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One thing humans are really good at is hearing about a tragic situation and telling others how they would’ve handled it differently, which presumably would’ve resulted in a better outcome. But the thing is, no one actually knows how they’ll respond to a terrifying situation until they go through it. Even those with specialized training don’t know how they’ll respond until the thing they’ve been training for is unfolding in front of them.

This is why we see stories of police officers mistaking a cell phone for a gun or not immediately entering a building to stop a gunman. So it’s interesting that people think they’ll make just the right decision in a traumatic situation as an everyday citizen. Trauma does weird things to your brain in the moment, and oftentimes we aren’t in control of what our brains decide to do.

But one man on Reddit says his wife believes he should’ve been able to override his trauma response to “defend” her during an armed robbery. Overwhelmingly, his AITA thread is proving that he is indeed not the bad guy in this situation.

The anonymous poster explained that after a date night, he and his wife decided to cut through the park for a romantic walk home. That’s when things quickly took a turn.

“Well shortly after we get approached by two guys who present, what we believe, are guns demanding our phone/wallets. We are totally caught by surprise and freaked out so we hand everything over,” the man wrote. “They get more elevated and tell us to ‘take off your sh*t’. Now I’m starting to panic, obviously, but what the h*ll am I going to do against a gun.”

Eventually, the husband and wife found themselves standing in their underwear when the men finally took off running. The couple flagged down a driver who called the police and gave them something to cover themselves while they waited for law enforcement to arrive.

The entire event was traumatic, to say the least, but a few days later, his wife angrily confronted him about his failure to protect her during the robbery. And while they both experienced the same traumatic event, their responses afterward were different. Because again, trauma does weird things to your brain. This includes feeling irrationally angry and blaming others for what may have felt like inaction on their part, when logically, you know they couldn’t have done anything differently.

In this situation, you had men who were armed with guns and who were becoming more hostile. Had the original poster attempted to become an Avenger in that moment, it’s a good guess that neither he nor his wife would be here to seek advice from strangers on the internet.

“You both probably would have been shot and killed if you fought back. It happened to a family member of mine. You did the right thing,” one commenter wrote. “Trauma gives people weird feelings and reactions. I hope you guys talk to a therapist to process it.”

“This is absolutely a trauma response. Not a doubt in my mind. Trauma affects everyone differently. Hell, it even affects the same person differently at different times,” someone who works in the mental health field said in part. “It’s really important to find some therapy help soon though. The longer you wait, the worst it can get. And try not to take what your wife said personally. There’s a whole lot to unpack after something like this, and right now, you’re the closest one, and thus the easiest to lash out at.”

The internet isn’t all bad. Many commenters reassured the husband that he did nothing wrong and explained that his wife’s response is also likely related to the trauma. Hopefully, they both come to realize there’s no wrong or right response when it comes to surviving a traumatic event and seek out a qualified trauma therapist to help them overcome that night.

Dating apps are challenging for the average guy because they can be a big blow to their self-esteem. They can contribute to feelings of anxiety and depression because of the heightened competition on the apps and the pressure to present a perfect image.

A study out of the University of North Texas found that male Tinder users reported lower levels of satisfaction with their faces and bodies and lower levels of self-worth than those who aren’t on the dating app.

A big reason is that it’s a lot harder for straight men to find matches on dating apps than straight women. An eye-opening video created by Memeable Data clearly shows why dating apps can be so frustrating for the average guy.

In the video, the narrator explains there are three significant reasons dating apps are so challenging for most men. Although he doesn’t have all the data necessary to make precise claims, the numbers are aligned with those reported by Hinge.

Reason 1: There are more male than female users. On most sites, men outnumber women 2-to-1.

Reason 2: Men give more likes than women. Men are nearly three times as likely to swipe a profile “like” (46%) than women (14%).

Reason 3: A small share of the users get a big percentage of the likes. About half the likes from men are given to about 25% of the women, and half the likes from women are given to only 15% of the men.

This means that out of 100 swipes per user, the average man only gets one like and zero matches.

Have you ever seen a post by some guy on Facebook with a photo of his significant other and a message that says, “She is my rock. I could never live without her,” or something similar? Did it make you think that the couple was doing well or that he just messed up and needed a little external validation?

