I'M THE VILLAIN

In this episode we talk about what we personally value when meeting another human being, and if there are particular factors that we find particularly revealing when it comes to a new person's personality, whether it be a potential lover or a new friend. Deondre' is all vibes. Can they talk about something interesting at length, do they laugh? Isabel really things birth order effects (whether you are the first child if you have siblings, or whether you are an only child) can be a really big part of determining one's personality as well. We also talk a lot about relationships and how the social dynamics are changing such that women really stand to lose to much more when entering into cishetero relationships because single women are the happiest women in America, and single men are much less happy compared to their partnered counterparts.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration, Cosmo Alto may not be the electron microscopist in the world, or North America, or Manhattan, but he is definitely the best electron microscopist I know. In this episode, Cosmo sits down with us and tells us about the wonderful world of electron microscopy.

If you're not familiar, for the majority of scientific history, we were using light microscopes to look at small things, which essentially just utilizes lenses to magnify things to the size where you can see them, like the microscope you probably used in science class. An ELECTRON microscope is used to look at things which are smaller than the wavelength of light! So the things you can look at in an electron microscope are on the picometer scale, which means you can look at the structure of proteins from the brain, for example. The microscope shoots a laser at the proteins and an electron detector receives the electrons that bounce off the protein, forming an image that scientists can then look at and synthesize into their research.

Lastly, I always like to ask guests who talk about technology how hard it would be to turn the technology they work on into a weapon: listen on to hear about whether you could turn an electron microscope into a space laser!

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

What factors do you think about when you are deciding where you want to live? This is another one of those life design episodes where we discuss the factors we think about when trying to design how we want to live.
When I was at South by Southwest in March, I ran into my friend Eric from high school, who I haven't talked to in like a decade, and his partner Isabella Chiu. She came on the show to talk about how they recently moved to New York after being nomadic for most of the pandemic and living in San Francisco prior to that.
They chose New York because they have family on the East Coast they wanted to be closer to, and they also love the bigness of everything. Isabella was also pleasantly surprised by how convenient it was to have everything she could possibly need within a 15 minute walk from their house. We also talk about some of the cons, like the smells and the pressure to be doing everything all of the time. Generally speaking, we talk about which factors are most important to us when deciding on a place to live, ranging from things like crime, proximity to friends, ability to drive around easily, and even just being able to smell fresh air. And at the end you'll also get a bonus little story about Isabella almost missing a flight, Deondre' accidentally going into the women's restroom, and Isabel being hit by a car.
Links:
Isabella's Blog, "What Would a White Man Do?": https://www.whatwouldawhitemando.com/
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In this episode Deondre and I (Isabel) talk about this book that Isabel has been reading with her book group called My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem, which talks about how trauma physically manifests itself in the body, and how human beings can try to deal with that trauma using somatic methods like humming together, dancing, and physically settling the body by focusing on breathing.

In this book, there is a section that talks about how racism was actually conceived of fairly recently in human history, when white landowners in Virginia were trying to come up with a solution to the class-based unrest amongst the workers. At the time these "bondsmen" were of both white and black skin colors, and had deals with the landowners that said if they worked long enough they could buy their freedom from servitude and be given a parcel of land that they could work themselves. However, the white landowners decided that the best way to appease the masses, who were getting more and more agitated about their economic situation, was to allow the white bondmen to receive land and to deny land to the black ones. This strategy became law in 1619.

This makes race one of the craziest acts of evil genius that humans seem to have come up with: those white landowners probably had no idea that their Hunger Games-esque scheme would be a major force throughout all of subsequent American history, they were likely only out to save their own asses. So we talk about whether there are other similar social constructs that have been a force for good in human history, and why it is so difficult to see and appreciate those things as well, when there are so many dastardly human ideas that seem like they are shaping our modernity.

Link to My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34146782

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Jesse Moss is the Senior Marketing Manager at Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids. Before she worked at Experience Camps, she was talking to her friend having one of those classic conversations about how to find a job that you find meaningful, and her friend told her about the nonprofit for the first time. She knew she wanted to work there but they didn't have any job openings at the time, so she signed up to volunteer at the camp. And serendipitously, a job opened up a few days before she went to camp so she tried it out and loved it. It was especially meaningful because her brother Jordan who died by suicide who was 3 years younger than Jesse had also gone to camp with her, and so it was a special experience they got to share when they were kids.

