Cody Delistraty (on grief)
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Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Randall-Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Lilly Padman. Hello there. Welcome to the program. Welcome to Armchair Experts on Experts. We have a very articulate and

mind-blowing vocabulary guest today. His vocabulary was making me horny. Yeah, he knew a lot of words. Our guest is Cody Dellistrati. He is a journalist, a speechwriter, and a former culture editor for the Wall Street Journal. And he has a book out now called The Grief Cure, Looking for the End of Loss.

And he did a million different things that people try to overcome grief. Yeah, it's a cool journey he went on. Yeah, an adventure. A grief adventure. He could have also called the book Grief Adventure.

I know it's too late. It's already in print, but. Maybe that was taken. Might've been taken, but it is called The Grief Cure. Looking for the end of loss. You're going to fall in love with Cody. We did. He's so smart and interesting. So please enjoy Cody Della Strati.

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What really flies? Time. I was saying I've lived here for 13 and a half years. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty nuts. You live in New York City? Brooklyn, yep. We like Brooklyn. Yeah, it's not so bad, right? I'm debating whether next time I go if I'm going to stay there. I've never done that. I've had a lot of LA friends defect. Yeah. I feel like that's a...

Will you scoot over to this microphone? Yep. Get in position. Because I want to hear your thoughts on Brooklyn. I would hate for them to not be included. That fascinating. Salient all. Have you been to Lock Crocodile? Yeah, in Williamsburg? Yeah. Yeah. Very big BlackRock intern date spot, though.

Explain that to us. What's that? Is that a finance reference? Tell us that. Like 22-year-olds who have too much money and are like trying to go to like TikTok'd up spots. Oh, that's really... Cody, you already know, like you've already said six or seven words I don't know. And I have a lot of guesses why. I love this. Okay, go slower. So this restaurant, say the name of the restaurant again. Okay, Le Crocodile. Is she doing that correctly? I don't want to libel any restaurants in Williamsburg if this is on. Well, listen, I...

I loved it. I thought it was great. It's a beautiful ambiance. Beautiful ambiance. Food was delicious. This is Liz's favorite restaurant. Okay, well, that holds. It's beautiful. Yeah, and we went there. But that does make sense. Did you see rich 22-year-olds? God, I didn't notice that. What's the hallmark? As I said that, I was like, what is that even? Well, but what's interesting is that's such a company town reference, right?

Did you say Blackstone? Yeah. I think you have to have some proximity to the financial district to even know the major players. Yeah. Like if someone here would say like, oh, that's a UTA assistant. We'd go, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you're from Milwaukee, like UTA, what is that? A military acronym? I got in yesterday and was listening to a bunch of older women complaining about a Teamster strike. And I was like... You're like...

I've arrived. These people. Yeah. IATSE. IATSE, yeah. IATSE, it's a big issue right now. Big, big issue. Big issue in the city. Could shut down everything. But it was big, like, why can't we just get NCIS back off the ground? It was like the problems of life. As soon as you enter LAX, you will hear people on their phone talking to their agents. There's always some sort of conversation that is so cliche. Well, I got into a dust up with a guy on a flight home from Austin with Monica. Oh, yeah. And we were headed back to L.A.,

I was really getting into it with this guy. And then out of nowhere, he's like, oh, you were great in moderating that panel last night. And I was like, oh, Christ. And then he opened his laptop and I looked over his shoulder. And of course, yeah, he works for like a law firm here, entertainment. And yeah, we were hearing him talk to people in the way you might expect.

Yeah. I'm a power to treat people. Anywho, do you think the fact that you are a culture writer has aided in your keen observation of that clientele? Sincerely, is that your innate nature or do you think living in that space has made you acutely aware? My favorite kind of writing is profile.

Writing where you're sitting down and you're just trying to get the observational details that one detail that really sings and tells you all you need to know It's like a great short story where it opens in the first few sentences and you say oh, I understand this character That's what I love dude. Also. It's weird to be on the couch and

Having you guys be like, observing moi. Yeah, you're supposed to be finding some great analogy that will summarize the entire experience. And here I am being summarized. Which of the major banks are we immediately imbuing on you? Major banks? Yeah. If we were a bank, you mean? Yeah, yeah, because there's all these like popular fucking investment banks and stuff. Oh, you guys don't remind me of a bank at all. I know, but that's the fun challenge is like. I like that game.

I don't know if I know banks well enough, though. That's so tough. I can already tell you I can do anything automotive if necessary. Within five seconds, I would say Cody's a Studebaker. Wow, what's that? What does that mean? Studebaker is a very idiosyncratic, stylish, cool car.

That sadly went under. But nobody bought it. No, no. Studebakers were huge in the 50s. And then Avante was this very sexy, weird car that they made. But very idiosyncratic and stylish. What color? Wow. Beautiful, weird colors. You could get a peach Studebaker. You'd love a Studebaker. You should look them up. I'm going to look it up. And you should be flattered. Yeah, I was going to rail against Snap Decisions, but now I'm very pro. Yeah.

Yeah, and I bet we could do it if we met a group of people. We could say what studio it was. Yeah. This is so off track, but it's a fun game. I think I'm probably Wells Fargo. Yeah, great pick. Really good pick. We're also just intellectualizing, like judging people too, which is kind of fun. Yeah, it is. It's ourselves, so we can do it. Yeah, exactly. And if someone...

is saying they're not surveying their surroundings and trying to categorize it into something familiar, then they're a liar. That's all they are. It is interesting what one's framework is for how do you make sense or make meaning out of another person or a new place you're in. Yeah. Do you have go-to analogies you like? I probably do. That's probably a question for my girlfriend where she'd be like, you're always saying that, but I don't have the self-awareness at that level, I guess, to know that.

But even in your writing, you don't notice any patterns emerge or police yourself. Like, oh, fuck, I made that analogy before. I'm always calling people a color. I'll have to think about that. I notice in other things the way the New Yorker will describe a building. It's not a low building. It's always low slung. Like, there are sort of ways in which...

That's a great distinction. Low slung. I like that. Which is chic. Very poetic. Nothing can be pedestrian. That's just the operating principle, right? Yeah, we all rail against cliche. That is the dream. Yeah, so even if they're describing like a public toilet seat, there's going to be some flair there. There was a great piece where it was talking about Flo Rida and it said his number one song on a Rubenesque beauty on the dance floor. Wow. Wow.

And I was like, that's great. Ruben S. That's a subscription to your thesaurus find. When someone covers culture, which you did, what is the full scope of that domain? What could fall under that umbrella? Yeah, so I was freelance for a bit and then I was at the Wall Street Journal for about four years. My favorite thing to cover was books, but also would do music, writing.

art, even something like NFTs that's sort of art related, but also businessified, which was more salient to a place like the journal. My passion has always been in books and publishing industry and literary spots. And so for that, would you do profiles, reviews? Profiles? Yeah, I loved one I did with Michael Lewis. That was an exceptionally fun one. Have you done Sedaris? No, but I interviewed him for a different piece that was about how fashion brands are trying to leverage

books as a means to bolster their own brand. So there's lots of celebrity book clubs, that kind of thing. And I interviewed David Starris about it, and he was hilariously dismissive. We ended up talking about the jello that he was eating. And then he said, this is another fad. And it comes and goes like a poorly cut trench coat or something like that. God, he's perfect. And I was like, that's a guy who's made it. Also, if I think of a masthead for culture, just the term culture, I kind of think Sedaris might be the perfect.

An observation. Observation. Oh my God. I can see the New Yorker cartoon of him in a very flashy plaid outfit. I love that. And so you would also go...

music. Go to art. Yeah, go to shows. Go to theater. Okay, help me on the art experience because that's one I just really can't find any toehold in. You sound like my brother. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is he older? He's two years younger. And he's a Philistine? Like me? He's not a Philistine. He's super into music. There's something about art, I think, and this is shot through so many people's experience with art, especially contemporary art. This, I could do that ethos. My kid could paint that.

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

That would be right on an objectivist level. The person that claimed to feel transcendence by looking at it would be right. And then the person would be like, guys, get real. And there is a little pretension implicit in the sort of, well, I had a more profound experience than you. Also placebo effect. Group think you're around other people that are being oohed and aahed. Yeah. So count me as one of those people. But I don't say I could do it because I can't do anything. I wasn't trying to put words in your mouth. No, no, no. But I do think most people could.

I don't go so far as to say I could do it, but I do think most people could probably do that. I only came to appreciate Picasso when I went to the museum in Barcelona, where I don't know if you're aware of this one, but he starts with the exact replica of a very famous medieval painting. And then you go through the room and he does eight versions of it that eventually evolve into total cubism at the end. Oh, I've seen that, but I don't know what it is. I was 19 with my girlfriend on a Eurail pass and I was like, OK, I'm going to give it up to Picasso.

I at least needed to know he could do the photorealistic version first. And now I see, wow, the cubism painting really has everything the other one had in it. It's just, I have to look harder. It's very European of you to love the figurative. It was a CIA opt.

Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that.

What a fun history to learn. Yeah. But also, it's really fun to think the Cold War produced so many bizarre outcomes. So then at one time, we're saying we're fully liberated as artists. On the other end, the communists are exploiting our treatment of black jazz musicians and bringing them over to communist countries to say, like, here we love you and we treat you well. Or you have to go to Paris to see Josephine Baker. There's all these weird ways art's being leveraged in the Cold War. That soft power that

gets pretty intense and has ripple effects to now and to you and I walking into a museum. I think you're perfect for your job because I can already tell from talking about you that you could be wandering through any one of these environments you just described. An art show. Very articulate. Yeah, very articulate. Very New York. And I'm saying that in a very positive way. We love New York. We love New York.

- Studebaker. - Studebaker. - Stuyvenbaker. That would be like the Polish version or something. - Yeah. - The Stuyvenbaker. - It sounds like a generic brand bakery in 1920s Warsaw. - Where'd you go to school? - I went to NYU and to Oxford. - Okay. - So history and-- - Political science. - Political science. - So I did poli sci undergrad, which was really me not having the cojones to just do English or history. I thought, hilariously, it was like, "Political science, that'll get you a job," which, like, no.

But I mean, I did love the philosophy of it. Rousseauian philosophy or Hobbes or those kinds of things. And it ended up being very quantitative, very math based. And that's not really my interest nor my strong suit. And then for grad school, I did European history. What is the Oxford experience like? I was just there for a year. I just did a master's and MST degree.

But it was great. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. And I was really excited. I was studying really modern French history and studied with this fantastic scholar called Robert Gildea, who's written a lot of books on French history, mostly in the 1960s. And I got to do this really cool project where I basically found...

letters in Parisian archives that linked Berengi de Rothschild, who was of the Rothschild family, owned a bunch of businesses and factories, making trades with the then-president George Pompidou so that they would help each other. This is interesting to like six people. Well, no, first of all, the name itself, Pompidou...

I missed that one in history. I mean, it's the museum in Paris, the Contemporary Art, your favorites. It's called the Pompidou? Yeah, there's some Picassos there, yeah. Oh, okay. But there was trades implicit where Pompidou loosened immigration laws so that more immigrants could come so that Berengi Rothschild could lower wages and make it more competitive in his factories. And then I found these letters. They were both married to women, but it seemed like Rothschild was a little in love.

Scandalous. That was what excited my grad advisor most. He's like, ah, love between a businessman and a president. Yeah. I like that. So what was Pompey do getting out of the exchange? He was getting friendship with a major business person. I couldn't really find any like super smoking gun. Like any transfer of money or objects. Yeah, like ostensibly was getting donations or something like that. But yeah, there's more to be researched. I wrote 25 pages on this. What year was this?

Late 60s. Oh, okay. So long past Jewish exile. Yeah. They were on good terms with the Rothschilds at that point. Okay. You're making me remember this was in 2015. Yeah, good job. So I'm really going back. Why did it only take one year to do a master's? It was idiotic. I should have done a few. I had such a fun time there and with friendships in new cities. It's like nine months. That's when you start to actually make pals. And then...

