Jenny Taitz (on stress resets)

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard and I'm joined by Miss Monica Padman.
Hi. Hi, Miss Monica.
Hi. Hi, Mom.
How are you doing today? You know, somebody made an Instagram. I sent it to you.
Yes, Hermium's Instagram, his own Instagram. And I think in the description it says you're his mom.
It does. I want to applaud whoever made that.
Big high five to whoever grabbed Hermium Permium. I hope he has like a million followers by tomorrow.
Okay, our guest today is Dr. Jenny Tates, who is a clinical psychologist, clinical professor in psychiatry at UCLA and best-selling author.
She has a couple of great books, How to Be Single and Happy and Emotional Eating. Her new book, which is out currently, is Stress Resets, How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes.
This this was helpful i think this is a great one for the top of the year oh no kidding yeah get people in a routine i feel like when we're overwhelmed now we turn to a lot of outward sources to help us and it this was very encouraging that you can look you can turn inward yes and she took us in a great way. Yes.
And had a lot of recommendations for us personally. Yeah.
Which we needed. Yeah.
So please enjoy Dr. Jenny Tates.
This episode is supported by FX's Dying for Sex, starring Michelle Williams and Jenny Slate. Inspired by a true story, this series follows Molly, who after receiving a

terminal cancer diagnosis, decides to leave her husband to explore the full breadth of her sexual desires. She gets the courage and support to go on this sex quest from her best friend Nikki, who stays by her side through it all.
FX is Dying for Sex, all episodes streaming April 4th on Hulu. We are supported by Claude, the AI assistant that just feels different.
You know, we're curious about the old artificial intelligence here on the pod. We are curious.
And we always want to give our arm cherries the if-you-know-you-know tips. We sure do.
So, they need to meet our new pal, Claude. While other AIs sound like robots, Claude just gets it with the emotional intelligence.
Whether I'm researching guests or refining my latest meal plan to get Brad Pitt's abs or looking for the best dating advice to give Monica, Claude is the fact checker in your pocket while you're in the armchair. Well, that's exciting for us.
I like having an extra companion.

Welcome to the team, Claude.

You can try Claude for free now at Claude.com.

That's C-L-A-U-D-E dot com. You have your own coffee shop, I see.

Leora?

Matcha.

That's a matcha.

That's a matcha.

Pistachio milk.

Oh.

Pistachio milk.

Tell me about pistachio milk.

I discovered it at Leora.

Okay.

Not too sweet, but a little like nutty. Nutty.
Nutty. Yeah.
Interesting. Okay.
I'll give it a whirl. Do you have a preferred nut milk? You know what? That's a naughty sounding sentence, by the way.
It is. It sounds terrible.
Ew. I know.
I'm sorry. I'm back on whole milk.
There we go. I've reverted back.
Get that calcium. Sure.
I used to think it affected my skin. It didn't affect either way.
So I went back and I like it. Love him.
Is pistachio not your favorite? No, I usually do La Cologne with a little bit of Laird. Do you know Laird? No.
The non-dairy creamer. Is it by Laird Hamilton? Yeah, yeah.
Is it mushroom based? No idea, but it's great. I like that there's like different flavors, not too into the seasonal ones.
Like they have mocha mint, but they have like plain, little cardamom plain. Yeah.
He's a special dude, Laird Hamilton. You know him, right? I just met him for the first time the other day, but we were right behind he and his wife.
I think her and Kristen were having a moment where they're very much married to kind of old-fashioned-y guys in some way. I don't know how to phrase that.
But she said, listen, I like his vibe.

He'll say to me in the kitchen, it's going to be okay.

It is okay.

That's like his big saying to her.

I like that.

Isn't that great?

Yeah.

Really, everything is okay because what other option is there?

Think good and it'll be good.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

These are all the types we're going to get into.

Yeah, he's like tapped into some kind of primitive way we were living

that seems to be yielding positive results.

Like stay very active, stay physically.

Eat.

I'm in. So it's super cool.
we actually do a group where we have a dozen people on a Zoom. And it doesn't matter if you have social anxiety, general anxiety, PTSD.
The treatment is the same. And so it's awesome because people can come in with social anxiety, OCD, major depression, and still get significantly better in a matter of weeks.
It's a cure-all. It works for everything.
It works for anxiety and depression. Yeah.
Anxiety disorders and depression. I think the first fun thing, I know what CBT is, and I think a lot of people in the audience will know, but I think maybe we should just delineate the difference between, say, psychoanalysis and CBT.
And then you have a second kind of specialization that I hadn't heard of, and I want you to tell me about that one as well. Sure.
So it's interesting. I went to graduate school all hyped up.
I'm like, I can't believe you can get paid to talk to people. And like, there's a science to it.
And you could move the needle and people can get better. And then I did all these things to kind of test the waters to see before you go to grad school for six years.
Do you like this? Yeah. And I started volunteering at the Suicide Prevention Center.
And literally the first call I got there, someone was listening in to see how I fielded the questions. And I had done all sorts of training through them.
And then the final step in the training is this test call. And this woman, she was 14 years old.
She had already taken a bottle of pills and was sounding pretty loopy on the call. And during our call, I'm trying to talk to her.
Someone starts banging on the door. My supervisor who was listening on the call had called an ambulance and the girl was pissed.
She felt betrayed. Yeah, and it gave me this sense of, I really wanted a career that not only saved lives, but made lives worth living.
And I was super stoked. And then I went to NYU.
I was really cool. I majored in psychology and social work and doing the social work bachelors allowed me to literally, I would be wearing my college clothes and then grabbing my Bellevue ID.
I literally had the opportunity to be a therapist at Bellevue. Okay.
And so this is kind of a famous institution. Yeah.
Bellevue, you hear about people getting sent to Bellevue and movies. Bellevue at that time, I don't think it's currently there, but Bellevue had a floor in a men's homeless shelter for men who were substance abusing, struggling with mental illness and homeless.
And so I got to do that. And between the Suicide Prevention Center, most people were happy for the help there and working with people that were really struggling with a lot of complex problems.
I was like, I want to be a psychologist. It's going to be amazing.
And then I get to grad school and I'm like, oh my God, these people are kind of weird. I don't want to be anything like these professors.
These professors seemed super socially anxious. They didn't really have like a clear way to define when someone would be ready to graduate treatment or how many sessions it would take.
And so this is kind of a way of getting back to this question of the difference between psychoanalysis and CBT. And I think a lot of people misunderstand that CBT is just kind of playing whack-a-mole on a problem.
I've heard psychoanalysts describe it that way. I see CBT as really helping someone both look in the rearview mirror.
Can you look at what in your past has led to this moment, but also a huge premium on understanding your current mental habits and loops and understanding the process through which we struggle. And there's kind of a systematic way to measure change and there's a lot of skill building.
So the idea is that we have 400 emotions a day, 6,000 thoughts at least a day, 20,000 breaths a day. Do we have a structure in place to navigate those? I'm all for therapy, but I also don't know if a therapeutic relationship is the way that I see a person transforming their life.
I think it's unfortunate they're kind of pitted against each other because I don't think that's really necessary because I definitely see the value of CBT. Have a toolkit and have some actionable things you can do.
And then also, I think it's very worthwhile of understanding how one ended up in a position where they need these tools. And I think good CBT does both.
My goal as a CBT therapist is I care about your time. I care about your money.
Let's do this. Let's graduate.
Let's keep in touch. Come visit me for spot treatments, but go live your best life.
Monica and I have talked about this a lot. There is this very nebulous zone where you're like, am I ready to quit this? Right.
Or not. And then you're fearful if you stop psychoanalysis, somehow you're going to revert or something.
It's a very ambiguous conclusion, I can admit. Yeah, I feel like saying I'm stopping therapy, it feels like arrogant to say that.
I love that. That's my goal.
That's great. But I also love thinking flexibility.
And I want to just say that there are so many psychoanalysts that are totally brilliant. And I have so much respect.
I love that. That's my goal.
That's great. I also love thinking flexibility.
I want to just say that there are so many psychoanalysts that are totally brilliant and I have so much respect. So much respect for them.
We're so in love with Orna. I need to watch that show.
I'm very bad at TV. I wonder what you'd think though, coming from inside.
Well, I'm going to make a very bold prediction. I think you'd come into it feeling the way you would feel.
And then I do think you would watch Orna do some stuff that is absolutely mind blowing and so worthwhile. And then some level of empathy and optimism.
I've never seen anyone really display. It's very impressive.
And you'd probably also have your own ideas about the couples and how you might want to talk to them. I don't do couples therapy.
So that's on its own. It's super fascinating.
I would imagine you can do CBT for a couple. Totally.
I target a lot of what someone would want to work on in their marriage one-on-one. Yes.
And then what's the second thing? DBT is the second thing. So dialectical behavior therapy.
What is that? It's a newer treatment that was developed in the nineties by Marsha Linehan, who is a professor emeritus at University of Washington. And she herself had struggled a great deal early in her life.
She came out at the end of her career saying that she felt like she needed to share with her patients. It was actually insane.
She went to this hospital that she was hospitalized in herself and told her story. And the place was like windowless and depressing and horrible, aggressive when she was a patient there and the unit that she was on it's gives me the chills talking about it is now a dbt unit which teaches mindfulness interpersonal effectiveness how to be more effective in relationships ask for what you want say no while maintaining self-respect and building relationships emotion regulation learning to kind of be able to dim down your your emotions so they don't feel like they're on an on-off switch and be able to act independent of how you feel.
So if you're like super mad, can you still be nice to your kid if that's in the service of your value? And then distress tolerance, how to survive a crisis without making things worse. And so DBT is an awesome treatment that is the gold standard in suicide prevention, but has now been found helpful well beyond that population to treat other difficult to treat problems like substance use.
Okay. So it started there and then because of its efficacy, it's being applied other places.
Okay. So your book is called Stress Resets, How to Soothe Your Body and Mind in Minutes.
Where to start? I think maybe let's just kind of define stress. I think that too could be an ambiguous word.
Some people would call something stress that aren't and other things that are not. What would we say stress is? So stress is this mismatch between your demands, what you're facing and your resources.
And so it's one of those moments when you think it's too much, I can't. And so much of stress is really subjective.

The thing that's interesting to think about with that

is if you have stress and believe stress is bad for you,

that actually increases your risk of dying

from stress-related causes.

And so I wouldn't get too down

on your body's stress response.

That's actually a huge part of what I wanna share

is if you normalize,

like it makes sense that I have stress in my life. If you don't have stress, your life would probably be pretty shitty and boring.
Yeah. There's also a tremendous amount of benefits associated with this stress response, right? Your immune system improves.
There's a lot of things that your body is readying itself to take on a challenge. Yeah.
So if you combine seeing stress is like the price of a meaningful life and your body's stress response is serving you. Butterflies is like oxygen helping you improve performance.
At-risk youth that are on their way to college that are taught that stress is okay. Everyone feels stressed.
Stress is something you can deal with. It's adaptive, not maladaptive.
Yeah, yeah. With the right supports, you're not alone.
You have nothing to be ashamed of. And what your body's doing in those stressful moments is actually helpful, not shameful.
One of my favorite papers on the topic is called turning your knots into bows, literally teaching people that the knots in their stomach are actually bows, improves their performance on like the GRE. I can feel it.
I always say this when we do live shows. It's like all of that stress for me, because I trust it now, converts immediately into like improved cognition.
I can think quicker. You know, I'm more agile.
and luckily, because I trust it now, converts immediately into improved cognition. I can think quicker.
I'm more agile. And luckily, because it hasn't gone bad a bunch, I associate that feeling, at least before I walk out on a stage.
It's like, oh, good. My superpower has arrived.
That's amazing. Because that's totally different than what happens to most people is you have a stressful event.
I mean, I think as people, we're masterful at something stressful happens and we multiply it. We think the worst, take something ambiguous and make it 10 times worse.
And then that obviously does a number to your body. And then the combination of your mind and body feeling like they're rebelling against you does not put you in a good position to deal with the demands in your life.
Yeah, and I don't want to prevent you from framing it in a positive way. But I also think there's some other fun physiological things that are happening.
When your stress is increasing dramatically, we know that the areas of your brain that are working are also changing, right? You're probably living in your amygdala when you're at peak stress. Whereas you'd hopefully want to be in your frontal lobe making some executive decisions and putting a plan in place.
But just this thinking itself is in a different region if you succumb to that. A hundred percent.
And that's why I teach all sorts of ways to get kind of out of emotion mind and more into a reasonable mind or wise mind. Yeah.
I don't want to minimize. Stress is very real.
And a lot of us are feeling super stressed these days. But how do we stop ruminating, which is one of the trans diagnostic, like a cross diagnoses.
This is one of the things we targeted in my group and we deal with in DBT, but how do we target overthinking something happened for two minutes and you could be playing it 20 hours later. And this is insane.
But if you're asked in a lab where there's all sorts of physiological measures hooked up to you about the worst thing that ever happened to you, your body literally re-experiences it even if the person that did it to you is dead. And I know you had Sapolsky on here, like how do we break free of overthinking? This is why zebras don't get ulcers.
I'm a great ruminator. Me too.
I'm a world-class ruminator. I was too.
And in Intro to Psych, I was like, this is me. This got into why I got into the mindfulness-based therapies that I practiced because I was like, this actually works for me.
And I thought that this was just who I was. Yeah.
By the end of this, I want you to be a world-class ex-ruminator. Oh, I would send you Christmas gifts for a life.
No, no, we're doing it. We're doing it.
Oh, exactly. This is so exciting.
Do you also ruin it? So much. That's probably the glue that binds us.
We're going to do it. I just want everyone to hear me out.
Anything I say is not something that I randomly thought about this morning at like a gym class. It's based on many research papers.
The resources are extensive. So we can talk through it all.
And you can tell me what you think would work. Great.
Because I want to know if there's papers on this like durianal versus nocturnal rumination. My nocturnal rumination is its own thing or feels like its own thing.
Like in the daytime, I think I have a lot of tools and I employ them pretty well, but I wake up at 3 a.m. and I am fucking defenseless.
I'm even saying to myself, this is madness, you won't care in the morning. Zero impact on the rumination, but we'll get to that.
We'll get to the treatment that's coming our way. But there's a couple of things that you lay out in the intro that I think are worth repeating, which is you give these great examples of your husband, Adam, right? Go ahead.
He's in the kitchen one morning. In the kitchen one morning, rushing before work.
And we have a small child. We have three small children, but one is the smallest.
And he spills literally a gallon of milk on the floor. And Adam likes to make sure that things are properly cleaned.
And so he starts aggressively trying to clean up the milk in such a way that he ends up cutting his hand on the kick plate of the bottom of the fridge. And then we didn't have any bandages in the house, so then he runs to the local CVS, busy with the baby at that time.
And I also am not quite sure this merits the CVS visit. Sure, sure.
That's a side note. It would be done with a couple's therapy.
Yes, yes, yes. And the great thing about Adam is he came home from this and he was like laughing with my laughter.
Okay, so he goes to CVS to get a bandage and some Neosporin and gets into a fender bender. Stop.
And like most of life is not spilled milk and I just want to double down on life is really hard and I don't want to minimize and I've certainly been through hard things myself.

But the fact that we can go from spilled milk

to cutting your hand to a fender bender

and thank God it was just a fender bender

is mind blowing.

And at the same time, I've had these things myself.

Like I was stressed postpartum.

This was the second kid.

I'm like picking up my nail and thinking I have no time.

I have to pump.

I have to get to work.

I have a book deadline.

I'm out of time.

And then I give myself a treatment resistant infection

See you next time. I have to pump.
I have to get to work. I have a book deadline.
I'm out of time. And then I give myself a treatment resistant infection.
From biting her nails. Literally, it was like picking my nail.
Your immune system is down apparently when you're nursing. And so my friend's a doctor, they're like, you have thepsis.
You need to like go to the ER. Oh my God.
Like stop infection or something weird. And then I'm like, okay, so I'm sitting in Cedar's ER for like six hours.
And I'm like, I thought I had no time. And now I really have no time.
But we're specialists at doing this to ourselves. And to your earlier point, when we're stressed, the emotional parts of our brain is on fire.
But people are also remarkably good at getting better with the right tools. If I had just slowed down and noticed, okay, there's the urge to pick up my nail.
I could do something instead. I like those examples because it's an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure because I think a lot of people's pushback will immediately be, and mine is initially, I don't have time to add something to my plate, right? Like I don't want to do any mindful practice or I don't want to stop for five minutes in the middle of this experience to check in and use some of the tools.
I don't have the five minutes to do that, but I would just argue that nine times out of 10, it's going to cost you far more time. Because they do.
They just compound. And then, not to out my wife, but I watch my wife in the kitchen frazzle.
Then, yes, she's moving too fast because she feels like she's jammed down. Now we've got a spilt thing.
And I'm just watching from the sidelines going like, oh, there's just a tornado of things now cascading. Or you have like an issue at work.
And then you're an asshole at home. And then that's like, let's just make your whole life terrible.
Now everything's bad. Both places are bad.
Almost all of us. We have some really counterproductive responses to stress.
So people that are tight on money may find themselves overspending as the result of that. Or they have a big deadline and then the response is procrastination or trying to perfect the thing they have the deadline about.
or you're feeling anxious and you start researching this and hyper-focusing on it. And now you're in panic.
So a lot of the ways we deal with this, is that what? That's you? Well, I think that's everyone. With WebMD, everyone's an expert now on every single thing that's wrong with them and you just go immediate to panic.

I do panic a lot. I was going to say we could only fix you.
I have a care for panic. No, no,

no, no, seriously, you guys, nothing makes me more excited. This is my Christmas gift.
Like,

I feel like you're giving me a Christmas gift. Another thing that is on the list of things that backfire that was the impetus for writing this book is so many people, especially people that

are lucky enough to get help. 30 million Americans take benzodiazepines.
So here's where you and I

are perfectly aligned. And I can already tell you what the comments are going to be.
People are Thank you. especially people that are lucky enough to get help.
30 million Americans take benzodiazepines.

So here's where you and I are perfectly aligned.

And I can already tell you what the comments are going to be.

People are going to yell at me and go,

it saved my life, lay off benzos.

I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to the person-

Don't yell at them.

No, I need to yell at them.

I'm not talking to you.

I'm talking to the person that as we describe this,

you know in your head,

I could probably get through this without this.

It is a huge epidemic no one wants to talk about.

And in your book, 93 million prescriptions for benzos a year in this country. So yes, a lot of people need them.
They're saving some people's lives. They're also dramatically overprescribed.
And there's a huge cadre of people who are addicted to them. I've watched people get sober for 20 years.
It is one of the gnarliest things to get off of. Your brain chemistry is so altered for so long.
You could be smoking crack for a year straight. After 30 days of sobriety, you'll be pretty back to normal.
I've seen benzo addicts take a year to return. I'm so pro drugs.
Do MDMA, go do mushrooms, but that one you really look out for. Yeah.
And I'm happy to talk a little bit about what my issues are with it specifically. So, I mean, a few things, the first thing to realize is, do you know about their history? No, I don't.
Like how they were developed? They were testing antibiotics, basically, and they noticed that mice on the verge of being electrocuted were acting passively when they were given this compound. And so, I don't know about you, but if I was about to be electrocuted, I would like to be...
You'd like to feel it. I'd like to be on high threat alert.
And so, then Arthur Sackler of the opioid crisis started marketing these to women in the 1950s. It was mother's little helper.
Exactly. It was the Sacklers.
Yeah. Yeah.
They've got a rich history. Yeah.
But I don't know about you, but I don't think a pill is a cure for an unsatisfying life. And my goal wouldn't be to like be drugged into submission if my days are dissatisfying.

I also just think it's interesting that when you need to be your sharpest, when you're stressed and you need to have your full brain to solve problems in front of you, you're taking something. I'm moving through the world.
I'm seeing tons of people really fucked up on benzos that I don't think most people are picking up on. Well, the thing that breaks my heart, Doc, is that so many of my patients come to me not realizing that there were other options.
I love people and I think people are amazing. But these people seem like they might have had a brain injury sometimes.
People that are incredibly privileged that keep going up on the dose because like a concierge physician is willing to keep, you habituate to it, then you need to keep raising the dose. Both things are true.
You're abusing it more and you're building a tolerance. Yeah, and like you, I believe, of course, if you need this, take it.
You know, a patient of mine was like, I feel so bad. I have to take this.
I'm finding out tomorrow if this ailment is terminal or not. I'm like, oh my goodness.
For me, like to tell you what to do. I think there's some acute use, which is great.
One cool thing for people that are listening that are thinking, I tried to detox once and it was hell. I don't know if this is anecdotal or larger, but I've had a couple of clients recently that are taking drugs like GLP-1s and finding that their detox is going a little bit better on the bed.
So that for people who don't know, GLP-1s are Ozampic, all the semaglutides. The one person that has tried that I'm thinking of in particular, he was on like six milligrams and really his whole life was on hold.
Like, yeah, OK, your body is not stressed, but you're not able to get a job. Oh, that's cool that that's helping because they're starting to really look into those GOP ones for addiction.
I'm very encouraged by it. I'm not a psychiatrist, so I can't say for sure, but this person has found that really helpful.
And so one of the things coming back to you, that brought me into writing this book was a colleague of mine, a psychiatry resident, Neil Hoffman, was saying in the peak of COVID when people were super stressed, like, hey, did you see this new paper that found that this song called weightless was found by researchers at the university of pennsylvania to reduce anxiety before surgery almost to the same effect as a benzo and i was like what that's crazy listening to a song for five minutes actually the song is so relaxing what's the song it's called weightless this is what i play for my kids if they're not going to sleep wow you could do that for your middle of for your middle of the night. Oh, it might help.
Yeah. I use a book on tape to get out of it, but yes.
It just opened my mind that there's so many things we don't realize that are free of side effects. We live in this world where it's like the fancier, the better, but like there's simple things.
Okay. So people love this quote.
I'm going to read it again. It bears reading.
Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist. What's his great book? He's got a great book.
Man's Search for Meaning. The quote is, between stimulus and response, there is a space.
In that space lies our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom.
And the goal of your book is to widen that space. Yeah.
There's so many things we could do moment to moment to make it a little easier. Maybe when emotions are super high, you can't do the hardest thing, but you could do something like relax your face, which automatically signals to your brain that I need to stop judging and thinking this is the worst.
And then that maybe allows you to find your breath. And then maybe you could do the next thing.
And there's all these things you could stack together. Yeah, the first part of the book is called befriending stress.
And we're kind of already been dancing around it, right? Which is a bit of reframing or really coming to see it as something useful for you. And one was the knot to the bow.
Do you want to elaborate on that at all? If we could really normalize that our body's serving us and we don't need to judge it and we don't need to be ashamed of it, then it automatically stops the cycle of your body does something, your mind makes it worse, your body then gets worse and then it's a tornado. I also think of stress as being a good indicator.
If I'm feeling the physicality of stress or anxiety, it makes me think what's going on in my life that is causing it to then address that. If you look at it as, oh, it's actually telling me something, then I think that's a smart way of embracing stress and saying that, oh, actually, so I need to look at what's going on.
I love that. And I think you could also swap the word stress for emotions.
Like this is also so relevant with emotions or people judge their emotions and then judge their body's emotional response, but you could use the two synergistically. Yeah.
How do we regulate our emotions? So many ways to regulate our emotions. I keep coming back to this three-part sequence of our thoughts, our physical sensations, and our behaviors.
So if you dissect an emotion into like its fundamental ingredients, it's thoughts, physical sensations, behaviors. So it's like you go to sleep and you start telling yourself, I need to go to sleep two hours ago because I have this important meeting tomorrow morning, that is going to make you feel probably more tense and revved up.
And then who wouldn't start scrolling on their phone? And so just noticing like, what is the arc of my emotions? What are the ingredients that are creating anxiety for me in this moment or sadness? Sadness doesn't just happen to you. We co-create sadness.
We think sad thoughts. We act in ways that perpetuate sadness.
But if we can take a step back and notice that our minds are full of like spam, a lot of the content in our mind is not necessarily useful or true. And if we choose our behaviors, like it sounds very simplistic, but behavioral activation, like helping people create a schedule that's full of activities that are pleasant and also give you a sense of accomplishment.
You don't just want to be sitting around basking in the sun. You also don't just want to be on the Stairmaster for hours.
You need like a good mix of activities, but doing that works as well as antidepressants for major to moderate depression. And I'm not against antidepressants, but I just want people to have a whole host of things.
So we manage our emotions by noticing how we're co-creating them and changing our behaviors in response to them. And so one of my favorite tools all around, regardless of the emotion, is the skill opposite action.
Because any emotion you want to change, you're angry at someone and the intensity isn't helpful for the situation or it's not in line with your values. Giving them the benefit of the doubt and being a little nice.
I mean, we think that acting angrily is somehow cathartic, but that's actually pumping up anger. That's what I would do as a couples therapist

or what I do with my individual clients.

You hate your spouse and you want to criticize them endlessly

and be aggressive.

Can we try to think about something

with a more generous interpretation

and plan like a secret caring gesture?

Like, can you get this awesome coffee for the person

and not have any expectations

or start counting like I did this?

If I'm understanding this correctly,

it's almost like you want to reverse the order of events.

So you're saying normally you have an emotion, stress or whatever the thing is you're ruminating on. And then you start thinking about it.
Your body has all these sensations. It starts responding.
In the worst case, it's like getting into flight or fight. And then a behavior results from that sensation because you want to soothe yourself.
So you pull out your phone and you start scrolling or you pull out your weed pipe and you take a hit or you do whatever thing you go shopping it's almost as if don't point at me i'm not so it's almost as if if you're more thoughtful about putting your behavior first then that almost reverse engineers itself it goes in other directions. Like I did something pleasurable that had some purpose and some community and some communication.
And then my body felt calm and relaxed. And then my thoughts were better.
Yeah, both things are true. It's stress is like that cycle.
But our emotions, the behavior that we're engaging in is creating the emotion as well. And so if I feel really ashamed, that's not just out of nowhere.
It's thinking thoughts about not being enough and then acting in ways that are hiding. You go to the party and you're on your phone the whole time.
No one's going to talk to you. Then you really feel like you're not worthy.
Yeah, and so our response to our emotion amplifies that emotion, but also our response creates the emotion. Oh, what a wicked cycle.
I think a lot of people have this idea that just changing your behavior isn't really going to do much. That's superficial.
And I just want to say a couple of things. We do this all the way.
And so it's not like I'm being nice and thinking resentful thoughts. It's like all the way.
And it's not just helping this moment. But if I have negative core beliefs, if I have beliefs from my childhood that I'm not lovable, the only way to change those beliefs is to transcend them with my behavior, to create a new narrative.
And so this isn't just, oh, right now I'm like acting opposite. Or as some of my clients would say, like the George Costanza approach, it's like, no, actually you're creating a new reality and feeling like you have agency in your life.
Again, you just mentioned two more AA things. It's easier to act your way into thinking differently than thinking your way into acting differently.
And that is so fucking true. Your brain sometimes will catch up with your actions.
And then you want self-esteem. Do esteemable acts.
I love AA. I don't know if you're allowed to do this, but when I was working at the Bellevue thing, I used to go to meetings there.
Well, there's open meetings. I dragged a client there also.
And I was like, this is so great. He was looking at me like, we're leaving.
I'm like, no, no, no, we're staying. We're staying as long as this goes.
I hope this goes for hours. Yeah trip out at all a lot of it is cbt that they didn't know was cbt okay so let's talk about resets so you have mind resets body resets and behavior resets so how would these work the notion of a book on stress is such an irony because who has time to read when they feel like they don't have in it and so the book is almost like a cookbook Resets is kind of the equivalent of urgent care, what to do in this moment if you feel really flooded.
And if your problem in this moment is your mind is really ruminating or doing those things, we have mind resets, we have body resets, which will also help your mind, and then behavior resets to change your behavior. Give me an example of a mind reset.
A mind reset is even just singing your thoughts. So we all have thoughts, like I said, that are more like spam that are just simply unhelpful.
And 90% of people report having intrusive unwanted thoughts. So if you have a repeated unwanted thought, like I'm a loser because I don't have plans on Saturday night, not a super helpful thought to think.
And so if you could sing that thought to the tune of Do You Believe in Magic, it automatically loses its grip. Yeah, well, because it's silly.
You guys have to sing. I don't have plans on Saturday.
No, I'm a loser. I'm a loser.
I'm a piece of shit. Okay.
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I get my best ideas from my clients. They're like, what are thoughts to the Hathaway song, What Is Love? And then with the Saturday Night Live clip is even better.
Do you know what I'm talking about? No. I think it's Jim Carrey is in a sketch singing, What Is Love? Baby, don't hurt me.
Baby, don't hurt me. Oh, baby, don't hurt me.
Oh, yeah. He joins the Will Ferrell and Catan, the Roxbury Boys.
Oh. And he sings that song.
Okay, so if you swap in instead of What Is Love, what are thoughts? What are thoughts? Baby, don't hurt me. Thoughts can't hurt me.
Oh, thoughts can't hurt me anymore. Is that it? Yes, I mean, that's one of the options you have at your disposal for ruminating because again, a lot of us have the same content that's just been there for ages, that's not serving us, that we take very seriously.
Like I wouldn't sit there and respond to spam emails or answer robocalls, but why are we doing that with our thoughts? We accept that insanity is repeating the same thing, expecting different results. And yet we're having the same thoughts we've been having for three decades.
And we think each thought is equal. That one thought is as relevant as I love you thoughts.
And they're not, Some are not true. Thoughts aren't true inherently.
But they create real feelings. Like if I told you to think about a cockroach while you're ordering avocado toast, it's going to make you lose your appetite.
Like they really affect your physiology. And so if we could even just see like any thought in the middle of the night is worth singing.
Yeah. And what about a body reset? A body reset could also change your mind because you change your body.
You could change your mind, but a popular body one, I'm just giving you one. There's many out here, many work for different people.
It's like, sometimes you need a tweezer, sometimes you need a hammer, different skills at different times. But if you were really stressed, if you took a salad bowl and filled it with ice water, held your breath, set a timer for 30 seconds and submerge your face in ice water, we have all these incredible features within us that we forget.
Like our body is truly our own walking pharmacy. And so if you submerge your face in ice water while holding your breath, your heart rate automatically slows down.
It activates like a parasympathetic response. So your heart rate would probably go down like 20 beats per minute on an Apple Watch.
You would redirect blood flow to your brain and to your heart. Right, because it thinks you're submerged in water, it's got to save the most vital organs.
Totally. And also, how can you

possibly be ruminating in that moment? I don't think you should be doing this all the time,

but I think just even metaphorically realizing there's something that can help you in seconds.

We have our own control-alt-delete functions within us. If we know what those are, yes,

they take a little bit of work, but they also come with this priceless feeling of knowing

you can count on yourself. What about box breathing or breathing exercises do you like those i really like the breathing in for five and out for five coherent breathing or paced breathing be more literal about that so you breathe yeah we could do this together yeah let's do it i'm gonna sit in the way you just did my feet don't reach the floor for the listener we've become very erect in posture.
So if you gently close your lips and breathe in for five seconds, I hope everyone tries this while they're listening. Breathe in for five.
One, two, three, four, five. And out for five, also through your nose.
If you want to tack onto this, you could ever so slightly raise the upper corners of your lips into like a half smile which is like a facial expression of acceptance monica has like such a model half smile i got a little glow across my face do you feel anything no i think the smiling is shockingly and it's a half smile and it's for you it's like i accept this moment so the half smile plus the slow breathing it even if you're getting a root canal, maybe you can't smile, but there's something about this slow breathing. I just want to now breathe the rest of this because it feels so good.
It did feel nice. Five minutes of doing this slow breathing reduces blood pressure.
Doing it for 20 minutes a day is known to affect your nervous system, helps with things like IBS. I interviewed a bunch of people for the book, obviously, and there's a couple.
They're both psychiatrists and based out of Columbia University in New York. They actually became so mesmerized by slow breathing that they now don't prescribe medications.
They mostly prescribe this breath work. And they're even working with people that are in disaster zones.
Back to Laird, that's his big thing. He does like breathing workshops.
I was at this thing where you could do all these different kind of mini clinics. And he hosted this one i didn't do it because i'm like i know how to breathe i'm gonna go watch the animation thing and then by the end of the conference the most unanimous thing the thing people like the most and there was really exciting offerings was this whole breathing workshop he did people were like that was the best i felt in a decade wow yeah and again this takes seconds instead of picking my nail i could have have smiled and slow breathed and done some sort of gesture of you got this.
It's okay. Yeah.
And then maybe that would have led to like some sort of problem solving of, okay, let's try to rework why I feel overwhelmed. Not to be so egocentric, but I do want to know what I'm doing when I do this.
So my biggest breakthrough in road rage, which I am terrible about, not anymore, but I used to be terrible at it, is while I'm monitoring whoever I'm mad at, right, who I think is a bully on the road and I'm going to teach them a lesson, I make myself either start reading license plates, and I got to say them out loud, J, L, 6, 7, or start reading the signs of the buildings I'm passing. And I can't tell you how effective that's been.
It's just like literally forcing myself to focus on something different than the thing I want to. That's what no one else wants to admit to.
There's also a high that comes along with your self-righteous indignation. We get off on this.
We're a little addicted to this. We like feeling superior and morally on our high ground.
And the whole anger thing's a little intoxicating. For me, I also have to admit,

there's a bad cycle of kind of, you know,

pleasure seeking in it.

Back to this thing of like,

do you want to be right or do you want to be effective?

And then what about behavior resets?

Even planning pleasant things,

a lot of times we're like,

oh no, I'm too busy to do something nice.

But actually doing positive experiences

and really learning to savor them and relive them. Yeah, I think it requires kind of like a whole paradigm shift in your head.
I know it happens in AA, right? Which for people who are like, I can't go to a meeting because I had a thing for my daughter. And I can't go to a meeting because I have a thing for work.
And you have to really instill in people, you only have those things if you're sober. The whole thing's built upon this foundation.
And I think for a lot of people, the notion that they can't take a walk with a friend, that they don't have time to do that. So, well, if you can't do that, the rest of the things are going to go away or they're going to suffer.
Right. So walk is totally a behavior reset.
Even learning how to assert yourself, like if you're annoyed with someone instead of stewing in it, I can give you a formula for how to ask for what you want, say no. So you're not overthinking it.
What's the formula? It's from DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and it's called Dear Man,

and it's an acronym for describe the facts,

express how you feel,

ask for what you want,

reward, like what's in it for the other person,

be mindful, act confident,

negotiate as needed.

Walk us through, can you give us a hard example?

Yeah, give me something hard.

Someone that's really annoying you.

We can't make it about us, because it's too rife. Too explosive.
Okay. There's so many times people think, oh my God, these people want to stay with me for like two weeks when they're in town for the holidays.
Most people default to posting them begrudgingly or making up a live. This is a great one.
Yeah. Let's stick with this one.
A lot of people have this. Yeah, but if you're like, okay, I'm so thrilled that you're coming to town.

I can't wait to see you.

I realize that it's a bit easier this time of year to just keep our house to our family. I really want to spend some quality time with people that we don't get to see that are going to be in town at the same time.
But I would love to plan a couple of really fun dinners. And I can also totally help you with some great local options of hotels that are right near me or Airbnbs that have good options for extended stays.
I can imagine someone doing that for the very first time and then waiting with the craziest sense of anticipation of what the response is. Like if they've never tried that.
What if the person says, so you don't want me to come? This is hard because there's so much in the book, but you have to do the dear man with also this best friend called give, which is like the give is the food for the relationship, which is being gentle, interested, validating, easy manners. So maybe the person says, so you don't want me to come? Of course I want you to come.
That's why I want to plan these really special dinners and want to make this tie, not with the chaos of the aunt that's staying for two days and the cousin that's coming for another day. And part of dear man is also calculating intensity because sometimes people are at the airport screaming at someone at a 10 when there's no seat.
What are you going to do about that? The person's not capable of giving you what you want. And so I also go through how to compute.
Should you be at a one? Should you be at a 10? And someone might be pushing back because you're at a three and maybe you weren't at seven. And this is why I wrote this book because a lot of people can't afford therapy or forget these when a cousin texts you.
And for you to have basically on like a post-it, how to do this in the heat of the moment, because that is stressful. Having someone in your house that you don't want there or continuing to reward your neighbor.
I feel like I've tried and learned some helpful tips with boundaries. These are all boundaries conversations, like how to implement them with kindness.

But I think putting it on me sometimes saying,

I'm not going to be my best self if we do this. And then that's going to affect you.

It's like, I don't want you to stay.

It's I know that I will be overwhelmed.

I love that.

And Monica, I think the thing that's great about that

is then even being clear,

my agenda here is self-respect.

And even if someone's mildly annoyed, self-respect is my aim. It's got to take priority.
Yeah, I like that technique quite a bit. Yeah.
I don't have any problem with kind of confrontation. We both don't have that much trouble with that.
Yeah, I know some people are just completely arrested with this inability to have this uncomfortable exchange. It hurt people's feelings.
Yeah, and I am so blessed. It's one of my blessings is I'm like, well, the alternative to me is not an option.
Me being uncomfortable for two weeks versus being uncomfortable for 12 minutes on the phone, I'm going to always pick that for me. There's just like a cost reward analysis, right? There's still a way to do it without being like, you can't come because I'll be, I'm mad.
When you're here for five days, the house starts smelling like you. That's terrible.
I hate it. I hate that smell.
Yeah, you can still be kind about it. Some people think you're just hurting their feelings and that's mean.
There's a middle ground. You can get what you want.
You can get the relationship and you can get self-respect if you know how to do it. Let's talk about buffers.
In addition to learning how to deal with intense moments, whether your mind is making you miserable or your body feels like it's waging a war against you or you're doing things that are just spreading your stress. We also need to learn how to live a life that feels less stressful.
We don't just want to go from like hard time to hard time. And so buffers is almost like preventative medicine that things we could do preemptively before the hard thing.
You don't want to always be responding. You want to be proactive.
Okay. Body buffer.
Yeah. So a body buffer coming back to the promise of panic.
If someone has panic attacks, one of the most research backed ways to treat panic is actually practicing panic. And so if someone feels like, oh my God, all of a sudden I'm short of breath, I'm really sweaty.
I feel shaky. I feel dizzy.
I feel kind of like dissociative. We can help you recreate those.
And so the worst thing to do is to try to calm down when your heart is racing. Like that's really stressful.
But if you practice, just imagine you take like a straw and you pinch it so it's narrow in diameter, like a tiny coffee stir size diameter where you could take a regular straw and make that happen. Close your nose and then just breathe from the small opening of the straw.
You could do that for 60 seconds. And you're like, whoa, I just made myself feel the way I sometimes feel out of the blue.
And when it comes up out of the blue, I'm really spooked by it. If you practice recreating the sensations that you normally run from when they come up, you can kind of put out a welcome mat to them.
You stop the loop of like, really bad, go to the ER. This is dangerous.
This is getting worse. But instead it's like, okay, I can radically accept how I feel because I've tried this before.
I've been here before. And so recreating your body stress response so you can experience it without whatever triggered it in the first place.
Yeah. Or without the negative layer of interpretation.
So I'm just so curious because you mentioned you had panic. I used to have full panic attacks.
Have you tried this before? I have not tried that. My therapist, she told me to like name three things you see, name three things you smell, you know, anchor down, name, touch things.
And that helped. I haven't had one in a really long time.
Yeah. I mean, when someone comes to my office with panic, I'm not like a cocky person, but I'm like excited.
I'm like, I can treat this and this doesn't take very long. I mean, panic again is your body's doing its thing and you're hyper focusing on it.
It's almost like the Chinese finger trap if you stop fighting. Well, also knowing what it is, I think that's so helpful to straw because then when you're in a panic attack, you're like, oh, this is what is happening.
I practice this. Yeah.
For so long, I was like, I have a tumor. I definitely have a brain disorder that's causing all of this.
Whenever I went to the doctor, they were like, you don't. Sorry.
You don't. Sorry to tell you the results are negative.
Yeah, they're like, I think you should go to therapy. And when I finally started to believe that and when it would happen, I was like, oh, I'm panicking.
I'm having a panic attack. I'm not dying.
No one's ever died from a panic attack. Then it went away.
Yeah. And this is my thing.
It's like, if you were taking a benzodiazepine, you might have never learned that lesson. You could learn this lesson in the panic exercises that I'm recommending.
Take about five minutes and then you would just need to replicate. Again, this is not a random thought page any dates.
This is in the unified protocol, which is a gold standard treatment for panic attacks. And it applies across across the board.
Like if you have those symptoms before giving a speech or before flying or during flying, you can still change your body's stress response. And what about behavioral buffers? What would that entail? So many to choose from, but one of my favorites is called a chain.
If you make a mistake, instead of doing one of two things, which I think a lot of us are prone to doing, a lot of us oversimplify like, oh yeah, no big deal. I'll do better tomorrow.
Or we struggle with this thing called the abstinence violation effect of like, I can't do it. It's too much.
Like I messed up once. Like I don't have it in me.
You fail it at once, you'll fail at it forever. Yeah.
You can take a moment to like literally write down, even if you took a piece of paper and folded it in half vertically, what was the sequence of events? What made you more vulnerable? Like I didn't sleep well, didn't exercise, didn't eat breakfast. This thing happened.
I did this. Write down exactly what happened, almost like you're rewinding a tape with compassion.
And then you can go and create solutions at every step along the way. Can I have a little food before? Totally.
And then you have like a million solutions. And so instead of being like, I'm just an asshole that sends mean texts to people, I'm like empowered to see what is the setup.
I didn't ask for what I wanted earlier. Then I felt more resentful.
Then I used my text instead of picking up the phone. And so there's a lot of tools, but people that think like, oh my God, I set these resolutions I can't stick to.
You actually can if you understand what is the domino effect and how do you change each step of the way. Committing to the laundry list that led up to this event.
Totally. Instead of I'm an idiot or I'll do better tomorrow.
I'm incompetent. I'm not enough.
I have a fundamental character flaw that prevents me from doing this thing versus these 12 things happened and now we're here.

Right.

That's very Sapolsky too.

I'm really struck by certain findings.

Again, I really am passionate about things where things are very serious, like suicide prevention.

And something as simple, Jerome Motto is one of the first people that created a suicide prevention initiative in the 1930s.

He's a psychiatrist and he did something as simple as sending people who left the hospital a letter that said, I'm thinking of you and hoping you're doing well and no need to respond. And that literally prevented suicide.
We don't want to do things either to us or to the people around us. We want to instead take vicious cycles and create virtuous ones and take these moments of pain.
I mean, I feel like the moments I feel most proud of are the times where things were really stressful. It's almost like chiseling your muscles of emotion regulation.
I was in a really bad mood that day. I had a shitty day and I was super sweet to my daughter on her way to swim team, or I was especially nice to like an older person that was in front of me taking forever in the grocery store.
Yeah. Okay.
So I had one specific question. I think the hardest time to use any of these tools

is when you're in the middle of a fight with a partner

or like a family member.

I find that once you're in that zone,

stopping it and resetting is, I think, the hardest.

Or for me, maybe.

How would you advise?

Because you're the most emotional, right?

Or no?

Yeah, I'm the most emotional.

I think the stakes feel highest because it's someone I love. I'm in a very heightened state and I don't know how to do the thing I do in traffic, which is look at a sign, do this, distract myself, check in.
And I'm curious how one interrupts this while in a fight with their partner. One thing you could do is even thinking about the values, like how do you want to show up in your life? A lot of us are focused on what we want to get.
How do we want to be spoken to? How do we want people to show compassion to us? But how do we want to show up? And so being really clear about regardless of what happens, this is my mission statement. I'm not going to deviate from this.
In students that write briefly about their highest values, years later, they're more able to regulate their emotions and persist with long-term goals. I think also just realizing, is there some sort of word we could say that's funny and playful? The anaconda.
Yeah. Let's take a minute.
This is the whole thing, like distress tolerance is, how do we not make things worse? And then once we came down a few decibels, then we can go to the problem solving. But if there's something we could do to self-soothe, I love this idea of even a hope kit, like a collection of things that gives you a sense of hope, like looking at some pictures that just broaden your view outside of this moment that's not going well to some broader moments of connection and joy.
And so something that could help you realize like, okay, in this moment, this isn't about who's right or who's wrong. This is about me doing what matters most to me and what my highest purpose is.
And I am too dysregulated to continue to stay here. It's almost like getting up in the middle of an exam and getting a sip of water and then coming back.
Let's try to come back. Stonewalling is a problem, like slamming doors.
You should be like, hey, I think we both need to get some water. I know I do.
Yeah, in like a lovely way. You made me so upset that I need to like...
But asking if you can take a minute to do some breathing i think it would be so sweet to do that together like we care too much about each other let's try this thing for a minute because things that are so interesting if like in the middle of a fight something funny happens you forget the fight or in the middle of spiraling someone calls you and they're funny you could totally stop and again it's realizing the channel can change if you let go i'm gonna admit this thing, family square. We probably do them once every couple of months.
It's when someone has an actual issue that they need to bring up in the family. We all sit down on the ground.
So everyone's low. There's no interrupting.
There's some ground rules. And so most often the family square is about the kids, but we had a family square a couple days ago.
And yeah, Kristen and I got into our loop. You would think, I mean, the thing I'm most committed to in my entire life is the kids and we're in a loop.
I can see we're in a loop. I can see it's upsetting the kids, the thing I care the most about.
And we can't get out until one of the kids goes, you guys aren't listening to each other and you're making it worse. And I'm like, I know the fucking nine-year-olds seeing how obvious this is.
And I was just thinking, because there were moments during it where I'm like, I know what's happening. I don't know how to get out of it.
All right. Telling yourself like, okay, we could put this down and pick this up at this time.
Because I think we think that we're winning by keeping it going, but we're majorly losing. Well, what I think is I'm finally going to craft a sentence that's so direct, clever, correct, that it'll penetrate the cycle.
And she thinks the same thing. But I could tell from listening to you that you are a masterful sentence crafter and you can totally create that.
That's why I'm misled. No, no, but to have even yourself.
I don't know. No, I think I'm a victim of thinking I'm so good at.
Yes, that is what's happening. We had a fight yesterday, Monica and I.
And literally this morning, I'm still thinking about it. I'm like, I know exactly how I could have got her to understand what I was saying.
I should have said X, Y, and Z. I'm still thinking a day later how I could have gotten her to understand my point had I crafted it better.
And of course, no, that wouldn't have worked either. No, that wouldn't.
No, and I too, I'm like driving in the morning and I'm just like. If emotions are high on both ends, even if it's the perfect explanation, the receiver's not going to receive it.
And so these are amazing ongoing relationships that it doesn't have to be right then and there. That is what is helpful.
I know it's like, okay, we're going to come, we're going to record. It will be fine because we'll put that aside for this

and we did and then

it is fine. Who cares?

At some point you just say like, who cares?

I kind of forget all the details of the thing

I wanted to bring up anyway.

I'll admit this to you. This morning when I

was thinking like, I should have said it this way.

I was like, also

hold on. You were in a fight in the family square three days ago, Kristen.
You were in a fight with Monica yesterday. You know, it might be you.
That's nice. I was like, you seem to be the common denominator this week.
Well, it's also just an alchemy of everyone's things coming together. We have a lot of shared work stress right now, so that wasn't the greatest.
Yeah. But I truly believe, again, like using the chain, you could totally look at the things and repair is beautiful.
I mean, repair could leave you closer than before. Yeah.
And to even just see a huge thing that John Gottman talks about is even just the startup, how the start of the conversation goes is really going to dictate how it goes. You know, if you can start with like warmth and kindness.
Yeah. I might need to adopt his, we interviewed him and he was so lovely.
So great. A long time ago.
Now I feel like this would drive someone crazy, but he doesn't. And I also love it, which is his behavioral thing he does.
I think which reverse engineers his whole thinking is he takes notes while his wife's talking. Like it's getting heated.
He's like, let me get my notepad. And then something about him taking, do you remember that part? Yeah.
Him writing down what she's saying, I guess. Something about that.
Well, I think it detaches the primal brain of when you're writing it down sort of objectively. You're also half removed.
It's always a hack, right? Like the part of your brain that needs to be present to write maybe is just enough to pull you out of the amygdala or something. Like anger, yeah.
If college students write for three days about something upsetting that happened to them for 20 minutes, the first day, the most upsetting thing, the second day, how it affected your life in the past, third day, how it's affecting you in the present. People that do that 20 minutes, three times, 60 minutes, six months later, they have significant reductions in rumination and depression.
And even for people that have PTSD, five days of specific therapeutic writing, written exposure therapy significantly reduces PTSD. And this has like blown my mind.
Memories during trauma are splintered and then it helps you kind of store it properly. And again, removes you from the event and create some working distance.
Again, like there's these things out there that a lot of people don't know about and they think that they need to do these really expensive things or things that are very mysterious. I like what you said that our bodies are a walking pharmacy.
We have tools with us. We don't have to look outward.
I mean, we can, but we can look inward too. Okay.
So now is the part of the interview where you give me free treatment. So nighttime rumination.
So again, in the daytime, I'm pretty good. I got a pretty good handle on it, on my ruminating.
Is that accurate? Let's just say it's significantly less controllable in the middle of the night. I'll even actively be in it going, 90%, I don't care about this in the morning.
And that is so the case. So often I spend an hour and a half at 3 a.m.
obsessing about something. I wake up in the morning and I'm like, I don't even understand why you were doing it.
You actually don't even care about that. What's happening and what can I do? I think you're in a compromised state at 3 in the morning.
You're not your most apt version. To quote a mentor of mine that taught this CBT for insomnia class, it's a problem to be awake when reason sleeps.
An interesting thing in a study on rumination was when people are asked to talk about something that really upset them, if 50% of the people have the opportunity to listen to researchers eavesdropping outside the door, those people stop ruminating, like literally having some sort of distraction. So some sort of distraction could help if the book on tape on Audible isn't doing it for you.
Have you tried a a body scan? Body scan is I could like literally send my breath to all my left toes and really focusing on the breath, reaching my toes. Like you'd inhale in and you imagine the breath traveling out of your lungs, down your leg, into your toe.
Yeah, and then you move up through your whole body. Yeah, you like cry at the top.
And there's progressive muscle relaxation where you tense and release. These things take a lot of your focus

and they're very sedating. I am energized

and in trainings where you

pair up and practice doing the body scan

on each other, I'm like snoring.

Because it's tedious too.

You start at the top of your head

and then you move to your right eye lid.

It's super focused and it's

super relaxing and I also find

I like to do the slow breathing, the five in,

five out. And sometimes if I don't get to it

during the day, I try to do the slow breathing,

the five in five out. And sometimes if I don't get to it during the day, I try to do it at night

and I can never do the 20 minutes I intend because I pass out probably in like seven minutes.

So that's also an option. The slow breathing, there's actually like a light that projects

that you could pace your breathing with a light, but there's a bunch of things,

but I think you're doing all the right things to even just realize like you're an emotion mind.

The content is relevant. Have you tried CBT for insomnia? No.
CBT for insomnia works as well as sleep medication for people that have a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep. And so you kind of calculate how many hours are you in bed? How many hours are you in bed? I'm in bed, like trying to sleep or watching TV.
And let's not get hung up on it. You're not supposed to watch TV in bed, but do you mean just supine in my bed? Let's do trying to sleep.
Okay. It's eight hours.
How many hours are you actually sleeping? Fuck lately. It's been rough.
Probably six. Also I'm in a weird zone, but seven probably.
Okay. So CBT for insomnia.
And again, this is just like a short version and there's apps for people that are listening like CBTI. It's like a free VA app that works well.

I gotta get that.

Yeah, so basically you pick your wake time.

Like what time do you want to wake up?

6.40.

So you set your wake time and that does not change.

There's no snooze.

You pick your wake time and then you go to bed

at about the same time

that you've been typically averaging sleep.

So let's say you've been sleeping six hours.

So you go to bed at 12.40.

Then you wake up at 6.40 and then that creates kind of a drive for sleep. So let's say you've been sleeping six hours, you go to bed at 1240, then you wake up at 640.
And then that creates kind of a drive for sleep. And because you need a certain level of homeostatic drive for sleep, because a lot of times what we do is like, oh, my gosh, I couldn't fall asleep last night.
Let's go to bed early tonight. And then let's hit snooze.
And those two things are a problem because it's almost like jet lag, you need to be primed for sleep. Then you get the six hours.
Then once you're sleeping 90% of the time, you can add in 20 minutes after several days. But I don't know if you've had this, but I've had this thing where I feel like, oh, I'm so tired.
I didn't sleep well. And then I start canceling things like I cancel a gym class I'm supposed to go to in the morning.
And then the whole day is set up for failure. Sleep is a huge buffer.
I don't want to understate that, especially if you're chronically not sleeping enough. Really hard to do any of the things if you're under sleeping, but it's like, okay.
So if I get up when I'm feel underslept and start running at Barry's bootcamp, I will have a better day and then sleep better the next night. Exactly.
Yeah. That's my reservation about people who do all these sleep monitor devices.
I'm like, if you wake up and you know, you've slept like shit, how are you not going to have a terrible day? I don't understand the benefit of this. I ran the marathon a number of years ago and the coach that I was working with, because I did it postpartum and I really needed a coach, he was like, just be prepared that you will not sleep that night because you have to start getting to Dodger Stadium at like four in the morning.
He's like, it's fine to not sleep. And I was like, how am I going to do it? He's like, no one sleeps the night of the marathon.
I'm like, if you could run a marathon on no sleep, like you can kind of do most things with no sleep. Yeah, you probably work out for 40 minutes on six hours.
Or like be functional at work or as a person. I do have that piece.
That's why I say 640. That's non-negotiable.
I have to meditate. I have to journal.
And I have to get my kids to school at a certain time. So there's no snooze because then I'll miss the meditation or the journal, then I might as well stay in bed all day because I'll have a miserable day We have more control than we think Yeah we do, it's good, it's hopeful We have so much more control than we think and peace of mind isn't life being easy but it's knowing that you can count on yourself regardless of what shows up in your life Stress resets how to soothe your body and mind in minutes.
And to your point about having something to reference, the book is incredibly efficient. It's a lot of bang for the buck.
Every single page, there's something actionable almost on it. There's something concrete and real and something you can practice.
And it's a very quick, easy way to get your head around all this. Totally.
And everything is rooted in science and these things are stackable and doable and i felt kind of weird but i taught these tools in a prison recently and i was thinking like this is a really shitty situation i really hope this will make a difference but with a lot of these tools you have a lot of options yeah great well jenny it's been so nice meeting you you represent the alma mater mater wonderfully. Feather in the cap, tall Bruins.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

We wish you well and I hope everyone checks out Stress Resets.

Thank you, guys.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at.

Any issues?

What would we call that?

Respiratory issues.

I've been masking outside.

Uh-huh.

So I've been fine.

I've been.

I mean, I've had headaches.

But other than that.

Yeah.

Headaches.

Same.

Yeah. It's very reminiscent of COVID.
It's for me. It's so COVID-y.
Yeah. Yeah.
I was just editing our last fact check, which was. Something I eat probably.
Huge day. Yeah.
It was Wednesday morning. And so much has happened since then.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. 130,000 people have evacuated.
Yeah. There's something like 9,000 structures are decimated.
Yeah, I have to imagine it's going to be... The toll at the end of this.
You'd have to go back to the Chicago fires probably. Oh, they already said it's eight times.
Sure. In today's dollars, right? Because Chicago disappeared.
Well, not dollars. Sorry.
They're saying space. Oh, space.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. There's also that picture going around of Manhattan.
It's like all of Manhattan is 14,000 acres. Oh, really? We're at what? It's also crazy that I'm like, oh my God, yay.
It's 3% contained. Like it's Friday and the Eaton Fire is 3% contained, which is the first time I've seen any containment on it.
The Eaton Fire, the one that's on the east side of the city, is at 13,956 acres. And Palisades is 20,000.
20,000 acres in the Palisades. We have people staying with us as we had in COVID.
And then, yeah, I went out yesterday with Delty in masks. And I was like, oh, this feels very familiar.
There's like people living at the house. I'm in a mask outside.
Oh my God, we're back here. I know.
When I was pulling out the masks, I was like, oh my God. I cannot believe I have to put this back on my face.
The feelings are really wild around. I still don't have power.
Still don't have power. It's inconvenient.
It's not bad compared to what's going on. Yeah.
Yeah, we drove down Hillhurst where there was like 25 crews working on all those power lines. Yeah, that's us.
With trees all over them. I'm presuming that's why yours is out.
Yeah, it's right at my intersection. Right.
So, but they've been working through the night, last two nights trying to get it back. There was an army there for sure.
Yeah, what feelings? I had, there was a moment where, you know, they had evacuated like a quarter mile down the road when the Runyon Canyon fire was going. And I was like, okay, so the west side's completely on fire.
Now the center of the city's on fire and the east side's on fire. And I did start to open up my imagination to the degree where I was like, well, I would have said what has already happened would have been impossible.
Like that for the Palisades to disappear. And then I was like, fuck, if the Palisades can disappear, I'm like, could LA disappear? Like, will we witness the end of LA as it previously existed? I know.
Yeah, that's never a thought I ever even considered was possible. But yeah, with winds blowing 70 miles an hour, yeah, it's possible.
Yeah. But then you click into whatever role you have in your group.
So, you know, then I go to, yep. And Dresden was gone and London was gone and Hiroshima was gone and Nagasaki was gone and we are resilient and it'll be back.

And that's who we are and trying to put some light at the tunnel for everyone in the house.

Yeah, you just go through all these.

Everyone just clicks into whatever role they have, you know?

Yeah, it's been interesting for me because I'm by myself and normally I'm not.

And it has been weird to. You have been invited over, we should say.
Yes, I have. I'm by myself and so I have taken on all the roles.
Uh-huh. Cheering yourself up, letting yourself get scared.
Yeah, I have to be scared. Like, I can't wait for somebody else to be else be like okay it's time to evacuate like i have to decide and i think normally i am in that sort of case like i let i'll let somebody else make that decision i think they're better at making that decision than me but what do i take at first i was like i don't even know what you're supposed to take like the last time we talked i was like oh I just I just put my passport in my medicine which also that was great I had I had one day left of seizure medication and then the my pharmacy was down because of the power so I was like oh my god I mean what am I gonna do about that and anyway but then then I really thought about it and I was like no I gotta like I to, like, I took all these photographs I have.
There's this little, like, drawing Delta made. I put that in there.
And then that was it. But I really was like, what matters here for real? Like, I probably have to go.
Like, what really matters? Yeah. And it was those things.
And it's just such a, it's so heady to have to think about that. Like, what do you really need? What will you be, like, did you see the thing John Mayer posted? I thought it was so well articulated.
No, I didn't see. It says, it said this.
What's funny is people are saying things I'm remembering that didn't even cross my mind. Like, I didn't pack a passport.
You got to get your passport. All I packed was my journals, which I think I may.
By the way, my journals take up the full size away bag. Wow.
So in the midst of all this, I also was like, to see my journals in one spot, I was like, holy smokes have I written a lot of. I had this weird little moment of like.
You should take your dad's, like something of your dad's probably. Yeah.
There's a ton of stuff I should have packed. Yeah.
But I was just like. I mean, it's panicky.
The written word. I have the memories like, yeah, all the cute things my kids made me.
They're all really, really important to me. But I have my kids.
They're important to me. And so I kept telling the girls that I'm like, we'll try to get everything you care about.
But also, guys, this is it. Us four can go anywhere and we have the thing we want.
So John Mayer posted a picture of a picture. And he said, this is the most valuable thing I own.
It's a folder of photos of my father spanning his life from being a baby, an educator, a husband, and a father. It's the only evidence of his life that will exist over time.
These are the quote documents you read about people taking from their homes. When you hear someone say they've lost everything in a fire, this is much of that everything, if not all of it.
Those who say they'll be okay still have their folders and their albums. Those who are inconsolable have lost them.
Just behind the immeasurable loss of life is the loss of the proof of life. I don't practice prayer, but tonight I will say one for everyone who no longer has these items.
It's not about the art and the collectibles. It's the photos, the letters, the class rings, the eyeglasses, and the things we keep to remind us that those we loved were here.
May those who have lost so much find some semblance of hope and support from their family and friends. Stay safe, look out for yourself and for one another, and trust that humanity and all it entails, though sometimes hard to see, is alive and well.
This is truly devastating. And I do think that's right.
Like, it's like, oh, all this stuff is just stuff, but it is more than stuff. It's evidence of life.
Yeah. It's really intense.
There are weird things. Like, my friend was just saying that her friend's house is the only one standing.
Like how weird.

Yeah, and this,

I'm naturally trying to govern what stuff we talk about because I know some stuff will,

it'll anger you or it'll.

Well, yeah, I mean, I don't want,

I don't know how much you want to say,

but I think we can.

It's real.

The reason I didn't come over

and I do really appreciate the offer, of course,

but I think me and you are always

the most compatible in these situations

Thank you. Like it's, there's something specific about us that we get really worked up when the other person doesn't align.
Right. And so I wasn't— Although I will add, well, okay, yeah, I think that's—a lot of that's true.
But I'm not bothered by, I don't mind that you're as scared as you are. I'm not, right? Yeah, yeah.
Like, I'm just naturally not. This is like, I'm like, oh yeah, this is all I think about.
This is like, the hypervigilance and all that. It's like, all right, yeah, it's here.
It's time to get, it's time to get down. And so I'm like energized and I'm focused and I'm thinking and I got all the hoses out and I got the generator out and I got the extra gas out and I got the car filled up.
And like, you know, I'm engaged in all the things that I will do to help get through this thing. And so, yeah, this was a thing I wasn't, it's like runs the risk of you being mad at me, but I was going to send them away, right? Like I was going to send Kristen and the girls to their dads.
I'm definitely staying and hosing the house down. There's no way I'm not going to do that.
Like I'm going to, I can sit in the middle of my yard. I'm not inside of a house burning.
I can be on the outside of a house that's burning and not die. And I have a motorcycle to escape at point so i very much was never leaving regardless in my mind i was like yeah i'm gonna definitely get my family out of here but definitely staying with hoses the hansons did that they hosed down their house when they because there was one popped up in studio city like right by a very suspicious one yeah that if that turns out i mean if it's not condolences.
If you have the audacity to try to fucking do some insurance fraud at the risk of setting up the rest of that area on fire. You're evil.
To me, you need to be in jail time for that. Yes, I agree.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The sunset one that was really close to us.
Yeah. And then this one in Studio City, like, felt really weird because the winds were pretty much done at that time.
It started inside their house too. Most importantly.
Yeah, I know. But even the Runyon Canyon one felt weird.
It was like, what? Well, you have two, there's two things happening. Yeah.
And that's another layer of this we'll get to. There are arsonists in the city.
They've set fires in, you know, many times, many of these fires we've had in LA are started by arsonists. And so you have arsonists that already exist and they've got the perfect opportunity, right? Then you have people who do commit insurance fraud.
They also pop up all the time. So you've like, there's easily two groups of bad actors in the mix of all this other shit.
mean there were looters well and that's what i wanted to add when i went when when it was a half mile from the house and it looked like okay it's coming here i had gone up to the gas station at sunset and uh and and uh doesn't matter very busy big gas station i wanted the truck to be full in case bell had to drive it all the way to Vegas to Dad's or whatever and I know the vibe I've been in Detroit when the vibe's happening on Devil's Night I know the vibe I was at the gas station I was like oh there's like 20 young men out there's dudes on dirt bikes that are not street legal like there's that air of like they know too, no one's watching. There's a vibe of everyone that's supposed to be making sure there's law and order is distracted.
And there was just this burble that I could feel from the other dudes. And I was like, okay, so we got the fire hazard.
But also, I'm now for me, there's a significant, maybe even double digit percentage. People are coming into the house today.
Other elements are now going to pop off because of all this other chaos. Yeah, but tends to be the way it goes in these scenarios.
So it's important to be prepared for all of it. It's so annoying because in the holiday, the movie, the holiday, there's this like cutesy moment where Jack Black is meeting Kate Winslet.
And like, it's like something that kind of gets in her eye and he picks it out of her eye. And it's just like very rom-commy moment.
He's like, Santa Ana's. He's like explaining to her about the Santa Ana's and it's like really cute.
You'll never be able to watch that part again. It's like not cute.
I can't watch that anymore. Can't watch it.
I will say the, for better or worse in life, I'm experiencing it, but I'm also kind of always looking at it from a little bit to the side of it in the very anthropological way and my current fascination with this whole thing and i've gotten to be a part of enough things now where i see this materialize it's like we're all so different yeah and thank. Thank God.
If they're all like me, everyone's going to kill themselves. If they're all rendered immobile by fear, they're all going to die.
And it really doesn't require any talk or coordination. It just immediately burbles up.
Like we had Jackie, Joe, Anna, Joy, Kristen, the girls, myself in the house. And everyone just innately files into their role.
Yeah. That they are biologically destined to be.
And it's just really on display in a situation like this. It's why ADHD folks are imperative.
Someone's got to go out and find the new fruit tree. And it's why leaders, while insufferable at times, that's their time.
And they reassure people. And then the people who are like really scared than at the other time in life they're more compassionate and flexible and dialed in and they're they're taking care of the needs the emotional needs of this group of 100 and and you just look at our it's not an accident where we come in these archetypes it's like we all have our different moments and the reaction is just so visceral, like whether you're wired what way or not.
Like I immediately text Ashton and said, are you guys up in Carpinteria? Mm-hmm. Which was my assumption.
The air is very clean up there. And he's like, absolutely not.
I'm at my house with a hose. Yeah, I saw it.
There was a video of him hosing. He went the palisades and and hosed other people's houses in the daytime and then he's at his house i hear what charlie's doing everyone's doing it's just really interesting i find it incredibly interesting that we are all unique in this very complimentary way where we we function as a group yeah and it's uh it's great.
It's so great. It is.
Also, it gets problematic when you only surround yourself with like one type of person or people exactly like you, which is easy to do, but it is not, I mean, for many reasons, it is not best.

You need a diverse group.

Obviously, not like... I mean, yes, racially, socioeconomically, skill-wise, you need a diverse group.

Yeah.

We're at an uncomfortable transition phase in civilization as humans where it's like we're almost there and also we're not. It's like we can almost be our best benevolent self, but you still have Vladimir Putin on the planet.
That's still a real person on the planet. That's not operating in the way we're all trying to evolve to.
We're not there yet. Yeah.
We're not in the space age where we have like dominated all threats and can all just be one way. Not even close.
I mean, if anything, this was so it's like we do live in this city of sparkles and money and status and fame and it can burn down in a Like, it is humbling. It is.
And then even like the trajectory of crime, if you plot it from the 60s and 70s, you know, it's just gone like this. Yeah.
But it's not gone. There's far less, thank God.
Yeah. But there's still quite a few people right now that are very willing to take an opportunity like this that's still a reality we're not there you know it's like yeah we're in a transition and it's just it's i think it's weirdly almost harder like back when it was barbarism it was was just like, okay, well, we got a rule with

a iron fist and you got to put down all this and we move away from that as we should. And we're getting somewhere hopefully in the future where that's not even necessary, but it's like, we're in this interesting phase where it's like, it's not necessary, but then all of a sudden it is necessary.
And then it isn't. It is.
The crickets made it though. That's good.
That's good. Yeah.
That part's good.

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Okay, a couple facts.

Okay, so for Jenny, Laird Hamilton's Creamer. Mmm, tell me about Laird Hamilton's Creamer.
You asked if it was mushroom-based. It is mushroom-based.
Clean plant-based alternative to your dairy and sugar coffee creamers. Mmm.
Made with reishi mushrooms. Now, I could be wrong on the timeline of this, but I do think I'm right.
I think mushrooms, fungi, was the first thing to sustain itself by eating other things. That sounds right.
Like prior to that, it's absorbing sun and everything's growing. And they invent consumption of other living beings.

They're the first monsters.

Oh, gross.

And they look like it.

Yeah.

And they taste good.

I like them.

There was in Mexico City on the menu.

It wasn't a mushroom cobbler, but by God, it was something like that.

There was a dessert on the menu that was mushrooms first. Weird.
And you know, Molly loves mushrooms. Oh.
And I said, how much do you love mushrooms enough to get this mushroom dessert? She said, absolutely not. So I'm wondering who orders the mushroom dessert.
Weird. Well, it's in this creamer.
Maybe it's good. The creamer's good.
I've had Laird's creamer, and it's quite good.

Interesting.

Okay, Bellevue.

Bellevue came up again, which is interesting because it came up on Monday's episode with Josh Brolin.

He said his aunt was at Bellevue.

Yeah.

It's a hospital in New York, oldest public hospital.

Can I ask where you first heard it?

Because I'm pretty sure where I first heard that.

Seinfeld, they would say it all the time.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Of course, it's a punchline in comedy a lot.

They're going to send someone to Bellevue.

Right.

And I think, obviously, they were all in New York making that.

Well, they were here making the show, but it's in New York.

And they're New Yorkers.

Oh, that's interesting.

I don't know the first time I heard it, but Seinfeld wasn't my show. Right.
I don't remember them saying it on Friends, but. They should have.
They were in New York. Missed opportunity.
Jim Carrey, SNL, What is Love is funny. It's funny.
Yeah. So check that out on YouTube.
You double checked it. Yeah, I looked it up.
You check that claim and it is a fact. It's funny.
It's funny. It's on YouTube.
You can check it out. We're also on YouTube.
We are on YouTube. Check us out on YouTube.
We're there. You wouldn't know, but we're there.
People liked the clip. The underwear clip.
People really liked the underwear clip. I like the underwear clip.
I really like watching when you and I start laughing in that deep, genuine, where we can't really proceed. Kind of, you get incapacitated, you can't move or talk.
Wow. There's something so joyous about that.
It is. It is fun.
Like, you're leaned over this, and I'm kind of just hiding from the camera. It's just really joyous.
Yeah. What was the clip people liked? The fact check clip of me daydreaming.
Oh my God, that was great. Yeah, that was fun.
That was really funny. People love that as well.
Yeah, that was a fun one. Oh, I think this is worth saying.
When I was editing this, I sort of had the realization because my friend had hiccups at the time, chronic hiccups, which he sometimes gets and And you've also had, and we've, we've talked about it and someone sent you lollipops. What were they called again? Hickey pops.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And. I got them again at Christmas, not nearly as long.
Funny enough, that's when I got them the previous time. I might be allergic to, I might go too hard at Christmas and it gives me hiccups.
And I was. That's when he had it.
Really? Yeah. I was scouring the house for the hickey pops and I couldn't find them.
I was desperate for a hickey pop right before Christmas. Well, yeah.
I mean, the thing is when you're around someone who's constantly hiccuping and it's wild, like it's really kind of scary and it won't stop. He was trying to do everything to get him to stop.
And you'll do anything, you know, you do. This other person was like, you know, you have to like turn upside down and like do the drinking the water.
And he was like, okay. You know, he's like, you're trying everything.
It's stupid. Like none of these things really are going to work for acid.
You'll learn the ends of the earth to stop it. You will, but we don't do it for our brains.
You'll do anything to stop hiccups, but anxiety and depression and these things that are- Rumination. Exactly.
Rumination. These are the real taxing things.
We're just like, I guess I just have this. I'll have to live with it.
Yeah. And you don't have to.
You can do these things and it can help. Yeah.
Body scans are great. Tara Brock.
If you have Wondery Plus, you heard us do these facts already. And we tried to get through a part that it was very hard to get through with me saying Tara Brock a lot of times.
It was out of the underwear, out of the pants again. Yeah, it was.
But Tara Brock is a great, she has a great podcast and a lot of great meditations. And she walks you through body scans and it's helpful.
I like it. Right.
And that doesn't mean go to an MRI and get your body scan. Because that's what I think of when I think of body scan.
No. It's a mental body scan.
Mental body scan. Before bed is good.
Focus on your follicles of your hair. Move down to the follicles of your eyebrows.
Yep. What did you think of the joke? Did you hear the joke about Timothee Chalamet? Also, have I told you how obsessed I am with him now? No, I love him.
I love him so much. Did you get to talk to him? No.
And I wanted to so bad. You're talking about the Golden Globes.
The Golden Globes. He was there and I had just watched Lady Bird and Little Women.
I forgot he was in Lady Bird. Oh my God.
I forgot. Oh yeah.
Yeah. I'm like...
He's in the new Leonardo DiCaprio.

It took me back to like Johnny Depp where I was like, what?

Who's this guy?

Whoa.

Yeah, there's something really powerful about Timothee Chalamet.

Am I saying it right?

Chalamet.

Chalamet.

Yeah.

You know he's in Call Me By Your Name.

I haven't seen that.

Oh, my God.

I need to see it.

It's a revelation.

Now that I'm on the Charlemai train. Yeah, Chalam chalamet chalamet i'll get his name one day yeah um by the way if i mix up your name and you're offended i would i hope this bolsters well to the fact that like i'm obsessed with this kid and i can't say his name um but there was a joke about him at the globes about his mustache said he has the most beautiful beautiful long eyelashes above his lip.
I know. And I felt very defensive of him.
Okay, so actually I've been wanting- It's a good joke. Let me just say it's a good joke.
Okay, I've actually been wanting to talk about this, but obviously the fires and it did not take precedent. Felt trivial.
But I have a lot of thoughts. Ooh, I would love to hear them.
About these types of jokes. Uh-huh.
Roasting in general is one topic. Roasting in general is one thing.
And then this is adjacent. But people who go to a roast have agreed to go to a roast.
Yeah, yeah. But like, why do we still do it? Why are we doing this? Why are we roasting? It is so, it's hard to have this conversation because I sound like very Pollyanna or like I'm, I'm, I'm so, I'm so against meanness.
Yeah. I don't mean to come off like that, but like I do.
It's true. Why be mean as a job?

I can see it from all the angles, right?

Yeah.

So one is the people making fun of the other. People would say they're punching up.
I know. Okay, that's kind of like the blanket excuse.
Well, you're punching up. You're not making fun of some disenfranchised person.
You're making fun of a very rich movie star. Yeah.
Valid point. That's fine.
Sure. Valid.
I can, yeah can yeah totally valid people really deeply enjoy watching their heroes have to get humbled a little bit by a joke so for the audience it's deeply satisfying like they enjoy the hell out of it at the end of the day putting on this entertainment show that's 26 hours long yeah and um it's presumably for the audience that's watching.

Then it gets into this really fun thing. And I will not out this person, but I'm really good friends with someone that was nominated for one of the big awards.
And we had this long text exchange and he is like, I can't believe I go to these. I don't want to go anymore.
The notion that the entire thing is to slake our ego's desire.

Yeah.

By making us compete so that ultimately someone else can sell a show to America for millions of dollars. That those people are smart enough to know that our egos will get us there to that room so that we can be made fun of.
The Golden Globes is run by the Hollywood Foreign Press. It's these single people who have left their country to come to Hollywood to report on Hollywood goings-ons back in their home country.
And it's very few people. It's not like the Academy Awards or it's like thousands of people who are peers and experts in the trade.
Of all the things, it's funny, that's the one that broke through as being second only to the oscars i know it's true and so my friend was like lamenting of how tricky it is like he doesn't want to be there he thinks it's the whole thing's a scam and that the people are making a ton of money on the vanity of these people and yet kind of has to do it because it helps promote the movie that he's in and potentially makes the movie more successful which is what he everyone would want yeah you get this like really catch 22 situation and i will say and people will rightly accuse me of going you're just saying this because you're left out of it but i don't feel that way the time for this has come and gone yeah i agree it feels very weird and outdated and tone deaf and weird it's starting to feel weirder and weirder and weirder i was like what is going on right here now you get into the whole roasting thing because i was watching i was like i get it punching up i like i like her she's great. I like her.
She's great. She's really, really funny.

I'll just say she's really, really funny.

And I have no ill will towards her.

I, my personal experience is I bump into Jesse Eisenberg getting a Diet Coke.

And he said, did you see we were in the New York Times yesterday?

You and I.

Apparently Nikki had two jokes about you and I that were too gnarly for ABC or whatever network it was on so I sit down at my seat you knew that at knowing she had some joke about me that was too bad to be aired so I'm watching the monologue going I'm expecting there's some shot that there's a joke coming my way. Maybe the one she wanted got rejected,

but maybe she retooled it or something. So I'm just kind of waiting to get blasted.
And I'm like trying to think like, okay, what's the ideal reaction to getting completely skewered? I'm now, I'm meaner than her in my own head. Right.
I'm like, she's going to start saying that I'm only there because of Kristen. I'm filling in all the worst blanks, like the loser boyfriend who's here, you know, the way she made fun of Benny Blanco.
Yeah. You know, and I'm like, oh, it's coming.
It's coming. And I have to play a role where I think it's hilarious.
What are you going to laugh? Because I don't, what else could you do? That's nice. No, some people don't.
They don't. Well, I didn't get to see Timmy's reaction.
He did it. He did a good job.
He played along. You got no option.
You got to act like you. I think it's nice to play along, but I also, like, I thought that when Joe Coy did his thing, no one played along except Bradley.
And I thought that was very big of him. Yeah.
And I remember thinking, like, oh, wow, good for him. He's playing along.
No one else is doing this. But I think that's the only move.
But I get it. You're like, why do I have to pretend this is funny? You're making fun of me.
Yes, in front of everyone. Yeah.
And I'm insecure like everyone else here here we're all insecure this you all think that we got secure somehow because we got invited this no everyone here's super insecure and then i find on the other side of that this great compassion for nikki which is like we'll invite you if you shit on everyone and now if she wants to be on TV in that big of an audience, she has to shit on all these people that she probably likes and would like to be endeared to and be friends with, just like all of us would be. So I'm like, everyone's losing in this scenario.
I don't think Nikki only wants to be invited to the party if she's come, if her responsibilities come shit on everyone. Yeah.
And I don't think anyone likes the being shit on. Yeah.
The audience is winning, I guess. Yeah.
There's no way they're not. That's fun.
They're loving seeing the elite people get taken down a peg because we all enjoy that. I don't.
I don't. I'm not, again, not to sound like I'm above everyone, but I don't understand that.
Yeah. I cannot relate to being happy that bad things are happening, even to people who are obviously doing great and doing much better.
Why would I want bad things to happen to people? Yes. I don't get that.
And then I'm taking some personal inventory during all this. I mean, my head was on fire during the whole monologue, right? Because again, I'm expecting something really embarrassing to come my way.
Do you know what it was? I do. Well, I'll get to that part of it.
So then I start taking a personal inventory. I go, hold on.
How judgmental can you be of all this? Have you done this? I have. I've been on Conan.
I had a movie coming out that I made that was up against Expendables. And I had a good time talking about that their fight scenes, they move less and less.
And I'm thinking, A, they would never hear this. Right.
It's objectively funny. like what I'm saying is funny is this action movie where everyone fights like within a one foot thing yeah and um so i've done it yeah and um and i'm guilty of it and then i go okay so what's some compassion i have for myself which is like i'm scared my movie's about to get blasted by these legends which it did i don't know what else to do trying to to make them happy.
And I go, yeah, yeah. This is the whole situation.
Yeah, that's generous. So I'm not in judgment of anyone.
I just, I'm not looking forward to getting blasted for all these people. So the monologue ends and somehow I made it out of it, right? And so did Jesse Eisenberg.
Yeah. We were spared.
And then Aaron, of all people, my best friend who I love, who I've told, when you hear something terrible about me, don't tell me. But I understand, like, you feel this responsibility to your best friend, like you should know what.
So I'm on Instagram, I look at my DM, and I see a clip of Nikki on Howard Stern the following day. And then Aaron says, rude.
And then I wrote, I'm not going to watch this. I bet it will just hurt my feelings yeah and I leave it at that and I decide I am not gonna watch it and then in the comments tons of people in the comments like do you see Nikki's joke about you so I've made the decision I'm not going to but you have to know that I now I have I have created 10 or 12 jokes that it might be, and they're so hurtful.
Listen. They're so hurtful.
It's not that bad.

It's nothing. Well, listen, I ended up.
Oh. I'm also telling Kristen this, right? I'm like, I guess, you know, she was bummed.
She didn't get to make the joke. So she went on start and made the joke.
And I just hope I never see it. I even wrote that in some comments.
No, I haven't seen that and hope never to see it. And then last night, Kristen comes in and she goes, I watched the Nikki joke.
It's nothing. All she said is all these people in the room are trying to probably avoid you.
So you don't ask them to come on your podcast. I'm like, Oh my God, that's nothing.
The things I thought of, I know that she could have said about me and we're on the table. And're my these very deep fears of people thinking i'm riding someone's coattails and stuff that's what i filled in so much so it at the end of the day it was good i heard what it was because i had assumed it was way way worse yes and all of it is this crazy ride we're all on for almost no reason at all.
It just seems so unnecessary. I don't know.
Before the show started, I was very skeptical of what the monologue was going to be. I don't like mean jokes for no reason.
I thought she is funny. She's really, really funny.
She is really funny. And a good writer.
Yeah. And there were a couple that I thought were so good.
The two fingers up for baby girl. For me, the best one was, oh, celebrities can do anything except get the country to vote a certain way.
That was so good. Like making fun of the group, the institution is good, but it's the singling out.
And there's a fucking close-up on the person that's about to get shit on. And you see them.
Their eyes are so wide. Like Selena Gomez, like she was just like, I felt, I was like, oh, this is so upsetting.
Why do you have to agree to that part of it? Like, hey, we got this award for you, but by the way, you're going to have to probably be in a close-up getting shit on to get this award. And I think that's why this friend is like, why on earth are we doing this? Yeah, I know.
Because they have turned to that. I think Gervais started it like real hardcore.
Yeah, I know. It did not used to be this crazy.
But anyway, so I already was going in Jess loves Nikki. Yeah, yeah.

He's been following her for years.

He thinks she's great and was really excited to see it.

And we know we had a lot of conversations before.

This, it's triggering for me.

I don't like it.

And then she was on a Vogue podcast before she did.

She went on and she said she doesn't.

Like, she can't really take the jokes about her. And I was like what the fuck like what is this who's winning anyway so then she did it we all watched it together and i was kind of like you know i again i thought that i thought i think she is very talented yeah um but it was that's overall that's hard for me to watch minus thoseus those globe, more global jokes.
And then the next day,

um,

someone sent it to me,

the Howard thing.

And we were already sort of in a thing.

Me and you were already sort of in a thing that day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Someone was like,

did you see the joke about Dax?

And I was like,

what?

And then I watched it.

And I also was like,

so scared.

It was going to be so mean. Yeah.
About my looks and why is she with me? I didn't know what it could be, But I was just like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like,

I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I'm like, I. And I also was like, so scared.
It was going to be so mean. Yeah.
About my looks and why is she with me? I didn't know what it could be, but I was just like, this is going to be bad. And then it wasn't.
And then I too was like, oh, that's really not a big deal. Also, it's not true.
And I said, oh my God, I hope he never sees this because he already doesn't ask anyone. Right.
I certainly would never ask anyone. And it's really fucking annoying.
It's annoying that you don't. Like, it's to a fault.
And I was like, if he sees this, he's never going to ask anyone ever again to come on. And that's hard.
That's bad for us. And this goes to, by the way, this really goes to demonstrate for me personally.
If you have an insecurity about something, it hurts so bad. Like, had she made fun of my looks and then I'm too ugly to be with Kristen, that would have really been hurtful.
I didn't give a fuck about that because what did happen at the Golden Globes, the only time the podcast came up at the Golden Globes is three different people I ran into each said, that's my favorite interview I've ever done in my life. All that really happened was people pulled me aside to say it was their favorite interview they've ever done.
I was like, I felt great. So she could say anything she would want about that and it doesn't bother me.
I sent it to Jess and I said, cool, period. And he was like, and he was like, no, I get it.
He was like, I get it. It's funny until it's you.
And I was like, exactly. That's the whole thing.
And anyway, but that was that, I guess. But I was very, I was very defensive.
Maybe I'm extra sensitive to it because I think there's already too much hatred out there right now

or in the last at least like eight to 12 years.

Do you think it's symptomatic of this?

I don't think it's symptomatic.

Larger diminishing of civility.

I don't think it's symptomatic.

I think it runs the risk of making it worse.

I'm like, it's already bad.

Like don't add meanness. Like It's not a good time for that.
It's a time to add kindness. And I understand that's not fun for an award show.
But it sucks out there. People are so mean to each other.
And even this with fires, like people are saying such horrible stuff. Are they? The rich people, they have other homes they can go to.
Oh, yeah, yeah. Fuck you.
Oh, I was thinking like, yeah, if you're, I mean, I said it out loud when I was like, when there was the moment where I was like, wow, could the whole city completely be razed right now? I was like, yeah, there's some people down south. That are excited.
That are like, yeah, fuck that place. I think it's extreme to have these thoughts.
Yeah, it's like the liberals were happy when COVID deniers died of COVID. That happened too.
Right, exactly. But also to me that's slightly different because those are choices.
These aren't choices. I think, I mean, that's still bad.
Well, they'd go, you had to live in this fancy place. You could have lived somewhere that doesn't catch out in fire every six months.
That's true, but then there's hurricanes, there's this, there's that. But I guess that's my whole point is maybe some people here would be like, well, hurricanes, like, I guess I don't really care about you, Florida.
But it's all bad. It's like, it's all bad.
Everyone should have compassion and help. And most people do.
I mean, I've gotten so many sweet like check-ins, random check-ins and also like, where can I donate? What do you know? Like on the ground here, what's going on? Whatever. It's very kind, mostly, but then there's just people who I'm just shocked by.
I have to mention, if you were like to the letter of the law creationists, believe in end of times Christian, this is so biblical. I know.
How are they not going like, other than a flood, this would be the next best thing? Well, I guess that was another thing people were saying, like the Globes joke about God Zero, which that was hilarious. I didn't see that.
Like Mario Lopez. It was the count of who people had thanked.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Moms.
Yeah, it was like Mario Lopez won God Zero. Yes, yes, yes.
And that was hilarious. And then people were like, see, that happened.
And now it's like, God's mad that no one thanked him. Well, he's very sensitive.
He's like me. Oh, my God.
You think he would not be sensitive. He's so powerful, but he's very sensitive, just like me.
He's very vain. Oh, jeez.
He's afraid people are going to take his looks and his social standing. Well, that, it's hard to be made fun of.
It's hard to be made fun of. It just is.
Anyway. Well, that was actually a very fun detour.
Yeah. Yeah.
And that's it for Jenny. That was it for Jenny.
Yeah. I do want to go out saying like, I would not want anyone to hear all my opinions I just said and have anything against Nikki Glaser.
I'm like rooting for her. And I think she's, really talented.
It's very generous of you and I agreed. I was unpunked.
It was like, let's get celebrities in a tricky situation and see if they act badly. And I was like, okay, well this is the only job I'm ever going to get and I'll take it.
Right. So I'm not really in judgment of anyone.
I'm just saying for me, I was in deep fear that everything I'm afraid people think about me was confirmed. And then it wasn't.
She's also, she's a Swifty. She's a major Swifty.
Oh, is she? She's been to like, she went to like a million of the shows. Oh, really? She's sober.
Oh, she is? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.
Wish you made me have her on and talk through this whole thing. I was like.
Like at first I was like, I never run a rewarder. That's how I, when I saw it, I was like, she is? Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah. We should maybe have her on and talk through this whole thing.

I was like.

Like at first I was like, I never run a rewarder.

That's how I, when I saw it, I was like, guess who's not coming on our show ever.

Yes.

But then now I feel like the bigger version of me would be like to have her on, try to have a sincere conversation about it.

Yeah.

Well, we could.

Anyway.

All right.

All right.

Love you.

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