Jonny Sun, Canadian author and illustrator of Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too and Gmorning, Gnight!, TV writer on BoJack Horseman, screenwriter, one of TIME Magazine's 25 Most Influential People on the Internet in 2017, and a doctoral candidate at MIT and a creative researcher at the Harvard metaLAB.
The original post for this episode can be found here.
Sarah Enni Hi Johnny. How are you?
Jonny Sun Good. I am so great. How are you?
Sarah Enni I'm so good. I'm so happy we can make this happen.
Jonny Sun Yes, likewise.
Sarah Enni Yeah, it's kind of a gloomy Los Angeles morning. It feels appropriate for introspection.
Jonny Sun Mm-hm, yeah, we both got our coffees here, we're ready to introspect.
Sarah Enni Ready to go! Let's get introspective. I like to start at the very beginning, which is, where were you born and raised?
Jonny Sun Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta in Canada and, well I was born there. I think my childhood was there and then we moved to Toronto pretty early when I was a kid. So I always say born in Calgary, raised in Toronto.
Sarah Enni Okay. So how old were you when you moved to Toronto?
Jonny Sun I think I was 10 or 11 - ish.
Sarah Enni Okay. That's kind of an intense time to...
Jonny Sun It's such a weird, like middle.... I feel like my life was rocked by that move because it was also so far away that I didn't keep in touch with any of my friends because we didn't have [pauses] we didn't have texting really. And we were too young to have cell phones obviously. And so it really did feel like this giant split and a disconnect when it happened.
Sarah Enni And from what I know, Calgary is way smaller than Toronto. So that's a big shift for your new environment. I assume it was maybe a little overwhelming.
Jonny Sun Yeah, we were living in the suburbs in Calgary and then the move to Toronto was like straight downtown. We had a nice, cute suburban house in Calgary and then we lived downtown and my brother and I shared a room in a two bedroom apartment and it was intense. It was a very big transition in a lot of ways.
Sarah Enni A lot of people talk about the before and after moments in life, and that can be for a variety of reasons, but that seems like a pretty intense one.
Jonny Sun Oh yeah, that's great. Oh, I like that framing. I've never thought about before and after. That's cool.
Sarah Enni How was reading and writing, and for you illustration or drawing, a part of your young life.
Jonny Sun I loved it. I remember I read a lot when I was a kid. I think I had a teacher in like third grade or second grade who... there are all these reading programs for kids and stuff. And so I remember reading the entire list and it was great.
Sarah Enni Reading the whole list! [Laughs]
Jonny Sun Yeah, I was just like, "I'll just read all of this!" It's definitely how I passed my time. And my parents still have the house in Calgary, and sometimes when we go back to visit I'll look at the shelves and it's kind of wild to see there's a lot of Canadiana type young reader's books. And then there were a lot of joke books. There were a lot of like 101 Space Jokes, 181 Skiing Jokes, 101 Animal Jokes. I never remembered reading all those, but looking at them I was like, "Oh, I definitely consumed all these joke books." And I'm sure that also contributed to me wanting to be a comedy person.
Sarah Enni Yeah, I was gonna say okay... a hundred questions about that. That's so interesting and also not only clearly planting a seed of comedy in general, but also joke structure. Writing it out and what are jokes but little tweets.
Jonny Sun Right, exactly. I mean I remember looking at this and being like, "Oh my gosh, this is Twitter before Twitter existed."
Sarah Enni Yeah, 101 Space Jokes would be an account I would follow. That's really interesting. I mean that does lead me to how did you find comedy and how did that play into your expression as a young person?
Jonny Sun I'm remembering now that a lot of the books we would read, and that we would get, weren't from... we didn't go to bookstores. Sometimes there was the Scholastic Book Fair, which was like my lifeline. But also we would also just go to garage sales and yard sales and thrift stores, and I would just pick out whatever books. And sometimes they were like the behind the scenes making of the Alien movie when I was eight years old. I'm like, "Gosh, this looks cool." And my parents were like, "Okay!"
Sarah Enni Eager at a young age. Yeah that'll do something to your brain.
Jonny Sun I often hear people talk about when you're a child of immigrants, and you're younger, you don't really have... your parents kind of allow you to watch whatever. Because there's not really that understanding of what is an R-Rated movie and what that looks like. But I think that was the same with books. I think I remember picking up a lot of joke books that, now when I think back, were probably dirty joke books, like for adults and stuff. I think I just went to every yard sale and was like, "I want all these books." And that's what we would do. And so I just collected all these books and I think that's sort of how I got into the humor and comedy readings. And then also when I was a kid, I watched a lot of The Muppet Show, which also in my adulthood I'm like, "Oh that wasn't really a kid's show at all."
Sarah Enni No, not really.
Jonny Sun But my parents would say that whenever it came on, when I was a kid, I would just watch it and I'd know whenever it was on. I don't remember even watching it. I was young enough, I think like four or five, and I think I just loved the puppets and stuff.
Sarah Enni Yeah, well there's a tone to it as well that is, I think, very particular. And if you are into that tone, then it sort of carries through the rest of your life I think. Cause I was a big Muppet Show kid too and you know when you're a kid and you are like, "I'm so interested in this thing, but I know that I don't really get what it is." But I think you spend the rest of your life being like, "Ooh!" You know? Kind of diving into that. But the Muppet Show has such a unique point of view.
Jonny Sun Totally. Yeah. And I remember watching it again when I was in college, watching a bunch of the Muppet Show episodes, and just being like, "Oh this is why I like sketch comedy!" This was my original sketch kind of thing.
Sarah Enni So when you got into comedy, I love that your intro to a lot of comedy was reading because... we'll talk about it later... but things that are supposed to be funny when you read them are really different from performing in any way. So I love that that was your way in. But how did it kind of lead to actual expression being on stage? I think you did like Improv and sketch and stuff?
Jonny Sun Yeah. And one more thing about the reading that I'm remembering, cause I also never talk about comedy as a reading thing, but I loved Calvin and Hobbes growing up. I think with Scholastic I was like, "Oh, I'm just gonna read all the Calvin and Hobbes." I liked Garfield and Charlie Brown and The Zits [laughing].
Sarah Enni Were you a Far Side guy ever?
Jonny Sun A little bit. Far Side was one of those collections that were always at the garage sales and the yard sales. So I have a lot of well loved Far Side things. But I think as a kid I was like, "This is so strange." And then I would read all of it and be like, "Okay, I understand what this is about." But I think Far Side always made me feel uncomfortable in that way that it's supposed to, and so I liked that. But I think I really loved Calvin and Hobbes. And then I loved, there was a series I remember called Wayside School.
Sarah Enni Yes. Oh my God, yes. Louis Sachar, so good.
Jonny Sun Yeah. And I remember that was probably my intro into absurdism, right?
Sarah Enni Yes. Oh my God. Yes. Well, I do want to talk about. So much with your work has absurdism. It has always been around, but I feel like it's having this moment where it, in some ways, feels more real than anything else.
Jonny Sun But going onto the rest of the question that I side-stepped, I think when I was in high school... so I was always a shy kid. And I was never good at just being outwardly extroverted. But I remember when I went to high school and I went to grade nine, there was also that kind of feeling of... none of my friends from junior high went to the same high school as me. And so there was that feeling of like, "I have a slight chance to try something new." So I convinced myself that I could do something. And I think because I always loved TV and movies and film, we would also watch - another story of inappropriate things to watch - I remember when I was like 10, we watched American Pie.
Jonny Sun And we watched it with my family. And they loved it. And I also loved it. And I guess I was like, "Okay, this is what this is." But I think I just was exposed to a lot of comedy. But then I wanted to sort of be an actor or kind of was interested in that world. So I took drama and I remember signing up for drama. Cause I signed up for all the maths and sciences and everything, and then I was like, "I'm gonna pretend that I'm a drama kid." And I did that in grade nine and it was terrifying. But I also loved it and I fell in love with that whole culture. And I fell in love with all my classmates. And I loved that when you were in drama class, it didn't matter where all the clique's that all the people came from. When you're in class, you're sort of like this family and it feels very familial and warm and open. And my drama teacher just fostered that. And so even if I didn't talk to the jocks who were outside of this class, when we were in this class, we were all sort of like friends. We all sort of did stuff together and that was really sweet.
Sarah Enni I love that. And good for your teacher for making that good-feeling, inclusive environment. I'm so interested in what kind of stuff were you doing? Were you staging things? Were you writing and performing? What was your work like at that time?
Jonny Sun In high school? I got really into... I took a playwriting class as well in 11th grade. And I also remember in grade nine, I think I told my drama teacher that like, "I really like comedy." And so she put me onto a bunch of plays by David Ives who was the theater version of sketch comedy, basically. And also very absurd and surreal. And I loved that. And I was like, "I didn't know that you could do this, in this way." I didn't know that you could do this in theater basically, or through acting. And so I loved that. And then I remember every class presentation I gave in like biology and English, I would write it as a sketch and it would be totally embarrassing to everybody [laughs].
Sarah Enni To everybody!
Jonny Sun I did not know that I was embarrassing myself. And I roped all my friends into it and some of my friends were not theater kids at all. Some were very med school track kids. And I was like, "Okay, you're going to be the person who's driving in the car who's going to hit me while I give this weather report and that's gonna be our presentation about meteorology in science."
Sarah Enni You say it's embarrassing, but if I was in that class I would have been obsessed with that. It's at least interesting, right?
Jonny Sun That's what I thought. I was like, "What better way to give an educational thing than to make it entertainment?" And so that was much of my high school career, was just doing these weird little sketches in all these serious classes.
