The Best Advice Show

Beth Nichols is an amateur baker, professional editor and excellent gift giver.To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTPaul Hollywood's Fortune Cookies Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Andy Eninger is an improviser, writer, facilitator and dog dad. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTTRANSCRIPT: ZAK: Is there a principal that you could share? Something for those of us who haven't taken an improv class but something we might try in our everyday life, taken from improv?ANDY: The improv philosophy that is serving me the most right now is this sense of following the follower. This sense of looking up and looking out and seeing what somebody else is doing whether that's the audience. Whether that's the person that you're performing with or the musician that you're improvising with and following where they're going and the magic of then they start to follow you and you follow them and they're following you and who's actually leading? It's almost like, have you ever seen a murmuration of birds when they're flying around. You're like which one's leading? They're all leading. They're all following each other. There's this magical sense when everyone's attuned to other people, you can go in this direction together. Even if that direction changes and changes again.ZAK: I'm thinking about concretizing this. I'm in a Zoom now, right, with a dozen of my colleagues. How do I look to follow the follower in a context like that?ANDY: I think it's really powerful for the person that might be leading the meeting to notice, 'Oh, I think people are shutting down. Lemme follow what's going on there by maybe asking or maybe it's time for me to be quiet and see if someone steps up.' I think that's one of the hardest things for someone who's a real driving personality who's leading a meeting is to shut up and leave a space and let someone step in and speak and I think it's not intuitive for leaders to surrender.ZAK: Is there a check-in that people who are natural leaders, like something that they can do just to catch themselves leading and not following the follower?ANDY: I think for a leader to take on this sense of following the follower, probably the best thing that they can do is ask themself, 'what does this person need?' Often, we're trying to apply our perspective and view of the world to everyone else. It's like, 'here's what you need to do' rather than finding out and listening to understand what another person actually needs. Asking those open-ended questions and I think that it goes counter to how many leaders think about themselves. 'Oh, I have to be smart. I need to have the right advice. I have to know what to do.' And there's so many situations where we simply can't know what's right for this person to do in the moment. We may have the vision in mind where we want the scene or the job, the project to head. But what this person needs in the moment can probably only come from that person. It's not going to come from us. I think that's what a leader is surrendering Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Caveh Zahedi is a filmmaker and creator of The Show About the Show and 365 Stories I Want To Tell You Before We Both DieTo offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Andrew Zerbo is the chef and creator behind Fermental StateMore fermenting advice from the archives!To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BEST Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

Kat Harris (@therefinedwoman) is an author, coach and host of The Refined Collective Podcast. To offer your own advice, call Zak @ 844-935-BESTKat's last episode from the show is ESSENTIAL! - listen. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information. ---Help Zak continue making this show by becoming a Best Advice Show Patron @ https://www.patreon.com/bestadviceshow---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow

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---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---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---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---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---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---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---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---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---Fill out the TBAS listener survey to help Zak get to know you better.https://forms.gle/f1HxJ45Df4V3m2Dg9---Call Zak on the advice show hotline @ 844-935-BEST or email him a voice-memo at ZAK@bestADVICE.show---Share this episode on IG @BestAdviceShow