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Simon is recording from Sassari, where the barn doors have just gone in and the pace of life feels unrecognisably slow. A conversation about loitering with intent – a legal phrase that turns out to be untranslatable into Portuguese – opens into a wide-ranging examination of third spaces, billionaires, and the frictionlessness of modern commerce: what the UK has lost, and why. Lee's account of an unplanned evening in Lisbon, ending with the three of them eavesdropping on an orchestra rehearsing through a church door, becomes the episode's counterpoint and its argument: that the best days are the ones that just keep opening.

Mentioned

• Sassari – city in Sardinia; Simon is recording from there mid-renovation on a place he has in the city
• Minority Report – Tom Cruise film involving pre-crime; cited as the logical endpoint of loitering with intent as a thought crime
• Cocktail – Tom Cruise film initially named instead of Minority Report; the mix-up launches a long digression
• Bryan Brown – Australian actor who appeared in Cocktail with Tom Cruise; his character's fate in the film briefly discussed
• Richard Chamberlain – actor; mentioned in connection with Cocktail and then The Thorn Birds and Shogun
• The Thorn Birds – TV miniseries; Richard Chamberlain connection discussed
• Shogun – TV miniseries; Richard Chamberlain confirmed as lead [?] – transcript garbled here
• Doctor Kildare – TV series; Richard Chamberlain's earlier role, mentioned in passing
• Jason Bourne / The Bourne series – Matt Damon spy franchise; invoked as another example of a character who wakes without his memory [?] – conversation unclear on whether the Bourne / Chamberlain thread was resolved
• Tilted Arc – Richard Serra sculpture [transcript says "Richard Sarah"] installed in Federal Plaza, New York; designed to bifurcate the plaza and force pedestrians around it; cited as an example of productive friction in public space
• Richard Sennett – writer and sociologist; invoked for his writing on friction in urban spaces and city life
• Too Good To Go – food waste app; compared between Coventry (mostly chain confectionery) and Sassari (independent grocers and green goods)
• Lievetta – artisan bakery in Sassari; slow-fermented, whole-grain bread; discussed as a surprising success in a city used to plainer loaves
• Keir Starmer – mentioned briefly as the kind of figure who has a public life in the institutional sense
• Pink Street – famous nightclub street in Lisbon; described as culturally hollowed out after the last Portuguese-owned venue closed
• Lucas – cocktail maker at a Lisbon bar; produced Japanese plum hooch from under the counter for an impromptu drink [last name unknown]
• Gilles – owner of a Lisbon restaurant serving Cabo Verdean cuisine through a Portuguese lens; met during the same unplanned evening
• Cabo Verde / Cape Verdean cuisine – the culinary tradition of Gilles's restaurant; described as African food filtered through Portuguese flavours

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon opens with a psychology experiment about misattributed arousal -- cross a rickety bridge feeling anxious, and you might mistake that adrenaline for attraction to whoever meets you on the other side -- and uses it as a prompt to ask Lee what emotions he feels most commonly. Lee lands on shame and guilt as uniquely useless (false friends that teach nothing, unlike anxiety or joy), then describes the untrammeled, leg-kicking happiness that sometimes overtakes him on a train crossing the River Tamar. The conversation moves through Grindr statistics at Republican conventions, a sudden bout of rage, and a father's urgent text that turned out to be about Peppa Pig.

Mentioned

- Grindr – gay hookup app; cited in connection with reported spikes in usage during Republican Party conventions, used to illustrate how shame can hide behind public moralising about LGBTQIA+ rights
- Republican Party conventions – referenced in relation to the Grindr statistics and the argument that political shamelessness often conceals private shame
- River Tamar – river in the southwest of England; the train crossing it is the setting for a description of sudden, involuntary joy
- Corvids – bird family; mentioned to explain why a magpie on the balcony had worked out how to use a tit feeder designed to exclude larger birds
- Peppa Pig – children's animated series; the actual subject of an "urgent" text from a parent, which arrived mid-meeting and caused several minutes of low-level panic
- Netflix – streaming platform; the medium through which Peppa Pig became a domestic emergency

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Lee has developed a habit he can't fully explain: he spends his walks listening to AI-generated voices read Reddit's most morally contested family disputes, swiping through them pocket-blind on his phone while his wife Bob removes herself from the room entirely. Simon has been watching The Pittt and finding himself deep in the YouTube rabbit hole of Dr. Mike, a physician with eight million followers who spent an episode patiently holding his ground in a room full of anti-vaxxers with flags. Together they turn over the question of why low-stakes moral soap opera – almost certainly fictional – scratches an itch that harder content never quite reaches.

