I'M THE VILLAIN

There's a lot of episodes we've had about major life pivots: Andy Reinhold (Episode 78) talked about how he started in consulting, quit his job to follow his passion and work in gaming, and then went back to consulting to support his baby. Sara Alepin (Episode 123) wanted to be a teacher, but after a student stomped on her foot and left her permanently unable to walk more than a few hours a day without pain, she pivoted to being a wedding photographer, podcaster, and running a businesses community. Ayana Major Bey (Episode 134) wanted to be an actor in plays and then a global pandemic hit.
Aaron Matis' story is a bit of a meld between Sara and Ayana's stories: he dreamed of being an actor, and at 26, he was cast in a show on Nickolodeon. He had succeeded in almost everything on his 5-year plan: "I was peaking in every measurable way." Then, one fateful day, he was walking down a hill with a cooler and fell and tore his meniscus. This one fall changed the course of his life forever. 3 surgeries later, and his doctors say he will likely never run again. He moved back home to Scranton from LA and is starting on his next 5-year plan: one that doesn't involve acting.
He tells us about the sheer amount of self-hatred that came after his surgery, and how it was so difficult to accept help from those supporting him: "I so much hated myself that I started to resent people that loved me because I thought there must be something wrong with them." He thinks of his former self as a completely different person, and in therapy, he has managed to go through the process of grieving that former self and that former vision he had of what his life was going to look like.
But he also talks about the process of rediscovering joy and trying to find happiness in simply being around the people he loves, and not worrying so much about what physical activity they may be doing. He talks about being able to empathize in a new way with his sister, who has a rare condition that causes debilitating bouts of pain, and has found a community in online groups for people who suffer from chronic pain.
"I'm not the happiest that I have ever been...but I am getting there."
Links:

PALS Programs, a camp for kids with Down Syndrome that Aaron has worked with and loves: https://www.palsprograms.org/
Deondre's new show, 3Disc Changer, a podcast where three friends take a deep dive into an iconic album each episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-disc-changer/id1644161173

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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 matter above 300 ppm, or parts per million (if you're interested, you can check out your local air quality here). California was wearing N95 masks long before Covid happened because of these fires. At one point, Martin's partner looked at him and said, "We are breathing in dead people."

This was a major wake-up call for Martin, who had been working in immigration at the time: it made him realize he needed to go into working in climate change. He went on to get a graduate degree from Scripps in Environmental Science, and learned a lot about things like how the weather works. We asked him what some of his main recommendations are around what the average person can do about the climate, and his main piece of advice: get involved in local politics to see what climate policies are being considered in your state, and educate yourself on what is most effective. In the climate space, there is a decreasing emphasis on individual accountability as it relates to climate change, and a greater focus on how we can influence companies, whose emissions far outweigh the emissions of individuals in the US. We're starting to realize that this problem can only be solved with serious legislation, as opposed to hoping that our individual consumer actions will save us. One main focus for Martin is public transportation, but there are so many more climate-related areas for the average citizen to focus on.

Links:

Martin's website: https://www.martinfroger.com/

"The 6th Extinction," by Elizabeth Kolbert: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185/thesixthextinction

"This Changes Everything," by Naomi Klein: https://thischangeseverything.org/book/

"All We Can Save," an anthology of pieces by 60 women authors about the climate crisis, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkerson: https://www.allwecansave.earth/anthology

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

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 important about them to us. We also continue talking about the importance of the middle tier friend, which is a friend who is not your best or closest friend, but someone who is just a solid friend that you can talk with regularly and there's never any drama because the stakes aren't too high with middle tier friends.
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

We have been doing a lot of introspection during this podcast, and this particular episode is the culmination of a lot of the conversations we have been having recently about racial justice and the general power dynamics at play in American society. We invite our friend Ronald Young Jr. back on the show to have a conversation about whether power is zero sum, Black Panther and whether Michael B. Jordan did a good job as Killmonger, and the general axis of change with the Martin Luther King Jr. nonviolent approach on one side and the Malcolm X violent revolution approach on the other.
This last topic has obviously been a topic of discussion for decades so we don't claim to come down on where on this axis we ought to be in this episode, the closest we probably get is that mainstream society has really picked a side (the MLK side) and in reality, the answer is probably more ambiguous than mainstream education would make it seem. While we broadly agree that incrementalism is a better approach than violent revolution, we talk about how one of the most important questions of our current historical moment is deciding what strategies progressives should be employing, given that it can be so demoralizing to be on the side where "when they go low, we go high" always seems to be the least effective way out.
Links:
Chadwick Boseman video talking about the 2 little kids with cancer who inspired while making Black Panther: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-D86wfxiE&ab_channel=SiriusXM
Ronald's podcast Time Well Spent: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/time-well-spent/id1191403830
Ronald's podcast Leaving the Theater: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/leaving-the-theater/id1481268414
Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.

The show is a conversational podcast where we talk about all the things that are fucked up about the status quo in America, with the perspective of the villain (Isabel) and hero (Meronne). In our first episode, we talk about the hero-villain complex, what making an impact means when you were brainwashed to have a very narrow definition of "doing good" in college, and why the world we are moving towards is going to be increasingly built by teams instead of gloried individuals, whether heroes or villains.

Note: A loyal listener of the podcast, Josh Palay, pointed out to Isabel that the story about Mozart and Salieri is, in fact, not true at all: according to Wikipedia, "However, even with Mozart and Salieri's rivalry for certain jobs, there is virtually no evidence that the relationship between the two composers was at all acrimonious beyond this, especially after around 1785, when Mozart had become established in Vienna. Rather, they appeared to usually see each other as friends and colleagues, and supported each other's work." Nevertheless, Isabel feels that the value of the story as it stands to highlight the false dichotomy of success which is still so commonly peddled by our universities, the Olympics, the Nobel Prize Committee, and so many other institutions, still holds water.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Salieri