Known Issue Podcast

Known Issue welcomes guest, Donald Boone--a corporate leader and Black entrepreneur who founded the on-demand rental company, BoxedUp. Allen interviews Donald, who shares thoughts on his upbringing, education, and life as a Black man navigating corporate America and the modern start-up environment. They discuss their perspectives on some root causes of institutional racism and the nuances of being the beneficiary of privilege. They also share some laughs. It's a refreshing dialogue between friends trying to be as honest as they can in a 70 minute phone call.

After a long month+, Allen and Hunter reunite to discuss the last five weeks of quarantine. Hunter gets a test, Allen struggles to juggle home life and starting a new business, and they both are glum about presumptive Democratic nominee, Joe Biden. They wrap up with a few Elizabeth jokes, so feel free to skip to the last 10 minutes.

Some lighthearted personal quarantine anecdotes followed by discussions on mask efficacy, the value of essential workers, and de-stigmatizing (at least the word) socialism.

The guys catch up about the weekend and the latest flurry of dialogue from the start of the week. Themes of the day are, be responsible, take care, and look out for one another. If you are so fortunate as to be able to donate to others in need, be thoughtful about where those dollars can go. Two groups local to us are richmondrestaurantsunited.com & austincf.org, which are supporting hourly/gratuity based employees here in Richmond and the businesses and artists effected by the cancellation of SXSW in Austin, respectively.

The guys wrap the week discussing the effect things have had on work, where to focus energy, and how to navigate the seemingly unnavigable. They TRY to leave it on a little positive note.

The guys are f*cking livid.

The guys decide to share their personal experiences regarding the current state of affairs concerning COVID-19 and how they are navigating daily changes in information and protocols. They will release a brief, unedited chat every day possible to recap their day of quarantine: how they are managing their small businesses while attending to young kids, aging parents, and their own sanity in the midst of a global pandemic. Hopefully, it helps.

Hunter and Allen are back, now on a semi-regular basis. They talk awards season, needless self-aggrandizement, and our inability to turn away. *This episode includes a quote from the Norm Macdonald classic, Dirty Work.

Allen talks The Farewell, his favorite movie of 2019. Hunter closes with a question re: Pedals from r/Guitar and an Adam Sandler bit from 100% Fresh. In between, they try not to sound afflicted by the subject at hand.

Allen ran the Richmond Marathon and lived to tell about it. Hunter has a food delivery app mishap. The guys talk amateur athlete exploitation and weird, old guys on message boards. Enjoy bowl season!

Happy Thanksgiving, pals and turkeys. Hunter and Allen share what they are grateful for this year, kick around a little advice for how to approach potentially awkward dinner table conversation with extended family members of dubious motive, and agree we could all do with a little more compromise. Enjoy on your layover in Charlotte or during a dry spell of your gridlocked road trip!

Episode 20! In the fifty-fourth minute, Hunter coins the phrase "next-level monkery". You will just have to listen to understand how we got there.

Fall arrives in Virginia and Hunter goes to Florida. The guys dig deep on topics like post war, the supposed golden age, the eastern bloc, and Astroworld. Also, some talk about family.

Hunter opens with a "college cool kid" catch phrase which in the unlikeliest way segues to the topic. The guys cover a lot of ground--positives and negatives of various debt instruments, where debt factors in covering fixed household costs, the value of college loans, and WeWork's massive leverage play that failed everyone but the founder. It's heavy, you know, like a $40k loan.

The guys are back after a little extended travel. They catch up on the raucous last few weeks and then talk some about how many movies we make about real already mostly famous people. Some time is spent trying to guess who will play Trump in the inevitable eight biopics that will be made about him. A lot of deep sighing.

No snark. An honest and earnest attempt to understand how we got where we are with guns and our hope for what can be done. If you only ever listen to one episode of this podcast, let this be it.

The guys misspeak about the Great Storm of 1900, how Dallas was founded, and how to identify the depression era. But then they talk about fantasy football and it's really not bad. This episode does not include draft advice about any players because there is nothing new under the sun.

Hunter and Allen discuss The Office, their love of Zach Woods, Hunter's smoking guitar pedals, factual inaccuracies, Trump as the world's worst stand-up, and eventually, why people still smoke. It's a doozie.

Allen tells the story of getting arrested while moving across the country. Hunter tries to recall the various names of a single contiguous road in north Austin. Like most people, the guys think traffic is not great and life would be better with less of it. Very little new ground is broken.

Mosquitoes kill over a million people per year, yet we worry more about bears and crocodiles. The guys discuss some of their pettiest frets while Allen mischaracterizes how people get lung cancer and Hunter miraculously finds a way to work in a World War II reference.

Allen talks about how his wife is not having a theoretical discussion about the elasticity of time during the morning drive to drop off their daughter. Hunter tells how he handled a car break down in the drive-thru line with an average amount of grace. Then they discuss how believing in clutch is equal to being a climate change denier.

Hunter tells how he ate too many jellybeans on the fourth of July and Allen describes his family's desert mishap. Then they discuss how retraining is a euphemism for trying to turn every coal miner into a web developer. They conclude that it is harder to be poor than well off.

The guys thought this was going to be a lighthearted talk about the San Diego Chicken, but ended up talking about pervasive cultural appropriation and people's inability to change. It's fun!

Allen shares a personal grievance about a bathroom renovation. Hunter describes growing up in a home of General Contractors, winning a cathode-ray tv in a college poker tournament, and being taxed on a Yeti cooler he received as a Christmas bonus.

The guys plead with young parents to vaccinate their kids to prevent mass disease, but acknowledge the "Don't Tread On Me" sentiment as being something that exists. Jenny McCarthy was exploited but should know better. Andrew Wakefield as a root cause.

Allen takes the Enneagram self-assessment test only to realize true believers don't take the test. Hunter recounts the 4 different results he got doing Myers-Briggs. The guys once again agree capitalism is probably to blame, but are still yet to establish a superior alternative.

Allen and Hunter remembered they met in college. It ended up being one of the only things they could remember.

Hunter does the world's deepest dive on LOST, JJ Abrams inventing sci-fi monsters, Alan Sepinwall's "revolution", and Damon Lindelof's start on Nash Bridges. Allen almost cries recounting Walter White's self-actualization and the guys both agree that GoT ended thin and "people know Billy Dechert".

Allen just watched Avengers Infinity War, Endgame, and Ironman 2. Ironman 2 was not his favorite. Hunter appreciates the humanity of the absurd. The guys agree 22 (and counting) is too many Marvel movies.

Hunter and Allen bring the facts. Improper waste disposal. Downstream effects. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Great Seattle Straw Ban. Hippies and compost peddling. Be prepared to throw down your possessions and go save the Great Barrier Reef. Or drink heavily.

In the inaugural episode, Allen Rogers & Hunter Dryden tackle a softball topic--the news. Hunter says the river of information has never been wider, then almost immediately walks it back. Allen says news sources are overly aggregated, then later says media is completely disaggregated. Then he calls Sean Hannity a brick head. The guys really dove deep to kick things off.

We know and can agree on the problem, so why can't we solve it?