Mentioned

- The Pitt (TV show) – medical procedural drama; praised for its realism and intensity; compared favourably to ER; its makers were sued by Michael Crichton's widow over similarities to ER
- ER (TV show) – 1990s medical drama created by Michael Crichton; watched back to back with The Pitt as an informal comparison
- Michael Crichton – creator of ER and Jurassic Park; his estate brought legal action against The Pitt's makers claiming it was an unacknowledged reboot
- Dr. Mike – YouTube creator with around 8 million followers; known for medical show breakdowns; discussed for his patient, measured performance in a debate surrounded by anti-vaxxers
- AITA / Am I The Asshole – Reddit community in which users submit personal moral dilemmas for public judgment; its stories are repurposed as AI-generated YouTube shorts with sped-up voices; the source of Lee's pocket-swiping habit
- amoral familism (familismo amorale) – sociological concept developed in 1950s-60s research; the idea that extreme loyalty to the immediate family degrades broader civic culture; mentioned while unpicking the ethics of the airport Thanksgiving story
- The Life of Chuck – film based on a Stephen King novella, starring Tom Hiddleston; recommended as a work in progress
- Carrie (1976) – Stephen King adaptation; cited approvingly; prompts a brief tribute to Sissy Spacek
- Sissy Spacek – actor; praised for her performance in Carrie; briefly distinguished from Susan Sarandon

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon opens with news: a colleague complimented his secondhand trousers, though he fails to mention he'd just sat through an important meeting with the fly jammed open. A digression via Sort Your Life Out – a decluttering show that leaves him reaching for the language of the divine – opens into a conversation about whether the body ever forgets its training, sparked by Lee's account of a Vera Montero solo and Bob's observation that ballet doesn't fully let you go. By the end they're in the territory of the Ozempic Economy: a Korean philosopher's framework for understanding why, in late capitalism, the self becomes the last thing left to optimise.

Mentioned

- Sort Your Life Out with Stacey Solomon and Dilla Carter (TV show) – decluttering and makeover series; Simon finds it compulsive and a little triggering; the guests' reaction of "Oh my God" to their transformed homes becomes a prompt for a riff on secular transcendence
- Hockey Smut – Lee's project around queer identity in sport; a local ice hockey team discovered it, prompting mixed reactions from players
- Trio A (1966, Yvonne Rainer) – postmodern dance work; cited as the famous example of pedestrian movement that paradoxically becomes virtuosic through its refusal to emphasise anything
- Vera Montero – Portuguese choreographer and performer; Lee saw her in a solo supported by four violinists; her flexed feet and facial effort unsettled him in ways he needed Bob to help him process; discussed as an example of earlier ballet training leaving a residue that resists being shed
- London Marathon – Simon ran it; used as an example of attending carefully to running form, then watching it dissolve as faster runners in every conceivable style streamed past
- Thomas Chan – Instagram creator; introduced Byung-Chul Han's ideas in relation to current culture and the Ozempic Economy
- Byung-Chul Han – Korean philosopher; author of The Burnout Society and The Transparency Society; his framework used as a lens on what GLP-1 drugs say about late capitalism
- Ozempic / GLP-1 drugs – weight-loss injections (Wegovy, Mounjaro, Ozempic named); discussed as emblematic of a pharmacological capitalism that promises frictionlessness by removing the "wrong" body from view
- Looks Maxing – online subculture rooted in red-pill ideology; involves extreme physical self-optimisation including mewing and leg-lengthening surgery; introduced via Clavicular, a figure in the newspapers
- Mewing – tongue-positioning technique associated with Looks Maxing, claimed to reshape the jawline
- Red pill / The Matrix – the ideological frame behind Looks Maxing; discussed briefly and dismissed

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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What do you do when someone asks if you liked something and the honest answer is "it's just not for me"? Simon and Lee explore how taste works – how it forms, how it shifts depending on who's in the room, and why saying something is "shit" is often just laziness dressed up as confidence. Along the way: sharks on planes, Pina Bausch via Tilda Swinton, Coldplay's complicated legacy, and a standing ovation nobody stood for.

