How to Be a Better Human - How to be brave when family life gets tough (w/Kelly Corrigan)

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Every person, no matter how ordinary, has to occasionally summon extraordinary bravery to get through life’s challenges. If you haven’t already had one of those moments, you will at some point. Because, hey, Kelly Corrigan says, that’s life. Kelly shares her trademark wit and wisdom  in this week’s conversation about how to hold ourselves, our families, and our loved ones together when our world is falling apart.For the full text transcript, visit go.ted.com/BHTranscripts  To see Kelly's full talk, visit go.ted.com/BH-Kelly  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. I've always loved to read. My favorite books are the ones where you feel completely immersed in the world of the book, both in the narrative and in the sentences. Where you come away feeling a connection to the characters and to the author, the ones full of moments and phrases that linger in your mind long after you're finished reading. Those are the kinds of books that Kelly Corrigan writes. She's an incredible author,

but she also hosts a podcast, a television show, and she does so many other things. Kelly is an extraordinary person, but what I think is so special about her work is that she highlights the everyday moments, the moments that we all experience in our lives. Kelly has been described as the poet laureate of the ordinary, and I think that is a perfect description. Kelly and I recorded this episode together in person at TED 2024 in Vancouver. Kelly was there because she was giving this beautiful talk about the courage and vulnerability of family life and what it takes to love someone over the long haul. Here's a clip from Kelly's talk. Say your kid was dropped from a group text. They were in it, they mattered, they belonged, and then poof. Or your husband blew the big deal at work, or your mom won't wear the diapers that

would really help her get through Mahjong on Wednesdays. And how should we calibrate the exquisite bravery to respond productively? When someone in our family looks at us and says, do I know you? I weigh myself before and after every meal. I hear voices. I steal. I'm using again. He raped me.

She says I raped her. I cut myself. I bought a gun. I stopped taking the medication. I can't stop making online bets. Sometimes I wonder if more life is really worth all this effort. Bravery is the great guts to move closer to the wound as composed as a war nurse holding eye contact and saying these seven words, tell me more. What else? Go on. We're going to be right back with much more from Kelly right after this break. Today, we're talking with Kelly Corrigan about love, courage, and family.

Hi, I'm Kelly Corrigan. I write books, and I have a podcast called Kelly Corrigan Wonders, and I have a show on PBS called Tell Me More. Well, I want to just first start off by saying the book Tell Me More, which is also the name of the PBS show. I read it in like truly one sitting. It was so good. And you are such a funny, but also really beautiful on the sentence level writer is really just a fantastic book. I really loved it. Thanks. You know, as a comedian, I often like come to things through the lens of humor. And I think that you are clearly a great

joke writer. You have so many really funny, hilarious stories and perfect one-liners, but you also are writing a lot about loss. And I think a lot of people don't think of humor and loss as going together. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. Yeah. I feel very Irish in that way. I feel like the great emotional mashup, you can be weeping one minute and slapping each other on the back the next. My dad was one of six kids from Baltimore. They had one bathroom and they would get in the tub one after another. They'd fill the tub once with hot water and then all six of them would move through. And my uncle Gene, who was a big college sports guy, would say,

oh, the whole reason why we're such good athletes is because you got free clothes and hot showers every day. Sounds the way. So anyway, this crew of six, we would celebrate the holidays together, and my Aunt Mary had this tiny little house in Baltimore with all these cousins jammed in. And at some point in the night, it was like time for somebody to stand on the coffee table and tell a joke. And this, you know, set off the string of people standing on the coffee table

telling a joke. And there were these classic jokes, like there's the sport coat joke, and then there's this would I joke. And the jokes nothing in and of themselves. They're really kind of a lower quality. But the telling there's accents, and there's all the kind of raising and lowering and the shock of your voice. And there were way more boys in that family than there were girls. And I was on the younger side of all these cousins. So I was always kind of looking up. And I thought that's the coolest thing is like being able to hold a room and get a laugh. And surely you have a story like that. Mine is kind of the opposite. My dad is from like an Irish Catholic family. My mom is Jewish. So like both of them have real traditions of comedy in the cultural thing, but both of my parents are kind of prefer to not be

in the spotlight. And there isn't like a big family of like, now it's time for everyone to perform. And so I think I did it because it was more like, you see, I can do this thing that's different than everyone else. Like I like to be having attention paid to me and very much like oldest child syndrome too. But yeah, when I was, one of the things that struck me in your book is like, there's a part where you're kind of just casually say like, and then the family all got together and sang our family song. And I'm like, you have a family song? My family is like dedicated to never having to sing.

