I'M THE VILLAIN

In this episode Deondre and I (Isabel) talk about this book that Isabel has been reading with her book group called My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem, which talks about how trauma physically manifests itself in the body, and how human beings can try to deal with that trauma using somatic methods like humming together, dancing, and physically settling the body by focusing on breathing.

In this book, there is a section that talks about how racism was actually conceived of fairly recently in human history, when white landowners in Virginia were trying to come up with a solution to the class-based unrest amongst the workers. At the time these "bondsmen" were of both white and black skin colors, and had deals with the landowners that said if they worked long enough they could buy their freedom from servitude and be given a parcel of land that they could work themselves. However, the white landowners decided that the best way to appease the masses, who were getting more and more agitated about their economic situation, was to allow the white bondmen to receive land and to deny land to the black ones. This strategy became law in 1619.

This makes race one of the craziest acts of evil genius that humans seem to have come up with: those white landowners probably had no idea that their Hunger Games-esque scheme would be a major force throughout all of subsequent American history, they were likely only out to save their own asses. So we talk about whether there are other similar social constructs that have been a force for good in human history, and why it is so difficult to see and appreciate those things as well, when there are so many dastardly human ideas that seem like they are shaping our modernity.

Jesse Moss is the Senior Marketing Manager at Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids. Before she worked at Experience Camps, she was talking to her friend having one of those classic conversations about how to find a job that you find meaningful, and her friend told her about the nonprofit for the first time. She knew she wanted to work there but they didn't have any job openings at the time, so she signed up to volunteer at the camp. And serendipitously, a job opened up a few days before she went to camp so she tried it out and loved it. It was especially meaningful because her brother Jordan who died by suicide who was 3 years younger than Jesse had also gone to camp with her, and so it was a special experience they got to share when they were kids.

In this episode, we talk about how much of grief can be psychosomatic - she describes doing a grief retreat with a death doula and therapist and about 60% of the retreat was spent in silence, just focusing on the body. She discovered an amazing leg swinging machine that really helped her to process the grief that was in her body. She also started running marathons after her mother died a few years ago, and last year a week before Jesse ran the New York City marathon, she got this horrible pain in her hip, and her grief therapist told her to name the hip and talk to it and miraculously...it worked. The pain went away.

Lastly, we get to hear some incredible stories of grief camp: there's a bonfire on the last night where the kids can say the name of the person they lost and say whatever they want about them, and there was one kid whose dad died who said he had not been able to get a full night's sleep ever since his dad had died. He had told the other kids in his cabin about this and they all decided to push their beds around his bed, and that was the first night he had slept through the night since his dad had died.

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This episode is a continuation of our last episode with Razi Shaban where he talks about having a major concussion before the pandemic started and how that experience changed his outlook on life. As an ex-Google employee, he had a lot of fun creating and building new things, but after the concussion started prioritizing joy over stress more, and left his job at Google last January. We talked about the difficult project of finding work that truly speaks to you, as he liked his work in many ways but started finding it difficult to find meaningful computer work to do that wasn't contributing to a potential fascist project. But at the same time, it is a blessing to have stability, and having a job you can clock in and clock out of, with a degree of non-attachment, can be tremendously freeing.

We also talk about the differences he has found between eastern and western medicine. Living in San Francisco and working at Google afforded him the ability to go to the top neurologists in the country but they were never able to offer him much, which made him realize that the western model doesn't understand the brain nearly as well as the eastern model does. When it comes to traumatic brain injury, there usually isn't a convenient pill you can take to solve the problem, but when he went to an eastern medicine practitioner, they told him to move the chi in his head down to the root, to focus on the breathe, to "sleep without sleeping." And there were immediate, effective, and repeatable results.

Traumatic brain injury can change your entire relationship with the outside world. That's what happened to Razi, who has sustained multiple concussions throughout his life starting in college, but suffered his worst concussion in 2019, right before the pandemic. When that happened, he was completely knocked out of his normal routine: for months, all he could do was sit in the bathtub with no light, maybe a candle. He likens this experience to going back to the womb.

But it also highlighted to him how much the modern world we have built is constantly at war with our bodies and our biology: for example, artificial light is a fairly recent phenomenon in human history, and our almost constant exposure to it is so vastly different from the "natural" light environment we evolved to be in, where the sun shines so many different kinds of light on us throughout the day that our biological clocks have grown to be naturally attuned to. And artificial light has forced us to ignore these biological signals we evolved to have to be able to be productive and entertained long into the night.

Another example is being able to travel around in cars and trains: modern transportation is very loud, can go very fast, and for most animals would be a relatively scary and traumatizing experience that we have completely grown accustomed to. It makes you think about how many other things in our daily lives condition us to ignore signals from our own bodies.

There's a lot of episodes we've had about major life pivots: Andy Reinhold (Episode 78) talked about how he started in consulting, quit his job to follow his passion and work in gaming, and then went back to consulting to support his baby. Sara Alepin (Episode 123) wanted to be a teacher, but after a student stomped on her foot and left her permanently unable to walk more than a few hours a day without pain, she pivoted to being a wedding photographer, podcaster, and running a businesses community. Ayana Major Bey (Episode 134) wanted to be an actor in plays and then a global pandemic hit.

Aaron Matis' story is a bit of a meld between Sara and Ayana's stories: he dreamed of being an actor, and at 26, he was cast in a show on Nickolodeon. He had succeeded in almost everything on his 5-year plan: "I was peaking in every measurable way." Then, one fateful day, he was walking down a hill with a cooler and fell and tore his meniscus. This one fall changed the course of his life forever. 3 surgeries later, and his doctors say he will likely never run again. He moved back home to Scranton from LA and is starting on his next 5-year plan: one that doesn't involve acting.

He tells us about the sheer amount of self-hatred that came after his surgery, and how it was so difficult to accept help from those supporting him: "I so much hated myself that I started to resent people that loved me because I thought there must be something wrong with them." He thinks of his former self as a completely different person, and in therapy, he has managed to go through the process of grieving that former self and that former vision he had of what his life was going to look like.

But he also talks about the process of rediscovering joy and trying to find happiness in simply being around the people he loves, and not worrying so much about what physical activity they may be doing. He talks about being able to empathize in a new way with his sister, who has a rare condition that causes debilitating bouts of pain, and has found a community in online groups for people who suffer from chronic pain.

"I'm not the happiest that I have ever been...but I am getting there."

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In last week's episode, we featured the first part of this conversation with Kenny Wical so if you missed it, you will want to take a listen to that one before you listen to this! In this episode, Kenny talks about ways that privilege manifests itself in his life, because there is a lot of pressure to conform to cis-normative standards of masculinity in the South even among people in the queer community. There's this notion that you can always push the shame and oppression to people farther down on the social ladder than you and even though he is genderfluid, there's a lot of experiences he has had where he initially is granted male privilege by a stranger, and the more they talk to him and see how much he doesn't perform masculinity, the more he sees that esteem they originally granted him melt away before his eyes.

Last week we started talking about the common advice that queer people in the South get to move to a more progressive place like New York City so they can be themselves more without the fear of (as much) oppression. While that has long been a really tempting proposition for Kenny, more recently he has been feeling the desire to nurture his roots in Raleigh, NC, because as a queer person it can be super freeing and heady to go to a more queer-accepting place like NYC where there's tons of out and proud queer people having awesome gay parties, but those same houses and parties need to be built in the South too. It obviously takes a lot more work and community-building can be a very thankless job, especially when you are dealing with a population that has more general trauma, which can make a lot of community-building really difficult because it's a process that inherently requires trust. 

But it's a necessary task. There's so many people in the South and other places in the world who don't have the privilege, financial, stability, or interest in just picking up and moving to a more progressive place, and if more people did that, those places in the South would be that much worse for the queer people left behind. This is that investing in your community looks like.

Kenny knew he was gay pretty much all his life, and has lived in Fayetteville, North Caroline, and then Raleigh North Carolina for the last 11 years. He talks to us about what his experience has been being gay in the South, especially given that a lot of the rest of the US considers the South a lost cause from a gay rights standpoint. When he first came out at the beginning of high school, the first people he came out to were his nerd friends on Gaia Online, an online community for anime fans where you could dress up your avatar with accessories from your favorite anime series. He describes this as a very common experience when you're queer in a more conservative area, because when you're gay it can feel like you're the only one, and online you have access to so many more people who are like you. 

We also get into the conversation around the North's perception that the South is so much more homophobic and racist than the North, to the degree that a lot of Black friends Deondre' has talked to in the North literally try to avoid going to the South because they are afraid they are going to get hate crimed in some way. However, there is racism and homophobia in all parts of the US and at least in Deondre's experience, the South can actually feel even more comfortable because the majority of Black people in the US do live in the South and he feels more comfortable in spaces where there are more people of color, as opposed to a lot of the places he has travelled to in the North where he is the only Black person in the room or on the block. Obviously the comparison of racism and homophobia is very apples to oranges in a lot of ways, but we get into the ways in which they manifest differently, and Kenny talks about a specific instance that highlighted the real importance of intersectionality to him. 

There's a huge frustration with progressives who say that they believe in gay rights or anti-racism but then essentially tell people in the South "What did you expect? You live in the South! Just leave." because that's exactly what the conservatives in the South want, is for the gay people to all move to more progressive places and get out of their hair. And a lot of the places in the world that have implemented progressive policies, like the Scandinavian countries, were only able to do that because they are very ethnically homogenous and those progressive policies are about to be tested as we have more and more climate refugees. The bottom line is that any progressives who believe in either anti-racism or gay rights would be remiss to dismiss the South as a lost cause, just because the South votes more conservatively.

In this episode, we sit down with Hannah De Groot, one of Isabel's old friends from high school, to talk about how her experience in political organizing turned into a job in political consulting. We've been wanting to talk to someone on the "inside" of politics for a long time, because much of this podcast is spent decrying the futility of trying to engage with American politics, when in reality, when you talk to people who actually work in this space, it doesn't seem futile at all. It can definitely seem challenging, but when you are working with other people who are addressing the challenge and separating it into manageable parts, it can be much easier to stop the cycle of despair. But the social support of other organizers is also crucial because, as Hannah points out, MAGA Republicans are no longer an anomaly: they are running in almost every red state.

Hannah's political organizing experience is also unique because she has lupus, which usually hits women hardest in their early 20's, and saps a lot of your energy, which makes it hard to do a lot of the typical activities associated with political organizing such as knocking on doors. The pandemic actually provided an opportunity in that respect because during the pandemic a lot of organizers had to resort to calling and texting potential voters instead, which was more accessible to her. 

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The 2 organizations Hannah recommends at the end of this episode are

Becca Wood is a business coach and Squarespace website designer. She is also the host of the "Probably Bothered" podcast where she breaks down all of the things that bother her about her industry. In this episode, we talk about how so many people who go into business do into it because there is something that bothers them about working as an employee, but then when they go into business there's a whole new set of hurdles that they have to face, such as a lack of a community, and a very narrow definition of what being "successful" really means to you - and most of those definitions have to do with money. We talk through coming to the right balance between trying to solve social problems that have a real impact on the world and our society and actually designing the kind of life you want to live at the same time, which can result in some very direct tradeoffs. 

As a follow-up to the dating coach episode, where our longtime guest Shreye spoke to us about what he learned from going to a dating coach (Episode 125 if you missed it), he is now back on the show to talk to us about his experience with a style coach named Patrick, who Shreye flew to Scottsdale, Arizona to meet in person with his entire wardrobe in tow. Shreye got Patrick's most extensive package, which covered a style consult that covered the perfect color palette for Shreye's skin tone, a shopping trip where Patrick had already pre-selected clothes for Shreye to try on and get custom tailored if necessary, and a final photo shoot with Shreye's fancy new clothes. Patrick even helped Shreye donate all of his old clothes that didn't fit him well before he flew back.

Shreye talks about the evolution of his style journey and why he wanted to take these steps at this point in his life, how his makeover has been received by friends (though of course he doesn't have enough data to prove any kind of causality - if you would like to take part in an informal survey to tell us what you think of Shreye's before-and-after shots, send us an email at imthevillainpod@gmail.com), and his thoughts on whether you should wear Chacos on a first date.

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Since we have been on a series of pretty heavy episodes recently, we decided it would be a good idea to lighten the mood a little bit and talk about the NYT's 36 Questions to Make You Fall in Love, or as they have recently backtracked it to, perhaps because they thought their original headline was too much, the "36 Questions that Lead to Love." If you haven't heard of this article before, when it came out back in 2015, everyone was asking these questions to their dates, though we discuss on this episode whether we think a lot of these questions should really be considered first date material. Or even if knowing someone better necessarily means you're more likely to fall in love with them...it might actually leave you wanting to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.  