Sarah Enni Well it's the beginning of your interdisciplinary life I guess
Jonny Sun I guess so. [Both laugh].
Sarah Enni Well that's kind of what I'm getting at a little bit. I was listening to an interview with you where you were talking about your freshman year of college and moving on from this high school where it sounds like you were able to integrate all of these elements of yourself. And then you went to school and were, by pressure within yourself or by pressure externally, were like, "I'm gonna focus on engineering." Can you talk to me about that?
Jonny Sun Yeah. So yeah, I think in 12th grade, the height of my memory of high school was I was in The Main Stage. I was in Guys and Dolls and I was Nathan Detroit. And I met my best friend ever and he was Skye Masterson. And from that point on we were inseparable. He went on to do Second City, The Main Stage and kind of is super amazing and he's in Come From Away now in Toronto. So he created a legitimate, very amazing acting and comedy career. But we would write sketches together and we would kind of do that. I remember when I started university, that first year, it just felt like, "Oh, now this is serious, this is the serious world." And like, "This is where I have to drop all the silly nonsense and just focus on this thing that is supposed to be my career." I think I bought into that for a month and then I was like, "Oh I do not, I do not like this at all."
Sarah Enni Really quick, before we dive more into that, I'm interested in where you think that came from. Do you think it was just your... ?
Jonny Sun A lot of it I think was me. And I think part of it was the culture of engineering because I think there is a culture that is a little bit harmful. That is like, "This is very hard and so you should work hard at it, and half of you will drop out." And I don't like that culture. And I think the reason I don't like that is cause I succumb so much to it, and I worked myself sick, very literally, and it was not fun. I remember having a conversation with my parents too, and I was trying to choose between... I wanted to apply to theater school for college. And I was deciding between that and engineering cause I also really did enjoy math and science and I liked a lot of that logical kind of [stuff]. And engineering also was sort of like logic and creativity.
Sarah Enni Mm-hm, It's spatial in some way.
Jonny Sun Yeah. And so my parents, their advice was sort of like, "Well the engineering degree is hard to get later and that it might be a good basis to have." And I think they knew a lot of artists and creatives who didn't have the degree from a creative field. And so I think their mentality was like, "You can do the arts as well, or at a later point, or you can find it again." And then I also had a really great conversation with my drama teacher and her advice was the best advice I ever got. And that was a before and after kind of moment too. I'm incorporating all these things. And her advice was like, "It's a hard life to lead in the creative fields." And she had done it her whole life and she said like, "If you can have a life and be happy not doing this... you should go for it. Because if you can find happiness that would be very great. But if you aren't happy, or if you keep finding yourself drawn to it, that's just gonna happen. And you're just gonna find yourself drawn to it in a way." And she was like, "So the choice is sort of made up for you." And I found that really empowering cause I was like, "Oh, this huge choice that I had in my head isn't really a choice." Like, "I'm gonna fall into it later if I need to." And it turns out I did.
Sarah Enni Yeah. I love that. That's really good advice. And also I agree with what you're saying, it feels empowering to [pauses] you as your own self are somewhat inevitable, and you'll kind of make it happen. If you're a creative person and you're repressing that creativity, your body will, you know, you'll erupt without it.
Jonny Sun Yes. Yeah, exactly. And that very much was my first year of college.
Sarah Enni I was gonna say, so it sounds like you took a month to be like, "Okay, I'm not that person." And then...
Jonny Sun I bought into it until I did my first midterm and I got a failing grade. And then I was like, "Oh, so you're telling me that even if I try, if I give it my all and I study as hard as I can, I still will not do well sometimes?" And I think that was a moment for me where I was like, "Okay, why not try stuff that'll make me happy and also try to get through this." Try to be a bit more balanced. But I think that really helped. The other thing is in that first year, I auditioned for this sketch comedy show that the engineers put on, and I didn't get in. So I was like, "Oh no, I can't do this." But then in my second year I auditioned again, and I got in. And that sort of became the basis of my family in university.
Sarah Enni That's so cool. So it was a bunch of engineers that were doing sketch comedy?
Jonny Sun Yeah. And it was this great production because we were engineers, everyone was interested in the backstage staff and all the tech and how a show is run. And so there were people who were just interested in lighting and were super huge lighting geniuses. And people who are interested in props and the ways you can rig up all the different things for the sets. There were just all these spatial kind of engineering minded, very smart people doing all this tech stuff. And then there was a handful of us who really loved performing and doing the comedy part and then a smaller handful of us who enjoyed writing. So that sort of became my outlet for that. I would write a lot. I remember like finishing my problem sets at like 3:00 AM and being like, "Oh great, now I have an hour to write the sketches that I wanted to write."
Sarah Enni Oh my gosh, that's so wild.
Jonny Sun And so that was sort of my life for awhile. Through all of college, for the rest of it, was just doing school and making sure that I did well, but also finding time to do this thing that I loved.
Sarah Enni Yeah. And I love that you once again found this place where it's a flattening, you know? It's like everyone has multiple levels of interests right? That are like, "Okay, we're engineers, but can we do something else? And Integrate our skills?" I mean I'm gonna use the word interdisciplinary too much in this conversation, but it's fascinating to me. So I love that you found that. But I also don't want to skip over the fact that in this previous interview you were talking about that first year of college as being difficult from a mental health standpoint. So I kind of think that these play into each other, you addressing your own mental health and discovering Twitter and the Internet. How did all of that come about?
Jonny Sun Yeah, definitely, that first year was really hard on my mental health. I think I learned to self-soothe in a way because the creative outlet I turned to actually during that first year was music. I would play a lot in my room after I got home from school and into the night. And I think that was a strange choice. But I think you're right in the sense of I needed to do something that wasn't just school, and it needed to feel like I was making something. I love playing music cause it feels like you are just making something out of thin air.
Sarah Enni Totally. What's your instrument?
Jonny Sun Guitar. And I learned guitar too for basically in I think in 12th grade, and that was all I would do when I would get home. So I would play and sing and kind of do that for awhile, almost every night before I went to bed. I'd also gone through like a really bad breakup over the summer before college. And so I think I was also bummed out about that. But all of those signs, like I wasn't able to sleep and I was deeply unhappy, and I think all those signs... I didn't have a label for that until much later. And I didn't know to label that as depression until much later. And so for me it was just like, "Oh, I'm in this weird funk for like a year." And in my head I was like, "Okay, I guess this is just how everyone goes through life."
Sarah Enni "I guess this is how I live now."
Jonny Sun And I didn't really have an understanding of what depression was and what anxiety was until basically I was on Twitter a lot and there was a weird link, but I wasn't around people who were talking about that openly. And that conversation was so stigmatized, and still is I think in a lot of in-person spaces, but online I found people talking about it openly and talking about what their depression is and what their kind of anxiety looks like. And I was like, "Oh, this feels way too accurate to me." And that's how I started to understand what that meant.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Which is huge.
Jonny Sun Yeah. And that was five years after this first year of college. So I was just living in it, and just kind of going through it without really having that.
Sarah Enni Yeah. I mean it's so huge that you were able to self-soothe. You were able to find the tools that worked for you anyway.
Jonny Sun But I wrote a lot of songs during that first year. I have notebooks of just these things that I would play and write. And I think that was part of it. I think if I'd go back I'd be like, "Oh, I was just doing therapy basically."
Sarah Enni Yeah, totally. Talk therapy but singing [both laugh]. Which is very, very valid. Oh that's so interesting. [takes a big breath] I know the thought, I'm like, "Ooh, would you want to go back and play those songs again?" Do you think that would feel good?
Jonny Sun I don't know. I think at this point I'd be like, "Oh this is really interesting and fascinating." I recorded a few of them I remember. I bought a little mic and like a little audio interface and I plugged it into my laptop and figured out how to do it.
Sarah Enni Of course you did. You're an engineer. You figured out the sound tech.
Jonny Sun Uh-huh. I Figured out how to edit and mix and everything. And I still like those songs. A lot of them were just about sadness and heartbreak.
Sarah Enni I love that. I was talking to someone recently about going back and reading old diaries cause I have all my old diaries. But going back and reading them is really difficult and I don't like it that much, but it's also very interesting because I think about art as weird time travel in a lot of ways. Musicians do put out work that is so important to them at that moment and then some artists are still touring with stuff they wrote so many years ago. And I think about having to embody that old work, especially when you're a performer, live on stage in the moment, you're like, "Let's get back into that frame of mind." That feels so intense to me.
Jonny Sun Yeah, it's so intense. That just made me think, Bruce Springsteen just had his Broadway one-man show and I listened to that. I really liked how he talked about it, cause it feels like he was playing those old songs, but I think his show to me was about how playing those became an act of nostalgia and reliving it and living in that memory as opposed to just playing them because they're hits. The act of doing that is about getting into that past reminiscing and thinking about that.
Sarah Enni Oh I like that. Engaging with your past self rather than just being like, "Here we go! Cause you want it." Ooh that's so interesting. And obviously, to watch him develop as an artist is really fascinating. And try all these different methods and means of examining his own work. I want to talk about, well first of all, when did you join Twitter? Do you remember when you heard about it?
Jonny Sun So I think I had two phases. I had this phase where I think it was right after we graduated from high school or early in college, where it just started. And I remember me and a bunch of my high school friends were like, "Oh this is how we can keep in touch." Like, "This is what we can do." It's not like Facebook, it's actually just Facebook statuses, is how we thought of it. And it was like, "Oh we can all get on Twitter." There were 12 or 15 of us and we all followed each other, and all of those little updates for me were just like, "I'm going to a movie now. I'm going to this place we used to hang out. I'm having food." Cause I was one of the ones who stayed in Toronto and a lot of them went to colleges elsewhere.
