I'M THE VILLAIN

In this episode we talk about the process of becoming a father, and we do it with Richard Dedor, who is a gay dad from Iowa who adopted his daughter through a private adoption agency. He talks with us about what the adoption process was like, the pros and cons of public vs. private adoption, and the effects parenthood has had on his relationship with his husband. When adopting through the private...

This episode is more of a story than a conversation around a particular topic. But the main theme of the conversation we had with Susan Barnes, a healer, and personal growth facilitator, is how she dealt with the fear of going off the typical "success" track: She was an accountant in New York, making a lot of money, and then one day she quit and flew to Bali. So many people in our generation lie a...

The Texas blackouts last month were the perfect example of why the go-it-alone mentality can only be viable when things don't go wrong...like when a huge winter storm hits. Then you need help. We talk with a Texas native and the co-host of the Broke, Gifted, and Black podcast Nono, about the perils of Texas politics and how it royally screws over Texas citizens over in times of crisis. She works a...

We have been talking to a number of people who have been diagnosed with various mental health issues in their adulthood. All of them have felt that their diagnosis changed their lives for the better, but this is the first time we have talked with a woman about how her diagnosis affects her life differently from men. We talk with Kriselle, who is the host of the Empowered in Color podcast, about wh...

This is a revolutionary episode. What would the world look like if we parented in communal groups that supported each other instead of treating every single mom as an island of one? What if we gave kids the agency and freedom to be themselves instead of policing their every move? What if we taught them emotional regulation? How do we do that if we weren't even taught those things ourselves? We tal...

With the vaccine out and both podcast hosts scheduled to get their first shot this month, hope looks to be on the horizon, so we decided to talk with a self-care expert about how to get through this last leg of the pandemic. We sit down with Re'Becca, aka Crowned ReRe, the host of the CrownTalk Podcast, about how she got into self-care after breaking up with her partner of 10 years, what self-care...

This is an exciting time for investing after the recent Gamestonk! debacle has gotten more and more people interested in getting into finance themselves, and has flooded TikTok and Instagram with influencers explaining what "shorting" is via more accessible metaphors like buying shampoo from Sephora. Even if that particular example was a bit of a doozy, we wanted to talk with our friend Danielle P...

Since we all just celebrated Valentine's Day, we wanted to showcase a millennial who was going decidedly against the romantic grain by choosing to stay single. Edirin Edewor, who has lived in Nigeria her whole life but just moved to Dubai during the pandemic, has faced pressure from family and people in her community to find a partner her whole life but instead chose to focus on her career. She ha...

When you listen to the intro, it might not sound like the intro to a show about game development but don't worry, soon you will understand. In this episode, we are talking with Andy again, the same guest from the last episode, and we talk about the world of gaming: turns out a lot of the jobs you can do in real life, you can do for a gaming studio. You can go to school to be an economist and wind...

As millennials we face a lot of tough choices with regards to what we should devote our career to doing. It's genuinely difficult to decide whether we should "follow our passion" and do the thing we actually want to do, or the thing that seems more practical. We talk to fellow podcaster Andy Reinhold about this decision, at a pretty critical transition point in his life: he spent his career in con...

This is where we process the shit that went down in the capitol building on January 6th with our friend Ronald. We wanted to take some time to process instead of giving a reaction right after the fact, but we delve into the implications of the insurrection on us as people on the left, if this is part of the "chaos" that is to come, as mentioned by Craig Blackmoore on our Futurism Episode, and the...

In a continuation of last week's episode with Justin (a psychiatrist) and Eddie (a therapist), this week we talk about how there is so much we still don't know about medicating mental health issues, and even the best treatments on the market for things like depression are only 70% effective. We cover the new treatments researchers are experimenting with, how to find a medication and a provider tha...

