Shelby Rubino is a person too.

Sure, she just finished her doctorate in Clinical Psychology—and yeah, she recently published a peer-reviewed study in Integrative and Complementary Medicine observing the adverse effects of social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic—but she also binge watches “Sex in the City” like the rest of us, making her the picture-perfect inaugural Tertiary guest.

Even though it’s officially Summertime (i.e., no longer S.A.D. season), the team at Tertiary still felt it appropriate to bring on an expert to help us tackle questions about mental health. After all, the kids are not alright. Together, Tertiary’s first trio laughs, cries, and explores topics like resilience and distress tolerance, collectivism vs. individualism, and the importance of loving, supportive relationships.

Want to be a part of the Tertiary community? Follow us on Instagram, send us an email at tertpod@gmail.com and fill out our Google Form to submit a question that we’ll answer in a future episode. We want to hear from you!

Assigned Reading

• Read Shelby’s paper, “Covid 19’s Social Quarantine-Moderated Self-Reported Mental Health and Substance Use Among US Adults,” here.

Further Reading

• Listen to “John Mulaney Radio” on Pandora here.
• Watch Jason Reitman’s “Thank You for Smoking” on Amazon Prime. If you want.

Our intro and outro music comes from “Cloud Dancer” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.

Listen, listeners—you spoke, and we listened. For today’s episode, Tertiary hosts Heaven-Leigh and Justin dive head first into our first-ever listener question: “ What do you think it will take for art-based platforms to regulate/condemn AI ‘art’ over profit?”

For a topic as gargantuan as artificial intelligence, it should come as no surprise that our conversation covered a lot of ground—from publishing industry scandals and algorithm-driven slop factories to the ineffable, untouchable thing that separates manmade art from clunker junk. While it’s clear that regulating AI is somewhat out of the question (thanks, capitalism), that doesn’t change the fact that protecting what makes art quintessentially human is important.

Don’t worry, we also made plenty of time to debate the Alien movies and gush over Jeff

Have a follow-up question about AI? Send us an email at tertpod@gmail.com and fill out our Google Form and we promise (we really do!) to answer in a future episode. We want to hear from you!

Assigned Reading

• Watch The Drey Dossier’s recent YouTube episode on “The Shy Girl AI Scandal Is Way Worse Than You Think” here.
• Read Nabeel S. Qureshi’s Substack, “What Makes Art Great?” here.

Further Reading

• Read Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” here.
• Read Britannica’s summarization of Machiavelli’s contributions to historiography here.
• Read Jay Caspian Kang’s article for The New Yorker, “Will A.I. Make College Obsolete?” here.
• Listen to The Grey Area’s podcast discussing “Machiavelli on how democracies die,” here.

Our intro and outro music comes from “Cloud Dancer” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.

The rightwing techno-elites are trying to hijack your dreams—and the only way to stop them is to listen to Tertiary’s latest episode! In a spiritual successor to our series on “Speculative Creatures,” your hosts Heaven-Leigh and Justin picked up where EP6: Eugenics, Fatalism, “The Last Messiah” left off to dissect the ways both the political “left” and “right” imagine humanity’s future. As these competing visions become increasingly detached from reality, we’ve done our best to bring the conversation back down to earth.

Don’t worry, we also found time to touch on werewolves and queer culture, zombie movies and paranoia, and—most importantly—social media bans for minors.

Want to be a part of the Tertiary community? Follow us on Instagram, send us an email at tertpod@gmail.com and fill out our Google Form to submit a question that we’ll answer in a future episode. We want to hear from you!

Assigned Reading

• Buy Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle on Bookshop here or watch “The Man in the High Castle” on Netflix.
• Read Slavoj Žižek’s Substack on “SINNERS: CLASS STRUGGLE, BLUES AND VAMPIRES” here.

Further Reading

• Listen to The Last Podcast on the Left’s series on Jimmy Savile here.
• Read Tiffany Hsu’s NYT article, “Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media,” here.
• Watch “Hegseth defends Iran War's mission, costs” on FOX 32 Chicago here.
• Read Dana Goldstein’s NYT article, “Did School Cellphone Bans Work? New Study Finds Mixed Results,” here.
• Read Justin’s Substack on “TikTok, Hypnopedia, and the Zombification of the Public” here.

Our intro and outro music comes from “Cloud Dancer” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0.