I'M THE VILLAIN

Sara Alepin was really passionate about being a teacher - and still is! But one day she was forced to quit her job teaching when she became permanently disabled from breaking up a fight at her school where a student stomped on a foot and crushed one of her nerves, making it difficult for her to walk, especially on the linoleum floors that usually line the floors of classrooms. Ever since then, she has only been able to be on her feet for 3-4 hours a day. 

What did the school do? Did it pay her medical bills and try to support her transition out of teaching? You guessed it: not it did not. Not only did they not do they, they actually hired a private investigator to follow her around to try to get out of paying the medical bills, who likely cost many times the amount they would have paid had they simply agreed to pay the medical bills. (The alternate title for this episode is Yet Again We Hear About Why the School System is Fucked.)

On top of hearing Sara's story, we hear about why it can be so difficult having an invisible disability: for one thing, when you are not obviously disabled, you can get some really dirty looks when you go to park in the handicapped spot, or try to get a wheelchair in the airport. For her, some of the most difficult aspects of her disability have not actually been as much around how the world is not designed to accommodate her needs (in fact, as many jobs ave become even more sedentary during Covid, one could argue that many people's lifestyles have been changing to become more like hers!) as much as it has been around the judgements and assumptions of other people.

Links:

Sara's podcast, The Wedding Dish: https://www.theweddingdishpodcast.com/

Sara's other podcast, Laughing with Gingers: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/laughing-with-gingers/id1524216963

Laughing with Gingers Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laughingwithgingers/?hl=en

Sara's wedding photography business, Photos from the Harty: https://www.photosfromtheharty.com/

Sara's other business, District Bliss Events: https://www.instagram.com/districtblissevents/?hl=en

The real estate market is bananas right now. You may have seen the headlines about around-the-block lines for open houses in San Francisco, or watched houses in your neighborhood go on and off the market the same day on Zillow. A lot of that has to do with the current low interest rates but it also has a lot to do with land being increasingly bought up by private equity and big developers trying to flip houses and even whole neighborhoods. So much of what is going on in the housing market is furthering the already vastly unequal trends in land ownership and equity.

But Wes wants to help create a world in which we can make cooperatives and land trusts more of a realistic option for everyday people. You've all seen the memes about millennials wanting to live in a big house with their 5 best friends; well, Wes thinks we can actually make that happen. He just started in real estate this week but after going to divinity school and working in the church for most of his adult career, now he feels like this new career change is going to be what really puts the values he has cultivated over the years to the test.

As a continuation of our conversation from last week that is broadly about land and faith and the entanglements between and how the ecology of place informs your philosophy of how to build a community, we dive into how so many of these tools (like co-ops, like trusts) have historically been used by wealthy white people to further their interests and how we can convert these tactics to help the historically oppressed as well. We talk about Squirrel Island, an idyllic piece of land off the coast of Maine that is owned by a cooperative, and how President Reagan once visited and wanted to buy in, but was blocked by the cooperative because he also wanted to build a helicopter pad on the island. Things like this might seem like trite examples of communities wielding their collective power, but you can probably imagine how similar powers could be used to protect much more vulnerable, marginalized neighborhoods.

Links:

Wes' real estate instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wesrealtor/

Wes' 5-part podcast on the Farminary: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-cultivators-podcast/id1508064564

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Wes Willison lives on a block with 100 houses on it. That is a very long block by most urban planning standards and he starts off telling us a bit about what that kind of built environment affords you: safety, because you have a lot more eyes on all the people going up and down the street but also, because his block is nestled in an otherwise high-crime part of Port Richmond, which is a neighborhood in Philadelphia, he and his neighbors get to avoid the attention of big developers who might want to come in and "flip" the neighborhood.

Wes originally went to seminary but is now pivoting to become a realtor, a role in which he hopes to apply a lot of the belief systems he has spent his whole life honing and shaping. We started this episode intending to have a conversation about the importance of place and ownership of land and the inequities ingrained in that, but what we ended up talking about was everything.

For example, Wes tells us the incredible story of how in San Francisco's Chinatown, the Chinese immigrants would pay white builders to add "Chinese-looking" facades to otherwise normal houses to fend off the government and developers looking to buy out or claim land in Chinatown through eminent domain and how the immigrant community organized themselves to leave the city en masse if the government did not choose to respect their land rights, which worked surprisingly well.

