I'M THE VILLAIN

If you share our politics you might be a nervous wreck right now, but one thing that both Deondre and Isabel like to do for our physical and mental health is go rock climbing. So we have on a super fascinating guest, David Liu, who works at a popular rock gym chain called Movement. He talks to us about how rock climbing has ballooned massively in popularity, and is now an Olympic sport. But the thing is, when rock climbing was intr...

We do a little processing of what the hell happened with the election, including where we think the Democrats fucked up, and where we go from here. We are joined by our very important, insightful, and charismatic friend Ronald Young Jr, of Oh Its Big Ron Studios. It's his 4th time appearing on this show, we ran the receipts.

Our assessment basically boils down to this: the Democrats did not find a way to speak to working people, u...

Reflecting on the previous episode, where Deondre' tells us about his experience of jury duty back in February, we talk about what we think the ideal system should be given that Deondre' has now had this experience. Isabel also had a friend of a friend go through a high-profile trial recently, and we grapple with what it really means to be a prison abolitionist, and the many contradictions that come with it. For example, de...

Prepare yourselves for a Cuckoo Bananas episode because Deondre' got called for jury duty and not only was Deondre' worried that he was going to be the alternate juror and not get to weigh in on the case at all, he actually got to be the foreman, which is the person who reads the verdict. This was an emotional job because the case was a murder case. We talk about the details of the case, and in the next episode we will cont...

Ya bois get down on some modern political commentary, albeit many months out of date (this podcast was originally recorded in November 2023) but a good lookback on our initial reactions to the crazy bullshit happening on the world stage happening now.

Ezra Klein came out with take when all of this was going down in October, saying the thing that makes this situation feel like we are all being constantly gaslit is that the mode...

Friends we are BACK ON OUR BULLSHIT. This episode is long overdue because Deondre' got married back in October and we recorded it back in November and now it is June. But fear not, we still have evergreen content for you all in the form of being messy and talking about our ex's, talking about the vision that we have for our romantic lives and what happens when straight boys read bell hooks. There has been a lot of evolution...

It has been an actually ridiculous amount of time since we last posted an episode, but we are back! And we are back with another installment of Millennials Lust After Their College Walkable Community!

We recorded this episode back in October 2023 about a camp what Mike Wheeler and Stephanie Logan put together called Camp Logwheel that Isabel attended in Septemer, and now that are already planning their next one for May, in a few sh...

This is a continuation of the previous episode from last week, and in this part of the conversation we UNPACK some SHIT. We talk about what happens when you are happily in an undefined relationship, and then eventually society comes along and peers in the window and asks you WHAT YOU ARE. This has been a particular frustration for Isabel recently, and so a lot of this episode is shooting the shit about our relationships and what is...

In this episode we talk about what we personally value when meeting another human being, and if there are particular factors that we find particularly revealing when it comes to a new person's personality, whether it be a potential lover or a new friend. Deondre' is all vibes. Can they talk about something interesting at length, do they laugh? Isabel really things birth order effects (whether you are the first child if you ...

Ok that might be a bit of an exaggeration, Cosmo Alto may not be the electron microscopist in the world, or North America, or Manhattan, but he is definitely the best electron microscopist I know. In this episode, Cosmo sits down with us and tells us about the wonderful world of electron microscopy.

If you're not familiar, for the majority of scientific history, we were using light microscopes to look at small things, whic...

What factors do you think about when you are deciding where you want to live? This is another one of those life design episodes where we discuss the factors we think about when trying to design how we want to live.
When I was at South by Southwest in March, I ran into my friend Eric from high school, who I haven't talked to in like a decade, and his partner Isabella Chiu. She came on the show to talk about how they recently ...

In this episode Deondre and I (Isabel) talk about this book that Isabel has been reading with her book group called My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem, which talks about how trauma physically manifests itself in the body, and how human beings can try to deal with that trauma using somatic methods like humming together, dancing, and physically settling the body by focusing on breathing.

In this book, there is a secti...

Jesse Moss is the Senior Marketing Manager at Experience Camps, a free grief camp for kids. Before she worked at Experience Camps, she was talking to her friend having one of those classic conversations about how to find a job that you find meaningful, and her friend told her about the nonprofit for the first time. She knew she wanted to work there but they didn't have any job openings at the time, so she signed up to volunteer...

Martin Froger-Silva woke up one day in fall of 2017 to find his Berkeley home surrounded by smoke: it looked like a scene from Blade Runner 2049. He looked outside and the entire sky was red, like he had been transported to the surface of Mars. For weeks on end, due to the California forest fires, Berkeley was in the "purple zone," which is considered the worst zone to be in on the air quality scale, with particulate matt...

"I feel like my mother loves me more than she loves herself, and it makes me feel really guilty. Am I bad if I don't love her more than I love myself?"

Man, turning 30 does a lot of things to you. This quote is from our conversation with Chelsea Hines, a New Orleans-based musician, screenwriter, and entrepreneur (among many other things) and what started off as a conversation about being a musician and what that entails qu...

Kimaya Diggs wants you to ask her about her mother. One thing Kimaya can tell you about her is that before she died, Kimaya decided to take a pottery class, which her mother asked to join in on. She was incredibly prolific: she created around 300 pieces, but didn't like to glaze her work as much as she liked throwing pots. So when she died, she left behind around 60 unglazed pieces that the owner of the studio was nice enough to ke...

When our friend Margot was getting ready to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), she thought she would be bored, and that this was going to be a period when she listened to more audiobooks than she had ever listened to in her life. But it turned out that when she actually started hiking, she didn't feel the need to listen to many audiobooks or music and she had a realization: so much of the world we live in currently can be harsh an...

We have probably all seen the late stage capitalism memes by now: "Stop glamorizing the grind and start glamorizing whatever this is" is a famous one, though there are many more. In this episode we talk about the societal shift towards glamorizing doing nothing. We talk with Winx Vestrit, a friend who works with Isabel on the board of the National Home Funeral Alliance, about a tweet that really resonated with them which goes: "The...

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 w...