After much prodding by my pal Madge Weinstein I started MikeyPod on the Bayou on July 4, 2005 having no idea, really, what I wanted to do. My main goal was to let all my friends around the country know that there was more to Texas than the George Bush and chicken fried steak, not that there is anything wrong with chicken fried steak, mind you. So I started by interviewing my friends, taking soundseeing tours of local folk art monuments, and playing as much local music as I could get my hands on.

Meanwhile, the peace movement rapidly began gaining momentum, and podcasting was giving me easier access to people like Bicyclemark and Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman who made it more and more impossible for me to ignore our Country’s policies were doing to the rest of the world.

In September of 2005, I began to follow the case of Frances Newton, podcasting my experiences working with the other people who were trying to save her from execution, as well as conducting an interview with her mother, Jewel Nelms. When she was executed on September 14, 2005 I was standing on the corner of Westheimer and Shepherd with a handfull of others, protesting her killing. Cars drove by us in rush hour traffic, drivers on cellphones in air conditioned cocoons with no idea that this woman was being killed. Killed by all of our silence.

That’s when I decided I needed to make a greater effort to learn about the people who were stepping out of their own comfort zones to speak out, and that is what MikeyPod has become about too.

August 2006 brought another massive change to my life. Bored with my life in Houston, and in need of some new experience, I quit my job, gave away most of my belongings and headed to Koinonia Partners, an intentional Christian community in Americus, GA steeped in civil rights and social justice history. I spent four months there as an intern, podcasting about my experience and conducting fantastic interviews, including one with Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller. From there I landed in New York City, which I now call my home.

All of that being said, MikeyPod is art and artists, independent music, politics, activism, human rights and interviews all tempered with my own reflections as I learn and allow myself to not know in order to begin to know.