I am like a one fucking one band, one woman show, and I can barely do this one. Do you understand? I am like holding this together with fucking glue and paper clips and and and like the tiniest amount of spit and a Kylie lip kit that I've had for five fucking years.

Hello, everybody, welcome to this yet another episode of Busi Phillips is doing her best, I am the titular busy Phillips joined today per yuge as.

As usual, I don't even know I was going to say, my dear, dear Casey S. on hello, and we're so thrilled today because we get to have a new guest co-host, a dear friend, a lovely human.

We all know her and love her. And you do, too. Ashley Nicole Black High.

The woman voted by Stacey Abrams, most likely to play me in.

A biopic, do you guys a biopic or biopic, biopic by fancy people, people say a biopic just a few years ago, just a chance to go.

You know what I think it is? I think it's a case of one of those, like somebody in a high position of power, said it incorrectly. And then everybody else was like, oh, we've been saying it wrong the whole time.

It's like it's a biopic now, biopic. So let's give biopics situation because it's like it's like it's a biographical picture. So biopic. Biopic. A biopic. Yeah, biopic.

We're Stacey Abrams said that Ashley should play Stacey Abrams, not that Stacey Abrams didn't say that Ashley should play busy Phillips in a biopic.

I would also be prepared to do so. You do a beautiful job either way. I agree. I agree. Yeah. My kids were stoked, Ashley, by the way.

They were like they told me before anyone. They both came in to tell me.

I believe I feel like I broke the news in the group. I'm so sorry, Casey. You did bring it up in the group.

Chappe, I my yes. My children knew you, Nabay. They're real.

They're on top of it. Political, religious grounds. Yeah, they really are.

Yeah. I'm just waiting for one is my name. I mean it's exciting. Everybody does.

And you're also making Bill Phillips is doing her best history because you're the first person to ever have been a guest and a guest host.

Oh, I feel like I should be holding a little trophy. I would like to thank my very free schedule for making this possible.

Well, you have your Emmy right behind you, so you have to match it up and pretend you have your Emmy on one side and your Swiffer on the other.

Yes, I'm feeling I'm feeling good. You're so well rounded.

Anyway, I stick this right here. Also, kudos for recognizing the top one third of a Swiffer. I'm going to take a picture because we all know the top one third of us, whatever, you know, name the pertinent part.

OK, I got a pic. I got a pic. Now point to the AMA over your left shoulder. There it is. There it is.

OK, me on one side, Swiffer on the other. That's how we live our lives.

Guys, it's Hollywood being good guys.

Speaking of Hollywood, I did the most amazing in table read. I can't talk about it, but it is really funny and it talks about Hollywood in it. But that's not what I wanted to talk about.

I don't know where this is going and I'm ready for it.

I wanted to talk about Thomas Middleditch in the Hollywood sex clubs. Casey shaking her head, do you not want to talk about it? No, I just like I mean, I had heard first of all, I want to hear what you have to say first.

When people think ridiculous things about Hollywood, I'm like, oh, come on, you guys. It's not like don't think ridiculous things. But then when somebody, like, does something that confirms the ridiculous things that people think, I'm like, thanks a lot, Thomas Middleditch thing.

I know also it just feels so on the nose, you know, I mean, except for the one detail that I can knock it over.

And this is not the headline, it's not the important part. But I'm reading the article and then like three quarters of the way through, there's a picture of the store front and it's on Hollywood Boulevard.

It's like having your sex club at Disneyland.

OK, the fact that this was in the back of Pig and Whistle is is actually deeply upsetting to me. Well, there were some real pigs there. Yes. For those of you who don't know what we're referencing, I don't know how you missed it.

But Thomas Middleditch, an improv actor of Middleditch and Shwartz fame, I guess, and you might think shows such as Silicon Valley.

Right. He's basically the lead of Silicon Valley.

And he's had there's been like a few rumor things in the last few years, like swirling about him kind of by his own making.

I feel like he publicly was talking about, like, how he and his now, I think ex-wife were swingers or something, because you were like the day after he got married.

I feel like he was like, I would like to have an open relationship. Right. We have.

Yeah. Like that. Gave an interview about it without telling me. So she read in the paper along with everyone else, that they had an open relationship. Yeah.

That's not guys I, I haven't done a ton of research on open relationships, but I do know that I think one of the tenants of it is that there's an understanding that you don't have to read it in an interview.

Yeah, it's it's usually a thing that you talk over and you say, yeah, but so anyways, so there was apparently some weirdos secret.

And also about Thomas Middleditch. He's also one of the I'm kind of scared about this whole ME2 thing. It seems like it's like going to you know, I said that, right. Yeah. Like like what's a guy to do.

Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to do next. Panish. Everyone's like, yeah. Like I have some ideas.

Like anyone who said that you're like buddy you want to just come clean right now. You're like what are, what are you not I mean what are some things you'd like to tell us.

Yeah. Would you like to share or not. Do we need to find out. Just disappointed.

So anyways, so he was I guess a part of this members only sort of like Goth sex club in the back of pig and whistle.

Well, to begin with, whistles like a longstanding L.A. establishment, like along the lines of, I don't know, like Canters or the deli or it's like a it's like an eating place.

Yeah, but you really like burgers and they have beer.

There's nothing sexier than a full stomach, nothing more than a very bloated with the Nexium documentary.

And then reading this article about this like secret club where they have rituals and you have to get a mark, a tattoo under your body, a tattoo on your fucking face.

By the way, that is your first sign.

People that like you don't want to be a part of this club. You want to leave. You're not.

I mean, I feel like if someone was like, we're going to go to this sexy place, we're like, okay, cool. But I'm a little sexy outfit. And the second someone said face tattoo, I would burst out laughing. There's nothing no sexy about a tattoo. What about sex? That's sexy. Like, let's do that. I don't know. I've even heard about, like, secrets.

No, there was maybe an article a couple of years ago about like secret secret sex clubs where you didn't have to get a tattoo and it did, but you had to pay like a shitload of money to go.

And it, like, did seem like like something out of Gossip Girl, you know. Well, but in a way, not sexy. Like, it's not my thing, it's not my cat.

But like, if you were into that, I don't know, maybe that would be better than just like the dinge, like peanut crusted floor back room of big and wimpy or what it smells like.

It just smells like, well, alcohol and it's like sticky.

And then here comes. Thomas Middleditch, just like dancing up on you, like you wrote what's happening to me?

Why do I have to do on my face a membership card, a membership card?

That was a thing that, like some people, had to pay for their membership and other people didn't and high school did.

Yeah, there's nothing more L-A than finding out that you were, like, only hard enough to have to pay to get into the pig and whistle, but other people were getting in the way. That's how Blockbuster Video was, I heard.

Oh my God. But speaking of which, you know what we watched again the other night?

What swinger's. It's a good one, guys. It's a fuckin classic, and I'm sorry that Vince Vaughn turned into such a Republican back because he was so fine. Have you watched Ashley?

No, you haven't. No, you don't have to watch it. It is like it's also just like so perfectly skewers the L.A. club scene in the late 90s.

And that's when I mean, that's when I moved to L.A. So I feel like it was just it's so good. The movie is so good.

I feel like it really does hold up. And Vince Vaughn is so fucking hot, busy.

You know how you're always like you never remember anyone's name. You never recognize anyone. Yeah, I always remember and recognize usually everyone. When I worked at 30 Rock, we have this new I.T. computer guy at The Rosie O'Donnell Show. And I was walking down the hallway at our offices at 30 Rock and I saw him, the new computer guy, Mike, and I was like, Oh, hey, how's it going?

And he was so friendly and so nice. And he was like, Oh, not bad. How are you? And I was like, great, are how are you settling in? And he was like, Oh, not bad. It's going OK. And I was like, that's good. And I was like, let me know if you need anything. And he was like, OK, cool, that's so nice of you. And I was like, yeah, no problem.

You know where to find me. And he was like, yeah, OK. And I was like, OK, I'll just see you around later. And he's like, Yes, to your letter and I'll talk to you later. And I was like, OK, bye.

And then I walked away and then everyone was like, you know, Vince Vaughn and and I was like, wait, I was I really, really had the hots for mid 90s, even late 90s, Vince Vaughn.

And when I was on Dawson's Creek, he had filmed a movie in Wilmington, North Carolina, the summer before I got there, first season five of Dawson's Creek.

And it was actually the movie where I think he and Steve Buscemi, like, got arrested in Wilmington and some sort of bar fight, which, by the way, according to my time in Wilmington, tracks like doesn't seem that difficult to do. Yeah, I almost was arrested a few times.

I'm so grateful that TMZ didn't exist and the camera phones did not be so fucking ruined. I would be ruined. I would be a ruined person anyway.

The point being that we should give young actors an easier time nowadays, but also the point being they came back to Wilmington for reshoots for like one week, and it became my mission to try to, like, find Vince Vaughn. And I don't know, I wanted to, like, have a beer with them.

It was before I knew his political views. Obviously, guys, I didn't know. I just thought he was hot and.

Anyway, the story doesn't go anywhere, I didn't find him. It's not too late. It's not too late. It is a pig and whistle, right? It is too late.

And I've ended up like a kid birthday parties with him sometime in the last 12 years. I can't keep any of the shit straight at this point.

And I remember just thinking like, oh, God, if only I could have told 18 year old me that I would be like rolling my eyes that Republican Vince Vaughn and like giving him the evil eye from across the room at like a kid's birthday party at my gym.

And not that he even knows what I'm doing or why I'm like, mad at him anyway.

So, yeah, sex clubs. I don't know, guys.

I'm just saying it all seems pretty fucking lame, you know what I mean? It's really wild.

Do you tell us at home, do you have sex clubs in your town that, you know, I've got sex clubs in the back of your dining establishments? Are they do your nerdy guys have memberships to them? It's it is a thing that, like nerdy dudes do, though, isn't it? Yeah.

It's like any any way that you can create a hierarchy, because like when I was reading it, it reminded me of like an improv club. It's the same shit. It's just a place where nerdy dudes can be like in this room.

There's a hierarchy and I'm at the top of it and now I get to be mean to you.

Yeah, it's so weird because also.

Gross, yeah, it's like a phenomenon with like espec comedy writers especially, but also comedic actors, the second they get like any kind of money power, they, you know, just use it in that way.

It seems like a lot of them.

Well, it's just like reinforcing ideas, right? Like this. It all comes back to how we raise boys, I imagine. Yeah. You know what I mean?

In a way, because, like the traits that we deem valuable for boys and men and and what sort of girls are kind of taught in response, oh my God, Birdies for the Birdie has a what's it called?

Sex ed. They're doing like their sixth grade, like sex ed stuff.

And Birdie already made them change how they were talking about it, because they said that they kept talking about the genders and. Bernie raise their hand and was like, I actually believe you're talking about sex, not gender.

And so you should you should differentiate because you were like, yes, you're correct. You're right. This is thing about the female sex and the male sex, not gender. Cool. Cool. I don't know.

But like, I think that there is it's like it's all just deeply ingrained in that in that thing, you know, and that these these guys who.

Had other attributes and felt like they were dismissed, you know, then when they get there, whatever power it is, like money or, you know, they're funny so that they get successful in that world and then they just kind of abuse that. They are not always, obviously not always.

And like everyone wants to be with someone that they find hot, you know what I mean? Like, ah, I don't begrudge anyone that certainly, like, you know, I've wanted to be with someone that I find hot. It's just a weird thing. I don't find, like, hot guys hot though.

Yeah, that's the thing. That's the. Do you Ashleigh.

I do you do you want you want you like I want like I like to honk but also I will say I have dated some like really really hot guys.

They're like I'm really hot. So I'm not it's like the nerdy guy who's like trying to appear hot, wants to date the most modern woman to, like, prove that he can get them. And I've dated literal models who are just like, you're nice. I like hanging out with you because they're not like trying to prove that they can get the hottest girl.

Right. So. Right. That must be why I was always so I was always so insecure. I was just always I was a bad dater. I was bad at it. I feel like I do. I feel like I was bad at it.

But I never liked I've never been attracted to like typically or whatever.

Symmetrical. What do you mean? I don't know. I don't want to insult and I can't I can't put this person on blast. But let me just say, one of the most famous women, one of the most famous, most beautiful, most powerful women, I won't say in the world in the probably in the world, someone who I'm not going to say who it is. I'm not going to put them on blast, who I had occasion to be around this story.

I know who it is. I had occasion to be around pretty regularly, was, you know, was dating someone. And I ran into her and I said, oh, you know, I saw a picture of you with the person that you're dating. He's cute. And she said, Oh, do you think so? And I said, Yeah. And she said, That's funny because you know me. I'm like, I'm ugly.

And I was like, that's so funny. That is funny.

But you just reminded me of that because you said you don't find hot guys hot. I think it's funny, too, because when you were saying, like, you love Vince Vaughn, I would have gone Jon Favreau, you know, for me.

Yeah. But you know what? It also speaks to where my brain was at at the time.

This is like prefrontal cortex, what I doing or whatever. Right. Like I was 17 years old.

And so, yeah, like I actually do think I liked hot guys when I was a kid.

I loved Leonardo know I loved Leonardo DiCaprio and I loved like Vince Vaughn. I had a poster, swinger's poster and I just thought he was looking hot. And I'm like, who else do I love? It's just it's very funny, like when you when you really think of like what you're what you're attracted to and. Yeah. And what's attracted to you, but yeah, I mean, I've had that too, actually, where I've gone out with guys, where people I, I've had people express shock like that.

Guys with you.

And I'm like, yup, yup. I really know what could I say. And you're just like yeah I don't I mean like I see this tattoo on my face.

I can better believe that he is like me and it's just like a really weird situation.

And you're just like, yeah, I mean, like I can't really explain it to you. I'm not going to defend it to you. But yeah, I know little sparkplug women that like very motley guys and I don't know why I do too.

I know. I know.

I have a good friend who's just like loves, loves a model dude. And I'm like, well, I'm just like, I don't need them to talk. Like, that is fucking wild to me.

So I guess so I don't begrudge, like, wanting the hotness or whatever.

I think I do think it's weird when it gets into like this area where I'm like, well, what's happening though? Like, does this does everybody have agency? Is everybody like having a good time? Are you having an actual relationship? But then I'm also like, well, it's also none of my business, so.

Yeah, well, I guess the point is in this sex club in the back of the pig and whistle, I bet they probably don't love that. That's how I'm going to reference it for me.

For all to and it's me is just the worst part to me.

It's so gross.

I just feel like. Yeah.

Like if I guess I guess you got to be careful what sex club you sign up for is all I'm saying. You know what I mean. It's true.

It's true. You got to read, read the the code of conduct. Yeah.

I feel like there are things this is one of those things that in theory it should be possible for a group of human beings to do, should be possible for a group of human beings to have a sex club and have it be fun and egalitarian and nobody get hurt. But it doesn't seem to happen all that often.

Just like you should be able to have a cult and just all worship whatever together and not be fine. But it never works out that way.

Can I tell you something? It should be possible to have a fucking chess club that goes really well, but even that shit implodes every time. So you know what I mean?

It all of these things, it's really difficult to get a group of people, even a group of people that all love the same thing coming together and like all moving in the same direction, doing the same thing.

I would say the exception was Schitt's Creek. I would say that was that was the exception, because they just that they just seemed like they loved each other. They loved the experience. They all want a bunch of awards.

It's true. But even that was a relatively small, small group.

And there really were leaders on Schitt's Creek. You know, there really there really were just a couple cooks and then everybody else really deferred to that leadership.

But it's really it's it's very difficult to have any type of of group and especially, you know, sex like especially when you add sex right into it.

Sex is very emotional.

And it's it's about a lot of things that are very loaded.

And people sometimes have a hard time being bossy and then other people have not a hard time at all being bossy. And, you know, and it gets all mixed up real fast. It can go south or sideways real fast. Yeah. I would have been out at the face tattoo, I actually would have been out when they told me the address and I was like the pig, and that would have been scary. I'm so sorry. I'm going to I'm going to have to I'm going to be at Musso and Frank's across the street having a fucking martini like an adult.

OK, well, you guys, did you hear the story about Kylie Jenner's make up artist?

Yeah, that was yeah.

That's tragic, first of all. And like, I wish the best for for that person that they get better.

OK, so the original. Thing. Is. Yeah, so she OK, she wants to clear it up that it's not her makeup artist, OK? It's a makeup artist that's friends with her makeup artist who she has worked with in the past.

So, OK, she does. But regardless, good better points later on in this. But the point is, it's not my makeup artist. It's not a good point. And she just shouldn't have it like that. She actually does have better points. But that was such a weird thing to lead with. It was like, you guys, it's not my responsibility. He's someone else's makeup. I she shared this guy's go fund me and.

And had donated like six thousand dollars yourself, I mean. Listen. She's a billionaire, you know, I mean, like, I just I don't know, I have a hard time. I don't know. I can't. She's a child, too, so I mean. Well, she's not really. How old is she? She seems like a child. She's onto the cortex.

She's all ages because, like, she's a billionaire. So she's. Yeah, her her brain isn't grown all the way because she's under twenty five. Right. You're also a billionaire. Right.

So, you know, because also our guest today, Dr. Harold, from the Child Mind Institute, he does talk about that, that you're your brain isn't truly fully formed until after twenty five years of age.

Right.

So like right up until I was twenty five I would have fucked Vince Vaughn that on that birthday. Out of luck for Vince, if only he had found you.

But all I'm saying is just like I don't know, do like I do think that there's something a little wild about like.

Kylie Jenner sharing a go fund me. When she's only donated six dollars, do it like it just seems it's what she said was that they were asking for ten thousand dollars they had raised for and so she donated the rest the other six, and then she had to go find me, which I could see how if you're not thinking about how actions have consequences, that seemed like the right thing to do. But the part about being under twenty five comes in when you have to know the Internet is going to drag you, even though what she did was fulfill the rest of what they were asking for.

She also could have just quietly done that and not shared it and not gotten into this controversy. Right.

And you know what they say. No good deeds, no deed goes unpunished, which my friend Jenny Eliscu and by the way, I haven't reached out to her, which makes me an asshole.

But I did read a tweet of hers. But she's my friend who's a DJ on Sirius XM.

You and she wrote this tweet the other day that was like after getting injured, trying to help a stranger, people can't stop saying to me, no good deed goes unpunished.

It's kind of bumming me out.

I'm just like looking for any stories of when you've helped a stranger and it's worked out great. And then Mark and I were sitting there and I started laughing because I was like, it's never worked out well for me.

It never worked out well for me, truly. But you've helped a stranger, right? Casey, I my sister, you got that email about for me, about that woman. For my sister. Yeah, no. Yeah.

Your sister helped a woman move out of her house when she was in a domestic violence situation. Yes. Yes. And they were like strangers, total strangers.

And the woman sent the email to our this busy Phillips is doing her best email, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

She just like just to say like just please tell busy to thank her sister, which is so amazing. And you're like, you're right. Yeah. She, she got her moved out of her. Yeah. So that seemed to have gone well. Yeah. I've helped people before.

Like I yeah. I have like sat with people who have been in car accidents and like held their hand while they waited.

I did that once and it was in Chicago and it was like negative 13 degrees and had me and a colleague were like walking to the bus from rehearsal.

We saw this car accident happen and it was like an old man who was like kind of disoriented, like we shouldn't leave him. But we ended up waiting for two hours in the negative 30 degrees and we were just both looking at each other like that.

I had to act of like, well, this sucks. But while also trying to comfort to take care of this dude, man, I did see this woman.

I think this was when we were doing busy tonight. I saw a woman get into like a scooter accident.

Do you remember that? Like those scooters, you know, that everybody has the burgers.

And I saw her like she just like flew off of this bird scooter and she's like into the street.

And I was like, oh, fuck me. All right. And so I, like, ran over to help her and helped her up.

And she was just like, oh, like I was like like and she's like the great stomp lady.

Yeah. It was like a great lady, totally.

And she was basically fine and she but she was like wearing rings and she had like mester hand up and I have to take your rings off right now, like you have to take them off or they're going to have to be cut off. I'm telling you, take fuckin rings off like. So I did do that and I was like helping her get up. And there are crazy paparazzi photos. I did not realize there was a paparazzi guy.

There are crazy paparazzi photos of helping me, helping this woman who's just like me, looks like she is in agony of still the woman's grief.

Oh, yeah. Listen, you know what? We couldn't have had to stay on that finger. It would have swelled up. They would have had to cut it up.

So, yeah, that was, I guess, find kind of funny because then I was like a funny it's a funny paparazzi photo. What else? I don't know. Whatever anyway. Post and go Funmi Me is also dicey, dicey proposition for billionaires.

I guess it's I mean, listen, it's hard because you want to help and you don't. It's just it's hard. It's a hard situation all around. Yeah.

I would say it is just so hard to be a twenty three year old billionaire.

I would say one thing I would say I, I just know without a shadow of a doubt, it is so hard to be a twenty three year old billionaire. End of the day she'll probably be OK. She'll be ok.

It is like a lie because I have people, I'm not nowhere near a billionaire. So like send me, go fund me and be like, will you share it? And I'm like, it's tough because I'm like, I don't know. There's no way for me to vet this information. So it's like a tough call. And at the end of the day, it's like we should be mad that we live in a country where people have to go fund me health care rather than being like who shares it or not.

Like it shouldn't be happening.

Right, right. That's the point. Right. Or yeah, of course. Obviously, Ashleigh, with the valid point, that's what we should be.

But I don't expect to defend Kylie Jenner today. No, no. But this is where we are.

But also, if there are celebrities listening, you don't need to publicly donate on the go fund me. You can always just shoot a little money privately so that it doesn't say Kylie Jenner. Five thousand dollars on the go on me and then nobody I know mostly do an anonymous nobody's business how much money you gave. And then you can just be like I privately gave an amount. So thank you. It's none of your business. I will say that I.

I have shared a lot of different charity things and organizations, things that I'm involved in personally and whatever, and I do always make it a point to say that I have donated and occasionally I will say the amount because this I fucking hate when I feel like people see.

But this is just my own thing. Like, I do hate when people that I follow that I'm friends with are like swipe up to donate to this charity or whatever. But I know that they haven't and that they think that they're that I'm just posting is like good enough.

Yeah. And it's is me. Yeah.

But that's a personal annoyance of mine. And so sometimes people on Instagram or whatever strangers have been like, you're you don't need to put your that you've donated. You're just trying to your signal. Wait, no. Not signal boosting.

What's the word. Virtue signalling.

Virtue signalling. I'm like yeah fuckin damn right I'm virtue's the Glencross going because I want people to know that I did this thing so that that I'm asking them to do. You know, I think it's like I don't know.

I think accountability is in in some times. Sometimes I think accountability is good. Yeah.

Yeah, I do. I have also shared some had been like white people. This one is for you. Yeah.

I don't want to see any black people donating to this thing. White people get it together. There you go. I people follow me and this one's for you.

There you go. Yeah. And you know what? I probably swiped right on up.

I really did. We guys. Casey, should we talk about the crazy email escalation? But I think should we even get into it or is it too insane?

It was so funny. You kind of talked about it before. You mentioned it before.

But it was so funny then you said I didn't mention it tonight, but it was really funny, like, so it's bonkers.

OK, so actually out of the blue I received listeners, my friends at home out of the blue.

It received an email a couple of months ago now from somebody that like I went to my high school, but we weren't in the same grade, but like kind of and and that this person had gotten my email from somebody else that I'm still friends with, like in a Internet sort of way.

And the email was kind of weirdly sounded like a form email. It's like very formal and. It was just like I have been working like I'm an artist, I've been working on this independent project and I'm putting it into a book, I would love to personally send you a copy of the book.

Hope you're well, and I was like, that's very nice, thank you. Sometimes people like to send me stuff. I know that the hope probably is that maybe I would post it, but there was no information about like where the books, whatever, there was no information or to tag the project or whatever. I just was like, oh, that's nice. This person wants to send me their like book that they've been working on.

And it was sort of like attached.

I mean, I don't even know if I can get into this whole part, but anyway. Then then they were back, it'll be there, you know, on this date and I was like, oh, that's intense. I've never gotten like a tracking.

OK, thank you. The book arrived, I was like, OK, I have a lot of stuff that's happening currently in my life and my personal life and my professional life and. My brain and work, and then two days later, the book should have arrived safely, please let me know that you got the book. And I was like I kind of like saw the email, but I was like, I'll just respond to it, like after I get a chance to, like, look at it and whatever.

Two days after that. Another email, the almost the exact same email, just kindly reply that you received the book and I was like, that's weird, I've had it for four days. Like, what? What am I supposed to be doing?

You know what I mean? Yeah. And then I was like, I don't love that. I that's like very presumptuous and and I don't love that. So I'm just going to hold for a second. Two days later, another one, two days later, another one, another two days, another email. Two days after that, another email, two days after that, another email. And then finally I was like it had been like two weeks.

And I was like, hey, dude, listen, I've yes, things are wild over here.

And I go everywhere. There's a pandemic going on. Wait, listen, I hope you had a lovely week. I'm simply checking in with you regarding the book I emailed you. I look forward to hearing from you.

I will be around all weekend if you briefly want to chat, OK? It goes on and on and on and on.

I appreciate that you have a hectic schedule. I appreciate your time. I will be around to chat after two p.m.. I was like, OK, finally after two weeks of this I wrote back the book arrived safely. Thank you.

I haven't had any time to spend with it. It looks beautiful. I'm curious what kind of feedback, because then at one at some point in the emails starts mentioning feedback. I'm like, I'm curious what kind of feedback you're looking for from me in regards to the book.

And then the next one was No worries. I know you have a hectic schedule. I'm looking for help and feedback related to promoting increasing exposure, support for the project.

OK. What? Once you've had time to spend with the book and read my letter, I would love to chat with you about your ideas. So I looked at the book, which is like it's essentially like a picture book. And and then I read the letter from this person just like I want to do this project and I want to raise money for these charities, but also like.

With anything, it's like, you know, you're also putting your name on it, so it's not like fully altruistic, let's be honest, and there was nothing specific in terms of like there's no website.

Like, I don't know what you. There's no website. There's no Facebook. There's no nothing to link to. So I don't understand what you're asking for me to do or to even really help you out. I don't know. I just don't understand. Right. Nor do I know this person. Just f why is the bigger issue, I guess. So then after that, it continues every two days.

Until. Until. Saturday, I guess, this this Saturday. In which.

I have been scolded now I got a new form letter, I do hope that you're well also, by the way, what if I fucking had covid? Do you know what I mean? The family did also. Who the fuck are you? Get out of my inbox, fucking creep. Sorry, wait, but this is the part that really got me. If you're unable or unwilling to assist with the project on which I am working, I ask that you kindly return the book I sent you.

I sent it to you with your consent in bold and the understanding that you were willing to help on some level with the project.

I do not know if it's the case, but I feel at this point, after numerous attempts to contact you, that I am being ignored.

You are. You are being ignored and you should be cleared.

If you are still willing to help, please let me know if you cannot or will not. My return address is the following. Kindly guys.

You got to stop turning into the Joker over over asking for help.

I mean, like, here's the thing. But I think his major area help. Yeah. It's not your area of expertise. You're not a publicist. You're not a publicity firm.

No, I am like a one fucking one band, one woman show. And I can barely do this one. Do you understand?

I am like holding this together with fucking glue and paper clips and and and like the tiniest amount of spit and a Kylie lip kit that I've had for five fucking years like people need to.

