I'M THE VILLAIN

I'M THE VILLAIN

By Isabel Knight & Deondre' JonesSociety & Culture
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I'M THE VILLAIN episodes

  • 103. The Living At Home Episode: Living With Your Parents at 28

    Forget about buying a house; that's not even on the radar for most millennials. Let's talk about living with your parents. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people moved home to live with their parents either temporarily to weather the pandemic or permanently. But Candace Howze was already living with her parents, and for many millennials, that is the normal state of affairs in today's skyrocketing rental markets. And now that the eviction moratorium is ending, that will likely be the norm for even more people than ever before in recent history.

    So let's talk about what it's like relating to your parents as an adult and how difficult it can be establishing "adult" boundaries with them when it is so easy to slip into the power dynamic you were used to growing up. How do you date? How do you have a separate social life without your parents policing your life? And lastly, what takeaway lessons are there for your relationships with your own future children that can come from an experience like living with your parents into adulthood?


    Links:

    Candace's website: https://www.candacehowze.com/

    Candace's Twitter: https://twitter.com/aceisjoy

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    37 min
  • 102. The Dating with Disabilities Episode: If She's Saying You Can't Defend Her In a Fight, You Gotta Ask WHO IS SHE FIGHTING?

    In a continuation of our conversation around disability from last week with Marquis Kearse, we get into what it is like to date while disabled. What are the power dynamics around one person in the relationship feeling like they need to take care of the other, or one person being deemed more conventionally attractive? And from there, we go into some heavier and more personal topics, like how protective his mom was when he was growing up, and what his thoughts are around assisted suicide, or as it is now referred to, medical aid in dying. And lastly, we talk about the bioethics question of whether Marquis, if given the ability to edit genes out of the human genome, would choose to eradicate genetic disabilities.

    Links:

    Crip Camp, a documentary on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81001496

    Twitter feed of Alice Wong: https://twitter.com/disvisibility?lang=en

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    51 min
  • 101. The Disability Episode: COVID Has Proven That People Don't Really Care About Disabled People

    Now that we are headed back to "normal" life, and a lot of people are going back to their workplaces, movie theaters, therapists offices, a lot of disabled people are wondering if we are also going to be making a return to a world of inaccessibility. In this episode, we sit down with Marquis Kearse, a disabled person with brittle bone disease who uses a wheelchair, to hear his story and talk about the ways in which the pandemic has made us rethink the way the world needs to look. So many of the changes we have made to adapt to the pandemic has been inadvertently great for accessibility, such as being able to work from home or do doctor's appointments from home, etc. and now they are fighting to keep those wins. On the flip side, whenever we hear statistics about Covid affecting people with pre-existing conditions, like how the vaccine is 95% effective, often the people in that 5% are DISABLED people and so wearing masks and getting vaccinated is truly a service we do for the most vulnerable people in our society. 


    Lastly, let's just talk about how freaking EXPENSIVE it is to be disabled (wheelchairs cost thousands of dollars and you need a new one every 5 years) and that is doubly nonsensical when you think about how you essentially need to be permanently poor in order to receive disability benefits because there are income caps to most disability programs. This is a wild world we live in y'all.


    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    54 min
  • 100. The 100th Episode: What the Revolution Will Look Like

    In this episode, we sit down and do some processing about what the past 100 episodes have taught us, and what larger narrative has come out of these conversations we have been having with millennials from across the country during this pandemic.


    Broadly, Isabel has definitely become more radical over the course of this show, and she talks about how the conversations we have had here have informed that, from our conversation with Yolanda about decolonizing parenting, to our talk about defunding the police, all the way through our more recent conversations on the Israeli occupation of Palestine with Sean.

    Both of us have been thinking about incremental change and whether reforming institutions is more stable in the long run than trying to dismantle them, and whether or not we need to have allies on board in the fight to bring about this kind of systemic change. We also discuss how privilege plays a role in how cynical or apathetic you allow yourself to be in the face of these monumental systemic odds, and how in spite of that, you need to use your logical left brain to trick your emotional right brain into thinking there is still hope, because that in and of itself will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    40 min
  • 99. The Social Work Episode: Why We Should Take The Problems of Kids More Seriously

    We have been wanting to talk to someone who does social work for a while and finally we got a chance to talk with Destiney Kinsey, a social worker who has worked in all kinds of different settings: she has worked with kids in schools, adults in the military, senior citizens, you name it.


    In this episode, we talk about the relationship between social work and the Black community, the various ways we think we handle things differently when we grow to be adults, when we actually maintain a lot of the same coping strategies we build when we are kids, and how social work impacts parenting.

    A big takeaway of this episode is that we should really take the problems of kids more seriously. We often don't think they are under comparable levels of stress, or that they don't deserve confidentiality, but in reality, kids really go through a lot at home.

    Links:
    Destiney's private practice, Revive You Therapy, which focuses on Black women professionals going through a life transition: https://www.reviveyoutherapy.com/

    Destiney's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reviveyoutherapy/

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    36 min
  • 98. The Play Episode: Why You Don't Have to Monetize and Compare Everything You Do As An Adult

    This episode is a smorgasboard. We get the change to sit down with Lauren DeVera, a life coach, dancer, and fellow podcaster. We met her because Isabel will be speaking on a panel with her this summer at a podcast conference called Podcast Movement to speak about the Asian American podcasting experience, and she just so happened to live close by, in Alexandria, Virginia.


    She also runs a dance studio called The Lion's Den, and a few weeks ago, she hosted her first in-person event since the beginning of the pandemic, which Isabel attended, and it was AWESOME. It was this incredible coming together of people who loved to dance, and was such a clear example of adults getting a chance to PLAY in a way that we often don't give ourselves permission to. Everything is so often about running around getting promotions, doing side-hustles, and then trying to calm yourself down in between those activities enough to have a sustainable mental state. Which we often fail at.

