I'M THE VILLAIN

This episode is a continuation of our last episode with Razi Shaban where he talks about having a major concussion before the pandemic started and how that experience changed his outlook on life. As an ex-Google employee, he had a lot of fun creating and building new things, but after the concussion started prioritizing joy over stress more, and left his job at Google last January. We talked about the difficult project of finding work that truly speaks to you, as he liked his work in many ways but started finding it difficult to find meaningful computer work to do that wasn't contributing to a potential fascist project. But at the same time, it is a blessing to have stability, and having a job you can clock in and clock out of, with a degree of non-attachment, can be tremendously freeing.

We also talk about the differences he has found between eastern and western medicine. Living in San Francisco and working at Google afforded him the ability to go to the top neurologists in the country but they were never able to offer him much, which made him realize that the western model doesn't understand the brain nearly as well as the eastern model does. When it comes to traumatic brain injury, there usually isn't a convenient pill you can take to solve the problem, but when he went to an eastern medicine practitioner, they told him to move the chi in his head down to the root, to focus on the breathe, to "sleep without sleeping." And there were immediate, effective, and repeatable results.

Links:

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Traumatic brain injury can change your entire relationship with the outside world. That's what happened to Razi, who has sustained multiple concussions throughout his life starting in college, but suffered his worst concussion in 2019, right before the pandemic. When that happened, he was completely knocked out of his normal routine: for months, all he could do was sit in the bathtub with no light, maybe a candle. He likens this experience to going back to the womb.

We will continue this conversation next week in Part 2 of the concussion episode.

There's a lot of episodes we've had about major life pivots: Andy Reinhold (Episode 78) talked about how he started in consulting, quit his job to follow his passion and work in gaming, and then went back to consulting to support his baby. Sara Alepin (Episode 123) wanted to be a teacher, but after a student stomped on her foot and left her permanently unable to walk more than a few hours a day without pain, she pivoted to being a wedding photographer, podcaster, and running a businesses community. Ayana Major Bey (Episode 134) wanted to be an actor in plays and then a global pandemic hit.

PALS Programs, a camp for kids with Down Syndrome that Aaron has worked with and loves: https://www.palsprograms.org/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

This might be a little old because everything is a blip in the news cycle and yesterday's news is forgotten in like 24 hours, but we recorded this at the time that the Black Little Mermaid stuff was going on but only got to releasing it now. In this episode, we talk about how Disney has actually turned into...a kind of great company despite its historic levels of shittiness? We liken it to Krispy Kreme, which was totally able to bounce back from the fact that they used to use forced labor to make their treats and were basically run by Nazis. 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

As some of you may know, Deondre' LOVES listening to true crime podcasts and so was very excited to have today's guest, Joy Scaglione, the host of the Bite-Sized Crime Podcast, on our show.

In last week's episode, we featured the first part of this conversation with Kenny Wical so if you missed it, you will want to take a listen to that one before you listen to this! In this episode, Kenny talks about ways that privilege manifests itself in his life, because there is a lot of pressure to conform to cis-normative standards of masculinity in the South even among people in the queer community. There's this notion that you can always push the shame and oppression to people farther down on the social ladder than you and even though he is genderfluid, there's a lot of experiences he has had where he initially is granted male privilege by a stranger, and the more they talk to him and see how much he doesn't perform masculinity, the more he sees that esteem they originally granted him melt away before his eyes.

Last week we started talking about the common advice that queer people in the South get to move to a more progressive place like New York City so they can be themselves more without the fear of (as much) oppression. While that has long been a really tempting proposition for Kenny, more recently he has been feeling the desire to nurture his roots in Raleigh, NC, because as a queer person it can be super freeing and heady to go to a more queer-accepting place like NYC where there's tons of out and proud queer people having awesome gay parties, but those same houses and parties need to be built in the South too. It obviously takes a lot more work and community-building can be a very thankless job, especially when you are dealing with a population that has more general trauma, which can make a lot of community-building really difficult because it's a process that inherently requires trust. 

But it's a necessary task. There's so many people in the South and other places in the world who don't have the privilege, financial, stability, or interest in just picking up and moving to a more progressive place, and if more people did that, those places in the South would be that much worse for the queer people left behind. This is that investing in your community looks like.

