LEE SUNG JIN: I know that there are so many works of film and TV currently that deal with class. And I don’t know that any of us writers are wanting to tackle that theme all the time. It’s just more like so much of what we do is not really just to make a show, it’s to excavate something true about our collective consciousness. And when you’re staring into the abyss, if you’re trying to do it honestly, then yeah, class keeps coming up.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Has someone ever pissed you off? Do you have a nemesis at work? Do you fixate on revenge in a way that could potentially alienate your friends and loved ones? Because if so, today’s episode is absolutely for you.
Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I am your host, Gabe González, and today we’re talking about a dark comedy that explores an almost universal phenomenon, the sort of destructive symbiosis that develops between people who have a deep resentment toward each other. In a word, beef. We’re sitting down with Lee Sung Jin, creator, writer, and sometimes director on the Netflix series Beef, now in its second season.
Whereas the first season explored a battle between two immovable objects, played by Ali Wong and Steven Yeun, this season weaves a slightly more tangled web. It stars Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Kali Spaeny, and Charles Melton, tracing various beefs across workplaces, romantic relationships, and international borders, presenting a more existential and stylized but still equally grounded and funny entry in the series, one that dives into the inhumanity of capitalism and the conflicts that arise when rugged individuality meets stark class differences. But despite being more expansive, Beef‘s second season still channels its core theme, exploring the self-destructive potential of letting resentment consume you and channeling rage in the wrong direction.
Later this episode, we’ll also be joined by Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom, to talk about class difference under capitalism, how it inhibits collaboration, and how it fuels beef among people wronged by the very same system. So don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back to We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González, and today’s guest is an Emmy Award-winning writer, director, and producer. He’s written for some incredible shows like Undone, Dave, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. He is also the creator of the critically acclaimed Netflix series Beef, now in its second season. Please welcome to the podcast Lee Sung Jin.
LEE SUNG JIN: Hello. Thanks for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Beef season one feels very dark, but also very comedic. And, I mean, looking at your past work, it’s just some, like, really classic, great comedy. So I’m wondering how much of your past work in comedy and that sensibility do you bring and kind of bend for a series like Beef?
LEE SUNG JIN: When you start out, you’re just kind of copying and mimicking the best you can to try and, like, just get hired and fit in. And so I definitely went at that hard trying to fit in, and I think as someone who had to assimilate a lot growing up, like, I moved every three to four years. I was Korean-American in the Midwest, so pretty good at copying and mimicking.
And so I think my whole career has been this journey to shake off and shed this notion of copying other comedic tones and just trying to find what my tone is. And Beef was really the first thing that I ever wrote that felt the most “me.” And so there’s obviously influences and a lot of training that happens coming up on those comedies, but I think we’re all trying to, you know, if you’re making anything, just trying to, like, get to a place where you feel comfortable in your own skin and just, you know, doing what you find funny or dramatic or thrilling.
Beef was a result of that for me. At least season one was, I just felt like I wasn’t seeing anything on TV that felt, like, representative of that tone and certainly of those faces. I was just trying to come at something from a different angle.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And there’s something just so refreshing about seeing Ali Wong and Steven Yeun just be mean. It was really– You know what I mean? ‘Cause they’re both such sweet people, and you know Ali’s got a bit of an edge to her comedy, and they’ve both done such different projects, but this felt so kind of liberatory. Like, you just really got to see them get, like, dirty and messy and mean, and there’s a very twisted fun in watching them kind of unravel alongside each other.
LEE SUNG JIN: Yeah, I think that’s what’s so great about those two is, you know, probably in the wrong hands, those characters may not have been as relatable because they’re always finding the humanity underneath the sort of questionable decisions. You’re always sensing that, “Okay, well, this person’s spiraling and spinning out,” but we all have a pretty good radar when it comes to, like, picking up the general essence of somebody, and I think Ali and Steven really bring that humanity into those characters.
And in season two, I was kinda trying to, like, take that and then build on it, where it’s not two perspective characters, it’s two perspective couples, and so, I mean, arguably three, which does complicate some of the story math, but ultimately, I think what we’re trying to say with season two is very different than season one.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: If you were to describe each of these seasons maybe using one adjective, what is the core descriptor that differentiates both of them?
