I'M THE VILLAIN

In this episode, we GO IN. We shit on marriage, we shit on romance, we shit on apologizing. We talk about why you should shit on your friends more. Basically we shit on everything that likable people typically like, so if you hate us after this episode, we understand. Just kidding, we actually offer up some nuanced commentary on why people should criticize their friends more, the unreasonable expectations in modern romance, the differences in group dynamics vs. one-on-one dynamics, and whether we should expect reciprocity in our relationships.

A Note on the Marriage Tax Penalty/Subsidy Question mentioned in the podcast: At one point, Isabel mentions in some cases, such as when spouses have very different incomes, getting married can incur a tax penalty as opposed to a tax subsidy. She made a mistake: for high earners, they actually incur a tax penalty when their incomes are similar. For low earners, it does not matter if their incomes are similar or not, as long as one or both of them are losing their Earned Income Tax Credit.

Source here:  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/marriage-penalty.asp 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.  

In this episode we talk about leaving college diploma in hand, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only to find a lot of the assumptions we had about what was "good" and "evil" were totally oversimplified. Then you go through the emotional roller coaster of trying to derive core principles of what actually matters to you when you want to have a positive impact but also need to balance your quality of life. How can you be happy when the very act of turning what you love into a career sucks out of the joy out of it? How can you live in the liminal space between seeing everything as black and white or seeing everything as being so nuanced that you can never make a decision or have a firm opinion? All this and more in this episode of I'M THE VILLAIN. New episodes every Wednesday!

Link to the Wait But Why article we referenced:  https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän. 

 The show is a conversational podcast where we talk about all the things that are fucked up about the status quo in America, with the perspective of the villain (Isabel) and hero (Meronne). In our first episode, we talk about the hero-villain complex, what making an impact means when you were brainwashed to have a very narrow definition of "doing good" in college,  and why the world we are moving towards is going to be increasingly built by teams instead of gloried individuals, whether heroes or villains.

Note: A loyal listener of the podcast, Josh Palay, pointed out to Isabel that the story about Mozart and Salieri is, in fact, not true at all: according to Wikipedia, "However, even with Mozart and Salieri's rivalry for certain jobs, there is virtually no evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after around 1785, when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues, and supported each other's work." Nevertheless, Isabel feels that the value of the story as it stands to highlight the false dichotomy of success which is still so commonly peddled by our universities, the Olympics, the Nobel Prize Committee, and so many other institutions, still holds water. 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Salieri