Being Different with Liz Durham

I recorded this before Election Day, and I had spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide what I was going to do. I’ve voted Republican my entire life. I’ve interviewed Michaela Barnett twice. I like Tim Burchett personally. And somehow I still ended up at a place where I didn’t feel like I could vote for any of them. So in this solo episode, I’m talking through how I got there. I get into...

I promise this is my last episode about Yesteryear, but there was one thing I couldn’t stop thinking about: why have we made motherhood look so miserable? There is so much pressure on moms now to do everything perfectly. Have the right stuff, create the perfect nursery, raise the perfect kids, feed them the right things, keep them safe from everything, and somehow make the whole thing look beautif...

I’m back with more thoughts on Yesteryear because apparently one episode was not enough. This time, I’m talking about something the book made me think about a lot: what does it actually mean to be traditional anymore? I’ve lived the corporate, career-first version of life. I’ve also spent the last few years at home with my kids, cooking dinner, raising chickens, trying to make sourdough, and getti...

I read "Yesteryear" thinking it would just be a fun book to read on vacation, and instead it pissed me off enough that I apparently need two episodes to talk about it. So here's Part 1 of my thoughts. I’m getting into one of the things the book captures so well: the weird tribalism happening between women right now—working moms, stay-at-home moms, trad wives, feminists, influencers,...

A friend recently told me she wanted to hear about my “cooking journey,” which made me laugh because honestly, it has been a pretty pathetic one. I went from barely cooking at all, to living on Uber Eats, to becoming slightly obsessed with Martha Stewart and convincing myself that everything needed to be homemade, organic, beautiful, and somehow effortless. Obviously, that didn’t last. In this sol...

Mark Taylor is one of my husband Luke’s best friends and one of those people I can never have a surface-level conversation with. Every time I talk to him, I leave thinking about something differently, so I finally decided to sit him down and ask him about all the parts of his life I somehow didn’t know after knowing him for years. We start with how Mark was raised and why he credits his parents wi...

Well… surprise. I’m pregnant with baby number four. After taking about a month and a half off from the podcast because I’ve been exhausted, nauseous, and generally useless, I’m finally back with a solo episode and a lot to catch you up on. I’m sharing the very unexpected way I found out I was pregnant, why this pregnancy has kicked my ass compared to the others, how we basically survived the summe...

In part two of my conversation with Michaela Barnett, we go straight into some of the most complicated and divisive issues in politics—and somehow manage to have a real conversation about them. We talk about immigration, ICE, border security, homelessness, addiction, affordable housing, artificial intelligence, rural healthcare, abortion, Gaza, vaccines, and the ideological inconsistencies that ex...

In this episode of Being Different , I sit down with Michaela Barnett for one of the most honest political conversations I have had on this podcast. I have voted Republican my entire adult life, but lately, I have felt increasingly frustrated, politically homeless, and ready to question the people and systems I once supported without hesitation. Michaela is a Democrat running against Congressman T...

In this episode of Being Different , I’m revisiting the infamous summer packet. Last year, I got a lot of people fired up when I said I threw Mac’s kindergarten summer packet in the trash. So today, I’m talking through what I meant, what I still stand by, what I probably could have said better, and how I’m thinking about it now that he’s heading into first grade. This isn’t about doing nothing all...

This week, I sat down with two of my very good friends and two longtime Knoxville real estate agents, Debaran Hughes and Lucas Haun, to talk about how much the real estate business has changed—and what has not changed at all. We talk about the old days of magazine ads, postcards, and cold calls, the rise of social media, the Selling Sunset-ification of real estate, and whether AI is going to chang...

This week I sit down with my friend Taylor Brasel for an honest conversation about dating, marriage, motherhood, careers, and the pressure our generation feels trying to “have it all.” Taylor is getting married in just a couple months, and hearing her talk about planning for the future with intention honestly gave me hope. We talk about the conversations nobody really prepares women for, what happ...

It’s just me this week, and after a complete disaster of a Mother’s Day morning, I had a lot to think about. Between Cooper dumping red dye all over the house, Charlie secretly cutting hair, missing church, and me and Luke ending up in a screaming match over a mattress and some rugs….I realized how much of our stress as parents comes from caring way too much about stuff that doesn’t actually matte...

I’ll be honest. I never paid much attention to school board races until I had kids. Then suddenly it hit me that these decisions actually matter, and I probably needed to stop pretending I had no reason to care. In this episode, I sit down with Ashley Sartelle, who is running for Knox County School Board, to ask the questions I actually wanted answered. What does the school board really do? Why ar...

I’ve never paid much attention to a sheriff’s race before…until now. So I sat down with Brent Gibson, who’s running for sheriff here in Knox County, and asked him everything I actually wanted to know, not the polished campaign answers, the real ones. What does a sheriff even do day to day? What’s actually happening with homelessness? Are we safe? And how much of what we see online about policing i...

Angie Lawless and I go way back. She was my co-host on a previous podcast before life got busy and we both went in completely different directions. But we made time to catch up again to talk about how she’s running for office in Nashville! So we sat down and talked through everything. How she got here, what finally pushed her to jump in, and what she’s actually seeing behind the scenes. We get int...

It’s just me today, and yes… we’re talking about homework again. But this time, I’m not just venting, I’m actually getting to the root of why it bothers me so much. Because I don’t think this is about worksheets or math pages. I think it’s about how we’re trying to force every kid into the same mold, and what happens when they don’t fit it.  In this episode, I break down the difference between kid...

It’s just me today, and I’m saying something I know not everyone is going to agree with… kindergarteners should NOT have homework.  I’ve been thinking a lot about how much structure, pressure, and constant direction kids are under now, starting earlier and earlier, and how little space is left for them to just be kids. To play, to be outside, to figure things out on their own without someone telli...

Chris Woodruff is back, and this is where the conversation gets deeper. In Part 2, we pick up after his comeback from injury and get into what actually made him walk away from pro tennis, what it feels like when your identity is no longer tied to performance, and why the hardest part isn’t always the grind… it’s what comes after. We talk about burnout, regret, and the question a lot of high perfor...

I sat down with my friend Chris Woodruff (“Woody” if you know my husband), Tennessee’s men’s tennis coach, former top U.S. junior, and a guy who went pro, lived out of dark hotel rooms in places you can’t pronounce, and clawed his way up the rankings the hard way. We talk about what childhood looked like before screens and everything being scheduled out for kids. Chris breaks down why playing one...

This week I’m sitting down with one of my oldest friends, Zach Ivey, and we’re talking about hunting. Not as a hobby, but as a way of raising boys who can face real life without flinching. I didn’t grow up around hunters and honestly, I didn’t “get it.” For a long time I resented what hunting took away from families, but now that I have sons, my perspective has shifted. A lot. We talk about what e...

Today, I’m sharing my response to an email I received from a mom named Rachel who is working from home with little kids, about to have another baby, and quietly drowning. Her message took me straight back to a season I don’t love remembering, when I was constantly exhausted, burnt out, feeling like I was failing as a mom, a wife, and a human. We talk about the story our culture and universities se...

What if the biggest lie women are sold isn’t “have it all”…but “you can have it all at the same time”? This week on Being Different, I sit down with Kate Zepernick — Georgia Tech grad, former consultant, high-achiever, and now mom — to talk about the stuff ambitious women are usually too polite (or too scared) to say out loud. Kate’s lived the whole arc: the full-time grind, the “part-time” job th...

This week's solo episode is sort of a follow-up to what I talked about last week about the show Landman . I wanted to spend more time on the character Rebecca, because she represents the version of woman I spent years trying to become. High-powered, serious, competitive, in control. The kind of woman we’re told to admire if we want to be respected. What I didn’t see at the time was how much o...

This week on Being Different , it’s just me and a TV show I didn’t expect to mess with my head the way it did. My husband and I started watching Landman , and I found myself annoyed, intrigued, defensive, and—eventually—forced to look at myself. The way women are portrayed. The roles men and women fall into. The things we’re allowed to say out loud… and the things we’re definitely not. I talk thro...