I'M THE VILLAIN
By Isabel Knight & Deondre' Jones
The show is a conversational podcast where we talk about all the things that are fucked up about the status quo in America, with the perspective of the villain (Isabel) and hero (Deondre'). We talk about norms we think need to change in society, and talk with other millennials about how to change those norms, including our obsession with work, the culture of quantifying everything we do, social media, the way we treat relationships, and more.
I'M THE VILLAINMar 17, 2022
155. The Camp Episode: If You Can't Find the Community You Want, You Need to Build It Yourself
It has been an actually ridiculous amount of time since we last posted an episode, but we are back! And we are back with another installment of Millennials Lust After Their College Walkable Community!
We recorded this episode back in October 2023 about a camp what Mike Wheeler and Stephanie Logan put together called Camp Logwheel that Isabel attended in Septemer, and now that are already planning their next one for May, in a few short months. We talk to Mike and Stephanie about what their community-building goals were for this camp, and the main thesis is that, if you think you are the only one who wants to build community, you're NOT. You may be more or less willing than some of your friends to sacrifice and invest in the community but you're certainly surrounded by people who are lusting for more community.
Stephanie tells us about her community growing up: her parents went to church, and though she wasn't fond of sitting in a pew listening to sermons, she did love being part of a community.
Mike was an RA (Residential Assistant) in college and he would leave his door open all the time, sometimes to come back from class and find his residents in his room playing on his GameCube, which he loved!
So now we are in or almost in our 30's and we are trying to figure out how to make these kinds of communities happen for us again, or at least get as close an approximation of it as we can. Mike knows friends whose parents moved away from their college friends in their 20s, only to decide to ask all of their friends to move in close to them, and they actually did!
So maybe, even though it can seem so unlikely in a world where social ties are simply growing weaker and the loneliness crisis is accelerating, our dreams of multigenerational communities who gather regularly for potlucks and take care of each other's children is actually achievable: maybe all we need to do is ask.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
154. The Chaos Demon Episode: Sometimes You Really Are Just Vibing
This is a continuation of the previous episode from last week, and in this part of the conversation we UNPACK some SHIT. We talk about what happens when you are happily in an undefined relationship, and then eventually society comes along and peers in the window and asks you WHAT YOU ARE. This has been a particular frustration for Isabel recently, and so a lot of this episode is shooting the shit about our relationships and what is important about them to us. We also continue talking about the importance of the middle tier friend, which is a friend who is not your best or closest friend, but someone who is just a solid friend that you can talk with regularly and there's never any drama because the stakes aren't too high with middle tier friends.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
153. The People Theory Episode: The Knight-Jones Personality Test
In this episode we talk about what we personally value when meeting another human being, and if there are particular factors that we find particularly revealing when it comes to a new person's personality, whether it be a potential lover or a new friend. Deondre' is all vibes. Can they talk about something interesting at length, do they laugh? Isabel really things birth order effects (whether you are the first child if you have siblings, or whether you are an only child) can be a really big part of determining one's personality as well. We also talk a lot about relationships and how the social dynamics are changing such that women really stand to lose to much more when entering into cishetero relationships because single women are the happiest women in America, and single men are much less happy compared to their partnered counterparts.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
152. The Electron Microscopy Episode: Meet the BEST Electron Microscopist in the WORLD!
Ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration, Cosmo Alto may not be the electron microscopist in the world, or North America, or Manhattan, but he is definitely the best electron microscopist I know. In this episode, Cosmo sits down with us and tells us about the wonderful world of electron microscopy.
If you're not familiar, for the majority of scientific history, we were using light microscopes to look at small things, which essentially just utilizes lenses to magnify things to the size where you can see them, like the microscope you probably used in science class. An ELECTRON microscope is used to look at things which are smaller than the wavelength of light! So the things you can look at in an electron microscope are on the picometer scale, which means you can look at the structure of proteins from the brain, for example. The microscope shoots a laser at the proteins and an electron detector receives the electrons that bounce off the protein, forming an image that scientists can then look at and synthesize into their research.
Lastly, I always like to ask guests who talk about technology how hard it would be to turn the technology they work on into a weapon: listen on to hear about whether you could turn an electron microscope into a space laser!
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
151: The New York City Episode: What Would Isabella Chiu Do?
What factors do you think about when you are deciding where you want to live? This is another one of those life design episodes where we discuss the factors we think about when trying to design how we want to live.
When I was at South by Southwest in March, I ran into my friend Eric from high school, who I haven't talked to in like a decade, and his partner Isabella Chiu. She came on the show to talk about how they recently moved to New York after being nomadic for most of the pandemic and living in San Francisco prior to that.