There's a pretty fundamental shift in our near future and the median AI scientist says it is coming by about the year 2040: the rise of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Right now, the types of AI that power TikTok and Facebook and Spotify and Netflix and any number of other major tech companies in the world currently are examples of Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) which may be superhuman, like the ANI's that can beat the best humans in the world at games like chess and Go, but they are only superhuman at one thing. An AGI is an algorithm that is good at learning how to do multiple things, and can attain human-level intelligence across the board. The next step after AGI is ASI, which is Artificial Super Intelligence, which goes beyond the known biological range of intelligence and can improve upon itself at an exponential rate. That's the scary stuff. 

We talk with Isabel's friend Shantanu, who works at a company called OpenAI, about the hypothetical scenarios that are possible and likely within our lifetimes. He notes that a lot of the biggest worries out there are projections of our own personal fears about the world and the direction society is going in because at the end of the day, it is hard to make predictions about what we don't know. But there are a lot of AI safety organizations out there putting extensive thought into these questions, because whoever comes up with the first ASI could determine the entire fate of humanity: we could hypothetically use the AI for "good" and bring an end to most human suffering in the world by using nanotechnology to reverse aging and stop most disease, and possibly create a world in which humans never have to work again and we all live off a universal basic income. But we could also use it for "evil," which is of course a moral imposition by humans that likely wouldn't apply to an algorithm without feeling or intention, but we could program an algorithm to optimize for one thing (the classic parable is making paperclips) and it gets so good at it that it turns everything in the world to paperclips. 

Links: 

The Wait but Why articles about hypothetical scenarios involving recursively self-improving AI:

Some examples of what OpenAI's code models can do:

You know the game 2 truths and a lie? Well we are switching it up and making it 2 breakups and a marriage proposal: in the last 2 weeks, we have had 1 proposal and 2 breakups between the 2 co-hosts. So we take a minute to talk about what we have learned from those experiences and why it's weird when when you go through a breakup and a proposal at the same time. We also cover: why we should put more serious, emotional conversations into writing, why it is useful to have people in your life who will tell you your flaws, and what our previous relationships have taught us.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Is soaking really a thing? Bubble porn? That thing where you get on a top bunk and have your friends jump around on the bottom bunk as a way to simulate sex? These are all things that people on Tiktok say the Mormon Youth do to get around the Mormon requirement not to have sex before marriage. In part 2 of this episode series, we continue our conversation with Cody Crabb from last week, and he debunks some myths about what The Youth are up to.

He also tells us what it is like being a missionary. On this show we like to use the podcast as an opportunity to talk to people who have different experiences from us, and it is hard to imagine a more different life from ours than that of a Mormon missionary. He describes it like this: "Imagine if someone just set you on the street somewhere and said 'Just do nice things for people.'" Help an old an out with his garden, help someone take in their groceries. You're dressed in white, and are often the only white person in a neighborhood of brown people. Eventually they are going to ask you what you are doing here. That's what the over 80,000 missionaries out in the world are up to right now.

Cody served his mission in Culiacán, Sinaloa, the place in Mexico where the show "Narcos" took place. And the mission could really be grueling: you wake up at 6am every day, do hours of text study, and then you're out in the sun all day talking to people. There were times when Cody didn't talk to his parents for 6 months. (Luckily, now the LDS church is changing the way they do missions because it turns out needing to be isolated from your family for that long can be kind of whack for your mental health.)

But we get to the elephant in the room: going to a country of poor indigenous people as a white person to try to convert them to your religion looks a lot like colonialism. And how, as a progressive person now, he reflects on that experience and thinks, "I look back and I can't even believe I did it."

Links:

Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/

Cody's email: codycrabb8 [at] gmail.com

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Cody Crabb knows how this sounds. In today's increasingly secular environment, saying you are religious sounds like you are saying you believe in aliens. Saying you are a progressive Mormon sounds like you either don't know what progressivism is or you don't know what Mormons believe. The Mormon church (they're actually moving away from the term "Mormon" and towards the "Church of the Latter-Day Saints," or LDS for short) isn't exactly known for being the most progressive institution. 

Same-sex marriages are not recognized by the church, Brigham Young was a racist, Black people were not allowed to be priests in the LDS church until the 1970s.

So how do you exist as a member of the LDS church as a progressive person who doesn't see a difference between your romantic relationship and that of your gay friends? As someone who believes in fighting racism?

But some things are changing. Religions everywhere are losing young people, and they know they have to adapt or risk drifting into irrelevancy. There's only so much that religions can do when they stand so at odds with the direction the rest of society is going in.

In the LDS church, this is where the phenomenon of modern revelation comes in. At any given moment, there is a living prophet in the church, and the current guy, as of 2018, is a former heart surgeon named Russell M. Nelson, who can update the handbook and stances of the church to fit modern-day values. Their job is to interpret the word of God. 

