I'M THE VILLAIN Isabel Knight & Deondre' Jones

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 short months. We talk to Mike and Stephanie about what their community-building goals were for this camp, and the main thesis is that, if you think you are the only one who wants to build community, you're NOT. You may be more or less willing than some of your friends to sacrifice and invest in the community but you're certainly surrounded by people who are lusting for more community.

Stephanie tells us about her community growing up: her parents went to church, and though she wasn't fond of sitting in a pew listening to sermons, she did love being part of a community.

Mike was an RA (Residential Assistant) in college and he would leave his door open all the time, sometimes to come back from class and find his residents in his room playing on his GameCube, which he loved!

So now we are in or almost in our 30's and we are trying to figure out how to make these kinds of communities happen for us again, or at least get as close an approximation of it as we can. Mike knows friends whose parents moved away from their college friends in their 20s, only to decide to ask all of their friends to move in close to them, and they actually did!

So maybe, even though it can seem so unlikely in a world where social ties are simply growing weaker and the loneliness crisis is accelerating, our dreams of multigenerational communities who gather regularly for potlucks and take care of each other's children is actually achievable: maybe all we need to do is ask.

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.


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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.


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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 have siblings, or whether you are an only child) can be a really big part of determining one's personality as well. We also talk a lot about relationships and how the social dynamics are changing such that women really stand to lose to much more when entering into cishetero relationships because single women are the happiest women in America, and single men are much less happy compared to their partnered counterparts. Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.


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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, which essentially just utilizes lenses to magnify things to the size where you can see them, like the microscope you probably used in science class. An ELECTRON microscope is used to look at things which are smaller than the wavelength of light! So the things you can look at in an electron microscope are on the picometer scale, which means you can look at the structure of proteins from the brain, for example. The microscope shoots a laser at the proteins and an electron detector receives the electrons that bounce off the protein, forming an image that scientists can then look at and synthesize into their research.



Lastly, I always like to ask guests who talk about technology how hard it would be to turn the technology they work on into a weapon: listen on to hear about whether you could turn an electron microscope into a space laser!



Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.


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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 moved to New York after being nomadic for most of the pandemic and living in San Francisco prior to that. They chose New York because they have family on the East Coast they wanted to be closer to, and they also love the bigness of everything. Isabella was also pleasantly surprised by how convenient it was to have everything she could possibly need within a 15 minute walk from their house. We also talk about some of the cons, like the smells and the pressure to be doing everything all of the time. Generally speaking, we talk about which factors are most important to us when deciding on a place to live, ranging from things like crime, proximity to friends, ability to drive around easily, and even just being able to smell fresh air. And at the end you'll also get a bonus little story about Isabella almost missing a flight, Deondre' accidentally going into the women's restroom, and Isabel being hit by a car. Links:Isabella's Blog, "What Would a White Man Do?": https://www.whatwouldawhitemando.com/Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.


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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 section that talks about how racism was actually conceived of fairly recently in human history, when white landowners in Virginia were trying to come up with a solution to the class-based unrest amongst the workers. At the time these "bondsmen" were of both white and black skin colors, and had deals with the landowners that said if they worked long enough they could buy their freedom from servitude and be given a parcel of land that they could work themselves. However, the white landowners decided that the best way to appease the masses, who were getting more and more agitated about their economic situation, was to allow the white bondmen to receive land and to deny land to the black ones. This strategy became law in 1619.



This makes race one of the craziest acts of evil genius that humans seem to have come up with: those white landowners probably had no idea that their Hunger Games-esque scheme would be a major force throughout all of subsequent American history, they were likely only out to save their own asses. So we talk about whether there are other similar social constructs that have been a force for good in human history, and why it is so difficult to see and appreciate those things as well, when there are so many dastardly human ideas that seem like they are shaping our modernity.



Link to My Grandmother's Hands: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34146782

Music is The Beauty of Maths by Meydän.


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Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/im-the-villain/support