Note: Isabel at this time was fostering 7 small kittens, so throughout the episode, you may hear them mewing. Sorry about that.

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Trigger warning: This episode contains discussion of early childhood rape, sexual assault, and incest.

This is a continuation of our conversation last week with Sunshine, so if you missed last week's episode, listen to that before listening to this. Even more so that last week's episode, this conversation is HEAVY. Sunshine talks about her experience coping with sexual trauma, and how her therapist actually gave her the best suggestion of all time: join the BDSM community. Her whole life, she has been trying to figure out how to have a healthy relationship with sex and intimacy, and so much of what society has told her is to erase the parts of herself that are considered "deviant" and the kink community offered another option: embrace it. Definitely make sure consent is king, but within that, there are ways to cope with sexual trauma that don't look like the "mainstream" societal picture of what sex should be.

When asked for what she would want to say to her younger self, she says this: There is no such thing as deviancy. 

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Well, it happened: Roe got overturned. Just like we knew it would. We have talked a lot about our revolutionary thinking on this show, and used this platform to document the major points of political radicalization we have had since the show started: for Isabel, it was when RBG died, for Deondre' it is now. We talk about what we think needs to change in American politics, mainly about the Supreme Court, and we discuss how our thinking has evolved on what strategies might be most effective in producing change going forward. We are still working through how we are going to be involved personally, and so if you have suggestions for organizations that are doing work with a real structural impact, please let us know!

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We feel like more and more people have been talking bout introversion vs. extroversion as a paradigm for categorizing people now, which probably started out because of the popularity of the Myers-Briggs, but also has been redefined more recently, or perhaps this definition has simply made it more into the mainstream: many people are resonating with the idea of introversion as deriving your energy from being alone, and extroversion as deriving your energy from being around other people. In this episode, we talk with Krista Walsh, who identifies as an introvert, about what our society gets wrong about introverts, and why they are actually great business leaders, politicians, and should generally run the world. 

Sara Alepin is back in this exciting episode about the wedding industry, as she has been a wedding photographer for over 10 years. She has ALL the stories, from wedding SNAFU's (one major tip she had to share: Shout wipes are better than Tide pens at removing stains right before the wedding photos!) to all the beautiful celebrations she has attended. 

Her hot take on weddings is that while you might think that the day is all about you, and nobody else, that mentality can really backfire on you because it often is a celebration you are throwing to unite your friends and families and if you ignore those people's opinions, it often makes the more softhearted person in the couple suffer, because that's who people come to with the complaints. This was a well-timed piece of advice for Deondre' who had just expressed 20 minutes earlier in the episode how excited he was to be the asshole to anyone who wanted input on his wedding outside of him and his partner.

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Get some water before you listen to this episode: I had to remind myself to drink multiple times during this episode. In this episode, we talk to health coach and host of the podcast "Salad with a Side of Fries," Jenn Trepeck. She talks with us about all of the complexities of the health and food systems that we are a part of (she makes a point of not talking about the healthcare system because in reality, what we have is hardly a system, it's a disaggregated set of actors that are responsible for your health that almost never talk to each other) and the various problems with all of them. 

For one thing, we have been told to ignore what our bodies tell us from a very young age: we are told to finish what is on our plates instead of listening to when we are actually full. 

For another thing, we have a totally unrepresentative and inapproproate set of standards that we use to measure "health": most metrics are based entirely off of men, as if women did not exist. The 2,000 calorie diet was created to prevent soldiers during World War 2 from dying of diseases like scurvy when rations were in short supply. BMI was created to make it easier for doctors to talk to patients about weight and because it is cheaper and easier to measure a simple data point like weight with a scale than it is to give patients a more comprehensive understanding of what makes up their body, such as by measuring what percentage of your body mass is fat and what percentage is muscle. 

We also talk about Big Pharma, GMOs, and how to figure out who to trust when it comes to health information given that so many actors in the nutrition and medical space have monetary incentives to lie or boas their studies, many of which have dubiously statistically significant results to begin with.

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Sara Alepin was really passionate about being a teacher - and still is! But one day she was forced to quit her job teaching when she became permanently disabled from breaking up a fight at her school where a student stomped on a foot and crushed one of her nerves, making it difficult for her to walk, especially on the linoleum floors that usually line the floors of classrooms. Ever since then, she has only been able to be on her feet for 3-4 hours a day. 

