I'M THE VILLAIN

If you have seen "Inside," you know that it is pretty unique as far as comedy specials go. It was shot entirely by Bo during the course of the pandemic inside of his LA guest house and touches on very millennial themes, such as the effects of the internet and social media on our collective mental health and his mental health specifically, anti-capitalism, turning 30 and thinking about what you have accomplished thus far in your life.

We talk with Shreye Saxena (his 4th appearance on the show, making him the most featured guest!) about his thoughts on the show, ranging from its depiction of mental health, the commodification of wokeness, and the constant balance of authenticity vs. performativity ever since we started expecting depictions people's real lives instead of made-up stories due to YouTube, Instagram, and other elements of media that have turned the cameras back on everyday people instead of just celebrities and movie stars.

Links:

"Inside" on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81289483

Bo Burnham's Kanye Rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYy0o-J0x20

Bo Burnham's "Art is Dead": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo9pU1q8sy8

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

In 2021, Elon Musk was named the Time Person of the Year. A contentious choice, given the events of this past year, and maybe that was the point. After all, print magazines are rapidly going out of business and vying to stay relevant and this is pretty much the only time of year you see headlines about TIME in the rest of the mainstream media. So maybe they chose someone intentionally controversial to stir up chatter, but regardless, we use this episode to talk about whether the pick was merited, given that Elon has been breaking ground: he has now definitively put electric vehicles on the map, despite Tesla's dubious labor practices, and he can move the markets with one Tweet (though maybe not always in the direction he wants them to go). We will have yet to see if he manages to put humans on Mars, but if he does succeed, it will undoubtedly be historic.

In this solo episode, Isabel and Deondre' talk through our relationship shit. Both of us have been going through some pretty serious transitions, that have pushed us to expand our understandings of what a romantic relationship can and should encompass. We already both identify as polyamorous, which is a form of ethical non-monogamy in which you allow yourself to love and date multiple people romantically. But it gets tricky when you start getting into the actual nuts and bolts of designing a life in a way that runs so counter to the societal norm. For example, there is the notion of a "primary" partner (your main romantic partner) vs. a "secondary" or "tertiary" partner within polyamory. How do you navigate what primacy really means within your relationship? 

It can definitely suck to relegate a romantic interest to the realm of "secondary" or "tertiary" so how can you also find non-hierarchical ways of categorizing your other partners while also recognizing that there are elements of life-building that are pretty zero-sum? For example, it's great when all of your partners live in the same city, but what if your primary partner wants to move, and wants you to move with them? We talk about the use of terms like "nesting partner" and "anchor" partner in place of hierarchical terms like primary or secondary and what they mean in context.

And even once you have decided to leave the conventional romantic assumptions behind, perhaps you still experience a desire to have the negative feelings that can arise from the difficulties of testing your limits validated, and you wonder whether that you are feeling is "normal" or "justified." And maybe it doesn't even make sense to ask those kinds of questions because at the end of the day, what is most comfortable to you is what matters, even if nobody else in the world would share those feelings with you. 

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We know that "pretty privilege" can affect everything from who society deems worthy of sex and intimacy all the way to who gets promotions, housing and friends. But it's not as obvious as with other forms of inequities what we should do about it. We can pretty much agree that everyone deserves housing and healthcare but attraction by definition requires another person to be attracted to you, and we can't force people to be attracted to each other. It's also a unique form of privilege because it is more changeable than a trait like race or gender. 

We talk with Hina Wilkerson, a member of the Salted Logic media collective, to talk about all of this and why we don't talk about it. It's a conversation that teeters between being exciting and edgy and also dark because it encompasses funny topics like Chads hitting on you at the gym all the way to rape, pedophilia, murder, and missing women.

And when you are on the "low" end of the desirability spectrum, the stakes can be pretty high. We already live in a society of ever-growing alienation, social anxiety, and isolation that is being fueled by social media and whether people find you attractive can be the difference between hugely opposite reactions, from revulsion to your creepiness, to elation that someone is sexually interested in you and you have no way of knowing how someone will react, which is why flirting is such a dangerous game.

Especially as society at large is moving in a direction to be more pro-kink and pro-fetish, we also get into how this interacts with what we allow ourselves to be "into" and whether we should be questioning that, and when that questioning verges into shaming. No spoilers, but raceplay and virginlust are inevitably mentioned.

Links: 

Hina's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hinarising/

Salted Logic, Hina's woman-owned media collective: https://saltedlogic.com/

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

What makes sugar, Adderall, tobacco, and alcohol legal while drugs like pot, heroin, cocaine, and meth are not? Is it addictiveness? Impact on health? Racism?

What does gardening have to do with the revolution? It turns out, it has everything to do with it - in this episode, Amirio Freeman, the host of the Loam Listen podcast, talks to us about how Black ecology fosters a sense of connectedness that teaches you if any one part of the complex system that is nature fails, the whole system collapses, and how capitalism has taught us to think of ourselves and our consumption habits in isolation from other parts of the system, to the detriment of all of society. 

We also go into a discussion of land rights, and the complicated turns that conversation can take when it comes to African Americans who are descendants of slaves - if we believe in returning the land to indigenous people or the people it originally belonged to, where do Black people fit into that equation?

This is a pretty mind-blowing conversation where we delve even deeper into what elements of our current society come from colonialism and white supremacy, much in the vein of the Decolonizing Parenting Episode, and how radical imagination and rest can be antidotes to the dystopian world we find ourselves barreling towards. Even in the midst of all of these barriers to a more community-driven society (even if we were to encourage foraging and gardening, how many people truly have the time, land, and knowledge required to do it?), Amirio still finds the fact that these barriers are all the products of the socially constructed world that we created heartening, because none of these factors are inherent to humanity. We can decide as a collective to change them, we just have to have the will to do it.

The Nap Ministry: https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

A conversation with Tricia Hersey, the founder of the Nap Ministry, on the relationship between rest and Black liberation: https://atmos.earth/rest-resistance-colonization-black-liberation/

An article about how the USDA was offering grants to marginalized farmers as part of the American Rescue Plan but this was blocked by a group of White farmers: https://www.youngfarmers.org/2021/06/delivering-on-debt-relief-to-black-farmers/

A super useful library of articles on Black Ecology: https://www.bilphenaslibrary.com/blackecology

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

It turns out that being a woman sports fan is just like being any other kind of sports fan. They don't need pink jerseys, they just want to feel included. In this episode, we sit down with Keely Dunning, a sports podcaster who has worked in sports for 10 years, after she decided she didn't want to go into the entertainment industry. As it turns out, just like in our Construction Episode (90), being a woman in the sports industry can be a tough job.

Millennials have a fraught relationship with work. At this point it feels like we could do a compilation of people telling us about the jobs they wish they had been able to have but couldn't for various reasons, whether it be because the lifestyle was too demanding, they didn't want to move to LA, or they had been sold this dream of fulfillment that was ultimately an illusion. In this episode, we talk with Cody Crabbe, an independent podcast producer based in Salt Lake City, who had a moment of reckoning after working a string of retail jobs and ultimately decided that he had to quit and work for himself. 

There were so many elements that went into that disillusionment, from the perverse incentive structures of hourly work that penalize you for being efficient, to the facade of having to pretend that your job is the only thing that's important to you in job interviews, to the absolute absurdity of working 40 hours a week. He even told us about a time when one of his former employers got acquired by Walmart, who cut their paid parental leave from 16 weeks to 2 weeks in an act of almost tragicomic cruelty. 

We talk about how we got here from the companies of our parents' and grandparents' generations, where it DID seem like once upon a time you could work at a job for 30 years, expect to get promoted, and retire with a healthy pension and the sense that your workplace was a community where people really did care about you that you could feel a sense of loyalty for, and why that gradually eroded away.

And then we talk about the future: the rise of automation and gig work wiping out a lot of the "stable" jobs of yesterday and what will happen if and when we start implementing a universal basic income (UBI). What would you do and what would the world look like if you had $5K a month, and could do whatever you wanted with your time? Cody thinks we could have a much more vibrant society, where people volunteered their time more to causes they cared about, we could share more knowledge with each other by taking the time to teach younger generations, and we could simply have more time for leisure. Which begs the question: what would you do with your time if you could work as much as you wanted to?

Links:

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

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We have a lot of conversations on this podcast about issues which are often moral in nature, such as the Israeli occupation of Palestine and defunding the police but often we aren't talking about the specific moral framework behind our positions on those issues, and so in this episode, we are going to have a more explicitly moral conversation than usual.