LEE SUNG JIN: I’d say for season one, the word would be lonely. You know, it’s really about two people who don’t want to participate in life because of all the stuff that happens. Eventually, hopefully get a glimpse that maybe they want to participate by the end. I guess that’s open to interpretation with that final shot. But Season 2 then I’d say one word would be samsara, the Buddhist and Hindu concept of this kind of eternal spiritual trap that we’re all in of repeating the same cycles of life and death and love and suffering.
And ’cause it’s really about, you know, two couples who like they do wanna participate. They found the person they want to participate in life with. But then what? You know, we live in 2026. We have to deal with the variable of class and extreme income inequality. You know, more and more the top one percent just control and own everything, and we all are here warring with each other when we should be upset at the billionaires, and then we just keep doing this. We just keep doing these repeated cycles.
And so really Season 2 starts as what you think is just a beef between these two couples, but it’s ultimately trying to shine a light on, well, with each generation, with each couple, we face the same hurdles as we go from our twenties to thirties to forties.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: How was it that for your sophomore album you landed on these two aggressively ambitious couples at odds with each other, right? Not setting their sights on the system itself, but on trying to kind of outplay each other.
LEE SUNG JIN: You know, at first we weren’t even thinking about writing a show about class. You know, I can’t seem to write unless the universe shows me what to write about. Season 1 was based on a real-life road rage incident that I got into, very loosely based. But Season 2 was based on a neighborhood spat that I overheard. And, you know, the spat itself wasn’t that interesting. It was just more when I was retelling the story that I realized that there might be a show here because when I was retelling it to all my Gen Z peers, they were like aghast and asking if I had called 911 and just really, really concerned. Whereas everyone my age and older just kinda like shrugged. You know? And they were like- … I mean, who amongst us hasn’t screamed those words in that order in the privacy of your own home? So I was like, “Wait, the age gap is not that far apart.” I thought it was fascinating that elder millennial and Gen Z, who are so close, were having such different viewpoints.
And so I thought, “Okay. Well, let’s start there,” and luckily Netflix agreed. And it wasn’t until we started writing these characters in the room that, you know, inevitably when you’re trying to write something honest in 2026, you just like go right up against the variable of class. It’s so hard to avoid.
And you know, I know that there are so many Works of film and TV currently that deal with class, there’s so many. And I don’t know that, like, any of us writers are longing to tackle that theme all the time. It’s just more like so much of what we do is not really just to make a show, it’s to excavate something true about our collective consciousness.
And when you’re staring into the abyss, if you’re trying to do it honestly, then yeah, class keeps coming up. I’d love a world where we don’t have to write about class as much, like truly. Yeah. Like, you know, like leaders of our country, like please.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and you directed episode four as well, so I did wanna ask you about that experience, ’cause it’s, to me, such an explosive episode. It feels like the solidifying of the grudge when Justin kind of like dangles Ashley’s safety and livelihood and access to healthcare over her. It seems like the first really low blow, and, like, everything after that just sort of goes really bad. We actually have a clip of that argument between Ashley and Justin and how that escalates. Let’s give it a listen.
CLIP: Beef Season 2, Episode 4
Yeah, you know, Chairwoman Park really likes you, clearly. You’re not going anywhere.
And she just extended me, so I’m not going anywhere. I feel like this is a good time for us to clean the slate, right?
Yeah. Uh, okay. Uh, well, I, I guess whatever doctor you think would get me seen the fastest.
I’d go with Dr. Wellington.
Great. Mm-hmm. Awesome.
Yeah, just need you to, um, delete those backup videos.
What?
What? Come on, you’re not stupid. You kept backups. It’s okay. Just pull them up. iCloud, Dropbox, whatever. Pull them up, delete them, you get seen, everyone’s happy.
I swear to God, I, I, I don’t have backup video.
Well, you know, you’ve certainly been acting like you do, walking around the office like you run the place, and look, I’m not, I’m not even mad about it. It’s fine. It’s the right move. But seeing as that you need something from me right now, I think we take this opportunity to clean the slate.
