The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.
We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.
What You’ll Find:
If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.
Episodes drop every Tuesday!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
The show where business meets love, and culture meets critique. We’re Aiwan and Tamanda, two Black women with 20 years each in entertainment, research, and social justice. We’re also a married couple figuring out what it means to build a life and two businesses together.
We'll talk about the realities of running a business, making creative work that matters, and navigating research with integrity.
What You’ll Find:
If you’re navigating business, love, and the messiness of life while trying to do meaningful work, you’re in the right place.
Episodes drop every Tuesday!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow, we spotlight a podcast that had us nodding, wincing, laughing, and quietly re-evaluating our own friendships.
We open with a short preamble and reflections on adult friendship; the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, closeness, and safety, and the moments when something starts to feel off but we can’t quite name why. From there, we introduce an episode of the Unapologetically Black Podcast that literally woke Tamanda up in the dead of night.
Hosted by Dr Leanne Levers and Roshan Roberts, the episode centres on friendship red flags- from love bombing and emotional over-investment, to negativity, judgement, and relationships that drain more than they give. What unfolds is an honest, funny, and sometimes uncomfortable conversation about how friendship can mirror romantic dynamics, and why so many of us end up lowering our standards when it comes to the people we call friends.
We reflect on why this episode resonated so deeply: the language it gives to experiences many people struggle to articulate, the permission it offers to reassess “ride or die” narratives, and the importance of boundaries in friendships.
This Feedwarmer is all about giving ourselves permission to name the patterns and emotional labour that seem to go unquestioned, and asking what healthier, more reciprocal friendships look like. You can see it as a taster of what’s to come in a deeper dive on friendship we’ll be dropping in 2026.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone rethinking friendships, boundaries, or emotional labour
☕ Want to support Rigour & Flow? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow
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In this Feedwarmer episode of Rigour & Flow, we share a moment of encounter: meeting sporting history in the flesh.
The episode opens with us setting the scene at CLIMB 2025, where Aiwan attended a talk by Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson and knew immediately she had to hear more. After that brief introduction, we move into a live conversation between Aiwan and Tessa, recorded at the AiAi Studios stand during the festival.
Tessa Sanderson is the first Black British woman to win an Olympic gold medal. In this conversation, she reflects on her journey to the 1984 Olympics, the mindset required to win, and the reality of carrying history on her shoulders. She reflects on racism in British sport, the pressures faced by Black women athletes, and the mental discipline required to sustain excellence over time.
The conversation also moves beyond the track. Tessa shares how she has translated elite sport into business, leadership, and advocacy - from boardrooms to grassroots work - including her longer term vision to set up a Museum of Diversity and her commitment to creating pathways for young people, especially Black girls, in sport.
This is a warm, generous, and energising conversation about excellence, confidence, legacy, and what it means to meet someone whose achievements shaped generations.
🎧 In this episode:
• Tessa’s journey to Olympic gold in 1984 and the mindset behind it
• What that medal meant for Black Britain and Black women in sport
• Mental strength, self-belief, and sustaining confidence over time
• Sport as business: sponsorship, leadership, and treating yourself as an enterprise
• The Museum of Diversity and educating future generations
• Encouragement for Black women and girls to take up space and keep going
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone who loves sport, legacy, and Black British history
☕ Want to support Rigour & Flow? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow
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In this Feedwarmer episode, we spotlight one of our absolute favourite projects of 2025: Unguilty Pleasures - the Real Housewives–inspired podcast we launched this year as a collaboration between AiAi Studios and Daylight Productions.
Hosted by Liv Little and Scarlett Curtis, Unguilty Pleasures is a joyful, self-aware ode to reality TV, escapism and the softer corners of culture we don’t always give ourselves permission to enjoy. From the chaotic brilliance of The Real Housewives to the emotional intelligence hidden inside so-called “trash TV,” Liv and Scarlett dive into the shows that hold us, distract us, heal us or simply make us laugh.
