I'M THE VILLAIN

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 to move to the left: Endless debt. Work. Housing. Elite indifference, opportunism, and inaction. We discuss how so much in politics has moved to the right in the US, so that even perfectly reasonable positions in other countries seem "leftist" in America. And all these things become even more stark in times of crisis like, say, during a pandemic.

As is common when talking to any international person at all, we were embarrassed by how much more American history and economics he knew than us, but still we managed to have a coherent conversation about the larger forces shaping our current political moment and whether it is possible to enact meaningful change in a system where is it so much easier to move towards chaos than it is to move towards order.

Links: 

Rowan's podcast, Connected and Disaffected: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/connected-disaffected/id1244893114

Many of the stats cited in this episode come from this Huffington Post piece, "Millennials are Screwed": https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millennials/

This is a specific episode Rowan did on his podcast with the author of the above article: https://soundcloud.com/connectedanddisaffected/s2e08-millennials-killed-napkins-boomers-killed-housing

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Trigger Warning: At about 2 minutes in, Deondre' gives a graphic description of the Golden State Killer's violent attacks on victims in California.

Almost everyone is a gamer now in some form, especially now that the pandemic has left many with way more free time than usual. In this episode, we sit down with Tom Derr, a socio-cultural historian who studies the history of games. He tells us about why pinball was banned for 30 years in New York City and how games came to be associated with skill, the first RPGs, and how morality started getting folded into gaming, which has huge implications as games become more and more realistic with Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and a shrinking workforce due to automation.  We also talk about gender and other cultural minorities in gaming culture and the profound impact the Internet has had on our psyches and social worlds, often in a toxic but seemingly inescapable way.

Tom's podcast: https://anchor.fm/getinformedpodcast

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In this episode, we sit down with DeWayne Anderson, host of the Instagram Live show, Wine Down Sunday. He talks about his experiences with mental health, why it is so stigmatized for black men to pursue self care, and how it is almost inescapable for the average Black person in America to have PTSD with all of the gruesome depictions of Black death and brutalization in the media and our history classes.

In this episode, we really engage in The Discourse™ - there is a larger Internet conversation going on about whether billionaires should be lauded for giving money to charitable causes or if we should be skeptical that they are doing so to preserve a fundamentally exploitative status quo that ultimately harms more people than it helps. And we (as Phil DeFranco, one of Deondre's favorite YouTube stars would say) dive right into it.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Have you ever had to work overtime without getting paid for it? Had an abusive boss, or just a boss who didn't know how to manage? We talk about how so many workplaces, especially nonprofits an social mission-driven organizations wind up being toxic and what we can do to make workplaces more humane. So much of the time, bad bosses don't wind up getting fired because they have the trust of the higher-ups (which is why they were promoted in the first place) and their loss would be so much more disruptive than letting the employees they abuse leave the organization. In this episode, we talk with Sakeenah Shabazz about her experiences with Americorps and the nonprofit world

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In a time and place when our generation has come to terms with the fact that the society we live in is not working for huge swathes of the population, and is in fact actively working against them in many cases, how to we move closer to a more equal society? In the case of gender equality, should you bridge the gap between men and women by asking women to be more masculine, or by asking men to be more feminine and society as a whole to value feminine-coded behaviors and professions more.

Like with so many questions on this show, the answer is obviously both, but we talk about some major reasons why we need to address masculinity, ranging from the serious (men are dying more during this pandemic because mask usage is seen as unmanly, the AI revolution is increasingly going to be automating traditionally male jobs like doctors before the traditionally female jobs like home health aides and nurses) to the hilarious (the internet has discovered that some men don't wipe their ass when they poop because they think it's gay, apparently "seafood is for women," and you become the brunt of ridiculous marketing campaigns, like that of "Liquid Death," canned mountain water that promises to "MURDER YOUR THIRST").

Note:

In this episode, Isabel cited the statistic that 80% of high school valedictorians are female. Actually the number is 70%. Citation: https://www.applerouth.com/blog/2017/08/15/troubling-gender-gaps-in-education/

Links:

Pew Research on how women read books more than men: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/

Data visualization on best-selling authors by gender: https://pudding.cool/2017/06/best-sellers/

Article about men who don't wipe because they think it's gay, as discovered by the wives of reddit: https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/what-its-like-to-be-a-guy-who-doesnt-clean-his-ass

Eater article on Liquid Death: https://www.eater.com/2019/5/8/18537259/liquid-death-canned-water-punk-rock-startup-fanfic

Liquid Death website: https://liquiddeath.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We try to talk to people who are doing good and having an impact on our show, but rarely do we get to talk to someone who is truly doing as much as today's guest is. On this episode, we talk to Ashley Johnson, who is a death doula and nurse working at a hospital in Central Florida, one of the areas that is getting hit the hardest by the coronavirus pandemic right now. A death/end of life doula is a person who advocates for those who are dying and walks them and their family through the end of life process from a place of compassion, very similar to the way a birth doula advocates for pregnant mothers. 

Ashley is in a very unique position as a death doula in that she also works as a nurse, meaning that because hospitals across America are currently suspending hospital visitation rights to friends and family to prevent spread of the coronavirus, she is one of the few death doulas who still has access to hospitalized patients. In fact, her role as a doula is so much more critical right now, in a time when families can't be there for their loved ones. She talks with us about her experience as a doula in the midst of the current pandemic, how she got into this work, and why continued education around the death doula movement is so important.

Links:

Loyal Hands End of Life Doulas Website: https://loyal-hands.com/

Loyal Hands Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LoyalHands

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In their previous job, B. Pagels-Minor had a senior female leader tell them they wouldn't go far in their industry because they were nonbinary despite also using them as a symbol of diversity for their company. B. is here to tell you that does not fly. (Also, we will note, that lady was wrong: B. is thriving.)

In this episode, we talk to B. Pagels-Minor, who is a Black, nonbinary product manager based out of Silicon Valley who also serves on the board of Howard Brown Health, a nonprofit health organization serving the LGBTQ+ community. They are also planning to have a baby soon, so we touch on SO many topics for this episode, from why nonprofits are so important and how strict their mentality should be around hiring effective workers compared to for-profit companies, how not to have your kid turn out to be an asshole, the problems nonbinary folks encounter with healthcare providers, their experience with coming out to their Southern black parents, you name it. Many of the themes in this episode tie back in with topics that have been on our minds recently, from diversity in hiring, to navigating class to activism. This is one of the most far-ranging conversations we have had in a while. If you liked our entrepreneurship episode, where we basically talk about everything under the sun, you're going to like this episode too.

B. Pagels-Minor's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bpagelsminor/?hl=en

Howard Brown Health: https://howardbrown.org/

In this episode, we talk with Alieshia Nunally, host of the podcast Millennial Thoughts, about gig work and the financial freedom she gets from being able to work multiple jobs. She believes everyone ought to have at least 2 streams of income as a form of insurance, because as we are seeing with this pandemic, you never know when one of your jobs might tank unexpectedly. We talk about whether or not you should tell your boss you have a side hustle, whether gig work is empowering and lets you experiment with a number of different interests at the same time, or whether the real narrative is one of debt-ridden millennials trying to string together multiple jobs (hopefully at least one of which has health insurance) and make the best of it.

Links:

Millennial Thoughts Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/millennial-thoughts/id1341002595

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.