The Kylen and Kenda Show

Kylen picked the topic and went first, which meant Kenda had to go second. His example is small and he refuses to let it be small. He stays up for one more hour of a day he is enjoying, and he pays for it with the whole of the next one. Not a little sleep. A lot of him. Hers is six nights in Paris and Champagne for her sister-in-law’s 40th, and she spent most of it anxious in beautiful rooms. Kend...

Kylen brought his best friend in. Jake Landel is the head coach of the men's indoor volleyball team at UC Santa Cruz, he has been coaching for close to two decades, and he is the person Kylen calls when he has doubt or emotional anguish. Kenda had been bracing for the worst. What she got instead is an hour about what a coach is actually building. Jake's answer to "what is the one th...

“No one’s looked at you and your problems and thought, I could make a show out of this. I thought I could make a show because I am a problem.” That is how Kylen opens, and then he tells the whole thing. Number-one rated amateur volleyball player in the US. Took the government money during COVID, souped up the back of a Toyota, lived in it — they called it the fart tube &mda...

Kylen has had cold sores since he was born. The only salve that ever really worked got discontinued, so Kenda went looking for it, talked her way through about twenty people until somebody finally said yes, and is now pressing him a batch herself. Along the way: gigartina and why nothing else will do, the suspicion that the things which actually work are the first ones to quietly disappear, and Th...

Kylen and Kenda put themselves on a full digital detox — no video games, no social media, bed by ten — and agree to read Digital Minimalism while they do it. Then they spend the episode working out why it is so hard, and who it is actually for. Along the way: the dinner party where a 16-year-old never put her phone down, a rooftop in Marrakesh that nobody looked at, and the arithmetic on what eigh...

Kylen sits down with a psychotherapist of thirty-five years. She is also Kenda's mother, which means the person taking him apart has known his boss since he started. He agreed to it half asleep. Within ten minutes she has ruled on his tattoos, Kenda has called him every red flag there is, and he has explained that being six foot six makes it hard to hide. It gets sharper from there. He descri...

Kylen nearly cashed out his 401k over a market-crash panic his feed served him. He does not have a 401k. Kenda turns the confession into the financial-literacy class school never taught — what a 401k actually does, compounding, the 59½ rule, APR — while Kylen argues the other side: he's too busy surviving to flourish, the system wasn't built for his generation, and betting on yourself be...

This week we finally settle the fight that's been running since episode one: which one of us is actually the mentor? Kylen spends the pre-show lecturing Kenda about finishing her vitamins; Kenda spends the whole episode quietly proving she never needed the lecture. It builds, it escalates, and it ends the only mature way two grown adults can end a standoff like this — rock, paper, scissors, w...

Kenda's back from a week of chasing the World Cup with her family — three matches, three stadiums — and she came home with a question: why did a crowd of total strangers feel so kind? Australians buying drinks for rival fans, people photographing each other's families, not one political argument. Turns out sociologists named the feeling back in 1912: collective effervescence. We dig into why awe s...

Welcome to The Kylen and Kenda Show — a podcast about why your generation feels alone, and what it actually takes to grow up. Kenda is the mentor: a tall, no-nonsense woman (daughter of a psychologist) who manages and mentors a whole bunch of young men and tries to help them become better versions of themselves. Kylen is her project: self-described as living in a shed, with a Peter Pan complex, ha...