In this episode, we revisit their conversation with Elizabeth Day - a warm, funny, chaotic delight that celebrates pleasure without guilt, the art of switching off, and the beauty of finding meaning in the unserious. We reflect on why these worlds grip us, what they reveal about class, gender and longing, and why escape isn’t something to apologise for.
If you need a smile, a breather or a reminder that joy counts as culture, this Feedwarmer is for you.
To close the year, we also share how much fun it has been to help bring this show into the world - with Aiwan Obinyan serving as Executive Producer and Senior Producer, Elizabeth Day as Executive Producer, and Tamanda Walker leading on data and insights for the series. One of the brightest collaborations of our 2025.
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone who loves Housewives, pop culture or escapist joy
☕ Want to support Rigour & Flow? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow
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We return to a conversation that never really settled.
After the unexpected response to Season 2’s “Episode 19: Are Mixed Race People ‘Properly Black’?”, we sit with what lingered; the comments, the discomfort, the language policing, and the familiar demand that mixed race people either ‘pick a side’ or ‘play the bridge’.
This isn’t a debate about identity labels. It’s a reflection on what mixedness is asked to do in a world structured by racial hierarchy.
We begin with language: the push to abandon the word “race,” the claim that naming it only entrenches division, and the exhaustion - especially among Black and mixed communities - of being told that silence equals progress. We ask what gets lost when language is policed, and why refusing to name race never seems to dismantle racism.
From there, we move into the deeper fault lines. The recurring pressure to “pick a side.” The temptation to claim a separate category. And the seductive pressure and idea that mixed race people are uniquely positioned to mediate, reconcile, or soften conflict - to ‘be the bridge’ in a divided world.
Drawing on personal experience, online responses, and psychological frameworks, we unpack the emotional labour hidden inside that phrase. The shapeshifting. The code-switching. The quiet expectation to absorb tension so others don’t have to sit with it themselves, and the discomfort of racial anxiety.
Along the way, we name a distinction that matters: being asked to pick a side is not the same as being asked to pick a politics. Identity does not determine values - but values do determine what we refuse to excuse, paper over, or explain away.
This episode is about exhaustion, refusal, and integrity. About belonging everywhere - and what it costs. And about the possibility that wholeness does not require neutrality, mediation, or silence.
In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone navigating mixedness, mediation, or the cost of belonging
☕ Want to support the show? Buy us a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/rigourandflow
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In this Notes from the Margins edition of Rigour & Flow, we follow three journeys that sit at the heart of Black life: how we heal, how we give, and how we move through a world that does not always want us in it.
Tamanda opens with a little-known and astonishing history of mental health care in Nigeria. Long before global psychiatry learned to speak about community, Dr Thomas Adeoye Lambo pioneered a model that placed patients with local families, blended medical care with traditional healing, and produced recovery outcomes that surpassed Western institutions.
We trace how cultural belief, ancestral knowledge and community networks transformed treatment, and why colonisation buried so many of these practices from view.
From there, Aiwan takes us into the psychology of lending money. Growing up in a home where generosity came before the electricity meter, she unpacks the emotional inheritance behind giving, the different meanings of “broke”, and the personal boundary she had to learn the hard way: ‘Do not lend what you cannot afford to lose!’.
We explore how culture, responsibility and survival shape our money instincts, and why boundaries are a form of self-care.
We close with a listener request that goes straight to the marrow of identity: travelling while Black and queer. From the relief of landing in majority Black countries, to “walking the gauntlet” in Lanzarote, we speak honestly about safety, the violence of the white gaze, and the fragile peace that holiday planning requires when your body is othered before you even reach passport control.
We also speak to the joy of finding Black owned and queer run travel spaces that see us, hold us and shelter us.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/1TTKqQl9k_o
🔁 Share with someone navigating their own journey
📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com
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We step into the charged, intimate territory of religion, politics and the stories we were raised to believe, and ask how aspects of Pentecostal conditioning continue to shape how many of us understand Israel, Palestine, and the Middle East today.
