Revolting

Multipart Definitions and Dual Diagnoses. Our simple human brains want everything to be simple. Effects have clear cut causes. Injuries happen to specific parts of the body. Unfortunately, the world isn't like this. It's all complex interactions spitting out murky consequences. Whatever is wrong with you though, you should probably be taking Vitamin D. Music […]

Never Not Bleeding for the Cause. Robot's wife said, “Oh my god, why are you always bleeding?” Suffice it to say, some of us are less careful than we ought to be. Also, the world is pointy and sharp. At this stage, we're often not even sure why we're bleeding, but we never stop. It's […]

Slow Walk to Music. You know something big is afoot when the main characters in a movie or TV show start slow motion walking to music. Of course, there are times in your own life that deserve this treatment. Or even better, a walk on song, like baseball players get, 10 seconds of Metallic to […]

Two Legs Bad, Four Legs Good. We can be reasonably certain that no cat ever crashed the economy. If you took a random Israeli dog and a random Palestinian dog, they'd probably be buddies. Russia/Ukraine? Same. Furry buddies don't say hurtful things, because they don't talk. They should OBVIOUSLY be running the world instead of […]

Hugs Are Better Than Drugs, But Drugs Are Also Pretty Good. Don't do meth, you'll lose all your teeth. Don't do coke, you'll lose your whole bank account. Don't do Molly, you'll sleep with your cousin. But, beer, weed, ibuprofen, caffeine, all in moderation, are probably fine, right? Music pick of the week: Robot – […]

Mona Lisa Wasn't Wearing Pants, That's What She Was Smiling About. Go in any art museum and you'll find paintings, drawings, sculptures and photos of people in various states of undress, sometimes even doing the most unnatural but also very natural things to each other. For millennia we've been into boobs and butts and even […]

Go Ahead and Call It a Comeback. 2025 is the year we both return from physical setback to reestablish ourselves as defiantly mediocre athletes. This time it's different, but also probably exactly the same. You can roll back the odometer, but the tires are bald and engine block is cracked. It's never a good sign […]

Like a Piano Down a Flight of Stairs. We all want to age gracefully…physically, mentally and emotionally…but the likelihood is we'll be just as annoying as our parents every step of the stupid way. The world is moving so fast, all the time, that the older you get the farther you fall behind. How do […]

Will the Rhombus Be Unbroken. If you follow the current laws of science through to their logical conclusions, then it's hard to escape the idea that we are living predestined lives, where everything we do follows inescapably from the last thing we did. That's a pretty tough pill to swallow though, so we invented the […]

The Wisdom of Your Future Self. If you knew now what you will know then, this whole story would be so, so different, so how could you possibly consult with future you to produce a present that you'll be happy with later? The answer is probably simpler and also more difficult than you think. Music […]

That One Friend. You Know the One. Look, we've all got that one friend who is basically lovable, but their behavior leaves a lot to be desired. At some point, you've got to sit them down and have an honest talk about their attitudes, outbursts and party fouls. It's a loving discussion; one aimed at […]

The Most Important Person in the World. Self-love, not that kind, but also not not that kind, is critical to living a contented, fulfilling life. But many of us struggle to like the person in the mirror. How come? And how do we fix that? Asking for a friend, who is us. Music pick of […]

In Which We Consider Bicycles. Even when you make a cycling podcast that's not about bikes, occasionally bikes comes up. Not as often maybe as burritos or how bad Foo Fighters are, but they do come up. Today we'll talk about bikes in exactly the way we talk about bikes when we're not recording a […]

Metamodern Sounds in DIY Podcasting. What are we even doing here? The only reason you're hearing words right now is that you've become too lazy to read. Remember when you subscribed to magazines? Remember when you read blogs? Now you just want to zone our and listen to two bozos having a conversation. It's a […]

The World Is Flatter Than You Might Think. In the vast info-verse we spend most of our days trudging around in, every voice is equal, which means the grifter and ignoramus are just as loud as the expert and visionary. Good people doing good things are easily drowned out by bad people doing bad things. […]

Saloons, Saloonery, and Saloonacy. Humans love a bar. They love to drink. They love to talk. They love to shoot pool, and some of them even love to get thrown out. Today we're mulling the universal appeal of the public room and discussing some good guidelines for behavior therein. Music pick of the week: Robot […]

Never Ever Pay the Artist. Your eyeballs have been under assault since you were born. Other people really are desperate for you to see what they want you to see. You'd think you'd place a higher value on the things can come into your field of vision, but you don't. Everywhere there is art and […]

Learning to Fiddle While Rome Burns. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1980, we thought the world was going to end in a nuclear winter. When George W Bush, who couldn't pronounce the word ‘nuclear,' took over in 2000, we figured the whole planet would be consumed by the War on Terror. In 2016, we […]

Superstition as a Brain Eating Virus. People believe all sorts of crazy things. The world is flat. Gluten is a huge problem. There's a mystical being who knows everything and controls our lives, but we can't see them or possibly know what they want. Once you open your mind to ideas that are magical, mystical […]

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 […]

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: […]