The Managing Expectations Podcast

Ep 68: Mammalian Amalgam

Places you don’t want to visit, foods you don’t want to eat! 

Ep 67: By The Rivers Of Babylon

MEP Supplemental - Wenger waxes solo on expatriate communities and how they got that way. He revisits a column he wrote in April 1997 about remembering the fall of Saigon.

Ep 66: Olympics Roundup: That Is How It Starts

Wenger and Jared talk about the Olympics again and also Nazi Sculpture 

Ep 65: Islands in the Streaming

Brian talks about the direct-to-streaming business model while Wenger tries to figure out who owns Warner and HBO. They talk Scarlett Johansson, Christopher Nolan, going to the movies vs sitting on your own sofa and watching a movie, The Bad News Bears, Loki and the MCU reset, and negotiating deals with an eye on the back end. 

Ep 64: So Communism Happened.

Wenger and Brian discuss the coming eviction crisis, Anne Applebaum’s book Iron Curtain, journalist David Halberstam, the war in Vietnam, Maoism, Stalinism, the Olympics, Putin, and the new Match Game. Listen and judge for yourself which is the greatest scourge of mankind.

EP 63 Annie and the Bandit? Smokey Hall? 1977 Redux!

A public reading of Esquire’s Guide to Modern Etiquette, connecting Smokey & the Bandit and Annie Hall, and a thorough retrospective of Denver’s iconic Casa Bonita. Also we learn that it’s harder to pilot a helicopter than a plane!

EP 62: No One Here Thinks I’m Funny

Wenger and Brian celebrate Bobby Bonilla Day - or at least explain it. And then they talk (seriously) about Portland as Wenger digs out his old review of a Chuck Palahniuk book.

MEP supplemental

Paid By The Interruption - Wenger talks with Elena Vee, one of the Mystery Solving Grannies about Eastern Europe, Houston, education, and a crummy job market. If Lucille Ball knew how to make borscht, you’d have E.V.

Book Club #3 Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut

Book Club #3 Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut — Wenger, Jared, & Tirzah explore the autobiography of Abstract Expressionist Rabo Karabekian, and the place of Vonnegut as satirist among the giants of American Letters. And at some point somebody says something funny.

EP 60 That’ll be *logom* of your Ab-Blaster (TM) story!

Brian tells a bladderish story and the guys talk about Nordic happiness, picnics, and pasta salads.