Category: Podcast

I suck at mornings, so it was kind of rough to get up earlier than usual so I could make it to KTLA to be on the morning news. But I was so excited to be there, and so excited my new podcast was finally out in the world, I practically jumped out of bed when the alarm went off.

Two cups of coffee and one surprisingly smooth commute into Hollywood later, I made a post on Instagram while I was in the Sam Rubin green room:

I’ve been on national and international broadcasts. Once, I was the guy BBC World Service went to for the governor election when Schwarzenegger ran the first time. True story!

But I’m one of those kids who loved the local news when I was growing up. It felt like something everyone watched and talked about. I don’t know if that persists in the current media landscape, but being invited to KTLA to talk about It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton is a very big deal for me, easily as exciting and meaningful (maybe a little moreso) than all of that other stuff. While I wait to go on my inner child is doing zoomies while I do my best to maintain decorum in the green room.

It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton dropped today, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

I had a fantastic time while I was there. I felt more comfortable, more focused, more present than I expected. I always get nervous and I always feel like I’m a beat behind the action because a big part of my attention is burned on tracking reactions — how much am I fucking up? — than it is on just enjoying the moment.

I did this thing where I reminded myself that I was invited, that I deserved to be there, and the thing I was there to promote is genuinely a good thing that I worked hard to make, so it’s totally cool to feel proud and enjoy talking about it. I even mostly listened to myself!

They were so wonderful to me. I have had interviews with people who are obviously just doing their jobs, who aren’t interested in me or what I’m talking about beyond whatever their producer prepped for them. This wasn’t that, at all. All of the anchors at the desk were just lovely! They were genuinely interested in me before the segment started (crazy, since they have so much on their minds and so much pressure being live) and stayed that way until I was finished. I was totally floored by how welcomed and celebrated I felt.

Can anyone else see how the news team is like YO THIS IS GREAT while my posture is just DONT FUCK UP WIL BE COOL AND STAND THERE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON MAKE SURE YOUR POSTURE IS GOOD SO NOBODY LAUGHS AT YOU ugh. I will eventually be able to pose like a human in one of these pictures, I promise.

Anyway, I had a blast. The producer who took these pictures (I lost her name; sorry she was lovely) told me my segment would be online, and when it is, I’ll link to it. EDIT: Here it is! https://ktla.com/video/wil-wheaton-describes-recording-his-own-podcast/10573518/

Late yesterday afternoon, one of my friends told me they loved the episode, and asked me how I was feeling. I tried to nail down and describe all the complex emotions (many of them conflicting) roiling around inside of me, and I settled on something like this: You don’t celebrate winning the game because you got a single in the first inning that didn’t even get a run across, but you absolutely celebrate your first single of the season, and hope that it’s one of the many things you need to do to eventually win the game. All the while, you try to find a way to enjoy the game, because playing the game is so much fun (and it’s what you’ve dreamed about doing forever), while also taking the job of playing the game seriously. There’s a LOT of game left, but our starter is looking great and the bat just feels very comfortable in my hands today, and I’m doing my best to stay out of my own head and just see the ball. I’m not even thinking about the stuff that’s out of my control. Yet.

It’s incomplete and imperfect, but so am I, so that’s what you get.

But for now, I just wanted everyone to know that my first episode, an absolutely magnificent story by the wonderful Caroline M Yoachim, is just a podcast, standing in front of an audience, asking them to listen to it.

Enormous thanks and gratitude to all of you who have listened, rated and reviewed, and told your friends. I wouldn’t have gotten on base without you, and you’re going to be a huge part of why I score any runs.

Two bits of business before I elbow and send.

First, the subscribe to my blog emails thingy:

And finally, the obligatory collection of links to subscribe to It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton:

Subscribe now at

• Apple Podcasts
• PocketCast
• Stitcher
• Spotify
• Pandora
• iHeart
• Amazon
• or grab the RSS directly from me right here.

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’m grateful for the opportunity to entertain you. It is a privilege that I do not take for granted.

It’s like … 1980, probably. Maybe late 1979. It’s the summer in Los Angeles, and it is as hot as I can remember. The smog is so thick, you can taste an oily sheen in air that looks overcast, all the time.

I’m in the back seat of my godmother’s car. My little sister and little brother are on either side of me. We didn’t wear seatbelts in those days, which is nuts but it’s how it was.

My mother has enlisted my godmother (who is my aunt, my father’s sister) to drive me on a commercial audition that I don’t want to go to. I presume my father was at work and my mother had some audition of her own, so my godmother ended up with three kids, plus my cousin, in her VW.

I can see this like it just happened. I’m sitting up on my heels, on that sort of plastic seat that 1970s Volkswagens had, with the waffle pattern. I look into her eyes in the rearview mirror, and I decide that it’s time to ask for help.

“Aunt Dorothy, will you tell my mom that I don’t want to do this anymore? Will you tell my mom that I just want to be a kid?”

What 8 year-old has to beg their mother to “let” them be a kid? What kind of mother doesn’t hear that? What kind of father doesn’t care?

You know the answers  — well, my answers — to those questions.

She looks back at me, and she says, as kindly and gently as ever, “You have to tell your mom that, but I’ll go with you if you want.”

And that’s when I knew that I was never going to just be a kid, because my mother refused to listen to me, refused to hear me, refused to see me as a person. I was her property, a tool to be used that would get her closer to her dreams, dreams she was focused on so singularly, she stole my childhood from me (before she and my dad stole all my money from me) and then lied to me about it.

I can’t count the number of times I begged her, “please let me just be a kid. I just want to be a kid.” I said those words through tears so many times, I can still feel how my throat burned with grief and fear and desperation. I can feel how much I was suffering, how unhappy I was, how I just wanted to be a kid, and how awful it was to be dismissed and gaslighted about it.

“You made a commitment,” was something she would say to me all the time, as if a seven year-old can understand what that means. “I gave up my career so you can have yours,” she told me, throughout my entire childhood, every time I wanted to quit, which was pretty much all the time.

It hurt, so much, to feel unheard, unseen, unsupported, and unloved. It was shameful to lie about it, to protect my abusers, for 46 years of my life. I know that it is the root cause of my CPTSD, my Depression, and my Anxiety.

Which brings me to the whole reason I told this story today.

My friend, Mayim, has a mental health podcast, and she asked me if I’d come on to talk about living with Depression. I said yes, and in the course of our conversation, we ended up talking quite a lot about my experience with selfish, narcissist, emotionally abusive, parents.

It’s intense. In fact, it’s so intense, this is the second podcast we did. With Mayim’s blessing, I spiked the first time we talked, because I felt like it was just way too raw and made me uncomfortable. So we had a second conversation, and it’s going to come out tomorrow.

Here’s a preview. What you don’t hear, just before this clip starts, is that my mother made me go to her commercial agency when I was just seven years-old, and coached me to tell the kid’s agent, “I want to do what mommy does.”

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is at Spotify, Apple, and all the usual places.