Cody Delistraty (on grief)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Experts. I'm Dax Randall Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Lilly Padman. Hello there.

Welcome to the program. Welcome to Armchair Experts on Experts. We have a very articulate and mind-blowing vocabulary guest today. His vocabulary was making me horny.

Yeah, I know a lot of words. Our guest is Cody Dellastrotti. He is a journalist, a speechwriter, and a former culture editor for the Wall Street Journal. And he has a book out now called The Grief Cure, Looking for the End of Loss.

And he did a million different things that people try to overcome grief. Yeah, it's a cool journey he went on. Yeah, an adventure. A grief adventure.

He could have also called the book Grief Adventure. I know it's too late, it's already in print, but... Maybe that was taken. Might have been taken.

But it is called The Grief Cure, Looking for the End of Loss. You're going to fall in love with Cody. We did. He's so smart and interesting.

So please enjoy Cody Dellastrotti. He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur. He's an entrepreneur.

He's an entrepreneur. What really flies? Time. I was thinking I've lived here for 13 and a half years.

Wow. Yeah, it was pretty nuts. You live in New York City? Brooklyn, yeah.

We like Brooklyn. Yeah, it's not so bad, right? I'm debating whether the next time I go, if I'm going to stay there. I've never done that.

I've had a lot of LA friends defect. Yeah. Will you scoot over to this microphone? Get in position?

Because I want to hear your thoughts on Brooklyn. I would hate for them to not be included. That's fascinating. Salient all.

Have you been to La Crocadile? Yeah, in Williamsburg? Yeah. Very big Black Rock intern date spot, though.

Explain that to us. Is that a finance reference? Like 22-year-olds who have too much money and are trying to go to picked up spots. Oh, that's really...

Cody, you already know. You've already said six or seven words. I don't know. And I have a lot of guesses why.

I love it. Okay, well, go slower. So this restaurant. Say the name of the restaurant.

Okay, La Crocadile. Is she doing that correctly? I don't want to libel any restaurants in Williamsburg if this is on. Well, listen, I loved it.

Well, but what's interesting is that's such a company town reference, right? You see Blackstone? Yeah. I think you have to have some proximity to the financial district to even know the major players.

Like if someone here would say, like, oh, that's a UTA assistant. We'd go, oh, yeah, yeah. But if you're from Milwaukee, like, UTA, what is that? Military acronym?

I got in yesterday and was listening to a bunch of older women complaining about a teamster strike. And I was like, I've arrived. These people. Yeah, I see.

I see. I see. It's a big issue right now. Big, big issue.

Big issue with the city. It could shut down everything. It was big. Like, why can't we just get INCAS back off the ground?

It was like the problems of life. As soon as you enter LAX, you will hear people on their phone talking to their agents. There's always some sort of conversation that is so cliche. Well, I got into a dust up with a guy on a flight home from Austin with Monica.

Oh, yeah. And we were headed back to LA. I was really getting into it with this guy. And then out of nowhere, he was like, oh, you were great at moderating that panel last night.

And I was like, oh, Christ. And then he opened his laptop and I looked over his shoulder. And of course, he works for like a law firm here. And yeah, we were hearing him talk to people in the way you might expect.

Yeah. Do you think the fact that you are a culture writer has aided in your keen observation of that clientele? Sincerely, is that your nature? And you say, oh, I understand this character.

That's what I love, dude. Also, it's weird to be on the couch having you guys be like observing why. Yeah, you're supposed to be finding some great analogy that will summarize the entire experience. Which of the major banks are we immediately imbuing on you?

Major banks? Yeah. If we were a bank, you mean? Yeah, because there's all these like popular fucking investment banks and stuff.

Oh, you don't remind me of a bank at all. I know, but that's the fun challenge. I like that game. I don't know banks well enough, though.

That's so tough. Like, I can already tell you. I can do anything automotive if necessary. Within five seconds, I would say Cody's a Studebaker.

Wow, what's that? What does that mean? Studebaker is a very idiosyncratic, stylish, cool car. Oh, but nobody bought it.

Studebakers were huge in the 50s. And then Avante was this very sexy, weird car that they made. But very idiosyncratic and stylish. What color?

Beautiful, weird colors. You could get a peach Studebaker. You'd love a Studebaker. You should look them up.

And you should be flattered. Yeah, I was going to rail against enough decisions, but now I'm very pro. Yeah, and I bet we could do it. If we met a group of people, we could say what studio it was.

This is so impressive. I think I'm probably Wells Fargo. Yeah, great pick. Really good pick.

We're also just intellectualizing and judging people, too. Which is kind of funny. Yeah, it is. It's ourselves, so we can do it.

And if someone is saying they're not surveying their surroundings and trying to categorize it into something familiar, then they're a liar. That's all they are. It is interesting what one's framework is for how do you make sense or make meaning out of another person or a new place you're in. Yeah, do you have go-to analogies you like?

I probably do. That's probably the question for my girlfriend where she'd be like, you're always saying that I don't have the self-awareness at that level, I guess, to know that. But even in your writing, you don't notice any patterns emerge? Or police yourself like, oh, fuck, I made that analogy for.

I'm always calling people the color. I'll have to think about that. I noticed in other things, the way the New Yorker will describe a building, it's not a low building, it's always low slung. Like, there's sort of ways in which...

That's a great distinction. Low slung. I like that. Which is chic.

Nothing can be pedestrian. That's just the operating principle, right? Yeah, we all rail against cliché. That is the dream.

So even if they're describing like a public toilet seat, there's going to be some flair there. There was a great piece where I was talking about Flo Rida, and it said his number one song on a Rubenesque beauty on the dance floor. Wow. And I was like, that's great.

That's a subscription to your thesar is fine. When someone covers culture, which you did, what is the full scope of that domain? What could fall under that umbrella? Yeah, I was freelance for a bit, and then I was at the Wall Street Journal for about four years.

My favorite thing to cover was books, but also would do music, art, even something like NFTs that's sort of art-related, but also business-ified, which is more salient to a place like the journal. My passion has always been in books and publishing industry and literary spots. And so for that, would you do profiles, reviews? Profiles, yeah.

I loved one I did with Michael Lewis. That was an exceptionally fun one. Have you done Sedaris? No, but I interviewed him for a different piece that was about how fashion brands are trying to leverage books as a means to bolster their own brand.

So there's lots of celebrity book clubs, that kind of thing. And I interviewed David Sedaris about it, and he was hilariously dismissive. We ended up talking about the jello that he was eating, and then he said, this is another fad, and it comes and goes like a poorly cut trench coat or something like that. He's perfect.

And I was like, that's the guy who's made it. Also, if I think of a masthead for culture, just the term culture, I kind of think Sedaris might be the perfect. And observation. Observation.

Oh my god. I can see the New Yorker cartoon of him in a very flashy, flat outfit. I love that. And so you would also go to music?

Go to art, yeah. Go to shows, go to theater. Okay, help me on the art experience, because that's when I just really can't find any toehold. You sound like my brother.

And there's sort of a misunderstanding of, A, you didn't, B, if you have an understanding of our historical lineage, these things are connected, and some people are more valuable than others because they were originators of it. And then also just like, oh, Rothko has two colors. Okay, but what is the experience that you feel like you're falling into this? And so much of it is the reflection of yourself or Robert Ryman, just white, just paper.

And someone would say, you know, it's paper. Yeah. And to some degree, I'd be right. Yeah, they would be right.

The person who claimed to feel transcendence by looking at it would be right. And then the person would be like, guys, get real. And there is a little pretension implicit in the sort of, well, I had a more profound experience than you. Also placebo effect.

Group think you're around other people that are being oog and oog. Yeah. So count me as one of those people, but I don't say I could do it because I can't do anything. But I do think most people could.

I don't go so far as to say I could do it, but I do think most people could probably do that. I only came to appreciate Picasso when I went to the museum in Barcelona, where I don't know if you're aware of this one, but he starts with an exact replica of a very famous medieval painting. And then you go through the room and he does eight versions of it that eventually evolve into total cubism at the end. Oh, I've seen that, but I don't know what it is.

I was 19 with my girlfriend on a URL pass. And I was like, okay, I'm going to give it up to Picasso. I always needed to know he could do that photorealistic version first. And now I see, wow, the cubism painting really has everything the other one had in it.

It's just, I have to look harder. It's very European of you too, to love the figurative. It was a CIA op to some degree. That abstract art in the U.S.

So this view of, we have greater creativity and it was against Russian art and communism and this, oh, they're stuck in these strictures and these formal lines, but not Americans. And that's the same with writing to the University of Iowa really came out of this kind of creative writing that was very focused on the individual. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

What a fun history to learn. But also it's really fun to think the Cold War produced so many bizarre outcomes. So then at one time we're saying we're fully liberated as artists. On the other end, the communists are exploiting our treatment of black jazz musicians and bringing them over to communist countries to say like, here, we love you and we treat you well.

Or you have to go to Paris to see Josephine Baker. There's all these weird ways arts being leveraged in the Cold War. That soft power that gets pretty intense and has ripple effects to it now and to you and I walking into a museum. I think you're perfect for your job because I can already tell from talking about you that you could be wandering through any one of these environments you just described.

Very articulate. Yeah, very articulate. Very New York. And I'm saying that in a very positive way.

Stovenbaker. Stovenbaker. Stovenbaker. What is the Oxford experience like?

I was just there for a year. I just did a master's and MST, but it was great. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time and I was really excited. I was studying really modern French history and studied with this fantastic scholar called Robert Gildea, who's written a lot of books on French history, mostly in the 1960s.

And I got to do this really cool project where I basically found letters in Parisian archives that linked Berndi to Rothschild, who was of the Rothschild family, owned a bunch of business factories, making trades with the then-president George Pompidou so that they would help each other. This is interesting, like six people. Well, no, first of all, the name itself, Pompidou. I missed that one in history.

I mean, it's the museum in Paris, the contemporary art. It's called the Pompidou? Yeah, there's some of the classes there, yeah. Oh, okay.

