I'M THE VILLAIN

I bet you don't really like suffering—that's kind of the definition. But Deondre' thinks it is an integral part of living a full life and relating to others. Hanyu vehemently disagrees and tried to avoid suffering at all cost. Isabel has lived an utterly undeserved life devoid of suffering, failure, or otherwise negative consequences.  Except for that one time that has been conveniently edite...

Welcome to the second season! So...we didn't mean to make this a clickbaity episode to kick off the second season. We really just wanted to have a discussion about transracialism - honestly when we were brainstorming for this episode, we were just trying to come up with the one thing we disagreed most on. And this notion of transracialism seemed to be the thing. In this first episode with new co-h...

Thinking about death is one of the best ways to appreciate life. As we round out season 1 with this last episode, we want to leave you with some thoughts on mortality. Isabel has been attending death cafes in the DC area and Meronne has been attending a number of funerals and these have helped us both think about life and the funeral industry and how we commemorate people's lives. There is a sayin...

We associate a lot of things with growing up: becoming more mature, more independent, more wise. But does living more life actually promote these qualities in people? Do you need to have suffered to achieve the elusive state of "wisdom" or can you live a perfectly charmed life and still end up wise? In a society that glorifies youth and youth culture, are these traits we even aspire to have anymor...

Raise your hand if you learned the things you really needed to know in school. There's so many things that didn't make it into a class that should have been required reading. How to do your taxes and how to understand other cultures are two examples. And yet here we are in 2019 still taking swim tests and learning math. How can education stay relevant in an age when the job market changes drastica...

Did your parents ever make you play an instrument growing up? Our parents both did, and it got us talking about how much parents should push their kids to do the things they associate with success and happiness, even if their child doesn't like it. At what point is it pushing them to have self-discipline, and at what point are you just making your kid suffer for no reason? Obviously we are not par...

What the heck do we need money for? Is being rich ethical? At what point does saving money stop becoming a prudent decision to support yourself and becomes greed? We discuss America's culture of money, philanthropy vs. taxes, the way we were raised to think about money, the classic "what would you do with a million dollars?" question, and whether working hard really has anything to do with what ec...

Keynes predicted by now we would have a 15 hour work week. What happened? Why are we even using an archaic time-based system for intellectual labor? What's the alternative? Is the workforce of the future going to be dominated by women because they dominate the fields that are hardest to automate, like teaching and caregiving? We talk about all this and other things that are fucked up about the wor...

Are you happy? In America, we uphold the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But then why are we so incapable of attaining, despite our relentless pursuit? We read countless articles and listen to countless podcast episodes trying to guide people in how to be happy, and yet we live in a society that does so little to promote the lifestyles that we know are scientifically proven...

In this episode, we GO IN. We shit on marriage, we shit on romance, we shit on apologizing. We talk about why you should shit on your friends more. Basically we shit on everything that likable people typically like, so if you hate us after this episode, we understand. Just kidding, we actually offer up some nuanced commentary on why people should criticize their friends more, the unreasonable expe...

In this episode we talk about leaving college diploma in hand, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only to find a lot of the assumptions we had about what was "good" and "evil" were totally oversimplified. Then you go through the emotional roller coaster of trying to derive core principles of what actually matters to you when you want to have a positive impact but also need to balance your quality of li...

 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 (Meronne). In our first episode, we talk about the hero-villain complex, what making an impact means when you were brainwashed to have a very narrow definition of "doing good" in college,  and why the world we a...