Chelsea Ursin is the creator and host of the podcast, Dear Young RockerTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTSELF-TALK ADVICE FROM THE ARCHIVESSelf-Talking with Steven HandelExpecting the Opposite with Sarah May B.Talking To Your Best Friend with LaurenEvolving Self-Talk with Kelly Travis Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Maddie Pasquariello is a nutritionist. She runs @eastcoasthealthIf you have some advice for me, call the hotline at 844-935-BEST. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Joe Keohane, a veteran journalist who has held high-level editing positions at Medium, Esquire, Entrepreneur, and Hemispheres is the author of The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting In a Suspicious World.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT:JOE: My name's Joe Keohane. I'm the author of the new book, The Power of Strangers: The Benefits of Connecting In a Suspicious World.ZAK: We've all gotten rusty talking to strangers because of COVID but also because of our phones and because of where we are as a culture. The thing that I like to do with this show is give people something they can try today. So, give me a strategy for getting back in to where it's not gonna overwhelm and feel like we have to go be friends with the world.JOE: First know that everybody is anxious. Everybody was anxious about talking to strangers before this for a lot of reasons I get into in the book and everyone's especially anxious now because we've been in the hole for a year. So, start easy. Start with a waiter or waitress. Talk to somebody that's at a coffee shop in a structured, public place where your roles are clear, right. You're not just sneaking up on someone on the street which I would not advise people to do. And there's a really cool technique that I learned from a woman named Georgie Nightingall who's this communications expert in London. I took a class with her where she taught people how to talk to strangers and she was very keen and very good at it. The idea that she had was, it involved scripts. So, when we have an interaction with someone at a corner store, right, you go in and say, how you doing? And the person says good, how are you and you say, good, thanks. And that's it. You've put no effort into it. There's no curiosity being exercised. It's just a way to recognize that you're standing there, right? Cause it would be weird not to say anything but you don't want to put any effort into it. So, that's a script and we use those all the time to converse cognitive load and things like that. When you find yourself in a situation like that and someone asks you a scripted question, give them a specific answer. So, what Georgie advised and what she always does and this is brilliant and I do it all the time. When someone says, how you doing? Georgie says, ehhhh, 7 our 10. So now you're off script. You're in uncharted territory. The person's gonna be alert now being like, ok, something different is happening here. I have to dial in. I have to pay attention. And then Georgie will say, how are you doing today? And now she's modeled something and they follow her lead because it's rude if they don't. This is how we communicate. They'll say, oh, pretty good. I'm about 8 out of 10. And then she'd say, what'll take to get you to a 9 today? And then they'll be like, my mother's not been feeling well. Maybe I'll go see her later. Maybe she'll be feeling better.JOE: When you get to that point, you get a glimmer of the other person. You get a glimmer of the depth and complexity of another person you would never register as a human being. People in service positions are often dehumanized. But, just a little trick like that is super useful and super easy and it's really funny and people I find are often kind of delighted by it. It's playful. It's audacious. You do that stuff enough, it leads to a little interaction and you'll feel good after you do it. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Haley Nahman runs a weekly newsletter and podcast called Maybe Baby, which was recently written up in The New YorkerTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Welcome back to the Best Advice Show and today, we're gonna get meta. We're gonna talk about advice about advice. Back in episode #48, Julia Putnam touched on this..JULIA: You should never give unsolicited advice...ZAK: Today's advice-giver is Haley Nahman. She is a writer and proprietor of the excellent newsletter, Maybe Baby and her advice dovetails nicely with what Julia said.HALEY: I think it's also ok to not follow advice and just make mistakes. I think are own experiences teach us lessons better than anyone else. I really don't think you can learn lessons before you experience them yourself. All the wisdom is out there. If you could just hear wisdom and live it, we would all be perfect but that's just not really how it works. So, yeah, I think my final comment is the worst case scenario is you fuck up and now you are smarter and now you know yourself better. The stakes aren't as high as ever think they are and your life will teach you so much more if you're paying attention than other people ever can. ZAK: Yeah. That's great. I love that. Cause especially me as the maker of an advice show and people that listen to this advice show, I think we can get obsessed in trying to subscribe to or search for the best path, but, can't know until we know. HALEY: Yeah, I spent so much of my 20s trying to follow everyone else's advice. It lands you into a really weird place. You don't know who you are. A lot of pent up emotion that you just want to release that feels like...you feel misunderstood. And it doesn't really help you grow to just follow the perfect path. So, there's always an upside to fucking up. I saw a Kurt Vonnegut quote that said, "the truth is we know so little about life, we don't know what the good news is and what the bad news is" and I think that's true of our mistakes too. We don't know what's gonna help up and what's gonna hurt us until we find out. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Mark Bittman is an American food journalist, author, and former columnist for The New York Times.Knife Skills Are Bulls*it from THE BITTMAN PROJECTTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's The Best Advice Show where every episode I give you one discrete morsel of advice. Today, I'm pleased to welcome back, Mark Bittman, the famous food writer and cookbook author. You know Mark is? He's like your uncle who reminds you, it's fine. Just relax. For example, sometimes you hear a chef talk about how important knife skills are. Mark Bittman disagrees. MARK: And, I saw some famous chef say, if your knife skills are bed, you'd better up your game. And I'm like, how can this possible matter. I know we're not videotaping this but my grandmother, I mean peasants all over the world, cut food by holding it in their hand cutting it with a pretty dull knife. Or maybe with a sharp knife. But that's a different kind of knife skills. But, chefs grew up or in the days of apprenticeships, would be giving a box of onions and say, here, cut these onions and you'd have to learn how to cut 50 big onions in 20-minutes and that's an amazing skill. Incredible. A home cook doesn't need to know how to do that. You cut an onion up any way you want to cut an onion up. It'll still taste fine and the fact that someone can do it in ten-second and it takes you a minute, cause even a novice can't take more than a minute to cut up an onion. So what? So it cost you 45-seconds. I mean, the dish takes you a half-hour to make. 45-seconds is not a big deal.ZAK: It made me think that maybe there's a metaphor in there, too. Like, life is so much more accessible when we don't think we have to be perfect or something. MARK: Or expert. I mean, mostly we don't. No one thinks they have to drive like...I don't know the names of any race car driver. No one, thinks they need to drive like somebody who drives in the Indy 500 if such a thing still exists. No one thinks they need to play tennis like Naomi Osaka just to give credit where credit's due. You just do those things. Maybe you feel bad or you wish you were better but somehow...and I think it's because chefs took over food television and so everybody thinks well if I'm gonna cook, I need to be able to cook like a chef. And, it's not in your interest to think that you need to be a chef in order to be a cook. You just need to think like your grandmother or great-grandmother. These people just cook and they don't fuss around with like, is this parsley minced uniformly enough or is this onion...did it take me 10-seconds to perfectly slice this onion or is this browned evenly enough? Your stove's not good enough for that. You don't have a good enough stove to do a real stir-fry. There's all these limitations in being a home-cook. Live with it. You're not a chef. It's fine. It's not a big deal. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Emily Naylor is a audio producer and presenter in LondonTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: I was gonna talk to Emily about a few Spanish comprehension strategies she's devised. But then I realized, she and I had something in common.ZAK: Is that a phrase over there, people-pleasing?EMILY: Yeah, it might as well be my middle name to be honest with you, Zak. (Laughter)ZAK: Emily People-Pleasing Naylor. I am Zak People-Pleasing Rosen. It's nice to meet you. (Laughter)EMILY: You too. Pleasure. Only if you like meeting me. If not then... (Laughter)ZAK: What do you think is the alternative to people-pleasing? Just to please yourself? To be a self-pleaser?EMILY: No, I don't think that quite it either. I think it's to be a person with people. You don't have a to be a people-pleaser. You don't have to be a person pisser-offer. You're just a person with people and it sounds so simple and obvious but perhaps we don't spend enough time thinking, you are a person. Think about how complex you are. Your emotions, hopes, ambitions, worries...what you're gonna be thinking about in 24 hours time isn't, that something said something weird and maybe they don't like me now. That's irrelevant. Think about how you and how complex you are as a person and then think you're in a room with 20 other people and they're just as complex and not in a negative way but you're not that big an influences on their life in that moment. They're going home. They've got to think about what to have for dinner. So, you're just a person with people. ZAK: Ugh, you're making me cry. I love this. Be a person with a people! Stop trying to curate their interpersonal dynamics. Just be with them. EMILY: And be present because ultimately when you're people-pleasing you're trying to manipulate a situation. You're taking a step back. You're not in the moment. You are analyzing little things. You're worrying and that can be quite self-centered and you aren't a person with people. You are yourself worrying about all these things which you can't control. So, don't waste your energy on that. Just be present and listen and try as best as you can in this kind of mindful, social way to let go of those little things. Doesn't mean they're not gonna worry you. If they do, just accept that. You can't shut it off, but, just try to listen to what that person's saying and if they like you or not, that's not really a) your concern and b) you can't control it, so...ZAK: Yeah. Yeah. Them liking us isn't the point. It's just a possible by-product of being present with them.EMILY: Exactly. And ultimately your job as a human being is to socialize with other human beings. We'd love that to be positive. Fine. But also if you are in a super important business meeting or you're in a courtroom and you're defending your client and then the prosecutor is whatever...you don't want the prosecutor to like you. You want your client to get the best deal. Forget about the people-pleasing. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Debra Allison is a seasoned Spanish teacher in California.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT:DEBRA: So, my best advice to acquire another language is repetition, repetition, repetition. I'll repeat that again, repetition, repetition, repetition. I'm gonna give you a little tidbit of information about the ways we acquire language and then I'm gonna tell you the two best ways to actually acquire language. The tidbit of information is this. Some people say that they are bad at learning languages. But, there's actually no such thing as somebody who's bad at learning languages. If you're listening to this podcast and understanding it, you're actually good at learning languages. The two ways that we acquire language is one, by reading and the other is by listening. What I mean by reading is when we read materials right at our level and for some people who are beginning to acquire their language, that might be those books with 1-3 words on a page. We learn vocabulary that way. We learn sentence structures that way. We learn grammar through reading. The second way we acquire grammar is by listening right at our level so it's understandable....almost 100 percent understandable but it's repetitive. It's that notion of ugh, I can't get something out of my head. It's stuck in my head. When my students say to me, "Ugh, Mrs. Allison I can't this voice...this phrase out of my head." I might apologize on the outskirts but inside so happy. This is not short-term memory we're talking about. We want to hear something five-thousand times so it just falls out of our mouth without even trying. Language learning or more technically speaking, acquiring a language should absolutely be effortless, like your first language was. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTSTOCKING UP WITH VALERIYATRANSCRIPT: ZAK: It's Food Friday on The Best Advice Show and as always, I'm really hoping you'll call the hotline and give me your piece of advice. It's 844-935-BEST. Valeriya called the hotline and offered this...VALERIYA: I feel like often people are really willing to share food with someone when that someone is going through a really big thing. Like grieving the loss of someone dear to them or weathering the exhaustion of a newborn baby or a big thing and that can result in the presence of an overwhelming amount of lasagna in one's kitchen and so what I'd like to advise instead or rather in a addition to is to share food more often as a way of extending comfort to people in your life even when they're struggling with something acute or maybe less intense like a difficult job hunt or a flooded basement or whatever. I feel like in those one-off instances it's maybe even ok to reach out a few hours before dinnertime rather than sign up through a meal-train that you create or something and offer a spontaneous food drop-off. Sometimes when people are least expecting it a warm, home cooked meal can go a long way. Pro tip I found that making sauces like really simple pesto with some garden fresh herbs with whatever nuts you can find in your pantry or if you want to make it fancy, not so hard, but so fancy aioli and putting those little sauces in little zip-locks or small jar can real seal the deal. So, yeah, cook more often for your friends when they're struggling with things that are not big things. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Gretchen Rubin (@gretchenrubin) is the co-host of the Happier podcast and wrote New York Times bestsellers Outer Order, Inner Calm, The Four Tendencies, Better Than Before, and The Happiness Project. - QUIZ - ARE YOU DRIFTINGTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Gretchen Rubin is back with another absolute gem on drift.GRETCHEN: So, drift is the decision that we make by not deciding or by making the decision that is just the easiest and causes the least friction. You know, I go to law school because I'm good at research and writing. I become a doctor because both my parents are doctors. I get married because all my friends are getting married. I take this job because someone offers me this job. We're drifting because we're not making an intentional choice. We're not deciding what we're going after. We're just doing the thing that comes most easily. Now, what can be deceptive about the word drift is it sounds like the easy way or the lazy way but drift is often accompanies with a tremendous amount of work. I drifted into law school because I thought, well, my father's really happy as a lawyer, maybe I'll be happy. I'm good at research and writing I can always change my mind later. It's a great education. It'll keep my options open and I don't know what else to do with myself. So drift isn't always the easy way but it's the way that makes us make the non-choice choice. And sometimes drift works out find and people drift into situations and careers that they're happy with. But a lot of times drift doesn't work out that way because we haven't chosen to do something, we've just drifted into it. So, you know, there's a