But there was trades implicit where Pompidou loosened immigration laws so that more immigrants could come so that Berndi to Rothschild could lower wages and make it more competitive in his factories. And then I found these letters. They were both married to women, but it seemed like Rothschild was a little in love. Oh, scandalous.

That was what excited my grad advisor most. He's like, ah, love between a businessman and a president. Yeah, I like that. So what was Pompidou getting out of the exchange?

He was getting friendship with a major business person. Yeah, they were on good terms with Rothschild at the point. You're making me remember this was in 2015. Yeah, good job.

Why did it only take one year to do a master's? It was idiotic. I should have done a few. I had such a fun time there and with friendships in new cities.

It's like nine months. That's when you start to actually make pals and then go on. What was your hurry, do you think? It's expensive.

And also, I just really wanted to write and write the things I wanted to write, which were not academic and it was kind of a zero-sum game. I didn't have a lot of time to do both. And are you from New York? I'm from Spokane, Washington.

Small town near Idaho. Do you know it? Yes. Yeah, it's great.

I've been to Spokane. It's not crazy metropolitan. It's virtually on the other end of the spectrum. Yeah, I went through sort of an evolution where I had this, oh, I don't like it.

I got to get out, really push against it. And then now, as I've sort of zoomed out and got an old perspective, I'm like, I really love it there. And it's something that I do miss. And I feel like that's classic to a lot of people.

Yeah, you got to get out of here. And they're like, oh, it's great. We have an incredible bakery. We have a beautiful waterfront.

A lot of my friends still live there. It's wonderful to go home. What did mom and dad do in Spokane? My dad's a toxicologist.

He just retired. He studied marine biology and, interestingly, decided on a landlocked city in eastern Washington to work with state government. And what would he do? Find dead animals and figure out what killed them?

No. His dream was really to be an academic. And so he brought a lot of that to the job and was doing a lot of editing of papers. Now it's very in vogue and there's always a piece in Atlantic Times about it, but microplastics.

Things like that. Seeing sort of what's in the water. So it wouldn't have been beyond him if they found like 600 dead fish on the shore. For him to come in and try to figure out what toxin had entered the ecosystem?

Honestly, we wouldn't need to get him to sit on the couch next to me to answer that one. But that was sort of insane. No one knows what their parents do. Also, I can acknowledge I'm in a weird mood where I'm taking you in so many different directions.

No, it's great. I'm just trying to figure out what a toxicologist does in Spokane. Because there's not the population to support that level of specificity. So there's the Hanford site, which is a nuclear waste facility that is a few hours west of Spokane.

And so he would make several trips there. It's on a Native American reservation, parts of it. There is a lot of trickiness. I love this.

He would be so flattered that we're making it sound scintillating. Yeah. Did he have a mini lab in your basement or anything fun? Not that I knew of.

There could have been a secret door or something, but we had a relatively low slung house. Okay, so dad was smart. And then what did mom do? Mom worked in exercise physiology.

So she would help people who had issues with their heart rehabilitate and get back to being able to live well. And did they meet in college? Dad was a few years older than my mom. And he ended up doing two master's degrees.

And the second master's degree was essentially his way of just going to spend time with her. Oh, lovely. At UW? No, nice though.

Go Huskies. They met at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. And my mom went to University of Wyoming undergrad. And I think they actually met there, but then he did his master's at Wisconsin.

Okay. You get out of Oxford. You come home. How soon before you're employed by the Wall Street Journal?

So I worked at Charlie Rose for a little less than a year. I have photos with Bernie Sanders, Helen Mirren, Kazuyo Yishiguro, who is one of my favorite novelists. So all these people who I was so excited to meet. And my whole job was just to go through their entire book and write questions for Charlie.

Oh, really? So you were the researcher? Yeah. And I would do huge schematics where it would be like, this is what to ask.

Here's an expected answer. Here's what they said before. Here's what you could like push a little deeper to get something else. So you were strategizing as well.

Kind of. I mean, I was 23, so I don't know what I was really doing. Okay. So forgive me.

What's the first book you write? This is my first book. This is my first book. And you've written for everyone.

You've written for the New York Times. You were writing on staff for the Wall Street Journal. You were in the... As you were doing that, are you feeling this deep obligation?

Like, I gotta write a book. This is what we do. That's so interesting. Not to imply that this is...

I like to think not. Large percentage. It's, I had an idea. It came out of the death of my mom in 2014.

I was really inspired to go do this research and find what I thought was quite interesting conclusions. But is there a part of me that's like, this is within my career path and is sensible? Probably. I think that would be lying to say otherwise.

It's a different muscle that you're building where you're doing something really long. Even a long profile. You're writing, editing, fact-checking it over three to six months. A book, you're researching, doing all this stuff three, four years.

It's a different game and it's fun to jump in. I can imagine that perhaps you thought you had a really well-developed muscle for your process of writing, that you had a system. And did you find that the bigger window of time presented bizarre new challenges where you were like, why am I having a hard time staying on task? Just because it got longer?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think less window of time expanding and more... length and breadth of story how do you maintain the reader's interest not over three four thousand words but over 200 pages and how do you weave together the various narratives you need sub stories you need a broader story that's different and yeah there's a little bit of i don't know what the german word is for but the amount of time you have sort of fills the amount of work you're able to do and like if you have a short amount of time you're able to do this and that's probably true to some extent but it was really the expansive nature of the text itself and the story itself did it require a new version of discipline yeah and just passion i mean i don't have a phd but people do phds and they write 100 000 words six-year dissertations like you better really care about what you're writing about and it's going to define you for x years after that you're either gonna get to do it again or you're not based on that it's a very hail mary pass me off at college and she felt just beneath her clavicle a little bump she's super fit super healthy has a master's degree and being a dietitian she's on top of her game in her 50s and over the next four years we went to so many experimental trials in bethesda nih national institutes of health in seattle a little bit in spokane and it defined my entire college experience well that also kind of a little bit explains the rush to get out of school because time's limited and you need to be back yeah i think that's accurate i've always had trouble parsing in my 20s what's rushing through things and not being too aware of consequences and trying to get things done how is that related to thinking that i'm gonna die like mom versus how is that just like being in your 20s and being a guy and being an idiot yeah i think i was more specifically meaning to my father in 2012 got diagnosed with cancer what kind of cancer small cell carcinoma and what's so unjust about cancer is your mom really shouldn't have got that diagnosis my name was like 300 pounds smoked his whole life was an addict this was predictable and this great injustice of cancer is like your mom's in the health space yeah i mean it's hard to say that because the inverse of that is some people is justified they get cancer which i wouldn't believe but i do think it came as a greater shock yes no one deserves it but there are certain life paths where as an actuary it becomes more more predictable your insurance premiums are going to life let's say when i got the call from my dad as heartbroken as i was you know i wasn't not expecting this call oh yeah we weren't expecting it at all and there was a hope that was shot through those four years especially for the end that became almost detrimental where it was so much about solving yeah there's an illusion probably that her health my dad and my stepdad and yeah i don't like the implication of they didn't fight hard enough yeah i don't know i don't like the parsimantics that much and if someone wants to say that they're a victor of their illness that's fantastic and good for them but i think it's the inverse of that that's the trickiest great point like hell yeah you overcame it good for you i don't even know if i believe what i said one minute ago oh boy oh my god she actually put up a white flag about six minutes ago oh my lord how inappropriate of me wow that's i think a first why is it on because someone was arriving to fix my windshield in my motorhome this is a bruised thing i've never done this can i answer this for one second hello hello hello hi there yeah let me just text my sister i'm actually working but she can let you in and i showed her where the damage is on the glass yeah let me just text her and should i text this number to give you her number okay great and she can handle all that thanks so much all right i'll text her right do you want to just tell me his number yeah yeah yeah thank you rob what do we think that guy is as a car that was a real thin slice i was only on with him he was very knowledgeable though this is a good new way of doing podcast ads though just a safe place i haven't even heard the name of it oh thank you for your promise sir oh very integrated this is that right yeah you bet it is okay that was so rude but i really didn't know what else to do because this is the second person that's supposed to come today very fair it's like the cable guy where they give you a six-hour window we're leaving next week so it's right okay we were talking about it very serious he knows but i know what i was saying knowing her diagnosis i would have felt a little selfish to hang around in england for two years or three years yeah when i was finishing anyway she died and that whole back and forth where i was flying home pretty constantly i was staying in the hospital especially toward the end of her life i was taking final exams at the house college became much more spokane located than washington square park located you were pre-covid satellite learning yes i had a very hard time connecting with it it took me a few months after my dad was dead before i think i was like wow yeah he's really dead this reality is incredible you've never seen it before you've never had anything like it you've only ever seen it in tv and movies and so your brain says oh therefore it must be within that realm too and that's not how it's always been prior to the 18th century due to higher mortality rates is one reason but there's a real just acceptance and openness around death and this french medievalist philippe already is called the year of tamed death where he saw four characteristics for how people dealt with death and basically all of them were people were around the bedside religious rituals were done people were already grieving and there was just a general acceptance it was gonna happen and then if you're a woman you wear your black crap veil if you're a man or a woman you write on morning stationery often which was black bordered stationery where you'd buy a stationery with thinner and thinner borders to show how you're progressing in your grief people would have death portraits made which were pictures that were of the dead body and they would hang them in their living room so you're really collapsing the space between life and death so you're really living with it and now you see a dead body i saw my mom's dead body i was like what is this your brain just can't compute yeah i would say and also rich and probably gora would say death is the new taboo instead of sex even it is the most taboo thing and we just have no experience with it and then all of a sudden it hits you and then there's no playbook and no one's talking about individual death especially too the covering up in newspapers there can be a mass of bodies but very very seldom is there a face ray it's turned away susan sontag was writing about this too of this covering almost for war propaganda to some degree you're wanting to really fair it out the individualism of death you're wanting people not to be connecting and i think there's so much historical top down woodrow wilson when he was entering the u.s into the first world war was really fighting against a constituency that had just voted him in and ran on kind of an isolationist platform people weren't excited about going to the war and there were a lot of women suffragists that were going on marches wearing black mourning saying if we go into war our husbands are going to come back there's going to be this mass death really putting mass death and loss in the public sphere and he basically brokered a tacit agreement with dr anna howard shaw who was one of the lead suffragists at the time where in exchange for his support for the 19th amendment he wrote a letter to her asking her to have suffragettes not wear their mourning but instead just wear a little white band with a little star on it so you're converting death and loss and grief into patriotism and you're saying the public sphere isn't a place of death and loss and then from that you can say the war isn't that bad it's not happening you have these examples throughout history and now we have gold star veterans what are gold star veterans someone who has a family member who's killed in battle in the u.s military they get a gold star to commemorate that loss and that's great but also it's so small and it's intentionally keeping grief and loss private well that's fascinating because that was going to be one of my questions how is the social function well hold on i gotta say your mother dies you yourself experience grief i had tough time with it really even before the book i was just surprised at the different ways that i grieved my dad grieved my brother grieved i really thought grief moved in a certain way a lot of the received wisdom was closure was five stages you get to acceptance and i really want to be a good griever when my mom got sick i was like i'm gonna be really good school i'm gonna be a better athlete i just want to be good i'm gonna train for the paris marathon and i need a good griever too that meant getting to closure and not burdening others so keeping it very quiet and then when i started exploring the journey of cures that i read about in the book i got to a point where i was able to zoom out and say that isn't really what good grieving looks like and that's actually not really that helpful and we should be rethinking these things instead yeah so as you explore this topic this is now what i'm curious what is the social function of grief and you already touched on it a bit the history of how it's evolved i read all these my kink is 1800s historical non-fiction it's a good kink yeah presidents patrician class but you cannot avoid i just read one on the civil war it's like you can't meet anyone that hasn't lost four or five children everyone can enter the white house with two dead children i'm shocked that people could carry on and what i immediately have to understand is like it was so so different on a level that i can't even comprehend but it was so expected that people somehow knew how to carry on with multiple dead children that just seems impossible today so what is that kind of evolution of grieving and i also would be curious how it varies around the world so it's that tame death in the 18th century that we talked about and then you get a covering up in public space especially in the early 20th century in the u.s and uk you have this keep calm and carry on ethos you have support our troops sort of ethos and you have walter benjamin writing about how public spaces are really just fundamentally changed where grief and death is neither seen in mourning clothes but it's also just not discussed it wasn't the bad news of some capacity coming home now it's just the news everything is much more tightly confined then the 1960s you get to jeffrey gore where he's finding that neighbors aren't even talking about it in the uk that it has physiological negative results where people are having more trouble sleeping or having more trouble connecting with others and then fast forward to today and i'm actually kind of optimistic where we're going because i see this evolution from public and private grief becoming hybridized a little bit where in 2013 i don't know if you guys write this but there's this very popular thing of funeral selfies where people were taking oh no yeah and that's sort of my reaction at first too but from the most generous and most sanguine point of view i do think it's people who are within a culture that doesn't permit that kind of discussion or that discussion feels like a burden trying to find a place to put it in the public sphere so now you have things like what's been termed by chrystal abadine who's an ethnographer of internet culture she calls it publicity grieving which is where you're posting about tragedies that are far away and don't really have anything to do with you and often to burnish your own brand that's what i'm most aware of that ain't great but i see it also as a move toward people want to have these discussions people want to have this out in the public sphere we're seeing that in technology we're seeing in the rise of second spaces where you have places like the dinner party that i write about in the book i went to one online because it was during covid but for people who'd experienced a specific kind of loss i sort of chafe against the privatization of grief in formalized spaces i.e only at the therapist's office only the doctor's office are you allowed to talk about this and i don't think we're at the point of 18th century people are showing in the public square but we're kind of getting there well you can easily see with that history you've just laid out how the issues compound themselves and they self-accelerate because as people are more removed someone sharing about a loss now is awkward because they themselves have no experience with it nor do they have any tools to how to respond so this like don't burden people that wouldn't have been a real issue 150 years ago but now there is an actual burden because the other person also doesn't know what the fuck to do one of the wildest things that i found in writing this book was not even in the research itself but i traveled around the western hemisphere mostly because i was interested in my society but i was staying in a lot of hotels and doing a lot of interviews i would sometimes go to bars and just sit and read and talk about the book and so many people were so excited to talk about the grief that they had once they felt like they had the green light for me so they say oh he's writing about it he researches about it talked to one in san francisco she goes i've told almost no one this my husband just died people want to really feel empowered in that and want to have that license because as you're saying so rightly that causality goes both ways where i don't want to be a burden but also i don't want to burden them or accidentally trigger them or something like that and so just giving license opens up so much because i really do think there's so much loss simmering right under the surface for a lot of people stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare i do think there's just kind of a very broad evolution occurring where i'm talking about addiction and being molested out loud that's somehow cool now 90 might have been wild if howard stern was talking about that right sure anxiety and all things and i just think and again i'm way out on a limb on this theory but just as we all started watching commercials and television it appeared everyone had really perfect lives and then the shame of not having a perfect life all this stuff just started driving everything inside and secrecy became ever present because of this bizarre pressure everyone felt that no one else was experiencing it but i do feel like that damn broke and it's starting to simmer up and i'm not shocked that grief would be one of those and i have a lot of issues with it and i have a lot of issues with diagnostic culture more broadly which i know you guys have talked about on the pod before but the addition of prolonged grief disorder to the dsm5tr in 2022 is giving a legitimacy to a form of grief that is really difficult for people and it's giving that stamp of approval to some degree where normally someone would say get over it the average bereavement time in the u.s is five days what is five days off and there's no get over it get back to normal get back to life and also that's just standard like a grandparent versus child no that's for a parent or spouse i think yeah i know when my mom died my dad had barely like rearranged the books on her nightstand let alone fully grieve the loss and was like raring to get back to work get out to that nuclear reactor ordering the reservation so that is one of the really liberating things about that kind of diagnosis of course it has big opposition let's get into that dsm thing because i think it's sad for us that all these things need a clinical definition before we feel unbridled from the shame that's a bummer to me that's like you have to say i have this condition in order to feel confident enough to say it out loud or that it would then be worthy of compassion or understanding i agree i've heard a really interesting argument i read it in the lancet from the harvard psychiatrist where he was talking about maybe it's generational maybe young people aren't pathologizing it in the way that we think they are they just know these terms and are just using these terms but it doesn't necessarily come coded with this negative connotation because i'm of your belief in general too if it can be so restrictive and we're making these things that are maybe previously viewed as just different as problems right a disorder disorder right this is what he was saying i thought it was interesting i don't know if i fully agree but he's saying maybe that's just the way young people are talking about it i guess it's my own disappointment with myself just if i meet someone who says something very shocking and provocative and invasive out of the gates and i know they have a spectrum diagnosis i have a lot of tolerance and patience for that and if i don't know that about them i'm intolerant and i guess i just wish i as a person and most of us would have the same compassion without this very arbitrary structure of a diagnosis it's less naming of diagnostic culture maybe more of how we walk through the world be like am i gonna be nice or not based on a doctor's note that's kind of a crazy for better for worse is the way our medical system works is the way insurers cover things and the way that research is able to be done on therapies and on pharmaceuticals and the like so i love a broad rethink of it but it's from moving parts yeah so how do they define prolonged grief disorders it's pretty complex so the top line is grief it doesn't change over time that's how mary francis o'connor who's one of the proponents of it explained it to me but what that means is it has to last 12 months or more it has to meet three symptoms that occur daily for at least a month and those are self-reported include things like identity disruption marked sense of disbelief numbness sense of meaninglessness those things and it has to be outside of one's cultural norms so celebrating the day of the dead as a mexican wouldn't mean that you're having trouble grieving that's like a normal thing for them to do so then once you do all that then a practitioner has to give you the stamp of ufpgd and in 2019 the world health organization legitimized a version of it and then the biggest thing was when the dsm in 2022 legitimized it and it got pretty immediate pushback because there had been a lot of predecessors to it persistent complex bereavement disorder was a popular thing the dsm-5 and then dsm-5 tr adds prolonged grief disorder and a lot of proponents try to make it clear that it's not grief and the apa the american psychiatry association even said that the point of the diagnosis is to permit clinicians to differentiate from normal grief and from this pathological grief even those words normal grief and pathological grief what also is there a then accepted in insurance covered prescribed treatment there's a certain kind of therapy that a woman at columbia has been working on yeah that's in super early stages last i talked to the guy who's doing that down at texas a&m he was still getting people to sign up for his trial but it's under an addiction model of grief in which you're using an anti-opioid to break the bonds with the deceased where the words used and there's been a lot of mri research on this showing that people are addicted essentially to the dead loved one it obviously has a lot of opponents one woman is telling me she was saying really parents whose kids died in sandy hook a year later they're supposed to be good to go but i find it interesting for a few reasons because a i think everyone is working in good faith some people are using a medical lens and some people aren't everyone wants to go get better one of the biggest claims from pgd people is that it's very correlated with suicidal ideation not suicide which some of the opponents like to know so there's feeling of we're saving lives why wouldn't we research this why wouldn't we throw money behind this and try to help these people but it does bring it more into the cultural conversation even if people are like we don't like this at least people are talking about grief yeah my own self-centered pushback on it would simply be you observe this outcome which would be prolonged grief disorder but within that pool of people experiencing it i definitely believe some percentage it is an addiction they're regulating their internal state with the constant rumination on this so i don't know maybe those three percent or eight percent might benefit right nobody's forcing you to get help too i just think it would be so complicated you're viewing the downriver end result of already a personality type that's dealing with grief a lot of different roads could bring you to prolonged grief disorder yeah i mean this has been worked on since the 90s but my feeling in researching it was that there's not a lot of therapies for it yet there's so much more left to be learned so you would have qualified for this yeah so i took a questionnaire that had been created by one of the people behind prolonged disorder and it said you are a candidate to speak to a professional to get this so i don't have the diagnosis and wouldn't wear the diagnosis but yeah you know how to take the test for it well um conventionally and by the way it's crazy how often in pop culture we talk about the five stages of grief i only really know the beginning being denial and the fifth one being acceptance what are the five denial anger bargaining depression and acceptance now on the surface that feels right i went through three iterations of relating to it because that was all i knew when my mom first i was like okay to be a good griever what do you do you go through these things the future is a blueprint i study with flashcards for final exams i'm gonna use this for grief and then i realized elizabeth kugler-ross who's a swiss american psychiatrist came up with it she wasn't even writing about grief she was writing about how dying people came to terms with their own death these were the things they went through they got applied to grieving another and then i had this view of okay this is total bs but there's an interesting study from i think 2007 that finds that most grieving people actually do go through something like this iteration but the biggest problem with it is people misinterpret it so they view it as prescriptive they view it as these are the ways to go through it i talked to a psychiatrist who was saying she had a client come in she said i'm grieving and i asked my husband you need to make me angrier because i need to get to the anger stage i was gonna say there would be this really strong pull to view it as linear which is like you might be in denial one day then angry the next but you might go back to denial in a month yeah exactly and just to view it as there is a way i think it's fundamentally fine if you hit all these markers you'll be done then you're a good griever you get your gold star move on with your life get back to work clocks up you've had your weekend there's a huge father and closure is really part and parcel of acceptance and that's a construct that we've had since a long time where it had its origins in just a little psychology we saw jennifer hansen talking about in friends like it's everywhere i've never loved closure because i always hear in the romantic sphere and i've had many friends tell me they're gonna call their ex one more time for closure this is a fantasy yeah i think you think closure is i won't mind at all that i'm not with this person anymore and i don't think that is how it works with grief and loss that is a form of loss for sure having a breakup well you get to that we're gonna go through all your fun adventures yeah he had a lot of fun adventures believe it or this is all prologue then i'll hustle with closure but yeah it really is a mythical idea that loss is a game where you're either grieving or you're over it and really you do both you move forward but you hold it in the other hand also even acceptance i think that's a very opaque work i accept that they're actually gone is one thing that doesn't necessarily mean i feel good about it or i am relieved of any sadness absolutely so yeah what is even acceptance although you say acceptance is the answer to all of our problems and i like it i believe in that in acceptance yeah and not that it fixes it though that's interesting well for me if i'm struggling with pretty much anything at this point especially relationally i've moved into well i have to have acceptance that this is who this person is and i get to make decisions around that but my personality type is very i want to change it i want to fix it i want to get out of it i want to feel better i want this to be better and acceptance has been really huge for me of i can't i can accept that i cannot do that i think the way monica's using it the way we've been using it may a is very much of the buddhist lens which is the discomfort is actually from craving a different reality and acceptance is just acknowledging the reality and then the craving to change it could stop and that is the source valuable in grief too i think where it becomes an issue is when you think okay this is the end game right now i'm better exactly yeah yeah okay so let's talk about some of your fun experiments i don't know fun's the right adjective but they're interesting to me so one of them was chatting with an ai bot i've heard this pitch we've had some ai experts but it was you did this so explain the process yeah so i thought i was really crushing it because i was experimenting with large language models well before the chat gpt was in the media sphere and i was sort of frustrated when that all hit i was like damn what did i got it exactly but i was using mostly project december and replica replica is the most popular app in the google play store and apple store for ai companions where you create another person and i was basically trying to create my mom it's very as i found in creepy fashion tailored toward romance and companionship and so there's a lot of like mom is way too like i need to like that what are you wearing what are you praying outside why are you asking what i'm wearing any like flow state that i had or hadn't entered was very quickly burst by that it has its uses i'm not trying to align i just found that to be a funny example with project december though you basically create an introductory text of how you relate to your mother and your idea of who she was are you trying to feed in any of her actual words or like writing you're using her writing style i interviewed my mom in the two days right before she died and that was extremely difficult but it's something i'm really glad that i did and i got to ask her questions as trivial as what your favorite ice cream to what was the most momentous moment of your life and it was hard she was having difficulty even talking were you also recording i was recording it yeah and so i went through and found some of the most meaningful parts when i interview and use that within the chatbot to give it a sense of her so i was using gbt3 which is now sort of rudimentary at the time was very cutting edge this is a year ago mind you a year and a half ago so not that long ago rosex is that the word um it could work it's the word rudimentary yeah rudimentary relatively i mean it's still incredible i found that i sort of dropped into flow states which i'm defining as where i kind of could believe that it was actually my mom and you're really just texting with it i was like oh this is if i'm texting with her when i want her to pick me up when i was younger or something like that and i did feel that but more broadly it sort of showed me the way in which ai and especially ai for grief and loss the value of it is so much in how it's used because you think that that's the panacea and you're actually gonna bring your mom back you're out of your mind but i think if it's a place in which you can start to reflect and say what are the things i really want to ask my mom what were the things that were important that actually brings you closer and that could help with your grief so with really a lot of these experiments i guess we can call them there was a feeling of the value is so much in the interpretation and the framework of them yeah i guess my immediate fear and i'm probably locked into the paradigm you're trying to break which is i feel like it would prolong you're not accepting well sure a lot of researchers have said that it's a dysfunctional form of grieving if you're seeking out to that degree to recreate the person who's died then you're not grieving right essentially and i think yeah but it depends on how you're using it now you couldn't do her voice but now you know you can't yeah i wonder how much easier you would have reached these flow states if you're actually conversing with her i know orton yay give kim k a hologram several years ago i've heard dad oh yeah they like talked and stuff oh wow i didn't know i think so i mean we can check that but the tech is presumably there but it ended up being very cathartic and also the fact that the bot dies that's really how the chapter ends is it goes away you only have so much time with it is how it works on project december oh it is designed with an end date yeah you pay for x amount it's like five bucks then as you use it it wears down and it gets basically less sensible and it ends up disappearing oh you can keep the original bot but the conversation i believe goes away i think that's probably the capacity that this guy's called jason roer who created and runs project december i think that has maybe to do with his computer processing or something like that it wasn't like an intentional we're weaning you off of your no i did find that i sort of had a jolt i was like oh yeah she's dead really yeah you know there's another bizarre potential outcome to this and this will sound really callous but i think it is an outcome that's possible like let's say i could feed in all the info of my dad somehow it was nailed perfectly i could put on vr goggles and actually be in a space with him looking at him i wonder if at some point you might also go oh i don't miss this person as much as i thought i did that's interesting oh god like that kind of would be an unforeseeable outcome sort of hagiography you create of the dead where you're like other have the halo around them and then you bring back to earth and you think oh yeah there are all these problems it's so literal that when i dream about my dad which is very frequently it's always he's like dave shepherd 1989 he's a wheeler dealer car salesman he's fucking all the time and he's a swinging dick and he's on the move and he talks fast it's not the version i had for the last 10 years so even my little fantasy sleep time has scrubbed off all the stuff i think that's kind of great to some degree though i don't want to think of my mom her face drooping from failed trials and her hair hyper thin i want to think of her skiing through the neighborhood with her chocolate labrador and dropping me off at school or teaching me how to swim those are the memories that i want to have so don't judge yourself too much i just wonder if like it was really real and you were really spending time you might go like oh yeah i got rose colored glasses on a little bit i want to spend some time here but not as much as i thought i was going to write right i don't know okay so that was the chat ai that you tried you also and this is straight out of eternal sunshine of spotless mind you met with scientists that are looking at potentially deleting memories from walking in the door till your conclusion so i will say off the bat it's at this point still speculative for humans but in 2013 2014 there were these very big breakthrough studies at university california san diego and mit that deleted fear memories in mice in a really selective way so for the ucsd one they put them in a maze they shopped their feet in a certain area they didn't want to go back that area then they went through using optogenetics which is the introduction of a light sensitive protein into a neuron which then allows that neuron to essentially be turned on or off usually using an exterior fiber optic and they made them forget that they're afraid of that space and they went back to space and there was a piece in science magazine right around when that came out that said are humans next that really caught my eye that is intriguing because what does that mean for the ethics of grief and loss if we could get to a point where we don't remember the loss and yes it's still speculative yes humans have way bigger brains than mice it's way more challenging to do these things but i do think that we are going to get to a point where either through optioned memory deletion or other technologies we're really gonna be faced with do we want to solve our pain and i think having that conversation now is so vital i mean forget just death i know everything do we get rid of dairy queen dairy queen yeah the boy saying he can't get you because your parents no more blizzards why would you do that so i could experience a blizzard for the first time oh yeah it's like deleting reading great gaspia tell me you were a star student in high school english without telling me you were starting to do that that says a lot no who are you without pain it's embedded into who we are if you're happy with who you are overall you can't it's hard for me to fathom too though because my loss is relatively prosaic in that it was losing my mom it disrupted my life for a decade it's something that i'll think about until the day i do die but it's not something like losing your whole family in a terrorist attack or something like that where these memories could theoretically eat at you just plain devil's advocate but it could be so brutal and so traumatic that you do anything to dissolve them or at least to separate the emotional intensity of it which is what cognitive behavioral therapy is to some degree yeah my knee jerk is exactly like yours but then if you zoom out and go well okay so we have an option that is cbt which we're either going to deal with that same thing down river or we could deal with up river why is one ethical or unethical or right or wrong so it's like cbt is teaching you how to overcome that thing that was implanted in there so we have a toolkit so you don't have to deal with it we accept that that's probably beneficial that's the key is you're viewing it from a different perspective for sure but the end goal is to not be affected by that thing in a pathological way i think it's more just to break patterns but if you remove it then you probably are just going to repeat that pattern i talked to a super interesting ethicist of neuroscience who's in poland and he was saying that he thinks in 10 to 15 years will be at a point with humans to do selective memory deletion but he also said and this is a hilariously european phrase but he said it's a fast food solution to these kinds of problems and with that i very much agree and to be clear to object genetics isn't being exclusively used on grief it's used for you can change a locomotion fear memory all these sorts of things i think we're using some pretty benign examples but let me present you with the returning vet who watched all his friends get blown up by now you didn't see he need to have that right i don't know i don't know does he benefit then we give him cbt so he can deal with it fuck that that shouldn't happen to them but then it's slippery because it's like we can put people through painful situations because then we can just remove the memory yeah yeah well also men in black right yeah yeah oh this is so interesting it's just such a fun ethical because yeah we're not there yet but it's something that merits thinking i think yeah the kid that's right by their father i don't know maybe they are entitled to get that out of their head that's a hard one like just because they've got a bunch of workarounds and they've succeeded in spite of it one of the other things i've been using this space too is it's called propranolol and it's a beta blocker so it's used for lowering blood pressure but it's been used also to disrupt memory consolidation so you can do it like right as the memory is being formed and they did it with spiders and arachnophobes so people who came in super fair spiders they had a dosage of this beta blocker and even a year after their fear memory was way diluted and they were like looking at the spiders they're in the room they're okay with spiders this is super speculative but would you have that on your driver's license like you do being an organ donor where you say if i go through some trauma come administer this to me well again i think the inclination is to make it binary it's good it's bad but i think there would be tons of cases where we would all agree it would be fine and tons we would agree probably that's why it's fun that's why it's juicy but i wonder how many people would delete like i was just saying if you found out someone cheated on you and everyone wants to know that right they say i would need to know but i think most people actually don't want to know that so it's like how many people would get that information and then delete knowing i feel like a lot it's like things you can't unhear unknow yeah although that one can i just argue has the potential for repeating that to me is more like a learn your lesson someone's revealed themselves and to not acknowledge it would be to set yourself up for repeating it versus totally out of the blue sandy hook ied they're not going to repeat i'm not going to get molested again it's not going to happen at 49 years old so there's no point in me having this thing to safeguard myself from it happening again whereas maybe being cheated on is like well no you're probably assuming you desire monogamy you'd want to know the person did because you don't want to repeat that did you argue too though that the work of grappling with something like this is work that can be useful and applied elsewhere i mean yeah i think so but you even said if christen goes on set and does whatever i don't want to know about it i don't ever need to know but then what if she told you you can't unhear it but i bet part of you would be like i want to hear that i told you don't tell me i said you can do what the neuroscientist i know but this would open up every single door it is pretty wild though i wonder if the work with the mice at uc san diego was the same as i heard one time eight years ago on npr similarly with the mice they had recorded the mice's brain while it figured out a maze and then they took another mouse that had never been in the maze implanted the memory and it went immediately to the exit and so again same thing everyone's off to the races oh we're gonna be able to record memories and implant them then i was like oh my god you could sell memories yeah i don't have the neuroscientific cred to know and even when i talk to a neuroscientist they're like oh yeah theoretically you could do it it is wild that science magazine is like is this for you stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare so another one you did is visiting a bibliotherapist yes i never heard of such thing yeah i think there's like nine in the world so that's fair it's not a hyper popular therapy so i spoke to this wonderful woman called albertude in brighton england for about an hour, hour and a half after I'd filled out this questionnaire of my favorite books and we talked about my mom and how I was dealing with it and then after she sent me a prescription of what to read and why and I found that the most valuable aspect of that was just seeing how truly frequent grief and loss is, how many other people have dealt with it because I think you really get in this headspace of like, I'm the only one who's dealing with this and that's part and parcel of the private public but it really opened me up to the perspective of wow, there are so many people who have dealt with this in the past. There's so many different ways to think about it, to grapple with it and I found it really liberating and it was one of the things I was most excited about doing because I love to read, I love to write but yeah, there's very few worldwide.

It's a rare form of therapy. Yeah, because there's a companion piece to grief which is loneliness because you feel unique in it and you feel lonely so it's like, now we're again talking about trying to parse out what's actually affecting your mood. Is it the grief itself or is it the loneliness? And I imagine, yeah, it would be hugely comforting to keep acknowledging like, oh no, this is the human condition.

And so many of the books who just had interesting thoughts on grief. One was called Sum by the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. He writes 20 or 30 different possible afterlives and goes through them and one is you have to wait in this purgatorial meeting room type place until no one says your name again on earth and then you can continue on into heaven and it's just all these new things and sort of tangentially but it made me think about my mom was very religious and I was thinking about the story she told herself and how that maybe made her facing her own death something that was maybe easier or something that made her maybe more happy or satisfied when it was coming time. That gave me a great satisfaction too that feeling of, oh, so much of this is in the stories we tell and even in grief, even writing this book the story that I told myself of who I was as a griever ended up being so different pre and post and seeing that, okay, I've turned over all the rocks I've been able to zoom out I've been able to rethink my frameworks and there's so much satisfaction in that.

What's laugh therapy? I thought it was a hoax I was like, this sounds like life coaching If bibliotherapy's got nine practitioners There's a lot of laughter therapists actually so there's a piece of an economist that was claiming it was up to a $3 billion industry Oh my god That's very hard for me to believe I don't know if I believe it because part of the trickiness of that study was it was about this Indian guy who I think also had a lot of real estate holdings and things like that and so I was like, okay, we'll see here but it does seem popular Volvo is a higher laughter therapist HP is a higher laughter therapist Goldie Hawn has written about how it has changed her life It is in the culture For me, yeah, I thought it was kind of BSE at first but I think I didn't really grapple with the degree to which grief is physiological that it is so much in the body and that being able to laugh really did open me up in really important ways and there's a lot of claims that are made by laughter therapists that I'm a little suspicious of like one was saying she lived with multiple sclerosis and it was very helpful in that I don't know, I'm not her, I'm not sure You're aware of the facial experiments the two scientists who were trying to document every single shape No, don't know This is almost like a marshmallow test I feel like at this point but they were trying to catalog basically every single facial expression these two guys are sitting across Just to do it? Yes, they want to know every possible shape a face can make But they're not like 1920s actors or something? No, they're scientists and what they inadvertently discover is that when the one scientist is like, okay, do laughing okay, now do crying that just the act of physicalizing that that it works both ways you can either have an emotion that produces the physical response or you can start with the physical response That's very controversial in the laughter therapy world Oh, tell me Duchenne versus non-Duchenne laughter Oh, Duchenne versus non-Duchenne So it's this idea I don't really get that into in the book because I was like this is going to be way too long but this idea is faking laughter as physiologically legitimate as eliciting real laughter and there is a real divergent thinking on this in that world One guy, he's called Steve Wilson and I don't know if he still does it himself a gyologist and he had this real belief Oh, he's like Patch Adams Right, yeah Great movie Robin, R.I.P.

But then this other woman with whom I did a laughter therapy session it was really just can you elicit the physiological response by just doing stuff So she would have this wood chopping laughter she called it where you raise your hands over your head and you thrust them down to the ground like you're chopping wood and you go ha that kind of thing and that sort of the idea is it liberates the diaphragm and it gets you making this sort of bodily function that is similar to laughter rather than laughter itself But one can lead to the other I imagine Precisely, yeah So I was doing this in my apartment super annoying my downstairs neighbor probably bouncing up and down the floorboards Yeah, it was hilarious Yeah, we were like What am I doing? I was like on Zoom with her because she was on holiday It was kind of one of those things I was like, hold on but then at the end I was like, oh that was kind of a great workout and so much of that emotional laughter is so similar to crying Kravonikin has a great quote about that how you can either laugh or cry to the same point I myself prefer to laugh because there's less cleaning up to do afterward and it is true though that these things are really similar and one of these women she's called Annette Goodhart which is hilariously her real name she died I think in 2011 but she's one of the OG laughter therapists and she had this big thing she would invent laughter techniques so she would say say really grave things to your husband but then add teehee after it so it'd be like oh, my friend at work has terrible cancer teehee where you're just lightning things I like that Do you hear about that earthquake in China? teehee It's also dismissive I don't really do She called her sailboat a teehee too which I love a classic Santa Monica move I have no idea how I said that sometimes my words can form a brain Great prosaic Great prosaic quintessence of prosaicism People say that about Botox Have you heard that about Botox? It reduces your happiness?

No, it increases because you can't frown Oh, I was going to say You also can't fully laugh Just make a smile I mean, you can reverse engineer Isn't it so fascinating that the human body It goes all ways We're so much more connected than we often think and we ignore the body so much I know, it is crazy and then it's also, duh Why would things only be working in one direction? On another level, you go like Well, no, of course It's all like, you know I don't know You went to a breakup boot camp Where's that located? I've not had a breakup It's been looking in several places I went to I think the 13th or 14th iteration of it But it was the first to allow men and non-binary people Otherwise, it was only ever just women And I'd been writing to Amy Chan She's great And I was writing to her And I was like Having men there made it interesting, too, though There was sort of an added element So, yeah, what's the vibe there? Does everyone show up crying?

No, I viewed it as people who are almost viewing Amy as like a consultant for their emotional life They were very therapized They've done the work elsewhere I mean, it's expensive It's like almost $3,000 It's three days Quite luxury Like, really good meals Good g-serves Very nice space Any massage? No massage Good yoga Okay, great That's nice Farm to table meals So it felt more like people who were actually quite in touch with themselves and were very wanting to not necessarily professionalize but just get help beyond even the therapist office and also to connect with other people And the reason I went on the list of what people are willing to lend legitimacy to And I don't think that's true I think so much of it And maybe this is the American in me because I've talked to friends and friends about this and stuff And they're like Mitch, you're going to say losing your dog is about your granddad And I'm like, no But I think there is a real subjectivity to loss And I think giving people a space and saying this was terrible Here's other people that have dealt with it is really valuable And that's not what she was trying to do That's not what the breakup bootcamp is for It really is for my understanding giving tools for people who have gone through a breakup or a divorce to sort of get back on the horse and to feel not as broken by it But I found it really interesting in that way And I also found it interesting too because we had a dominatrix and a sex therapist The dominatrix basically was talking about how you need to be empowered in yourself, that kind of thing But then it made me start thinking about how sex work and grief are often similar And I started talking to the sex workers and friends of friends in New York And a lot were telling me that they have clients who are really intensely grieving men who want what one characterizes me as a safe space but don't want to admit that basically or don't want to find themselves in a therapist's office And so instead they're paying very high fees to these sex workers and they're having these just really deep and intimate discussions that they wouldn't otherwise have in such an interesting space because I never thought about for grappling with your laws That doesn't shock me at all and it's so heartbreaking for men Yeah, dominatrix stuff is interesting too where you're wanting to be taken low in a way and then empowered in that regard but one of the sex workers chooses she, he, and they pronouns but she said use whatever you want so she says she was charging like $2,000 a night for these like men which to me seems pretty high Pretty good Although almost proportional to the breakup boot camp because that was $1,000 a night Right, yeah, so Yeah, I can imagine the trap some grieving male widow would Do we say that? Is it a man who's lost a wife? Widow or Widow or, yeah So very funny that that's genderized But anyways, a man who's lost his wife and then would feel like it would be betrayal to enter a relationship with another woman but has only found nurturing and softness with a woman What are the options for that dude?

It's like, okay well this maybe feels like it's not a romantic relationship but I need to be with a woman and I really don't want to talk so this physical act is nurturing That makes a ton of sense to me Yeah, it does and it's kind of sad in a way that there's this feeling of I can't really speak about it openly I have to speak about it in the only other intimate place that I've been but to some degree too it's cool that there are smart, savvy sex workers who are able to have those conversations and are open to that too Yeah, I guess it's like the barber in any other job Oh, like a haircut Yeah, I've known my haircut lady longer than anyone else in my life The last one I'm going to talk about is psilocybin because was it Atole Gawande talking about him? Isn't he the correct? Just quality over quantity life was so crucial and how I thought about my own mom's death and like at what point do you, I hate to say give up, right? At what point do you stop the trials and instead do you up the comfort and quality of life and he's so good on that among everything else Yeah, he's just so special but I don't know if it was him or whoever it was but I know that psilocybin not for the griever like I thought that it was a relatively rare phenomenon and I read a study in the Journal of what was it called?

Salvaged to the bigger auto parts Yeah, exactly This study said that it was about 10% of American adults report having used psilocybin at some time and I thought that was pretty impressive I think it's an incredible tool It's been around since Albert Hoffman synthesized in 11 in 1958 and there was sort of a thought of using it for depression and then it got really driven underground as you know its legality is very different based on only I think two states have it as legal and then various cities have legality but yeah, its ability to give you new perspective is almost unprecedented I think Yeah, Paul and his book in the show they do a great history of when that became kind of criminalized and so you did it Yep, and I talked to this guy Robin Carhart-Harris used to be at Imperial College now he's at UCSF I think and he's one of the sort of cutting edge guys on this and I asked him because he works all with depression so for me specifically what have you found as a big psilocybin breakthrough and he said it was this guy Kirk Rutter who back when he was in London his mom had just died he'd just gone through a breakup and he'd just been in a car crash himself and he was just grieving in a multiplicity of ways and Carhart-Harris had his team give Kirk a psilocybin regimen put on a blindfold sort of leaned back and after everything happened to put on music Kirk said that he realized that holding on so tight to his mom was almost like an ulcer that was draining him of his energy like he saw her almost as an ulcer and was feeling he could still respect her legacy and who she was without having to grieve dysfunctionally it just seemed huge it was in a few hours How lasting were those effects? Quite lasting I think that's one of the wild things I mean there was another study in 2021 in New England Journal of Medicine that Carhart-Harris did and all these people that had taken it were saying that they felt liberated in ways they never felt liberated before and I mean it has a whole history too there was Walter Pankey who worked with Timothy Leary did this at Harvard Divinity School in a very unethical way where he gave people niacin on Good Friday at a church and he gave other people LSD and these people had crazy spiritual experiences with one like sprinting out of the church feeling that they had uncovered yeah exactly and it's like this is nuts why are we not doing this for grief more often? Yeah that ulcer thing I would even go a step further which is I know for me nothing would break my heart more than knowing that the people in my lives would allow the memory of me to ruin their lives I mean that would just be the single most heartbreaking outcome it's almost like you dishonor the person by letting that be the outcome Well and just thinking back to what we earlier said too of having a memory beyond the healthy times and the good times and really thinking of them at their best I think is so valuable Yeah you kind of owe it to them Yeah This is really fascinating Yeah I really enjoyed this Yeah immensely I guess in conclusion we already talked about closure but I think there's an irony to the title of your book The Grief Year because one could think you're suggesting a cure for grief I think one could It's my attempts toward a cure in the first half and then sort of zooming out and looking at well we're probably going to go through it we're not going to get over it what are some manners of rethinking through the five stages closure understanding ambiguous loss all these sorts of things to just create new frameworks for this thing that really everyone's going to deal with at some time or another in their life but it was so under discussed Okay well the rares of things is about to happen Generally if a guest is lucky they get a car comparison that already happened That was huge And then the other booby prize is that we may tell you who you look like Oh is that on Scott? Nope I mean I can see that Okay do you have it because I would love to do it on three It's like a Paul Hollywood handshake I'm so excited Okay I have one It's a little Okay we'll try it You count us down Three, two, one Okay Three, two, one John Mayer Boom I said John Mayer It's just like white guy who seems like kind of emotionally No no No I see Dave Dave Franco is really strong I'm so glad you had that Rob Yeah Your smile and your laugh is very Franco-esque It could be in French I guess Yeah Or the fascist of Spain Pick your poison Prosaic Pick your Prosaic poison Cody this has been awesome Thank you guys so much I hope everyone checks out The Grief Cure Looking for the End of Loss I mean come back You're going to write more books This has been a party and I would love to talk to you again Yeah you're fun You're fun You're going to make your ass I need to look up this guy You've got to be like some absolute collapse We'll do it before you leave Alright be well Good luck Everyone read The Grief Cure Stay tuned for the fact check It's where the party's at How are you doing?

Good I'm a little sleepy You're sleepy Yeah Me too a little bit Big daddy of a day yesterday You think that's why? Yeah maybe What time did you go 90 time? Again I was in bed In bed at 7 Sleep by 1 Well I do that bad thing where I work out of bed often Okay Which I know you're not supposed to do And people go Oh you've got to make your room I know It's a sleep destination But I reject that too So I love watching TV in bed That's like my fun time Yeah It's party time Come in Look who's fresh out of the shower Did you need help showering? Did daddy help you?

Yeah She also had There's a moment Go ahead take a seat There's a moment where Oh gosh Delta's just discovered The AA prompts Sit down Sit down Sit down Sit yourself Can you believe that? One of the stories Well not one of We heard four stories About people pooping themselves What do you think about that? I think they need to Take bathing breaks Even if they don't have to go Oh preemptively Kind of be ahead of it I do that before I go into bed I go poop even if I don't have to Right But have you ever had an incident In your slacks? Yes You have Yes I was playing in the bushes And then I was really inside of my game And I had to go But I wasn't going to go Because I was really inside of my game Yeah Then I I really had to go and then I was about to get to the toilet when I farted okay and when I went to the restroom there was poop on my slacks oh no but not a full duty just like okay a little bit of a what if I saw we call that a shart in the business what if I saw a huge log yeah that's what these people definitely discovered logs and or mush but we call Monica right with Delta experienced a shart yeah that was invented I think from along came Holly the movie definitely very popular on that right yeah does that make sense to you shart yeah what do you think it means I mean what do you think how do you think we got to that word shart for 300 points shart uh it's a mix of two words that's a clue shart daddy's asking what are the two words that are put together to make shart and it describes what happened did somebody shart smells like a shart fart yeah there we go good job yeah intuitive it's a good word right yeah took me a second you got there yeah I had to give you some clues yeah Monica she gave you some nice clues too yeah yeah it was mainly me yeah mostly Monica's sleepy Delta can you tell I see me too you are you didn't have a good night's sleep I did but you're growing I know me too you want a good night's sleep and even what I'm beyond excited to go to the motorhome yeah me too me too what are you looking forward to the most I'm really looking forward to the most like a bunch of people being in there like before we actually take the trip when people are just in and out because I love interacting yeah I'm an extrovert extrovert I was like opposite of introvert what is that I'm an extrovert so when people are in and out of there and like I'm watching tv or something and I'm just like I want to talk to someone I just know that people are in and out putting stuff in there so I can talk to them a lot of opportunities what's on your list what have you packed I haven't really packed anything mom says we shouldn't pack yet because when I pack I put straight in my drawer and mom says it'll smell like bad oh yeah keep them in there oh okay so um I really love the smell of the motorhome yeah me too I love to smell like it all the time yeah me too I like very odd smells what are your top three favorite smells sterile mist not the dentist office though okay like sometimes sanitizer and then like I was at um outside when Lincoln was spray painting because I like that smell too oh I love it I kept commenting on it I love it you like the smell of spray paint Monica I don't dislike it yeah David and Tammy and I were all sitting on the uh deck and she was spray painting under the trampoline and it kept walking over to us and every time I was like god I love that smell yeah I was just sitting next to them on the tarp while they spray painted it's too bad I wish it wasn't toxic because if it wasn't I just carry a bottle of spray paint wherever I went well they should make um spray paint perfume what do you think about that yes no because a lot of people like spray paint exactly and like perfume is not like you don't sniff yourself it's so you don't gross other people out that's why perfume exists but you could have like a like something that you could smell like a candle yeah spray paint candle oh spray paint candle and the whole home would smell like spray paint yeah okay I'm open to that so long as we can get our noses on that smell without it being toxic seems like a win um so spray paint motorhome and like sterility sterile yeah yeah I like flowers too flowers oh that's a left curve ball yeah that wouldn't be in a connections oh my god speaking of I opened it up today and I was like hell no oh really yeah okay there's too many things that everything could be oh okay like we play a word game she knows you know connections the today's is it's either really hard or too easy right I can't figure it out that's one of the gifts of it sometimes you're like this is either insanely easy it's too easy suspiciously easy yeah I think it's extra hard I know I know I like the variability of it being hard and easy yeah I do that sometimes like with daily things like when I'm doing skate rooms or puzzles like that I'm like this is too easy to be real yeah yeah something smells fishy yeah that's like part of the connections fishy oh my gosh I haven't looked at it yet they should make a kid's connections why they should they have mini crossword so I feel like they should have I could join your text of putting connections yes how about if you what would be fun is instead of waiting around for someone else to make kid connections maybe you could start making your own puzzles you gotta write down 16 words and there has to be four groups that go together and then you can start challenging us family members yeah but then I know the answer so I can't do the puzzle but then maybe Lincoln would reciprocate by making you a kitty connection yeah kitty connection and you spell like a k with a k like you're in the south okay but then connections also with a k yes that's what we're saying kitty connections k-k don't don't add another k word in there that's a bad thing three k's is bad yeah really bad yeah it's the symbol of the klu klux klan which is a hate group they hate anyone that's not white not terrible horrible it's a horror and a horrible yeah I was gonna say horrid and then horrible came out and said horrid works good too yeah yeah terrible group yeah not a good group to associate I always think no matter what you do I'll be proud of you as long as you're passionate about it but there is an exclusion if you become passionate about joining the kkk I'm not gonna be proud of you I'm gonna be in fact I'm gonna distance myself well first I'll probably try to get on the right path I'll kidnap her yeah yeah then I'll hold me gunpoint until I decide I'm not gonna hold them gunpoint then I'll hold out my hand my soft hand and I'll say delta I don't know how you've ended up on this path but I'm here to bring you home this is a word back yeah I remind you of all the people we love in the world that aren't white namely me yes I want to call my people so many exactly you gotta leg up because you had me since you were really little since the jump delta how's this duolingo going good good keep sending me notifications you can turn those off you can turn notifications off on anything I can't I'll help you thank you okay well yeah so I was doing french for a while and then the other day I was hanging with delta and we were doing spanish together and um you know I took eight semesters in spanish so I should be pretty proficient at it yeah I took four years in high school and four semesters in college I had to um I feel like you retain even less than me I have it's crazy but what I'm realizing via duolingo is I am actually pretty proficient at reading and writing uh-huh but I I cannot speak it I was trying to write it I kept asking her how do you spell this how do you spell this and she just knew how to spell everything who's she the computer oh monica yeah but only because I learned it so I should know it's just been a long time can you spell beligrafo yeah okay I'm not gonna okay can I say something in spanish yeah please let's give it a shot disculpe um excuse me i eat apples oh and you think that you need to be excused to do that now it would make sense if you said excuse me I need to eat an apple like you're removing yourself from what is it yeah necessito I need oh I need oh wow you guys really are coming up on your spanish uh but excuse me I'm gonna eat an apple necessito comer manzanas maybe I want to eat an apple or you could just say like not even put the apple part just say like may I please be excused like por favor de scupe I do think de scupe is your favorite spanish word yeah it is but I'm polite so excuse me but I was thinking so that day Delta and I were doing a lot of spanish that day I hung out with Anna our spanish-speaking friend later that evening and she went to the bathroom and so I pulled up duolingo to do a little while she was in the bathroom oh nice then she came out and I was still doing it and all of a sudden I just felt that Anna is the smartest person I know it really hit me that the way she speaks english which she learned when she was 18 right is with such a proficiency that like you know I'm doing this and I'm a two-year-old it's a joke she's trying to give me encouragement but it's like so embarrassing and then her brother and sister call her they group call her uh-huh as they do uh-huh and they are speaking in spanish we get in the car and she has it on speaker and I'm like trying so hard to see what I can get just get one word right I'm getting some words and I'm trying to understand like I was like oh the dad is here and Anna is like I don't have to be with the dad all the time you know I made up everything that I thought was happening and then at one point I looked over because there was someone on the street and I looked for like four seconds and then I came back and I missed so much like you definitely can't be doing anything other than just straight up paying attention it just becomes white noise so and then I thought man she's doing it's it's really impressive yes because she's as you said very proficient extremely she's good connections of course I know okay we're gonna do some work now delta feel free to hang out listen yeah I'll just say silent listen to what you're doing okay but if something really good strikes you yeah feel free to share okay so this is for cody cody is the uh brief guy yes yes he was fun really fun lived up to the name cody cody immediately think it's gonna be fun right cody I was with my buddy cody we were uh we started off a hang gliding and then cody was like why aren't we out ripping in the surf yes it is surfer it does it does read surfer that part's true yeah cody sounds fun yeah what you would never say is like oh yeah my buddy cody and I went to this emo show and just got really heavy and then we were we just went to the parking lot just kind of cried a bit on my bumper we did that though you and cody yeah wait you have a real cody that you've cried with no we didn't cry me and cody went through that show like two nights after this interview oh right in real life our guest cody not my hypothetical cody oh wow okay so did you see him there yeah we did we went up you chatted a bit how did it go outside of this context okay wonderful yeah you do very well in those situations i would say you're gonna have meeting up with folks you just met carrying on kept it brief okay but no crying on your bumper of your car no crying on the bumper but it could have led to that sure but not with cody maybe another friend darren you and darren would have a good cry yeah the meaning of prosaic you brought you said it a few times i want to use it so bad yeah it means having the style or diction of prose lacking poetic beauty commonplace commonplace that's what i was trying to go for prosaic yeah cody was so smart let's talk about that for a second i want to hear your thought vocabulary he was very cultured like he knew a lot yes cultured elevated yeah uh the vocabulary was off the charts it was not prosaic at all oh this was a weird thing in this episode you said he looked like both of you said he looked like dave franco in that conversation we're identifying who he looked like and he said adam brody or adam scott or something so you must get that all the time and then i said john mayer and anyway those three names come up john mayer adam brody and adam scott and upcoming on turn anonymous there's a discussion about another person what they look like and it was those same three people so i think it's like a cookie cutter cookie cutter even though they're all unique and beautiful no this is what happens there's a cookie cutter and then they change small details but like very happily and quickly they told you i've been running into a few mollies okay yeah yeah i've run into two mollies that aren't molly i've run into a couple mollies that aren't molly then here's an interesting thing so we're cleaning out the um shed that's off of this old ass garage right and there's a ton of um just garbage in there going through it yesterday and we found um molly's bachelorette party dvd which apparently was filmed her bachelorette party and eric and molly's engagement party uh in your garage in my storage facility and then a dvd video of i think their wedding in our store so the amount of things that would have had to happen like a they would never bring those over these are from 2006 these dvds we since we've been friends have never played a dvd right i'm not thinking they're gonna assume we even have a dvd player nor had they ever said like let's bring over molly's bachelorette party so how these ended up over here is such a mystery this is a huge shoot on mystery big mystery speaking of dvds um we talked about laugh therapy here and when he was talking about laugh therapy it was reminding me that i engaged in something like this you did yes i vaguely remember callie was there are you calling an improv show laugh there no so i texted her and i said was there something weird we did in college where we went somewhere and we laughed and she said yes i did a documentary she was a film major in college okay and her specialty that's not a thing focus yeah her focus was documentaries she wanted that was she wanted to produce documentaries and grad school that's what she did okay yes what's a dvd great question it's a disc like this big it's very thin uh you know what a cd is yeah yeah it looks just like a cd but a movie is on it and you put it in a dvd player and that's how you watch movies up until streaming you've seen them you have a bunch of them we have a ton i refuse to throw away my dvd collection it's a great source and we would put the dvds in the car when we yeah back when we would drive the truck to the sand dunes we had little dvd players so yeah yeah you've had dvds yeah you've had them in fact um monica bought you inside out dvd for your birthday i thought you said i gave it to me it was i know it's one of the two and now one of them's here so just make it to her no because i don't know i don't know i probably bought it for both i don't even remember doing this so this is tricky but anyway i just the name doesn't really ring a bell dvd or inside out dvd i know what dvds are oh i'm so glad you're here because i've been trying to remember oh your market because we're still talking about something but you're mark fall guy oh okay um so yes she did a documentary on laughing yoga laughing yoga yeah it was a thing and then i went to a class with her oh my gosh this sounds like your worst nightmare talk about participation anxiety i know i have only vague memories of it but i think there was a forced laughter and then free laughter i asked her if i could get my hands on that dvd that was the class you attended she filmed it was part of the documentary oh my god yeah perhaps play it yeah so she said she's gonna look into it okay she's gonna go through her files i knew there was some laughing structured laughing thing i had participated in separate from acting class i mean also in acting class i'm sure we did all kinds of weird stuff like that yeah embarrassing thing well you know the ha-ha game no how's that go it's like everyone lays down and like i'm laying down then like you would lay down put your head on my stomach and then the next person put their head on your stomach so it's all interwoven and then one person says ha and then the next person says ha and like because you're being moved and your head is being jolted it like has a ripple effect and everyone's saying ha and eventually everyone's just laughing oh that sounds really fun and that one works i think it works yeah or it's it's um the physicality part it would be what probably would make me giggle killing someone's belly yeah i think it's also self-filling prophecy yes and um perhaps also could be yeah could be okay delta stop rocking and pay attention i've been meaning to bring this up for a few fact checks uh because when i see a stellar movie i want to shout it from the rooftop so everyone supports fall guy it was oh my god it's incredibly good dad rented it and he was like it's not gonna be like barbie we're not gonna watch it a million times it was totally like we were deciding whether to rent or purchase and it was a big debate yes about halfway through death was like you should have bought this i'm like i know i blew it it is so funny and so good i couldn't get over it yeah we're gonna watch it again for sure nice also dave leach directed it and i was in dave leach's very first thing he ever directed he was i believe red pit stunt double that was his kind of claim to fame he's very famous stuntman because he was red pit stunt double he had the most incredible physique i ever saw and it was when i was in the groundlings and he came and cast like six of us in this 20 minute short and because he had all these great relationships like i think keanu reeves was in it ben stiller was in it i played a special effects prop master and um so i've watched his career with that kind of pride of having been a part of his first thing in excitement for him at every run of the ladder he's you know directed all those john wicks but this by far i think is his best movie it's so good why do you have cords coming from your ceiling yeah um a lot of guests wanted that too and that's because there was a huge wall there uh just hours before we recorded our first episode of this and we knew we needed new hardwood floors because there was a cat in here that had peed for a decade and the whole room smelled like cat pee so i realized if i don't tear this wall out the hardwood floors are not going to go under that wall and if we want to tear the wall which i think we do want to um we're going to have to redo the hardwood floor so on a sunday i came and tore out that entire wall by myself uh so be ready for the hardwood floors and all i did uh on the ceiling where all the electrical wires came out was put tape over it because we were in a hurry and then i've just never addressed it for six and a half years but funny enough address it you should it's getting addressed this summer yes finally yeah like i'd be fine with it if it was like white but you don't like the yellow it's blue yellow that just doesn't match that okay monica's main issue is the amount of bugs stuck to the underside of the tape that's fallen off the ceiling you probably don't want to look too close yeah i it's just overall a little little bit grody yeah it's unsettling it's grody um charming kind of yeah embrace it it's charming kind of embrace the charm the charm's on its way out monica's very tell her you should take this place in now because we're changing stuff and we're making it better in quotes but it's not going to be better because it's a question for your dad like it's been here a lot but like well we have the chance maybe we could just like make a little bit better yeah i think you're i think you're on the same page as your dad yeah i don't think we're gonna change much but we are gonna give guests a door to the bathroom which is a big thing we've got to step out to the bathroom yeah this is minimal change door to the bathroom and hide all the cables why is there a door because there was a wall there with a door over there so you could close off that closet and you'd be private but i tore that wall out so but tell t with your friends and stuff don't you think you like people who are not perfect but who are interesting yeah that's this that's this attic it's not perfect but it's interesting aren't gross right do they have wires coming out of their heads no there's beauty and imperfection i think there'll be plenty of imperfection to go around in this room i mean it's fine i've i've accepted it is what it is i like how this you're grieving you do like that you kind of want to keep that keep that keep that yeah i like that too um by the way i'm still stepping out when people go to the bathroom if this i always feel like it's worse because now they're gonna be right there we're gonna be like it's weird if we step out but if i was peeing right there i'd be so uncomfortable knowing everyone was right here i could still hear it maybe we should at least if we're gonna put a door we should soundproof it well what we're gonna do as soon as the door closes this whole room i'm mounting speakers everywhere it's gonna sound like a rainforest in here and so there'll be loud rainforest sounds piped in we just have a lot to think about the next guests that are gonna be on once this is finished they're gonna be lucky they're gonna have the bathroom at the door they'll probably like instagram from here they'll like it so much they'll like want to promote the episodes they're on i'm like man i've never been in such a tiny perfect room all right let's see here percent of american adults that have used psilocybin um this is according to the hill 6.6 percent of adults from ages 19 to 30 use hallucinogens other than lsd in 2021 up from 3.4 percent in 2018 well just in that year not even in their lifetime magic machine is nearly doubled in three years i don't mind that okay a widow is a woman who's lost a spouse by death and is not remarried a widow where is a man who's lost a spouse by death and is not remarried does that make any sense to you no i don't understand why there's two names for it and you add an er it's like more widow it sounds like one perpetuates it on the other right like interview yeah and an interviewer you know what it is you know what's in there now that i'm really saying the word over and over again there's an implicit victim and victimizer in it so if you're a widow it's like you're the victim you're a you're a widow but if you've widowed someone you're a widower yeah it feels like it should be the person who died is the widower yeah yes exactly yeah it's strange like they did something to somebody okay so did kanye give kim a hologram of her dad yeah he did it looks like this oh that's looks pretty convincing i watch over you and your sisters and brother and the kids every day no see i know his body language was very weird i know yeah i would not want to receive that don't give me that for christmas either of you dave senior talking to me painful orders yeah you better see if you get a refund uh abe lincoln entered with one dead child but then a child died in office in office yeah wow yeah it is you know that lincoln or lincoln do you know that we just said lincoln that's why lincoln uh do you know that delta that like it was very normal for people in the 1800s to lose like half their kids what yes what yeah there's a lot of diseases and stuff we didn't have cures for and vaccines typhoid fever yellow fever like i'm always talking about the spanish flu uh-huh that was the last that was the last quarantine before covid uh we can tell our children we lived in i know isn't it weird but you've lived through one i don't remember it i don't think it's weird if that's like what happened to you know i think it's weird for us it doesn't seem like it's weird for them they're like oh yeah that's you know i'm saying because it's part of the kids huh yeah maybe because they don't expectation about it they didn't really think about it it was just happening i bet it crosses over at age like 10 maybe because then you're aware you're not in school right and you're not like meeting up and playing with your friends exactly yeah well definitely would have been torturous when you're like in ninth grade oh my god i feel so bad for yeah i have to pack now okay did you get a text no no i was thinking about the bar and i thought about bars in our cover and then i thought about our cover and then i thought about the motorhome cover and then i thought about the motorhome and then i thought about my clothes in the motorhome wow before you go can i get you to publicly declare that you're going to be somewhat discerning with how many stuffies you bring oh yeah has this already been negotiated because i brought about 50 and three fit in my bed so you want to bring 50 and then it turns out only three fit wait you want to bring 50 or you have 50 i want to bring how many do you have oh i have like 150 or something yeah we were just on a walk the other day and delta was saying she's she's getting next fact check that you have even if it's after the summer i will have counted okay great but also you were saying you're starting to consider reducing the amount of stuffies which i was i said reducing the amount of toys not stuffies i said toys like mini things like what am i going to do with these mini things never reducing the amount of stuffies hold on you're in a hurry to go pack but we're finally on something juicy okay you have a particular kink for really tiny miniature things right you seem to really love miniature things i have a miniature barbie credit card and a miniature barbie um uh dove lotion yeah and you got like miniature tied and miniature products and miniature money it's a thing this age group likes miniatures yeah and i just wanted can you explain a little bit of the appeal of it does it make you feel big like i'm a big monster i got my mini money what do you feel like when you're interacting with these miniature things it's just like you're so used to big size uh-huh when it's mini it feels special like if you found uh a um fossil which i did i have a rock with a fossil on it okay so they're like fossils do you ever line up all the mini stuff and then come in your bedroom and go around like uh king kong godzilla and smash everything okay so it's not a power trip for you no it's just really cute mini but i'm giving that up right now it's like i'm getting up all the little toys of plastic stuff i don't use but stuffies stuffies are so soft and squishy and they're like little babies and they have feelings and you don't want to have them feeling lonely or abandoned i really want a baby because they're so soft you want a human baby yes oh i don't want to go through labor though i'm gonna go adopt that's your plan because there's a lot of kids that need to be adopted yeah well how long are you gonna wait are you gonna adopt this year this year no i practiced on stuffies on group yeah you do such a good job i've never seen a more incredible mother than you are to group you're very rough with your baby actually sometimes if i mean a little that's why because he can't really feel pain okay he can't feel pain he can um he has feelings like hunger though oh yeah so he has hunger pains but he doesn't have like when you throw him 30 40 feet in the air and you don't make the catch and he hits the ground that's fine no he is an acrobat oh okay does he have bones no he has built in muscle to protect him he's full of beans people beans are protecting his heart his heart is him okay wow and his heart is always protected so his heart is fine and but he can he can really take a lick and keep on ticking he's had some big falls right oh yeah he's got like four stitches yes do you know that monica he has stitches group one on his foot one on his leg like right here okay inner thigh one like on his hand right here and then he's got the other on his hand right here matching matching and who did you or mommy mama she's the suture she'll suture she's well she comes from a nursing family yeah my grandma's my grandma's the doctor and so it's um your grandma's grandma's grandma's too wow all right well thanks for that i appreciate it if i had to pick any of the things you were going to get rid of it would be these miniature things because they get left all over the house and i step on them and whiskey eats them whiskey actually trumps on my legos too and that's why he's not alive in my brain when i play with legos okay but wait we didn't just how many stuffies are you going to take oh three because that's all that fits my god no no no no three squish mellows don't yeah don't get it twisted yeah three squish mellows which are a brand of stuffy and groot and meerkat can you dig deep and tell us what they provide you the stuffies squish mellows all of them like what do you get they provide me love and so they they i sleep them but they stay in my bed most of the time yeah so they're like nocturnal they sleep in the day and they wake up in the night to protect me from bad guys okay they're protective agents they're nocturnal and they stand vigil and you feel safe with them and it's not really that i feel safe and happy when i provide yeah it gives me a feeling of i matter and i have a place in this world fuck yeah that's great that's really good it's good that you already know that about yourself and like if i haven't played with group in a long time i feel super bad yeah that's the part i don't like to feel guilty i have that too when i when i come back so they're dead and when i have the thing that oh this is sounding much the thing that keeps them alive is my nurturing so when they're dead i have to bring that back alive i place them on my heart and they feel my heartbeats going straight to their heart and that provides them yeah so a bit of a frankenstein fantasy as well is any part of it delta because this is what i've always wondered is any part of it that you're the baby of the family you're the tiniest and then it's nice to have other things around that are you so that they're the baby of the family you get to be the kind of grown up you know what that's actually no no it's not that no no because i already have that with you so okay okay i'm glad i found out at the only place where i get mad that i'm a baby because when i get into lincoln but like other than that i like being yeah i like to be a baby and i i feel really safe when people nurture me like i'm a baby so i do that to my stuffies because you know how good it feels yes you pass it on you pay for it i do want to be the oldest right okay a little bit so just a bit of it too yeah all right um i love you have fun packing thanks for stopping by disculpe i know adios i know adios amigas well i mean we're done anyway there's nothing else okay so you're off to do your biz all right love you