Okay. So there was a Broadway show maybe that had a song in it called Harrigan, H-A-R-R-I-G-A-N spells Harrigan. And we co-opted it to C-O-R-R-I-G-A-N spells Corrigan. And it became this great punctuating moment in these giant family get togethers. And it still happens and it's heaven. And I love being a part of it. Like being a Corrigan is the absolute cornerstone of my life. There's so many cousins and they're so interesting and charming and charismatic and they do cool things. And there's a familiarity and a comfort and an intimacy and a casualness that I crave in the outside world.

So what does it mean to you to be a Corgan then? It means that the originals, is what we call these six people, my dad and his five siblings, that we kind of plug back into the originals. And the originals were a great model of all the things that you and I know are important about being a great human. Total connectors, tons of eye contact. They knew everybody's name. They couldn't wait to meet you.

They couldn't wait to find out what was special about you. They remembered what you told them the next time they saw you. They had a great firm handshake. They had a big, broad smile. They could laugh at themselves. Nothing was too serious. They never felt sorry for themselves. They would never sort of have that victim mentality. That's what I saw. Great goodwill, easy forgiveness, quick to laugh. In my mind, that's the perfect model for how to be a good human.

I think a lot of what makes your writing unique and what people really connect with you in the show and the podcast and in your books is that you're really open and honest about the ways in which you fall short. So there's these people on this pedestal, but you are, at least in your own telling, not often living up to that model. And you're always striving for it. There's something about their childhood that is not really possible anymore that helps me forgive myself for not being the way that they were all the time. It's not a simple world anymore. Like modernity isn't doing us any favors in terms of connection.

I mean, honestly, like part of why I like podcasting and doing the PBS show is because what we're doing right now is so unusual. You don't have your phone out. I don't have my phone out. And we're just looking at each other and talking about stuff that's so much deeper and better than the small talk that's available to us out there. And I like that. I like being in this kind of conversation way more than what do you do? And oh, yeah, interesting. And who do you know? And that kind of shucking and jiving and, like, very thinly veiled ambition that you can feel coming off people, they just didn't have that. Do you think that's a generational if you grow up with one bathroom and where your mom could make like a turkey dinner last for four days and you just had one pair of pants, that as soon as you have two pairs of pants, you're like, I can't get over this.

Can you get over this? This great friend of mine, Jennifer Wallace, Jenny Wallace, wrote a book about achievement culture and how toxic it is. Wallace, wrote a book about achievement culture and how toxic it is. And I asked her on a walk once, why is it worse now than it was in the previous generation or the generation before that? And she said, this is the first time in US history where it's sort of a long shot that you'll have it better, quote unquote, in economic terms or career terms than your parents. It was really easy to have advancement from one generation to the next when the originals were coming up. It's different now. Like, hey, can I put three kids through college with no debt? I don't know. The price tag's different and everything in the 18 years leading to the first tuition check is more expensive.

And I think I sort of blame the modern world for how infrequently I feel like I am totally tuned to the original's channel. Yeah. And they worked long. They worked until they were 75 years old. And I have that in me. I like to put it together. I have a little pep in my step work-wise, and I totally see it coming straight from them that they were, whatever they did, they were doing it. They were all in. They were like full engagement kind of people. My dad was the first person in his family to go to

college. He got a job, and his goal was stability. So he was like, I got a job at the Port Authority. Great. I'm going to be able to retire with a pension. And he succeeded. And he didn't spend a lot of time being like, is this the most meaningful career? It was like, you know what's meaningful? It pays the bills.

