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Talking Simpsons - Separate Vocations With Nina Matsumoto (Patreon)

Published:
2023-02-08 05:00:02
Imported:
2026-06
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We're thrilled to be joined once more by the gifted artist Nina Matsumoto as we discuss an episode all about gifted children! While Bart is told he'd make a wonderful fascist/cop, Lisa is told that she should be a homemaker and stop using her stubby fingers for jazz. This sets both on a topsy-turvy path that threatens to destroy the school. All that, plus a deep dive into the career of George Meyer, so grab your copies of MAD, Cracked, and Crazy, and listen along!

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Patrick

Wife of the pod, Nina Matsumoto (I love her artwork and I love when you have her on the show)

Christopher McBride

Did Patreon try to forbid download links again? I remember they tried that years ago and immediately reverted back to allowing downloads.

Angel Young

Thank you for talking about school trauma! I was after No Child Left Behind. I think because my school had low funding they implemented that if you don’t pass the state test in Pennsylvania you don’t graduate. So I nearly didn’t get my diploma but only got it by going through a bunch of math classes during the day to prove I knew the material. It was half of the class who nearly didn’t graduate but needless to say I was pissed.

T

My Texas school would harrass the hell out of any student who did poorly on our T.A.K.S test. Every year they would hand out practice tets a month or so in advance and if you tested below a certain percentage they would take you out of class and put you in study hall to do Taks drills, which would make your grades in your regular classes slip. When that happened they would rip you out of any extra curricular activities or clubs you were a part of and shove you back into study hall. I missed out on a one act play competition I worked very hard on because of this cycle, which led to me dropping out and getting a G.E.D.

Blake R.

another Texan here who went to school primarily during the Bush era. The TAKS test was a waste and it seemed the school years had less and less time before the teachers had to begin 'teaching to the test' to their chagrin and the students. they drilled that into your head for months that this would decide your academic career but also...get a good sleep and eat a good breakfast! My mother who claims to be a centrist but usually votes right threw a water bottle at our tv once when W Bush started talking about No Child Left Behind and yelled "it's your fault my kid hates school!"

Brian Hortin

I took one of those personality tests at my previous job. The higher up managers had taken the test before and thought it was so great that they decided everyone should take it. A couple of weeks later they had a facilitator talk to us all about the test and types of personalities and how you can use the information to work better with your coworkers. They had us break into groups and do dumb exercises. It all basically came down to this is how you manipulate people into doing what you want. It was the biggest waste of time I have ever participated in at a job. The whole time I was trying to hold back rolling my eyes. The managers and facilitator were remote, so the whole thing used Zoom. I told one of my coworkers it was a good thing I’m wearing a mask to hide how much I hate this. They said it wasn’t hiding much, lol. The training was clearly meant to teach managers how to manipulate people, but my managers were dumb enough to have everyone take the same training which kind of breaks the whole thing. I left that company not too long after when an opportunity at another company came along.

Lenny

Longtime listener, first time commenter- Nina and I have the same Myers Briggs, AND horoscope profiles!

Chris Dobson

Like the hosts, I was a good (if lazy) student, but I do have a story about getting in trouble that involved the Simpsons. I was raised Catholic where you went to Sunday School until Confirmation, and absolutely hated it. But I made friends with a "bad" kid over our shared love of the Simpsons, and somehow my 12 year old brain cracked the code that even if they assigned us homework or made us take quizzes, there really wasn't anything they could do to "fail" us, so I stopped doing anything and spent the next couple months in the back of the class quoting the Simpsons and movies we'd seen, and a couple of other kids joined in and basically stopped participating in class entirely. My teacher sent me out of class one day and made me explain why I had stopped trying and had "formed a gang" to the associate pastor at our church. Believe it or not, I quit Sunday school and never got confirmed.

Carlos Hernandez

I love all of Nina’s sweet and innocent Canadian school takes. I can’t imagine what it’s like to go to school today with the exponential amount of school shootings. Seeing images of bulletproof backpacks make me disgusted to call this country home. This episode is really resonating with me as I work in the field of sustainability and feeling a ton of disillusionment.

burro (edited)

Comment edits

2026-09-07 10:00 Is this the longest Talking Simpsons to date?
2023-02-08 22:32

Norman Benford

I got thrown out of a tenth grade geography class for pointing out to the teacher that her assertion that Margaret Thatcher was the Queen of England was wrong, and then refusing to shut up when she doubled down.