Yeah, you keep saying that, but I, I, I don’t know what to tell you.
Ashley, I’m getting really tired, okay? I’m getting really tired of waking up every day under your tiny little thumb. You milked this for all it’s worth. There’s nothing left on this teat. You understand?
You do realize you tried to bribe me first, right? Mm. You, you intimidated me.
I intimidated you? I was being nice to you.
Do you know how startling it is to come up on someone yelling, “Claw me”? I mean, I think about it every day.
Ashley, delete the videos or I’m gonna walk away right now.
Are you seriously toying with my health right now?
You’re toying with your health right now.
I don’t need your fucking help, you fucking boomer.
Enjoy the wait.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: How do you convey that sense of specificity you wanna bring, and why was that the setting for that kind of big turning point in the series?
LEE SUNG JIN: Well, one, in terms of the turning point, I think a lot about when I’m structuring a season with the writers, I’ve sort of come up with this rise/fall method. And I think season one, when you have this really aggressive, overt beef that starts it, then the rises and falls start to kind of domino a certain way. And so we wanted to do the inverse with this very passive witnessing of something, which is like almost the antithesis of a road rage, you know? You’re like, once you do that, then the shapes start to almost invert, and so then the beef actually kinda starts getting slow-boiled, and then gets heightened more towards the midpoint.
So, you know, we knew shape-wise that would be the case, but then, you know, honestly, we were kinda stuck revisiting, like, the first three episodes a lot, and then it wasn’t until this real-life hospital incident happened that it kind of unlocked everything. I tend to, whenever I’m going through something in life, I just have my Notes app open and I write down everything, and this was no different.
Even, like, the level of condescension in the doctor’s voice when she, like, tells Ashley that she’s perfectly healthy, you know, that’s something that happened in real life, and I– You really have to dial that in, ’cause if it’s too condescending, then you’re like, “Wait, that doctor’s such a dick.” Like, that’s not how doctors are.
But then if not condescending enough, then there’s not enough of a shame that washes over Ashley. And so, you know, just dialing that in, it’s so much easier if you’ve experienced it firsthand to be able to, like, put everything where it’s at. And then I think also that episode is a more surreal episode because it all happens in a hospital, and we have more time to sit with one character and experience their subjectivity of an experience.
And so I knew that James Laxton, our DP, our brilliant DP, who shot Moonlight and often works with Barry Jenkins, he and I really wanted to use episode four as a way to break up our normal Beef visual language and start to play around with some of the surrealism and the horror elements. And so Beef is usually so perspective-driven, the camera tends to stay close to our actors. But in episode four is when you start to feel like, wait, they’re staying in these wides instead of being with the character, and their lenses are a little wider. And so it kinda creates this kinda ominous dread that there is almost, like, a horrific hand of God leading these characters to their demise.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I am so glad you said that because I had watched the series when it originally came out, and then I re-watched episode four for this interview, and I wrote down in my notes, “Feels like Beetlejuice purgatory?” With a question mark after it.
LEE SUNG JIN: That’s amazing. I love that.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So I’m, like, really glad I was on the right track. I was like, “Do I ask about that? Am I making an assumption?” But it makes so much sense, right? It does feel like one of the darkest moments for Ashley’s character, but also just in general, the vibe is creepy. It does feel a bit like a kind of emotional purgatory for an episode.
LEE SUNG JIN: It really is, and I think that’s how often these experiences feel when you’re going through them in real life, you know? It’s been interesting watching the comments roll into that episode because, you know, I’m an avid Reddit user and certainly need to stop ’cause it’s not good for my mental health. But I’d see comments from, like, France or Germany being like, “There’s no way a hospital would be like this. This is absurd.”
And then there’s, like, hundreds of American commenters being like “Nope, I am in a hospital as I type this, and this is highly accurate.” And yeah, I think when I was going through that, it does feel like a true Kafkaesque nightmare. You’re like, “This can’t be real. There’s no way out of this. There’s nobody that’s willing to help.” And, you know, you get frustrated with the people working there, but then you realize, wait, it’s not their fault. It’s not the doctor’s fault. They’re all, like, overworked and understaffed, and insurance companies have just ruined the healthcare system. And so everyone feels underwater on both sides, patients and hospital staff.
