Marc Brackett (on emotional intelligence)

24:29We start writing this curriculum. And then I realized, like, I have no credibility. Right, right. Like, who's going to buy a book? You need to be anointed. Yeah, I need to get a PhD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I decided to apply for my PhD. I just thought, oh, there's these researchers. One is at Yale. One is at New Hampshire. I wrote to them both. They both agreed to meet with me for lunch. The guy from Yale said to me, you're a great guy, but you're never going to get in. and the guy from New Hampshire said, I'll give you early admission. I guess I'm going to New Hampshire. That was also a shock.

25:01That wasn't John Mayer that you met with. It was. Okay, so John Mayer became your supervisor. And tell me a little bit about John Mayer and his contribution to this. And I think now would be a great time to define emotional intelligence. Good idea. So John Mayer, or Jack as he goes by. Do you think they've added the D to his name on Wikipedia because of John Mayer the musician? Did he always go by John D. Mayer? Academics always add that, but maybe. Yeah, that's a good point. And then the other person is Peter Salovey, who became the president of Yale. These two guys wrote this theory called emotional intelligence that I was using to guide my curriculum.

25:37What was novel about this term, emotional intelligence? What were they doing? How were they approaching it that gave it validity? Historically, I mean, you think about it. When I say the word emotional, what comes to mind? Quick. You almost think of women. Yes. It's very gendered. Feminine. What else? I think like lost the control. Yeah. Right? Angry, sad. Yeah, like hysteria. Hysteria, yeah. Emotional, like you can't handle it. Yeah. Well, that's the opposite of emotional intelligence. That's emotional stupidity. Yeah, or emotional bankruptcy or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Emotional intelligence is using your emotions wisely to achieve your goals.

26:13I mean, that's a broad definition. Now we get specific, and this is where my research has gone. So Peter and Jack wrote this theory. They propose a set of skills. And then what I've been doing for the last 25, 30 years is kind of fine-tuning it all. Really quick. So the traditional intelligence has metrics, or we attempt to, right? We have IQ tests. We have different tests to assess the aptitude of your intellect. Did they propose a scale to even evaluate? So how does that scale work? So let me tell you the skills, and I'll tell you how they measure it. Okay. So the first skill is about perceiving or recognizing emotions.

26:48So I'm looking at your facial expression right now. I'm looking at you. I'm like, is this going well? Is this not going well? It's self-awareness and social awareness. Obviously, coming from my background, I'm more vigilant than maybe other people would be. Because I got to like, you know, am I going to get beat up here? Or, you know, am I safe? And we're doing that subconsciously. From the moment we wake up and we have a feeling in our bodies and our minds to walking into the set, to going to a school, our brains are making predictions. It's incredible. It's astounding we can do it. Well, but a lot of us don't do it so well.

27:22Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like this underrepresented area of intelligence or intelligence that we don't give enough attention to. Hence the work that we do in schools to try to make this part of the curriculum. Yeah. Which, by the way, if you want to talk about that, is so much pushback right now in this. Really? Oh, really. Political, it's been polarized. Why, because people say it's like soft? It's woke. Yeah, it's woke. Well, it is not what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it seems to overlap with this endlessly progressive, let's all talk about our feelings. No one's got to be tough and just fucking show up and do the job.

27:59I get it. It's not hard for me to lock into what they're feeling. Yes. And the thing is that the way you said it is not what it is. Correct. Someone who's observed it in my children. Yeah, that's not what it is. I don't want kids. No. It reduces fragility. Yeah, exactly. Funny enough. The fear is we're making all these kids so fragile that they can't even function. But yes, the opposite is true. This makes you incredibly resilient. And the irony is the people who normally are saying it and saying it in that way are the people that have no emotional tools. Yes. Generally, because that is a fear response.

28:34And are hiding something that's scarier than anything else. Yeah, I think they're scared in a way that is not. They're not locked into what it's like to have emotional tools. I think to be compassionate to those people, yeah, when they consider it being emotional, they have the sense that to do so would be to completely destroy them permanently and there'd be no coming back. So I feel that's a person who's carrying a tremendous amount. Again, I always say the dude in the pickup truck that's jacked up with the nutsack hanging out the back that flips me off, that is my hardest guy to have the compassion for.

29:07And it is the one that needs the most compassion. It's funny you say that. So I'm giving a speech. I do these reunion speeches at the university all the time. There's hundreds of alumni. I love doing these speeches. I can just joke with all the graduates. And then I'm driving home. I'm literally on Route 95, and this massive truck drives by with a flag, and it says, fuck feelings. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you can't make it up. I'm like, did they know I was giving the speech 15 minutes ago? Anyway. Fuck feelings. And it's like, really? Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by Allstate.

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33:55Here's what I find, and I want to go back to the skills in a second, but what I find is that people have a misunderstanding of what it is and that they're against something that it's not. So when I meet people who are against the work, I just say, well, what do you think it is? And then I say, well, let me share with you what it is. How would you feel if your kids had good strategies to manage stress and anxiety? Definitely want that from my kid. How would you feel if your kid had a better vocabulary so you can describe things and write better? That's important. I said, well, that's what it is.

34:26Yeah, exactly. So, okay. First skill, by the way, the acronym is RULER. So recognize emotions, paying attention to other people's emotions, face, body, voice, behavior, paying attention to my own emotions, what's going on in my head, what's going on in my body. Boom. I'm so sorry to interrupt. That's all right. It just crossed my mind. We know that for autistic kids. I'm good. I don't mind. It doesn't bother me. You can diagnose me as ADHD at the end of this. I have it too. We know that for autistic kids and adults, it is harder for them to read some of the cues that would let them know what the other person's emotions are.

35:02Do they have the same difficulty identifying their own? Oftentimes, yes. Yeah, okay. So that's a struggle for autism. It is a struggle. Yeah. Which probably causes some of the outbursts and stuff. Big bottles up. We've worked with many schools that serve children on the spectrum, and we've had great results. You just have to go slower, use more cues. What's interesting is that oftentimes interventions have this weird thing. Oh, we're going to make the kid less autistic. That's not our goal. Our goal is to help the child be who they are, but have slightly more skills in that space. There's also this very annoying thought, which is like, anything short of perfection is proof that it doesn't work.

35:42So even if you take the autistic kid to one on the scale to three, their life experience is going to be measurably better. Completely. I live in the world of everybody's gut to have the perfect everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Recognizing emotions. We're good with that one? Yeah. All right. Next one is understanding of emotions. So this is really trying to understand why we have feelings and where they come from and the differences between and among them. So I'm going to give you a little test of emotional intelligence. What is the psychological difference between anger and disappointment?

36:15What's the psychological? Anger is outward and disappointment is inward. Okay. Well, that's really good. That's a good one. It's good. It's not correct. I got to go. It's a B. Sorry. Fuck. Yeah, but on that same train, I would say anger generally you assign responsibility to something outside yourself and then the other one you're responsible for. Yeah, it's like a shame. No, shame is shame. I guess it can come externally. Yeah, you can be disappointed in others, I guess, too. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's, okay, I want to keep, I want to disappoint. You want to be perfect. Oh, I do. Yeah, we're aiming for it.

36:53In fact, ideally before the other one is perfect. Yeah, exactly. You should never ask this question. We're going to be here for so long. There's like a sadness in disappointment. You let me down. Like an expectation. Maybe expectation. There you go. So disappointment comes from unmet expectations. Anger comes from perceived injustice. Perceived injustice. Like that's not fair. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Now, you have kids, obviously. If I come home from school. I hate school. How am I feeling? I would say frustrated. Something is frustrating. How do you know? Bottling response. I just think because it's, yeah, it's all consuming.

37:32Anger is like a really enveloping condition you have temporarily. Yeah, or it's just like your amygdala is on fire, right? You're not running anything through the frontal lobe. You're assuming that from my behavior. Yes. This is where emotional intelligence comes in really handy because we tend to overly diagnose emotion from behavior. When we observe in a behavior, we think we know how the person is feeling based on their behavior. Got you. And I could be feeling shame. I could be feeling sadness. But I'm a boy who's gay. I don't want anybody to know. And I'm feeling inferior or whatever. And I'm just going to look tough.

38:11I'm going to try my best to look tough. And you're going to be my dad. And you're going to get triggered by my anger expression. And then it's going to be a whole thing until you can lower your emotional temperature to be more present with me and help me lower mine and get to know the why and the understanding, you're not going to know that it's actually someone spit on me on the bus and I hate myself. Yeah. And I'm afraid to go to school tomorrow. Yeah. Or whatever it is. Yeah. Here's the research. We grossly overestimate our skills. Yeah. You know, I think I'm great at this. And it's like, well, let me give you some feedback.

38:46Yeah. And so you think about the how many people misperceive our facial expressions, or body language. I get misperceived all the time. People always think like there's something wrong when they come near me. And I'm like, I'm actually pretty content. But I think because of being a scientist, I'm literally always thinking about stuff and I make weird facial expressions. So when I'm walking, I'm not like walking like, and I'm walking like, huh. And people are like, what's wrong? I'm just thinking about something. You're like grinding through a thought a lot of times. Well, even worse, I think, is like, yeah, you have what you interpreted, which is often wrong.

39:22But then I think even worse than that is you immediately run it through your narrative. So it's like your kid comes home frustrated. Your overarching fear for me is like, oh, my kids don't know how good they have it. They've grown up in abundance and I'm so fearful they're not right. They have no gratitude. Yeah, they have no gratitude, no understanding. So anytime they're unhappy, it sends the alarm bells that that other thing's happening. So my inclination is to figure out a time where like, oh, well, no, were you inconvenienced? You know, did you have to wait in a line? You know, my fear of what could go wrong is likely what I'm going to attribute it all to ultimately, like attribution error.

40:01That's what it is. It's attribution errors. It's a misattribution of emotion. And so this skill of recognizing other people's emotions is tricky because, A, we hide our emotions a lot. So understanding emotion is understanding the causes of emotion, the consequences, the differences. And I think the key here is, you know, going back to our stories of growing up as a gay guy, there's a lot of homophobia in our society. Oh, God, yeah, especially when we grow up. Yeah, and even still right now. And so as a gay guy, I might be more triggered by homophobic jokes than you would be or you would be. Right.

40:44You might be more triggered by race stuff. Oh, I am. Yeah, we do get into it. We do get into it. Yeah, I have the luxury of pretty much thinking everything's funny because I'm a very tall, white, straight man. Exactly. You're good. They rarely come for us in the jokes. We've gotten in a lot of fights about like what's mean and what's not mean. Yeah, what's mean and what's not mean. And it's really interesting because like for me, I'm like, that's mean. And he's like, it's not mean. But there you go. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, nobody's here to be upset about it. But for me, it's so deep being called something or made fun of in that way.