We begin with the lessons we absorbed long before we had language for them: Zion as a sacred homeland, Jews as “God’s chosen people,” Muslims as enemies in spiritual warfare, and Israel as a nation that could never be questioned without risking blasphemy. We trace how church services, sermons, youth camps and worship songs shaped a political worldview long before we voted, read widely, or understood the stakes.
From there, we widen the lens. Aiwan recalls her childhood Pentecostal formation: the unquestioned reverence for Israel, and the anti-Muslim narratives woven into some spiritual teachings. She then reflects on her pilgrimage to the Holy Lands - from being baptised in the River Jordan, to standing on the shore of the Sea of Galilee - and how the holiness of those spaces blurred the violence and dispossession occurring in the present day. Together, we ask what it means to inherit a theology that centres on people’s chosenness at the expense of others’ humanity.
Along the way, we confront the fear many Christians carry: the fear of questioning Israel; the fear of “dishonouring God”; the fear of being seen as anti-Semitic simply for naming state violence. We explore how Christian Zionism blurs spiritual devotion with geopolitical allegiance, and what it looks like to unlearn those scripts with clarity, compassion and courage.
This is not a geopolitical debate.
Recorded on 19 August 2025, it is a discussion about how faith shapes our inner world, how conditioning influences what we think is right or wrong, and what it means to find honesty at a holy crossroad. It is about learning our minds, unlearning what no longer fits, and staying open to the full story of building faith in humanity.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/vf84RUtOtgc
🔁 Share with someone exploring faith, politics or deconstruction
📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com
⚠️ Content note: discussion includes anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim narratives, state violence, and theological indoctrination.
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Divorce is sheer grief. It pulls apart your routines, your identity and the story you believed you were living. In this episode of Rigour and Flow, we open up with one of our most private conversations.
Tamanda shares the long road from confusion to clarity in her first marriage. She reflects on growing up with parents who modelled peace but not conflict, and how that silence left her without the tools to navigate a hint of difficulty in her own relationship. She talks about sexless partnership, emotional distance, shrinking herself, and the quiet moment she realised she could not live another decade in a marriage that looked calm but felt empty.
She shares about rings coming off, crying in public, the support of older women and the slow, steady work of starting again. We also walk through the identity collapse that follows and the loneliness of losing not only your spouse but the entire community that forms around a marriage.
We then explore dating after divorce, stepping back into a world that feels unfamiliar and the gradual rebuilding of confidence, boundaries and desire.
Ultimately, we wrap up reflecting as a couple on how Tamanda found the courage to marry again. Then we get to how Aiwan’s certainty in proposing grounded Tamanda… and how conflict resolution, honesty and growth have reshaped the meaning of love the second time around.
🎧 In this episode:
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone navigating heartbreak, healing or hard decisions
#RigourAndFlow #Divorce #Relationships #LoveAndLoss #IdentityRebuild #GriefWork #DiasporaDialogues #AiAiStudios
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We take education to task. Asking who it serves, what it leaves out and what it means for boys growing up in an age of algorithms and Andrew Tate.
Aiwan opens with a question many 18-year-olds are asking today: "Is university still worth it?" She shares what she gained from structured learning in music technology and what 20 years in a creative industry taught her that a degree never could. We talk debt, discipline and the difference between education and enlightenment. And, dare we say, even wisdom.
Then Tamanda brings to the surface a story that’s hard to ignore: the rise of the Black Red Pill bros. She introduces Kelvin Frimpong, a Ghanaian-born ex-Red Piller, whose viral TikTok lays bare how young men can be groomed through isolation, resentment and the promise of belonging. We hear his cut-through voicenotes on education as prevention, and the role that adults can and must play in creating spaces where boys can question safely without being shamed.
