Ky and Martine are two DJs who went to the same elementary school. Martine says she doesn't think they were actually friends until second or third grade, when they did a cooking club together. They tried to make whipped cream from milk and it didn't work because you need heavy cream. Around age 12 or 13 they started riding the bus home together and sharing headphones, which is when Martine says the friendship really started.

Today, they both live in NYC and run a DJ collective together. They're both thirty now. In this episode, we talk through their friendship.

This episode is about the male loneliness epidemic. I know. I spent about a month talking to men about it and kept noticing the same thing: you can't approach it directly. You have to come at it sideways, usually as a joke, which is both the only way in and the reason no one gets very far.

What I kept seeing is that the joke is doing two things at once. It opens a door. But it also keeps that door from opening all the way. You can make it funny, you can build a whole podcast around the irony of the name, and still not quite arrive anywhere.

Lily Lady, and Maya are two escorts who are friends. I talk with them about the friendships that form when you speak the same language and what you see when you work alongside a friend. Then Jennifer Worley, author of Neon Girls, tells me about the women she met at the Lusty Lady, a San Francisco peep show where the dancers organized the first successful sex worker union in the US and then bought the place. The word that keeps coming up is civilians. As in, everyone else.