I'M THE VILLAIN

If you haven't heard of the podcast Code Switch, it is an NPR podcast that talks about race in America, and a person that Deondre' dated texted him to let him know that she called into the show to ask a question about their relationship. Immediately Deondre's interest was piqued, and it turns out that she went onto the show to ask about "race and dating preferences." The episode of that podcast has since come out, so we can tell you exactly what she asked:"I've been casually seeing a guy for a few months now. For reference, I'm white, he's Black, and we're polyamorous. I've briefly met his other partners and they are both also white women. This struck me as a little odd since we both live in a major city that is multiracial. I've met some of his friends and that group is diverse.I'm currently at a point in my life where I want to make sure I am actually living my values, including challenging my whiteness and that comes with that. I want to ask him about it, but I also don't want to seem like I am questioning his racial identity or trying to minimize his life or choices as a black man. I also don't know his entire dating history, so maybe he just has a type as of late? Any advice on navigating this conversation?"In this episode, Deondre' talks about how this whole encounter made him feel, and the answer is: not great. We talk about whether or not questions like this get asked of white people as much as they get asked of people of color, as well as the baggage of the still-prevailing assumption that people ought to date within their race: despite the fact that it is 2025, we are still in a society where cross-racial dating is still not considered an unquestionable norm, and a number of commentators have openly wondered whether the Supreme Court might reconsider Loving vs. Virginia, the unanimously-decided 1967 Supreme Court case that struck down the State of Virginia's anti-miscegenation law that prohibited interracial marriages.Links:Code Switch Episode Featuring Deondre': Ask Code Switch: Is it a preference or a fetish?

If you share our politics you might be a nervous wreck right now, but one thing that both Deondre and Isabel like to do for our physical and mental health is go rock climbing. So we have on a super fascinating guest, David Liu, who works at a popular rock gym chain called Movement. He talks to us about how rock climbing has ballooned massively in popularity, and is now an Olympic sport. But the thing is, when rock climbing was introduced to the Olympics in 2020, they combined a number of different types of rock climbing that are pretty different from each other (bouldering, lead climbing, and speed climbing). We talk through why these different types of climbing require really different skills, and so in 2024, the International Olympic Committee actually did split the rock climbing event into 2 separate events: speed climbing and bouldering and lead. And while this is definitely better, anyone who has done bouldering and lead climbing will tell you that these are still quite different from each other.We also talk about other aspects of climbing, like the difference between outdoor climbing and indoor climbing (the hardest climb in the world is called The Burden of Dreams in Finland, which is level V17; apparently people have been making 3D-printed replicas of this climb to try to practice on it) and whether or not we should be trying to preserve outdoor climbs as much as possible (sometimes people will try to chip away at outdoor climbs to make it more traversable).And what makes something satisfying to climb? There are some obvious metrics, like not being too hard or too easy for your particular level, but there are also equally difficult climbs that can still be more or less satisfying to climb than others. In this way, setting a climb is sort of like music in that it is often really difficult to understand or articulate why we like certain climbs and not others, which can feel almost spiritual. David has clearly thought a lot about the philosophy, mechanics, and power dynamics of rock climbing, and this conversation is a fascinating reflection of that.Links:Burden of Dreams Climb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_Dreams_(climb)#:~:text=Burden%20of%20Dreams%20is%20a,climbing%20film%2C%20The%20Lappnor%20Project.Climbing at the 2024 Olympics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_climbing_at_the_2024_Summer_OlympicsDavid's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/r2dliu/?hl=en

We do a little processing of what the hell happened with the election, including where we think the Democrats fucked up, and where we go from here. We are joined by our very important, insightful, and charismatic friend Ronald Young Jr, of Oh Its Big Ron Studios. It's his 4th time appearing on this show, we ran the receipts. Our assessment basically boils down to this: the Democrats did not find a way to speak to working people, using language that appeals to elites but is not accessible to working people, despite championing wildly popular policies. But of course, they are, as Ronald would say, showing up to a boxing match where sure, maybe they could have trained harder, but the Republicans just straight up have razor blades in their gloves. We need to figure out whether we are going to literally die on the hill with the moral high ground, or whether eventually the Democrats will also have to start changing the rule book like the Republicans have been doing all along. Deondre' thinks we can win straight up, but only if Democrats take the opportunity of being in the minority party to openly criticize the wildly unpopular genocide in Gaza, and figure out how to actually build a coalition. Aside from dunking on the Democrats, we talk about the importance of podcasts in this election, given that Trump not only went on Joe Rogan, but 13 other podcasts, which resulted in 124 million views on YouTube, compared to the 5 podcasts Kamala went on which only got about 4 million views. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOJI9Rw-EZ0&ab_channel=ColinandSamir) Deondre' is starting a new trend called #RippedforTrump, which basically entails going to the gym because there are about to be a lot of things outside of our control in the coming months, but one thing you can always control is your body. Isabel had a (mildly flirtatious?) run-in with a Trump canvasser which resulted in her lamenting the fact that we tend to be the party of wusses, which gives even more reason for us all to go to the gym. Links:Ronald's shows:Weight For It: https://www.radiotopia.fm/podcasts/weight-for-itLeaving the Theater: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leaving-the-theater/id1481268414Pop Culture Debate Club: https://lemonadamedia.com/show/pop-culture-debate-club-with-ronald-young-jr/

Friends 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 thought there was no way he was ever going to get married, not because he isn't an eligible bachelor but because he didn't feel very bought into marraige as an institution. I thought we were doing to be ride or die sluts. But now all that has changed: Deondre' is vying for that white picket fence dream. We'll see if he gets it.Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän. Links:Deondre's Wedding Vendors: Moontide Sundries: https://moontidesundries.com/Photos from the Harty: https://www.photosfromtheharty.com/Mimosa Barn: https://www.facebook.com/MimosaBarn/Aven: https://www.instagram.com/aven/?hl=en

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.