[music]
Hello, and welcome to Andy Dehnart’s Reality Blurred.
I’m the aforementioned Andy, the creator of Reality Blurred, and a writer who believes in the power of true stories.
Every week I’ll take you behind the scenes of reality TV and my writing.
On today’s episode, revelations about Reality Blurred and the internet during a 5K, my chat with Coach D from Bring It, recommendations for useful phone calls, and finally, life advice from TV, this week featuring Captain Jason from Below Deck Down Under.
Hello!
Welcome back.
So good to be with you, and thank you for letting me join whatever part of your life you’re currently involved in, whether that’s walking or doing some things around the house or driving.
I am thrilled to be in your ears.
Let’s start today with the segment On My Mind, in which I share things that are on my mind.
And this week, it’s what happened during a 5K that I participated in this weekend.
So this is a community 5K that I’ve done many times in the past, and this year, for the first time, I walked it with a group of friends.
Now I should say, I’m usually not running competitively when I’m running.
I’m just running for fun and to try to maybe see how this feels compared to the last time I ran a 5K.
I am not looking to PR every time I run, and I’m certainly not trying to win any medals.
I think the only time I’ve ever come close is when there was no one else in my age group.
So that’s about my running, racing life.
It’s something that I like as a personal challenge and something that’s enjoyable.
It’s not competitive.
But this time, I just walked with my friends, and it gave me a chance to really appreciate what was happening along the way, all the people that came out to cheer on the runners and walkers.
And that was really fun, and just getting to see this up close instead of kind of in a blur as I run by.
Although I should say, like, I’m not running that fast that everything’s a blur, but when I’m running, I’m generally not paying as much attention to individual signs or things that are happening on the sides of the road because I’m trying not to trip and fall or bump into somebody.
So, at the end of the race, we were walking toward the finish line, and the announcer up in the grandstand scaffolding said something like, I’m gonna go old school now and shout out Reality Blurred, which was my must-read every day.
And this was a wild and amazing moment because I certainly didn’t expect to be recognized in a race or for Reality Blurred, and I didn’t expect that kind of shout out at all, which was really kind and generous.
Of course, because it was a lovely thing to say, I did the thing that is so very familiar to me, which is, I get a bunch of positive feedback, and there’s one kind of maybe average or middling thing in the middle there, and I fixate on that thing.
So, of course, when this person said, was my must-read, I think I actually yelled back something and sort of in mock incredulity, like, was, like, was, like, why not still?
Again, I am focusing on the wrong part.
The fact that I was recognized that Reality Blurred was part of someone’s daily life is quite remarkable, and again, that’s something I’m really grateful for.
It’s humbling and awesome that someone would check my website every single day.
The truth is, as I thought about my reaction to that, what I realized was, is that I was actually nostalgic for that time when people did check blogs every single day, and I include myself in that.
There are so many websites and blogs that I used to go to every single day, and I don’t do that anymore, even as I’m trying to get back into paying attention to smaller, independent websites rather than going to corporate social media and just getting involved in the endless scroll to serve them ads and capture my attention and my data along the way.
I really just liked that time in the 2000s, especially when I would write stuff that was much shorter and quicker, and people could just pop in and scan it and maybe follow a link and read it, and that was it.
And of course, what I do now is very different, you can certainly come and skim the homepage of Reality Blurred, but you’re going to find links to my stories and to other writers’ stories that are hundreds and thousands of words long.
So instead of a one-paragraph recap of something that happened on Survivor, I’m writing 1,500 or 2,000 words about it.
And I love that kind of analysis, and I love going deep, and I love that that’s changed, and that’s all really exciting.
And we have really good conversations about it in the comments.
But it’s also, again, like just reminded me of this time when things were simpler and quieter, and the web wasn’t overrun by, again, these corporate monsters that are just hoovering up all of our data and, you know, our intellectual property, too, and then trying to sell it back to us in the form of AI shit that none of us want that’s been crammed into the corner of every single product imaginable.
But I digress.
So I just want to hold on to that moment of a person remembering that my website and work had been part part of their daily life.
And if it’s not today, that’s okay because things change.
And there’s certainly a ton of websites that are not part of my daily life like they used to be either.
And really, like, I think I was also not just nostalgic, but kind of sad about where we are today in terms of discoverability.
Like, back then, we would link to other blogs, and people would find each other.
And today, it’s searching through Google, which, as you know, is not quite as useful as it used to be and has, over the past year or more, done a lot of work to continually deprioritize and crush smaller websites, including mine, by, I don’t know, tweaking the algorithm in ways that I think we’re supposed to get rid of spam and AI-generated nonsense, but have only made their search worse.
And people find things via social media.
And, of course, most of the social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and Threads, all of these, and I’m not going to even mention the site formerly known as Twitter, they don’t actually prioritize posts with links in them because they don’t want you to leave their site.
So here I am writing on my own website and trying to get people to come to it to read the stuff that I’ve written or that our contributors have written.
And it’s hard to actually get those posts to even appear in front of people.