They chose New York because they have family on the East Coast they wanted to be closer to, and they also love the bigness of everything. Isabella was also pleasantly surprised by how convenient it was to have everything she could possibly need within a 15 minute walk from their house. We also talk about some of the cons, like the smells and the pressure to be doing everything all of the time. Generally speaking, we talk about which factors are most important to us when deciding on a place to live, ranging from things like crime, proximity to friends, ability to drive around easily, and even just being able to smell fresh air. And at the end you'll also get a bonus little story about Isabella almost missing a flight, Deondre' accidentally going into the women's restroom, and Isabel being hit by a car.
Links:
Isabella's Blog, "What Would a White Man Do?": https://www.whatwouldawhitemando.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
150. The 150th Episode(!): I Have a Hard Time Trusting Anybody to Do Anything Good Enough for a Long Time
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.
Link to My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34146782
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
149. The Experience Camps Episode: Talking to the Sumo Wrestler on Your Hip to Take Away the Pain
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.
Links:
Experience Camps Website: https://experiencecamps.org/
Experience Camps Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/experiencecamps/?hl=en
148. The Climate Episode: The 4 Horsemen Are Here
Martin Froger-Silva woke up one day in fall of 2017 to find his Berkeley home surrounded by smoke: it looked like a scene from Blade Runner 2049. He looked outside and the entire sky was red, like he had been transported to the surface of Mars. For weeks on end, due to the California forest fires, Berkeley was in the "purple zone," which is considered the worst zone to be in on the air quality scale, with particulate matter above 300 ppm, or parts per million (if you're interested, you can check out your local air quality here). California was wearing N95 masks long before Covid happened because of these fires. At one point, Martin's partner looked at him and said, "We are breathing in dead people."
This was a major wake-up call for Martin, who had been working in immigration at the time: it made him realize he needed to go into working in climate change. He went on to get a graduate degree from Scripps in Environmental Science, and learned a lot about things like how the weather works. We asked him what some of his main recommendations are around what the average person can do about the climate, and his main piece of advice: get involved in local politics to see what climate policies are being considered in your state, and educate yourself on what is most effective. In the climate space, there is a decreasing emphasis on individual accountability as it relates to climate change, and a greater focus on how we can influence companies, whose emissions far outweigh the emissions of individuals in the US. We're starting to realize that this problem can only be solved with serious legislation, as opposed to hoping that our individual consumer actions will save us. One main focus for Martin is public transportation, but there are so many more climate-related areas for the average citizen to focus on.
Links:
Martin's website: https://www.martinfroger.com/
"The 6th Extinction," by Elizabeth Kolbert: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185/thesixthextinction
"This Changes Everything," by Naomi Klein: https://thischangeseverything.org/book/
"All We Can Save," an anthology of pieces by 60 women authors about the climate crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkerson: https://www.allwecansave.earth/anthology
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
147. The Musician Episode: Am I Gonna Be a Wife or Am I Gonna Be a King?
"I feel like my mother loves me more than she loves herself, and it makes me feel really guilty. Am I bad if I don't love her more than I love myself?"
Man, turning 30 does a lot of things to you. This quote is from our conversation with Chelsea Hines, a New Orleans-based musician, screenwriter, and entrepreneur (among many other things) and what started off as a conversation about being a musician and what that entails quickly morphed into a conversation about how to build a life that is worth living.
It is increasingly starting to feel as though living your life and having children is mutually exclusive. It's starting to feel like so many of the dreams we once had are unattainable, at least in the ways that we were told to imagine. It is incredibly difficult to balance believing in the individualism and self-reliance that we were taught to aspire to and also build a community where everyone feels safe trusting and relying on each other.
Many millennials, and especially straight women, have gone into the dating pool with a lowered sense of trust that they could ever find a partner who would meet their expectations, and be as reliable as they needed them to be.
But then if you try to be perfectly independent and not rely on anyone else, then what was it all for?
Links:
Chelsea's Healtys Herbal Smoking Blend: https://chelseashealthys.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
146. The Support Episode: 60 Unglazed Pots
Kimaya Diggs wants you to ask her about her mother. One thing Kimaya can tell you about her is that before she died, Kimaya decided to take a pottery class, which her mother asked to join in on. She was incredibly prolific: she created around 300 pieces, but didn't like to glaze her work as much as she liked throwing pots. So when she died, she left behind around 60 unglazed pieces that the owner of the studio was nice enough to keep so that Kimaya could glaze them herself and the studio even named a color of glaze after Kimaya's mom.