41:20Even without your knowledge is the ultimate fear. Are they being nice to me here? But when they're by themselves, they're like, she's so brown. Yeah. So I just like put myself in every, even if it's not a race joke, but it's just like something. I'm just like, no, you can't do that. And I think what you're getting at here is the core of understanding. So going back to anger, perceived injustice. My husband is Latino. He's dark skin. And so we've been in situations. We were in a restaurant in Connecticut, and this is the best. We're getting set to sit down, and the host says, where'd you get your tan?

41:51Oh, boy. And he's like, my mother.

41:56Oh, my gosh. I mean, he's dark. Yeah. He is not, you know, like a wasp who has a tan in Connecticut. Anyway. He's the real deal. He's what us whites are going for with that tan. Yeah. Exactly. Now, he's an immigrant. so his relationship to the American kind of thinking around race is different. Even though he's my husband, we've been gay for 32 years, a long time. I cannot relate to what it feels like to be a man of his skin color walking around a store in Connecticut and being monitored. That doesn't happen to me. Just like, well, he can really because he's also gay. He's got number one. But I was going to say, I a little bit reject that.

42:36Say more. You cannot experience those exact details Correct But those human emotions, you can You're making a good point Which is that I can relate to the shared emotion You've been in a locker room with a bunch of straight dudes That somehow are speaking some language so organically And you're like, what the fuck? Correct So I can't relate to the experience But I can relate to the emotion associated with the experience Which are unifying, which is beautiful Humans have the same emotions And that's why it's so important to get at the emotion level. I can't talk about what's going on in your head when someone's monitoring you as a person of color.

43:16Just like you as a straight guy, you have some background in this, but you're not going to feel the same way I'm going to feel or have the same experience psychologically as I'm going to have when I hear people making jokes about Jews or homophobic stuff. But we can have a shared emotional experience. And that's what emotional intelligence really at the understanding level is, is I need to have empathy and compassion and curiosity about what makes you feel the way you do so I can be a better friend. Yeah, totally. Otherwise, if I'm like, well, why would you feel that way? That's not emotional intelligence.

43:49And then there's the L, labeling emotions, getting super precise about our feelings. And we have a tool that we call the mood meter, which you may have seen. It's in schools. It's a two-by-two grid of colors to help people describe their feelings. Actually, quick side note is during the pandemic, the co-founder and CEO of Pinterest reached out to me and he's like, I read your book and I really would love to work with you on an app. And so we created an app called How We Feel that is free forever. We have 3 million people using it now every month. That's incredible. And it is a tool to help build emotional self-awareness.

44:23And so it's fantastic. Check it out. But the idea behind it is that it takes the science of emotion. So emotions have pleasantness associated with them, and they have energy or activation levels. And you cross these two things, and you get yellow, red, blue, and green. Yellow is high energy, pleasant, like happy, excited. Green, pleasant, but low in energy, like calm, content. Blue, low energy, but unpleasant. Sad, disappointment, lonely. And then the red is the upper left, which is high energy, unpleasant, anger, anxiety. And so we put 144 words to map that out with their definition so people can build their emotional self-awareness.

45:02And the key of labeling is just precision. Let's try one. Can we try another one? Yeah. Anxiety, stress, pressure, fear. What's the difference? Anxiety is, I think, unique in that or specific in that you are very fearful of the outcome of something, which is unknown. Stress, to me, can be much more predictive. I've had the same job for 35 years. I'm in one right now. Like, we always have to stockpile this time of year so we can have a vacation. It is what it is. But I already have had the experience of doing it. I know I'll get through it. So it's like I don't have anxiety about it, but I have the stress of the workload.

45:42What were the other two? Pressure. Fear. Pressure and fear. I think there's no difference. I want you to get your PhD. I thought that was a trick question. I did. I did. I thought it was a trick question. You're trying to be too clever. I was. I mean, that's what a lot of people say. They think I'm like Mr. Neurotic Emotion Labeling Guy. And then pressure to me is just stakes. It means it's something of value. It could be an indicator that you value this thing. That's why you feel the pressure of it. Yeah, I don't think pressure is negative necessarily. No. It could be, but it doesn't have to be.

46:18Okay, and then fear. Fear to me is related to anxiety in that it's generally an outsized feeling. about something that when you're in, you'll just walk through. There's some asymmetry to fear. Let's get really, let's get to the... Let's get granular. Yeah, that's the word. So anxiety, it actually is the word, emotion granularity. So anxiety is about uncertainty, perceived uncertainty around the future. I get anxious when I can't make the prediction. What's going to happen? Stress is having too many demands and not enough resources. Can't do it all. I'm finite. Yeah. Pressure, something at stake, is dependent upon your behavior.

47:02So the pressure for me to get through this podcast. I'm not anxious about it necessarily. I'm not stressed. It's pressure. You've got to perform. And fear is impending danger. Now, why does this matter? I would say that most people are really prone to label those things interchangeably. Yep. And all four have much different solutions. That's the key. that for yourself, for your loved one, for your kids, for your colleague, really getting at that level of granularity will help you have a solution. So for example, if you're anxious about something, you're going to ruminate likely. You can go for the walk, you're going to come back and ruminate.

47:38You can take your deep breaths, you can do your yoga, you do your downward dog and you'll still come back like, what's going to happen? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So matching the emotion to the strategy is key. That's my new book called Dealing with Feeling, which is to help people make that connection. Because most people, even, I'll give you an example, Yale, all these bright people, all my students said they were stressed. I was like, come on, stressed? I mean, I had empathy because they were 78 % of the time feeling that way. But at the same time, I didn't believe it was actually stressed. What do you think the number one emotion actually was?

48:14Anxiety. Yeah, that would be my guess. You're at this really interesting phase of your life where they're giving you four years to figure out exactly what you want to do for the rest of your life. The future is very uncertain. Yeah, and how does one know if they've picked the right lane? It's all about the future, and did I pick right, and am I rising to the occasion? And the answer is none of the above. Okay, great. Okay, that was a trick. That was a trick. You finally got it. Yeah, you knew it was going to slide a trick in. Sorry. The answer is envy. Oh. Envy was... They're mislabeling stress for envy.

48:46Oh. because they're sitting in class thinking, you study for fewer hours and get better grades. Your father's famous. Your mother has connections with Wall Street. All they're doing is making social comparisons about physical appearance, about you were the real valedictorian. And so I did this research with them where I had them journal about all their feelings and came back and found that the real understanding of emotion showed up at was envy, not stress or pressure. And I think that's important because what you would do to manage envy, is way different than what you would do to manage anxiety or stress.

49:21Right. So the core of my kind of newer work is really helping people make the connection between their emotional experience and the selection of the best strategy to regulate it. Crazily, what do you think the number one hope for emotion is? Like, how do you want to feel at school, at the university? What their answer would be? Oh. I mean, would they be honest enough to say? I think everyone just wants to be adored. It's close. It's loved. Yeah, loved. I mean, yeah. But that one really surprised. The envy one didn't shock me because, you know, everything's about social comparison these days. But the loved one was a little sad for me, especially on college campuses.

50:02So I did some more research about that. And here's the sad part, which is that the number one reason was they said they felt manufactured. They felt manufactured? They felt like their parents, their school they went to, to get to be at a place like Yale, they just needed to like. Perform. Perform, like play this sport, do this instrument. Yeah, yeah. Get this thing, get this thing, SAT scores, GPAs, you know, travel to this country. And they felt like they didn't have an identity, which is unbelievable. And it would be very easy to assume that you were loved because of those accomplishments. Yeah.

50:39As opposed to like you're just intrinsically loved because your parents loved. Yeah, they feel it's all extrinsic. That's heartbreaking. Yeah. But very predictable. It is. For like these elite schools. Also, don't you think that's everyone's answer in the whole world? For different reasons. How do I want to feel in my marriage? Definitely loved. But how do I want to feel at work? I don't want to feel loved. That's too much for me. You want to feel respected. I want to feel valued, appreciated, supported, connected. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But some people do want to feel loved at work. Yeah, and that's not, that's tough.

51:11It's probably not healthy. But if you're going to a college where 2.5 was the average admittance, no, that's not how your parents picked other things. They were like, Tony's so funny at a party. He's so good at talking to adults. He's a great athlete. So in absence of great accomplishments, the things your parents will call out about you are probably more character driven. Yeah. Which feels more substantive or more intrinsic, which is like they'll say he's so nice to kids or he's so good with, you know. Whereas if your kid just got a 4.0 and got a fucking 1 ,800, that's what you're going to hear them tell their friends.

51:44Well, hopefully you'd hear them say, like, they're a hard worker, like something still intrinsic. That's what you want. So going back to what we started talking about with Uncle Marvin and permission to feel is that the challenge for most of my students is they don't feel they have the permission to feel. That's why they're dying to feel loved. Yeah. And most of them and most people in my research say they feel judged from the moment they came out of the womb. Like you're too fat, you're too skinny, you're too dark, you're too light, your nose is too big, your nose is too short, those pants don't fit you right.

52:16From the moment you come out, it's like judgment, judgment, judgy, judgy, judgy. That's why the number one characteristic that people are saying they're wanting in other people is nonjudgmental. That makes sense. So we got through recognition, self-awareness, social awareness, understanding why am I feeling this way, understanding how people feel. so then the understanding, the labeling, the expression this is where the cultural differences really show up where it's kind of knowing how and when to express emotion with different people, across contexts and across cultures my work has translated now to 33 languages and so I've gone all over the world and we have a center in Italy that does trainings and all throughout Tuscany and Italy and I go there, Marco, where have you been all over?

53:01I'm like, oh, I love Italy You know, I go to Hong Kong, Markson, you know, where he bows to me. I go to Wall Street. I always joke about this because I gave this talk at a big hedge fund in New York City and the guy came out in his Versace suit, you know, the perfect tie, perfect side comb. And he's like, hello, Dr. Brackett. You know, it's like, I need a little testosterone for this presentation. We have this, whether it's downtown New York or whether it's in England or in Italy or in Hong Kong, there are differences. And let's just acknowledge that. People don't express emotions the same way, like in India.

53:40I've had a lot of Indian students. And one of the things that I found interesting, and I don't know if you can relate to this, in education in India, there's not necessarily a lot of asking you for your perspectives. There's a lot of sage on the stage. You are the learner, I am the knower, and I do that. Interesting. And so when I have graduate students, and I'm like, it's time for you to come up with a research project. I've done this already. And they struggle for the first while of like, I have the autonomy to like. Right. They want to be told what to do. That's interesting. Can you relate to that or no?

54:15Well, my mom grew up here, so I have to take her out of it. I would say, I think my dad, I don't know. He really has a lot of opinions and is fine sharing them, But he's also pretty meticulous. He's an engineer. Okay. He just retired. So, yes, he is also good at following instructions. Very good at it. He's kind of an anomaly. I'll tell you my experience over the last 11 years being around Monica and the thing that I was completely wrong about and shattered my naive realism, which was, I'm like, your dad, I don't care where he's from. He would love for you to call him and say, I love you so much.

54:55And she's like, you really don't understand. That would just make him quite scared. Why is she sharing this? Something must be wrong. This is so out of the pattern of what's normal. It would just elicit fear. And I have tried to intervene. I like flew them secretly to a live show we did so they could watch her on stage. And I had all these expectations of how that would go. And at the end of the whole thing, I had to go, yeah, ma 'am, you got to accept it's different. You want there to be this universal thread. That's not. It's not there. It stops there, yeah. And that's okay. It's okay. Totally.

55:26Hey, that's what I can't. It's nothing wrong. I'm not judging it. Yeah. I kept telling him, I was like, it doesn't mean they don't love me or I don't love them. And we aren't confused. Right. We aren't like, oh, if they don't call me and tell me this, do they love me? We know. You don't, from the outside, it might look like it's not there, but we know it's there. I don't know. It was very cultural. I've been to all over Asia. And what I found is that in certain cultures, just cooking together is a symbol of love. That was the last thing that would happen in my household is like, let's chop lettuce.

56:00Right, right. You know, again, the point of this is that how we express emotions does vary by personality. I'm an introvert. People think I'm outgoing because I do a lot of public speaking. Even here, I'm traveling for some work here in L.A. I'm not going to go out. It's not my thing. I get drained from it. My brain is so occupied in what I do and what I think about that to unwind, I want to go to a hot yoga class. Yeah. I want to have a glass of wine with a friend. I don't want to be that social. It's taken me years to really own that. And that's part of the work on emotional intelligence. Knowing my personality will help me find better strategies too.

56:40Again, expressing emotions, you can express them in art. You can express them in spoken word. You can express them through music, but we got to get it out. Unexpressed emotions end up being like a dead. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We have someone we love so much who has the most paralysis around the expressing, and it's so painful to watch. I can feel the clamped tightness at the thought of it. Yeah, and it's heartbreaking. It's really heartbreaking. Yeah, and so that's part of being what I call an emotion ally is trying to figure out your way in to give them that opening. It is hard, but sometimes just doing nothing is something in terms of presence.

57:25By the way, going back to this kind of emotion ally thing, which is the Uncle Marvin in a psychology term, is that a lot of parents, a lot of people at work, their excuse is, I don't know how to do it. I don't want to open this up because it's going to open up and I'm not going to handle it. Or I'm afraid that I'm going to look bad or things of that sort. And I say, let's go back to the characteristics. Nonjudgmental, listener, warmth, compassion. No one's asking you to solve their problems. No one's asking you to fix them. Nobody wants to be fixed. As a matter of fact, in my research, no one ever says that their Uncle Marvin or Aunt Maria was a fixer or an advice giver.

58:07And that's really important for people who are listening because there's an inhibition to showing up because you think you actually have to do something that's going to change that other person's experience when that's not what they're actually looking for. Okay, so the last one is regulating. And to me, that's where your book, Dealing with Feeling, really comes into play, this last component of ruler. And that's the big one. I'll just share with you what happened for that. So here I am. It's the pandemic. So Horacio is the name of my husband. His mother's name is Irene. She lives in Panama. And my colleague was getting married March 7th of 2020.

58:45Oh, boy. And so Irene loves this colleague of mine, Robin. And so we fly Irene up from Panama to come to the wedding. Going to come for a couple weeks. Lo and behold, March 13th, every flight to Panama gets canceled. I think she was scheduled to go home on the 15th or 16th. So we're like, all right, whatever. You know, we'll get through this. Eight months later. Eight months. With your mother-in-law. Yeah. She couldn't get home. There was no flights. Yeah. And so about three months in, she's 81. She was very upset. She had a dog and a parrot we had to figure out how to deal with. Yeah, that's a lot.

59:16I was out of my mind busy because everybody's freaking out and, you know, masks and no masks and anxiety and fear. And Horacio's a filmmaker. He's a cinematographer. And so he's like out of work because nobody's making out on a movie set, you know, in March and April of 2020. So it gets really kind of ugly in my house. Everybody's tense. And one night, my mother-in-law looks at me and she says, you know, are you really the director of the Center for Emotional Intelligence? Because you've been being shitty. Yeah. And I'm like, you know, I love you, but not tonight. It's going down. We were just at each other's throats.

59:50And then, of course, since late, go to bed. I went to bed thinking to myself, Mark, you're the director of the freaking Center for Emotional Intelligence. Like, how is it possible that you could not regulate? Yeah. Like, how could you not apply your own stuff? for 25 years. We've been teaching us, writing papers. And I realized I really was struggling and I was not eating healthy. I was not exercising like I was. I was really negative. And obviously it was a pandemic. It was weird. But nevertheless, I thought I could apply my stuff to that moment. And I was really not doing well. And so I woke up the next morning.

1:00:24I said, I'm going to start a study. I'm going to study thousands of people around the country and find out what they're doing with their feelings and how are they doing. And what I found was people were not doing well. Only 10 % of people felt like they had good strategies. Most of the people said they were drinking, they were eating, they were avoiding, they were being self-saboteurs, they were scrolling on Instagram and social media. And it was really eye-opening for me that people were desperate for healthy strategies. And because I was so overwhelmed and I'm an academic and I really had no place to go, I'm like, what I could do is I could lock myself in a room, do research and write a book.

1:01:04And so that was my strategy. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. We are supported by AutoTrader. All right. If you've been putting off car shopping because it sounds like a whole thing, buying your car online on AutoTrader makes it way easier. Really. You can shop tons of cars online, compare prices, check financing and trade-in options all from wherever you are. And if you want to start online and go to the dealership for a test drive, you can do that too. Really. What I like is the flexibility. Start online, finish at the dealer. Or the other way around. Your info stays with you so you're not starting the process from scratch.

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1:02:45Well, the book heads straight at a pretty frequent debate we have on here. Okay. I love how it starts. So it starts with you urge people reading to ask yourself this question. Look over all the times in your life that your emotions influence you to act one way or another. And then ask, did those actions help me or did they hurt me? I think so often people are trapped in whether they are a person or a person or a person or a person. deserved to have those emotions or if they were unavoidable. And there's this sense that they're a given and that's that, that you have some kind of autonomy over that.

1:03:22And the other thing you say in that same paragraph is the degree to which you will get what you want out of life is equal to how well or poorly you deal with your feelings. I love this as a setup for the book, which is, it's real simple. Do you like the outcome of when you were, I would say maybe a victim or a passenger to your feelings? If so, keep going. If that's your conclusion at the end of it, then cool. You like being upset? It doesn't seem to bother you. The outcome's not bad. Who gives a shit? For you and other people, it's not just about you. Okay, great. Elaborate on that. Well, like my father would be like, son, this is the way I deal with my feelings.

1:03:58You're going to have to get used to it. I'm like, okay, dad. Let's talk about having a little bit of an other mindset, that other orientation? Like, this is a family. You blowing up every night is not great. Yeah, it might be great for you. You might be at peace with it. You're fine with it, but what about everybody else? And then a thing that I think is quite liberating and helpful is you also write in that same section, many of us believe that the way we respond to our emotions is an intrinsic part of ourselves, a fixed aspect of our personalities, which is simply not true. There's another thing I think people are like, yeah, fine, you don't mind that, but I do.

1:04:33Yeah. I like that. That feels liberating that you're not born. You're not born that way. Yeah. It's an important distinction between temperament and personality and emotional intelligence and emotion regulation. I, for example, going back, we're talking about our childhood traumas earlier. When I was in high school, I mean really struggling with coming out of the bullying and identity. Everyone in your school knew you were molested. I mean that's an insane experience. Exactly. pre-social media. I still can remember, actually, this is even later. This is when I met Horacio. I met him on a movie set.

1:05:12I was hired as a stunt coordinator. Oh, for a fight sequence? Okay. What movie was it? It was a very, very early movie. It's an independent movie called Ten Benny with Adrian Brody. It's the first leading role. We made it to Sundance. This is 1996. Shot in New Jersey. I had a karate studio. I got hired. I was never a stunt coordinator again just so you know. But I got my love of my life. I see this exotic guy named Horacio. All being said, he's this gorgeous human being. I mean, he's just very good looking and he's got great genetics and I hate him for that and look forward to it. I'm a Jersey boy who's in the closet and this exotic guy comes in with his black long hair and his perfect features.

1:05:52And he's like, can you stand in for Adrian Brody? I'm like, yes. I had done my little experimentation, but this was the first kind of thing. And I remember coming home that night because I had moved back in with my dad after my mother had died. This is all around the same time. And just going into my room and crying for hours and saying, this is my life. How can I do this? How can I fall in love with this exotic thing? And what's going to happen in my life? What am I going to be? And what are people going to think of me? And I just was so distraught. Of course, call Uncle Marvin again. The key there was that, A, I didn't realize there was something you could do with your feelings.

1:06:36I just thought you experienced these strong negative feelings. They pour through you. Maybe they'll dissipate over time, but there's nothing I could do in the moment. And that is so far from the truth. And I'll say even worse, when you're in those states, you're most convinced this feeling is permanent. Despite the fact that none of your other feelings are permanent, when they're negative, you're like, well, this is the rest of my life. It's the rainy day. It's a thunderstorm. It's going to turn into a hurricane. It's not going to pass. No. What's our debate in this? I'm not following. Well, like you'll have the woman at the store and then you'll be mad at her and upset.

1:07:09And I'm like, first of all, why would you give that person that much control over your emotional state? Oh, I see. That's like a recurring thing. We have these debates where she's like, no, objectively, people are terrible sometimes. And you should feel that way as a result. Right. Is that a fair? Well, no, I don't think I would ever say objectively. People are terrible. I don't know that. I think there are people doing bad, not the lady in the store, but there are some people, bad actors in the world, doing things that hurt people. And I think it's okay to react to that, to feel that. That's correct.

1:07:47It's an injustice. The right thing to do is say, hey, not cool. You're being unkind. Do you let that take you on a ride? Well, my question. No, it's that. Well, yes. Let me just tell you what I'm thinking. Is that the principle that emotions are impermanent is that the rainy day is going to last forever. And that there'll be no more sunny days. And objectively speaking, that's not biologically possible. Yeah. And I don't have that. No. I definitely am of the like, every feeling is temporary. I don't operate like that. But we get sometimes in a debate where he's like, if you are upset by something, don't let that upset you.

1:08:27And it's like, that's upsetting. Well, don't let it have power over you. I think you're getting it. Well, a lot of things. Why am I upset? What did it trigger? If you're focused on that person, your life for the rest of your life will be out of your control. If that person has the power to dysregulate you, as opposed to that person triggers this fear in me that I have control over addressing, and that when I get my arms around that fear, lo and behold, that person who I said was objectively offensive, I'll magically discover isn't that offensive. I believe that to be very true. There are a lot of negative things you could say to me, but it requires that I carry my own insecurity about that to be affected.

1:09:08There's a lot of things being said about me that are probably objectively negative that have no impact on me whatsoever because they don't trigger any of my own fears. So my point is these people are roadmaps to your work. I agree. At the same time, it depends how intimate you are. If it's your husband, your wife, your partner, your mom, your dad, your colleague, and you can't get out of that relationship, it does make it tougher. Sure. You need a lot more tools at your disposal. And if you don't do something about it, it can move into the realm of gaslighting. Sure. If you're going along with it.

1:09:42Yes. But if you're not. No, if you're not, it doesn't change the feeling. Right. Right. That's the thing. Because the feeling is an accumulation of your whole life experience. It's not just that moment. It's almost assured it's not that moment. Exactly. That's kind of the point I like to make is like, this person gave you kind of a little gift. Why would this stranger with no impact on your life have the ability to alter your mood? That's a great clue as to what work we get to do. Correct. It is, but you are like in that moment, don't be offended. I'm allowed to be offended in the moment when someone says or does something that is offensive.

1:10:21I mean, this sort of does go back. I do think I spent a lot of my life having to like turn the other way when a lot of offensive things were happening. So I'm very acutely aware of I don't like that. I don't like the way it feels. But my question is, do you think that that's a given, that you will always feel that way in response to that person? Or do you believe you might be able to change yourself and have a different experience of that person? That's my curiosity. I guess the truth is I don't care to have a different opinion of the person, the stranger. Yes, if it's someone in my life and I have to live with them and understand them and know them, that requires some real, like, we got to work things out.

1:11:04I got to figure out who I am in relation to you, whatever. But if it's a stranger at a store who said something offensive or did something offensive, do I feel like I need to bypass? I wouldn't want you to deny your feeling. I'm not asking you to deny your feeling. My question is, do you think you might do some work that may result in you not even having the feeling in the face of that person? I don't think it's possible to not have the feeling. I don't think that's the goal. I can give you my own anecdote where this was the breakthrough of all breakthroughs to me. 2011, I'm directing a movie, maybe 2012.

1:11:36My mother has come in. She's doing craft service. It's a family affair. It's a small budget movie. There is a PA on the movie that has a terrible personality. Now, I had been anointed the most important person on the set because I'm the director. So I have no insecurities about my role whatsoever. And I would come home at night and I would be talking with my mom at the end of the day. And she'd be like, oh, I hate that guy. He's so condescending. He says blah, blah, blah. And he treats me like shit. And I just had this moment where I was like, oh, yeah, he talks the same way to me. But I know it's on paper.

1:12:07I'm above him. I have the power. So what I know about this person, he's not being condescending. He's just a shitty personality. From that moment on, I, as a commitment, was like, oh, well, if I always felt that way, if I always felt secure, I don't think I'm going to deal with as many problems. And I think that's true. But you're getting at a power dynamic, and that's a critical thing. People with greater power have less to worry about. They have a luxury of not succumbing to this inferiority story. But if it's a racist boss— We've got to bracket racism. Yes. But it's part of my whole history.

1:12:41I know, but if she said something racist to you, I'm not asking you to not care about that. But if she says something that implies you're not worthy of being in the store, I think that's your thing. But it's a whole accumulation of, I mean, what are you thinking about this? You're now a marriage counselor. I was going to say, this is reaching, you know. And here's a tricky thing I would say. Put on your orna hat. We do fact checks here. So it's like we come in here and we tell stories about what happened that weekend. So that's when that story comes up, right? That lady, I did not think about her.

1:13:14I wasn't for hours after like, God, that bitch. I forgot immediately. And then I was like, what did I do this weekend? Oh, I have a story. It does not rule my life. But it's an incident that does cause an emotion in the moment. But I just think it's fine. You know, I have tons of those. I don't think you're unique. I think what we're getting at here is this nuance, which let me try to say it my way, which is that the assumption that we make is that when we feel a strong, unpleasant feeling in a moment, is that we're going to have a strong, unhelpful, automatic, unhelpful response. And that's where I think you're connecting here, which is that noticing, having like, I could be enraged.

1:13:59It doesn't mean I have to throw something. But we make an assumption that if I'm enraged, it means I'm out of control. Not true. I have lived with anxiety for 56 years. And I'm pretty freaking good at dealing with it. Most people think I'm the most even-keeled, calm person. I'm like, I'm a mess. But I'm very skillful. I have tons of strategies for different situations. Sometimes I'm like, hey, anxiety, welcome. Good to see you today. Have a good day. Bye-bye. And there are other days when I have to work a lot harder at it. And there are moments in life. I was in a taxi coming from the airport the other day.

1:14:35and the guy was driving like 500 miles an hour. I'm like, dude, you got to slow down. I was like, this is like not safe. And he got pissed. He got embarrassed. Yeah. And I said, you know, respectfully, I'm an anxious passenger. I'm not. But I was in that moment and I just needed him to slow down. I didn't need to like scream at him. Like if I had a friend of mine with me who I won't mention, but she would have been like out of her mind. Fight or flight about it. And again, the big question for these experiences is how do we feel at the end? If you feel like crap because someone was not kind to you, you got to observe that and say, am I giving them too much power?

1:15:12Am I not giving them too much power? Do I need a better strategy? Am I ruminating? Am I not ruminating? And that's where I think the science of emotion regulation is so critical because no matter what, we have to have a belief system. This is kind of where the work began. Do you even believe that you can do it? Yeah. That's why I like the rejecting you're intrinsically set with this reaction. Exactly. We're all in learning mode here. But that's a mindset, which you talk a lot about. So let's start with the mindset. Do you think you might feel different? Is that an option? Is it possible that you could learn helpful ways to deal with your feelings?

1:15:47No. I think a lot of people would just say no. Exactly. And that's what we call a fixed mindset. And that's going to impact your choice of strategies. It's going to impact your willing to learn new ones. So we've got to work on the mindset piece first. and my keynote talks and my presentations, a lot of my work is giving people the science behind the mindsets. Oh, it's possible. Oh, there's no bad emotions. Oh, emotions are impermanent. I like the call to self-evaluate because, again, you're not saying there is a threshold by which you're suffering from your reaction. It's just saying when you look back, do you think you would have better outcomes by regulating differently?

1:16:27And do you want different outcomes? If it's no to the first and no to the second, then keep it moving. Keep going. Have a great life. Yeah, but if you want to emotionally regulate and learn to do that, by God, you have a system laid out. So I guess I want to first start by what is the actions of emotional regulation? The way I like to think about it is that emotion regulation is a set of goals and strategies. Simple. I can prevent an unwanted emotion. So let's say I thought I would be anxious coming here today. I got a 15-minute taxi ride to do some breathing exercises, give myself some positive self-talk.

1:17:07So that way when I get here, I'm already kind of present. A lot of people don't think about preventing unwanted emotions. They get into a situation, and I got to deal with it in the moment. Prevention is really important. Preventative and proactive is way better than reaction. And we should add, emotional regulation is not getting rid of emotions. No, never. That's not the goal. The goal is not to not experience emotions. I mean, that's not even possible. The goal might be to shift from one emotion to another. So if I'm feeling anxious about to go on stage, because I had this happen once where I was in a place where I was not going to be welcome.

1:17:44It was actually 1 ,500 police officers. I was going to guess a rodeo, but it was similar. I've been around. For some reason, I wasn't really paying attention to what I was doing. And I got on stage and they were introducing me. And I see 1 ,500 guys mostly with their guns. And then they're like, Mark is here to talk for three hours about emotions. Oh, God. If you would have just watched the room. And I was like, okay, this is not going to go well. Mark, totally different president. You got to figure this out in the moment. You got to play around. The moment I just felt terror. And I'm like, transfer the terror into inspiration.

1:18:17Transfer the terror into humor. Harness this energy source. Yeah, I actually turned into a great talk. But that's in the moment. I'm reducing the anxiety and trying to move it to something else. But one thing that's interesting about emotion regulation is that we can intentionally initiate an emotion. So like your kids are coming home, you notice this, and you're like, I want to just like, let's do something playful. Let's just create an emotion that's very different from the one I'm seeing here right now. You can maintain an emotion. Have you ever had a good day? Oh, yeah. No, yeah, tons. Any time you ever had like a good day, but then there's someone who calls you or gets in your life.

1:18:52They try to like bring it down. The kind of dream stealer type. So how do you bounce back? How do you like, you know, something like I want to prolong this feeling. I'm really in a good place. I'm going to take a little bit of a longer walk. I'm going to call someone else to like tell the story to because I want to like relish it. And then we can also kind of boost or enhance emotions. So those are the goals. The strategies are what the whole book is about. And so the first strategy is shift your mindset. You can do this. You haven't learned it yet. It's possible. The second is you got to have the language.

1:19:25You got to know what you're feeling. So we've covered those a bit. The next one is the basics. You got to have the skills to deactivate. You just have to be able to take that breath. And I know people think breathing, it's overrated. And I see it feels patronizing. It does. People are convinced like there's no way that tiny solution could solve this big problem. It almost seems offensive. And if I say it in my office, it is offensive. Because I'm always like, I think we need to take a deep breath. And everybody's like, that's a trigger. You know, it's like, obviously we need to take two deep breaths.

1:19:58But the truth is that when our nervous system is activated, like giving that example, imagining I'm your kid. I hate school. My mother, in that moment, is activated. Her whole life is coming through her. I'm a terrible mother. My kid is being bullied. I don't know what to do about this and so what do I do? I yell, scream, go to your room. I just eliminate you. Yeah. Instead of, oh my gosh, my job is to deactivate. I got to take a step back. I got to take a deep breath. I got to figure out a way to help my kid deactivate so that we can actually have a conversation because it's impossible from a brain science perspective to have any communication when you're both in fight.

1:20:43You can't talk to someone's amygdala basically. This would be a nice time to just, there's some physiological imperatives, right? As your cortisol goes up and your heart rate goes up, we can watch in an fMRI, you're shifting think. It's just automatic. You go survival mode. And so first thing you have to acknowledge, and I resisted this when my wife was pitching it to me, because you know when your kids are acting insane, you want to in that moment teach them this lesson that would have prevented them from getting into the state or whatever it is. and my wife was just relentless about going, hey, they can't hear anything you're saying to their back online.

1:21:17Like whatever impulse you have to do this in this moment is just a waste of your time because until they're calm, no progress is going to be made. And like that was hard for me to accept and I have and yeah, what a difference if you just chill. Because you want your need to be met in that moment. Yes, because now I'm uncomfortable. Listen to me. And there's no listening. Yeah, I want to heal my discomfort. Or what my mom did was eliminate the discomfort which was go to your room. Range. Yeah, get out of my face. There's too much going on in front of me, and I have no clue what to do about it, so it's fight or flight.

1:21:49Yeah. The other piece of that deactivation, though, is not just about lowering kind of the arousal. It's also about stealing the mind. I don't know about you, but we were talking about ADD, ADHD earlier. I mean, that's a lot of people's challenge these days, but we're really trained to be distracted in our society. We're not trained to be still. I mean, how many people spend 10 minutes a day just doing a breath work or a mindfulness exercise to really just still their minds? It's very few. How many people spend five hours? How many teenagers spend six to seven hours a day on their phones? On the stimuli.

