Self-Centered Pod

Produced by Phoenix Maulella
Edited by Louis Sangiorgio
Recorded at The KINN

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EP 02 · Rebuilding Connection in a Fractured Reality with Sophie Beren and Matt Klein

aselfcenteredpod@gmail.com (Olivia Owens, Tori Lazar) — Wed, 3 Dec 2025 15:00:00 +0000

What happens when the world we are living in stops feeling shared?

We talk about empathy, listening, nuance, dialogue. We talk about polarization, online echo chambers, and misinformation. We talk about connection as the antidote to loneliness, and yet so many of us still feel misunderstood, unseen, or at the very edge of our own relationships.

In this episode of Self-Centered, Tori Lazar and Olivia Owens ask what it takes to reconnect when our informational worlds, emotional needs, and relational patterns no longer align. What does support look like when we cannot agree on basic truths? How do we navigate discomfort without collapsing into defensiveness? And how do we rebuild trust, in ourselves and with each other, in an era defined by performance, fragmentation, and emotional overextension?

Who we tapped to investigate

To ground the conversation in lived experience, we turned to Sophie Beren, a unifier, founder of The Conversationalist, and a leader in helping people navigate dialogue across difference. Sophie’s work centers on breaking out of echo chambers and creating containers for honest, purpose-driven conversation. She helps us unpack the collapse of shared reality, the difference between discomfort and danger, and what conversational consent looks like when tensions run high.

To help us explore the systems shaping our social and emotional lives, we sat down with Matt Klein, a cultural strategist mapping the ways digital environments influence identity, behavior, and connection. Matt reveals how platforms turn relationships into performance, why our tolerance for friction is shrinking, and what happens when every interaction is mediated by an algorithmic stage.

Together, their perspectives illustrate how personal experience and structural design are always in conversation, and how reclaiming connection requires addressing both.

What we explore in this episode

Why people living in different information loops struggle to connect

Discomfort vs. danger: how to stay in hard conversations without self-betrayal

Conversational consent and the art of setting shared intentions

Reciprocity vs. over-functioning in relationships

The fear of voicing needs and how it blocks intimacy

Performance culture and the loss of “backstage time”

Why parasocial relationships evoke real emotional responses

How the feed trains us to avoid friction and outsource selfhood

Storytelling as both a mirror and container for healing

Co-creation as the foundation for deeper relationships and dialogue

Follow along

00:00 — Show open · Why connection feels harder right now
00:48 — Social overstimulation · Olivia on friendship, solitude, and being alone
02:17 — Emotional availability · The anxiety of initiating connection
04:07 — Parasocial desire · What Love Island opened up for Olivia
05:57 — Healing inside relationship · Triggers as invitations
07:21 — Reentering dating · Slowness, readiness, and the self
09:21 — Reciprocity as intention · “Am I getting what I’m giving?”
10:32 — Over-functioning · Childhood patterns of giving without receiving
12:42 — Edges of belonging · Feeling peripheral in friend groups
15:15 — Boundaries vs. needs · The vulnerability of naming what you want
17:45 — Love languages and emotional texture
19:32 — Double-Tap: Sophie Beren intro · Echo chambers and courageous dialogue
20:20–21:48 — Conversational consent · Intention, capacity, and relational safety
21:48–23:11 — Evolving vs. changing · What conversation can realistically do
23:11–27:16 — Childhood conditions that shape how we listen and respond
27:16 — Double-Tap: Matt Klein intro · Identity, performance, and digital environments
29:29–31:30 — Platforms as third parties · When the medium speaks for us
31:30–34:43 — Opposing views · Hearing vs. being heard
34:43–37:24 — Shared reality and the cultural cost of fragmentation
37:24–40:39 — Echo chambers IRL · Comfort as a false signal of truth
40:39–44:24 — The feed as a trough · Design incentives and internalization
44:24–47:10 — The vanishing backstage · Why we’re starving for unperformed space
47:10–51:01 — Anxiety, avoidance, and the cost of frictionless design
51:01–54:23 — Story as identity · Updating the narrative as we evolve
54:23–59:04 — Parasocial relationships · Naming them to navigate them
59:04–1:04:40 — Responsible innovation · Designing systems with humanity in mind
1:04:40–1:06:00 — Co-creation · Building relationships through shared containers
1:06:00 — Close · Staying a little more self-centered

Some takeaways

Shared reality is a prerequisite for connection.
Without a baseline of truth, conflict becomes impossible to navigate and empathy has nowhere to land.

