Weirdly Helpful (formerly The Best Advice Show)

Adam Milgrom is an entrepreneur and dad living from Michigan. ANALYZING ENVY WITH GRETCHEN RUBINTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: A few months back, I talked to the wise Gretchen Rubin about envy. GRETCHEN RUBIN: One of the challenges of our lives is to know ourselves and you would think, it's so easy to know myself. I just hang out with myself all day long but it can be hard to be truthful with ourselves and really see what's in the mirror and so sometimes it's helpful to think about questions that get at the truth indirectly and I think an indirect question that's very helpful is whom do I envy? ZAK: Today's advice comes on the heels of that episode. It's from one of my dearest pals in the world, Adam Milgrom. ADAM: Try to think about the difference between jealously and envy. It's an easy thing that people mix up. Jealously is when you want the thing that the other person has and you specifically don't want them to have it. You want to have it instead of them. You want to take it away. Envy is just when you also want it. And when I think about this, nine times out ten what I feel is envy not jealousy. And that makes me feel a lot better about it and feel like I can do something about it. Because when I realize that it's not that I don't want that person to have it, I just also want that. It makes it more about me than about them and I'm not trying to take it away from them but I'm just understanding something that I want. And that feels not as dark and it feels like, oh, if that's something that I want, why do I want that? And should I do something about it? It also feels nice just understanding language. Yeah. ZAK: I got a quick story about Adam. He and I were 16 years-old visiting his grandfather in Miami. We borrowed Adam's grandfather's car. I believe it was a sky blue Ford Taurus station-wagon and we were driving late at night. We didn't know where we were going. And at one point we had to gas up so we go the gas station. I'm driving the car at that point and as we're pulling out I scraped the side of the car against this cement barricade. Of course, I'm terrified. How am I gonna explain this to Adam's grandfather? How am I gonna pay for it? When we get back to Adam's grandpa's condo, Adam says he's the one who was driving and pays his grandpa back for the repairs right on the spot. This is one of the noblest things I've ever witnessed in my life. Adam, thank you for being such a good friend and thank you for this advice. You've been listening to The Best Advice Show and I would love to hear your advice. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Kidada Williams is the host of new podcast, Seizing Freedom, a historian, author and professor of U.S. History, with a focus on African Americans. She is an Associate Professor of History at Wayne State University. ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show. I'm here to help. KIDADA: My name is Kidada Williams. I am a history professor at Wayne Statue university. I research and specialize in African American history. ZAK: Kidada is also the host of an important, beautiful new podcast called Seizing Freedom. KIDADA: If you had asked me 10 years-ago or even 5 years-ago if I had thought I'd hosting a podcast, I would have said, there's no way in hell. No! Even though I like podcasts, right? I'm a historian. This is what historians do! But one of the things that I realized along the way was how much of the history that I produce in conversation with my peers, my fellow historians never makes it down to the public. ZAK: It was this observation and some unintended circumstances that led to Kidada down this other path. KIDADA: Figure out how to pursue the work that you love and have a sense of where you want to end up or what your destination is. But be open to paths that you wouldn't expect. I think what you realize is that what's meant for you will find you, right? That sort of saying. And if your plan or your intended destination changes a little bit based upon that detour then that will sort, you know, reshape your future and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. It could actually be really good and promising. ZAK: And how do you think you stay open to this idea of like, being willing to get side-tracked or just like, reoriented. KIDADA: I think I stay open by thinking through the possibilities. Thinking through questions about whether or not it's a good fit and trusting my instincts. ZAK: Yeah, I don't remember who told it to me but it's just like asking yourself...actually actively asking yourself, what's the worst that can happen. The downside of exploring the possibilities is pretty low, right? KIDADA:I agree but I think that perspective comes with age and personal experience. So, at 20 I might not have taken a risk like, agreeing to do a podcast. Or, I may have seen it as risky. But, coming through, experiencing things, knowing I can always say no. I can change my mind. I can figure out what the stakes are. I can collect enough information has made it easier for me to sort of explore possibilities and see what's a good fit or what's not a good fit. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show and today we're gonna continue our on-going series, Advice from Our Grandparents. If you have some advice from your grandparents, I would love to hear it. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. JULIA: My name is Julia and my advice is to never complain about paying taxes. Tax day is nearly upon us so this advice seemed timely. My grandfather, Arthur Braverman, used to have all these saying he would repeat and one of them was, "never complain about paying taxes." The reason behind this counsel is because paying taxes typically means two things. You are living in America or are an American and you likely have a job. Two things to be grateful for and not complain about. Both of my grandfathers were World War II vets and taught us to take great pride in being Americans. It is the land that gave our family opportunity. Also, there are so many people in our country that don't have a job right now and are hurting economically, emotionally or otherwise. They don't have the chance to pay taxes. It is important to not forget about them. ZAK: Thank you Julia Friedman and thank you, Arthur Braverman. I've got an old picture of Arthur up on our Instagram @BestAdviceShow. He's wearing a great suit. It was a less schlubby time when that picture was taken. Go check it out. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kamala Puligandla is the author of the novella, You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone and writes The Dyke Kitchen Column at Autostraddle. IMPROVISING SALADS WITH KAMALA PULIGANDLA TRANSCRIPT: KAMALA: I'm Kamala Puligandla. I'm a writer. ZAK: Kamala is a Food Friday returning champion. We last spoke about salad making. Today, we're taking it to cocktails. ZAK: I like, kind of make an Old Fashioned. I think that's the only cocktail I've ever made. I'm overwhelmed. How can I improve my cocktail confidence? KAMALA: Ok, so I think that classic cocktails are really delicious and really cool but I don't hold myself to doing them in the classic way. So, I like to borrow flavors from them. Sometimes I'll borrow ratios from them. I'm just really into making my own simple syrups right now that have whatever flavor that I'm into. So, recently, I think it was last weekend, a friend of mine was like, come over and hang out in our backyard and everyone was like, we'll bring our own cocktail so I was like, ooo, I have to bring a good one. So, I had some mezcal and I was like, what are some flavors that I can mix into a syrup that would go with the smokiness of the mezcal and I ended up putting some garam masala into my simple syrup with a cinnamon stick and some cloves and then I mixed that into the mezcal with some grapefruit soda. And that was really, really, really good. It's sort of like a paloma but it's like, I don't know, like a spicy paloma. ZAK: That sounds really nice. How do you imagine what will work? KAMALA: So, recently I realized that I thought I didn't like sweet cocktails but that when you add sugar to things it changes the things that everything else tastes. And for awhile, I was trying to resist putting in too much sugar because I have had sickly sweet drinks that I'm not into. But when I'm making my own syrup it helps it marry all the flavors together so that they're a little closer. They don't feel like alcohol, citrus, some other flavor. So that's something that I was like, I should just add syrups to things, But what I'm usually thinking about is like, I have the alcohol taste and I'm trying to figure out what about the alcohol taste I like so that I don't mask it. And then like, what can go with it to sort of enhance that. So with mezcal, I like that it's a little sharp and a little smoky and so I try to add citrus to it. I think citrus helps in every cocktail cause it helps brings the sharpness out and then doesn't overwhelm the smokiness or overwhelm the taste of the alcohol. And then also on something smokey, I was like, what are some other things that I eat that are sort of smokey and I was like, oh, I would put garam masala with chilis which are kind of smokey and I was just like, that sounds good. It sounds earthy and like it would go in the same family as smokey so that's what I was thinking. But then like, sometimes I'll have lighter cocktails. Like if I have gin I like to get a really herbaceous gin and then I don't love floral tastes that much but I do love putting other herbs in there so it's like, I don't know, there's like a rosemary simple syrup that I've made that I like and that sort of brings out the flavors in the gin. Things like that. That's mostly what I'm thinking about. I think it's similar to the salad question. I want something kind of earthy, something kind of bright and then something that's kind of punchy, so like, just pulling those things together and sometimes spicy is a really good addition and sometimes it's totally unnecessary. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audio artist, screenwriter, performer, and story editor Sharon Mashihi is the creator and host of the podcast Appearances from Mermaid Palace and Radiotopia. Sharon on managing fear and self-doubt, saying yes to your wild ideas, and using rituals to break through creative blocks. Aaron Finbloom and The School of Making Thinking TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Sharon Mashihi is one of my favorite audio people. One of my favorite artists in general, I'd say. She made this podcast called Appearances, which if you haven't heard yet, just stop this episode and go listen to that. But anyways, I was reading an interview with her on a website called The Creative Independent, and she talked with the interviewer about this thing called, Structured Walks. SHARON: Alright. It's recording and unfortunately, I'm not able to fully monitor the levels but they look good. SHARON: You and I would take a walk and we'd time it. SHARON: I was thinking we could do 25-minutes you and 25-minutes me and then we'll both walk in one direction and we'll both walk back. Does that sound good? ZAK: Perfect. SHARON: You know, my friend, Aaron Finbloom, devised this but I always think of Socrates and those dudes. They were walking. ZAK: So, I'm walking on Belle Isle which I may have mentioned to you before. It's the big, public park in Detroit. SHARON: Uh huh. ZAK: So, the concept here is simple. You can try it today with a friend who lives in your town. Or you can do what Sharon and I did and call someone up. You take a walk on your end, like I did in Detroit. And then they'll be wherever they are. Sharon was in New York City when we talked. SHARON: Go first Zak. I think it should be you. Alarm set. ZAK: For the first half of the walk I'm talking through this current creative struggle I'm having. I've been mapping out this historical fiction project but I don't know how to start and I'm intimidated. SHARON: Maybe can you articulate what your hurdle is with fiction? ZAK: And this is all we're talking about for 25-minutes. My current struggle and then when those 25-minutes are up, we turn the tables and it's Sharon's turn. You can do it for however long you want. I think the important thing is that it's equal amounts of time for both people. SHARON: What I had in mind to talk to you about. I'll paint the picture. It has to do with work and art and how organize this next chapter of my life. Um... ZAK: The structured walk is such a simple, effective tool. And it can work for anything. You don't have to be engaged in a creative project for this to work. Maybe you're just having such questions you want to wrestle with about your work life or a relationship. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

June Thomas (@junethomas) is one of the hosts of Working, Slate's podcast about the creative process and also the Senior Managing Producer of the Slate podcast network. PERFECTING EGG SALAD w/Nancy Kaffer TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: So, today's advice, I've usually thought of in relation to food, specifically. But June helped me understand it's much bigger and broader than that. JUNE: I was walking down 6th Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn and I heard these little kids arguing about whether the child had been correctly accused of yucking someone's yum and it struck me that that is a really profound and very correct piece of advice. ZAK: Yes! JUNE: Don't step on someone else's pleasure. Don't feel that you have to be scornful of what makes someone else happy. If you don't like it, you don't need to tell them. You don't need to argue about their views on something that they take pleasure in. Like, just let it be. So much of the really advice in life comes from the school-yard and I never heard that on the school yard. That was something I only heard the first time a couple of years ago but it is so right, you know. I have a lot of really weird hobbies...things that I like I know objectively, they're not good, but I love them. And so, selfishly, I don't want anyone yukking my yum. But also, it's something that I really try to keep in mind, like, I'm a very judgmental person. I'm a critic by nature as well as sometimes by profession. But, you know, when you're talking with your friends or just a stranger on the street, like, it's a version I guess of live and let live but also, if somebody is getting pleasure and fun from something and it's not harming anyone, that is the greatest thing in the world. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jason Feifer (@heyfeifer) is the editor in chief Entrepreneur magazine and hosts Build For Tomorrow. A novel he wrote with his wife, Mr. Nice Guy, is currently being developed for television. How are you building for the future? Lemme know at 844-935-BEST. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey, it's The Best Advice Show where everyday, a guest offers one morsel of wisdom. JASON: My name is Jason Feifer. I am the Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur magazine. And I self-describe as the guy that gets you excited about the future. In front of you, in front of me, in front of everybody who's listening to this right now, you have two sets of opportunities. Opportunity Set A and opportunity Set B. Opportunity Set A is everything that is asked of you in your job. Everything that your boss expects. All your KPI's, Key Performance Indicators...all that stuff. Opportunity Set B is everything that is available to you that nobody is asking you to do and I am telling you that Opportunity Set B is more important. It is always more important. I have built my career on Opportunity Set B because if you focus on Opportunity Set A, all you are doing is you are helping yourself be qualified to do the thing that you're already doing. But Opportunity Set B is where real Opportunity happens. That's where growth is. If you want to focus on your future, on improving your career on finding new things that you didn't even think that you would be interested in later on, well then you focus on Opportunity Set B all the time and that doesn't mean that you have to be a bad employee. It just means, in fact, I would say it's quite the opposite. Sometimes if you go out and you focus on Opportunity Set B, you are gonna be building new skills that are ultimately useful for you at your job too. But it's also gonna open up all these other avenues. ZAK: Do you have a rubric or a filter for figuring out what's A and what's B? ZAK: It's either, are you expected to do this or are you not. Is somebody measuring you by your performance in this particular area or are they not? You want to find the thing that nobody's asking you to do. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joey Soloway is a showrunner, director, writer and creator of Transparent. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I love the idea of team-building. But usually in action, team-building activities make me cringe. Maybe you're at a work thing, or a meeting, and you're told to do some ice breaker, or an activity meant to bring the room together. It can be so awkward when there's no buy-in from the participants or feels forced or trite. I think we've all been there. But team-building done right, it can an be incredibly uniting and energizing. That's what today's episode is about. I'm a huge fan of the TV show, Transparent. If you haven't seen it. It's on Amazon. It was created by Joey Soloway. JOEY: I remember as I was an up-and-coming filmmaker, somebody told me a story about Quentin Tarantino. When he first arrived on the first-day of Reservoir Dogs...I think it was a grip who was there and he said he came outside. They were building a stage there and he came outside and the camera truck had pulled up. They opened the back-doors and they pull out the tailgate and he jumped up on the tailgate and he ran inside and he's like give it to me! Give it to me! Give it to me! And somebody was like, here...And he took the camera on got out on the tailgate and he took the camera like Simba. He was so excited to take the camera and go fill it with images. So that made me never really want to do that but it did make me want to give a speech from a tailgate. And the first day of the second season (of Transparent) was the day that Marriage Equality passed and so then we were just like, the camera truck happened to be there. So I got up there and said something about Marriage Equality and then we just kind of took turns. Different people wanted to get up and say something. And then it became a tradition where every morning we stopped using a tailgate and started using a big apple box and putting it in the center of wherever we were. So all the actors were get ready. They would all have gone through hair and makeup and be ready to shoot. And before we would go to the set, we would all just start going...box, box, box, box, box. And people would start to gather and clap and say box and the whole crew...like every single person would come and stand in the circle around the apple box and people would take turns talking about whatever they were going through. Sometimes it was good stuff like, my kid got a scholarship or sometimes it was like bad stuff like my wife has cancer and it would connect everybody so much. Even if we were wasting time that morning by box going so much longer than anybody planned for or budgeted for or scheduled for, it always made the day go faster cause we all were so heart-connected. And normally the pieces of a machine on a movie, somebody's like, that's not my fault. That's the AD's fault. That's the grip's fault. People were always throwing each other under the bus and then once we started doing box you're not throwing anybody under the bus anymore cause you know there wife has cancer. ZAK: Yes. So much is happening with box. You're decentralizing the leadership. You're connecting. This is something where you don't have to be making TV shows to practice box. I can do it with my family tomorrow morning. I can do it at work. JOEY: Totally. And then like prioritizing wasting time which is amazing. And that would be my favorite time where people couldn't really stand it anymore because we were wasting too much time. I truly believe it actually makes a better product. So, when other people were like, we're running out of time, you can be thinking that this time, that nobody thinks we deserve that is past the amount of time that we've all decided was the right amount of time to spend on love is now the most important time. Just to tolerate the emotion of feeling present to one another and the gratitude that we're making art. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Darian Muka is a baker and marketer in NYC. Perfecting Chocolate Chip Cookies with Michelle Ganley. To offer your own FOOD FRIDAY advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I hope your week has been above average, and I hope it gets better with today's Food Friday advice. DARIAN: I'm Darian Yuca. I'm a slightly above average baker. ZAK: Granted, I haven't eaten Darian's baked goods, but calling herself a slightly above average baker has got to be a gross understatement. She told me she has 12 kinds of flour in her cabinet! DARIAN: Well, I don't eat a lot of my own baked goods. I'm not really a sweet person. I really like making them. That's probably why I make a lot of bread. And also my partner has like really bad teeth. So he doesn't like sugar. So we don't really eat a lot of this stuff I bake. So anybody that will take it, I will either send it or walk it to that person. ZAK: And that's what we're here to talk about today. One of the ways in which Darien preps her care packages. DARIAN: Yeah. So anything that's like super soft, um, will harden with air. So when you're shipping it, you want to have something that will release moisture in order to keep the cookie moist. So I put slices of apple inside anything with soft cookies. Um, the apples look absolutely disgusting when they get to the person, but the cookies are really soft. So, um, the apples will like, yeah, they'll shrivel up and your cookies will stay nice and moist. So you have to like warn someone. Cause it's not fun to get like a shriveled apple as like here, I bought you some cookies, but yeah, the, the cookies take away the moisture from the apple. That's like slowly releasing. So they stayed nice and moist, I've done it over like a three to four day shipping period. So it's like, it stays good for a while. ZAK: First of all, it's very nice of the apples they're giving their life to these cookies. But so, so your cookies are in the same bag as the slices? DARIAN: Yeah. You have to put them like directly in the box. Try not to have them touch the cookie because then that part of the cookie will get really moist, like kind of wet. So you want it to like be in the box, but try to like move them to the sides so that they're sharing the same air, but they're not actually touching the cookies. Actually. You couldn't do that like normal in your house too. If you want to keep cookie soft and they're out and they're already baked, just drop, um, Apple slices in, they sell like, um, little discs that are, I don't think they're terracotta, but they're usually used to make Brown sugar moist so that doesn't harden over time. Those work the same. They're a little disk that you can buy, but if you're not trying to buy anything, Apple slices are the exact same thing. ZAK: And the cookies won't take on any of the apple properties? DARIAN: Nope. Um, I'm trying to think if there's like, I'm sure you could do this with another fruit. If someone was allergic to apple and have to have the same, like texture and moisture levels and apples. So I would try like a pear. I'm trying to think if there's...the only thing that's coming to my brain, that would be the same, like consistency. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations and the author of Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles (Chronicle Books, 2021) and Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press, 2018). TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Just saying the word...need, gives makes me hesitate a bit. Instead of coming out and telling someone, I need your help, I usually modify to, I could use your help. But, thanks to today's guest, Beth Pickens, I'm working on being more forthcoming with my needs. BETH: I think we have to always tell people everything that we need because we all float around we're just little children masquerading as adults...just assuming that nobody needs anything and we're the only ones with needs and we have to get rid of those needs or diminish them. But we all need emotional support. ZAK: What's a way that we can practice giving and asking for help? BETH: I like to do everything starting with a quantity. Just quantifying it. A goal of, I'm gonna ask for three things this week that are directly related to my creative practice. And here's what those needs are gonna be and here are some appropriate people I think I could ask. And I'm just gonna practice on the asking. I have no control over the outcome. Then I'm gonna avail myself three times to people. Maybe I'm asked for something or maybe I offer something or I connect with another artist friend and say, this is the kind of help I need right now. What kind of help do you need right now? Let's help each other find it. ZAK: And not necessarily a one-to-one where the help you're offering you're getting back from the same person? BETH: Right. Cause maybe the things you ask for maybe you don't know how to give or you don't have that resource to give. Or maybe the person you're asking for something from, they have a different thing to reciprocate with. Cause we all have different things to offer. Some are universal but many are very different. And we always have to identify, who do we ask...How do we match the ask, the request to somebody's who's appropriate. Rather than I'm gonna try to ask this person for emotional support who I know cannot or will not give it. But if I try hard enough, I can prove that I won by going to the hardware store for a gallon milk. They don't have it to give. So we have to think about who are we going to for which things and one person cannot meet every need which is the fallacy of marriage and modernity. ZAK: Totally. It's kind of like a creativity time-bank you're describing. BETH: Yeah, very much so. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beth Pickens is a Los Angeles-based consultant for artists and arts organizations and the author of Make Your Art No Matter What: Moving Beyond Creative Hurdles (Chronicle Books, 2021) and Your Art Will Save Your Life (Feminist Press, 2018). To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I love a specialist. That's how I'd describe Beth Pickens. BETH: So, I essentially counsel artists. I went to school to be a therapist. I only work with artists and I've been talking recently with artists about how to re-enter a project or something that you have been avoiding for a long time. And you have a lot of fear about. It's a thing that comes up for artists when somebody has like a durational project, a book or an album, or some big thing that they're doing. Sometimes, you know, after the honeymoon phase wears off, it can be hard to sustain that marathon nature to keep going through it. Especially if you don't have somebody waiting for it, if you don't have a deadline or accountability. Um, and so, what will happen is a person maybe will retreat from the long durational project. And then it will start to build into something in their mind that they become afraid of, but they can't get back to, and it becomes this big mental block about, I want to finish that. I'm afraid of it. I don't know how. It's impossible. It becomes this sort of cycle of self-defeat. And so I will often work with clients to help them re-enter, kind of tiptoe back into the water of a big project that they've lost the honeymoon limerence feelings for, but they really are committed to. ZAK: How do you tip toe back? BETH: We start really simple. You start with just like 15, 20 minutes. Just planning to be in the project for 15 or 20 minutes. And I'll often recommend that people actually just kind of go into the world they're creating and turn the lights on. So if it's a manuscript, for example, or if it's a body of music to go first and just inhabit it, read everything they have. listen to everything that they have and do that about four or five times, just for 15 minute increments, maybe once a week, maybe a few times a week, to first just to re-inhabit the universe and let it come alive in your subconscious. Because so often for a big project, the solutions that artists come up with happen when they're not sitting in front of the computer, when they're in the midst of it, it's like when they're on a walk, when they're washing the dishes, when they're doing something else, they can have an idea of, this is where I can go next. Not necessarily a breakthrough, it doesn't have to be that big, but it can be just an indication of this is a next step. So we start with really tiny increments and then celebrating that as an achievement, like telling an artist friend right before you do it and then telling them right after you do it and celebrating, just re-entering, tip-toeing back into the water. And that sort of breaks the myth that seal of I can't do it. It's impossible. There's no way back in. It's just by slowly reentering and not doing it with a ton of pressure that I have to go in and finish it or figure it out. Cause I think that's not realistic. And it's a mean thing to expect of oneself. ZAK: Yeah. I love this two-part process. BETH: Oh yeah. Having somebody outside be like that big congratulations. You can do it again, but for today you're done. You don't have to do that again today. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stephanie Wittels Wachs is the co-founder of Lemonada Media, host of Last Day and author of best-selling memoir Everything Is Horrible and Wonderful: A Tragicomic Memoir of Genius, Heroin, Love, and Loss. Harris Wittels (April 20, 1984 – February 19, 2015) was an American comedian, writer and podcast. His book is Humblebrag: The Art of False Modesty. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Whoa, I just realized this. Today is the one -year anniversary of The Best Advice Show. We are more than 250 episodes in. Here's to another at least 250. In honor of this one-year celebration I would love to your advice. Give me a call on the hotline at 844-935-BEST. Ok, lets get to today's show. I never met Harris Wittels but in my mind, we were dear friends. I get the feeling he had the effect on people. Even if you've never heard his name before, you've you've probably laughed at Harris' jokes. He was a writer on Parks and Rec. and the Sarah Silverman Program, Master of None and Eastbound and Down. He also hosted one of my all time favorite podcasts, Analyze Phish, in which harris, who loved Phish more than most things, spends hours and hours trying to get his co-host, Scott Aukerman, to like Phish too. The band Phish I'm talking about. Harris also invented a word. Before harris, we didn't have a word for an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement whose actual purpose is to draw attention to something of which one is proud. Yes, the humblebrag. We have harris to thank for that. Today is 4-20. Harris' birthday. Harris Wittels was born on 4-20. That this is a fact makes the world worth living. Harris died in February of 2015 when he was just 30. Since that time, Harris' sister, Stephanie, has flown her younger brothers flag. In the wake of his overdose, she started a podcast, Last Day in his honor and subsequently she co-founded a media company called Lemonada which recons with the messy, ugly, hilarious, painful parts of living so very well. And so, today, on Harris' bday, I'm here to talk to Stephanie about just one of the many pieces of advice Harris left us. STEPHANIE: He used to say quit future-tripping. And one of our dear friends from high school got that tattooed on his arm. And its become this kind of mantra for a bunch of very high strung, anxious, neurotic people. And I think what it means is that very cliched, like, live in the moment and you can't control what happens tomorrow. So I love that advice and I have internalized and tried to abide by that as much as possible. There's been a lot of things that have happened to me in the past 5 years, 6 years that, you know, pre-COVID, that would have caused me to future-trip...have caused me to future-trip. ZAK: What does your future-tripping look like? STEPHANIE: Oh, it's movies in mind. I direct them. Star in them. Produce them. Sound-design them. Edit them. They are sprawling. There are multiple sequels and I can just really get caught up in anxiety. I have very intense anxiety. I'm medicated for it. God bless medication. But, I can seriously spiral out on if this, then this and it's not real. It's not steeped in reality. It's steeped in my version of reality. It's steeped in a lot of fear and for me fear is about everything that we can't control. Everything that's unknown. And the thing about life is, it's all unknown! It is all unknown. I am talking to you right now...in five minutes, I have no idea what's gonna happen. I can predict based on prior experience living my life everyday but I truly do not know. So, that's what it looks like for me. ZAK: Next time you're getting ahead of yourself. Directing movies in your mind. Just think of Harris and his advice. Quit future-trippin'. If you don't know Harris' work, give him a Goog. He was one of the greats. You can listen to Stephanie's podcast, Last Day, wherever you hear The Best Advice Show. Thanks, Stephanie. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ken Haddad (@KenHaddad) is the digital content manager at @Local4News in Detroit. LIVE BLOG: Tracking COVID-19 vaccines in Michigan: New openings, clinics, appointments TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show where everyday a different guest shares one piece of advice. KEN: I'm Ken Haddad. I'm the digital content manager at ClickOn Detroit and Local 4 and I've been helping people find vaccine appointments in the state of Michigan. After getting a ton of emails from viewers about having trouble finding appointments, I started a live blog and I started live Tweeting any appointments I could find. Any walk-in clinics popping up around the state of Michigan. So basically, what I've been doing is combing through county health department sites, through pharmacy scheduling sites, through community organizations, calling around to pharmacies and just finding out just where appointments are available and offering that information in real time. KEN: My top tip for finding vaccines is to not wait around. There are a lot of waitlists right now. Especially in Michigan and I've heard it's like this in other states as well. Big wait lists at the bigger pharmacies or the country health departments have a giant wait list for all of their residents and people are frustrated with that but there are a lot of other options that you can take upon yourself. Call an independent pharmacy near your house. Call a community health organization that's near your house. There are a lot of places that have vaccine supply but they don't have the platform or the marketing to tell people about it. So that's what I'm finding right now. There's a lot of people waiting 2, 3, 4 weeks for an appointment with the health department. They could have gotten a vaccine around the block from their house yesterday. And then, check with community organizations, like even churches. There are so many clinics happening at churches right now in neighborhoods. Again, they just don't have the platform to get the word out. But if you check with them, just give them a call. They may even refer you to a different church. There's a huge network of that happening right now. ZAK: If people want to find you, what's the best way to do that? ZAK: I have a live blog on ClickOnDetriot.Com or you can follow me on Twitter @KenHaddad and I'm live tweeting anything that comes across my radar pretty much all day and all night. I do sleep during the early morning hours but there will be information there 7 days a week as long as we need to keep giving that information Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nancy Kaffer is a columnist and member of the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: NANCY: I'm a life-long fan of egg salad and I've often thought about how to improve my egg salad. This is slightly controversial. I make my egg salad while the eggs are still warm and everyone I've ever said this to thought it was disgusting and then as soon as they ate it they've been a convert to the warm egg salad theory. So, the way I've started making egg salad is put the eggs in the cold water, turn the burner on high for 15-minutes and then boom the perfect hard-boiled eggs every-time. No lid. Run cold water over them. Peel them. Smush them up with some mayonnaise. Salt, pepper and cayenne and then here's the secret. Toast a piece of bread. Cut a clove of garlic in half. Rub the garlic all over the toasted bread. Put the egg salad on the bread. Eat it as an open-faced sandwich. You will not regret it. It is the perfect egg salad sandwich. ZAK: Raw garlic? NANCY: Raw garlic rubbed all over the toast. It turns the bread yellow-y and then spread your egg salad on there. ZAK: What kind of bread? NANCY: Just white bread. I mean, I guess you could it with...I like a multigrain but for this the texture and flavor a multigrain would over-power the garlic rubbing. Just a nice, white bread, though. Like your Pepperidge Farm or your Sara Lee or your Avalon, your Whole Foods store brand. You don't want your Wonderbread. ZAK: Set the scene for how you're eating this. Are you standing by the sink? Are you sitting down with napkin and plate? NANCY: I normally sit down. I have a thing for decorative napkins. I'm sitting down with an attractive napkin, little glass of iced tea and a book and I cut it in half and eat it by myself. I don't want to be eating my egg salad with anybody else. I want it to be a private experience with me and my book. I love to read while I eat. Egg salad. Book. Iced tea. Garlic rubbed toast. ZAK: Do you want to hear about my ancestral egg salad? NANCY: Yes. I do. I always want to hear about egg salad. ZAK: It's actually not mine. It's my wife's family's. This is why I married her cause I tasted her family's egg salad. We have it on Shabbat on Friday night. And this comes from her grandma. She's from Poland and it's mayo-less...but wait. There's no mayo but wait. Hard-boiled eggs and then cut em up with grated radishes, diced white onion and diced, peeled cucumber and salt and vegetable oil. NANCY: Wow. ZAK: We never eat it as a sandwich. You know, we eat it with, like a piece of challah, maybe shovel some on the top of it but we're eating it with a fork as an appetizer on Friday nights and it's fab. NANCY: I can see that that would be delicious. If you were in the mood for egg salad, that might not quite scratch that itch. ZAK: It's a different kind of egg salad. NANCY: It's surprising how controversial egg salad is. People really have deeply held opinions. ZAK: Well, cause it smells farts. I think that's why people are afraid to admit they like or afraid to eat it in-front of other people like you mentioned. NANCY: I'm not afraid to. It's my oasis. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gary Macko is a husband and father living in Michigan. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: When Gary was a young dad, his son loved playing pots and pans. Everyday, he would take them out, make a big pile, make a mess. And then Gary would come in and clean it up. GARY: I can't tell you how many times my wife would look at me and laugh because of watching me put the pans and pots away every single night. ZAK: So your wife understood that it was a kind of fool's errand but you didn't? Is that what you're saying? GARY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean she had certainly some type of EQ that gave her the ability to step back and realize that, you know, this kid is just having a good time and let him be. ZAK: And how long did it take you to learn that lesson? GARY: At least 45-days of solid banging my head into the wall. ZAK: Yeah. GARY: And then when that moment came of like, I'm not gonna do this anymore and it's perfectly fine. It was the most amazing revelation. Get out of the way. Let go and enjoy your life. It's tough to be a perfectionist in a world in which we live in. I mean, you might be able to keep that quest for perfection at some level and be able to modestly chase it. But when you put kids into your world that chase or that desired outcome, it doesn't seem to be achievable anymore. Hi, my name is Gary Macko and I'm a husband and a father of three boys. ZAK: I love this story because Gary pinpoint the moment where he internalized that lesson. Let go. You can't control everything. Perfection doesn't exist. Have you internalized that realization? If so, how'd you do it? Lemme know at BestAdvice.Show. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Handel is a published author, coach, and creator at The Emotion Machine, a website dedicated to all aspects of psychology and self improvement in the 21st century. Investigating Your Shame with Heather Radke To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I don't really have a morning routine. I would love to, but I feel like I'm constantly in reaction mode, just basically responding to what the kids need...breakfast, clothes, but still I love hearing about your routines and I'm thinking about the day when I can finally start my own. STEVEN: My name is Steven Handel. I have a psychology and self-improvement website called The Emotion Machine. ZAK: Not surprisingly, Steven has a very intentional morning routine that we're gonna hear about. STEVEN: Reflect on a strength. Reframe a negative thought. Think about one thing you're grateful for. I do that every morning. Those are my three tiny, mental habits I do every morning. And it's a little thing but you have to put in that work everyday, even if it's just 5-10 minutes. It is effort. ZAK: Ok, so you wake up and then take me through how move through those three things. STEVEN: Uh, it's not the first thing I do when I wake up. Usually walk the dog first and have coffee and shit like that but when I'm...like I'm taking a moment before I check my e-mails. It's literally on my to-do list on my daily check-list, I have, reflect on one strength. And I try to choose something different everyday to remind myself of all my strengths or maybe if something really good happened yesterday, I'll be like, oh, that strength really shined through yesterday. ZAK: What was today's? STEVEN: Today I said consistency and the fact that I put in the small steps everyday which is a strength I think about a lot but I think it's a really important strength for sure. And then, find one thing to be grateful for. It could be anything. It could be a good meal I had yesterday or a new opportunity I came across or a new person I met. One thing to be grateful for. And then re-frame one negative thought. So, I have to first think about a negative thought thats been buzzing in my mind and try to re-frame into something more positive or more constructive. ZAK: And all three of those things you put on your to-do list. STEVEN: Yeah. I actually have a fourth one too which is appreciate one thing in nature. ZAK: Like, appreciate it theoretically or go out and find the bird? STEVEN: Something I experience. And I don't really have to go seek it. It's usually if I'm just outside and I see something interesting. There's a lot of interesting wildlife in Florida, especially compared to the suburbs of New York. I see crazy birds all the time. And honestly, my thing a lot of the time is enjoying sitting in the sun. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jenae America is a storyteller, photographer and pulp fiction writer. TRANSCRIPT: JENAE: My name is Jenae America and I'm a storyteller, photographer, pulp fiction writer and a badass woman. Being single was something that I was scared of. I was raised in a house of loving parents. Four brothers and sisters. And as I got older I realized that I put so much pressure on myself...I put a lot of pressure on my young, little, tender heart. I didn't know anything. I witnessed my parents marriage and their arguments and I'm studying about what it's like to be with a companion and so on and so forth and I just found myself being drained and disappointed. ZAK: About what? JENAE: I was drained and disappointed about the relationships I pursued. I was drained and disappointed about people and how they act and how they have the free will to do anything even if you give them your very best. And it just made me feel like I'm unlovable and it's not a pretty site. Especially as a woman because you don't want to be looked at as desperate. You want to look at yourself as confident and cool and calm in any state. And I've witnessed woman who are married who I could just tell, they have a calm about them but it wasn't because of the marriage. It was because of them and they had somebody else come into their life. ZAK: So, what changed? JENAE: What changed was, it was the summer of 2020 and I remember that I'm thinking about my last relationship. It ended just before COVID hit. It was only 4-months with a young guy. He didn't know what he wanted and obviously was using me and I tried so hard to keep him and I remember just thinking about it and then I basically announced to myself I'm gonna stay single and I felt like this spiritual feeling of somebody taking something off of my shoulders. It was almost like a heavy coat and somebody just took it off. And I was like, I feel lighter and I had the courage to pursue that idea to the point that every time I scrolled through social media and there's something about relationships I was able to look past them and be like, that doesn't interest me anymore. Now, I'm not gonna say it wasn't a mental battle but it gave me the strength and courage to not look to others to feel fulfilled but look to myself and my morals and yeah, that's it and accept everything about it. I got more concerned about doing things for me and not for other reasons that had nothing to do with me. I changed my perspective. Basically being single means testing the love you have for yourself and being single is not easy because you feel lonely, you feel you can't do nothing with the urges so the fact that if you're going to a place by yourself you don't have anybody watching your back because that's a benefit as well but it's testing the love you have for yourself because the benefits of being single was, I ended up becoming strong, sharp, interesting and unique. I ended up being pretty dynamic because of how much I've widened my world in being single. Enjoy being single because you deserve to get to know you and love you first. ZAK: That's so beautiful. Like, are you open to being in a relationship if you meet the right person? JENAE: Right now I'm casually dating. I'm enjoying the person's company and getting to know them and I believe if it's meant for me to say, hey, I want to move forward. Well, it takes two to tango and if the person doesn't say anything, I'll be like, well, back to dating me again. And that's easier said than done but I can definitely say it's liberating. It's very liberating. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meiko Krishok is the founder and co-operator of Guerrilla Food (GF), a Detroit-based grassroots culinary team that uses food as medicine. GF is the team behind the Pink Flamingo To Go farm-to-table carry-out restaurant in the Palmer Park neighborhood in Detroit and Pink Flamingo popular seasonal vintage food trailer that is located in a community garden in Corktown, Detroit. Meiko was last on the show talking about the ease and joy of growing garlic. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: There was a Danish author named Karen Blixon writing at the beginning the 20th century. One of her pen names was Isak Denesen. And it's Denisen who the following quote is attributed to. The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. My guest today, Meiko Krishok, who's been on the show before has been thinking about this piece of advice a lot lately. MEIKO: To me all those things work in different contexts. So, like, sweat is sort of an easy one. It's like, movement or physical activity and the actual expelling of energy. Right? And how relieving it can be to go for a walk or a run or work in the garden. And then tears is another obvious one. It's sort of about that release emotion, whether it's happiness or sadness. ZAK: What makes you cry? MEIKO: Movies. Every now and again I'll read something and it'll make me cry. You know how some people are like, oh I cry all the time. At this point in my life I don't cry all the time. And then the sea. I do feel like there's something especially therapeutic about the ocean. I don't know if it's chemically what's going in salt water. You can float more in salt water than fresh water. And the waves. ' ZAK: Yeah, I can't wait to go to the ocean again. MEIKO: I've been trying to take Epsom salt baths. ZAK: That's a good home hack! MEIKO: Is it a good home hack but it's not the same. It's not the ocean. You don't get the power with it. But you do get some benefit. ZAK: Maybe you have to cry in the Epson salt bath. MEIKO: hahahah Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback. SIGN UP FOR The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST ZAK: Thanks for listening to The Best Advice Show. This is part 5 of our week-long series on Bystander Intervention training. With the help of Dax Valdes from Hollaback, we've been going through the 5 D's of Bystander Intervention. DAX: Distract. Delay. Delegate. Document. Direct. ZAK: Five actionable steps we can take out in the world if and when we see someone being harassed. And it's this final D, direct, that seems the most daunting. DAX: So, direct is this is one that everyone thinks about when they think about bystander intervention. You are setting the boundary about what you want the person to do. Hey, stop talking to her that way. That's not cool. And then, that engagement is over and then you turn and you focus on the person who is experiencing that conflict and then you get them out of there. Get them to where they need to feel safe. So, if it's something that's happening on the street, hey man. Why don't you back off and stop saying things to her. And then I would turn to the woman and say, hey, let's get out of here. Let's go for a few blocks and make sure you are all taken care of. And direct can get tricky because the person that is doing the conflict would probably want to get into a back-and-forth with you and it's gonna take all of our will power not to shoot back with the thing that's gonna be the most explosive to meet their energy. ZAK: Direct in particular seems like a real delicate dance because like you say, you're not being combative but you're being resistant in a way. You're being calm but you're also being assertive. This is a challenging one, I think. DAX: Yeah, that does take a lot of practice. Cause, a lot of folks might not feel that comfortable being that direct but, again, if they see somebody doing it in a way that is, oh, I think I could do it. And so maybe it's not the next time they see an incident of harassment happening but maybe the time after that. Seeing two instances, it's like, ok, I can do this. I know what to say and I feel confident enough to do so. And even if it does not go the way that you might originally plan, you have 4 of the other strategies to rely on so maybe direct didn't work and it is something like, delegate, asking somebody else to help you in that instance. Maybe it is somebody who is physically bigger nearby. Hey, can you come here and just help me out here. This guy is yelling at this woman and you look you could, squash him. ZAK: Yeah, you said to do this well it's gonna take some practice. So are you suggesting that there's a way to practice this stuff outside of the loaded situations? DAX: You know, sometimes you're sitting at home, thinking about what you would do in this particular instance if you saw this conflict happening but knowing what these strategies are and reading other people's stories about what happened and what you could have done or thinking about like, oh yeah, I could have done it this way. I could have done it that way is a start for that. But, again, the action doesn't have to be incredibly huge. A small gesture goes a long way. Are you ok? What do you need from me in this moment? How can I support you? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback. SIGN UP FOR The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: In the last year, anti-Asian and xenophobic hate has skyrockets all over this country. And of course, street harassment has been endured by humans since the beginning of streets. But the organization, Hollaback, wants us to know that we aren't powerless...that we can do things as random people on the street when we witness harassment. DAX: My name is Dax Valdes. I am a Senior Trainer at Hollaback and I'm based in the traditional land of the Lenape in New York City. I'm originally from San Fransisco and I have the privilege of doing this work with Hollaback and uplifting these trainings for my Asian community. ZAK: All week I've been going over Hollaback's 5 D's of Bystander Intervention training. Distract. Delay. Delegate. Direct. And today's D... ZAK: Tell me about document. DAX: So, you're creating documentation of the incident so this is something that you can do with your phone. So you can take a photo or a video. We're all glued to our little rectangles and so you can hold your phone sideways and record what's going. It's Monday, March 22nd. It's 3:30 and this woman is yelling at this guy and his two kids and where you are...I'm standing on 59th and Broadway in broad daylight and it's happening right there. And what we recommend that you do is you should give that footage to the person that was experiencing harassment so they can decide what to do with it because we don't want to blast that footage on our socials without them knowing because then we're just essentially replaying someone's trauma over and over again. ZAK: Yeah, I could see someone's instinct to go on Facebook or Instagram Live during that situation, but that's not what you recommend. DAX: It's gonna work differently for everybody but if it is particularly traumatic for that individual, having that footage can be really helpful in showing what harassment looks like for them and maybe at large as part of their community and they have agency on how they're sharing so they can share it on their socials or with their family and friends that this is what this looks like. ZAK: And so it's like going up to them after and being like, do you want me to email this to you? DAX: Yeah. I saw what happened. And it's like a combination of Delay afterwards. I saw that. That wasn't cool. I'm sorry that happened. I took this footage so if you want to report this or whatever you need...This is for you. And again, showing that they're not alone and that people are looking after them or people are looking out for each other. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

