People Stuff

Why will people wait an hour in the rain for a lobster roll when the exact same food is available across the street with no line? This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael take on Red’s Eats, Magnolia Bakery, Courage Bagels, and the modern compulsion to be seen eating the “right” food in the “right” place.

Drawing on Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption—updated for the Instagram era—they argue that what’s being consumed isn’t lobster, cupcakes, or bagels, but attention itself. Taste turns out to be beside the point. The real question is whether the meal happened publicly enough to matter.

Anthropology says: it’s not about flavor. It’s about status, visibility, and being legible as a person worth noticing.

This week, Dan and Michael investigate suburban car psychosis and the anthropology of asphalt.

Why do normal people turn feral over parking spaces?
What makes ride-sharing feel both convenient and morally icky?
And how exactly did Elon Musk turn the Hyperloop into the most expensive metaphor for magical thinking?

Plus, Michael explains why gifts are actually acts of aggression, Dan redesigns public drinking laws, and both agree that walking remains America’s most banned activity.

📍Topics include:
– The anthropology of parking rage
– Ride-sharing and privatized public goods
– Elon Musk as modern taboo
– Gift-giving as social warfare
– Beer gardens and failed freedom

🎙️ People Stuff — where anthropologists answer your dumb, beautiful, deeply human questions.

In this episode of People Stuff, Dan and Michael discuss and/or are informed by:

“The Speed of Human Thought Lags Far Behind Your Internet Connection, Study Finds” in the NYTimes by Carl Zimmer https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/science/speed-of-thought.html

The Gift by Marcel Mauss

Taboo by Franz Steiner

Ever wondered why people still warn you to check your kids’ Halloween candy for razor blades — even though it’s never actually happened?
Or why politicians say, “a lot of people are saying…” when they clearly made it up?
In this week’s episode, Dan and Michael Heard It Through the Grapevine, our resident anthropologists dig into how rumors, myths, and moral panics shape our everyday lives.

They unpack the folklore behind Halloween candy scares, explore how gossip and political speech both rely on indirect attribution, and dive into what it means when your suburban neighborhood suddenly becomes deer country.
From Levi-Strauss and Santa Claus to Donald Trump and talk radio, this one’s equal parts anthropology, humor, and exasperation at the human condition.

🎧 In this episode:

The anthropology of Halloween and the myth of poisoned candy

How politicians use marketing psychology to sell ideas

Why gossip is dying (and what we lose with it)

The strange suburban ecology of deer and hunters

What ancient festivals and modern politics have in common

Works Cited

The “Lloyd’s List Shipping Podcast” https://www.lloydslist.com/the-lloyds-list-shipping-podcast

“Father Christmas Executed” by Claude Lévi-Strauss https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/LEVI-STRAUSS_1995_Father_Christmas_Executed.pdf

Rabelais and His World by Mikhail Bakhtin https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262520249/rabelais-and-his-world/

“The Dead Baby Joke” by Alan Dundes https://www.jstor.org/stable/1499238

“A feral science? Dangers and disruptions between DIYbio and the FBI” by Michael Scroggins https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0308275X231157559

Key Themes and Topics:

The decline of democracy and rise of tech authoritarianism

Curtis Yarvin and the myth of the “CEO monarch”

Liberal democracy vs. fascist aesthetics

Student politics and the mirror of national elections

Organizational governance and consensus decision-making

Airline inequality and the anthropology of travel

Humor, politics, and why anthropology still matters

Keywords

Why democracy feels broken in 2025

What is Curtis Yarvin’s neo-monarchism?

Funny political podcast about democracy

Anthropology meets politics podcast

What’s wrong with student elections?

Consensus decision making in activism

Airline class inequality explained

Comedy podcast about society and governance

Works Cited

In this episode of People Stuff, Dan and Michael discuss and/or are informed by:

An article in the Times about that rigged Texas lottery: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/rigged-texas-lottery.html

A profile of Curtis Yarvin in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile

“Does the “New Economy” Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past” by Robert Gordon https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.14.4.49

“Election” (the movie) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126886/

“The Tyranny of Structurelessness” by Jo Freeman https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

This week on People Stuff:

What Fresh Hell: “Unsinkable” — Dan on Titanic déjà vu and the myth of technology.

Question 1: UFOs, drone swarms, and why mystery still matters.

Question 2: Body doubles, tacit knowledge, and classroom conspiracies.

Fixing Shit: Dan fixes “ostracism.” Could democracy use a reboot?

Question 3: True crime, Pacific Northwest serial killers, and paranoia.

💬 Got a question for Dan and Michael? Leave a voice memo or message at https://www.people-stuff.com/

In this episode of People Stuff, Dan and Michael discuss and/or are informed by:

“Unsinkable” by Daniel Mendelsohn https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/04/16/unsinkable-titanic-iceberg

“Removing Knowledge” by Peter Galison https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037c-4c4a-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/content

“On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture” by David Graeber https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenology-of-giant-puppets-broken-windows-imaginary-jars-of-urine-and-the-cosmological-role-of-the-police-in-american-culture/

“The Bridge [Broen på dansk]” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_(2011_TV_series)

This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael wrestle with the fine art of naming—bars, gun clubs, and even your long-lost festival alter ego. What’s in a name, really? Turns out, quite a lot of cultural baggage, generational anxiety, and maybe a touch of nostalgia-induced regression.

From a bar named Stacy’s Mom (a terrible idea, we all agree) to a gun club trying to rebrand itself into a “Second Amendment Tactical Brigade,” this episode digs into why naming things feels so loaded—and how those labels shape who we are. Along the way, Dan and Michael contemplate QR codes, nostalgia, and ritual theory, all while trying to fix “names” as a social institution.

Come for the anthropological analysis, stay for the fake sponsorships.

Chapters:
00:00 — Intro: The problem with labels
03:15 — What Fresh Hell: QR Codes and the Death of Memory
09:40 — Question 1: “Stacy’s Mom” is not a bar name
19:55 — Question 2: When your gun club becomes a militia
35:20 — Fixing Shit: Names, and why Michael is now a constitutional originalist
46:00 — Question 3: Losing (and finding) yourself at camp
57:10 — Nostalgia Suppositories and designer nicknames
59:00 — Outro

Works Cited: 

Stacy’s Mom.

Ritual and Mantras: Rules Without Meaning by Frits Staal

The Rites of Passage by Arnold van Gennep

The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Strucutre by Victor Turner

This week on People Stuff, Dan and Michael get their hands dirty—literally and intellectually.

💥 They tackle the big questions:

Should you go to college or learn a trade?

What’s it really like working in a modern factory?

Why are oil field jobs impossible to fill (and even harder to keep)?

Along the way, they talk about:

The myth of “college as transformation”

How AI is reshaping universities (and cheating’s golden age)

The decline of unions and the lost art of solidarity

Fixing professional sports through relegation (sorry, NFL fans)

And yes—what happens when your HR department gets too anthropological.

👷‍♂️ From Texas high schools to South Carolina factories, to Bakersfield oil fields, this episode explores how work shapes identity, class, and meaning.

Chapters:
00:00 – Intro
03:00 – Forbes 30 Under 30 and the Theil Fellows fiasco
08:00 – College vs. Trade School
22:00 – Life on the Factory Floor
38:00 – Fixing Sh*t: Professional Sports Edition
46:00 – Oil, Labor, and Truth in Job Ads
59:00 – Outro + Fake Sponsor (Robot Plumber)

Works Cited:

“30 under 30-year sentences: why so many of Forbes’ young heroes face jail” by Arwa Mahdawi https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/apr/06/forbes-30-under-30-tech-finance-prison

“Breaching Experiments” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_experiment

Studies in Ethnomethodology, by Harold Garfinkel (you may want to bookmark this one; Michael brings it up a lot)

This week on People Stuff, anthropologists Dan and Michael get their hands dirty with the real weirdness of modern life — from politicians oversharing on social media to waiters wanting crypto paychecks to a man who just keeps adding doors to his house.

We’re asking the big questions:

Should politicians be more boring online?

Is crypto a union-busting fever dream?

How many doors are too many doors to the spirit realm?

And can you really fix vaccine hesitancy with darts and cash?

Along the way, Dan and Michael explore why algorithms flatten culture, how anthropology explains “weird” behavior, and what liminality has to do with your living room. It’s people being people — and us trying to make sense of it.

Timestamps:
00:00 — Intro: Touching grass, anthropologist-style
02:10 — What Fresh Hell: AI reading med school applications
08:35 — Question 1: Politicians and the bread-posting problem
18:45 — Question 2: Unionized waiters and the crypto crusade
30:20 — Fixing Shit: How to end vaccine hesitancy (dart guns included)
42:00 — Question 3: A contractor, a house, and too many doors
53:10 — Fake sponsor: Hyperreality™ — where billionaires graze
56:00 — Outro and credits

In this episode, Dan and Michael discuss (and/or are informed by):

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, by Richard Hofstader (https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/)

Boba Fett, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boba_Fett

Dog the Bounty Hunter, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_the_Bounty_Hunter

The Rites of Passage, by Arnold Van Gennep

The Ritual Process, by Victor Turner