Kitchen Table Sessions: Culture Vultures ( A deep dive into pop culture & klesha)

Selena Tatum: Pull up the chair. Hey folks. Welcome back to the Empathy Lab Kitchen Table Sessions. Episode 18. Reading the Room. So last time I sat here, I have walked through four questions about the survival script from inside my own surgery, and that was a diagnostic. This week, though, folks, this week we're having a bit of fun. This week I want to read the room. Not the internet's room, just the general culture room, my room, the things that are capturing my attention in 2026, the music that I'm listening to, possibly warbling in the background, and the conversations that my hubs and I are having at dinner, the things that my son is noticing about the world, as he is now a tween, and the news that are sometimes keeping me up. And when I was thinking about this episode in the lab discussing it, I was like, how do I show folks the clacias just walking around in plain clothes? And the only way that I felt I could do that is if I show you them walking around in my life. So you might start to see them in yours. Not because we need to be out here right now in July during the full moon week fixing anything, because seeing is the practice. And honestly, as I said last week or the week before, and I'll say again this week, you don't have to do anything about what I'm gonna name. The first step is knowing that it is what it is. So we are now about two weeks outside of the World Cup. We're still talking about it. Lots of stuff happened on there, but and also I wanna talk about Abivanacea on the pitch. So we know that Spain won the World Cup Sunday, July 19th. We know that there was a lot of let's say, theories around that. They won 1-0 over Argentina in extra time, and the moment it ended, Argentina shows you exactly what Abivanatia looks like when it has nowhere left to go. So what happened here? Perez grabbed the Spanish player by the throat, Molina punched Rodri, Gabby got kicked on the ground. 46 fouls in the match and 25 of them from Argentina. Let's talk about it now. Now it was a brawl. Like the to which I have in the years, which is every year of my life that I can remember watching football, watching the World Cup, never have seen this behavior in my life. I was like an Argentinian coach grabbing a Spanish player. What the hell is going on? And People like, this is poor sportsmanship. No, it's not. That is not poor sportsmanship, what we saw. That is what we saw in real time is the survival script collapsing. And now I'm pretty sure now that you've seen this brawl, you can kind of look at other things happening in the world. Abhivinacea says, if I lose, I'm erase. When the loss arrives and the body has no exit, it goes to the person standing in front of it, right? The brawl is what happens when the nervous system equates losing a football match with annihilation. And we have Lamin Yamal praying on the field as soon as the whistle is blown. So chaos is happening, and we have this one individual giving thanks. Meanwhile, Messi, I'm gonna hold my peace on that because Argentina is not a team I like, and Messi is not a player that I'm into. Fight me in the comments, okay? Meanwhile, Messi standing on the other side of the pitch. He's got his hands on his hips. He's watching his own teammates lose their minds. And then he walks over and shakes every Spanish player's hand. Same team, same loss. One man running the Klecha, one man witnessing it. That is the whole framework in one image. And to sum it all up, we have Lominia Mal who walks over to embrace Messi. End scene. Passing of the golden dude per se. Okay? Talk about the halftime show. There's a really cool comedian. Her name is Laura Ramusso. I'm gonna have her links in the show notes as I usually do. Now, the Halftime Show, first ever FIFA halftime show, and Laura Ramusso does such a good bit on this. Like, go see it, it's on YouTube. And the Halftime Show modeled the Super Bowl. We got Tom Cruise out there giving a speech about unity and a match between two countries that he has no connection to. Okay, we have the American anthem right before the game. And I can't remember because I was watching it with family if the respective countries' anthems came first and then theirs. I really don't remember if they did that all again, but I think in the 20 minutes they had no time to do that. All this is happening on American soil. We've got Madonna out there. We've got Ronaldo and Ronaldinho standing there while she's performing, like hey, the best of soccer, both of them smiling. The world's game folks got a super bowl makeover and nobody in the stadium asked for it. To add to this before I talk about the Klacia running, but you probably have figured it out. We've got Justin Bieber, okay, one of Canada's most famous folks. I said one of, I didn't say the only one, one of. So he comes out and we're all gonna pretend like he's never played in front of thousands of people before. We've got Jason Sudakis out there showing up as Ted Lasso, like coaching him to start singing this song. I mean, it's just I was like, what is going on? And you know what? That's NVIDIA performing universality while the camera's running. That's that glacia, right, going on. So, not so. I've given you two just looking at the World Cup because I was a footballer, I will always be a footballer, and that's how you can see some of that playing out there. So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about the hamster wheel. So my husband and I, like