On Facebook, maybe something like 8,000 or 9,000 people follow Reality Blurred, and Facebook regularly shows posts to maybe a quarter of those people, a lot less usually, and, of course, Facebook wants me to pay them in order to get that post in front of more people, but I am not going to do that, and I am instead just going to complain about it because it’s annoying.
So, all of that said, I’m really trying to focus after this revelation this weekend on, you know, what we do have today, which is, there are people who stop and read Reality Blurred every day or do follow on social media and are active in the comments and are listening to this podcast right now, and that’s awesome, and I would rather, instead of trying to, like, chase Google’s algorithm and chase Facebook’s latest gambit of whatever they’re trying to get us to do, I would rather focus on what I do have right now, and even though that might be an audience that’s not as big as it once was or not growing in the way it once was, that’s okay because I’m just enormously grateful for the fact that my writing can reach anybody, and that’s the amazing thing about the internet.
There seems to be a push right now to really bring back the independent web, and as much as I can contribute to that, I will, and along the way I’m just gonna say thank you to those of you who read daily or used to read daily or read monthly or listen to this podcast every time or occasionally, like, it’s all terrific and thank you so much.
Okay, now it’s time for Why I Wrote That, the segment where I talk about things I published on Reality Blurred recently.
This week, it’s my interview with Dianna Williams, the coach of The Dancing Dolls, who were featured on Lifetime’s Bring It, a show that aired from 2014 to 2019.
I didn’t actually realize that Dianna Williams and The Dancing Dolls were back on reality TV since it aired over those five years and I didn’t realize it had come back, but it hasn’t come back on Lifetime.
It came back on a streaming service that I also had never heard of called Brandon TV, which was actually founded by an American Idol alum.
I learned about this thanks to basically a cold pitch email from a publicist who reached out to share some things about Brandon TV and I was like, oh, look, bring it, Dianna Williams.
Like, I didn’t realize that she was back and so I asked about an interview and we set that up.
As a brief tangent, this is why I love working with publicists.
It really is useful for me to find out about things that I just would never have encountered before.
There’s way too much information, too many shows, etc. and I really appreciate when I get a really good targeted pitch that helps me learn about something that I would have missed otherwise.
And unfortunately, we’ve seen a lot of publicity departments purged in order for corporations to save a lot of money or at least what they think is saving money.
Plus, there’s the fact that some of these companies don’t even think publicity is necessary or at least working with journalists and critics is not something that they think is necessary to bring people to their shows. they think they can reach fans and viewers directly and through their algorithm and otherwise.
But we’ll talk about that at another time.
So I set up an interview with Dianna Williams and we talked on Zoom for about half an hour or so.
But I found it particularly fascinating to learn about what Lifetime wanted from Bring It, which was competition.
They thought that that would make for really good TV.
And so basically, the Dancing Dolls did a lot more competition than they actually do in real life just to kind of feed the machine that was Bring It, this incredibly popular show on Lifetime.
And I think, these are my words, but I think that basically burned out both the girls and Dianna Williams herself.
Dianna really wanted the new show to be much more authentic in terms of what they actually do at the Dancing Dolls and in their rehearsals and training and practice.
And I think she also really wanted to change how the show affected her life.
And she talks a lot about that and just about how she kind of lost touch with her own family and was giving more time to the show and the Dancing Dolls because it was such a phenomenon.
And that’s why I actually, in this interview, left in a bit where she had to take another call and put me on hold for a few minutes, which, no problem at all.
That was great.
And it’s usually the kind of thing I would cut out of a transcript.
It’s not necessary.
But I think it really illustrated what she was saying about now prioritizing her son, her family over TV, obviously over an interview with a journalist because she knows what’s important to her now and she’s finding some balance with that.
It’s just a really fascinating story overall.
Okay, now it’s time for recommendations where I share some things that I think are awesome and entertaining and would be a useful part of your life too.
The first is Below Deck Down Under.
It is back for its third season with Captain Jason, who you will hear from a little later in this episode.
And it is really a return to form for Below Deck.
If you’ve never watched the Bravo series Below Deck and all of its spinoffs, it follows a group of people who work on a super yacht and then there are groups of basically really wealthy people who come in and out every few days for some luxury charters.
And you really get to see how much work it takes to do that kind of service for people.
And then, of course, there’s a lot of drama too, sometimes with the guests, sometimes with the crew, sometimes between the guests and crew, and often between the crew itself.
But this new season just feels like it’s really back to where the show used to be, and it also has some refreshed graphics and presentation and a new yacht, which is massive and gigantic and has an elevator, but also as the stews have to climb three stories of stairs just to deliver dishes from the kitchen.
So that’s going to make those multi-course meals a real challenge.
But check out Below Deck Down Under if you haven’t ever watched a Below Deck before.
You can just jump right in because it’s mostly a new cast.
There’s nothing you need to know.
And it’s just some fun, light drama, which I think I’m coming back to a lot these days and maybe saying that like fun and light are things that I’m looking for.
OK, next I’m going to recommend a website slash service.
Again, these recommendations are never ads.
They’re just things that I like and use and think you might like to check out yourself.
This one is inspired by the start of tax time here in the U.S.