Finally, we hear from our dear friend, Dr Alex Blower, whose academic work explores the most critical and urgent of questions: “What can we do about the issue of boys, men and toxic masculinity?” Alex adds a dose of compassion that’s informed by his work on boys, schooling and masculinity. And he offers a roadmap for teachers, parents and communities to become “trusted adults”, i.e. mentors who can protect and honour the emotional lives of boys in a world that too often forgets them.
🎧 In this episode:
🎙️ Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with a parent, teacher or friend raising a boy in 2025
📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com
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In this episode of Rigour & Flow, we step into the tender terrain of family business: where bedrooms and boardrooms can potentially become interleading doors. From millennia-old trading families to today’s co-founder couples, we ask what it takes to build something together without breaking each other.
Our conversation starts with a question we hear often: “How do you run a business with your spouse?” To get to the heart of it, we trace our journey of running two entities side by side: AiAi Studios and Roots & Rigour. Plus building out this podcast from scratch!
Aiwan reflects on her childhood fascination with families running their corner-shops and the powerful influence of prosperity preachers - like TD Jakes - passing on their mega-gospel empires to their kids so that wealth and work were kept in the family. Tamanda offers a counter-portrait of her parents’ co-op working farm in Botswana, a familial partnership built on hard work and a whole lot of unforgettable produce.
After covering this ground, we walk through another door and consider why our modern workplaces have become so loveless. Why are they places where we “leave ourselves at the door”, and how has capitalism cut emotion out of work relations?
Then we turn the key and confront the paradox of partnership: that business can strengthen love, or test it to breaking point. From succession plans to Succession-style dramas, from grant-making films to hard working farms, there’s no holding back in getting to the realities of what it means to turn shared purpose into shared prosperity within a single family unit.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone thinking about love, work and legacy
📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com
⚠️ Content note: discussion includes references to domestic violence and workplace inequality.
#RigourAndFlow #FamilyBusiness #FamilyLegacy #BusinessPartners #BlackBusinessGrowth #WorkMarriage #WorkAndLove #Entrepreneurship #WorkCulture #RelationshipGoals #AiAiStudios #BlackPodcast #DiasporaDialogues #BlackWomenPodcasters #RootsAndRigour
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We turn our gaze to the glittering world of Africa’s super rich - and ask what wealth really means in a world built on inequality.
Beginning with the BBC documentary From Lagos to London: The Rise of Nigeria’s Super Rich, we unpack the rise of “soft-life” culture, the myth of meritocracy, and the emotional price of Black excellence. From oil money and old elites to Instagram entrepreneurs and Dubai Bling escapism, we explore how class divides shape not only who gets to live well - but whose stories get told as success.
From there, we widen the lens. Tamanda reflects on growing up between Botswana, South Africa, and Britain - seeing wealth, domestic work, and dignity collide inside her own family history. Aiwan recalls her first reaction to the From Lagos to London BBC documentary in 2016 - the thrill of representation, the absurdity of diamond-encrusted phones, and the unease of celebrating excess while living through austerity.
Together, we map the fault-lines between aspiration and accountability, asking how we can enjoy the good life without reproducing the hierarchies we claim to resist.
Along the way, we confront the paradox of privilege: the soft-life that depends on someone else’s hard one; the excellence that excludes; the success that can’t always look itself in the mirror.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone thinking about wealth, class or “soft-life” culture
📬 Reflections or stories to share? rigourandflow@gmail.com
⚠️ Content note: discussion includes class inequality, elitism, and structural violence.
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The original African Bad Gal gets us going, Kenyan MP and activist Millie Odhiambo Mabona, whose fearless voice and legendary one-liners have cut through flaccid politics with candour. From calling out men on the parliamentary floor on decisions, periods (!), to publishing her book Rig or Be Rigged, Millie embodies the unapologetic role needed for women to step into power.