And I've experienced this to people don't ask for what they want and then they get mad when they don't get it. Like the first email should have been, hey, busy. I wrote it. Yes. I love it. If you would tweet about it because you're famous and would help me sell my book, can you do that? And here's the website in which I sell it. Yeah, whatever you can write back. Yes or no end of interaction.

But instead he plays coy. I want feedback or some involvement.

Oh no, but that's the craziest thing. No feedback.

I, I did this art project and I made a book of it and I would love to personally send you a copy of said book, art project book thing that I did add to that. I'm like, I don't want to be a fucking dick. This guy is like made a book of some art projects he did in Phoenix. Like, I just OK, sure. Send me your book, you know, but with it and this letter there was like.

No, there's no where people can buy it. There's no like it's just it's just like I'm planning on making more of these. I really want to get this off the ground. Right. I want, you know, help. Well, OK, I'm not I don't. What do you want? I'm literally what do you want from me?

Right, because this is like it's so weird.

Somebody needs to actually teach a class in this.

I think it's a really interesting and crucial lesson for creative people, probably just for anyone in not being manipulative.

You can't position something like it's a gift when it's really not when it's a burden. Actually, when when you're asking for something and then when you're asking for something, Ashley's right. You have to be specific, like I love so much when someone's like, hey, can you help me get the word out about something? I need you to tweet. Here's a sample tweet. You just tweet this. You can reworded if you want, but you could also just use exactly this one, you know what I mean?

Do you know it makes me like, honestly, like want to make out with someone when they fucking send me a sample tweet for their fucking charity or whatever like or whatever it is that they're promoting their TV show.

Yeah. Just like you have a sample tweet and I'm like a little picture that I could post. Yeah.

Just doing the work. Don't ask the one who's doing you a favor to do you five favors like.

But also I think part of the problem is people need to be honest with themselves about what they want because I definitely get people email me and be like, hey, can you read this script? You're a genius. I'd love your feedback. And I'm like, sure, what do you want? You do you want notes? Do you want me to say, like, I don't put it in these terms, I'm nicer than this. Like, do you want me to say you did a good job or do you want, like, actual notes?

Like, what are you looking to do with this? Are you trying to staff are you trying to get an agent? Because those are different things and people will be like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I just want feedback. So then you spend the weekend reading their scripts, typing up their notes, giving them feedback, and then they're upset when they get the feedback because what they actually wanted was you to recommend them for a job. And it's like you just need to be honest with yourself and say, right, what do I actually want from this interaction?

I want to ask Ashley if she can help me find a job and then ask that question and get the real answer.

This is it. And this is like we've talked about this before on this podcast.

I've come to the realization in my life and it took me way too fucking long that like beating around the bush, like not asking exactly for what it is that you want or need or desire will only get you a fucking headache and will exhaust everyone around you. And you have to in order to do that, you have to be able to, like, reach down inside of yourself and know what it is that you're asking for.

And I think that's the trick, because I think a lot of people don't even know they can't. It's so hard for them and especially I do find especially women to like really sit with what is it that I want?

It's hard for me to know what I want, like California Pizza Kitchen do again, like avocado rolls.

The hard life is what I do love those people like the like weird pizza spring rolls is that when you have girls with avocado in the southwest.

Oh you're talking about the Southwest eggrolls. I love the pizza roll like the pizza roll ups. Do you remember those. I don't know what that sounds like. It's my jam so.

Yeah. See but the good news is we can get both good news and we can share.

But you know, also I think a lot of what we're talking about, we're talking about in terms of like professional, you know, professional or like colleagues or whatever, a lot of this applies at home and in friendships as well.

That's what I mean. Yes. Yeah.

So, like, you know, with your with your kids, with your partners, with your friends, a lot of times I think we beat around the bush and we get dissatisfied because we're like I was like, you know, kind of hinting at like what I wanted and nobody got it.

But sometimes it's hard sometimes to get it.

Do you guys want to hear about a breakthrough I had in therapy last week? Yes. On this very topic. Yeah. Yeah. So I had had I've been having a really rough time actually.

I don't know if you're aware, but I listen to the pod religiously, you guys.

So, you know, things have been tough for me. And like it's it's also just it's just been a lot a lot of stuff has been really hard.

OK, I'm not going to cry today. And last week I had a particularly hard day. And I was sitting on the high line, which is this lovely thing, it's real cute, it's a little park in New York that's an elevated park, a great place to cry in public.

For those of you that don't know, the Highline is an old railroad like elevated railroad track that runs. It's like two miles, I think the whole thing.

And they turned it into greenery and like a park and a walkway and it's so pretty. And you can walk the whole thing and it's really nice. And sometimes I do therapy up there as I'm walking and then sometimes I sit and cry. So anyway, I was just really having a fucking moment. It was that day that I was listening to Suspended and Gaffar on repeat, which, you know, is just never a good time and.

And I had gotten done with therapy and I was just so sad and I was crying and listening to suspended and Gaffa and taking pictures of myself and then getting embarrassed that that's what I was doing.

And I don't know, it was just all a fucking downward spiral.

And so then Mark texted me, what are you doing? Because he knew my therapy was had been over for a bit. And I was like, OK, in my head.

This is what I was thinking. I'm really sad about a lot of things. One thing that I know makes me kind of happy is like planning for stuff. And we needed to get some tile for this bathroom in this place that we needed to get new tile for. And that's kind of fun, even if it's like we were just going to buy, like, look for, you know, overstock tile or something or like tile that have been returned to one of these tile places in New York which aren't far from the Highline, you know.

And I was thinking like maybe it would be nice if, like.

Mark left the kids with Sarah Beth for a bit and we walked and we got and we looked at the tile and saw if there was any good returned or overstocked tile for this project that we were trying to do.

But instead, I just wrote back thinking about Tiel. And then he was like, yeah, I mean, there are too many times during the day when I'm not thinking about and then I wrote back like, yeah, you know, actually I read somewhere that, like, women think about TYL as much as men that they just don't talk about it.

And then he was like, cool. Yeah. All right. Got it. So are you coming home or what? And like, dinner. And I was like, yeah, I guess I'll just come home.

And I went home and I was so fucking mad, like, irrationally mad at him and just like went into the house just like and I couldn't I'm so I wasn't aware of what was happening to myself.

I just was like the worst, just the worst.

And then the next day we're talking about it in therapy. And it was bad night, like it was just fucking bad. And the next day we were talking about in therapy and I was and I had the realization that what I was doing was I was like, I'm going to give you this little tiny crumb, but I'm not going to tell you what I really am thinking, because if you really know me, you're going to fucking guess it.

And if you don't, you're not. And then I really can hate you.

And like, you know, that's unfair and totally bonkers.

It's a test that he didn't even get to take the class. No, he has no fucking idea.

Yeah.

So I think we all have to be aware of those little tests that you those breadcrumbs that you like leave out for your friends and your family and your partners and your, you know. It's just you got to ask for what you need or what you're thinking you might need, because the worst that could happen as somebody says no and then they really don't care.

Right.

They know the truth, but like if you're just offering them, like, a little tiny little crumb of a piece of a side of an idea, and they don't know what they're supposed to do with it, they're like, OK, well, do you want to just get, like, tacos or something?

I can. Yeah, I don't know what to do with this tile thing, you're never having the real conversation, right? If there like you're never you're never doing the things that I want to do. You know, whenever I'm mentioning tile, you're never like meeting up with me to go to the tile store.

It's you're never having the real conversation. But if you're if you're saying to your partner, I want to go to the tile store and they're saying, no, no tiles.

Well, that's stupid. Yeah. Yeah, that's not good. Yes.

Then then you're having the conversation and then you're having another conversation that, you know, that's you're getting to like the meat of like a different problem, you know.

Well, yeah. Then you're like in it because the answer might be, I don't want to go the tile store right now because I'm exhausted because of this thing right now.

We're both talking about our thing. Right. Right. Because if one person is vulnerable, it allows the other person to be vulnerable. Right.

Right. It's a big deal, guys. It's a big deal to ask for what you need. And also, like, it's such a huge favor to the other person because sometimes, like, it's just, you know, people have a lot going on in their minds. And also, like, for me, it's such a pleasure for me when, like, someone that I love asks me, can you do this for me? Like, it's such a pleasure for me to be asked.

Like, I don't know. It's kind of like an honor for me sometimes when someone that I love is like, can you do this for me? Or can you, like, talk to me for a second about this or like, can you spend a minute with me or whatever, you know, like you. It's weird because I think so many times you don't want to be a burden and you're like, how how dare I ask for this thing?

How dare I how dare I take up space in this person's life?

And what you don't know is that, like, if this person is in your life anyway, they probably want you to take up a little bit of space, at least. And so, like, for me, it's like very much an honor when someone takes up the rightful space that I'm giving them in my life and says, like, would you do this for me?

I would say especially right now, because, like in this pandemic, I'm 14 alone, as you guys know. So any time someone's like I'm having this problem, can I just call you and talk about it? I'm like, yes, please.

I am a lot like talk to me for three hours about your health. It's not averted. And maybe one person might be like, I'm too busy. I can't do that right now. That doesn't mean they hate you. But there's someone in your life who's sitting at home wishing someone would talk to them for hours about a problem.

That's not my problem. I agree. So, guys, I hope we've all learned something, and if you happen to be the person that sent me that thing. I'm sending it back. Yeah, it's in the fucking mail and I'm never responding to your email, but Kylie Jenner would be happy to tweet about it, sir, but maybe you should reach out to her.

OK, well, listen, guys, this is delightful. OK, so let's go through what we're doing, our best shot this week.

Casey, would you like to go first? Sure.

What am I doing my best at this week? Well, now that the weather's, like, nicer, I've just been like, oh, I'm just going to, like, go for a little walk around my cul de sac and listen to other podcasts. So I've been listening to.

I'm really excited about the add to Cart podcast, which is our friend Klop and Suchin. I'm going to be appearing on their podcast coming up. But but they had a really special podcast this week. They did a special episode that normally is a really fun podcast about buying things and just really comedy centered. But this week they did a special episode just talking about their feelings about violence against the Asian community. And it was really touching. It's only a half hour.

I totally recommend that people just listen to it so that you can hear, like, firsthand how they're feeling. And I'm going to be on an upcoming episode talking about an item that I'm really excited about. So, yeah. So I've just been walking around my little cul de sac like, I don't know, 10, 20 times and listening to podcasts. And every time I walk by my own house, I'm like, wow, I really hate the color that my house is painted.

It's do you think you'll paint it? Yeah, I have to. I mean it's like terracotta who want to Tarago house. Oh, no, I mean, we're really using terra cotta here in L.A. I mean, I have a mid century modern house. It's not a fancy house, but it's like built by my second favorite architect. And it was never meant to be painted terracotta. And it's not meant to have a terracotta tile roof either. But that's what we got.

But we got to paint it because it's not meant to be painted the color of a flower pot. I'll tell you that. What about what color do you want to paint it?

I don't know, because we're really kind of like we really kind of got boned by the previous owners with that tile roof. Like, we're not you know, we're not going to change out the roof. It's perfectly fine, even though, you know. It's not the it's not strictly appropriate for them. Can I ask you a question? Why isn't it historically appropriate?

Because it's not like, you know, it's it's like a Spanish style room. It's like a Spanish style roof on a mid century modern house. It should have like a rock roof or like a like maybe shingles. Oh, but it has tiles. Yeah, tiles. That's just because it's everything that's tiles. Mid century modern fans would be horrified. So if there are any museum fans out there, I'm sorry it came with that roof.

But yeah, we you know what?

I was just you know, I just got silent for a second because then I just remembered that I wanted to check the thing that I put to try to find you one of those fireplaces.

Oh, I have never heard of those before.

You talked about it on the podcast, and now I see them everywhere. Now you see them everywhere.

I get so many messages and people are so nice and they always send them to me and they're like somebody selling one. And it'll either inevitably be in like Maine. And I'm like, well, I'm not going to drive to Maine to pick it up. Or it'll be like in L.A. but like three thousand dollars. And I'm like, that is very high.

But I just found one that's terracotta. It's actually not.

It's actually it is a vintage mid century modern one. And but and it's porcelain, but it's the color of terracotta. I mean, it's so ugly.

It looks like a doll. It's actually it's like a.

I love that. Oh, this one's nice.

This is a freeway. Yeah. That's what you want, right? Yeah. Driveway home. Right. Freeway.

My home or this one is twenty eight hundred dollars. That's you know that's a little up. What are we looking to spend. You got to tell me what works. I mean like I almost got one for one hundred dollars. I was like five minutes late on replying to the person that was selling it. That doesn't make any sense where. What are we doing in L.A.? It was by L.A., here's what I'm saying to you. You have to show because you're good at that shit.

And I know it's like all on Facebook or whatever, and I'm not on Facebook. You have to sign up for like these, like upstate and like all around this area because I can go get it. I have a car. And actually, it wouldn't be me.

It would be Ray, but I wanted to go get it. So, like, just figure it out because I know that they're around here. There's probably more there because it's cold.

Yeah, it's true. It's true. I bet you there are like Vermont, even we can send rate of Vermont.

It would be great for his contacts.

Can you imagine how fucking you got to heat how you break down on the way to Vermont, just like mentally and mechanically?

I don't know where to charge. Well, what are you doing your best at Ashley? I knew this question was coming and I was like, no, it is the theme.

Yeah, I literally I had to think really because my first thing was nothing.

I've been feeling like very unmotivated because I realize I'm motivated by like other people.

So normally my job I would do in a room full of people. And you get kind of like immediate feedback about how you're doing your job, whether it's from if you're in a writer's room, the other writers are on stage from the audience. And without that, it's just not as motivating to, like, sit down and work alone.

So I was like, I don't know what I did my best because I've been so unmotivated. So this is like a little hack.

