What happens when you stop looking at a troubled neighborhood from the outside and start seeing it as home?
For JJ Smith, the Tenderloin in San Francisco is home. He has spent much of his life here, and his connection to the people on these streets is not theoretical. It comes from family, experience, survival, mistakes, loss, friendship, and a deep belief that the people around him are still people, no matter what circumstances they are living through.
In this conversation, JJ takes Greg and Marc into that world and talks openly about his own history. He remembers growing up without parents around and taking responsibility for his younger brother and sister. He describes getting into the street drug trade as a young man because he believed he needed to find a way to provide for his family. He also talks about watching people close to him struggle with addiction, including his brother, whose death in 2022 came after JJ had spent days trying to help him find treatment. Read more
https://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/WP-Featured-Image.webp423667Two Outlawshttps://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/mo-logo-sq-trans_white-1030x1030.pngTwo Outlaws2026-09-14 01:01:372026-09-13 17:43:33Home in the Heart of the Tenderloin — JJ Smith | Episode #265
For Professor Paul Greenberg, that question has been part of a life spent moving between worlds. He grew up with a father who was both a psychiatrist and a film critic, discovered early that writing could be a way of making sense of the world, and eventually found himself in the recently collapsed Soviet Union helping train journalists who were learning how to practice journalism in a new political landscape.
Some conversations take us into difficult places. The second ride with Elizabeth Mikotowicz takes us there—but it also keeps asking what happens when we find our way back.
Elizabeth is the author of No Justice, Just Us, a book rooted in her experiences with the criminal justice system, addiction, incarceration, trauma, and recovery. In this conversation, she talks openly about what she saw and experienced behind bars, the people she met there, and the ways systems can shape—and sometimes distort—the lives of the people moving through them.
But the deeper movement of this conversation is personal. Elizabeth talks about learning to recognize the survival behaviors she had developed, confronting the ways trauma had affected her relationships, and discovering how much changes when we begin to set boundaries and take responsibility for our own healing.
https://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/WP-Website-Image.jpg423667Two Outlawshttps://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/mo-logo-sq-trans_white-1030x1030.pngTwo Outlaws2026-08-31 01:01:522026-08-30 19:04:43There’s No Justice, Just Us: Elizabeth Mikotowicz on Healing, Empathy & Agency | #263
Some guests return because there is still more road to travel together. Author Dick Wybrow joins Marc and Greg for a third Moped Outlaws conversation, and this time the scenery has changed in more ways than one.
Dick arrives with a new science-fiction heist, The Facilite Con, a new home in Christchurch, and a creative life that seems to be expanding in every direction at once. The book brings together space-faring con artists, questionable robots, improbable engineers, and the darkly absurd humor that has become part of Dick’s signature. But as usual with Dick, talking about the latest story quickly becomes a conversation about why human beings keep telling stories in the first place.
His years in stand-up comedy taught him that silence can be a brutal teacher. Radio sharpened his ear. Writing taught him to trust readers enough not to explain everything. Now he’s bringing those lessons into audiobooks as well, producing The Facilite Con himself and discovering what happens when another performer takes characters that have lived in his head and gives them a voice of their own.
But this third ride also finds Dick in the middle of a much more personal change. After years as an agnostic, he was baptized into the Catholic Church this past Easter. He talks openly about losing his television work, reaching a very low point, and beginning to reconsider how much control he really had over the course of his life. One unexpectedly funny encounter while he was reaching out for help became part of a larger question: what if some of the moments he’d always credited to cleverness or luck were pointing toward something else?
https://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/moped-outlaws-262-dick-wybrow-too-dumb-to-stop-featured.webp423667Two Outlawshttps://mopedoutlaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/mo-logo-sq-trans_white-1030x1030.pngTwo Outlaws2026-08-24 01:01:172026-08-23 20:21:14Too Dumb to Stop: Dick Wybrow on Writing, Faith & the Long Road | #262
Who gets to decide how a person should live—and how much of that decision belongs to culture, institutions, experts, governments, or the individual?
In Episode #261 of Moped Outlaws, Marc and Greg sit down with author and freelance marketing consultant Mohamed Nabil for a conversation that begins in Egypt and keeps widening until it reaches questions of artificial intelligence, citizenship, democracy, and how human beings decide what to believe.