Jonny Sun And so we were using it for that for a little bit. And that was really cool. It was just me trying to keep all these little updates going. But I think slowly people stopped using it. It stopped being interesting to them. Most of my friends from high school just didn't see the value of it or whatever and I stopped seeing them post as much. But I think I got really excited about it and I started writing little jokes and little fun thoughts. And I started following comedians and writers and creative people that I found on Twitter. And that was the first wave of it where it's sort of like, "Oh, I'm just gonna follow funny people that I know who are famous," basically. And I think for a while I was like, "This is cool." But they're not that funny online, most of them.
Sarah Enni Right. And or they're just promoting stuff.
Jonny Sun Yeah, and it felt like, "Oh, that's not what I'm interested in." And eventually I found people who were not famous and who were writers, or just on Twitter for the same reason I was, which was just tell a few jokes and kind of hang out. So I think I found a lot of those types of people. That took a while, but then flash forward to grad school, so four years later basically, and then I started really getting into whatever quote "Weird Twitter" was. I really liked the humor there and I liked the idea that you read the jokes instead of telling them, cause I think people were also starting to get into Instagram and YouTube for sure. Which is a performance medium I would say. And I never felt like a good performer and I always liked writing more. And so I was like, "Oh, Twitter is a writers medium."
Sarah Enni Yeah. I think it feels so good to so many of us, which we'll get to it, but it's part of what makes it difficult. It's a terrible place [both laugh] that we hate it so much. And yet it's so exactly the comfort zone that so many of us value, you know? So where did you go to undergrad actually?
Jonny Sun University of Toronto.
Sarah Enni Okay. And then you got your masters in Yale in play writing?
Jonny Sun In architecture.
Sarah Enni In architecture, but you put on plays through Yale?
Jonny Sun Yeah, and I was taking classes at the school of drama, and doing play writing as much as I could. And little workshops and stuff.
Sarah Enni Amazing. Yeah, no big deal. Uh, sounds like a lot of work!
Jonny Sun It was [laughs]. I also made myself sick.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Well I'm so fascinated about this time of your life because you're just like a productive person. It seems like you are interested in trying to do everything at the same time. Which I actually admire so much. I think a lot of my questions are going to be like, "I want to do that too! How do you stay sane doing that?" But how does studying architecture, being a creative person, writing your own plays, expressing yourself in that way, and then being obsessed with getting some notoriety in and wanting to study the internet?
Jonny Sun Yeah, all of that, right? [Laughs]
Sarah Enni Like maybe seven years of your life! But how did all of those things kind of interplay for you?
Jonny Sun Yeah, I think a lot of it, now that we're talking about that self-soothing thing, I think a lot of it comes from that. So engineering school was very difficult, it wasn't entirely fulfilling to me. And it was also just very hard and hard on my mental health. So the self-soothing thing kicked in and then I found my sketch comedy people and that was the self-soothing thing for awhile. And then in architecture school I thought like, "Oh okay. Now I found this one field that's gonna make me happy." Cause it's Kind of like engineering, there's a lot of technical stuff, there's a lot of math or logic rigorous kind of stuff. And then it's also creative. And so I was like, "Oh this is perfect. This is the one thing that'll make me happy." So I did that and then I think I quickly was like, "Oh this also isn't completely fulfilling me." And so I started using Twitter then because the architecture school schedule, if possible, is more grueling than the engineering school schedule. I always think engineering, you work hard and you work into the night, but there's answers that you'll get to once you find the solution you can stop. But architecture school is like, you have this building that you have to design and you can keep tweaking it forever. And there's no right answer. There's no final solution.
Sarah Enni That's, that's what makes it like art. But, at the same time... [laughs].
Jonny Sun Yeah, exactly. But every tweak takes three hours to figure out and then you have to make a model and yeah, it was a lot. But I would turn to Twitter because I was like, "Okay, I need a break from this. I'm gonna like write a few dumb jokes online and then get back to this architecture stuff." And so that was sort of like the self-soothing thing as well. And then with writing plays and kind of taking playwriting and stuff, I think I just very quickly was like, "Oh, I think architecture culture is not for me entirely." So I think I needed a little bit of a separation from that.
Sarah Enni Was it because you were able to dip back into the sort of advanced, like your high school world?
Jonny Sun I think so.
Sarah Enni Checking back in with that.
Jonny Sun Yeah. I think it was and I think because I was writing sketches with the engineering group, I also started writing longer and longer sketches. And then eventually, one of those sketches turned into a play.
Sarah Enni I was gonna say Johnny has sketches not 27 minutes long.
Jonny Sun But one sketch really started out as a sketch. It was about two people trapped at a dead end hallway, where a zombie was on the other side. And I was like, "Oh, that's a fun five-minute sketch." And I kept writing and it turned into this longer and longer conversation. And I was like, "Oh, this can go in so many ways." And I kept working on it and that became my first play that I wrote. And that was an hour long one-act and I put it on with another drama group in college. But then later on I dug that up and I put it on in Toronto in a real theater. So I think that was my sort of like, "Oh, I think this is a play. But I've never taken official drama classes so I don't know if it's a play." So, I think I got interested in that and I was like, "Oh, if I'm at Yale, I'm gonna try to do as many school of drama things as possible."
Sarah Enni You have the Yale drama school right there, you might as well.
Jonny Sun So I took a bunch of play writing classes when I could and some musical theater classes as well for songwriting and lyric writing. I was like, "I have to. If I'm this close to this, I have to do it. I have to find a way to do it."
Sarah Enni Yeah, good for you. It's funny, I relate to this a lot, but the solution to destress from your hard work is to find more work. You know, you're not talking about taking long walks. It's this other really intense grueling stuff. But really soul fulfilling. I love that Twitter was kind of maybe running in the background a little bit, a stress relief kind of thing. When did it start to take on a bigger part of your life?
Jonny Sun I think for a while it was just like, "Oh, I'm on here, I'll goof off and kind of make friends and talk to people that I think are interesting, and kind of be part of this." And I did that all through architecture school and I think by the time I got out of architecture school I like kind of woke up realizing like, "Oh, like a bunch of people follow me."
Sarah Enni By that, when you say a bunch, when you realized that you were getting a big following, what is the number that you're looking at?
Jonny Sun I think the first time was like 50,000. I think that's sort of like, "Oh, that's..."
Sarah Enni "This is not a small number of people."
Jonny Sun Yeah, that's a scary number of people. But I think I never really was interested in amassing a following. I think I was like, "I'm popping on here. There are people that I like reading and joking with, and I like putting my thoughts on here because this is a place to store them." And I was really into the diary idea of like, "Oh here's a funny thought, I'm gonna write it here so I don't forget it. And now there's a place for it." And I loved that. And then when I started my Ph.D., I turned to it more then because it was another kind of... architecture school was over, all my friends moved to different cities. I moved to Cambridge and none of my friends did. But I was like, "Oh my internet friends are sort of still with me inside my pocket."
Sarah Enni "They're still here."
Jonny Sun And I turned to that. And then I think there was a lot of things that happened in quick succession. I think it was that, I also thought the Ph.D. would be the thing where I would find the one field that would make me happy, and the one focus. And it turns out that that wasn't it either. And so I was like, "Okay, I like being on Twitter and writing, and talking to people makes me happy, so I'll do that more."I was doing that and then the election happened and then I turned to Twitter more and more because of that. Just cause it felt like [pauses] I don't know why. Did you turn to it too?
Sarah Enni Yes and no. I fully shifted how I was on Twitter. After the election I was like, "Okay, I need to follow the news more." I did this huge purge of even writers that I'd known and loved and was just like, "No, I need to follow the staff of the Jake Tapper show." My whole life needs to be this. And then about a year after that, I was like, "Oh my God. I've created this environment where I can't relax on this platform anymore." So it's interesting, I've deconstructed and reconstructed it to better serve me over time. But I certainly was on there obsessively scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Feeling no relief for a long time.
Jonny Sun And that was my feeling too. But I think I also found I felt trapped on it. The endless like, "Oh, if I'm more informed I'll somehow know how to... "
Sarah Enni I found myself getting to the bottom of it when it's like doing the quick whoop and recognizing I had the feeling of, "Oh, maybe this new screen will have it." And I was like, "I don't know what "it" is." It was a very strange thing to realize like, "I'm searching and I don't even know for what and I think that means I'm not gonna find it."
Jonny Sun I think that was a lot of it. But I also, at the same time, was like, "Oh, I'm gonna just..." I found it was a good place to continue to just write what I was feeling.
Sarah Enni Yeah, and I think that the difference with our experience of Twitter is that we're already cultivating a voice on there and that was a primary medium for you to communicate with these people. And it didn't exist in that way for me. So I don't think putting things out on Twitter felt like I was building something. It seems like maybe you were able to sort of...
Jonny Sun I think so. And I think I was just feeling so overwhelmed and sad all the time, and I think by sharing that, I think there were many people online who were feeling that at the same time. And it made me feel less lonely. It made me feel less like I was going through this by myself and when I did that and other people also were like, "Oh, I feel that way too." It made me be like, "Oh, okay. There's a little semblance of a community or something."
Sarah Enni You were also providing counter-programming.
Jonny Sun A little bit. yeah.
Sarah Enni I think I went right into it and was like, "I need to retweet the news." And I think what you did, very intelligently, was talk about like, "All of these things are happening, but how are we feeling about it?" I think that your sphere of Twitter was interested in addressing that and I think that was really wise. And a lot of us finally turned back to that and were like, "Oh my gosh, yeah, we do all feel so alone. Like how can we address what we're collectively feeling in addition to what's collectively happening to us?"
Jonny Sun Yeah, I think that definitely is right. And at that point, I was starting to realize more and more that like, "Oh, there are enough people following me that it almost feels like there's a responsibility to that." And so I was kind of writing and tweeting my own kind of thing that I liked doing. But at the same time I was also like, "Okay, now this is my chance to retweet other people and to signal-boost activists, and marginalized voices, and people of color, and trans artists." And all that stuff. And so I think I became much more conscious and aware of doing that. And I think, I dunno, that feels cool.
Sarah Enni Okay, a few questions right in a row. First of all, when you went to Ph.D., what was that program that you were?
Jonny Sun The Ph.D. is in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Sarah Enni And this is at MIT, right?
Jonny Sun At MIT, yeah. Oh yeah, sorry I didn't provide context. And I really thought the program and sort of the focus that I got in for was data-driven, urban design. Cause in architecture school I started getting into city planning and urban design. And so I thought like, "Okay, so maybe this is the one field where it's part of..." In engineering, I was looking at data science and simulation stuff. And I was like, "Okay, if I can combine that with urban design, maybe that's the answer to all my problems."
Sarah Enni I also love that it goes from engineering, it gets further... more conceptual. It's from building something all the way out to be like, "What is a city?" You know?
Jonny Sun Exactly. And I thought that was it. But then when I got there I sort of felt like, "Oh, all my ideas I had for it, other people were already doing." And so I felt like, "Okay, that means that I'm probably already behind." Like, "My thinking is outdated." And I didn't know like what the way into it was. And then at the same time I found, I started taking classes in the media lab and the Comparative Media Studies Program. And there's another thing, the Science Technology in Society spheres of MIT. And those were all about online culture and what technology was doing to us and the effect of the Internet on society. And it was much more of a media studies type focus and I was like, "Oh, I love, I actually love this!" And so I very quickly changed course and got really into that. That felt really important. And that was something that I keep, I still have a finger on, and I'm still trying to do my PhD, but that's what my PhD exams became. Like, "What is the Internet's place in society and how is it affecting us?" And all that.
Sarah Enni I love that. Okay. So I would love for you to explain your alien persona and how it came about.
Jonny Sun Yeah, I think when I got really into Twitter humor, a lot of the people I was following were all anonymous and they had cartoon avatars. And so in my head I was like, "Oh, I can't use my face to be on Twitter as well, so I'm just gonna draw a little cartoon." And I just really quickly sketched out this little alien face and used that. I never thought about like, "Oh, I'm tweeting specifically as an alien character." I sort of was like, "Oh, this was just the placeholder, anonymous avatar that everyone else is using."
Sarah Enni Kind of like a veil, a thin veil.
Jonny Sun Exactly. And so it always felt to me like I was just tweeting as myself, but at the same time there was stuff that people were doing on Twitter with misspellings and grammatical errors and just a lot of aesthetic play. And I really loved that and I was like, "Oh. How can I take that and play with it too?" And I think those two things of having an Avatar of an alien, and kind of playing with grammar and spelling and stuff, I think that went hand in hand for a lot of people reading it. And I think I was really slow on the uptake of that. It took me years to be like, "Oh, okay, that's why these two things work together." Because in my head I was just like, "If I could tell these jokes as me, and still play with grammar and spelling and all this aesthetic stuff, I would do that." But I think because of the community that was telling these types of jokes, was interested in this, it sort of just worked in a weird organic way. And then eventually I was like, "Oh, okay, this is something."
Sarah Enni Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is something. I love that. And I've heard you in interviews say that you always have felt maybe a little bit of an outsider perspective as an Asian Canadian, and Asian representation in media or lack thereof. So having this alien Avatar as a conduit for an outsider, is so useful. How does that interplay?
Jonny Sun Yeah, I think that that too was something I was a little slow on the uptake for, because I think I realized the type of humor I cared a lot about was sort of from the perspective of the outside looking in. And because that's just how I've always felt with my life. I've always felt like an outsider. And so I think a lot of my humor would reflect that. And so I think for the longest time I was just writing in that and kind of figuring out what my voice and my perspective was in that. And then eventually, by the time I wanted to actually do something with it, where the time where I sort of had people following me, and I had this alien persona and a perspective, I was like, "Okay, this feels like it's all sort of figured out and now what do I do with this?" And so for me it was like, "How can I take this offline? Can I do something else with it?" And that sort of became the idea for the book.
Sarah Enni So the book... I would have assumed that publishers were approaching you?
Jonny Sun No, not really. I think it was, I'm very confused about the state of publishing stuff from the Internet. Because I think we went through a first wave of it with like, Shit My Dad Says and "As Seen on Tumbler" kind of thing. And I think that was years before, that was a while ago now. And I think there was that first initial wave of like, "Oh we can just take stuff that's funny on the Internet, and publish it as books and as humor things and see what that looks like." And I think that was exciting for a while and then it died down. And so I think there was sort of an apprehension, or I felt an apprehension when I was sending things to agents and publishers in a way.
Sarah Enni Yeah, like, "This is not Shit By Dad Says."
Jonny Sun Yeah. But I think there was that sort of like, "Well we don't know what to do with stuff from the Internet." But at the same time, I think so many writers are people who started with blogs. So many essayists that I really look up to and funny kind of humor writers, are people who started online. And I think there's such an interesting blurring now where writing online is just writing. And it feels like that age of the novelty account that gets published is sort of outdated, or it sort of has existed already. And I've seen what that looks like. But now they're just people who are writers who have become writers based on the voice that they've cultivated online. And that's sort of the online to offline transfer right now. I think for me I was just trying to figure out how to do that, because I think what I was doing online was very different from a blogger or someone who writes essays online. Or someone who has written pieces for online publications. So I think it was a lot of just trying to figure out how to explain that and how to argue for that.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Cause this is a really unique way of bringing Twitter to a book. I was reading it just being like, "I don't think I could have ever conceptualized this." Which was great, you know? And by this I mean, I'm holding "Everyone's an Alienbn When UR an Alienbn Too." Your debut novel. Which is such a beautiful piece of art also. I love, I really, really love it. But that's so cool that you were like, "Okay, I want to create a thing. How do I want this thing to look like?" Cause my other question was gonna be was the publisher like, "You should take your tweets and illustrate them?" Because some of this is brand new for the book, but there are some of your most popular tweets incorporated in this as a narrative. So how did that kind of structure come about?
Jonny Sun It was kind of funny cause the first version of the proposal that I drafted, I was thinking of like "The Shit My Dad Says" model. I had called it "A Hundred Days on Earth" and it was gonna be a hundred tweets that I would illustrate. And the more I talked to people, the more I got that push back of like, "I don't know if this is interesting for people anymore. And this feels played out." And that caused me to go back and think like, "Okay, it makes sense. And I don't think that doing the "As Seen Online" thing makes that much sense." So I really thought of how would I approach this as a book for people who don't know me on the Internet and to make it not be an "As Seen Online" kind of thing. And so I think I went back and I just thought more about what I wanted to do with the book and how to tell that story. I think for me the play in it was my kind of Meta idea was, "How do I take the experience of being online and translate it to a book without saying this is a book about the Internet?"
Sarah Enni Yeah, I've heard you described this before and I'm obsessed with it. That you're sort of messing with narrative structure in this way. That the structure of this book because it is a lot of different narratives all crashing into each other and happening at the same time and disparate. And it's real life. It's the internet, but it's also like real life. What was it like?
Jonny Sun Yeah, so I had this thought of how the timeline was, and this was related to what I was looking at for my PhD as well, but how it changes how we think about keeping track of different stories. Because it's no longer like... If I follow a hundred people on Twitter, I'm just seeing a hundred different updates from them all the time. And I have to somehow keep all of them in my head. And I realized like, "Oh, we're all doing that all the time." And there's some level of, I don't know if this is new to how we can process information, I'm sure part of it is. But I realized like, "Oh, if I'm on Twitter, if I see an update from someone..." I'm like, "Okay, I remember, this is sort of who they are.This is their story. This is what their voice is and what they've talked about." And you can hold like 200 or 300 or a thousand people in your head that way. And that's so fascinating to me.
Jonny Sun And so I thought, "Okay, if I'm doing a book that sort of feels like Calvin and Hobbes, or sort of feels like Winnie the Pooh, how do you do that but in a way that speaks to that narrative structure of how we've learned to read stories online? And so for me that was like, "Okay, if I take Winnie the Pooh and instead of breaking it up of like Pooh and Eeyore for one chapter, and then Poo and Owl for another chapter, and Poo and Piglet for another chapter, what if you take all those chapters and mash them into each other and get all those updates?" So chapter one begins, then chapter two begins, then chapter three begins and then you get more updates from those. And then at the end of the book, all the chapters sort of wrap up at the same time. That was sort of what I wanted to do. And so I wanted to structure it like a social media feed kind of way.
Sarah Enni I love that. And I think it really works. And I think that if you are someone who has been on the Internet, like I had no problem following it whatsoever. So then when I read you talking about it, I was like, "Oh yeah, it was like that!"
Jonny Sun That's great! That's exactly what I wanted. And I think there's precedence for it too. I think in Calvin and Hobbes, in the way that comics tell stories, a lot of that is these little updates and you're kind of like, "Oh, I know Linus is about this." And like, "Linus loves his blanket." And so every time you see Linus and you see a Linus story, you're like, "Okay, this follows my entire 10 year understanding of what Linus is, the character."