we sit down to dinner and we sit down a lot. we sit down a lot, of course you sit down a lot. We often have conversations, you know, and we've been talking about this particular Kalatia. For a while, I think it's been the last couple of weeks. It's the one that is the craving, the chasing, the acquiring, the hamster wheel that everybody is running and no one's naming. Okay. It's the purchases, the vacations, the hustle, the let me don't take a bite out of your meal. I gotta take a picture of it for the gram. You know what I mean? vacations that are performances because you see more of the vacation on like the interwebs than when they come back you don't hear from them or they don't have like back in the day we had video reels. I'm not saying that anybody has to bring that back. All I'm saying. The hustling, I mentioned the hustle, but the hustle that never arrives anywhere. You know, and he and I sit and we talk about it with a lot of love and a lot of honesty, right? What it is is it's raga and it's the grip around the next thing. So all of this continuous playing the game, being in the game, being out of the game, that's gripping. And it's the attachment to the idea that the next acquisition, the next experience, the next upgrade will be the one that finally completes the picture, finally makes me whole, finally makes me happy. And seen, it never does. What happens is the wanting doesn't stop when the thing arrives. The wanting is not about the thing. It's all about wanting the thing, right? And he and I have been talking and I'm like, you know, we see it in our close friends, you know, and sometimes we wonder, like, are we alien? Because he and I can name the hamster wheels that he and I are both in all the time, right? And then we feel bad because we feel like we're judging when we're sitting in the bardle of the whole thing, and then we flag it for folks around us, and they look at us like we have two heads. And I like as your hostess with the most, I'm not above any of this, okay? Check it out. The empathy lab, the thesis, the novel, submissions, surgeries, the everything, right? Tatum has their own hamster wheel. And the hamster wheel has a different paint job when you are building something you believe in. So everything I named, clearly I believe in it, and I will down a hill for it. However, the mechanism behind the whole thing is the same. Raga doesn't care about our intentions. It runs the grip regardless, right? For example, my current Raga is shopping. Right? For some reason, not for some reason, I know the reason. My thing is shopping. I will go, and I'm a great online shopper. I will go, I have my apps for the places I like to shop that are ethical and whatnot, and I will fill an online cart with things that I assume they want. Right. And some of the things I need and some of the things it's like, okay, hey, I worked really hard, or I just want that thing. Like not because I know it's gonna make me happy when I get it. I actually take out the jest, take out the action. I want it. Plain and simple. And then sometimes I buy it and sometimes I don't. And when I do buy it, I feel terrible about it. And I give myself a whole talk about you wanted this thing, now you bought it, you think it's gonna make you happy? Journals. There you go. That I was trying to think as I was talking to you guys about this. What is one thing that I can say that they'll be like, yeah, I have a thing with notebooks, I have a thing with journals, I have a thing with mole schemes, I have a thing with pens. Okay, and I always figure, I want that one. And in the times when I'm like, I want that one, the ragged running is I want that, because then I will write the perfect journal entry, whatever the fuck that is. I'll be able to have the best line for my next novel, or like I'll draw the perfect thing, the wanting. And then I chide myself after I get it, as though I don't deserve it. Super wild. So there you go. That's Raga. Journals. Any woman can talk to you about that one little thing that they think if they get that thing, they'll be happy. My other thing before I move on to the next topic is bags. I have a thing for bags. I met not met, I follow someone on Substack who is also equally into bags and I was she was saying that she's just on this hunt for a bag and she hopes one day that she finds the right one. But And also she's probably found the right one. And it's not the right one that she thinks is in her mind 'cause she's always changing her mind about what that right one is. The wanting, the fucking hamster wheel. It's crazy. It could be anything. Books, Kindles, pens, paints, whatever, shoes, you name it, raga. Name your own ragat here, folks. Huge sigh. Why am I sighing? Because this one was like really had me sit down and then I had to sit down on the floor and then I just lay down on the ground. So sometimes I talk about my son. He is twelve. Everyone knows that he is autistic and he is one of the most precise observers of human behavior I have ever met. We're gonna call this segment kind spots and not kind spots. A video through a 12-year-old's eyes. My son doesn't have the option of ignoring the architecture or the structure of the room because his nervous system registers everything the room is doing, whether the room intended to communicate it or not. My son already knows what the fuck is going on. And he said something to me recently. He said the world has kind spots and not kind spots. That is his language. And in that moment, I was like, huh, and I was like, Yo, Tatum, that is his language for what I call inclusion and exclusion. We can even call it, if you want to get philosophical about it or highfalutin it, structural inclusion and exclusion. He is mapping the same thing I map in my research. And he is doing it without the vocabulary and with more accuracy than most of the organizational leaders I have studied have ever done. And what Prompted this was he wants to go to New York City, right? He wants to go and see things in New York City. There are buildings and trains and and science things that happen in New York City that he really wants to go see, and he wants to go visit his hero, one of his heroes, Mark Rober, and they happen to live in the States. as you know, wow, we are people from the cultural community and I have made it very plain that I have no desire to go into the US and I've said it out loud and he has obviously heard me say this because it's not safe. And he realized, hey, that's an unkind spot for us right now, and also realized that during the World Cup, the US looked like a really cool place to be, because here are all these people that look kind of like him going into what they call flyover states and having a really great time and the population there embracing those folks and wanting to learn more about them. So the US on a whole, not kind spots, but not kind spot. And also there are kind spots in there. My son also brought it up because he happened to hear part of the headline about the young man named Nolan who passed away when he went on a party boating trip with his friends to a small island, and his friends came back and he didn't. And what prompted him coming to me and saying that, and me realizing, my word, my 12 year old has realized this is a video at the structural level. The world that refuses to see what does not fit the inherited design means that my son's neurodivergence ultimately, at the end of the day, means that the world was not built for the way his mind. He knows this. And he has known it longer than he has had words for it. And the not kind spots are the places where the architecture was designed for frequencies that is not his. My son was bullied in daycare, and then again in kindergarten and grade one. Right. And when we think about bullying, we're like preschool, yeah, it happens. Okay. My son is not wrong about the world. The world in the way it's constructed right now. Is wrong about him. And I had to stop, and that's when I was sitting and lying on the floor, because when a 12-year-old can map the inclusion architecture of his environment with more precision than an EEI committee, then I have to say that committees are not the solution. Seeing is the solution, and some people, neurodiet Virgent folks. Black people, anybody whose body doesn't match the inherited design, have been seeing it their whole lives. The calicia isn't theirs, it belongs to the system that they're in that refuses to look at. Okay, here we are. 20 minutes in, roughly. I'm gonna talk about What is that? And I think I said in the beginning, what keeps me up? And so I live in Canada. my really good friend, cousin, godsister in the States refers to it as Canadia. And, you know, a lot of what is thrown at me here in Montreal is just thrown around in general. Montreal language, the news, Dervesha, and Esimita in my own city. I live here, I'm a black woman. Caribbean woman, Afro Latina, Indo Caribbean, t late whatever label you wanna put. Put them all together because they're all valid. I turn on the news, open my phone when I do decide to scroll, and I feel accosted. And that's not hyperbole. What I feel is a somatic response to a media environment doesn't wasn't designed for my frequency. And I'm saying this because many like me face what I call dual gaslighting environments, especially here. Where here in the province to which I live, they scream up and down. There is absolutely no racism. But and also the language that you speak makes you different. So I need you to speak mine and assimilate immediately and don't ask me any questions. And in order to do that, I'm gonna take away everything that makes you you so that you have nothing of you left and you can only embrace what I am. This is what is happening here. Vive la Quebec live. Wow. And I'm gonna come out on my neck and say it with Say it with my full chest. Quebec is built on immigrants. Okay? Quebec is built on immigrants. The French were sent here on boats. So if you if you've left where you're from and you come to another place, I'm an anthropologist, just want to point that out for the world. you leave where you're from. You're put on a boat and you're sent to another place, from what I understand unwillingly. You land in that other place where there are already people here, and you decide to stay here, you have immigrated here. So I can easily say Quebec is built on immigrants, you too, as well, French person. Now Montreal is one of the most multicultural cities on the planet. And would it it not surprise you to know that we all arrived here in some way, shape, or form? The language laws that are really being held up by notwithstanding clauses, we're trying to unravel that. The religious symbol bands, the specific flavor of xenophobia that wears a progressive mask, that is asamita at the provincial level. The defended identity, the founding story that says we are this, and if you challenge this, you challenge our entire existence. The same pattern as the founding wound. That I wrote about extensively in my articles for the