I'M THE VILLAIN

As a follow-up to the dating coach episode, where our longtime guest Shreye spoke to us about what he learned from going to a dating coach (Episode 125 if you missed it), he is now back on the show to talk to us about his experience with a style coach named Patrick, who Shreye flew to Scottsdale, Arizona to meet in person with his entire wardrobe in tow. Shreye got Patrick's most extensive package, which covered a style consult that covered the perfect color palette for Shreye's skin tone, a shopping trip where Patrick had already pre-selected clothes for Shreye to try on and get custom tailored if necessary, and a final photo shoot with Shreye's fancy new clothes. Patrick even helped Shreye donate all of his old clothes that didn't fit him well before he flew back.

Shreye talks about the evolution of his style journey and why he wanted to take these steps at this point in his life, how his makeover has been received by friends (though of course he doesn't have enough data to prove any kind of causality - if you would like to take part in an informal survey to tell us what you think of Shreye's before-and-after shots, send us an email at [email protected]), and his thoughts on whether you should wear Chacos on a first date.

Links:

Men's Fashion Reddit that Shreye references: https://www.reddit.com/r/malefashionadvice/

Hasan Minaj gets style advice from Tan France of Queer Eye: https://youtu.be/uFhRONeopbQ

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Since we have been on a series of pretty heavy episodes recently, we decided it would be a good idea to lighten the mood a little bit and talk about the NYT's 36 Questions to Make You Fall in Love, or as they have recently backtracked it to, perhaps because they thought their original headline was too much, the "36 Questions that Lead to Love." If you haven't heard of this article before, when it came out back in 2015, everyone was asking these questions to their dates, though we discuss on this episode whether we think a lot of these questions should really be considered first date material. Or even if knowing someone better necessarily means you're more likely to fall in love with them...it might actually leave you wanting to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.  

Note: Isabel at this time was fostering 7 small kittens, so throughout the episode, you may hear them mewing. Sorry about that.

Links:

The New York Times's article, "36 Questions that Lead to Love": https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Trigger warning: This episode contains discussion of early childhood rape, sexual assault, and incest.

This is a continuation of our conversation last week with Sunshine, so if you missed last week's episode, listen to that before listening to this. Even more so that last week's episode, this conversation is HEAVY. Sunshine talks about her experience coping with sexual trauma, and how her therapist actually gave her the best suggestion of all time: join the BDSM community. Her whole life, she has been trying to figure out how to have a healthy relationship with sex and intimacy, and so much of what society has told her is to erase the parts of herself that are considered "deviant" and the kink community offered another option: embrace it. Definitely make sure consent is king, but within that, there are ways to cope with sexual trauma that don't look like the "mainstream" societal picture of what sex should be.

When asked for what she would want to say to her younger self, she says this: There is no such thing as deviancy. 

Links: 

National Sexual Assault Hotline: https://www.rainn.org/resources

Woman Against Rape (not recommended per se but was mentioned in the episode): https://womenagainstrape.net/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Trigger Warning: This episode mentions rape and sexual assault. 

This is a heavy episode, and next week's episode will be even heavier. We sit down with Isabel's friend Sunshine to talk about being an artist and the ways in which art can help you process trauma, in this case sexual trauma, and how that very personal expression of self interfaces with the consumers of your art and the outside world. Sunshine displays her art in many different types of venues: she will display her art in the park on the weekends, but she has also had art acquired by corporate art purchasers, such as the FMC building, which is a skyscraper in Philadelphia. 

She describes some unexpectedly intense reactions some people have had to her art, from a gaggle of passing frat bros being moved by one of her more abstract paintings about rape, to a woman in a gallery who would up purchasing Sunshine's whole exhibition. We talk about the complicated relationship between art and capitalism, and ultimately for Sunshine, being able to translate that trauma into a means of survival is empowering. 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Well, it happened: Roe got overturned. Just like we knew it would. We have talked a lot about our revolutionary thinking on this show, and used this platform to document the major points of political radicalization we have had since the show started: for Isabel, it was when RBG died, for Deondre' it is now. We talk about what we think needs to change in American politics, mainly about the Supreme Court, and we discuss how our thinking has evolved on what strategies might be most effective in producing change going forward. We are still working through how we are going to be involved personally, and so if you have suggestions for organizations that are doing work with a real structural impact, please let us know!