Frank Grimes

I could go on and on about college text books...I worked at my university's bookstore and the markup...ridiculous. And when our manager tried to lessen returns of USED books was a hilarious quarter.

Aaron Johnson

Nina's bucket hat/New Radicals and aspic/asspic jokes had me laughing out loud. Fantastic episode, and top tier podcast entertainment, week after week.

Gayest Episode Ever

Henry is correct in stating that The Wild One is unmemorable. But I do know one other thing about it, and that’s that it was based on the one interesting thing that ever happened in my crappy hometown, which is that some bikers got rowdy. The level of rowdy was probably staged, but it became a news story anyway, and now there is an annual biker get together in celebration of this fake news story that became a bad movie. Not one of the thousands of bikers who come to town look like a Tom of Finland anything looking for rough trade, however. This is a very specific cross section of my pet interests of Hollister, California, sucking but also iconic gay pop culture images. Thank you for your time.

SilkiePJ

Always love having Nina on an episode! It was great to know bits about Canadian education and her journey as an artist Bart's future as a cop reminded me when I was in a Senior in High School and our class was given a tour of the local sheriff's office to educate us about crime and to likely recruit some graduates. This was the same year the movie Hot Fuzz came out and when the tour was over, I asked "How much paperwork is involved in your job?" The cop giving the tour tried to dance around the topic a bit, but he admitted around 50% of the job was paperwork. That took the wind out of some of my classmates sails knowing that unglamorous aspect was part of the job. I don't imagine Bart would function well as a cop for that reason, one of many. I also must correct Henry, it was Guitar Hero 5 (not Rock Band) that used Kurt Colbain as an avatar for that game you could use to sing Mmmbop or Nickelback. Activision did this with several musicians and Courtney Love joined a lawsuit with No Doubt to sue them to make sure Kurt would only be used during Nirvana tracks.

Joe Hodgson

Teacher requirements vary from state to state. My aunt had an unfortunate go of it when her husband decided he wanted to uproot their family and move from Massachusetts to Florida in the early/mid 90s to pursue a career as a photographer. She was a teacher in MA at the time, and during her tenure the state passed a new requirement stating all teachers needed to get a Master's degree in their field. Existing teachers were grandfathered in. Well, they moved to Florida, the marriage didn't go well, but she could teach there without a Master's, but as her kids all moved back to New England she felt trapped there since she could no longer teach in MA. She's still there, my uncle is not, but at least her daughter stayed behind with her and she's at least nearing retirement age now.

John-Charles Holmes

We didn't have career aptitude tests in my school district growing up, but we certainly had the standardized tests y'all described in this episode. Out in Virginia, ours were called the Standards of Learning test, which only hit me once I was older that they were hilariously referred to commonly as the SOL's. In high school I went to governor's/art school (similar to the IB program Nina described) that due to its structure, operated separately from the requirements of the state— except for the SOLs which we were still required to do. I just remember even my teachers being frustrated that our advanced gifted classes had to still go over the SOL material as a formality even though the tests were designed be as insultingly rudimentary as possible and played a large part in determining our school's budget eligibility. If you told me that tests like these really WERE only in practice today as a tool of the #2 pencil industry, I absolutely would believe it.

Samwise

I feel obligated to point out that Bob has perpetuated the mispronunciation of "sea anemone", the M comes before the second N! Also, I had many similar interactions with teachers as a kid, luckily they usually handled it pretty gracefully, with the exception of my high school history teacher, who insisted that Japan had a population above 1 billion, and kept going on about not being able to believe they fit so many people on those little islands. When I politely suggested she might be thinking of China, she got unexpectedly upset and sent me to the principal's office, leaving me to implore the class to look it up as I was marched away

Wood Duck

As a not-a-yank I already really enjoy hearing Bob and Henry relate their life experiences to things in The Simpsons, and it's even better when Nina comes on to give the North-America-but-not-USA perspective to see what is similar and what is quite different! Also great work triggering/pandering to our generation of "gifted kids" :D

Thad Komorowski

Excellent episode of both the show and the podcast. But to respond to that last little bit re: leaving Twitter.... Got to say, I left almost two years ago to improve mental health. And peeking in now and then - I made the right choice. Miss you guys...

