I'M THE VILLAIN

This is where things start to get uncomfortable. We are trying actively push ourselves out of our comfort zones on this podcast, and to do that, we are inviting more guests onto the show and letting them pick the topic. Our first real guest of the second season is named Luke Phillips and he identifies as a social conservative and economic liberal, and he suggested for this episode that we talk about patriotism. Things get deep: we talk about what it means to be an American, how patriotism differs from nationalism, whether you can be a patriot and still protest and resist your country's policies, and whether this act of resistance can in and of itself be a patriotic act.

I bet you don't really like suffering—that's kind of the definition. But Deondre' thinks it is an integral part of living a full life and relating to others. Hanyu vehemently disagrees and tried to avoid suffering at all cost. Isabel has lived an utterly undeserved life devoid of suffering, failure, or otherwise negative consequences.  Except for that one time that has been conveniently edited out of her memory.  Tune in to find out if her life is actually vapid and superficial and incapable of appreciating true happiness because she has never experienced true loss.

Welcome to the second season! So...we didn't mean to make this a clickbaity episode to kick off the second season. We really just wanted to have a discussion about transracialism - honestly when we were brainstorming for this episode, we were just trying to come up with the one thing we disagreed most on. And this notion of transracialism seemed to be the thing. In this first episode with new co-host Deondre' Jones, we go in deep on what race really means, who gets to define your identity, and why being able to define yourself is an integral part of being human blah blah post racial utopia blah nobody reads to the end of these descriptions anyway.

Thinking about death is one of the best ways to appreciate life. As we round out season 1 with this last episode, we want to leave you with some thoughts on mortality. Isabel has been attending death cafes in the DC area and Meronne has been attending a number of funerals and these have helped us both think about life and the funeral industry and how we commemorate people's lives. There is a saying in Bhutanese culture that goes: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.  We agree.

Find a Death Cafe near you:  https://deathcafe.com/ 

WeCroak app that reminds of your mortality 5 times daily:  https://www.wecroak.com/ 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.    

We associate a lot of things with growing up: becoming more mature, more independent, more wise. But does living more life actually promote these qualities in people? Do you need to have suffered to achieve the elusive state of "wisdom" or can you live a perfectly charmed life and still end up wise? In a society that glorifies youth and youth culture, are these traits we even aspire to have anymore? There are so many ways in which the natural, linear narratives we build for ourselves are false, and we delve into them in this episode.

 Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.      

Raise your hand if you learned the things you really needed to know in school. There's so many things that didn't make it into a class that should have been required reading. How to do your taxes and how to understand other cultures are two examples. And yet here we are in 2019 still taking swim tests and learning math. How can education stay relevant in an age when the job market changes drastically every couple of years? The fact that the jobs of tomorrow haven't been invented yet has given rise to the need for lifelong learning and in this episode, we talk about how that is influencing online learning, the rise of MOOCs (massively open online courses), and the fact that so much of your REAL education, even while you are still in school, happens outside of the classroom.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.     

Did your parents ever make you play an instrument growing up? Our parents both did, and it got us talking about how much parents should push their kids to do the things they associate with success and happiness, even if their child doesn't like it. At what point is it pushing them to have self-discipline, and at what point are you just making your kid suffer for no reason?

Obviously we are not parents, but we have a lot of opinions on parenting dynamics, going off how we were parented, our observations of other parents around us, and how we see parenting changing in response to the modern digital environment.

Link to the Ezra Klein episode on parenting with Alison Gopnik:  https://www.vox.com/podcasts/2019/6/13/18677595/alison-gopnik-changed-how-i-think-about-love?fbclid=IwAR1xsz7kZCONOVpuGC1kKf-SxarJjmCUsFW12OKfU6SJgb410qasqXYJRZ8

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.  

What the heck do we need money for? Is being rich ethical? At what point does saving money stop becoming a prudent decision to support yourself and becomes greed? We discuss America's culture of money, philanthropy vs. taxes, the way we were raised to think about money, the classic "what would you do with a million dollars?" question, and whether working hard really has anything to do with what economic class you wind up in.  If you have thoughts about this episode, let us know! Tweet us at @imthevillainpod.

Meronne mentioned in this episode an anecdote about Gary Varynerchuk selling his family's wine business. This was incorrect, he actually renamed the business to "Wine Library". 

 Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.    

Keynes predicted by now we would have a 15 hour work week. What happened? Why are we even using an archaic time-based system for intellectual labor? What's the alternative? Is the workforce of the future going to be dominated by women because they dominate the fields that are hardest to automate, like teaching and caregiving? We talk about all this and other things that are fucked up about the workforce and work culture that Americans just seem to take for granted.

Link to Statestarcodex article on taking adderal just to keep yourself focused at work:  https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ 

Link to Yuval Noah-Harari's TED talk on how feeling embodied makes us live more fulfilling lives:  https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_globalism_the_new_political_divide?language=en#t-1022797 

Link to the Metafilter thread on Emotional Labor:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0UUYL6kaNeBTDBRbkJkeUtabEk/view?pref=2&pli=1 

 Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.   

Are you happy? In America, we uphold the values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But then why are we so incapable of attaining, despite our relentless pursuit? We read countless articles and listen to countless podcast episodes trying to guide people in how to be happy, and yet we live in a society that does so little to promote the lifestyles that we know are scientifically proven to make people happy: we live in isolation, don't have the kinds of public spaces other countries have to promote a sense of community and trust in strangers, and we stare into screens, both at work and at home. Does happiness exist as an unattainable cultural ideal just to sell you stuff? What would it look like if we lived in a society that truly invested in the happiness of its own citizens? We talk about this, the importance of novel experiences, the importance of being satisfied with what you have instead of always trying to maximize, and the importance of trying to contribute to something larger than your own self and your own happiness.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.