(Warning. Today's episode contains a news clip which describes a disturbing hate crime that recently took place). Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback. SIGN UP FOR The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Warning. Today's episode contains a news clip which describes a disturbing hate crime that recently took place. It's The Best Advice Show where everyday I share one piece of advice. Something that hopefully you can try at home. All week I'm featuring Dax Valdes. He's a trainer with the group, Hollaback and their mission is to end harassment in all forms. So, this week we're going over the 5 D's of Bystander Intervention Training. We're learning about what we can do if and when we see someone getting harassed. The first D we learned on Monday in Part 1, Distract. Yesterday was Part 2 when we learned, Delay. And today, Part 3...Delegate. ZAK: Can you just set-up a scenario? DAX: One of the attacks that happened in Queens where a man pushed a woman over. NEWS CLIP: Police in Queens arrested a man accused of shoving an Asian woman to the ground. 47 year-old, Patrick Mateo is charged with assault and intent to cause physical injury and harassment. On Tuesday, the 52 year-old woman was outside a bakery on Roosevelt Ave. in Flushing when the suspect had gotten into an argument with her and then pushed her. Her head hit the metal newspaper stand. She needed ten stitches. The attack is the latest in a spike of unprovoked attacks against Asian-Americans. DAX: If you happened to be there in that scenario, one of the things that you could have done is, hey, go and tell someone and say, can you go check on her, see if she's ok. I'm gonna try to get help. Or, I'm gonna check on her. I'm gonna see if she's ok. Can you go into the store and ask the store manager to call the police or can you ask them for a band-aid cause not everybody will have gone through a Bystander Intervention training and people want to help usually, but they just don't know what to do. So, we gotta tell them. Hey, back up. That guy is harassing that woman. I'm gonna see if I can go intervene. ZAK: And one thing that you're not saying is like, in this delegation one is like, you go and pin the aggressors down. That's now part of this. DAX: No. you don't know what the other person might be capable of. If we're meeting violence with violence, physically or verbally...If we get caught up in that then we are not doing the best job that we can do as a bystander to help take care of the person in conflict. Cause it's not about us or even them in that moment. It's about the person who's experiencing that disrespect. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback. SIGN UP FOR The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hello. Thanks for listening. This is the show where everyday I give you a little morsel of wisdom that you can try. Sometimes immediately. This wee on the show, I'm doing something a little different in that I'm featuring the same guest everyday. I'm talking to Dax Valdes a trainer from an organization called Hollaback. DAX: Hollaback is an organization that was founded in 2005 by a group of friends and there mission is to end harassment in all its forms so they started this as a blog post and they were collecting stories of harassment and they read those stories and they started to notice that the only thing good thing that ever happened to people who experienced harassment was when somebody intervened on their behalf to help them out. ZAK: Dax is here to teach us about what we can do as bystanders when we see someone getting harassed. DAX: These tools, these strategies, these methods are for anybody experiencing or sees an instance of harassment. But the lens is hyper-focused right now, so...we're focused on the AAPI experience. ZAK: The group Stop AAPI hate just put out a report where they counted 3800 incidents of Anti-Asian harassment since March of last year. Yesterday, In part 1, Dax taught us about the distract method of Bystander Intervention. It's one of the 5 D's that Hollaback trains people in. Today, the second of the 5 D's. Delay. So, imagine this... DAX: Somebody driving by in a car and yelling a racial slur and everybody's shell-shocked, like, did that just happen? Another tactic is delay. After the incident is over, you check in with the person who's been harassed. Even, I saw that. That wasn't cool. Are you ok..? can make a huge difference. ZAK: Why is that delay? DAX: Because you're waiting until the harassment is over and those moments of harassment happen so quickly sometimes that it's all you can do is delay and just check in with them. ZAK: So you're kind of going and validating this thing that just happened. You're not pretending it didn't happen and you're making sure the victim is ok. Interesting. So, what else can you say to a complete stranger who you've just witnessed be harassed. DAX: Acknowledging what happened and making an offer how you can support them in the moment is great. Hey, do you want me to wait with you until your friend comes to get you. Do you want me to go with you and talk to a store manager or wherever it happened. In some cases, it's like, do you want to go report this or do you need help reporting this? Depending on what the person needs at that moment. So, being able to take care of them and make them feel supported in something that is super scary for them is a small action that goes a long way. ZAK: Thanks you Dax Valdes. Dax is from Hollaback. If you want to get trained in their 5 D's of bystander Intervention, you should! You can sign up at their website. It's free. It will take about an hour. It builds on the stuff that Dax and I have been talking about on the show. I've put a link in the show notes. Hollaback is doing these trainings in collaboration with Asian Americans Advancing Justice. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dax Valdes is a senior trainer at Hollaback. The 5 D's of BYSTANDER INTERVENTION TRAINING GET TRAINED IN BYSTANDER INTERVENTION by Hollaback in collaboration with ASIAN AMERICANS ADVANCING JUSTICE. New York police have arrested a man who viciously attacked a 65-year-old Filipino woman near Times Square as she was walking to church on Monday To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Today's episode contains graphic and disturbing descriptions of a recent hate-crime that was caught on video. I'm not gonna play a video but you will hear me listen to it. If you want to see it, I linked to it in our show notes. And if you don't want to see it or hear the descriptions, skip this episode. AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW excerpt: ZAK: (Watching recent attack on 65 year-old woman in NYC). Oh my God. Oh my God. AMY GOODMAN, DEMOCRACY NOW excerpt: New York police have arrested a man who viciously attacked a 65-year-old Filipino woman near Times Square... ZAK: That's one of the things that makes this video even more disturbing. But it's to watch these guys, apparently, they're security guards, literally close the door on this woman. I don't know what could have been done. The attacker is really violent. Really fast. But, depending on the situation. Depending on how physically violent it is, there are several things we can do as bystanders. DAX: Hollaback is an organization that was founded in 2005 by a group of friends and there mission is to end harassment in all its forms so they started this as a blog post and they were collecting stories of harassment and they read those stories and they started to notice that the only thing good thing that ever happened to people who experienced harassment was when somebody intervened on their behalf to help them out. ZAK: All week on the show, we're gonna learn the 5 D's of bystander intervention from Hollaback. DAX: Distract. Delegage. Document Delay. Direct. ZAK: Five actionable steps that we can take to help out the person who's being harassed. DAX: Not necessarily dealing with the person doing the harassing but taking care of the person in conflict. At the start of quarantine last year, there was an uptick in reported crimes towards Asian-Americans and a lot of these incidents go unreported for any number of reason. ZAK: But a lot of these incidents are reported. The group Stop AAPI hate just put out a report where they counted 3800 incidents of Anti-Asian harassment since March of last year. Most of these attacks aren't physically violent. 70% are acts of verbal abuse and harassment. Alright, so what can we do? When we talk bystander intervention training, the first to think about, says Dax... DAX: You gotta just trust yourself. If you feel comfortable stepping in. Great. You should do it. And it's always a judgement call and it's always a brave thing to do. If you're seeing something that's erupting into physical violence, you have to prioritize your safety. But if it's something like... ZAK: You see two people on the sidewalk and they don't appear to know each other. And one of them is verbally attacking the other. What do you do? DAX: You can drop something. Accidentally spill your drink in-front of somebody. Oh, I'm so sorry. ZAK: Distract. DAX: If you see somebody in conflict, you could walk up to them and say, I'm sorry I'm late. Who's this? Well, we gotta go. Thanks. Even if you don't know them. Or, don't I know you from somewhere or could you give me directions. If you're starting a conversation with the person who's in conflict, you don't have to talk about refer to what you just saw or what's going on with the person who's doing the harassing. Just keep it cool. Talk about something unrelated and hopefully the person who is doing the harassing is starved of attention and they exit the scene. It might not always work that way but you're doing that, other people are seeing this and thinking, oh, yeah. That's something I can do. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jean Wilson is an artist, farmer and urban forager in Detroit. ZAK: Today on The Best Advice Show, I'm dipping into my archives. 13 years ago I got some advice from Detroit farmer and artist, Jean Wilson. She taught me a super effective way to pare down my grocery bills. It's Food Friday. ZAK: It's about 9 o'clock, I just pulled up to a westside, organic market. I'm here with Jean Wilson. So, what are we about to do? JEAN: We're about to dive in a dumpster and look for some fresh produce. ZAK: Are you diving just for yourself? JEAN: I do end up feeding myself and then also my mother who's on an income of $500 dollars/month social security and my friends and then end up cooking large meals for sometimes hundreds of people. ZAK: You're cooking for hundreds of people you just said? Just random people you find on the street? JEAN: Well, like last weekend we cooked up as much food as we could and we took it down to the lower, Cass Corridor area and served people over there. When I see a lot of food, I find a way to get rid of it. I just can't see this food going to waste. ZAK: Let's go. JEAN: This particular place doesn't waste very much at all. ZAK: We're looking inside a big, metal dumpster. It's about a third of the way full, there are probably 10 garbage bags. JEAN: Light ones we toss aside. When it's heavy it's a good sign. I'm gonna hop up inside. Keeps me inside. ZAK: Jean's in the dumpster. I'm gonna stay outside. You just ripped open that bag. I see some Cliff Bars. Empty, though. Jean, you've done this before. You are moving like a super-human right now. You've already gone through 4 bags. What constitutes what's take-able and what isn't? JEAN: I just take stuff that's good. Like, this whole onion looks good. This apple looks entirely good. ZAK: When was the last time you went into a grocery story and paid for food. JEAN: I've probably spent 50 dollars in the last five years. Seriously. ZAK: Whereas most people spend on themselves, maybe 200/month would be a modest estimate? JEAN: My mother spends six or seven dollars a week because she's particular. I'll eat anything. I just pick out the healthiest stuff and I pick out what I have. Sometimes there was just cheese and crackers for a few days, well, that's ok but as long as I continue to dumpster for food the quality and freshness and quantity and choices have been amazing. We should be getting together and making sure that this food doesn't go to waste. We all should be eating all the food. ZAK: What is that a mango? JEAN:Yeah, that's a really good mango. There's a couple good apples. ZAK: How about them apples? Jean, what is garbage? JEAN: Something that can't be used at all. Something that can't be eaten or fed to the worm box in the kitchen or the compost in the backyard. ZAK: But what we just put in my trunk, that's not garbage? JEAN: What do you think? Wanna come over for dinner tomorrow? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sylva Florence is a writer, translator, bike-tour leader and author living in Italy. Her new book is called Finding the Sylva Lining. Read her blog here. Scheduling Joy with Nate Mullen. If you have advice call me and tell me what it is @ 844 935 BEST! TRANSCRIPT: SYLVA: Hi Zak. My name is Sylva Florence and my advice involves making lists. It started because I suck at organizing my life. I'm an artist and so I think in a very creative, scattered way and so I started to make lists and I noticed I get an absurd amount of joy when I cross things off my list. And I started to obviously keep myself on task better and keep myself organized better because if I don't make lists, I'll forget things like, paying my bills. So, but I've also been starting to add other things to my list which were not just things I needed to get done but things I wanted to get done and even more things that were delightful to get done. Like, I'll just read you my list that I made today. Taxes... Ride Bike Farmers Market. I love in Italy so I am very lucky to have an incredible farmer's market and as long as I put farmer's market on my list then I remember to go get healthy vegetables and say hello to my farmer lady. Clean house already. I didn't quite get to that so that will have to be put on tomorrow's list. Chill. That's gonna happen shortly. Hi-Gene. Because I try to reach out to someone everyday. At the end of each day I make a list for the next day and I have fun with it. Yesterday I put... Get up and do a happy dance because I spent a lot of time in-front of the computer and I needed to get up and move. So, anyways, make your lists, check them twice, have some fun with them. Include some things you wouldn't normally put on a list, like get up a do a happy dance. And maybe it will give you the same pleasure it gives me to accomplish various kinds of tasks and also have included a little bit of joy and all you need to do is write it down. ZAK: Silva Florence is a writer, translator, bike-tour leader and author living in Italy. Her new book is called Finding the Sylva Lining...cause that's her name! So good, Sylva. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Joe Saul-Sehy is the creator and co-host of the Stacking Benjamins and Money With Friends podcasts Understanding Time Horizons with Justin Waring To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Today on the show, a few simple tweaks you can make to automate your financial picture. JOE: That's one of my favorite things to talk about, Zak and I think it's the hidden thing that people don't think about. They think they need to make more money. They think that they need to pay attention to their budget a lot. Which, you know, both those things are great but, man, automated your financial picture so that money just goes to the right place I think is the best advice I've got. ZAK: Heck yeah. So, I have been meaning to do that for, I don't know, five years and just haven't. So, how would you suggest folks get started? JOE: Well, the cool thing about it is that you just do it once. The nice thing about automating your finances is you do it once and it's all done. And I think that the way we think about it is that our brains can only handle so much at one time. Here's where I'm coming from. Sherlock Holmes, the smartest guy who never lived, in A Study in Scarlet, he famously said, 'What the deuce is the solar system to me.' And what he's really saying is he only has so much room in his brain attic and he needs to just focus on the important stuff. And one of my favorite researchers about time management, a woman named, Laura Vanderkam. She talks about our brains being a battery and that battery during the course of a day, it runs out. So, I don't want my brain battery running out before I remember to build my net worth. So, this is where automation comes in and all these important things we need to do, like remember to save and pay the bills on time. If we automate that stuff, we can just focus on the most important thing in our financial life which is finding ways to be better at our job and maybe make more money or have a more fulfilling career. ZAK: I love it. So, what do you use to automate? JOE: So, the first thing I have is something that helps me track my money and I use a low-cost program called Tiller cause I don't like ads but there's plenty of free things. There's a great one called Clarity Money. There's another one called Mint. There's Money Lion. The bad news about those apps is that they will market to you at the same time as they're helping you but what I like about all of these is that you can set alerts that you tell you when you go over set numbers. So if I spend too much money at a restaurant. This happened to me just a few weeks ago. I go through a drive-thru to pick up some food and immediately my phone buzzes because I went over my restaurant budget for that week. I really like the fact that I don't have to pay attention to my money every minute. I just have to pay attention at critical times. The other thing, though. The one that most people have is if you have a job and you have direct deposit, almost everyone direct deposits to their checking account and this is a really easy, automation shift. So, you already have the automation, we just have to have it go to the right place. Have that go to you savings account instead. And all of a sudden your brain has flipped and now the money is automatically saved and instead of deciding how much of your paycheck you want to save, now your money is already saved and you have to decide how much you want to spend and now we're doing critical task, number one, I think, which is we're disassociating the amount of money that we make from the amount of money that we spend. And when I made that one switch, all of a sudden where I didn't think I could save money before, money started piling up in my savings account because I'd always leave a little there instead of taking every dime to spend on whatever I needed that walk. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jesse Thorn (@JesseThorn) is the owner of the podcast network, Maximum Fun and host of the podcasts, Bullseye, Jordan, Jesse, Go! and The Turnaround. The Turnaround with Jesse Thorn Interviewing with Aaron Lammer To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show where every weekday, someone I like offers one morsel of advice. Ideally, something you can start practicing today. On this episode, I'm gonna talk interviewing with one of my favorite interviewers. JESSE: I'm Jesse Thorn and I'm owner of the podcast network, Maximum Fun and also among other things the host of the NPR show, Bullseye. ZAK: Jesse' gonna talk about interviewing an iconic interviewer on his podcast about interviewing. And for those of you keeping tracking at home, this is my second interview with an interviewer about interviewing. The first one was with Longform podcast host, Aaron Lammer. There's a link to that in the show notes. Ok, here's Jesse talking about an essential piece of interview advice you can try at home, even if you don't have a talk show. JESSE: Like, the thing that I think about all the time that I learned from...I did a show called The Turnaround where I interviewed famous interviewers and I just did it because I never went to journalism school or had a mentor or anything. I just was like, doing my college radio show until I was 40. And, we sort of were surprised that Larry King said yes to coming on the show. Like, basically, we just made a list of every famous we could think of, sent out one email to each of them and saw who said yes. Cause it was a low-budget show. ZAK: But you had for people that haven't heard it, you had Ira Glass, Brook Gladstone, Larry King, did you get Terry Gross? JESSE:Yeah, that was the first time I talked to Terry Gross and I was very gratified. I'm a huge fan. But Larry King I was not a huge fan of, may his rest in peace. I wasn't against him or anything, I just never had cable tv as a kid so I never saw him, you know? And I never listened to overnight talk radio. But, I went into his house and he had this big house in Beverly Hills. ZAK: Did someone answer the door or was it him? JESSE: Yes, his assistant just a really sweet, obviously, intensely competent man. His assistant offered me a bottle of water and I was like, what is this gonna be like? And he sat us down in Larry King's trophy room which was like, the trophies were like structural to the room. There were so many trophies and prizes and pictures of him with Hank Aaron or whatever and he came in and he just Larry King right away. The moment he walked in the room, I understood why he was Larry King. Cause you're like, oh, this guy is the most engaged person ever. He locked eyes on me. He was completely present with me and the question that he said he was really proud of when I asked him about this, he said, one time a pilot came on my show... LARRY: And I said when you're going down the runway do you know it's gonna take off? And he said I never think about it. Yes, it will take off but it may not stay up. An engine could go. Birds can fly into the plane. But if I'm going 160 MPH down that runway, it has to take off. Now it may take off for five feet and crash but it will lift off the ground. But he never thinks about it. JESSE: And to me, that's like the perfect question because Larry King doesn't care that it makes him look dumb or makes him look like he doesn't know about pilots. ZAK: Yeah, there's narrative in that question. JESSE: Yeah, and it's like go so much emotional content, you know? ZAK: I spend my entire life not trying to sound dumb. Trying not to sound dumb. Not trying to sound dumb. See? And so, to know that one of the keys to really engaging and asking good questions is to not worry about sounding dumb. This is the work. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Niccole Thurman is a Los Angeles-based Actress and Writer. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Today's advice from actor, writer and comedian, Nicole Thurman, contains some explicit language. You've been warned. NICCOLE: Don't do wifey shit for a fuck boy. I saw that on a t-shirt once and I was like, fuck yeah. ZAK: Tell me more. I love this. NICCOLE: Ok. Ok. So, don't do wifey shit for a fuck boy. It's about not giving yourself and your time and your emotional labor to a man who is emotionally unavailable, stunted, not interested in actually being in a relationship...any of the above. I feel like when I saw that shirt I was in a relationship with a guy who was completely, emotionally unavailable, had told me he didn't want to be in a relationship to start the relationship. But I still was like, no no, I know what's best for us. Like, we like each other. We should be together. So then we ended up in a relationship that he did not want to be in and he was deceptive and not good the whole time because of it. ZAK: And you were doing wifey shit? NICCOLE: I was doing wifey shit! We lived together. He drove my car. His name was on my insurance. We went to weddings together. I was way more emotionally invested then he was, talking about future events, saying, I love you, to no return. ZAK: Did you see that shirt during the relationship? NICCOLE: During the relationship. I was downtown in LA and I was walking to work and I was almost, always in a bad mood cause the mother fucker was always doing something. So, I was walking and I saw this woman crossing the street and it said, Don't Do Wifey Shit For a Fuck Boy and I was like, damn! ZAK: What did you do in the moment? NICCOLE: It was one of those epiphany moments. I think it's like, you see it happen all the time where it's like, a man will tell you directly something about how he feels or he's not available to give you what you want and woman will be like, oh, I can see potential here. They see a project. They don't see a product. They don't see the person in-front of them that doesn't want the thing. And so I think it just put that in my head. Cause you don't think of your boyfriend as a fuck boy while you're dating them. After I broke up with him one of my friends was like, I always thought he was a fuck boy. And I was like, what!? Why didn't you tell me. But then you start to see the light like, I'm giving all this energy to someone who's not gonna be around in a year, six-months, whatever. ZAK: Did it change the way you are in relationships now? NICCOLE: I'm way more cutthroat, but in a good way for both me and the guy. If a guy's like, I can't be dating right now, I'm like, byeeeeeee! ZAK: My last question is. It was hard for you to acknowledge that he was a fuck boy during the relationship. For people that are in relationships now and want to figure out if maybe they're with a fuck boy. Is there a question you can ask yourself to help you see more clearly? NICCOLE: I think there's a series of questions. And there's also a series of moments that you need to pay attention to and not brush off because I think it's easier to brush the moment off and keep moving forward with this thing that's not happening. You have to say, did he ever say, I don't want to be in a relationship. You deserve more. Or, I can't give you what you need. Or, I don't know if I'm there yet. I don't know if we're on the same level. Like, those phrases...GET OUT. If you want a relationship. These are for woman that want a relationship. I'm a person that wants a relationship and I wasted a year and a half of my life on someone that didn't want the same thing because I wasn't listening to the...I wasn't getting the clues up front. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liz Alpern is passionate about reimagining tradition and bringing people together. Liz is co-founder of The Gefilteria and co-author of The Gefilte Manifesto: New Recipes for Old World Jewish Foods. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: The Jewish holiday of Passover is coming up this week. It's a holiday commemorating the Israelite's liberation from slavery in Egypt. And today on Food Friday we have some advice about Passover, celebration, symbolism and liberation. Our guide is Liz Alpern. She's a Jewish food entrepreneur, educator and cook author. ZAK: To start, for our non-Jewish friends, what is matzah and why do we eat it on Passover? LIZ: So, matzah is a ritual food of Passover. A ceremonial food of Passover. And so, it is essentially like a cracker or a flatbread and it has symbolic meaning because in the story of Passover, in the story of Exodus that's told during the Passover holiday, the whole idea is that the Jews were slaves in Egypt and they fled very quickly. And they barely could bring anything with them and so they, like, didn't have time for their bread to rise and so they threw some flour on their back and kind of got the hell out of dodge. You know what I mean? And so, matzah is bread. That biblical bread that is associated with this fleeing of Egypt and on a spiritual level there's this whole process that you do in your life but it's supposed to have a spiritual element to it. I mean, "supposed to" in air quotes. You clean your house of all of the leavened products. You get rid of them leading up to the holiday. And so there's this spiritual meaning that I've learned around this which is about confronting your ego. Confronting all the things that are puffed up. Confronting the stuff that you're carrying that is maybe taking up too much space, right? And so this idea of this cleansing process maybe the week before and then during Passover eating this humble, flat bread that is like, the literal symbol of what it is to be humbled has a lot of spiritual meaning and the way it's translated is that it's the bread of affliction...this bread that symbolizes the experience of slavery. ZAK: How do you do it? How do you make your own matzah? LIZ: My gosh. So easy. You take some flour. You mix some water. Basically, it's 4 parts flour to 1 part water. So, I mix this very, very, very basic dough. I roll it out as thin as I can. I break it up into some chunks. Roll it out, thin, thin, thin, thin. Poke some holes in it and I throw it in the oven and I bake it for about 5-6 minutes total. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emily Berman is a mom and audio-maker based in Washington DC. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Do you ever gossip about somebody over text and then you realize to your horror you sent the text to the person you're talking shit about!? Of course you have, you're human. And if you haven't, good on ya. But if you have like the rest of us, you might appreciate this advice. EMILY: DO NOT TALK SHIT ABOUT PEOPLE IN WRITING. Don't do it in text. Don't do it in an e-mail. Don't write it on a piece of paper. Don't write it down. And this works on a lot of different levels. You can go very deep with this. Like, biblically deep. First of all, its saves you from being caught in a very embarrassing situation. It pauses you for a second. If you just like, have this rule that you're not gonna write things down. If you're not gonna say anything bad about someone else...you pause. You're not gonna text it. You have to call the person to say it. You have to call whoever you want to talk to. Are you gonna make the call just to say that thing? So, it gives you a second to reflect. And if you call, ok, you call and you say it and then maybe notice how you feel after that. Like, was it worth it to call to say that? Like sometimes maybe but generally speaking it feels pretty bad to say...you might start to notice. I've started to notice that it feels pretty bad to say negative things about people. EMILY: And, this is not my idea. This is one of the most important laws in the Torah, which is the laws surrounding Lashon Hora which means evil speech or evil tongue is what is means exactly. And it's really one of the worse things you can do in the Torah because it is so destructive. Things you say about other people can be destructive to them in their lives in so many ways. EMILY: It's an on-going practice. Everyday you're going to be confronted with this situation of like, you have the thought of something you feel about someone else. Something you need to get off your chest. And then you have your choice of like, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna quickly express those thoughts to someone else? Are you going to keep it to yourself? And like, you're gonna practice over and over not writing it down. Not making the call to express the feeling and then eventually, I don't know if I can say I think the thoughts less, but I feel like it's becoming a smaller and smaller part of my personality and my goal is to be a person who does not say negative things about other people. ZAK: When you're suppressing the urge to write shit or talk shit, what do you do then with that feeling of like, man, this person just was being an asshole and I want some catharsis from it? EMILY: Ok, so like, sometimes I don't do it perfectly. Like, sometimes I do pick up the phone and call the person I want to talk to about it and vent for a second. But, it's like I'm getting quicker and being more empathetic to the person I would have said something negative about. Little by little it doesn't feel as much like suppression, although at the beginning when I first learned about this, it did feel like I was suppressing things and I felt stifled. I just want to say what I think. I just want to say...I just want say how I feel and that's important because I feel it. But it actually becomes a spiritual practice of empathy. Cause it feels terrible to think that other people are out there saying bad things about me. And if we're all just doing that, that's such a heavy reality to be living in. So, I guess I am trying to do my part to change the reality...change the way we all communicate with another and just, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna say something bad about you, Zak. Laughter. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marty Maddin is a husband, father and a leadership and performance coach. Tell me your regrets at 844-935-BEST OR [email protected] TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Ok, it's July, 1995. Where are you in your life at that point? MARTY: So, I am in high school and it's summer time and I'm working at a day-camp. ZAK: And so, in your mind you've got a lot going on? MARTY: It sounds funny when you say it now, but yes, at the time I thought I was pretty busy with life. MARTY: I have an older brother and he thought it would be really fun to go to Chicago to see the Grateful Dead. They were playing at Soldier Field and I thought it was a great idea and I thought about it for a day or so and then I just kind of got a little lazy and felt like I was kinda busy with all the different things that I thought were going on at the time and so I told him, you know what, lets just wait until next year. Maybe I'll join you next year. I think he was planning on going either way so he was nice enough to invite me but I kind of told him I was too busy. ZAK: Is it I don't have the time? I don't want to put the energy into going? What do you think was your headspace then? MARTY: Probably the biggest thing was I felt like I could just do it at any point in the future so why do it right now. ZAK: That was July 9th, 1995. Grateful Dead plays at Soldier Field. They open with Touch of Grey. They close with Box of Rain and that ends up being their last show ever. Because one month later... ARCHIVAL NEWS: Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead guitarist who kept the counter-culture of the 1960s rocking and rolling right into the 90s died today in California. He was 53. MARTY: It was a crazy moment because I was on the bus working when I found out that he passed away and I really did have a moment of, oh my gosh, I blew it. That can never happen. I can never get that chance to go to that concert with my brother and see Jerry Garcia perform and so it was sad. I chose incorrectly. I, you know, being a little lazy there was not the right choice. I think the advice is to...well it's really two things. It's to live in the moment because it's so easy to have regrets about the past and to be worrying about the future and what you have to do or what can happen or how much time you have and to stay present to what you have right in-front of you right now. What I had in-front of me in that moment was an amazing opportunity to go spend time with my brother and go see an amazing band and because I was worrying about things that I needed to get done, I missed that opportunity. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alice Bagley is a gardener, biker and time-banker from Detroit. Throwing Seeds with Alice To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome to The Best Advice Show where everyday a different guest offers a little morsel of wisdom for you. ALICE: Hi, this is Alice Bagley from Detroit, Michigan where I am a gardener and biker and time-banker and probably some other things. My advice today is to wait to clean-up your garden until it's warmer. Here in Detroit we're having a warm spell. Its gotten up to 60 or 70 degrees the past few days but it's gonna get cold again and if you clean up all the leaves and sticks and other brush in your garden you can clear away the eggs and cocoons of a bunch of insects that we like such as butterflies and preying mantises and lovely, native bees. So if you can you should wait to clean up your garden. ZAK: But, Alice says, if you feel like you need to be more productive in your garden. There are some things you can do, like... ALICE: Prune your fruit trees and your bushes. This is the right time of year to do that. There's a bunch flower seeds that actually like to go through freeze/thaw cycles. Especially wildflowers so you can put some seeds around to do that. If you must plant some thing which I totally feel that too, some seeds you can plant this time of year are peas, carrots, beets, spinach, salad greens. You can also look in your vegetable garden to see if some stuff lived through the winter like spinach usually does and I was able to find some beets and carrots out in the garden too. So if you do have to clear-off the garden you put on your mulch, like maybe you put down some leaves and straw, you can just clear them off of the place where you're gonna plant things. You don't have to clear your whole garden out. You can just push the leaves or straw off to the side, plant the seeds that you want to plant and hopefully it will be more spring-like soon when the temperature is more reliably above 40 or 50 degrees everyday. That's the time of year to start clearing out your garden beds and all the old, dead plants from last year. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Evangeline Garreau writes the Good Questions newsletter. Read it! Shira Heisler is a physician and complimenter. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I'm pleased to welcome back Best Advice Show regular and the love of my life, my wife, Shira. SHIRA: If you have a compliment for anyone. Like, if it just crossed your mind and you're like, hey, that guy has beautiful eyes. Or, oh, you're really kind and generous. Or, you look pretty today. Whatever compliment you have for anybody who crosses in your life, stranger, friend, partner...tell them. ZAK: That's a great piece of advice, Shira. SHIRA: That's why it's on the show. ZAK: For sure, but I was complimenting you. SHIRA: Oh. Laughter. Good. Good. ZAK: I love this advice. I recorded it with Shira a long time ago and I finally got around to putting it together today and actually, literally, five-minutes after I finished editing this episode and uploading it, I got this voicemail on the advice hotline. This is unbelievable! EVANGELINE: Hi, my name is Evangeline Garreau and my advice is to say the nice thing. I don't remember where I first heard this but the idea is that every time you think something nice about someone, you should tell them. For me this mostly shows up with clothing. Anytime I notice a cool shirt or a nice piece of jewelry, I want to tell the person how great it is. This happened a lot more pre-pandemic but still on Zoom calls when I notice that people make an effort, I want them to know that they look great. It makes me feel good to give them a compliment and it makes them feel good to receive a compliment. And often it leads to friendship. People tend to like you more when you tell them nice things about their clothes. I also feel like it's the kind of thing that when you practice in a low-stakes context, like, complimenting someone's outfit, it gets easier in a high-stakes context like, telling someone you love then for the first time. I have an example that's not quite that high-stakes but recently I had a moment where I was feeling really grateful for my mom and my sister. We were navigating a hard family issue and I felt really good about how it was being handled. And, I had a moment where I thought, should I say something or is that totally sappy to just tell them, oh, man, you guys are so great. And then I thought, say the nice thing, and I'm glad I did because they deserve to know how much they mean to me and who knows what's gonna happen tomorrow. So, whether it's about shoes or true love...say the nice thing. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ma'ayan Plaut (@maayanplaut) is Senior Manager, Audience Development & Engagement at PRX. Plating with Ma'ayan To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday and today return contributor, Ma'ayan Plaut is here to talk about sandwiches. Not just any sandwich, though. MA'AYAN: I don't know if it's cause I miss my parents a lot right now but I've been making a lot of what my mom likes to call the two-handed sandwich. And it's actually more of an idea than it is a recipe and it's delicious because it's filled with all sorts of crunchy vegetables...usually lettuce, cucumbers, sprouts, for my mom it has to have avocado in it. If you're me, any type of savory spread, avocado included, also welcome. And the main thing here is that it's piled super-duper high. It's absolutely beautiful to look at and it's the best. First bite, last bite, all of them are great. The only challenge with the two-handed sandwich is that it's really just that. It only works best if you're holding it with two hands and whoa is you if you decide to put it down for any reason whatsoever. So, the thing is with all of those crunchy vegetables and all of the spreads, everything starts sliding in every direction, so the bread might fall off completely because of all the stacked, multiple dimensioned things on top. The vegetables, especially if they're slide-y vegetables like cucumbers or sprouts, they just slide side-ways and you kind of just end up with something I call a miserable tossed salad with bread that just so happens to be on the side or on the bottom. So my solution is actually to self-contain the sandwich and that usually comes from one of two things. It's either a well-places toothpick or you can wrap your sandwich up either in wax paper or aluminum foil and that just gives you some extra, internal stability when all of the slide-y and crinkly and gravity-defying fillings have all these ideas about what a strong, free-standing structure really should look like. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Glenn Gass is a provost professor emeritus at The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: This is Dr. Glenn Gass. GLENN: I'm a provost professor emeritus at The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and just retired this past May. ZAK: When I was Professor Gass' student in his History of The Beatles class. Yes, that's a real class and yes it was most the beloved class on campus and one night in class, professor Gass told us this Beatles story which remains one of my favorite Beatle's stories. And I think the essence of this story has a jewel of wisdom that I've been thinking about a lot, which we'll get to. But first, let's go back to the spring of 1966 when The Beatles were recording the song, Yellow Submarine. GLENN: And they had a bunch of friends over. Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones, Hunter Davies, Alf Bicknell. They just said, come on in. They just wanted normal voices singing the chorus, so it didn't sound like The Beatles singing in perfect harmony. They had Mal Evans with a parade bass drum and they had the cocktail party. That's actually Patty Boyd, George's wife that has the big shrieking, high life in the middle of that and the glasses clinking and all the sound effects. So, anyway they did this and they did the overdubs singing, we all live in a Yellow Submarine and everyone was having a great time. Who knows, it's 1966, so they're probably having a really great time. The engineer, Geoff Emerick went to lock up the tapes and turn off the lights and he came back out to turn out the lights in the studio. He walked in the control room and looked down to Studio 2 and saw everyone was still there. They were there with Big Mal Evans and that parade drum in the front of this conga line with everyone on the person in-front of them's shoulders, swaying back and forth singing, we all live in a yellow submarine. I mean there's no tape running. The song is done. They're having so much fun, they didn't want it to end. That's so beautiful on so many levels. The Beatles just want to be together. They want to sing and have fun together. You wouldn't likely do that on a George, Paul or John song but for Ringo, lets all gather round our friend and just have a good, old sing-a-long. ZAK: I love it so much. I love thinking about how, the song in this instance, maybe not with all their output, but maybe in this case, the song was just a by-product of their friendship. GLENN: Yes. ZAK: The song wasn't even the point. The point was them being together and having fun and, awesome, this amazing song came out of it. GLENN: The point was being together, having fun and the song expresses that. My friends are all aboard. Many more of them live next door. The whole song was about being together with your friends and the fact that Paul wrote it not for himself but for his friend. So, it not only is about friendship, it sort of embodies friendship. ZAK: We have these really loud baseboards cause we have a boiler with hot water heat and in our bedroom it sounds like we're in a submarine right now and I've been thinking about the song and thinking about how, all of us, are in our own...if we're lucky to have our own proverbial submarines with the people in our lives we love. Like, we're just kind of very insulated in our own yellow submarines right now. GLENN: Yeah and everyone's submarine is so different. ZAK: At the beginning of the pandemic, parents with young families were talking about how they would have impromptu dance parties. It's like finding fun where they can because we don't have access to all these old ways of having fun outside our houses. So, I feel like that's another thing that this song makes me think of. It's just like, make meaning amid the isolation. GLENN: Create the world you want to be in. Create the atmosphere you want. And damn the torpedoes we're gonna do this submarine song and we're gonna have fun with it. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karen Semone is a senior director of innovation at Salesforce. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Warning, today's episode might put you to sleep. But if it does, that's a good thing. Here is Karen Semone's advice for falling asleep easier and dreaming better. KAREN: You basically think of a place that you loved as a child. For me it's my grandma's house. And you take a visualized tour of that house. It's not about the people in the house. It's about the place. But it's very much a sensory experience. So you really feel what the handle of the door feels like. You smell. You visualize the smell. You try to remember details of where the photos are on the photo wall, where her art was. And you walk through the rooms. And more often than not, by the time I've gone through the whole house, I'm asleep which is awesome. You enter through the garage and she has this very old-school screen door and I think it is a form of meditation because you have to be really methodical and sort of, slow. Sometimes I like to pretend like I can smell her famous pecan sticky buns that she would always make in the morning. ZAK: Is it always your grandma's house that you do? KAREN: It's funny. I change it up but it usually tends to be places I visited in summertimes as children. So I have a couple of cottages that I did or my aunt's house where she had a pool. And I think that might just be because it's light-hearted memories. Like, positive associations. And I tend to have nicer dreams since I started doing it. My name is Karen Semone. I am a senior director of innovation at Salesforce. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tiffany Paulsen (@thetiffanypaulsen) is a screenwriter, producer, director. Her most recent film, Holidate, is on Netflix. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Thanks for listening to another episode of The Best Advice Show where everyday I talk to someone new who's got a little morsel of wisdom for you. Something you can take with you and try, hopefully immediately. I've been in touch with some listeners recently who hear my daily call-out for advice but think they don't have anything good to offer. You're wrong. You do. It doesn't have to be sage and profound. My favorite type of advice is stuff the advice-giver is still working on. So, what is it? What are you working on in your life that you think might be valuable or helpful to some other people to work on? That's the stuff that I want to hear. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. So, that thing about the advice-giver still working on the advice. That's true of today's episode. TIFFANY: Hi. My name's Tiffany Paulsen. I'm a screenwriter, producer, director. Most recently I wrote the romantic-comedy, Holidate for Netflix. The thing that I try to do and I want to get so much better at is, do the hard thing first. Doing the hard thing first is something I'm really working on and is helping me because I find when the hard thing is out there and I mean the email I don't want to send, the call I don't want to make, the thing that's broken in my house that I have to figure out...it just hovers. It hovers in my workspace. It hovers in my energy. And it slows everything down. So, getting that thing that I don't want to do that I'm regretting out of the way is really helpful. ZAK: And once you're able to do that. Once you actually get the hard thing done first, what does that do to the rest of your day? TIFFANY: Well, first of all I find that the hard thing is never as hard as I'm anticipating that it's gonna be. So, it instantly relieves anxiety. And for me as a writer, I just feel like anything I can do to free up my creative space and my brain-flow is always gonna be more positive to my work-day and have a better outcome with my work-day. So, I really am finding that getting that, however big or small, but the thing that I'm dreading the most about the day or the thing that I just don't want to tackle. If I could just not procrastinate it, it's gonna be far beneficial to get it done. And changing that mindset of, like, ok, what is it? What do I need to deal with? I'm gonna just get it done, it's that...ahhhh. Wasn't that bad. I don't need to think about it anymore. I can put that great line on my to-do list for the day and cross it out. So, I think for me I get an instant, positive, reaction. An instant, release of some negativity or some worry. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Wells runs Cheap RV Living and appears in the film, Nomadland. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: BOB: My name is Bob Wells and I live in a van and I have a website called CheapRVLiving.com and youtube channel called, Cheap RV Living and I like to tell people they have a choice. ZAK: If you've seen the new movie Nomadland, then you know Bob Wells. He was in the movie. He was in a couple scenes. He looks just like Santa Claus. Here he is in the movie which stars Frances McDormand as a woman in her 60s who, after losing everything in the Great Recession, is traveling across the country in a van. And then she meets a bunch of other van-dwelling people and we learn about their lives. One of those people is Bob Wells, who plays himself just like a lot of the characters. Nomadland Excerpt ZAK:I connected with Bob last week over Zoom. He was visiting his family in the Pacific Northwest and I was in my office in Detroit. BOB: Ok, here's my one piece of advice. Our society is organized to give us the most possible menial, unimportant choices that we possibly can have. So our life is full of meaningless choices. But the big choices in life are really few and far between and we don't get to make them. So, if I could tell your audience anything, I would tell them that they have many, many more choices then they know and to stop worrying about the little, tiny ones that are meaningless and think about the big ones. Think about the ones that will impact your life and the lives of the people you love. Question everything. Look at all the possible options. Take a chance. ZAK: And what's the first time you remember consciously taking a chance on something unconventional. BOB: I wasn't brave enough. I feel in the trance and stayed there. I was deeply hypnotized. I went through a divorce so I set up two households and I couldn't afford to pay for two households so I was forced into a different choice. I had always been a camper and a backpacker. I saw a van on the way to work for sale and one day the idea popped into my head... completely unconventional choice. I could live in that van. I can live in a tent for months at a time. I can live in that van better! I stopped. I bought the van and I moved in. And at first I hated it. I felt ashamed. I felt like I was a failure. I had utterly failed in the American Dream and all of a sudden. Well, not all of a sudden. Gradually, I fell in love with that life and for the very first time in my life, I was happy. ZAK: What do you think is our species essence? BOB: It's connection. Our species essence is connection. Connected to nature. Connected to each other. Connected to the sacred. It's deep, profound. You ask any anthropologist about what humans are. We are a pack animal. That is a simple, science of humanity. We are pack animal. And instead of being a pack animal that lives in packs, profoundly connecting to each other and everything around us, we've become ants or bees in a hive. And we've lost all connection to each other. ZAK: So do you live by yourself in the RV? BOB: I do live alone in my RV but I usually have a pack around me. ZAK: Well some of us aren't going to become nomads. At least not yet. What do you think is something that we might practice today to get some of the feeling that you get from being on the road without actually packing up and hitting the road like you did? BOB: Well, you can embrace minimalism. That's one thing you have to be pretty minimal. Nomads were all minimalists. Things were a burden. The attitude always was, if I have too much stuff and I have to carry it to the next stop cause that's where the food and water is, then that stuff is a burden and I don't want it. So that is an attitude that every nomad had and you could adopt tomorrow. You can stand up right now, get a bag, go around, find a lot, a lot, a lot of crap in your house that you don't need and get rid of it. And that will free you. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meiko Krishok is the founder and co-operator of Guerrilla Food (GF), a Detroit-based grassroots culinary team that uses food as medicine. GF is the team behind the Pink Flamingo To Go farm-to-table carry-out restaurant in the Palmer Park neighborhood in Detroit and Pink Flamingo popular seasonal vintage food trailer that is located in a community garden in Corktown, Detroit. Growing Garlic Fermented Honey Garlic TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome to another addition of Food Friday where talk food advice. MEIKO: My name is Meiko Krishok and I live in Detroit. I have a food business called Guerrilla Food and run an off-shoot of that business which is Pink Flamingo Food Truck and Pink Flamingo To Go carry-out restaurant. One thing I've been enjoying that I've been learning how to do that I really enjoy doing because it's so low effort is how to grow garlic. This is the time of the year where it starts to pop-up a little but because you grow it in the fall. You don't really need to have access to water to grow it. You just need a space to put it in the group and cover it up really well in the winter time so it doesn't freeze and I just think it's like, one of the best food sovereignty things that we can be doing that's also not very hard. You know for things like onions and stuff you either need to grow the seeds or you need to get transplants and garlic you literally just take the cloves, right? Any cloves. Even stuff from the grocery store and then you just need a place to put it in the group that can go into the ground about 6-inches or so. And then you just cover it really well. I like to use leaves and then if you have straw. So, I literally don't even water the garlic. I just put it in the ground, cover it and then in the spring I uncover once it's warm enough and wait for it to grow the little garlic scapes. It grows this little curly-cue and that part will flower if you don't pick it. If you break it off of at the right time of the year, then all the energy goes down into the bulb and then the garlic grows and then you have garlic by July. ZAK: Garlic continues to be just, obviously it's part of so many recipes...but it's the thing that I'm perpetually so intoxicated by in the kitchen. It's just the best. MEIKO: Yeah. It's so good. You can do so many things with it. One thing we've been doing recently which has been so delicious is you take peeled cloves of garlic and you put em in a jar and then you put honey on top. And the honey will ferment the garlic and it just mellows it out slowly over time. But that is really delicious. You can eat the cloves of garlic or you can the honey. And you just let it sit for as long as you can and eat a little bit every day. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Taylor Cox is a writer, comedian and host of the podcast, Hills I'd Die On. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Celeste Holbrook (@drcelesteholbrook) is a sexologist, speaker and author. She was last on the show talking about the reality that one of you wants to have sex more than the other. I want your advice about having difficult conversations! Call me at 844-935-BEST or email at [email protected] TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I'm excited for some more advice from Dr. Celeste Holbrook. CELESTE: I am a sexologist. I've had my own practice for 7-years and I've been a sex educator for 10. ZAK: Today's episode may not be suitable for children. But it also may be suitable for children. ZAK: I was actually thinking leading us to this interview, we're gonna need to put a disclaimer for kids at the top of the episode but I wonder what do you think about how early is too early to start talking openly about sex. CELESTE: I mean, I'm a little biased, Zak. Laughter. I definitely have told my 8 year-old not to touch their clitoris at the table. So probably never too early. ZAK: But yeah, what have you noticed in your own children or friend's children or client's children, like, what do you think is a healthy way to start talking opening about sex? CELESTE: Start early by naming body parts what they actually are. And that starts when they're 18-months old and then grow the conversation...The conversation matures as they mature. It's not just one conversation. It's not just one talk. It's something you talk about through and through, over and over. My kids knew about what was by the time they were four. We're the ones that bring all the shame to the table. ZAK: Hmmm. Uh huh. Uh huh. CELESTE: So, early. Early. ZAK: Yeah. And when you say, you know, actually name the body parts, you mean like, say penis instead of pee peep. Stuff like that? CELESTE: Correct. Plus it gives a sense of trust that you're gonna tell then the right things from the very beginning, So at age 9, you're going, it's not your tee-tee, it's your vulva. It's not your wee-wee, it's your penis and then they're going, well what other things did they lie to me about. You know. ZAK: You're giving yourself more work. CELESTE: Yes. That. *Laughter. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ronald Young Jr. is the host of Time Well Spent and Leaving the Theatre and the associate producer for the Seizing Freedom podcast from VPM and Witness Docs. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome to The Best Advice Show. Spring is here in Detroit. I'm grateful for the sun. Today's advice comes from Ronald Young Jr. And this is advice like all the advice on this show that you can practice as soon as you hear it. I think it's really simple but super important. Here's Ronald. RONALD: So, I went through a break-up in September. When you're in a relationship you always have at least one person that you can talk to, lean on, stay stuff to. And my life feels like, and I feel like maybe to my detriment, feels so compartmentalized outside of being in a relationship that I don't really have...like sometimes I find myself outside of all my compartments. I don't have big group of friends that still hangs out. Like, I do from college but we're all separated now. So I feel like often, I'm a single person with no kids and unmarried so it's very often...and I feel like other single will probably understand this to. Especially when you live by yourself. People just don't...It's easy to be lost in the cracks. And I only mean in terms of social interaction and communication. ZAK: I hear that. For sure. Yeah, that makes sense. RONALD: You're married, right? ZAK: I'm married and I have two kids. So, it's like the opposite. And I take it for granted. I take the morning conversation I have my wife totally for granted. RONALD: Yeah. That's something I miss. Like, with my ex-girlfriend, I miss being able to talk to her in the morning or talk to her in the afternoon or chit-chat. But what I would tell you is that you probably have a single-friend out there who's just like me. Who lives by themselves, no kids...Just reach out to them. Just say, hey man, what's up. Hit 'em up. And if you really want to do a service, hit him up regularly. I have one or two friends that I know can count on I'll talk to, probably, a couple times a week but, it's different cause you get out there and there's no guarantee that I'm gonna have regular interaction if I don't seek it out, which feels like crazy at times. You know? Cause yours comes by default. ZAK: Yep, it's a real effort that you have to make to reach out and it shouldn't fall on you entirely or even the majority. It should be, you know, reciprocal at its best, but right now, like, yeah being alone sounds really challenging right now. RONALD: And to be honest, that's the first time I articulated it. Because I don't think anybody owes it to me to reach out to me. I just think that it is something like, when I was communing to work and I was getting coffee before I went to work at the coffee shop or going in and talking to the employees or even the people that cleaned the building. I had a friend in the mail-room who me and him would have these long conversations. So, you had all these incidental interactions with people and when you're a single person and you don't live with anyone. I don't have pets, kids...those incidental interactions are all gone and I think that's something that...And I know a lot of people and families are suffering cause they're getting sick of each-other. It gets challenging and all that. And I completely understand that. And that is its own struggle. But I just feel like those incidental interactions are important. And I'm an extrovert. And I didn't say all that to say the onus is on YOU to talk to ME. It's just saying, for a lot of us singles out here. We have to generate and then the other part is, when the depression and all that stuff sets in, it then becomes hard to generate that interaction. And so, even a, hey man, what's going on? What you up to? Just one of those is nice. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suneel Gupta is the author of BACKABLE: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance On You. He's the founder of RISE and is on faculty at Harvard University. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey, it's The Best Advice Show where every weekday I talk to someone awesome and they give you one thing that you can do today to improve your life. Today, the writer and entrepreneur, Suneel Gupta. He just put out a book. It's called Backable. What does it mean to be Backable? SUNEEL: Backable is...you're able to walk into a room and people want to take a chance on you. And the thing that makes backable unique is that it's this mix of creativity and persuasion. Even when the creative idea you have...even if that's yourself isn't fully baked. You may not be the obvious choice. You may not have the perfect resume and yet there's a leap of faith that people want to take on you. ZAK: And in his book, Suneel proves that it's not just natural talent that can make people want to take a chance on you. There's a bunch of things you can do to become backable or get to get ready to be backable. Like using low stakes practice sessions to prepare for high stakes moments. SUNEEL: We call these exhibition matches. And those exhibition matches tend to be very, very sloppy. ZAK: But sloppy, at least initially is good. Because Suneel says long-term success comes from short-term embarrassment. SUNEEL: So, if you're gonna be embarrassed, the viewpoint is why not be embarrassed in-front of friendlies in these low stakes moments. What ends up happening is you get to this level of mastery where you can be fully tuned-in and fully present with what's happening inside the room. Charlie Parker, the jazz musician had this great quote which is, somebody came up to him one time and said, how do you have such incredible stage presence? And his answer was, practice, practice, practice and then forget yourself and just wail. And I think that's the state that we really want to get to. But we can't get there simply by winging it. We get there only when we have such incredible mastery of our material that we're no longer wondering what to say next. We're fully tuned in and adaptive to exactly what's happening inside the room. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/ The Club From Nowhere: Cooking for Civil Rights https://www.npr.org/2005/03/04/4509998/the-club-from-nowhere-cooking-for-civil-rights To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Every Friday on the show we talk food. Today's episode is also the final installment of Amanda Alexander week. Amanda is the founder of the Detroit Justice Center. AMANDA: We're lawyers who support people's movements here in the city and who are fighting for a world without jails and prisons. ZAK: Amanda and I have been diving into the letter she wrote to her niece, Fiona, and later published in the Boston Globe. It's all about how Black woman have created movements and cultivated joy. And Amanda's letter is filled with some deep, deep wisdom and advice. Like this, find what brings you joy and use it for movements. AMANDA: Given that the task is as big as remaking society, and ending mass incarceration, creating conditions for people to thrive, it means that the problem is so deep that there is work for everyone all the time. And so, that means that everyone can be part of the solution and being part of the world that we need. And actually, there's so many good examples of people putting their talents and passions and particular joy to work for movements. ZAK: Like Georgia Gilmore and the Club from Nowhere. AMANDA: They were a group of cooks and bakers from Montgomerie, Alabama who made and sold food to help fund the Montgomerie Bus Boycott. It was 382 days long. And people often think that it was Rosa Parks, she refused to give up her seat, and maybe a few days later the busses were integrated. ZAK: Right, this spontaneous thing. AMANDA: Right, but this was a very long time and so people were doing things like The Club from Nowhere did to take their skills in cooking and baking and using the proceeds from sales to power right back into the movement. So in that case creating some delicious food that would fuel people and fortify their bodies and then taking the profits from that and very literally funding movement work. ZAK: We watch a lot of Mister Rogers around here and he has a song that you just reminded me of. The song is, There Are Many Ways To Say I Love You. AMANDA: Oh, I love that. ZAK: And this is an example of...find the thing that you care about or that you are good at or that you love and, like, use that for the greater good. AMANDA: Yes. Everyone has a role to play. ZAK:I hope you enjoyed this week as much as I have. Thank you so much, Amanda Alexander. If you haven't read her entire piece, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy, you must. It's at The Boston Globe. It's also linked in our show notes. As always I want to hear your advice. Give me a call at 844-935-BEST. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/ TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome back to my week-long series of advice with Amanda Alexander. AMANDA: The founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. We're lawyers support people's movements here in the city and who are fighting for a world without jails and prisons. ZAK: Earlier this year, Amanda wrote a letter to her young niece, Fiona. She wrote it in response to a question Fiona's mom posed to Amanda. How do you stay focused on Black joy and liberation? And how can I raise my child with that sense of possibility? Amanda thought a lot about those questions and came up with this beautiful letter, full of advice that was recently published in The Boston Globe. All week, I'm digging into that letter with Amanda and today we're gonna talk about one piece of advice which I find so vital. The advice is, admire ease, not just struggle. AMANDA: I try to admire our great movement builders not just for these moments of confrontation that are seared into our collective memory, but also for their ease. There's this photo that surfaced in the last few years of Rosa Parks doing yoga and there's the documentary of Toni Morrison that came out a couple years ago and there are just these images of her sitting by the water on the dock by her house. I loved learning in that documentary that Toni Morrison loves a good party and loves to dance. And there's a reason that that photo of James Baldwin and the Freedom Rider, Doris Jean Castle, the photo of them dancing together feels so good and it's because they're delighting in each other's freedom and their own. And so I think it's important to see and celebrate and create these moments of delight. To delight in each other's freedom and not just honor the struggle. ZAK: And I think it also helps to remind that we're all these three-dimensional people and we're not one thing. Like, Rosa Parks isn't just responsible for having catalyzed the Montgomery Bus Boycott, she's also, like, a lady that likes Yoga! You know, we're all these things at once. AMANDA: Yes. Yeah. Yes we are fighting for freedom in a very different world but right now we need to delight in each other's freedom. We need to dance. We need to make music. We need to stretch our bodies. Whatever it takes to feel free with each other. ZAK: Yeah. I just googled this photo of Rosa Parks practicing yoga. AMANDA: Right. There are several. I think they're in the Library of Congress. ZAK: She looks so cool, too. Like, cool and calm in that moment. AMANDA: Yes. Yes. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/ TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: My wife does this, a lot, and I don't know how she learned it. But often, she'll be the one in a room to say the thing that other people don't have the courage to say, myself included. And, Amanda Alexander who I'm featuring on the show all week believes that when we see someone do this...When we see someone speak up and act courageously, it's important to go up to them and them them for it. AMANDA: Yeah, I think back to...I'm a lawyer...and in law school there were these moments where it was often Black woman who would say what needed to be said, We had been talking about a case for 45-minutes and talking around the real issues of race or white supremacy or all of that and then there would be the person would just cut through it all and say what so many people were thinking and feeling and it being important to go over to that person, you know, or in the moment, in front of everyone, building on that comment so that it's something that's affirmed right there in-front of everybody else. And just standing alongside that person and I think that there can never be enough people who are saying what needs to be said and so, just affirming that courage when we see it and when we hear it. ZAK: Yeah, this should be taught in schools. Like, what an important life-skill this is, to affirm someone else's courage and to practice it yourself when you can. And we're not taught that. AMANDA: Yeah, it's a micro-thing and I think that I learned it from a friend of mine who is just really good at that and it was a law school friend who just modeled that really well and I saw the way that their, um, affirming that courage it made it ripple. You know? So, suddenly you have not just courageous individuals but a whole community of people who are emboldened by each other's courage. ZAK: Yeah. Yeah. Courage is contagious. AMANDA: Yeah. I mean I think it's really then creating a culture of courage. ZAK: All week on The Best Advice Show, I'm featuring Amanda's advice. She first collected it in the Boston Globe in a piece entitled, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy. This is part 3 of Amanda week and I'm excited to bring you two more episodes, tomorrow and Friday. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for thanking the brave ones among you. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander - https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/ TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Last summer Amanda Alexander and her friend Mo Connolly were at a protest together. It was led by students calling for Police free schools in Detroit and as they were leaving the rally, Mo asked Amanda... MO: In the wake of everything that's going on, how do you stay focused on joy and possibility and liberation? How can I raise Fiona with that sense of possibility? ZAK: Fiona is Mo's daughter. And though Amanda and Mo aren't actually sisters, Amanda is Fio's honorary aunt. And Mo's question got Amanda thinking a lot. She compiled her thoughts in a letter to Fiona. It was published in the Boston Globe recently and all week, Amanda and I are talking about it and the advice it contains. Like this...Define the future worth fighting for. AMANDA: So, this is one where I try to stay very clear on what is a question worth fighting for? What is at stake? I say in the letter that there are so many well meaning people in the world who would have you believe that the question of our day is how do we end cash bail? Or, how do we keep police from shooting black people? And I think the powerful thing that our movements have shown in the last few years is it's not about demanding scraps or the basics of what we think we can win but staying focused on what is the future that we're truly fighting for. Like, what does it actually gonna take for black people to thrive and be free and so I say it's not these other questions about cash bail or police shootings, it's the same question that freedom movements have posed for generations which is how do we expand black joy and liberation and ensure that all people on the planet can thrive? AMANDA: And lately I've been thinking of it in terms of, how can we have all the elders that we're supposed to have? I am tired of losing people in their 40s or 50s or 60s and I think it's going to take a lot for us to create the conditions where we can just delight in watching each other grow old, you know? I want to be 80 and 90 and watching each other. And I think if we stay focused on that vision and what it's gonna take in terms of the whole shift in society to get there, that to me is what it means to define the future that we're fighting for and it also means being able to define what victory is and isn't so that we know that we're not settling for something that's less than that. Or a vision that's too small. And so I shared in the letter to Fiona that, you know, Rosa Parks has been painted as an integrationist and she was always clear in her time that if wasn't about integration. That wasn't the point. It wasn't about getting to sit next to white men on the bus. The ultimate goal was to discontinue all forms of oppression against everyone who is weak and oppressed. And so when she was black listed down in Montgomery after the bus boycott, she couldn't find a job. Her husband couldn't find a job. She came up to Detroit and she spent the never several decades working on housing and economic development here in the city and building up things like the first Black-owned shopping center in the country in the early 1980s. She knew that the work was to cultivate Black freedom and to create the conditions that we would need for all us to thrive and it was simply about integrating the bus system. And I think it's that clarity of vision that probably kept her focus on the long haul of the struggle. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Amanda Alexander is the founding Executive Director of the Detroit Justice Center. How Black women have built movements and cultivated joy by Amanda Alexander https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/02/11/opinion/how-black-women-have-built-movements-cultivated-joy/ TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: One of Amanda's nieces is named Fiona, or Fio. And Fio is the inspiration for all the advice Amanda is gonna share this week. AMANDA: So this was last summer when people had taken to the streets in the wake of the calling of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and Tony McDade and Elijah McClain and so many people. And I had gone to a rally that was called by some brave, young organizers here in the city of Detroit and they were calling for police free schools. So they were demanding that all of the funding for police be cut by next here. And Mo and I were there with her daughter, Fiona, who is now almost 2 years-old and we were leaving the rally and Mo turned to me and just said, you know, in the face of everything that's going on. All of the misery and trauma and everything that we're up against, how do you stay focused on joy and possibility and liberation? And the second part to her question was, how can I raise Fiona with that sense of possibility? And I certainly can't give parenting advice. I'm not a parent. I wouldn't presume to do that. But I did think there might be some things I could share with Fiona directly. So I decided after giving her what felt like a throwaway answer, I promised to give it more thought and sat down and spent some time with old journals thinking back on what are some of these practices that feel second-nature to me now that are so part of how I live. What is there that I could pass on to Fiona as she's coming up? And what could be useful to her and to folks in her generation. ZAK: Amanda's letter to Fiona was first published in the Boston Globe on February 11th. The headline is, How Black Woman Have Built Movements and Cultivated Joy. And so all week Amanda and I are gonna dig in to that letter and talk about some of the advice that she shared with Fiona which I think is also very relevant to you and me. Today's advice, practice your freedom. AMANDA: So this one I wanted to let Fio know that even-though we are fighting to be free, we also have to practice our freedom now. Most weeks I'll take a tech Sabbath so I just put my phone away and laptop away and I sit down in the morning at my dining room table and I write out a list and at the top of the page I write, TODAY I WANT. And then I listen. I want to make it clear this is not a to-do list. This isn't a list of things I should do but it's a list of things that if I really listen deeply to my gut and to my intuition, it's what I want. Today I want to be by the water or I want to take a walk through tall trees or I want to hear my friend's voice. And it keeps me in the habit of being guided by my intuition and making sure that I know what I want and I know what it feels like to practice my freedom and making sure there's a distinction between that and the imposition of someone else's will. And I got this idea after reading Lorraine Hansberry's list she had written back in 1960. She would write a list of her likes and hates. Things like, I love Mahalia Jackson's music. I like my husband most of the time. I like dressing up. And what stuck me was how well she knew her interior world. As a Black, queer woman in the 50s and 60s and I just really admired that and I wondered, do I know myself that way? Do I know how I feel most free? So I wanted to challenge myself to do that every week and to stay in that practice and to know what feels good to me. How I want to move through the day and by knowing that I can then communicate what I feel, what I want and what I need and it helps me show up in my relationships better. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kamala Puligandla is the author of the novella, You Can Vibe Me On My FemmePhone and writes The Dyke Kitchen Column at Autostraddle. TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday. KAMALA: I'm Kamala Puligandla. I'm a writer. I do a lot of things but it usually revolves around writing. ZAK: Kamala writes a column called The Dyke Kitchen and I knew I needed to talk to her after I read her piece, The Art of Salad. KAMALA: Yeah. I don't know, I love salads because I think the possibilities are endless and I think all the things that I might want to eat when I'm hungry...If I don't really know what I want, all the things I could want will be in a salad. ZAK: For people who don't feel like free-form salad musicians, how do you think one can practice becoming a better salad improviser? KAMALA: I think part of it is having a bunch of stuff ready. I always have citrus at my house. Partially cause I'm in LA because you can turn it into a dressing or you can put it in whole and it will just drip its juices in, which is one of my favorite lazy salad methods. Put a bunch of wet stuff in your salad and then you don't have to make a dressing. That's kind of one of my cheats for salads. ZAK: I consider my mom a salad artist and I think that's where I get a lot of my chops from. Pun intended I guess. Chops. Like, for people who aren't confident in making salads or think that salads are boring, how can you help them feel more empowered in making a delicious salad that's actually gonna be satisfying. KAMALA: I think that people have this notion that salads are gonna be healthy and I think if you discard that, you're more likely to have a better salad. So, the thing is it's going to be healthy if you're eating vegetables. But you still have to use fat or else it tastes terrible and also a friend of mine told me that you have to have fat in order to digest the raw ingredients, so I was like, ok, great! So there's that and you can also put spices and flavors in to your salad. It doesn't have to be a bare, acetic salad. I put chicken in there and I'll grill my chicken with fish sauce and curry paste and other things like that, so that it's definitely not a boring salad. I think all the things you might like in a non-salad food, you can have in a salad food too. Sometimes I put the seasoning that I would put in my beans in my salad dressing. And things like that where I'm just like, what is some other taste that I like and then I'll put it in a salad. ZAK: This is such good salad therapy. KAMALA: I'm glad! Wait, what are your favorite salads? ZAK: Oh, last week I made a chicken shawarma salad where the dressing was tahini. KAMALA: That sounds so good. ZAK: With pickled cucumbers and pickled radishes. Um, when your grocery shopping, do you think about the salad that you're eventually gonna make? KAMALA: Sometimes I do. A lot of times I don't. The way that I grocery shop is like, ok, I sort of set my fridge up like someone's deli bar at the store except for it's in my refrigerator. So, I'll be like, ok, here's a couple vegetable I'm gonna cook a particular way that's like, flavorful but I could always add more to it and then I also get a couple of proteins that I'm gonna do something do and then it's like, ok, do you want to have it with noodles, do you want to have it with rice? Do you want to just put them together? Do you want to put that in an egg dish? ZAK: You have them prepped already? KAMALA: Yeah, so one of my favorite things to do is just to blanch broccoli and blanch green beans and then they're pretty much ready to eat but I could cook them again if I wanted to or I could just throw them into things, like if I'm making instant noodles, I could put broccoli in there. I also roast eggplant a lot and that's one of my favorite salad ingredients. So I just have a little thing in the fridge of whatever vegetables I bought that week. I guess I'm not putting a lot of raw ingredients in the salad except for my greens. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greg Fox (@gdfx) is composer, drummer, teacher and coach. He was last on the show talking about the 2 of 3 rule in episode #129. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: You might remember Greg Fox from episode 129 of this show. He talked about the 2 of 3 rule. The idea is you need two of the following three things for a project that you're thinking about to be worthwhile. GREG: And those three things are, good hang, good product and three, good pay. ZAK: Today Greg, who is a composer, drummer, teacher and coach is back with some more advice and an exercise he teaches his drumming students. GREG: In my teaching, the first exercise I teach everybody is an exercise of just spending five-minutes doing single strokes while focusing on the breath. ZAK: Single strokes. Just left, right, left right, left, right. This is something you can try at home. You don't need to be a drummer to practice this. All you have to do while you're doing left, right, left, right is just to notice when your thoughts start to drift. GREG: And then bringing them back to the breath. And that practice is not about how much of this five-minutes can I spend fully focused on my breathing as some sort of measurement of success or failure. It's about those moments where you notice, oh, I'm thinking about this thing that happened yesterday or I'm thinking about this thing I'm excited or anxious about that's gonna happen tomorrow and say, oh, I am thinking about this thing. Now I'm focusing back on my breath. And that's the exercise, right? Coming back. And so if you're doing that while you're drumming, right...I am drumming and then the thoughts start to drift, I'm over here thinking about when I was in my car yesterday and had this argument with somebody...Oh wait a minute. I'm drumming. Come back here. It's not about perfectly always being in this levitated moment. It's just reminding yourself to check in and remember, oh, I'm just in this body right here in this moment. And what am I doing right now? Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. --- Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow --- Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better. https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9 --- Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at [email protected] this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices