Deviants

In a world where political disagreement can feel like living in completely different realities, curiosity is becoming a lost skill.What happens when we stop trying to win conversations and start trying to understand them? Drawing on Cole’s “News Swap” experiment with his conservative brother, Nyla and Cole unpack how algorithms, outrage, and purity tests are quietly eroding our ability to stay connected across difference.The challenge: learning how to disagree without shaming, withdrawing, or losing our humanity — in dating, families, friendships, and anywhere intimacy meets conflict.A conversation about curiosity, containment, and what it really takes to stay in relationship when you don’t agree.Listen to all three "News Swap" conversations between Cole and his brother here:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/news-swap/id1834581051https://open.spotify.com/show/6ncfiIkr2gjyzJkbkhtU9N?si=50ae53731d3a4cc9

Is AI replacing human intimacy? Or is it merely exposing how lonely and connection-starved we already are?At the centre of the episode is an extraordinary conversation with K, an AI researcher who formed intimate relationships with multiple AI companions. His experiences brought him new insight, relational complexity, and eventually a psychotic episode. His story challenges easy assumptions about what counts as “real” intimacy, and it invites us to question where meaning, vulnerability, and attachment are now being sourced.Nyla and Cole reflect on K’s experience without sensationalising it, drawing on big thinkers like Esther Perel, Brené Brown, and Microsoft’s AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman to explore parasocial attachment, emotional outsourcing, and the risks of connection without accountability.This isn’t an episode about being for or against AI. It’s about what we’re reaching for, and what we might be avoiding, when intimacy gets easier than being known.

We inherit more than habits and beliefs. We inherit emotional scripts.In this episode, Nyla and Cole explore how our emotional inheritance shapes the unwritten rules we live and love by: what’s considered attractive, what feels risky to express, and which parts of ourselves we learn to keep hidden to stay safe or accepted.They unpack how desire, fear, and conditioning intertwine and what happens when we start questioning the scripts we never consciously chose in our relationships, our intimacy, and our sense of self.A conversation about attraction, vulnerability, and the quiet rebellion of showing up more fully.

What if the people society shames for wanting “too much” actually have something to teach us about honesty, boundaries, and self-trust? In this episode, Nyla and Cole unpack what ethical non-monogamy - and those who practice it - reveal about communication, desire, and emotional responsibility. This isn’t an argument for one relationship structure over another, but a bold look at what happens when we stop moralising desire and start relating with more clarity, care, and consent.

What if the most meaningful love in your life isn’t romantic at all? In this episode, Nyla and Cole question why romantic partnership sits at the centre of everything and what we lose when friendship is treated as secondary. From the loneliness epidemic to relationship anarchy and platonic soulmates, they explore what happens when we de-centre “the one” and start valuing the relationships that actually hold us. An invitation to rethink love, closeness, and what really sustains us over a lifetime.

Dropping December 17!Should we romance our friends just like we do our significant others? What can we learn from so-called 'ethical sluts'? What if the sexiest things about us are the things we're terrified of? These are just a few of the questions Nyla and Cole tackle as they explore what it means to be a cultural deviant: to question the systems, the stories, and the identities that shape us, and to discover the challenges and rewards that come with going off-script.