Revolting

As Punk as Kettlebells and Scented Candles. When you’re just a pimply-faced teen trying to establish yourself as an iconoclast and quite possibly a voice of your generation, things are pretty simple. You pull on your bondage pants and your Chuck Taylors and show the world who’s boss. Then you get old as shit and […]

The Struggle is Surreal. We want everything to be easy, but if everything comes easy, it doesn’t have a lot of value. So we need some struggle but still hate struggling. Is this why human people are so stupid? Music pick of the week: Robot –  Vanishing Life – Surveillance Stevil – Poison Idea – […]

Pivotal Moments in Dirt Bag Development. In a deterministic universe, there are no surprises. From the moment we emerged from our mothers’ wombs we were meant to be the dirt bags and derelicts we have become. But there were warning signs, critical junctures at which we might have followed different, more stable and lucrative paths, […]

Our Current Tally of Major Awards. So far we have zero Webby, iHeartRadio or People’s Choice podcast awards, the same total as George Clooney. Also no Pulitzers or Nobels, but usually those get awarded years after your major accomplishments, so we’re not sweating it. This week’s topic is figuring out how to go on with […]

For Our Next Trick, We’ll Need a Volunteer. We always say we’re doing the only things we know how to do, but that’s a cop out. We could be carpet salesmen or tree surgeons. We could be the Sigfried and Roy of a casino in a minor media market. We could be satanic priests or […]

The Best Defense Is to Be Extremely Offensive. We’re living in the age of outrage, and to be fair, there’s plenty of outrageous stuff happening. At the same time, it’s worth asking what the value of being offended really is. Is it a way to drive change, or just a way to drive people more […]

Lightning in a Bottle, Thunder in a Can. We’re taking a break from the deep, philosophical explorations this show is known for to reengage with our monkey brains. It’s another lightning round of questions that don’t really deserve answers, though those are exactly the questions this podcast was designed for. Music pick of the week: […]

Stapling Bananas to the Wall. This one is partially inspired by a question from listener Oliver Beckers and partially by the deaths of Rick Froberg, Gary Flloyd and Steve Albini, and partially by the #MeToo movement and partially by the complicated business of consuming art in the information age. This week we’re talking about what […]

Emerging Patterns from the Swirling Chaos.  Ain’t it just the case that you reach these points in your life where you think you have some things figured out, you can see the way forward, and you feel hopeful and optimistic, but as sure as the sign rises in the East, chaos comes to scatter your […]

When the Wedding Band Stretches Out. This is a show about Steve Albini, who is probably really dead, despite both of us hoping the news of his passing was some elaborate prank he was pulling. When people think about the pure ideals of punk rock, they usually think of Ian MacKaye first, but they should […]

Karma Is a Failure of Both Pattern Recognition and Ligaments. We musta said and done some pretty not cool stuff to deserve the level of negative physical consequences doled out by daily life lately. Today we’ll talk about the possibility that there actually is justice in the universe, or whether we’re just ignoring the normal […]

If Dungeons and Dragons Was Real, Metal Would Make a Lot More Sense. Listen, not everything has to be so literal. You don’t have to talk about your heart to express your love for another human being. Maybe that’s why Candace left you. You’re boring and predictable. Today, we’re talking about ways to open your […]

The Women Without Whom We Would Not Be Us. Roughly half the people on the planet are women, and a very high percentage of them are smarter, funnier, more beautiful, wiser, and more emotionally stable than a high percentage of the other half of the people, all of this notwithstanding the people who are neither […]

The Internet Stole My Mind and My Wallet. Sometimes you marvel at how much easier things are, because you can email your grandmother and pay your debts online, but then you realize you don’t seem to have any more time in your day and your attention span has been smashed into a million pieces, leaving […]

Pep Talks from Chronic Depressives. When you’ve been through some hard times, you learn things that might be useful to other people. At the very least, you come to understand the value of a sympathetic ear. There’s a real case to be made that chronic depressives are much better at pep talks than shiny happy […]

My Body Is a Temple, Abandoned by the Gods. All things fall apart. Order tends toward chaos. The entire universe gets colder and colder by the picosecond. And our bodies, strong and capable for a shining moment, eventually let us down. Today we’re talking about how cadaver parts and stubbornness keep us on the right […]

Don’t Wear Sandals to a Bar Fight. Life is full of rules, both useful and made to be broken. There are bike rules. There are rock show rules. There are a million reasons to follow them and just one to punch them in the face. Today we talk about the rules. Music pick of the […]

The Real House Husbands of Whatever Zip Code This Is. Both of us are home bodies and at one time or another have been home makers. Today we’re talking about what it means to have and make a home, and how that lets us create great works of art and philosophy and impress other people […]

The Re-Arrangement of the Deck Chairs on the Titanic. There comes a time in everyone’s life when they realize they’re on the wrong path. Maybe you’ve let Leo DiCaprio make periodic-specific nudies of you, only to let him drown after the boat hits an iceberg. Wake up calls like that can be valuable. Music pick […]

Other Things We’re Not Good At. We try to stay humble. We’re not great at podcasting, mountain biking, skateboarding or orthopedic surgery, but actually, there’s a ton of other stuff we’re also not very good at. Sometimes it’s helpful to remind yourself what you’re really best at is mediocrity. Music pick of the week: Robot […]

Coffee and Sugar, Cigarettes and Weed. Everyone loves drugs, even the people who say they’re against drugs, and we love them too, even if only pretty specific ones. Today we’re talking about our relationship with vice and the dumbest things we’ve done to get high or get away with getting high. Music pick of the […]

The Joys of Being Single. It takes a special kind of bike rider to ride a single-speed, the kind of rider who really only likes to pedal going uphill, the kind who appreciates making everything harder for themselves. But simplicity has a certain charm to it, and anyone who’s married maybe knows what we’re talking […]

The Year Punk Rock Went Broke. I don’t know what happened, but it was probably Green Day’s fault. Everyone went from making fun of us for listening to weird music to elbowing us out of the way, so they could buy Red Hot Chili Pepper’s t-shirts at Target. We went from saying this music should […]

The Unbearable Lightness of the Corrosion of Conformity. Life has this odd tension between wanting to fit in, go along and get along, be a good teammate or co-worker or whatever, and then at the same time, fully inhabiting your own identity (whatever that is) in order to stand out and remind yourself that you’re […]

The No Good, Very Bad Words. Every week we rewrite our content warning because we’re required somehow to warn people that we use profanity and sometimes talk about the immense size of horse penises. At the same time, folks are bumbling about their everyday lives using terrible words that we find more offensive than all […]