corporate junkies on LinkedIn, as any organization. This is the origin myth running the operating system. And we can see the parallels what is happening. The US is not accidental. It is the clacia at different scales. The misogyny from the South in cell movements and whatnot reaching Montreal. It's not the first time. We had December seventh here. We had the polytechnic. the polytechnique massacre. We had that here. So there's been misogyny here in Quebec for a long time. We just had a young man that drove from Alberta all the way to Montreal with a a mishmash. I'm not, I don't even know what that. Manifesto was, but decided to go to Cotinege, one of the most multicultural spots in Montreal, and decide to shoot up the place. As I said before, Quebec has language laws, we have religious bands here. And we have the racism that no one names because Quebec's founding story says we're a tolerant society built by and for the French language. I said that earlier. And it's with that thought that I was about to talk about NVIDIA, but I'll jump back over here that folks thought it was okay to protest in a town called Shewinigan with a sign that says, I remember a white Quebec. What the fuck? Cause there never was one. I just want to point that out there. And then the politicians that very subtly encourage this, right, swear up and down that Quebec has no racism. Let's just rewind a little bit to the incident in Joliet two or three years ago where the young woman lost her life on camera. These folks, our politicians that we vote in, swear up and down that Quebec has no racism. Just the disappearance of French is cause for alarm. And then I look at everything and I'm like, yo, my parents immigrated here. I was I was more in Courtenay, you know. I was more in St. Mary's. And I'm supposed to be now at 47, my big age, okay with this as a taxpayer. We have police officers here, folks, who Are still in the force. I think they're in non-public facing roles who worked in another area of Montreal Montreal, Montreal North, another super multicultural area, and a symbol of where our Haitian brothers and sisters really developed that part of the city, right? So the police officer would go out and just like stop and search arrests for no reason other than profiling. And those they arrested, they cut the locks of black men in like 2024, 2025, 2026, and kept them as trophies in 2026. And that's not racism, according to our current premier, Christian Frauchette. She says it's a group sickle that got together to do that. I ask, what the fuck is a group cycle? Like, what the fu like what what is going on? And When we talk about cleishas, Avidia is the refusal to see the full picture. So nobody wants to see the full picture of any of this. That's what's going on right now. And asamita, the identity that collapses when it's challenged. So now we have, I don't want to see this, and our my whole identity is built on this and it's collapsing because I'm being challenged. And then we have dervasia, which is the walls we build to keep out whatever threatens our groove, our wall. Different flags, same nervous system. We could talk about terrorists, we could talk about the war in Iran, we could talk about global toxicity, we can talk about the erosion of community, the ways in which we've divided ourselves into camps that cannot hear each other. Individual that said what is really heavy right now is that we all agreed watching children dying in Gaza is okay because it's not happening here, and it became not okay, more not okay, when IC started to do the things it did. And this is a kitchen table, y'all. I am being very straight about what things are not taking aside. As I said, this is Clacia's operating in areas global scales, cultural scales, that you can actually be like, shit, that's what the fuck that is. my God, this this word she's been saying then she just gave it a colors on a page for me to be able to see. That's what that is. shit. At least I hope. I really, I really hope. And now I'm gonna run a bit of a counter frequency because I've just been really heavy for about 25 minutes. after doing a culture vulture episode, I need to run a counter frequency. I need to run an anti resistance on these resistances that are coming up, right? And here's what's holding my room together, like music. You guys know me as DJ Series Black. You know, the music, my June top artist list on Deezer tells the whole story. Whatever you've been listening to, I've been listening to, and now some of you are gonna fall on your face I've been listening to Glorilla. According to my artist spot artist Spotify, artist profile, I gave her 36 minutes. She's full size presence, refusing to apologize for the space that she takes up. Yes, she is complicated. That is the antidote to every passive blocker I've ever mapped. She is the whole ask as a person, right? I'm listening to TGIF. That's one that really gets me going. I'm actually gonna give you guys a whole playlist, but now you know TGIF is one of the ones that really gets me going and gets my dog going as well. Meg D. Stallion. I'm a big Meg D stallion fan, believe it or not. 25 minutes, 25 whole minutes, same energy, different frequency. Meg has been through the public trial, the betrayal, misogyny, the industry's trying to shrink her, and she's still here, still full volume. Abinesha tried to run and she ran, she outran it. She was like, yo, later, can't run and face up to these knees. Kid Cootie gave 24 minutes. Now he makes music about depression and anxiety