And I’m going to recommend checking out freetaxusa.com.
Basically, FreeTaxUSA is a service that helps you do your taxes like TurboTax or H&R Block.
But as its name suggests, it’s actually free. it is zero dollars to file your federal returns.
And if you want to do state returns, it’s 15 bucks.
Why would you use FreeTaxUSA instead of TurboTax?
Good question.
I use TurboTax for years and I really thought that it was simpler, easier.
They were going to do all the math for me and just make it quick and simple.
And what I ended up finding was that it actually just kept getting more and more expensive as they charged me for things like because I was doing some freelance work or now running my own business, all that complicated things.
And I had to do add-ons and I didn’t understand the questions that they were asking.
But again, I stuck with it because I’m like, well, I’ve been using it, so I might as well keep using it.
Until I finally got frustrated.
I think it might have actually been inspired by an episode of Adam Ruins Everything, which I’ll link in the show notes, in which he talks about basically the massive scam that these tax preparation software providers have been perpetuating on all of us. essentially lobbying to keep themselves in business.
There are much simpler and easier possibilities for the way we would do our taxes in the USA, and instead we let these companies control it and make money off of all of us.
So that’s why I think FreeTaxUSA is such a wonderful deal, in part because it’s free, but also, and here’s the incredible part, it’s so much easier than TurboTax.
They’re not trying to upsell you every two seconds.
They’re not cluttering the screen with all kinds of things that are unnecessary, and the questions are straightforward, and it really does, like, just made it super easy for me to do my taxes, and I have kind of a more complicated tax situation with, like I said, freelancing, running a small business now, and all of those things are included.
I just pulled up their website, and for example, like, they include the normal things that you would do, like step-by-step guidance, etc.
But they also include things like homeownership, or earned income credit, or rental income, investments, small businesses, contractors, all that stuff that you would pay more for on other services, all just included here.
The obvious question, how do they make money?
What are they doing?
Are they selling my data?
They are not, and they explain right there on their homepage that they’re making money by, one, selling you $15 state tax return, so those of us who have to file in our individual states pay $15, and they make their money on that.
They also offer a couple upgrades, like priority support, and live chat, and unlimited modifications for $8, and then another package for $40.
If you want to add those on, they are not necessary, but that’s how they make their money for those people who need those things.
And that’s still an incredibly reasonable price.
I was paying, I think, like $120, something like that, when I stopped using TurboTax, and it just kept getting, again, more and more expensive.
So check out FreeTaxUSA.
I will link that in the show notes.
Okay, and finally, I have two recommendations for phone calls that you might like to make.
The first one is a website called fivecalls.org, which basically gives you quick access to finding the phone numbers for your representatives in the U.S. if you would like to call them because you are upset or irritated or dismayed about things that are happening in the capital right now, for example, or things that are involving the unelected billionaires running amok around Washington.
Maybe you want to give your senator or representative or both a call.
They give you little scripts you can use of things to say to the kind people who answer the phone, and of course, we should be kind to those people because they are not our representatives.
They’re just staff members.
I’ve actually just reached voicemail when I’ve called, so I just leave a quick message, and it’s really useful.
Even if you don’t want to use their scripts, or even if you don’t want to care about the issues that fivecalls.org is listing there, it’s a really great resource to just quickly find those phone numbers to get in touch with your representatives.
And then once you’ve done that, or you just need a break in your life, the final recommendation today is for a phone number called Pep Talk.
I will link that in the show notes, but here’s the number, 707-873-7862.
Again, 707-873-7862.
I’m going to read from their website right now, and when you call, you can do the following.
Press number one if you’re frustrated.
Press number two for life advice.
Press number three for Pep Talks by Kindergarteners.
Press number four to hear children laughing with delight.
Press number five to get a Pep Talk in Spanish.
Press number six to hear how awesome you look.
Or press seven for bonus advice.
As you might have guessed with the children and kindergartners references, this is actually from an elementary school in California, Westside Elementary.
They run this, and all this is pre-recorded advice, encouragement, just joy, basically.
So call them, give it a shot, and you’ll hear also you can press zero to donate to them if you want to help keep this project alive.
But give the Pep Talk hotline a call whenever you need it.
I might actually just add it to my phone book, right now, or excuse me, to my contacts.
I don’t actually have a phone book anymore.
I am now showing my age, I guess.
Enjoy that.
[music]
Okay, and that’s it for this week’s episode.
Thank you so much for listening and for being with me.
Please feel free to send me feedback, questions, thoughts.
The theme song you’re listening to right now is Cheery Monday by Kevin McLeod.
And this episode was written, produced, and spoken out loud by me, Andy Dehnart, and it’s copyright 2025 by Reality Blurred LLC, which is also me.
You can find me at realityblurred.com and andydehnart.com.
I’m going to leave you today with life advice from Captain Jason from Below Deck Down Under, who was diagnosed with melanoma in December and after two procedures is doing well and has good news from his doctors.
And he is now reminding all of us…
Make sure you throw on some sunscreen, get some shade, and cover yourself up and enjoy your day out in the sun.
English (US) ·