What happens when the mind wants evidence, the heart wants meaning, and suffering refuses to fit inside a tidy explanation?
In Episode #260 of Moped Outlaws, Marc and Greg sit down with Dr. Jamey Hecht—psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, scholar, poet, and author of the forthcoming Into Theism: Overcoming Obstacles to Belief in God—for a conversation that travels directly into that unsettled territory.
This is not an argument designed to corner anyone into belief. In fact, Hecht describes his book as something closer to a truce: an attempt to invite the intellect along rather than asking thoughtful people to silence it before approaching questions of God, consciousness, suffering, or the possibility that reality may be larger than the material world immediately available to us.
The ride begins with the intellectual and emotional barriers that can make belief difficult. Greg brings the question down from philosophy into ordinary human pain: what does any idea about God mean when your body hurts, your heart is broken, or someone you love has left? Hecht responds first with metaphysics—and then, when Greg asks him to speak as though comforting a six-year-old, with something radically simpler: the assurance of presence, love, endurance, and the possibility that pain does not have to be faced alone.
This original recording with comedian, writer, producer, and podcast host Rosie Tran was nearly lost when a technical glitch left the video unusable. The audio, however, remained clean—and the conversation carried far too much honesty, laughter, and life to leave by the wayside.
After Rosie returned for the official Episode #258, we decided to share this first ride as an audio-only bonus. It is not a discarded rehearsal or an alternate cut of the same conversation. It travels its own road.
Some conversations challenge assumptions. Others quietly invite us to rethink the boxes we place around ourselves and the people we meet. This ride with Rosie Tran does both.
Rosie returns to Moped Outlaws after an earlier recording was lost to technical difficulties, bringing the same openness, humor, and curiosity that made the first conversation worth revisiting. Comedian, producer, author, television host, and creator, Rosie shares a perspective that consistently resists simple labels—and in doing so reveals something larger about what it means to live authentically. Read more
Home in the Heart of the Tenderloin — JJ Smith | Episode #265
/by Two OutlawsWhat happens when you stop looking at a troubled neighborhood from the outside and start seeing it as home?
For JJ Smith, the Tenderloin in San Francisco is home. He has spent much of his life here, and his connection to the people on these streets is not theoretical. It comes from family, experience, survival, mistakes, loss, friendship, and a deep belief that the people around him are still people, no matter what circumstances they are living through.
In this conversation, JJ takes Greg and Marc into that world and talks openly about his own history. He remembers growing up without parents around and taking responsibility for his younger brother and sister. He describes getting into the street drug trade as a young man because he believed he needed to find a way to provide for his family. He also talks about watching people close to him struggle with addiction, including his brother, whose death in 2022 came after JJ had spent days trying to help him find treatment. Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 54:45 — 75.3MB) | Embed
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What Happens When We Stop Talking? — Paul Greenberg | Episode #264
/by Two OutlawsWhat happens when we stop talking to one another?
For Professor Paul Greenberg, that question has been part of a life spent moving between worlds. He grew up with a father who was both a psychiatrist and a film critic, discovered early that writing could be a way of making sense of the world, and eventually found himself in the recently collapsed Soviet Union helping train journalists who were learning how to practice journalism in a new political landscape.
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04:19 — 88.3MB) | Embed
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There’s No Justice, Just Us: Elizabeth Mikotowicz on Healing, Empathy & Agency | #263
/by Two OutlawsSome conversations take us into difficult places. The second ride with Elizabeth Mikotowicz takes us there—but it also keeps asking what happens when we find our way back.
Elizabeth is the author of No Justice, Just Us, a book rooted in her experiences with the criminal justice system, addiction, incarceration, trauma, and recovery. In this conversation, she talks openly about what she saw and experienced behind bars, the people she met there, and the ways systems can shape—and sometimes distort—the lives of the people moving through them.
But the deeper movement of this conversation is personal. Elizabeth talks about learning to recognize the survival behaviors she had developed, confronting the ways trauma had affected her relationships, and discovering how much changes when we begin to set boundaries and take responsibility for our own healing.
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14:38 — 102.5MB) | Embed
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Too Dumb to Stop: Dick Wybrow on Writing, Faith & the Long Road | #262
/by Two OutlawsSome guests return because there is still more road to travel together. Author Dick Wybrow joins Marc and Greg for a third Moped Outlaws conversation, and this time the scenery has changed in more ways than one.
