This Is Your Afterlife

Ian Rhine is "one of the guys" who host Pod Casty for Me, my current favorite podcast. He and Jake Serwin talk about film and politics, and their deep friendship is evident in every episode. I find it illuminating and comforting and fun, and, wouldn't you know it, that's also how I feel about this conversation with Ian. I split him from Jake for another two-episode week, so stay tuned for Jake on Part 2. Ian and Jake joined me on a bonus episode a few months back to talk about Exorcist III, so these appearances on TIYA proper are...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

People have mentioned many versions of the afterlife on TIYA, but which one is THE BEST? That's exactly why we're here today. Afterheads, I present to you the Afterlife Power Rankings. My long-time comedy collaborators Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn join TIYA After Dark to rank eight separate afterlives, but first, we discuss the Pixar movie Soul, since Lucia Whalen mentioned it on her...

Place-Goers Week continues on TIYA, an acronym my guest—comedian/actor/YouTuber Danny Catlow—attempts to pronounce in this episode and we agree doesn't quite roll off the tongue. WE COVER SO MUCH GROUND IN THIS EPISODE. It starts with talk of how we met each other when my improv group Computer stayed on his couch for a festival in Austin when he was 18 and I was in my mid-20s. Strange! And then it ramps up (or cooks down?) into an exploration of grief in its many forms as Danny attempts to break the podcast's record for number of "...

I've become a weekly watcher of Kate O'Connor's YouTube vlog, Place-Goers, which features her going places with her boyfriend, Danny Catlow. I know both comedians—and unapologetic YouTubers!—from doing comedy in Chicago, but since they live in L.A. now, that's the site of most of their place-going. Their dynamic is great together, but for their TIYA appearances, I wanted to talk to them separately. These are the first two-part episodes featuring collaborators in a long time, and it's the very first two-episode week for the podcast.

We talk about: relationship patterns, increasing bone density, Jungian ther...

All-new type of bonus episode this week! I decided to visit the cemetery across the street from me, make my way to the grave of Cleveland working class artist hero and underground comics pioneer Harvey Pekar, and bring you all on the trip. This was a blast to record, and it's one of my favorite episodes of TIYA After Dark and maybe even the entire project of This Is Your Afterlife. Some of the audio is rough around the edges, especially in the bookshop and coffee shop, but those segments are quite short, so stick through if you're having...

Chicago comedian and gem-of-a-person-to-talk-to Lucia Whalen returns to This Is Your Afterlife... for the first time? Lucia wanted a few things from episode 83 kept private, so I sent it to the great podcast beyond, and we took the opportunity to record a new conversation as episode 205. I honestly think we had even more fun than before! We're older, wiser, and Lucia is DEFINITELY prepared this time. Right, Lucia?

We talk about: having a one-page worldview, the 2020 Pixar movie Soul, disappearing into oneness vs. losing consciousness, being present for her dad's heart attack, the lonely life of a...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

Thanks to everyone who contributed voice messages to this first call-in episode of TIYA After Dark (at least of the new era)! It's an exorcism of all the casual cruelty we experience at work, from the mundane to the dramatic. I hope you dig it. It was very fun to do.

I talk about: work, bosses, how much I love work and...

THIS WEEKEND I'm recording a bonus episode of the podcast about the casual, mundane cruelty of work. If you've listened to recent episodes, you know why! I'm calling it the Casual Work Cruelty Exorcism, and I'd love you to be a part of it. Call me at the number I say in this clip or email thisisyourafterlifepodcast@gmail.com for me to play/read your contribution on the episode. I will make you feel better. You will make me feel better. It'll be a primal scream into the void of our capitalist hell in the hopes of finding a...

There's only one piece of music from 2026 so far that I've loved, but it's nearing the point of obsession: Wretched Blessing's "How Deep Is Your Love?," which features guitar work from previous TIYA guest Genital Shame! It's a cover of the Calvin Harris & Disciples song (not the Bee Gees), but there's an important note: Norwegian singer/songwriter Ina Wroldsen is uncredited on the original, despite singing the hook and co-writing the song. Wretched Blessing drummer and singer Rae Amitay emphasizes this in the liner notes on Bandcamp, and they brought it up on this episode.

Rae and...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

A solo episode in which I'm trying to choose narratives for my life. Maybe you can relate?

Support the show and get the TIYA After Dark feed on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Follow/contact This Is Your Afterlife:

https://thisisyourafterlife.com/

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thisisyourafterlifepodcast@gmail.com

"How can this possibly be the way?!" is a question Leigh Claire La Berge asks constantly in Fake Work: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke. The book is Leigh Claire's reflection on her time prepping a Fortune 500 company for Y2K by essentially making a bunch of copies, double-checking spreadsheets, and traveling internationally to give frivolous PowerPoint presentations. It's very funny! And unfortunately hella resonant! Leigh Claire jumped right into the deep end with me on this episode, and the result is one of my favorites in a while.

We talk about: anxiety, Fake...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn return to talk about Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York. They're my closest comedy friends since right before this movie came out in 2008, and it was fun to sit down and goof off about a movie Daniel calls one of his favorites that he'll never see again.

We talk about: bedtime, a career in the arts, phone etiquette...

I recently saw two movies that exemplified how I want to make political art: Neo Sora's "Happyend" and "Failed State" by Christopher Jason Bell and Mitch Blummer. Both films tell intimate stories that show rather than obscure the ways political systems influence their characters' lives. In this episode of This Is Your Afterlife, I'm grateful to talk to "Failed State" co-director Chris Bell about his approach to making political work and what makes him the artist and person he is. He's TIYA's first filmmaker guest!

We talk about: DIY filmmaking, reconnecting with childhood friends, panic attacks, meditation...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

I love talking to Lucas O'Neil about the specifics of standup comedy craft, and since he just released his first special, Emotional Man, I use this bonus episode as an opportunity to dig deep with him into the process of conceiving, creating, and releasing it. It's the kind of creative exercise I've longed to do in podcast form, and I'm grateful to be able...

Michael Penn II, aka CRASHprez, makes two rapper episodes in a row! Not since Mike Watt has there been a This Is Your Afterlife guest slinging this much of their own lingo (what is it about Mikes?), and I do my best not to pretend too hard like I understand it all. Fortunately, we take a detour into the topic of slang ("getting kirk" is simply unbelievable) on the way to Michael revealing one of his origin stories as an artist. It's a small, powerful moment, the kind I love featuring on TIYA, and I'm glad he didn't save...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

On the heels of last week's 200th episode, I talk about why it made me more emotional than I expected, and I offer a guide to the back catalog in the form of 5 episodes that changed my thinking, 4 about death and 1 about art.

Support the show and get the TIYA After Dark feed on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife<...

Sometimes a guest breaks my brain, like when Open Mike Eagle asks the titular question of this episode. I'm still parsing the way the question reorients consciousness in the body rather than as an entity separate from it. Maybe it's a basic thought, but it hit me fresh this time. But let me back up. OPEN MIKE EAGLE IS ON EPISODE 200 OF THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE.

The rapper, podcaster, streamer, TV writer-performer-producer-creator, and independent art-making role model of mine has been a dream guest since I started the show. You can hear why at the beginning of...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

I use my coma as the central metaphor of This Is Your Afterlife to discover the moments that transformed my guests' lives, but is there a more transformative life experience than a coma? What's the MOST transformative life experience? This is the question we answer in this week's TIYA After Dark, Bracketology: Transformative Life Experiences.

"We" is several members of K.C...

KR Riiber wrote one of the best plays I've ever seen, Tangles & Plaques, a show about dementia and memory care borne from their time as an ensemble member of the Neo-Futurists, the Chicago theater group with core tenets like honesty, brevity, risk & chance, and transformation. Hmmmm, sound like any other show/podcast you know??? Jk, this is not exactly a "brevity" podcast. Truly though, the Neos have been a huge influence on my work, and I'm excited to finally welcome KR to the ranks of Neo-Futurists I've had on the show. The afterlife they imagine in response to the...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

I got to talk about my favorite movie with the hosts of my favorite podcast! My guests this week, Pod Casty for Me's Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, have not appeared on the main feed. YET! But I couldn't resist easing them into the TIYA universe with a talk about a movie I first saw in the fall of 2024 that has since become one...

I encountered the live feed puppetry of Theatre Nobody's "rustbelt." when I shared a venue with the show at Cleveland's BorderLight Festival 2025. That's how I met Kevin Michael Wesson, a Chicago puppeteer and theatre artist committed to the DIY ethos that so inspires me. This episode is full of gems like Kevin calling his childhood puppeteering "playing critters" or dropping the knowledge that doing puppetry is like "acting if you didn't have a body."