Links:

Article from the New Yorker on "Roe's Final Hours in One of America's Largest Abortion Clinics": https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/roes-final-hours-in-one-of-americas-largest-abortion-clinics

Interview Deondre' mentions with Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin on resistance strategies and how to become ungovernable: https://blackrosefed.org/ungovernable-interview-lorenzo-komboa-ervin-anderson/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We feel like more and more people have been talking bout introversion vs. extroversion as a paradigm for categorizing people now, which probably started out because of the popularity of the Myers-Briggs, but also has been redefined more recently, or perhaps this definition has simply made it more into the mainstream: many people are resonating with the idea of introversion as deriving your energy from being alone, and extroversion as deriving your energy from being around other people. In this episode, we talk with Krista Walsh, who identifies as an introvert, about what our society gets wrong about introverts, and why they are actually great business leaders, politicians, and should generally run the world. 

It seems like with the internet came more conversation about introverts and their superpowers, perhaps because more introverts frequent online spaces, although Krista points out that being on Twitter can feel like a very draining, extroverted space as well, given the plethora of headlines and hot takes and the dearth of nuance. We talk about how the pandemic has affected our personalities and mentalities around introversion and extroversion, and share stories about the lengths we will go to get out of social situations we don't want to be in - in some cases all you have to do is jump out of the car!

Isabel got invited to an astrology party and so in this episode we talk about the rise in popularity of astrology and why we think it has been so trendy even though we think it is kind of bullshit and also why it might be useful in your life even if you think it is kind of bullshit. We also talk about the general category of similar personality categorizers such as enneagram, Myers-Briggs, DISC, and other random personality paradigms that people use and why they might be useful or not. Deondre's favorite is enneagram, and says he is a Type 2 Wing 3, and Isabel has been told she is a Type 8. This leads us into a broader conversation about our desire to organize the world when we generally feel like there are all of these crises all happening at once, and how maybe all of these silly little personality quizzes and our desire to grow basil and be little cottagecore fairies in the woods might stem from a darker, more survivalist place even though the manifestation might actually look pretty cute and harmless.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Sara Alepin is back in this exciting episode about the wedding industry, as she has been a wedding photographer for over 10 years. She has ALL the stories, from wedding SNAFU's (one major tip she had to share: Shout wipes are better than Tide pens at removing stains right before the wedding photos!) to all the beautiful celebrations she has attended. 

Her hot take on weddings is that while you might think that the day is all about you, and nobody else, that mentality can really backfire on you because it often is a celebration you are throwing to unite your friends and families and if you ignore those people's opinions, it often makes the more softhearted person in the couple suffer, because that's who people come to with the complaints. This was a well-timed piece of advice for Deondre' who had just expressed 20 minutes earlier in the episode how excited he was to be the asshole to anyone who wanted input on his wedding outside of him and his partner.

Links:

Sara's wedding podcast, "The Wedding Dish": https://theweddingdish.podbean.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Do you know the moment when you feel as if you don't understand something, and then something just clicks? What do you do when the thing you are confused about is dating? Is it possible to help coach someone who hasn't had a lot of success at dating to get something as complex as flirting to "click"?

113. The Bo Burnham Episode

71. The Mental Health Stigma Episode

47. The Financial Inclusion Episode

Get some water before you listen to this episode: I had to remind myself to drink multiple times during this episode. In this episode, we talk to health coach and host of the podcast "Salad with a Side of Fries," Jenn Trepeck. She talks with us about all of the complexities of the health and food systems that we are a part of (she makes a point of not talking about the healthcare system because in reality, what we have is hardly a system, it's a disaggregated set of actors that are responsible for your health that almost never talk to each other) and the various problems with all of them. 

For one thing, we have been told to ignore what our bodies tell us from a very young age: we are told to finish what is on our plates instead of listening to when we are actually full. 

For another thing, we have a totally unrepresentative and inapproproate set of standards that we use to measure "health": most metrics are based entirely off of men, as if women did not exist. The 2,000 calorie diet was created to prevent soldiers during World War 2 from dying of diseases like scurvy when rations were in short supply. BMI was created to make it easier for doctors to talk to patients about weight and because it is cheaper and easier to measure a simple data point like weight with a scale than it is to give patients a more comprehensive understanding of what makes up their body, such as by measuring what percentage of your body mass is fat and what percentage is muscle. 

We also talk about Big Pharma, GMOs, and how to figure out who to trust when it comes to health information given that so many actors in the nutrition and medical space have monetary incentives to lie or boas their studies, many of which have dubiously statistically significant results to begin with.

Links:

Jenn's podcast, "Salad with a Side of Fries": https://asaladwithasideoffries.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Note: In this episode, Jenn talked about the Nobel Prize-winning agronomist Norman Borlaug and his invention of dwarf wheat. She mentions that dwarf wheat was invented to solve world hunger and did not, in fact, solve world hunger, and therefore suggested that we should go back to eating other forms of wheat because dwarf wheat causes gluten sensitivities.

Some articles on Norman Borlaug:

"The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-man-who-saved-a-billi_b_4099523

"Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity": https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/