Dick arrives with a new science-fiction heist, The Facilite Con, a new home in Christchurch, and a creative life that seems to be expanding in every direction at once. The book brings together space-faring con artists, questionable robots, improbable engineers, and the darkly absurd humor that has become part of Dick’s signature. But as usual with Dick, talking about the latest story quickly becomes a conversation about why human beings keep telling stories in the first place.
His years in stand-up comedy taught him that silence can be a brutal teacher. Radio sharpened his ear. Writing taught him to trust readers enough not to explain everything. Now he’s bringing those lessons into audiobooks as well, producing The Facilite Con himself and discovering what happens when another performer takes characters that have lived in his head and gives them a voice of their own.
But this third ride also finds Dick in the middle of a much more personal change. After years as an agnostic, he was baptized into the Catholic Church this past Easter. He talks openly about losing his television work, reaching a very low point, and beginning to reconsider how much control he really had over the course of his life. One unexpectedly funny encounter while he was reaching out for help became part of a larger question: what if some of the moments he’d always credited to cleverness or luck were pointing toward something else?
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:19:34 — 72.9MB) | Embed
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Who Gets to Decide? — Mohamed Nabil | Episode #261
/by Two OutlawsWho gets to decide how a person should live—and how much of that decision belongs to culture, institutions, experts, governments, or the individual?
In Episode #261 of Moped Outlaws, Marc and Greg sit down with author and freelance marketing consultant Mohamed Nabil for a conversation that begins in Egypt and keeps widening until it reaches questions of artificial intelligence, citizenship, democracy, and how human beings decide what to believe.
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:40 — 29.0MB) | Embed
Join The Gang Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pandora | iHeartRadio | JioSaavn | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
A Truce Between Faith and Intellect — Dr. Jamey Hecht | #260
/by Two OutlawsWhat happens when the mind wants evidence, the heart wants meaning, and suffering refuses to fit inside a tidy explanation?
In Episode #260 of Moped Outlaws, Marc and Greg sit down with Dr. Jamey Hecht—psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, scholar, poet, and author of the forthcoming Into Theism: Overcoming Obstacles to Belief in God—for a conversation that travels directly into that unsettled territory.
This is not an argument designed to corner anyone into belief. In fact, Hecht describes his book as something closer to a truce: an attempt to invite the intellect along rather than asking thoughtful people to silence it before approaching questions of God, consciousness, suffering, or the possibility that reality may be larger than the material world immediately available to us.
The ride begins with the intellectual and emotional barriers that can make belief difficult. Greg brings the question down from philosophy into ordinary human pain: what does any idea about God mean when your body hurts, your heart is broken, or someone you love has left? Hecht responds first with metaphysics—and then, when Greg asks him to speak as though comforting a six-year-old, with something radically simpler: the assurance of presence, love, endurance, and the possibility that pain does not have to be faced alone.
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 58:58 — 54.0MB) | Embed
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Making Light of Something Heavy — Rosie Tran | #259 Bonus
/by Two OutlawsThe video failed. The conversation did not.
This original recording with comedian, writer, producer, and podcast host Rosie Tran was nearly lost when a technical glitch left the video unusable. The audio, however, remained clean—and the conversation carried far too much honesty, laughter, and life to leave by the wayside.
After Rosie returned for the official Episode #258, we decided to share this first ride as an audio-only bonus. It is not a discarded rehearsal or an alternate cut of the same conversation. It travels its own road.
Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:18:12 — 71.6MB) | Embed
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Living Outside the Box — Rosie Tran | Episode 258
/by Two OutlawsSome conversations challenge assumptions. Others quietly invite us to rethink the boxes we place around ourselves and the people we meet. This ride with Rosie Tran does both.
Rosie returns to Moped Outlaws after an earlier recording was lost to technical difficulties, bringing the same openness, humor, and curiosity that made the first conversation worth revisiting. Comedian, producer, author, television host, and creator, Rosie shares a perspective that consistently resists simple labels—and in doing so reveals something larger about what it means to live authentically. Read more
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14:26 — 102.2MB) | Embed
Join The Gang Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Pandora | iHeartRadio | JioSaavn | Podchaser | Podcast Index | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More