I found Dr. Bezios podcast about popular culture in its relationship to leadership to be very interesting, and I have two main takeaway points from it. The first point being how impactful popular culture is on our society and can cause real change and conversations to happen outside of the fictional worlds or our television screens. When Dr.Bezio talked about Robin Hood, the only thing I really knew about the story was the “steal from the rich and give to the poor trope”. I did not know that because of Robin Hood, it caused riots and revolutions that changed the whole face of english governmental system and paved the way for the creation of parliament and the house of commons.It’s also amazing to see how this trope has been carried into our current culture today. Although I cannot think of any specific examples at this moment, it makes me think about what movies, tv shows, or popular culture of today has had a huge impact or may continue to have one in the future. This also shows the importance of what popular culture is put out there, as if one fictional story can cause a revolution, it shows both the good and the bad sides of popular culture in how impactful one story can be if we get attracted to the narrative and characters.

The other takeaway I have from the podcast is the importance of representation in media. Dr.Bezio says that media is the number one way we normalize behaviors, and how Entertainment has more influence over changing our mind than facts and we need to see representation immediately made me think of the films such as Black Panther, Hidden Figures, Us, Get Out, The Princess and The Frog, and many others before Dr.Bezio even mentioned them. These movies doing so well in mainstream box offices really shows how much our society is craving diversity and diversity heroes and main figures to look up to. We know that there has been tons of stereotyping and lack of representation in the media, so to see people of color painted as powerful, good people is so important. This discussion actually makes me think about my research topic I am doing for this class, as it relates heavily to this. I am discussing the power of media to influence their audience through the perspective of how powerful reality television has influence on the audience, specially looking at racial stereotyping in media and more specifically the TV competition show Survivor. Within this topic, an important point I am discussing is how the narrative can be manipulated by the media and tends to paint people of color, especially black people, in a bad light. This is made clear by dozens of black Survivor contestants speaking out because of the resurgence of the BLM movement this summer and discussing how they feel they were painted to look “angry” or the villain of their season, or overall were given a bad narrative that was not true to their personality or actions on the show. This relates back to Dr.Bezios point of the story the media tells (in tv, film, etc) is extremely influential to the audience and needs to include proper representation.