And so then there is this dreadful, ugly feeling. Like you’re just trapped in, like you said, Beetlejuice purgatory. You know? That’s such a funny way to put it, and I, I mean, that was one of my favorite movies growing up.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I do wanna kind of talk about their relationships as couples, like their views of each other as couples, right? So we have Josh and Lindsay, and we have Austin and Ashley, who I think really see each other as antagonists instead of potential allies for most of the series, despite both of them maybe, like, essentially being under the thumb of, who’s a character we get to know a bit better. For you, what is stopping them from finding solidarity with each other before it’s too late? Like, what is inhibiting that?
LEE SUNG JIN: That’s a great question. I think that our brains love to create antagonists, you know? And I feel like unless you do a lot of therapy and practice a lot of self-awareness, it’s easy to, like, get stuck with your blinders on and just not understand that other generations are just kinda doing what you used to do, or vice versa.
Like, I remember being on staff in my 20s, and if a showrunner made us stay till, like, you know, 7:04 PM, I’d be like, “I can’t believe we’re here past 7:00. I bet that showrunner hates his family. I wonder what’s going on in his life.” Just so judgmental, you know? And here I am, 44, routinely staying at work till, like, you know, 11:30 PM.
And it’s just like… And then if I don’t practice self-awareness, then I’m like, you know, “How come all these younger writers don’t wanna, like, stay that… You know, they just wanna leave. They just wanna get out of here.” And it’s, you’re like, “Oh, wait, no. Like, we’re just stuck in our such, like, subjective, selfish blinders.”
And I think that’s really ultimately what we were trying to show through the show of the season, and especially the time jump at the end, is When you have to actually walk the walk and you get older and you’re faced with the same variables that the previous generation did, I think that’s when you realize, oh, that’s why we all are doing that, you know?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When your life is family, job, family, job, family, job, you wanna complain about both of those things to somebody.
LEE SUNG JIN: A hundred percent. Esther Perel talks about this both on her podcast and I think in Mating in Captivity, where she talks about the paradox of modern monogamy, which is that suddenly this one person has to embody all these contradictions.
Like, they have to be your mysterious lover, but also, like, your best friend and safe space. Yeah. Yeah. And all the parts of your psyche that have these needs, this one human being suddenly has to fulfill, ’cause like you said, in the climate of late-stage capitalism, your life does become, like, job, home, job, home.
You really start to run out of just leisure time. And back in the day, Esther Perel talks about how we used to live in these, like, close-knit villages, and we raised children together. You know? You needed someone to look after your kid, we were true neighbors, and we would, like, help each other. And suddenly, that lifted some of the time.
And then also, you were so tight-knit with your community that your psychological needs were being fulfilled by the village. So suddenly, the pressure wasn’t on just, like, this one human being. You know? For us, when we were starting to talk about, okay, well, we knew that the season was gonna be about love and marriage in these two couples.
It’s not really either couple’s fault that they are the way they are. It’s like, how can any relationship really survive in these times? It is extremely, extremely difficult, and I do think that in order to do it, you need therapy, you need couples therapy, you need time to yourself. Like, who gets that? The ultra wealthy.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I do wanna talk about the third couple that you alluded to at the beginning and sort of our way into that. To me, Chairman Park is one of the most compelling and wildest characters on season two. She seems like the villain throughout the first part, but as we get to know her and her husband, we realize there’s a lot more going on with her story that complicates how we kinda categorize her. Can you talk to us about shaping this character?
LEE SUNG JIN: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, one, we had the luxury of having the great YJ, Youn Yuh-jung, you know, the queen of Korea playing Chairwoman Park. And what I love about her is that she plays things so subtly, and again, finds that third dimension of humanity that even in a billionaire character that is, like, truly the villain, like, you do find yourself empathizing for her, or at least seeing her in a different way than we see Bezos or Musk or any of the male billionaires. And that’s something also kinda ripped from the headlines.
Between seasons, I had the fortune of directing a music video for RM, one of the guys in BTS. And I hadn’t been back to Korea in a while. I was born there and went to elementary school there, but I certainly had never been exposed to high society in Korea before. And it was really interesting to experience because it just felt so much more tempting than, like, American conglomerates. Like, here if Jeff Bezos took me out to dinner, I’d have my guard up, you know? I’d be like, “I’m scared a little bit.” And then in Korea, I was being wined and dined in, like, the halls of these corporations, and you just feel so, like, at ease.
There are, like, Chairwoman Parks and Chairman Parks, those type of personalities, where you’re just like, “Oh,” like, “they’re human,” and like, “It’s cool that they have all this money.” Like, “They’re just being nice,” you know? But really, at the end of the day, all billionaires have way too much power, and so it’s the same thing as American conglomerates, but just, like, packaged a little bit differently. And so I knew experiencing that, I had, again, written it in my Notes app, of like, “I don’t know how to get there, but I know that this has to be a part of season two.”
GABE GONZÁLEZ: And YJ’s final monologue as Chairwoman Park is so great. It feels very much like a commentary on capitalism and the cost of pursuing wealth and power maybe. I’m curious, in your mind, is she speaking strictly for herself, or did that monologue also kind of encapsulate the series’ worldview?
LEE SUNG JIN: I think certainly her monologue that she gives prior to the end when she’s captured everybody, the one where she talks about how love exists in the system of capitalism and that capitalism ultimately is an extension of nature because nature is a system of the self, like that I think is very much a Chairwoman Park ideology.
CLIP: Beef Season 2, Episode 8
My second husband always said love is putting other person over yourself. But as soon as you’re born, you cry for mommy’s milk. You do not care about her. You only care about yourself. Maybe you put others over self a few times, but only when it is easy. The universe is not designed for this. Thank God we survived billions of years from tiny cell to bacteria to monkey because we only care about self. That is why capitalism works. It is a system of nature, system of the self. Love lives in this system. All relationships exist in this system. They are all the same. Another way to serve the self. That is all I was to Dr. Kim, and that is all he was to me.
LEE SUNG JIN: Whether you agree with that or not, of course, a billionaire would think like that. But then I think her monologue in the time jump, that one feels a little bit more kinda tail between her legs and more regretful and lamenting that she thought she had it all figured out, but even with all the money and power in the world, here she is, just like her mother, regretful, laying at the grave of her first husband, who she’s missed this whole season because the second husband ended up just being a pain. And so I think her final monologue is more indicative of the theme of the season of, hey, like, the seasons of life are coming for you no matter what. How are you gonna grapple with that?
And I think that’s really the point of all this. A lot of Hindu and Buddhist texts describe reality as this curriculum. You go through this curriculum of samsara, and the only way out is through enlightenment, but I wonder if enlightenment is only achieved in kind of the acceptance of samsara.
And, you know, we had a lot of debates about the end shot because some of my collaborators found the ending, like, very disturbing and depressing, you know? And they thought the mix should be a little bit, like, darker. But for me, I think where I’m currently at– Because I think season one is a reflection of, like, when I start thinking about the cycles we’re trapped in, it can be really depressing.
And I’ve, you know, struggled with mental health at various points of my life, and I’ve been Danny before. It is really sad when you think about just why is the world the way it is. Like, why would a god make it like this? And I think season two is sort of a graduation for me of, like, I used to feel like that in my twenties and thirties, and now in my forties when I think about the cycles, I’m just like: Look, these are the parameters we’ve been given, and the only way through is just to accept it, you know?
Like Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, it’s all about, like, the people in Holocaust who somehow were able to have some sense of meaning and happiness while in concentration camps, and it’s like, yeah, we’re stuck here. And so you almost have to accept it as the first step in hopes of trying to get out of it or survive it at all.
And so that’s why, for me, with the final shot, I try to keep it almost like a lift, you know? Which I know is probably a little strange given the ending, but at least for me, that’s where I’m at currently.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I loved it. I actually rewound it ’cause tonally it felt like such an interesting contrast. You’ve got a really contemporary song and an image that evokes something so classic and spiritual, but tonally it did feel, it was like wistful but uplifting. So much so that I was like, I wanna watch that top shot again.
Lee Sung Jin, thank you for coming by We Disrupt This Broadcast to talk about Beef. We’re really so thankful you did, and I had such a great time diving back into the series while talking about it with you.
LEE SUNG JIN: Thanks so much for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thanks again to Lee Sung Jin for joining us. One thing that’s pretty clear after our conversation is that this season is all about class, the desperation and shame financial struggles can bring, the resentment people feel when they work harder for less pay, the rat race we see our characters buy into before it devours them and spits them out when they’re no longer offering a worthwhile return on interest.
But in a way, Beef‘s second season is also about contracts, and I know that doesn’t sound very sexy, but it’s the best way I can describe it, so hear me out. It’s about the contracts we have signed with society, with our employers, with our romantic partners, and what happens when we feel the other party has violated the terms of that agreement.
You’re not where you thought you’d be right now. You didn’t get the promotion you deserve. Your partner doesn’t want to be around you. It makes you wonder if signing the contract was worth it to begin with. But because it’s what everyone else is doing, you’ve got to do it, too. In a way, Lee Sung Jin’s Beef is tapping into something we are all feeling, a lack of connectivity, of purpose, of dignity in our lives.
It follows characters who have been pushed to the brink by that feeling, and through watching their downfall or their fate of repeating the same mistakes their predecessors made, Beef‘s second season becomes a sort of call to action, urging us to break the cycles that harm us, the things that we’ve created that rob us of our humanity, while acknowledging the inevitable and sometimes cruel cycle of our lifespans.
So stick around. When we return, Jeff Jones talks to journalist and author Grace Blakeley about the economic systems that keep us in constant conflict with each other.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Next up, we’ve got author Grace Blakeley in conversation with We Disrupt This Broadcast executive producer and executive director of the Peabody Awards, Jeffrey Jones.
JEFFREY JONES: It is my delight to welcome today, author and public intellectual Grace Blakeley, most recently the author of Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom, available at Simon & Schuster, so you should find it at your local bookstore. Grace, so good to have you. Thank you for being here.
GRACE BLAKELEY: Thanks for having me. Great to be here.
JEFFREY JONES: So let’s kick off. Please give our listeners a brief synopsis of your book’s focus and thesis.
GRACE BLAKELEY: So my book really digs into this argument that capitalism is this nice democratic free market system where you have lots of little small businesses and individuals competing with each other in free markets.
But the argument I make in Vulture Capitalism is that we live under capitalism, but capitalism is not a free market system. And the reason for that is that all actually existing capitalist societies are characterized by significant concentrations of both economic and political power that really mean that that kind of idea of the free market doesn’t work in practice.
So if you look, for example, at big, powerful corporations that organize so much of our production, that determine what innovations we see, that determine who gets jobs and how much they’re paid, the decisions made by the heads of those corporations are not subject to the market mechanism. You know, at the moment, it’s all being channeled into AI, into creating these LLMs and applying them in different ways.
That means they’re making decisions about how our energy resources are being used, how people’s labor is being used, and very little of that is subject to genuine market pressure because none of these market structures are subject to proper competition. And then you add in the close links between those big businesses and the state, the government, where you’ve got this revolving door and you’ve got money moving between both sides, and you realize that actually that undermines the functioning of democracy and then in turn, the government undermines the, the functioning of the free market by dishing out favors to the businesses that it prefers.
JEFFREY JONES: You cannot divorce conversations of the market from what’s happening politically. And I came of age in the Reagan-Thatcher era, and most of my lifetime was structured by this neoliberalism. Would you kind of define neoliberalism for our listeners if you could?
GRACE BLAKELEY: So I have a slightly different view on neoliberalism than the one you may have heard before. In Vulture Capitalism, I argue that neoliberalism was basically about sucking power out of the hands of ordinary people and centralizing it at the top. Neoliberalism was about crushing people power. It was about taking all the institutions and spaces in which people had figured out how to work together, how to cooperate, how to really fight back against the elites that were screwing them over, and just destroying them, destroying the labor movement, destroying cooperatives.