and the inside of a mind that does not work the way the world says it should. This is the Kalia framework set to beat. He has been naming the patterns his whole career without using a word of Sanskrit. Okay, kid cootie, just go there. Do that. who else is on there? The Robert Glasper experiment. You know, we got about 29 minutes. And those minutes are satva. Clarity through complexity. Jazz that thinks. Music that makes the room smarter just by being in it. Listen to Bad Bunny, I've been listening to Rihanna. I've listened to Little Ways Hustler Music was playing while I wrote these show notes for the Culture Vulture episode today. My playlist is the counter frequency. I got Joe Scott in there. I got Tara Whack in there. this is the counter frequency to everything. When the news is Dirvesha and the culture is Raga and the government is Asmita, the music needs to be what holds the And here I mean it's super personal because I get personal, but I I often keep my husband off the podcast table. But I want to tell you about my husband. My husband is 6'4. My husband is Quebec. He is French. My husband's a metalhead. Tool, Pussifier, Perfect Circle, that frequency, all the way. My husband's a Scorpio, who will tell you to your face. That he does not like people. And he married a Trinidadian woman who talks about feelings for a living. This is its own client diagnostic right here. Okay? So and it's amazing. Like amazing. It's I mean, this is it's absurd and beautiful in its pairing. Now, my husband, he watches something called Music for Change. music for change. Again, the link will be in the show notes. And musicians from all over the world, strangers, unknown artists from different countries, gather to play famous songs. And usually one of the people that was involved in the song they're being played, a band member of the band themselves, are involved. Now I don't know the story behind it, but I don't think these people have ever met. They do not speak the same language. They're also in different places when they're playing. So if they I when you see them, you know, you they just have a little inner thing, and they're in there. home country or wherever they happen to be, and they sit down and they play. And the music is the bridge. There's no performance, there's no hamster wheel. Strangers coming together, building something together because the building is the fucking point. Right? And that is what I talked about again, the and protocol at a global scale. What's the AND protocol? Both and community as practice, not content. It is the opposite of everything I just named in the Raga section. No grip, no chase, people showing up to make something with absolutely no attachment to what it becomes. We're just gonna we're just gonna do this. We're just gonna picnic to picnic. We're just gonna jam to jam. We're just gonna do whatever to do whatever because whatever, whatever. Everything, what is it, everything, everywhere all at once? That's basically that. Now my husband runs interference in our house. He is the person who sits with the clacias. Not to name them. He would never ever use that word. To find the wisdom inside of them. He watches the news, he scrolls, you know, from time to time. He gets angry, he gets perturbed when he hears me talk about things that I experience with this face in this incarnation in this body. And then he watches music for change and remembers why he still believes the world can be different. He understands it's completely fat, and he still believes that we can liberate ourselves. He holds both truths at the same time simultaneously. My six foot four metalhead Scorpio who hates people and still believes that is the practice. Not the meditation, not the framework, it's the willingness to hold anger and belief, hope, love, whatever you call it, in the same body without one canceling the other. That's the dude that I'm journeying with. Everything all at once all the time. Now the playlist is gonna be on Substack after this episode later on. Go and find the frequency. I'll tell you what I'm listening to. You tell me what's holding your room. So here we are, we're coming down to the end of our shows this week, and this was the practice of seeing. The World Cup, my son's kind spots, the hamster wheel, Montreal, the music that holds the room when the rest of it is falling all the way apart. That is what had my attention in 2026. Well, we're seven months in, guys. We've got the bar belt. I'm not an astrologer, but the bowl happening. People are talking about it. We've got the full moon on Wednesday. We have the nodes changing place today, Sunday, July 26th. So we got to make our lunar node intentions. what else do we have? We gotta breathe this week. We have Jupiter going into the sun this week. This is what I've been looking at in July. Not trending topics, the things that live in my body, the things I talk about at dinner, the things my twelve year old sees that most adults have trained themselves not to. The classias are not an abstract framework. They're an operating system of culture, of the country, of the city, of your kitchen table, of your soup. You do not have to do Anything about what I just named. The first step is knowing that it is that that is what that is. Or is what it is. Next week I'll be back with the ragged diagnostic, four questions about the grip. Now it's your turn. This has been the Empathy Lab, the Kitchen Table Sessions. I'm Tatum. Stay hydrated. Be kind to each other. Stay anchored. I'll see you next week. Peace.