From there, we pivot to the plains, asking why the wildlife stories of Africa are still told through a White lens. Where are the Black filmmakers in natural history and conservation media? From Botswana’s Tourism Board to BBC studios, we trace the complex landscape of access, ancestral knowledge and representation in this important space.
Finally, we turn the lens inward for a segment that’s equal parts rigour and self-reflection: After an anonymous comment called out a previous episode on Black Britishness, Tamanda and Aiwan unpack what happens when class and accountability collide in our own communities - and why words absolutely DO matter in a world that too easily wants to delete them (after rightfully expressing them).
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with a Bad Gal who speaks the truth and rewrites respectability rules
📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com
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We travel back to the glossy pages that raised us - the agony-aunt columns, gossip spreads, and advice pages that shaped girlhood across Africa and beyond.
At the centre of the story is Dear Dolly - an advice column that captured the hearts of readers across the continent of Africa, answering questions about love, shame, and desire. What few people knew was that, in the early days at least, “Dolly” wasn’t a woman at all, but a group of men writing under her name.
Reading directly from the Drum magazine archives, we dive into real letters from the 1960s and 70s - from women asking about cheating husbands and body image, to queer readers cautiously revealing their desires in a deeply heteronormative world. We sit with the tenderness, the absurdity, and the harm in those pages: the empathy that sometimes peeked through, and the patriarchy printed between the lines.
Together we ask what these columns reveal about love, morality, and modernity in post-colonial Africa - and how their logics still echo today, from tabloid talk shows to TikTok advice culture.
🎧 In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone raised on the magazines that taught us who to be
📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com
⚠️ Content note: discussion includes gendered violence, body shaming, and references to mental health.
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We step into the charged terrain of land, power, and belonging - and ask who really gets to claim ownership of land in Africa. Beginning with a screening of The Battle for Laikipia at Hyde Park Picture House, we trace the tensions between Indigenous Samburu pastoralists and fourth-generation white settlers in Kenya - and unravel how the logic of private property, colonial inheritance, and climate crisis continue to shape who eats, who survives, and who gets fenced out.
From there, we widen the lens. Tamanda connects the film’s themes to her own family history across Botswana, South Africa, and Britain - from childhood memories of “the boy” on white relatives’ farms to a recent, real-life story of stolen oranges and guinea fowl that became a parable of modern policing versus ancestral justice. Aiwan brings a filmmaker’s eye to the ethics of empathy and the politics of whose pain is centred, then flips the frame to Yellowstone and the global story of land as commodity - whether in Montana, Laikipia, or the post-colonial south.
Along the way, we confront the colonial hangover that refuses to die: white settlers who never left, governments that compensate the oppressor before the oppressed, and a climate emergency exposing the same old inequalities in new forms.
In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube
🔁 Share with someone thinking about land, identity, or climate justice
📬 Reflections or stories to share? Email us: rigourandflow@gmail.com
⚠️ Content note: discussion includes colonial violence, racist language, and murder/death.
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FGM, cultural silence, and women’s rights in Britain today.
In this feedwarmer - and our very first Rigour & Flow On The Go - we take our podcast out of the studio and into community spaces. Live from Climb25 in Leeds, Aiwan reflects on the intimacy of podcasting, how deep conversations can cut through even in a noisy public space, and the art of capturing sound in the moment. From the clang of a circus game in the background to the warmth of our signature African textile on the table, this is Rigour & Flow out in the real world.
At the centre of this episode is Dorcas, founder of Peacemaker International and Women in Safe Hands. Dorcas shares her experience as a survivor of female genital mutilation (FGM), the cultural superstitions that sustain the practice - including the belief that a newborn could be harmed by touching a woman’s clitoris - and her fight to protect other women and girls. She speaks about underfunding, being surveilled in the building her organisation carries out its work, and the “quiet sacrifices” she has made to keep her work going, from personally funding Christmas gifts for families to running culturally-sensitive food banks stocked with African produce.
