Can you have a fun and lively conversation about a serious and sensitive subject like crippling anxiety?

Well, we just did.

Renee Zukin is an educator, writer, and occasional musician who has openly written about her own struggles with anxiety for a while now, and she joins me on this week’s show to talk about how she has been able to make tremendous strides in facing, overcoming and learning to manage many of the anxieties which had kept her from living as full a life as possible for far too long, and what she’s learned along the way, lessons she’s sharing in her forthcoming new book Every Day, I’m Brave, which drops on August 8th.

It’s entirely possible that Liz Ford loves cats even more than I do.

How do I know? She made them her life. And dogs, too.

Liz is the former director of the Iowa City Animal Care and Adoption Center, who now has her own dog training business, and we talk about her journey from the corporate world to the world of working with animals, common misconceptions people have about their pets, the differences between cats and dogs, what people don’t consider when adopting animals that they really should, and all the good work the folks at the animal shelter do for all kinds of animals that make their way through there.

What’s the old joke?

“Do you know how to get to Carnagie Hall?”

“Practice!”

Well, in a similar vein, I wondered “How does a young woman from tiny little Solon, Iowa, become a sought-after opera singer who’s performed all across Europe and the United States, and just came back to Iowa after three months in New York City working with the Metropolitan Opera?”

And the answer to that question, and the journey she took to get there, was really kind of fascinating to me.

We also talked about what it’s like traveling the world and singing (and living) in places where you don’t speak the language, what opera singers have to do to stay in “opera shape” in between gigs and so much more on this week’s episode with Mezzo-Soprano Leia Lensing.

Josh Carroll is one of the singularly most talented writers, comic artists, and drummers I know, all at the same fucking time.

He’s also someone who is very open about the fact that he’s been in recovery from alcohol abuse for well over a decade now.

We have a very interesting, and sometimes very deep conversation about creativity, reading, writing, drawing comics, making music, sobriety, recovery, how he ended up moving to Iowa (via Portland, via Arizona) and why he’s now moving to Washington, and I was really happy to be able to get him on the show before he left town.

Megan Early Alter is an Iowa City city councilor who joined me in my shop to talk about her time at New York University, which is also where I went to college, what brought her here, her “day job” at ACT, her time as a professor at the University of Iowa, why she decided to enter politics, what it’s like being an elected official in a town like Iowa City, training with the Joffrey Ballet, being a competitive collegiate diver, and a whole bunch of other things I didn’t know about her since she’s the first guest I’ve had on who I didn’t already know to some degree, which made for a very interesting conversation.

Ortega LaTrobe, AKA Craig Owsley - or maybe it’s the other way around? - is one of the most unique and interesting people in Iowa City.

He’s been a doorman or a bouncer at almost every live music venue in town during the last 20 years, he’s a rabid professional wrestling fan who travels the country by bus to see his favorite wrestlers perform, is an avid chef and gourmand, and he shares all of those parts of his life on the many YouTube channels he’s created to share his passions and adventures with the rest of us.

We talk about food, travel, wrestling, bouncing, masculinity, and meeting David Bowie.

Ross Meyer has been the head projectionist at FilmScene in Iowa City since they opened while also being the ringmaster of their long-running, weekly grindhouse movie screenings, Late Shift at the Grindhouse for almost 12 years.

He talks about FilmScene and their history, role, and mission in the Iowa City community, how the film-going experience has changed over the years with the rise of streaming, what it’s like showing dated and sometimes raunchy old movies in a sometimes very sensitive college town, and his own favorite film-going experiences.

Kristofer Paine has been the proprietor of the Iowa City Police Log, a Facebook page and Twitter account that documents the weird, wild, and sometimes disturbing calls made from citizens to the Iowa City Police Department for close to 12 years now. He talks about how and why he started it, what the response has been, how it's changed over the years, and why so many people seem to be so willing to lose their minds in public on the internet when they encounter something they don't like, and what kind of entitlement fuels that.

Patrick Tape Flemming has been a major part of the music scene in Iowa and across the midwest for over twenty years. He talks with Yale about his time with the bands Poison Control Center and Gloom Balloon, producing albums for other artists, the highs and lows of fame, bleeding sandwiches, and a few other things, too.

Katie Roche has been elbow deep in everything that makes Iowa City a halfway decent place to live most of the time for as long as I've lived here. Local television, The Englert Theater, and now, the Iowa City Public Library, Katie has worked at all of my most beloved places in town, and she innaugurates the show as our first guest as we talk about extinct sandwiches, libraries, the coming apocolypse, Werner Herzog, what it feels like to be a human living in the current timeline, turning old bars into orphanages and a few other things.