Kimaya's mom grappled with cancer for 12 years and she decided not to tell most people in her life that she had cancer, which was difficult for Kimaya to grapple with. When she found out, she was 16, and her younger sisters were 14 and 10. She immediately started making contingency plans, figuring out when her sister's annual physicals were, getting a driver's license as early as possible in case she would need to drive them to school. Kimaya is a songwriter, and her first album, which came out before her mother died, was about grieving her mother, though she had to sing about it in vague terms.
Kimaya had been curious about death from a young age: when she was a child, she would write her will in her school composition notebooks, causing some alarm to her parents. She feels that in a lot of ways she has had an easier time of thinking about her own mortality than her mom did.
She writes about her mom a lot nowadays, writing out conversations she never had with her mom as if they were scenes from a play. She struggles with the temptation to write what she herself wishes her mom would have said in these conversations compared to what she thinks her mom would have said in reality.
She also wishes that more people would have been supportive to her partner in grief, who she has been together with for 9 years. In many ways, he was grieving his own loss just as much as she was, but she was the only one who got the cards and offers of support from friends and family, and she wasn't as able to support him while he was grieving. She hopes that in the future, offering support to everyone affected by a death, even if it seems like they would not be as obviously affected, will be far more normalized.
Kimaya knows her grief will be with her for the rest of her life, and will always do that wack thing where it suddenly and unexpectedly gets super heavy on some days, but at least now she feels like she has a better handle on what she is dealing with.
Links:
Kimaya's website: https://www.kimayadiggs.com/
Kimaya's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kimayadiggs/?hl=en
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
145. The Pacific Crest Trail Episode: Imagine Not Needing to Unplug
When our friend Margot was getting ready to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), she thought she would be bored, and that this was going to be a period when she listened to more audiobooks than she had ever listened to in her life. But it turned out that when she actually started hiking, she didn't feel the need to listen to many audiobooks or music and she had a realization: so much of the world we live in currently can be harsh and grating, like the soundscape of cars and sirens and construction when you go outside in a city. And much of the reason why we may need to wear headphones or distract ourselves from the world around us may be because we are trying to seek comfort away from those harsh externalities. But when you spend every day in nature, you might not need the security blanked of distraction.
Hiking the PCT is a notoriously difficult endeavor, that requires months of prep and planning. In Margot's case, she and her partner both quit their jobs, and Margot took a wilderness first aid class and they spent time in the weeks leading up to their departure dehydrating their food and sending care packages of food to different points along the trail where they would be walking. They each got a "trail name" bestowed upon them, which is a nickname you use while on the trail, and got adopted by "trail families," which are groups of people you hike with, which you might have many of if you are hiking the whole thing from start to finish. They even met some "trail fairies" who opened up their homes to Margot and her partner and fed them a meal.
Margot and her partner hiked the whole thing in 6 months, a feat that only approximately 25% of PCT hikers can claim to have accomplished: along the way, they saw joshua trees, wore the same change of clothes every day, and Margot even had to perform first aid when one of their trail buddies fell while crossing over an ice bridge and hit his head. And when asked if she would do it again, she said "I would do it tomorrow!"
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
144. The Girl Moss Episode: The Girl Boss is Dead
We have probably all seen the late stage capitalism memes by now: "Stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is" is a famous one, though there are many more. In this episode we talk about the societal shift towards glamorizing doing nothing. We talk with Winx Vestrit, a friend who works with Isabel on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance, about a tweet that really resonated with them which goes: "The girl boss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature)".
So much of the rhetoric around burnout and rest in the mainstream culture has been about resting for the purpose of getting back to being productive, but there is also a more anticapitalist movement towards resting for resting's sake, because you as a human deserve rest, or for the purpose of healing from a society that never taught us how to have work-life balance. We talk about how our current mindset will potentially harm us in the future if the economy does begin to shift towards mass unemployment with the automation revolution and what we would all choose to do if we were truly given the choice to do whatever we want.
The reset afforded to many remote workers by the pandemic allowed so many people to look inward and think about topics like gender and the nature of society in ways that our parents' generations and many generations before them likely did not have the bandwidth or energy to imagine on the scale that we are now as a generation, simply because they were too exhausted at the end of the day from working.
Obviously the Girl Moss tweet is a repudiation of modern-day hustle culture, but we also talk about what would happen if we were suddenly thrust back into a state of needing to grapple with nature, such as in the scenarios posed by the world of Station Eleven, a popular fiction book that talks about what would happen if there was a pandemic that wiped out 99% of the global population, or by Tim Urban on a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast where they talk about a hypothetical in which a witch came and took away all of our modern-day technology and we had to re-create society with only the knowledge in our heads now. We decided it probably wouldn't hurt to start learning some survival skills.