We close with reflections on what Dorcas’ story reveals about women’s rights, cultural taboos, and the resilience of grassroots activists working against the odds.
In this episode:
🎧 Listen wherever you get your podcasts
🎥 Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mWTOfcjwnvs
🔁 Share with someone who needs to be in this conversation
📬 Leave us a voicenote for Season 3: https://telbee.io/channel/_lea4tltbwrlyfaymnucla/
⚠️ Content note: This episode contains discussion of female genital mutilation (FGM) and violence against women and girls (VAWG).
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Trans rights, migrant labour, and the hidden lives of domestic workers in Britain.
In this feedwarmer, we shine a light on Our Place Is Here - a powerful three-part podcast series created in partnership with the Our Place Is Here campaign produced by Aiwan and AiAi Studios in collaboration with gal-dem. The Filipino Domestic Workers Association, and campaign partners fighting for migrant workers’ rights including Kanlungan Filipino Consortium, The Voice of Domestic Workers, Kalayaan, and Purpose. Visit gal-dem.com to read the essays in both English and Tagalog, and find out what you can do to support the campaign.
At the centre of our conversation is Nina’s story: a trans woman navigating life as an undocumented domestic worker in the UK. Her essay, read in both English and Tagalog, unpacks the intersection of gender, migration status, and labour - revealing what it means to survive, resist, and find dignity while working behind closed doors.
We reflect on the broader campaign, the dual-language production process, and what this project teaches us about trauma-informed storytelling, the politics of translation, and the role of podcasting as a tool for research and systems change.
In this episode:
Our Place Is Here was created with and for the community it represents - centring the voices of domestic workers themselves, in their own words.
Listen, reflect, and ask yourself: who gets to be seen, and whose labour remains invisible?
Our Place Is Here was produced by Aiwan Obinyan with production and sound design by AiAi Studios. The Executive Producers for gal-dem were Suyin Haynes, Cici Peng and Katie Goh.
The Executive Producer for the Our Place Is Here campaign was Francesca Humi, supported by the Filipino Domestic Workers Association, Kanlungan and The Voice of Domestic Workers.
With graphics produced by Karis Pierre and artwork produced by Khadija Said.
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In this final episode of Season 2, we return to our signature Unfinished Business format, bringing together the conversations that refused to be neatly stitched up.
We open with reflections on the mixed reactions to our episode on mixed race identity, which sparked far more commentary than we anticipated on social media - including a sharp intervention from the brilliant BBC 1Xtra presenter and commentator Richie Brave, who stepped in with timely analysis just as things were getting hot in the kitchen.
From there, we weave together three of the season’s most urgent themes to ask: What links queer domestic violence, the raising of boys, and the anger directed at migrants and asylum seekers?
Aiwan reflects on the silence around queer relationships in DV spaces - why they’re rarely addressed in mainstream narratives - and the frustration of being asked to speak on the issue in professional spaces when her expertise lies elsewhere. Tamanda builds on this by connecting anti-immigrant rhetoric to violence against women and girls, drawing on the recent statement by 100 women’s rights groups that challenges far-right attempts to scapegoat migrants and asylum seekers.
Along the way, we share stories from ourselves and our listeners: being caught in Millwall football crowds on matchday, facing down misogyny from schoolboys, and healing from trauma as a teacher. The through-line is patriarchy and masculinity - how harm is taught, inherited, and weaponised from the playground to the political stage.
As Season 2 closes, we carry forward the reflections of two teachers who sent us a powerful voicenote exchange: Who teaches men to harm, where are we right now, and what would it take to break the cycle?
In this episode:
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We hand the mic to you. For our first-ever community voicenote episode, we asked you, our listeners, to share what’s stayed with you so far. What you’ve disagreed with. And what you want us to explore more deeply. The result is this moving, funny, and thoughtful collection of reflections that remind us why we make this show in the first place.