We talk about: the foundations of puppetry, bunraku, urban exploration, Midwestern emo, being proudly unrepresented, moving to Chicago from Florida, LaVeyan Satanism, New...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

I love year-end list season! Whether you're as gung ho as I am or view these lists with skepticism (or both), I've decided to share my enthusiasm by reading a bunch and then very UNSCIENTIFICALLY telling you which albums on them are truly the best. I sorted through hundreds of albums to arrive at these 11, unranked but sorted into six groupings. Plus three Unlisted...

Keir Neuringer is my kind of artist. The saxophonist, improviser, writer, and composer of Irreversible Entanglements and DROMEDARIES faces down the horrors of our world and plays AT them. He's not making easy-to-compartmentalize "political art." He's grappling with how to be an artist, father, bandmate, and human being during collapse. Like we all are.

We talk about: being radicalized during the Iraq War, incorporating politics into music, depression, divorce, playing saxophone after a car accident, hospicing both of his parents when they died of cancer, literally arming the audience, No Mas Lagrimas in Ithaca.

Support...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

Matt Sage, aka M. Sage and 1/4 of TIYA fave Fuubutsushi, is here to talk about a shared passion of ours: compact discs, aka CDs!!! Matt and I have become friends since his first appearance on the podcast, and it was a blast to stretch out and go super-nerd mode here. I hope you find it as fun as we did.

We talk...

Eden Robins wrote a novel comprised of obituaries, Remember You Will Die, and even more importantly, she wrote an essay about becoming a school crossing guard that inspired me to do the same. We start our talk there.

We talk about: death as subject matter, best practices for talking and writing about suicide, weirdo heroes, obituary writing, the curse of ANY success, making narratives amidst uncertainty.

Support the show and get the TIYA After Dark feed on Patreon:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Follow Eden:

https://www.monkeythumbs.com/<...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

For the first episode of this new premium feed, TIYA After Dark, I talk to my close friends and previous TIYA guests Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn about holidays. I went into this episode with a plan to rank holidays by how problematic/weird the people are who call them their favorites. Pretty much from the start, my plans got tossed, and I genuinely...

After a year away, This Is Your Afterlife is back! One of the highlights of my year, creatively and culturally, was dipping my toe into black metal. The extreme music genre inspired my performance art installation, Black Metal Rooftop, which I expanded into a talk show called Black Metal Patio. My house band and musical guest for BMP was Genital Shame, a trans black metal artist from Pittsburgh who now lives in L.A. Real name: Erin Dawson. Genital Shame's Chronic Illness Wish was one of the records that cemented my interest in black metal. In between discovering her...

READ THIS!

Life has made it hard to put out the podcast weekly, and I can't stop myself from apologizing for that. Just know this is a temporary situation. Diabetes trauma, depression, and full-time work have been hurdles, but I've nearly cleared the first two. I know better than to make promises about show frequency or format now, but I didn't when recording this episode. Rather than tack on an intro, I'm letting you know here:

I appreciate and share your...

THIS solo episode comes from my car during my lunch break.

I talk about:

The Neo-Futurists series continues with dyed-in-the-wool weirdo Emma Casey. We bond over our recovery from the hyperindividualism of mistranslating punk ideology, and she shares a walk through New York City that could only happen with the confidence of youth. She's very cool and thoughtful and lovable, and I hope you love her!

Content warning: whiteness, pristine coffee shop hell, personality/worldview copes for not being wealthy or authentic, Taylor Swift, Harold and Maude, Afterlife Tycoon, notebook cartography, the spectacular gift of consciousness.

If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want the uncut conversations...

Adam Gilbert (Just for Laughs) is a real sweetie, and he was in a punchy mood (or maybe that's just him?) when we recorded. And even though he compared me to Bill Maher, we had a lot of fun. This makes two weeks in a row of standups, and who knows, maybe this is the start of This Is Your Afterlife as traditional comedy podcast! (It's not.)

Content warning: alcoholism, dead dad, escalators, spiders, time, self as a concept like gender or money, unsucked boy.

If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want...

SNL writer, stand-up comedy comrade of mine, and O.G. observer of my coma, Steven Castillo joins me to brag about the memory of his second Saturday Night Live audition. Actually, this is a very sweet and warm chat between old friends, and I was so grateful to have it (on my 40th birthday! I don't mention this on the main feed, but it's in the full convo on the Patreon). Now it's yours.