Discomfort is not danger.
Friction is part of connection. Learning to stay regulated inside tension expands relational possibility.

Reciprocity is a practice, not a personality trait.
Over-functioning often comes from old conditioning—not genuine alignment.

Needs deepen intimacy.
Boundaries protect the relationship; voiced needs grow it.

We’re losing our backstage.
When every interaction is performed, authenticity becomes harder to access—even alone.

Parasocial relationships are emotionally real.
Understanding them helps us reclaim agency instead of judging ourselves.

What We Need More Of

Containers for conversation.
Clear intentions, shared capacity, and structured dialogue create the conditions for honesty and care.

Design that honors human limits.
Platforms must evolve beyond engagement metrics toward supporting resilience, friction, and critical thinking.

Practices that reintroduce friction.
Not everything should be easy—depth requires resistance.

Relational co-creation.
Shared expectations, explicit agreements, and intentional repair build trust more sustainably than vibe-based connection.

Prompts for Reimagination

Where am I confusing discomfort with danger, and what conversation has space to continue?

What need am I not voicing because I am afraid of how it will be received?

Which echo chambers (digital or relational) am I participating in without realizing it?

What would “backstage time” look like in my day or week?

How might co-creation shift the dynamics of a relationship I care about?

What story about myself is outdated, and what would it mean to rewrite it?

Links for Further Exploration

Sophie Beren

Matt Klein

Stay Connected

Self-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners.

Subscribe & Listen

Produced by Phoenix Maulella
Edited by Louis Sangiorgio
Recorded at The KINN

Rate & Review

Leaving a quick review or rating helps more people find the show, and keeps thoughtful, slow media visible in a noisy world.

Join the Community

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💬 Follow us on Instagram for clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes moments.

DOUBLE TAP · Identity, Community, and Choosing Safety with Van Newman

aselfcenteredpod@gmail.com (Tori Lazar, Olivia Owens) — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 08:00:00 +0000

To rethink how we relate to identity, platforms, and belonging, we turned to Van Neumann — a writer, designer, and cultural strategist whose work spans community building, narrative worlds, and screenwriting. Van’s question sits at the center of it all: What does it take to feel safe enough to be honest?

In this episode, Van traces their evolution from creative strategist to screenwriter, the limits of platform-based community, and the hard, practical choices trans people are making to live safely and fully. It’s a conversation about creative focus, digital agency, and building containers that let people rest, rebuild, and be real.

What we explore in this episode

The difference between a friend group and a community with purpose, structure, and containers

Why opting out of platforms is hard when daily life and safety still run through them

Creative evolution in public: being known for many things and choosing “writer” for this season

Original thought vs. the algorithm: how distraction dilutes selfhood

Character as mirror: putting more of yourself on the page in screenwriting

“Not a heroic timeline”: starting from the real baseline and chipping away

Safety as a creative condition — the ID/passport reality for trans people

Mini-experiments over master plans: zines, retreats, private sharing, and trying once

The one question to ask again and again: “Why am I doing this?”

Follow along
00:00 – 01:27 — Opening · Who Van is and why this conversation now
01:27 – 03:41 — The builder’s impulse · Communities born from a single IG post
03:41 – 06:12 — Platform resistance and rethinking how to gather
06:12 – 08:29 — Letting projects live beyond you · A design circle becomes a co-op
08:29 – 10:17 — Shifting to screenwriting and stepping back from public community work
10:17 – 12:00 — Settling into “writer” while being remembered for many things
12:00 – 15:39 — When do you feel most yourself? Presence over distraction
16:08 – 19:23 — Character as mirror · Vulnerability in the writing
20:46 – 23:31 — Incubating screen work while doing public, smaller experiments
23:31 – 26:02 — The internet as superstructure · Why exits are complicated
26:02 – 28:18 — Living abroad and the real-world dependence on Meta tools
28:18 – 31:38 — Passports, IDs, and safety for trans people
31:38 – 34:08 — If you can’t go 0→100, chip away locally and communally
34:08 – 36:39 — Friend group vs. organizing body · Containers and agendas
38:12 – 44:36 — Zines, retreats, private sharing · Mini experiments over master plans
45:02 – 47:38 — Ask “Why am I doing this?” then ask why again
47:57 – 50:31 — The most self-centered thing: leaving the country to choose peace and safety
50:42 – 51:27 — Host reflections and close

Some takeaways

Safety enables originality.
Less distraction and more signal control create room for the most honest thoughts — and the work that follows.