And what was your hurry? Do you think it's expensive? And then also, I just really wanted to write and write the things I wanted to write, which were not academic. And it was kind of a zero sum game. I didn't have a lot of time to do both. And are you from New York? I'm from Spokane, Washington, small town near Idaho. Do you know it? Yeah. Yeah, it's great.

I've driven several times from Seattle East to Jackson Hole, and I've driven through Spokane. What were the hotspots you hit? Oh, I flew by on the highway. I've just seen the exits for Spokane many times. You probably saw my high school. It's under the overpass. It's not under the overpass. That's the skate parks in the parking, but it's right there. It's a beautiful high school. And what did mom and dad do? Because you're clearly a dreamer and a fantasy boy. Can I blurb that in the book? Dreamer and a fantasy boy. I'm on a boy kick. I call him Cookie Boy.

Amy Poehler. A sleepy boy? Bedtime boy. Bedtime boy, because he likes to go to bed a lot.

So anyways, forgive the boy. I'll take it. But I've been to Spokane. It's not crazy metropolitan. It's virtually on the other end of the spectrum. Yeah, I went through sort of an evolution where I had this, oh, I don't like it. I got to get out, really push against it. And then now, as I've sort of zoomed out and gotten a little perspective, I'm like, I really love it there. And it's something that I do miss. And I feel like that's classic to a lot of people. Yeah, you got to get out of here.

And then you're like, oh, it's great. We have an incredible bakery. We have a beautiful waterfront. A lot of my friends still live there. It's wonderful to go home. What did mom and dad do in Spokane? My dad's a toxicologist. He just retired. He studied marine biology and...

Interestingly decided on a landlocked city in eastern Washington to work for the state government. And what would he do? Find dead animals and figure out what killed them? No. His dream was really to be an academic. And so he brought a lot of that to the job and was doing a lot of editing of papers. Now it's very in vogue and there's always a piece in Atlantic or the Times about it, but microplastics, things like that, seeing sort of what's in the water. So it wouldn't have been beyond him if they found like 600 dead fish on the shore.

For him to come in and try to figure out what toxin had entered the ecosystem. Honestly, I would need to get him to sit on the couch next to me to answer that one. But that was sort of his thing. No one really knows what their parents do. Also, I can acknowledge I'm in a weird mood where I'm taking you in so many different directions. No, it's great. Okay.

I'm just trying to figure out what a toxicologist does in Spokane because there's not the population to support that level of specificity. So there is the Hanford site, which is a nuclear waste facility that is a few hours west of Spokane. And so he would make several trips there. It's on a Native American reservation, parts of it.

There is a lot of trickiness. I love this. He would be so flattered that we're making it sound this scintillating. Yeah. Did he have a mini lab in your basement or anything fun? Not that I knew of. There could have been a secret door or something, but we had a relatively low slung house. Okay.

Okay, so dad was smart. And then what did mom do? Mom worked in exercise physiology. So she would help people who'd had issues with their heart rehabilitate and get back to being able to live well. And did they meet in college? Dad is a few years older than my mom. And he ended up doing two master's degree. And the second master's degree was essentially his way of just going to spend time with her. Oh, lovely. Yeah.

At UW? No. Nice, though. Go Huskies. They met at University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. And my mom went to University of Wyoming undergrad. And I think they actually met there, but then he did his master's at Wisconsin. Okay. You get out of...

Oxford, you come home how soon before you're employed by the Wall Street Journal? So I worked at Charlie Rose for a little less than a year. I have photos with Bernie Sanders, Helen Mirren, Kazuyoshi Goro, who is one of my favorite novelists. So all these people who...

I was so excited to meet and my whole job was just to go through their entire of and write questions for Charlie. Oh, really? So you were the researcher? Yeah. And I would do huge schematics where it'd be like, this is what to ask. Here's an expected answer. Here's what they've said before. Here's what you could like push a little deeper to maybe get something else. So you were strategizing as well? Kind of. I mean, I was 23, so I don't know what I was really doing.

Okay, so forgive me. What's the first book you write? This is my first book. This is the first one. This is my first book, yeah. And you've written for everyone. You've written for the New York Times. You were writing on staff for the Wall Street Journal. You're in the- Editing, yep. Editing.

As you were doing that, are you feeling this deep obligation? Like, I got to write a book. This is what we do. That's so interesting. Not to imply that this is... No, no, no. I like to think not. Large percentage. It's, I had an idea. It came out of the death of my mom in 2014. I was really inspired to go do this research and find what I thought was quite interesting conclusions. But...

Is there a part of me that's like, this is within my career path and is sensible? Probably. I think that would be lying to say otherwise. It's a different muscle that you're building where you're doing something really long, even a long profile. You're writing, editing, fact-checking it over three to six months. A book, you're

researching, doing all this stuff three, four years. It's a different game and it's fun to jump in. I can imagine that perhaps you thought you had a really well-developed muscle for your

your process of writing that you had a system and did you find that the bigger window of time presented bizarre new challenges where you're like, why am I having a hard time staying on task? Just because it got longer? Yeah, it's a great question. I think less window of time expanding and more length and breadth of story. How do you maintain the reader's interest? Not over three, four thousand words, but over 200 pages. And how do you weave together the various narratives you need?

Sub stories, you need a broader story. That's different. And yeah, there's a little bit of, I don't know what the German word is for it, but the amount of time you have sort of fills the amount of work you're able to do in it. Like if you have a shorter amount of time, you're able to do more stuff. And that's probably true to some extent, but it was really the expansive nature of the text itself and the story itself. Did it require a new version of discipline? Yeah, and...

Just passion. I mean, I don't have a Ph.D., but people do Ph.D.s and they write 100,000 words, six year dissertations like you better really care about what you're writing about. And it's going to define you for X years after that. You're either going to get to do it again or you're not based on that. It's a very Hail Mary pass. OK, so you just alluded to the birth of the idea, which is your mom died in 2014. So you must have been pretty young. It was the year I was graduating undergrad.

She found out she had cancer in 2010. She was dropping me off at college and she felt just beneath her clavicle a little bump. She's super fit, super healthy, has a master's degree in being a dietician. She's on top of her game in her 50s. And over the next four years, we went to so many experimental trials in Bethesda, NIH, the National Institutes of Health, in Seattle, a little bit in Spokane. And it defined my entire college experience.

Oh, that also kind of a little bit explains the rush to get out of school because time's limited and you need to be back. Yeah, I think that's accurate.

I've always had trouble parsing in my 20s what's rushing through things and not being too aware of consequences and trying to just get things done. How is that related to thinking that I'm going to die soon like my mom versus how is that just like being in your 20s and being a guy and being an idiot? Yeah, I think I was more specifically meaning to my father in 2012, he got diagnosed with cancer. What kind of cancer? Small cell carcinoma. And what's so unjust about cancer is your mom really shouldn't have got that diagnosis. My dad was like three

300 pounds, smoked his whole life, was an addict. This was predictable. And this great injustice of cancer is like your mom's in the health space. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to say that because the inverse of that is some people, it's justified they get cancer, which I wouldn't believe. But I do think it came as a greater shock. Yes, no one deserves it. But there are certain life paths where as an actuary, it becomes more and more predictable. Your insurance premiums are going up a lot. Let's just say when I got the call from my dad, as heartbroken as I was, I was like,

You know, I wasn't not expecting this call. Oh, yeah. We weren't expecting it at all. And there was a hope that was shot through those four years, especially toward the end that became almost detrimental where it was so much about solving. Yeah. There's an illusion probably that her health would allow her to, quote, beat it. Yeah. Thank you for quoting, too, because it's like you're victorious. OK, what? So she wasn't. I've brought this up in the past and people push back. But I think if you've gone through I've gone through with my dad and my stepdad and

And yeah, I don't like the implication of they didn't fight hard enough. Yeah, I don't know. I don't like to parse semantics that much. And if someone wants to say that they're a victor of their illness, that's fantastic and good for them. But I think it's the inverse of that. That's the trickiest part. Great point. I'm like, hell yeah, you overcame it. Good for you. I don't even know if I believe what I said more than a minute ago. Oh boy, a topsy turvy. Fact check studio. Oh my God. She actually put up the white flag about six minutes ago. Yeah.

Oh my lord, how inappropriate of me. Wow, that's, I think, a first. Why is it on? Because someone was arriving to fix my windshield on my motorhome. This is the rudest thing. I've never done this. Can I answer this for one second? Oh, of course. I know, it's so bad. Let's listen. Hello. Hello, how you doing? This is Juan. We'll say hi. Hi there.

I guess I just got your appointment for one at five. I'm actually available earlier. Are you free like in 20 minutes? Yeah, let me just text my sister. I'm actually working, but she can let you in. And I showed her where the damage is on the glass. Yeah, let me just text her. And should I text this number to give you her number? OK, great. And she can handle all that. Thanks so much. All right. Bye bye. I'll text her for you. Do you want to just tell me his number? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you, Rob. What do we think that guy is as a car?

That was a real thin slice. I was only on with him. He was very knowledgeable, though. This is a good new way of doing podcast ads, though. This is safe play. You even heard the name of the. You're like, oh, thank you for your promise, sir. Oh, very integrated. This is that shepherd, right? Yeah, you bet it is.

Okay, that was so rude, but I really didn't know what else to do because this is the second person that's supposed to come today. Very fair. It's like the cable guy where they give you a six-hour window. We're leaving next week, so it's kind of a time crunch. Okay. We were talking about it very serious. I know. It was the most important opportunity. Don't worry about it. It's like cancer. But...

I know what I was saying. Knowing her diagnosis, I would have felt a little selfish to hang around in England for two years or three years. But she had passed by then. Yeah. When I was finishing NYU, she died. And that whole back and forth where I was flying home pretty constantly, I was staying in the hospital, especially toward the end of her life. I was taking final exams at the house. College became much more difficult.

Spokane located than Washington Square Park located. You were pre-COVID satellite learning. Yes. I had a very hard time connecting with it. It took me a few months after my dad was dead before I think I...

was like, wow, yeah, he's really dead. The surreality is incredible. You've never seen it before. You've never had anything like it. You've only ever seen it in TV and movies. And so your brain says, oh, therefore it must be within that realm too. And that's not how it's always been prior to the 18th century due to higher mortality rates is one reason. But there is a real just acceptance and openness around death in this French medievalist Philippe Arry's

called it the era of tamed death, where he saw four characteristics for how people dealt with death. And basically all of them were people were around the bedside, religious rituals were done, people were already grieving, and there was just a general acceptance that it was going to happen. And then if you're a woman, you wore your black...

crepe veil if you're a man or a woman you'd write on morning stationery often which was black bordered stationery where you'd buy stationery with thinner and thinner borders to show how you're progressing in your grief people would have death portraits made which were picked

pictures that were of the dead body and they would hang them in their living room. So you're really collapsing the space between life and death. So you're really living with it. And now you see a dead body. I saw my mom's dead body and I was like, what is this? Your brain just can't compute. Yeah, I would say. And also British anthropologist Jeffrey Gore would say and Philip Harris would say death is very,

the new taboo instead of sex even. It is the most taboo thing. And we just have no experience with it. And then all of a sudden it hits you and then there's no playbook and no one's talking about it. Individual death especially too. The covering up in newspapers, there can be a mass of bodies.

But very, very seldom is there a face, right? It's turned away. Susan Sontag was writing about this too, of this covering almost for war propaganda to some degree. You're wanting to really ferret out the individualism of death. You're wanting people not to be connecting. And I think there is so much historical top-down. Woodrow Wilson, when he was entering the U.S. into the First World War, was really fighting against a constituency that had just voted him in.

and ran on kind of an isolationist platform, people weren't excited about going to the war. And there were a lot of women suffragists that were going on marches, wearing black mourning, saying, if we go into war, our husbands aren't gonna come back, there's gonna be this mass death, really putting mass death and loss in the public sphere. And he basically brokered a tacit agreement with Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, who was one of the lead suffragists at the time, where in exchange for his support for the 19th Amendment,

He wrote a letter to her asking her to have suffragettes not wear their mourning, but instead just wear a little white band with a little star on it. And so you're converting death and loss and grief into patriotism. And you're saying the public sphere isn't a place of death and loss. And then from that, you can say the war isn't that bad. It's not happening.