If you were skeptical and thought that the relationship might be in trouble, you’re probably right.

A survey of 2,000 British people ages 18 to 50 by Shotkit found a dramatic difference in relationship happiness between people who post a lot of couples’ content and those who “never” share any.

Of those who share excessively (three or more times a week), only 10% report being “very happy” in their relationships, and 42% say they are “very unhappy”—as opposed to those who “never” share couples’ content, of which 46% are “very happy,” and 13% are “very unhappy.”

Those who also share a moderate amount of couples’ content (birthdays, anniversaries, etc) tend to have healthy relationships as well. Thirty-two percent are “very happy,” and 12% are “very unhappy.”

“We wanted to carry out this research as there are often mixed views on whether posting on social media regularly has positive effects on us or not. We, in particular, wanted to look at the correlation between this and people in relationships. We expected there to be some disparities with the survey, but we didn’t know quite how much of a difference it could make in relationships,” Mark Condon of Shotkit said.

“However, this isn’t to say that all selfies are bad, of course not,” he added. “Perhaps the saying ‘too much of a good thing’ is true in this case. We hope that the research provided some insight and perhaps food for thought for some people.”

A study published by Psychology Today found that posting “general” social media content about a significant other can be a sign of happiness. However, when people make “excessive” posts about their significant others, it’s often a sign of an unhappy relationship.

“So people who post relationship information that they deem as potentially embarrassing or that shows more affection than they are comfortable expressing in person were actually less satisfied,” Gwendolyn Seidman, Ph.D. writes.

Further, people who make these “excessive” posts assume they will help their relationship, which doesn’t always happen.

“This suggests that these types of over-the-top displays are being used to compensate for weaker relationships,” Seidman continues. “These individuals then believe that engaging in these types of posts has helped their relationship.”

However, Seidman says that it’s “not clear” if these posts improve their relationships.

So the takeaway is that it can be healthy for couples to post normal status updates about their relationship, such as “George and I went camping this weekend,” or “Happy anniversary to my boo.” But when the posts are excessive, both in quantity and the amount of personal information disclosed, and out of character for the person posting, they may be a sign of trouble.

Traveling with preteens and teens is a breeze in comparison to traveling with little ones but as a parent you still want to sit near your kiddos in case they need you for anything. If you’ve traveled on an airline in the last several years, you know it’s much cheaper to chose the basic seats in the main cabin.

There’s nothing different about these particular seats other than the airline sort of randomly selects your seat and if you’re traveling alone, that’s really not a bad deal. The risk gets to be a little higher if you’re traveling with a party that you’d like to keep together – like your children. One mom took the risk and banked on a stranger accommodating…that’s not quite how it played out.

People sit in the wrong seats on planes all the time, usually because they read their ticket wrong or accidentally sit one row ahead. Takes no time to double check your ticket and move along, but when Tammy Nelson did a double take at her ticket after seeing the mom in her window seat, she realized she wasn’t mistakenly staring at the wrong row.

This mom boarded the plane with her older children and had taken it upon herself to sit in the same row as her children, essentially commandeering a stranger’s seat. Nelson assumed it was a mistake and informed the woman that the seat was in fact hers but the response she received was surprising.

“She said, ‘Oh, you want to sit here?’,” Nelson tells Good Morning America. “She said, ‘Oh, well I just thought I could switch with you because these are my kids.'”

That’s an interesting assumption when seats are assigned and many people, like Nelson, pay extra to have the seat they prefer. Now, there’s no telling if funds were tight and this was an unplanned trip for the mom and kids which caused her to buy the more budget friendly tickets or if she was simply being frugal and was banking on the kindness of a stranger.

Either way, Nelson specifically paid for a window seat due to motion sickness and though she paid extra, she was willing to sit in the other row if that seat was also a window seat. But it turns out, it was a middle seat.

Surely there’s someone out there that loves the middle seat. Maybe a cold natured person that enjoys the body heat of two strangers sitting uncomfortably close. Or perhaps someone that doesn’t mind accidentally sleeping on an unsuspecting passenger’s shoulder. But that person isn’t Nelson, so when the middle seat was offered in exchange for her bought and paid for window seat, she politely but sternly declined.