Community needs a container.
Friendship is care; organizing is purpose. Clear vessels (agendas, cadence, roles) turn care into collective action.

Evolving in public is allowed.
You can be known for many things and still choose a one-word identity for a season. Today, Van chooses “writer.”

The internet is infrastructure.
“Leaving platforms” meets real-world limits when access, translation, and safety still run through them.

Try once, then decide.
Mini experiments — a monthly zine, a retreat, a private update — beat forcing every idea into a brand or business.

What We Need More Of

Containers that protect care.
Spaces designed for rest and honesty, not just output and visibility.

Small, repeatable actions.
When the system won’t budge, chip away with durable, communal practices.

Honest baselines.
Before we tell the heroic story, accept the constraints — then choose the next doable move.

Boundaries as creative fuel.
Reduce inputs, reclaim attention, and let original thought surface.

Prompts for Reimagination

Where am I confusing friendship with organized community — and what container would clarify the purpose?

Which parts of my life still rely on platforms I want to leave, and what’s a realistic “chip-away” plan this month?

If I chose one word for my creative identity this season, what would it be?

What could I try once — a zine, a private email, a retreat — without turning it into a brand?

When I open an app, why am I doing this? What’s the why behind the why?

What boundary would give me more original thought and less algorithm in my day?

Stay Connected

Self-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners.

Subscribe & Listen

Produced by Phoenix Maulella
Edited by Louis Sangiorgio
Recorded at The KINN

Rate & Review

Leaving a quick review or rating helps more people find the show, and keeps thoughtful, slow media visible in a noisy world.

Join the Community

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter for deeper dives, tools, and upcoming episodes.

💬 Follow us on Instagram for clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes moments.

DOUBLE TAP · Play, Community, and Redefining Healing with Minaa B.

aselfcenteredpod@gmail.com (Olivia Owens) — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 19:39:18 +0000

DOUBLE TAP · Play, Community, and Redefining Healing with Minaa B.

To help us re-examine the story of healing, we turned to Minaa B. — a licensed therapist, social-worker-turned-author, and founder of the media company, I’m So Mature. Her work bridges psychology and culture, positioning nostalgia and play as serious mental-health practices.

In this episode, she reminds us that healing is not about fixing what’s “wrong,” but building the capacity to function, connect, and experience joy — even when life feels heavy.

What we explore in this episode

The difference between good and bad mental health — and why it’s not about being happy
How resilience and self-efficacy help us thrive through adversity
Perfectionism as self-sabotage: the marathon with no finish line
Why your devices can’t tell you how well you’re doing
Family patterns that shape how we seek validation and stay too long in unhealthy systems
Self-advocacy inside healthcare and therapy — when to speak up and when to walk away
Joy as an act of resistance, not avoidance
How community care can coexist with self-care through four circles of support

Follow along

00:00 – 02:20 — Opening · Why healing doesn’t have to be heavy
02:50 – 05:57 — Defining good vs. bad mental health
07:10 – 09:59 — Resilience, self-esteem, and belief in self
10:31 – 15:27 — Self-advocacy in systems that dismiss our experiences
17:03 – 18:28 — Family wounds and learning to leave when we’re not seen
20:41 – 23:24 — Measuring vs. feeling · Knowing yourself better than your ring
24:17 – 26:38 — Practice, not performance · Problem-solving as healing
30:25 – 37:07 — Culture, rest, and the roots of community care
41:33 – 52:08 — The Circle of Support · Intimacy, friendship, participation, exchange
54:19 – 59:42 — Perfectionism, productivity, and redefining “good enough”
1:02:22 – 1:07:59 — Joy and hope as tools for endurance
1:08:20 – 1:09:21 — The most self-centered thing Minaa B. has ever done

Some takeaways

Healing is about function.

Good mental health isn’t the absence of bad days — it’s the ability to regulate, adapt, and keep going.

Perfectionism is self-sabotage.

