How Long Gone · Chris Black & Jason Stewart / Talkhouse

921. - Chris & Jason

March 23, 2026·1 hr 7 min·6 clips
Chris Black proposes a 'founder asylum' to publicly shame startup founders in a playful, absurd twist.
Sunday in Manhattan sounds a little bored. The opener takes gloomy-enough weather and packed basketball courts, then turns them into a Tribeca riff that slides straight into fake prescription warnings. Nothing stays put for long. "Sky Rizzy" is a medication, a pop act, and someone supposedly met at a Malibu camp, depending on where the bit needs to go. Chris and Jason move by escalation. Every proper noun gets handled like a loose wire until it throws off another reference. Then the enemy becomes language itself. The argument lands on "shop," which Chris hears less as ordinary speech than as agency-adjacent cosplay. TJ helps the case. Once he agrees, Chris can pin the word to agencies, copywriters, VC, private equity, and firms without sounding completely alone in the grievance. Jason keeps feeding the premise. Soon one word has turned into a whole class of people explaining their master plan and tagging every sentence with "right." Chris knows he is not fully outside the blast radius, which is why the rant works. He would rather sound awkward than borrow a phrase that smells like professional shorthand. The bit is small, petty, and weirdly exact. Casual listeners get a language feud. Regulars get two hosts building an entire operating system out of irritation. The close keeps the ad slippery. Magna's blue ice flavor gets sold, mocked, nudged toward apple, and drained of any noble mission. Brand awareness lives, barely. That is the mode: names, neighborhoods, products, and pet peeves flying fast enough to feel social, not structured.

As heard by us

A fast, funny riff on status language, industry slang, and the social meaning hiding inside ordinary words.

How Long Gone turns a loose Sunday check-in into a study of how social language gets weird, sticky, and class-coded. Chris and Jason move from Manhattan basketball courts and made-up neighborhood names to pop-star jokes and the kind of professional slang that makes ordinary…

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Why you'd press play

You want Manhattan basketball courts, prescription-medication riffing, agency jargon, and a very specific complaint about saying "right."

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