@myconquering

Having had only 90 minutes of sleep the night before and knowing I had to give a presentation to 500 people, I desperately needed some sleep, so I did not agree to switch seats. 🤷‍♀️ Before anyone comes after me… the kids looked like they were about 11 and 15 years old. And the mom was in arms-reach of both of them from the middle seat in the row behind us. The mom proceeded to complain for at least 15 minutes to the person next to her loud enough for me to hear. But the woman actually defended me – several times. It was so kind and I appreciated it so much because I was feeling really guilty. 🤦‍♀️ ##airplaneseat##seatswitching##airplanekarens

Her refusal to give in to the mom’s seemingly entitled request for Nelson’s seat has resulted in parents and child-fee people cheering her on after she posted the details on her TikTok page, MyCONQUERing. The video has over 3.4 million views.

“Nope. If it’s not an upgrade it’s a sacrifice,” a commenter writes.

“You did the RIGHT thing. Folks need to plan their travel together. Lack of planning on their part does not constitute an inconvenience on yours,” one person says.

“I have 3 kids and have sat in different rows when they were passed toddler age. I agree, book your flight earlier,” another writes.

“You were right. As a woman with 3 children, I always pay extra so we’re sat together,” another mom says.

Nelson is also a mom so she knows how important it is to sit next to kids on flights. But since airlines have made that a luxury, as the parent, you have to plan to pay extra or accept that you likely won’t be seated next to your children. Hopefully in the future, this unnamed mom is seated next to her children or pays extra to make sure it happens. In the meantime, people continue to support Nelson standing her ground.

In May, Grimes launched Elf.Tech, a platform that allows fans to use AI technology to replicate her voice. She shared “Cold Touch,” a collaboration with Kito made with Elf.Tech. After, she released “Welcome To The Opera,” a song she first debuted at Electric Daisy Carnival in 2022.

The eccentric pop star confronts her interest in technology on her new clubby track “I Wanna Be Software”: “I wanna be software / Upload my mind / Take all my data / What will you find?” she sings, her vocals warped and alien-like. “I wanna be software / Battery heart / Infinite options / State of the art.”

However, despite her advocation and excitement for the intersection of AI and music, it was reported that Grimes was a signee on a short statement from the Center For AI Safety (CAIS) that warned of AI posing an extinction threat to humanity. “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the brief statement read. CAIS also noted in a press release that they want to “put guardrails in place and set up institutions so that AI risks don’t catch us off guard.”

Listen to “I Wanna Be Software” above.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

Mau y Ricky have never limited themselves to one genre. Throughout their career, the Venezuelan brothers have remained committed to pushing Latin music to new places while having fun doing it. As they get ready to embark on a new era, Mau y Ricky have compiled their recent hits onto the new Desgenerados Mixtape. Alongside acts like Eladio Carrión, María Becerra, CNCO, and Carin León, the guys explore diverse sounds like EDM, regional Mexican music, reggaeton, and cumbia.

“Desgenerados means the liberty to do anything we want,” Ricky Montaner says about their mixtape. “To not just be put in one box. We’re having the liberty of just expressing anything that we’re feeling.”

Mau y Ricky have a very unique perspective as artists. They have multi-platinum plaques as a duo and thanks to superstars they’ve written for like Becky G, Karol G, Ricky Martin, and Maluma. Mau y Ricky also come from a famous musical family with Argentine pop icon Ricardo Montaner as their father. Their sister Evaluna Montaner and their brother-in-law Camilo are musicians as well. Despite growing up Montaner, Mau y Ricky have made a name for themselves as hit-making singer-songwriters.

Mau y Ricky are at a transition with recently signing to Warner Music Latina and launching their own label. Desgenerados Mixtape is a gift to their fans while the guys get ready for what’s next. Over Zoom, Mau y Ricky caught up with Uproxx about the mixtape, the stories behind their big hits, and their future as a duo.

How would you describe the experience of working on music together as brothers?

Ricky Montaner: In our case it’s been amazing because truly we’re best friends. We have this way of working where one’s weaknesses is the other person’s strengths, so we do play better together. We’ve just been very practical with that since we know that we need each other to succeed. We’re also really good at getting along because we don’t want to tarnish that. Not only is our relationship as brothers obviously important but so is our passion. They’re very well aligned, so we found a way of keeping everything super smooth. Truly it’s the best part about my job that I’m able to do it with my brother.

