LEXLOS

Alexa can smell Halloween. Haunted houses, the pop-up shops, Spencer’s, Hot Topic. Same smell every time, and nobody around her ever smells it. She spent years assuming something was wrong with her. Our pastor Mark Evans names it in about ten seconds.

Mark grew up in Australia where Halloween isn’t really a thing, and his wife was the one who liked it. What changed his mind wasn’t an argument, it was watching his own kids get scared before anyone taught them it was supposed to be fun.

We get into where trick-or-treating actually came from, why Christians who celebrate it always explain themselves, Alexa admitting she’s been judgy about it, and Mark telling us what it cost him to spend years proving he wasn’t one of those pastors.

Our book Joy Isn’t Canceled is out Tuesday, November 3.

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Part two of our Dancing with the Stars season, and it stopped being about dancing.

Alexa was given “I’m a Slave for You” and had to choose between owning it and playing it funny. She played it funny, and on this episode she finally says why: she was afraid that being confident would make people doubt her faith. Eleven years later she’s pretty sure nobody would have thought that at all.

We also get into Carlos telling his testimony on live TV to an a cappella Amazing Grace, the Magic Mike number the very next week, a live snake named Angie, and the contemporary dance where Alexa shared something she’d kept for six years.

If you’re struggling with an eating disorder, the National Alliance for Eating Disorders helpline is 1-866-662-1235.

Our book Joy Isn’t Canceled is out November 3.

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In 2015 we became the first married couple in Dancing with the Stars history to compete against each other on the same season. Carlos with Witney Carson, Alexa with Mark Ballas. He finished fourth, she finished sixth.

This is part one and it’s the honest version. On this episode Alexa says something we’ve never said out loud: she would have had more fun on that show without her husband. He was competitive. He was jealous. We’d been married six months. And our two pros weren’t speaking to each other, so the plan to go through it together fell apart in week one.

We get into how the offer came, why Carlos asked to switch partners before rehearsals started, how the money actually works, what a real DWTS week looks like, and why she needed more time to learn choreography than he did.

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Mark Evans is a fourth generation pastor who nearly quit. Around two years ago he told his own congregation he’d been drinking almost every night to self-medicate, and that confession is where this conversation starts.

We talk about what he calls the guru drug: the pedestal people put pastors and public figures on, and the hypocrisy that grows in the gap between the pedestal and the person. His antidote is honesty. Boast in your weakness and there’s nothing left to protect.

Alexa shares what happened the night she told her story on live TV, we talk about what it’s like when people say things about you publicly and you choose not to defend yourself, and Mark lands a line we haven’t stopped thinking about: don’t be the devil’s debt collector.

Also: a church that meets around tables, getting zoned out of a backyard, and why every disciple was a misfit.

Episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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We volunteered at a three day conference at a massive Los Angeles church, working behind the scenes, seating celebrity pastors. We won’t name it.

We heard staff yelling at each other through our earpieces during a worship conference. Alexa, eight months pregnant, was sent to move a small church that had shown up on time out of their seats so a bigger church that was late could have them. Carlos offered to walk a well known pastor to her seat and she told him she could read.

Over three days, one pastor acknowledged that we were human beings.

This is about why we stayed. How to tell the difference between a church that is actually broken and your own hurt looking for somewhere to land. The night Carlos decided he was done with the church we’re at now, and what changed his mind. And the churches that formed us, including one on Maui that fits inside a pickup truck.

If someone in a church hurt you, we’re not going to tell you that you caused it. Real abuse is a separate conversation and this isn’t it. But if you gave up on church because of people, come sit with this one.

Episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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No guest this week. Just us, answering what came in.

Alexa talks about the hardest season of our marriage, the year she spent praying over it, and how long it took before she saw anything change. Then she explains something neither of us had ever said out loud: that after a fight her heart and her mind know Carlos is safe, but her body puts a wall up and has to learn to trust him again.