We have been on a mental health kick after our Mental Health Stigma Episode with Shreye, especially given that this year doesn't appear to be going any easier than the last. So in that vein, we sat down with Justin, who is in his third year of residency to become a psychiatrist in Omaha, Nebraska, and Eddie, who is a therapist in an outpatient eating disorder program in Portland, Oregon, to talk a...

It has been a pretty intense year to process, and based on the events of January so far, so will 2021. We took this moment to look back on the timeline of 2020, reflect on what happened, and marvel at how dystopian our present world is. It really feels like every new milestone was a punch in the gut at the time when it happened, and now it really feels like absolutely nothing short of the literal...

For our last episode of 2020, we are talking about the future. Given all this year has uncovered, between the pandemic, half of the country being on fire, and increasing unrest around racial politics in the United States, we talk with Craig Blackmoore, a Detroit-based artist, about our outlook on the future. He dabbles in a lot of tech innovations, from 3D printing to cryptocurrency to AI, and is...

As a special holiday treat for you all, we have created a special, never-before-seen supercut of bloopers from previous episodes that we had cut out of the show. Some prominent features are: a pre-covid hot wings party, breakups, finding out the name you came up with for your brand comes up with porn when you Google it, conference hookups, and being so type A that you might need to go to therapy....

Internet culture has made depression and anxiety in vogue, with brands marketing their "Depression" and "Anxiety" necklaces and graphic tees. But when was the last time you say "Schizoaffective disorder" on a T-shirt? We talk to Shreye, who you heard on the Effective Altruism and Financial Inclusion episodes, about what it's like having Schizoaffective Disorder and how there is still widespread st...

Have you ever wondered how nuclear weapons are connected to fat? I have not. Not once in my life. But I guess someone has, because apparently there is a documentary about it. In our second installment where we watch a documentary together and discuss it afterwards, we watched the Nukes Episode of the Connected show on Netflix. The premise of the show is to talk about how seemingly unrelated things...

We have been doing a lot of introspection during this podcast, and this particular episode is the culmination of a lot of the conversations we have been having recently about racial justice and the general power dynamics at play in American society. We invite our friend Ronald Young Jr. back on the show to have a conversation about whether power is zero sum, Black Panther and whether Michael B. Jo...

After this summer and the George Floyd protest, racial justice is now a major topic of mainstream discussion, with major companies conducting anti-racism trainings, and conversely, Trump banning diversity trainings within the government, citing them as racist against white people. But how do we translate this heightened literacy and awareness of racial justice issues into action instead of just th...

In our second international guest on this podcast, we talk to Uddhuv, who describes himself as "the only neuro atypical comedian on the Mumbai circuit," about how he was recently diagnosed with autism. He reflects on the ways in which not knowing he had autism affected past relationships, his school years, and the ways in which he could have been supported if he had just known he was neuro-atypica...

6 days until Election Day. I'm sure you may be sick of hearing this from the 5+ texts and calls a day you're probably receiving, but there's a lot at stake in this election, and we break down what we think matters, whether this is really "the most important election of our lifetimes" as news outlets like to say every election year, and talk about why we are more activated this year than we have be...

We try a completely different format for this episode, where we watch a documentary called The Social Dilemma, and respond to it with our friend and former guest for the Suffering Episode, Hanyu Chwe. Hanyu is a graduate student who studies network sciences. The documentary covers social media's insidious effects on our brains, interviewing a number of former Silicon Valley executives about the wa...

In this episode, we talk DC politics with our friend David Lazere, who, full disclosure, is the son of one of the frontrunners for the DC At-Large Candidate, Ed Lazere. We talk about the big topics on the ballot, as well as the topics that are notably missing - we also have a conversation about who the frontrunners are and the importance of local politics in general. Links: DC At-Large Candidate D...

The question is this: how can you look around, at the economy, at the presidential debates, at your social media feed, and not be radicalized? How can you live in a system that has never prioritized any kind of long term vision without feeling a sense of impending doom? In this episode, we talk with Rowan Emslie, a podcaster based in Brussels, about the global forces that are causing young people...