Pacific Rim (not the porno), Cremation Bling and Basketball Dream-Crushers: A Love Letter to Bad TV and Worse Decisions

Welcome back to the podcast, where we grab the wheel of culture, yank it towards the median, and immediately drive straight into a ditch full of Shark Tank reruns, basketball-fueled trauma, and questionable streaming choices of movies based in 2025.

• Our season opener two-parter brings back guest guest (star?) Patrick who brings his wife Brenda along for the ride. Who do YOU think lost the bet?
• Nancy questions the value of diamonds and why they're not worth anything - unless you make them out of your dead friends.
• Scott loses his mind over tiny-town basketball preempting his hero Mark Cuban taking Russian operative Kevin O'Leary out to the woodshed.
• Nancy goes on another anime tirade but Scott can’t quite grasp the point of “screaming and people punching each other with wind.”
• Nancy admits she’s still holding out hope that George R. R. Martin will finish The Winds of Winter before we all turn into diamonds ourselves. (Spoiler: he won’t)
• Patrick goes full spreadsheet mode, lamenting the state of the streaming industry with the passion of a man whose free trial just ended. He breaks down subscriber counts like an actuary on a Red Bull bender, but we all know he’d rather be watching Law & Order: HVAC Unit Victims Division. Also, he somehow ends up defending Avatar 2, which should be a court-martial-level offense.
• While Scott complains about the YouTubes and Nerds, Brenda tries to time-travel back to when network television was still a thing. Any silence isn’t absence—it’s judgment marinated in a Kirkland Old Fashioned.

Other highlights include:

• A screaming goat button that raises more questions than it answers

• A drive-by shade at Chris Pratt’s Mario voice

• Nancy trying to schedule a séance with Millie Bobby Brown’s childhood

• And all of them collectively forgetting how Shark Tank works for at least six minutes

In short, this episode is a deeply unqualified TED Talk on streaming, grief jewelry, and the structural integrity of goats-in-a-button.

Stay tuned for part two!