What did the school do? Did it pay her medical bills and try to support her transition out of teaching? You guessed it: not it did not. Not only did they not do they, they actually hired a private investigator to follow her around to try to get out of paying the medical bills, who likely cost many times the amount they would have paid had they simply agreed to pay the medical bills. (The alternate title for this episode is Yet Again We Hear About Why the School System is Fucked.)

On top of hearing Sara's story, we hear about why it can be so difficult having an invisible disability: for one thing, when you are not obviously disabled, you can get some really dirty looks when you go to park in the handicapped spot, or try to get a wheelchair in the airport. For her, some of the most difficult aspects of her disability have not actually been as much around how the world is not designed to accommodate her needs (in fact, as many jobs ave become even more sedentary during Covid, one could argue that many people's lifestyles have been changing to become more like hers!) as much as it has been around the judgements and assumptions of other people.

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The real estate market is bananas right now. You may have seen the headlines about around-the-block lines for open houses in San Francisco, or watched houses in your neighborhood go on and off the market the same day on Zillow. A lot of that has to do with the current low interest rates but it also has a lot to do with land being increasingly bought up by private equity and big developers trying to flip houses and even whole neighborhoods. So much of what is going on in the housing market is furthering the already vastly unequal trends in land ownership and equity.

But Wes wants to help create a world in which we can make cooperatives and land trusts more of a realistic option for everyday people. You've all seen the memes about millennials wanting to live in a big house with their 5 best friends; well, Wes thinks we can actually make that happen. He just started in real estate this week but after going to divinity school and working in the church for most of his adult career, now he feels like this new career change is going to be what really puts the values he has cultivated over the years to the test.

As a continuation of our conversation from last week that is broadly about land and faith and the entanglements between and how the ecology of place informs your philosophy of how to build a community, we dive into how so many of these tools (like co-ops, like trusts) have historically been used by wealthy white people to further their interests and how we can convert these tactics to help the historically oppressed as well. We talk about Squirrel Island, an idyllic piece of land off the coast of Maine that is owned by a cooperative, and how President Reagan once visited and wanted to buy in, but was blocked by the cooperative because he also wanted to build a helicopter pad on the island. Things like this might seem like trite examples of communities wielding their collective power, but you can probably imagine how similar powers could be used to protect much more vulnerable, marginalized neighborhoods.

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There's a pretty fundamental shift in our near future and the median AI scientist says it is coming by about the year 2040: the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Right now, the types of AI that power TikTok and Facebook and Spotify and Netflix and any number of other major tech companies in the world currently are examples of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which may be superhuman, like the ANI's that can beat the best humans in the world at games like chess and Go, but they are only superhuman at one thing. An AGI is an algorithm that is good at learning how to do multiple things, and can attain human-level intelligence across the board. The next step after AGI is ASI, which is Artificial Super Intelligence, which goes beyond the known biological range of intelligence and can improve upon itself at an exponential rate. That's the scary stuff. 

We talk with Isabel's friend Shantanu, who works at a company called OpenAI, about the hypothetical scenarios that are possible and likely within our lifetimes. He notes that a lot of the biggest worries out there are projections of our own personal fears about the world and the direction society is going in because at the end of the day, it is hard to make predictions about what we don't know. But there are a lot of AI safety organizations out there putting extensive thought into these questions, because whoever comes up with the first ASI could determine the entire fate of humanity: we could hypothetically use the AI for "good" and bring an end to most human suffering in the world by using nanotechnology to reverse aging and stop most disease, and possibly create a world in which humans never have to work again and we all live off a universal basic income. But we could also use it for "evil," which is of course a moral imposition by humans that likely wouldn't apply to an algorithm without feeling or intention, but we could program an algorithm to optimize for one thing (the classic parable is making paperclips) and it gets so good at it that it turns everything in the world to paperclips. 

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Is soaking really a thing? Bubble porn? That thing where you get on a top bunk and have your friends jump around on the bottom bunk as a way to simulate sex? These are all things that people on Tiktok say the Mormon Youth do to get around the Mormon requirement not to have sex before marriage. In part 2 of this episode series, we continue our conversation with Cody Crabb from last week, and he debunks some myths about what The Youth are up to.

