What If I'm Right?

This week, host Ian Heller opens with a question marketers and politicians already know the answer to: why do we believe what we see, even when it never happened? Drug commercials bury the warnings under happy people dancing in the street, and political ads use the same ploy. With the midterms coming, how do we get better at spotting a pitch designed to pull our attention away from what matters to us, or from the truth?Then Ian is joined again by John Parikhal, an award-winning advertising expert, brand strategist, and communications guru who has helped countless people and businesses grow and improve their bottom lines. John studied media with Marshall McLuhan, and he returns to pick up the conversation they started the last time he was on the show.John makes a provocative case that every new medium, from oral storytelling to print to television to the internet, rewires the brain, and that today’s media keeps us reactive instead of thinking. They get into why “repetition is definition,” how fast cuts and constant news scrolls overwhelm our attention, why fear and anger are such powerful tools in political persuasion, and why John worries AI could magnify all of it.Together, Ian and John look for the way out: reading with everything else turned off, meditating, giving yourself one minute to breathe, and reconnecting with other people by listening. Along the way they talk about the high schoolers who call themselves “readers” and the “gamers,” a “school of the future” where kids run their own court, and why connection, with ourselves and each other, may be our best defense. It’s a conversation about how to become a smarter consumer of political speech, and why Ian, ever the optimist, thinks we can still turn the ship around.

This week, host Ian Heller opens with a question the midterm coverage keeps skipping: everyone is talking about voter intimidation, fraud claims, and mid-decade redistricting, but how much of democracy is decided by election law and the census long before anyone casts a ballot?Then Ian is joined by Jeffrey Wice, a national expert on redistricting, voting rights, and census law with decades of experience, who has been named to Roll Call's list of the top 50 Washington policy insiders. He is of counsel to the Washington, DC law firm Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock, chairs the New York City Bar Association's Election Law Committee, and was appointed in 2026 as co-chair of the New York City Council's Census 2030 Task Force. A long-time counsel to the New York State Legislature, he has assisted in every New York congressional and state legislative redistricting since 1980, and served as counsel to President Clinton's appointees on the 2000 federal Census Monitoring Board. He is also a co-editor of the NCSL Redistricting Law Handbook and has taught election law at Hofstra and Touro.Jeff makes a compelling case that the census is the bedrock beneath election law, shaping representation in Congress, your state capital, and your town board, as well as the funding that follows. He walks through the state-by-state, district-by-district battles over maps in Texas, California, Missouri, Maryland, and New York, and explains how recent Supreme Court rulings have limited federal challenges to partisan gerrymandering and minority voting rights claims.Together, Ian and Jeff trace a line from the Constitution's enumeration clause and the three-fifths compromise to the Fourteenth Amendment, and then to a newly proposed draft regulation that could change how the census is conducted. It's a conversation about what it takes to defend democracy, from the courts to state constitutions to the voters themselves, and why Ian hopes this moment is waking "We the People" up.

This week, host Ian Heller opens with a question that music history keeps answering the same way: does great art actually need a crisis to be born from? Ian's answer might surprise you.Then Ian is joined by Tom Rizzuto, a professor of music history, guitar, and media at Molloy University and SUNY Old Westbury, whose TEDx talk "Why Streaming Can't Replace Physical Media" was an editor's pick on TED.com with over 150,000 views. His research and writing on music and cultural shifts has appeared in Discover Magazine, History Magazine, Arts Education Policy Review, and The Rock and Roll Archaeology Podcast.Tom makes a genuinely compelling case that music's biggest breakthroughs — punk and hip-hop erupting out of a bankrupt, crumbling 1970s New York, Beethoven reinventing the piano while Napoleon's wars gutted Vienna's economy — aren't coincidences. When the old institutions fall apart, new music rushes in to fill the gap, played by self-taught outsiders instead of trained virtuosos.Together, Ian and Tom trace a wild, wide-ranging line from CBGB and the Ramones to the Clash's London, from Beethoven's deafness and his invention of the modern piano to the current anxiety over AI, algorithms, and whether either of them will manage to homogenize music into oblivion. It's a conversation about how music keeps functioning as society's early warning system and its release valve — and why Ian, in classic form, thinks the machines are about to lose.

This week, host Ian Heller opens with a question most people are afraid to research honestly: what if some of our most effective tools for anxiety, depression, and addiction have been sitting right in front of us, buried for decades by the war on drugs? Ian's answer might surprise you.Then Ian is joined by Dr. Marc Swogger, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Palliative Care at the University of Rochester Medical Center, where he serves as psychotherapy director for a program using ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to treat existential distress in people facing life-threatening illness.Marc makes a compelling case that ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is nothing like the pharmacological, take-a-pill-and-wait model of Western medicine. It's closer to indigenous healing traditions, opening patients up so they can do the work of healing themselves, guided by trained therapists rather than left alone with an expensive high.Together, Ian and Marc explore how the therapy actually works (screening, preparation, dosage, the arc of the experience), why certain psychiatric conditions disqualify people from treatment, what happens in the room during a session, and how the effects ripple outward to the families of the dying - sometimes easing a lifetime of grief before it even begins. The conversation is a rare, unflinching look at what it means to offer real options to people who are running out of time.#ketaminetherapy #psychiatry #psychedelic #psychedelictherapy

This week, host Ian Heller opens with a question most of us avoid: where does all the rage go? Not the big explosions - the quiet, simmering kind that leaks out sideways at the dinner table, or builds until it finds the worst possible moment to erupt. Ian's answer might surprise you. Then Ian is joined by Jack Holloway - writer, musician, minister, dog walker, and the creator of Despair Sanctuary, a drone metal vigil for public grief held inside a historic Gothic church in Brooklyn. Jack is also the author of Hands of Doom: The Apocalyptic Imagination of Black Sabbath, and he makes a genuinely compelling case that doom metal, slow, sludgy, foreboding, might actually be one of the better ways to navigate despair. Sometimes the path through misery is to let yourself feel miserable, and to do it alongside other people who are feeling it too. Together, Ian and Jack explore the toxic positivity that tells us to shake it off, why suppressed grief and rage always find their level eventually, and what happens when you give people a nondenominational, no-agenda safe space to collectively scream. The conversation stretches into history, Marx, the Constitution, and what it means that we only seem to make big changes after catastrophe - bringing it all full circle back to despair, and what we might do with it before it does something with us.The next Despair Sanctuary is Saturday, August 15th at 8pm at Old First Reformed Church - a stunning historic Gothic church just blocks from Prospect Park in Park Slope, Brooklyn. 729 Carroll St, Brooklyn, NY. More info: oldfirstbrooklyn.org/arts/despair-sanctuary