in terms of sort of like cocktail parties, which obviously COVID haven't been doing much of lately, or dinners or things like that, um, I usually will segue over to, yeah, I have done all of those things and I've been in you know that movie with that famous person. Um, but now I'm I'm writing and producing television and loving doing that. And that way I get to talk about what my you know my current um you know involvements are and my passions as opposed to the things that are on my resume.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah. So I guess this is quite a general question, but uh every time we have a guest on the show, I'm always fascinated by the new and different ways that they've been rejected. Um I mean there's have been some extraordinary ones, and every everyone seems new. So is there no one's probably gonna ask you at some point about you know the one that mattered most to you, but I'm more interested in just the interesting anecdote side of it. Is has there been a particular failure that was uh sorry, not just a failure, a rejection that was presented in a you know for for for odd reasons in the way that sometimes these do, or one that particularly stands out to you as being, you know, yet another slightly crazy way that they can shatter your dreams?

SPEAKER_03 18:12

Yeah, there's certainly been a couple of those. Before you know, we started this call. I actually sat and put a list together of all the things that I had developed or been involved in or pitched that got crushingly, you know, that failed one way or the other. And when you read the whole list, it's quite depressing. Because all that time and effort into all those things. But one does in that sort of uh category, one really does stand out, and that was um a limited series that I had pitched uh to a Canadian network um who shall remain nameless, um, who had greenlit it and said, we're do we're moving forward, we're at least we're gonna develop scripts, we're gonna um, you know, we're really into this project. We love it because it's controversial, was the thing they kept saying. And so I thought, well, this is great because this is a broadcaster who doesn't have a history in doing things that are particularly controversial. So I maybe get to break the mold a little bit. So I worked on it for two years, and there was lots of notes, and there was a lot, it was really top-heavy in terms of development. And then eventually the producers that I was partnered with said, Hey, look, you're in Vancouver, we're based in Toronto, we need you to fly out here, we need to talk about what happens next, what we're gonna do next to keep the wheels turning on the project. So I flew out to Toronto and um I went to their offices and we sat down, and it was all the people that I'd been working with at that company, and then a couple of new faces that I didn't know. And as we were the they're asking questions, and I was offering up my ideas about what we could do to turn things and move things in a different direction. And one woman kept uh speaking up and asking some specific questions, and I eventually realized that I didn't know who she was. So I asked, I said, I'm sorry, I don't think we've been introduced. I which part of the company do you work in? And then there were all these nervous glances around the room, and finally the executive producer who I was working with said, Oh, oh, this is so-and-so. She's been brought in to rewrite you. And I thought, might have wanted to mention that before I got on a plane to come out, you know, like it's a little bit weird in the middle of a meeting to just drop it in that I had to raise it, I had to bring it up. And um, that was a definitely an awkward meeting because at that point it was like, okay, so I'm here to digest all of my plans and my whole idea for this project I've been working on with you guys for a year and a half for her, so she can carry it forward. Great. So that was probably one of the lowest moments, sort of leaving that. And I tried to be gracious and about it, and I tried to be, you know, understanding of the circumstances, and they gave me all the reasons why they felt it was necessary. But I still had to walk away from that going, oh, I got fired off my project in person without being told in advance that I was going to meet the person replacing me in the room. Um, that one was hard. That one was a very difficult moment.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

