Content & Coffee Is Becoming INSIDE with Taylor Nakakihara

There’s a funny thing about creating something for yourself: sometimes you accidentally build yourself another job. That is, more or less, what happened with Content & Coffee.

I started the podcast because I genuinely love talking about content. Not just social media content, either. Advertising, television, magazines, creators, marketing, pop culture, why certain things work, why other things flop, and all of the strange little ways media shapes the way we think and communicate. I wrote an entire episode about how COPS, AFV, and Disney Channel stars shaped social media today.

I still love all of that. I just realized I don’t want to run an entire podcast about it anymore.

So, Content & Coffee is becoming INSIDE with Taylor Nakakihara, a lifestyle and pop culture podcast with a lot more room for everything else I want to talk about.

Why I’m Rebranding Content & Coffee

I was on a date last December explaining some of the economics surrounding Taylor Swift, her enormous cultural presence and the fascinating point at which being that popular can make hating you almost as culturally significant as liking you. Somewhere in that conversation I said she was, in some ways, this generation’s Nickelback.

The guy I was on the date with is also a content creator, and he straight up told me I needed to change my podcast from content marketing to pop culture.

I fought the idea for a long time (I don’t like being told what to do), but eventually I realized he was absolutely right – I love to talk, I’m smart, I make great connections, I’m funny, and I like sharing things with people, but pigeonholing myself into one niche was making me miserable and unproductive. I wanted to stop requiring myself to make every conversation fit neatly underneath “content.” There are so many things I naturally want to explore that live outside that box.

I want to talk about what perfectionism has done to things I genuinely love, including my history with Spartan racing. I want to talk about dating in my thirties, the things I’ve recently had to unlearn and the absolutely baffling things people put on Hinge. I want somewhere to turn personal essays from my blog into conversations instead of leaving them sitting quietly on a webpage waiting for someone to click a link. I want to talk about life and pop culture while it’s actually happening. I want to bring my friends and family and other guests on and see where a conversation goes when we’re laughing so hard we can barely speak. You guys are gonna LOVE it when my mom guest stars!

Why INSIDE?

The first kanji in Nakakihara is 中 — “naka” — associated with inside, within, middle or center. I kept coming back to INSIDE because it gives the show a place to go without giving it another tiny box to live in.

Sometimes we’ll go inside something happening in pop culture.

Sometimes we’ll go inside one of my own experiences.

Sometimes it’ll be a personal essay I wanted to read out loud, I loved reading aloud in school. Sometimes it’ll be a conversation with someone I love.

Sometimes I’ll have researched the hell out of something before I sit down to record, and sometimes I’ll simply have a bunch of thoughts I eventually connect in the end.

The episode titles can reflect that too: INSIDE: Perfectionism. INSIDE: Modern Dating. INSIDE: [whatever has been on my mind this week].

It can be analytical, personal, funny, serious or occasionally a little chaotic depending entirely on what I’m talking about. That’s much closer to the way I actually create, speak, learn, and exist.

The Part Where Perfectionism Gets Involved

There’s another layer to this rebrand that I’m getting into much more deeply on this first transition episode itself. Content & Coffee became one of those projects where my standards for what it could be started getting in the way of actually making it.

I could prepare more. Research more. Make a better outline. Create better supporting content. Have a more polished production setup. Make better eye contact with the camera. Figure out the perfect release schedule. Do it professionally, even though I learned how to do all of this on my own. And suddenly something I had created because I wanted to talk became something I could perpetually prepare to do instead.

Perfectionism has played that trick on me in more than one area of my life: convincing me that impossibly high standards are evidence that I’m doing a good job, even after those standards have stopped helping me make or enjoy the thing I supposedly care so much about.

So it feels fitting that the transition from Content & Coffee to INSIDE begins there. The new version of this show has to leave room for curiosity, tangents, changing my mind, getting better as I go and sometimes simply pressing record.

What INSIDE with Taylor Nakakihara Is About

If you’re finding the show for the first time, INSIDE with Taylor Nakakihara is a lifestyle and pop culture podcast about the things I can’t stop thinking about.

Through personal essays, conversations and the occasional deep dive, I’ll be talking about life, relationships, work, creativity, internet culture, media, pop culture and whatever else has my attention.

Some episodes will be solo. Some will include friends, family and guests. Some will start with something happening online and end somewhere unexpectedly personal. The common thread isn’t a subject area.

You’ll be able to find INSIDE here on my website, where I’ll be posting episodes, transcripts, related writing, and anything else that makes sense alongside the conversations.

I’ve spent more than a decade sharing pieces of my life online in one form or another. The blog has always given me room to write. Social media gives me room for the quick version. INSIDE feels like the place for everything that needs a little more space to breathe.

So, Content & Coffee had a very good run, but I think I’m ready to go Inside.