How to Fight Loneliness: A Conversational Podcast, Mouse & Weens

More About Mouse and Weens

Julianne and Joel describe the show like this: Two sisters, one single in Hollywood, one settled in the suburbs. Join us on this adventure through a conversation of human behav. The length of each episode is between an hour to an hour and a half. The series is ongoing with new episodes available once a month.

Kid Podcast Guide

Before we learn more about the vibe of the show, we are going to take a quick break to talk about my Guide to Kid podcasts. One of my favorite parenting tools is Kid podcasts. I use them when I’m running errands with the kiddos to keep them from complaining the whole time. Or when I need a mom break, I’ll just grab an easy activity like coloring pages or a sensory bin. Turn on a kid podcast and the kids will be entertained for at least half an hour.

I know that Kid Podcasts would help you in your life too, which is why I made a Guide to Kid podcasts. There are eight different categories ranging from science to mindfulness to audio drama with at least three podcasts in each category. There are 27 podcasts in total on the guide. I’ve listened to each of the podcast so I can attest to them being kid friendly, and I put my email at the bottom of the guide so that if you try a couple with your kids and none of them are a good fit, you can email me and I will personally help you find a kid podcast that works for your littles and you.

Introduction to Julianne & Joelle

We are mouse and weens, we’re sisters. I’m Joelle, I’m Mouse. I am a mom living down in San Diego and married and doing the whole suburban life and I’m Weens and I, I was up in LA doing the film business. and now I’m doing grad school life. I thought I was leaving a stressful job to go to a kind of a more mellow life, but yeah both stressful.

How Mouse and Weens Came to Be

Joelle says, Well, this was kind of my baby brainchild and Julianne jumped right on board, but I was a new stay-at-home mom and I had just moved to a new area and frankly, I was dealing with loneliness. And so I started listening to this morning show radio morning show, and I got really involved with her life and her day-to-day, you know, thoughts and comments and learned all the characters on the show, kind of in the people that would come in and really felt that camaraderie.

And it eased my lonely really and it was fun. It was neat catching up on the world and feeling young and hip again and whatever. So I was just in that world for a while, raising kids, and then the show went off the air. So I heard about this thing called podcast and I started looking for a podcast similar to that and just couldn’t find it. And it was like, wow. It’s interesting. There aren’t many, just chat fun, feel like you’re hanging out with your girlfriend’s kind of podcasts. And I would call Julianne all the time. She was in LA, she’s in the middle of working on movies and TV and you know, all these exotic stories and musicians and, and I would get all my stories from her and feel connected again.

And then kind of thought, well, why don’t we just record these and share them with others and keep them for posterity’s sake? And so, honestly, within 48 hours. We researched it, made a logo, recorded an episode and posted it and we had our first episode and that was I think five years ago. 

How Mouse and Weens Helps You Fight Loneliness

I would say just that feeling of being with friends. The feeling of hearing chit chat and being a fly on the wall and. I don’t know, not feeling lonely. I think that’s the goal, is to create joy and laughter and, and share stories.

I just love Julianne’s life and that was also part of it. I loved the, you’re stuck in suburban world, mom world, but here’s this exotic Hollywood girl over here. Hanging with the likes of Keanu Reeves and Jack Black.

Joelle likes celebrity stories. But everybody likes a good celebrity story, right?

I just wanna say also though, it’s a nice balance, I think from the reviews that we’ve heard, it’s not just, it’s just kind of hearing stories about the similar topics, but from different points of view, you know, from a mother versus a single person. So it’s not all fluff, but you know, there’s a good balance, I think. 

And my kids, you know, we started and they were. 13, 12, you know, all the way down to I think five or six, and now they’ve grown up, you know, so there’s a good five year span of me going through all the parenting stuff and then asking her is the cool auntie, am I overthinking it? What should I do?

You know, there was like sex ed in school and now my oldest has a girlfriend and I don’t know what the rules are. Bringing the girlfriend over and college is the next phase. So yeah, you, if you jump into the old episodes, you can follow right along with all the stages.

The Vibe of Mouse and Weens

Casual. Thoughtful. Yeah. And fun. I think just coming from the same family and having a mom and dad with sense of humor.

I think we try to infuse humor in there just to make it kind of fun. It’s a quirky kind of show too. I think we may not hit everybody’s sense of humor, but we think it’s fun people tend to find the thing that they like out of it.

We do like the idea that we’re helping people at some level and we’re also here for people to reach out to us and talk to us about stuff too about loneliness and other mental health issues. Because you know, there’s like mental health issues that pop up here and there. We’ve done episodes about that. One outta four people are on some kind of anti-anxiety or antidepressants right now. That’s a big one. So I like to talk about that. If we can provide that connection or be a resource or whatever we are, or community. I think we’ve gotten very detached from a central community.

Where to Find Mouse and Weens

We are very easy to find. Everything is Mouse and Weens. And that’s our handle on all the social media, YouTube, mouseandweens.com, and on all the podcast platforms.

Favorite Episodes

I would say a good place to start and maybe get a fun sense of who we are would be our 100th episode. We kind of did a medley of Kind of contest lists and snippets and songs and things like that. We also do interviews and there’ve been some really good interviews too.

Steve Ferone came to mind, who’s the drummer for Tom Petty, and his was pretty thoughtful and interesting and he talks a lot about going on the road with different artists. So that was fun. Yeah. He played with…I wanna say the angry white men, but I don’t Oh, no, no. Who else? John Mayer, he’s on the road with him right now. And so that’s, pretty cool. Yeah. Beatles stories.

So, yeah. And lots of fun interviews. And then there’s some silly ones. There was one that where Julianne was in an improv kind of mode and talking about the fact that you had slept with Yani, the pan flute guy or the saxophonist, what does he play? She was pretending like he was just waking up behind her in the bed and she was like, “oh, oh honey, stop.” That one had me laughing so hard. It was just a weird mood that morning. Oh, mom’s like, might like the most recent interview we did with Jamie Groome.

She was on the cover of Time Magazine, breastfeeding her son who was standing up. He’s a four year old. I don’t know if everyone remembers that, but it was about attachment parenting. Yeah. It was very controversial. Yeah. And they did skits about her on Saturday Night Live, the breastfeeding mom. Now 10 years later, she talks about what that was like.