When the Flames Go Up

After a few weeks off, we’re back behind the mics to catch up and pitch topics for some upcoming episodes. It’s been a busy time, and we’ve had a lot of opportunity to talk with friends about retirement (what even is that anymore?), parents, kids—and that big spicy meatball, health. This includes diagnostic tools and preventative diets for Alzheimer’s disease, which Magda researches passionately because it runs in her family. How helpful is a low-carb, ketogenic diet? Should you test for the APOE4 gene? Does Dr. Dale Bredeson know what he’s talking about?

Another surrealistic parenting moment is the first time your adult child comes to you for financial advice. How do you preach faith in American investments when your kid’s monetary touchpoints are The Great Recession and The Tyrannical Tariff Toddler? We’ve got a bit longer perspective, but we also know that “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” So while we’re both hunting around in the dark, at least our flashlight burns a little bit brighter.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to help us continue our writing and podcasting.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true WTFGU chat without a couple “disgusted huffs” to lighten the mood. You can learn a lot about Magda’s lens on life from her interpretation of that George Bailey movie they show every Christmas. And though Doug might be a fan of The Four Seasons, after four months of mostly relentless cold he’d settle for two.

Other links:

* Tina Fey’s 2025 reboot of The Four Seasons arrives May 1 …

* … and don’t confuse the movie with Same Time, Next Year

* The late, lamented Bike & Build program

* Reversing Alzheimer’s by Heather Sandison

* Our discussion about gut health with Maya Gangadharan:

We all knew of the American Association of Retired Persons when we were kids, right? It was that super powerful interest group that got senior citizens all those cool discounts. It started before Medicare in 1958 as a way to secure health insurance for 65-year-olds (a lot of them teachers) who had been forced to retire, in order to keep them out of poverty. But now that it’s 2025 and no one can retire, what purpose to they serve?

AARP says it serves 38 million members, but what exactly does it do for them? It says it focuses on 50-year-olds and up, but you can join whenever you want. And its core demographic still seems a lot older than us midlifers, who have different health concerns, still worry about work and ageism, have elderly parents of our own, etc. Where’s the Not-Quite-As-Gray Mafia advocacy for us?

We don’t need to be sold crappy medigap insurance from United Healthcare, but we do want to know more about how to navigate Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security (before they evaporate, anyway). We want to prepare against medical bankruptcy, become experts in home ownership, and understand estate law.

Basically, we want a useful resource that makes us feel smarter for having read it, and which reminds us that we’re not alone in our ignorance and frustration.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to help us continue our writing and podcasting.

We’re interested in how the American Association of Never Gonna Retire Persons might look, and we’ll be revisiting this often. What resources matter most to you? How accessible is the information you have, and what reliable source(s) did you learn it from? And what questions are more important than Al Pacino’s Keys to Longevity?

Other links:

* ProPublica’s analysis of AARP’s balance sheet

* ICYMI: All you need to know about pączki.

* Paul Lynde is a national damn treasure.

* Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s podcast, Wiser Than Me

* Drinking alcohol raises your risk of getting several kinds of cancer

Kimberly Shepherd coaches young adults (and their parents) that college is just one of many paths for a high school graduate to take. And that path often seems impassable—whether you’re applying, choosing a major, or sussing out a potential career.

It’s also important to understand that neurodiversity, learning disability, and emotional issues have nothing to do with intelligence, so it’s not uncommon for the most gifted people to struggle with executive function. When coping mechanisms stop working, it’s time to acknowledge your impediments and pursue courses of action that are less exotic than you might think.

Building on her previous careers in social work, crisis intervention, and college admissions, Kimberly has spent 14 years helping young adults overcome their blocks and uncertainty. When a client is coping with unreasonable expectations, self-doubt, and the nefarious practices of schools looking to juice their rejection stats, Kimberly’s first priority is to offer up adult help without an agenda.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to help us continue our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about the symbiosis between OCD and ADHD, the debatable appeal of “unborscht,” and the surprising abundance of fish hatchery biologists.

Other links:

* Follow Kimberly on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

* “I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

* Doechii’s tiny desk concert

* Robin Williams’s father: “Have a back-up profession like welding.”

Two extraordinary things happened on Sunday: 1) Kendrick Lamar livened up a noncompetitive Super Bowl with a halftime show that people will discuss for years to come; and 2) Doug didn’t watch it. In fact, he blew off the whole event, mostly as an experiment to test the limits of his FOMO.

