Marc Brackett (on emotional intelligence)

I'm Randall Shepherd Cobb Tech's Hobbes, and I'm joined by Monica Padman. - That's boring. - I know.

“- You said you too many. - No, it's okay.”

- It's okay. - It's okay. - It had already tipped in the first one. Today we have Mark Brackett. He is the founding director of the Yale Center for emotional intelligence and a professor at Yale University.

He's also a best-selling author with the book Permission to Feel, and of course the book he's here to talk about, dealing with feeling beautiful episodes. - I've already recommended it to a few people. - Yeah, he's a special vegetable dude. - He's a special vegetable dude.

It's including yourself. Yeah, it's incredible. If anyone has a kid at a school where the curriculum is SCL, social, emotional learning, that's Mark. Yeah, that's his curriculum.

Anyways, please enjoy Mark Brackett. (upbeat music) - Hi there, welcome, Mark. - Thank you. - Nice to meet you, Monica. - Nice to meet you, Monica. - Where do you live, Mark?

- I lived in two places with a New York City. - Okay. - And I live in the countryside of Connecticut. - Oh, okay. - Speaking of virtue of a nice sweater on. - Yeah, you do have a nice sweater on.

There's a lot of fun colors around the collar. - I actually was like, wait a minute here. I'm a little matching matcha with my socks and my family. - It's nice and Monica's the perfect person to observe this 'cause she's a fashionista.

- Okay. - I do like fashion. Look, the collar's kind of mad. - They kind of mad. - I worked hard to get this collar. They did not want to do it. - Yeah, you're very stylish, you have beautiful Adi does.

And these Adi does are of the current trend. I've noticed the cooler people at my kids school are wearing. - What are they going to school? - This chartered now in the street. - Okay.

- Why can I do it? I work with thousands of schools. - Your curriculum is at this school. The SCL curriculum is. - It is.

- It is. - Oh, that's amazing.

- I probably rare that you would be interviewed by someone who's child. It's the product of your brain child. - Only two people, Chrissy Tegan. - Okay. - Okay, but let's start at the beginning

which would be New Jersey. My first question is how does one determine whether they're going to spell Mark with a C or a K? - I mean, my hunch is that it's a Jewish thing, actually. - Okay, that makes sense.

- I don't know why. - I go up Jewish. And Mark in the Bible is with a K, I don't know if I may have something. - Okay.

- And your dad was-- - My dad is not Jewish. - He's not Jewish. - No, he converted. - Was he a charismatic man? - I wouldn't say charismatic. I don't know what I would say.

- Depends what day it is. - He stole a lie. - No, they both my parents have died. So it's easy for me to write about them and talk about them. - Exactly.

- Yeah, I have that luxury too. - Yeah. - A good guy, but Kara's not a guy wouldn't describe it. - Okay, I just sales many. That's generally--

- He wasn't, he wasn't a he was a repair man. - Oh, he was a repair man. - And tell me about your mom. - She also was a character. She grew up in the Bronx.

My grandfather owned a liquor store. I think he was a crooked liquor store owner. - Oh, wow. - My grandfather was Jake Lamada, I remember. - Oh, the boxer.

- Yeah. - From my mother's gathering, he would port half the bottle and put water in it because he was so drunk that he could sell him half the bottle. - Oh, okay.

- Yeah, my uncle was not known for his scruples. (laughs) - But was he tough? If you're from the Bronx and Dad owns a liquor store? - No.

- She was neurotic. - And how did that manifest? - I think she was more of a leotentive to what wasn't happening for her. - Oh, okay.

(laughs)

“- That's why I'm going to say hello to her.”

Research is me, sir. - Yeah, we're off and all right. - It gets some answers that alluded us in our childhood. But tell me about childhood. - Like, grew up in Northern New Jersey, two parents?

- Does that mean it's close to Manhattan? - Yes, 25 minutes outside the Lincoln Tunnel, little town called Clifton. Next to a more posh, she town called Monclair, which people have heard of.

- I've heard of that.

- That's where Bobby Brown restored that amazing hotel.

- Yeah. - I believe, right? - I think you're right. I don't go back too often. - But yeah, two parents, mom, dad, two brothers,

they're technically half brothers. My first book, which is called permission to feel I go into a letter to detail about that, which is that from the age five to ten, abuse by my parents best friend.

- Which was a neighbor? - Yeah. - Also, it comes out. - He was a worker at the Boys Club, where I would go after school and...

- Yeah. - Yeah. - But that lasted, unfortunately, for five years. - Yeah, that's an eternity. - That's double your life.

- Yeah, that's the amount of time. - Yeah, yeah. - Yeah. I was gonna say, wait a minute. - Sorry, I'm really not gonna math, but...

- Yeah, ten, you had already spent half of your life in this situation. - In this dark secret. - Yeah.

- 'Cause I'd never disclosed it.

“- Can you remember the motivators of not declosing”

was it that Threats had been made that someone would get hurt

of responsibility for it all?

“- I think it's an all the above kind of thing.”

You know, I joke now after 20 years of therapy and a PhD in psychology, that my father, he also was from the Bronx originally, from Manhattan actually, but, you know, when the tough side of Manhattan,

my father would say things like, when I was a teenager, to give you a clue into his charisma, like, "Son, I used to be kids up like you." - Sure, that's gonna come for you. - Yeah. (laughs)

- Okay, Dad, we could talk about that in your parenting class. - Yeah, he really wanted you to be an alpha monster. - Yeah, I don't know a lot about his childhood. My hunch is that it wasn't,

I mean, I know it wasn't a healthy one. His father would burn cigarettes. My grandmother, I'm pretty sure with schizophrenic. I only remember just having a flashback. So when I was around, maybe 9 or 10,

my grandmother to make money lived in a house and upstate New York and Cooper's town, this little nowhereland. Some like nine years old, it's a spooky house. I mean, this house is not like a nice country house,

like Spookville. And my grandma used to take care of old people with mental illness to make money. So like Elsa would be sitting there rocking in the chair.

I'm like nine years old, it's a house of horse. - Yes, yes. - And my grandmother promised me a horse. And I'm like, okay, horse, horse, horse, yeah. So that's lives into my childhood.

That's my father's side. My mother's side is the liquor store owner. And then my grandmother had terrible bipolar disorder and was treated with electric shock therapy and my mother took her for that.

- The immediate silver lining of this is on paper, no shot. You're gonna be riddled with mental health issues. You're gonna repeat the cycle. And I'm not betting on you. - Right.

- So like that's-- - You are betting on me now. I help me immediately. - Now. - Immediately, the silver lining is like, yeah,

it doesn't necessarily matter what ingredients go into it. - Well, that's, you know, as a psychologist who does research, part of me really doesn't like to do these predictive studies. Because if you would have measured my social and emotional capacities, my mental health, my relationships,

I had self-hatred, I had an eating disorder, I was lonely depressed, everything. And you were saying, okay, that kid-- - I know the percentage is, eight percent and chance you're gonna be an addict, 55 percent chance of this.

Educational achievement? - Yeah. - Is this number? - Exactly.

“I'm not a big fan of that because I think”

that's too deterministic.

Just to go back as the real critical element in my childhood

was basically a magic wand that happened, which was an uncle. - Marvin? - Yeah. - Who was a middle school teacher in the Casca Mountains

by day, by night, he was a bandleader at the Concord Hotel, these famous borscht belt hotels. - I'll fund it, he played the clarinet, you just might learn. - He was a trumpet player.

- Oh, trumpet player. - Oh, I'm sorry. (laughing) - So was he dazzling, he was in show business? - Oh, he was there.

- You can't even picture this. Imagine, like the Robin Williams character in Deadpool, it's a society singing La Bomba at a Jewish resort in the Casca Mountains. Who teaches social studies by day?

- What? - Yeah, it's the Patrick's lazy movie. - Yeah, it's dirty dance. - It's dirty dance, even meat. - Yeah, that pose, sorry.

- Exactly. - So he happened to be going to grad school, near my hometown in Jersey, with staying with us one summer, and we're sitting in the backyard. And it just looks at me like no one else had ever looked at me

before and he's like, "Hey, Mark, are you feeling?" - That's a go on. - Yeah. - There it goes. Everything comes out, I hit my life, I'm being abused.

- Oh wow. - All this happened. It was a pretty crazy moment. - Do you think what made him a good candidate in some ways was simply also the knowledge

that he was going to leave? Like, he might take your secret with him? - Yeah, I don't think so. - No, okay. - 'Cause I've now done research on these people.

I call them the Uncle Marvin's in our world. - Mm-hmm.

“- And I think he had a number of key qualities.”

Number one, he was nonjudgmental. He was so curious about my life. He just asked all these great questions. He was warm. Now my parents were kind of warm,

but my mother would be triggered with it. Like, you know, I could do that and she'd be triggered. - Yeah, yeah, that's my father's saying. - Yeah, my father was the same. Like, you know, what do you think you're talking to?

And I always say that, but the father

who just tells you to toughen up all the time and a mother who's gonna have a breakdown, no matter what you say. Like, I'd be bullied, and I'm getting bullied. Oh my God, I can't handle it.

I'm gonna have a breakdown. I'm like, I'm the one having the breakdown. - He's exactly. - Yeah, you're either too fragile to exist or you need to be this hyper-masculable.

- Yeah. - I'm gonna bowl up proof figure. - Exactly. Uncle Marvin was different. He was warm, he was nonjudgmental.

He listened, he was compassionate. I'm sharing with you, like, the results of 75 studies that I've done. After I wrote this thing called permission to feel,

I decided, like, that was an anecdote.

I decided that my uncle gave me permission to feel. And I was wondering how many people have an uncomorbent or an amorea or whoever. Someone in their lives that create the conditions for them to be open honest and truthful

about their feelings. And when my research shows across the world is only a third of us. - Me. - Like that in our life or in our past.

- Yeah.

“- The only way I was able to say out loud”

that it had happened. My motivation was very much, I'm defective. Like, no one's gonna love me if they know this. - Yeah. - Two, I'm gay, where I grew up at the time I grew up.

That meant I was gay. I knew at the label of gay man, which was ostracized from everyone in school. So yeah, the stakes of it felt really enormous. And then I carried that for, I guess probably 10 years

and then I grew up in my senior year

while talking at a birdhinks and I'm the hood in the parking lot told me that she had been raped that summer by somebody. It was just so available and honest, it would have felt like a crime to not match her vulnerability.

- Yeah. - It would have felt really good for her. - She just said, "Genius, so then I told her." - Did you have an uncomorbent? - I would say she was, right?

I think she's the person that got that out of me. I don't know when it comes out, if ever it comes out without her, yeah. - Well, I think you were. He was.

That's why she said it to him. - Yeah, maybe I was. - You were that person for you. - Yeah, I was warm and non-judgment or maybe she felt comfortable to tell me that

and then I felt like I owed that back to her, yeah. - What about for you, did you have an amoreo? I don't call Marvin? - No, I wouldn't say anyone in my family

could hear anything. - Monty's first generation, Indian.

- Yeah. - Yeah, so the emotions are probably to be avoided. - Emotions are to be, or they're scared. It's not that you can have that. - It's positive emotions only.

- Yeah, otherwise it feels like you're burning them 'cause they're worried. It's kind of the same. It's not like, even still, it's like that. It's like, okay, I have to tell you something

and then you see the stress on there. They're trying, they're trying to be there, but they're like, okay, it's, yeah. And I'm like, oh, no, now they're so stressed about this thing.

So no, I don't think I did. - I don't have any, I mean, I did have friends. I did have a lot of friends. - Yeah, did they have friends? - Yeah, I did have friends.

- I didn't have capital T trauma to report. - Yeah, I mean, everybody's got a story.

“I think that what's critical about this,”

going back to the research for a minute, is that it does predict a lot about our lives. And so I've done studies where it's like, you have one, you don't have one. What's different about your personality?

What's different about your mental health? What's different about your life satisfaction? And I find huge differences, like 15% differences in people's purpose in meaning of life. - Can I add one thing?

Which is kind of comical? It's like, you would think abuse is so specific. But at the core, you and I have the same fear, which is, you were Indian, did not want anyone to know 'cause that would lead to exclusion.

I was secretly gay 'cause I had been molested and was gonna lead to exclusion. Like funny enough, the driving force is still like, I'm not gonna be part of my community from this shame, yeah. - Yeah, and I was gay, or am gay.

And so I was, even when I was like a teenager, and I was having some courage to talk about it, my parents blamed it on my abuse. It's like, oh, you know, it's like, you just think you're gay because you were abused.

I'm like, well, actually it's like a really different phenomenon. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And in an implies that what you have is dammit. - Exactly.

- Exactly. - Yeah, very complicated. - I mean, I grew up in New Jersey with the only gay guys that I had access to in terms of knowing what it meant to be gay.

It was like my mother's hairdresser. And it was like, right, you know, flamboyant Teddy. - Yeah. - And I'm like, I'm not Teddy. - Yeah.

- There's two questions I have about your child. One is, there was somehow media attention that followed the revelation. - Unfortunately. - This sounds terrible, please, what happened?

