The Stir!, a new Livingston County-based podcast, debuted this week. Branding itself as a show featuring local and statewide news and analysis from a left to left-of-center point of view, the podcast will also feature guest interviews from around the county to speak on the topics presented on the show.
The debut episode of The Stir! was released Sunday and featured an interview with staffers from FlexTech Academy in Brighton. Recently a Pride flag was burned in the middle of the school parking lot and the area was vandalized with racist and homophobic graffiti on the night before the first day of classes. It’s on real-life incidents such as this that the co-hosts want to focus to help the community gain understanding and heal.
The podcast’s hosts — Kasey Helton, Jace Arledge, and Ella Nikitin — had very different life stories prior to crossing paths in Livingston County, but they all had the same dream, and last week they made it happen.
“I had a hard time at first coming up with a name,” Helton said, “but I think ‘The Stir!’ works perfectly because we definitely want to mix it up here in Livingston County.”
Helton, 46, a Howell resident, teamed-up cross-county with Arledge, 57, of Fowlerville, and Nikitin, 22, of Hartland Township, to bring a new kind of podcast to Livingston County. Helton said its name — The Stir! — works “perfectly.”
Helton, no stranger to stirring things up, made national headlines in 2021 when the Livingston County Sheriff’s Department recommended felony charges against her for tweeting about a local nurse who spread COVID misinformation at a series of public meetings during public comment. Livingston County Prosecutor David Reader never issued charges in the investigation. (You can read our coverage of that by clicking here.)
Nikitin, a trans woman who graduated from Hartland High School in 2019, runs tech on The Stir! while also co-hosting.
“One of the things this podcast does is remind people that, yes, I am a real person,” said Nikitin. “I have hopes and dreams like everyone else, and the fact that I am trans is just one part of me.”
Arledge, meanwhile, has a wife and five children, and is a trans man. He is a retired teacher and former youth minister with a master’s degree in education curriculum and instruction from the University of Phoenix, and a bachelor’s of science degree in social studies from Eastern Michigan University. These days, Arledge is a school bus driver for the Fowlerville Community School District where kids know him as “Mr. Jace”; he is loved by students on his route for dressing up on holidays by request as popular characters like Buddy the Elf and Ms. Frizzle from the popular Scholastic cartoon “The Magic Schoolbus.”
“Jace is really the heart and soul of our show,” said Helton, who identifies as straight and cisgender, a term that describes a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex assigned at birth, in her case female. The two first met at Howell Pride in 2022 and became friends.
“I can get kind of riled-up and assertive in my opinions because of how passionately I feel about the issues, but Jace softens the edges by encouraging listeners to consider all sides of the issue,” Helton said. “He comes from this analytical mindset of an educator, but at the same time he’s so engaging and genuine and funny as hell. He tells killer jokes.”
“I think that’s another thing that makes The Stir! a different kind of show,” said Helton, who ran three times as a Democrat for the Livingston County Board of Commissioners in 2018, 2020 and 2022. “Livingston County has been traditionally Republican for so long, but things are changing here and I hope there might be people out watching or listening who are unsure of what to make of the state of the world today and would be interested in hearing a different point of view.”
You can watch a video recording of The Stir! on YouTube every other Sunday evening at 7 p.m.
Subscribe to the audio version of the podcast on The Stir! on its website.
Follow The Stir! on Facebook.
TikTok & Insta: @thestirpod
