Weirdly Helpful (formerly The Best Advice Show)

Tiffani Rozier is a chef, writer, chaser of curiosities and host of the podcast, Afros + Knives To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey pal, thanks for joining me for another edition of Food Friday. TIFFANI: My name is Tiffani Rozier, I am what I refer to as a semi-retired chef because my podiatrist only wants it that way right now. I'm a food writer and I host and produce a podcast called the Afros and Knives podcast. ZAK: You step into your kitchen with a very specific vision in mind. You saw this recipe on the internet and you want to replicate perfectly. Well, that is one way to do it. But Tiffani says there's another way. TIFFANI: So if you show up to your kitchen prepared to practice the act of cooking then you kind of leave the idea of failure and mistakes behind as a dictatorship and you just lean into, like, hey this might not come out the way I had originally planned. This might not look like the picture I saw. But in the end no one's tasting this but you or maybe your family and if it's inedible you throw it out, you start again. And so with cooking it's like, connect with the food, connect with yourself. Or connect with your family history. There's just so many things you can be doing when you cook and it's just like, you can learn more about your family history, you can learn more about yourself and your temperament and your ability to wait for something. Cause waiting for yeasted dough to rise can be a thing and if you don't wait long enough you don't get the result you want. If you wait too long, it falls apart. Learning how to have a certain inner-sense of timing and then on top of that you need to stay curious and curiosity for me is kind of like the center belief of my life. People's favorite meals come from that. You're tasking that experience. The experience of a person coming into their kitchen, practicing the art of cooking and using a tremendous amount of curiosity and imagination. ZAK: You're surprising me in one way but you're also reaffirming some core philosophies here. Like, in art we talk about the process is more important than the product. In travel we talk about the journey is more important than the destination and in cooking I always thought of it as an exception. No, it's about the finished thing. But you're saying no, this IS about process over recipe or end result. TIFFANI: Exactly. Getting people to feel good in the kitchen and making them curious about what's possible. It's just like, there's so many ramifications. And so for me I'm like, go back to your kitchen and be curious. If I can tell you nothing else about cooking...go back to your kitchen and stay curious because if you're curious you will chase the information. You will get on Youtube and watch someone cut through an onion so you know what a small dice, or a mince or a brunoise looks like. You will go to a video to watch how somebody sautés a steak perfectly every single time. You will chase the information because we pursue the things that are important to us. For me it's always a win. Stay curious. Be curious. You buy a whole chicken and the first question you should ask is, what can I do with this? 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

Elia Einhorn is a host at Sonos Radio and Pitchfork Radio and editor of the new zine, Sober 21 To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Quick warning. Today's episode contains a hardy amount of swearing. ELIA: Hey, I'm Elia Einhorn. I wear a lot of hats. I host Sonos Radio, Pitchfork Radio. I hosted the Talkhouse podcast for years. My newest project is Sober 21. It's a compendium that just came out via the Creative Independent as a beautiful zine and online for free and it's these 21 sober musicians sharing crucial tips and hints and advice for musicians who are thinking about getting sober. Maybe sober curious or are newly sober and are afraid that their career is over. We put it together to say it is no. Shit is about to get way the fuck better! ZAK: A lot of us are getting back out into the world and it feels really good. And for the sober among us, Elia has some advice about making that transition smooth and healthy. ELIA: My advice is this. Don't walk around a bar with a pint glass full of Diet Coke. Get your drink in a rocks glass. Get whatever you're having. A Diet Coke. For me, it's a cranberry and soda with lime but get it in a rocks glass. And there's a wonderful piece in Sober 21 about this by Jen Champion and she titled it, Soda Water with a Lime But Will You Put it in a Rocks Glass" and it's something that in sober communities of people who are out at shows, are out at clubs, are playing concerts, we just know this. It's just this implicit experience. Put it in a rocks glass then you don't have some asshole asking you why are you not drinking. But really, why aren't you really drinking! Come on, man. What's the deal? You know that drunk person who's pushing too far. You can do it at parties too. I find you're either at somebody's house where they're putting out glasses if they're feeling a little fancier. Or, there's like a red plastic cup essentially or the equivalent. The Solo cup. Don't drink out of your can of Diet Coke. Don't drink out of your can of Diet Coke. Don't drink out of your gatorade. Put your Gatorade in the plastic cup and drink out of that and you'll almost definitely not have to answer the question all night. And also, a little bit of an addendum; refresh your drink yourself. Cause people are so thoughtful, if they see your drink's getting low they'll grab one for you. Get ahead of that. Refresh it yourself and always have enough in there that you're like, oh, I'm good. Thanks. It's amazing how much of the 3rd degree that totally gets ahead of. I am staunchly pro people drinking when they can drink safely. It's an awesome thing. And I want to say that because I feel like people have this idea that people who are sober are like, oh man. Fuck these guys that are drinking. Absolutely not. It's awesome. If I could drink normally I'd drink all the time which is how I know I'm an alcoholic. And I say that because what I'm about to say next is it's usually the person who's a little but too drunk who doesn't understand the social cues around this. It's like, why aren't you having a real drink? Cait O'Riordan from The Pogues talks about this in Sober 21. Why aren't you having a proper drink cause she lives in Dublin so she deals with this shit all the fucking time. It's just not worth having that conversation with everyone you happen to come across. A lot of people got sober during the pandemic. AA meetings are flooded with new people. A lot of people hit their low, hit their bottom during the pandemic and found help, thankfully and now they're re-emerging and doing things in a whole new way. Getting sober is not supposed to be about being boring and sitting around the house watching Netflix. You're supposed to be out in the mix living your life to the fullest, I'd say. You almost didn't get to have a life. Now you to have it. Fucking live 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

Dearest Listener, starting this week, I'm going to put the show out Monday, Wednesday and Friday instead of every weekday. Making TBAS is my favorite thing right now but I have other work responsibilities that require more of my attention. I hope you understand and I thank you so much for your on-going support. Love, z 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

Laura Herberg is a reporter in Detroit and the host/creator of COMPLETE ME. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: This episode is a long time coming. 15-months coming, in fact. That's when I recorded this interview originally. I've been holding it because for the most part we haven't been going to many event together, which is starting to change, thank God. And that's what today's advice is about, at least in part. LAURA: So, Zak. You know that I have trouble getting things done. So much so that I created a whole podcast around that idea. ZAK: It's an absolutely wonderful show. It's called, Complete Me. LAURA: But one thing I'm really proud of which I'm going to give advice on today is the fact that I even launched the podcast in the first place. So for people out there who have a creative project that they've been working on or even just an idea, actually, that they really want to put out in the world. My advice and this is what I did with my podcast is just book the launch event now. Even if, maybe it's not the final, final...the film is finished or whatever event. Maybe it's your showing of where you're at so far. But book it now, tell your friends and don't back out of it no matter what and I think that's the kick in the pants that a lot of people need to get something done. ZAK: I think you're absolutely right. I mean, speaking personally. Deadlines are the only way I'll get anything done. So I think that's brilliant. I feel like, it doesn't even have to be a creative project. You don't have to be an artist or "creative person" to do this. I was thinking, like if you have been meaning to clean out your basement for 3 years, you could plan a house party and send out the invites and then you better clean that shit up before the guests arrive. LAURA: Yes, plan a clean basement party! I love that! 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

Aaron Mondry is a journalist and salad maven. PAUSING WITH AARON MONDRY. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday. And today, we're gonna discuss a long held, deeply felt belief of mine. You don't need to buy salad dressing. AARON: I take 2 parts oil, 1 part vinegar and put them in a glass jar. A reused jam jar is a great option. And I shake it up. That's the really, really basic blueprint for a salad dressing. But there's lots of ways you can vary it and mix it up and make it interesting and cater it to a slaw, some greens, Asian radishes. Whatever you want. But that's just the basic blueprint. It's so easy. ZAK: Yeah, I love it. What's the vinaigrette that you make the most frequently. AARON: I'd say I do 2 parts olive oil, 1 part lemon juice, fresh squeezed, of course. Finely mice some garlic. Maybe finely mince a shallot or an onion. Just a little bit. Salt. Pepper. G-d just that is so delicious. It's so good. But you can add a teaspoon of mustard, a little bit of yogurt. If you want to get fancy you can add some black garlic if you have any. It takes 5 maybe 10 minutes. It tastes fantastic. It lasts in the fridge forever and it tastes better than any store-bough dressing you can get your hands on. I guarantee it. ZAK: Yeah. I agree. Before I started making my own dressings my fridge would have like a collection of store-bought dressings that would never get finished. And they would just be all coagulate-y and this frees you from that burden. AARON: Yes. Frees up fridge space and impresses friends, strangely. They're like where'd you get this dressing. Oh, I just made it. Really!? ZAK: Yeah, I feel like you just have to do it once and then you'll be doing it yourself. AARON: Yeah. ZAK: You person at home who hasn't made their own dressing yet. AARON: Yeah you. Why haven't you? ZAK: So you do lemon juice and balsamic vinegar? AARON: I'll typically just do lemon juice but there are tons of great vinegar options including balsamic vinegar, rice wine vinegar, red wine vinegar, sherry. They all have their own unique taste obviously but I just like lemon juice the best, I think. ZAK: Our house dressing of late has been olive oil, balsamic vinegar, honey and horseradish mustard. AARON: That sounds really yummy. And thank you for mentioning honey cause it is good to add a little sweetener too cause it can be really sharp without it so some honey or maple syrup will balance it really nicely. ZAK: Yeah. The shaking is also very satisfying I find. AARON: Yeah. Sometimes I'll just take a salad dressing out of the fridge and just shake it and not use it and just put it back. ZAK: Is that true? AARON: No, it's not true. Laughter. But the shaking is satisfying. 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

Tad Davis produces stories in Detroit. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I got this voice memo from my buddy, Tad, the other day. TAD: I think to sum it in one sentence is to try to be more...when you're making things or trying to come up with new ideas or working on a creative project that you're excited about buy maybe are stuck and don't know where to go with it is try to unlock your inner-child. I think I've seen that with a lot of creators that I'm envious of. When I hear the things they say, they're so introspective and honest in a way that a little kid could be and maybe not in the sense of the material that they're using but the sense of how they're thinking about it. That there's a vulnerability. That they're not afraid to say what they're thinking and try things that might be out of the norm or uncomfortable as an adult. As I've grown I've just kind of realized that, that the best way for me to make better things or think in a way that is unconventional is to be more playful...to bring out that child-like wonder that kids have and use that for my benefit. It's kind of advice that I need as I'm making things. Ok. Thanks, Zak. Bye. 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

Max Linksy the host of a new podcast, 70 Over 70. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey, it's Zak. You're listening to The Best Advice Show and today we're gonna talk about something that I've been wanting to talk a lot more about. We're gonna talk about endings. MAX: My name is Max Linsky. I'm the host of a new podcast. It's called 70 Over 70 and it's from Pineapple Street Studios which is a podcast company I work at. ZAK: Max is gonna invoke some advice his dad gave him at a critical juncture in his professional life. MAX: I was leaving a job and it was the first job that I ever had where my leaving was gonna be a problem for people I was working with. It was gonna make their lives harder? ZAK: Because they were gonna have to pick up the slack you were leaving? MAX: Yeah. There were some things based around things at the time I could do at the place and that was gonna be hard. It wasn't just gonna be more work. It was gonna get worse for a little bit after I left before it was gonna get better. And people were frustrated that I was leaving. And I don't like letting people down and so I was really torqued about it because I knew it was the right thing for me to go and I could't figure out how to both do the right thing and leave and not let people down and I did what I always do when I'm stuck in that way and called him and tried to talk it through with him and he said this thing which stuck with me was that he thinks that how you leave is as important as you how you start. I found that to be a really powerful idea and one that I never thought of. I think we put so much energy into first impressions and so much energy into how we start a job or start a relationship or start a friendship or start, even an interview...I mean I do all these interviews and there's so much energy in how it begins and how we present ourselves and what that means about how it's gonna go. And I think we punt on endings a lot, you know. And in part because they end later than they should have and so feelings have sort of crept in and started I think to kind of poison things and one of the things that was helpful about that idea for me...I mean it helped me in that moment and Iw was able to see it from their vantage point a little more. I stayed a little bit longer than I wanted to but I felt really good leaving. Like, I made a goal to leave feeling good about how I left and that really changed the urgency with which I had to leave, you know? And I think if had just been like, I know the right thing is to go. I can't do this perfectly. Like, rip the band-aid off. I just think it's a thing that would have bothered me going forward. And the other piece of it is that it would have changed my impression of the whole time. And that's the other piece of this that I think is really significant and I think it's really true with relationships. It's true with friendships. And I think particularly when things end badly or end because they need to end, there's a tendency to only remember that last stage. And I think that's a pretty toxic thing, actually. And it's worth investing in ended it well so that all of the strong parts of that relationship or that time or that job or whatever...you get to hold on to those and not batch 'em in with the shitty end when everyone was being their smallest self. And how you leave is as important as how you start. Just that phrase from him in that moment really flipped the way I was thinking about it and the terms of the choice. 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

Andy Kushnir is a writer, landscaper, cook, dad and hubby living in LA To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Hey, it's Zak. It's The Best Advice Show and today we're gonna think in the long term and change our behavior in the short term. ANDY: I grew up playing sports and it occurred to me as I get older and my body continues to break down and get worse and worse by the minute that I can't do this forever and I played soccer growing up and you go and look at a soccer field and there aren't 60 year-olds running around and in the pandemic I struggled with depression and I started to take stock of the older men in my life. None of which I would qualify or describe as happy people and I thought, what's that about? Now, all the older woman in my life are thriving. They are in a million clubs. They're doing a million things. They have a vibrant social life and they seem to be doing very well. And, you know, I started to think, a lot of the older men I know are sitting around and watching MSNBC all day and they don't have anything to do. They don't have a hobby. They don't have a place to go. They don't work anymore. Their whole lives were for work and making money and I so I need to start developing a way to be happy that isn't related to work. So, I began cooking and taking cooking very seriously in my house. We moved during the pandemic from a little apartment in Los Angeles proper and we moved to the valley which is like the suburbs of LA and we got a little house that has a yard and I've taken to re-doing the full yard and that brings me a lot of happiness. I've got all of North Hollywood helping me. All my neighbors have lent me tools which has helped foster community as well through this hobby and being outside has made me happier. Its helped with my depression and its helped me talk about things that aren't just work and honestly I think the whole experience is an exercise in anti-Capitalism. Just finding happiness where I am with what I'm doing and not thinking about how will I pay for blank or where am I in my career. 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. Kira Newman is a physician and scientist who studies poop all day. AVOIDING CATASTROPHE WITH BRENDEN MURPHY To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I took a walk this weekend with a gastroenterologist friend of mine. So, of course we're gonna talk about poop. If you could tell everybody who poops one thing, what would you tell them? KIRA: I think if I could just tell them one thing it would be that there's no right number of bowel movements to have. I think a lot of people get sold this bill of goods that like, you need to have one perfect bowel movement a day. It should look like a snake made out of toothpaste and if you don't do that then there's something wrong with you. But really and truly there are lots of people who poop more than that, less than that...different consistencies and that may just be there normal. ZAK: That's gonna put so many people at ease. That's gonna put so many butts at ease. KIRA: Hopefully. There's definitely stuff we tell people to watch for in their poop. Blood is not a normal thing that should be in poop. Black tar-like poop can sometimes be blood thats been digested. These are things that I want people to know that they should be concerned about. But most poop most of the time is just a sign that the body is doing what its supposed to do. And that's a wonderful thing. ZAK: Can you introduce yourself? Tell me who you are and what you do. KIRA: I'm Kira Newman. I'm a physician. I'm towards the end of my training for gastroenterology. So I study poop all day everyday, talk to people about their poop and help them problem solve when their poop isn't doing what its supposed to do. KIRA: I wish that people paid a little more attention to their poop sometimes cause I think that people don't give it the appreciation that it deserves. ZAK: How do you mean? KIRA: We spend all this time thinking about...you talk about evolution and the magical evolution that gave us eyes that are capable of seeing. But, we all have these guts that are capable of taking all kinds of things from the world and turning them into nutritious things that build an entire human being and nobody appreciates it. Take a moment to be, instead of grossed out, be excited and be like, wow, my body just did something really cool! My body took all the stuff I ate and broke it down and turned it into fuel for me. That's pretty rad. So I hope that people can appreciate it a little but more and just think like, hey, my gut did this for me today and it does it everyday. It doesn't ask for a lot. It doesn't look like the prettiest organ on your body but it's pretty marvelous. ZAK:Thank gut! KIRA: Yeah. Thank gut! ZAK: Thanks, Kira. KIRA: You're welcome. 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

Zoë Komarin cooks fun, gorgeous, healthy, delicsious food @ ZOEFOODPARTY Zoë was last on the show talking about the superiority of spoons. TRANSCRIPT: Zak: It's so nice to be with you for another addition of Food Friday. Before I get started though, I've been doing some soul searching about this show and I have some big questions about what I want this show to become and what you want this show to become and I want to put together a Zoom call with a handful of you who consider yourselves dedicated listeners...people who love the show a lot and listen a lot. I just want to ask you some questions. If you want to get in on this, I would really appreciate it. Email me at ZAK@ BESTADVICE.SHOW. I will be forever in your debt. Ok, on to today's Food Friday advice. Zoë: Hi, my name is Zoë of Zoë Food Party. I'm a chef and a food curator and in general I have a lot of food ideas and I have sticky hands. Zak: Get ready for a very simple, very effective refrigerator trick. Zoë: I can honestly say it has consistently provided me with a much easier time quickly making myself a meal than any other trick I can think of and that is to always keep a rotating bowl or box or plate of the odds and ends that you're cooking with. In your fridge, ready to grab. And what I mean by that is, every time you cut half an onion for a pasta sauce you have this other half. Or every time you use a couple slices of tomato and you've got a bunch of tomato left. All of these odds and ends I feel like people just put them back in their fridge in a haphazard way. Something's on the top shelf. Half a lemon is in the door. Maybe you wrap your onion in saran wrap because of the smell. Whatever it is, they all need to land in a box. And the box should be clear and the bowl should be clear so you can see in there. And every time you open your fridge and think, oh, I'm hungry and I need to make some food and I don't have a thought out plan. The first thing I do is I pull the bowl or box out and land that on my counter because I'm starting with what I have...what's already in use...what's in flux. I've got half and onion and a carrot and a bit of tomato. If I'm making a sandwich, those should all go in it. It just helps me...It's a catalyst for creating something. It's a starting point. Zak: And for wasting less. It's so great. The amount of avocado halves that browned in my life. Zoë: That's the saddest thing I've ever heard in my whole life. What's sadder than not getting the full delight of a whole avocado. Zak: This is fantastic. What's something you recently made out of odds and ends? Zoë: Breakfast. I reached for this scrap bowl and in it were half a zucchini, some red onion. We have some spring garlic from the farmer's market that we store in the fridge. There were some mushrooms. All these little bits and pieces that we just hadn't used up the day before that landed in this bowl and we quickly threw those in a cast-iron pan, got a garlic and salt and chili flake on there and then made some avocado toast and piled it on there and it was absolutely delightful and you know, sometimes it just doesn't matter. Like, you can make a curated avocado toast with exactly what you're imagining should go on one or you can just take whatever you have in the fridge and make one and it's delightful. Zak: What's it gonna be? Curated avocado toast or whatever avocado toast. I'm going for the latter everytime. Thank you, Zoë. If you don't follow Zoë on Instagram, you must. She puts out amazing videos. You'll learn a lot. You'll chuckle. @ZoeFoodParty. Like I said earlier, if you want to participate in an interactive feedback session with me, email at ZAK @ BESTADVICE.SHOW. And thank you in advance! 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

Laura Solomon is an attorney dedicated to providing specialized, but affordable, legal services to nonprofit, charitable organizations, foundations, business leagues, political action committees, and philanthropic individuals. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I'm Jewish and in our tradition we have this thing called tzedakah. That's Hebrew word that translates to righteousness. But really tzedakah is this ethical obligation we have. And one of the core tenants of this obligation is that we're supposed to give ten-percent or our income to charity each year or to people or organizations in need. The ten-percent principle is something I heard my whole life. But one thing I never learned, at least explicitly, is how to give. And that's where today's advice, from Laura Soloman comes in. LAURA: So, I'm a lawyer. I have a law firm devoted to forming and representing charitable organizations and working with philanthropic individuals to achieve their charitable missions philanthropic visions. I think people benefit from having philanthropic mentors, role-models. I was blessed in growing up with a grandmother who was a survivor of the holocaust who would get her reparation check from Germany and we would sit down at her kitchen table in Washington Heights, New York and write check after check until it was all gone for charitable purposes. And she had a catch-phrase. In German she'd say, "the last dress has no pockets," meaning you don't hoard it. You don't keep it for yourself. Give freely with a full-heart and give now and so I think finding a philanthropist of a generous person that you look up to as a role model can be incredibly helpful. ZAK: I love that. And so you had your grandmother as your philanthropic mentor or at least one of them. What are some questions that I might ask my philanthropic mentor once I find them? LAURA: How have your priorities changed over time? Have you always been passionate about the environment or last year were you more interested in addressing racial disparities? I think it's important to understand that, you know, our thoughts and feeling change over time and therefore our priorities and therefore our philanthropic priorities. ZAK: What's the objective of having the mentor? LAURA: I think you can learn to be good at philanthropy just like you can learn to be good at something else. ZAK: Like, what do you think makes a compatible mentor/mentee relationship in this dynamic? LAURA: Somebody who's open to talking about it. Not feeling as through money or philanthropy is a taboo subject but one that should be part of our everyday lives and part of the conversation. You know, one of the things I think COVID has shown us is that we all have this shared vulnerability. But we can also all share in the repair. 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

Andy Eninger is an improviser, writer, facilitator and dog dad. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show where everyday, I invite a different guest on to offer one piece of advice. Today, we're gonna talk about moving through grief in our own unique ways with Andy. ANDY: My father passed away from COVID-related caused a couple months ago. ZAK: Oh man. I'm sorry. ANDY: Yeah. It's been rough on top of a pretty rough year for him and certainly for the family. I'm also in such a busy phase right now. And I'm like, you can't busy yourself through something like this. And so, I just had to figure out something new and someone recommended, well, think of a ritual. Have a ritual. And so now, I have created this box and I put in this box different things that remind me of him and different aspects of him. A t-shirt that he gave me when I was a little kid that I still somehow have, a ceramic chicken because he hoarded his mom's ceramic chickens after she passed away. Some other little trinkets and I pull out this box, I light a candle and I just breathe ten times and then whatever comes up, comes up. But just that ritual has been profound in just letting me move through it and be really aware of it and be mindful of actually letting myself do that. Because I know on the days that I don't do it, I'm a crab. I'm just terrible. ZAK: So this is a daily thing? ANDY: Yeah, I do it everyday, every other day. I've replaced my meditation with doing this because it's such a focus right now. ZAK: So how did you figure out that this would be a good ritual for you? ANDY: Trial and error. I wasn't sure. I was like, I don't know what a ritual is. When I think of ritual I think of going to church and something huge and based in history. And just simply thinking, well I can make up what it is was completely outside of my experience. I don't know, I'll put together a box and put some things in that box. I don't know what to do with it. I'll just breathe. And I discovered that just that time with those things and those memories of those things also bring is so profound in letting me bring those things to the surface rather than having the be underneath. Here's my little box. I'm gonna use this box for the next ritual. So the next thing. I'm gonna do one thing at a time right now. As I move through this and when it's time to take on the next thing, I want to use this same box and I want to start thinking what the next process that I want to move through...the goal that I'm working toward. But put those signs and symbols into it and use it as a thing that I can return to. Light the candle, put on some music and assemble the elements that allow me to move through that. I think we often feel like ritual has to be something that's handed to us but I think that what's needed in a moment actually lives inside of us too. 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

Adriana Lozada is the creator and host of The Birthful podcast as well as a working doula, a childbirth and postpartum educator and a sleep consultant. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Adriana is here today to teach us something that I am so incredibly uncomfortable with. Asking again. ADRIANA: This was year's ago and my husband and I were going to the Apple store because both our earbuds had busted. He had an iphone. I had an ipod so his, they were like, here's your replacement, no problem. For me, it was like, you need to make an appointment with a genius. There was no appointments. And it was hours wait. So I asked the person helping us, couldn't they just give it to me. You know that's what's gonna happen at the end. My husband just got it. Can't you just give me one again. He was like, well, I don't know...policy. And I said, can you ask the manager. I'm a doula. So it comes from advocacy and making your voice and needs heard in a very conversational and curious way. Like, why not? Lets just explore this. Is it possible. Not, I'm demanding something to happen. So, that person went and asked the manager and came back and said, no, the manager said no. And I looked up and I said, can you ask them again? ZAK: Whoa. ADRIANA: And of course he laughed and my husband's looking at me like, what!? And he's like, sure. I'll ask again. I'll humor you crazy lady. And he went and came back with my earbuds. hahaha. And he's like, here ya go. And so that was very much the epitome of the ask again moment. But, it's a moment that I've definitely honed in with all I do with my doula clients. Understanding that circumstances can change and asking again does require you to put yourself out there and it does require some vulnerability because you already have the answer you didn't want. If you ask again you might get the one you want. ZAK: My fear is by asking again, people are gonna think I'm a diva or something. How can you give people like me the confidence to actually ask again? ADRIANA: The key point there is you do need to put your ego aside. The outcome doesn't reflect to you or who you are. And I think that also comes from...I'm originally from Venezuela so my other mother tongue is Spanish and there you've got two different words for the verb, to be. And you have ser and estar. And one (ser) is you are. A condition that isn't gonna change. Like, I am a human. I will always be a human. But the other one is estar. It's a condition that is depending on how the moment is. I am cold. That's not who I am. I am cold right now. So, I think having that flexibility in your brain of this doesn't define me has been helpful in being able to navigate that asking again. And then from being a doula for so many years, I get to have the unique perspective of being able to go to different hospitals, work with different providers at home, at schedule cesarian, unmedicated births...The whole gamut and I see one provider might come up or a nurse and say, no, we need to do this and I know just last week in this same hospital down the hall with different providers, we did something different. And so knowing that things can be done in many different ways. There is that strength inside me of, well, I know it can be done differently. Lets see if we can make it different 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

Ned Spector dance, sings and inspires from Metro-Detroit. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST listen to COUNTER PROGRAMMING! TRANSCRIPT: NED: I'm Ned Specktor. I'm 40 years-old. I just really stand for positivity, optimism and good energy. I feel like my thing that i've been given is energy and I want to share that. I want to build a platform for good. I want to light people up. No matter what situation I get into, I'm just trying to bring good energy to it in a very, very genuine way. When I watch Ned's videos on Instagram. It makes me want to get up and do aerobics. So, here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna cue this music (electro-pop music begins) and as we listen to his advice, if you wanna do some jumping jacks, I'm not gonna stop ya. NED: My best advice is, as fast possible in your life and even if it's later in your life...but man, like, fight for the time to bring your passion to life. If you said, what do you stand for, I'm on a mission to get people plugged into why they're here and I just feel like it gets buried under bills and fear and jobs and everything but, man, I don't care if it's at night, on the weekends, in the morning, please schedule time to work on the thing that lights you up the most, period, end of story. I feel like the world would be so happy even if you're going to a job that's 9-5, maybe there's a creative way you can bring it into your job but if you know even going into that job, if you know Tuesday nights from 7-8:30, that's my time to work on my passion project. Like, you're ok with the BS that happens. You just know, you know there's something else going on here for me. I'm cool. I'm gonna honor where I'm at like Danny Johnson says, prosper where you're planted. But man, please schedule time to work on your passion. I just feel like we all have a gift. As corny as it sounds. But I feel like we're more than a 9-5 and I think we should honor that. Do great. But please just do it. Yeah, and what I so appreciate about your framing of it is, it really only takes 10-minutes a week or a minute a day. You don't have to quit your job and move to LA. NED: And I will say that. Cause sometimes I get a little radical. I'm like black or white. We've gotta quit our job and go do this. And I've learned to live in the grey a little bit. Ok, cool. I'm working on this live show. This motivational musical we're gonna bring to the dance floor and it's literally, dude, it has literally taken me 6-years. Like legitimately its taken me 6-years because A) insecurity and B) sometimes I can only work on it once a week. But there's a great book called The Compound Effect. Small behaviors practiced consistently over a long period of time produce massive results. Brick by brick. Drop it in the bucket, drop it in the bucket. Like, schedule it. Time Ferris, great podcast, I'm sure you're familiar...he's like, if it's not on the schedule it's not real. And it's so true. You're never gonna be like, oh, I have an extra 90-minutes. Not gonna happen. So, schedule the time for your passion. 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

Erin is the Minister of Communications for the Society for the Advancement of the Crush Agenda. MAY 7TH IS INTERNATIONAL TELL YOUR CRUSH DAY! TRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Yes, I know that's Food Friday but it's a national holiday and we must observe. ERIN: Hi Erin. I'm the Minister of Communications for the Society for the Advancement of the Crush Agenda, a mostly fictional organization that runs a very real holiday, International Tell Your Crush Day. ZAK: When you're talking about crushes. Is it specially romantic of not necessarily. ERIN: Yeah, not necessarily. I think we all have that connotation and that model of crush can help you know what the feeling is. Like, is this a crush or is it not? You know when you have...sometimes we call it sparklies...that whatever the physical feeling is that goes with that intellectual pining for someone. Yeah, it can be a friend crush. It can be someone you appreciate a lot. There's a lot of room here. We're not too big on specifics and exact rules. ZAK: Yeah. And so what are you big on? ERIN: We're big on knowing that people can't read your mind. That's a big premise of good communication in general I think. We all kind of go around thinking...well if they knew they wouldn't have done that thing. I think we assume that our intentions are clear and that our experiences are clear and they're not and so we're big on, if you want somebody to know something, tell them. And so, we think the world is better when people get to hear that they're loved and they're noticed and a valued part of your community and your world. ZAK: I can think of what it sounds like to tell someone you want to be romantically involved with tah you're interested in them. But how might it work for platonic friendships and people in your life? ERIN: We really encourage people to reach into their own creativity and their own thoughtfulness and to figure out what the message delivery needs to be for their particular situation. There's also two categories. There's the people you're gonna tell, I have a crush on you. And that could sound like, hey, I just wanted you to know that I love it when we both show up in the same places and it always makes me so excited if I know you're going to the meeting I'm going to. If you ever want to get ice-cream, let me know. Like, that could be a basic crush tell. There's also people you shouldn't tell you have a crush on. Whether it's your boss or someone you're gonna have to see everyday and it might make things super awkward. But, if you want to celebrate the day, please join and tell those people, you've been my teacher for the last five years and everything you share fills me with excitement for the work that I do in the world and I can't thank you enough. There's so many different ways to do it. I'm gonna use this crush day to tell someone that I had a a really sweet dream they were in. Like I don't even know if I have a crush on them. But in the dream it was so nice being in their presence and so I'm gonna send a text and tell them. ZAK: I love this. I'm thinking about if someone came up to me and said that, like, to be honest I would be wondering, oh that's so sweet...like, are they interested in me as a partner or are they just interested in me as a friend? How have you dealt with these dynamics? ERIN: That's a great question. I think being careful with your words and saying as much as you need to. Like, you can even say, hey, just so you know...I'm in a committed partnership and I'm not in a position to date other people right now but I also want you to know that I have a little crush on you and it's just fun seeing you when we're both around. Being clear. Setting up what your boundaries are...if you're not sure where you want to go and you want to leave it open, LEAVE IT OPEN! 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

Sarah Knight (@mcsnugz) is the author of the NYTimes Best-Selling No F*cks Given guides and host of the No F*cks Given Podcast. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST TRANSCRIPT: SARAH: I have a piece of advice that has kept my 20-year relationship moving smoothly and it involves saying no and setting boundaries. So, I call it, MVP...Mutual Veto Power. And this is something that's been working for my husband and I since the early days. We got together in 1999 and it means that you both have the power to say no to something and not be questioned. If I say no, I don't like that paint color. No, I don't want that couch. No, I don't want to go on our honeymoon to Tokyo...The answer is no and we've agreed to not pre-argue about it. We're not gonna debate. We're not gonna engage in guilt-tripping. It's just a no. We both get to have that Mutual Veto Power and what it means is you avoid a lot of conflict and if the other person is just neutral on the thing...you know, on the vacation destination or the paint color or whatever then you go-ahead and do it because that way one of you is getting what you want. But if anybody is a no then you don't do it because that way nobody has to do what they don't want. And I have to say, you know, it works for the little stuff and it works for the big stuff and it just takes a lot of the pressure off of a relationship and this could work with, you know, a client relationship, a family relationship. ZAK: Because you've had so much practice with this...I can imagine when it first starts it takes some restraint to not push back. SARAH: It does and I think, you know, what we've learned as a couple over time is that life is much better when you don't force one another or guilt another into doing something the other person doesn't want to do. What you're doing when you say yes to things that you don't want to do or force other people into saying yes to things they don't want to do is you're poisoning the time that you do send together. You're poisoning the relationship. You're creating toxicity that doesn't need to be there and it is not ever, I don't think, my intention or anybody who's trying to get me to do somethings intention to make me frustrated, resentful, angry, anxious about it. Wouldn't it be so much better to just rip-off the band-aid at the beginning, say no, have your no be respected and go on about your day and you know, be able to do things with and for one another that you're both excited about it? ZAK: Hell yeah. My wife and I, we've been together since 2006 and I think some adjacent practice that we do, it's called Who Wants it More? You have to be really honest about, do you actually care about this? And if you do. If you really want to go out to eat rather than carry-out, just invoke, I think I want to go out more than you don't want to go out. And it causes us both to evaluate how much we do care about and then just to be like, ok, you care more. We're gonna do the thing that you care more about. SARAH: That's a really good way to phrase it. I have something similar where I talk about making a selfish decision. And I think you can differentiate between good selfish and bad selfish and what I like to advise people is, listen, is the decision that you want to make...is it helping you more than it's hurting anybody else? Because that's probably good selfish. Bad selfish is when a decision you want to make hurts other people more than it helps you. In which case, why aren't you doing it. Why not just go ahead. Go with the flow. And that kind of ties into the MVP rule of, if it's neutral then the person who wants to do it, we can do it. But if either one is a negative, we just both don't do it. And again, that means that at least somebody is getting what they want all the time and nobody is getting what they don't want, ever. 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

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