Trying to be “better” all the time turns care into punishment. You don’t max out at 5 percent — only at zero.

Joy fuels endurance.

Joy isn’t frivolous. It’s the energy source for sustained advocacy, creativity, and resistance. It helps us keep showing up to do the work of repair in a world that’s constantly asking more of us.

Devices give data, not direction.

Your ring can track your stress — it can’t set your boundaries or solve your problems.

Community care is layered.

Minaa’s Circle of Support framework shows how intimacy, friendship, participation, and exchange create a web of belonging.

Culture dictates care.

American hyper-individualism makes self-care an “I” project instead of a “we” practice. In cultures that still prioritize interdependence, rest and community are seen as public goods — not indulgences.

What We Need More Of

Healing with humanity.

Healing isn’t a solo performance or a productivity project; it’s a collective process of remembering how to be human in systems that often dehumanize.

Care that includes connection.

The self-care industry was built for an individualist culture, but real care requires an ecosystem.

Boundaries as love.

In systems that reward overextension, saying no is a radical act of preservation.

Cultural change from the ground up.

Third spaces, sober-curious communities, and grassroots efforts redefining how we gather and grow.

Prompts for Reimagination

Where have I internalized independence as the only form of strength?
What systems (workplace, family, healthcare, tech) are shaping how I define “wellness”?
Which cultural values around rest, play, or interdependence do I want to re-import into my own ecosystem?
What would a “joy infrastructure” look like in my workplace, household, or community?
How might I practice community care within my own circles of support?
How might I start measuring my healing by how it feels instead of how it looks?
What boundaries could act as maintenance against exhaustion?

Links for Further Exploration

Minaa B.

Stay Connected

Self-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners.

Subscribe & Listen

Produced by Phoenix Maulella
Edited by Louis Sangiorgio
Recorded at The KINN

Rate & Review

Leaving a quick review or rating helps more people find the show, and keeps thoughtful, slow media visible in a noisy world.

Join the Community

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter for deeper dives, tools, and upcoming episodes.

💬 Follow us on Instagram for clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes moments.

EP 01 · Reclaiming Our Peace in the Performance of Healing with Van Newman and Minaa B.

aselfcenteredpod@gmail.com (Olivia Owens, Tori Lazar) — Wed, 15 Oct 2025 13:15:00 +0000

EP 01 · Reclaiming Our Peace in the Performance of Healing with Van Newman and Minaa B.

When did caring for ourselves become something to prove?

“Mental health” is everywhere. Ad campaigns. Onboarding paperwork. Influencer captions. We talk about burnout, boundaries, therapy, rest. And yet, for many of us, actually feeling better still feels out of reach.

In this debut of Self-Centered, Tori Lazar and Olivia Owens slow down to ask what support really looks like when productivity culture swallows self-care, healing becomes performance, and rest turns into another thing to optimize. What does care feel like when it’s not measured or monetized? And how do we find our way back—especially in a world that keeps asking us to push through?

Who we tapped to investigate

In each core episode of Self-Centered, we sit down with two guests: one to help us explore the self, and one to help us examine the systems that shape it. Together, their perspectives reveal how personal experience and structural design are always in conversation.

To ground the conversation in lived experience, we turned to Van Newman—a writer, designer, and cultural strategist who has spent the last decade creating digital, physical, and narrative spaces where people can feel more like themselves. From platforms like Somewhere Good to the writers’ room, Van’s work blends systems thinking with lived experience to ask: What does it take to feel safe enough to be honest? In this conversation, we dive into the importance, and the challenges, of finding community in an ever-changing landscape.

To help us explore the systems that impact our mental health, we sat down with Minaa B.—a licensed therapist, author of Owning Our Struggles, and founder of the media company I’m So Mature. Her work lives at the intersection of mental health, workplace wellbeing, and cultural care. A former social worker turned consultant, Minaa challenges the ways we’ve turned healing into performance, and invites us to choose presence instead. In this episode, she keeps it real about the urgency of challenging the systems we’ve inherited.

What we explore in this episode

Why mental-health visibility hasn’t translated into actual wellbeing
How healing became something to perform (and who that serves)
The difference between resilience as survival vs. resilience as sustainability
Perfectionism, palatability, and the quiet harm of being “the regulated one”
Rest and joy as rituals of return—not rewards for endurance
Devotion to the self vs. self-optimization and hyper-discipline
What it means to design systems that support rather than measure healing

Follow along

00:00 — Show open · What this project is and why now
02:50 — Self × system · How we’ll hold tension without binaries
05:22 — Episode setup · “If the language of healing is co-opted, how do we find our way back?”
10:08 — Performance wellness · When sleep scores and discipline replace softness
13:07 — Double-Tap: Minaa B intro · What “quality mental health” really means
14:03–17:03 — Minaa on function, resilience, and why support shouldn’t require constant strength
17:32–21:34 — Palatability, people-pleasing, and unlearning regulated selfhood
24:31–26:37 — Labels as shields · Therapy-speak vs. feeling the thing
28:44–29:36 — Untamed · Glennon Doyle’s reminder that self-liberation frees others, too
35:22 — Double-Tap: Van Newman intro · Safety, identity, and community in flux
36:20–41:20 — Van on resilience myths, leaving/returning, and “small hills” of change
43:17–45:10 — Rest as source of resilience · Learning, not earning
49:00–51:37 — Softer, cyclical models of healing (home, work, community)
57:01–1:01:24 — Work as a site of care · Structure, data, and leadership
1:02:07–1:04:31 — From discipline to devotion · Designing for regeneration
1:05:05 — Close · How to stay a little more self-centered

Some takeaways

Healing shouldn’t require heroics.

When systems rely on individual resilience, they outsource care. Support should reduce the need for constant endurance.

Palatability keeps us small.

Performing “fine” to stabilize a room fragments authenticity. Permission to be messy is part of being whole.

Devotion > discipline.

Discipline optimizes; devotion nourishes. The point isn’t to become “better,” it’s to remain in honest relationship with yourself.

Rest is not a reward for endurance.

If rest only arrives as recovery, we’re already overdrawn. Treat it as a sustaining rhythm and ritual of return.

Language can liberate or limit.

Labels help us name; overuse helps us avoid. Precision without compassion dilutes connection.

What We Need More Of

Care that counts.

Move beyond “performance wellness” toward practices that prioritize rest, reflection, and repair over metrics and measurement.

Soft leadership as a standard.

Leaders modeling repair through transparency, boundaries, and accountability—replacing endurance with empathy.

Care by design.

Workplaces and teams intentionally building systems for rest, flexibility, and regeneration before burnout becomes the norm.

Community as infrastructure.

Mutual-aid networks, peer support, and workplace cultures that make dignity and connection non-negotiable parts of how we work and live.

Prompts for Reimagination

If true care shouldn’t require resilience, what would it look like to design systems that reduce the need for endurance instead of rewarding it?
If healing has become performance, how can we return to practices that feel nourishing?
Where are you still optimizing what needs to be felt?
What would change if rest wasn’t something you earned, but something you protected?
How might devotion replace discipline in the way you approach your own growth, care, and connection?
When was the last time you felt fully yourself, and what conditions made that possible?

Links for Further Exploration

Minaa B.

Van Newman

Stay Connected

Self-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners.

Subscribe & Listen

Produced by Phoenix Maulella
Edited by Louis Sangiorgio
Recorded at The KINN

Rate & Review

Leaving a quick review or rating helps more people find the show, and keeps thoughtful, slow media visible in a noisy world.

Join the Community

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter for deeper dives, tools, and upcoming episodes.

💬 Follow us on Instagram for clips, quotes, and behind-the-scenes moments.

Self Centered Pod Season 1 Trailer

aselfcenteredpod@gmail.com (Tori Lazar, Olivia Owens) — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:00:00 +0000

🎙️ About the Show:
Self-Centered is a space where the language of self-care meets the reality of living within systems — from work and wellness to identity and community. Through deep conversation and grounded reflection, Olivia and Tori invite listeners to rethink what it means to be well, whole, and self-centered in the best way possible.

💌 Connect with Us:

Instagram: @selfcenteredpod

Newsletter: Subscribe for early drops & extras

Hosts: @olivialowens & @torilazar

✨ First Episode Drops: October 15

Stay Connected

Self-Centered is a space where centering the self is the first step to rethinking the systems around us.

If this conversation resonated, we’d love your support in helping the work reach more listeners.

Subscribe & Listen