1:22:2795%. I know. So once we get through the deactivation and the mindfulness piece where we can actually be present, then we have to also learn the cognitive strategies. To me, these are the master strategies. It's the self-talk. It's Mark, take the high road. Mark, you got this. Mark, you know this feeling is impermanent. It's that self-talk that works for you. And you have to cultivate your own. I can't tell you what it is. You got to kind of figure out the phrases that work for you, but it really works. And especially when you do it in this third person sense. So it's like you say to Mark, you got this.

1:23:04I'm showing empathy to myself like I would to a best friend. And so by saying that, Mark, you got this, it's like literally giving advice to Mark. Yeah. As opposed to me in the moment who's ready to murder that person or whatever is happening. There's a million of these techniques. My other favorite one for people who have trouble with interactions like relationship stuff where someone might get aggressive or kind of be unsettling, it's called spatial distancing. This is the one I use with my dad a lot. So my dad, he would get triggered, and then he'd go on and on. You think this, and you think that.

1:23:37And then I would just make him into a movie. I literally... Put him in a box. Put him in a box, in a frame. I'm like, wow. This is like a Nicholson character. Exactly. Totally. Yeah, yeah. B-level, but nevertheless, yeah. And the way I think about it is what it's doing is it allows you to observe and not absorb. that's a big difference observe instead of absorb yeah that's great in partnerships another one that I use pretty much daily is temporal distancing like I'm the scientist I use spreadsheets I'm a director of a center and Horacio is an artist we have very little in common when it comes to planning when it comes to details and it's okay that's why our house has great lighting but I don't want to pay for the lighting and so the joke is we have to listen and i'm like i have to take a moment i'm like mark a can we afford it can we not afford it b how much does this matter to you the house is going to look great no matter what because he's going to do a great job is this a massive credit card debt or is this something you can live with and that's hard in relationships because we're so freaking controlling i mean at least i am and even like stupid little things and i mark are you going not sleep tonight because we bought this stupid little thing?

1:24:57No, you don't give a shit. Let it go. Walk down the other aisle. Wait in the car. So those cognitive strategies in those moments when you're like, that's a rip-off, which is what I can go in that direction. This is a scam, man. Yeah. You know, you're a sucker. Mark, whatever. Does this really matter? Does this really matter? And a week from now, am I going to be still angry about this? Or am I going to forget about it? Deathbed checks good at this moment. Am I going to carry my deathbed? I also think punting it is kind of good. Like, okay, well, if I still care about this next week, maybe I can bring it up.

1:25:27Then we have a conversation, but not when we're in the middle of buying it, when we can return it. Exactly. How does co-regulation work? That's the next key thing, which I think is so important, which is that, A, we overdo, and especially in Western society, this like self-control, self-regulation, I can do this on my own. Why should you suffer by yourself? Because it's strong. Which is ridiculous. There's a phrase that I love, it's never worry alone. Like, why? I'm not weak because I worry. I'm worried for a reason that's legitimate. And guess what? I could use someone sitting by my side. I could use a hug right now.

1:26:02I could use someone just saying, you want to go for a walk? That's co-regulation at the highest level. It's noticing and saying, I can be supportive to help this person manage their feelings. I'm not going to fix them. I'm not going to tell them what to do. But I'm going to make some offerings. And it's not coddling, which is what people sometimes think it is. It's not like, it's going to be okay. Don't worry about it. Mommy will take care of it. Daddy will do it for you. That's not co-regulation. That's unhealthy co-regulation. Co-regulation is your kid is climbing a rock. If you're my mother, you're going to fall.

1:26:38That's unhealthy co-regulation. That's creating fear. Healthy co-regulation is the kid is climbing the rock. The mother's a little nervous that the kid's going to fall because it's a little risky because they're tiny. But we're going to play this out. and I'm going to say, honey, that looks really steep. I believe you can do it. I just want to be super careful, so I'm going to come closer and be there for you. That way, if anything goes wrong, which I don't think it's going to, I'm there for you. Totally different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One is rescue or get down. The other is I actually believe in you.

1:27:08It's building the resilience in the kid, building the confidence in the kid, but providing that little bit of support. I mean, we're endlessly co-regulating. We're co-regulating right now with each other, whether we're conscious of it or not. Right. Right. You're saying something, I'm responding. If I don't agree with you or you don't agree with me in that moment, you get a little feeling. You're like, whatever, it's only a podcast, let it go. And, you know, it's like we want this to be inspiring and engaging for people. I hope that they're going to learn something from it. So we're purposely telling stories that are aligned with that.

1:27:36That's co-regulation in action. Yeah, I mean, I want everyone to get out of this. Yeah, you're going to have emotions. They're going to be strong. They're going to be uncomfortable. and there's a version where you do the best with that that you can. Exactly. That's what the goal is. And by the way, part of the co-regulation thing that's so important is that when you try to be the fixer or the advice giver or the solver, you're not actually helping the brain develop as a parent. I need to be uncomfortable. I don't want to be in a situation where I'm going to die. Right. But, you know, I can get up on the rock.

1:28:12You know, I can be a little exploratory. and I need to know that I can talk to myself in a way that says, Mark, you can do this. I need to know that I'm going to fail. I need to know that it feels shitty when you fail. I need to learn what to say to someone who treats me in an unkind way. We have to build that muscle and you don't build that muscle by learning nothing, by no one being there, and you don't build that muscle by coddling. You don't build that muscle by controlling. You build it by co-regulating and scaffolding and building it. It's amazing how much vestigial shit we're still dealing with when early enlightened writers split the emotions and the intellect into two separate things.

1:28:54The great question would be like, why don't we know any of this? Why has this never been taught? Why did no one take this seriously? It's right out of my mind. Because, oh, emotions are something to be ignored, avoided, and controlled. And intellect is something that will bring you everything. Yeah. And so why would we spend five minutes learning this thing that we're supposed to avoid in place of more math that could take us further? And it's kind of crazy that at best we're 50-50 analytical and emotional creatures. But in reality, we're like 85 % emotional. Yeah. And we've just ignored it. Emotions drive everything.

1:29:27They drive our attention, our learning, our decisions, our relationships, our health, our performance, our creativity. There is no correctness here. And I want to say that loudly. There is no correct strategy. This is a game we play in our lives. But one thing you can say is if you've misidentified the emotion, you have no shot at combating that. You're chasing a different issue. It seems most logical to actually start with a true understanding of what you're feeling, which is way more complicated than people give it credit. Self-awareness is a gift, and most people don't have much of it. Uh-huh.

1:30:02It's funny, when I was writing, I knew a lot of it, but then I had to do research for a lot of it because I'm not an expert in everything. The pieces that I had to really study so that I could write about them were the pieces, of course, that I procrastinated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would just get so overwhelmed, and I would try to, like, Mark, you're a professor, work through it. And every time I tried to do that, it got worse. Every time I just shut the computer and went to work out, I came back in flow states. I remember joking, you know, you may not finish the book, but you're going to be in the best shape.

1:30:33And then you get one outcome. Could turn into a fitness book. Exactly. The point I'm making is that life is a rollercoaster ride of emotions. You know, I didn't know my mother was going to die when I was 24 years old of pancreatic cancer. I didn't know the same year I'd find the person who I was going to be with for my whole life. I didn't know I was going to become a professor. I didn't know I was going to run a center. I didn't know I'd be traveling. Like, all these things happen. And if we just observe that and say, okay, life is a rollercoaster ride of emotions. I think I'd rather have more pleasant ones than unpleasant ones.

1:31:07Let me do some self-evaluation of where I'm at in my life. And let me be a scientist about my strategies. Are they working for me? Are they working against me? Because by the way, all the unhealthy ones are okay too. Drinking's fine a little bit. Eating a little bit of sugar, whatever. Distraction, fine. Avoidance works for me sometimes. Yeah, binge a TV show. But, you know, when I used to be a fitness instructor and I'd see people on the treadmill for eight hours, I'm like, eesh, now you're like not dealing with the real feeling. Right, right. So everything is a balance. My hope for people is that they learn the strategies and practice those strategies and then just take some time, you know, monthly to say, is my life working for me or against me?

1:31:53Yeah. Yeah. And at some point in our lives, we can blame our childhoods and blame our parents and blame everything. Or we can wake up and say, you know what? I'm going to be my own Uncle Marvin today. I'm going to look in the mirror. I have a little less judgment. I'm going to be a little bit better listener to myself. I'm going to have some self-compassion. I'm going to be a little warmer to myself. And what the research shows is that will make a difference for you. You can cultivate Uncle Marvin-ness in yourself. And here's the more beautiful thing from my perspective. And I'll just share one last story, which is, so I'm giving a speech in a town in New York State, and I'm talking about my uncle, which I didn't normally do in my previous presentations.

1:32:36And this one guy looks at me and he's like, are you talking about Marvin Moore, the sixth grade social studies teacher from Monticello, New York? I said, I am. And he's like, Mark, your uncle was my uncle Marvin. I said, what do you mean? He's like, he was my sixth grade teacher 50 years ago. And I will never, ever forget the twinkle in his eyes, the way he smiled, the way he taught us about emotions and history. And like the guy just kept on talking. And I said, well, I got to finish my speech, but can I interview you afterwards? And he stayed and I talked with him about a half hour videotaped this interview with one of my uncle's own actual students.

1:33:12But I share that with you because at the end, he looked at me and he said, it's pretty darn clear the impact that your uncle has had on your life and I said of course and so he said I'm just curious Mark for whom are you and Uncle Marvin and it just hit me I'm like I like to do the research and I realized I was not showing up as that non-judgmental listener for my significant other for a lot of other people and I made it a goal and I share that because what the research shows is really interesting is that when we can show up for you, for you as that character, as that ally, we see the benefit in the other person.

1:33:54That's the co-regulation. I can see your life is improving as a result of my co-regulation. And by me watching you have a better life, it makes my life better. So it's a twofer. And I think that's where it begins. I love that. The book is called Dealing with Feeling. Use your emotions to create the life you want. Dr. Mark Brackett, this has been so fun. Yeah, thank you. And I enjoy it so much. It's been great. I can talk about feelings forever. Feelings are important. We don't want to do that. We want to limit that. In the right time and place. There you go. Be well. Good luck with everything.

1:34:31I hope you have a great rest of your tour. Just a quick reminder that as part of our summer break, here's a rerun of one of our favorite fact checks.

1:34:43Hello. Hi. I'm excited to be here today. We haven't recorded in a couple days. Uh-huh. Yeah, I missed you. I was out of town for a few days. We had like a five-day break. Yeah, Thursday or Tuesday. Is that five days? Yeah. Wow. It's like a full Thanksgiving. Speaking of which, I really have the tinglys about it being here. I'm excited too. Yeah. Are you excited about your secret turkey? No. I mean, receiving it or preparing one. Preparing one. No, I'm not. You know, this is a big shortcoming of mine. I'm bad at gifts. I'm just bad. Like, I'll tell you, I think about it 30 minutes a day, which leads to depression.

1:35:26Yep. I spent 30 minutes thinking about this and I have nothing and I'm going to do it tomorrow. Remember how great it is? It's fantastic. It's a great thing. I'm not creative in this space. Sure. It's a shortcoming. To remind people if they don't know about Secret Turkey. Erica and Molly's daughter invented it, which is great. And she invented it like three years ago? I think so. So she was like 12 or 13. The first year we were all together and she was like, everyone pick a name out of a hatch. And this is a very, what's the word to describe Lily? Great sense of humor. Ugh. She knows herself really well already.

1:36:03She's very self-assured. Yes. Like during COVID and stuff, she would put on all these plays. Every time we would go on a big pod trip, she would organize a play. She makes movies with the kids and she directs all of them and there's babies involved and she edits them all. She's really good at that. Can't wait to hire her in eight years. But yeah, no, she's wonderful. Special girl. Very, very special. She came to us, whatever, and it was like, pick a name out of the hat and it were people's names. And then also we had to pick another thing that said, like, write a story or origami or something.

1:36:40Yes. And you had to match the two and do this by the end of the night. And I was annoyed. We all were. Yeah. We were all annoyed. Like, oh, we have homework now. Yes. I was like, I just wanted to relax today. And now we have to figure this out. And we have to because it's for a child. Right. Can't break her young dreams. Yep. And we did it and it was spectacular. It was the best thing we ever, ever did. It was so heartwarming. And then the next year, which is great, is I had never received a text from Lily and it just said, your secret turkey is blank. Yeah. And I didn't even know what that meant, but it was just in order.

1:37:20Yeah. Which was really fun. Yeah. So for the past few years, we've received with some weeks in advance, our secret turkey, someone in our pod, and we have to make the gift. Correct. and or if you're Charlie you you say you made it but you really hired an artist exactly which is very good yeah and then we go around and we present our secret turkeys and it's a really special thing to do and right now you're in that phase where you're stressed out about it yeah but you're gonna feel good once you accomplish it it'll be wonderful it's all it's the best part of Thanksgiving I haven't started mine but I know what I'm doing okay great I'm excited to see who you have and I'm excited.

1:38:02I'm really, well, everyone's a good person. Yeah. I basically have a lot of, as much excitement as I have, I also have a ton of holiday anxiety because it's also limited a sweatshirt edition time. Yeah. So this is the time of the year where I've got to like go draw. And every time I enter it with the same anxiety, because I can't draw very well. So it's not true. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yesterday I sat down with an idea. It was actually your idea. So I had to draw three different things. I do the first thing. I was like, oh my God, this is great. I sent it to you. Yeah. Really good. And then I tried to draw the next thing for hours and I just couldn't.

1:38:41I'm like, why can I draw that thing and not this thing? Yeah, it is weird kind of. Were you looking at an image? Oh yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah. It was just very frustrating and I couldn't, I couldn't do it. And then I was like, and I can't bring in someone to do one of the three pictures on this, but it's got to be from me. Now, I did order a device this morning. I'll have you know that I think might help with this. But also, I think you are overthinking it. And this is because you actually are good at drawing, that your bar is much higher. The thing, I guess, can we say? Yeah. Wanted to do a crow, a mouse and cherry.

1:39:19Yeah. Which is so cute. And then you were able to accomplish the mouse. Yeah. In fact, regardless of that, I do want to Merry Christmas. I'm going to frame that for you for Christmas. Oh, that's so sweet. Yeah. Yeah. The problem was the mouse is good enough that the crow look like a crayon drawing. Like they have to be somewhat comparable in detail. It's not like one can be a caricature and one can be photorealistic. Yeah, because the mouse is photorealistic. It has like hairs. Yeah. And it's so detailed. It is so detailed and it's really, really good. But maybe you could dumb, give me that for Christmas.

1:39:59But then maybe you could do a version that's more crayon like the crow so that it matches. So I ordered a light board today, an artist light board. What's that? So I trace the outside of a shape and then I do all the stuff. And the crow is just a big blob of black. And it just, I couldn't even get the shape right. And then to get into the feathers and there's so many patterns that go all these different ways or whatever. Now, a light board emits bright light behind the images you're doing. So, like, I could put an image and trace it. Yeah. I guess it's a cheat. No. Anyways, light boards are really popular and I realize a lot of people are using light boards.

1:40:36Because once I got on there, it was all these different options. And then the stuff I was looking at, I was like, oh, yeah, I see that all the time. People are definitely using light boards. Oh, my God. Anyways, I ordered a pretty nice light board today. You're turning into a real artiste. Yeah, maybe this will send me on some kind of a trajectory. You could probably use your light board to make whatever your secret turkey gift. True. That's a good point. Okay, great idea. You're marked. Okay, I have a few funny stories I want to tell you. Okay. When I work out, there's a lot of mirrors in my gym.

1:41:06And there's a lot of backlight. And when I look in the mirror in my bathroom, there's zero backlight. It's all frontlight. And so what I see, and that's going to be a ding, ding, ding. when I see what's so backlit, that's where I'm seeing like, oh my Jennifer, I have so much hair growing out of my trapezias, my deltoids, my back. And then I see like really long stray hairs coming out of my neck, which are disgusting. And while I'm working out, all I can do is focus on those. Of course. So it occurred to me, I'm going to keep scissors in my gym now. Oh, wow. Okay. So that I can get the things I'm seeing.

1:41:41So yesterday I fully was just going to work out. okay and i cut some hairs then i cut some more hairs then i oh my god i gave myself a full haircut when i was working out yet do you know what my hair is cut from the last time you saw me i got like a fresh cut right now that's because i gave myself a full haircut in the gym and i put a towel down and i would go over the mirror and i would just start cutting and then i would walk outside and shake all the hair off and like that's it now get back to your workout working out a little bit more oh i missed that spot this way so i was in there working out for about an hour and 45 minutes and i got a terrible workout and i came out with a fresh haircut you have an unusual marriage to your hair uh-huh in that you you sometimes have to like change it immediately like remember when you you had to buy those shavers you had to buy a razor when you were on vacation with delta to shave your face in the parking lot right because i just hit a maximum I was like, this thing is way too long.

1:42:44I gotta get it off my face. I felt like claustrophobic for it. And then I also, when I'm depressed, I'll give myself a radical haircut, but that started in junior high and it's kind of like a coping mechanism. It's not like we're gonna reset. There's a new me and I'm not. And also I tend to trim my hair. Kristen points us out all the time. If she sees me like almost like five nights in a row doing some trimming in the mirror when I brush my teeth, she knows I have a lot of anxiety. So, yes, I currently have a lot of anxiety. And yes, so that you're you're right about that pattern. Well, do you want to talk about why you're depressed?

1:43:19I have a lot of work anxiety. Yeah. There's a lot of work anxiety right now. Yeah. BTS. BTS. We're like I'm some days at eight going like to the family. May I go to bed? May I just go to bed? Now, if if this was happening with a family member. Yeah. What advice would you give them? Well, it happens all the time, you know. And what advice do you give? Yeah. Oh, so, you know, Kristen has depression. So hers won't necessarily be incident driven, right? It's not like she has a specific thing. She'll just have a wave of it. And yeah, she'll sleep a lot. And there's really, there's nothing I can do or nor do I think I should do.

1:44:00I just go like, oh yeah, yeah, she's kind of in a slump. She's going to sleep a lot for a while and then she's going to come out of it. Now, earlier on, that used to scare me. and I was like, is this going to be forever? And I've just gone through the cycle enough that now I just go like, oh, right. Yeah. She's going to organize for a couple of days really, really intensely. And then she's going to sleep a lot for a few days and then it's going to be over. I guess I'm asking like, what, what would your recommendations be if there was a prolonged period of what you felt was not a great state. Yeah.

1:44:41Well, yeah, there's steps. One is like, I will gently and have, have like, Hey love, have you, um, have you checked in with your psychiatrist lately? Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm not saying you need to do anything. Just like, have you checked in with your psychiatrist? Yeah. So that'll be like one thing I can do. It's evolved because I used to try to fix it. That's my nature. Yeah. And I used to try to talk her out of it or tell her what's good in her life or, you know, gratitude list. One thing I'll still do, and she likes this and it's not, it doesn't trigger feeling judged about being sad, is let's go for a walk or let's go for a hike.

1:45:22Like just encouraging, let's go, you know, move around. But I'm still moving around. I'm still doing all my workouts. That's good. Oh, another great update So I got the toe thing looked at Yeah Guess what I'm doing tomorrow I'm going to the dentist Wow First time in 10 years Oh my god Yeah That's great Yeah Guess what else I'm gonna do I'm gonna have my teeth whitened Get your ears cleaned Oh, wow Yeah What do you think about that? I think that's great I've been seeing a lot of pictures of myself From olden days And I realized my teeth used to be so much whiter Oh I had, you know, I had four or five years of tobacco use sure yeah coming up on a year without are you worried about it being too bright oh no but that is a really funny episode of friends yeah um no but like it hurts oh yeah it hurts really bad i remember because i did it like 18 years ago yeah and it was miserable yeah but i think i'm going to and they won't like this but i'm well at least when i did it before you did multiple sessions and I'm going to go, I can handle just a little bit of lightning.

1:46:29I don't got to go all the way and have the insane tooth pain. Like I won't trade off. I'm willing to just do halfway. I feel like I wasted some money, but not. Yeah, because when I did it the first time, it felt like ice picks in my teeth. Yeah, no thanks. You haven't had it done, have you? No. No need. What a bitch. I use that arm and hammer, you know. I keep telling you and you can do it. It's at your disposal, but you just don't. Yeah, but also you never chew tobacco and you're new to coffee. I drink a lot of red wine. Yeah, that's problematic. God, imagine what they would look like if you didn't drink so much red wine.

1:47:06Do they not look good? They're so white. They're very enviable. It doesn't help that I work with you because I'm staring at like as white as they can get all the time. Natural. Now you're right. You can go way too far. Yeah, you can. And you can tell. To me, you can tell. I guess this is the reverse veneers conversation. You got to be careful to find line. Yeah. Well, we'll find, you'll see Thursday. Okay, great. I'm excited. Now, I just remember we were on camera, so I showed my teeth and I remembered something else. People will definitely say, Monica, do you have a hickey? Oh, let me see. And do you?

1:47:44I don't. Oh. Do you see it though? I do not. Oh, really? Do you point to where it's at? Well, I don't remember. Oh, on that side. A little bruise. Yeah, it's a bruise. which is a hickey. How'd that happen? I had a refresh of my Botox. Oh, okay. And they do your neck. Yeah, they do because I have a very strong neck. Uh-huh. And so they have to put some Botox in there. Okay. To make it less strong. Less strong. Yeah. It's too strong. What if you woke up in the morning and you went to lift your head up and you couldn't and you came into work and your head was like this and you go, and you go, you ever get toothpaste?

1:48:24full talks um okay so in this episode Anna goes into the bathroom and while she's in the bathroom you're telling me about your potential cashmere sweater that you're gonna make out of your back hair thank you that you I guess made you collected some more yesterday no I didn't I didn't but I I see that a new crop is coming in. Oh, exciting. In case you missed that episode, basically I discovered I had all this back hair from the backlighting of the gym. I was saying it out loud to my family and Lincoln said, do you want me to shave your back? Which I think is a dirty job. I would have never asked her to shave my back.

1:49:05That sounds, well, first of all, like very vain on my, like I've got my kids grooming me now. but she offered and um and I shave her legs for her yeah that's cute and so have you thought about combining that's a great idea well maybe um two different sweaters so anyways so I sat on the edge of the bathtub and she shaved my whole back and then I collected it to throw it away and I couldn't help but notice by George this is the softest hair I've ever felt in my life I didn't would have never thought my hair was a sock. So then Lincoln and I decided that I should start collecting it because it's cashmere.

1:49:48Sure. And that at some point, maybe when I'm 60 or 70, I'll have enough for a sweater. Yeah. Yes. And so. So you brought it. I brought it and I keep it in this bag now. I don't know if that's how you spell cashmere. And as you can see from the amount in it, it's going to take a long time. It's really, really going to take. But I really wanted you to feel it because I think anyone you tell this to is like, there's no way it's what you say it is. But you're very objective and you don't ever lie to benefit me. You spelled it right. I did. I want you to take it out and touch it. And Rob, you're invited to, too.

1:50:30But be careful you don't get any stuck to your fingers. Yeah, you can't waste any. No, I don't have enough to spare. yes yes definitely dry your fingers off i know

1:50:44okay yeah there's really not a lot to work with here um you can pull it all the way out oh wow and you want to go like this between your fingers as if it's a cashmere sweater okay

1:51:00it's okay everything's okay i'm scared of dropping some really enjoy okay what do you Go ahead and touch it with your other fingers I'm good

1:51:12Wow It is really soft Have you ever felt hair that soft? I haven't Hold on let me Yeah use both hands Well no I want to do like a comparative Now you could make a snowmobile suit in like a day But not a This hair is coarser Right they're very different Yeah, it's really soft. Hold on. What about arm hair? Yeah, I imagine that might be similar. I have a lot of arm hair. That's when they said I was a woolly mammoth. I mean, werewolf. One of them. A woolly werewolf. Okay. It's really nice. Rob, do you want to grab a little? Rob, do you want to keep your job? He doesn't want to. Don't make him. Okay, but it is starting to fall apart.

1:52:00It's okay. Okay. Do you love it? It is soft. Rob, don't downplay it. It's very soft. It's compressed a lot. Yeah. I did that on purpose. Where is it? Oh, my God. Here it is. Oh, my God. Guys. Guys, that's so hard to come by. That's like rare earth metals. Yes. Oh, my God. Get this back in here. This is so rare. And to remind people, this is my competitive product. to Brad Pitt's God's True Cashmere. My company is going to be my true cashmere. Oh, no, it should be called Back's True Cashmere. Ooh. Because it's almost your name and it's your back. Back's with an X. Yes. Back's Cashmere. Wow, guys, that's a great.

1:52:50How do you feel about me, like, just putting a tiny bit of my arm hair in here? Oh, that would be great. That would be great. That's similar to P-Baby. Okay, got a couple. You did. Okay, great. Yeah, just add it to the bag.

1:53:06Wow. It's pretty special, right? I feel like that came off a base. I can't believe. Wait till I have a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I don't know if this is the best vessel because I see little hairs all over. They're not in the little ball they were in. Every time you touch it, it does lose a little bit of its quality. Thanks for being willing to touch that. I hope it delivered. I'm going to give it a touch, too. Oh, God. I'm going to see because I was just talking about in a way that now I'm wondering, is it as soft as I remember? It got smaller, which is a little concerning.

1:53:44Well, I didn't get smaller. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's wow. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:54:02Yeah, we don't have much left after that little. That might be the last show and tell of my casualty. Wait, no. Now it's just more compacted, but you're going to need to compact it. I got to learn how to spin yarn, too, because isn't that part of what I'll have to do? Yeah. Okay, so that's a fact because you said that cashmere comes from a goat's chin. Chin hairs. It does. It comes from the soft undercoat of cashmere goats. Ah, and they're like, they're up in Tibet. No, India, Kashmir, India with a K. Okay. Oh, right, Kashmir. When we were in India, I did get myself some Kashmir scarves from Kashmir.

1:54:41From Kashmir? Mm-hmm. I presume they grow them elsewhere. But it's like champagne. Yep. Where you're only really drinking champagne if it comes from Champagne, France. Speaking of things to consume, I just saw a Nora in the movie theater. It's a movie to see in the movie theater currently out. It's so good. It is. What's it about? You can't tell? I don't really want to say too much. I prefer that. Yeah. Is there anyone in it I know? I don't think you probably know anyone in it. Right. But you will. I think she's definitely going to get nominated and might win. And she is so good. I mean, everyone's so good in it, but the main actress, Mickey Madison, she is a revelation.

1:55:27It's really something to see. It's so weird because it's like a it's sad. Like there's like sad things that happen, but there's also like there's there's such comedy throughout. So totally. And sometimes I don't like that when tones are sort of all over the place, but they nailed it. I like multiple tones and things. Sometimes I think it can feel forced. Yes. But it didn't here. But like Hit and Run was like a car chase movie, but it was a relationship movie and it was. But tonally, it was one. It had one tone. It was different genres were mixed. I think you can do multiple tones if you're the writer director.

1:56:09It is. It's Sean Baker. He did The Florida Project and Red Rocket. Oh, yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I think if you're a writer-director, like, I would be thinking about this when I was doing Hit and Run, because there's, like, there's some broad comedy scenes with nudity and old people. Then there's some really violent scenes. But the unifying tone is it's everything I like. So it's bizarrely consistent tonally, even though it's, like, everything I like in one movie. Right. It's such a good movie. I'm going to see it. I really highly recommend it. Been some good movies lately. substance, Anora substance substance again, Anora poor things last year yeah so woman of the hour ding ding ding do you love it?

1:57:01yeah, I mean it's dark yeah, but yes, so well done it's very well made she killed it the notion that she pitched herself hours before they had to have a director and then had six weeks of prep and then executed that is hugely impressive. It really is. Really is. Very good job, Anna. Good job, Anna. Okay, I have an update, a huge update. Ring's back. My ring is back. Yeah. But it's a little smaller now? Yeah, so I got it soldered back, and I think it's a mix of it being maybe a teeny bit smaller because of like, you know, they probably have to overlap it a tiny bit to solder it. Would be my guess.

1:57:44Maybe not. But anyway, it might be a little bit smaller. And I think my knuckle is permanently bigger now. A bit bigger. From the B. So I had to really shove this thing on. It took a while. And while I was doing it, I was like, is this a this is a what am I doing? I'm doing I'm setting myself up for another horrible situation. Right. But I kept going. In AA, we say doing the same thing and expecting different results. I know. They say that in AA. They say it everywhere, I think, too. There's a quote that Einstein says that's like insanity is the definition of doing the same thing. Anyway, I worked really hard to get this on.

1:58:28Yeah. It is never coming off. Well, maybe I'll, you know, at any moment you want me to take it off. We've gone down this road. I can get it off in a second. I hope I die with it on. Okay. I hope that's in 100 years, but yeah, that sounds fine. At first, when I put it back on, I had so much fear that I made a huge mistake and that I should not have put it back on and that I'm jinxing. Oh, my God. Now it's like a triple jinx? Yes. It's a reverse back jinx because I really started to believe that the ring was the cause to a lot of bad stuff that's going on in the world and personally. Yeah. And you did try to tell me that it wasn't the case.

1:59:12You said, I'm not that powerful, which was a nice thing to say. But I don't believe you because a lot. Also, one of my favorite restaurants closed. Like, oh, no, things started to really unravel, really started to unravel. Yeah. So I had to get it back on. But then as soon as I did, I thought, oh, maybe you're not supposed to go back. Maybe this is a lesson in not going back. Right. Not trying to go back to high school or recreate. recreate no it's a cute ring it looks great on your hand and you love it and it really symbolizes something beautiful and you should continue to love it and embrace it your first big job and you got a reward for yourself i did i love it so maybe can you wear it on a different finger that's smaller i can't wear it anywhere again because you can't get it off yeah fuck that yeah that makes me panic but i did make a joke that i think the bee that stung me was of a different political party that I'm affiliated with really got in there, you know, did some dirty work.

2:00:15Sure. You know, one of the scariest I've ever been is I have, I have sensed this moment, been stung enough that I know I've outgrown my B allergy, you know, infamously in second grade, my whole face disappeared and I almost stopped breathing. Yeah. And so I had. You also almost stopped breathing because he put a sheet on your face. He had put wet washcloth on my face, similar to what we did at Bubba Bob. and I carried an EpiPen and whatnot and then I got stung and then I went to the hospital and they just monitor me whatever I now wouldn't have this fear but when I was in an archaeology class and we were digging up in the Santa Monica Mountains at Stunt Ranch a swarm of bees was migrating and you all of a sudden heard it and then crazy enough our archaeology teacher he had been on a dig in South America and a student got killed a graduate student by getting attacked by a bee so I only imagine what his PTSD is about all this he calls it out he's like everyone's still and you can hear like and you start hearing hearing hearing it and we just all sat there and this it was like biblical oh it was a cloud when they went overhead now mind you they were still probably 60 feet above us it's not like they were coming down but there was a moment where it was a visible black cloud and the amount of noise they made was on par with when a helicopter when a police helicopter flies over it was so loud in so many quadrillion of them and i'm thinking i'm allergic to them still and i remember just like should i run should i not run should i run should i sit here should i run and i just i stayed and then they passed obviously i didn't die good thing you stayed yeah you think i would have caught their attention and yes your teacher said specifically don't move i'm glad you listened but that's interesting too because part of the reason the the student had died was that everyone ran and he ran kind of uphill and he got stuck he couldn't climb any higher oh my god yeah sorry i brought that up it's a horrible story it's not a good story and i apologize my girl so anyway so ring is back we'll see how the world yeah takes that in tbd uh one other thing i want to say really quick so i almost did something bad oh good but i didn't i like bad stuff tell me so i was at a restaurant the other day and I went to the bathroom.

2:02:48Very rare for me. Right. Yeah. I don't pee a lot. The bathroom smelled so good. Also very rare to go to a public restroom and it smelled good. Yeah. And when I was peeing, I saw there was this big candle lit. I was like, that's the cause of this delicious smell. And I went and I was trying to see what the brand is and what it was and I couldn't find it. So I went back to my seat and I asked the server, what is the candle in the bathroom? I really like it. He said, yeah, we get this a lot. It's specifically made for us. You're in a bizarre pattern. No, I know how to sniff out limited a dish. Yes, you do.

2:03:37And he said, oh, yeah. Where were you where you wanted to get the candle holders off the table? Remember that? Oh, man. And I tried to find those candles. Again, back to my bad gift giving. And I tried to find those candle holders and I was unsuccessful. Shoot. I don't even remember. So many things you like at restaurants. It would be hard to. When I walk through the world, I am like. You're like Terminator. But instead of scanning for risks or threats. Yes. You're scanning for items. Beautiful items. That could be in your house. That is how I operate. So he said it's limited with different words.

2:04:12He said it's limited a dish. Then a manager came over and I said, oh, is this about the candles? And she said, yeah, so we get a shipment every Monday. So we'll be getting more tomorrow. You have a big purse. I don't know if you want to go in there. She said there's a lot in there. So there's multiple in there. Oh, my God. She was giving you. She was giving me permission, which is why this was tricky. Can I just say one of my favorites early, early SNL sketches was I think Eddie Murphy or one of the black cast members went in white face. And it was like a fake documentary, like a 60s documentary.

2:04:56So he experienced what it was like to be white. And he goes to a shoe store. He tries on some shoes and he goes, oh, yeah, these are great. And the guy goes, take them. and he finds out that like white people aren't even just give it pain for anything just take them and everywhere he went it was like that oh my god that's hilarious this is basically what happened to you the owner is just like just take it yeah wow not the owner the manager which is why i'm not going to say the name of the place i don't want her i don't want to get her in trouble right so i went in there with my bag really excited and i opened In the cabinet, there's a bunch of these candles.

2:05:37Oh, wow. And so I take one and I put it in my purse. You have the weirdest life. I started washing my hands and I thought, I can't do it. Oh. I can't do it. I took it out. Unexpected. And I put it back. Yeah. That's kind of good, karmically. I don't know. You just got to figure out how to buy them. or talk about them enough on here that they send them to you. And now I can't say the place. So I really put myself in a pickle. Now I went back to that place and. Like you be in bed thinking about what you're in the mood for to eat. And then you go and then in your calculations, like, I don't even know what I want to eat, but I want to smell the candle.

2:06:22So I want to go eat at that restaurant or I want to see the mugs. So I want to eat at that restaurant. Are you deciding to go to places for smells and the trinkets they have? Okay. So twofold. Yes. In that I will pick locations based on ambiance and vibe. Yeah. But no, like I wouldn't have gone back to Budanoke just to see the mugs because that's in fact taunting. Yeah. Okay. I got you. I have to have it. Does that make sense? Yeah, of course. I wonder what that's about. I don't feel safe unless I have it. Seeing from afar is lame. Right. Having it is un-lame. Write that down. That's a quote. That's a new quote.

2:07:09Yep. Now, anyway, I was back there with some other friends, and a friend offered to take my purse and go get it. This person has not very many morals. Right. I know who you're talking about. No, you don't. Okay. I know who you think I'm talking about and it's not him. It's not him. It's not Jess. I would have thought Anna too. It was Anna. Well, you know who I hang out with. So that's part of it. But yeah, but it's deeper than that. I know Callie didn't do it. I know. I know Rachel wasn't going to do that. I mean, it's not going to be Laura. It's not going to be. Callie might do it. She might.

2:07:46Yeah. She's a rascal. Oh, I shouldn't say that. She's she would never do something like that. Some of Callie's co-workers listen I just found out which is exciting Hi co-workers So anyway I said no again Yeah great And I really hesitated because I thought Well I'm not doing it It's the same thing you're going to get something you didn't pay for And you'll know it I know I'm saying good job I know but I do want You're going to be able to figure out who makes this candle No I'm going to be fine without it Oh okay that's also a good goal I'm going to be fine I don't need it What's it going to do for my life?

2:08:24Nothing. I mean, it is going to make my house smell so nice. But you already have a lot of candles. I have a lot of candles. I have a lot of great candles. None smell like that, but that's okay. Yeah. And I'll get through this. You'll be stronger for it. Mm-hmm. So that was my almost stealing. Maybe because I stole when I was young, and that was really bad. Yeah. And apparently my mom cried. Well, that's what my dad told me happened. What had you stolen? More than the cookies. I stole the cookies and then I stole the boy's sand art. And your mom cried over that? Well, my dad told me that, but I think he was lying.

2:09:01I don't think she did. Yeah. I think he was trying to guilt me. Yeah. And it worked. I know. You don't steal anymore. It was a good. What are you going to say? Wow. That's good parenting. It is. It's great parenting. Your mother has, your mother was inconsolable for a week. Like she seems fine. At night she's been crying in bed. I don't steal. Next to me. well you tried to steal a parking meter well i did steal a parking meter so i did try to rob a 7-eleven yeah what are you talking about i had a compartment in my head right yeah when i was younger and an alcoholic uh-huh oh i'm gonna say this one thing we're going too long and our new goal is not go so long i know but i was just in kawaii that my 40-hour trip was kawaii i have not been there in 20 years since my last week of drinking oh wow yeah was it p what did it how did it feel it felt great like i saw the guardrail me and the dude smashed into on the way to buy ice i saw the crazy hotel dean and i were at that i went jogging after being awake for three days like i saw all the stuff and i thought wow we're back here yeah look how different yes everything is You should be so proud of yourself.

2:10:19You made the right turn when you left here. It was a bizarre way to reflect on like, what was my life like and my mental health 20 years ago when I was there? And what is it like today? Yeah. And such an obvious decision was made and I'm now there with a family and I'm healthy. And yeah, it was, uh, it was, it was rad. That's wonderful. Yeah. I liked it a lot. I love that. I kind of thought I would never go back there. Yeah. I got invited to go there. So I don't even know I would have ever picked it because it's, yeah, it's my last week and it was a gnarly week. But it was very fun to be there and just go like, oh, man, did we dodge a bullet if we would have stayed the course.

2:10:59A, we wouldn't be alive right now. And B, we would just not have the life we have. So it was, yeah, it was cool. That's lovely. Yeah, great time to reflect. Well, did that do anything for? My work anxiety? Yeah. Yeah, my time there was a beautiful, I did, I left all of my worries in Los Angeles and did have a totally carefree, wonderful 40 hours. Is that what you're asking? Well, sort of. I guess like the, the reflection, like you being able to really, really have a physical reminder of where you were and where you are and understanding like the, the stuff that's happening is really, really, really frustrating and not really not fun.

2:11:53Yeah. But in the grand scheme, like, like, look where you are and what you're doing. Yeah. I'm aspiring to be there, but I'd be lying if I said I could. I mean, one of the tools I'm employing is like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. Everything, everything at this point could get destroyed and I'd still be very fine. Yeah. So I am cycling through that reminder when I'm doing the other things to help. And then I just get caught in the loop. You know, I get caught in the rumination, you know, my sense of injustice just going crazy. And so I, yeah. And then I get stuck in it and then I say you're stuck in it, but it has no effect on being stuck in it.

2:12:31I know. Have you considered reaching back out to your therapist? I didn't consider doing it, but I did have a moment of like, why aren't you talking to your therapist? This would be a time. It's a good time. Yeah. Yeah. It did kind of cross my mind. Maybe. It's also easy to forget when you've been out of it for a little bit, how helpful it is. Yeah. But yes, I agree with you and that's probably a good idea. Yeah. I don't, I think it's might be a good idea. I had therapy and it was helpful. Oh, good. Okay. So, uh, are 90 % of Asians lactose intolerant? Um, 70 to a hundred percent of people in East Asia are lactose intolerant.

2:13:13Yeah. So yeah, 90s right in there. You know what would make you proud of your girl, Lincoln? She had to name all 32 countries on a map of Asia for a test, and she got 32 out of 32. Wow, that's incredible. She even hit me with the name of a country I didn't even know. That's awesome. Yeah. I thought she was making one up. I had to get out my Google map. Okay, when did Missoni and Target do the collab? 2011? Okay, the seahorse situation where you said they're made of dust. Those are sea monkeys. Those are sea monkeys, and a lot of commenters pointed that out. Yeah, they're sea monkeys, and sea monkeys is a colloquial term for shrimp brine.

2:13:53Scrimps. And it's really just so disgusting. And it's a powder. Yep, and it's very disgusting. Yeah. Oh, and then I'm going to play one clip before we end here. Okay, I love a clip. Most memorable moments from the Newlywood game. What's the old urban legend? You know, where's the strangest, most unusual place you ever made Whoopi? That didn't make it on the air. But she actually said that. Well, she said worse. All of a sudden, there was an urban legend that went out there that said, I said, where's the strangest, most unusual place you've ever made Whoopi? And the lady was supposed to have said, well, that would be in the butt, Bob.

2:14:32And that never happened. That never happened. About five years ago, I get a call from Game Show Network, and they said, you better come down here and take a look at this. So I go down and take a look at it, and there is this little Caucasian lady from Pennsylvania. right her name was Olga and I said where's the strangest most unusual place you've ever said made whoopee and she says in the ass I said no no no no no no it has to be a location oh oh sorry you know so that asshole that didn't make it on the air we cuckooed that one out also what's his name the Bob Eubanks Bob Eubanks Bob if the um person in your story's name is Olga you don't have to say Caucasian.

2:15:11We could definitely context clue that. You know what's funny? I almost said, I like that he said that. Because people would say black or Asian. Yeah, that's fair. What's the other one? There's another really famous funny one, which is karate. Yeah, karate class. Karate class. What's the setup for that? Is it condiments? I think it is condiment. Oh, is it? What's your favorite condiment? karate class. No. What's your husband's favorite condiment? Karate class. I don't think. I think. Here, I can email you. What will your husband say is his favorite condiment? Oh, I would say his pool table upstairs.

2:15:53Definitely. Oh, that's interesting. His pool table upstairs. Annette? All right. I never heard that word before. I mean, it's downstairs karate school. Karate school. What will your husband say is his favorite condiment? Karate school No one knew what condiment was No I would have thought they would have confused it with condom But they confuse it with like recreation Right Interesting Very All right So that's it We love Anna Kendrick We were so delighted she came back to us We love her, love her, love her And oh do you want to Update she came to Halloween That's right Yeah, yeah, yeah So on the episode, she said she felt bad that she ghosted.

2:16:35And then we invited her to Halloween. And she was very, very brave. Came all by herself and joined our family outfit. She did. She was Claire Corningstone or whatever. Veronica Corningstone. Yeah. From Channel 4 News. Yeah. Anchorman. Good job, Anna. Yeah. That's called growth. Growth. We love it. We love to see it. All right. All right. Love you. Love you.

2:17:03Thank you.