What was life like for you guys also growing up in a very musical family?

Mau Montaner: It’s awesome because we know we all have a lot of things in common and we know that in our own different and authentic way, we’re impacting the lives of people. That’s beautiful to be able to do it as a collective and as a family. The only thing that sucks is that we all have crazy schedules that sometimes we’d want to be able to be at each others’ things, activities, and moments a lot more. That’s probably the downside of it, but it’s for a good purpose and something that’s very positive

Why did you guys decide to put together these songs on the Desgenerados Mixtape?

MM: This is a collection of songs that we had for the last couple of years. They almost didn’t see the light of day and we just decided to do a big mixtape of all the songs that weren’t put on albums. We’re constantly making music, so we’re constantly evolving as artists. That’s a version of Mau y Ricky we thought was very important for our fans to experience and have as well, so that’s why we decided to put these songs out. We really love them and we’re ready to move onto the next phase of our creativity, so this tells a story that helps transition into that.

You guys live up to the name of Desgenerados (Without Genre), so what was the experience like to explore different genres on the mixtape?

RM: It’s amazing! We usually do that and we usually give ourselves the liberty of doing that. We wanted to reinforce it — even with the name of the mixtape. Letting everybody know that we’re not defined by one thing. We’re going to keep changing and evolving because we think that’s important as artists. There’s songs of mine that I have written that I feel are like two or three Mau y Rickys ago. They’re all still part of me, but we’re constantly growing.

One of the biggest hits on the mixtape is “Llorar y Llorar.” How did that regional Mexican music song come together with Carin León?

RM: That song is truly a dream come true for us. It’s a song that we’re extremely proud was successful and that people got to hear it. It was not only our fans who are the best, but also people who don’t necessarily listen to Mau y Ricky everyday. People were connecting with the song, so that’s such a special one. It came together when we were on tour in Mexico. We were living there for a minute and I was in the car and that first line of the chorus and melody came together. We just sat down with the guitar and wrote it and finished it. Then we produced it with Rafa Arcaute, who is a producer I admire a lot, and JonTheProducer as well. We reached out to Carin through a mutual friend we have. We knew about each other, but we never met, and we met through a Zoom call. It was literally friendship at first sight.

Speaking of JonTheProducer, you guys have a history of working with him. What’s the chemistry like between him and Mau y Ricky in the studio?

RM: Jon is like the third member of our band. He literally knows us the best more than anybody else. Sonically, I trust him so much. He’s a guy that’s studied so much and has just done it for so long at a high level that I think he’s just amazing. Our chemistry is as strong as it is with Camilo, with Mau, and our constant collaborators. Jon is our most frequent collaborator. He’s just incredibly talented and we’re lucky to be able to work with him as often as we do because I know a lot of people want to work with him.

How did the song “Mal Acostumbrao” come together with María Becerra?

MM: We were having to leave Buenos Aires to play some shows in Mexico and María was flying to Buenos Aires. Her flight got delayed, so we ended up not being able to meet at the time that we had set. Our flight was at 8 and we had no time to meet, so we decided to move our flight back for the later flight of like two hours later. We were able to get into the studio for about two hours with María and Big One and we wrote this song. I love the song so much and María is just incredible, so is Big One, and we had an amazing time. This is definitely another pillar inside the mixtape for us.

Your new single from the mixtape is “Ex” with La Joaqui. What’s the story behind that cumbia collaboration?

RM: We were doing The Voice in Argentina. We were having to live there for a minute and we were also in the middle of touring. Every time we would go out after a show, we noticed they played our songs at the club, but they remixed them to this cumbia sound. We decided to do a song that they didn’t have to remix. I reached out to the producers that I feel together with Tini have made that sound be super mainstream. I said, “Hey guys, I have this chorus and I think it would be a great cumbia song and you guys are killing the game with that sound, so let’s do it.” They came back wanting to do it. They wrote the verses and they sent them to me, we cut them, and we just killed it. We sent La Joaqui the song and she decided to hop on it immediately. She confessed to us later that she was super excited because she’s never done this kind of genre before. For us, it was just so natural to invite her and she killed it, so it’s a song we absolutely love.

CNCO is getting ready to split up. How would you describe the experience of working with them on the song “Vivir Sin Ti”?

RM: The experience of working with CNCO was amazing. We’ve been friends since they started. We were trying to make it at the same time and everything started happening close together. We wrote songs together. We hung out at the studio. We had the same management at the time. It was a very natural collaboration for us. Lots of the CNCOwners were really asking for this and I get messages on my social media all the time about this. We finally got together to make this happen. We’re honored to have the official last CNCO song — for the time being anyway. I love those guys and wish them all the best.

An explosive moment on the mixtape is Puerto Rican rapper Eladio Carrión featuring on “No Puede Ser”? How did that EDM-infused collaboration come together?

MM: We were friends and got along in the studio. We had written several songs in the studio together. One day we just came across the producer Palace with this new kind of sound and style of songwriting that we decided to do on the song. We sent it over to Eladio and we told him we sincerely thought he would murder this song. It’s a super unexpected collaboration and an unexpected song to do together. We thought that was the magic behind it and I think it paid off. It’s one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done and one of my favorite [guest] verses. He just kills it and it’s outside of what he usually does. I love that he was able to do that in a song that’s on our mixtape.

I noticed that you guys also released the mixtape through Why Club Records. What can you tell us about your label?

MM: Why Club Records is a record label that we dream will eventually host other artists as well, but for the time being it’s us and our new creative place. It’s a place for musicians and artists with their music that has some kind of purpose. Not necessarily a message to it, but they want to impact the lives of people profoundly. They want to impact culture, so this is a house for that. It’s for the liberty of artists being able to do whatever they feel genuinely and authentically.

What can we expect from the next era of Mau y Ricky?

MM: If you mean what’s coming after Desgenerados, you can expect us to do the best music we’ve done in my opinion. We’re more authentically ourselves than ever and just creating from a place of pure honesty and joy. We’re planning a lot of cool and meaningful stuff for our fans and people that are just joining our family. We’re just really focused on our people and making our people feel special as we really hope they do. I hope that you stay tuned.

RM: We’ve been in the studio since November working on a new album. That’s why we called this a mixtape because we’ve rediscovered the meaning of making an album with what we’re working on right now. We’re incredibly excited about it. We’re working, of course, with Jon as well, but we’ve brought in a couple of people that truly have made a huge difference in our lives and in our creativity. It’s going to be amazing. It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Desgenerados Mixtape is out now via Warner Music Latina. Listen to it here.

Some of the artists mentioned here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

We are gathered here to celebrate the beginning of the end for How To With John Wilson, a show that somehow blends a showcase of human weirdness, modern annoyance, mundane misadventures, and litter to create something that touches profundity while in pursuit of presence and meaning.

With a final 6-episode volume (which debuts Friday on HBO), Wilson isn’t necessarily promising a grand thesis statement (perhaps partly due to the fact that he’s still going to be telling stories, just through different projects). Instead, he’s doing what he’s done during the show’s first two seasons, exploring, observing, theorizing, and showcasing a broad spectrum of humanity while turning his camera on the world around him, celebrating uniqueness and connection all the while.

As we have at the start of each previous season, Uproxx spoke with Wilson about all of that and so much more, closing the loop on an enjoyable series of conversations with a filmmaker who has elevated people-watching to a literal art form during a, let’s say a highly eventful span of three years.

Through the show, you uncover a lot of things that I would imagine in the moment are somewhat surprising. I’m just curious if you found yourself changing with the process, getting more used to these kinds of things, getting more used to just abject human weirdness as you went through it?

It’s less that I got used to it. I think I just started to gravitate towards it more. When people reveal something very personal to me during an interview, I don’t react on my face, but I feel this intense high inside, that this person trusts me and that I am having an actual real moment with somebody, or I’m getting a real moment from somebody on camera and I’m kind of just more in shock that I’m the only person there witnessing something like that.

That’s the high that I’m chasing throughout all the work; getting to these real moments with people that we don’t usually have access to in our personal lives or in other media that we watch. I feel so much content out there doesn’t want to go to these really complicated places with people because a lot of reality content and even fictional content, there’s a lot of heroes and villains and there’s not as much in between. And it’s like, it’s all that weird gray area stuff that I think you can relate with the most. Because people do confess these really personal (things).

People say a lot of stuff that you might on the surface think is kind of weird in the show. But then I try to make you see that you’re only a couple of degrees away from this person, or you just might feel the exact same way as this person. There’s a bit of this person in all of us, in a way, that you’re seeing.

For sure. Thinking about other shows that you watch, or reality TV, like you’re saying, it’s almost like you take away that there’s maybe eight kinds of people and you watch this show and you see that it’s a much bigger box of crayons personality-wise that we have out in the world. It’s refreshing, honestly, to see them.

Yeah, I just find it so insulting when we don’t give people the space they deserve. I think that there’s this whole generation of reality, kind of nonfiction stuff that wastes so much opportunity with these really complex people by flattening them, and I want to encourage people to not do that anymore.

Yeah, it’s a cynical sort of productization. Again, it’s only a handful of archetypes that they want to showcase, and so everything feels just homogenized as opposed to something like this, which feels like I said, more like a rainbow of personalities. Was that the goal from the start, to showcase that?

I mean, that was part of it. Part of it was to reveal parts of myself. Part of the goal to begin with was to reveal parts of myself that I was afraid of revealing, but also exploring humanity in a way that I felt was being neglected in other media.

You mentioned revealing parts of yourself. I know catharsis through art can be tricky, especially at the end when you’re kind of looking back at it. At the end of the show now, three seasons in, any pause over any bits of yourself that you revealed? Do you feel like you didn’t give enough?

I don’t regret anything that I’ve revealed.

Are there things filmed that you pulled back specifically because it was too much, with regards to your personal revelations?

No. There was some stuff that didn’t make sense narratively, some anecdotal stuff that we took out. That was just kind of fat and we just trimmed it as we were editing stuff. But again, people just reveal so much of themselves in the show, that I needed to either meet them there or kind of overdo it with my own memoir stuff, just so it didn’t feel like I was just gawking.

This may sound like an insult — it’s not — but some episodes feel more intentioned or kind of polished than others. I like that. It feels refreshingly uneven at times with the story. Is that intentional to not necessarily have it feel so polished and so crisp that people start to wonder if it’s staged?

Yeah, totally. I never want anyone to think it feels staged. I want everyone to believe what they’re seeing and some episodes are extremely tight in how they wrap up and cover everything, but I like kind of having variation with that because then it doesn’t feel like a formula as much. And the idea of a formula is something that I’m constantly trying to fight.

Yeah, you’re not making Law & Order, you’re making something that feels like a fingerprint. Something that’s a little different in every iteration. Right?

Yeah, that’s well put. Otherwise, people get bored once they see what’s coming.

Yeah, anyone would get bored if they were trying to fill a specific template each time.

Yeah.

I don’t know if this was intentional or not, but I always feel like it just feels like a sunnier story when you’re talking about a specific interest that people have that they kind of come together to share as opposed to things where people are more isolated with their interests. The silo guy story is a bit sadder than the vacuum club because one is someone who’s trying to limit their indulgence into their own sort of interests to make sure that they still stay connected and one is people sharing an interest.

Yeah. I usually do celebrate these larger groups within the show because no matter how niche their interests are, I love that they found each other no matter what the obsession is. But yeah, the guy in the bunker, I did also see a bit of myself in him, but also I think that’s this kind of logical extreme in the episode for privacy and as it relates to restrooms and stuff like that. And the fact that he was also a septic tank specialist was like too perfect to me.

Is there a specific theme for this season or an overarching idea, whether it was intentional going in or whether at the end of it you feel like it revealed itself? I have my own takeaways, I doubt that they’re the takeaways that you intended.

I would be curious to hear yours.

I’ll be vague here, to not spoil anything. But in the early going, it seemed like some of the messaging was to be careful to not get too into our specific sensitivities, but then there’s also sometimes a danger in getting too into our specific interests as well. I spent a lot of time indoors during the pandemic because I’m immunocompromised. And so to me, I always felt like there was a risk in getting a little too inside oneself. So I kind of took that away from the show.

That’s good. I think there is a risk to getting too much inside yourself and it’s something I try to fight because otherwise you get lost in this galaxy of options. But getting lost in there is something that a lot of us do at the same time, and I want to make people feel comfortable doing that.

