The 10 Topics a Bangkok Teen Podcast Refuses to Touch

A school podcast run entirely by teenagers sat down for a holiday episode meant to introduce its own crew, and ended up reading a different kind of list out loud: the ten topics the show has agreed it will never cover. Politics. The origins of COVID-19. The war in Ukraine. Gossip about classmates' relationships. Rating teachers by name. The students behind Students Incorporated, the marketing-class podcast at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok), didn't stumble into this list by accident. They built it on purpose, and the reasoning behind it says more about how young media-makers are approaching their own platforms than the trivia game and Christmas carol wrapped around it.

What Got Cut, and Why

The list, read aloud by the show's rotating cast of student hosts, moves from geopolitics to hallway drama in the space of a few minutes. Regional politics topped it, dismissed with a joke about not wanting anyone "to disappear in the middle of the night." Next came the debate over Donald Trump's removal from and later reinstatement to Twitter, which the students correctly identified as touching free speech, censorship, and platform moderation all at once, then declined it anyway. COVID-19's origins and Russia's invasion of Ukraine followed, both waved off with a version of the same line: "We want our podcast to bring people together, not divide them."

We want our podcast to bring people together, not divide them.

Closer to home, the list gets more specific to campus life: an internal school scheduling stretch the students only ever call "Triple T week," dress-code enforcement, cafeteria food (dismissed with the observation that nobody envies whoever has to feed a thousand students a day), gossip and relationship rankings among classmates, and a proposal to let listeners publicly rate their teachers by name. The tenth and final entry turns the joke on the show's own host, a marketing teacher who also runs a coffee brand called Simple Coffee: why, the students ask, is his coffee so expensive? It's the one item on the list that actually gets asked, immediately, on air.

A Legal Fight These Students Don't Have to Fight

What makes the list notable is what's missing from the reasoning behind it: any mention of getting in trouble. In the United States, scholastic journalism's relationship with controversial topics has been shaped for nearly four decades by Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 Supreme Court decision that let a Missouri principal delete stories about teen pregnancy and divorce from a school-sponsored newspaper before publication. The court ruled that school officials could censor school-sponsored student speech whenever they had "legitimate pedagogical concerns," and that ruling still governs most public high school journalism today. As the Student Press Law Center noted in a January 2026 piece marking the decision's 38th anniversary, only 18 U.S. states have since passed "New Voices" laws restoring stronger free-press protections to student journalists, and Georgia became the seventh state to introduce similar legislation so far in 2026.

That legal backdrop has a measurable chilling effect. A national survey of roughly 500 students and 78 advisers, conducted around the National High School Journalism Convention by the Student Press Law Center, the National Scholastic Press Association, and the Journalism Education Association, found that 42% of students and 41% of advisers were told not to publish or air specific content, and that 39% of students and 32% of advisers had preemptively killed a story they expected would be censored.

None of that legal apparatus applies to ICS Bangkok. As a private international school in Thailand, it isn't bound by the First Amendment, Hazelwood, or any state's New Voices statute. There's no principal with the power described in that 1988 ruling looming over this newsroom, and no legal precedent forcing these students' hand. Their list wasn't a response to a threat of censorship. It was a values call, made from scratch, by a group of teenagers deciding for themselves what a "positive, encouraging, and uplifting" show should sound like, the mission statement the podcast has stated in other episodes. That distinction matters: the self-censorship documented in U.S. scholastic journalism research is largely defensive, a hedge against administrators. What ICS Bangkok's students did looks more like the opposite: an editorial policy adopted with nothing forcing it.

Avoidance Has Become the Norm, Not the Exception

These teenagers are also, without knowing it, ahead of a curve showing up in survey data about their generation more broadly. A November 2023 Harris Poll "Political Avoidance" survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults found that 51% of Gen Z respondents skip family gatherings specifically to dodge political arguments, and 38% of Gen Z and Millennials dread those gatherings for the same reason, more than double the 20% of Gen X and Baby Boomer respondents who said the same. Just under half of Gen Z and Millennial respondents, 48%, admitted they struggle to control their emotions once a political conversation starts, and more than half said they actively curate their social media feeds to avoid political content, with 41% saying they've secretly unfollowed someone over a political post.

Where older generations in that survey described themselves as keeping the peace by avoiding conflict, pollsters found younger respondents more likely to treat entire subjects as permanently off-limits, closer to what the ICS Bangkok students did on air: deciding in advance which doors simply don't get opened. It's a generational instinct the podcast happened to formalize into a spoken editorial rule, months to years before most of the national survey data describing that same instinct existed.

The Team Making the Call

The episode doubles as a rare on-air introduction of the crew usually working behind the scenes. Over the course of the hour, the show's producer, administrator, outreach coordinator, investigative reporter, script editor, tech engineer, and two co-hosts each give a quick self-introduction of their role: seven distinct jobs behind a show that, on the surface, is just two students reading questions to a teacher each week.

Before the no-go list, the episode opens with a trivia matchup: the students quiz their teacher-host on pop culture (naming rappers whose names start with "Lil," identifying slang like "riz" and "based"), while he quizzes them on marketing fundamentals (the four Ps, revenue versus profit). The students win comfortably. Tucked into that segment is a claim worth a quick fact-check: one student, explaining a "rate your classmates" idea the show declined to pursue, notes that this is "how Facebook was started," a reference to Facemash, the 2003 Harvard site where Mark Zuckerberg had users rank fellow students' photos by attractiveness before building Facebook the following year. The comparison is broadly accurate. Facemash was real, and it did get Zuckerberg disciplined by Harvard's administrative board for violating student privacy, though Zuckerberg himself has since pushed back on the idea that Facemash was central to Facebook's creation, calling that version of the story overstated.

What the List Actually Says

Read together, the ten items aren't a list of subjects these students find boring. Several of them, war, free speech, campus gossip, teacher accountability, are exactly the subjects that drive traffic for professional newsrooms and social platforms built on engagement. The show's choice to opt out of all of them, on purpose, while still naming each one specifically enough to make clear they'd thought it through, reads less like avoidance and more like a stated editorial identity: a group of students deciding that "bringing people together" is worth more to their audience than being first, loudest, or most argued-about. Whether that holds as the show and its hosts get older, and whether it should, is a fair question. For one December episode, at least, the answer was a list, read out loud, on purpose.

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