Revolting

The Customer Isn’t Always Bright. Expectations are the enemy of happiness, which is why the Amazonification of customer service has ruined a lot of people. They want everything now. They want a refund on it before it’s been shipped. They want a tracking number and a thank you note and a discount. But we’re all […]

White Whales and Sinking Ships. All of life is a struggle between our best intentions and the predations of time. Will we land our great white whale before the veil falls and we return to dust? Or are we still able to heft the big harpoon and land the whale, filling our holds with oil […]

Bill and Ted’s Hot Tub Time Machine. In 1968, when Dr. Spock invented the internet, it was just a cool way for people to share information with each other. Then the same people who brought you credit cards and telemarketing turned it into a predatory beast that wanted the last four of your social, every […]

New Year’s Icebreakers for the Dull or Demented. From a party perspective New Year’s is really amateur hour, hordes of emotionally chaotic humans getting sloppy and rubbing up against each other, celebrating an arbitrary milestone with Jell-o shots and plastic thimbles of champagne. This week we’re gonna help you bone up on your conversational chops […]

The Warm Breeze Off Jugalo Island. We live 3000 miles apart, but we’re neighbors on Jugalo Island, a special place where two fifty-something jabronis can have a podcast where they offer uninformed opinions, share dubious battle stories and generally pretend to know what’s going on in the world. This week you’ll get the warm breeze […]

Bad Reasons to Talk About Batman. Batman is clearly the best superhero because he doesn’t have any superpowers and because he isn’t even sure whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy. Also, because he wears his underwear on the outside. Recent events have highlighted that humanity has a real soft spot for vigilante […]

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together Again. We’re just a couple of cracked eggs, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men apparently need to be involved in our rehabilitation, which has to thread the needle between opiate addiction, night sweats and the fear of sneezing. Music pick of the week: Robot – Dissolves […]

The Last Will and Testament of Stevil Kinevil. By the time people are hearing this, I’ll either be in the great beyond where all the guitars are air guitars and all the cocktails come with umbrellas, OR I’ll just be crawling out of an opioid nightmare on the other side of knee surgery. And so, […]

Trying Very Hard Not to Try Very Hard. After 153 hours of jibber-jabber, I think we’ve established that nothing matters, and that quite possibly we’re all dead already anyway. That means we’re all free to do what we want, which for most us means, not very much. And yet, it’s still so hard to pull […]

The Epistemological Challenges of 21st Century Consciousness. One of the problems of being alive right now is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to know what’s true, to even know what you know. There’s AI, deep fakes, fake news, memes, rumors, conspiracy theories, stuff we see in dreams, numerology, astrology and psychic surgery. How in the […]

Looking for a Good Cult to Join. Humans will believe just about anything. You wonder how people join UFO-worshipping, death cults, but is any of that so far from the stuff everyday people are completely sure about as they walk around the planet, eating food and reproducing? Music pick of the week: Robot – Billy […]

The Apocalypse Being Nigh. This episode has been gifted to humanity one day before the US election that may or may not (but probably will) trigger the end of our species in the universe. We can imagine a few of you are feeling some considerable stress, so today we’re going to talk about how to […]

Arbitrary Moments of Joy, Pain and Indifference. There are milestones in life that you see coming, and there are others that just happen to you. There are some you think are going to move your forward, like a marriage or a new job, but maybe they don’t pan out quite as expected. You shouldn’t expect […]

Natural Born Killers. There are aliens among us, people endowed with extraordinary abilities and no fucks to give. They don’t need expensive equipment. They don’t need a very tight shirt. They don’t need you to see them do the things they do. They’re just built different. Music pick of the week: Robot – Buildings – […]

The Three Body Problems. Never mind the sci-fi novel or the mini-series they made from it. Today we’re talking about the design problems with the human body, which are as obvious as the nose on your knee. Also, we can’t do anything about them, even though they’ll probably cause us to go extinct sooner rather […]

Anthony Bourdain’s Nightmares. In the night, when the hungers come, the mind capers at the culinary possibilities lurking in pantries and refrigerators. Weekend mornings, when we’re maybe not our best, we’ve contrived dishes that will never find a home at your local Applebees. Then there’s the stuff we’ve eaten on dares. Music pick of the […]

The Eventual Thoughtlessness of the Homogenized Mind. Either by algorithm, lowest-cost architecture, or the crushing weight of American cultural hegemony, we are all being rinsed clean of original thought, encouraged to communicate in memes and enjoy things like “boneless” wings. Music pick of the week: Robot – Pissed Jeans – King of Jeans Stevil –Lady […]

The Revolting Biopic Starring Danny Devito and Pauly Shore. The Revolting biopic is a comedy and a cautionary tale, a bildungsroman and a French period drama. Sure, it’s got panache and style. The costumes are outstanding, but what are the lessons we’re meant to learn from it and why does the plot seem so incoherent? […]

For a Brief, Shimmering Moment We Were Gods. We may look like only slightly abnormal human beings, but oh, you should have seen us back in the day, or rather, on that one day, when we were really good at something, so good that we remember it and base some not insignificant amount of our […]

The Motivation is the Message. Marshall McLuhan, who was Canadian and had a great name, thought the “medium was the message,” but it was the ‘60s, and apparently he also thought a mustache was a solid move. Anyway, since then media has exploded into a million little messages, and it seems more clear than ever […]

Coup d’etat! Coup d’etat! It was 1984 and Repo Man was in the theaters, a couple of them anyway. The suburban United States suddenly became aware of a little LA band called The Circle Jerks. Forty years later, some large part of the US custom bike building community converges unironically on Portland, and a whole […]

How Heavy is Your Record Collection? You can measure it a couple ways. Raw weight. Number of Slayer albums. Quality vs. quantity. This is all really just an excuse to talk more about music and how we consume it and to express even more of our questionable opinions. Music pick of the week: Robot – […]

The Fine Print in the Social Contract. Just cause we’re introverted malcontents doesn’t mean we’re not on our second-best behavior when we’re out in public. Out there in the streets it’s a collaboration. Teamwork makes the dream transpire in a more agreeable fashion. So how do we get more people to understand there’s no ‘them’ […]

Excuse Me, Can I X-ray your Xylophone. We’ve both been back to places we might have come from to revisit our roots, and all the while you think you’re finding a deeper part of yourself, the connections are breaking down in time. Maybe you realize you’re just a random collection of genetically encoded dust, or […]

Caring Carers Who Care. We can all agree that it’s much better to not care than to care, but sometimes you have to, and more specifically, sometimes you have to take care of something or someone you didn’t expect to. This can be mentally and emotionally draining. Why is it so hard to care for […]