Mentioned

- "Thrash" -- shark/hurricane disaster film; Lee watched it on a plane back from Lisbon, wriggling in his seat
- Glen Powell -- actor; appears in the romcom "Set It Up"
- Zoe Deutch -- actor (Lea Thompson's daughter); co-stars in "Set It Up"
- "Set It Up" (2018) -- romcom Simon watched for distraction, possibly a rewatch
- Peter Jackson's Beatles documentary "Get Back" -- referenced as an 8-hour documentary
- Akram Khan -- British-Bangladeshi choreographer; front-row sweat anecdotes, early career shows
- Coldplay -- band; discussed at length re: cool, taste, and politics
- Chris Martin -- Coldplay frontman; known for writing political slogans on his hands
- Snow Patrol -- band; used as a cool/uncool comparison with Coldplay
- Radiohead -- band; controversy over performing in Israel
- Nick Cave -- musician; mentioned alongside Radiohead re: Israel performances
- Wim Wenders -- German film director; made the Pina Bausch documentary "Pina"
- "Pina" (2011, dir. Wim Wenders) -- documentary about Pina Bausch; Lee found it very boring
- Pina Bausch -- German expressionist choreographer; subject of the Wenders documentary
- "Cafe Muller" -- famous Pina Bausch dance-theatre piece
- "Suspiria" (2018) -- Tilda Swinton plays a Pina Bausch-like character; Lee's recommended alternative to the documentary
- Tilda Swinton -- actor; plays the Pina Bausch character in Suspiria
- Diana Nipsa -- choreographer; created "Hornfuckers," seen by Lee and Bob in Lisbon
- "Hornfuckers" -- dance piece by Diana Nipsa; front-row experience, disputed standing ovation
- "Jay Kelly" -- George Clooney ensemble film about acting and its absurdities; Simon watched it with his sister and niece
- George Clooney -- actor/director; made "Jay Kelly"

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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A chance remark in a New York bar in 1991 — "you're an idealist" — lands differently than expected. Simon and Lee trace that moment through the topsy-turviness of political labels, from Antifa on a Lisbon rooftop to the day idealism became an insult. Along the way: growing up under IRA bombs and Cold War dread, algorithmically sorted fear, and whether a badly-timed fart rules out the simulation.

Mentioned

- Wall Street (1987, dir. Oliver Stone) — discussed as cautionary tale vs celebration of greed; Gordon Gekko, Michael Douglas, Charlie Sheen
- Platoon (Oliver Stone)
- Born on the 4th of July (Oliver Stone)
- Supergirl (film, trailer) — discussed; CGI dog face controversy
- John Wick — mentioned in comparison to Supergirl's dog-in-peril setup
- Good Boy (horror film) — cited for a dog considered an excellent actor
- Stonewall — NYC bar and landmark; site of the 1969 uprising
- Marsha P. Johnson — activist; cited for throwing the first brick at Stonewall, pivotal for US gay rights
- Antifa — political movement; discussed in context of linguistic and political inversion
- Trump — mentioned in context of Antifa during his first term
- Jillian — babysitter from childhood story; spent her savings on a Vidal Sassoon haircut
- Vidal Sassoon — hairdresser, mentioned in Jillian story
- IRA — cited in context of childhood anxiety and mainland Britain bombings
- Chernobyl — cited as example of proximate vs remote political anxiety (New Zealand vs UK)
- BBC — cited for one-sided reporting on the IRA
- Jeffrey Miller — the dog

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Simon finds himself crying for multiple things at once. Lee reflects on being largely inoculated from grief since childhood, always the supporter, never quite allowed his own response. An honest conversation about mortality, what we carry, and Swedish death cleaning.

Mentions

• Touch by Ashley Montague — cited for the observation that "touch" has the longest entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, longer even than "love"
• Concentric circles of grief — diagram showing inner/outer circles for determining who gives support vs. who can express grief outward; discussed in context of knowing your place in someone else's bereavement
• Swedish death cleaning — practice of clearing possessions before death so loved ones aren't burdened with sorting them; Lee's mum has done this, including getting rid of 400 books
• 2012 Olympics — mentioned as a turning point when arts funding was redirected and a number of mid-scale venues closed, contributing to the decline of the UK live arts scene ahead of Brexit

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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Lee and Simon move from the absurd grind of international transit and the ways money buys freedom from friction into a sharper reflection on systems, meritocracy and the stories we tell about fairness. The episode lands somewhere quieter and more human, with transhumanism and techno-hope set against goodbye, touch, family and the fragile consolation of ordinary love.

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)