So now we’re in this situation where we’re told life is like a market. You have to compete to survive. Don’t cooperate. That’s for losers. Push each other out of the way to get to the top, except the top is closed off because it’s just corporate monopolies, it’s financial institutions, it’s politicians in the pockets of those big businesses.
JEFFREY JONES: And what you’re describing is a mythology and a narrative that has, especially in the United States, been so strong, and I think we’re seeing that mythology and narrative break down. Do you think that’s because there’s just such a vulgarity or overtness to the billionaire and now trillionaire class, and awareness of such gross inequality that they’re just so flagrant about it now?
GRACE BLAKELEY: What I think has happened is that for a while after the 1980s, it was possible for politicians and the businesses and corporations that they were working with to portray what they were doing as in everyone’s best interests. Why? Because we had massive economic growth. You could buy the idea that all of these changes that have been brought in the 1980s had worked, that we were more free, that we did have a more prosperous economy.
Of course, it was all based on this bubble. It collapsed in 2008, and ever since then, this neoliberal lie, this narrative has been on life support. We saw after 2008, you know, the rise of the Occupy movement. The banks got bailed out. We got sold out. Interestingly, during the kind of 2010s, you saw democratic socialist movements that were able to mobilize that anger and to really push for some big challenges to that neoliberal model.
You know, you had like Bernie Sanders in the US, Corbyn here, Podemos, Syriza all over the Western world, these new leaders saying, “We want to end neoliberalism.” But a whole host of things have happened over the last almost 10 years now that have made people lose faith even more than they already had in the promise of collective politics and the promise of politics rooted in cooperation and collective power.
And what we have instead is the rise of fascism, which a friend of mine summarized very neatly as the worship of power for power’s sake.
JEFFREY JONES: Well, that’s so nicely put, and it directs us to the popular imagination, which is really why we’re having this conversation today with you. So, you know, the second season of Beef, we see two couples who work at a country club. One is working class, the other is in the managerial class, and they basically go to war with each other, all while the kind of billionaire owner of the club gets away unscathed.
So my question for you, you know, the UK and US are different, and I want to talk about that in a second, but is it important for popular culture, television shows in the US like Beef or White Lotus or a film like Beatrice at Dinner with John Lithgow and Salma Hayek in 2017, is it important for popular culture to explore class conflict and income inequality?
GRACE BLAKELEY: I think it is, but with one big caveat, which is that if you are just exploring class conflict, you are holding a mirror up to society, but you’re not convincing anyone that things could be different. Because the reason that these films do so well, you know, White Lotus, Parasite, Beef, et cetera, is that people recognize something that they know intuitively, which is that the powerful are screwing them over and, you know, they’re living in a society which is basically kind of broken on so many different measures.
The people I speak to, from the left to the far right, anyone except for people in the kind of liberal bubble, and by liberal I mean the European sense of liberal, which kind of means centrist in US terms, these people who have positions of power within the political and economic system. Everyone except for those guys knows the system is broken.
They know it’s rigged. That’s what Donald Trump voters and Bernie Sanders voters will agree on. What they don’t agree on is how we challenge those at the top. Now, a lot of people would see a show like that and just be like, “Right, well, we need Trump to just go in and pick the good billionaires and support them and take on the ones that are screwing over working people,” which is kind of the message that Trump went in with during the elections.
Now, I would argue that the alternative to that is not just, like, different policies, different approaches, you know, not having a trade war, et cetera. It’s actually giving people the power to transform society themselves. Because you can know that things are going really wrong, but if your only solution to that is to say, “I’m going to project all of my agency onto someone else and get them to try and save the world for me,” that’s not radical politics. That’s not really what socialism, in the sense that I understand it, and what progressive politics has been throughout the whole of history.
If you look at early workers who formed the labor movement, they were being screwed over by their bosses. They knew that the politicians at the time were not gonna help them. They couldn’t even vote. They were like, “What are we gonna do? We want a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work, but no one’s gonna give it to us. We have to organize. We have to form a union, and we have to demand that our wages increase in line with inflation.”
And that’s the other side of class conflict. The media is really good at showing bosses screwing over people, really good at showing politicians screwing over people. It’s not good at showing how often and how successfully people have come together to fight back, and that, I think, is the really radical other side of the story that needs to be told. But it’s not maybe as sexy.