Links:
Girl Moss Tweet (the original tweet seems to be deleted so this is a link to a screenshot from another person's Instagram): https://www.instagram.com/p/Cehw4pmNNGe/
Instagram Isabel References with the Frog with Stilettos and a Mushroom Hat: https://www.instagram.com/maybell.eequay/?hl=en
KnowYourMeme Article explaining the "Stop Galmorizing the Grind and Start Galmorizing Whatever This Is" Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-glamorizing-the-grind-and-start-glamorizing-whatever-this-is
Lex Fridman podcast episode with Tim Urban where they talk about the hypothetical in which a witch takes away all our technology: https://lexfridman.com/tim-urban/
We don't talk about this book explicitly, but much of what we talk about in this episode is also discussed in Tricia Hersey's book, "Rest is Resistance": https://thenapministry.com/
National Home Funeral Alliance: https://www.homefuneralalliance.org/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
143. The Concussion Episode Part 2: Anxiety is a Dizzyness of Freedom
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.
Links:
Razi's Website: https://www.therazy.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
142. The Concussion Episode Part 1: "OK: I am alive. And I am in a body. And everything hurts."
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.
We will continue this conversation next week in Part 2 of the concussion episode.
Links:
Razi's Website: https://www.therazy.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
141. The Pivot Episode: Grieving the Alternate Paths You Life Could Have Taken
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."
Links:
PALS Programs, a camp for kids with Down Syndrome that Aaron has worked with and loves: https://www.palsprograms.org/
Deondre's new show, 3Disc Changer, a podcast where three friends take a deep dive into an iconic album each episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-disc-changer/id1644161173
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
140. The Disney Episode: Black Ariel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and How Disney's Absurd Level of Historic Problmaticness Weirdly Set It Up for Success in the Modern Media Environment
This might be a little old because everything is a blip in the news cycle and yesterday's news is forgotten in like 24 hours, but we recorded this at the time that the Black Little Mermaid stuff was going on but only got to releasing it now. In this episode, we talk about how Disney has actually turned into...a kind of great company despite its historic levels of shittiness? We liken it to Krispy Kreme, which was totally able to bounce back from the fact that they used to use forced labor to make their treats and were basically run by Nazis.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
139. The True Crime Episode: Virtuous Police Accountability or Gratuitous Violence Spectacle?
As some of you may know, Deondre' LOVES listening to true crime podcasts and so was very excited to have today's guest, Joy Scaglione, the host of the Bite-Sized Crime Podcast, on our show.
We cover a lot in this episode:
How does true crime reflect the broader inequalities in our society and spur a conversation around how to avoid these dangerous or deadly situations by raising our children to have better awarenesses of mental health and emotional regulation?
How does true crime interact with the carceral system?
If we funded schools and mental health, how would that affect these types of crimes?
Is true crime really just a reflection of the gladiator effect of being mesmerized by public violence and drawing recreational and entertainment value out of it at the expense of the victim's families, who have to be re-traumatized every time they hear their families' stories re-enacted in the public square?
Much of true crime involves intimate partner violence, so it's not just how we parent our children, it's how we choose our romantic partners and spouses, and how we have public conversations about mental health. Thankfully, we are now having a much more robust conversation as a society about how to spot red flags in your partner, and it's producing much healthier relationships, which will hopefully lower the number of domestic violence cases and murders.
Links:
Joy's podcast, Bite-Sized Crime: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bite-sized-crime/id1575638833
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
138. The Gay in the South Episode Pt 2: Somebody Had to Build That House, and You Can Build One Too
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.
Links:
Kenny's website: http://kwical.com/
Kenny's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/okaykennyray/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
137. The Being Gay in the South Episode: When You Always Knew You Had a Little Sugar in the Tank
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.
You'll also hear some stories about petty times we have either fucked with someone's life (such as putting oreos on a nemesis' windshield), inadvertently fucked with our own life (Deondre' had someone accidentally leave raw salmon in his microwave in college and they couldn't find it for weeks), or would hypothetically fuck with someone else's life (such as by putting sugar in someone's gas tank, which then caramelizes and totals the car). This was a long conversation so tune in next week to hear Part 2!
Links:
When Deondre' is talking about his story about the raw salmon in the microwave, we mention a "Dolly Zoom" and if you aren't familiar with this term, you can watch this quick YouTube video explaining the concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5JBlwlnJX0
Kenny's website: http://kwical.com/
Kenny's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/okaykennyray/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
136. The Political Consultant Episode: Why Establishment Politics is Important
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.
Links:
The 2 organizations Hannah recommends at the end of this episode are
- People's Action (for progressive organizers who are interested in deep canvassing) https://peoplesaction.org/
- Vote Save America (a group working to mobilize voters around the midterms) https://votesaveamerica.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
135. The Business Coach Episode: What Do You Owe the World vs. What Do You Owe to Yourself when Building a Business?
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.
Links:
Becca's Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iambeccasimone
Becca's Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/probablybothered/
Becca's Podcast Website: https://www.beccawood.com/business-podcast-rebel-entrepreneurs
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
134. The Actor Episode: Who Am I If I'm Not Acting?
Ayana Major Bey had a major reckoning when the pandemic hit. Ayana has been a musical theater actor, a "straight play" actor (which is what they call non-musical theater plays in the theater world), and is now a voice actor.
She talks us through the process of figuring out her career: she got a masters, has worked on cruise ships for up to 10 months at a time where she had to be in Barcelona every Saturday, and mentors other artists on how to design a career they enjoy. She was super lucky when the pandemic hit compared to a lot of her peers because a few months before the pandemic hit she found her voice acting manager, or rather her voice acting manager found her. She has been doing voice acting ever since and has been loving the freedom and flexibility it gives her. But she has been wondering how to do all the things that she loves to do without the sacrifices that typically come with them. How do you be an actor without it crushing your soul?
Links:
Ayana's Podcast, the Artist Pivot: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-artist-pivot/id1528786107
Ayana's Instagram handles:
Personal: @ayanambey
Podcast: @theartistpivot
Ayana's Website:
https://www.ayanabey.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
133. The Style Episode: Should You Wear Chacos on the First Date?
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.
Links:
Men's Fashion Reddit that Shreye references: https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/
Hasan Minaj gets style advice from Tan France of Queer Eye: https://youtu.be/uFhRONeopbQ
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
132. The 36 Questions Episode: Email Us and Tell Us Whether You Are in Love With Us After Listening to This Episode
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.
Links:
The New York Times's article, "36 Questions that Lead to Love": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
131. The Sexual Trauma Episode: There is No Such Thing As Deviancy
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.
Links:
National Sexual Assault Hotline: https://www.rainn.org/resources
Woman Against Rape (not recommended per se but was mentioned in the episode): https://womenagainstrape.net/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
130. The Art Episode: How Art Can Help Heal Sexual Trauma
Trigger Warning: This episode mentions rape and sexual assault.
This is a heavy episode, and next week's episode will be even heavier. We sit down with Isabel's friend Sunshine to talk about being an artist and the ways in which art can help you process trauma, in this case sexual trauma, and how that very personal expression of self interfaces with the consumers of your art and the outside world. Sunshine displays her art in many different types of venues: she will display her art in the park on the weekends, but she has also had art acquired by corporate art purchasers, such as the FMC building, which is a skyscraper in Philadelphia.
She describes some unexpectedly intense reactions some people have had to her art, from a gaggle of passing frat bros being moved by one of her more abstract paintings about rape, to a woman in a gallery who would up purchasing Sunshine's whole exhibition. We talk about the complicated relationship between art and capitalism, and ultimately for Sunshine, being able to translate that trauma into a means of survival is empowering.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
129. The Roe Episode: Well, Here We Are
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!
Links:
Article from the New Yorker on "Roe's Final Hours in One of America's Largest Abortion Clinics": https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/roes-final-hours-in-one-of-americas-largest-abortion-clinics
Interview Deondre' mentions with Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin on resistance strategies and how to become ungovernable: https://blackrosefed.org/ungovernable-interview-lorenzo-komboa-ervin-anderson/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
128. The Introversion Episode: Should Introverts Run the World?
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.
It seems like with the internet came more conversation about introverts and their superpowers, perhaps because more introverts frequent online spaces, although Krista points out that being on Twitter can feel like a very draining, extroverted space as well, given the plethora of headlines and hot takes and the dearth of nuance. We talk about how the pandemic has affected our personalities and mentalities around introversion and extroversion, and share stories about the lengths we will go to get out of social situations we don't want to be in - in some cases all you have to do is jump out of the car!
Links:
Krista's website: https://kristawalshcopywriter.com/quicklinks/
Tiktok where guy chokes on boba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z74-9gDhkZs
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
127: The Astrology Episode: You Can't Snap You Fingers and Achieve Inner Peace, but You Can Get Into Astrology
Isabel got invited to an astrology party and so in this episode we talk about the rise in popularity of astrology and why we think it has been so trendy even though we think it is kind of bullshit and also why it might be useful in your life even if you think it is kind of bullshit. We also talk about the general category of similar personality categorizers such as enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DISC, and other random personality paradigms that people use and why they might be useful or not. Deondre's favorite is enneagram, and says he is a Type 2 Wing 3, and Isabel has been told she is a Type 8. This leads us into a broader conversation about our desire to organize the world when we generally feel like there are all of these crises all happening at once, and how maybe all of these silly little personality quizzes and our desire to grow basil and be little cottagecore fairies in the woods might stem from a darker, more survivalist place even though the manifestation might actually look pretty cute and harmless.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
126. The Wedding Episode: Are Weddings Just For the Couple?
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.
Links:
Sara's wedding podcast, "The Wedding Dish": https://theweddingdish.podbean.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
125. The Dating Coach Episode: Figuring Out the "Click"
Do you know the moment when you feel as if you don't understand something, and then something just clicks? What do you do when the thing you are confused about is dating? Is it possible to help coach someone who hasn't had a lot of success at dating to get something as complex as flirting to "click"?
That's exactly what Shreye Saxena wanted to figure out when he went to a dating coach recently. Her class was appealing to the specific niche of cis-het men trying to figure out how to date women, and she has a question on her FAQ page relating to whether her method works for Indian men specifically because Indian men tend to perform worse than other demographics on dating apps.
Does Shreye think it was worth the money? All you have to do is listen to the intro of this episode to find out. We discuss how "coachable" we think a lot of the soft skills of dating are, what flirting even is, and whether there are actually similarities in philosophy behind polyamory and arranged marriages.
Links:
36 Questions that Lead to Love from the New York Times that Shreye mentions: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html
A Youtube video from the New York Times by Amanda Hess on Zyzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fYmwhyqmYg
Note: In the episode, Isabel talks about how Zyzz worked out to death/until his heart gave out, but upon rewatching this video, it turns out he actually just had a pre-existing heart condition.
Shreye's previous episodes:
71. The Mental Health Stigma Episode
47. The Financial Inclusion Episode
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
124. The Health Coach Episode: We've All Been Taught to Ignore Our Bodies
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.
Links:
Jenn's podcast, "Salad with a Side of Fries": https://asaladwithasideoffries.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
Note: In this episode, Jenn talked about the Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug and his invention of dwarf wheat. She mentions that dwarf wheat was invented to solve world hunger and did not, in fact, solve world hunger, and therefore suggested that we should go back to eating other forms of wheat because dwarf wheat causes gluten sensitivities.
Upon further research after the episode, the articles we found mostly seem to suggest that although we have not solved world hunger, the invention of dwarf wheat has likely saved over a billion people from starvation, so we will allow you to judge for yourself how this use of GMO's might weigh against the current rise of gluten sensitivities.
Some articles on Norman Borlaug:
"The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-man-who-saved-a-billi_b_4099523
"Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
123. The Invisible Disability Episode: What Would You Do If You Could Only Be On Your Feet for 3-4 Hours A Day?
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.
Links:
Sara's podcast, The Wedding Dish: https://www.theweddingdishpodcast.com/
Sara's other podcast, Laughing with Gingers: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laughing-with-gingers/id1524216963
Laughing with Gingers Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laughingwithgingers/?hl=en
Sara's wedding photography business, Photos from the Harty: https://www.photosfromtheharty.com/
Sara's other business, District Bliss Events: https://www.instagram.com/districtblissevents/?hl=en
122. The Land Episode: How Can We Make Equity Work for the Community?
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.
Links:
Wes' real estate instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wesrealtor/
Wes' 5-part podcast on the Farminary: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cultivators-podcast/id1508064564
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
121. The Faith Episode: How We Build Meaning in Everything From Neighborhood Architecture to High School Musical Nights
Wes Willison lives on a block with 100 houses on it. That is a very long block by most urban planning standards and he starts off telling us a bit about what that kind of built environment affords you: safety, because you have a lot more eyes on all the people going up and down the street but also, because his block is nestled in an otherwise high-crime part of Port Richmond, which is a neighborhood in Philadelphia, he and his neighbors get to avoid the attention of big developers who might want to come in and "flip" the neighborhood.
Wes originally went to seminary but is now pivoting to become a realtor, a role in which he hopes to apply a lot of the belief systems he has spent his whole life honing and shaping. We started this episode intending to have a conversation about the importance of place and ownership of land and the inequities ingrained in that, but what we ended up talking about was everything.
For example, Wes tells us the incredible story of how in San Francisco's Chinatown, the Chinese immigrants would pay white builders to add "Chinese-looking" facades to otherwise normal houses to fend off the government and developers looking to buy out or claim land in Chinatown through eminent domain and how the immigrant community organized themselves to leave the city en masse if the government did not choose to respect their land rights, which worked surprisingly well.
120. The AI Episode: Immortality and Endless Wealth or Human Extinction?
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.
Links:
The Wait but Why articles about hypothetical scenarios involving recursively self-improving AI:
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
Some examples of what OpenAI's code models can do:
https://openai.com/blog/openai-codex/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUCcjHTmGY
Some examples of what gpt-3 can do:
https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3
Openai's blog:
https://openai.com/blog/
https://openai.com/blog/webgpt/
https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
https://openai.com/blog/instruction-following/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
119. The Proposal Episode: The Life and Death of Relationships
You know the game 2 truths and a lie? Well we are switching it up and making it 2 breakups and a marriage proposal: in the last 2 weeks, we have had 1 proposal and 2 breakups between the 2 co-hosts. So we take a minute to talk about what we have learned from those experiences and why it's weird when when you go through a breakup and a proposal at the same time. We also cover: why we should put more serious, emotional conversations into writing, why it is useful to have people in your life who will tell you your flaws, and what our previous relationships have taught us.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
118. The Missionary Episode: How Religious Institutions are Changing to Cater to the Youth
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."
Links:
Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/
Cody's email: codycrabb8 [at] gmail.com
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
117. The Mormon Episode: What is it Like to Be a Progressive Mormon?
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."
Links:
Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/
Cody's email: codycrabb8 [at] gmail.com
The Wikipedia page for the current LDS prophet, Russel M. Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_M._Nelson
116. The Endemic Episode: The Next Phase of Covid
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.
Links:
The Daily, Pt. 1 "We Need to Talk about Covid": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/podcasts/the-daily/omicron-coronavirus-behaviors.html
The Daily Pt. 2 "A Conversation with Dr. Fauci": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/podcasts/the-daily/we-need-to-talk-about-covid-part-2-a-conversation-with-dr-fauci.html
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
115. The Figuring Shit Out Episode: The Millennial Urge To Throw Your Life Away and Start All Over Again
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.
Links:
Wait But Why article, called How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You): https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
114. The Digital Nomad Episode: When There's No Return Ticket
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.
Links:
Couchsurfing: https://www.couchsurfing.com/
Workaway: https://www.workaway.info/
Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/home/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
113. The Bo Burnham Episode: The Ultimate Millennial Comic
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.
Links:
"Inside" on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81289483
Bo Burnham's Kanye Rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYy0o-J0x20
Bo Burnham's "Art is Dead": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo9pU1q8sy8
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
112. The Elon Musk Episode: Time Person of the Year
In 2021, Elon Musk was named the Time Person of the Year. A contentious choice, given the events of this past year, and maybe that was the point. After all, print magazines are rapidly going out of business and vying to stay relevant and this is pretty much the only time of year you see headlines about TIME in the rest of the mainstream media. So maybe they chose someone intentionally controversial to stir up chatter, but regardless, we use this episode to talk about whether the pick was merited, given that Elon has been breaking ground: he has now definitively put electric vehicles on the map, despite Tesla's dubious labor practices, and he can move the markets with one Tweet (though maybe not always in the direction he wants them to go). We will have yet to see if he manages to put humans on Mars, but if he does succeed, it will undoubtedly be historic.
Links:
Wikipedia Page on the Time Person of the Year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year
Time article on Elon Musk as the Time Person of the Year: https://time.com/person-of-the-year-2021-elon-musk/
Wait But Why Article on Elon Musk: https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-the-worlds-raddest-man.html
Wikipedia page for the Long Tailpipe Theory of Electric Vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe#:~:text=The%20long%20tailpipe%20is%20an,those%20from%20non%2Delectric%20vehicles.
Our World in Data Chart of Emissions by Sector: https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
111. The Expanding Polyamory Episode: Expanding Our Conception of What A Romantic Relationship Is
In this solo episode, Isabel and Deondre' talk through our relationship shit. Both of us have been going through some pretty serious transitions, that have pushed us to expand our understandings of what a romantic relationship can and should encompass. We already both identify as polyamorous, which is a form of ethical non-monogamy in which you allow yourself to love and date multiple people romantically. But it gets tricky when you start getting into the actual nuts and bolts of designing a life in a way that runs so counter to the societal norm. For example, there is the notion of a "primary" partner (your main romantic partner) vs. a "secondary" or "tertiary" partner within polyamory. How do you navigate what primacy really means within your relationship?
It can definitely suck to relegate a romantic interest to the realm of "secondary" or "tertiary" so how can you also find non-hierarchical ways of categorizing your other partners while also recognizing that there are elements of life-building that are pretty zero-sum? For example, it's great when all of your partners live in the same city, but what if your primary partner wants to move, and wants you to move with them? We talk about the use of terms like "nesting partner" and "anchor" partner in place of hierarchical terms like primary or secondary and what they mean in context.
And even once you have decided to leave the conventional romantic assumptions behind, perhaps you still experience a desire to have the negative feelings that can arise from the difficulties of testing your limits validated, and you wonder whether that you are feeling is "normal" or "justified." And maybe it doesn't even make sense to ask those kinds of questions because at the end of the day, what is most comfortable to you is what matters, even if nobody else in the world would share those feelings with you.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
110. The Progressive Christianity Episode: Satanism, Science, and Secularization with a Sunday School Teacher
Links:
The Holy Watermelon Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/holy-watermelon/id1534587756
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
109. The Desirability Politics Episode: Should We Dismantle Our Conception of Who is Attractive?
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.
Links:
Hina's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hinarising/
Salted Logic, Hina's woman-owned media collective: https://saltedlogic.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
108. The Drug Episode: Addiction is Rare, but Misuse is Still a Problem
What makes sugar, Adderall, tobacco, and alcohol legal while drugs like pot, heroin, cocaine, and meth are not? Is it addictiveness? Impact on health? Racism?
In this episode, we talk to Jay Shifman, the host of the Choose Your Struggle podcast who has experiences coping with addiction to prescription medication and self-identifies as a drug user in long-term recovery.
We talk through the history of drug use, going all the way back to the first drug laws in the 1800s, all the way up to today, and consider what the next steps should be in drug policy evolution, looking at models like the Portugal Model.
By the end, we may not come away agreeing on what our ideal society in terms of drug use should look like, but we all agree that we do need to conduct more research around the root causes of drug problems, given that so much of America's drug policy was rooted in propaganda and scare tactics.
Links:
Jay's podcast, "Choose Your Struggle": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/choose-your-struggle/id1502017563
Choose Your Struggle website: https://www.jayshifman.com/choose-your-struggle-podcast
Chasing the Scream, a book that documents the history of drug use: https://chasingthescream.com/
The Abstinence Myth, a book about why shame-based recovery models don't work: https://www.adijaffe.com/book
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: https://drgabormate.com/book/in-the-realm-of-hungry-ghosts/
Carl Hart, a professor of psychology at Columbia University who studies drug use and addiction: https://psychology.columbia.edu/content/carl-hart
The Weight of Air, a book by David Poses that documents his struggle with heroin addiction: https://davidposes.com/the-weight-of-air
The New Jim Crow, a book that exposes the racist roots of the current American carceral state: https://newjimcrow.com/
Link to article talking about how a Nixon advisor knew that the drugs were not the problem: https://qz.com/645990/nixon-advisor-we-created-the-war-on-drugs-to-criminalize-black-people-and-the-anti-war-left/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
107. The Black Ecology Episode: Humanity Isn't Wrecking the Planet, Capitalism and White Supremacy Is (And Those Are Fixable!)
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?
This is a pretty mind-blowing conversation where we delve even deeper into what elements of our current society come from colonialism and white supremacy, much in the vein of the Decolonizing Parenting Episode, and how radical imagination and rest can be antidotes to the dystopian world we find ourselves barreling towards. Even in the midst of all of these barriers to a more community-driven society (even if we were to encourage foraging and gardening, how many people truly have the time, land, and knowledge required to do it?), Amirio still finds the fact that these barriers are all the products of the socially constructed world that we created heartening, because none of these factors are inherent to humanity. We can decide as a collective to change them, we just have to have the will to do it.
Links:
Amirio's Instagram: @plantasia_barrino
Amirio's podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/loam-listen/id1477513600
Braiding Sweetgrass: https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
Fannie Lou Hamer and her piggy bank: https://lifeandthyme.com/commentary/fannie-lou-hamer-and-farming-as-activism/
The Nap Ministry: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/
A conversation with Tricia Hersey, the founder of the Nap Ministry, on the relationship between rest and Black liberation: https://atmos.earth/rest-resistance-colonization-black-liberation/
An article about how the USDA was offering grants to marginalized farmers as part of the American Rescue Plan but this was blocked by a group of White farmers: https://www.youngfarmers.org/2021/06/delivering-on-debt-relief-to-black-farmers/
A super useful library of articles on Black Ecology: https://www.bilphenaslibrary.com/blackecology
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.
106. The Sports Episode: Women in Sports Aren't Unicorns
It turns out that being a woman sports fan is just like being any other kind of sports fan. They don't need pink jerseys, they just want to feel included. In this episode, we sit down with Keely Dunning, a sports podcaster who has worked in sports for 10 years, after she decided she didn't want to go into the entertainment industry. As it turns out, just like in our Construction Episode (90), being a woman in the sports industry can be a tough job.
We talk about why it is important to get women more engaged in sports communities (other than to make sports media more money), how the promotion of women's sports can be good for creating more women fans, and how different professional sports leagues have handled increasing calls for diversity (Spoiler: NASCAR beats out the NFL by a long shot).
Links:
Keely's Twitter: https://twitter.com/keelyfdunning?lang=en
Keely's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kielbossa/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.