Human stories, art, healing, and endurance.
Hey Human Podcast is a long-running interview show built around curious, personal conversation. Susan Ruth’s guest list moves from actors and authors to clinicians, poets, travelers, and people carrying extraordinary stories from difficult places.
PRESS PLAY
Hey Human Podcast is a long-form interview series about the lives behind the work. It is rooted in conversation. Recent episodes move between artists, writers, actors, clinicians, travelers, and people who have lived through events that resist easy summary. One episode follows Ugna Zavista-Skete through Lithuania, education in Russia, television and film work, travel hosting, and a career being expanded in Los Angeles. Another brings in Donovan McPhee, whose poetry, songwriting, essays, and work with religion and the arts open a more reflective lane. Wendy B. Correa’s appearance centers on memoir, childhood trauma, spiritual practice, music industry encounters, sobriety, and a life that can turn from painful to funny within the same stretch of story. Sirous Esmailzadeh’s episode carries the weight of detention in Iran, escape, and imprisonment in Pakistan. Michael Trapani brings historical storytelling through World War II, Hitler’s rise to power, and the system that allowed catastrophe to build. Andrea Lieb’s conversation focuses on survival, healing, advocacy, and the complicated language of play after abuse. Sheree Foxy and Zeke Goodman bring the show back to theater, acting, performance, and the mental work of becoming a character. Dr. Heather Stone adds a health thread through functional medicine, low thyroid symptoms, Hashimoto’s, and root-cause care. Across the range, the show keeps returning to the same question: how does a person become who they are after what they have carried? The pacing is intimate and unpolished in a human way. Susan Ruth’s framing remarks often include personal reactions, care for the guest, cultural recommendations, and blunt acknowledgement of a difficult world. The result is not a narrow celebrity-interview format or a clinical expert show. It is a compassionate archive of people explaining themselves through art, memory, illness, history, spirituality, and endurance. Some episodes are gentle. Others are emotionally demanding. The throughline is attention: to stories, to damage, to craft, and to the stubborn possibility of connection.
Made for: For listeners who like patient, personal interviews with artists, writers, survivors, health voices, and people with uncommon life stories. It especially fits audiences drawn to memoir, theater, spirituality, trauma recovery, and reflective cultural conversation.
What sets it apart: Its range is unusually wide, but the emotional register stays consistent: warm, candid, arts-aware, and openly concerned with humanity. The show can move from theater to Hashimoto’s, from Lithuanian media work to World War II history, without losing its intimate center.
Hey Human. I’m Susan Ruth. I have interesting, enlightening, in-depth conversations with people from all walks. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes their point of view couldn’t be further from mine. The world expands and contracts in experience and conversation. I find people fascinating… every human has a story.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A survivor's memoir prompts a measured conversation about childhood, play, and healing without easy closure.
Andrea Lieb's conversation about Such a Pretty Picture sits with survival, childhood, and the fraught place of play after abuse. She speaks about volunteering at Stuart House, a UCLA Rape Treatment Center program for children, where being the play lady means meeting young…
A candid, personal account of cancer treatment's physical costs and the self-advocacy that follows.
Cancer treatment's hidden costs shape this candid episode with Kenneret Sherman, who was diagnosed with stage 2 rectal cancer at 43, first tried holistic options, then moved through chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, an ileostomy, more chemotherapy, and another surgery after the…
A mountain-shaped life story linking safety, massage, and care for the natural world.
Iqbal Khanna gives this episode its lift through a life spent close to mountains, care, and consequence. Born in Kashmir, India, he remembers hiking with Tenzing Norgay, running a climbing and hiking company in India, and helping move a Scottish doctor with altitude trouble from…
Dr.
Susan Ruth interviews Rick French, co-founder of Pack Paddle Ski Adventures, about his most memorable travel experiences including meeting the Dalai Lama and a client's broken leg at high altitude.
Chad Covington discusses the applications and implications of artificial intelligence and its impact on human evolution.
Susan Ruth interviews Kineret Sherman, who was diagnosed with stage 2 rectal cancer at age 43.
Susan Ruth interviews Iqbal Khanna, a 71-year-old from Kashmir who led Himalayan hiking expeditions and medical missions.
Cidny Bullens, a two-time Grammy nominee who sang backup for Elton John in the mid-1970s, tells host Susan Ruth how he went from running away to New York City at 15 to arriving in Los Angeles in 1973 with $100 and a green backpack.
An interview with Lithuanian actress and travel show host Ungė Zavistauskaitė about her background and career.
Host interviews poet and professor Donovan McAbee about his upcoming poetry collection and the intersection of theology and the arts.
Susan Ruth interviews Wendy B.
Host introduces a guest who was detained in Iran and imprisoned in Pakistan, sharing his story and promoting a film project.
Susan Ruth introduces Michael Trapani and his book 'How to Start a War', discussing its unique narrative style and detailed coverage of Hitler's rise to power.
Susan Ruth interviews Andrea Leeb about her memoir Such a Pretty Picture, which recounts childhood sexual abuse and incest in New York.
Claire Thomas turned photographs from Ghana into 77 beds for women living with HIV, tuberculosis, and severe poverty.
At 13, Corinna escaped an armed abduction when a stranger stopped his red van and drove her to safety.
Hey Human Podcast host Susan Ruth and Chad Covington examine AI's effects on work, creativity, relationships, and human identity.
Host Susan Ruth interviews actors Sharae Foxie and Zeke Goodman about their roles in Stephen Lawton's play 'One Jewish Boy' at Los Angeles' Echo Theater, discussing acting, theater vs.
Dr.