Episode 25: Transcript

"I need to be more than just the guy who glided through." - with Ian Shea-Cahir

Doug French: So tell me about your ankle. Let this be a much needed public service announcement against Turkey Trots.

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: Okay, so I ran a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning and I ran it in a place that was really hilly. And then at the end of the turkey trot, I thought, oh, yeah, I feel like a little weird, achy twinge in my heel. That's probably plantar fasciitis. Drove back home here and had some discussion about the turkey and then went upstairs to take a shower. And by the time I got out of the shower, I was like, oh, this is not plantar fasciitis. My heel/slash ankle region really, really hurts. And then Mike's mom showed up for the meal and she is a massage therapist. And so she was like, oh, I can look at it. And she looked at it and she was like, yeah, this is not a fascia problem. There's a bruise developing right now. This is a sprain. Oh, come on. Mike had to cook the entire Thanksgiving meal, except for everything that we had done the day before. You know, we did pies and like some prep, but he did all the rest of it. I could sit there and chop with my foot up, but I couldn't be walking around doing any like actual cooking, so.

Doug: Is it immobilized at all? You got an Ace bandage on it?

Magda: Um, no, not anymore. But we went to the Peabody Essex Museum on Sunday and saw great, great exhibits there. But I borrowed a wheelchair from the coat check because I didn't want to stress myself or anybody else out like hobbling around the museum. Boy, is it not any fun to be under somebody else's power the entire time? Like I thought, oh, this is going to be kind of nice. Somebody else is going to be pushing me around. Well, Mike and I just do not have the same style of looking at exhibits. And I kept forgetting that he was pushing me so he would stop and look at something. But I would be facing the wrong direction.

Doug: You didn't propel yourself? You didn't do the old “Ironsides”?

Magda: No, it wasn't it wasn't that kind of wheelchair. It wasn't like an athletic wheelchair. It was like the wheelchair for putting somebody who didn't have their own wheelchair. You know what I mean? Like, think about the kinds of people that come to a museum without their own wheelchair. It's basically like people have injured themselves, or older people who can do some walking or something like that, right? Like so it was definitely meant to be wheeled around. And I also got motion sick from being wheeled around in it. Did you ever see the movie Murderball? It's a documentary. 

Doug: I don't think so. 

Magda: It's amazing. It's about men who are quadriplegic, paraplegic, something like that, who play this game that's basically like basketball, but it's in their wheelchairs. And they are vicious. They just like peg each other with this ball. And it's amazing. They're just these amazing athletes who play in wheelchairs. That will not ever be me.

Doug: Maybe I didn't realize it was called Murderball because I seem to recall something like that when these guys were just no-holds-barred and could... Yeah. You know, it's kind of like I'm still mystified by water polo. You know, the rules. How you can't touch the ground. That's just nuts.

Magda: That was my whole foot-related injury. And yeah, I'm getting better. We'll see. It'll go a little bit different.

Doug: Should I be more upset that you have a sprained ankle or that you called it Peabity?

Magda: Well, I had to ask how it was pronounced because, you know, if this was in Michigan, it would be the Peabody Essex Museum.

Doug: Right.

Magda: And so people were like, oh, no, it's Peabity. I was like, oh, come on, people.

Doug: Really? Well, I'm sure that somebody else would guffaw at Hamtramck or Tecumseh.

Magda: Hamtramck is pronounced exactly the way the letters are, though, right?

Doug: Like, oh, yeah, sort of. Yeah. I mean, there's a, we could use an extra vowel in there somewhere, but it's yeah.

Magda: So then it turns out that the people there say Peabity. So they don't say Pibbity. They say Peabity. And Essex is pronounced the way I would say Essex, E-S-S-E-X. And then “museum” seems to be universally pronounced.

Doug: As a native of Essex County, New Jersey, I didn't want to hear that Essex is pronounced differently.

Magda: I was waiting with bated breath for them to give me some Masshole pronunciation of Essex.

Doug: Yes, we pronounce “museum” as “art barge.” Well, tell me about Ian Shea-Cahir. Tell me where you found him.

Magda: Um, I found Ian Shea-Cahir on the internet. Like, he's friends with people that I'm friends with, and we just got along. He's a good guy, and he really takes being a dad very seriously, and he really just takes being, like, a citizen seriously.

Doug: How to stay politically active and keep your head on your shoulders throughout the onslaught, yeah.

Magda: Yeah, exactly. And so I wanted to talk to him about his specific project, which is he lives in a suburb in Kansas that has been overrun of late with local politicians who are just antis. You know, they're anti-woman, they're anti-LGBTQ people, they're just anti, like, humans, sort of. So he has just been going to meetings and town halls and stuff like that, and he's the guy who stands up and just challenges them, you know, like he's not yelling and he's not screaming.

Magda: He just stands up and asks them these very realistic questions about, you know, like what they think are going to happen, who they're being paid by, that kind of stuff. And he really gets under their skin. So he's just kind of taken on that role of, as he calls it, the loud mouth. And then the people who are more strategic and tactical about things, who are more organized, sort of use him as cover to get things done, to get these people out of the race or out of office, that kind of thing. And I think it's very interesting that you can be useful being a loudmouth, because I'm not sure that we think that that's the case. Like, he doesn't want to be a politician himself. He's just taken on this role of challenging them. And I found that very interesting and thought that it was a good example of blooming where you're planted and just sort of using what you have to be politically active and to try to make things better in your community.

Doug: You know who Jeff Jackson is? Representative from North Carolina.

Magda: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Doug: Who goes on TikTok and therefore Instagram and talks matter of factly about why things are happening. Right. And is about to be gerrymandered out of his own seat. But he went on the Daily Show the other day because he's decided to run for Attorney General, which is probably a more important seat because he's going to oversee elections.

Magda: Oh yeah.

Doug: But he will tell you, he'll say a lot of this outrage that many of a certain cohort in the Republican Party embrace is just theater. It's just there to throw red meat to their voters. And it's kind of jarring to see how they are just normal when the cameras are off. And then as soon as the cameras are on, they become who they are.

Magda: For people who don't know, when you and I started writing the blog about co-parenting together, we got all kinds of interviews and articles written about us and stuff like that. And we also got invited to come on the Mike Huckabee show. And we went–

Doug: Oh, do we have to go down this road again?

Magda: Okay. But I mean, to me, the thing that I took away from that, beside the fact that that whole world is so strangely constructed, is how genuinely affable Mike Huckabee was.

Doug: When the cameras were off.

Magda: Yeah, when the cameras were off. And I was like, wow, because I can't imagine. It's, I've been trying to figure it out ever since. And we were on that show what like 15 years ago? It's like, how did he have that one side that he was presenting to the people he saw all the time? Like I remember talking to the makeup and hair people about him, and they all thought he was great. And I was like, okay, but you're gay. You know, he actually wants to kill you and is advocating for that. But you think he's a great guy. It's like, how do these people have both sides to them, in which they're genuinely like, it seems like, more than nice. It seems almost like actual kindness, but on the other side are so evil and so just vociferously horrible.

Doug: Well, he never said he wanted to kill gay people.

Magda: Well, he didn't have to say it directly.

Doug: He just wanted to make sure they had no rights. And were secondary human beings and couldn't start families.

Magda: Well, okay, not wanting people to exist is not wanting to kill them. That's true. It's a thin line, but it's there.

Doug: He actively wants your life on earth to be as miserable as he can make it. Well, it's the same thing when right-wing people go on left-leaning shows. Like, I remember, um, Trey Gowdy. He interviewed with Colbert. Because Trey Gowdy, who is a firebrand right-winger from South Carolina, wanted to talk to another South Carolinian, Stephen Colbert, to talk about a new book he'd written. And he became a different guy. You know, he knows the room. And they all know the room. They know what they have to say because they know who the audience is.

Doug: But the whole point of why Ian came on, I enjoyed the fact that he had, like, he came out of the box with a bunch of pop culture references, which is what we do as men. And he was going to talk about messaging and mass media and his ongoing education now. He's in business school. But then he went into his depression. He got very personal. He got very specific about his second marriage and his second shot at being a dad because he's got adult children and a nine-year-old. That could have been a podcast in and of itself. The whole idea of second chance fatherhood. And talk about what it was like to parent a tween at 60. You know, it's exhausting, but it's also exhilarating just because you feel as though you can kind of come at parenting with a perspective you lacked the first time around. So that's what I enjoyed, I have to say. He was very candid and is a good example for men who need to be candid with stuff and recognize that there is privilege to be a man and you can recognize that there's the patriarchy and there's manhood and they don't necessarily overlap. By the way, can we also talk about that express train?

Magda: Oh, my God. Can you imagine? You'll have to link the express train diagram in the show notes.

Doug: I will.

Magda: If that express train existed, think about how many problems it would solve for so many people, because flying is so miserable and so expensive. And if there was a train that just made that loop, it would be better than anything else that exists right now, like would just solve so many problems, would really bring parts of the country together. And would give us easy access to Canada too, which I think is fantastic.

Doug: And you could commute.

Magda: Yes!

Doug: It's a fantastic idea and all you can do is think of all the very wealthy lobbies that would work very hard to make sure it never happens.

Magda: Yeah.

Doug: So, which is why, and I think it's true, when men build things, they build things that are super tall. Why is anybody's guess? But don't you think that if a bunch of women were in charge, that we'd kind of steer away from the big buildings and, you know... Build things that were useful? Yeah, if we're building things that look like our genitals, then a nice oval train schedule I think fits the bill perfectly.

Ian: One of the funny things that I keep hearing is, being a Gen Xer, obviously we're the feral generation, we walked ourselves home, we did all this stuff. I keep hearing from colleagues, people I work with, friends, who are kind of down on Gen Z, down on, you know, Gen Alpha. And I, I'm the opposite. I freaking love them. And one of the reasons that I love them is because they are willing to be open with their crazy. And I mean that in a positive way. You know what? I've become so much more over the past three years, while I'm not a partaker of the OnlyFans space, I'm like, Right, right, right. I think the weird part about it is that the kids these days, because they've got so much exposure to stuff that we would have been, that would have been hidden from us or just not accessible to us because, you know, you couldn't go Googling porn. I think that they're a little weirder, but I think that they are just much more comfortable in their own shoes than we ever would have been. And I think they're fucking cool. I love my kids.

Magda: They just don't feel ever like they have to read the instruction manual first, ever. You know, they just grab it and they're like, “oh, I can figure this out” about everything, everything.

Ian: And I think that, you know, I think that resonates with a Gen Xer like me who, because we were kind of forced to live without reading the instructions. My mom, you know, was a single parent for most of my childhood. And I was the one cooking dinner and making school lunches when I was like eight, nine. You know, and that, but that was out of necessity here that with this generation, they have helicopters around them. They have the parents, especially the Millennial parents, who I love also in their own way, don't hate me. But there is a perception among them that they don't really need us because they can just look it up, you know, if they want to, or they could just find their way through. It's all one giant Minecraft to them.

Doug: I think I see also there was a piece recently about this is an OnlyFans that is they're treating like a media empire. They're basically there's a whole compound and there are people who live there who do the filming and who do all the PR and do all the coding and there's a whole enterprise behind this very profitable site.

Ian: And it spurred out of, you know, these YouTube conglomerations, these groups of people who learned to pool their resources in making YouTube empires, which spawned the TikTok houses, which has spawned this kind of OnlyFans and other sites kind of conglomeration. And as someone who, you know, aside from kind of the emotional, parental, I'm an old guy point of view toward it, I think, as someone who worked in social media for more than a decade, it just fascinates me. I'm not a not-smart person, but I never would have seen where half of these platforms would end up. And it's because these kids just do not give a fuck.

Magda: That's what it is. I think it's our fear that has held us back because we're as smart as they are. But they're not afraid of anything. And I feel like they also didn't go through that hard rebellious phase that we went through and were told to expect because they didn't have anything to rebel against because they didn't see it as an equal fight, right? They just sort of like, dropped their end of the rope and are patting us on the head.

Ian: I think there is a rebellion, but I think it's a silent rebellion. They don't need us to hear it. I think of the scene in Boogie Nights where Mark Wahlberg is like screaming at his mom about, “you don't understand me. I'm going to be something.” And then he runs out of the house and she tells him to go. They don't need that because they have their community online. They have their community around them. And they can find the place to scream into a pillow without having to antagonize us. So it becomes this kind of like, you're right, they don't have to be this kind of let's burn it all down type thing because they're going to burn it all down from the inside.

Magda: I think a lot of us were like waiting for that rebellion to come. And it didn't. And then just like, suddenly, we realized, oh, we have no idea what they're thinking, doing talking about, like, they left and we didn't notice.

Ian: That's why, despite my wife's chidings, that's why I'm on TikTok as much as I am, because, you know, I gotta have that riz.

Doug:  So right, you talk a lot about how the landscape has changed, how the audience is changing, how our motives are changing. How do you as a Gen Xer feel you can keep up with that, adapt to that? I know you're pursuing more education in the field, but relevance is a tough word. But in terms of staying current in your profession, what do you think the steepest challenge is?

Ian: So I think one of the biggest things that I've been able to do over the past 15 years, especially as my kids, you know, I have a son and a stepson who are now 23. I have a daughter who's 21 and then I have a daughter who will be 9 next week. She was intentional.

Doug: No judgments here, I'm just saying welcome to born-again parenting.

Ian: Yeah, we could have a whole podcast on how our strategy toward the new one has been different than it was toward our original ones.

Doug: Yeah, that could have been easily the subject here. Born-again parenting is a big deal among people in the 50s.

Ian: Yeah, it really is. But I think one of the things that I've learned is the Amy Poehler character in Mean Girls, where she's doing the dancing and she's trying to act like she's cool and she's talking about You know, all of that, when she does that, is like trying to connect with the teen kids who don't want to be around her, while trying to connect it back to her coolness from way back when. And I think one of the ways that I've been able to stay relevant, but also one of the things that's been most instructive for me around communication, especially social communication, is to stop trying to connect with my space. Not MySpace, but my space, my experience and to more, in a weird way. It's the same way that I've learned to be better about racism and misogyny and other things is stop trying to tell people what you think and just listen to what they think and adjust your communication style to what the audience is giving you. Rather than trying to impose your communication style onto the people around you

Doug: So it's more along the lines of just your canoes in the river. You're just following the river as opposed to trying to steer where the river goes.

Ian: Yeah. And, you know, to a certain extent as a communication professional, I do help steer the river a little bit, but I do it within the parameters of the audience that I'm with. And it's why I'm good at it as opposed to, you know, there are a number, I'm sure you've seen, there's a number of people who try to jump on and say, Hey, look, I'm cool. It's, you know, it's the Steve Buscemi and 30 Rock thing. “Hello, fellow young people.” All it does is make them say, God, what a fucking idiot, more.

Doug: And by the way, so Magda, do you see now? That's three pop culture references in the first 10 minutes. So very grateful to have a dude on because as you know, men communicate in pop culture references. So at this rate, we'll have a couple hundred before we're done.

Ian: So it's one of the reasons that I ended up kind of stepping away from social media as a profession a few years ago. I spend more time doing internal communications and PR. I get social media, but I think one of the things that it really can start to wear on you is to understand that at a certain point, there is a space that you need to leave alone. There is a space where you need to let people be people and you need to let the kids or let the people on Facebook or the people on Instagram kind of live in their space without kind of trying to force your way in.

Be in that canoe and ride along with it. Steer within the parameters of what helps you, your brand, the people you're trying to reach, but don't try to take over the river. And social media, unfortunately, has gotten to the point in many respects where the river is just now a paved over highway. You know, it's so pay-to-play, it's so algorithmed, it's so contrived from an ad-driven, revenue-driven point of view that there's a reason we use Facebook less. So this is how I kind of like communicate in the real world has been influenced by how I've seen communication kind of be bastardized by people who are trying to say, hey, look at me, I'm cool.

Doug: I'm also a big fan of reinvention. I think though, when you get to your 50s, the exertion can be a bit more. Do you really have to train yourself to be open to new things and watch Saturday Night Live and recognize you probably won't recognize the musical guest?

Magda: But Saturday Night Live is also for old people. Like, I mean, I think part of this is if we're saying the word relevance, I think we have been trained to think that relevance means relevance to the 18 to 25 demographic, no matter how old we are. And I would rather be relevant to the people my age, that I've been relevant to the entire time. And I think, you know, when you're talking about these creation of things, Ian, we had a guy on who goes by Brittlestar. He's Canadian, he does comedy online, and it's genuinely funny, but it's all targeted at people his age. And I think that's the reason he's successful is because he's not trying to make things that are funny to 18 year olds when he's 52 or whatever, right?

Ian: Here's the thing about that. I love that you use the word “relevance,” because it started in my 40s, it really started after I got divorced, where I kind of had to re-find who I was. Anyway, I think where I'm successful in being able to not just connect with kids on some level or connect with young people on some level, but also be able to understand things like my privilege or, you know, what's really going on in the world that I probably was a little bit more blind to early in my 20s and 30s, is that I've stopped trying to be relevant to anyone other than the people who I love the most. And so, if you are a creator who's trying to put content out, then yeah, be relevant to the people who you connect with the most. It sounds like staying in your lane.

But I think really it's more to the idea of understanding the limits of your abilities, understanding the limits of your understanding, understanding that you are not the person who is going to say the perfect thing to every person all at once. I think the big thing is that my world opened up as a communicator, as a person, as an ally, as a friend, as a husband, as a dad, when I stopped trying to be more than I was. And I'm okay with that. And I didn't used to be as a journalist, as a professional communicator, as a PR guy, it used to be like, well, I didn't get the proper engagement on this, you know, and that would happen in real life, too. Did they say that at PTA meetings? If you want to talk about Kansas, I'll tell you about the now councilwoman who attempted to punch me because I told her that my city had a trans protection bill. So I spoke, I spoke out and me being the cis, in his forties, male. I will be the bad guy. I will be the guy who everyone hates, if it means that we can push the ball forward on some of this stuff. Because I got to use all this privilege for something. And at the time, I basically said the people who were anti-trans, the people who were trying to save the bathrooms, all that stuff, I said, you guys realize that you're on the same side as Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church. Which if you don't know, huge culty church here in Kansas. Ted Lasso even talks about it in his show. And they show up at like military funerals with signs that say, “God hates fags” and things like that. One of the people who was against it, after the city council meeting, she literally attacked me and had to be held back by police.

Magda: So she realized that being told she was on the same side as Fred Phelps was an insult, but she didn't realize that her views were an insult?

Ian: Yes. She thought that she was on the side of God, that she was doing what was right by God and what needed to be imposed upon our city.

Magda: But she can identify that Fred Phelps isn't on the side of God. That's fascinating to me. I guess I thought these antis or whatever you call them, I thought they all thought that anybody who hated people was on the side of God.

Ian: No, they believe that they are the white knights. And I use that phrase very purposefully. They feel that they are the white knights here to save us from–That's a good point about communication in this day and age because the discourse is failing and.

Doug: You know, as we record this, we're digesting stories of people threatening fights in Congress, which we thought we'd put away, you know, since Andrew Jackson, but here we are. In your perception, is there less value in communication now? Because we are so convinced that our way is the right way. I think part of social media is giving us the arrogance to no longer let people live and let live. Now it's like, you have to live the way I want people to live. So how do you communicate to people who seem kind of ossified against any kind of updating their mind?

Ian: I say this as someone who lives in a part of the country where “my side of things,” and I'm using air quotes there, you know, the left in this particular part of the country.

Doug: Yes, the state that elected Sam Brown.

Ian: But now has, you know, has Laura Kelly, who has been a great advocate for a lot of things. So it is a goofy state in that way. But the bigger part of it is that one thing that the zealots have learned how to do is they have learned how to treat communication with their purpose. It's like playing the game Risk. They send the people straight up the gut at you that are going to scream and are going to be loud. It's a very sleight of hand. You learn how to play “divide and conquer” communications. They send the people at you who are going to scream, who are being sent out to say the stupid thing and are being sent out to distract you from the people who are actually saying quiet stuff on the side. And so in a place like Kansas, I have been trying to communicate with other politically active people around me that we can't all be saying the same thing at the same time. And I, in my neck of the woods, have decided and taken on the idea that I can be the blunt instrument for now. It's the Obama method. You can let people scream from the heavens and then Obama's going to come in and say something that is exactly the same freaking thing but is said in with soft tones and is said in a clear way.

Magda: His gift was really sounding reasonable. Isn't it? Right? Like, there's such a gift to sounding normal.

Ian: In my neck of the woods, I'm the loud guy, you know, who knows me for saying that there are more priests in my town who are up for child abuse than there are trans people. And I'm okay with that. Because what it's allowed is for we actually flip three of our council seats in this area, because I got to be the crazy person and they got to do the real work.

Doug: Does it seem like the first tier that you're talking about is overwhelming the discourse a bit to the point now where you're seeing potential fist fights in the Senate.

Ian: I think that's true to a certain extent, but I actually love how Jeff Jackson looks at this, the congressman from North Carolina. It's like Mr. Rogers telling you about the House of Representatives. It's great. His point of view is exactly right. The overwhelming of the discourse by the loudest, by the screamiest, by the craziest is not intended for anything other than the spotlight. It's one of those things that I think on a national level, we're not going to be able to break through that as easily. But I've become a firm believer in the last 10 years, you know, the old saying, all politics is local. The reason that Kansas is still a place where women can get abortions legally is because we did the work in the background quietly while the people screamed. That's why it was such a surprise to the national media because they heard the screaming, not the real work being done.

Magda: I think we saw that in Ohio in the last election, right? Like, the Ohio Republicans have been in control for so long, and the Dems just weren't organized at all. And the Republicans kept screaming, screaming, screaming, screaming, screaming, and the Dems were just doing this work very quietly. They got it on the same ballot as legalizing weed, and then everybody turned out and voted for it.

Ian: And I think the big thing about that is that, to your point, Doug, about the discourse being kind of overrun, I think that's a little bit overstated, because we only hear it on that national level. I kind of bristle at that a little bit because I think it becomes an easy excuse for us to not get involved.

Doug: You're right. It's a strategy because right after this was over, first of all, it came about because the senator was quoting tweets, which is all about increased access to each other. And then subsequently, that senator made every right-wing TV show that night. I mean, it worked, right? And this wouldn't keep going unless, if it didn't work, and it does.

Ian: The one thing I really wish that people could understand or would understand is just how much in the minority those screamers are. And it's that way in almost every place. This is A Bug's Life. The screamers, Fox News.

Doug: This is the grasshoppers, exactly. If the ants knew how many more of them there are and how few of us. Yeah, you know, and that's what it is.

Ian: And so they feel the need to own a couple of outlets that get screamed at. And then unfortunately, as a journalist, it pains me so much to see the more centrist media cover the crazy media. It's almost like not saying the name of a serial killer or not saying the name of a terrorist. I wish that we would keep to that, but I know that money outweighs good thinking.

Doug: You're a trained journalist, but you're also an inflamed partisan.

Ian: That's got to be a push-pull. Here's the funny thing. I was nowhere near as inflamed when I was in journalism and when I saw Behind the Curtain. I spent so much time trying to focus on being open and honest and truthful to the people that I was communicating with that I was a closeted extremist. That really didn't come out until a couple of very specific things happened in my 30s and 40s that weaponized me as this kind of professional communicator who saw some red lines and went over them. I was a pop music critic for a couple of years at my first newspaper, and this was 98. And I interviewed Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine. It was a great conversation. Half Mexican, first generation American. It took me a while to come around to the kind of in-your-face politics of rage. And so Tom and I had a great discussion that wasn't really about music at all. We talked about Chomsky and we talked about the methods of communication and the ownership of the lanes of communication and things like that. And I kind of felt like that sat in my craw for a few years until after I was out of journalism.

The catalyst for me. I'll tell you my catalyst story. It was after I moved back to Kansas. I lived in New Jersey. I ran social media for Princeton University for two years. Then I moved back to Kansas because my kids were here and I went and married another Kansas woman. I was at a grocery store and there was a woman who was in the front of the line who was pulling out all the change that she could to pay for the groceries that she had. This was 2012. And the two women who were in front of me, but behind the woman, the Hispanic woman who was looking for change, started to talk to each other. And one of them says to the other one quietly, but so that I could hear, “She just needs to go back to her country.” And it wasn't the first time. As someone who is light-skinned, who has that Irish side, who's named Ian. People usually don't get that I'm Mexican. And so I hear, I get to hear these conversations regularly. And that was a moment that kind of broke my brain. And my response generally when I hear these things now is I said to the woman at the front of the line, I said–my Spanish is horrible. I speak, I think in English, so it's really hard for me to speak, but I speak enough. And the woman looked at me and she said, “No gracias, estoy bien.” And the two women, the two white women were there and their faces, you know, they were ghost white and didn't say another word the rest of the time. And my point was made.

And to go back to Tom Morello, the point was, you need to be watching who you're talking about, when you're talking about them, where you're talking about, because when you say those things, you are telling the world that you are the bad guy. And our responsibility is to tell you that you're the fucking bad guy. You know that stuck with me for 14 years from the time that I heard it to the time that I finally kind of said, you know what, that's it. I can't do this anymore.

I've been pulled over for driving while brown, but at the same time I've also gone to watch a boxing match in a neighborhood in Southern California where the Crips were maintaining the gateway to that cul-de-sac pointing guns at us. I've been held on the side of the road waiting for someone to look me up because it didn't look like my car because I happened to be tan that week. But at the same time, you know, I got pulled over about six weeks ago, and the guy was like, oh, no, you're fine. Just go a little slower next time.

Doug: So do you identify more as Eddie Murphy going undercover as a white man or as Frank Costanza who, unbeknownst to everybody, can speak Korean?

Ian: Neither. When I was younger, I wasn't allowed to be either. When I was in high school, uh... Here we go, Magda, you got me. I'm going for the deep stuff now. We weren't allowed to speak Spanish in the house when I was a kid. Because my father, who was born in Ireland, is a bastard. He was emotionally absent from the time I was born. So I didn't learn how to speak Spanish until I was like 10 or 11. Which is one of the reasons why it comes as a second language to me. So when I moved into high school, there were kids who knew I was Mexican because my family clearly looked more Mexican than I did, but I also wasn't allowed to be Mexican because I wasn't dark enough. And so that was my first kind of view into it, but I lived by my grandmother. Her rule was, “this isn't our game, but we're going to win by their rules.” And so I kind of lived by that until I decided, no, we're going to change the fucking rules. So to answer your question, Doug, I don't identify as either. If you ask me what I am, I will say that I am Mexican, but also Irish. So I communicate and I deal with these things from the point of view of someone who is lucky enough to be able to glide through all of the situations. But I'm also kind of cursed with having to hear the dark sides of all of it. And so I decided about 10 years ago that I needed to be more than the guy who just glided through. Because I want to be a better parent than my parent was. And now he brought the whole thing down.

Doug: Absolutely not. That's the that's the point. That's what we're here to plumb the depths of man. That was awesome.

Magda: Okay, I'm gonna say “let's go here” because I think that this is something that a lot of us who are this age have dealt with a lot, which is depression. I think it's really difficult to be in the middle of depression when you are parenting. I also have found that for me personally, it has kind of made me feel like I was never going to amount to anything in a way. And I wonder if for you, having depression kind of forced you into that don't give a fuck territory and just like you might as well shoot the moon, right? Go in and be that person who is pushing hard because the depression is kind of like–

Ian: Yeah, and I wouldn't have told you that. I wouldn't have told you that at the time. I think it becomes this kind of dark safety blanket in a weird way. Because one of the things that I've dealt with, that I love my wife, we don't fight really, but one of the things that she has kind of hit me over the head with a club about over the, what, 12, 13 years that we've been together, you know, which is like a core issue, the “you don't deserve to be loved because of that childhood, because of the way that that experience was.” And a lot of my depression, especially that deep depression in my like early forties was coming out of that childhood, coming into a place where, you know, my first marriage failed. And now I would say it didn't really fail. It led to its inevitable conclusion.

Doug: Yes.

Ian: But then also, you know, the kind of the carnage, both for me and for my kids, after that divorce, I think, led me to a place where that depression was born out of, you know what? I always told myself I was going to be a better parent than my father. And in that time, you feel like, I failed at that. When you're fighting with your ex-wife over everything, it just becomes this kind of never-ending cycle of, God, I screwed this up so bad. And it takes a long time to get out of that. And so with that, there becomes this kind of, well, fuck it. I mean, I've already screwed up all this part of my life. I might as well make something good come out of it. And so, yeah, there probably was a little bit where, you know, I talked earlier about I'm willing to be the blunt force object that people love to hate. And I think that started in, well, I don't love me. Why should anyone else love me? It's been interesting because I don't know if I talked about this on social media, but I went off of antidepressants, what, about a year ago now? And the primary reason for it and the discussion that I had both with my wife and with my doctor was that I had gotten to the point where I wasn't feeling anything, good or bad. And so I knew it was a risk, but I decided to try it with guidance. Hell, I did therapy right before this call, which is like super, I primed myself for the whole podcast deepness thing.

Doug: We should do that. We should send people like, please make sure you schedule a therapy session right before you speak with us. Yeah, so that your emotions are particularly raw and exposed.

Ian: Yeah, the funniest thing about that, as that kind of physical change happened over the course of weeks, that was this dam of emotions, you know, that I'd been trying to keep down because it was the only thing keeping me from jumping over the edge of the cliff, but I had gotten to a point where I was able to deal with it a little bit better, and so now I understood I needed those emotions. I needed to be able to tamp that depression down a little bit, so that way I understood why I was doing the things I was doing, whether for good or bad. As I've gotten further away from that, I understand I need those emotions because the emotions are what make this real. The emotions are what make this all stick. 

Doug: So you're off and you're going to stay off?

Ian: Yeah, I love the fact that I cry like crazy now. And that was the thing that pointed out to me that maybe I was at a point where this wasn't helping me, but it was actually keeping me back a little bit. I got to a point where I'd been off them for a few weeks and I was driving to work and “What I Am” by Edie Burkell and New Bohemians came on. And that song, that album, actually resonates with me because it was the favorite album of a kid who died my senior year of high school, and I'm like driving along 435 here in Kansas City and like it all just came out and I cried like 37 times that week. I came home that day and I told my wife, I'm like, yeah, I cried at this and I cried at this and I cried, you know, someone told me that they went to the park and I started crying and she's like, Oh God, I'm so sorry. I'm like, no, no, it was fucking awesome.

It's not just that it's all coming back. It's to be able to handle it.

Magda: Yeah. I think that's it. It's the being able to handle it. I remember when Doug and I were getting divorced, I had not cried in forever and ever and ever. I had just not allowed myself to feel any emotions for a long time, for like years at the end of our marriage. And I remember we were doing this counseling, not with the intent to try to save the marriage, but to try to, you know, go through it in a better way. And those sessions, for me, at least, were horrific. I don't know if they were horrible for you, Doug, but for me, they were awful. And I used to... 

Doug: Oh, they were awful, but for different reasons.

Magda: I used to get out of the session. And there was a place, like a bao bun place that had just opened on 14th Street. And I would go there and treat myself with like, pork bun to try to like eat my emotions and just sit there and cry. And I remember feeling so disoriented by the fact that I was actually feeling enough to cry because I hadn't felt safe enough to let myself feel those emotions and to have been able to go through an hour of torture every week. I actually haven't had buns in the 16 years since, except that Mike and I went out for buns with some friends of his a couple weeks ago and I was like, oh, I can eat these again.

Doug: There are three points I'm thinking of right? Whatever you perceive as rock bottom, when you went on SSRIs, and when you met your current wife.

Ian: I worked at the University of Kansas, worked at the School of Engineering. She was an engineer. We had, you know, friends in common, that kind of thing. We actually dated for a few months and that was going great, but the other 93% of me was slowly falling down into the abyss. And so I actually broke up with her and moved to California, partly to be near family, partly to try to figure out what the hell was going on. Partly just out of sadness over the whole thing. You know, that went, got the job at Princeton and moved to New Jersey for almost two years, in that period, that's where rock bottom was.

Magda: You know, there's that song, Saturday night in Toledo, Ohio is worse than being no place at all.

Ian: Just insert, “built me in New Jersey” and you've got a song. It was interesting because my career was at the highest point that it had been. And if I'd stayed at Princeton, you know, things would have continued on an upward trajectory, but I hit rock bottom there. It was not a good time, but I remember actually the first time I was with a woman while I was in Jersey, I spent half the time thinking of her. So I reached out and we became friends again and we spent a few months, you know, after that long distance dating and God love her. She was the first person to ever kind of call me out on my negative bullshit. And so it kind of became this cathartic thing where it was like, wait, okay, maybe, maybe if I give this a chance, you know, I actually do deserve something like this. And so I moved back in 2012. We got married in 2013. I didn't actually go on SSRIs. I was in therapy, but I didn't actually start going on medication until 2015 partly because just fear and bravado, but also partly because I needed to get to the point where I even felt like it would do anything good. That's how deep I was. And so I was on from late 2015 until I stopped last year, so 2022, almost seven years. And what's interesting is, even while I was on SSRIs, I still was, in kind of very real ways, worse. There were parts of my life that were great, there were parts of my life where I was just a deep, dark hole. And I think it was the pandemic that was so horrible for some people, and so horrible for me in some ways, that forced me to kind of watch myself a little bit. You know, you're forced to be with yourself all day.

Doug: And also, let's not forget, you had a young child at this point. And I think the decision to have a child with her, I'm sure, had all sorts of motivations. Not least to kind of try again as a healthier person to be a parent, even if it is in your 40s.

Ian: You know, I love that you think that much of me, Doug, that you think that, but... But... That's what I'll always do.

Doug: I'd rather be disappointed.

Ian: We wanted to have a child together. Part of that was, and I can admit this now and I've admitted it to my older kids, leaving them, moving to California when they were eight and six will always be my biggest regret. And so, yes, I concede that I am probably chasing a bit of a redemption arc. I own that. And I own that to them. It doesn't mean that my youngest has replaced them in any way. And I try to make that clear every single time. I think if you know me, you know how much I adore my kids. 

Doug: Well, I don't know you but I totally get it. That comes out from the job. That's what comes out of you.

Ian: There are a few things in this world that affect me more than one of my kids’ smile. Like, God, you got, there it goes. God damn you, there it is!

Doug: No, but that's the catharsis of a good cry. I mean, I will cue up things that I know make me cry because, like Jim Volvano said, you should laugh really hard every day, you should cry really hard every day.

Ian: I wasn't just a pop music writer, I was in sports most of my journalism career, so yeah, I know that speech well. It seems so simple at the time, or if you're not in that place, But to get to that place where you can understand that the good and the bad are both valuable. As my wife will say, negative data is still valuable data.

Doug: That's an engineer talking right there. Magda's nodding. She's in love with an engineer.

Ian: The vacations that we're taking and all the spreadsheets that go along with them.

Magda: Well, there you go.

Ian: I will say that getting an MBA and being the political activist that I am and someone who had a minor in economics when they first went to school and learned from a very Keynesian economist. Holy fuck, did I hate my MBA management economics class. The professor used to be the chief economist for the Koch brothers. He taught the entire class from the point of view of the Friedman Doctrine, which is, you know, all corporations’ entire purpose in life is to create value for shareholders. And if you live by that, then I'm not going to be your friend.

Magda: Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

Doug: That's not... But unfortunately, that's what the laws say, yeah.

Ian: I've learned a lot about kind of how other people see the world and how other people see business because of that. It's been fascinating to me.

Doug: You're a career activist. How do you think your current training is going to inform your activism going forward?

Ian: Because there's still plenty to fight for. Where it affects me is I've been asked to run. I can't. I won't.

Magda: But that's not your role, right? Do you want to walk down into the actual issues or do you want to be the one who articulates the problems with the process?

Ian: I've considered stuff like that and I've looked at, you know, being able to have conversations with people who are getting these grassroots efforts going in my area and really being able to talk to them about, this is where we need to play dirty, this is where we need to play nice, you know, and just provide that kind of viewpoint on things. And then, you know, I'm okay as a, you know, to circle all the way back, I'm not a quiet person. So I'm okay with being the guy who can speak the truth to the people in the grocery store line. And, but you don't understand me, let's talk for 20 minutes about how that is.

Doug: How willing are people that you encounter? How willing are they to talk about stuff like that? Because unfortunately, when you have a discussion like this, people are so married to their beliefs as to make them a part of their own existence, their self, their identity.

Ian: Every time that I say something loud and I get shouted down by someone else, there are invariably four or five people who DM me, who say, “This is how I feel, too. Let's have a discussion. How can we make this happen?” My real work, I scream up here and then I help those people find the people who can actually make a difference. I'm helping them find the people who DM me and want to get involved but are afraid to get involved. There are more of us than there are of them, but they're screaming louder, so we're just going to do the work underneath the surface. We've made some gains even after 22, and I think we can continue to do so. And to go really full circle on this whole conversation, I love these Gen Z-ers. If we can get them off the couch for any reason, whether it's, you know, weed, abortion, I don't care. Put something on the ballot that they care about. They will make shit happen.

Magda: Yeah, like everybody talks about how kids, meaning 18, 19, 20 year olds now, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, whatever, are so uninvolved.

But then, you know, I work the polls. I'm a chairperson at a precinct in Detroit. And the last election that the city of Detroit had, had the Michigan ballot for reproductive rights on it. And we were just worried that people weren't going to turn out. And I saw so many first time voters

who were 18, 19, 20, 21 year old girls who were bringing their boyfriends with them. It was their first time. They had just registered and they were coming to vote specifically on that. And it really made me realize that all you really have to do is make sure they understand why they have to come and then tell them how to come. You know, well, because they think they can do it all at the last minute online, because in their world, you can do everything at the last minute online.

Ian: So you have to just be explicit, make it happen. It was the neocons trying to make sure that Bush got a second term. You know, we can all have a discussion about good and bad of Bill Clinton, but he wasn't Bush. And the catalyst for many of my friends to show up in that election, not just MTV Rock and Roll, which was a big thing, but it was also, I don't want to go to war in another country. You know, so if you put something on that is relevant to them, don't try to tell them what's relevant. Listen, find an issue that's relevant, get it in front of them, and then, yeah, make it clear how to change it. I have way more hope now than I did eight years ago.

Doug: When you talk about your presence online, you say you're on TikTok. Where can our listeners find you online, learn more about what you're doing, what you're writing about, what you care about, and learn more about your process as you grow into the “What is TikTok for 50 year olds?”

Ian: GenXNotBoomer on TikTok. It's where I have become hopeful.

Ian: A note to all Swifties, we do not hate Taylor Swift, we love her. Stop trolling us. Don't besmirch the Swifties. They will destroy you.

Doug: Oh, I know. No, no, no. I'm not gonna pick a fight. I'm just saying there's that great line of like, here I am, you know, Kim Kardashian is burning how many billion gallons of rocket fuel and I'm watching my paper straw wilt in my coffee.

Ian: Oh, yeah. No, I kid because I love. But yeah, it's the apparently the epicenter of the celebrity universe is going to be here.

Doug: And I love the conspiracy theories like, like the NFL and Taylor Swift had flailing businesses and this is all a PR stunt to try and expand their fan bases.

Ian: You know, if she really wants to expand, she needs to bring Kansas City and American Treasures, Jason Sudeikis and Paul Rudd. Eric Stonestreet. Yes, yes. Bring them together and we can have this kind of coven of Kansas City love.

Doug: And what is that event they do, the celebrity softball game? They raise money for the hospital. Big Slick. And Rob Riggle.

Ian: Yeah, it's all the Kansas City people and now Heidi Gardner from SNL is part of it, too. And yeah, so it's Big Slick. Been a couple of times. It's a lot of fun.

Doug: And thank you listeners for listening to Episode 25 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Pecsenye Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been Ian Shea-Cahir, who does so many things, which kind of defies logic to try and pigeonhole him here. When the Flames Go Up is a production of Halfway Noodles LLC. It is available on all the usual podcast platforms and at whentheflamesgoup.substack.com. Please subscribe there for our weekly episode every Wednesday and our newsletter every Friday. And if you listen to Apple Podcasts, which many of you do, please send us a review. That really helps us out a great deal. Thanks again, and we'll be back next week. Until then, bye-bye.

Ian: You really do have a good radio voice.

Doug: Thank you. That's the last thing I have left. That's what I'm clinging to. I want to be wheeled out of a studio when I'm 90.