Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb. Friends, this is a very special episode for me.

I'm going to tell you why. It really touches on a part of my life, which is my kind of punk rock coming of age.

I want to talk about the time period when I was really in this punk and post-punk scene

in Pennsylvania.

It was the mid to late 90s mostly.

It's difficult to describe that time.

Where I grew up in small town, Pennsylvania, there was so little meaning available to people.

There just wasn't much there for anyone to do. I've talked a bit about on the show before how

there were lots of Nazis and the KKK members, real ones in my town. And a lot of it was, it seemed a terrible response to the sense of

meaninglessness, that everything was kind of going nowhere, that there was no culture, and that there

was nothing to do. And of course, the organizers of the Nazis were praying on younger people

to try to get them indoctrinated into that

sense of meaning that comes with fascism. If you want a culture where I lived, you had to do something,

you had to create the culture. A lot of my friends were in local bands, and the scene that they formed was, in my mind, a kind of

antidote to this fascism and to the monolithic uniform conformity of neoliberalism that was also

rising at the time.

With punk rock, there was a real antidote to that lack of meaning and also an opposition

to Nazism, neoliberalism, fascism, and just the boringness, right?

There were clubs you could go to Scarlet O'Hara's and so forth,

but a lot of the shows that we went to were just set up by kids.

And that is something that's really beautiful,

and I want people to take in from this episode with Ted Leo,

...