Sounds Pretty Genuine

Lisa Rubin walked away from one of the country's most prestigious corporate law firms at 40 — not toward a plan, but because she'd slowly lost the thread of why she'd become a lawyer in the first place. That reinvention led her directly to the stories that implicate everything she'd spent a decade serving. She's now MSNOW's senior legal reporter, covering the Trump trials, the erosion of DOJ indep...

This episode was recorded at NYU Law and sponsored by the NYU Journal of Legislation and Public Policy and the NYU Chapter of the American Constitution Society. Brad Lander keeps showing up when most people would walk away. He cross-endorsed Zohran Mamdani in the middle of a mayoral race he was still running. He went back to 26 Federal Plaza three times to accompany asylum seekers out of the build...

When Sah D'Simone's mother Patricia died, he did what most of us do: he went back to work. But the grief didn't go anywhere. It froze. So he and his father walked the Camino de Santiago for 32 days — 500 miles of crying, laughing, and falling apart without anyone trying to fix them. Sah is a spiritual teacher, bestselling author, and founder of the Somatic Dance Institute. His work is built on a s...

Andre Holland has spent his career granting characters what Shakespeare denied Othello: a visible inner life. In this conversation, he traces that commitment back to Bessemer, Alabama, describes acting as an act of radical empathy — finding the piece of every character that lives in him too — and reflects on what it cost his father to be different selves in different rooms. Now he's learning to do...

We're taught that changing our minds about God — or the beliefs we were raised with — is dangerous, even sinful. But what if it's actually holy? Theologian Ciarra Jones joins Kendall and Alessandra to reframe deconstruction not as losing your faith, but as a sacred act of growth. Ciarra shares her journey from Assemblies of God fundamentalism to queer-affirming spirituality, why she encourages a "...

In this episode of Genuine Live, hosts Alessandra Biaggi and Kendall Ciesemier engage in a profound conversation with Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots organization dedicated to combating gun violence in the United States, and author of Fired Up: How to Turn Your Spark Into a Flame and Come Alive at Any Age . Shannon shares her journey, which began in the wake of the S...

In this inaugural episode of Genuine Live, Hosts Kendall Ciesemier and Alessandra Biaggi engage in a profound conversation with Representative Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress. They explore themes of resilience, grace, and the importance of maintaining relationships across political divides. McBride shares her experiences facing political resistance, the significanc...