I'M THE VILLAIN
192 episodes - English - Latest episode: 24 days ago - ★★★★★ - 41 ratingsWelcome to I'M THE VILLAIN, a podcast about 2 millennials trying to decode, deconstruct, and dismantle the world as we know it.
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. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/im-the-villain/support
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Episodes
158. The Gaza Episode: To Make Scandalous the Presentation of Context
June 19, 2024 10:04 - 30 minutes - 42.4 MBYa bois get down on some modern political commentary, albeit many months out of date (this podcast was originally recorded in November 2023) but a good lookback on our initial reactions to the crazy bullshit happening on the world stage happening now. Ezra Klein came out with take when all of this was going down in October, saying the thing that makes this situation feel like we are all being constantly gaslit is that the modern media environment "makes scandalous the presentation of conte...
156. The Wedding Episode: I Was Playing the Game Of Love to Not Lose and Now I Am Playing to Win
June 06, 2024 01:43 - 1 hour - 108 MBFriends we are BACK ON OUR BULLSHIT. This episode is long overdue because Deondre' got married back in October and we recorded it back in November and now it is June. But fear not, we still have evergreen content for you all in the form of being messy and talking about our ex's, talking about the vision that we have for our romantic lives and what happens when straight boys read bell hooks. There has been a lot of evolution in Deondre's life in particular; when I (Isabel) first met him, I th...
155. The Camp Episode: If You Can't Find the Community You Want, You Need to Build It Yourself
January 25, 2024 03:15 - 1 hour - 89 MBIt 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 c...
154. The Chaos Demon Episode: Sometimes You Really Are Just Vibing
September 06, 2023 12:43 - 43 minutes - 59.9 MBThis 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 t...
153. The People Theory Episode: The Knight-Jones Personality Test
August 30, 2023 11:04 - 37 minutes - 51.2 MBIn 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 ...
152. The Electron Microscopy Episode: Meet the BEST Electron Microscopist in the WORLD!
July 26, 2023 17:38 - 50 minutes - 68.9 MBOk 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 wher...
151: The New York City Episode: What Would Isabella Chiu Do?
July 05, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 91.9 MBWhat 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 l...
150. The 150th Episode(!): I Have a Hard Time Trusting Anybody to Do Anything Good Enough for a Long Time
June 23, 2023 18:37 - 45 minutes - 62.8 MBIn 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 recen...
149. The Experience Camps Episode: Talking to the Sumo Wrestler on Your Hip to Take Away the Pain
May 24, 2023 10:00 - 55 minutes - 76.4 MBJesse 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 bef...
148. The Climate Episode: The 4 Horsemen Are Here
April 27, 2023 16:59 - 1 hour - 104 MBMartin 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 c...
147. The Musician Episode: Am I Gonna Be a Wife or Am I Gonna Be a King?
March 08, 2023 14:04 - 1 hour - 94.8 MB"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 w...
146. The Support Episode: 60 Unglazed Pots
February 23, 2023 11:00 - 52 minutes - 71.9 MBKimaya 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 eve...
145. The Pacific Crest Trail Episode: Imagine Not Needing to Unplug
February 10, 2023 11:00 - 51 minutes - 70.8 MBWhen 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 constru...
144. The Girl Moss Episode: The Girl Boss is Dead
January 26, 2023 04:08 - 1 hour - 83.9 MBWe 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 flo...
143. The Concussion Episode Part 2: Anxiety is a Dizzyness of Freedom
January 11, 2023 11:00 - 1 hour - 82.9 MBThis 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 wa...
142. The Concussion Episode Part 1: "OK: I am alive. And I am in a body. And everything hurts."
December 16, 2022 03:23 - 33 minutes - 45.5 MBTraumatic 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...
141. The Pivot Episode: Grieving the Alternate Paths You Life Could Have Taken
November 07, 2022 11:46 - 54 minutes - 74.4 MBThere'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 com...
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
October 21, 2022 22:51 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBThis 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...
139. The True Crime Episode: Virtuous Police Accountability or Gratuitous Violence Spectacle?
October 05, 2022 22:30 - 54 minutes - 74.4 MBAs 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 intera...
138. The Gay in the South Episode Pt 2: Somebody Had to Build That House, and You Can Build One Too
September 21, 2022 11:30 - 39 minutes - 54.7 MBIn 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 ...
137. The Being Gay in the South Episode: When You Always Knew You Had a Little Sugar in the Tank
September 14, 2022 19:25 - 55 minutes - 76.6 MBKenny 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 fan...
136. The Political Consultant Episode: Why Establishment Politics is Important
September 08, 2022 19:48 - 50 minutes - 69.3 MBIn 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 ...