I guess I write everything in my calendar. I don't like delete things from it because I did them. I leave everything there. So I went back and looked at my calendar from last week and I got so much fucking work done. I did so much work and I worked out a ton and I was like, here I am like doubting myself, saying I'm unmotivated. I did all that stuff. I obviously motivated myself. Like I figured out you don't even know it.

Yeah. So that's what I did my best at this week was that I actually was very motivated.

But do you where you put your dog on blast because she is not doing her best? Because to me, yes. Do you know is that what you have? Because we wanted Ashley to come on the podcast today and she almost couldn't because she was up late last night because her dog ate her bed.

She ate her bed.

Yeah, she well, that's bad. But also same girl. Tell her I relate. I'm like, she was having a rough night.

She was like she has these like bouts of Peka.

And so I put her in the bed in the crate so she would be safe from eating because she was trying to eat everything. And then she ate the bed, which I should have seen coming.

Like she said, she ate all looking bad.

She ate a chunk of it, which I didn't know until this morning when she threw it up and I was walking her.

So there's like my dog is not she's very picky about other dogs she wants to interact with.

And it's like there's was a bit of a neighborhood drama because I have neighbors who are like giving me the Sinai because I won't let my dog play with theirs, because I know she's going to start a fight. But then there are a few dogs that she like, so they'll see me interacting with another dog. It makes me look like an asshole when in fact the dog is the asshole.

So I'm walking towards this neighbor who like kind of gives me the side eye because I don't let my dog interact with his and I'm trying to, like, rush her by quickly before she can growl or something. And that's when she threw up this chunk of bed.

It's crazy, right?

This to be here. Well, then her dog play with anything that feeds her bed. That's what that guy.

Oh, me on poor Gordi.

OK, two things that I've implemented into Jennens diet, that's really helped.

OK, so Gina was going through first of all, I have a cat with Betka and I have spent I don't even want to tell you how many thousands of dollars worth of cat surgery.

A thousand dollars down today. Yeah, it's the worst Pécas condition if you guys don't have pets or you don't have a pet. But added, I certainly didn't know what it was.

I had a cat with Betka, like where they want to eat things that are not edible, like plastic and toys that are like they just want to eat them whole.

I mean that Gildo Gildo had like an entire sponge Gildas, a small cat and had eaten like a whole sponge. We couldn't keep anything. So now, Gildo, so a lot of people sometimes on Instagram, they're like, what happened to her cats?

Why do they like why aren't they ever around?

They really do have to be confined upstairs into like two rooms so that we can just like make sure that Gildo also they're fine with it, to be totally honest.

They're fine with that, OK? Anyway, Gina has been really getting Chewey recently, and I've been bummed because I'm like, oh, no, just Gina have Peka now to Chicot paper, I swear to God and plastic.

And like all this stuff, she just like we have to get lid's for all the trash cans poop. She started eating poop.

It was a disaster. And she is like a really her tummy gets upset a lot too.

So our dog Turner from L.A. recommended two things. No.

One was a dog probiotic to give her, which like it's like almost I don't know what I don't know, guys. I'm not a fucking vet, am I?

Am I not. Yeah.

Oh my God.

Am I have that it would be cheaper but but the probiotic is like, you know, because they're they're they're trying to get something like they need something. They're missing something. Right. So there's that and then and this is the gross one. But I swear to God, the last two weeks it's like changed our life at the pet store. They have frozen bones with marrow. And boy, did she chow down on that little frozen marrow bone.

And like the first night she did it, I swear to God, she looked like she was on drugs, like she looked like she was raving and that she was like full blown candy flipping.

And her eyes were like rolling into the back of her head and she couldn't stop. And she was just like tweaking on the marrow and was so happy. And now she's kind of chilled, but she still really likes it. And she stopped chewing on other things.

She stopped taking my shoes because she upset and stopped like she wants the good stuff. Now she wants the marrow bone.

But also I took her to the dog park with Kirkup on Sunday. And all these dogs were like really sniffing home.

But like, I know now they want to eat her pussy because it's like full marrow, high quality food, midlane, Camaro.

But like, they were like really like up in it, like looking back at their owners, like, yeah. Yeah.

Have you seen all this bitch. Do you know she's got this is straight beef marro but she's like she's so much out here and she's stopped chewing so much.

I wish there was like a cat equivalent that I could give Gildo so he would stop eating plastic and having emergency surgery. Actually he hasn't, he hasn't been quite some time. It's been about oh god, I'm just going to knock wood because I hope he's on the wagon.

He's I think he's doing good. I think he's doing well. I think he's doing well. What are you doing your best at this week?

Well, I've been sticking to my working out for my mental health, and I've really made it a priority, even though I've had some days where I've been not in the mood. Sucked it up and done it and. So they're not investing. That's great. It has made a difference, and I went to this Tracy Anderson workout class like a private yoga class, and I it was so hard and I had to change my mask four times. It was like it's oppressive to workout wearing a mask because it's not right and the rooms are heated to there.

I told the the trainer girl, like, I was like, I need to dance like I need to, like I need endorphins, like that's all. I don't worry about my butt. Don't worry about anything else, just endorphins, and so she did just like kept doing cardio with me and then I did some like leg and arm things.

But afterwards I came out of there and I had therapy. Right after my therapist was like, you sound like a different person.

Like you sound like you're compared to what you sounded like on the podcast, which I was just listening to. And I was concerned. Oh, Lord. She's like and now you sound like totally different. And I really think I do.

Had she say I sounded lovely. She laughs.

I just want to make sure she thought I was OK.

I had a therapist one time who, like I didn't like I don't know, the vibe was like a little weird. And then one day she came in and she was like, you're on TV. Like she finally seen me on TV. And I was like, Yeah, what are you talking about this whole time? And she was like, oh, I just like it seemed like you thought your job was really important.

Like, you just didn't get like I think she thought that I was like a little bit off and was like overstating it like at times, you know.

Yeah. So she's like, I hate that she woke up.

She was a great therapist. We did not keep working together, no longer than that.

But it was just such a weird it was so so I was like, oh, now I believe you.

Wow, wow, wow, wow. Lady, you know what?

You were doing good at reminding me of something else I was doing good at, which is having a really strong.

But do you have a Maraba though. Do I go. Bye. But I looked at like 60 pounds with my foot at once. Who knew. Yeah, my trainer to me.

You know, you do like glute bridges. Sure. And she had me put the like the barbell across your hips hips and do the bridges.

And then after I did it she was like, that was sixty pounds. So my butt is the strongest part of me by far. I couldn't lift it off myself with my arms to hand it back to her like seriously.

So much stronger kind. God, I was dying to know what you did with your butt to test the strength of it. And I was glad. I was very curious where that was going.

Well, I. Then found out how much those Tracy Anderson private classes cost, and then I got real sad because I was like, this is not a sustainable endeavor for me.

You're going to be dancing on your patio. I know I'm need a dance.

I do it at home. It's just like there's something about being in a space with a teacher who's, like, pushing you to to just do it, you know, like. Yeah. And you just kind of and you just get into it like it.

It's hard. To get it up in my, you know, TV room, yeah, in the same way I try surgeries, right?

That's right. I got to save that money. Can you have a trainer come to your. To your son, I feel like it's still not the same because I like the flaws and I want the I want the space, I don't have the space, you know what I mean?

Like, I'm, like all crammed into this corner next to the sofa next to windows here.

And I have space heaters that I put up to try to make it warm, like, oh, like you know, like, oh yeah.

Like like that in L.A. is heated and Tracy Anderson's heated. And I just feel like I know I like I need this.

I retain so much water, whatever that body type is that retains like. A ton of water, that's what I have human. No, no, you know, mine is abnormal. You've seen it, Casey firsthand.

Bodies are like, what are they like, 70 percent water?

Yes, but you've seen don't let's not you you have to back me up here. No, I. Do I or do I not retain more water than anyone that you know other than maybe I barenholtz you you do.

Yes. You do have that magic trick where you can like get rid of some water. I like guys I. Can gain and lose. I would say seven pounds of water in one week. Yeah, like I retain so much water, I retained so much water when I was pregnant with Berdy. This is not a joke. When I was nine months pregnant with Berdy, I went to a pregnancy acupuncturist and he put the needles in my legs and water started dripping out for real water.

That's how much like I was retaining so much water and I didn't have hypertension or anything. Like, I just whatever. I don't know. There's something about my body I like went to go get some rings of mine fixed because I slammed my hands against tables a lot and I deform my archive.

We're going to do a great over here.

And the woman was like trying to measure my finger because she's like, these aren't even circular anymore. So I don't even know what size they are.

I felt a little shady, but but so she was measuring and I was like, I don't think this is going to be accurate because I could tell I was really swollen that day and I was like, this is the all these things are going to be too fucking big.

I know it, but. I don't know, my gosh, you're going to be when you get old, this is what it's going to be like. When I worked in the nursing home, some of the ladies that were like water retainer ladies that were like, tell me this is going to make me so sad.

A Dema lady, I don't like this. I already don't like this. When you would like wake them up in the morning before you would wake them up, their eyelids would be like you could touch their eyelids and like an ocean wave would go across their eyelids.

It would be like a bullet, like a giant blister. Why were you touching their eyelids to see it do that? Wait, listen, I don't think so. I think I'll look. I think I'll be like my grandma mout. I think I'll I think I'll look like her.

She didn't have terrible edema when she was an old lady to live to be one hundred and six that will say.

All right, all right. Let's get let's get to our interview. I felt like I know this isn't the usual doing our best interview because normally we really talk about Pivot's and stuff with our guests.

But I just feel like.

The mental health crisis in children, teens, young adults in this country right now is and we were not wrong because we talked to an expert about it, that it's just that it's really something that we need to keep talking about as much as we can.

And we want to give as many people resources as possible in order to facilitate them being able to get kids and teens and young people in their lives any help that they might need. And so, Dr. Harold, who's the president and founder of the Child Mind Institute here in New York City, wrote a really great parenting book called The Scaffold Effect.

Which I'm trying to implement some scaffolded parenting here in this house. But. We just we wanted to have him on to, like, just chat about this time and the effect that it's having on our kids.

I know that a lot of parents listen to this podcast, and I know that a lot of people listen to those podcasts who maybe don't have kids yet or may never have kids or still kind of feel like kids themselves.

And this is just been like a very tricky time, mental health wise. And we wanted to chat with Dr. Harold, and he's very interesting person and has a lot of stories. A real character, a real character. He's a real character, actually. We love a New York character. He's a real New York character. But also just like. Putting it out there, this is just like a normal it's a normal thing that we have to talk about.

It's it's I know it's hard for people, adults to talk about their mental health. We have to, like, start talking to all of our kids about it as well, because this is a thing that affects literally every almost every kid out there, you know, and especially right now, especially in this time. And so that's all.

That's all. Guys, that's that's our interview today. And it is really funny and interesting. And I did text Casey in the beginning. This might be my favorite interview we've ever done, so let's take a listen. We're so excited to be talking to you today, Dr. Harold Kaplowitz is joining us now.

Harold is the president of the Child Mind Institute here in New York and has a new book called The Scaffold Effect Raising Resilient, Self-reliant and Secure Kids in an Age of Anxiety.

And one of the main reasons why I wanted to have you on today, Harold, is first of all, I love the book and I'm trying to implement some scaffolding parenting myself. We've got we've got miles to go. The scaffolders may be made of. Toothpicks and no no glue than encouragement, but busy, I watch a partisan, I look and listen to your podcast and the fact that cricket recently was showing you her painting, I think your scaffolding, your daughter, you know, it's because, remember, it's not only that success can be an option, failure can be an option.

We want our kids to try new things to get out of their comfort zone, go into their growth zone. And cricket certainly is risking and going into a growth zone all the time.

So, yeah, I'm I actually have to say that this is a this that's been a big thing for cricket.

She's definitely my kid who suffered a bit from the like, not wanting to fail thing and and being afraid to even ask questions because she she didn't want to fail, you know, she didn't want to ask the wrong question. And she was a little bit younger in her grade in school. And I think that had something to do with it. And also, she was in a school previously before we got to New York, where they really, like, tracked the kids out in kindergarten for, like reading and math so that they could meet the kids at their levels.

But also what it did was that it put this weird pressure on the kids because they felt like it meant something. If they were like not in the top reading group, like the best readers or the best ones at math. What do you feel about that kind of thing?

So I think it all depends on how it's done. I think that all of our kids have deficits, weaknesses and strengths. Right. And as parents, we try to minimize the deficit. So we get a reading tutor or we even get them a baseball coach, a klutzy kid. You go into the backyard and you keep throwing the ball so that you increase the chances of the ball getting into the mint. And when you remember that movie Parent Hood, where Steve Martin is very quirky, odd kid, and he keeps throwing the ball and there's the famous game.

The little game. Yeah. And his quirky odd kid puts his glove up and by chance the ball goes into the glove and the kid wins the game and dad makes a special winning dance in. The mother says to him, nothing has changed. He's still a quirky kid. He still needs to go to therapy and says that you increase the chances of the ball getting into his glove because you went out in the backyard and he threw it to him a thousand times.

That's a scaffolding parent. That's a parent who says, I'm going to encourage you. I'm going to structure you. I am going to support you. But I'm also going to recognize that you do need some help here, that you are not a natural athlete. And since it's easier for kids who play sports than kids who don't play sports, I'm going to help you with that. And so that's that's a good example of that. And I think the same thing happens in school.

I think there's nothing wrong with pointing out which kids need more help with reading and which kids seem to be gifted in math. It's just that if you don't do it in a careful way, you can really hurt your kids self-esteem. I mean, our middle son had terrible dyslexia. We thought we were really taking care of it. We took him to a speech and language person was four. And then when he was in third grade and reading tutor and in third grade, he punched another kid in the nose.

