Like all the best podcasts, this talk with Ian Shea-Cahir could spawn a half-dozen new episodes. We could talk about his career in journalism or his job running Princeton University’s social media team. We can talk about divorce, co-parenting, remarriage, forgiveness, redemption, and parenting a tween in your 50s. We can talk about the pressures of his Mexican/Irish background, or hitting rock bottom with depression and how learning to manage it saved his life.
We talked about all of that.
But our main topic was how to defy news fatigue and keep pursuing your political passions, mostly by remembering that all politics is local. In a two-tiered strategy that deploys the blowhards to grab headlines, the real work happens behind the scenes when the serious people get to work. That’s how, for example, his current home state of Kansas preserved a woman’s right to choose despite not having voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.
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We also talk about understanding his privilege, why Gen Z fuels his optimism, getting punched at a town hall meeting, and how interviewing Tom Morello inspired him to rage against the machine.
Other links:
* Follow Ian on TikTok.
* Eddie Adams leaves home in Boogie Nights (did you know Joanna Gleason is Monty Hall’s daughter?)
* “How do you do, fellow kids?”
* From A Bug’s Life: “Those puny ants outnumber us 100 to 1. And if they every figure that out, there goes our way of life!”
* Amy Poehler as the Cool Mom in Mean Girls
* Rep. Jeff Jackson (D-NC) explains government on Instagram
* Eddie Murphy “experiences America” as a white man
* Frank Costanza speaks Korean
* Jim Valvano’s iconic speech about fighting cancer: “Never, ever give up.”
* Trey Gowdy appears on The Late Show
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