Sarah Enni Yeah, That's so true. Comics are, and we're talking about comic strips which it's true for that, and then I think part of my stumbling block of comic books has been that they sort of do that too, but I feel comic book people are living in four dimensions. I find it difficult to approach because they're like, "Well I like this version of this character." I mean their characters exist 10 different ways all at the same time. It's amazing to me.
Jonny Sun Yeah. There's so much information to hold.
Sarah Enni It's incredible to me but it's very intimidating. But I love that all of these things are challenging the structures and how we interpret the kind of stories we want to hear.
Jonny Sun That's such an interesting observation. I never thought about it before like that. Now social media has turned us all into comic book minded people.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Everything's happening all the same time. And people that have been following you for years could be like you exist, and again this is me talking about the time travel thing cause it just preoccupies my mind, but you exist for someone discovering your feed at the same time when you started it as now. You know what I mean? Someone could go back like a deep [dive] you know? [Unintelligible] that people are still engaging with you many years ago and also still are gonna watch like your upcoming TED Talk or whatever. All those things.
Jonny Sun Yeah. That was one of my PhD exam questions was the idea of how do you deal with or what is the phenomenon of social media being something where you're present in real time but you're also creating an archive of yourself and what does that do? And I think there are a lot of bad things that happen. It's such a weird dichotomy where when I'm on Twitter I think like, "Oh when I post this it's just for people to read in real time now that I get to connect to." But then you're right, it extends years backwards.
Sarah Enni People are living back there. People are scrolling, which is really interesting. And we've always kept diaries and been archivists of our own lives, but they've largely been private. So now it's just the fact that anyone could read your diary. So, I want to talk about illustrating this book cause it seems like it was a tough time for you. You said in an interview that pre Twitter that you wanted to sort of be an illustrator. That was a big thing you wanted to do. How did deciding to illustrate this book come about?
Jonny Sun That's a good question.
Sarah Enni Yeah, tell me that and then we'll address how it was.
Jonny Sun Yeah, the first thing I ever remember drawing was my mom when I was a really young kid, when I was reading kid's books, she was like, "You should draw a kids book." And I was like, "Okay." And it was about a kid who went into shape world and became a shape. And then had to make friends, I think. I think that's all I remember about that. But I was really into shapes at the time. And so I was like, "Okay, I'll draw shapes." But yeah, for a long time I wanted to be an illustrator and a visual artist. And I think that was another thing that I sort of tried to keep up as much as I could. So I was doing art pieces and doing kind of street art style installations in different places legally.
Sarah Enni Very important to note.
Jonny Sun I would try as much as I could. Like I had a friend who owned a gymnastics gym and I asked if I could do a mural on his wall. And so I did these little figures that were jumping over all these little blocks and stuff and I tried to keep that up as much as possible. And then for a while I got really into webcomics and webcomic artists like The Perry Bible Fellowship. I'm not sure if you know them? They're great, he's phenomenal.
Sarah Enni And I do show notes, so I'll link to all this stuff too.
Jonny Sun Oh, cool, great. Excellent. And so for a while, I was like, "Okay, it feels to me the natural step of having a Twitter account where I can post all these jokes, and also being interested in illustration, the natural thing would be to do a web comic." And for awhile I think I have a journal full of different web comic ideas and that's sort of where the 100 Days on Earth illustrated tweets came from. Because I think I realized very quickly I don't have a schedule where I can do this every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Regularly. And I applaud all the web artists who can because that is a very grueling schedule and I just did not have the ability to schedule myself and the capacity of my life to do that. So I couldn't do that, but I think I always kept that in my head. And my mom also follows me on Twitter, an anonymous account which is very sweet. And she's always like, "You should draw Jomny doing this tweet." And so she was also a very heavy advocate of like, "I would love to see illustrations for this."
Sarah Enni Okay, that is precious. I'm obsessed with that.
Jonny Sun I know, it's very sweet. Sometimes I want to block my mom on Twitter because I'm like, "This is for me! This is my space!" But it's very sweet and she follows me.
Sarah Enni Oh, that's so funny. I love it. She's like, "I want to know what Jomney's doing." That's so funny.
Jonny Sun But I think because I had kept all that stuff in my head for a long time, and for awhile it was kind of just like, "Oh, as soon as architecture school is done and I have more free time, I'm gonna do this." But then I started my PhD and had no time. But then I think doing the book was sort of my way of forcing myself to make this happen. And once I sold the book, I was like, "Oh, now I have to live up to this proposal of illustrating an entire book." Writing this story and figuring it out.
Sarah Enni Because this is like, what are we talking here? 300 something pages. Of really intricate... did you also, did you illustrate... I'm sorry listener, I'm flipping to the book to show him a visual, but did you draw these as well?
Jonny Sun Yeah. So at the back of the book there are five or six different illustrations of a very different style. They're very realistic kind of like nature journal drawings I would say. Or like wood etching drawings. So I did those too, yeah.
Sarah Enni They're beautiful. It was fun to flip to the end and be like, "Oh, you can do other stuff too!" And I love that you had that concept. It feels so natural to have tweet size bits of texts paired with beautiful, expansive... But by being minimalist, your illustrations sort of hint at a bigger world, I think, which is a really cool visual trick for this particular project. But I want to hear you talk about how that went because there's like 300 pages of illustrating. That's a lot.
Jonny Sun Yeah. It was a lot. And this was my first big illustration project. I had done a lot of architectural drawing by hand, and that was my other way into this of understanding how to do that which was great, but a very different type of project. I'm trying to think of where to start. With the style it really was about trying to make it minimalist, I'm glad that that reads. Cause I was thinking like, "Oh if I'm trying to tell the story as sparsely as possible, I want the illustrations to match that." But it took a long time for me to figure out what that style was and how sparse to go and how sparse was too sparse.
Jonny Sun Cause there was a version of it where they were all just small icons. And that was too sparse, I think. And so I liked the version that it settled on. But because I have not been experienced as an illustrator that much beforehand, it took a long time for me to do each of these drawings. And I did it all by hand. I wanted to try to live a life as like a throwback, comic strip illustrator. And so I looked at how they used to do it and it was this arduous process. And I think comic illustrators still do this, but they kind of sketch out everything in a blue pencil first, and then they'll stand it and go over it and ink it. And I did all that. So I still have all these draft versions that are all blue pencil, more intricate versions that I went over.
Sarah Enni So you made it a lot harder yourself.
Jonny Sun I think I did.
Sarah Enni That's intense.
Jonny Sun But it was fun. For me it was just like why not do it that way? And why not have fun with it? But it took way longer than I expected.
Sarah Enni Yeah. And you've talked in articles about that period of time, it being hard, you tore your shoulder?
Jonny Sun Yeah, this started as a self-soothing thing to get me through my first few years of my PhD. And then when I actually had to do the book, it became the primary focus. And I kind of was trying to balance illustrating and writing this book while also taking classes and preparing for my exams. And eventually I had to pause my exam stuff and my PhD stuff because the deadline for the book was coming up. And so I ended up getting to the point where I was illustrating... I would wake up and in the morning I'd start and I'd stop once it got late into the night. And I think part of that is just cause I'm inexperienced as an artist, but I think a lot of it was just like, I didn't know how else to do this.
Jonny Sun And it was winter and I was in a very cold little apartment in Cambridge. At some point I was doing it, I was illustrating for the whole day, and it was cold and I was tensed up and I stretched and I tore all along my shoulder blade. And it sucked! I had to call my editor and I was like, "I think I badly tore my shoulder and I have to slow down on illustrating." I think I was halfway through the book, and that slowed down for awhile, and I had to take a more deliberate pace with it.
Sarah Enni And you talked about this being a stressful time for you too and maybe an anxious time.
Jonny Sun Yeah, absolutely. I think because of school, I've sort of learned or thought about project as like, "Oh these are things that I can put off." And then in a week of intense...
Sarah Enni Cram.
Jonny Sun Yeah. And I learned very early on that a book is not paced like a school project.
Sarah Enni It is blessedly unschool like, right? I mean in some ways.
Jonny Sun So I'd never thought I could illustrate the whole book in a week, but I was sort of like, "Oh, if I just put aside a month to do this, I can." And it took longer than that and I think it was just a big learning experience for me.
Sarah Enni Yeah. I mean were you okay during it?
Jonny Sun I am okay now. It still comes up. It still hasn't fully healed.
Sarah Enni You have an athlete's injury.
Jonny Sun That is exactly what the doctor... I went to the emergency room and he said like, "Were you playing a sport?" Cause he said that is something that football players and hockey players get. From intense physical contact. But I was like, "No, I just kind of drawing and I stretched and it was bad."
Sarah Enni I guess partly I'm asking too... like you said before, you would have days where you just couldn't put pen to paper. Maybe this was another depressive episode or just an anxious episode.
Jonny Sun Yeah, it was a depressive episode for sure. I think a lot of it was just [pauses] I think one was the pressure of doing it and thinking that this was sort of the first really public work that I've done, or that I would do. And just the enormous pressure of that. And then also, I think in the middle of it, it sort of felt like, "I have 200 drawings left. I already did a hundred drawings." And this was all in a very set period of time. And so it was in the moment where it was just like, "I don't see an end to this. I don't know how I can get to that end point." And I think there were moments where I was just like, "I can't." I would just sit there and stare at this little blue line sketch and I was like, "These happy characters." And be like, "I don't know how I can do this."