We get into why one of us wants to talk it out tonight and the other needs space first. We disagree, on the record, about posting our kids. We agree completely about phones, which is that ours aren’t getting one before 18. Carlos talks about the job he turned down, and whether money changes a person or just reveals them.

The last question was what opinion might lose us followers. Alexa answers it. She’s pro-life, and she’s clear that she doesn’t mean pro-birth. She means pro-baby, pro-mama, and taking care of that mama after the baby comes. She also tells the story of a girl who called her, and what came of it.

Episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Stephen Kramer Glickman played Gustavo Rocque on Big Time Rush. During the pandemic he put a cover of "Crazy" on TikTok, it did 8.8 billion plays, it charted on Billboard above Kendrick Lamar, and almost nobody realized it was him. That's how he ended up on the reunion tour, after a phone call that came through while he was sitting in synagogue with his mom.

Carlos has known Stephen longer than he's known Alexa, so nothing in this one is off limits.

He crashed a Big Time Rush mall show in full Gustavo costume and got pulled out by security. Fans left CDs on his car because they thought he was a real record producer. At the end of season three he rented a truck, backed it onto the soundstage, and took home everything he could fit, and then the show got picked up for a fourth season and somebody asked for it all back.

On the final season, everybody got a raise. Stephen got a few hundred dollars. An executive promised him a real check on the last shooting day. What he actually got was an envelope with a $250 gift card to Red Lobster in it. Carlos has the matching story, which involves Louis Vuitton belts and a beach in New Jersey.

Also: the book about the show he wants somebody to let him write, why he will never pay for a sandwich at the Jersey Mike's in LAX, the audition that ended his Broadway dream, the first Gustavo who got replaced days before filming started, and the CIA gift shop.

Plus the new record deal, and the My Chemical Romance duet he somehow got Adam Pascal to sing on.

Stephen's new single, a full-band rock cover of "Driver's License" with Edwin McCain, is out now: https://stephenglickman.lnk.to/driverslicense

Episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Disclaimer: This conversation is for general information and encouragement only. It is not financial, investment, tax, or legal advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold anything. Colby's comments reflect his own views, not advice for your situation. Talk to a licensed professional who knows your actual circumstances before you make any money decision.

One of us saves. One of us gives it all away. Thirteen years of marriage and we are still negotiating it.

Colby Gilmore is a wealth manager who works mostly with athletes and entertainers, and who emailed Carlos every month for eight months before we finally agreed to meet. He showed up and led with Jesus and family before he said a word about taxes, and that is pretty much how this conversation goes.

Alexa tells the story of asking her mom, at seven or eight years old, how much she was making from a movie. Carlos admits that things, not money, were the idol. We have a real disagreement about debt that nobody in the room wins. Colby does the math on what a tithe actually came to in the Old Testament, which is a bigger number than you think, and then argues the ten percent is the wrong thing to be arguing about anyway.

Plus the accounting partner who died a month after he retired, why Colby thinks retirement is made up, and the family he told to turn down millions of dollars.

Episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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Neither of us parents that way now, and we're still figuring out what to do instead.

Four kids in, we talk about how we were raised, the things we swore we'd never repeat and caught ourselves repeating anyway, giving our kids a real seat at the table, what we're feeding them, and the hardest two words in parenting. Plus the line that reframed it for us: there's a difference between a kid who's scared of you and a kid who doesn't want to let you down.

Not a how-to. Just what we're trying.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@LexLos

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Brian Pruett has spent his life in fitness, and he'll be the first to tell you it's temporary. Futile, even. It just opens doors.

The former ballplayer and coach talks about what baseball taught him about chasing approval, how his wife Gigi found him because of the fame he was embarrassed by, and why broken isn't an identity. Then our producer Derek drops a reframe near the end that none of us have shaken since: stop trying to be liked, start trying to make people feel loved.

Watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@LexLos

lexlos.com

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