- So it just so happens that my parents had a friend who was a psychiatrist. - Who happened to be a writing a book about pedophilia. And I'm kind of the same today as I was when as a kid. I was precocious.

I got a lot of grit. I'm a very like persevering kind of guy. However, it's like, you know, development matters. So when my parents friend said to my parents, I'm gonna be on television.

“And I think Mark should join me to share his story.”

- Oh God. - And my parents told me about it, which they probably should have done to begin with. I was like, I gotta do this, yeah. I'm gonna protect other kids.

I'm gonna tell, and I did do it. 12, yeah, dumb, dumb, dumb. I mean, national television, it was like a big station. I forget what it was back then. I think it was WPIX, New York.

And so here I am. And of course, now my secret, which I had disclosed

also really weird place to live. 'Cause the pedophile, he got arrested, but then returned home for a year before he went to prison. Something every day I'm driving this go in his school, like seeing this guy, his house, his kids were my friend.

(gasping) It was very awkward. And then it becomes a national television. Now I'm like a pariah, you know, I'm just terrible. No one realized like, wait a minute,

people don't know how to deal with this at home, nevertheless, in the world. Here's 12 year-old Mark, who's like, going to like, six grade. - Yeah, yeah.

- It's like forget it. - My friends, parents, would like, done play with Mark. - Now you're a liability. - Exactly.

I mean, honestly, it was horrific. It led to a lot of bullying and eating disorder. - You had bulimia? - Yeah.

“- And I think we have a pretty common understanding”

that that is generally a search for control. - Yeah. - Is that what it gave you? - I mean, I was so distorted with my self-perception. I had body dysmorphia, I would look in the mirror

and just see something that wasn't there. It was like a teenage kid next door who was very fit. And I just lived an envy of that. - Everything just mess with my brain. - Well, yeah, also if everyone's the world

is telling you your bad or stay away from you and you're like, "I'm trying to do the right." This is so confusing. For an adult, it would be confusing. Identity-wise, let alone a kid.

- Yeah, being applauded for your bravery, I'm sure, but then the results are like, "No, what do you want to say?" - Trauma, really. - More double trauma. - Yeah.

- It's like, I disclose it to get rid of the trauma. And I'm double traumatized. - So did Uncle Marvin tell you to tell your parents? - Oh, yes. - And what happened like, my brother was there, it became

like moment where my father took him back. It was gonna kill the man. - Oh, wow. - My mother called the police. He got arrested immediately.

“Happened to be one of our neighbors was a police officer”

who kind of helped facilitate all this. But then we realized like, there were a lot of kids in my block. I was the only one who just closed it, but other kids then. And then like his nephew lived in our block. And he said, "Oh my God, not again."

Like, dude, like you let your uncle who abused you, moved to our block. And like, you suppressed it, but now like we're all victims of it. That's not cool. - Well, again, that becomes,

we just had an expert on, she's the head of the Johns Hopkins Center for Studying this. And I have lived with the guilt of like,

well, I never told anyone.

I don't know if that dude went on to do that a bunch more. And a little bit relieved that she told me like, 70% of sexual abuse towards minors is from other minors. Who don't necessarily ever do it again? - Yeah.

- I was comforted by that. Like, well, God, I hope that was the situation 'cause I have the guilt. - 'Cause here's was the teenager. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - I had that too, actually. So another neighbor, you know, also decided that that was another opportunity. - I tried to don't wanna get this.

I don't know where I grew up with the era I grew up on, but there was so much fucking perversion happening all around at all times. - It's still on the day of our terrible times of how much abuse there is.

Some of us get through it. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - And I dedicate my career, my life, my health, my wellness to my uncle because he gave me something to focus on,

which was basically how to be open with my emotions

and then how to regulate them. - Right. I'm surprised you went to Rutgers. I might have wanted to get many, many states away. - It was 'cause it was state and cheap.

- Okay. So you went there and you did undergrad there. - Did undergrad there, majored in psychology and Spanish. - I'm like one of those people that has, I'm very non-traditional career path.

I taught martial arts. - What version? - It's called Hopkido. So I got a fifth degree of black belt in Hopkido. We came very, very competitive and taught it for years.

And then I also sold skin care with my mother, which I'm not sure why I just told that to it. - It's a shit shit shit shit. - And then nutrition products and that was a whole... - That was like a--

- That was a multi-in-level marketing company, I imagine. - Yeah, yeah. (laughing) I was like, I'm gonna be a diamond. - Yeah.

- Yeah, of course.

“And while you were studying for a GRE, your mom passed?”

- Yes. - Bomb the GREs, got rejected from graduate school,

the first year, all of them, nobody accepted me.

I'm sitting with my mother, 23 in a diner in New Jersey. She was not feeling well. I've later learned that she had pancreatic cancer. - Which is very accelerated.

She died four months later. - Yeah, yeah. - I'm selling skin care, I graduated college. I am teaching karate, I'm teaching aerobics, I'm teaching all these things, and trying to figure out who I am,

what I'm doing my life. I had a girlfriend for many years, and my mother just looks at me at this breakfast table. And she's like, your father, and I have determined that you're a loser.

- Oh my God. - Yeah, tough, love time. - Oh yeah. And I looked at, I said, go fuck yourself. (laughing)

And I couldn't help it. - Yeah. - And she runs out of the diner, screaming and crying,

She's driving the car, running circles, and the parking lot. I run after my mother.

“No mom, it's gonna be okay, I promise you, I'm gonna lose her.”

- Yeah. - It was a really big moment in my life. Of course, who do I call? - I'm goal. - I'm all right.

- Round two, I'm sitting down. (laughing) - Not getting those, like road trip to Fort Lauderdale, 'cause he had a retired there. And actually, I really bonded for a second time

with my uncle, and we just started talking through things. And I like, I had to get out of my situation. It was eye-opening. It wasn't like the most emotionally intelligent way of motivating your kid.

- Yeah, we're not recommend. - Exactly. - Exactly. They could have been done with a little bit more compassion. But anyway, it did force me to go to Florida

to be with my uncle for a little bit. And that's when I decided to pull him out of retirement. And we would write a book together. I'm just like 24. What do I know about writing books or curricula?

My uncle is in his mid '60s retired. And just a little side story about this.

So my uncle was this incredible person.

Not only for me, but for his community, for kids. But his program was so provocative in the 1970s and '80s that the parents forced him to retire.

“This moment's where I walk around, you know,”

5,000 schools use our program now. We've reached 10 million children across the world. And I think what I get accolades for, what I get to talk with you about is what got my uncle fired. - Yeah, yeah.

- It's crazy. - So that's what he was pursuing was some kind of emotional occasion. - He realized it was a missing link in education. And he was really ahead of his time

in terms of this field called SCL, which wasn't there 50 years ago now. And so I pull him out of retirement. We start writing this curriculum. And then I realized, like, I have no credibility.

- Right. - Like, who's gonna buy a book? - You need to be annoying to it. - Yeah, I need to get a PhD. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - And so I decided to apply for my PhD. I just thought, oh, there's these researchers. One is at Yale. One is a New Hampshire.

I wrote to them both. They both agreed to meet with me for lunch. The guy from Yale said to me, you're a great guy,

but you're never gonna get in.

- Oh, yeah. - And the guy from New Hampshire is that I'll give you early admission. - Yeah. - I guess I go and go and go in in a Hampshire. - Yeah.

- That was also a shock. - That wasn't John Mayer that you must. - Yes. - It was. - Yeah.

- Okay, so John Mayer became your supervisor. - Yep. - And tell me a little bit about John Mayer and his contribution to this. - And I think now would be a great time

to define emotional and tell it. - Good idea. - So John Mayer or Jack, as he goes by. - Do you think they've added the deed

“to his name on Wikipedia because of John Mayer the musician?”

Did he always go by John D. Mayer or is that-- - I could that make so he's had that. But maybe. - And then the other person is Peter Salva, who became the president of Yale.

These two guys wrote this theory called Emotional Intelligence that I was using to guide my curriculum. - What was novel about this term emotional intelligence? What were they doing? How were they approaching it that gave it validity?

- Historically, I mean, you think about it. When I say the word emotional, what comes to mind? Quick.

- You always think of women.

- Yes. - It's very gender. - feminine? - What else? - I think like lots of control.

- Right. - Right. - Angry, sad. - Yeah, like hysteria. - Yeah. - hysteria. Emotional, like you can't handle it.

- Yeah. - Well, that's the opposite of emotional intelligence. - That's emotional stupidity. - They say our emotional bankruptcy. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Emotional intelligence is using your emotions wisely to achieve your goals. I mean, that's a broad definition. Now we get specific, and this is where my research has gone. So Peter and Jack wrote this theory.

They proposed to set a skills. And then what I've been doing for the last 25, 30 years is kind of fine-tuning it all. - Really quick. So the traditional intelligence has metrics,

or we attempt to, right? We have IQ tests. We have different tests to assess the aptitude of your intellect. Did they propose a scale to evaluate? So how does that scale work?

- So let me tell you the skills, and I'll tell you how they measured. - Okay. - So the first skill is about perceiving or recognizing emotions.

So I'm looking at your facial expression right now. I'm looking at you, I'm like, is this going well? Is this not going well? - It's self-awareness and social awareness. - Uh-huh.

- Obviously coming from my background, I'm more vigilant than many of you other people would be. - Yeah. - 'Cause I got to, like, you know, I'm gonna get beat up here or, you know, my safe.

And we're doing that subconsciously. From the moment we wake up, and we have a feeling in our bodies and our minds, to the walking into the set, to going to a school,

our brains are making predictions. - It's incredible. Is this sounding we can do it? - Well, but a lot of friends don't do it so well. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- It's like this underrepresented area of intelligence or intelligence that we don't give enough attention to. Hence the work that we do in schools to try to make this part of the curriculum,

which, by the way, if we wanna talk about that,

- Really? - Oh, really? - Political, it's been polarized. - Like his face, like saw. - It's woke.

- Yes, woke.

“- It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not, yeah, yeah.”

But it seems to overlap with this endlessly progressive. Let's all talk about our feelings. No one's gotta be tough and just fucking show up and do the job. I get it.

It's not offering me to lock into what they're feeling. - Yes, and the thing is that the way you said it, is not what it is. - Correct. - It's fine.

- Someone who's observed it in my jailburn, yeah, that's not what it is. - It's like that's not, I don't want kids. - No. - It reduces for jail, funny now.

The fear is we're making all these kids so fragile that they can't, you know, function. But yes, the opposite is true. This makes you incredibly resilient. - And the irony is that people who normally

are saying it and saying it in that way are the people that have no emotional tools. - Yes. - Generally, because that's a scary area than anything else.

- Yeah, I think they're scared in a way that it's not locked into what it's like to have emotional tools.

“- I think to be compassionate to those people,”

yeah, when they consider it being emotional, they have the sense that to do so would be to completely destroy them personally and would be no coming back. So I feel that's a person who can't do all of this.

- They need tools. - I remember some of them, yeah.

Again, I always say that dude in the pickup truck

that's jacked up with the nut sack hanging out the back that flips me off, that is my hardest guy to have the compassion for. And it is the one that needs the most compassion. - It's funny, you say that.

So I'm giving a speech. I do these reunion speeches at the university all the time. It is hundreds of alumni, I love doing these speeches. I can just joke with all the graduates. And then I'm driving home.

I'm literally on Route 95 and this massive truck dries by with a flag and it says, "Fuck feelings." (laughing) - Yeah, you can't make it up. I don't think they know I was giving a speech 15 minutes.

(laughing) Anyway. - Fuck feelings. - And it's like, really? Stay tuned for more armchair experts.

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incorporated in all state affiliate. (upbeat music) Here's what I find. And I want to go back to the skills in a second. But what I find is that people have a misunderstanding

of what it is and that they're against something that it's not. So when I meet people who are against the work, I just say, well, what do you think it is? And then I say, well, let me show you what it is.

How would you feel if your kids had good strategies to manage stress and anxiety? Definitely want that for my kids. How would you feel if your kid had a better vocabulary so you can describe things in right better?

That's important. I said, well, that's what it is. Yeah, exactly. So, okay.

First skill, by the way, the acronym is ruler.

So, wrecking knives and motions, paying attention to other people's emotions, face, body, voice, behavior, paying attention to my own emotions,

“what's going on in my hand, what's going on in my body?”

Boom. I'm so sorry, you're right. I'm just crossing my mind. We know that for us, I don't know. I don't know, I don't know.

It doesn't bother you. You can die in 2018 at the end of this event. I love it too. We know that for autistic kids and adults, it is harder for them to read some of the cues

that would let them know what the other person's emotions are. Do they have the same difficulty identifying their own? Oftentimes, yeah. Yeah, okay. So, that's a struggle for other people.

It is a struggle. We probably caused some of the outbursts and stuff. They bottles up. We've worked with many schools that serve children on this spectrum and we've had great results.

We just have to go slower, use more cues. What's interesting is that oftentimes interventions have this weird thing. Oh, we're gonna make the kid less autistic. That's not our goal.

Our goal is to help the child be who they are, but have slightly more skills in that space. There's also this very annoying thought, which is like anything short of perfection is proof that it doesn't work.

So, even if you take the autistic kid to one on the scale to three, their life experience is gonna be measurable better. Completely, I live in the world of everybody's got

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, recognizing emotions,

we're gonna give it that one. Yes. All right. Next one is understanding of emotions. So, this is really trying to understand

“why we have feelings and where they come from”

and the differences between and among them. So, I'm gonna give you a little test of emotional intelligence. What is the psychological difference between anger and disappointment? What's the cycle?

Anger is outward and disappointment is inward. Okay, well, that's really good, that's a good one. It's good, it's not correct. I gotta go. It's a B, sorry.

Fuck. Yeah, but on that same train, I would say anger generally, you assign responsibility something outside yourself and then the other one you're responsible for.

Yeah, it's like a shame. No, shame is shame. I guess it can come externally. Yeah, you can be disappointed in others, I guess, too. Yeah, yeah.

Maybe it's okay, I wanna kiss you. You wanna be perfect. Oh, I do. Oh, I do. Oh, I do.

In fact, I feel like before the other one is perfect. Yeah, that. (laughing)

“You should have a brother, you should have a brother.”

You're so long. There's like a sadness and disappointment. You let me down. Like an expect, maybe expect. There you go.

Oh, no. So, disappointment comes from unman expectations. Anger comes from perceived injustice. Right? It's like that's not fair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Now, give kids. You say sleep? Yep, yep.

If I come home from school, I hate school. How am I feeling? I was a frustrated, something to frustrate. How do you know? I just think 'cause it's, yeah, it's all consuming.

Anger is like a really physical response. Well, being conditioned, you have temporarily, yeah, or it's just like, you're a Miguel is on fire, right? You're not running anything through the frontal lobe. You're assuming that from my behavior.

Yes. This is where emotional intelligence comes in really handy. 'Cause we tend to overly diagnose emotion from behavior. When we observe and to behavior, we think we know how the person is feeling based on their behavior.

Got you. And I could be feeling shame, I could be feeling sadness, but I'm a boy who is gay. I don't want anybody to know and I'm feeling inferior, or whatever, and I'm just going to look to off. I'm going to try my best to look to off.

You're going to be my dad, and you're going to get triggered by my anger, expression, and then it's going to be a whole thing until you can lower your emotional temperature to be more present with me and help me lower mine and get to know the why and the understanding. You're not going to know that it's actually someone spit on me on the bus when I hate myself. Yeah.

And I'm afraid to go to school tomorrow or whatever it is. Here's the research. We grossly over estimate our skills. Yeah. You know, I think I'm rated this and it's like, well, let me give you some feedback.

And so you think about how many people misperceive our facial expressions or body language. I get misperceived all the time.

People always think like there's something wrong when they come near me and I'm actually

pretty content. But I think because of being a scientist, I'm literally always thinking about stuff and I make weird facial expressions. So when I'm walking, I'm not like walking like, ah, I'm walking like huh. People are like, what's wrong?

I'm just thinking about something. Yeah. You're like grinding through a thought a lot of times. Yeah. Well, even worse, I think is like, yeah, you have what you interpreted, which is often

wrong. But then I think even worse than that is you immediately run it through your narrative. So it's like your kid comes home frustrated. Your overarching fear for me is like, oh, my kids don't know how good they have it. They've grown up in abundance and I'm so fearful they're not right.

Have no gratitude. Yeah. I have no gratitude. No, I understand. So anytime they're unhappy, it sends the alarm bells that that other things happen.

So my inclination is to figure out a time where like, oh, we'll know where you inconvenient.

“You know, did you have to wait in a line, you know, my fear of what to go wrong is likely”

what I'm going to attribute it all to ultimately like attribution error.

That's what it is. It's attribution errors. It's a mis attribution of emotion. And so this skill of recognizing other people's emotions is tricky because A, we hider emotions a lot.

So understanding emotion is understanding the causes of emotion, the consequences, the differences. And I think the key here is, you know, going back to our stories of growing up as a gay guy is a lot of homophobia in our society. Yeah.

So when we grow up, yeah, and even still right now. And so as a gay guy, I might be more triggered by homophobic jokes than you would be, or you would be. Right. You might be more triggered by race stuff.

Oh, I am. Yeah, we get it. We do get it. We do get it. Yeah.

I have the luxury of pretty much thinking everything's funny because I'm very

Exactly. Yeah. You're good.

They rarely come for us in the jokes.

We've gotten in a lot of fights about like what's mean and what's not mean. And it's really interesting because, like, for me, I'm like, that's mean. He's like, it's not mean. But there you go. Yeah.

He's like, nobody's here to be upset about it. But for me, it's so deep being called something or made fun of in that way.

“Even without your knowledge, the ultimate fear, are they being nice to me here?”

But when they're by themselves, they're like, yeah, so brown. Yeah. So I just like put myself in every, even if it's not a race joke, but it's just like something. I'm just like, no, you can't do that.

And I think what you're getting at here is the core of understanding. So going back to anger, perceived injustice. My husband is Latino. He's dark skin. And so we've been in situations.

We were in a restaurant in Connecticut and this is the best. We're getting sad to sit down. And the host says, where'd you get your tan? Oh, boy. And he's like, my mother.

My mother. He's not, you know, like a wasp to as a tan, you know, anyway. He's the real deal. He's what us whites are going for with that tan. Yeah.

Now, he's an immigrant. So his relationship to the American kind of thinking around race is different. Even though he's my husband, we've been get a 32 years long time. I cannot relate to what it feels like to be a man of his skin color walking around a story in Connecticut and being monitored.

That doesn't happen to me. Just like, well, he can't really, because he's also gay. He's got no more. But I was gonna say, I a little bit reject that. Say more.

You cannot experience those exact details, but those human emotions you can. You're making a good point, which is that I can relate to the shared emotion. You've been in a locker room with a bunch of straight dudes that somehow are speaking some language so organically, and you're like, what the fuck? Correct.

So I can't relate to the experience, but I can relate to the emotion associated with the experience. Which are unifying, which is beautiful, humans have the same emotions.

“And that's why it's so important to get at the emotion level.”

I can't talk about what's going on in your head when someone's monitoring you as a person of color. Just like you as a straight guy, you have some background in this, but you're not gonna feel the same way I'm gonna feel, or have the same experience psychologically, as I'm gonna have when I hear people making jokes about Jews or homophobic stuff.

But we can have a shared emotional experience. And that's what emotional intelligence really at the understanding level is. Is I need to have empathy and compassion and curiosity about what makes you feel the way you do so I can be a better friend. Yeah, totally.

Otherwise, I'm like, well, why would you feel that way? That's not a emotional intelligence. So then there's the L labeling emotions, getting super precise about our feelings. And we have a tool that we call the mood meter, which you may have seen. It's in schools.

It's a two by two grid of colors to help people describe their feelings. Actually, quick side note is during the pandemic, the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest reach out to me is like, "I really would love to work with you on an app." And so we created an app called How We Feel that is free forever.

We have three million people using it now every month.

That's incredible. And it is a tool to help build emotional self-awareness. And so it's fantastic, trick it out. But the idea behind it is that it takes the science of emotion. So emotions have pleasantness associated with them, and they have energy or activation levels.

And you cross these two things and you get yellow red, blue and green. Yellow was high energy pleasant, like happy excited, green, pleasant but low energy, like calm content, blue, low energy but unpleasant, sad, disappointment lonely. And then the red is the upper left, which is high energy, unpleasant, anger and anxiety. And so it put 144 words to map that out with their definitions so people can build their

emotional self-awareness. And the key of labeling is just precision. Let's try one. Can we try another one? Yeah.

Stress, pressure, fear. What's the difference?

“Anxiety is I think unique in that or specific in that you are very fearful of the outcome”

of something, which is unknown. Stress to me can be much more predictive. I've had the same job for 35 years. Oh, I'm in one right now.

We always have to stockpile this time of year so we can have a vacation.

It is what it is. But I already have had the experience of doing it. I know. I'll get through it. So it's like I don't have anxiety about it, but I have the stress of the workload.

What were the other two? Pressure, pressure, and fear. I think there's no difference. I want you to get your PhD. Oh, you don't have to trick questions.

I didn't. I didn't.

Yeah.

I mean, I throw a lot of people say they think I'm like Mr. neurotic emotion labeling guy.

And the pressure to me is just stakes. It means it's something of value. It could be an indicator that you value this thing. That's why you feel the pressure of it. Yeah, I don't think pressure is negative necessarily.

No. It could be, but it doesn't have to be. Okay. And then fear. Fear to me is related to anxiety in that it's generally an outsized feeling about something

that when you're in, you'll just walk through. There's some asymmetry to fear. Let's get really, let's get to them. Let's get granular. Yeah.

Yeah.

So anxiety, it's actually as the word, emotion granularity.

So anxiety is about uncertainty, perceived uncertainty around the future. I get anxious when I can't make the prediction. What's going to happen? Stress is having too many demands and none of resources. Can't do it all.

I'm fine, night. Yeah. Pressure, something at stake is the pen upon your behavior. So the pressure for me to get through this podcast, then that anxious about it. This is early in that stress, it's pressure and a perform and fear is impending danger.

Now why does this matter? I would say that most people are really prone to label those things interchangeably. Yep. And all four have much different solutions. That's the key.

That for yourself, for your loved one, for your kids, for your colleague, really getting at that level of granularity will help you have a solution. So for example, if you're anxious about something, you're going to ruminate likely. You can go for the walk, you can come back and ruminate. You can take your deep breaths, you can do your yoga, you do your downward dog and you'll

still come back like, what's going to happen? So matching the emotion to the strategy is key. That's my new book called Dealing with Feeling, which is the help people make that connection. Because most people, even, I'll give you an example, Yale, all of these bright people, all my students said they were stressed, I was like, come on, stressed.

I mean, I had empathy because they were 70, 8% of the time feeling that way. But at the same time, I didn't believe it was actually stressed.

“What do you think the number one emotion actually was?”

Anxiety. You know, it would be my guess. You're at this weirdly interesting phase of your life where they're giving you four years of figure out exactly what you want to do for the rest of your life and the future's very uncertain.

Yeah, and how does one know if they've picked the right line? It's all about the future and did I pick right and am I rising to the occasion?

And the answer is none of the above.

Okay, correct. That was a trick. That was a trick. Yeah, you didn't get to slide a trick. Sorry.

The answer is envy. Oh. There missed labeling stress for envy because they're sitting in class thinking you study for fewer hours and get better grades. Your father's famous.

Your mother has connections with Wall Street. All they're doing is making social comparisons. So physical appearance about you were the real validatorian. And so I did this research with them where I had them journal about all their feelings and came back and found that the real understanding of emotion showed up at was envy

not stress or pressure.

“And I think that's important because what you would do to manage envy is a way different”

than what you would do to manage anxiety or stress. So the core of my kind of newer work is really helping people make the connection between their emotional experience and the selection of the best strategy to regulate it. Crazyly, what do you think the number one hoped for emotion is? Like, how do you want to feel at school at the university?

What their answer would be? Yes. Oh. I mean, would they be honest enough to say, I think everyone just wants to be a door. It's close.

It's loved. Yeah, love. Love. They supply. The envy wouldn't attract me because everything's about social comparison these days.

But the love one was a little sad for me, especially on college campuses. So I did some more research about that. And here's a sad part, which is that the number one reason was they said they felt manufactured. They felt manufactured. They felt like their parents, their school they went to, to get to be at a place like

Yale, they just needed to perform, perform, play this sport, do this instrument, get this thing, get this thing, SAT scores, GPAs, travel to this country, and they felt like they didn't have an identity, which is unbelievable. It would be very easy to assume that you were loved because of those accomplishments, as opposed to, like, you're just intrinsically loved because you're parents.

Yeah, they feel it's all extrinsic. That's heartbreaking. Yeah. But very predictable.

“Like these elites are all, so don't you think that's everyone's answer in the whole world?”

For different reasons, how do I want to feel in my marriage?

But how do I want to feel at work?

I don't want to feel loved. That's too much for me. And just, you want to feel respect. I want to show value to appreciate the importance of that. Yeah.

But some people do want to feel loved at work. They want to. Yeah. And that's not, that's not. But if you're going to a college where 2.5 was the average admittance, no, that's not

how your parents picked other things. They were like Tony, so funny at a party. He's so good at talking to adults. He's a great athlete. Soon, in absence of great accomplishments, the things your parents

will call out about, you're probably more character-driven. Yeah. Which feels more substantive or more intrinsic, which is like, they'll say he's so nice to kids or he's so good with, you know, whereas if your kid just got a 4.0

“and got a fucking 1800, that's what you're going to hear them tell the friends.”

Well, hopefully you'd hear them say, like, they're hard work or something still intrinsic. That's what you want. So going back to what we started talking about with Uncle Marvin and permission to feel is that the challenge for most of my students is they don't feel they have

the permission to feel. That's why they're dying to feel loved. And most of them, in most people in my research, say, they feel judged from the moment they came out of the womb. Like you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too dark, you're too light.

Like, nose is too big and nose too short, this pants don't fit you right from the moment you come out. It's like judgment, judgment, judge, judge, judge, judge, that's what the number one characteristic that people are saying, they're wanting in other people is non-judgmental. That makes sense.

So we got through a recognition, self-awareness, social awareness, understanding why am I feeling this way, understanding how people feel, so then they're understanding the labeling, the expression. This is where the cultural difference is really show up, where it's kind of knowing how one went to express emotion with different people, across contexts, and across cultures.

My work is translated now to 33 languages. And so I've gotten all over the world. And we have a center in Italy that does trainings throughout Tuscany and Italy. And you know, go there. Marco, where have you been all of it?

Hmm. Hmm. Like, oh, I love Italy.

“You know, I go to Hong Kong, Marxon, you know, about to me.”

Yeah. I go to Wall Street.

I always joke about this because I gave this talk at a big hedge fund.

New York City. And the guy came out as Versacee Sue, which you know, the perfect Thai, perfect side comb. And he's like, "Hello, Dr. Brecket." You know, it's like, "I need a little testosterone for this president."

Yeah. Yeah. We have this, whether it's downtown New York or whether it's in England or in Italy or in Hong Kong. There are differences, and let's just acknowledge that. Yeah.

People don't express emotions the same way, like in India. I've had a lot of Indian students, and one of the things that I found interesting, and I don't know if you could relate to this, in education in India, there's not necessarily a lot of asking you for your perspectives. There's a lot of sage on this stage.

You are the learner. I am the knower, and I do that. Interesting. And so when I have graduate students, and I'm like, "It's time for you to come up with the research project."

Like, I've done this already, and they struggled for the first while of like, "I have

the autonomy to like..." Right. They want to be told what to do. That's interesting. Can you relate to that?

I don't know. Well, my mom grew up here, so I have to take her out of it.

“I would say, I think my dad, I don't know, he really has a lot of opinions, and is fine”

sharing them. But he's also pretty meticulous. He's an engineer. Well, I'm just retired. So yes, he is also good at following instructions.

Very good at it. He's kind of an anomaly. I'll tell you my experience over the last 11 years being around Monica and the thing that I was completely wrong about and shattered. My naive realism, which was, I'm like, "Your dad, I don't care where he's from."

He would love for you to call him and say, "I love you so much." And she's like, "You really don't understand. That would just make him quite scared." Why is she sharing this? Something must be wrong.

This is so out of the pattern of what's normal. So it would just elicit fear. And I have tried to intervene. I like flew them secretly to a live show. We did so they could watch her on stage.

And I had all these expectations of how that would go. And at the end of the whole thing, actually, yeah, ma'am, you got accepted different. You want there to be this universal thread. That's nice. It's not stopping, sir.

Yeah. And that's okay. Totally. Yeah. It's something wrong.

Is that judging it? Yeah. Oh, I kept telling him. I was like, "It doesn't mean they don't love being or I love them." And we are confused.

We aren't like, "Oh, if they don't call me and tell me this, do they let me?" We know, you know, from the outside of my look like it's not there. But we know it's there. I don't know. It was very cultural.

I've been to all of our Asia. And what I found is that in certain cultures, just cooking together is a symbol of love.

Right. Right. Right. Right.

That how we express our emotions does vary by personality.

I'm an introvert. People think I'm outgoing because I do a lot of public speaking. Even here, I'm traveling for some work here in LA. I'm not going to go out. It's not my thing.

I get drained from it.

“My brain is so occupied in what I do and what I think about that to unwind.”

I want to go to a hot yoga class, I want to have a glass of wine with a friend. I don't want to be that social. It's taking me years to really own that. And that's part of the work on emotion totally. Knowing my personality will help me find better strategies, too.

Again, expressing emotions, you can express them in art, you can express them in spoken word, you can express them through music, but we got to get it out. Unexpress the emotions end up being like a dead. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

We have someone we love so much who has the most paralysis around the expressing.

And it's so painful to watch. I can feel the clant tightness at the bottom of it. Yeah. And it's heartbreaking. It's really heartbreaking.

Yeah. And so that's part of being what I call an emotion ally is trying to figure out your way in to give them that opening. It is hard. But sometimes just doing nothing is something in terms of presence.

By the way, going back to this kind of emotion ally thing, which is the Uncle Marvin in a psychology term, is that a lot of parents, a lot of people that work, they're excuse is, I don't know how to do it. I don't want to open this up because it's going to open up and I'm not going to handle it.

Or I'm afraid that I'm going to look bad or things of that sort. And I say let's go back to the characteristics, non-judgmental listener, warmth, compassion.

No one's asking you to solve their problems, no one's asking you to fix them.

Maybe you want to be fixed, as a matter of fact, in my research, no one ever says that their Uncle Marvin or Aunt Maria was a fixer or an advice giver. And that's really important for people who are listening because there's an inhibition to showing up because you think you actually have to do something that's going to change that other person's experience when that's not what they're actually looking for.

Okay. So the last one is regulating, and to me, that's where your book, dealing with feeling really comes and play this last component of rule or whatever. And that's the big one. I'll just share with you what happened for that.

So here I am, it's the pandemic. So Odasio is the name of my husband. His mother's name is Irene. She was in Panama, and my colleague was getting married March 7th of 2020. No, boy.

And so he loves this colleague of mine, Robin. And so we fly your ane up from Panama to come to the wedding and come for a couple weeks. No one behold, March 13th, every flight to Panama gets canceled.

“I think she was scheduled to go home on the 15th or 16th.”

So we're like, all right, whatever, you know, look at through this eight months later. Eight months. Whether your mother. Yeah. She can get home.

There was no flights here. And so about three months in, she's 81. She was very upset. She had a dog and a parrot. We had to do a lot.

I was out of my mind busy because everybody's freaking out and you know, masks and no masks and anxiety and fear and what else he was a filmmaker, he's a cinematographer. And so he's like out of work because nobody's making out on a movie set, you know, in March in April of 2020. So it gets really kind of ugly in my house.

Everybody's tense. And one night, my mother-in-law looks at me and she says, you know, are you really the director of the Center for emotional intelligence? Has you been being shitty? Yeah.

And I'm like, you know, I love you, but not tonight. It's going down. We were just at each other's throat. And then of course, since late, got a bed. I went to bed thinking myself, Mark, you're the director of the Facebook Center for

emotional intelligence.

“Like, how is it possible that you could not regulate?”

Yeah. Like, how could you not apply your own stuff for 25 years? You've been teaching us writing papers and I realized I really was struggling. And it was not eating healthy. I was not exercising like I was.

I was really negative. And obviously it was a pandemic. It was weird. But nevertheless, I thought I could apply my stuff to that moment. And I was really not doing well.

And so I woke up the next morning. I said, I'm going to start a study. I'm going to study thousands of people around the country and find out what they're doing with their feelings and how are they doing? And what I found was people were not doing well.

I mean, 10% of people felt like they had good strategies. Most of people will say they were drinking. They were eating. They were avoiding. They were being self-sabotors.

They were scrolling on Instagram and social media. And it was really eye-opening for me that people were desperate for healthy strategies. And because I was so overwhelmed and I'm an academic and I really had no place to go,

And so that was my strategy.

Well, the book had straight at a pretty frequent debate. We have on here. Okay. I love how it starts. So it starts with you urge people reading to ask yourself this question.

Look over all the times in your life that your emotions influence you to act one way or another. And then ask did those actions help me or did they hurt me? I think so often people are trapped in whether they deserve to have those emotions or if they were unavoidable. And there's this sense that they're a given and that's that that you have some kind of autonomy over that.

“And the other thing you say in that same paragraph is the degree to which you will get what you want out of life is equal to how well or poorly you deal with your feelings.”

I love this as a setup for the book, which is it's real simple. Do you like the outcome of when you or I would say maybe a victim or a passenger to your feelings? If so keep going if that's your conclusion at the end of that then cool you like me and upset it doesn't seem to bother you thought comes not bad who gives a ship for you and other people that's not just about you. Okay great elaborate on that. Well like my father would be like so this is the way I deal with my feelings you're going to have to get used to it and like.

Okay, but let's talk about having a little bit of another mindset other orientation like this is a family you blowing up every night is not great. Yeah, maybe great for you you might be like you're fine with it, but what about our videos and then a thing that I think is quite liberating and helpful is you also right in that same section many of us believe that the way we respond to our emotions is an intrinsic part of ourselves of fixed aspect of our personalities. Which is simply not true there's another thing I think people are like you have fine you don't mind that but I do.

Yeah, I like that that feels liberating that you're not born. You're born that way. Yeah, it's an important distinction between temperament and personality and emotional intelligence and emotion regulation. I for example going back we're talking about our childhood traumas earlier when I was in high school I mean really struggling with coming out of the bullying and identity. Every one in your school knew you were more of it. I mean that's an insane experience. Exactly pre-social media I still can remember actually this is even later. This is when I met

“What else you know I met on a movie set. I was hired as a stunt coordinator. Oh, for a fight sequence of a okay. What movie was it?”

It was a very very early movie. It's a independent movie called 10 Benny with Adrian Brody. It's the first leading role we made it to Sundance.

This is 1996 shot in New Jersey. I had a karate studio. I got hired. I was never a stunt coordinator.

Again, just so you know, but I got my love in my life. I see this exotic guy named Orazio all being said he's this gorgeous human being. I mean, he's just very good looking and he's got great genetics and I hate him for that. I'm a jersey boy. He was in the closet and this exotic guy comes in with a black long hair and this perfect features and he's like can you stand in for Adrian Brody? I'm like, yes. I had done my little experimentation, but this is the first kind of thing. And I remember coming home that night because I had moved back in with my dad after my mother had died.

This is all around the same time and just going into my room and crying for hours and saying this is my life. How can I do this? How can I fall in love with this exotic thing and what's going to happen in my life? What am I going to be and what do people want to think of me? And I just was so distraught. Of course, Kolonko Marvin again, the key there was that I didn't realize there was something you could do with your feelings. I just thought you experienced these strong negative feelings. They pour through you. Maybe they'll dissipate over time, but there's nothing I could do in the moment.

And that is so far from the truth. And I'll say even worse, when you're in those states, your most convinced this feeling is permanent. Despite the fact that none of your other feelings are permanent, when they're negative, you're like, "Well, this is the rest of my life." It's the rainy day. It's a thunderstorm. It's going to turn into a hurricane. It's not going to pass. No.

What's our debate unless I'm not falling? We'll like you'll have the woman at the store and then you'll be mad at her and upset.

And I'm like, first of all, why would you give that person that much control over your emotional state?

Oh, I see. That's like a recurring thing. We have these debates where she's like, no, objectively people are terrible sometimes.

“And you should feel that way as a result. Is that a thing?”

Well, no. I don't think I would ever say objectively people are terrible.

But there are some people, bad actors in the world doing things that hurt people.

“And I think it's okay to react to that, to feel that.”

That's correct. It's an injustice. They're right thing to do is say, hey, not cool. You're being unkind. Do you let that take you on a ride? Well, my question. No. It's that, well, yes, let me just tell you what I'm thinking. Is that the principle that emotions are impermanent is that the rainy day is going to last forever. And that there'll be no more sunny days. And objectively speaking, that's not biologically possible.

Yeah. And I don't have that. No, I definitely of the like every feeling is temporary. I don't operate like that. But we get sometimes in a debate where he's like, if you are upset by something, don't let that upset you. And it's like, that's upsetting. Well, don't let it have power over you. I think you're getting it. Well, a lot of things. Why am I upset? What did it trigger? If you're focused on that person,

your life for the rest of your life will be out of your control. If that person has the power to disregulate you. As opposed to that person triggers this fear in me that I have control over addressing. And that when I get my arms around that fear, lo and behold, that person who I said

“was objectively offensive, all magically discover isn't that offensive. I believe that to be very true.”

There are a lot of negative things you could say to me. But it requires that I carry my own insecurity about that to be affected. There's a lot of things being said about me that are probably objectively negative that have no impact on me whatsoever. Because they don't trigger any of my own fears. So my point is these people are road maps to your work. I agree. At the same time, it depends how intimate you are. If it's your husband, your wife, your partner, your mom, your dad,

your colleague, and you can't get out of that relationship, it does make a tougher. Sure. You need a lot more tools that you're disposed of. And if you don't do something about it, it can move into the realm of gas lighting. Sure. If you're going along with it. Yes. But if you're not. No, if you're not, it doesn't change the feeling. Right. That's the feeling is an accumulation of your whole life experience. It's not just that moment. It's almost assured. It's not that moment.

Exactly. That's kind of the point I like. This first thing gave you kind of a little gift. Why would this stranger with no impact on your life have the ability to alter your mood? That's a great clue as to what work we get to do. Correct. It is. But you are like in that moment, don't be offended. I'm allowed to be offended in the moment when someone says or does something that is offensive. I mean, this sort of does go back. I do think I spent a lot of my life

having to like turn the other way when a lot of offensive things were happening. So I'm very acutely aware of. I don't like that. I don't like the way it feels. But my question is, do you think

that that's a given that you will always feel that way in response to that person or do you

believe you might be able to change yourself and have a different experience of that person?

“That's my curiosity. I guess the truth is I don't care to have a different opinion of the person,”

the stranger. Yes, if it's someone in my life and I have to live with them and understand them and know them, that requires some real like we got to work things out. I got to figure out who I am in relation to whatever. But if it's a stranger out of store who said something offensive or did something offensive, do I feel like I need to bypass? I wouldn't want you to deny your feeling. I'm not asking you to deny your feeling. My question is, do you think you might do some work that may

result in you not even having the feeling in the face of that person? I don't think it's possible to not have a feeling. I can give you my own anecdote or this was the breakthrough of all breakthroughs to me. 2011, I'm directing a movie. Maybe 2012. My mother has come in. She's doing craft service. It's a family affair. It's a small budget movie. There is a P.I. on the movie that has a terrible

personality. Now, I had been anointed the most important person on the set because I'm the director.

So I've no insecurities about my role whatsoever. And I would come all night night and and I would be talking with my mom at the end of the day and she would be like, oh, I hate that guy. He's so condescending. He says bubble, blah, blah, and he treats me like shit. And I just had this moment. I was like, oh, yeah, he talks the same way to me. But I know it's on paper. I'm above him. I have the power. So what I know about this person is not being condescending. This is a shitty

personality. From that moment on, I, as it came in, was like, oh, well, if I always felt that way, if I always felt secure, I don't think I'm going to deal with this many problems. And I think that's true. But you're getting at a power dynamic. And that's a critical thing. People with greater power have less to worry about. They have a luxury of not succumbing to this inferiority.

I know, but racism is she said something racist to you. I'm not asking you to not care about that.

“But if she says something that implies you're not worthy of being in the store, I think that's your”

thing. But it's a whole accumulation of, I mean, what are you thinking about this? Yeah, like, you're not a marriage counselor. I'm going to say this is what you're changing it up. And here's a trick you know, we do a fact checks here. So it's like, we come in here and we tell stories about what happened that weekend. So that's when that story comes up, right? That lady, I did not think about her. I was not for hours after like, God, that bitch. I forgot immediately

and then I was like, what did I do this weekend? Oh, I have a story. It does not rule my life. But it's an incident that does cause an emotion in the moment. But I just think it's fine. Just, you know, I tons of those. I don't think you're unique. I think what we're getting at here is this nuance, which let me try to say my way, which is that the assumption that we make is that when we feel a strong, unpleasant feeling in a moment, is that we're going to have

“a strong, unhelpful, automatic, unhelpful response. And that's where I think you're connecting here,”

which is that noticing having like, I could be enraged doesn't mean I have to throw something, but we make an assumption that if I'm enraged, it means I'm out of control. Not true. I have lived with anxiety for 56 years and I'm pretty freaking good at dealing with it. Most people think I'm the most even killed, calm person and I'm like, I'm a mess. But I'm very skillful. I have tons of strategies for different situations. Sometimes I'm like,

hey, anxiety. Welcome. Good to see you today. Have a good day. Bye-bye. And there are other days when I have to work a lot harder at it. And there are moments in life. I was in a taxi coming from the airport the other day and the guy was like 500 miles an hour. I'm like, dude, you got to slow down. This is like not safe. Yeah. And he got pissed. You got embarrassed. Yeah. And I said, you know, respectfully, I'm an anxious passenger. I'm not. But I was in that moment and I just needed him to slow down.

I didn't need to like scream at him like, if I had a friend of mine with me who I won't mention, but she would have been like out of her mind. Fight her flight. Yeah, about it. And again, the big question for these experiences is, how do we feel at the end? If you feel like crap, because someone was not kind to you, you got to observe that and say, am I giving them too much power? Am I not giving them too much power? Do I need a better strategy? Am I ruminating? Am I not

ruminating? And that's where I think the science of emotion regulation is so critical.

Because no matter what, we have to have a belief system. This is kind of where the work began. Do you even believe that you can do it? Yeah. That's why I like the rejecting your intrinsically set with this reaction. Exactly. We're all narning mode here. But that's a mindset, which you talk a lot about. Like, so start with the mindset. Do you think you might feel different? Is that an option? Is it possible that you could learn helpful ways to deal with your feelings?

“No. I think a lot of people would just say no. Exactly. And that's what we call a fixed mindset.”

And that's going to impact your choice of strategies. It's going to impact your well into learn new ones. So we've got to work in the mindset piece first and my keynote talks and my presentations. A lot of my work is giving people the science behind the mindset. Oh, it's possible. Oh, there's no bad emotions. Oh, emotions are impermanent. I like the call to self-evaluate. Because again, you're not saying there is a threshold by which you're suffering from your reaction.

It's just saying, when you look back, do you think you would add better outcomes by regulating

differently? And do you want different outcomes? If it's known to the first and know the second,

then keep it moving. Keep going. Have a great life. Yeah. But if you want to emotionally regulate and learn to do that, by God, you have a system laid out. So I guess I want to first start by what is the actions of emotional regulation? The way I like to think about it is that emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies. Simple. I can prevent it unwanted emotion. So let's say I thought it would be anxious coming here today. I got a 15 minute taxi ride to do some really

exercises, give myself some positive self-talk. So that way when I get here, I'm already kind of present. A lot of people don't think about preventing unwanted emotions. They get into a situation and I got to deal with in the moment. Prevention is really important. Preventative and proactive is way better than reaction. And we should add emotional regulation is not getting rid of emotions. No. That's not the goal. The goal is not to not experience emotions. I mean, that's not even possible.

The goal might be to shift from one emotion to another. So if I'm feeling anxious about to go on stage

actually 1,500 police officers. I was going to guess a rodeo but I was like, "I've been around for some reason I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing and I got in stage and they were in just me and I see 1,500 guys mostly with their guns. And then the like Mark is here to

“talk for three hours about emotions. If you want to just watch the room and I was like, "Okay,”

this is not going to go well. Mark, totally different present. You got to figure this out in the moment. You got to play around. The moment I just felt terror and I'm like transfer the terror into inspiration, transfer the terror into humor, harness this energy. Yes. I actually turned into a great talk. But that's in the moment. I'm reducing the anxiety and trying to move it to something else. But one thing that's interesting about emotion regulation is that we can intentionally initiate

an emotion. So like your kids are coming home, you notice this. You're like, "I want to just like, let's do something playful. Let's just create an emotion that's very different from the one I'm seeing here right now. You can maintain an emotion. Have you ever had a good day? Oh yeah. No, no, tons. Anytime you ever had like a good day but then there's someone who calls you or gets in your life they try to like bring it down. The kind of dream stealer type.

So how do you bounce back? How do you like, you know something like, I want to prolong this feeling? I'm really in a good place. I'm going to take a little bit of a longer walk. I'm going to call someone else to like tell the story too because I want to like relish it. And then we can also kind of boost our enhanced emotions. So those are the goals. The strategies are what the whole book is about. And so the first strategy is shift your mindset.

You can do this. You haven't learned it yet. It's possible. The second is you got to have the language. You got to know what you're feeling. So we've covered those a bit. The next one is the basics. You got to have the skills to deactivate. You just have to be able to take that breath. And then people think breathing, it's overrated. And it feels patronizing. It does. People are convinced like there's no way that tiny solution can solve this big problem.

It almost seems offensive. And if I say it in my office, it is offensive because I'm always like,

I think we need to take a deep breath. Everything's like, that's a trigger.

“You know, obviously we need to do deep breath. But the truth is that when our nervous system”

is activated, like giving that example, imagining I'm your kid, I hate school. My mother in that moment is activated. Her whole life is coming through her. I'm a terrible mother. My kid is being bullied. I don't know what to do about this. And so what do I do? I yell scream, go to your room. I just eliminate you. Instead of, oh my gosh, my job is to deactivate. I got to take a step back. I got to take a deep breath. I got to figure out a way to help my kid deactivate

so that we can actually have a conversation because it's impossible from a brain science perspective to have any communication when you're both in fact. You can't talk to someone's a make-dola based. This would be a nice time to just, there's some physiological imperatives, right? As your cortisol goes up in your heart rate goes up, we can watch an FMRI, your shifting think. It's just

automatic. You go survive a mode. And so first thing you have to acknowledge, and I resisted

this with my wife was pitching it to me because you know when your kids are acting and saying, you want to, and that moment teach them this lesson, that would have prevented them from getting in this state. Whatever it is, and my wife was just relentless about going, hey, they can't hear

“anything you're saying to their back online. Whatever impulse you have to do this in this moment,”

it's just a waste of your time because until they're calm, no progress going to be made. And like that was hard for me to accept, and I have, and yeah, what a difference if you just you want me, you want your need to be met in that moment. Yes, because now I'm unclifable. Listen to me, and there's no listening. Yeah, I want to heal my discomfort. Or what my mom did was eliminate the discomfort, which was, go to your road to college. Yeah, they're on my family.

There's too much going on in front of me, and I have no clue what to do about it. So it's fight or fight. Yeah. The other piece of that deactivation, though, is not just about lowering kind of the arousal. It's also about stealing the mind. I don't know about you, but we were talking about ADD ADHD earlier. I mean, that's a lot of people's challenge these days, but we're really trained to be distracted in our society. We're not trained to be still. I mean, how many people

spend ten minutes a day just doing a breath work or a mindfulness exercise to really just still in minds? It's very few. How many people spend five hours? How many teenagers spend six

to seven hours a day on their phones? I'm just doing me a lot. 95 percent. So once we get through

the deactivation and the mindfulness piece where we can actually be present, then we have to also learn the cognitive strategies. To me, these are the master strategies. It's the self-talk.

It's that self-talk that works for you. And you have to cultivate your own. I can't tell you what it is. You've got to figure out the phrases that work for you, but it really works. And especially when you do it in this third person sentence. So it's like you say to Mark, you got this. I'm showing empathy to myself, like I would to a best friend. And so by saying that Mark, you got this, it's like literally giving advice to Mark. It was supposed to mean the moment

who's read it and murdered that person or whatever is happening. There's a million of these

techniques. My other favorite one for people who have trouble with interactions like relationships stuff where some of them might get aggressive or kind of be unsettling. It's called spatial distancing. This is one I use when I write that a lot. So my dad, he would get triggered and he'd go on and on. He would think this and you think that. And then I would just make him into a movie. And literally put him in the box. I don't want to box in a frame and like, wow.

This is like a Nicholson character. Exactly. Totally. Yeah. It'd be level, but nevertheless. Yeah. Yeah. And the way I think about it is what it's doing is it allows you to observe and not absorb. Mm-hmm. That's a big difference. Yeah. I'm sure even said of absorb. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's great in partnerships. Another one that I use pretty much daily

is temporal distancing. Like, I'm the scientist. I use spreadsheets. I'm a director of a center. And what I'll see is an artist. We have very little in common when it comes to planning

“when it comes to details. And it's okay. That's why our house is great lighting. But I don't want”

to pay for the life. Yeah. And so the joke is we have to listen. And I'm like, I have to take a moment. I'm like, Mark. Can we afford it? Can we not afford it? How much is this matter to you? The house is going to look great no matter what because he's going to do a great job. Is this a massive credit card debt or is this something you can live with? And that's hard in relationships because we're so freaking controlling. I mean, at least I am. And even like stupid little things. And I

mark. Are you going to not sleep tonight because we bought this stupid little thing? No, you don't give a shit. Let it go. Walk down the other aisle. Wait in the car. So those cognitive strategies in those moments when you're like, that's a wrap off. Yeah. When I can go with that direction. This is really bad. Yeah. You know, you are a sucker. Mark. Whatever. Does this really not? Does this really matter? Yeah. And a week from now, am I going to be still angry about this?

So am I going to forget about it? Mostly I'm going to forget about it. Death bed checks good at this moment. Am I going to carry my death? I also think punting it is kind of good. Like, okay, well, if I still care about this next week, maybe I can bring it up. Then we have a conversation. But not when we're in the middle of buying it, when we can return it. How does co-regulation work?

“That's the next key thing, which I think is so important, which is that we overdo in”

especially in Western society, this like self-control self-regulation. I can do this on my own. Why should you suffer by yourself? Because it's strong, which is ridiculous. There's a phrase that

I love. It's never wary alone. Like, why? I'm not weak because I worry. Yeah. I'm worried for a reason

this legitimate. And guess what? I could do someone sitting by my side. I could use a hug right now. I could use someone just saying, you want to go for a walk? That's co-regulation at the highest level. It's noticing and saying, I can be supportive to help this person manage their feelings. I'm not going to fix them. I'm not going to tell them what to do, but I'm going to make some offerings. And it's not coddling, which is what people sometimes think it is. It's not like, it's

going to be okay. Don't worry about it. Mom, you'll take care of it. Daddy will do it for you. That's not co-regulation. That's unhealthy co-regulation. Co-regulation is your kid is climbing a rock. If you're my mother, you're going to fall. That's unhealthy co-regulation. That's creating fear. Healthy co-regulation is the kid is climbing the rock. The mother's a little nervous of the kid's going to fall because it's a little risky because they're tiny boat. We're going to play this out.

“And I'm going to say, honey, that looks really steep. I believe you can do it. I just want to be”

super careful, so I want to come closer and be there for you. That way, if anything goes wrong, which I don't think it's going to, I'm there for you. Totally different. Yeah. Yeah. One is rescue, or get down. The other is, I actually believe in you. It's building the resilience in the kid, building the confidence of the kid, but providing a little bit of support. I mean, we're endlessly co-regulated. We're co-regulating right now with each other, whether we're conscious of it

or not. Right. Right. You're saying something I'm responding. If I don't agree with you or you don't agree with me in that moment, you get a little feeling, you're like, whatever, it's only a podcast, let it go. And you know, it's like we want this to be inspiring and engaging for people. I hope that they're going to learn something from it. So we're purposely telling stories that are aligned with that. That's co-regulation in action. Yeah. I mean, I want everyone to get out of this.

And there's a version where you do the best with that that you can't exactly. That's what the goal.

“And by the way, part of the co-regulation thing that's so important is that when you try to be the”

fixer or the advice giver or the solver, you're not actually helping the brain develop as a parent. I need to be uncomfortable. I don't want to be in a situation where we're going to die, but you know, I can get up on the rock. You know, I can be a little exploratory. And I need to know that I can talk to myself in a way. This is Mark. You can do this. I need to know that I'm going to fail. I need to know that it feels shitty when you fail. I need to learn what to say to someone who

treats me in an unkind way. We have to build that muscle. And you don't build that muscle by learning nothing by no one being there. And you don't build that muscle by coddling. You don't build that

muscle by controlling. You build it by co-regulating and scaffolding and building it. It's amazing how

much vestigial shit we're still dealing with when early enlightened writers split the emotions and the intellect into two separate things. Yeah. The great question would be like, why don't we

“know any of this? Why has this never been taught? Why didn't no one take this series? Because, oh,”

emotions are something to be ignored avoided and controlled. And intellect is something that will bring you everything. Yeah. And so why would we spend five minutes learning this thing that we're supposed to avoid in place of more math that can take us further? And it's kind of crazy that at best we're 50, 50 analytical in emotional creatures. But in reality we're like 85% of emotions. Yeah. We've just ignored it. Emotions drive everything. They drive our attention, our learning,

our decisions, our relationships, our health, our performance, our creativity. There's no correctness

here. And I want to say that loudly. There's no correct strategy. This is a game we play in our lives. But what do you can say is if you've misidentified me emotion, you have no shot at combating that. You're chasing a different issue. It seems most logical text start with the true understanding of what you're feeling, which is way more complicated than people give it credit. Software and this is a gift and most people don't have much of it. Uh-huh. It's funny when I was

writing, I knew a lot of it, but then I had to research for a lot of it because I'm not an expert and everything. The pieces that I had a really study to write about them were the pieces of course that I procrastinated. Yeah. And I would just get so overwhelmed and I would try to like mark your professor work through it. And every time I try to do that, it got worse. Every time I just shut the computer and went to work out. I came back in flow states. I remember Jo,

Jo, you know, you may not finish the book, but you're going to be in the best shape. And then you get one outcome. Get turn into a fitness point. Exactly. The point I'm making is that

“life is a roller coaster ride of emotions. You know, I didn't know my mother was going to die.”

When I was 24 years old, a pancreatic cancer. I didn't know the same year I'd find the person who was going to be with for my whole life. I didn't know I was going to be a come-up professor. I know I was going to run a center. I didn't know I'd be traveling like all these things happen. And if we just observe that and say, okay, life is a roller coaster ride of emotions, I think I'd rather have more pleasant ones than unpleasant ones. Let me do some self evaluation

of where I'm at in my life. And let me be a scientist about my strategies. Are they working for me? Are they working against me? Because by the way, all the unhealthy ones are okay, too. Drinking's fine. A little bit. Yeah. Eating a little bit of sugar, whatever. Distraction fine. Yeah. Avoidance works for me sometimes. Yeah, binge a TV show. But, you know, I used to be a fitness instructor and I'd see people in the treadmill for eight hours and like

each, now you're like not dealing with a real feeling. Yeah. Right. So everything is a balance. My hope for people is that they learn the strategies and practice those strategies. And then just take some time, you know, monthly to say, is my life working for me or against me? Yeah. And at some point in our lives, we can blame our childhoods and blame our parents and blame everything. Well, we can wake up and say, you know what? I'm going to be my own Uncle Marvin today.

I'm going to look in the mirror and a little less judgment. I'm going to be a little bit better listening to myself and have some self compassion. I'm going to be a little warmer to myself. And what the research shows is that we'll make a difference for you. You can cultivate Uncle Marvin this in yourself. And here's the more beautiful thing from my perspective. And I'll just share one last story, which is some giving a speech in a town in New York state.

And I'm talking about my uncle, which I didn't normally do in my previous presentations. And this one guy looks in me and he's like, are you talking about Marvin more? The sixth grade social teacher from Madison, New York. I said, I am. And he's like, Mark, your uncle was my

And I will never ever forget the twinkle in his eyes, the way he smiled, the way he taught us about

emotions and history. And like the guy just kept on talking. And I said, well, like I got to finish my speech, but can I interview you afterwards? And he stayed and I talked with him about a half-hour video tape this interview with one of my uncle's own actual students. But I share that with you because of the end, he looked at me and he said, it's pretty darn clear. The impact that your uncle has had in your life. And I said, of course. And so he said, I'm just curious, Mark, for whom are

you and Uncle Marvin? And it just hit me. I'm like, I like to do the research. And I realized I was not showing up as that non-judgmental listener for my significant other, for a lot of other people. And I made it a goal. And I share that because what the research shows is really interesting, is that when we can show up for you, for you, as that character, as that ally, we see the benefit

“in the other person. That's the co-regulation. I can see your life is improving as a result of my co-regulation.”

And by me watching you have a better life, it makes my life better. So it's a two-fer. And I think that's where it begins. I love that. The book is called dealing with feeling, use your emotions to create the life you want. Dr. Mark Bracket. This has been so fun. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So much. I can talk about feelings forever. I'm so important. We don't want to do that. We want to love it.

In the right time and place. Be well, good luck with everything. I hope you have a great rest of your tour. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks. Hello. Hi. I'm excited to be here today. We haven't recorded in a couple of days. Uh-huh. Yeah, I missed you. I was out of town for a few days. We like a five-day break. Yeah, Thursday at Tuesday. Is that five days?

Thursday, Friday, Friday. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. It's like a full Thanksgiving speaking of words. I really have the the tinglies about it being here. I'm excited too. Yeah. Are you excited about your secret turkey? No. I mean receiving it or preparing one. For pairing one. No, I'm not. You know, this is this is a big short coming of mine. I'm bad at gifts. I'm just bad. Like,

“I'll tell you, I, I, I, um, I think about it 30 minutes a day. Uh-huh. Which leads to depression.”

I, yep. I spent 30 minutes thinking about this and, um, I have nothing and I'm going to do it tomorrow. How great it is. It's fantastic. It's a great thing. I'm not creative in this space. Sure. It's a short coming to remind people that they don't know about secret turkey. Erica Molly's daughter invented it. Just great. And she invented it like three years ago.

I think so. So she was like 12 or 13. The first year we were all together. And she,

she was like, everyone picked a name out of a hatch. And this is a very, what's the word to describe Lily? Great sense of humor. Oh, she knows herself really well already. She's very self assured. Yes. Like during COVID and stuff, she would put on all these plays. I would tell me we would go on a big pod trip. She would organize a plan. She makes movies. Yes. The kids and she directs all of them. And there's babies involved. And she edits them all. Yes. Really good at that. So

can't wait to hire her in the eight years. But yeah, no, she's wonderful. Special girl. Very, very, very funny. She came to us, whatever. And it was like, pick a name out of the hat. And there were people named people's names. And then also we had to pick another thing that said like write a story or origami or something. Yes. And you had to match the two and do this by the end of the night. And I was annoyed. We all were. Yeah. We were all annoyed. I got we have homework now. Yes.

It's like I just wanted to relax today. And now we have to figure this out. And we have to because it's for a child. Right. Can't break her young dreams. Yep. And we did it. And it was spectacular.

“It was the best thing we ever ever did. It was so heartwarming. And then the next year, which is”

great, is I had never received a text from Lily. And it just said your secret turkey has blank. Yeah.

And I didn't even know what that meant. But it was just an order. Yeah. Which was really fun. Yeah. So for the past few years, we've received with some weeks in advance. Our secret turkey, someone in our pod. And we have to make the gift. Correct. And if you're Charlie, you say you made it, but you really hired an artist. Exactly. Which is very good. Yeah. And then we go round and we present our secret turkeys. And it's a really special thing to do. And right now you're in that phase

It'll be wonderful. It's the best part of Thanksgiving. I haven't started mine, but I know what I'm dealing. Okay. Great. I'm excited to see who you have. And I'm excited. Well, everyone's a good person. Yeah.

I basically have a lot of as much excitement as I have. I also have a ton of holiday anxiety,

because it's also limited a sweatshirt edition time. Yeah. So this is the time of the year where I've got to let go. Draw in every time I enter it with the same anxiety, because I can't draw very well. So it's not true. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yesterday, I sat down with an idea. It was actually your idea. So I had to draw three different things. I do the first thing. I was like, oh my god, this is great. I sent it to you. Yeah. Really good. And then I tried to draw the next thing for hours. And I just

“couldn't. I'm like, why can I draw that thing and not just there? Time does. Are you looking at an image?”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. It was just very frustrating. And I couldn't do it. And then I was like,

and I can't bring in someone to do one of the three pictures from me. Now I did order a device this

morning. I'll have you know that I think might help with this. But also, I think you are over thinking it. And this is because you actually are good at drawing. That your bar is much higher. The thing, can I guess, can we say? Yeah. Wanting to do a crow a mouse and chair? Yeah. Which is so cute. And then you were able to accomplish the mouse. Yeah. In fact, regardless of that, I do want to Merry Christmas. I'm going to frame that for you for Christmas. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. Yeah. The problem was the

mouse is good enough that the crow looked like a crayon drawing. Like they have to be somewhat comparable in detail. It's not like one can be a character and one can be photorealistic. And then

“yeah. Because the mouse is photorealistic. It has like hairs. Yeah. And it's so deep. It is so detailed.”

And it's really, really good. But maybe you could dump that, give me that for Christmas.

But then maybe you could do a version that's more crayon like the crow so that it matches. So I ordered a lightboard today an artist lightboard. What's that? So I trace the outside of a shape. And then I do all the stuff. And the crow is just a big blob of black. And it just I can't even get the shape right. And then to get into the feathers and there's something that there's so many patterns that go all these different ways or whatever. Now a lightboard emits bright light behind the images

you're doing. So like I could put an image and trace it. Yeah. I guess it's a cheat. No. Anyway, the lightboard is a really popular and I realize a lot of people are using lightboards. Because once I got on there, there was all these different options. And then the stuff I was looking at, I was like, oh yeah, I see that all the time. People are definitely using lightboard. Oh my god. Anyways, I ordered a pretty nice lightboard today. You're trying to a real artist.

Yeah, maybe this will send me on some kind of a trajectory. You could probably use your lightboard to make whatever your secret turkey gift. True. That's a good point. Okay, great idea. You're marked. Okay, I have a few funny stories I want to tell you. Okay. When I work out, there's a lot of mirrors in my gym. And there's a lot of backlight. And when I look in the mirror my bathroom, there's zero backlight. It's all frontlight. And so what I see and that's going to be a

“ding ding ding. When I see what's so backlit, that's what I'm seeing like, oh my Jennifer,”

I have so much hair growing on my trapezias, my deltoids, my back. And then I see like really long stray hairs coming out of my neck, which are disgusting. And while I'm working out, all I can do is focus on those. Of course. So what occurred to me, I'm going to keep scissors in my gym now. Oh, wow. Okay. So that I can get the things I'm seeing. So yesterday, I fully was just going to work out. Okay. And I cut some hairs. Then I cut some more hairs. Then I--

I don't want to get myself in a full haircut when I was working out. But I do know what my hair has got from the last time you saw a man. So I got like a fresh cut right now. That's because I gave myself a full haircut in the gym. And I put a towel down and I would go over the mirror and I would just start cutting and then I would walk out so I'd shake all the hair off. I'm like, that's it. Now, get back to your workout. We're going to let it work. Oh, I missed that's

about this one. So I was in there working out for about an hour and 45 minutes. And I got a terrible workout and I came out with a fresh haircut. You're having an unusual marriage to your hair in that you sometimes have to like change it immediately. Like men or when you had to buy those shivers. You had to buy a razor when you were on vacation with Delta to shave your face in the parking lot. Right. Because I just hit a maximum capacity. I was like, this thing is way too long.

I got to get it off my face. I felt like claustrophobic for it. And then I also when I'm depressed,

mechanism. Oh, generally we're going to reset. There's a new me and I'm not. And also I tend to trim my hair,

Chris and points us out all the time. If she sees me like almost like five nights in a row doing some trimming in the mirror when I brush my teeth, she knows I have a lot of anxiety. So yes, I currently have a lot of anxiety. And yes, so that you're you're right about that pattern. Well, do you want to talk about wired depressed? I have a lot of working anxiety. Yeah, there's a lot of work anxiety right now. Yeah. BTS. BTS. We're like, I'm

some days at eight going like to the family may go to bed. May just go to bed.

“Now, if this was happening with the family member, what advice would you give them?”

What happens all the time? You know what advice do you give? Yeah. Oh, so, you know, Griffin has depression. So she'll, hers won't necessarily be incident driven, right? There's not like she has a specific thing. She'll just have a wave of it. And yeah, she'll sleep a lot. And there's really, there's nothing I can do or nor do I think I should do. I just go like, oh, yeah, she's kind of in a slump. She's going to sleep a lot for a while. And then she's going to come out of it.

Now, earlier on, that uses scare me. And I was like, is this going to be forever? And I've just gone through the cycle enough that now I just go like, oh, right, yeah, she's going to organize for a couple days, really, really intensely. And then she's going to sleep a lot for a few days. And then it's going to be over. I guess I'm asking like, what, what would your recommendations be if there was a prolonged period of what you felt was not a great state? Yeah, well,

yeah, there's steps. One is like, I will gently and have like, I love a view on if you check in with your psychiatrist lately. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm not saying you do anything just like, have you checked in with your psychiatrist. So that'll be like one thing I can do. It's evolved because I used to try to fix it. Yeah. That's my nature. Yeah. And I used to try to talk her out of it or tell her what's good in her life or, you know, gratitudeless. One thing I'll still do and she

she likes this and it's not, it doesn't trigger feeling judged about being sad is, let's go for a walk or let's go for a hike, like just encouraging, let's go, you know, move around. But I'm still moving around. I'm still doing all my workouts. That's good. Oh, another great update. So I got the toe

thing. Look that. Yeah. Guess what I'm doing tomorrow. I'm going to the dentist. First time in 10 years.

Oh, my god. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Guess what else I'm going to do. I'm going to have my teeth

“quite clean. Oh, wow. Yeah. What do you think about that? I think that's great. I've been seeing”

a lot of pictures of myself from olden days and I realized my teeth used to be so much a wider. Oh, I had, you know, I had four or five years of tobacco use. Sure. Yeah. Coming up on a year without are you worried about it being too bright? Oh, no, but that isn't really funny episode of friends. Yeah. No, but like it hurts. Oh, yeah. It hurts really bad. I remember because I did it like 18 years ago. Yeah. And it was misery. Yeah. But I think I'm going to, and they won't like this.

But I'm, well, at least when I did it before, you did multiple sessions. And I'm going to go, I can handle just a little bit of lightning. I don't got to go all the way and have the insane tooth pain. Like, I won't trade off. I'm willing to just do halfway. I feel like I wasted some money, but not yet because when I did the first time, it felt like I spicked in my teeth. Yeah. No first. If you, you haven't had it done. Have you? No. No need. What a bit. Are you that arm and hammer,

you know? I, I don't, I keep telling you and you can do it. It's, it's either disposal, but you just,

you just don't. Yeah, but also you never chewed tobacco and you're new to coffee. I'm new to

like, I drink a lot of red wine. Yeah, that's problematic. God, imagine what they would look like if you didn't drink so much red wine. Do they not look good? They're so wild. They're very valuable. It doesn't help that I work with you because I'm staring at like, as wide as they can get all the time. Natural. Now you're right. You can go way too far. Yeah, you can. And you can tell to me. You can tell, I guess this is the reverse veneers conversation. Yeah. That would be

careful to find line. Yeah. Well, fine. You'll see Thursday. Okay. Great. I'm excited.

“Now, I just remember we were on camera as I showed my teeth and I remember something else.”

People will definitely say Monica, do you have a hickie? All of me see, and do you? I don't. Oh, do you see it, though? I do not. Oh really? You're going to point towards that. Why don't

I had a refresh of my Botox. Oh, okay. And they're due your neck. Yeah, they do because I have a

very strong neck. Uh-huh. And so they have to put some Botox in there. Okay. To make it less less strong. Yes, too. What if you woke up in the morning and you went to lift your head up and you climbed it and you came into work and your head was like this. And you go, and you go, you ever get to the face? Or? Do you ever get full talks? Or? Um, okay. So in this episode Anna goes into the bathroom and while she's in the bathroom, you're telling me about your potential cashmere sweater that you're

going to make out of your back hair. Thank you. And you, I guess, made, you collected some more yesterday. No, I didn't. I didn't. But I see that a new crop is coming in. And I already say in case you missed

that episode, basically I discovered I had all this back care from the back lighting of the gym.

I was saying it out loud to my family and Lincoln said, "Do you want me to shave your back?"

“Which I think's a dirty job. I would have never asked her to shave my back. That sounds”

well, first of all, like, very vain on my, like, I've got my kids grooming me now. Yeah. But she offered and, um, and I shave her legs for her. Yeah, that's cute. And so what have you thought about combining? That's a great idea. Well, maybe, um, two different sweaters. So anyways, so I sat on the edge of the bathtub and she shaved my whole back. And then I collected it to throw it away. And I couldn't help but notice by George, this is the

softest hair I've ever felt in my life. I didn't even would have never thought my hair was

the soft. So then Lincoln and I decided that I should start collecting it because it's cashmere. Sure. And at some point, maybe when I'm 60 or 70, I'll have enough for a sweater. Yeah. Yes. And so, so you brought it. I brought it. And I keep it in this bag now.

“I don't know if that's how you spell a cashmere. And as you can see from the amount in it,”

it's going to take a long time. It's really, really going to take, um, but I really wanted you to feel it because I think, um, anyone you tell this to you is like, there's no way it's what you say it is, but you're very objective in, you don't ever glide a benefit. It's about it, right? I did. I wanted you to take it out and touch it. And Rob, you're invited to, too. But be careful. You don't get any stuck to your fingers.

I don't want you to make that. You can't waste it. No. I don't have enough to spare. Yes. Yes. Definitely dry your fingers off. I know. Okay. Yeah. There's really not a lot to work with here. You can pull it all the way up. Oh, wow. And you want to go like this between your fingers, as if it's a cashmere sweater. Okay.

“It's okay. Everything's okay. I'm scared of dropping some. Really enjoy. What would you think?”

It, go and touch it with your other finger. Wow. Wow. It, it, it is really soft. Have you ever felt hair that soft? I haven't. Oh, not let me. Yeah, use both hands. Well, no, I want to like a comparative. No, you could make a snowmobile suit. And like a day. But, but not this hair is Corsair. Right. Very different. Yeah. It's really soft. Hold on. What about arm hair? Yeah. I imagine that might be similar. I have a lot of arm hair. That's when they said

I was a wooly man. I mean, where will one of them? Oh, well, we were. Okay. It's really nice. Rob you want to grab a little. Rob, do you want to, to keep your job? It does. It's starting to fall again. It's okay. Do you love it? It is soft. Rob, don't downplay. It is very soft. It's impressive. I did it on purpose. Where is it? Oh my god. Oh my god. Guys, guys, that's so hard to come by. That's like rare earth metals. Yeah. Oh my god. Get this back in here. This is so rare.

And to remind people, this is my competitive product to Brad Pitt's God's true cashmere. My company's going to be my true cashmere. Oh, no. It should be called back's true cashmere. Almost your name. And it's your back. Back's with an axe. Yes. Back's cashmere. Wow, guys. That's a great

That would be great. That's similar to P baby. Okay. I got a couple. You did. Okay.

Great. You just added to the book. Wow. It's pretty special, right? I feel like that came off a beat. I can't believe. Wait until I have a gallon size Ziploc page. Oh my god. Oh my god. I don't know if there's the best vessel. Vessel because there's a little. I see a little hairs all in there. I know. And the little ball they were in. Every time you touch it, it does lose a little bit of its quality. Thanks for being willing to touch that. I hope it delivered.

I'm going to give it a touch too. Oh god. I know because I was just talking about in a way that

now I'm wondering, is it as soft as I remember? It got smaller, which is a little concern.

“Well, I think it's smaller. Oh my god. Yeah, it's wow. Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare.”

Yeah, we don't have much laughed after that little. That might be the last show until my cat. Wait, no. Now it's just more compacted, but you're going to need to go back to it. I got to learn how to spin yarn too because that isn't that part of what I'll have to do? Yeah, okay. So that's a fact because you said that Kashmir comes from a goats chain. Chin hairs. It does. It comes from the soft undercoat of Kashmir goats.

And they're like, they're up and to bat. Yeah. No, India, Kashmir, India with the K.

All right, Kashmir. Well, we were in India. I did get myself some Kashmir scarves from from Kashmir. I presume they grow them elsewhere, but it's like champagne. Yep. Where you're only really drinking champagne. If it comes from champagne, France. Speaking of things to consume, I just saw a Nora writing the movie theater. It's a movie to see in the movie theater currently out. It's so good. It is. What's it about? You can't tell? You don't really want to say to that.

I prefer that. Yeah. Is anyone in it? I know. I don't think you probably know anyone in it,

“but you will. I think she's definitely going to get nominated and like my win and she is so good.”

And I mean, everyone's so good at it, but the main actress, Mickey Madison, she is a rebelist. It's really something to see. It's so weird because it's like a sat. Like there's like sat things that happen, but there's also like there's there's such comedy throughout. So totally, and sometimes I don't like that when tones are sort of all over the place, but they nailed it. I like multiple tones and things. Sometimes, I think it can feel forced. Yes. But it didn't hear.

But like, hit and run was like a car chase movie, but it was a relationship movie, and it was other. But tonally it was one. It had one tone. It was different genres were mixed. I think you can do multiple tones if you're the writer's writer. It is a Sean Baker.

“He didn't the Florida project. I think if you're a writer director, I would be thinking about”

this when I was doing hit and run because there's like, there's some broad comedy scenes with nudity and old people, then there's some really violent scenes. But the unifying tone is it's everything I like. So it's bizarrely consistent, tonally even though it's like everything I like in one movie. Right. It's such a good movie. I'm going to say really highly recommend it. It's a good movie lately. Substance, Anora. Substance. Substance again.

Anora. Yeah. Poor things last year. Yeah. So, a woman of the hour, ding ding ding. Do you love it? Yeah. It means it's dark. Dark. Yeah. But yes. So well done. It's very well made. She killed it. The notion that she pitched yourself hours before they had to have a director and then had six weeks of prep and then executed that is hugely impressive. It really is really is very good job. Good job. Okay. I have an update. A huge update. Rings back. My ring is back. Yeah.

But it's a little smaller now. Yeah. So I got it soldered back and I think it's a mix of it being maybe a teeny bit smaller because of like, you know, they probably have to overlap it a tiny bit to solder it would be my guess. Maybe not. But anyway, it might be a little bit smaller and I think my knuckle is permanently bigger now. A bit bigger than the bee. So I had to really shove this thing

setting myself up for another horrible situation. Right. But I kept going. And hey, we say doing the

“same thing and expecting different results. I know. They say that in AA, they all say it everywhere. I”

think. There's a quote that Einstein says that's like insanity. The definition of insanity is

doing the same thing. Anyway, I worked really hard to get this on. Yeah. It is never coming on. Well,

maybe all, you know, any moment you want me to take it off. We've gone down this road. I can get it off in second. I hope I die with it on. Okay. I hope that's in a hundred years. But yeah, that sounds fine. At first when I put it back on, I had, I had so much fear that I made a huge mistake and that I should not have put it back on and that I'm jinxing. Oh my god. Now it's like a triple jinx. Yes. It's a reverse back jinx. Because I really started to believe that the ring was the cause to a lot of bad stuff

that's going on in the world and personally. Yeah. And you did try to tell me that it was in the case. You said I'm not that powerful. Yeah. Which was a nice thing to say. But I don't

believe you. Uh, there's a lot. Also, one of my favorite restaurants clothes. Like, oh, no. Things

started to really, she really started to unravel. Yeah. So, uh, I had to get it back on, but then as soon as I did, I thought, oh, maybe you're not supposed to go back. Maybe this is a lesson and not going back. Right. Not trying to go back to high school or recreate recreate. No, it's a cute ring. It looks great on your hand and you love it. And it really symbolizes something beautiful

“and you should continue to love it and embrace it. Your first big job, you got to reward for yourself.”

I did. I love it. So, maybe can you wear it on a different finger that's smaller? I can't wear it anywhere again. Because you can get it all. Yeah, it's fucked. Yeah, that makes me panic. But I didn't make a joke that I think the B that's stung me was a different political party that I'm affiliated with. Uh-huh. Really got in there, you know, did did some dirty work. Sure. You know, one of the scariest I've ever been is I have, I have since this moment been stung enough that I know I've outgrown my B allergy.

You know, environmentally and second grade my whole face disappeared and I almost stop breathing.

Yeah. And so I have almost stopped breathing because he put a sheet on your face. He put what washed cloth on my face similar. What we did to bump above. Um, and I carried an happy pen and whatnot. And then I got stung and then I went to the hospital and they just monitored me whatever. Um, I now wouldn't have this fear. But when I was in an archeology class and we were digging up in the Santa Monica Mountains at Stunt Ranch, a swarm of bees was migrating and use all

of a sudden and heard it. And then crazy enough, our archeology teacher, he had been on a digging south of America and and on a student got killed to graduate student by giving attack by bees. So my only imagine when his PTSD is about all this. He calls it out. He's like, everyone's still and you can hear like, uh, and you start hearing hearing and we just all sat there and it was like biblical. Oh, it was a cloud. I mean, when overhead, now mind you, they were still probably

60 feet above us. It's not like they were coming down. But there was a moment where it was a visible black cloud in the amount of noise they made was on par with when a helicopter. I want to help you please helicopter flies over it was so loud and so many could trillion of them. And I'm thinking I'm allergic to them still. And I remember just like, shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean. Shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean, shirean. I just I stayed and then they passed.

“Obviously I didn't die. Good thing you stayed. Yeah. I think I would have caught their attention.”

Yes. You got your teacher said specifically, don't move. I'm glad you listened to that. That's interesting too because part of the reason the student had died was that everyone ran and he ran kind of up and he got stuck. He couldn't climb any higher. Oh my god. Yeah. Sorry I brought that up. It's a horrible story. It's a really good story. It's very my girl. So anyway, so ring this back. We'll see how the world takes that in TBD. One other thing. I want to say really quick. So I almost

did something bad. Oh good. But I didn't. I like bad stuff. Tell me. So I was at a restaurant. The other day and I went to the bathroom. Very rare for me. Right. Yeah. I don't pay a lot. It's the bathroom smell. It's so good. Oh, good. Also very rare to go to a public restaurant and it smelled good. Yeah. And when I was peeing, I saw there was this camp, this like big candle lit.

to see what the brand is and what it was and I couldn't find it. So I went back to my seat and I asked

the server, what is the candle in the bathroom? I really like it. He said, yeah, we get this a lot. It's it's specifically made for us. You're right. Oh, those are pattern. No, it's that I know how to sniff out limited edition. Yes, she do. And and he said, oh, yeah,

“remember where you wanted to get the candle holders off the table. Remember that? Oh,”

and I tried to find those can again, back to my bad gift giving and I tried to find those candle holders and I was unsuccessful. Shoot. I don't even remember. So many things you like if restaurants would be hard to. When I walked through the world, I am like, you're like terminator, but instead of scanning for risks or threats. Yes, you're scanning for item. Beautiful items. It is. That is how I operate. So he said it's limited with different words. He said it's limited

edition. Then a manager came over and I said, it was to spot the candles and she said, yeah, so we get a shipment every Monday. So we'll be getting more tomorrow. You have a big purse. I don't know if you want to go in there. She said that she said there's a there's a lot in there. So there's multiple in there. My God, she was giving you. She was giving me permission, which is why this was tricky. Can I just say one of my favorites early early SNL sketches was

“I think Eddie Murphy or one of the black cast members went in white face and it was like a fake”

documentary, like a 60's documentary. So he experienced what it was like to be white and he goes into a shoe store and tries on some shoes and he goes, oh yeah, these are great and the guy goes, take them. You find something like white people. Just give it to you. Just take them.

And everywhere he went, it was like that. Oh my God, that's hilarious. This is basically what

happened to you. The owners just like take it. Yeah, not the owner of the manager, which is why I'm not going to say the name of the place. So I don't want to, I don't want to get her in trouble. Right. So I went in there with my bag. Really excited. And I opened the cabinet. There's a bunch of these candles. Oh my God. And so I take one and I put it in my purse. See, the weird as life. I started washing my hands and I thought, I can't do it.

Oh, oh, I can't do it. I took it out. I put it back. Yeah. And that's kind of good, carmically. I don't know. You've got to figure out a poem. We're talking about them enough. I'm going to finish this. And now I can't say the place. So I really put myself in a pickle. Now I went back to that place. And like we, you'd be in bed thinking about what you're in the mood for to eat and then you go. And then in your calculations like, I don't even know what I want

to eat, but I want to smell the candle. So I'm going to go eat at that restaurant. All right. I want to see the mug. So I want to eat at that restaurant. Are you, are you deciding to go to places for smells and trinkets they have? Um, okay. So twofold. Yes. And that I will pick locations based on ambiance and vibe. Yeah. But no, like I wouldn't have gone back to Buddha nokey just to see the

“mugs because that's in fact taunting. Yeah. Okay. I got you. I have to have it. Does that make sense?”

Yeah. Of course. I wonder what that's about. I don't feel safe unless I have it. Right. Seeing from afar is lame. Right. Having it is on lame. Right that down. That's a quote. That's a new quote. Yep. Now anyway, I was back there with some other friends and a friend offered to take my person and go get it. This person has not very many morals. Right. I know who you're talking about. No, you don't. Okay. I know who you think I'm talking about and it's not him. It's not just

I would have thought on it too. It was on it. Yeah. Well, you know who I hang out with so that's part of it. But yeah, but it's deeper than that. I know Kelly didn't do it. I know Rachel wasn't going to do that. I mean, Kelly. It's not going to be Laura. It's not going to be. Kelly might do it. She might

as yellow. She's a rascal. Oh, I shouldn't say that. She's she would never do something like that.

Some of Kelly's coworkers listen. I just found out which is exciting. Oh, yeah. I call workers. So anyway, I said no again. Yeah, Greg. In the back and I really hesitate because I thought,

know, you'll know it. I know. I'm not saying good job. I know. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to be able

to figure out who makes this candle. No, I'm going to be fine without it. Oh, okay. That's also good. I'm going to be fine. I don't need it. What's it going to do for my life? Nothing. I mean, it is going to make my house most so nice. But you already have a lot of candles. I have a lot of great candles. None smell like that. But that's okay. And I'll get through this. You'll be stronger for it. So that that was my almost dealing. Maybe because I stole when I was young and I thought,

“like, that was really bad. Yeah. And apparently my mom cried. Well, that's what my dad told me”

happened. What had you stolen more than the cookies? I saw the cookies and then I stole the boy's

sandart. And your mom cried over that? Well, my dad told me that. I don't think he was lying.

I don't think she did. Yeah. I think he was trying to guilt me. Yeah. And it worked. I don't steal anymore. Does it good? What are you going to say? Well, that's good parents. It is great parents. Your mother has, your mother was in console for a week. When she seems fine. And nice. She's been crying in bed. I don't steal. Next week. Well, you tonight to steal a parking meter. Well, I did steal a parking meter. So I don't think you can

rob a seven. Yeah. What's talking about? I had a compartment in my head. Right. Yeah. When I was younger and an alcoholic, I was going to say this one thing. We're going too long in our new goals. I know. I know. I know. But I was just in Kauai. My 40-hour trip was Kauai. I have not been there in 20 years since my last week of drinking. Oh, wow. Yeah. Was it Pete? What did it? How did it feel? It felt great. I saw the guardrail. Me and the

dude smashed into on the way to buy ice. I saw the crazy hotel, Dean and I were at that I went jogging after being awake for three days. Like I saw all the stuff. And I thought,

“wow. We're back here. Yeah. Look out different. Yes. Everything is. You should be”

so beautiful. You made the right turn when you left here. It was a bizarre way to reflect on like what was my life like in my mental health 20 years ago when I was there. And what is it like today? Yeah. And such an obvious decision was made. And I'm now there with a family and I'm healthy. And yeah, it was, it was, it was rad. That's wonderful. Yeah. I liked it a lot. I love that.

I kind of thought I would never go back there. Yeah. I kind of invited to go there. So I don't

even know I would ever pick it. Because it's, yeah, it's the my last week and it was a gnarly week. But it was very fun to be there and just go like, oh, Amanda, we dodgeable. We would just need the course. A, we wouldn't be alive right now. And B, we would just not have a life we have. So it was, yeah, it was cool. That's lovely. Yeah. Great time to reflect. Well, did that do anything for my work anxiety? Yeah. Yeah. My, my time there was a beautiful, I did,

I left all of my worries in Los Angeles and did have a totally carefree, wonderful 40 hours. Is that what you're asking? Well, sort of. I guess like the, the reflection. Like you can help me with my current to really, really have a physical reminder of where you were and where you are. Yeah. And understanding like the stuff that's happening is really, really, really frustrating and not really not fun. Yeah. But in, yeah, I'm skiing. Like look where you are, what you're doing.

Yeah. I'm aspiring to be there. But I'd be lying if I said, I could, um, I mean, one of the tools I'm applying is like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything, everything at this point could get destroyed and I'd still be very fine. Yeah. So I am cycling through that reminder when I'm doing the other things to help. And then I just get caught in the loop, you know, I get caught in the rumination. You know, my sense of injustice going crazy. And so I, yeah, and then I get stuck in it.

And then I say you're stuck in it. But it has no effect on being stuck in it. I know. Have you considered reaching my cut to your therapist? I didn't consider doing it. But I did have a moment of like why aren't you talking to your therapist. This would be a time. It's a good time. Yeah. Yeah. It did, it did kind of cross my mind. Maybe it's also easy to forget when you've been out of it for a little bit. How helpful it is. Yeah. But yes, I agree with you. And that's probably a good idea.

“Yeah. I don't, I think it's, I'd be a good idea. I had therapy and it was helpful.”

Oh, good. Okay. So our 90% of Asians lactose intolerant, um, 70% to 100% of people in East Asia

girl Lincoln. She had to name all 32 countries on a map of Asia for a task and she got 32.

Wow. That's incredible. She even hit me with the name of a country. I didn't even know.

She knows. She knows. She knows. Awesome. Yeah. I thought she's making one up.

“Yeah. Get on my Google map. Okay. When did Missoni and Target do the collab 2011?”

Okay. The seahorse situation where you said they're made of dust. Those are Seamunki. Those are Seamunki's and a lot of commenters pointed that out. Yeah. They're Seamunki's and Seamunki's is a colloquial term for shrimp brine. Scrims. Yeah. It's really just, and it's a power. Yeah. And it's very

disgusting. Yeah. Oh, and then I'm going to play one clip before we end here. I love a clip.

Those memorable moments from the newlywed game. What's the old urban legend? You know, where's the strangest most unusual place you ever made wippy? That was, that was, didn't make it on the air. But she actually said that. Well, she said worse. All of a sudden, the, I love that there was a other urban legend that went out there that said I said, where's the strangest most unusual place you've ever made wippy? And the lady he was supposed to have said, well, that would be in the

butt, Bob. And that never happened. That never happened. But five years ago, I get a call from

game show network. And they said, you better come down here and take a look at this. So I go down and take a look at it. And there is this little Caucasian lady from Pennsylvania, right? Her name is Olga. And I said, where's the strangest most unusual place you've ever said, if I made wippy, and she says in the ass, I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. It has to be a location. Oh, sorry. You know,

“so that's whole. That didn't make it on the air. We cooked that one out. Also, what's his name?”

Bob, you banked Bob. If the person in your story's name is Olga, you don't have to say Caucasian, we could definitely contact with that. I actually eat what's funny. I, I almost said, I like that he said that because people would say black. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Let's see, other one. There's another really famous funny one, which is, um, karate. Yeah, karate class. Karate class. Yeah. What was, what's this set up for there? Is it condiments? I think it is condiment.

Oh, is it? What's your favorite condiment? Karate class? No. What's your husband's favorite condiment?

“Karate class. I don't think. I think. I can email you it. What will your husband say is his favorite”

condiment? Oh, I would say his full table upstairs. Oh, that's okay. That's okay. That's okay. All right. I don't know where it's going. He's not there for ratty school. What was your husband's name? His favorite condiments. Karate school. No one knew what condiment was. No. I would have thought they were to confuse it with condom, but they can fuse it with like recreation. Right. Interesting. Very pretty. All right. So that's it.

We love Anna Kendrick. We were so delighted she came back to us. We love her love her love her love her. And oh, do you know she came to Halloween? Yeah. Yeah. So on the episode, she said she felt bad that she ghosted and then we invited her Halloween. She was very, very brave. Came all by herself and joined our family outfit. She did. She was Claire Corningstone or whatever. Veronica Corningstone. Yeah. From Channel 4 News. Yeah. Thank you, man. Good job, Anna. Yeah. That's called growth.

Growth. We love we love to see it. All right. Love you. [BLANK_AUDIO]