There’s a lot of stuff that we cover in the show and it’s really hard to sum up what the project of this season specifically was. There’s a lot of non-sequitur stuff in there. But I think this season is kind of about truth, it’s about desire, it’s about the infinite. It’s big things that I think about all the time that I’m not really sure about. Commitment.

And vacuums.

Yeah, vacuums.

The season premiere of ‘How To With John Wilson’ debuts Friday on HBO

With The Boys, Invincible, and now Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem under his belt, Seth Rogen has become quite the mastermind at delivering well-received adaptations based on indie comics. The comedy writer/actor and his partner Evan Goldberg have openly admitted to being longtime comic book fans, but the one thing they have not been interested in (so far) is tackling a project for the Big Two: Marvel and DC Comics.

While promoting Mutant Mayhem, Rogen opened up to Polygon about why he’s steered clear of the MCU and whatever the heck is happening over at DC Studios.

“Honestly, probably fear,” Rogen said with a laugh. “We really have a pretty specific way we work; me and Evan have been writers for 20 years at this point. It’s a fear of the process, honestly. And I say that knowing nothing about the process. There are a lot of Marvel things I love.”

Rogen further elaborated on his concerns about the Marvel system, and if he and Goldberg would be able to work in that environment:

It’s mostly a fear of how would we plug into the system they have in place, which seems like a very good system, and a system that serves them very well. But is it a system that we would ultimately get really frustrated with? And what’s nice about [Mutant Mayhem] is that we’re the producers of this. So we dictated the system, and we dictated the process in a lot of ways.

Working on The Boys has also spoiled Rogen when it comes to creative control.

“We are creating the infrastructure and process for them, not plugging into someone else’s infrastructure and process,” Rogen said before getting brutally honest. “We’re control freaks!”

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hits theaters on August 2.

(Via Polygon)

After Ian hit up the Pitchfork Music Festival last weekend, Steven hits him up for a post-mortem in today’s episode. Turns out Ian skipped out on Saturday — a day marred by weather delays — in order to eat custard in Wisconsin. Which means he missed out on the headline set by Big Thief, the weekend’s most polarizing performance. Steven and Ian also talked about the band’s recent single, “Vampire Empire,” and whether it qualifies as a disappointment.

Another huge indie star who put out new music this week is Mitski. Ahead of her forthcoming album The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We, due out in September, she released a quality single, “Bug Like An Angel.” After discussing the song, the guys try to place Mitski in the galaxy of reigning indie stars. From there, they pivot in a non-indie direction to Post Malone, whose new album Austin is out today. Does he deserve a yay or nay? They report, you decide.

In the mailbag, a listener asks Steven and Ian to stop making fun of Sublime. This, predictably, only prompts more Sublime jokes. Ian also pulls out his San Diego card to justify the mockery.

In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks about the latest effort from the long-running British band The Clientele, while Steven endorses a recent live album from Father John Misty.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 148 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [email protected], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and Twitter for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.

Sin City is going to need to make room for one more music star. First, it was Adele, then it was Usher, and now it’s Kylie Minogue, who is set to storm the strip with a glamorous residency of her own. Beginning on November 3, the “Padam Padam” singer’s highly-anticipated Las Vegas debut will kick off at Venetian Resort’s Voltaire.

Minogue’s More Than A Residency marks the pop star’s first Vegas residency, and it will also be the venue’s featured act. Across three months (November, December, and January 2024), the musician will bring back the essence of Studio 54 in the intimate 1,000-person capacity venue.

When asked about her upcoming Vegas debut, the singer said, “The spirit of Voltaire is one of pure, authentic fun. It’s one I resonate with as a pop artist. My new album ‘Tension’ is all about the space where the intimate and universal come together, and Voltaire represents just that.”

She later added, “The creative team has designed an environment where people can get up and dance at their tables and revel in the night. That’s what Voltaire is, and I can’t wait to perform in this intimate and exciting setting.”

With Emmy and Tony Award-winning production designer Derek McLane at the helm of the set, that’s a complete understatement. McLane opened up about the inspiration behind the design, saying, “I really wanted it to feel like an escape from the environment of the casino floor. Something that felt like a completely different world. An intimate, exciting, and inviting world.”

Tickets, tables, and packages for Minogue’s More Than A Residency show go on sale on August 9. Find more information here.