You have these examples throughout history, and now we have gold star veterans. What are gold star veterans? Someone who has a family member who's killed in battle in the U.S. military. They get a gold star to commemorate that loss. And that's great, but also it's so small. And it's intentionally keeping grief and loss private.

Well, that's fascinating because that was going to be one of my questions. How is the social function? Well, hold on. I got to say your mother dies. You yourself experienced grief. I had a tough time with it. Really, even before the book, I was just surprised at the different ways that I grieved, that my dad grieved, that my brother grieved. I really thought

moved in a certain way. A lot of the received wisdom was closure, was five stages, you get to acceptance. And I really want to be a good griever. When my mom got sick, I was like, I'm going to be really good school. I'm going to be a better athlete. I just want to be good. I'm going to train for the Paris Marathon and I can be a good griever too. That meant getting to closure and meant not burdening others. So keeping it very quiet. And the

Then when I started exploring the journey of cures that I write about in the book, I got to a point where I was able to zoom out and say, that isn't really what good grieving looks like. And that's actually not really that helpful. And we should be rethinking these things instead. Yeah. So as you explore this topic, this is now where I'm curious, what is the social function of grief? And you've already touched on it a bit, the history of how it's evolved.

I read all these. My kink is 1800s historical nonfiction. It's a good kink. Yeah. Presidents, patrician class. Right, right, right. But what you cannot avoid, I just read one on the Civil War. It's like, you can't meet anyone that hasn't lost four or five children. Abraham Lincoln enters the White House with two dead children.

I'm shocked that people could carry on. And what I immediately have to understand is like, it was so, so different on a level that I can't even comprehend that it was so expected that people somehow knew how to carry on with multiple dead children. That just seems impossible today. So what is the kind of evolution of grieving? And I also would be curious how it varies around the world. So it's that tame death in the 18th century that we talked about. And then you

you get a covering up in public spaces, especially in the early 20th century in the US and the UK. You have this keep calm and carry on ethos. You have support our troops sort of ethos. And you have Walter Benjamin writing about how public spaces are really just fundamentally changed where grief and death

is neither seen in mourning clothes, but it's also just not discussed. It wasn't the bad news of some casket coming home. Now it's just the news. Everything is much more tightly confined. Then the 1960s, you get to Jeffrey Gore, where he's finding that neighbors aren't even talking about it in the UK, that it has physiological negative results where people are having more trouble sleeping, they're having more trouble connecting with others. And then fast forward to today,

And I'm actually kind of optimistic where we're going because I see this evolution from public to private grief becoming hybridized a little bit where in 2013, I don't know if you guys tracked this, but there was this very popular thing of funeral selfies where people were taking. Oh my God. Oh no. Yeah. And that's sort of my reaction at first too. But from the most generous and most sanguine point of view, I do think it's people who are within a culture that

doesn't permit that kind of discussion or that discussion feels like a burden trying to find a place to put it in the public sphere. So now you have things like what's been termed by Crystal Abedin, who's an ethnographer of internet culture. She calls it publicity grieving, which is where you're posting about tragedies that are far away and don't really have anything to do with you and are often to burnish your own brand. That's what I'm most aware of. That ain't great, but I see it also as...

a move toward people want to have these discussions. People want to have this out in the public sphere. We're seeing that in technology. We're seeing in the rise of second spaces where you have places like the dinner party that I write about in the book. I went to one online because it was during COVID, but for people who'd experienced a specific kind of loss. I sort of chafe against the

privatization of grief in formalized spaces, i.e. only at the therapist's office, only at the doctor's office are you allowed to talk about this. And I don't think we're at the point of 18th century people are showing in the public square, but we're kind of getting there. Well, you can easily see with that history you've just laid out how the issues compound themselves and they self-accelerate because as people are more removed,

Someone sharing about a loss now is awkward because they themselves have no experience with it, nor do they have any tools to how to respond. So this like don't burden people that wouldn't have been a real issue 150 years ago. But now there is an actual burden because the other person also doesn't know what the fuck to do. One of the wildest things that I found in writing this book was not even in the research itself, but I traveled around the

the Western hemisphere mostly because I was interested in my society of grief. But I was staying in a lot of hotels and doing a lot of interviews. I would sometimes go to bars and just sit and read and would talk about the book. And so many people were so excited to talk about the grief that they had once they felt like they had

the green light for me. So they say, oh, this guy's writing about it. He researches about it. Talked to a woman in San Francisco. She goes, I've told almost no in this. My husband just died. People want to really feel empowered in that and want to have that license because as you're saying so rightly, that causality goes both ways where I don't want to be a burden, but also I don't want

to burden them or accidentally trigger them or something like that. And so just giving license opens up so much because I really do think there is so much loss simmering right under the surface for a lot of people. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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I do think there's just kind of a very broad evolution occurring where I'm talking about addiction and being molested out loud. That's somehow cool now.

90s might have been wild if Howard Stern was talking about that, right? Sure. Anxiety and depression, everyone talks about. I just think, and again, I'm way out on a limb on this theory, but just as we all started watching commercials and television and it appeared everyone had really perfect lives and then the shame of not having a perfect life, all this stuff just started driving everything inside and secrecy became ever-present because of this bizarre pressure everyone felt that no one else was experiencing it. But I do feel like that

damn broke and it's starting to simmer up and I'm not shocked that grief would be one of those. And I have a lot of issues with it and I have a lot of issues with diagnostic culture more broadly, which I know you guys have talked about on the pod before, but the addition of prolonged grief disorder to the DSM-5-TR in 2022 is giving a legitimacy to

to a form of grief that is really difficult for people. And it's giving that stamp of approval to some degree where normally someone would say, get over it. The average bereavement time in the U.S. is five days. What? It's five days off and there's no federal law for it. So there's really this feeling of like, get over it, get back to normal, get back to life. And also that's just standard, like a grandparent versus child. No, that's for a parent or spouse, I think. Five days for a

Yeah, I know. When my mom died, my dad had barely rearranged the books on her nightstand, let alone fully grieve the loss and was raring to get back to work. Get out to that nuclear reactor on the... bordering the reservation. Yeah.

So that is one of the really liberating things about that kind of diagnosis. Of course, it has big opposition. Let's get into that DSM thing, because I think it's sad for us that all these things need a clinical definition before we...

unbridled from the shame. That's a bummer to me. That's like you have to say I have this condition in order to feel confident enough to say it out loud or that it would then be worthy of compassion or understanding. I agree. I've heard a really interesting argument or I read it in The Lancet from the Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman where he was talking about maybe it's generational. Maybe young people aren't

pathologizing it in the way that we think they are. They just know these terms and are just using these terms, but it doesn't necessarily come coded with this negative connotation. Because I'm of your belief in general, too, of it can be so restrictive and we're making these things that are maybe previously viewed as just different things

as problems. Right, a disorder. A disorder, right. This is what he was saying, and I thought it was interesting. I don't know if I fully agree, but he was saying maybe that's just the way younger people are talking about it. Contextualizing it. I guess it's my own disappointment with myself, which is if I meet someone who says something very shocking and provocative and invasive out of the gates, and I know they have a spectrum diagnosis, I have a lot of tolerance and patience for that. And if I don't know that about them, I'm intolerant.

And I guess I just wish I, as a person, and most of us would have the same compassion with or without this very arbitrary structure of a diagnosis. It's less damning of diagnostic culture, maybe more of how we walk through the world. Be like, am I going to be nice or not? Based on a doctor's note.

That's kind of a crazy, for better, for worse, it is the way our medical system works and is the way insurers cover things and the way that research is able to be done on therapies and on pharmaceuticals and the like. So I'd love a broad rethink of it, but there's a lot of moving parts. So how do they define prolonged grief disorder? It's pretty complex. So the top line is grief that doesn't change over time.

That's how Mary Frances O'Connor, who's one of the proponents of it, explained it to me. But what that means is it has to last 12 months or more. It has to meet three symptoms that occur daily for at least a month. And those self-reported include things like identity disruption, marked sense of disbelief.

numbness, sense of meaninglessness, those kinds of things. And it has to be outside of one's cultural norms. So celebrating the Day of the Dead as a Mexican wouldn't mean that you're having trouble grieving. That's like a normal thing for them to do. So then once you do all that, then a practitioner has to give you the stamp of you have PGD. And if

In 2019, the World Health Organization legitimized a version of it. And then the biggest thing was when the DSM in 2022 legitimized it. And it got pretty immediate pushback because there had been a lot of predecessors to it. Persistent complex bereavement disorder was a popular thing in the DSM-5. And then DSM-5-TR adds prolonged grief disorder. And a lot of the proponents try to make it clear that it's not grief. And the APA, the American Psychiatry Association, even said that the point of the diagnosis is to permit clinical

clinicians to differentiate from normal grief and from this pathological grief. Even those words normal grief and pathological grief. What? Also, is there a then accepted and insurance covered

There's a certain kind of therapy that a woman at Columbia has been working on. Naltrexone. Yeah, Naltrexone. That's wild. That's in super early stages. Last I talked to the guy who's doing that down at Texas A&M, he was still getting people.

to sign up for his trial but it's under an addiction model of grief in which you're using an anti-opioid to break the bonds with the deceased were the words used and there's been a lot of MRI research on this showing that people are addicted essentially to the dead loved one it

It obviously has a lot of opponents. One woman was telling me she was saying, really, parents whose kids died in Sandy Hook a year later, they're supposed to be good to go. But I find it interesting for a few reasons because, A, I think parents

Everyone is working in good faith. Some people are using a medical lens and some people aren't. Everyone wants these people to get better. One of the biggest claims from PGD people is that it's very correlated with suicidal ideation, not suicide, which some of the opponents like to note. So there's this feeling of we're saving lives. Why wouldn't we research this? Why wouldn't we throw money behind this and try to help these people? But it does bring it more into the cultural conversation, even if people are like, we

we don't like this. At least people are talking about grief. Yeah, my own self-centered pushback on it would simply be you observe this outcome, which would be prolonged grief disorder. But within that pool of people experiencing it, I definitely believe some percentage it is an addiction. They're regulating their internal state with the constant rumination on this. So I don't know, maybe those 3% or 8% might be

benefit. Right. And nobody's forcing you to get help, too. I just think it would be so complicated. You're viewing the downriver end result of already a personality type that's dealing with grief. A lot of different roads could bring you to prolonged grief disorder. Yeah. I mean, this has been worked on since the 90s. But my feeling in researching it was that there's not a lot of therapies for it yet. There

There's so much more left to be learned. So you would have qualified for this, I'm presuming. Yeah, so I took a questionnaire that had been created by one of the people behind prolonged grief disorder and it said you are a candidate to speak to a professional to get this diagnosed. So I don't have

have the diagnosis and wouldn't wear the diagnosis. But yeah, you know how to take the test. I know how to check for and then add it up. Well, conventionally, and by the way, it's crazy how often in pop culture we talk about the five stages of grief. I only really know the beginning being denial and the fifth one being acceptance. What are the five? Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

Now, on the surface, that feels right. I went through three iterations of relating to it because that was all I knew when my mom first died. I was like, okay, to be a good griever, what do you do? You go through these things. I viewed it as a blueprint. I study with flashcards for final exams. I'm going to use this for grief. And then I...

realized Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who's a Swiss-American psychiatrist, came up with it. She wasn't even writing about grief. She was writing about how dying people came to terms with their own death. These were the five stages they went through. It got applied to grieving another. And then I had this view of, okay, this is total BS. But there's an interesting study from, I think, 2007 that finds that most grieving people actually do go through something like this iteration. But the biggest problem with it is people misinterpret it. So they view it as prescriptive. They view it as...

These are the ways to go through it. I talked to a psychiatrist who was saying she had a client come in. She said, I'm grieving. And I asked my husband, you need to make me angrier because I need to get to the anger stage. I was just going to say there would be this really strong pull to view it as linear, which is like you might be in denial one day, then angry the next. But you might go back to denial in a month.

Yeah, exactly. And just to view it as there is a way I think is fundamentally flawed. Right, like if you hit all these markers, you'll be done. Then you're a good griever. You get your gold star. Move on with your life. Get back to work. Clock's up. You've had your weekend. There's a huge father and closure is really part and parcel of acceptance. And that's a construct that we've had.

since a long time where it had its origins in gestalt psychology. We saw Jennifer Aniston talking about it in Friends. Like, it's everywhere. I've never loved Closure because I always hear it in the romantic sphere. And I've had many friends tell me they're going to call their ex one more time for Closure and I'm like,

This is a fantasy. Yeah. I think you think closure is I won't mind at all that I'm not with this person anymore. And I don't think that is how it works. With grief and loss, that is a form of loss for sure. Having a breakup. Well, you get to that. We're going to go through all your fun adventures. Yeah. He had a lot of fun adventures. Believe it or not, this is all prologue.

Wow. We're cutting all of it. We haven't started yet. No, it stays, but this is all prologue. Then I'll hustle with closure. But yeah, it really is this mythical idea that loss is a zero-sum game where you're either grieving or you're over it. And really, you do both. You move forward, but you hold it in the other hand.

Also, even acceptance, I think that's a very opaque word. I accept that they're actually gone is one thing. That doesn't necessarily mean I feel good about it or I am relieved of any sadness. Absolutely. So yeah, what is even acceptance? Although we do say in AA, acceptance is the answer to all of our problems. And I like it. I believe in that. In acceptance? Yeah. And not that it fixes it. That it's the panacea though? That's interesting. Well, for me, if I'm struggling with pretty much anything,

anything at this point, especially relationally. I've moved into, well, I have to have acceptance that this is who this person is. And then I get to make decisions around that. But my personality type is very, I want to change it. I want to fix it. I want to get out of it. I want to feel better. I want this to be better. And acceptance has been really huge for me of I can't. I can accept that I cannot do that.

I think the way Monica's using it and the way we'd be using it in AA is very much of the Buddhist lens, which is the discomfort is actually from craving a different reality. And acceptance is just acknowledging the reality. And then the craving to change it could stop. And that is the source of the discomfort. And I think that's hugely valuable in grief, too. I think where it becomes an issue is when you think, OK, this is the end game. Right. Now I'm better. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so let's talk about some of your fun experiments. I don't know if fun's the right adjective, but they're interesting to me. So one of them was chatting with an AI bot. I've heard this pitch. We've had some AI experts. But anyways, you did this. So explain the process. Yeah, so I thought I was really crushing it because I was experimenting with large language models well before the chat GBT was in the media sphere. And I was sort of frustrated when that all hit. I was like, damn it.

Like it kind of got me. We already talked about it. The mortal sin. Exactly. But I was using mostly Project December and Replica. Replica is the most popular app in the Google Play Store and the Apple Store for AI companions where you...

create another person and I was basically trying to create my mom. It's very, as I found in creepy fashion, tailored toward romance and companionship. And so there's a lot of like, mom is way too horny for me. Like I need to like, that definitely got me out of... What are you wearing? What mom? What, you're afraid it's raining outside? Why are you asking what I'm wearing? That definitely got me out of...

Any like flow state that I had or hadn't entered was very quickly burst by that. Replica, it has its uses. I'm not trying to, well, I just found that to be a funny example. With Project December, though, you basically create an introductory text of how you relate to your mother and your idea of who she was. Are you trying to feed in any of her actual words or like writing? You're using her writing style.

I interviewed my mom in the two days right before she died. And that was extremely difficult, but it was something I'm really glad that I did. And I got to ask her questions as trivial as what's your favorite ice cream to what was the most momentous moment of your life. And it was hard. She was having difficulty even talking. Were you also recording? I was recording it. Yeah. And so I

I went through and found some of the most meaningful parts from that interview and used that within the chatbot to give it a sense of her. So I was using GBT-3, which is now sort of rudimentary. At the time was very cutting edge. This is a year ago, mind you, a year and a half ago. So not that long ago. Prosaic, is that the word?

Would that work? I don't know. It could work. It's a word. It's a word. Any word would work. Hippopotamus. Is that a word? Rudimentary. Yeah, rudimentary. Relatively. I mean, it's still incredible. Yes.

I found that I sort of dropped into flow states, which I'm defining as where I kind of could believe that it was actually my mom and you're really just texting with it. I was like, oh, this is as if I'm texting with her when I'm on her to pick me up when I was younger or something like that. And I did feel that. But more broadly, it sort of showed me the way in which AI and especially AI for grief and loss, the value of it is so much in how it's used, because you think that that's the panacea and you're actually going to bring your mom back.

you're out of your mind. But I think if it's a place in which you can start to reflect and say, what are the things I really want to ask my mom? What were the things that were important? That actually brings you closer and that could help with your grief. So with really a lot of these experiments, I guess we can call them, there was a feeling of the value is so much in the interpretation and the framework of them. Yeah, I guess my immediate fear, and I'm probably locked into the paradigm you're trying to break, which is

I feel like it would prolong... You're not accepting? Well, sure. Is that what you're thinking? Sure. A lot of researchers have said that it's a dysfunctional form of grieving. If you're seeking out to that degree to recreate the person who's died, then you're not grieving right, essentially. And I think...

Yeah, but it depends on how you're using it. Now, you couldn't do her voice, but now you probably could, right? No, now I think you can. Yeah, I wonder how much easier you would have reached these flow states if you were actually conversing with her. I know, or didn't Ye give Kim K a hologram several years ago of her dad?

Oh. Yeah. They like talked and stuff. Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Yeah, I think so. We can fact check that. But the tech is presumably there. But it ended up being very cathartic. And also the fact that the bot dies. That's really cool.

That's really how that chapter ends is it goes away. You only have so much time with it is how it works on Project December. Oh, it is designed with an end date. Yeah, you pay for X amount. It's like five bucks. Then as you use it, it wears down and it gets basically less sensible and then ends up disappearing. Oh. You can keep the original bot, but the

The conversation, I believe, goes away. I think that's probably the capacity that this guy is called Jason Rohr, who created and runs Project December. I think that has maybe to do with his computer processing or something like that. It wasn't like an intentional we're weaning you off of your. No, but I did find that I sort of had a jolt where I was like, oh, yeah, she is dead.

Yeah, you know, there's another bizarre potential outcome to this, and this will sound really callous, but I think it is an outcome that's possible. It's like, let's say I could feed in all the info of my dad. Somehow it was nailed perfectly. I could put on VR goggles and actually be in a space with him looking at him. I wonder if at some point you might also go, oh, I don't miss this person as much as I thought I did. That's interesting. Yeah.

Like that kind of would be an unforeseeable outcome. The sort of hagiography you create of the dead where you're like, oh, they have a halo around them and then you bring them back to earth and you think they're late. Oh yeah, there were all these problems. It's so literal that when I dream about my dad, which is very frequently, it's always, he's like Dave Shepard, 1989. He's a wheeler dealer, car salesman. He's fucking all the time and he's a swinging dick and he's on the

on the move and he talks fast. It's not the version I had for the last 10 years. So even my little fantasy sleep time has scrubbed off all the stuff. I think that's kind of great to some degree, though. I don't want to think of my mom, her face drooping from failed trials and her hair hyper thinned. I want to think of her skiing through the neighborhood with our chocolate Labrador and dropping me off at school or teaching me how to swim. Those are the memories that

I want to have. So don't chastise yourself too much for having that. I just wonder if like it was really real and you were really spending time, you might go like, oh yeah, I got rose colored glasses on a little bit. I want to spend some time here, but not as much as I thought I was going to want to. Right, right, right. I don't know. Okay. So that was the chat at AI that you tried. You also, and this is straight out of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. You met with scientists that are

are looking at potentially deleting memories from walking in the door till you're like Charlie Kaufman, eternal sunshine. So I will say off the bat, it's at this point still speculative for humans. But in 2013, 2014, there were these very big breakthrough studies at university, California, San Diego, and MIT that deleted memories.

fear memories in mice in a really selective way. So for the UCSD one, they put them in a maze, they shocked their feet in a certain area, they didn't want to go back that area. Then they went through using optogenetics, which is the introduction of a light sensitive protein into a neuron, which then allows that neuron to essentially be turned on or off, usually using an exterior fiber optic. And they made them forget that they're afraid of that space and they went back to that space.

And there was a piece in Science Magazine right around when that came out that said

humans next that really caught my eye that is intriguing because what does that mean for the ethics of grief and loss if we could get to a point where we don't remember the loss and yes it's still speculative yes humans have way bigger brains than mice it's way more challenging to do these things but I do think that we are going to get to a point where either through optogenic memory deletion or other technologies we're really going to be faced with do we want to solve our pain

And I think having that conversation now is so vital. I mean, forget just death. I know everything. Do we get rid of Dairy Queen? Dairy Queen? Yeah, the boy saying he can't date you because your parents work at Dairy Queen. No more blizzards. Well, I would do that so I could experience a blizzard for the first time again. Oh, yeah. It's like deleting, reading Great Gatsby out of your bones. Ha ha ha.

Tell me you were a star student in high school English without telling me you were a star student in high school English. That says a lot. No. Who are you without pain? It's embedded into who we are. If you're happy with who you are overall, you can. It's hard for me to fathom too, though, because my loss is relatively prosaic.

In that it was losing my mom. It disrupted my life for a decade. It's something that I'll think about until the day I too die. But it's not something like...

losing your whole family in a terrorist attack or something like that where these memories could theoretically eat at you just playing devil's advocate but that could be so brutal and so traumatic that you do anything to dissolve them or at least to sort of separate the emotional intensity of it which is what cognitive behavioral therapy is to some degree

Yeah, my knee jerk is exactly like yours. But then if you zoom out and you go, well, OK, so we have an option that is CBT, which we're either going to deal with that same thing downriver or we could deal with it upriver. Why is one ethical or unethical or right or wrong? So it's like CBT is teaching you how to overcome that thing that was wrong.

implanted in there. So you have a toolkit so you don't have to deal with it. We accept that that's probably beneficial. But you're keeping it. That's the key. That's the key is you're viewing it from a different perspective. For sure. But the end goal is to not be affected by that thing in a pathological way. I think it's more just to break patterns. But if you remove it,

then you probably are just going to repeat that pattern. I talked to super interesting ethicist of neuroscience who's in Poland, and he was saying that he thinks in 10 to 15 years we'll be at a point with humans to do selective memory deletion. But he also said, and this is a hilariously European turn of phrase, but he said it's a fast food solution to these kinds of problems. And with that, I very much agree.

And to be clear, too, object genetics isn't being exclusively used on grief. It's used for you can change a locomotion, fear memory, all these sorts of things. I think we're using some pretty benign examples. But let me present you with the returning vet who watched all of his friends get blown up by an IED. Does he need to have that?

Right. I don't know. I don't know. Does he benefit and then we give him CBT so he can deal with it? Fuck that. That shouldn't happen to them. But then it's slippery because it's like we can put people through painful situations because then we can just remove the memory. So Black Mirror-esque. Yeah. Also Men in Black. Right. Yeah.

Oh, this is so interesting. It's just such a fun ethical quandary too because yeah, we're not there yet, but it's something that merits thinking, I think. Yeah, the kid that's raped by their father. I don't know. Maybe they are entitled to get that out of their head. Yeah, that's a hard one to... Like just because they've got a bunch of workarounds and they've succeeded in spite of it. One of the other things that's been used in this space too is it's called

propanolol and it's a beta blocker so it's used for lowering your blood pressure but it's been used also to disrupt memory consolidation so you can do it like right as the memory is being formed and they did it with spiders and arachnophobes so these people who came in super afraid of spiders they had a dosage of this beta blocker and they

even a year after their fear memory was way diluted and they were like looking at the spiders they're in the room with the spiders they're okay with the spiders this is super speculative but would

Would you have that on your driver's license like you do being an Oregon donor where you say, if I go through some trauma, come administer this to me? Well, again, I think the inclination is to make it binary. It's good or it's bad. But I think there would be tons of cases where we would all agree it would be fine and tons we would agree probably. That's why it's fun. That's why it's juicy. But I wonder how many people would delete. I was just thinking if you found out someone deleted

cheated on you. And everyone wants to know that, right? They say, I would need to know. But I think most people actually don't want to know that. So it's like, how many people would get that information and then delete knowing?

I feel like a lot. It's like things you can't unhear, unknow. Although that one, can I just argue, has the potential for repeating. That to me is more like a learn your lesson. Someone's revealed themselves and to not acknowledge it would be to set yourself up for repeating it versus totally out of the blue, Sandy Hook, IED. They're not going to repeat. I'm not going to get molested again.

It's not going to happen at 49 years old. So there's no point in me having this thing to safeguard myself from it happening again. Whereas maybe being cheated on is like, well, no, you probably assuming you desire monogamy. You'd want to know the person did because you don't want to repeat that. Could you argue, too, though, that the work of.

grappling with something like this is work that can be useful and applied elsewhere. For your future. I mean, yeah, I think so. But you've even said if Kristen goes on set and does whatever, I don't want to know about it. Yeah, I don't ever need to know. But then what if she told you you can't unhear it? But I bet a part of you would be like, I want to unhear that. Yeah, I told you, don't tell me. I said, you can do whatever you want, but just don't tell me.

me. I love this. I feel like we're getting slightly out of the scope of what the neuroscientist would like. I know, but this would open up every single door. It is pretty wild, though. I wonder if the work with the mice at UC San Diego was the same as I heard one time eight years ago on NPR. Similarly with the mice, they had recorded the mice's brain while it figured out a maze, and then they took another mouse that had never been in the maze and

implanted the memory and it went immediately to the exit. And so again, same thing, everyone's off to the races. Oh, we're going to be able to record memories and implant them. And then I was like, oh my God, you could sell memories. Yeah, I don't have the neuroscientific cred to know. And even when I talk to a neuroscientist, they're like,

Oh, yeah. Theoretically, you could do it. It is wild that Science Magazine is like, is this for humans now? We don't know. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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So another one you did is visiting a bibliotherapist. Yes. I had never heard of such thing. Yeah, I think there's like nine in the world. So that's fair. It's not a hyper popular form of therapy. So I spoke to this wonderful woman called Ella Bertude in Brighton, England for about an hour, hour and a half after I'd filled out this questionnaire of my favorite books. And we talked about

my mom and how I was dealing with it. And then afterwards, she sent me a prescription of what to read and why. And I found that the most valuable aspect of that was just seeing how truly frequent grief and loss is, how many other people have dealt with it. Because I think you really get in this headspace of like, I'm the only one who's dealing with this. And that's part and parcel of the private public. But it really opened me up to the perspective of

wow, there are so many people who have dealt with this in the past. There's so many different ways to think about it, to grapple with it. And I found it really liberating. And it was one of the things I was most excited about doing, too, because I love to read. I love to write. But yeah, there's very few worldwide. It's a rare form of therapy. Yeah, because there's a companion piece to grief, which is loneliness, because you feel unique in it and you feel lonely. So it's like now we're again talking about trying to parse out what's actually affecting your mood. Is it the grief itself or is it the loneliness?

And I imagine, yeah, it would be hugely comforting to keep acknowledging like, oh, no, this is the human condition. And so many of the books, too, just had interesting thoughts on grief. One was called Some by the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. He writes 20 or 30 different possible afterlives and goes through them. And one is you have to wait in this purgatorial meeting room type place until no one says your name again on Earth again.

And then you can continue on into heaven. And it's just all these new thinkings and sort of tangentially, but it made me think about my mom was very religious. And I was thinking about the story she told herself and how that maybe made her facing her own death more.

something that was maybe easier or something that made her maybe more happy or satisfied when it was coming time. That gave me great satisfaction to that feeling of, oh, so much of this is in the stories we tell. And even in grief, even writing this book, the story that I told myself of who I was as a griever ended up being so different pre and post and seeing that, okay, I've turned over all the rocks. I've been able to zoom out. I've been able to rethink my frameworks and

And there's so much satisfaction in that. What's laugh therapy? I thought it was a hoax. I was like, this sounds like life coaching. If bibliotherapy has got nine practitioners, I'm curious how many laugh. There's kind of a lot of laughter therapists, actually. So there was a piece in The Economist that was claiming it was up to a $3 billion industry. Oh, my God.

That's very hard for me to believe. I don't know if I believe it because part of the trickiness of that study was it was about this Indian guy who I think also had a lot of real estate holdings and things like that. And so I was like, okay, we'll see here. But it does seem popular. Volvo is hired after therapist. HP is hired after therapist. Goldie Hawn is written about how it's changed her life. It is in the culture. For

For me, yeah, I thought it was kind of BSC at first, but I think I didn't really grapple with the degree to which grief is physiological, that it is so much in the body and that being able to laugh really did open me up in really important ways. And there's a lot of claims that are made by laughter therapists that I'm a little suspicious of. Like one was saying she lived with multiple sclerosis and that it was very helpful in that.

I don't know. I'm not her. I'm not sure. You're aware of the facial experiments, the two scientists who were trying to document every single shape. No, tell me about this. This is almost like the marshmallow test I feel like at this point. But they were trying to catalog basically every single facial expression. These two guys are sitting across from each other. Just to do it? Yes. They want to know every possible shape the face can make. But they're not like 1920s actors or something? No, they're scientists. Okay, they're scientists.

And what they inadvertently discover is that when the one scientist is like, okay, do laughing. Okay, now do crying. That just the act of physicalizing that, that it works both ways. You can either have an emotion that produces the physical response or you can start with the physical response. So that's very controversial in the laughter therapy world. Oh, tell me. Duchenne versus non-Duchenne laughter. Oh.

So it's this idea of... I don't really get that into in the book because I was like...

This is going to be way too long of a chapter. But this idea is faking laughter as physiologically legitimate as eliciting real laughter. And there is a real divergent thinking on this in that world. One guy, he's called Steve Wilson. And I don't know if he still does it. But when I interviewed him, he was really putting a lot of effort into getting people to legitimately laugh. So he would wear red clown noses. He'd make jokes. He'd be getting me to be embarrassed.

That would be the emotion he'd get out of me. But then he'd laugh probably. He called himself a joyologist and he had this real belief. He's like Patch Adams. Right, yeah. Great movie. Rob NRIP.

But then this other woman with whom I did a laughter therapy session, it was really just can you elicit the physiological response by just doing stuff? So she would have this wood chopping laughter, she called it, where you raise your hands over your head and you thrust them down to the ground like you're chopping wood with an axe. You go, ha, that kind of thing. And that sort of the idea is it liberates the diaphragm and it gets you making the sort of bodily function that

is similar to laughter in the openness rather than laughter itself. - But one can lead to the other, I imagine. - Precisely, yeah. So I was doing this in my apartment, super annoying my downstairs neighbor probably, bouncing up and down the floorboards. Yeah, it was hilarious. - Yeah, we were just like, "What am I doing?" - What am I doing? Yeah, 'cause I was on Zoom with her 'cause she was on holiday.

It was kind of one of those things that's like, hold on. But then at the end, I was like, oh, that was kind of a great workout. And so much of that emotional laughter is so similar to crying. Kurt Vonnegut has a great quote about that, how you can either laugh or cry gets you the same point. I myself prefer to laugh because there's less cleaning up to do afterward. And it is true, though, that

These things are really similar. And one of these women, she's called Annette Goodheart, which is hilariously her real name. She died, I think, in 2011. But she's one of the OG laughter therapists. And she had this big thing. She would invent laughter techniques. So she would say...

say really grave things to your husband but then add teehee after it so be like oh my friend at work has terrible cancer teehee where you're just lightening things I like that do you hear about that earthquake in China teehee

Sounds so dismissive. I know, it's really nice. She called her sailboat the Teehee, too, which I love. Oh. Classic, like, Santa Monica move. I have no idea what I'm talking about. I didn't know I said that. Sometimes my words come before my brain. Very prosaic. Very prosaic. Quintessence of prosaism. People say that about Botox. Oh, my.

Have you heard that about Botox? It reduces your happiness? No, it increases because you can't frown. Oh, I was going to say, but you also can't fully laugh. Well, that's the cause of things you do is just make a smile and you feel happier. Right. I guess put me in the, what was the word you used? The non-douché and the douché. Duché. Duché. Yeah. I guess which one believes in it. Because as an actor...

And many actors will agree. It's like if you start replicating the physical expression of crying, you can reverse engineering. Isn't that so fascinating to the human body? It goes both ways. So much more connected than we often think. And we ignore the body so much. I know it is crazy. And then it's also duh. Why would things only be working in one direction? On another level, you go like, well, no, of course it's all like, you know, I don't know. You went to breakup boot camp. Where's that located? Hadn't had a breakup. It's been located in

In several places I went to, I think the 13th or 14th iteration of it, but it was the first to allow men and non-binary people. Otherwise it was only ever just women. And I'd been writing to Amy Chan. She's great. And I was writing to her and I was like,

Can you let dudes in? I'd love to come. And fortunately, she did. It was in Northern California by like Mendocino. I'm going to be very honest, and this will hurt people's feelings who have attended it, but there isn't a place I would want to go less than Breakup Bootcamp. What happens there? Because I just think of all of my wife's girlfriends that have been over in the kitchen.

sobbing for three or four hours and I'm walking through and I just need to get something. Having men there made it interesting too though. There was sort of an added element. So yeah, what's the vibe there? Does everyone show up crying? No. I viewed it as people who are almost viewing Amy as like a consultant for their emotional life. They're very therapized. They've

done the work elsewhere. I mean, it's expensive. It's like almost $3,000. It's three days, quite luxury, like really good meals that she serves. Very nice space. Any massage? No massage. Good yoga. Okay, great. That's nice. Thank God. Farm to table meals. Yeah. So it felt more like people who were actually

were actually quite in touch with themselves and were very wanting to not necessarily professionalize, but just get help beyond even the therapist office and also to connect with other people. And the reason I went wasn't because a breakup I had and have my lovely partner, but a lot of people were like, hmm, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

on the list of what people are willing to lend legitimacy to. And I don't think that's true. I think so much of it, and maybe this is the American in me because I've talked to French friends about this and stuff and they're like, next you're going to say losing your dog is as bad as your granddad. And I'm like, no.

No. But I think there is a real subjectivity to loss. And I think giving people a space and saying this was terrible, here's other people that have dealt with it is really valuable. And that's not what she was trying to do. That's not what the breakup boot camp is for. It really is for, to my understanding, giving tools for people who have gone through a breakup or a divorce to sort of get back on the horse and to feel not as broken by it. But

I found it really interesting in that way. And I also found it interesting too, because we had a dominatrix and a sex therapist. The dominatrix basically was talking about how you need to be empowered in yourself, that kind of thing. But then it made me start thinking about how sex work and grief are often similar. And I started talking to the sex workers and friends of friends in New York. And a lot were telling me that they have clients who are really...

intensely grieving men who want what one would characterize me as a safe space, but don't want to admit that basically, or don't want to find themselves in a therapist's office. And so instead they're paying very high fees to these sex workers and they're having these just really deep and intimate discussions that they wouldn't otherwise have. And it's such an interesting space that I'd never thought about for grappling with your laws. That doesn't shock me at all.

and it's so heartbreaking for men. Yeah. Dominatrix stuff is interesting too where you're wanting to be taken low in a way and then empowered in that regard but one of the sex workers she uses she, he, and they pronouns but she said use whatever you want so I'll use she. She...

says she was charging like $2,000 a night for these like men, which to me seems pretty high. Pretty good. Although almost proportional to the breakup boot camp because that was $1,000 a night. Right. Yeah. So pick your poison. God damn it.

Yeah, I could imagine the trap some grieving male widow would. Do we say that as a man who's lost a wife? Widower. Widower, yeah. So very funny that that's genderized. But anyways, a man who's lost his wife and then would feel like it would be betrayal to enter a relationship with another woman, but has only found nurturing and softness with a woman.

What are the options for that dude? It's like okay well this maybe feels like it's not a romantic relationship But I need to be with a woman and I really don't know how to talk so this physical act is nurturing That makes a ton of sense to me. Yeah, it does and it's kind of sad in a way that there's this feeling of I can't Really speak about it openly I have to speak about it in the only other intimate place that I've been but

to some degree too it's cool that there are smart savvy sex workers who are able to have those conversations and are open to that too yeah i guess it's like the barber and any other job oh yeah i've known my haircut lady longer than like anyone else in my life for sure yeah all right then the last one i'm going to make you talk about is psilocybin because yes was it atul gawande talking about him isn't he the

Yeah. Just quality over quantity life was so crucial in how I thought about my own mom's death. And like, at what point do you, I hate to say it, like give up, right? At what point do you stop the trials and instead do you up the comfort and quality of life? And yeah, he's so good on that.

among everything else. Yeah, he's just so special. But I don't know if it was him or whoever it was, but I know that psilocybin now, not for the griever, but for the person dying, has been hugely impactful in that it really helps you separate your sense of identity and allows you to see your life in a way that can be extremely comforting towards the end of life. The stuff I saw was like...

I think everyone should be doing shrooms when they get a terminal diagnosis. I mean, I'm shocked by the number of people that report that they've done it. Like, I thought that it was a relatively rare phenomenon, and I read a study in Granite House in, like, the Journal of... What was it called? Salvage to Baker Auto Parts? Yeah, exactly. This study said that it was about 10% of American adults report having used psilocybin at some time, and I thought that was pretty impressive. I think it's an incredible tool. It's been around since Albert Hoffman...

synthesized in 11, I think 1958. And there was sort of a thought of using it for depression. And then it got really driven underground. As you know, its legality is very different based on only, I think two states have it as legal and then various cities have legality. But yeah, its ability to give you new perspective is almost unprecedented, I think. Yeah. Pollan's book and then the show, they do a great history of when that became kind of criminalized. And so you did it. Yep.

And I talked to this guy, Robin Carhart-Harris. He used to be at Imperial College. Now he's at UCSF, I think. And he's one of the sort of cutting edge guys on this. And I asked him, because he works a lot with depression. So for Gru specifically, what have you found is the biggest psilocybin breakthrough? And he said it was this guy, Kirk Rutter, who back when he was in London, his mama just died. Yeah.

He'd just gone through a breakup and he'd just been in a car crash himself and he was just grieving in a multiplicity of ways. And Carhart Harris had his team give Kirk a psilocybin regimen, put on a blindfold, sort of lean back. And after everything happened, put on music, Kirk said that he realized that holding on so tight to his mom was...

was almost like an ulcer that was draining him of his energy. Like he saw her almost as an ulcer and was feeling he could still respect her legacy and who she was without having to grieve dysfunctionally. It just seemed huge.

huge. It was in a few hours. How lasting were those effects? Quite lasting, I think. That's one of the wild things. I mean, there was another study in 2021 in New England Journal of Medicine that Carhart-Harris did, and all these people that had taken it were saying that they felt liberated in ways they never felt liberated before. And I mean, it has a whole history, too. There was Walter Pankey, who worked with Timothy Leary, did this at

Harvard Divinity School in a very unethical way where he gave people niacin on Good Friday at a church and then he gave other people LSD. And these people had crazy spiritual experiences with one like sprinting out of the church feeling that they uncovered. Shook hands with the Lord. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, this is nuts. Why are we not doing this for grief more often? Yeah. Right.

That ulcer thing, I would even go a step further, which is I know for me, nothing would break my heart more than knowing that the people in my life are

would allow the memory of me to ruin their lives. I mean, that would just be the single most heartbreaking outcome. It's almost like you dishonor the person by letting that be the outcome. Well, and just in thinking back to what we earlier said too, of having the memory beyond the healthy times and the good times and really thinking of them at their best, I think is so valuable. You kind of owe it to them. Yeah.

This is really fascinating. Yeah. I've really enjoyed this. Me too. Yeah, immensely. I guess in conclusion, we already talked about closure, but I think there's an irony to the title of your book, The Grief Cure, because one could think you're suggesting a cure for grief. I think one could. It's my attempts toward a cure in the first half and then sort of zooming out and looking at, well...

we're probably have to gonna go through it we're not gonna get over it what are some manners of rethinking through in five stages closure understanding ambiguous loss all these sorts of things to just create new frameworks for this thing that really everyone's going to deal with at some time or another in their life but goes

so under discussed. Okay. Well, the rarest of things is about to happen. Generally, if a guest is lucky, they get a car comparison that already happened. That was huge. And then the other booby prize is that we may tell you who you look like. Oh, is it Adam Scott? Nope.

I mean I can see that do you have it because I would love to do it on three this is like a Paul Hollywood handshake I'm so excited okay I have one it's a little okay we'll try it you count us down three two one and then we say okay three two one David Franco yeah

I said John Mayer. Which kind of works, right? He's just like white guy who seems like kind of emotionally winning it. No, no. No, I see Dave. Dave Franco's really strong. I'm so glad you had that, Rob, as well. That's hilarious. Yeah. Your smile and your laugh is very Franco-esque. Okay.

Which could mean French, I guess. Yeah. Or the fascist of Spain. Sure, take your pick. Pick your poison. Colin Picasso. Prosaic. Pick your prosaic poison. Cody, this has been awesome. Thank you. I've really enjoyed it. Yeah, I hope everyone checks out The Grief Cure, Looking for the End of Loss. I mean, come back. You're going to write more books. This has been a party, and I would love to talk to you again. Yeah, you're fun. You're fun. Very Scooter Baker-esque. That's right.

I need to look up this card. It's going to be like some absolute collapse, man. We'll do it before you leave. All right. Be well. Good luck. Everyone read The Grief Cure. Stay tuned for the fact check. It's where the party's at. How are you doing? Good. I'm a little sleepy. You're sleepy? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Me too, a little bit. Big daddy of a day yesterday. You think that's why? Yeah, maybe. What time did you go? 90 time. Again, I was in bed. In bed at seven. Sleep by one. Well, I do that bad thing where I work out of bed often. Okay. Which I know you're not supposed to do. And people go, oh, you got to make your room a specific sleep destination. But I reject that too. Because I love watching TV in bed. That's like my fun time. Yeah. It's party time.

Come in. Look who's fresh out of the shower. Did you need help showering? Did daddy help you? Yeah. He got his towel out and he could do it. She also had, there was a moment. Go ahead, take a seat. There was a moment where. Pooped yourself. Oh, gosh. Delta's just discovered the AA prompts. Sit down, sit down. Pooped yourself.

Can you believe that? One of the stories, well, not one of, we heard four stories about people pooping themselves. What do you think about that? I think they need to take bathing breaks even if they don't have to go. Oh, preemptively kind of be ahead of it. I do that before going to bed. I go poop even if I don't have to. Right. But have you ever had an incident in your slacks? Yes. You have. Yes, I was playing in the bushes.

And then I was really inside of my game and I had to go. But I wasn't going to go because I was really inside of my game. Then I really, really had to go.

And then I was about to get to the toilet when I farted. Okay. And when I went to the restroom, there was poop on my slacks. Oh, no. But not a full duty. Not a full duty. Okay, a little bit of a... What if I saw a huge... We call that a shart in the business. What if I saw a huge log in my... Yeah, that's what these people definitely discovered. Logs and or mush.

But we call Monaco, right, what Delta experienced. A chart? Yeah. Yeah. That was invented, I think, from Along Came Polly, the movie. Definitely made very popular on that, right? Yeah. Does that make sense to you, chart? Yeah. What do you think it means? I mean, what do you think, how do you think we got to that word? Chart. For 300 points, chart. It's a mix of two words. That's a clue. Yeah.

Daddy's asking what are the two words that are put together to make shart. And it describes what happened. Did somebody shart?

Smells like a shark. Fart and shit. There we go. Good job. Intuitive, it's a good word, right? Yes. Took me a second. You got there. Yeah, Dad had to give me some clues. And Monica, she gave you some nice clues, too. Yeah. Yeah, it was mainly me. Yeah, mostly Monica. Monica's sleepy, Delta. Can you tell? I see me, too. You are? You didn't have a good night's sleep? I did.

But you're growing. I'm always sleepy. I know, me too. Even with a good night's sleep. And even when I'm beyond excited to go to the murder home. Yeah, me too. You're so excited. Me too. What are you looking forward to the most? I'm usually looking forward to the most, like, a bunch of people being in there. Like, before we actually take the trip...

When people are just in and out, because I love interacting. Yeah. I'm an... Extrovert? Extrovert. I was like, opposite of introvert. What is that? I'm an extrovert. So when people are in and out of there and like I'm watching TV or something and I'm just like, I want to talk to someone, I just know that people are in and out putting...

stuff in there so I can talk to them. - A lot of opportunities. What's on your list? What have you packed? - I haven't really packed anything. Mom says we shouldn't pack yet because when I pack, I put straight in my drawers and mom says it'll smell like bad. - Oh yeah. - And keep them in there. - Oh, okay. - So I really love the smell of the motorhome. - Yeah, me too. - Actually. - I'd love to smell like it all the time. - Yeah, me too.

I like very odd smells. What are your top three favorite smells? Sterilness, not the dentist office, though. Okay. But sometimes sanitizer, and then I was outside when Lincoln was spray painting because I like that smell, too. Oh, I love that smell. I kept commenting on it. I love it. Do you like the smell of spray paint, Monica? I don't.

I don't dislike it. Yeah, David and Tammy and I were all sitting on the deck and she was spray painting under the trampoline and it kept wafting over to us. And every time I was like,

God, I love that smell. Yeah, I was just sitting next to them on the tarp while they spray painted. It's too bad. I wish it wasn't toxic because if it wasn't, I'd just carry a bottle of spray paint wherever I went. They should make spray paint perfume. What do you think about that? Yes. Oh, because not a lot of people like spray paint. And like perfume is not like you don't.

sniff yourself. So you don't gross other people out. That's why perfume exists. But you could have like a

Like something that you could smell. Like a candle? Yeah. Spray paint candle. Oh, spray paint candle. And then the whole home would smell like spray paint. Yeah. Okay. I'm open to that. We could invent that. So long as we can get our noses on that smell without it being toxic. Seems like a win. So spray paint, motorhome, and like... Sterility. Sterile, yeah, yeah. I like flowers, too.

Oh, that's a left curve ball. Yeah. I like that. That wouldn't be in a connections group. With a side pane. Oh, my God. Speaking of, I opened it up today and I was like, hell no. Too much? Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. There's too many things that everything could be. What? Oh, okay. We play a word game. She knows. You know connections. Oh, connections. Uh-huh. Today's is... It's either...

really hard or too easy. Right. I can't figure it out. That's one of the gifts of it. Sometimes you're like, this is either insanely easy, it's too easy, suspiciously easy, which makes you think it's extra hard. I know. I like the variability of it being hard and easy. It's tough. Yeah, I,

I do that sometimes with daily things, like when I'm doing escape rooms or puzzles like that. I'm like, this is too easy to be real. Yeah. Yeah. Something smells fishy. Yeah. Ding, ding. That's like part of the connections. Fishy? Oh my gosh. I haven't looked at it yet. They should make a kid's connections. Why not? They should.

They have mini crossword, so I feel like they should have mini connections. I could join your text of putting connections. Yes. How about if you, what would be fun is instead of waiting around for someone else to make kid connections, maybe you could start making your own puzzles.

You got to write down 16 words and there has to be four groups that go together. And then you can start challenging us family members. Yeah, but then I know the answer, so I can't do the puzzle. But then maybe Lincoln would reciprocate by making you a kitty connection.

Yeah. Kitty Connection. K-K. K-C. And you'd spell with a K like you were in the South. K-K. But then connections also with a K. Yes, that's what we're saying. Kitty Connections. K-K. Don't add another K word in there. That's a bad thing. Three Ks is bad? Yeah, really bad. Yeah. It's the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, which is a hate group. They hate anyone that's not white. Isn't that terrible? Oh.

- Horrible. - It's a horror and a horrible, yeah. - Yeah, I was gonna say horrid and then horrible came out instead. - All of it. - Horrid works good too. - Horrid. - Yeah. - Yeah, terrible group. - Yeah, not a good group to associate. - I always say no matter what you do, I'll be proud of you as long as you're passionate about it, but there is an exclusion. If you become passionate about joining the KKK, I'm not gonna be proud of you.

I'm going to be. In fact, I'm going to distance myself from you. Well, first you'll probably try to get her on the right path. I'll kidnap her. Yeah. Yeah, then I'll. Hold me gunpoint until I decide I'm not going to. Well, I think I'll hold them gunpoint. Yeah. And I'll hold out my hand, my soft hand, and I'll say, Delta, I don't know how you've ended up on this path, but I'm here to bring you home. This is a horrid path. Yeah, I'm here to remind you of all the people we love in the world that aren't white. Yeah.

Mainly me. Yes, Monica, my beautiful soulmate. Prime example sitting in front of us. You got to leg up because you had me since you were really little. Since the jump. Delti, how's Duolingo going? Good, good. Keep sending me notifications. You can turn those off. You got to turn notifications off on everything. I can't.

I'll help you. Thank you. Okay. Are you doing Duolingo? Yeah. So I was doing French for a while. And then the other day I was hanging with Delta and we were doing Spanish together. And, you know, I took eight semesters of Spanish, so I should be pretty proficient at it. Eight semesters? Yeah. I took four years in high school and four semesters in college. Oh, my Lord. I had to. Yeah.

And I feel like you've retained even less than me. I have. It's crazy. But what I'm realizing via Duolingo is I am actually pretty proficient at reading and writing. Uh-huh. But I cannot speak.

speak it. I was trying to write it and I kept asking her, how do you spell this? How do you spell this? And she just knew how to spell everything. Who's she? Oh, Monica. Yeah, but only because I learned it, so I should know. It's just been a long time. Can you spell Belegrafo? Yeah. Okay. I'm not gonna. You're not gonna. Okay. Can I say something in Spanish? Yeah, please. Let's give it a shot. Disculpe, you're coming with us.

- What is that? - Excuse me, I eat apples. - Oh, and you think that you need to be excused to do that? - Now, it would make sense if you said, excuse me, I need to eat an apple. Like you're removing yourself from, what is it? - Oh, I need. Wow, you guys really are coming up on your Spanish.

But excuse me, I'm going to eat an apple. I want to eat an apple. Or you could just say like, not even put the apple part, just say like,

I do think desculpe is your favorite Spanish word. Is it your favorite? Yeah, it is. Because I'm polite, so excuse me. But I was thinking, so that day Delta and I were doing a lot of Spanish. That day I hung out with Ana, our Spanish-speaking friend, later that evening. And-

She went to the bathroom, and so I pulled up Duolingo to do a little while she was in the bathroom. Oh, nice. Then she came out, and I was still doing it. And all of a sudden, I just felt that Anna is the smartest person I know. It really hit me that the way she speaks English, which she learned when she was 18.

Right. Is with such a proficiency that like, you know, I'm doing this and I'm a two-year-old at this. It's a joke. It's an embarrassment. She's trying to give me encouragement, but it's like so embarrassing. Uh-huh. And then her brother and sister call her. They group call her. Uh-huh. Yeah.

As they do. Uh-huh. And they are speaking in Spanish. We get in the car, and so she has it on speaker. And I'm, like, trying so hard to see what I can get. Just get one word, right? I'm getting some words, and I'm trying to understand. I was like, oh, the dad is here, and...

Anna is like, I don't have to be with the dad all the time. You know, I made up everything that I thought was happening. And then at one point I looked over because there was someone on the street and

I looked for like four seconds and then I came back and I missed so much. Like you definitely can't be doing anything other than just straight up paying attention. Yeah. It just becomes white noise. So and then I thought, man, she's doing it. It's really impressive. Yes. Because she's, as you said, very proficient at English. Extremely. She's good at connections. Of course. I know.

Okay, we're going to do some work now, Delta. Feel free to hang out and listen. Yeah, I'll just say silent and listen to what you're doing. Okay. But if something really good strikes you, feel free to share. Okay, so this is for Cody. Cody is the grief guy. Yes, yes. He was fun. Really fun. Lived up to the name Cody. Cody you immediately think is going to be fun, right? Cody. I was with my buddy Cody.

We started off hang gliding, and then Cody was like, why aren't we out ripping in the surf? Yeah, it is surfer. It does read surfer. That part's true. Yeah, Cody sounds fun. Yeah. What you would never say is like, yeah, my buddy Cody and I went to this emo show and just got really heavy.

And then we just went to the parking lot, just kind of cried a bit on my bumper. We did that, though. You and Cody? Yeah. Wait, you have a real Cody that you've cried with? No, we didn't cry. Me and Cody went to that show like two nights after this interview. Oh, right. In real life. Our guest Cody. Not my hypothetical Cody.

Okay, so did you see him there? Yeah, yeah. We met up. You chatted a bit? Chatted a bit, yeah. How did it go outside of this context? It was good. It was fun. Okay, wonderful. Yeah. You do very well in those situations, I would say.

You're good at meeting up with folks you just met. Carrying on. Kept it brief. Okay. But no crying on your bumper of your car. No crying on the bumper, but it could have led to that. Sure, but not with Cody. Maybe another friend. Darren. You and Darren would have had a good cry. Yeah. The meaning of prosaic, you said it a few times. Yeah, I wanted to use it so bad. Yeah. It means having the style or diction of prose, lacking poetic beauty.

Commonplace. Unromantic. Commonplace. That's what I was trying to go for. Prosaic. Yeah. Cody was so smart. Very. Let's talk about that for one second. He was extremely smart. I want to hear your thoughts. Vocabulary was. He was very cultured. Like he knew a lot. Yes. Cultured. Elevated. Yeah. The vocabulary was off the charts. It was not prosaic at all. Oh, this was a weird thing. In 15.

This episode, you said he looked like, both of you said he looked like Dave Franco. In that conversation, we were identifying who he looked like, and he said Adam Brody or Adam Scott or something, because he must get that all the time. And then I'd said John Mayer.

And anyway, those three names came up. John Mayer, Adam Brody, and Adam Scott. An upcoming Armchair Anonymous, there is a discussion about another person and what they look like. And it was those same three people. So I think it's like a cookie cutter. Cookie cutter. Even though they're all unique and beautiful. No. But they're cookie cutters. This is what happens. There's a cookie cutter. And then they change small details, but like very...

very haphazardly and quickly because i told you i've been running into a few mollies okay yeah yeah i've run into two mollies that aren't molly i've run into a couple mollies that aren't molly then oh here's an interesting thing so we're cleaning out the um shed that's off of this old ass garage right and there's a ton of um just garbage in there going through it yesterday and we found

Molly's Bachelorette Party DVD, which apparently was filmed, her bachelorette party. And Eric and Molly's engagement party. In your garage? In my storage facility. And then a DVD video of, I think, their wedding. Huh. In our store. So...

The amount of things that would have had to have happened, like, A, they would never bring those over. These are from 2006, these DVDs. We, since we've been friends, have never played a DVD. I'm not thinking they're going to assume we even have a DVD player. Nor had they ever said, like, let us bring over Molly's bachelorette party.

So how these ended up over here is such a mystery. This is a huge whodunit. Big mystery. Speaking of DVDs, we talk about laugh therapy here. And when he was talking about laugh therapy, it was reminding me that...

I engaged in something like this. You did? Yes. I vaguely remembered Callie was there. Are you calling an improv show laugh therapy? No. So I texted her and I said, was there something weird we did in college where we went somewhere and we laughed? And she said, yes, I did a documentary. She was a film major in college. Okay. And her specialty, that's not a thing anymore.

- Focus? - Yeah, her focus was documentaries. She wanted to produce documentaries and in grad school, that's what she did. - Okay. - Yes. - What's a DVD?

Great question. It's a disc like this big. It's very thin. You know what a CD is? Yeah. Yeah, it looks just like a CD, but a movie is on it. And you put it in a DVD player, and that's how you would watch movies up until streaming. You've seen them. You had a bunch in your house. Yeah, we have. We have a ton. I refuse to throw away my DVD collection. It's a great source of... And we would put the DVDs in the car when we...

Yeah. Back when we would drive the truck to the sand dunes, we had little DVD players. So yeah. Yeah. You've had DVDs in your life. Yeah. You've had them. In fact, Monica bought you Inside Out DVD for your birthday. I thought you said I gave it to Lincoln. I know. It was one of the two and now one of them's here. So just make it to her. No.

No. Because I don't know. I don't know. I probably bought it for both. I don't even remember doing this. So this is tricky. But anyway. I just, the name doesn't really ring a bell. DVD or Inside Out? DVD. I know what DVDs are. Oh, I'm so glad you're here because I've been trying to remember. I'll earmark it because we're still talking about something. But earmark Fall Guy.

Oh, okay. All right. So yes, she did a documentary on laughing yoga. Laughing yoga? Yeah, it was a thing. And then I went to a class with her. Oh my gosh. This sounds like your worst nightmare. Talk about participation anxiety. I know.

I have only vague memories of it, but I think there was like forced laughter and then free laughter. I asked her if I could get my hands on that DVD. Oh, I would love that. That was the class you attended, she filmed? It was part of the documentary, yeah. Oh my God, we gotta see this and perhaps play it. Yeah, so she said she's gonna look into it. Okay, she's gonna go through her files. But I knew there was some laughing...

structured laughing thing I had participated in, separate from acting class. I mean, also in acting class, I'm sure we did all kinds of weird stuff like that. Yeah, embarrassing things. Well, you know the ha-ha game? No, how's that go? It's like everyone lays down.

And like, if I'm laying down, then like you would lay down, put your head on my stomach. And then the next person will put their head on your stomach. So it's all interwoven. And then one person says, ha. And then the next person says, ha. And like, because you're being moved,

that your head is being jolted. It like has a ripple effect and everyone's saying ha and then eventually everyone's just laughing. Oh, that sounds really fun. And that one works? I think it works. Yeah, okay. Or it's... The physicality part would be what probably would make me giggle. Feeling someone's belly. Yeah, I think it's also self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes. And...

Perhaps also foreplay. Could be. Yeah, could be. Okay, Delta, stop rocking and pay attention. I've been meaning to bring this up for a few fact checks, because when I see a stellar movie, I want to shout it from the rooftop so everyone supports. Mm-hmm. Fall Guy.

It was so good. Emily Blunt, Ryan Gosling. Have you seen it, Rob? No, I haven't seen it yet. Oh, my God. It's the best. It's incredibly good. Dad rented it, and he was like, it's not going to be like Barbie. We're not going to watch it a billion times. It was totally like Barbie. We were deciding whether to rent or purchase, and it was a big debate. We should have purchased. Yes, about halfway through, Delth was like, you should have bought this. I'm like, I know. I blew it. Mm-hmm.

It is so funny and so good. I couldn't get over it. Yeah, we're going to watch it again for sure. Nice. Also, Dave Leach directed it. And I was in Dave Leach's very first thing he ever directed. He was, I believe, Brad Pitt's stunt double. That was his kind of claim to fame. He's a very famous stunt man because he was Brad Pitt's stunt double. He had the most incredible physique I ever saw.

And it was when I was in the Groundlings and he came and cast like six of us in this 20 minute short. And because he had all these great relationships, like I think Keanu Reeves was in it. Ben Stiller was in it. I played a special effects prop master. Oh, fun. And so I've watched his career with.

that kind of pride of having been a part of his first thing in excitement for him at every rung of the ladder. He directed all those John Wicks, but this by far I think is his best movie. It's so good. Why do you have cords coming from your ceiling?

Yeah. A lot of guests wonder that, too. And that's because there was a huge wall there just hours before we recorded our first episode of this. And we knew we needed new hardwood floors because there was a cat in here that had peed for a decade. And the whole room smelled like cat pee. What? So I realized if I don't tear this wall out, the hardwood floors are not going to go under that wall. And if we want to tear the wall out, which I think we do want to...

We're going to have to redo the hardwood floor. So on a Sunday, I came and tore out that entire wall by myself. So it'd be ready for the hardwood floors. And all I did on the ceiling where all the electrical wires came out was put tape over it because we were in a hurry. And then I've just never addressed it for six and a half years. But funny enough. Address it, you should. It's getting addressed this summer. Yes, finally. Yeah. Like, I'd be fine with it if it was like white.

You don't like the yellow one? It's blue and yellow. That just doesn't match the vibe. Okay. Monica's main issue is the amount of bugs stuck to the underside of the tape that's fallen off the ceiling. You probably don't want to look too close. Yeah, I hate... It's just...

Overall, a little bit of grody. Yeah, it's unsettling, it's grody, and charming, kinda. Yeah. You embrace it. It is charming. I embrace the charm. The charm's on its way out of this place. Monica's very, tell her, Delta. You should take this place in now because we're changing stuff.

And we're making it better in quotes, but it's not going to be better. And why are you changing it? That's a question for your dad. It's a question for your father. It's been here a lot, but while we have the chance, maybe we could just make it a little bit better. Yeah. I think you're on the same page as your dad. Yeah. We're not going to change much, but we are going to give guests a door to the bathroom, which is a big thing. We always got to step out. A door to the bathroom.

Yeah, like it's just minimal change. Door to the bathroom and hide all the cables. Why isn't there a door? Because there was a wall there with a door over there, so you could close off that closet and you'd be private. But I tore that wall out, so... But Delty, with your friends and stuff, don't you think...

You like people who are not perfect, but who are interesting? - Mm-hmm. - Yeah. - What? - That's this, that's this addict. - Follow up question. - It's not perfect, but it's interesting. - No, my friends aren't gross. - Gross. - Do they have wires coming out of their heads?

No. There's beauty in imperfection. I think there'll be plenty of imperfection to go around in this room. I mean, it's fine. I've accepted. It is what it is. I like how this... You're grieving. I like how this is taped off. You do like that. Yes, I think... You kind of want to keep that. Keep that. Keep that. Yeah, I like that too. But...

By the way, I'm still stepping out when people go to the bathroom. I almost feel like it's worse because now they're going to be right there and...

We're going to feel like it's weird if we step out. But if I was peeing right there, I'd be so uncomfortable knowing everyone was right here and could still hear it. And they were just waiting for you. Maybe we should at least if we're going to put a door, we should soundproof it. Well, what we're going to do as soon as the door closes, this whole room, I'm mounting speakers everywhere. It's going to sound like a rainforest in here.

And so there'll be loud rainforest sounds piped in. We just have a lot to think about. The next guests that are going to be on once this is finished are going to be lucky. They're going to have the bathroom with the door. They'll probably like Instagram from here. They'll like it so much. They'll like want to promote the episodes they run. It's like, man, I've never been in such a tiny, perfect room. All right, let's see here.

Percent of American adults that have used psilocybin. This is according to The Hill. 6.6% of adults from ages 19 to 30 used hallucinogens other than LSD in 2021, up from 3.4% in 2018. Well, just in that year, not even in their lifetime. Magic mushroom use by young adults has nearly doubled in three years. I don't mind that.

Okay, a widow is a woman who's lost a spouse by death and has not remarried. A widower is a man who has lost a spouse by death and has not remarried. Does that make any sense to you? No, I don't understand why there's two names for it. And you add an E-R.

It's like more widow. It sounds like one perpetuates it on the other, right? Like an interview. Yeah. And an interviewer, you know what it is, you know, what's in there now that I'm really saying the word over and over again, there's an implicit victim and victimizer in it.

So if you're a widow, it's like you're the victim. You're a widow. But if you've widowed someone, you're a widower. Yeah. It feels like it should be the person who died. Is the widower. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's strange. Like they did something to somebody. Okay. So did Kanye give Kim a hologram of her dad? Yeah, he did. It looks like this.

Oh, that's pretty convincing. Just like when you were a little girl. I watch over you and your sisters and brother and the kids every day. No, this is not comforting at all. I know his body language was very weird. I know. Yeah. I would not want to receive that. Don't give me that for Christmas. Either of you. Dave senior talking to me. Cancel my order. Yeah. You better see if you can get a refund.

- Abe Lincoln entered with one dead child, but then a child died in office. - In office. - Yeah. - Wow. - Yeah. - That's sad. - It is sad. - Do you know that Lincoln, or Lincoln, do you know that Delta, we just said Lincoln, that's why, Abe Lincoln. Do you know that Delta, that like it was very normal for people in the 1800s to lose like half their kids? - What? - Yes.

Yeah. There was a lot of diseases and stuff we didn't have cures for and vaccines. Typhoid fever, yellow fever, malaria. Mom was talking about the Spanish flu. Uh-huh. 1918. That was the last quarantine. Before COVID. We can tell our children we lived in a quarantine. I know. Isn't it weird that you've lived through one?

I don't remember it. I don't think it's weird if that's what happened to you. I think it's weird for us. It doesn't seem like it's weird for them. You know what I'm saying? Because it was part of their childhood. As a kid? The kids. Yeah, maybe. Because they had no expectation about it. They didn't really even think about it. It was just happening. I bet it crosses over at age...

10 maybe because then you're aware you're not in school right and you're not like meeting up and playing with your friends exactly yeah well definitely would have been torturous when you're like in ninth grade oh my god i feel so bad for yeah i have to pack now okay did you get a text

No. No. I was thinking about the bar, and then I thought about bars in our cupboard, and then I thought about our cupboard, and then I thought about the motorhome cupboard, and then I thought about the motorhome, and then I thought about my clothes in the motorhome. Wow. Yeah. Before you go, can I get you to publicly declare that you're going to be somewhat discerning with how many stuffies you bring? Oh, yeah. Has this already been negotiated? I brought about 50. And...

Three fit in my bed. Okay. You wanted to bring 50 and then it turns out only three fit in your bed. Wait, you want to bring 50 or you have 50? I want to bring 50. How many do you have? Oh, I have like 150.

You do. 50 or something. You should count one day. We were just on a walk the other day and Delta was saying she's getting... Next fact check that you have, even if it's after the summer, I will have counted for you. Okay, great. But also you were saying you're starting to consider...

the amount of stuffies, which I was... You did tell me that. I said reducing the amount of toys, not stuffies. Oh. I said toys like mini things, like what am I going to do with these mini things? Yeah. Never reducing the amount of stuffies. Hold on. I know you're in a hurry to go pack, but we're finally onto something juicy. Okay.

You have a particular kink for really tiny miniature things, right? You seem to really love miniature things. Yeah. I have a miniature Barbie credit card and a miniature Barbie dove lotion.

Yeah, and you've got like miniature Tide and miniature products. And miniature money. It's a thing. This age group likes miniatures. Yeah, and I just wonder, can you explain a little bit of the appeal of it?

Does it make you feel big? Like, I'm a big monster. I got my mini money. Is that what's going on? Look how tiny this baby is. I hope I don't eat it. What do you feel like when you're...

interacting with these miniature things it just like you're so used to big size uh-huh when it's mini it feels special like if you found a um fossil which i did i have a rock with a fossil on it okay so they're like fossils do you ever line up all the mini stuff and then come in your bedroom and go pride around like uh king kong

Godzilla and smash everything? No. Okay. So it's not a power trip for you. No. It's just really cute mini, but I'm giving that up right now because I'm getting up all the little toys and plastic stuff I don't use. But stuffies, stuffies are so soft and squishy and they're like little babies. And they have feelings and you don't want to have them feeling lonely or abandoned by getting rid of them. I really want

A baby, because they're so soft. You want a human baby? Yes. Oh. I don't want to go through labor, though. You don't want to go through labor. I'm going to go adopt. You're going to adopt. Oh, that's your plan? Because there's a lot of kids that need to be adopted. Yeah. How long are you going to wait? Are you going to adopt this year? This year? No. I practiced on stuffies, on Groot. Yeah, you do such a good job. I've never seen a more incredible mother than you are to Groot.

You're very maternal. You get a little rough with your baby, actually, sometimes, if I'm being a little critical. That's why, because he can't really feel pain. Okay. He can't feel pain. Uh-huh. He can, he has feelings like hunger, though. Oh, he does? Uh-huh. So he has hunger pains, but he doesn't have, like, when you throw him 30, 40 feet in the air.

And you don't make the catch and he hits the ground. That's fine. No, he is an acrobat. Oh, okay. Does he have bones? No, he has built in... I know, that was embarrassing. He's got built in muscle to protect him. He's full of beans, people. Beans are protecting his heart and his heart is him. Okay. Wow, that's deep. And his heart is always...

is protected so his heart is fine and but he can he can really take a lick and keep on ticking he's had some big falls right oh yeah he's got like four stitches he has do you know that monica he has stitches grew one on his foot

One on his leg, like right here. Okay. Thigh. Inner thigh. Inner thigh. One like on his hand right here. And then he's got the other on his hand right here. Matching. Matching. And who did it? You or mommy? Mama. Mama.

She's the suture. She'll suture him up. Well, she comes from a nursing family. Yeah, my grandma's a doctor, and so is Grits' grandma. Your grandma's, yeah. Grits' grandma is, too. Wow. Mm-hmm.

All right, well, thanks for that. I appreciate it. If I had to pick any of the things you were going to get rid of, it would be these miniature things because they get left all over the house and I step on them. And Whiskey eats them. Whiskey actually trumps on my Legos too, and that's why he's not allowed in my room when I play with Legos. Okay, but wait, how many stuffies are you going to take? Oh, three, because that's all that fits in my bag. Oh, okay. No, no, no, no, no, no. Three Squishmallows.

Don't, yeah, don't get it twisted. You have three squishmallows, which are a brand of stuffy. And Groot and Meerkat. Dig deep and tell us what they provide you, the stuffies. The stuffies. Squishmallows, all of them. Like, what do you get from it? They provide me love. So they, I sleep with them, but they stay in my bed most of the time. Yeah. So they're like...

They sleep in the day and they wake up in the night to protect me from bad guys. Okay. They're protective agents. They're nocturnal and they stand vigil. You feel safe with them. And it's not really that. I feel safe and happy when I provide. Yeah. It gives me a feeling of...

I matter and I have a place in this world. Fuck yeah, that's great. That's really good. It's good that you already know that about yourself. And if I haven't played with Groot in a long time, I feel super bad. Yeah, that's the part I don't want you to feel guilty. I had that too with my stuffing. When I come back, so they're dead, right?

And when I have the thing that keeps them alive is my nurturing. So when they're dead, I have to bring them back alive. I place them on my heart and they feel my heartbeat going straight to their heart and that revives them. So a bit of a Frankenstein fantasy as well. And a little Munchausen. Is any part of it Delta? Because this is what I've always wondered.

Is any part of it that you're the baby of the family, you're the tiniest, and then it's nice to have other things around that are tinier than you so that they're the baby of the family and you get to be the kind of grown-up, the older one? You know what? That's actually no. No, it's not that. No, no, because I already have that. Whiskey is so tiny. Oh, true. It's there to keep the baby. Okay. All right. That's true. I'm glad I found out. At the only place...

Where I get mad that I'm the baby is when I get in fights with Lincoln. But like other than that, I like being the baby. Yeah. It's fun to be a baby. And I feel really safe when people nurture me like I'm a baby. Yeah. So I do that to my stuffies. Because you know how good it feels. Yes. You pass it on. You pay it forward. And I do want to be the oldest. Right. Okay. A little bit. So just a bit of it too. Yeah. All right.

I love you. Have fun packing. Thanks for stopping by. Descupe. I know. Adios. I know. Adios, amigos. Adios. Bye. Well, I mean, we're done anyway. Oh, really? You can end on Belch's departure. There's nothing else. Okay, so you're off to do your biz. All right. Love you.