Willoughby Hills with Heath Racela

Eddie Sotto had a long career designing public entertainment spaces like high-end car dealerships, destination retail stores, and theme parks, having served as Senior Vice President of Concept Design at Walt Disney Imagineering.  In this archived conversation from May, 2020, Eddie and Heath discuss the parallels between filmmaking and theme park design, the challenges to public venues during COVID...

Sarah Kendzior’s new book is The Last American Road Trip , a chronicle of trips that she and her family have made across the vast U.S. beginning in 2016 and continuing through 2024. It’s an examination of American identity, the changes that the last decade have brought to our soil, how Americans retell our history, and how 2020 became the clarifying dividing line of our modern era. The book travel...

Ben Napier is the co-host of HGTV’s Home Town , Home Town Takeover , and Home Town Kickstart along with his wife Erin. In his third appearance on this podcast, Ben discusses the work he and Erin are doing with Osprey , a group they co-founded in 2023 that helps connect parents who want to limit screen time and social media access for their kids. Ben and Heath discuss how their own attitudes toward...

Ashley Fairbanks is an Indigenous author, artist, and activist. Ashley is Anishinaabekwe from the White Earth Nation. She was raised in Minnesota and now lives in Texas. Her new children’s book This Land: The History of the Land We’re On serves as a great jumping off point for early readers, older kids, and even adults to begin to question who used to live on the land that today makes up the U.S....

Farah Assi was born in Southern Lebanon under Israeli occupation. Her family fled to Canada for some of her childhood, but returned to Lebanon during her teenage years. Farah’s father and extended family are still living in Southern Lebanon, often a few hundred yards from the sites of bombings. In this conversation, she shares about her childhood memories of Lebanon, her experience as a refugee, t...

Audrea Lim is the author of Free the Land: How We Can Fight Poverty and Climate Chaos . The issues of climate change, gentrification, racial inequity, and corporate greed are often treated as unrelated issues, but Audrea argues that they all share a common root: the commodification of land. She not only looks at how the American system of private property ownership has been destructive, but also e...

Akilah Hughes is a comedian, author, and podcast host, known for her book Obviously: Stories from My Timeline , her YouTube channel , her amazing Twitter/X and Instagram feeds , and her nearly two year run hosting the daily news podcast What a Day for Crooked Media from 2019-2021. Akilah's latest podcast Rebel Spirit , investigates the history of how her high school in Northern Kentucky came to ad...

Author Austin Frerick's new book Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry looks at seven sectors of the American food system, profiling the company that dominates each of those markets. Some are familiar names like Cargill, Wal-Mart, and Driscoll’s. Others are foreign companies or giant conglomerates that are hardly household names but which still exert massive control o...

J.B. MacKinnon is a Vancouver-based author, journalist, and professor. His book The Day the World Stops Shopping operates on a simple thesis: gaming out how society, economies, and our lives would change if consumer culture disappeared overnight. When the global pandemic shutdown happened in 2020, suddenly the thesis had a real world example. J.B. joins Heath to discuss intentional consumerism ins...

Amanda Gelender is an American Jewish writer and poet currently based in the Netherlands. Amanda was raised in a progressive Jewish community, yet she was still only taught some of the truth about Israel and Palestine. It wasn’t until college that Amanda began to deconstruct what she had been taught and question her Zionist education. Amanda joins Heath to discuss how Zionsim differs from Judaism,...

Tracie McMillan is a journalist and author of the new book The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America . In the book, Tracie charts her own family’s history, plus follows the stories of four other white American families, to see how explicit government policies and implicit biases have led to massive amounts of wealth for white Americans. Tracie joins Heath to discuss he...

Jenan Matari is a Palestinian-American content creator known for her popular Instagram page . She has amassed a large audience with her videos that explain the struggle of Palestinians before and since October 7. Jenan joins Heath to discuss the challenges of teaching children about a genocide, navigating capitalism, and what it means to have deep ties to the land. She also chats about her own upb...

