I'M THE VILLAIN

If you are an environmentally-minded person, it can be really difficult to compare which actions are going to have the greatest effect on the planet if you're going by the public awareness campaigns. Is it recycling? Going vegan? Using metal straws? Turns out that not taking ONE Transatlantic flight actually saves more than all of those things combined. And not flying isn't even number one or number two on the chart. The answer: not having kids. But you don't see many public awareness campaigns pushing THAT, do you? For this conversation, we sat down with Elijah Innes-Wimsatt, who has the fascinating job of quantifying the carbon emissions of various companies. We talk about personal actions you can take, but also about how voting actually matters way more than you think it does, and about how the average environmentalist of today looks very different from the environmentalist of 20 years ago.

Links:

A comparison (with a very helpful bar chart in Figure 1) of the carbon emissions saved by adopting different green actions, such as going vegan or living car free: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Zooming in on the food conversation, here is a Fast Company article that delves into the carbon footprint of different protein sources: https://www.fastcompany.com/90461008/this-graph-will-show-you-the-carbon-footprint-of-your-protein

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

SPOILER ALERT: This episode contains spoilers for Hamilton: An American Musical.

In case you were concerned that this podcast has too much structure, we tried experimenting with even less structure in this episode, and just went where the wind blew us. If you are curious where it blew us, we started off at Mount Rushmore, where we talked about the Native American leaders who are calling for the removal of Mount Rushmore, and then moved on to Minneapolis, where we followed up on some of our conversation from the Defunding Police Episode and talked about the pivot among many activists away from calling for Breonna Taylor's killers to be locked up (as this reinforces the current prison system that many of these activists are trying to abolish), and eventually wind up back in DC, where we consider the branding of police cars and whether they could benefit from a friendlier look and feel instead of being steeped in militarism.

Links:

Dakota tribal leaders calling for removal of Mount Rushmore: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/505474-second-tribal-leader-calls-for-removal-of-mount-rushmore-before-trump

Think about the last time you heard someone casually talk about losing weight in the workplace. Did you think about how it could affect the self-image of your fat co-workers? Or if your fat coworkers weren't listening, how it would affect you if you were fat? It is so normalized to talk about weight in our society that it's often hard to recognize internalized fatphobia, and rarely do we think of the affects that fatphobia has on fat people, which is why this week we sat down with Cheyenne Davis, host of the Weighted Words podcast. We talk about how health relates to fatness, representation of fat people in erotica and porn, and the portrayal of fat people in the media, among many other topics!

Cheyenne's podcast, Weighted Words: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/weighted-words-podcast

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Defunding the police seems like something that was completely unimaginable even 3 weeks ago. Now it's being talked about in most major media sources.

Did you know 7% of Americans don't have a bank account? Having a bank account is probably something every person reading this takes for granted, but is a huge problem for around 23 million Americans. To add to the problem, many banks around the country are removing their low-cost offerings like accounts with no annual fees. But can fintech come to the rescue? Find out in this exciting new episode of I'M THE VILLAIN!

FlexPay, the app that is trying provide an ethical alternative to predatory payday loans: https://www.getflexpay.io/

ShEO, the fund of women CEOs supporting other women: https://sheeo.world/about-us/

Kiva US: https://pages.kiva.org/blog/innovative-loans-series-lending-based-on-character-not-credit-scores

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In another solo ep, Deondre' and Isabel discuss whether it is healthy to expect reciprocity in a romantic relationship. Reciprocity is often touted as the hallmark of a healthy relationship, but how do you aspire to something that is so hard to quantify, especially when different people value everything differently? How much should doing the dishes when you don't want to count vs. calling your partner when they are on a trip? How should the calculation change when you don't mind doing dishes? Obviously it is impossible to quantify these things but we go deeper into whether even aspiring to equality in a relationship is healthy vs. assigning specific roles to each person.

What have your house policies been around coronavirus? In this episode, we get into the governance structures of various group houses during coronavirus, since most of our friends live in group living situations, and we thought it has been interesting to see the differences in response to this pandemic, because it has varied widely. We also talk about how being nonmonogamous has been for us (hint: not good) as we navigate the pandemic and how so much of individual responses to lockdown have further solidified romantic primacy in our society (ie. many houses are only allowing romantic partners in and out, as they are seen as more "essential" to one's mental health than other friends).

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

If you haven't heard of effective altruism (EA), it is a utilitarian philosophy where a bunch of academics and researchers try to calculate what you should do with your career if you are trying to have the highest social impact. The effective altruists came up with the notion that one very ethical option is actively trying to make as much money as possible and giving as much as you can away, which gave rise to the "Giving What We Can Pledge," which states that you promise to give at least 10% of your income away.

One big effective altruist group is an organization called 80,000 Hours which targets college graduates who are trying to figure out what to do with their careers and point them in the most ethical direction. They have a list of causes they believe are the most urgent to address, with "positively shaping the development of artificial intelligence" at the top of the list. 

We sit down with Deondre's friend Shreye who consulted this website and used its principles to shape his career, and he now works as a data scientist on artificial intelligence. We talk about the politics of who gets to decide what "ethical" means, whether we should prioritize human lives in the future as much as we value current human lives, and the concept of charity (addressing current problems like feeding and vaccinating people) vs. philanthropy (trying to solve the root causes of pervasive issues like hunger and pandemics).

Effective Altruism website: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

80,000 Hours' list of global priorities: https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/#potentially_promising

Kiva, a great microfinancing organization to donate to that Shreye used to work for: https://www.kiva.org/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.