Links:

Kenny knew he was gay pretty much all his life, and has lived in Fayetteville, North Caroline, and then Raleigh North Carolina for the last 11 years. He talks to us about what his experience has been being gay in the South, especially given that a lot of the rest of the US considers the South a lost cause from a gay rights standpoint. When he first came out at the beginning of high school, the first people he came out to were his nerd friends on Gaia Online, an online community for anime fans where you could dress up your avatar with accessories from your favorite anime series. He describes this as a very common experience when you're queer in a more conservative area, because when you're gay it can feel like you're the only one, and online you have access to so many more people who are like you. 

We also get into the conversation around the North's perception that the South is so much more homophobic and racist than the North, to the degree that a lot of Black friends Deondre' has talked to in the North literally try to avoid going to the South because they are afraid they are going to get hate crimed in some way. However, there is racism and homophobia in all parts of the US and at least in Deondre's experience, the South can actually feel even more comfortable because the majority of Black people in the US do live in the South and he feels more comfortable in spaces where there are more people of color, as opposed to a lot of the places he has travelled to in the North where he is the only Black person in the room or on the block. Obviously the comparison of racism and homophobia is very apples to oranges in a lot of ways, but we get into the ways in which they manifest differently, and Kenny talks about a specific instance that highlighted the real importance of intersectionality to him. 

There's a huge frustration with progressives who say that they believe in gay rights or anti-racism but then essentially tell people in the South "What did you expect? You live in the South! Just leave." because that's exactly what the conservatives in the South want, is for the gay people to all move to more progressive places and get out of their hair. And a lot of the places in the world that have implemented progressive policies, like the Scandinavian countries, were only able to do that because they are very ethnically homogenous and those progressive policies are about to be tested as we have more and more climate refugees. The bottom line is that any progressives who believe in either anti-racism or gay rights would be remiss to dismiss the South as a lost cause, just because the South votes more conservatively.

You'll also hear some stories about petty times we have either fucked with someone's life (such as putting oreos on a nemesis' windshield), inadvertently fucked with our own life (Deondre' had someone accidentally leave raw salmon in his microwave in college and they couldn't find it for weeks), or would hypothetically fuck with someone else's life (such as by putting sugar in someone's gas tank, which then caramelizes and totals the car). This was a long conversation so tune in next week to hear Part 2!

In this episode, we sit down with Hannah De Groot, one of Isabel's old friends from high school, to talk about how her experience in political organizing turned into a job in political consulting. We've been wanting to talk to someone on the "inside" of politics for a long time, because much of this podcast is spent decrying the futility of trying to engage with American politics, when in reality, when you talk to people who actually work in this space, it doesn't seem futile at all. It can definitely seem challenging, but when you are working with other people who are addressing the challenge and separating it into manageable parts, it can be much easier to stop the cycle of despair. But the social support of other organizers is also crucial because, as Hannah points out, MAGA Republicans are no longer an anomaly: they are running in almost every red state.

Hannah's political organizing experience is also unique because she has lupus, which usually hits women hardest in their early 20's, and saps a lot of your energy, which makes it hard to do a lot of the typical activities associated with political organizing such as knocking on doors. The pandemic actually provided an opportunity in that respect because during the pandemic a lot of organizers had to resort to calling and texting potential voters instead, which was more accessible to her. 

Links:

The 2 organizations Hannah recommends at the end of this episode are

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Becca Wood is a business coach and Squarespace website designer. She is also the host of the "Probably Bothered" podcast where she breaks down all of the things that bother her about her industry. In this episode, we talk about how so many people who go into business do into it because there is something that bothers them about working as an employee, but then when they go into business there's a whole new set of hurdles that they have to face, such as a lack of a community, and a very narrow definition of what being "successful" really means to you - and most of those definitions have to do with money. We talk through coming to the right balance between trying to solve social problems that have a real impact on the world and our society and actually designing the kind of life you want to live at the same time, which can result in some very direct tradeoffs. 

Links:

Becca's Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/probablybothered/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Ayana Major Bey had a major reckoning when the pandemic hit. Ayana has been a musical theater actor, a "straight play" actor (which is what they call non-musical theater plays in the theater world), and is now a voice actor.