I'M THE VILLAIN

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 controversia...

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 roman...

What does progressive Christianity look like in an increasingly secularized world? We sat down with Preston Meyer, the host of the Holy Watermelon podcast and a Sunday school teacher from Canada, who dispels some myths some people may have about Christianity and Mormonism, such as the notion that Mormons primarily go door to door proselytizing or that Sunday school is just for children. We cover t...

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 w...

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...

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 a...

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), bein...

Millennials have a fraught relationship with work. At this point it feels like we could do a compilation of people telling us about the jobs they wish they had been able to have but couldn't for various reasons, whether it be because the lifestyle was too demanding, they didn't want to move to LA, or they had been sold this dream of fulfillment that was ultimately an illusion. In this episode, we...

We have a lot of conversations on this podcast about issues which are often moral in nature, such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine and defunding the police but often we aren't talking about the specific moral framework behind our positions on those issues, and so in this episode, we are going to have a more explicitly moral conversation than usual. We sit down with Luke Phillips, who has app...

Forget about buying a house; that's not even on the radar for most millennials. Let's talk about living with your parents. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people moved home to live with their parents either temporarily to weather the pandemic or permanently. But Candace Howze was already living with her parents, and for many millennials, that is the normal state of affairs in today's skyrocketing...

In a continuation of our conversation around disability from last week with Marquis Kearse, we get into what it is like to date while disabled. What are the power dynamics around one person in the relationship feeling like they need to take care of the other, or one person being deemed more conventionally attractive? And from there, we go into some heavier and more personal topics, like how protec...

Now that we are headed back to "normal" life, and a lot of people are going back to their workplaces, movie theaters, therapists offices, a lot of disabled people are wondering if we are also going to be making a return to a world of inaccessibility. In this episode, we sit down with Marquis Kearse, a disabled person with brittle bone disease who uses a wheelchair, to hear his story and talk about...

In this episode, we sit down and do some processing about what the past 100 episodes have taught us, and what larger narrative has come out of these conversations we have been having with millennials from across the country during this pandemic. Broadly, Isabel has definitely become more radical over the course of this show, and she talks about how the conversations we have had here have informed...

We have been wanting to talk to someone who does social work for a while and finally we got a chance to talk with Destiney Kinsey, a social worker who has worked in all kinds of different settings: she has worked with kids in schools, adults in the military, senior citizens, you name it. In this episode, we talk about the relationship between social work and the Black community, the various ways w...

This episode is a smorgasboard. We get the change to sit down with Lauren DeVera, a life coach, dancer, and fellow podcaster. We met her because Isabel will be speaking on a panel with her this summer at a podcast conference called Podcast Movement to speak about the Asian American podcasting experience, and she just so happened to live close by, in Alexandria, Virginia. She also runs a dance stud...

It's a word many people associate with millennials: burnout. But it's a phenomenon that has been around for a long time, but has new manifestations in our world of psychological and social engineering baked into apps like Uber, giving the brain little hits of dopamine if we just finish out the hour, or Facebook, getting us to keep scrolling for just a little longer. And in the areas of activism, w...

Richard, from the Fatherhood Episode, is back! And he is talking about being the chair of the Iowa chapter of the Alzheimer's Association. We talk about how scary it is to have Alzheimer's (just imagine people you don't recognize coming into your house and telling you they're your own son or daughter - if you haven't watched The Father, which was nominated this year for an Academy Award, they show...

In a continuation of last week's conversation, we talk with Sean Emery about the larger picture: not the specifics of Israel and Palestine, but about the larger global movement going on amongst the working class. It's an exciting time to be a revolutionary. We just experienced the largest protest movement in American history. Just this week, as this episode is being released, we have major news or...

Right now there is a violent occupation going on in the West Bank and Gaza. At the time when we were recording this episode, the ceasefire between Hamas and the Israeli military forces had been going on for about 20 minutes. We sit down with activist and organizer Sean Emery to talk about why this issue is so difficult to talk about in America in 2021. He leads the Philadelphia Free Palestine Coal...

So TikTok is low-key the first big manifestation of AI taking over the world. Many of us (though now all, because Deondre' seems to have avoided the TikTok trap) have had those moments during the pandemic when we went down a TikTok wormhole and the next thing you know, it's 4 in the morning.  We talk with our friend Andy Reinhold about why TikTok is so effective, and here is what he thinks: T...

On this show we talk a lot about problems that need to be solved and not a lot about how to solve them, which is a criticism my mom brought up to me recently. So in this solo episode, Deondre' and I talk about some of the problems we have talked about on the show and whether the counterculture is overcorrecting for them. For example, cancel culture is trying to solve the problem of harmful rhetori...

Why are relationships are a mid-level marketing scheme? Because the media only ever focuses on getting you into them (the will-she, won't-she flirtation period) and then conspicuously leaves out all mention of the WHOLE REST OF THE PACKAGE. The biggest celebration most people have of themselves in their lives is their wedding. Which, if the marriage goes well, is really only, what, the first 10% o...

2 weeks ago, we got to talk to Sal, an apprentice training to be a plumber, and now we get to talk about what it's like being a woman in construction. We sit down with Taylor Mount, the co-host of the Honey and Heart podcast, who works in construction management and is one of only 4 women on her job site in Sacramento. Nationwide, only about 9% of construction workers are women, which also include...

In this episode, we sit down with Vanessa, a public school teacher who has been teaching 7th grade language arts throughout the pandemic in Jacksonville, Florida, and has been teaching in-person this whole school year. She says she knows she is risking her life, but she cares so much about her kids that she is willing to risk it.  She tells us about how the school is trying to shift its focus...

Apprenticeships and trade schools have a marketing problem. Sal, the host of the Fresh Apprentice podcast and a plumbing apprentice, told us that when he was first starting his apprenticeship, he got some flak from his family: "You're going to school to plunge toilets and everything? That's so sad." But it turns out that apprenticeships and trade school are actually a pretty sweet gig! He's gettin...