For example, a recent prophet said that the church was going to require the children of gay parents to be baptized at the age of 18, whereas you usually get baptized when you are 8 years old. There was a huge backlash to this inside and outside the church and after that backlash, the church revised its guidelines to allow everyone to be baptized at 8 years old.

Obviously a lot of these issues cause a ton of cognitive dissonance as a progressive person, and Cody talks about how for him, so much of the teachings of the church are about clothing the naked and feeding the hungry, which is exactly in line with progressivism. For the things that feel contradictory, you just have to believe in slow, incremental change, and realize that some things are always going to have to go "on the shelf."

Links:

Cody's website: https://www.codycrabb.com/

Cody's email: codycrabb8 [at] gmail.com

The Wikipedia page for the current LDS prophet, Russel M. Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_M._Nelson

In this episode, we discuss a recent 2-part series by The Daily discussing the next phase of Covid-19 and how we are going to get there, including whether or not we are going to have to rely on the unvaccinated to get vaccinated. In the second part of their series, they interview Dr. Fauci, where he talks about the bizarre politics of the pandemic, in which "the cautious are being cautious on behalf of the uncautious, who resent the caution of the cautious" - in other words, the people who are most at risk at this point don't even want the economic and mental health sacrifices of those who are Covid-safe (mainly split by ideological lines more than real risk) and the pandemic will likely run its course with or without them because they will either get it and become immune, or get it and die. 

Links:

The Daily, Pt. 1 "We Need to Talk about Covid": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/26/podcasts/the-daily/omicron-coronavirus-behaviors.html

The Daily Pt. 2 "A Conversation with Dr. Fauci": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/podcasts/the-daily/we-need-to-talk-about-covid-part-2-a-conversation-with-dr-fauci.html

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

Have you ever felt like you don't know what to do with your life? You know we have to solve just about 101 existential crises in our lifetime, and you want to pick a career that does some good for the world and helps us solve these problems, but at the same time, you have so many friends who have had a terrible time working at nonprofits and social impact orgs, either because they are poorly run or because they work on such complex issues that they have to celebrate for such incremental change or risk being depressed all the time. So you wonder if it is a better idea to sell out and donate your money so that you will have a better quality of life, but that doesn't feel very satisfying either. So you write a hail-mary application to grad school even though you're not entirely convinced that that will help you to do good either.

In this episode we sit down with our friend Vija about how the hell you're supposed to figure out what to do with your life. Vija started out last summer after working in wilderness therapy thinking she was going to drive across the country with her dog (#vanlife) to end up in New Hampshire by the end of the summer, where she was going to embark on a year-long project making art and living rent-free at her friend's parent's house. Turns out, before she made it to New Hampshire, she met someone and decided to move in with them in Boulder, CO, where they lasted six weeks before breaking up and she moved back in with her parents in Chicago. Now she is applying to Master's programs in design.

We talk about how to figure out what to prioritize in your career,  how to choose your "hero's work" (this will all be explained in the episode), and whether it makes sense to "follow your passion" even though it's not entirely clear how to find your passion in the first place.

Links:

Wait But Why article, called How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You): https://waitbutwhy.com/2018/04/picking-career.html

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

When was the last time you decided to go live in another country with no plans to return? In this episode, we talk to Isabel's friend Elaine, who has spent much of her post-college life traveling around the world and is currently teaching English in Shanghai. Prior to the pandemic, she had plans to travel around Asia during this time but China's Covid policies threw a wrench in those plans as you are required to quarantine for 2 weeks whenever you return to the country, so for right now she has to settle for traveling around China. At the beginning of the pandemic, Elaine was teaching in Madrid, and was traveling basically every weekend and after she is done teaching English in Shanghai, she plans to travel around the coast of Australia with her sister.

We talk with Elaine about why traveling is so integral to her life, why she considers herself an adventurer more than a tourist, and how she is able to afford traveling this much (apps like Couchsurfing and Workaway make many of Elaine's travel experiences free or close to free). So many of the hosts she has met while traveling have been exceptionally open and interesting people, and while some of them have admittedly been sketchy, she talks about the importance of trusting your gut, which may lead you to get in a van with a total stranger, but in Elaine's case that decision resulted in a delightful week's worth of good food and good company. She even met one Workaway host in Tuscany whose guests literally helped her birth her child when she was pregnant and they are now considered part of her family.

Links:

Couchsurfing: https://www.couchsurfing.com/

Workaway: https://www.workaway.info/

Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/home/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.