Reflecting on a Year of Podcasts

It's 2026! Aila and I have officially been doing the WEquil Podcast for a little over a year now and we thought it would be fun to reflect back on what that's been like for us. We started the podcast for a few reasons:

1. Shared Goal: To have a shared goal in your relationships is extremely important. Especially for siblings, you need a reason to get along (lol), but most importantly a meaningful reason behind sharing your lives together. The podcast was something we knew we could commit to: a conversation every week about anything we wanted. Something that we were envisioning could keep us together for decades into the future no matter where we went or what we were doing.

2. Share Our Journey of Understanding: A lot of what we try to optimize for in our lives is learning. Especially as a young person, you have the freedom and time to set yourself up to be the most powerful person you can be which only gives you more options when you're preparing for your future. This journey of understanding is the one that is going to shape you into who you are and set you up for the rest of your life. Having that documented is going to be very valuable when you're 40 and looking back trying to understand what the heck happened. In all seriousness, it's hard to understand who you are. Especially, because when you're really young you often don't have to context to understand what was really all that unique about your experience until you're older and the damage has already been done ... jk ;)

3. Authenticity: We didn't really start out the podcast thinking that we wanted to work on our authenticity, but eventually we learned that was really the key to doing a good podcast. What is a good podcast, you might ask? Well, ideally it serves the purpose of communicating valuable interesting content, but that could just be done in an essay or different format of video. The most unique and valuable part of podcasts specifically, is that you can really almost be with another person because they are there, with no bells and whistles, sharing themselves long form. In order for that to be remotely interesting at all, you need to be honest ... or in other words, authentic. This is because we actually are interested in humans, and what is going on in their heads. But this can only happen if you're comfortable enough to actually be aware of and accurately share what's going on in your subjective experience. We did a whole podcast on why this is super duper hard: https://youtu.be/udRIJ_EfpZo

There's plenty of other reasons why the podcast has been great and I'm really glad we started doing it. But there has been a huge way in which the podcast has served us, that was kind of going on behind the scenes, that we wanted to share and talk about during this latest episode. Feel free to watch the podcast linked above to learn about it, but the short version is...

TL;DW* for Those Who Want to Read About Our Podcast, Instead of Podcast About Our Podcast...It's OK, I Understand

*Too Long, Didn't Watch

Many communication videos talk about micromanaging your outward appearance. They'll talk about using your hands while you speak, project yourself with confidence, tell stories, be funny! Just be funny guys! However, developing authenticity doesn't work that way. It isn't about changing your behavior, it's about working through things internally that might prevent you from being comfortable to share yourself naturally in a way that will often lead to the outcomes discussed in communication videos. If you're authentic you'll smile more, gesture more openly, tell stories, laugh out loud, etc. But it's not because you're trying to do any of those things, you're just being yourself.

Be Yourself!! ✨✨🌈🌈🧁🧁

How do you actually be yourself? You need to discover yourself. And this specifically, is what the podcast forced us to have to do. Especially for Aila, since she is 13 and that's the age when you are really forced to have to figure out who you are.

When you watch our podcast you see us chattin' it up like a couple of cool bros. But just a few seconds before, it was just us, sitting there, alone, staring at each other, needing to figure out what we wanted to say. Now, our podcasts are unscripted, and that means you need to somehow find within yourself something exciting and interesting to share, and that is actually hard.

That requires, apparently (based on our experience), working through any mental and emotional blocks that could prevent that ease of sharing and having ideas flow naturally. This process is mostly about finding yourself and building a sense of identity that is consistent with who you actually are. You might have an identity of being super witty, and guess what, you hit record and you are super not witty. Oof. That hurt. You're trying to keep the conversation going, but the whole time in your head you're trying to think of witty things to say to redeem yourself. Instead of having a natural conversation your internal monologue is "Come on, think of something funny. You're supposed to be funny! I don't want to share this, this podcast sucks! AHHHH!"

That is the best way to do a horrible podcast. Because you're worried about living up to who you think you are, not recognizing who you are, and allowing yourself to be that. It's hard because as a young person you haven't had enough time to practice being a fake version of yourself, so any fake version of yourself is not practiced AT ALL. And, as a young person, you're often still trying to prove yourself, to yourself and to others. Confidence is a big part of what's required for authenticity, mostly because it means that you're comfortable with yourself and that's required to be yourself.

Why It's Important to Find Yourself

You have two choices: face who you are, or not. If you choose not to, that means you're choosing some kind of false identity. And that can work out, for a while. But it's ultimately limiting, wants to stagnate and find certainty, and therefore keeps you stuck. Often it means setting yourself up for a mid life crisis moment later on.

In today's world it is so easy to hide from facing who you are. Social media is literally the perfect tool for projecting the version of yourself that you want to see, and then all your friends and family validate it, and then when they see you they ask you about it long enough for you to project your version of reality, but not long enough for them to see the person behind it.

The reason why I am emphasizing this is because I'm really really glad we had the podcast as a mechanism to keep us accountable to facing ourselves. Because you can't hide from a 30 minute long uncut clip of you talking off the cuff. That's you. In many ways more than any memory you have that is a subjective recollection. Or someone else's account of what happened. No that's literally you sitting there talking for 30 minutes. That's you burping into the mic. Yup. That happened. Can't hide.

I think this process has kept us extremely mentally healthy. On top of that, we have been engaging in this process together so our understanding of each other has grown so much to levels that I can't think of many examples that match what Aila and I have honestly.

Why This Has Anything To Do With You

I think this process we've gone through point to an underlying truth: that we need some kind of mechanism to face ourselves, with others to keep us accountable. It doesn't need to be a podcast, it doesn't need to be public. But it needs to happen. In a world where we're so disconnected with so many ways to run from accountability, we, the human species, need it.

So try this:

1. Make time with your family to share where you're at. What are you really thinking about? What are you really struggling with?

2. Sit in front of a blank page and start writing. Block out time to really document where you're at. Don't delete it. Even if it's embarrassing (it will be). You're gonna want to read it later on (and cringe really hard at yourself but try to remember there's beauty in the cringe).

3. Make time to sit with yourself. Don't meditate and try to push out thoughts. Let the thoughts come and wrestle with them. If you don't like a thought, why? Why did it come to you? What could it mean? Mark those things down to explore with yourself, or ideally a loved one.

Hope you enjoyed this post and episode! We'll continue posting our latest podcasts on our website so you can tune back in every Friday.