Content warning: YouTube comments, therapy, failure, convoluted reincarnation, a healthy amount of "fuck you," vape soul.

If you believe in This...

"Why Cleveland?" is the question I get when I tell people I moved from Chicago to Cleveland, mostly from people IN Cleveland. This Very Special Episode of This Is Your Afterlife does not answer "why" and in fact cautions against reading too much into every little detail of such a huge life transformation. My lovely pal, very funny comedian, and big TIYA fan Claire Favret helps me tease it all out.

Content warning: employment, power outage, crappy apartment, COVID precautions, reckoning with the concept of sour grapes, relationship between making a living and making art, disillusionment with...

As a follow-up to last week's Will Oldham episode, I'm re-releasing my episode with the man Will called an "internet angel," saxophonist and Fuubutsushi member Patrick Shiroishi.

This conversation has been on my mind because my move to Cleveland has come with consuming more Taco Bell than I have in the past decade, so take any shade I throw toward T. Bell with that grain of salt.

In my mind, this is a classic This Is Your Afterlife. I hope you enjoy it.

Content warning: Japanese internment camps, ambiguously supportive parents, ancestors, shit...

Booking This Is Your Afterlife sometimes looks like me hand-writing a list of dream guests off the top of my head. Will Oldham appears on every one of those lists. I've been a fan since he released the first Superwolf album with Matt Sweeney in 2005, and their 2021 follow-up, Superwolves, joins it as one of my favorite albums ever.

Few artists are better at combining mystery, sincerity, wisdom, and mischief. And rather than strive for any sort of definitive Will Oldham interview, I just wanted to do the best This Is Your Afterlife episode I could with him...

Playwright, actor, and well-balanced adult Steven Strafford is a breath of fresh air when it comes to putting creative pursuits in their proper place, i.e. as part of a life rather than a whole life. It was wonderful to talk to him about sobriety, meeting his husband, and moving from Chicago to Ohio as a grown man.

Content warning: sobriety, family, having kids, people pleasing, ants and grasshoppers, the "Pumpkins" song, a funeral at a sensible black box.

If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want fun bonus episodes, become a patron...

I've wanted artist, writer, educator, and organizer Benji Hart on the show for a while, and today we finally make it happen. It's such a pleasure to speak with them about navigating abolition work while acknowledging the very human desire to see evil punished. It's something I think about a lot, and clearly Benji does too.

Content warning: abolition, punishment, religion, not being able to relate to doing a genocide, Saturn return, voguing, bomba, dismantling the binary between thinking and feeling, why am I mourning Ben Carson?

If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife...

My conversation with Lyn Rye was so intense and locked in that I gave up on taking notes (and doing bits). They're a bass player, songwriter, artist, gardener, "house dad" at Casa Al-Fatiha (an autonomous sanctuary house for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers), and abolitionist troublemaker. Yet our conversation stretched beyond even all that work!

Content warning: domestic violence, carceral violence, assisted dying, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, Islam's day of reckoning, Joe Hill, afterlife-as-memory synchronicity.

Wanna hear the full-length version of this conversation? Become a patron for $5 or $15/month at patreon.com/davemaher.

Follow Lyn on IG...

Daniel Wyche is a composer and improvising musician who uses guitar, pedals, and other electronics to make tracks full of ideas, noise, and even humor. I love his new tape with Lia Kohl, Movie Candy, so I talked to him in my living room about how to listen to experimental music (a Patreon-only part of our talk) and just how important other people are to his well-being.

Content warning: hell is NO people, a gap year without the name "gap year," Chris Wiersema, learning how to hitchhike, metalhead with duffel bag full of CDs, Estonian farm, cousins.<...

Improviser, actor, and teacher Mary Cait Walthall directed Feed Wolf Ice Cream, the one-man show this podcast grew from. I talk to her about how the project has evolved and the comas that lead away from the dream of fame.

Content warning: punishment, parenting, enlightenment, death of childhood friends, talking circle funeral, Karens.

If you believe in This Is Your Afterlife and want fun bonus episodes, become a patron for $5 or $15/month at patreon.com/davemaher.

Mary Cait's improv team, Super Human, performs on Thursday nights at the Annoyance Theatre in Chicago.