INTRODUCING - Severance

[00:00:00] Don't pervert a handbook passage to me, okay? You are listening to a Howard plus Lorhounds joint covering the Apple TV sci-fi Severance. We are doing that in conjunction with the Lorhounds so if you did a search for Severance Lorhounds, you will find our Severance podcast.

[00:00:31] Steve and I are going to be doing an episode by episode rewatch and then John and David from the Lorhounds will join us every episode of season two. If you'd like to watch along with us and use this podcast as a companion, it's a fantastic

[00:00:47] show I would call it hard sci-fi. It's really funny. Some world renowned actors, Christopher Walken, John Tuturo, Ben Stiller is the show runner and you can watch that on Apple TV plus.

[00:01:01] All right, so I want to talk about Severance and I feel like you're almost the perfect person to comment on this show because this show is so deeply rooted in office life and you've spent the majority of your adult life in and around offices, right?

[00:01:27] I'm an office boy. Yeah, you're an office boy. I don't feel like a lot of that makes it into your standup material. It's almost as if you have a bifurcated life. You've got your office persona and then you've got your stage persona.

[00:01:46] Yeah, almost as if I don't have any recollection of one versus the other. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it's funny because people you work with are constantly like, oh, you must get so much material from this place.

[00:01:58] Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard you tell an office joke. Uh-uh. I look at them and I'm like, what about this environment is amusing? You just, you think it's too boring to talk about? Yeah, I'm like, what am I going to do?

[00:02:12] Dude, I'm going to just, I'm going to run. No, you can't wait to hear my next 10 minutes on pivot tables. Let's talk about the premise of the show. The premise of the show I think is an expansion or a caricature of the idea

[00:02:26] that most folks who work in an office develop something of an office persona that seems to be somewhat related to their real personality, but not necessarily. There's like this distinct difference between office Steve and domestic Steve or outside of office Steve.

[00:02:47] And so this show basically is, you know, taking it to an extreme. The show is saying, well, what if people only had memories of their office life while they were in the office and they only had memories of their outside life when they were not in the office?

[00:03:05] So complete severing of the two different halves of the personality. It's it I really took that took away from it a lot of that idea that we say, you know, companies will say, hey, this is a great place for work life balance

[00:03:21] and it's hard to divorce yourself of the two worlds. Right? Like the the idea of there to be true work life balance would be work is work. Life is life, but we do carry over right?

[00:03:33] And like it's almost impossible to not be stressed out or to be stressed out at work and not have that carryover when you get home and vice versa. So would you be attracted at all to a severance procedure if offered?

[00:03:47] No. No, like is it because of the show? Because I think that if I hadn't seen the show, I would I might think like, boy, it sure would be nice to just leave all of my work at the office and be fully present at home when I'm yeah.

[00:04:02] Well, that and that's the that's the allure, right? But there is the idea that it's like that's you're not just forgetting the work part of it. You're forgetting every other aspect of it, right?

[00:04:14] Every, you know, and so part of the reason why and that's the I, you know, and I think that's why this showed us such a good job of taking it to that extreme is that for you to be

[00:04:25] good at your job, you know, you obviously have to have a certain amount of intelligence and training and all the things that goes along with that. But there should be something about your other experiences that you've had that you can leverage, right?

[00:04:35] Like I mean, I think we see that a lot where you leverage experiences that you may have had in the workplace and you can maybe relate that to other power dynamics you may encounter outside of work. But if you don't have any recollection that that's who you are

[00:04:51] outside of work or outside of home, but it's you're you're missing something, right? So this show is a little bit of a horror, thriller, psychological sort of cautionary tale or something. But I'll be honest, if I had not seen this show,

[00:05:06] I think I would be really attracted to a severance scenario. I feel like it would just be really nice to only care about office politics in the office. That to me, that sounds highly desirable. Yeah, I guess it's but I mean. You're just not having that accountability.

[00:05:28] It's a lot of time out of your day that you don't have any recollection of right. I mean, the idea of not having work stress is one thing, but to take, you know, a third or more of your day and wipe it out. Sure. Well, and that's

[00:05:45] I think that that's what you want to do is put your job. You want to quit your job. That's what I want. You want someone to implant a chip that makes you rich. No, see, I think that would be

[00:05:58] or a chip that gets implanted, that makes you content with being homeless. If I could have that chip. Oh, baby. Yeah, I want a chip that makes me just a little less aware, just maybe a little dumber.

[00:06:17] See, I think I would have been really attracted to that idea before the show because one of the things that the show brings out when you realize how messed up it actually would be is that what you're doing is

[00:06:29] you're creating a version of yourself that can never leave the office. Right. So you are what you're doing is you're enslaving yourself. Yeah, so that and that is an interesting way to look at it, you know, because I mean, could you imagine like the in order

[00:06:46] for you to wake up every day and never going to work? A part of you has to wake up every day. Now, I never sleep because a version of you that never sleeps. Yeah, they're rested, right? So they're rested.

[00:06:58] It's like they live in the last horrible because half of the I mean, to always be rested, never have an excuse to just lay down to walk into an elevator and then turn around and go back into that. Oh, geez. I mean, it really is.

[00:07:18] It really is turning the workplace into this weird psychological rat maze. Yeah, because it's a turnstile, right? You go in and you go out back to work in and go out back to work. And so that's the thing that's interesting too about the way it's done.

[00:07:33] I mean, obviously there's something that happens when they go through the elevator that gives them the ability to know that it's a new day, right? I mean, as opposed to just go in with it, go in fine, come out with a headache

[00:07:45] because you're hungover like that's wild, right? That's a bit wild. You go in just feeling gross and then immediately feel like you're you've just showered or that you've just put on cologne or whatever it is. Are you a cologne guy? No, no, nor am I.

[00:08:02] My son's a big cologne guy. How about that age? Were you ever a cologne guy? No, I was. We all had a bottle of Dracar Noir somewhere. I mean, look, the closest I ever came to it was like my dad had a 50 year old bottle of old spice.

[00:08:22] You know, every now and again, I'd sniff it, but there's no way I'm putting that stuff on. And my dad had like cologne bottles that were like, I don't know if they actually were what the cologne came in or if they if there was

[00:08:33] such a thing as like you could buy a different bottle to put the cologne in that was like more decorative because I remember he had like it looked like a clear old timey car. And there was some sort of nondescript cologne and there was like no label on

[00:08:51] that one. Cologne bottles a lot. It would actually you would want to shape the glass bottle as something masculine, right? Like a ship or a car or something. So it looks like you're actually like taking a hammer to your head,

[00:09:04] but you're really just sprinkling it out of the. Yeah. Spout that's not. So that the whole part of that whole part of your life is gone. It's like you never that part of your life never takes a shower. That part of your life never puts on cologne.

[00:09:19] That part of your life never has a cigarette or a sip of alcohol or watches television. It never leaves the office. It owned that you're creating a creature out of your own personality that is enslaved within the office. That's the premise of the show, right? Yeah.

[00:09:39] And it creates it's like it's cloning without cloning. Sure. Yeah, there you go. And it creates a scenario where the they call these sort of personalities inies and outies. And the outies have all of the power, right? So I'm about to get into the spoilers here.

[00:09:57] OK, so go watch Severance. It's on Apple TV. It's nine episodes for the first season. Beauty of it is you can pause this podcast. Yeah, go watch it. Pick it up right where you left off and it's sort of like you or any at the office.

[00:10:14] And you know, slap on a little cologne before you come back. Yeah. Yeah. Again, if you can get the drag car.