Sarah Enni How did you ultimately...?
Jonny Sun I think it was just the pressure of it. And also around that time I started finally seeing a therapist. And that helped a lot. That was also something I learned, or I was educated on through Twitter. Of people talking about their therapists and me being like, "Maybe that is something I should do."
Sarah Enni Yeah. I'm really glad to hear you say that. And also on this podcast, and in real life, I do not ever shut up about my therapist. Because I would rather be like, "Well in therapy the other day, I was talking about this." And to whatever degree I can help de-stigmatize it, even though I think in our community it's largely been de-stigmatize, but it's still worth saying like, "No, I'm still actively seeing someone."
Jonny Sun Yeah. And to this day I talk to my therapist every week and it's the best. And I find when I don't talk to him for a week, I will start to spiral and all this stuff that I keep in check starts to really get out of hand.
Sarah Enni It's like, "Oh right, I'm going for a reason." Like, "This is still extremely important for the balance of all the things."
Jonny Sun So I think the first time I met with my therapist, I got out of the appointment and I just started crying. And I was like, "Oh, I didn't know what it felt like to talk about this stuff out loud." And it was that feeling of holding all of it in. And a lot of it I think was related to the pressure of trying to do this PhD, and the pressure of trying to do this book and all of that. And so therapy definitely helped.
Sarah Enni I mean this book is also about existential stuff. And so is a lot of your Twitter. And a lot of your comedy is rooted in like, "We're all dying and what do we do with that?" So I can imagine being so immersed in this project, and so dealing with all the different levels of dread or happiness, or what is happiness? Or what is anxiety? I mean when you're immersed in those conversations, that's a lot.
Jonny Sun And I think a lot of it was... I think I didn't know a lot of authors at that point. And I was very new, very kind of foreign to the book world. And so I was going through that feeling of like, "Is this just a really stupid idea?" Like, "Why am I putting off... why am I spending a year on this project, putting everything off on this dumb book of drawings?" I just got to that point, and I think every author goes through that, but I feel like I was in a place where the only friends I had were through school. And so they were all doing their PhDs and working towards that, and writing and reading and working on their exams and doing dissertation stuff. And I was like, "I can't do that. I have to go draw a happy hedgehog for a while."
Jonny Sun And so there was a lot of... I'm sure part of it was real and a lot of it was just imagined. But I think I thought everyone thought I was an idiot for wanting to do this. And so there was a lot of pressure from everywhere. And so it was just kind of like, yeah... there were so many moments where I was just staring at the drawings and being like, "What is this?" Like, "Why am I doing this?" And I didn't know how to kind of...
Sarah Enni That is very relatable. Like hardcore. Especially [since] I come from the world of writing for kids and teens, and there's a lot of, even with an author world, there's sort of a dismissive attitude towards writing for teens. Which you know, hopefully we're all getting over that. But that exists. But I love, I think it's so fascinating that you commit yourself to a project born of the world that you were studying. I mean in some ways it's so valid, it's hyper-valid in the world that you were in, but at the same time of course, it's more complicated than that.
Jonny Sun I'm so glad that you said that cause that was sort of like when I started thinking about it, I was like, "Oh, this brings a lot of stuff together." And then when you're in it, you're just like, "I don't... this doesn't... "
Sarah Enni "What am I doing?" It's so fascinating and I love that you got to have the final beautiful "in the world" thing. I'm not gonna keep you here forever, but let's turn to the work that continues on now. So having this experience, this first massive illustrated experience, then you get the opportunity to illustrate Lin-Manuel Miranda's book. How does that come about? And were you hesitant about taking on another illustrating project?
Jonny Sun I loved it. I was not hesitant at all. It came about... Lin had been doing these "good morning" and "good night" tweets. And he blurbed this book, Everyone's a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, because I think we eventually... I'd followed him forever, since In the Heights. And In the Heights was such a huge musical theater... that was a before and after moment for me of being like, "Oh musical theater can sound like this." And I remember when I was in college, actually for the sketch comedy show that I did in the year that I directed the show, I wrote two or three musical numbers that were In the Heights numbers. The way that the sketch show worked is, it's mainly sketches, and then there's musical numbers where you take existing things and just rewrite the lyrics and then you choreograph and perform them.
Jonny Sun So we did two In the Heights numbers for that show and it was such a world changing piece of art for me. And so I had followed him from that point, which must've been like 2010 or 2011 or whenever In the Heights Kinda came out... the recording came out, the Broadway cast recording. And so I'd followed him for a while and then I think as I was on Twitter more and more, eventually at some point he had seen me and then followed me. And so like we were friends, or friendly online, and we just kept that up. It was one of many strangely organic online friendships that I think we don't talk about enough either. Just the idea that you can have real friendships born from online spaces. Which is so cool.
Jonny Sun And so at some point he started doing these "good morning-goodnight tweets" and I really loved them and I thought they were doing a lot of that counter programming thing you were talking about of like, "Oh this really grounds a lot of people and it's very helpful for a lot of people." I think people started asking him to do a book of them. He had tweeted like, "Is this a good idea? Should I do this?" And I had just done this book and I messaged him and I was like, "Here are all my thoughts." Basically like, "Here are the things that I would avoid doing. Here's sort of the things that I think would make it really special."
Sarah Enni You were like, "Avoid illustrating your own book!" And he was like, "Great... can you do it?"
Jonny Sun But I think it was the same kind of [thing]. A Lot of it was similar in that you don't want it to feel like a "As Seen on the Internet" kind of thing. I shared my experiences of trying to avoid that and what that meant. A book is a different object than something that is online. I think if you treat it with respect as a physical artifact in a way, and you really treat it as this special thing, I think if you start from that mentality then and move on with that or move forward with that, then it changes what you think of the book as being. And what type of project you want to put into this very special physical thing. So I think we just started talking about that and I said as an offhand, I was like for example, "I think illustrating it in a way that feels special would be cool." And we were talking about that and he was like, "Oh, do you want to illustrate it?" I was like, "Oh, okay, sure. Yeah, let's do that!"
Sarah Enni Like, "I wasn't fishing but hey...."
Jonny Sun Right, I legitimately wasn't. I was just offering advice to my friend of being like, "Find an illustrator maybe, cause that would be a way to make it a special thing." And so we just started talking and that's how it came about. And I loved that idea. And because I wanted to be an illustrator for such a long time too, the idea of illustrating someone else's words was also a huge cool thing to do. And it's Lin and I love him and he's the best!
Sarah Enni And you were familiar with these tweets, like his whole project of encouraging self-care or self-love.
Jonny Sun: Those tweets meant a lot to me. And as a fan of his for such a long time, I felt like I knew him in a way. And so my mission with the book was to do a portrait of Lin-Manuel Miranda in a hundred different little illustrations where none of them are actual drawings of him. And so that was sort of the approach that I tried to take.
Sarah Enni Right. I was gonna say, I read that you wanted to incorporate settings that he refers to a lot and imagery that he mentions. He posts pictures all the time so we kind of get a sense of what his world looks like through his eyes. Which is very cool.
Jonny Sun And I kind of scoured for things he had tweeted about. And then we got to talk [pauses] we had a wonderful woman who curated his tweets, her name is Cassandra Tidland. And she's great and she compiled all the tweets and then from there I talked to Lin about each of them and got to be like, "Okay, when you were tweeting this, what were you thinking at the time?" This is so funny that we're coming full circle, but it's like how you were saying when a musician plays old stuff... some of those tweets were from years and years ago.
Jonny Sun: And so it was a process of being like, "Okay, when you wrote this?" And he was like, "This was on the last day of Hamilton", or "The last day where I was playing the character and I wrote this." And so I was like, "Okay, that is very meaningful in many ways." I don't remember the tweet for that, but the illustration for that one became the fire escape staircase, because he was talking about like, "This was the last day of Hamilton where I was playing Hamilton, and it kind of was about like new beginnings." And we were talking a little bit about how that felt like the end of In the Heights as well. And In the Heights had the fire escape imagery and I thought the stairs going up and down made a lot of sense. You're stopping here for a moment, but you're going up or you're going down and you're kind of continuing to move.
Jonny Sun And the way he talks about it, he's such an artist, he puts so much thought into each of those. And I've gotten to see him draft a few of them and he takes a lot of thought. And so he talked about them with so much reverence and thought that like, it made it really easy for me to be like, "Oh okay, here's the space he was at. Here's what he was thinking of. Here are some images that he was thinking of." And I got to turn all of those into little drawings.
Sarah Enni And how special for him to have someone, a friend who's also really familiar with his work, and bring your own creative... that must've been so cool for him to see how you interpreted.
Jonny Sun: I hope so, yeah!
Sarah Enni I love that. That's so special.
Jonny Sun And we had talked about like, I think it was a very different style from "Everyone's an Alien" cause we just talked about our love of the Shel Silverstein type of drawing. And so it was a tribute to that type of thing as well.
Sarah Enni So cool! So, okay, I do want to move into what you're working on now. So I'd love for you to just actually lead me to moving to Los Angeles and how you ended up making that choice.
Jonny Sun So the reason I'm here in LA is cause I got an offer to write for the next season of BoJack Horseman, which has been the best job ever.
Sarah Enni Like the coolest gig ever.
Jonny Sun And I think I'd always wanted to be a TV writer. So many of my passions have started from TV and film.
Sarah Enni Well when I heard that you were writing on BoJack, I was like, "Oh Duh! Illustration. Discussion of mental health and therapy, and writing." And you have a background in plays and comedy.
Jonny Sun I'm so glad. Yeah. I mean, and also BoJack was a huge influence on the book and on what I consider comedy to be, and the voice that I've developed has been strongly influenced by that show. So it was such a great feedback loop type thing because I think it does such a great job of talking about very serious issues. And how it uses humor sometimes to bring people in, and sometimes to deflect, and sometimes to to do something completely different. But also coexisting with this very serious storytelling around sadness and depression, and all of these things that influenced what I want to do with this book. And what I wanted to do with how I approached writing and storytelling.
Sarah Enni And that leads me actually to an interesting question. You have this book, which is a real success, you're getting a lot of attention for your Twitter style, and you got the chance to work with Lin. But how, at that point, are you thinking about your career and what you want to say and how you wanna say it?
Jonny Sun I don't really know. I feel like I'm just like grabbing at straws of what the next thing is. I'm working on a second book. I am gonna work on a sequel for Everyone's an Aliebn When Ur an Aliebn Too. But between that I'm working on a book of essays and these short form pieces. And I'm still trying to figure out what that looks like. But that is all prose and I'm not sure if that'll be illustrated. But I think at this point I'm really interested in figuring out... I've always thought work is really interesting when you find a medium that works with the thing you want to do. And so for me I was thinking this short form essay space is exciting to me cause it's something I started doing online, through Instagram. It's sort of like blogging, right? But I thought, "Okay, that's a cool space and I want to see if I can stretch into doing a project like that." So that's what I'm working on book-wise. And then writing for BoJack, which is amazing.
Sarah Enni So I love that, actually. I love that actually you are open to whatever is coming your way. I think that's really actually admirable as an artist and feeling like, "Okay I can tackle all these different mediums at the same time." And I will come back to that form of storytelling, cause I really do want to ask about that, but just not to pass over BoJack cause it's such a big deal. What was it like to move to LA? It's a big choice as well. And then to join a writer's room where it's really collaborative. This is not the void of Twitter at all.
Jonny Sun Yeah, exactly. So moving to LA I think has been really cool. I got the offer to write for BoJack like a week before the room started. So I had to move.
Sarah Enni Wow, so they're like, "Get over here."
Jonny Sun Yeah, exactly. So I've been staying in a sublet, the first sublet I found on craigslist. I've been staying here since September. I was like, "Oh, I need to get to LA really fast.
Sarah Enni Yeah. And we are talking in April, so it's been quite a few months.
Jonny Sun Yeah, exactly. I think I like LA a lot. I think because of Twitter again, I've surprisingly had a lot of friends and people I know who are here. And so the transition to understanding the city has been really nice cause a lot of people live in different areas, and I've gotten to visit them and hang out and kind of see all the neighborhoods. That's been really cool. And I think LA is a very,... the community is very open and warm. And that was surprising to me. I think because I've been in academic spaces so long, and because in Boston that kind of experience was like, "Oh, here's an academic studying these intense human rights things. And here's another academic doing this work and another academic." For me, it was like, "I kind of want to write books and tell stories." And I felt at odds with that. And so, coming here was such a breath of fresh air because so many people are just writing. I know so many writers now. I used to not know any writers in person.
Sarah Enni You can't throw a rock in LA without hitting a whole bunch of them.
Jonny Sun That's so warm and nice and I love that.
Sarah Enni And how was the room? And we don't have to spend that much time, whatever you want, but how was the room? And then how was it getting to write your own first episode?
Jonny Sun The room is amazing. It's so cool. Because I was such a fan of the show, it really feels like, "Oh man. This is where it happened." It's been such a surreal experience where I keep having to check myself. This is like, "Oh, we're doing it!" I think going into a show that has already kind of established everything, feels the first little while for me, it felt like I was writing and pitching fan fiction in a way. Because I was like, "Oh, this is... we're just talking about these characters?" And it was amazing. I think the feeling of being in a writer's room specifically, was something that I had sort of had that because I'd write with my sketch friends and when we did the sketch show together, we'd sort of write together and kind of talk about that stuff.
Jonny Sun But this is such a cool experience because it is so collaborative. And it's intensely... for me, it's intensely stressful to write by myself because every single thing you put on the page you're like, "Is this right?" And then I spend a day thinking of like, "Is that the right thing to say? Is that the right direction to go?" And it's such an internal process. And with the room, you just externalize all that stuff. And now instead of just one writer who doesn't know what they're doing, you have eight writers who are also thinking about the same anxieties about the story as you are. And different ones. And everyone has all these different strengths and so it's so cool to export all those worries, so that other people can also worry about them.
Sarah Enni Right, right. I love that.
Jonny Sun So in a way it feels like you have this safety net, in a way. And this support group. And I also get to be part of that support group for everyone else. And so it's just such a cool thing where you talk about these things, and you talk them out, and then you have this magical solution. And it's this crazy alchemy of everyone brings something together, to the table, and then together all of a sudden the story is figured out. And that's amazing.
Sarah Enni It also feels like possibly for you, the shorter timelines might have been good. A book is really long. Like you're saying, that actually can contribute to the anxiousness of it. Cause you're sort of in the wind for a year. Being like, "Is this right? I don't know. I don't get this time back." And I think the thing that appeals to me about TV writing is being like, "Well we're shooting on Tuesday, so whatever is on the page then is what's happening." And in some ways it lets you let it go a little bit. Or that's my dream anyway.
Jonny Sun Totally. There's less time to hem and haw and we have a little bit of that, but it does feel like, "Oh we gotta get going." So whatever feels right at the moment and no one has worries about... that's what we're gonna go with. But it's so cool because you have the creativity of eight other people. And it's just the thing that comes from it really is a collaborative thing and it feels like magic to me. Like I have no idea how it happens.
Sarah Enni Yeah, it is magic. I love that. And it's so cool that you got to move to LA and have that as your kind of landing pad, kind of hit the ground running, and with these people that are making such cool work.
Jonny Sun And they're all so amazing. They are all great and wonderful and I love it.
Sarah Enni Yay. Good! Okay, I do want to talk about these other things. You mentioned the short essays. I wonder how you thought of that? And how did you think about what you wanted to cover in that kind of a book? And how are you finding prose to be?
Jonny Sun It's funny cause I think prose is something... When I was writing sketches and the plays, I found that I really liked writing monologues. The other play I wrote was called Fried Muscles and it's set in a diner and it's three tables, and it's three conversations happening at the same time. And so a lot of that is, you just have three monologues happening concurrently. And it was really fun to do that. And so for me, I think that's the genesis of longer prose writing, which is probably a sacrilege to say. But that's sort of how I approach it. But I also just started writing. I mean that started being organic too, cause I started just writing. I have a little Instagram account where sometimes I'll write just thoughts, and it feels very much like blogging. And I found that really nice. And I also just started reading more prose and essays and kind of things in that nature and found it really wonderful and effecting. And so I was like, "Oh, I want to play in this and see what that feels like as well."
Sarah Enni Yeah. I love reading essays. So when I heard that you were doing that I was like, "Ooh good!" And your Instagram is fantastic for that kind of thing. But then even an Instagram post or something like that, you have these concepts, but an essay really demands you sort of... But then also we're talking about this as though you haven't written so much in the academic world, which is very dense, longer, really thought [out]. You have to have a thesis, right?
Jonny Sun: I guess that's a good point. I never think of that as writing, even though it is, it's just a different style and a different genre.
Sarah Enni And it's a good structure, right? Academic writing definitely has a structure to it. Also it's called... they're humorous essays. Do you think you could've even possibly not written...
Jonny Sun: Humor?
Sarah Enni You know what I mean?
Jonny Sun It's fun cause right now I'm still in the muck of it. And so I even feel weird talking about what it's about cause I'm not entirely sure yet. But the process of it has been [pauses] I fell in love with a book called 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write by the playwright Sarah Ruhl. And those are so great because they are short, they're like one or two pages long for the most part. And they're just these beautiful, self-contained, almost like these little sketches of ideas or these tiny short plays. And I love that format. So I was like, "Oh, I think that feels right to me." But yeah, I think a lot of them aren't funny, but then a lot of them are just very funny, or I would think are very funny. They are recognizable as humor essays as opposed to other types of essays. So I think we'll see how all that stuff balances out. I don't really know.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Humor in writing is tricky cause also you know a humor structure or a joke format, if you write it down it could still not be funny. And something you write that's just very honest ends up really getting to someone. So I don't want to make you talk about stuff that's in progress too cause I know that's hard.
Jonny Sun I'll come back and we'll talk about it when it's done.
Sarah Enni Yes, perfect. Perfect, I love that. Then I want to talk about your other, you are doing a sequel to Alien, which is so interesting to me because we do have kind of an ending for him at the end of the first book. And I don't know if we care about spoilers with this or not, but he learned what he learned and he's kind of moving on. So where did you pick up thinking like, "What's next for our guy?"
Jonny Sun I don't know yet. I think that's sort of why I was like, "Oh, I want to do a sequel, but I also want to do this essays book" because I haven't figured out where the next thing is gonna be yet. And so I think having that time off from thinking about this is nice. I also think I wanted to keep this first book as like a special kind of object story and everything. And so I didn't want to very quickly be like, "Okay, here's like Jomney book two and three and four and five" and make it a long series. I think that is a cool way to work, but I didn't feel like this was that.
Sarah Enni Yeah. It's not like all of a sudden he's like Tokyo Drift, you know? It's just not like [that]. It's kind of like a complete thought. That's what that book feels like to me. So I feel like that makes sense what you're saying. Once you have the concept for the next thought for him to explore.