That's the craziest thing about this because I mean, I love, I love the business we're in, and I hate the business we're in for the same reason. I mean, for the reasons that these and these stories that come up on this thing, that they are that they don't care, that there is no sensitivity to you know what's going on inside people as we're creating art and then the art is changing. Granted, people will say, and I've said in the past, it's not show art, it's show business, become tougher, but man, when you're in that moment, it's extremely painful. So, my question has to do with what you're talking about now, connected maybe to this situation or another one. I mean, you've you've had a successful career. There's no denying you were successful in both TV and and and in the writing side, but did you have a dark night of the soul? Was there a moment in here where you were like, I'm gonna become a carpenter or I'm I'm out? This is just ridiculous. Whether it was a TV rejection of your writing, like in this moment or a span of time where you just couldn't land anything, or it was just the people, or you know, what? Was there ever a moment where you were like, you know, typewriter down? I'm done.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Um, there's certainly been a couple. I think to be honest with you, I've been having one lately. Um I just finished the fifth season of Van Helsing. I've largely been working sometimes overlapping projects for the past eight, nine years. So I've been very lucky to be on a really good run. And I sort of thought that once Van Helsing ended, I had two projects that looked like they were definitely going to go forward. Um, and so I just thought, well, I'll take a month or two off and I'll just roll into the next thing. And though neither of those two things have happened. Uh, they both, for varying reasons, the wheels fell off the wagon. And so I just sort of uh looked back into a place of, okay, well, that's disappointing, but I'm just gonna keep generating new work, new pitches, new materials, spec some things, develop some things. It's gonna be fine. It's been six months of that now. There's been pitches and some things have gotten close and some other things have fallen apart. But one of the ones that really kind of pushed me over the edge about two months ago, 10 years ago, I wrote a spec feature, a really boutique, very personal story. This really lovely story that I read and deeply researched about an art forger in Holland in the Second World War who fooled the Nazis into buying fake Vermeer paintings, not fake, not copies of paintings. He made original vermeers and passed them off through art critics as real, and the Nazis bought them. And so he was able to dupe the Nazis in the second. It's a great wonderful story with all these layers and great characters. And I worked on that script and did revisions, and it went through Sundance, um, Alfred P. Sloan, and you know, it it there was a whole bunch of good things happening for it, but we were everyone always said it's boutique, it's boutique. I don't know if we can make it. And I was just in discussions with a company about a month and a half ago about the idea of maybe adapting it into a limited series, when all of a sudden one of the executives said, Well, hold on a minute. There's a film that just got released that I think deals with this same topic. And I was, I was like, oh no, you well, I mean, it's a great idea. I'm sure other people have thought about adapting it, but everyone told me that it maybe couldn't get done. So we scrambled around and we looked, and sure enough, there is a movie that came out recently starring Guy Pierce, was released, I think, in January, that is the exact same story. Now they handled it differently than I did, and and again, ego, I feel like my take on it was better, but the story has been told and the film is out, and mine's dead. There's no way that it can be adapted into a limited series because no one's gonna want to touch that same boutique story. Because if the film's a huge success, then I it looks derivative. And if the film's a failure, then it's validation of what people said that it's too boutique for people to be interested in it. So the project's over. So there's 10 years of work. So all those things coalescing together when that when I learned that and I sat down and tortured myself by watching that movie. Uh, I was like, oh, this is, I just, I don't know. Maybe I go back to acting, maybe I just take this hat off and retreat. Um, but I've picked myself back up and dusted myself off and I carry on.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

So it's interesting, you know, you casually said, and I go back to acting. I guess this is the thing. You've got you have a safety net that probably other writers don't have. So if Noah Noah's working at the moment in a room, which is great, but I've known Noah most of the time I've known Noah he hasn't been working, which is more a reflection on the industry than on Noah. But uh he can't suddenly think, well, you know, I'll just quickly go and uh do some, even if it's just commercial, just some acting for some easy money to you know keep the kids in school, he has to just keep writing. So for you, when it does get tough, even though you've uh very clearly said that you know you writing is where you want to go, if you have a parents' bill that uh goes into uh I don't know the exact time span, but starts drifting into months and it's a few too many rejections. Is there a part of you that gets on the phone to your agent and says, Look, just get me some guest bots um on some shows, just to maybe for money, but maybe just to get you working again in a sense of something. Does that make it harder for you? Because you you could sort of cheat and go and get some easy acting rather than fighting the good fight that the other writers have to?

SPEAKER_03 26:25

Yeah, and yeah, you know, I I think it's a very fair question because if I had a single, it's you know, like it's like a company that's only got one product. If you've only got the one thing, you better get really good at selling the one thing. Um, and although I've largely defined myself as a writer-producer the past decade, I do have that somewhat to fall back on. I would say this though, it's vastly more competitive now in the era of COVID to book a job, even whether you've got a resume or not, um, because everything is over Zoom and they're getting hundreds of submissions for every role from all over the place. And so um it's not, it's I can't just walk in and go, I think I'll act now, and the roles just come, you know, landing in my lap. Uh, it's very, very competitive and very difficult. But yes, I do have that other avenue that I could pursue. It's another thing that I could do. Um, but in many ways, the only reason that I even indulge it at times is just simply because at least sometimes it gives me an energy to be able to go, I can tackle this from a couple of different directions. And this, you know, some progress over here will get me excited enough to make some progress over there. Um, and I try I try to use, and I again I don't spend a lot of time auditioning for things or trying to book acting work because I am focused on the writing, but I do use it sometimes as a way to try and re-energize myself if I'm waning.

SPEAKER_02 27:44

I've tried acting many times and and uh and no one will ever book me for anything. No, the reality is like it's such a hard, different scale. And I do want to put a correction out there for the record that Dan only counts the time that I'm in a room as actually working, where people, as you get into this business as a writer, you're probably working harder when you're not in a room, trying to either pay off gigs or accomplish things or develop than when you actually are in a room. But we'll just put that in there. Uh the uh the we always ask this question uh to every guest. And so I'm sure you're prepared for what's about to come out of my mouth. But um if you are you know giving advice to somebody who is up and coming in the industry, uh, and in this case you can pick actor or writer, uh what advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_03 28:31

Um you know, I I always believe that um in either career path, I think it works for both. Um you know, being is doing. Um you have to just keep working, whether you're being to follow up on your point, whether you're being paid to be in a gig or whether you're trying to hustle to get the next gig, that's all work. It's all work. And um, you can always be developing your skills, you can always be learning new things about your craft, you can always be finding new nuances. And I, you know, writers write, and unless you're writing, you're not pushing yourself in in ways that you need to be pushed. And this is the same with actors, they need to be in class, whether they're, you know, some of the best actors I've ever worked with have coaches and continue to train because just because you've reached a level doesn't mean that you can't get better. Um, so I think that consistency of work and of constantly wanting to do something to move yourself forward is the key. And I think the only other thing I would add to that, and it's a lesson hard learned by some people, particularly actors, is don't let your ego get ahead of you. Um, you know, that there's ups and downs in this business, so you can have great success and then suddenly barren stretches of failure. And you have to understand that you're you have to look inward a little bit about measuring your own success and measuring your own value and not have it come constantly from external factors. Because whether you're a writer or an actor, you can beat yourself up about the things that you're not doing and the roles you're not getting or the projects you're not getting hired on. Um, and it can't always be Pavlovian about how you reward yourself. You've got to find you've got to find joy in the work even when you're not getting paid for it.

SPEAKER_00 30:17

Yeah. That is a great answer. Uh, particularly because there's a lot of time, I think, that is spent not being paid for things in the way that's so yeah, no, indeed. Look, um Jonathan Lloyd Walker, thank you very much for being part of our show and giving us a version of what it's like on rejection and failure on both the acting and the writing side. And um the very best of luck with your work on the writing. Keep doing that so you don't have to go back and be an actor or have people like me saying, Oh, this guy hasn't worked for a while, which of course is never fair. So thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_03 30:55

Thank you both. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Alan.

SPEAKER_02 31:02

All right, that does it for us today. I want to thank you for tuning in to Screaming Into the Hollywood Abyss. If you have any questions or comments, you can reach out to me on Twitter. I am at NEVSLIN.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

Well, are we are we not bothering to talk about the other Twitter account, given we have this great social engagement that people never bother to actually include me, whose idea it was to do this podcast in the first place. Do you have a Twitter account? I do have a Twitter account. It's at Dan Rutstein. And not only do I have another Twitter account, I also have two other podcasts. And some of our listeners have been saying, please tell us about your other podcasts. So our other podcasts are. Uh, what are my other podcasts? Oh yes, United States of Dramerica, where I share a glass of whiskey and have a fascinating conversation. And America the beautiful game, where I talk about soccer in America and what it can learn from Europe.

SPEAKER_02 31:56

For our repeat listeners, uh, you can probably stop listening when Dan starts talking about his second and third podcast. Uh, that brings us to the end of another great episode. We, as always, want to thank our wives for putting up with our nonsense.

unknown 32:12

That's good.

SPEAKER_00 32:12

I'll do it.