In this episode, we talk about how much of grief can be psychosomatic - she describes doing a grief retreat with a death doula and therapist and about 60% of the retreat was spent in silence, just focusing on the body. She discovered an amazing leg swinging machine that really helped her to process the grief that was in her body. She also started running marathons after her mother died a few years ago, and last year a week before Jesse ran the New York City marathon, she got this horrible pain in her hip, and her grief therapist told her to name the hip and talk to it and miraculously...it worked. The pain went away.

Lastly, we get to hear some incredible stories of grief camp: there's a bonfire on the last night where the kids can say the name of the person they lost and say whatever they want about them, and there was one kid whose dad died who said he had not been able to get a full night's sleep ever since his dad had died. He had told the other kids in his cabin about this and they all decided to push their beds around his bed, and that was the first night he had slept through the night since his dad had died.

Links:

Experience Camps Website: https://experiencecamps.org/

Experience Camps Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/experiencecamps/?hl=en

Link to leg swinging device mentioned in the episode

Martin Froger-Silva woke up one day in fall of 2017 to find his Berkeley home surrounded by smoke: it looked like a scene from Blade Runner 2049. He looked outside and the entire sky was red, like he had been transported to the surface of Mars. For weeks on end, due to the California forest fires, Berkeley was in the "purple zone," which is considered the worst zone to be in on the air quality scale, with particulate matter above 300 ppm, or parts per million (if you're interested, you can check out your local air quality here). California was wearing N95 masks long before Covid happened because of these fires. At one point, Martin's partner looked at him and said, "We are breathing in dead people."

This was a major wake-up call for Martin, who had been working in immigration at the time: it made him realize he needed to go into working in climate change. He went on to get a graduate degree from Scripps in Environmental Science, and learned a lot about things like how the weather works. We asked him what some of his main recommendations are around what the average person can do about the climate, and his main piece of advice: get involved in local politics to see what climate policies are being considered in your state, and educate yourself on what is most effective. In the climate space, there is a decreasing emphasis on individual accountability as it relates to climate change, and a greater focus on how we can influence companies, whose emissions far outweigh the emissions of individuals in the US. We're starting to realize that this problem can only be solved with serious legislation, as opposed to hoping that our individual consumer actions will save us. One main focus for Martin is public transportation, but there are so many more climate-related areas for the average citizen to focus on.

Links:

Martin's website: https://www.martinfroger.com/

"The 6th Extinction," by Elizabeth Kolbert: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185/thesixthextinction

"This Changes Everything," by Naomi Klein: https://thischangeseverything.org/book/

"All We Can Save," an anthology of pieces by 60 women authors about the climate crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkerson: https://www.allwecansave.earth/anthology

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

"I feel like my mother loves me more than she loves herself, and it makes me feel really guilty. Am I bad if I don't love her more than I love myself?"

Kimaya Diggs wants you to ask her about her mother. One thing Kimaya can tell you about her is that before she died, Kimaya decided to take a pottery class, which her mother asked to join in on. She was incredibly prolific: she created around 300 pieces, but didn't like to glaze her work as much as she liked throwing pots. So when she died, she left behind around 60 unglazed pieces that the owner of the studio was nice enough to keep so that Kimaya could glaze them herself and the studio even named a color of glaze after Kimaya's mom.

When our friend Margot was getting ready to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), she thought she would be bored, and that this was going to be a period when she listened to more audiobooks than she had ever listened to in her life. But it turned out that when she actually started hiking, she didn't feel the need to listen to many audiobooks or music and she had a realization: so much of the world we live in currently can be harsh and grating, like the soundscape of cars and sirens and construction when you go outside in a city. And much of the reason why we may need to wear headphones or distract ourselves from the world around us may be because we are trying to seek comfort away from those harsh externalities. But when you spend every day in nature, you might not need the security blanked of distraction.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We have probably all seen the late stage capitalism memes by now: "Stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is" is a famous one, though there are many more. In this episode we talk about the societal shift towards glamorizing doing nothing. We talk with Winx Vestrit, a friend who works with Isabel on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance, about a tweet that really resonated with them which goes: "The girl boss is dead, long live the girl moss (lying on the floor of the forest and being absorbed back into nature)".