    So in this episode, we talk a lot about play and why it is so important, life coaching, positive psychology, and the scarcity mindset that so many people find ourselves in that winds up preventing us from doing the things we truly want or need to do.

    Links:
    Lauren Devera's Website: https://www.lauren-devera.com/

    Lauren's Podcast, Thrive and Thread: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thrive-and-thread/id1525470424

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    52 min
  • 97. The Burnout Episode: The Way to Address Burnout Isn't Self-Care, It's Unions

    It's a word many people associate with millennials: burnout. But it's a phenomenon that has been around for a long time, but has new manifestations in our world of psychological and social engineering baked into apps like Uber, giving the brain little hits of dopamine if we just finish out the hour, or Facebook, getting us to keep scrolling for just a little longer.


    And in the areas of activism, where the content is mentally and emotionally exhausting, how do we spread awareness around important issues to the right people without just showing black people dying to black people who already know about the issue?

    In this episode, we sit down with AJ Joyce, the host of the She's So Reel podcast, to talk about her experiences with burnout in the entertainment industry, nonprofit world, catering, and just being a Black person in the midst of a pandemic and a global racial reckoning.

    Links:

    AJ's podcast, She's So Reel: https://shessoreel.com/

    She's So Reel on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shes-so-reel/id1450553422

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    51 min
  • 96. The Alzheimer's Episode: "We Are On The Brink Of A Financial Tsunami"

    Richard, from the Fatherhood Episode, is back! And he is talking about being the chair of the Iowa chapter of the Alzheimer's Association. We talk about how scary it is to have Alzheimer's (just imagine people you don't recognize coming into your house and telling you they're your own son or daughter - if you haven't watched The Father, which was nominated this year for an Academy Award, they show a poignant depiction of this), how hard it is to get a diagnosis, and what the Alzheimer's Association is doing right now to lobby for the rights of people with Alzheimer's and fund research to find a cure.


    Links:

    Alzheimer's Association website: https://www.alz.org/

    Alzheimer's Association 1-800 number: 1-800-272-3900

    Richard's personal website: https://www.richarddedor.com/

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    48 min
  • 95: The Solidarity Episode: There Are Decades Where Nothing Happens and There Are Weeks Where Decades Happen

    In a continuation of last week's conversation, we talk with Sean Emery about the larger picture: not the specifics of Israel and Palestine, but about the larger global movement going on amongst the working class.


    It's an exciting time to be a revolutionary. We just experienced the largest protest movement in American history. Just this week, as this episode is being released, we have major news organizations finally covering the Tulsa massacres, 100 years after they occurred, and we saw the last 3 survivors testifying before Congress last month. Human Rights Watch, a pretty centrist organization, has formally classified the Palestinian occupation as an apartheid crime against humanity.

    All of this is incredibly exciting to watch as many activists have waited for decades for this kind of recognition. And a lot of people have been activated by these recent events and are wondering what to do if they want to act in solidarity. We start this conversation talking about what a revolution looks like in the modern day, because most people likely think of violence when they think of revolution. But we talk about how we can spur social revolution by putting in place the education and institutions to allow for a global watershed moment and put workers in a position where they can truly leverage their power. And to create these conditions for change, we need to activate the human impulse towards collective action and solidarity instead of ingrouping and outgrouping.  

    As Lenin once said on the topic of social revolution: "There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen." And it's hard to say, but something in the air seems to suggest that those watershed weeks could happen any day now.

    Note: In this episode, Sean refers to the Sinovac vaccine as a Russian vaccine, when in fact it was developed by China.

    Links:

    Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition: https://www.instagram.com/freepalestinephilly/?hl=en

    Socialist Alternative: https://www.socialistalternative.org/

    Article on Human Rights Watch classification of the Israeli Occupation as apartheid: https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.



    46 min
  • 94. The Palestinian Occupation Episode: Why Fighting Israeli Occupation Requires Fighting Capitalism

    Right now there is a violent occupation going on in the West Bank and Gaza. At the time when we were recording this episode, the ceasefire between Hamas and the Israeli military forces had been going on for about 20 minutes.


    We sit down with activist and organizer Sean Emery to talk about why this issue is so difficult to talk about in America in 2021. He leads the Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition (PFPC) and is also a member of Socialist Alternative (SA). He talks about how he sees class and socialism as a fundamental part of the solution to the current ethnic cleansing going on in Jerusalem, specifically around Sheikh Jarrah and al-Aqsa mosque.

    This is one issue where looking at the modern media, it really is hard to get down to something that feels like an objective truth. Just as with the George Floyd murder, despite there being a huge amount of footage of the crisis being posted to social media in real time, you'll find many people who support more "traditional" leftist positions, like Black Lives Matter or gun control, denying that the Palestinians are under a brutal colonial occupation or who say that both Israelis and Palestinians are suffering equally.

    In the United States, because we are such a young country and far away from most other countries, it can feel sometimes like we are insulated from longstanding historical conflict by both time (most millennials only heard about the Iraq War through the news) and space (we only share borders with 2 other countries). So it can be tempting to write off what's going on in Palestine as an age-old religious conflict that is simply unsolvable. But as you'll find in this episode, many of these dynamics are less than a century old (Israel was established in 1948), many of the original Zionists were actually socialist, and class dynamics and capitalism play a bigger role in the current crisis than you might think.


    Links: 

    Philadelphia Free Palestine Coalition: https://www.instagram.com/freepalestinephilly/?hl=en

    Socialist Alternative: https://www.socialistalternative.org/

    Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

    1 hr

About I'M THE VILLAIN

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to I'M THE VILLAIN, a podcast about 2 millennials trying to decode, deconstruct, and dismantle the world as we know it.