Jonny Sun I think I just wanted to put myself on the hook for doing it because it is something I want to do. I've learned about myself that if I don't have something that I'm signed up for, I won't do it. And so I think I just want to be like, "I'm signing up for this." And so in the back of my head I can kind of start to think about what that will be.
Sarah Enni Ooh, that's so smart. Cause not everyone... you signed a three book deal and not everyone, sometimes you sign a three book deal, and you're just like, "Eh. TBD." Like. "It'll exist at some point." But it was notable in that announcement that you were like these are the books. They will happen.
Jonny Sun It's nice to have... I think with this book, one of the stressful things about it was like, "Oh I did the proposal." And then it was due in a year since the proposal was accepted. And it felt like, "I have to put all this stuff in." And it felt like a short amount of time. So I think just the luxury of getting to think about it in the background for a while was really nice.
Sarah Enni Yeah. Yeah. And grow as a person, right? Yeah. Cause you are Jomny. Jomny is Johnny. So what his next journey in life will inevitably be with how you grow and change, which is the point of it. And then the third one we'll get to, TinyCareBot. Do you want to just talk about the origin of Tiny Care Bot and what he is and then I'd love to ask about how he's gonna be a book.
Jonny Sun So when we're talking about the election in 2016, I found myself just being glued to Twitter and not being able to stop the endless scroll thing. And it was that and then also the outpouring of other voices of how this election was gonna affect their lives. And it was just a lot. And part of that was, I realized if I had my phone on me then there were days where after the election where I was just in bed and couldn't really bring myself to do anything. And so I made this little Bot to show up in my feed. So I just made it for myself cause I was like, "Okay, I need like..." this might sound silly, but it wasn't silly to me and it isn't silly to me.
Jonny Sun And I just needed like a little poke to be like, "Here's something really easy that you can do that you have to put your phone away for." So it was just stuff like open a window, or take a walk, or just get a drink of water even. Stuff like that is intentionally supposed to be these small, really doable things. And it started working where I would follow it and I'd see a little thing that I had to do and I'd be like, "Okay, I'm gonna listen to that thing and put my phone down." And that was enough to break the spell.
Sarah Enni That's amazing.
Jonny Sun Yeah. And so I was following it and then I thought, "Okay, maybe I'll just share it with people." Cause I thought it was neat. I thought it was helpful for me. And then I think a lot of people really found it helpful for them. And I think everyone was going through that similar feeling at that time. So it was sort of born from that national kind of funk, you know?
Sarah Enni Yeah, like this huge psychic wound was created.
Jonny Sun And so I'm really happy that it was just this one little small thing that made a small difference.
Sarah Enni Cool! So how does this little, I keep calling it a little guy, but it's a little it. How does little Care Bot become a book?
Jonny Sun: I'm not entirely [laughs]... I think I'm very aware that self-care has now turned into a thing that helps companies sell products. And I hate that and it feels very gross. I'm also aware of the conversation of people conflating self-care to like solving depression for example. I think self-care is one small piece of it. So it's a very complex, nuanced conversation. And I think I have always thought of the Tiny Care Bot as being one really, really tiny piece of that.
Sarah Enni Well I love how you described it as breaking the spell. It's just a little like, "Oh!"
Jonny Sun Like I don't believe that getting a drink of water is going to solve someone's depression. And it's very strange to see how that stuff gets conflated on the internet. And so for me I'm trying to be mindful of making sure that even in the way it looks as an object, is a small thing. And not like this big self-help book. And I want it to be this little thing. Like I want it to physically be a very small thing.
Sarah Enni When I was a kid, there were little pocket books. I remember getting at novelty stores. And they had the little thread marks or whatever, thread bookmarks. And I remember cherishing some of these little ones so much. I love that you're messing with format too. That's really cool.
Jonny Sun Thanks. And so I think I'm trying to think of that more as an object. And I don't really know what is going in it yet, but yeah, that's sort of where my thinking is on that.
Sarah Enni I like that.
Jonny Sun I don't want it to be a sort of self-help-y type book that is gonna solve all the problems.
Sarah Enni Yeah, it almost feels like those party game things where you draw a card or whatever. Like, you know, there's some element of trying to re-enact the randomness of the Bot in some way.
Jonny Sun: Yeah. And I think there is something about how fun that is, right? It's easy and fun by design. There's, there's something cool about that.
Sarah Enni Yeah. So let's talk about being a multidisciplinary person. Let's see, what did I write down? I am obsessed with this because I feel very compelled to do everything at the same time. That's a phrase that runs through my mind a lot. I'm just like, "Well, the answer is you do have to do it all at the same time." And that feels empowering at the same time that it's overwhelming. There's not enough hyphens even to describe all the things that you do now and have done in your life. You're still a PhD candidate.
Jonny Sun Yes. I feel a lot of it has been trying to dodge any label.
Sarah Enni Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which you've done. Because I was like, "I don't even know how to describe you." You're just a creator. But what does it mean to you to be multidisciplinary and how have you compartmentalized your interests?
Jonny Sun I think as much as possible I've been trying to approach everything with this understanding of the more sort of pools you can draw from, the more it will enrich the stuff that you make. And I think consciously, I guess with Everyone's an Aliebn When Ur an Aliebn Too, we talked a lot about how the PhD work and academic stuff went into it in a very sideways way. But I think having that, knowing what that conversation is, is something that I could draw from to work on this book. So I think there's a fun in having a wide array of interests in different things that you've done, because it's just more things to draw from I guess. And I think each person is so interesting in the amount of interests that they have. And I think that's one of the things that makes each voice in each person unique is like, "Oh, it's wild that they're interested in this thing, but also way over here they're also interested in this." Even if you don't explicitly bring those two together, both of those things feed into whatever it is that you want to talk about. And whatever that voice is.
Sarah Enni They inform one another or they add specificity to you talking about something unrelated. Right? That's the joy of Improv. Honestly, the funniest stuff is not a joke it's when someone's reference will be so bizarre to the audience, but it's like, "Well, it's on the top of their mind cause that's an interest they have." And those are the most fun, silly moments.
Jonny Sun I think even doing this sketch comedy show with engineers, those are two things that seem like at totally opposite ends of whatever this spectrum of interests are. But for me, that felt so natural once I was in that world. And a lot of it was a learning thing where, in the show that I directed, one of my stage manager and my technical director really got into like these light-up EL wire suits. I don't know if you've seen those in like the dance shows.
Sarah Enni Yes. I think we call it L wire. And yeah, like rave culture. I go to burning man, so I know exactly what you're talking about.
Jonny Sun But they were like, "I want to build one of those from scratch." And so I was like, "Okay, great." If you want to do that on the tech side, I'm gonna write a bunch of sketches that we use that for. And so it really was this marrying of tech stuff and creative work. And we made a bunch of sketches that really use the power of that. And we did a lot of sketches for that show in darkness where people would light up and they were fight scenes and dance numbers and for me I was like, "Oh, if we didn't have engineers working on this, we would've never gotten to this stage." I think for me that's always been exciting. And then when I was working on the plays at Yale, just the idea of thinking architecturally and thinking about what space is informed a lot of the plays and the scenes that I wrote there. And so I've always been sorta like, "Oh whatever you can draw..." I think for me though, storytelling and writing and making stories, is sort of like the goal. I think I'm orienting all the other interests as like how does that all feed into making these things?
Sarah Enni Communicating. Yeah, yeah. I love that. And it seems like you are interested in form and challenging existing forms. So bringing a whole panoply of different versions of expression to one thing helps you blow it apart.
Jonny Sun Yeah, I think that's one of the fun things of getting to do all this stuff, I think you start to see like, "Oh, all these existing norms and cultures in academia, in architecture and engineering, they're sort of all like why do they exist?" Like, "Why can't we just do things different ways?" I think I like taking that spirit.
Sarah Enni Yeah. I love that. Okay. You have been so generous with your time. The very last thing that I do is I ask for advice. A lot of your life is predicated on talking about advice or suggestions for people, but I'd love to just hear maybe about people who are drawn to lots of different kinds of storytelling. What would your advice be to maybe someone who's like, "How do I, where do I even begin?"
Jonny Sun Yeah. I think for me, speaking from my experience, a lot of it is just falling in love with stuff. And I think for me I find as soon as I fall in love with a piece of art or a specific medium or something, I want to immediately figure out what makes that work and how you can take that apart, and what you can push and pull on. For me, I think everything that I care about doing hasn't come from a point of like, "Oh this is an idea that will sell well." Or like, "This is an idea that I should write cause there's a market for it." It's always been like, "Oh man, I like this idea of an illustrated book." And how do you push and pull that in ways that just make me excited to do it.
Jonny Sun So I think my advice is whatever the things are that you are in love with and that makes you tick, look inward and try to really understand why you love them. Because the chances are the reasons you love them are the reasons other people love them as well. Or you can convey why you love them to other people. And that's the most personal, specific universal thing. And as soon as you sort of figure out the thing that makes you love it, you just start to work out from that. And sometimes that doesn't turn into something and sometimes that kind of falls apart. But I think sometimes that leads you down all these fun roads and then you eventually get to a thing where you're like, "Oh, I need to do this."
Sarah Enni Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I think that's really great advice. And I think you can always tell as a consumer when you are watching something that was created from a place of love as opposed to for money or for whatever else. I think there's like the beating heart of something is what makes people really compelled and drawn to a lot of different works of art. Oh my gosh, thank you so much. This was the most fun interview. Thank you for being so generous with your time and let's talk again when you have more stuff.
Jonny Sun I would love that! Yeah.
Sarah Enni Thank you so much, Jonny.
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