This Is Your Afterlife

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. This solo episode was an experiment. Of the things that have occupied my thoughts recently, I picked two, made one a starting point and the other an endpoint, and improvised my way from A to B. I'm pretty happy with i...

Cultural critic & friend of the show Madeline Lane-McKinley joins my conversation with Sean O'Brien about their book The Return of the 90s: A Cultural History of the Present for the end of another two-episode week! Or am I joining their conversation? Doesn't matter! It's a great one because not only do we get to explore in greater depth the project of the book, in the back half of the episode...

I don't tend to use the word "periodizing" for the project of This Is Your Afterlife, but when I ask my guests, "What's your coma?," I'm absolutely "categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis" (thanks, Wikipedia). Periodization is the explicit project of The Return of the 90s: A Cultural History of the Present, a new book edited b...

This is a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear all the other After Dark episodes for just $5 a month. I asked, subscribers voted, and we're doing it: watching all seven Andrei Tarkovsky feature films this summer! Here's an "episode zero" for this bonus miniseries, in which I explain the genesis of the idea, my approach, and my genera...

Is gossip the only thing people want from their media these days? Is your own taste to the contrary evidence of an audience for something different? What do you do when you want to create work that engages culture thoughtfully in a format longer than a single TikTok? The answer for Jeff Weiss is: double down on the publication you started as a rap blog in 2005, which has launched the careers of ma...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. You can also purchase just this standalone episode for $3 here: patreon.com/posts/nasty-squeezes-158644003 Sarah Knittel is a clown, actor, producer, deviser, previous TIYA guest, my close friend, a comrade-in-arms wh...

Pod Casty for Me week on This Is Your Afterlife concludes with a silly, serious, thorough, and discursive episode with that podcast's other host, Jake Serwin. I'm pleased to say our internet interactions have blossomed into an actual friendship, and I'm not at all insecure about how much I text him after the bit about "Lisa Lampanelli" he does at the top of the episode. Nah nah nah, c'mon, Jake is...

Ian Rhine is "one of the guys" who host Pod Casty for Me, my current favorite podcast. He and Jake Serwin talk about film and politics, and their deep friendship is evident in every episode. I find it illuminating and comforting and fun, and, wouldn't you know it, that's also how I feel about this conversation with Ian. I split him from Jake for another two-episode week, so stay tuned for Jake on...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. People have mentioned many versions of the afterlife on TIYA, but which one is THE BEST? That's exactly why we're here today. Afterheads, I present to you the Afterlife Power Rankings . My long-time comedy collaborato...

Place-Goers Week continues on TIYA, an acronym my guest—comedian/actor/YouTuber Danny Catlow—attempts to pronounce in this episode and we agree doesn't quite roll off the tongue. WE COVER SO MUCH GROUND IN THIS EPISODE. It starts with talk of how we met each other when my improv group Computer stayed on his couch for a festival in Austin when he was 18 and I was in my mid-20s. Strange! And then it...

I've become a weekly watcher of Kate O'Connor's YouTube vlog, Place-Goers, which features her going places with her boyfriend, Danny Catlow. I know both comedians—and unapologetic YouTubers!—from doing comedy in Chicago, but since they live in L.A. now, that's the site of most of their place-going. Their dynamic is great together, but for their TIYA appearances, I wanted to talk to them separately...

All-new type of bonus episode this week! I decided to visit the cemetery across the street from me, make my way to the grave of Cleveland working class artist hero and underground comics pioneer Harvey Pekar, and bring you all on the trip. This was a blast to record, and it's one of my favorite episodes of TIYA After Dark and maybe even the entire project of This Is Your Afterlife. Some of the aud...

Chicago comedian and gem-of-a-person-to-talk-to Lucia Whalen returns to This Is Your Afterlife... for the first time? Lucia wanted a few things from episode 83 kept private, so I sent it to the great podcast beyond, and we took the opportunity to record a new conversation as episode 205. I honestly think we had even more fun than before! We're older, wiser, and Lucia is DEFINITELY prepared this ti...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. Thanks to everyone who contributed voice messages to this first call-in episode of TIYA After Dark (at least of the new era)! It's an exorcism of all the casual cruelty we experience at work, from the mundane to the d...

There's only one piece of music from 2026 so far that I've loved, but it's nearing the point of obsession: Wretched Blessing's "How Deep Is Your Love?," which features guitar work from previous TIYA guest Genital Shame! It's a cover of the Calvin Harris & Disciples song (not the Bee Gees), but there's an important note: Norwegian singer/songwriter Ina Wroldsen is uncredited on the original, de...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. A solo episode in which I'm trying to choose narratives for my life. Maybe you can relate? Support the show and get the TIYA After Dark feed on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife Follow/contact This...

"How can this possibly be the way?!" is a question Leigh Claire La Berge asks constantly in Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke. The book is Leigh Claire's reflection on her time prepping a Fortune 500 company for Y2K by essentially making a bunch of copies, double-checking spreadsheets, and traveling internationally to give frivolous PowerPoint presentations. It's very funny! A...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn return to talk about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York . They're my closest comedy friends since right before this movie came out in 2008, and it was fun to sit down and goof off...

I recently saw two movies that exemplified how I want to make political art: Neo Sora's "Happyend" and "Failed State" by Christopher Jason Bell and Mitch Blummer. Both films tell intimate stories that show rather than obscure the ways political systems influence their characters' lives. In this episode of This Is Your Afterlife, I'm grateful to talk to "Failed State" co-director Chris Bell about h...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. I love talking to Lucas O'Neil about the specifics of standup comedy craft, and since he just released his first special, Emotional Man, I use this bonus episode as an opportunity to dig deep with him into the proce...

Michael Penn II, aka CRASHprez, makes two rapper episodes in a row! Not since Mike Watt has there been a This Is Your Afterlife guest slinging this much of their own lingo (what is it about Mikes?), and I do my best not to pretend too hard like I understand it all. Fortunately, we take a detour into the topic of slang ("getting kirk" is simply unbelievable) on the way to Michael revealing one of h...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. On the heels of last week's 200th episode, I talk about why it made me more emotional than I expected, and I offer a guide to the back catalog in the form of 5 episodes that changed my thinking, 4 about death and 1...

Sometimes a guest breaks my brain, like when Open Mike Eagle asks the titular question of this episode. I'm still parsing the way the question reorients consciousness in the body rather than as an entity separate from it. Maybe it's a basic thought, but it hit me fresh this time. But let me back up. OPEN MIKE EAGLE IS ON EPISODE 200 OF THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE. The rapper, podcaster, streamer, TV wr...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. I use my coma as the central metaphor of This Is Your Afterlife to discover the moments that transformed my guests' lives, but is there a more transformative life experience than a coma? What's the MOST transformati...

KR Riiber wrote one of the best plays I've ever seen, Tangles & Plaques, a show about dementia and memory care borne from their time as an ensemble member of the Neo-Futurists, the Chicago theater group with core tenets like honesty, brevity, risk & chance, and transformation. Hmmmm, sound like any other show/podcast you know??? Jk, this is not exactly a "brevity" podcast. Truly though, th...