good change that maybe it's not gonna be a great fit.ZAK: How do we know when we're drifting?GRETCHEN: One is if you often have the feeling that you're living someone else's life. Or you feel like you're off-track. I was as a lawyer, clerking for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and I was enjoying it tremendously. I felt so lucky to be there and yet I did feel like I wasn't where I was supposed to be. I felt like I was sort of on a lark. On a detour is the only way that I can describe it. It didn't feel like it was the center of my life. Or, if you have a fantasy that something's gonna blow up your life or in a way that would somehow make it impossible for you to continue or if you have a fantasy life where you're constantly day-dreaming. Or, maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe you're very distressed when somebody talks about something that maybe was once interesting to you but now it's like you can't even bare to think about it because it's so emotionally fraught for you, you can't bare it. Or if you get extremely defensive if somebody suggests that what you're doing isn't the right choice or not the only choice. If you're an associate at a law firm and somebody says something like, well, financial security isn't taht important to me. And you become furious at the idea that somebody would say that. It's like, why is that so energized for you? Often, drift is just feeling like I just did the obvious thing at every turn. I just did the thing that everybody expected for me or that I expected for myself and I took the obvious choice. Often, that is drift.ZAK: Just so you know. If you are drifting. That's ok. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

CNN "Reliable Sources" Interview with Rose and Bud Fenster They Call It ‘Insane’: Where Myanmar Sends Political Prisoners‘The darkest days are coming’: Myanmar’s journalists suffer at hands of juntaTRANSCRIPT:ZAK: 36 days ago, Danny Fenster was detained and thrown in jail in Myanmar without a charge, without access to lawyer and without a phone call to his family. He has subsequently been charged under penal code 505 a which essentially makes it a crime to practice independent journalism. Danny's family still have not been able to talk to him. It was just last week that he was finally granted a phone call to the American embassy in Yangon. Danny has a hearing this Thursday where he faces as much as three years in prison. Again, the crime being practicing independent journalism. Danny is a friend of mine. I've known him and his family for nearly all my life. But even if you don't know Danny. You should care about this story. I've put a bunch of links to learn more in the show notes. I hope you'll take a few minutes to learn more and then tell your friends and family. For now, though, I'm honored to get some advice from The Fensters. Danny's mom Rose. His dad, buddy and his brother Bryan.ZAK: You three are going through a living nightmare. Have you noticed something that people say that is very helpful or something that people say that isn't helpful. Cause a lot of times we just don't know how to engage with people suffering a tragedy.ROSE: I can speak. Especially from my hospice nursing experience and dealing with life and death and family and all that. I mean, it's definitely some people walk toward you with the right words. Some walk toward you with...they don't know what to say. It might agitate you but you've got to realize that they're coming from a space of love and trying to hold a space for you of love. But people also need to realize, I guess, that sometimes in these situations you don't have to say anything. Just be present and a hug, a look is helpful if you don't know the right words.BRYAN: Yeah, I think just being there really. Showing up, a hug. Don't get me wrong the meal train has been delightful and people going out of their way to do stuff, obviously, just the simple things, really. Knocking on the door, smiling, giving hugs. That's been going a long way for me.BUDDY: You know, it's funny, a lot of people they mention you something like, "I don't know what I would do! I would be losing my mind!" I just smile to myself cause it's like, you don't know what you would do and I don't know if you'd lose your mind. I'm not losing my mind. I'm angry at the unfairness of it. It's a parent, knee-jerk reaction to say something like that and I don't know if I'm gaining anything from it or not, but I think to myself, you really don't know until it happens to you. No one prepares for this kind of thing. Don't bring me food. Just sit down and talk for a minute. That's nice. I appreciate that. I'm not as social as her and Bryan. I'm the quiet guy here but it's very appreciated when someone...doesn't even have to be related to what's going on. Just to talk. Say hi, how you doing.ROSE: And in multiple texts that we're getting and people every couple days people check in and say sending love and prayers and no reply needed. So, that's nice because it's hard to reply to everybody but you care about everybody that's caring for you.BRYAN: And as exhausting as it is to keep talking about this, I find myself comforting my own self by comforting others cause people don't know what to say and I enjoy very much being like, it's ok, come here and let me get my arms around you. Let's talk about it. It's alright. It's a lot of work but it makes me feel better at the same time.ZAK: To follow Danny's case...to sign a petition to pressure the Biden administration to secure Danny's release and to learn more about sweet, brilliant, Danny Fenster...visit BringDannyHome.com   Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow