#5 INTRO: Covid and Nudge Cards, Part 1

Cakelin: You're listening to Defective Detective: a podcast about when the world's a mess, when your brain's a mess, when your body's a mess and technology, somehow. 

[00:00:11] Meet My Sister Sarah

Cakelin: Recording.

Sarah: I'm definitely recording right now.

Cakelin: I just noticed it says disk space remaining for recording. So if you wanna talk for 207 hours, we can do this shit.

Sarah: I mean, we definitely can, that last phone call was eight hours long, so..

Cakelin: Yeah, we're wild.

Sarah: We, we definitely are. 

Cakelin: Do you want me to introduce you? Or do you wanna say something about you? Or should we just not even acknowledge that there's another person with another voice?

Sarah: And then make the listener figure out if it's you just projecting it in a different voice?

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: Or put an auto tuner on it or something. 

Cakelin: Yeah. What if I just coded myself another person in my life? 

Sarah: That would be.. 

Cakelin: With machine learning? We're not there. We're not there. A lot of people think that AI can just do this wild shit that it can't. We're not there. Advances have been made.

Sarah: We do not have the technology.

Cakelin: Anyways, I was gonna say about you is, this is Sarah.

Sarah: Ta-da.

Cakelin: She's my sister.

Sarah: I'm the sister.

Cakelin: And we both have chronic illness.

Sarah: Whoopee.

Cakelin: Which..

Sarah: So exciting.

Cakelin: Is it okay that I say that you have Celiac's?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. That's cool.

Cakelin: Do you wanna be known as Sarah or would you rather have another name? I think anyone should be able to change their name if they want.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Cakelin: It shouldn't just be for trans people. Or people should be able to just try on other names. I was going by Fable in my psychedelic trips.

Sarah: Yeah. I'm trying to think now of the last podcast that I listened to, and I don't think you introduced yourself on it. At least I don't remember.

Cakelin: So a lot of podcasts, they have this beginning thing that happens behind while the music is playing, where it'll be like you are listening to Defective Detective and then it'll say a little sentence about what it is. And I forgot to put that in. Well okay, that's a lie. I.. 

Sarah: Let me start over.

Cakelin: I remembered that I didn't have it when I was at the very end of editing. Which meant that I already had the transcript done with the timestamps of every single section. So if I would've added that at the beginning, I would've had to redo every single timestamp in the transcript, and I was. 

Sarah: No. Not worth

Cakelin: I think I would rather fall off a cliff because it took me three days to edit that. Originally, the audio recording, which ours will probably be off by this even more if.. I don't know if we decide that we want to cut a lot of this chattering stuff, although I like the chatter.

Sarah: I also like chatter.

Cakelin: It was an hour and 42 minutes long, and I cut it to an hour 15.

Sarah: That sounds about right.

Cakelin: So I think the first night that I was editing it, I was editing it for I think five hours, and I got through 20 or 30 minutes and I was I'm never gonna be able to finish this. I'm never gonna be able to have a podcast. And then I look back and I have now had a podcast for almost two years and I've only put out four episodes, but I don't care because it's getting easier now to edit. I think the next night I was editing faster. But it takes time. 

Sarah: I mean that's the.. 

Cakelin: It takes the time it takes.

Sarah: Yeah, I mean that's the hard part about creating anything is it goes by so quickly when you're actually in the creating process, but then as soon as you get to the extra nitty gritty work, the editing and then the transcripting and all of this other stuff.

Cakelin: Yeah. 

Sarah: That's when you're like, I have to power through. Like the Kool-Aid man and just break through the wall.

Cakelin: Yeah. It's the 80 20 thing. I just imagined you as the Kool-Aid man. What color of Kool-Aid is my sister? Oh my God, I'm that terrible interviewer at a tech company. So tell me your five year plan and what color of Kool-Aid you would be. Have I ever told you that?

Sarah: Note to self. No, what I was going to say..

Cakelin: There was a guy at my old company who would ask people what flavor of Jolly Rancher they would be.

Sarah: Oh my..

Cakelin: That is so inappropriate, especially considering gender.

Sarah: Note to listeners though, I do not look like the Kool-Aid man.

Cakelin: I mean, you could have just let them have that.

Sarah: I mean, I guess I could have. The smile is the same though.

Cakelin: Oh yeah, I can, I can confirm.

Sarah: Yes. And I do have a habit of breaking things, so. Not on purpose, of course, but.

Cakelin: We're all doing the best we can.

Sarah: I mean well, that's what matters.

Cakelin: Exactly.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: Plus life of the party. So you know, we have now gone so far that I don't remember what we were talking about that brought up the Kool-Aid man.

Sarah: I don't remember either. This is what happens to us though, and why we end up on eight hour long phone calls, but it doesn't feel like eight hours until we actually look at a clock.

[00:05:18] Founder Focus and Content First Software

Cakelin: We were talking about the end of projects.

Sarah: Oh yes. Okay.

Cakelin: One of the things that happens to a lot of founders is that they will focus on that smaller stuff to the detriment of the bigger meatier things that.. I can't believe I just said meatier. And then when I said it again it sounded like meteor and I was like, oh my God.

Sarah: That's what I thought. Meteor sounds better.

Cakelin: Okay. The meteor things have to happen. The project that I was consulting on, I suggested that maybe they have a podcast. It was the same idea as this podcast, cause I'm not that original. Right? That they could have a podcast where they interview users for the company and get those stories out there. You're kind of hedging your bets. Making it so that even if you fail, you still publicized the issue. Made something. That's why I think that doing things in a content first way is just a better way to build a company now. Not for every industry or every founder or every product, but in a lot of ways, I think there's so many advantages to having to make content first. Because if you can make TikToks or podcasts or write a book or whatever that's in the realm of where the product is. I was mentioning to you earlier that Rob Fitzpatrick wrote a book about writing useful books. One, the book was super useful about writing useful books. I understand how meta this is sounding. Maybe one or two places in the entire book where he mentioned that they had a product to do this. So cause of SEO, a lot of companies are making content that's just marketing content and it's garbage. And so they're not ranking that highly on SEO. Google has now changed, they're always updating how their SEO works and then everybody has to mad shuffle to figure out how to get their things to list high again. Right?

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah.

Cakelin: Ridiculous how much search and social shapes what we find and what we're exposed to. Just suggested that podcast to put their user voices out in the world, because I think that that's really transparent. What ended up happening is the person who I suggested that to, instead of just wanting to do a podcast in the easiest way possible.. Like I bought the music for this podcast off from a website so that I would have the copyright to it. So I wasn't gonna try to make my own podcast music. I had debated asking my ex C about doing it. It's just so easy. You could just buy a clip off from this website and instead this person I suggested it to, decided to send out an email to this email list group to try to find someone to make music for the podcast. This is a distraction.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: It's a really fine balance because sometimes you're putting extra details into things. It helps your product stand out and keeps you engaged. And then there's getting so into the branding, marketing side of things that you're not really paying attention to the product you're building or the impact that you're having. Right?

Sarah: Yeah. On the details.

Cakelin: Yeah, exactly. I think VC, Venture capital..

Sarah: Uh oh.

Cakelin: I'm sad because Adobe bought Figma.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Yep.

Cakelin: I'm happy that Figma exists. I think it's a brilliant product. I think the fact that they could make a native like app in the browser is amazing. It gives a lot of support. I would only build a product that's a web product. I would not build separate native mobile apps. That's where we're at, with software as an industry, right?

Sarah: Yep. Well, and you want it to be accessible to as many people as possible.

Cakelin: Yeah. Which also means that you really do have to focus on it being a progressive web app. Which means that the performance of the app is improved because people could be using your app and not have the best network access not be on wifi. You have to keep that in mind when you're building things. Depends on what your user base is and how you're figuring out who those people are. I don't even like the word user and I don't like term target audience. One time, a long time ago, I found replacements for both of those, and I can't remember what either of them are. So even though I found language that I felt was better, I didn't write it down anywhere or remember it. But I hate that it's target, cause that sounds violent and it sounds like you're manipulating people.

Sarah: So why not just audience?

Cakelin: So an audience is technically a one way relationship, where they're just listening to you. A community would be the people that are in that group are interacting with each other. Community might revolve around a leader or a product or whatever. The whole strength of a community is that the people that are in it are interacting with each other. So I think user driven design needs to be more like a community and not an audience. But I don't know. And there's probably a bunch of other terms that I'm not even remembering right now. So. The whole point is. The worst leadup I've ever done. Maybe we should actually judge those and, and write 'em down somewhere at some point, because sometimes it takes me 15 minutes to say something that could have taken 30 seconds and I don't even know why.

Sarah: I mean, it's a slow buildup. It's not like Hollywood where it's explosions Michael Bay in your face. You know? It's a slow burn.

Cakelin: So, do you remember? What was it that I asked you earlier today for us to do? On this. Do you remember?

Sarah: Yes. Ask the person who has a very poor memory to remember that happened today.

Cakelin: No.. 

Sarah: Uh. You were going to ask me questions, I believe. Yes.

Cakelin: And the reason for that is cause the whole idea of this podcast, which I have not executed well on. That's where the friction's coming from. That's where the build ups coming from. It's cause I just don't want to face that I've failed at a bunch of things cause I've tried to do way too many things at the same time, but at the same time, I'm really happy that I did a bunch of things together because now I have all these skills. It's complicated. 

[00:11:53] User Interviewing Like IndieHackers Podcast

Cakelin: Anywho, user interviewing. The Indie Hackers podcast is Cortland Allen interviewing successful bootstrapped founders and then there's the Indie Hackers website, which is the product that Cortland built. What he was doing with the podcast was to showcase successful users from the product.

Sarah: Okay, that makes sense.

Cakelin: I don't really go on the Indie Hackers website that much. 

Sarah: So wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on.. 

Cakelin: used to.

Sarah: You're like, so you're like this guy, he makes this podcast to show the users using his product.

Cakelin: Well..

Sarah: But I don't really go on the website.

Cakelin: Technically the people that are on the podcast don't have to be Indie Hacker's users. They just have to be bootstrapped founders.

Sarah: Okay.

Cakelin: You know the Spotify year in review or Spotify Unwrapped or whatever? I don't have Spotify anymore cause I switched to Tidal because the Joe Rogan shit, and them not paying artists and blah blah blah.

Sarah: I've never used it, so we're in a good boat.

Cakelin: Anyway. Well sorry, let me ex.. Let me explain this product to you. Spotify does this thing at the end of the year called Spotify Unwrapped, and I've always wanted to do a version of it for Good Reads, which I wanna call Good Reads uncovered. But it's, y'know, one of my 10,000 ideas.

Sarah: Sounds, sounds about right. Yes.

Cakelin: In that data, the podcast page, where it told me how much I listened to different podcasts was just a bunch of pictures of the Indie Hackers cover because I listened to every single fucking episode of that podcast.

Sarah: Oh, was it a Netflix binge sort of a thing or?

Cakelin: I don't know. I just wanted to learn everything that I could about it and I don't listen to podcasts as much now, which is funny cause I'm working on mine. 

[00:13:46] Learning Versus Doing and Time Frames

Cakelin: I think for a long time I was focused on taking in a lot of information and it's a fine balance between taking in information and learning stuff and then creating things. If I were to think about what my balance is, I'm way more towards the learning side. I mean, doing is also learning, right?

Sarah: Yes. Correct.

Cakelin: If you make a website, you learn while you're doing it. I tend to think too far into the future. So I'll be thinking out what are all the possibilities if I built this in five years or something?

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: Instead of what are all the things that I need to execute in the next month. Basically, you need to be mentally flexible enough as a founder to have a ton of different interests across a bunch of different markets, because the main thing that makes a company successful is timing. It's whether or not all of these things exist in the world that would support the business happening at that exact moment.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: So you have to be able to pay attention to pretty much everything. Then you have to be able to switch back and forth between learning and doing.

Sarah: To make more complicated.

Cakelin: Be able to switch between different timeframes.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: You have to be able to look at a problem in terms of a day, a month, six months, five years, whatever. 

[00:15:03]  Public User Interviews for Disabled Users, Founders, and Creators

Cakelin: What Indie Hackers inspired me to do is to wanna do the same thing for disabled people that he did for bootstrapped founders. So I picked out two questions today that I think are good user questions to start with. What I have been thinking about, and I'm so curious to hear your thoughts, is basically just coming up with different problems that chronically ill or disabled or neurodivergent or whatever people have, and then bringing 'em on the podcast to interview them about that problem, and then taking the transcript of that interview and just making it available for everyone. The reason why I wanna do this is because my goal is not.. I am just gonna say it. My goal is not to be successful.

Sarah: Yes.

Cakelin: I don't really care about making money. Yeah. I, I just want, I just wanna admit it. I would like to make enough money to support myself and to build creative things and to explore stuff. I have never, I don't even think for a moment, wanted to make a billion dollar company. Do you know what I'm saying?

Sarah: Yeah, I definitely understand that. There are different types of success. It also depends on your definition of what success really means, but

Cakelin: You know, I..

Sarah: I mean..

Cakelin: ..Wrote an article about that on my blog once..

Sarah: I knew it. That's why tangent, no, no tangents.

Cakelin: we don't have talk about that now. You know when your sister is used to having a neurodivergent..

Sarah: This will be an hour long that we're gonna have cut out and make another podcast. Since we are sisters and we are alike in some ways. We both are the types that don't care about status or monetary things. We're more about improving the lives of people we care about and love and who are marginalized and getting that information out there because.. In small part to social media, which again is a double-edged sword, it is a way for marginalized people to get their voice out there. I think making a podcast like this is a great idea because it's another source to get people's voices out there and heard and hopefully heard by people who are making billion dollar projects and going, Hey, this is something we didn't consider when making our product.

Cakelin: Yeah. And we both know that disabled people are rarely considered.

Sarah: It's frustrating. How many disabled people there are.

Cakelin: Exactly. And there are other podcasts which showcase disabled people's stories. It's not that I want to completely remove the story that's happening, but I think the thing that is missing is taking parts of these different stories and doing the user research to isolate a problem that a group of disabled people are having and to put that information out there into the world. In an easy to use format. The reason why I wanna do that is because I want to help disabled people become creators and become founders or whatever else other thing that they want to do to make content or to make products for disabled people. Cause that's what we need.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And so I think..

Sarah: And again. Go ahead.

Cakelin: That's my thought is to put out these interviews in a way where the problems that come up to sort them together. So that people just have some of that user research done. I don't know.

Sarah: Yeah, and.. 

Cakelin: So.. 

Sarah: I think..

Cakelin: So even if my product fails it doesn't matter because I'm trying to help other people build products.

[00:19:04] Defining Success as Influence

Sarah: Again, what's your definition of success? Which there is a book on that my sister has read that we aren't going to talk about right now, but..

Cakelin: No, I.

Sarah: May talk about in the future .

Cakelin: There is an article I wrote on my blog. 

Sarah: An article, oh.

Cakelin: About my definition of success, I don't remember what it says, but I wrote it.

Sarah: On the blog, should go check it out.

Cakelin: Yeah, whatever. One person subscribed to my blog anyways. 

Sarah: You can get more.

Cakelin: That's true. You know that book I was talking to you about, maybe Why Greatness Can't Be Planned? I'm obsessed with this book. The premise of the book is that all great innovation happens because people didn't even have an objective and they just explored shit that was interesting to them. And then by doing that, they left stepping stones for other people to explore and create more things. So to me, I think the definition of success is influence on others.

Sarah: That's a good way to think about it.

Cakelin: Or empowering them.

Sarah: Yeah, when you start to interview people, you start to find out they have similar experiences and this just reflects back onto the isolation that you can feel when you're disabled. Which again, social media does help with that. Connecting with people that you don't physically have in your life or community. Finding, oh wow, there's someone else. Who has had an experience like mine and then you start to see trends outside of your community in the world, and then that's what you have to latch onto to try to make change. So I just wanted to bring up that one point about isolation.

[00:20:57] Community

Cakelin: Yeah. That's the point of forming community. Right? So that you don't have that isolation so that you have a sense of belonging. Today, you know how I was like, Hey, I need to take a nap first. But then of course I went on Twitter and I still took a nap. I did a Yoga Nidra nap. I was postponing doing that by being on Twitter and Brianne Benness from No End In Sight had retweeted somebody asking about a work station set up where they were laying down.

Sarah: Oh, okay.

Cakelin: And so I went and dug up an old tweet where I had my couch desk set up, and then I also shared a picture of my pillow office and I sent that to them. Then somebody else had replied and they had the same little lap desk that I have that I love, but for some reason haven't used in a while probably cause I just forgot it existed cause folded it up and put it to the side of my chair. And so that means it's gone. 

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: Oh my God, we have the same desk. And then the person who had written the original request, it turned out they were in Madison.

Sarah: Oh, wow.

Cakelin: Yeah, and so then we followed each other. More or less, whenever anybody follows me on Twitter and it's another disabled person, I follow them back.

Sarah: Yeah, that's, that's what I do it too. I actually had a similar experience like that too. With someone who is disabled but also a BTS fan. Sorry. 

Cakelin: Okay Sarah, if we're gonna have a podcast together and you're gonna be here regular, regularly, we're gonna talk about BTS. It's just gonna happen. It's part of who you are. I accept it. 

Sarah: Yes and I am definitely not ashamed of it. I'll tell you that.

Cakelin: I don't think you need to apologize.

Sarah: Okay. Thank you for accepting it. 

Cakelin: You have found a community.

Sarah: I have.

Cakelin: Where you feel belonging.

Sarah: This is true. This person is super awesome, really sweet. Just randomly responded to one of my tweets and then I found out that they were high risk. So I found them through BTS. Then I found out that they also had high risk chronically ill. We started just chatting back and forth and now we follow each other and it's a mutual support. Oh, they, oh, they posted. I gotta like it. I gotta like it. And it's just another person out there that you can connect to that you don't feel so isolated. So it's nice.

[00:23:32] Isolation Is One of Humanity's Biggest Issues

Cakelin: Yeah. I think if there is an issue we're gonna have to confront in the near future, it's isolation.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: It's figuring out how to actually do mutual aid and be in community with other people without needing to rely on in-person events and getting to know your neighbors and things like that. We've talked about this. I'm not gonna talk to my neighbors. Nobody is wearing a mask.

Sarah: Yeah. Yep.

Cakelin: It's literally unsafe for me to even just stop and talk to them within a short distance. I know I'm wearing an N95 when I walk Pepper, but it's still.. Then there's children running around everywhere in my buildings. I feel like a different person physically when I'm out in the world. Other people don't seem real to me. They seem like objects that I have to avoid instead of potential points of connection. The only way that I think that I'm going to feel belonging outside of our relationship, which is awesome, is online. I don't see another way to do it.

Sarah: Yeah. I've noticed, especially when I go outside feel very similar to that. I also have a sense of, this is gonna be funny too but I have a sense that I'm the old neighbor from Dennis the menace where I'm like, get off my lawn. Because the kids are running around without masks on and stuff. 

Cakelin: Yeah. 

Sarah: The kids outside and I'm trying.. 

Cakelin: I feel like curmudgeon. 

Sarah: Yes. Yep. And I'm trying not to be hostile, so I'll wave and stuff. They'll keep going and they won't approach me, which is good. There's definitely that separation where I'm not the neighbor from Dennis the Menace, but unfortunately Covid has forced me to put up that front, literally put up a fence. I have a fence up.

Cakelin: Wait, what?

Sarah: So.

Cakelin: You put up a fence around your apartment?

Sarah: No, I'm saying metaphorically.

Cakelin: Okay. Here I was imagining this giant fence around your patio.

Sarah: No. Wow, this really works. This metaphor works because Dennis the Menace has a huge fence. 

Cakelin: Oh, I can't remember Dennis the Menace because I don't have the best memory for media. 

Sarah: It was also black and white from the 1940s. 

Cakelin: Oh. 

Sarah: 1950s or something.

Cakelin: Well then I can't blame myself at all.

Sarah: They had it on Nickelodeon with Lassie and Leave it to Beaver and stuff.

Cakelin: It sounds familiar. I just can't recall. 

[00:25:59] Being a Covid Grinch

Cakelin: So I feel like a curmudgeon. I also call myself a covid Grinch. It's not just the kids running around and people being on your lawns. A friend of mine texted me yesterday, former friend I should say. Then I feel bad saying former friend because I didn't exactly tell everyone that I didn't want to be friends with them anymore because it was really fucking hard. I just kind of hoped that people would assume that since I wasn't responding to anyone's text messages, that they would just go away. We would just drift apart and I wouldn't have to have a painful conversation about ending friendships with every single friend that I had. These are friends of mine who have been even less safe than other people, Yeah, we're gonna go to the Willie Street Fair that's happening outside my place right now. The thing that I told you is stressing me out because there's so many people outside that when I walk Pepper. It's really hard. I'm just okay, that person's crossing the street down there and this person is standing here smoking a cigarette. I kind of wanna avoid them. It's just a lot of cognitive effort to survive.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: I understand why people have decided to have a pretendemic and just pretend this shit's over because it's easier. It's easier for them, which of course made it harder for the rest of us, and I just don't see how I could have relationships with people. when every time that they're making the decision to go out maskless and go to the bars and travel and go to super spreader events and whatever the fuck else they wanna do, that they are excluding me from the world. How can I have a fucking relationship with them? I know that this is gonna sound really dramatic cause it's always dramatic whenever somebody brings up the Holocaust.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I feel like my friends took me to the train station and put me on a train and they were like, sorry, you can't stay. And they're waving at me while I'm on the train to go to the camp while they're all partying at the train station. I know that sounds overly dramatic because I can stay home all of the time. I can avoid necessary medical care and dental and all these other things, and I'll probably survive this, but I'm gonna be surviving for a life with complete physical isolation.

[00:28:21] Statistics versus Stories and Visual Harm: How Do We Make This Real?

Sarah: I don't think that's far off, honestly, that metaphor, because if you really think about it.. 

Cakelin: Doesn't feel like it considering what's happening to people.

Sarah: Yeah. Again no offense to any listeners for this, but literally the people who are isolating right now have the privilege to do that. If you look at the Holocaust, and I'm not professional historian, the people who had a much better life. Had privileges to escape or to hide and had the connections to do that. The marginalized and the poor did not. They were the easiest to target and round up. Even Anne Frank, and please don't quote me on this, her father owned a printing. and had many employees. Those employees helped keep them hidden because they hid above the print shop. That's how they survived for so long. People who have the privilege to isolate and have the resources have a much higher likelihood of surviving. Other people have been rounded up and sent off and then they disappear. They disappear. That's exactly what's happening right now with these people is if they're getting sick with long covid or other health conditions, they disappear and you forget about them. The deaths. You forget about them until you're reminded usually by some kind of physical metaphor. I'll speak from personal experience and we're kind of getting off tangent, but I think it's important.

Cakelin: No, this is good.

Sarah: That when I was in Washington DC I went to the Holocaust Museum. I don't know anyone personally who survived the Holocaust, but I am a history minor, so I've read quite a bit about it and, it didn't really hit me the number of people who had died or had been affected until I started to see physical artifacts. I remember there was a pile of shoes and all different types: little kid shoes, men's shoes, women's shoes. Some of them were saved and they were kind of piled up. Then you see the picture behind it of a mountain of shoes. That's when you really get hit in the gut and think each one of those pairs of shoes belong to a human being. The enormity of it is something that we definitely take for granted. I know they tried to do something similar with COVID deaths. I think they put out either shoes or flags, I can't remember. Somewhere in Washington DC closer to the beginning of the pandemic, they did the same thing. To see one flag planted is, it's just one. But then to zoom out and see a million flags, it's just mind boggling. That's when you really get punched in the gut as to the effect of the pandemic on people and survivors. So I think it's very important not to forget that, or ignore that as some people are unfortunately choosing to do.

Cakelin: That's the thing about data is that we do respond so much more to one person's story than we do to figures. We can't conceptualize over a million people dying. It's far higher than that because a lot of haven't been attributed to Covid, even though they are from Covid. Yeah, I agree. I think the worst atrocities in human history have always been connected to a group of people being dehumanized and then usually segregated from everybody else. If you compare what's happening with Covid to what happened with the Holocaust is I don't know how many German citizens really knew what was happening at concentration camps and was up close to it. That's a central part of fascism working is that a lot of people are removed from having to see that suffering. That's part of the rationale for segregating people. I try not to use segregation because I don't know if that's race specific, but the history of institutionalization is the same thing. They're all under the same, isolate, separate people.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: When I think about it in terms of covid, it's the people who work at hospitals have gone through so much stress that doctors have taken their own lives. It's editing Cake to say that I phrased this wrong. I should have said died by suicide because people don't commit suicide or take their own lives. 

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And they didn't have enough room for bodies to go. They had vans with bodies happening in New York City. People like us.. I haven't been exposed to the suffering of Covid. Do you know what I'm saying?

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: I know people who've had it. I know people who've had Long Covid. I haven't seen anyone. on a ventilator.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: I'm not right up there with it. I think because of having chronic illness, because of having issues with so many of my organs over the years, I think that for those of us who have that kind of relationship with our body, where we haven't been able to depend on our body or we've had really difficult health things to go through that it just feels more real. I don't have to see someone on a ventilator to know that people are suffering and to want to do something about it. It's like they put those graphic pictures of lung cancer on cigarette cartons in order to like deter people from smoking.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: If you put a picture of a person on a ventilator on the door of a bar, would people not go into the bar? How do you actually make this real enough to other people that they wanna change their choices? Then there's this part of me that just understands why are they making these choices. Because it sucks to be alone all the time. It sucks to give up all the access and things that you had in your life, but all of us could have the ability to go out there and exist in the world if we had mask mandates. If they were giving out N95 masks to people, but the government's not going to do either of those things. 

[00:35:00] It's On Us To Manage Covid

Cakelin: So now, it is on us to figure this stuff out. That's why I wanted to start the user interviewing with Covid related things, even though I wanna expand it to all sorts of other issues. It's impacting our community in such a, I don't even know how to explain the grief and losing all of those relationships in such a short amount of time. You know what I'm saying?

Sarah: I do. I think a big problem with social media, even though it's great. It has many benefits. Again, double-edged sword is that people now are to the point where they don't believe what they see on social media. Even to the effect of if you did put up a poster of someone on a ventilator, would they?

Cakelin: I think there's third of people, at least in America. I don't think that we're gonna be able to make much of an impact..

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: On the way that they view things because they're hardcore Make America Great MAGA people and they don't believe in vaccinations and science and things like that. I don't see what we can do about them.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: And that's a third of people.

Sarah: Yeah. Even to the point where if something does happen, there is a loss or a death. If they're vaccinated, oh, the vaccine did it. They're going to. Do whatever they can in their power to continue to be correct in their mind.

Cakelin: Yeah. Otherwise they have to face cognitive dissonance and lose their belonging.

Sarah: Yeah, and that won't happen. That didn't happen to the point where there were stories of people who were in disbelief that they were dying.

Cakelin: I think it can happen for some people. I listened to a memoir, I can't remember the name of it, I can't remember the name of the books that I've read. The guy in it was a white supremacist, was raised a white supremacist, and then went to college and got exposed to these other people and by the end of everything, he was no longer a white supremacist, but he had to lose and he had done a considerable amount of harm in that time. I have some complicated feelings about the fact that, y'know, as a white man, he's now a professor. He changed his name and is just living his life. At the same time, I think we need to give people paths out of being radicalized at that level. Otherwise, it's gonna be even harder. 

[00:37:39] The Language and Groups of Covid

Cakelin: I don't know what to do with all of that, but that's just the third of people. There's a third of people who are very high science and community minded that are still taking Covid precautions and there's a third of people in the middle that are a mix of a bunch of different things and are kind of following the crowd and probably changing their mind frequently. I think my prognosis or prediction is that these groups will become more static and more defined over time and we'll start to develop language around it. There's Covid shielders or there's Covid cautious. I think we're gonna get more defined language around what some of these things mean. I think until we have cognitive shortcuts for what people's behavior is, we're gonna need to figure out ways to share our Covid choices with other people. I don't think that this level of physical isolation is going to work long term. There's even disabled people who are giving up on doing any precautions. There needs to be another option there where it isn't oh, I'm gonna give up completely and just start going everywhere maskless and not try at all. Versus having to be indefinitely isolated and not around anyone. That's what public health did. They put that division in place. Because we could have kept mask mandates and then everybody would've had a standard of behavior. Instead they decided that divisiveness was a good idea.

Sarah: Yep. They shifted all the.. 

Cakelin: They shifted all the animosity.

Sarah: Yeah. To disabled and marginalized. 

Cakelin: Instead of judging public health, they'll see somebody in a mask and harass them because they don't wanna be confronted with reality.

Sarah: Yeah. To the point now where I saw a post of I think it was the New York Metro, the MTA. . Yeah, so the MTA they had started the pandemic with these yellow posters of how to wear a mask properly.

Cakelin: Yeah.

Sarah: They were really cute and effective and were great. Then all of a sudden, a couple weeks ago, they did an about face to make fun of their own poster.

Cakelin: I saw it, it had four faces on it. Right? And..

Sarah: Yeah. Yep.

Cakelin: One of them was a person wearing a mask under their nose?

Sarah: One was the mask covered their face and they were great. And then the next one was covered just their nose and it was okay. Then another one was underneath their nose and well that counts. The last one, didn't have any mask on at all. You do you, and it's like what? Making complete fun of their own poster and message from earlier in the pandemic. Of course this just caused mass confusion then cause it's more misinformation out there. Just unbelievable that the government in general does this to their own programs and messaging. It just keeps muddying the water even more and more.

[00:40:50] Democrats Left Us to Die and Gaslighted Us About It

Cakelin: Y'know what was wild? For me to tell somebody, the reason why I don't like Democrats the other day is because they've left us to die and be isolated. And for that person responded with, well, even the Democrats are gonna pick the economy. I didn't think about it until after, it's not better for the economy to do this. That is a bold face lie because it's not better for the economy for 4 million people to have Long Covid and be unable to work.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: not better for the economy for those people to then have to crowdfund medical necessities and help from everybody else in their life basically bringing down the wealth of the 99% because we have to rely on other people. It's only wealthy people, extremely wealthy people or somewhat wealthy people that can just rely on themselves cause they have so much fucking money. It's not better for the economy because a third of people, are still deciding to stay home because there's no mask mandates. What would've been better for the economy is to improve ventilation in all public spaces that are indoors and to have mask mandates. If we would've had those two things, less people would be getting disabled. Less people would be getting sick and missing work or pulling their kids out of school. Online learning is not worse for kids than them having Covid multiple times.

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: We all know this. Anybody who's living in reality is aware of this. Some people have accepted it because they're like, I just can't do anything about it, so I'm not gonna wear a mask and I'm just gonna do what everybody else is doing. The ambivalent people, but there's a third of us that are like, fuck no, this can't.. This is..

Sarah: Yeah.

Cakelin: You can't gaslight all of us. The reason why it's advantageous for government to make these choices isn't because it's better for the economy, isn't because it's better for workers, it's because it's better as we confront the climate. because the more that they can get people used to dividing themselves into different groups and only caring about what happens to their group, the easier it will be for government to not take responsibility for all of the people that are gonna die everywhere in the world. I know that just got so dark, but it's true. Look what's happening in Pakistan right now. While our media isn't covering it, people are going on vacation and taking trips and going out to bars and partying and shit like it's 2019.

Sarah: Yep.

Cakelin: That's what the government wanted. It wanted to reinforce privilege and reinforce comfort at the expense of lives. And it worked. It worked. It worked with a lot of people. 

Sarah: It did.

Cakelin: That's it for part one of this episode, but there'll be two more parts. See you later, Defective Detectives. Bye!