Jessica S

Funny thing about homework now, our district doesn’t grade it any longer. And particularly since the pandemic, for elementary grades at least, they don’t assign homework at all except month book reports maybe. I’m definitely anti-homework, but my reasoning has evolved. Basically, there’s no way to solve for the disparities that exist outside the school: is there support at each home, is the support meaningful at each home, is the support consistent at home, is the place of home itself consistent? Closer to home, the disparity is capabilities - one of our kiddos is autistic and needs support for organizational tasks, be it things or ideas (writing). It’s written in his IEP so legal the district must meets those needs with their own resources. I’m pretty sure I don’t qualify, lol. And being on the spectrum with ADHD, I really super don’t qualify. However, kid 2 will sit down and write a book report like it’s nothing, at 8. Go on, girl. Unless she can’t, and then the school can figure it out. In fairness, kid 1 does some work at home now, but he refuses to let us help lest we tell him it’s not good enough. Like I’m dying to dip my toe in that shark tank. Lol. So for now, our home rule is if you can get started on your home, sustain the effort to continue and finish it, have fun. We will answer questions of course! But any further help than that and a) they’re too young to manage it or b) their executive functioning skills are lagging. Wouldn’t it be easier to find a way to live without it? A mom can dream. :)

YancySr

You know what I’ve always been curious about. How in the USA they call that thing where you twist the arm an “Indian burn” but here in the Uk we call it a “Chinese Burn”. Like is it purely coincidence they both have vaguely racist names, or did one come before the other. & then one day, one country decided to change the race of the burn.? Like how does that happening. Maybe originally they called it an Irish burn, but then Indian and chinese immigrants became more common? Who knows

Manic Rainbow

What a great episode! I’d love to give a non gifted child’s perspective on this episode! No offense to you gifted folks(or gifties as I call you). As a kid who had learning disorders, I shudder when ever J. Loren Pryor speaks. He is the perfect encapsulation of the incredibly passive aggressive, calm voiced councilors and analysts I would have to work with all the way from kindergarten to high school. When Pryor says he saw Bart being a drifter, it honestly wasn’t far off from what those sorts of people made us feel was our destiny. Episodes like this, Bart the genius, and Bart gets an F ring so true to me. When you treat kids as if they are stupid and have no future, what else do you expect them to do but stop caring? I know Lisa’s situation in this episode is different than mine, but I really do love seeing her be bad as a reaction to being put in a particular box. Watching the Simpsons as a child taught me to challenge the intellectual power structure in schools. Great episode, and it’s always a pleasure to hear the brilliant and talented Nina on the pod.

Aaron Alcott

Have taken the Briggs Meyers test. It's just corporate astrology

Spyda K

The talk about job shadowing reminded me of the one time I shadowed someone for a “take your kid to work day” thing. I wound up going with a family friend (who as an adult, I realize meant “guy my parents sold weed to”) who worked at the local FOX station. It was neat to see all of the electronics in the control room, but ultimately was a pretty boring and uneventful day. The thing I remember most is watching a Simpsons episode from the syndication rack on a little monitor in the corner, on what I assume was a Beta tape. The episode was “The Joy of Sects”. The FOX guy pointed out how the blob monster was a reference to The Prisoner, which I did not know about at the time. Keep up the good work -Alex “Thundarr” McG

Dylan (batmanboy11) Freitag

In Ottawa, Ontario, we didn't have these career aptitude tests like I would always see on TV (Buffy has an episode about them where, if memory serves, she is ALSO told she could be a cop), but we DID have a "take your kid to work day" in 9th grade. I had already been to work with my parents a bunch as a kid - with two working parents, it was an easy way for them to still look after me (the youngest) on a day where school was out but they may not yet have been their annual vacation time and my older siblings were busy. So going in with my dad on that day in grade 9 was basically just an excuse for me to not have to ride the bus or sit through boring classes for one day, while mostly just reading comics and entertaining myself at an extra seat in my dad's work area.

crystalhearts

I was just picking up my phone to comment that the Pokemon Go death tracker has a few honorary negative deaths (including an overdose one of my friends came across while playing and reversed with narcan) when I got caught way off guard by my sister kathleen being referenced and then me being greeted! hi!