Julián Castro served as the mayor of San Antonio, Texas before joining the Obama administration as housing secretary. And he was briefly in the race for president, the only Latinx candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary. But he admits he still gets stagefright. When he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2012, “for the first 30 seconds, I thought I was going to pass out on-stage in front of 25 million people watching,” he tells host Rebecca Carroll. “That's my advice for people just getting into it: be prepared for the nerves at the beginning, but then it'll be fine.” These days he’s stumping for the U.S. Census and he’s encouraging undocumented people to participate. “[Organizers] can’t take that information and turn it over to Immigration,” he says. “I know that it takes a little bit of a leap of faith during this Trump era especially, but that is what the law says and that’s how the law will be enforced.” Plus, we end the podcast season as we began it, with Rebecca’s best friend, Caryn Rivers.

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As a struggling screenwriter, Twitter was exactly what Ira Madison III needed to get noticed. More than 200k followers later, he’s writing for Netflix (“Daybreak” and the upcoming “Q-Force”). He tells host Rebecca Carroll, “I think that by virtue of being Black and telling your story, you are already analyzing and critiquing what it means to be Black in this era.” For writer and producer Kay Oyegun (NBC’s “This is Us”), “Black women are always my protagonists.” When she writes a script, “I always say, ‘assume everyone's Black unless I say otherwise.’” 

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Waubgeshig Rice is a Canadian journalist and bestselling author (Moon of the Crusted Snow) from the Wasauksing First Nation, who grew up in an Anishinaabe community. He hopes COVID will be a wake-up call to a crisis that has been going on for decades: climate change. “People from so-called ‘marginalized communities’ know what it's like to have that sort of tenuous hold on life and know that the world can end at any time, if it hasn't already,” he tells host Rebecca Carroll. “And the dominant mainstream majority is finally understanding just how close they are to chaos.”

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