135. The Business Coach Episode: What Do You Owe the World vs. What Do You Owe to Yourself when Building a Business?
August 31, 2022 11:00 - 39 minutes - 54.6 MBBecca 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 narro...
134. The Actor Episode: Who Am I If I'm Not Acting?
August 17, 2022 17:00 - 57 minutes - 79.2 MBAyana 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...
133. The Style Episode: Should You Wear Chacos on the First Date?
August 03, 2022 20:01 - 38 minutes - 53.5 MBAs 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...
132. The 36 Questions Episode: Email Us and Tell Us Whether You Are in Love With Us After Listening to This Episode
July 30, 2022 18:56 - 49 minutes - 68.1 MBSince 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 ...
131. The Sexual Trauma Episode: There is No Such Thing As Deviancy
July 21, 2022 15:31 - 47 minutes - 64.8 MBTrigger 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, s...
130. The Art Episode: How Art Can Help Heal Sexual Trauma
July 13, 2022 18:51 - 49 minutes - 67.8 MBTrigger 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 ...
129. The Roe Episode: Well, Here We Are
June 30, 2022 12:23 - 54 minutes - 75.5 MBWell, 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...
128. The Introversion Episode: Should Introverts Run the World?
June 24, 2022 21:55 - 50 minutes - 69.7 MBWe 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 th...
127: The Astrology Episode: You Can't Snap You Fingers and Achieve Inner Peace, but You Can Get Into Astrology
June 20, 2022 13:53 - 53 minutes - 73.1 MBIsabel 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. Deond...
126. The Wedding Episode: Are Weddings Just For the Couple?
June 09, 2022 20:19 - 57 minutes - 78.9 MBSara 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 ...
125. The Dating Coach Episode: Figuring Out the "Click"
May 18, 2022 18:00 - 1 hour - 86.7 MBDo 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 wo...
124. The Health Coach Episode: We've All Been Taught to Ignore Our Bodies
May 14, 2022 10:22 - 1 hour - 99.3 MBGet 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 responsib...
123. The Invisible Disability Episode: What Would You Do If You Could Only Be On Your Feet for 3-4 Hours A Day?
May 05, 2022 16:12 - 56 minutes - 77.2 MBSara 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 ...
122. The Land Episode: How Can We Make Equity Work for the Community?
April 08, 2022 21:00 - 34 minutes - 47.1 MBThe 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...
121. The Faith Episode: How We Build Meaning in Everything From Neighborhood Architecture to High School Musical Nights
April 02, 2022 21:32 - 1 hour - 83.6 MBWes 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 ...
120. The AI Episode: Immortality and Endless Wealth or Human Extinction?
March 17, 2022 11:00 - 53 minutes - 73.7 MBThere'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 the...
119. The Proposal Episode: The Life and Death of Relationships
March 10, 2022 12:00 - 56 minutes - 77.6 MBYou 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 wh...
118. The Missionary Episode: How Religious Institutions are Changing to Cater to the Youth
March 02, 2022 12:00 - 53 minutes - 73 MBIs 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 missio...
117. The Mormon Episode: What is it Like to Be a Progressive Mormon?
February 26, 2022 14:16 - 44 minutes - 61.3 MBCody 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...
116. The Endemic Episode: The Next Phase of Covid
February 16, 2022 14:00 - 33 minutes - 45.5 MBIn 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 a...
115. The Figuring Shit Out Episode: The Millennial Urge To Throw Your Life Away and Start All Over Again
February 04, 2022 23:24 - 45 minutes - 62.4 MBHave 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 chan...
114. The Digital Nomad Episode: When There's No Return Ticket
January 28, 2022 06:52 - 46 minutes - 63.4 MBWhen 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 ...
113. The Bo Burnham Episode: The Ultimate Millennial Comic
January 20, 2022 14:33 - 39 minutes - 53.7 MBIf 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 sho...
112. The Elon Musk Episode: Time Person of the Year
January 12, 2022 11:00 - 47 minutes - 65.3 MBIn 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 mer...
111. The Expanding Polyamory Episode: Expanding Our Conception of What A Romantic Relationship Is
November 10, 2021 12:00 - 57 minutes - 78.5 MBIn 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...
110. The Progressive Christianity Episode: Satanism, Science, and Secularization with a Sunday School Teacher
October 28, 2021 13:21 - 32 minutes - 44.7 MBWhat 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 topics like whether or not religion is a tool, the role of questioning religious doctrine in the c...
109. The Desirability Politics Episode: Should We Dismantle Our Conception of Who is Attractive?
October 06, 2021 10:00 - 52 minutes - 71.8 MBWe 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...
108. The Drug Episode: Addiction is Rare, but Misuse is Still a Problem
September 22, 2021 12:00 - 1 hour - 102 MBWhat 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 to...