Sarah-SoonLing Blackburn is an author, educator, and speaker. She is the author of the new young reader book Exclusion and the Chinese American Story , part of the Race to the Truth series . In the book, Sarah dives into the histories of Chinese Americans who contributed to the gold rush, the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, and sharecropping in the Mississippi Delta, while also look...

Dennis Kucinich is an Ohio politician who has served as Cleveland city councilor, mayor of Cleveland, Ohio state senator, and U.S. representative from 1997-2013. He was a presidential candidate in the democratic primary in 2004 and 2008. He is currently running for U.S. representative for Ohio’s 7th district as an independent. Dennis joins Heath to discuss the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, how...

Sarah McCammon is NPR national political correspondent, co-host of The NPR Politics Podcast, and covered the 2016 Trump campaign for the White House . Her new book The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church chronicles her personal faith journey, and similar paths of former Evangelicals who have since parted ways with the church. She joins Heath to discuss her upbri...

Richard Rothstein is the author of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America and Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law , which he cowrote with his daughter Leah Rothstein. Richard joins Heath to discuss some of the historical background of how we became such a segregated country, how this racism affected everything from househ...

Sarah Mock is a seasoned agricultural reporter and author of two books: Farm (and Other F Words): The Rise and Fall of the Small Family Farm and Big Team Farms: Growing Farms Differently . She is also the host and producer of the new podcast from Ambrook Research: The Only Thing That Lasts . Sarah was raised on a farm in Wyoming and has had agriculture in her blood from an early age. But she’s als...

Francisca Gajardo is a Chilean fashion designer who specializes in upcycling old clothing into new garments. She grew up in Northern Chile, near one of the largest clothing dumps in the world. She joins Heath to discuss what she's seen first-hand at the clothing dumps, how the second hand markets of Chile inspired her career in fashion design, and how she hopes to standardize upcycling so that maj...

Richard Frishman and B. Brian Foster, Ph. D. are the duo behind the incredible new book Ghosts of Segregation: American Racism, Hidden in Plain Sight . Rich is an award-winning photojournalist who spent several years traveling the country, photographing signs of American racism in our built environment. Brian is a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia with a focus on documenting and...

Vishaan Chakrabarti is a New York based architect, the founder and creative director of PAU , the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism, and the author of the book A Country of Cities: A Manifesto for an Urban America , and the upcoming book The Architecture of Urbanity: Designing for Place, Pluralism, and Planet , scheduled to be released later this year. He served as Director of the Manhattan O...

Director Melinda Maerker and producer David Clayton Miller are the duo behind the new Hulu documentary We Live Here: The Midwest , which looks at how Midwestern LGBTQ+ families are faring after increased discrimination in the Heartland. Melinda and David join Heath to discuss some of the behind the scenes stories from the film, including the origins of the project, the challenges of finding famili...

Patric Richardson, also known as the Laundry Evangelist or The Laundry Guy, is back for his second appearance on the podcast. Patric joins Heath to discuss his new book House Love , which contains advice and ideas for sustainable cleaning methods. The book also helps timid homeowners and renters embrace using vintage items for decorating their homes. Get full access to Willoughby Hills at heathrac...

Andrew Leland, a writer, journalist, audio producer, and podcast host. His new book The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight is a thoughtful and deep exploration of blindness, looking at both the personal and the societal implications of what it means to be without vision. In the book, Andrew visits a blind convention in Florida, a training facility in Colorado which includes kitchen...

Brian Ruhlmann founded Craic Sauce as a side business in 2017. By 2020, he was able to focus full time on hot sauce. Brian's sauces are unique because he sources some of the best ingredients from local farms in Massachusetts and his sauces often involve more ingredients than in a conventional sauce, resulting in a ton of flavor. Brian joins Heath to discuss his unconventional approach to making ho...

Rebecca Clarren is a journalist who has spent the last 20 years documenting stories of Indigenous Americans. Rebecca’s reporting collides with her personal history in her new book The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance , which explores how her Jewish immigrant ancestors were gifted land by the U.S. government that had previously belonged to and promised to Lakota people....