I'M THE VILLAIN

Do you talk to your friends more now that you can text them at any time? There are a lot of ways in which technology has made communication easier but in this episode we talk about whether that convenience has really led to more frequent interactions and stronger friendships. We live in both a more connected and more isolated time, when we are less likely to know our neighbors but also more likely to see personal Facebook posts from middle school friends we haven't spoken with in decades. Should we aspire to a world where we can just drop into our friends' houses unannounced?

We talk about all this and more with Simone Miles, the podcast host of Nice to Meet You, a Washington DC-based podcast about meeting strangers.

Simone's podcast: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/nice-to-meet-you

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

It seems like people are getting cancelled left an right these days. Did you boycott SoulCycle when you learned the CEO was a Trump supporter? Did you support Kevin Hart when he stepped down from hosting the Oscars last year? In this episode, we talk to Carlyn Crawley, a fellow podcaster who runs her own podcast called the Femtourage (tagline: "Bad bitches on the road less traveled"), about her thoughts on cancel culture and where celebrities and politicians cross the line. We discuss whether it is effective to cancel regular people without a platform like friends and family, the differences between cancelling a politician and a comedian, and most importantly, whether Deondre' should invest in a male romper. Coincidentally, RompHim is having their biggest sale ever right now: https://www.romphim.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

This season is about to get political. 

We hadn't planned it this way: it just sort of happened. Almost all the guests we invited this season wanted to talk about socialism, local politics, call-out culture, etc.

So with the media inundating us with political headlines for the next 11 months, we figured it was a good time to record an episode on our political stances as a backdrop for this season. Being generally liberal (though less liberal than some of the guests you'll see this season), we talk about why Trump won in 2016, what we think Democrats and society at large needs to do to stop the "pendulum" that has been pushing us farther and farther to the political poles, and how the increasingly public nature of our lives raises the stakes for both politicians and average people to tiptoe around sensitive issues without being able to say what they really mean.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Not only do you get to stay with your lover, you also get to have sex and romantic relationships with other people!  Including your ex! In the last episode of this season, we talk about how restrictive the classic script on romance is and why we think breaking down those rigid barriers actually can create an even more stable and communicative relationship. In short, there's no one way your relationship has to be for it to be valid and healthy.

This episode has been a long time coming because it's the main way in which both co-hosts really go against the societal grain in true villain fashion. Even among millennials, rates of non-monogamy are below 10%, despite the fact that we are the most open to non-monogamy than any previous generation in American history. Overall, about 1 in 5 people report having been in a non-monogamous relationships at some point in their lives based on the US Census. So tune in if you want to hear how the other fifth lives!

Links:

Alain de Boton's video "On Romanticism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPOuIyEJnbE&t=2s

Bell Hooks' book "All About Love": https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060959470/all-about-love/

PDF Version of "All About Love": https://www.docdroid.net/goTB7E8/124493278-bell-hooks-all-about-love.pdf

A very cute, very long Wait But Why illustrated explainer on the issues with the traditional marriage script: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html

Study showing rates of non-monogamy and openness to non-monogamy by generation: https://ifstudies.org/blog/national-survey-reveals-generational-differences-in-consensual-nonmonogamy-

1 in 5 people have been in non-monogamous relationships: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-polyamorists-next-door/201905/updated-estimate-number-non-monogamous-people-in-us

The song this episode title is referencing (50 Ways to Leave Your Lover): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABXtWqmArUU

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

If you are a scientist, you know that the frenzy for funding can be fierce, which is why, as with any system where people are competing for a pool of money, there can be perverse incentives to fudge the numbers, or select your variables to give you the most significant result. This practice, known as "p-hacking," is rampant, as argued by a mathematician known as Jordan Ellenberg, whose book Deondre' read recently, and whose talk on the subject is linked below.  (There's a great explanatory interactive that explains p-hacking made by 538 linked below as well.)

In this episode, we talk with Tayeb Zaidi, a biomedical physicist at the FDA, about the various way in which science isn't always the well oiled machine of truth that some people think it is. Replication studies, which are the mechanism of 'checking' other scientist's work by doing the same experiment again to see if you got the same results, aren't sexy, especially when scientists usually got into the field to discover new things in the first place, and it's hard to build a reputation for yourself as a scientist by re-doing other people's work. On top of that, they often aren't well-funded, because funding organizations would also like to spend time and money discovering new things over replicating other studies.

Links:

The 538 Guide to P-Hacking: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/

How Not to Be Wrong Book: https://www.amazon.com/How-Not-Be-Wrong-Mathematical/dp/0143127535

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

WAR. Good god y'all. What is it good for? Making a FUCK TON of money for defense contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. The US currently spends $649 billion dollars on our military, which is more than the next 7 countries combined. And to justify that expenditure, we are constantly at war. Every single child living in America today has lived in a country that has been at war their entire lives, and for the most part, they couldn't even tell you who we are fighting. In this episode, we sit down with Rahul Kulkarni, a nonviolence advocate who tells us his thoughts on how we came to be in this state of perpetual war, why we need to start talking about it more, and why we need to think more about the actions of the military when we go to the voting booth.

If you care about climate change, things might look a little bleak right now. It is so easy to listen to the news of the Amazon rainforest fires, see the ever-climbing emissions statistics, and watch Greta Thunberg admonishing the United Nations and get overwhelmed with the sheer scope of the issue and the collective action it would take to solve it. 

In this episode, Spencer Schecht talks to us about his organization, Green Drinks DC, and how he believes one solution to the problem is to have conversations about environmentalism to reach an understanding about what values we really hold (ex. do we care about the environment for the sake of the planet or the people?) and to gain some perspective on the progress we've made. We have solved environmental issues in the past, we just don't hear about it because the news has a negativity bias.

And even though much of the world's carbon emissions are caused by a few big companies, we also have more sophisticated tools to foster transparency and accountability; even big companies have been known to bow to the Twitter hordes. 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Strap in, we are taking you on an emotional rollercoaster this season. In a swift departure from the upbeat mood of the last episode, on this episode, Isabel talks with her friend Christen about what it's like to grieve a sick family member who is in and out of the hospital and how to cope with those emotions. Even if you have friends to support you, it can be really tough to even figure out how you want to be supported. Sometimes you need to post on social media, sometimes you need to make art, sometimes you just need someone to be physically present. 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Look, it is tough out here. Especially in the rough-and-tumble world of dating apps, where the Super Likes are few and far between, ghosting is imminent, and the zaddies are on the prowl. According to Greek myth, it was a golden apple labelled "for the fairest" that set off the Trojan War over whether Hera, Athena, or Aphrodite was the hottest goddess. In today's world, not much has changed. Now the golden apple is called "Tinder" and you get 50 swipes a day instead of one apple, but both still cause roughly the same amount of social mayhem. (As an aside, a golden apple would only be worth about $6,000 today while Tinder is valued at $10 billion.) 

In this episode, guest star Austin Spivey, of DateLab fame, (DateLab is a Washington Post column where they set you up on a blind date) (co-host Deondre' Jones was also featured on DateLab) (as was Hanyu Chwe, from Episode 2) (yes, literally all of my friends have been on DateLab) talks to us about the pros and cons of dating apps, both on us as individuals and as a society. We discuss how men use dating apps differently from women, proper dating app etiquette, and the weirdest thing we have ever seen in a Tinder bio.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Let's get it out in the open: it's 2019. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that the meat industry is morally bankrupt and also terrible for the planet. And yet, as of 2015, only 3.4% of the population said they were vegetarian and 0.4% said they were vegan. At the same time, Beyond Meat had the largest IPO of any company in 2 decades when it went public in May 2019. This means lots of people are betting big money that we are on the cusp of a huge change in the way we eat, especially along millennials, with the Economist predicting that 2019 will be remembered as The Year of the Vegan. So we decided to get a vegan, Marissa Soltoff, in the room with us and talk to us about the ethics of meat, the social stigma around veganism, and the environmental impact. Hopefully this episode will get us all to think more about how our everyday choices have a wider impact than we often care to think about.

Here's some more about Marissa:

Marissa Soltoff recently graduated from George Washington university. She is 22 and has been vegan for 4.5 years. Her interests include traveling, making vegan Mac and cheese, and promoting effective vegan advocacy.

*NOTE: In our conversation, we touch on making veganism accessible for all social classes, not just rich people. It turns out, this was actually a completely false assumption. According to a Gallup poll, most vegans and vegetarians actually make less than $30,000.

Links:

Beyond Meat Stock Soars: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/14/beyond-meat-stock-how-the-alternative-meat-company-surged-500-percent.html

Economist 'Year of the Vegan' Prediction: https://worldin2019.economist.com/theyearofthevegan

Forbes article showing most vegans and vegetarians actually make less than $30,000: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/08/06/who-are-americas-vegans-and-vegetarians-infographic/#768b2dc8211c

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.