JEFFREY JONES: Absolutely. Well, let me ask you one final question, coming back to your point about the media doing a bad job of showing the ways in which cooperation in a different world can exist. How do we build more solidarity among working classes?
GRACE BLAKELEY: It’s a big question.
JEFFREY JONES: I know, it’s a huge question.
GRACE BLAKELEY: This is actually some research I’m doing right now for my new book, which is about this issue of market ideology, what I call market ideology. So this is the idea that you can take the kind of principles of market competition and apply them to every area of society, and it’s all based on these ideas around competition, individualism, assumptions about who we are as people, basically.
And I think one of the biggest things that we need to do is figure out how we break this really deep-rooted assumption that a lot of people have that basically they’re on their own, and everyone else is out to screw them over. ‘Cause there’s no possibility of building collective power amongst people who’ve spent so much time acting like they’re in a competitive market, that they can’t even imagine what it would be like to, you know, show up to work and chat to their colleagues and say, “Hey, we’re all being a bit screwed over here. Why don’t we try and join the union?” It’s just, like, not even in their mindset ’cause they’re like, “These guys are all out to get me,” and I think this is kind of why we’re here discussing this, right? It’s like this idea that these two people would just be fighting each other instead of recognizing that they have a common enemy.
And a lot of that isn’t just showing that they’re being screwed over. It’s also showing the ways in which humanity has a big capacity for cooperation and the ways in which we have been convinced that that isn’t true, that we’ve been lied to, basically, that the assumptions and ideas that most of us hold about human nature exist to benefit those at the top.
So for me, one of the things I’m trying to do now is just showing, “Hey, these are the times that we figured out how to cooperate, historically and today.” So I’m looking at examples in the cooperative movement. I’m looking at cooperative energy, cooperative housing. I’m looking at how people have come together in the trade union movement, both historically and today, to, yeah, form these like collectives you can take on the power of, of those at the top. I’m looking at how this plays out in politics. Just like clear, stark examples of people, through their own will, not forced by anyone from the outside, coming together and forming organizations and institutions based on cooperation and solidarity rather than conflict and competition.
And yeah, I think just, like, showing those examples and demonstrating that there is this deep well of mutual care and cooperation and solidarity that we can tap into if we just work on it.
JEFFREY JONES: Well said. Well, Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism, thank you so much for being with us today. We really enjoyed it.
GRACE BLAKELEY: Thank you so much for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again to Lee Sung Jin and Grace Blakeley for joining us. Today’s episode let us view some of Beef‘s themes through two different perspectives.
First, Lee’s show, which depicts the personal experiences of people suffering under cruel and honestly inhumane systems, like healthcare in this country or exploitative workplaces. And second, we’ve got Grace’s insights, which show us a little peek behind that curtain. What are the mechanisms or institutions that benefit from keeping these systems in place? And why don’t people work together instead of buying into the zero-sum game mentality where current systems encourage?
Look, we know class conflict is approaching a boiling point in many places around the world, that the wealthiest among us grow wealthier, while the poor and working class find everyday survival a financial struggle. What Lee and Grace ask us to think about is: Who benefits when we’re fighting amongst ourselves, instead of working cooperatively to change the systems that keep us tethered to this cycle?
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Because the Peabodys are decided unanimously, every episode we’ll bring you the quote that we chose unanimously as our most disruptive moment. Behold:
LEE SUNG JIN: More and more, the top 1% just control and own everything, and we all are here warring with each other when we should be upset at the billionaires.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Join us next time for the season three finale of We Disrupt This Broadcast. We’re ending with a banger, folks. TV and Peabody Award heavy hitter Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, joins us to talk about his latest mind-bending creation, Pluribus.
VINCE GILLIGAN: If you could be nothing but happy, would that even be a healthy thing for you as an individual? You can’t have light without darkness. You have to have contrasts in life. There has to be such a thing as sadness, misery, depression for happiness to have any meaning, maybe.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. Managing producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producers Jennifer Keishin Armstrong and Bethany Hall. Researcher, Riley McLaughlin. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Drayer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.