From lived experiences of sickle cell and navigating Black British and other migrant identities, to the intersections of queerness and faith, your voices bring new dimensions and fresh truths to the conversation.
We are so grateful to everyone who sent in a voicenote. We received a lot more than we expected and could only feature a small selection here, but we’ll be returning to others across the season as they connect with future themes. Also, since we loved hearing from you directly: we’ve decided to keep our voicenote channel open all season long, so please keep sending your reflections, provocations, and questions as you listen.
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We abandon the serious stuff and dive straight into our love of all things woo-woo: near-death experiences, dodgy mediums, growing up under Satanic Panic, and the paranormal guilty pleasures that make us cry with laughter.
Tamanda sets the scene early: this is not a serious death and grief episode. Instead, it’s a confessional of the strange, terrifying, and sometimes hilarious ways we first encountered the afterlife - from her family cat “Pussy Rosa”, to the endless references to reincarnation and sangomas in her mother’s magazines.
Aiwan recalls growing up under the shadow of debunked Christian writers like Rebecca Brown and Mary K. Baxter, whose lurid books about demons terrified her as a child… and still rack up glowing Amazon reviews. Meanwhile, Tamanda confesses her loyalty to Tyler Henry, the sweating, scribbling “white boy band” medium who claims to chat with the dead.
Between the crying-laughing fits, we ask ALLLLLL the serious-unserious questions: are near-death experiences brain glitches, or proof of the great beyond? Are mediums for real, or do they just make really great TV? And is it better to chase the afterlife — or focus on the here and now?
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We step into the tangled, deeply personal politics of body image - and the fat and skinny shaming scripts that shape how we see ourselves, each other, and the people we love.
We open with a conversation about what it means to be two women in a relationship with entirely different body types; each of us shaped by radically different cultural beauty standards in our own homes. From Lagos to London, Malawi to the Midlands, we unpack how the same body can be celebrated in one place and critiqued in another - and sometimes by the very same people!
Tamanda shares her lifelong entanglement with weight, the childhood humiliations that stuck, and how growing up in southern Africa taught her that a bigger body could be a symbol of health, wealth, and desirability. Meanwhile, Aiwan reflects on the flip side: the invisibility and dismissal that can come with being naturally slim, the “chicken bone legs” taunts of school, and why she’s had to defend the legitimacy of skinny shaming as real harm.
Along the way, we trace the food rules and body scripts we inherited: from family kitchens lined with SlimFast boxes, to the public weigh-ins of Weight Watchers, to today’s Ozempic era. We unpack how those scripts collide in our relationship, how they shape intimacy, and what it takes to stop policing each other’s bodies when the culture won’t.
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We step into the messy truth about adulthood, rites of passage, and why so many of us hit 40 feeling… not quite grown.
Aiwan opens with Kendra Lindsay’s viral post - a rallying call to join the “Council of Elders” instead of clinging to youth - which ultimately ruffled the feathers of a legion of women in their 40s. From there, we dive into the uncomfortable question: Where did we get the idea that 40 isn’t old? And who exactly benefits from allowing us to believe that, at 40, we are still really youthful?
The conversation spirals into Blindboy’s take on the infantilisation of millennials - from the deregulation of children’s advertising in the 1980s, to the way nostalgia and “adult baby” culture can soothe us… while distracting us from demanding what we deserve.
Tamanda shares her own feelings about approaching a milestone age: how she carries all the responsibilities of an adult, but none of the financial security promised to us if we worked hard and played by the rules. Aiwan reflects on getting past the big 40, growing up outside of commercial youth culture, the rites of passage she did experience, and why she believes adulthood is something we should step into rather than avoid.
Together, we ask what happens when capitalism needs to keep us “forever young”, just so it can hold on to its happy and willing consumers - and what it takes to claim your place as a fully-fledged adult in a system that keeps moving the goalposts.
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