And we were called because they said he was aggressive and he wasn't really an aggressive kid. And when we spoke to him about it, he literally said to us, someone called me stupid and I am stupid. I was two steps behind everyone in reading, but it was always two steps ahead of everyone in math. And they've turned math into reading. And what he was talking about is word problems. Right. And so, so quite clearly. And then the best part is he says to us and the smart kids are in the hawks and the stupid kids are in the sparrows and I'm in the sparrows group and hawks eat sparrows.

And I'm thinking, you're not the stupid kid. The teacher is an idiot. Oh, names. You know, who wouldn't be names to slow reader sparrows and the fast readers hawks. But you really what was worrying to us was that his self-esteem was going to be damaged. There's nothing wrong with telling your kid the truth and saying reading is hard for you. That's why we're going to practice. That's why we do reading all the time. And math is really easy for you, so you don't have to practice it much.

So I don't think tracking is the problem. I think it's the way we message it to our children. And so if you think you're in the sparrows and everyone is a hawk, you're afraid you're going to be you know, it's not good for your self-esteem at this point because of the way that the education system is.

We have a lot of a lot of our listeners are parents. A lot of our listeners have young kids, a lot of our listeners have preteens. And a lot of our listeners are dealing with past educational scars even. That's right. Even people who aren't parents are dealing with. Things that happen to them in the educational system where they're like that kind of messed me up when I was a kid, right. And I have to tell you, it's interesting because we're talking about scaffolding.

I hate parenting books where the expert is shaking his finger at you and making you feel totally inadequate. So I made a point of putting in all my foibles, all the things I screwed up. And it's under the category. Do not do this at home. And I have three sons and one of my sons is socially very reticent. He's thirty seven years old. He doesn't believe in chitchat. He tells me I tell too many anecdotes, stick to the point, you know.

And he said to me that when he was in fifth grade, he came home and he announced to his mother and me that he was going to perform a dance with his best friend Adam in front of the entire Thanksgiving Day assembly in middle school. I couldn't think of a worse idea. I was thinking I have patients that are talking about the traumatic scars they feel from one of those terrible, embarrassing moments. And he said, no, it's going to be great.

It's going to be a message to Michael Jordan. I love Michael Jordan. He had posters of Michael Jordan. And and Adam and I are going to do it. And my wife, who's just as socially that is, and she says, oh, that sounds like a great idea. I did. Why don't you just perform surgery on the stage? And that's that's how bad this is going to be. And a few days before three days before the assembly, he comes home and he says Adam is backed out.

I said, well, you know, it wasn't meant to be. Not everything we planned happens. And he says, no, I'm going to do it by myself. I've been working with the dance instructor and she's helped choreograph it. I can't think of a more horrible idea.

The whole thing is just like you like parent Harald, not the doctor. So it's like you're literally like this is terrible and I can't let my kid do this.

And thankfully, that was my inside voice. My voice was silent. I kept shaking my head. And there goes my social events like saying, Oh, I'm sure it's going to be great. So the day comes. I'm clearly at the hospital seeing patients. My wife actually teaches at the school. She's an art teacher at the school. I call her a few hours later and she says it was amazing. He just performed. Everyone loved it. You wouldn't believe how much stage presence he has.

OK, fast forward 20 years. This is in the book. It's his 30th birthday. His friend Elias stands up and says, hi, my name is Elias. Everyone knows Joshua is my best friend. I love Joshua. And that's the only reason, since I hate public speaking, that I'm willing to stand up and say happy birthday. But Joshua doesn't know that the first time I laid eyes on him was it the Thanksgiving Day assembly when he was in fifth grade and I was in fourth grade.

And when they announced that Josh, coupled with some fifty two, was going to do an interpretive dance in honor of Michael Jordan, even in fourth grade, I knew this was social suicide and yet, my God.

And yet the stage was dark. A spotlight came on Joshua. He was wearing a baseball hat backwards, a Chicago Bulls basketball baggy outfit. You had his head down and within a minute he started spinning. He flipped over. criss-Cross was playing in the background and everyone was on their feet screaming, Go, Josh, go, Josh. And then I saw him on Monday after Thanksgiving, he says. And there he was, holding too many books, his head down, walking unobtrusively through the hallway.

And Elias said, I spoke to my parents so many times about how brave Josh was to do that. And I thought to myself when I was listening to this and I put it in the book, if I would have said, don't do this, you can die from embarrassment, which we know you can't, or that failure is an option. It's OK. If it doesn't work out, you'll stand up and do it again. He not only was great for himself, it was a real Napoleon Dynamite moment, but it was also really important for all these other socially reticent, nerdy kids in the home who said Josh can do something great.

And I think that as parents, we want to protect our kids, you know, our DNA, and we want to fix it. And that's not the way to get a resilient child. Right. Scaffolding is the exact opposite of swooping in and being a helicopter.

And I think that I think that there's a whole generation of parents like my age now who are dealing with this idea of not wanting to be a helicopter parent, but at the same time also wanting to protect their kid. And like in my particular instance with my 13 year old, I had without getting too much into details. But we've had a really interesting few years.

And Bertie came out and when they came out as gay at their old school, there was a lot of bullying around it and it wasn't handled well.

But Berdy, like being resilient, decided they wanted to run for president of their. Raed and Mark and I also had the conversation like are is this going to be one of those situations where we're setting where our kids we need to protect our kids? There's a difference between what I'm trying to say is that these kids are dealing with some really serious issues as well. And there's a difference between protecting your child from, like real harm, because there is there is the opportunity for real harm, like from some of what's happening out there in the world or a dance on a stage or even standing up and giving the speech to be president, which wasn't harmful.

Yes. I think the difference is that if if you remember when you're on an airplane, the flight attendant always says when the air pressure drops, put the mask on yourself before you put it on your kids. It's very hard for us to do that. It feels like I have to protect my child first, not myself. And I think that if we can stand back a little bit and say, what is the risk to my child, you know, it's going to be some more embarrassment.

It might be failing a math test and after they've studied really, really hard for it and they still get celebrated for the effort. But then we figure out and we brainstorm with them, we don't fix it. We don't take the test for them. We don't tell them don't tell anyone you're gay or don't don't be proud and stand up there. Don't take the risk of running for office. We really are there to support. The whole concept of a scaffold is not only support and structure and encouragement, it's also that we stand on planks.

And the planks should be patience, awareness, warmth, dispassion, which I bet too busy.

I know Harold's not very good at, which means don't kid, don't get overly enthusiastic, don't cheerlead too much, don't blow too much smoke and then don't catastrophe's and less monitor.

So the business with this passion is your kid has a fight with someone. When someone heard one of my boys, I would maybe take a contract out on that. I wanted to I wanted that kid hit and hit hard. And when two weeks later they were friends again with my son, I felt like what happened to the contract didn't work. I wanted it liquidated. That's not his passion. This passion is you hold back and you help your kid negotiate with people who he has fights with or she has disagreements with.

And he and he doesn't have to be friends with everyone. But that's really hard because there's a part of us that just so much wants to protect the kid, that we don't want that. And inevitably, that takes away from independence, because if you tell them don't run for office or if I told Josh, don't do that dance, you know, they become risk averse. I mean, what you want is not to swoop in. You want to give them a whole bunch of tools and hope they pick the right tool at the right moment when they're in trouble.

Hard not.

Well, it's hard. It's not easy. I really appreciated in the book when you're like, it's fine to think your kids at times.

I want to give you full transparency. I did write that and then asked me to read the book and so it took four days. Your voice is too low. That's not pronounce the correct way. And said, boys, you mean boy, I mean, for someone who doesn't do this professionally, it was challenging. And then that sentence came up. Sometimes we have to admit our kids can be assholes. And I said, oh my God, did I really write the I yes.

It's so much better when you when you wrote it and you read it and say it out loud. But then I thought about it. It's so true. All of us love our children.

And you shouldn't call your child an asshole, but know that and you make the distinction in the book. I want to be clear. It's not OK to call your kid names. Even in the moment when they are acting like they're like, why didn't you just you have to have that dispassion. That's the thing I've struggled with my whole life. But I really feel like honestly, in the past year, I've like I'm getting it where you have to like you have to have the dispassion and then, you know, an hour later you can call your partner or your spouse or what are you tell your therapist, your own personal therapist.

But you know, it is I found it really helpful when my kids have been assholes in the past, because I'll tell you to be honest, because that's the moment when I'm like, you know what? They are people. They're their own people. And I'm an asshole sometimes and they're an asshole sometimes. And this is a good time to go to our own corners and talk to each other later when we're all not being our own people. So forceful.

So it's really interesting. You said go to your own corners. There's a story in the book. I mean, I talk about patience a lot and the patience of all become pieces of different patience. You know, you really want to protect their identity. My sons use my son's real stories. And in the book it says I got. And from everyone, it's a lie. I did not get a prediction from my children. I figured if they want to sue me, go ahead, sue me.

I was because I knew if I asked for permission, they would say, no, they're going to get it from you eventually, Dr. Koplewicz, sooner than later.

Anyway, there is a point where our young we get a phone call about our youngest son is in eighth grade. And for those people who are listening, that more than one child, you know, that when your first child falls, you run and you pick them up and say, are you OK? When your second child falls, you walk over, you dust them off and you say you're fine. When your third child falls, you scream and they come here, you're all right, and then your fourth child falls.

You don't even know they fell. So this benign neglect. And here we have this very happy go lucky, socially engaging kid. And I get a phone call in March right before spring break from a colleague and a friend. And he says, Harold, I have to tell you, I've been trying to reach you. On Wednesday, I was at a dinner party and someone told me that Sam and two of his friends were either completely wasted, drunk or stoned at a party on Saturday.

Oh, and I oh, my God. I said, you must be mistaken. He can't be Sam, which is not which is to say. And he said, Harold, I love you. You introduce me to you introduce me to my wife. I hope that if this ever happened to Katie or Jake, you would call. But I'll give you the names of the people who told me. But I'm telling you, it sounds accurate. I hung up the phone.

I started thinking about it. And I remember on Saturday night when we left the house, everything seemed cool. But, you know, something could have happened. I was kind of disappointed because I really had the most open relationship with my third kid. He was the talker and he made this whole promise about marijuana that he wouldn't smoke marijuana until he graduated high school. And here he really got wasted. And so I called my life. I tell her and she said, oh, they must be mistaken.

It can't be said. And I said, no, no, no, it was Sam. I think you should just tell him he's grounded because I had an evening meeting and she said, you got to be kidding. Come home. I'm not doing this by myself. And so we get home and I say, we know everything that happened on Saturday night. You can get into more trouble or less trouble. You have to tell us the truth.

You can see tears are in his eyes. And I say, and by the way, you've lost my trust. Oh, my God, it's. And in this moment you're thinking, this really hurts me more than it hurts him. I, I, I want to punish him. I'm so upset. And he says, I drank vodka. I said, OK, what about marijuana? He said, no, I promised you I wouldn't smoke marijuana.

OK, I said my wife said, Where'd you get the vodka. One of my friends put it over. My wife says, How much did you drink? He says, Three shots. My wife says, We don't have any shot glasses. What did you use as a shot? Orange juice glasses. So three big glasses of orange juice.

I felt myself so upset, so angry that I remember saying to him, let's go to our own corners and there will be a consequence, but we're not going to talk anymore right now. And we had to think about the fact that he drank vodka and B, that he broke our trust and the punishment didn't kill him. We basically told a very social kid that he was grounded for a month and that if he wasn't put in his room, but he had to hang with us, so he had to go to dinner with us or to a movie with us.

And he certainly knew that if he ever did it again, the consequence would be greater. I have to tell you, I called the other parents. He was very upset about that. You tell them. And one of the parents said, oh, they did it again. And I remember saying to the mother, Beth, what do you mean? She said, oh, they they did it in December. At Christmas time. I said, You didn't tell us.

Oh, they were just being kids, being kids. And I was so annoyed with her. And I said, and that's why they have parents, because they're not supposed to be drinking at thirteen or fourteen vodka. And the fact that you let it go and didn't tell us and didn't give us the courtesy, you know, if you want your kid drinking, that's OK. But it really it shook us for a few reasons. I was embarrassed.

I wasn't there. And this child psychiatrist in the village, you know, people are talking about me telling me that I'm a bad boy. The craziness was about Hamer's and also about the fact. And did we have good communication? Could we trust him? Could we what happens the next time? And by the way, it turned out to be a really teachable moment, even though there was a punishment. He was the guy who when girls got drunk in high school, he was the one who took them to the emergency room.

He was the one who made sure they got home. Even if it wasn't his date. He recognized that this was we had a conversation saying you could get so seriously ill from that level of vodka that you can get alcohol poisoning. He took it to heart and it really made him more responsible. He's thirty two years old now and he still smokes marijuana. But that's there. Know, he kept his promise.

OK, Beth, if you're listening, that was that was not the move to. It. Come on, Beth blew it. I know I was going to I was going to say that I had a moment like I was proud of parenting recently in the past few weeks. And then I've had lots that I'm not proud of.

But I but I did say one of my kids made a real bad error in judgment and I'm not going to put on blast which one you can probably get anyway.

And I said. I said. And they felt like my kid felt so bad about it and was like I knew it was a bad idea. That's what I knew it was a bad idea. I knew it was stupid. I'm so stupid. And I was like, you're not stupid.

You're human. We all do things at one point or another that we know we really shouldn't be doing. But what determines what kind of person you really are is how you handle yourself immediately after. And you came to us and you have remorse and you asked us to help you fix it. And like all of those things make me feel really good about this isn't the last time that you're going to do something stupid.

I mean, I do stupid stuff like that at least once a week.

Casey, what would you say we I mean, both of us, a stupid stuff all three times a week. Yeah, I'm doing stuff.

But like but just for me, the important thing is like that they that my kids understand that. Like what? Immediately. Like, yes. Let's make let's try to make better decisions. Always of course.

But but also it's a perfect model in the respect that parenting is the only sport that you have redos all the time. You know, you don't get a redo in football or you can't redo your servant tennis. I mean, you could do mulligans and golf and stuff, but then people don't like playing with you.

You know, you do get to say, I made a mistake. I'm going to redo that. I was too harsh or I was too lenient. I didn't take this seriously enough. And you go back and you say to your kid, I'm sorry, I, I handled that poorly. Let's do that again. And that's perfectly all right. First of all, it's a good model for your kids to see that when you make a mistake, you admit it and you and you redo it.

So that's important. And the fact is, we can't there's always a chance to redo the blueprint so that just because you haven't been scaffolding all along doesn't mean you can't help the kid build a good building tomorrow. I have this whole thing that it's so hard now during covid that I try to explain to parents we are negative trackers by nature. We can tell you what's wrong with this picture. And if you change that and say, let me track all the behavior, let me catch my child being good, let me find three good things and say thank you for setting the table.

Thank you, Bernie, for telling that terrific story. I needed a laugh. Thank you for cleaning up the issue. And you did a really good job before you say one negative constructive criticism. So catch your child being good three times. Now, what will happen is your kid is after two weeks, we'll start giving you more and more good behavior because they love hearing praise like that specific praise. The first thing the kid is going to say, someone stole my mother, who's the body's natural mother, because where is that witch who is constantly telling me, stop doing my but the napkin in my lap, all this insignificant nonsense that we focus on and it's good for spouses to do.

You know, try saying three positive things for every one time you want to criticize your spouse.

And the other thing that is really important is that if you change that, well, then you can change the trajectory of your relationship. Right. You you don't become a negotiator. You're looking for the stuff that they do good.

And this is where this is why I really, really, really think this book is so great. And I'm going to start doing some scaffolding things. And I actually am making Mark read it, too, because we do we're in the homework fight, you know, currently.

And guys, if you're at home and you also are in the homework fight, who's not in the homework fight, I guess, is the question at this point.

But there's some real practical ways to kind of deal with it and de-escalate it, which I'm looking forward to implementing in my home.

And then you have my telephone number. So if it doesn't work, you're going to call me.

But the piece that I think is really quite important is when we think about parenting, it is a journey. Right. And there's going to be some bumps in the road. There are going to be kids who get depressed and they're going to be kids who have learning problems and they're going to be catastrophes like covid where we just have to step back and re-evaluate. So, for instance, I think all parents should re-evaluate their expectations for their kid's academic achievement during.

The good part is the kids under the age of twenty four, they will bounce back. They will learn faster these learning losses. If you come from the middle class or upper class, the schools will fix this for you.

How do we help kids that are, you know, are in underserved communities? Like if you are someone of privilege, what what can we do?

I you know, we're working now with we're in conversations with the governor of California. And also we worked with the entire New York City public school system, talking to them about what's a good tool kit.

That we should have for every teacher and for every parent, a digital toolkit to help them with reentry because it is not going to be a piece of cake for everyone. There's going to be a whole bunch of kids who are going to be overwhelmed with how much learning they haven't had. And I think there's going to be a lot of kids who are socializing are going to be very difficult. So kids who were separated and anxious to begin with, the kids who were too clingy to mom and dad and always had trouble going to school or now they're exposed to separation again, the kids who are socially anxious, worried about looking petulant, they're pathologically self-conscious, they've been at home.

They don't have to worry about that. So there's going to be a good 20 percent who are going to have trouble psychologically. It's going to be a very long tail and there's going to be at least 20 percent and maybe more in kids of poverty who are going to have that learning loss, which I think there should be summer school. I think we should use our tax dollars and public schools should offer a summer school option to give you that kind of boot camp, academic boot camp.

I think that there should be study clubs this fall in most public schools, because for a lot of kids who are barely holding on with too many kids in the class, too few teachers per student, I worry that some of those kids just let go and they don't come back. My wife teaches and watching her remote teach 15, 10 year olds. This is a reality show. Jason, where did you go? Jason he fell off the screen or another kid.

The camera's not on. I mean, this is this is going to be tough.

And I'm trying to start the beginning of this podcast. Like, imagine being a teacher. I don't know if this is unique to me. I feel very in touch with who I was as a child. I don't know why that I feel like I can just reach back and remember what it was like to be seven, 10, 12, 15. And I just feel like it was like being in the sea all the time, you know what I mean?

And like, you're you're just floating and sometimes you can grab on to something for a minute. And so I've been thinking a lot about kids like.

Going back out into the sea, but I would tell you I would tell you that most kids will be OK. Yeah, the kids under the age of five. This is a holiday. They get to spend so much time with mom and dad. There isn't one child at four year old saying, oh, I miss daycare, no kissing babies, daycare. They love being with mommy and daddy and five year olds to 12 year olds, maybe struggling with some distance learning or these hybrids.

This is not as easy as having a teacher in the classroom touching you on shoulder and saying, come on, pay attention or let's try this again. But the kids who took the biggest losses are thirteen to twenty four year olds say they're not getting their junior prom back. Kid who's been working his ass off to become the quarterback, varsity quarterback or make the varsity team, the tennis team or get on to the subject that's gone. You're not giving that back to them for the first date or the first kiss or or getting into that click you wanted to or the math teacher, you know, geeky, nerdy, sporty jockey doesn't make a difference.

You lost. And we as parents of teenagers have to be very honest with them that this is worse for them than it is for us. Because when we look back on this, it'll be a terrible time. It'll be like the Great Depression or World War two, World War One, but it's a blip. And for the thirteen to twenty four year old. And if you went to college, this is ridiculous. You go to college, even if you're living in a dorm, you're doing your classes on a screen.

What happened to them hooking up?

Both of my my younger son lost his senior prom, his graduation, his freshman year of college. My older son lost his junior year and senior year of college.

Well, I have to tell you, I have a whole bunch of patients who tell me that they are going to stay away from their parents. They're in their 20s and they're not going to go near the grandparents, but they're whingeing and bumbling. And I said, you know, they say that you look so unnerved. I said, not only do I need you to wear a condom, I want you to wear a mask.

What are you talking about?

But this is my question to you, because I do think I know I see it with my teenager, pre teen ager, I mean, really a teenager.

But I have so many friends who have kids that are starting twelve and then up and like Casey's and.

I am really concerned, like I've heard more really scary stories in the last I would say like four months, four months, like, it's like almost like it's almost like a lot of kids like really.

And teenagers like really like power through. And now everybody is kind of hit a wall. I feel like I hit a wall, you know what I mean. And.

And I heard a lot of really upsetting stories about kids being suicidal, so let's so let's just let's talk about that for a second. This is a major stressor. Your adolescence are the most common illnesses of childhood and adolescence are mental health disorders. So there are 17 million kids in the United States who have or have had a mental health disorder before the age of 18. There's fifteen thousand kids who had cancer. There are two hundred thousand with diabetes and seven million with asthma.

So these are the most common. It's one out of five, which means if it's not any. Wait, I'm sorry.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Harold, wait. Tell me again.

Mental health disorders are seventeen point one million. Asthma is seven million. Peanut allergies is seven million. Diabetes is two hundred cancer.

And what is it? Fifty thousand.

So when we started the Child Mind Institute, the model was St. Jude's. I love St. Jude's Children's Hospital, a small hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, with seventy eight beds, which is fifty five years ago, put a laser focus on childhood leukemia, pediatric leukemia, and they made it so that ninety four out of one hundred kids now live who had pediatric leukemia. But they also made cancer less scary. And I thought I need to develop a St..

Jude's for childhood mental health disorders. And that's what the German Institute is, an independent nonprofit that's laser focused. The only difference is, is that everyone has everybody listening to your podcast knows and loves one of these kids, because if it's not your son or daughter, it's your niece and nephew or your best friend from college is good or it's your daughter's best friend. So the fact that the majority of these kids don't get help, you know, is outrageous because these are real.

They're common and they're amazingly treatable. There's so much more treatable than if any one of the three of us got depressed tomorrow. Depression in adults is serious, and you usually have to take medicine for a very long time. Depression in your teen years. It is much more frequent for teenagers than adults. But nevertheless, 12 weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy with a low dose of an SSRI, Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro. Eighty one percent of the kids get that.

Well, there's nothing that has that kind of treatment response. So the problem is you have to be able to diagnosis. You have to be willing to accept your kid has the problem and you have to go find someone that knows how to do the treatment dose, how to do an evidence based treatment like cognitive behavioral therapy, and knows that you have to give a low dose of these medicines and you have to be patient and watch the kid carefully. That seems to me to be criminal, that we're not doing this and we have a suicide rate that jumped from five thousand to six thousand one hundred and twenty deaths before covid, and it just jumped again.

And we have one point two million teenagers showing up every year in emergency rooms for suicidal thoughts and suicidal behavior that means to kids every minute. So this country, the only silver lining as far as I'm concerned, covid, is we're talking about children's mental health. And one of the things in the book I do in Scaffold is say this is normal, this is the problem. This is a disorder because parents have love.

That guy's Harold wrote these little things out, which is like, is it rambunctiousness or ADHD normal? And then you list these things that like are within the range of normal problem. This is this might be a problem. This is, you know, disorder. And then you list the things that would sort of indicate this is not for you to diagnose your kid.

It's just for you to, like, have information that you can if you have a concern, you have a red flag, get help. Yeah. And that's the other silver lining to mental health. It's not going to disappear. The Child Mind Institute before covid. We're seeing two hundred kids a day in California and New York in person. Yesterday, we saw three hundred and ten kids online on a screen and we saw twenty eight kids in person. So A we're seeing more kids than ever before.

I mean, it's a real problem. We're reaching overcapacity. But the fact that you can get on a screen and get evidence based treatment, get a diagnosis and get a treatment plan and your kid doesn't have to travel and there's less stigma because you don't have to be in a waiting room. Hopefully this will get become a very important component post covid of the way we deliver this care. I think it could be the democratization of children's mental health care in the United States because so many kids don't have access to it, because I assure you, is he no one thinks that when their kid is born, they're going to go to a mental health professional.

They think about orthodontia or maybe a broken bone, but they never think, oh, my God, my kids are going to see a shrink.

And to help them, I mean, I did, but I'm an actor. Yes, well, that was it was a given Dr. Herold's I can say that in my family, we had we had some issues with childhood depression and.

At the time, it was really hard to even find out where to start, to just even find anyone to talk to us at first and also to find someone who knows what they're doing.

Yeah, I'm sorry. So the numbers are terrible. There's only eight thousand five hundred child psychiatrist in the United States, and a lot of them don't want to see little kids and and and a lot of them don't want to work past five o'clock. Child psychiatry gets practiced a lot from four to eight after kids come home from school. Right. So you have to you really have to love this. I have to tell you, I'm considered an old child psychiatrist over 60, and I still would become a child psychiatrist in New York.

Where else do you get to change the trajectory of the kid's life that if you make the right diagnosis and give them the right treatment, they can go on? And by the way, because they do enough TV a few times a year, I have a man who's 50 years old, who's the head of the urology department at a hospital somewhere in the south, who saw me on television and said I just wanted to reach out to you. I'm sure I was one of your first patients.

I was 15 years old. And I still remember some of the stuff you said to me. And I'm so glad you still have a mustache. I have one time.

Where do you get someone to thank you for what you did for them and that it was really obviously a meaningful I actually remember him. You really get to touch someone's heart. So I you know, I don't get to surgery, but I, I get to change lives.

I mean, I just have to say I want to see this so that my listeners can hear it. Like, I think that, you know, you would think you would think I obviously, you know, work in Hollywood. I have connections.

I know fancy people, I whatever.

Trying to find a therapist for my kid, who had would do after school hours, I could see 10 a.m. on Wednesdays, I'm like, well, that's that.

That would be hard because I believe that social studies, trying to trying to find a therapist that would do CBT or DETI with my kid because they weren't old enough.

We don't start CBT or DBT until 15 like, well, OK, that's not going to help me.

I need, you know what I mean.

And DBT is dialectical behavioral training. Right.

So and then CBT is to cognitive ability and so CBT is the way you think affects the way you behave, which affects the way you feel. And so if we could I'm a fat pig. No one likes me. I feel awful. I don't want to get out of bed. I don't want to go to school. And if you could get that kid to jog around the reservoir, maybe I'm not a fat pig. Maybe some endorphins are surging in my head.

Or maybe if I take a shower or maybe if I could study a little bit. And it's a very magnetised approach and it really works. It works in about three quarters of the kids who participate. But it's not just supportive therapy. It's not psychoanalytic. It's not telling you that your mother didn't suckle you the right way or she wiped your rear end too hard or too soft. None of that nonsense. It is really about the here and now.

Now, DBT turns out to be Zen Buddhism meets cognitive behavioral therapy. So I hate myself. I want to die. I'm so depressed. And the dialectic is to say, it's OK. You can live with that feeling. Let's live with that feeling together. Let's ride that wave together of awfulness of hating yourself, because ten minutes ago you weren't feeling so bad. So will ride that wave and you'll learn that that waves temporary, that that feeling is not something you have to live with and it's done in groups.

And again, very marginalized. You really have to know what you're doing. Not everyone can do it and it's done again. You are monitoring how is the kid doing? Plus the kids allowed to talk to the therapist every day. So if you have a bad feeling, it's you have to hold the bad feeling until six thirty because from six thirty to seven thirty, you can have ten minutes with the therapist every day. And after a while you don't want the ten minutes.

So it is really a here interesting kind of treatment versus what I went through psychoanalysis. You know, it's part of my training where I lied on a couch and free associated. You know, the treatment wasn't going to end until the animals died. I was never going to get better.

Well, I think it's interesting. I think people know about talk there. Right. Right. But they don't necessarily know that there are there's like skill building therapies that can help especially and have good results with kids and teens and young adults and then also just adult adults.

And I just I do feel like we need to encourage more people to go into this.

First of all, like we don't have enough we do not feel like Casey. I feel like your son would be great. He would be a great of about child. There is like he is like, what if I was like a hiking therapist? Is there like a therapist that like hikes and does therapy with me every week?

By the way? Wait, first of all, we do you know that I have a friend in Los Angeles who has a hiking therapist. It's his whole thing.

But is the therapist helping him get to become a better hiker or hiking? It's just the activity they do while they talk.

He's like, no, like they they like and do therapy. He's like he thinks he could be a therapist if there was like a physical activity that you did while you are there.

That's kind of refreshing. There's also guys most therapists are not all that fit. This sounds like it could be a fit therapist. I like it.

It's like maybe I like being bike riding something. No, there's you know, there's no there's a tennis therapist in L.A. to. Do you know that, Harold? Have you ever heard of the tennis?

Nobody does that. I'm sorry. It does sound very L.A. you know, it's Super York at all.

Harold, please. You know, we went for the interview at our kids school, went for for an interview with the kids school. Well, when I found out I was we were we're going to stay here for the year and we're like, let's try to get them into school. And I got on the Zoome with the head of admissions or whatever, and he's like, well, tell me about your kid. And was like, they're just like the most magnetic person and they're really fantastic, but could use some help in, like, motivation.

And so the I started laughing.

He's like, I got to tell you, never in New York have I had an interview with parents like this before. He's like New York parents come in here and they're like, our child is perfect.

You can. You can look at their SAT scores, they've never had any issues or any problems, their five years of perfect, but they've taken the SAT. So let me just say. Right totally.

I want to share with you part of my job. Before I was at the German Institute, I started something called the NYU Study Center, and I had to start fundraising. So I go to these fancy dinner parties and he said to a lady, to your left, lady to your right. And they tell you stories. And 20 years ago said, oh, my son invented penicillin. Oh, my son won the Nobel Prize. And I mean, my kid has a reading tutor.

And I would go into the elevator with my wife and said, how is it that we always get stuff? But the dumb kid I mean, a Nobel Prize penicillin. My wife my wife says to me, they're just lying to you. They're just like you. It's complete bullshit.

It's just the most amazing New York phenomenon.

This is an interesting thing, though. Like, I think it is useful for parents to start being more realistic and talking about all of this stuff, like in a in a you don't have to put your kids to this one thing. You don't have to put your kids down. But I think being honest about what being a parent is and what being a kid is important for the whole point of scaffolding.

That's exactly it. We're not we're not over cheerleading. We're not saying, oh, you're great because you poured a glass of milk. Thank you for bringing us some milk. It's terrific. But the idea of overexaggerating is so problematic. You know, 30, 30 years ago or so, it was summertime. My wife was out in the Hamptons and I had dinner with another guy, you know, bachelor dinner. And he said, you know, so and so.

He's a total wuss. He's been working for Lehman Brothers for ten years. Why would anyone work for Lehman Brothers for ten years? And I said and he must make must make a ton of money. You know, Harold, at best, he makes half a million dollars a year. This is thirty years ago. And I was the youngest chief of child psychiatry the country at the time, and I wasn't making one hundred thousand dollars. He then says, you know so-and-so, he works at Drexel Burnham.

He can barely put his hands together. He makes a million dollars, you know, so and so. He makes two million dollars. And so I was sitting there at the table and I told everyone I know must make a million dollars a year. Does everyone know I don't make a million dollars is so embarrassing. This is like the worst thing that's ever happened. And I'm too quiet. I must have twitched. And he said to me, Harold, you can't compare yourself to these people.

After all, you're just a doctor, just not any idea how hard it was to get a medical bill.

So I made a decision that I'm not going to have dinner with this guy ever again. But more importantly, he's paying for the he's paying for dinner because if he thinks four hundred or so, he pays for dinner.

I'm walking outside. I'm on Madison Avenue between eighty nine and 90th Street on the east side of the street. It's a beautiful night. And walking up the street is Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. He is shorter. He was shorter than you would have thought. He was wearing a seersucker suit and had his jacket over his shoulders. So the blue of his eyes were absolutely unbelievable. She had blonde hair then and he had his arm wrapped around her. They clearly liked each other.

I'm way too cool to say hello to them. And as they're walking up and I'm walking down, they stop me and say, hi, how are you? It's good to see you. And I say, It's good to see you, too. Aren't we lucky? What a beautiful night to live in New York. I said, yes, we're so lucky. You know, we're lucky to live in the city. I said I couldn't agree with you.

More is well, good seeing you. Have a great evening. I said the two of you two, I walk away and instead of feeling isn't it amazing? Two of the most famous movie stars at the time think they know me. All I could think about was that each one of them was making more than a million dollars a year.

So if if they could make me crazy, I could make me feel totally inadequate.

And I was you know, I was the youngest child psychiatrist running a department in the country. I came home and I called my wife and my wife said to me, this is absurd. You know, you love being a child psychiatrist. We want to make a million dollars a year. You have to go do something else. I said, I'm so upset. And she said, well, it must be a vacuum in the in the desert. Just think about it.

Go to sleep. You'll feel better tomorrow. But the next day when I woke up, I started thinking about it. New York. But I think L.A. too. And Chicago, this is a bubble. And if everyone's making a million dollars and everyone's winning the Pulitzer Prize and everyone's winning the Tony Award or the Oscar, and you have a kid who is struggling to pass math to get a C in algebra, you as a parent, this was the beginning of scaffolding.

If you as a parent don't say I have to protect my kid, I have to give him structure and support and encouragement. And I have to celebrate the fact that he got a C plus because otherwise he's going to be diminished. I felt diminished and I shouldn't feel diminished by someone else making a million dollars a year. And it's. Being excited about seeing Paul Newman, he knows me, I'm just worried about how much money is in his bank account.

So we have to we have to protect our kids, whether you're living in L.A. or Chicago or New York or Miami or in rural America, where there's always someone who's going to be more successful, someone else is going to have a slightly easier time hitting the baseball or catching the football or getting the answer right. And what we have to do for our kids is just scaffold them to say, you can do this. You know, it might be hard, but next time it's going to be a little bit easier.

I mean, this journey could be so much fun. And we need some tools that, look, if you don't scaffold yourself, you can't do this. That's the trick. If you don't do self care, you don't do child care. If you're not sleeping eight hours, if you're not eating normally, you're not doing some exercise and some spirituality. If you're not doing some mindfulness or going to church or synagogue, you're not taking care of yourself. And you have to take care of yourself and be a good scaffolded so that the building can be strong.

When Bertie was going through the most sort of dramatic part of the bullying and we didn't know, I, I truly didn't know what to do and I was having such a difficult time, it was really, really, really hard.

Now, Harold, I love them.

I love them, Marguerita. You know what I mean? I'm like I'm like a lady who likes my chips and my Glock and my Margarita's and and I I'm not I'm not one of those like every night drinkers.

But I like love I do love margaritas.

And I remember feeling this feeling like. OK, here's one thing I'm going to do, I am until this all gets figured out and I know exactly what we're doing and what I'm not going to drink. At all, like I'm just I need to be as clear as I can so I can be aware as I can, so I can be like in myself, in my body, just as clear as possible. And I have to tell you, it made the hugest difference.

And it wasn't forever. It was just while I currently have a kid in crisis, did I take like a step back? And I'm like, here's what I need to do.

I'm going to need to continue working out, taking care of myself. But I'm also not going to drink. I'm not going to smoke pot. I'm not going to impair myself in any way for this time because I need to, like, be sharp and focused.

You were securing yourself. Yes. For me, I think probably for everybody.

It's the Stop the Rosebraugh dinner, you know what I mean?

The fact is that if you don't secure yourself, if you don't lay a good foundation for yourself, you can't you can't help your children, especially during a catastrophe. Because I said this is a major stressor. This will make every child who had anxiety or a mood disorder. But for worse, this is even for the healthiest kids. They are going to feel the social isolation. They're going to feel the stress. So we as parents really have a much harder job now than before.

And we just have to we have discovered them.

It sounds like you're saying that that was like a realistic thing that you needed for yourself. And we were having a good conversation about being realistic in general. And I wanted to bring up something. And Dr. Harold, I'm not a professional, so you can correct me if I'm wrong. I want to bring up something about being realistic as a parent that has dealt with some of this stuff in the past about being realistic. And that is and I want to try to say this correctly.

If as a parent you feel like something's going on with your kid and you're afraid because that's a scary thing, saying something about it or not saying something about it won't make it more or less true.

You're absolutely right. But, you know, it's. Think about it, the average parent in the United States waits two to eight years depending on the diagnosis, once they see symptoms before they go see a doctor. So that means that people are afraid that if I say it out loud, it'll mean my kid is sick or very psychotic or very learning disabled or or disordered. One more parent says to me, can't we just call it problems? Well, if we call it problems, it's one hundred percent of the population.

Can we call it issues? We've got issues that about 50 percent of the population, if we call it disorders, it's 20 percent. That's still a lot. But if you don't call it what it is, insurance doesn't cover it. You don't get accommodations. You don't get the treatment you're supposed to. So if your kid has a real reading disorder or a language disorder, the school is required to remediate it for free. But if you're just saying it's a little reading issue, they're going to say, I'm not paying for it.

And if you don't tell your insurance company, your child really has depression. It's not just moralization. The kid's appetite, the kid's mood, the kid's sleep are really affected. The insurance companies aren't going to pay for it. And one of how do I know, busy, busy, participated in this unbelievable campaign. We started in twenty seventeen a hashtag, my younger self. We got famous influencers to give us a video to say I have one of these disorders.

I made it through the tunnel, don't be ashamed, get help. But the idea that famous, good looking successful people can say, look, I have it and I got better.

I have to tell you, last year, Kevin Love, who's this basketball player, he said, I have a terrible anxiety, panic attacks. And until I started taking medicine and doing more physical exercise, I was struggling. So the fact that in America we are worried that our kids will be less than if they have a mental health disorder or a learning disorder, really impairs the fact that they don't get help. Because I told you before, real common, but remarkably treatable, remarkably treatable.

And also, if you think if you think something's going on with your kid and you say, hey, I'm worried that something might be going on with you, you're not going to make that true for them. If it if it is true, it's true. And if it's not true, it's not true. And you're not going to make it true by saying it out loud to them, you're not going to give them the idea to the idea that they're going to become suicidal or depressed.

Because you say I'm worried that you seem very hopeless and very sad lately. You don't seem the same. Talk to me, you know, and I'll take it one better. You even go get them evaluated. What's the best thing that could happen to and in the doctor says normal teenager. Just some angst, nothing to worry about. So, yes, it was time consuming. It cost them money. But how reassuring to be told it's OK. It's just part of normal development.

Well, this is what I was going to say to you, because I know we have to let you go in a second.

What can what should parents be doing at home if they don't have your number in their phone?

So I would tell you that. So I would tell you that child mind, Doug, our website, which now I think has fifty eight million visitors and gets almost two million unique visitors every month, is really a very reliable resource of scientifically sound information. There's a symptom checker that within twenty minutes you can figure out if there's something to worry about or not and then you could reach out and get some help. It should be reassuring to families to know that A, we don't take money from the pharmaceutical industry.

We don't let drug reps on the grounds of the treatment institute simply because they're always attractive, articulate and seductive. And they bring food and pens. Just keep them away from me. And we don't take money from guns, tobacco or liquor. So the fact that we are giving you scientifically sound information, we're not asking for money for it. You can just rely on us. It's supported through philanthropic, you know, resources. I think that if I was worried about my child, I'd go to child my dog and and check the symptom checker or look up on a video of what a learning disability looks like or check what's the difference between demoralization and depression?

Because when things happen, we feel crummy, which is different than depression. And I think the more informed we are as parents, the better we are for our kids. And certainly I think it's time for us to be we could all be better parents, you know, stop. Hello. I think helicopters or snowplows or I sometimes think I was a concierge parent, you know, can I get you a better class? Can I get you that kind of stuff that you want?

Independent Mark is really what Mark is. Mark's a real he's a real, like waiter on a cruise.

He'll get the he will get those kids anything. They will be like. Yes, is definitely I mean, I can't I don't even know if I can ever mess with that.

Like, I think there's some part of him that, like, it just brings him such joy to make them exactly what they want that. It drives me insane. And, you know, not letting them ever cook, you know, it's like let's prepare the food.

Yeah, no, no, no. The kids cook with. Yeah, no. Right. The kids cook two.

Oberti makes really good smoothie. There we go.

Yeah. I think the child mind is such an incredible resource for parents. I just also want to reiterate, guys, we talk about mental health a lot on our podcast. We talk about our own therapists that we see. And like Herold said, remember when we used to fly on airplanes? Remember that? And they would we'd watch that video and you wouldn't be paying attention.

But you know that you're supposed to secure your, you know, face mask thing before you help your kids. And you have to make sure that mentally you're doing OK, too. And I know this has just been such a hard time, such a hard year over a year now for so many people and then before that even as well. And so I really think that. All of these things, it is like a pressure cooker or cumulative, you know, like I remember once having an allergist who told me that allergies are cumulative and your body, like, will reach a point where they're just like, oh, forget it, I cannot handle one more piece of this thing that I'm allergic to.

And mental health is kind of the same way. Right. And so, like everybody been getting filled up and filled up and filled up.

And so just let's make sure that you're taking care of yourselves and that will allow you to take better care of your kids and get the right help for them that they may need. Or maybe you just read the scaffold effect and implement some tools and like then everything is fine.

You drive the blueprint. It's still time.

Well, Harold, I can't thank you enough for joining us. This was so nice and helpful. And I know that a lot of our listeners are going through it and they have kids that are going through it.

And I know just in my own house we've been going through it.

We will get through this. We will get through it. OK, thank you, Dr. Harold Deflater. All right, well, there, there, that was informative, yeah, interesting.

We were talking to Dr. Harold, all I kept thinking is like this is so useful for kids. Like as someone who is a parent. So many times I was like, I really wish I had someone to ask about issues like this. I really wish I had someone to turn to. But also, like just even before I ever had kids, I really wish I had known a lot of these things that I could have applied to thinking about my own childhood.

I think it's really useful for just anyone who ever has been a child to kind of like be able to wrap their head around. Like, here's how, you know, here's how you kind of come to terms with, like, a lot of things that you had to deal with as a child. And here's how you, you know, fix it and go forward.

Yeah.

And I feel like it's I don't know, like I just I was just so blown away.

By. When Dr. Harold was saying that, you know, the cases of, like mental illness in children far surpass anything else that ails kids. Yeah, I mean, beyond and yet we're not having we're not holding huge fundraisers, generally speaking, like no one is raising money for kids whose parents can't afford help with their mental health and wellbeing.

And it's just like it really breaks my heart, because especially for Dr. Harold, who's somebody who's obviously spent his entire life figuring out the best ways to help kids and how they can help get teens and preteens back, sort of like on the right mental health track.

It isn't. I mean, it's not it's not rocket science. It's not brain surgery. Turns out right.

It's like actually they can do it, but they people need resources and there need to be professionals that can provide these services.

And parents have to be willing to ask for help for their children in that specific way and for whatever reason, still still, there's just this stigma where parents don't want to acknowledge or. Admit maybe that their kid might be struggling with some issues and could use some help. Yeah, and I know this from experience when parents are finally ready to say, like, I think there's something going on with my kid, a lot of times they just.

Can't find where you're supposed to start, there just is no start line, it's just a lot of people saying, like, I don't know, I yeah, you know, and I would say I mean, I was saying actually in the interview with Dr. Harold, because I do think it's important.

Like even even me. Like even even me.

No, but like even like that's real. Meghan McCain. I really was a real fucking Meghan McCain. We didn't talk about Meghan McCain apologizing, even me. It was hard for me then. Me, I am from Arizona. Let's let's just forget.

But there's got to come in with three buttons on top of her head and the transformation will be complete.

No, I remember my friend Yashar, who was like like a long time ago about, you know, Meghan McCain.

I really think you got I was like Yashar and that if I could chance. Not one fucking chance. No. No, Sarah, no.

I don't want to fuck Vince Vaughn anymore, and I'm not going to make McCain. You know, what's interesting about Meghan McCain is I know Yashar really digs her. Andy Cohen really digs her. He has her on watch. What happens live a lot. And, you know, our friend Michael Ian Black also has done projects with her. And so what I'm saying is, like a lot of guys really dig Magnacca.

I was a good thing. We used to live in the same apartment building.

Really? Yeah. And she is really friendly and was always very friendly to me. And that's when she was on The View and I was on both fronts. Also, we both knew what each other stood for.

But I it it's I think some people have more tolerance than others for that, for the thing where it's like, yeah, I go on TV and say all these things but I'm nice in person.

I thought of that. But I think some dudes are I have zero.

I think I have zero fucking tolerance for it because because I think that we've just so clearly seen the effect. And I think like we're living through the fucking effect right now. And it's caused so many people so much pain and unnecessarily so just for some fucking ratings.

Fuck. And there are nicer ways to get on TV, get married at first sight, go on American Idol. Like if you want to be on TV being. Yeah. That ranting about other human beings is not the only option you have.

It's just a shame. It's like, it's like. Yeah it's a bummer, it's a bummer that that but that people convince themselves that these personalities are like actual personality is in order.

Oh it's like this goes back to the top of the show, like sit with yourself and be honest. What is it you want? Do you want to trade in on your little bit of fame from who your parent is and try to like, get more famous? Is that what your goal is?

Or do you want to do good in the world or do you want to be of service to people or do you hope to maybe do both? And if that's the case. Go fuck yourself to doing it all wrong.

I don't I don't know, she just drives me fucking nuts because I don't I do because that is the thing, because it feels like she does know better. Like it feels like she is smarter than the stupid shit that comes out of her mouth. Do you know what I mean?

And it feels like it's all done in order to just like keep up this persona to keep her fucking shitty job on a shitty show that is like, I don't know, the to like keep in headlines.

Like, she's saying things she's like bought into the whole thing. She's bought into it and it's fucking bullshit. Oh, I hate it.

Sorry.

It's very professional wrestling and it's it's so weird because it's like, you know, the view trends like every day, you know, like I've smacked down Meghan McCain or Joy Bahah destroyed Meghan McCain or, you know, whatever. And like so obviously that's good for The View.

And it seems very sincere, like every time will be like tares. Meghan McCain, the new one. It seems very sincere. And whenever Meghan McCain's like throat turns all red and splotchy, it seems very sincere that she's like embarrassed or upset. So, you know, but then, yeah, I'm like it's it also seems like you can't believe half of this bullshit that you're saying, like, you know, like I do. I did have, like, a modicum of respect for your dad, but I do also have, like, a modicum of respect for her mom, you know, that they have their beliefs, but they also like kind of stand up when they're like, hey, but this is also, like, wrong.

Yeah, there is a line and it's sad that, like, that's the bar. But people who say, like, there's a line and you can cross it now, like rare and you have to respect that. Yeah. Well, I'm all about lines, there's a line there and lines and boundaries. That's what I needed to learn some boundaries.

Listen. My boundary is the threshold of the pig and whistle, which what struck me before I knew about the God, the sex club, by the way, would you just much better for as long as I've lived in L.A..

Oh, big and wisl we hardly knew you from now on the way to go to buy a sexy golf party that show Silicon Valley, just that everybody got canceled except for my friend Martin Starr and Geeks and Kumail me.

But they tried to come for Kamale. They listened, they tried to come for him. Did they just say yes because he got, because he got like jacked. Remember it was a controversy.

You can't come for him. People are being mean.

I love him. I love him.

He's very nice. I worked with him very briefly and he was very lovely.

And you know what? I'm never mad at any person who wants to like. Do the thing at one point in their life where they get, like, super in shape. Yeah, and he was he's doing it for a job, which is like a great excuse. And and I'm I like it. I was watching him, too. I like comments at dinner.

Katie Turino from Mega Babe, and she had posted this thing. Like about some headline with Gwyneth Paltrow, I was up real early and I was kind of like a little wired and she posted this thing about this headline with Gwyneth Paltrow gained weight or something, I don't know.

And Katy was like going off like, you know, these aren't headlines. This isn't news. Like women's bodies are news.

And I responded like this paragraph basically that was like, I totally agree with you and it's such bullshit.

But also, like I do feel like we, as in the people who get asked these questions, have to do better about not answering them in the way that they want, because no matter what, like if you give them anything, they're going to turn that into the click bait headline.

And so it's hard because that's a hard thing to remember to do when you're doing press, because you're generally exhausted. You're generally doing back to back interviews and like your old brain, like patriarchal bullshit sets in people and you're a people pleaser and you want to just like just be nice, answer the questions so you can fucking go home. And so, you know, I think it's like a little complicated because I think that the onus is on not just the reporters, but also on the people who are being asked the questions to say, like, you know, I honestly, I'm not going to do it.

Not going to go there, girl, you're not getting your headline. But then I was like, but the only exception is like when Christian Bale lost all that weight for the Machinist or when Hilary Swank transformed her body for the boxing movie or Kamale, when he got all ripped for whatever movie it is. I have no fucking idea. But it's going to be a superhero movie, I'm sure. Like I always want to know about those body transformations.

You know, in the case of Gwyneth, though, like, that's her whole you know, that's her whole business plan is to like, sell some detoxifying duster, whatever, you know, so. I mean, she does look good. Yeah, I mean, she just did anyway.

You know, I think if I put a rock in my vagina, I'm going to look like that. You know, I think that's the one that I could put 50 rocks in my vagina. And I'm not going to look like that. It's genetics. It's a lot of genetics, man. Vagina rocks. It's a lot of genetics. Money is a teacher. I think it's genetics, not vagina rocks. Oh, my God, that's genius.

It's genetics, not vagina rocks. It's a conversation starter. It's if I wore it, I would have to say it's genetics, not vagina rocks. And then in parentheticals and a little bit of olé!

Oh, gosh, I cut my hair into like a little kinky.

Bob, look at this. But when you put it back, I was like, look, you look cute.

It's very Charly's mean once right after years ago, like fifteen years ago, someone at a hotel thought that I was Charlize Theron. And it was truly one of the best moments of my life.

They quickly realized I was not good for one second. They thought that I was. When you got excited about it, I got excited. I'm like, oh, no, no, that would never get this excited. I mean, one hundred percent. Right.

You know, our listeners, Neil and Jennifer Neil sent me a message on Instagram. Neil and Jennifer are going out. They listen to the podcast together in Ottawa, and they've been each other's covid bubble since January. And Neil works for the Foreign Service and he's been given a new post and he has to leave for four years and Jennifer won't be going with him.

Oh, and I really hope this this isn't the first time Jennifer's hearing of this, because that would be terrible.

But she'd want to hear it from you.

You never know you're gone, Jennifer. You're in an open relationship, just like I get it. I'm getting I get it.

But Neil mentioned that they are spending their last few days together in Ottawa, and he said it would mean a lot to her if we just said to them that they're doing their best and they're doing what's best for each other by, you know, going their separate ways. And, you know, it's it's going to be hard. But Jennifer and Neil were thinking of you guys, Mariah Carey Butterfly, actually a great breakup song.

That's my contribution to the conversation. Mariah Carey's Butterfly, that is.

Yeah, that is a good breakup song. And yeah, it really sucks you guys. But I just I think it's nice. It sounds like you're partying on really excellent, very grown up terms. And I super admire that. And I love that you wrote to us and asked us just to say hi to you and we love you and we love you guys. Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy your last couple of moments together and. Yeah. And maybe in four years.

Who knows.

Who knows. Also, yeah, just who knows? You never know, you don't know what could happen. You never know. You never know. We truly never thought we were going to make it through the past four years.

I didn't think we were going to make it through 30 episodes of this podcast.

And here we are. Thirty three or whatever. And then something. Oh, my God, you guys, we love you so much. We just fuckin love you. Take care of yourselves, Ashley. You're just the best.

I mean, we love you. What's happening? What's going on? Like, what is your show coming back. What's going on. Tell us real fast. Oh, I cannot say. Oh, never mind. Don't tell us anything. But we don't want to know.

It's a secret when a black lady sketch show is coming back to HBO. So keep your eyes out looking for it. I don't say keep your eyes peeled because I think that phrase is disgusting.

You know, just like when I said to cricket skin the cat, when I tried to take her to put her jammies on and she was like, that is so messed up, man. That has really turned a corner of attitude since the haircut.

And I just don't know, what do I look like? Samsung, which is more powerful. Yeah, she got up. She got down. She got more power.

She got very powerful and she had very sassy and is like not having me at all.

But she is not to be messed with that great. One of the best things about not having kids is how much I get to enjoy that kind of thing.

Like my favorite developmental phase is what a child learns the word no. And they say it's everything because I don't have to live with the kid.

With learning to say no is very important. It is. It is to empower our children.

And that's the thing to like when you're like the trickiness of raising a child in which you want to make sure that, like, consent is always something that they understand is important and valuable and they're always allowed to express their desires and their wants and their needs.

And it starts like just basic stuff. But then they just take advantage of it. They just say no to fucking everything. That's what we would always whisper to each other.

My husband and I would always whisper, if he's standing up to you, that means he'll stand up to others.

I to my mom said, like, we could always have a conversation in our house because my mom wanted me to be able to stand up to teachers and bosses and all this stuff.

But then as adults, she was like, you talked so much, like you just never stopped. We talked for eight years.

You guys, I, I feel I feel pretty certain that Bertie is not a podcast listener. So I'm going to share this. But yesterday I've been really doing a good job also. Here's another thing. I've you know, I've been really working on my parenting and I've been doing a good job at, like, putting my phone down, putting my own devices down, like leading by example. Right. And spending time with my kids. And it's hard sometimes not to just capture those moments right onto Instagram, which I do occasionally.

But even doing better about that, I feel like.

But yesterday evening dinner. Then after dinner in my. Berdy found me and it was a nonstop, one sided conversation that at a certain point I had to text Mark and I was like, I cannot do this anymore, like you have to come. And he had tried to come in a couple times because I think you could tell that I was like, oh, my God.

But. As soon as he would walk, anybody would be like, go away, we're talking. We are not talking. You have been talking at me for damn near four hours now. I can not. And like by the way, they're so smart and they know so many things and they have they're so thoughtful and like have told me so many incredible things. But then a lot of it, just like we. Yes. We went over this.

Yeah, I remember. Right. I remember because you just said that. Yeah. You just said that. The thing that's the same thing you just said, you know what I mean. Like I believe anyway, I love them. I just love them. Wow.

It's Levonne. It's all for fun.

You've had that, I'm sure. Kizzie Oh my gosh. Yeah, I have it with my husband sometimes.

Matt does listen to the podcast. OK, say he does.

What do your boys do? They listen. Yes, they all they do do. Yeah. Oh that's cute.

We love you guys. We love you all. All my people. Listen.

Well, I'm glad that all of you at home listen and I'm glad that Ashley listens and was here. And I listen, sometimes I'm not going to be on it, but I love you guys.

And I hope that this week is a little bit better for you all at home. It was a little bit better for me.

A little bit, but we're going to just keep doing our best, that's all we can do. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, are we in a group OK? Yeah, we got it. OK, we're going to do you guys.

I love you. We love you so much. Well, I actually we love you.

Thank you, sir. I love you. Love you, too. Bye bye. People love you. Oh, no.