Weirdly, there wasn’t any. Whatever was worth watching could be watched later, without Tom Brady’s overpriced, braying platitudes. And the halftime show was almost as amazing as the polarized response to it. If you didn’t like or understand it, maybe it wasn’t for you. In a pluralized society, not everyone is like us. Why you gotta yuck someone else’s yum?

When you age out of that 18-49 demographic, however, it gets easy to think that not much of popular culture is for you. You might feel extra pressure to keep up, just to feel relevant to modern discourse—especially when your kids and stepkids are involved. How else can you be a source of comfort to those unfortunate Swifties who just learned what it’s like when your team gets smacked around in the big game?

TThanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to help us continue our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about the sad state of modern men, the wisdom of a lesbian gym teacher, and why Steely Dan regulates Magda’s brain.

Other links:

* Childish Gambino’s This Is America and all of its messaging

* A lesson plan for understanding Kendrick’s halftime show

* How the production team put the show together

* Josh Johnson explains The Beef

* How In Living Color changed the Super Bowl Halftime Show

* Was Prince’s show better? You be the judge.

* Michael McDonald breaks down his vocals on Steely Dan’s “Peg”

* Behind the meaning of Steely Dan’s band name

* Doechii’s ALLIGATOR BITES NEVER HEAL

* When Harry and Sally pitched mayonnaise at Katz’s Deli

* Watch Yacht Rock on HBO

* The Kansas Department of Transportation

After several years of suffering her own gastric distress, Maya Gangadharan consulted the Nutritional Therapy Association and learned a ton about how so much of our bodily function connects back to our GI health. Digestion is an inflammatory event, it starts in the brain, and it can become more complex as our bodies’ relationships to insulin, hydrochloric acid, and belly bacteria change with age.

Now a functional nutritional therapy practitioner, Maya discusses the phenomenon of “leaky gut” and the scarcity of shortcuts to treat it properly—like probiotics, which aren’t always what they’re marketed to be. The key to understanding your gut health is a willingness to approach your body as a unique science experiment, with singular weaknesses that can only be determined through trial and error. But it will also respond to treatment and care, because at its core your body is very zen—even when it’s unwittingly trying to kill you.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to help us continue our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about outliving your body’s memory cells, the triumphant rebirth of Jamie Lee Curtis’s career, and why you owe it to your biome to stir up an Old Fashioned every so often.

Other links

* Find Maya at Intrinsic Origin, as well as on Facebook and Instagram

* Blueberry supplementation improves memory in older adults

* Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride and the GAPS diet

* How to play Red Rover

* The health benefits of senna

* Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD)

* Ignatius J. Reilly‘s troublesome valve

* CFUs = colony-forming units

* Hashimoto’s thyroiditis

* The End of Alzheimer’s by Dale Bredesen

* “Get back into life … with Depends!”

Now that Mark Zuckerberg thinks fact-checking is overrated—a decision described as both desperate and potentially disastrous—you might find yourself in a quandary over whether to keep using Meta’s social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Even though Facebook’s credibility has fallen off a cliff and its feckless moderation often results in random bans and post deletions, we’re not ready to abandon the communities we’ve built over the years. There’s still value to be found, but like most things we now have to work a little harder to find it.

Facebook’s flag has been flying pretty low since the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the site’s war on local journalism. But we think our overall opinion aligns pretty well with that of Mark Lemley, the Stanford law professor who fired Facebook as a client. He’s chosen to deactivate Threads and buy nothing off Facebook ads, but he’ll stay on the site because “it doesn’t seem fair for me to lose [my connections and friends] because Mark Zuckerberg is having a midlife crisis.”

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about the joy of pebbling, how “to give smile in picture,” and the cognitive dissonance when a puddle of anchovy paste decides that corporate America needs “more masculine energy.”

Other links:

* Watch list: The Social Network and The Social Dilemma

* The trailer for the Valentine’s Day slasher pic, Heart Eyes

* Magda’s Group Hugs site

Last week, the family endured a big scare after our son texted us the picture below with the caption, “something very, very bad has just happened.” He had hit some black ice on I-90 near Presho, South Dakota, and rolled his 1982 Chevy Silverado, which coincidentally was packed with everything he owned (or used to):

Every parent knows that having a child is like wearing your heart outside your body, and it doesn’t get any easier when that child is out in the world and subject to the violent physics of highway travel. We’re just grateful to have him home and safe and willing to chat about the kindness of South Dakotan strangers and the 42-year-old chassis that saved his life.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about how to fix your alternator with a screwdriver, the wide charisma gap between Cold Miser and Heat Miser, and obtaining a bear tag in Washington state.

Other links:

* Treating convergence insufficiency with a Brock string

* Did you know the Bumble’s full name is The Abominable Snow Monster of the North?

* That guy whose uncanny Rankin/Bass animation imitation went viral (compare to the original)

Bryan McGrath describes himself as “a Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke, William F. Buckley conservative” who has written his blog, The Conservative Wahoo, since 2008. After 21 years in the Navy, culminating in the command of the guided-missile destroyer USS Bulkeley, he currently works as an author, speaker, and national security consultant.

Bryan has always embraced his macro political firebrand-ery, but after the election re-elevated that guy, whom he has never liked or supported, he’s wondering what influence he’s ever had, and whether ballooning his blood vessels is worth it anymore. He might do better to focus more locally and “swim in that wonderful pool of what is.”

This introspection comes near the end of a very tough year, during which he lost his father and three of his dogs. And 17+ years after he fell in love with a 9-11 widow with two small daughters, he knows the best use of his time is to be the best partner, father figure, son, parishioner, and friend he can be.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about how the military helped offset his chaotic childhood, why Christianity has no place in Christian nationalism, and the powerful allure of a good giggle.

Other links:

* Follow Bryan on Twitter (even though we’re long gone off that POS site)

* Once More to the Lake, by E.B. White

* The best of Serenity Now!

* Marcus Aurelius and Eckhardt Tolle

* Jesus and John Wayne, by Kristin Kobes Du Mez

* Knotweed and Johnson grass

As Kathryn Hahn said recently, “the universe doesn’t give us anything that we can’t handle, but JESUS CHRIST.” There’s lots of emotion to sift through as the asbestos settles on this disastrous election, which once again elevated the worst man to the highest office. The horse is once again loose in the hospital, but now he’s older, meaner, and surrounded by hench-horses eager to get in on the stampede.

So what’s the way forward? Are you out of fucks? If you know someone voted to invite more chaos into our lives and threaten people you love, are they dead to you? Or do you think you can keep a few bridges intact until the midterms?

It’s hard to find compassion when you read about all the ”truly clueless” Google searches on Election Day and wince while the American kakistocracy limps toward our 250th birthday. You want to believe we can salvage the republic, but you don’t know where to get news you can trust. Any maybe our culture has become too irrevocably siloed and woefully undereducated to ever have nice things again.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

If you're finding it extra difficult to find community with Those People, then don't. This podcast will at least shed light on why pickleball is so dangerous for seniors, why Magda empathizes with Big Bird, and which Cabinet position Doug might hold in the Principality of Magdania.

Other links:

* Follow Magda and Doug on Bluesky

* When We Went MAD! documentary

* Chappell Roan performs Pink Pony Clun on SNL

* She is Doechii

* Prof. Tressie McMillan Cottom on 45/47’s “weird gift”

* “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.”

* The 2024 election cost $16 billion

Aya Yasukawa-Dudzinski is a “third culture kid,” a native Japanese who has spent almost all of her life in America. She has a full-time job and two tween daughters here, and her parents in Tokyo are adjusting to her dad’s newly diagnosed dementia. But that’s not the hard part.

Aya’s parents are proud and private people in a proud and private culture, and her mom, in particular, is having a difficult time releasing her iron grip on control over her dad’s care. Her strategy for now is to think proactively, like a chess master, and hope all her pieces are in the right place at the right time.

The good news is that the Japanese healthcare system is a lot less expensive and confusing than in America, and there are many support groups in Tokyo set up to help families cope with dementia. But Japan’s oldest citizens are still not generationally or culturally trained enough to make the most of them. The physical distance from her parents can be daunting at times, but Aya would likely face much of the same challenge if they lived next door.

Thanks for listening to When the Flames Go Up! We’re a listener-supported enterprise, so please consider a paid subscription to support our writing and podcasting.

We also talk about the importance of cats in Japanese literature, watching Rocky Horror at a reasonable hour, and what audiobooks have in common with plastic coffee lids.

Other links:

* There are a ton more Bridgerton novels than you might think

* What A Fool Believes, no wise man has the power to reason away

* How Laurie Smithwick convinced her dad to ditch the cane: