In this episode, we unpack what happens when the holidays stop feeling magical and start feeling heavy. From childhood nostalgia and midnight Christmases to fractured families, financial pressure, and the erosion of tradition. This conversation traces how adulthood, trauma, and economic reality reshape the way we experience the holidays. We talk about why tradition isn’t neutral, how obligation replaces joy, and why so many of us feel indifferent rather than festive. We hope you enjoy listening as much as we got to share our perspectives!

In this episode we revisit our most played early release and use it as a jumping off point to talk honestly about what being “chronically online” actually means now. We trace the evolution from channel surfing and MySpace to modern algorithms designed to capture attention, shape behavior, and profit from addiction. We reflect on growth, validation, and why this podcast exists in the first place: not to perform, monetize, or chase approval, but to document thought, perspective, and change in real time. The internet can be powerful. Without balance and real-life community, it can also hollow you out.

We hit play on our past selves and perform a full audio autopsy of year one. We revisit an unreleased pilot and a long early episode filled with Domino’s tracker updates, local Chinese takeout with a surprise fly, free food ethics, POS loopholes that hand out free coffee, and our sincere belief that everyone should steal from corporations, not small businesses. Then things escalate into fake meat discourse, plant feelings, cats, dolphins, gooning apes, Black history, privilege, and the way our school books trained us not to feel the weight of it. Thank you for one year!

In this solo episode, I talk about shedding the pressure to deliver a polished year end character arc and why real growth rarely waits for a calendar to give permission. I get into the psychology of “temporal landmarks,” why New Year momentum fails most people, and what it means to choose your own turning points instead of performing them for an audience. This is an invitation to let December be a hinge instead of a finish line and to honor the shifts that never made it into a highlight reel. If you have been feeling behind, scattered, unfinished, or simply human this one is for you.

Sources:

• Milkman, K., et al. (2014). The Fresh Start Effect: Behavioral Science Explains Why “Temporal Landmarks” Motivate Change. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

• Norcross, J. C., et al. (2002). Auld Lang Syne: Success Predictors, Change Processes, and Self Report Outcomes of New Year Resolvers and Nonresolvers. Journal of Clinical Psychology.

• University of Scranton. (2014). Study on New Year’s Resolutions and goal abandonment rates.

We're taking a week break to be with our friends and family, but in the meantime...Kirbs is breaking down the mess and meaning of Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the retail blackout because nothing exposes our relationship with gratitude and capitalism quite like this week does.

We go from “be thankful” to “panic-buy everything” in under 12 hours, and we're pretty over it.
What does gratitude look like when life is complicated? How does Black Friday trap us in manufactured urgency and why is choosing not to participate actually a form of protest?

We dig into intentional spending, opting out of the noise, and redirecting our support toward actual people and local communities, not corporations built on scarcity and chaos.

If you’re tired of feeling guilty for what you buy, guilty for what you don’t buy, or just ready to reclaim some peace this holiday season, then this one’s for you.

What happens when the internet flattens every subculture into an “aesthetic”? And what does it mean to build identity through music when the dance floor is no longer neutral if it ever was?

In this episode, we sit down with ZAKU.86, an LA DJ, record collector, city pop obsessive, and former punk kid who somehow became a cultural bridge between Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Southeast Asian sounds. We talk about growing up feeling uncool while everyone else had Mustangs and perfect high school lives, buying turntables with stimulus checks, digging through crates like it’s religion, and accidentally becoming the guy who shifts energy in rooms people don’t expect.

We get into the collapse of real subculture, the myth of “apolitical art”, nostalgia as survival, and why city pop isn’t just cute music, but a whole archive of memory, migration, and longing.

If you care about music history, identity, third spaces, or what happens when cultural obsession becomes community, this episode is for you.

This week, I’m sitting down with a guest whose life looks nothing like the script most of us were handed.
Melanie AyLin (_melanie.aylin) first gen kid, fulltime nomad, community builder, festival worker, and desert sunrise chaser joins me to talk about what it really costs to choose yourself when everyone expects you to play it safe.

At 19, she dropped out of college, converted multiple vehicles into homes, and hit the road with nothing but instinct and stubborn courage. Since then she’s lived everywhere and nowhere: national parks, parking lots, Burning Man, Joshua Tree, and more concerts and festivals than most people see in a decade.

In this episode, Melanie and I dig into:

• the immigrant roots that shaped her fire

• turning loneliness into chosen solitude

• sustainability and off-grid living

• how rejection becomes redirection

• building real community in spaces built to be temporary

• the moment she realized she didn’t want to wait to “feel ready” for her own life

If you’ve been craving freedom or feeling stuck in your routine, Melanie’s story is going to challenge you in the best way because she’s proof you can build a whole life out of courage and curiosity.

When artist and writer Eva (@birdlets) asked their therapist for help, they ended up locked in a psych ward. In this one-year anniversary episode, we talk about surviving childhood abuse, an eating disorder that nearly killed them, a $130K porn lawsuit pinned on an ex, and the long climb back to self-trust.

⚠️ CW: sexual assault, eating disorders, psychiatric abuse, self-harm.