He also tells us what it is like being a missionary. On this show we like to use the podcast as an opportunity to talk to people who have different experiences from us, and it is hard to imagine a more different life from ours than that of a Mormon missionary. He describes it like this: "Imagine if someone just set you on the street somewhere and said 'Just do nice things for people.'" Help an old an out with his garden, help someone take in their groceries. You're dressed in white, and are often the only white person in a neighborhood of brown people. Eventually they are going to ask you what you are doing here. That's what the over 80,000 missionaries out in the world are up to right now.

Cody served his mission in Culiacán, Sinaloa, the place in Mexico where the show "Narcos" took place. And the mission could really be grueling: you wake up at 6am every day, do hours of text study, and then you're out in the sun all day talking to people. There were times when Cody didn't talk to his parents for 6 months. (Luckily, now the LDS church is changing the way they do missions because it turns out needing to be isolated from your family for that long can be kind of whack for your mental health.)

But we get to the elephant in the room: going to a country of poor indigenous people as a white person to try to convert them to your religion looks a lot like colonialism. And how, as a progressive person now, he reflects on that experience and thinks, "I look back and I can't even believe I did it."

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Cody Crabb knows how this sounds. In today's increasingly secular environment, saying you are religious sounds like you are saying you believe in aliens. Saying you are a progressive Mormon sounds like you either don't know what progressivism is or you don't know what Mormons believe. The Mormon church (they're actually moving away from the term "Mormon" and towards the "Church of the Latter-Day Saints," or LDS for short) isn't exactly known for being the most progressive institution. 

Same-sex marriages are not recognized by the church, Brigham Young was a racist, Black people were not allowed to be priests in the LDS church until the 1970s.

So how do you exist as a member of the LDS church as a progressive person who doesn't see a difference between your romantic relationship and that of your gay friends? As someone who believes in fighting racism?

But some things are changing. Religions everywhere are losing young people, and they know they have to adapt or risk drifting into irrelevancy. There's only so much that religions can do when they stand so at odds with the direction the rest of society is going in.

In the LDS church, this is where the phenomenon of modern revelation comes in. At any given moment, there is a living prophet in the church, and the current guy, as of 2018, is a former heart surgeon named Russell M. Nelson, who can update the handbook and stances of the church to fit modern-day values. Their job is to interpret the word of God. 

For example, a recent prophet said that the church was going to require the children of gay parents to be baptized at the age of 18, whereas you usually get baptized when you are 8 years old. There was a huge backlash to this inside and outside the church and after that backlash, the church revised its guidelines to allow everyone to be baptized at 8 years old.

Obviously a lot of these issues cause a ton of cognitive dissonance as a progressive person, and Cody talks about how for him, so much of the teachings of the church are about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, which is exactly in line with progressivism. For the things that feel contradictory, you just have to believe in slow, incremental change, and realize that some things are always going to have to go "on the shelf."

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In this episode, we discuss a recent 2-part series by The Daily discussing the next phase of Covid-19 and how we are going to get there, including whether or not we are going to have to rely on the unvaccinated to get vaccinated. In the second part of their series, they interview Dr. Fauci, where he talks about the bizarre politics of the pandemic, in which "the cautious are being cautious on behalf of the uncautious, who resent the caution of the cautious" - in other words, the people who are most at risk at this point don't even want the economic and mental health sacrifices of those who are Covid-safe (mainly split by ideological lines more than real risk) and the pandemic will likely run its course with or without them because they will either get it and become immune, or get it and die. 

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Have you ever felt like you don't know what to do with your life? You know we have to solve just about 101 existential crises in our lifetime, and you want to pick a career that does some good for the world and helps us solve these problems, but at the same time, you have so many friends who have had a terrible time working at nonprofits and social impact orgs, either because they are poorly run or because they work on such complex issues that they have to celebrate for such incremental change or risk being depressed all the time. So you wonder if it is a better idea to sell out and donate your money so that you will have a better quality of life, but that doesn't feel very satisfying either. So you write a hail-mary application to grad school even though you're not entirely convinced that that will help you to do good either.

In this episode we sit down with our friend Vija about how the hell you're supposed to figure out what to do with your life. Vija started out last summer after working in wilderness therapy thinking she was going to drive across the country with her dog (#vanlife) to end up in New Hampshire by the end of the summer, where she was going to embark on a year-long project making art and living rent-free at her friend's parent's house. Turns out, before she made it to New Hampshire, she met someone and decided to move in with them in Boulder, CO, where they lasted six weeks before breaking up and she moved back in with her parents in Chicago. Now she is applying to Master's programs in design.

We talk about how to figure out what to prioritize in your career,  how to choose your "hero's work" (this will all be explained in the episode), and whether it makes sense to "follow your passion" even though it's not entirely clear how to find your passion in the first place.

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When was the last time you decided to go live in another country with no plans to return? In this episode, we talk to Isabel's friend Elaine, who has spent much of her post-college life traveling around the world and is currently teaching English in Shanghai. Prior to the pandemic, she had plans to travel around Asia during this time but China's Covid policies threw a wrench in those plans as you are required to quarantine for 2 weeks whenever you return to the country, so for right now she has to settle for traveling around China. At the beginning of the pandemic, Elaine was teaching in Madrid, and was traveling basically every weekend and after she is done teaching English in Shanghai, she plans to travel around the coast of Australia with her sister.

We talk with Elaine about why traveling is so integral to her life, why she considers herself an adventurer more than a tourist, and how she is able to afford traveling this much (apps like Couchsurfing and Workaway make many of Elaine's travel experiences free or close to free). So many of the hosts she has met while traveling have been exceptionally open and interesting people, and while some of them have admittedly been sketchy, she talks about the importance of trusting your gut, which may lead you to get in a van with a total stranger, but in Elaine's case that decision resulted in a delightful week's worth of good food and good company. She even met one Workaway host in Tuscany whose guests literally helped her birth her child when she was pregnant and they are now considered part of her family.

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If you have seen "Inside," you know that it is pretty unique as far as comedy specials go. It was shot entirely by Bo during the course of the pandemic inside of his LA guest house and touches on very millennial themes, such as the effects of the internet and social media on our collective mental health and his mental health specifically, anti-capitalism, turning 30 and thinking about what you have accomplished thus far in your life.

We talk with Shreye Saxena (his 4th appearance on the show, making him the most featured guest!) about his thoughts on the show, ranging from its depiction of mental health, the commodification of wokeness, and the constant balance of authenticity vs. performativity ever since we started expecting depictions people's real lives instead of made-up stories due to YouTube, Instagram, and other elements of media that have turned the cameras back on everyday people instead of just celebrities and movie stars.

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We know that "pretty privilege" can affect everything from who society deems worthy of sex and intimacy all the way to who gets promotions, housing and friends. But it's not as obvious as with other forms of inequities what we should do about it. We can pretty much agree that everyone deserves housing and healthcare but attraction by definition requires another person to be attracted to you, and we can't force people to be attracted to each other. It's also a unique form of privilege because it is more changeable than a trait like race or gender. 

We talk with Hina Wilkerson, a member of the Salted Logic media collective, to talk about all of this and why we don't talk about it. It's a conversation that teeters between being exciting and edgy and also dark because it encompasses funny topics like Chads hitting on you at the gym all the way to rape, pedophilia, murder, and missing women.

And when you are on the "low" end of the desirability spectrum, the stakes can be pretty high. We already live in a society of ever-growing alienation, social anxiety, and isolation that is being fueled by social media and whether people find you attractive can be the difference between hugely opposite reactions, from revulsion to your creepiness, to elation that someone is sexually interested in you and you have no way of knowing how someone will react, which is why flirting is such a dangerous game.

Especially as society at large is moving in a direction to be more pro-kink and pro-fetish, we also get into how this interacts with what we allow ourselves to be "into" and whether we should be questioning that, and when that questioning verges into shaming. No spoilers, but raceplay and virginlust are inevitably mentioned.

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What does gardening have to do with the revolution? It turns out, it has everything to do with it - in this episode, Amirio Freeman, the host of the Loam Listen podcast, talks to us about how Black ecology fosters a sense of connectedness that teaches you if any one part of the complex system that is nature fails, the whole system collapses, and how capitalism has taught us to think of ourselves and our consumption habits in isolation from other parts of the system, to the detriment of all of society. 

We also go into a discussion of land rights, and the complicated turns that conversation can take when it comes to African Americans who are descendants of slaves - if we believe in returning the land to indigenous people or the people it originally belonged to, where do Black people fit into that equation?