I can afford things for my kids. We can live in a house and not worry about it. And at the end of my career, I'm going to be good. Right. Right. And we've just blown past stability. Stability is like, wow, like that's like a starting place. Oh yeah. When I quit teaching to try and do comedy, my dad was like, well, you're continuing the grand Duffy tradition of your father, not being able to give you any practical advice about your life whatsoever. Like you leave, you're leaving the stable career. I, you know, God bless. Good luck. I have no clue what's going to happen next. I think it's worth underlining. I love that, that his goal was

stability. That is a goal. And I've been doing this thing in the last couple of years where sometimes when the waters get rough, it's nice to point out any time that you feel peaceful and happy. And so I'll say out loud, I feel really peaceful and happy right now. I just wanted to put it on the record. And mostly it's my husband hearing that, but if the girls are around, I'll say it in front of them. If my mom's around, I'll say it in front of her. I think it's good to claim it as those moments come through us and such that maybe it would suggest back to yourself, this is a worthy goal. To just have some peaceful, happy moments in the course of every day is sort of winning. I mean, it's funny. It's interesting to think about the older I get, the more I think it's a total home run to love a person for a lifetime, to not lose a kid. to, you know, at 56, I think, oh my God, I have seen so much horror happen all around me and maybe even within my own family in moments. And when the seas are calm, I think this is all I could

ever ask for. This is more than my wildest dreams. So my wildest dreams got way less wild. And the thing I had never thought before is that I wasn't watching the originals when they were in their 20s. And so maybe they had to learn just like I'm learning and just like you're going to learn when you get a little older, Mr. I don't have a gray hair in my head, whatever, is that your wild dreams will become much more simple. It's one of the parts of your talk that I thought was like the most moving to me.

Your talk is, you know, like much of your work, there's moments where I was laughing out loud and there are moments where I quite literally had tears in my eyes. For example, you talk about how it's brave to stay. It's brave to do the slow work of, you know, getting past suffering and the hard things. That's not really culturally,

there's not a ton of celebration of the slow, boring moments. And yet that is what gets you through from the big scary stuff to the small moments where you can say, I am really grateful again. I mean, those are the people I admire. Yeah. As you watch people raise kids all the way through their teenage years and into adulthood, and you have close relationships, you're going to be privy to so many kinds of pain. And so many moments where a reasonable person would have not one shred of an idea of how to proceed.

To see my friends manage these moments with the kind of grace and equanimity that they are able to muster has been remarkable for me to observe. Let's go into the book. There's a quote that you have in here, which I think is actually very relevant to what we've been talking about, where you're talking about loss and talking about some of the things you experienced. And you say, shouldn't loss change a person for the better forever? And of course, you're saying that as the idea that you wish it did, that that's how you think it's supposed to work, but that's not how it actually works. We just don't live at that level 24-7. We just don't live at that level 24-7.

We touch it and we, it's a very great, beautiful space of clarity when you experience it. But for whatever reason, we just don't live there. We drop back into parking tickets and the five pounds we can't lose and, you know, how our socks don't match. But, and this is what we're always looking for. This is why people are listening to this podcast and reading books, because they want to find it again. They want somebody to give them a way to get there more frequently, to that place where you're seeing things more clearly and what matters is very apparent and most salient and kind of towering over the nonsense.

But it's not how we work. We're animals and we can't afford to be in that philosophical, heady space all the time because there are other needs that require our attention. And tell me more. And in the talk, I refer to this friend of mine, Liz, who was the first really young person who I knew really well and loved a lot and would actually miss who died. And I would bet that everyone listening will tell you that whenever that happened to them, it's a total before and after moment. Because it's a very abstract idea that people die prematurely, that people die in their 40s or 30s until it happens. She was sick for seven years. She did 88 rounds of chemotherapy. She had an eight-year-old, a 10-year-old, and a 12-year-old. It really was like a fake idea that maybe she would die. You can't even let it in that it's possible. And having watched it and having had the

conversations that I had with her, because I had cancer in my 30s, among our friends, she didn't know that many people who had done chemotherapy before. So when it began, we had this special shared experience. And then her experience exceeded mine by 1,000 miles. But because we had that in the beginning, it put us on a conversational trajectory that I don't think that she shared with many people. You know, like I looked at her and said,

I will miss you so much. Like that was one of the last things I said to her. Like I just kissed her on the lips like a million times. We had been like in her bed, her head on her pillow, my head on her husband's pillow. And just crying, like I just left like a, it was like as big as a plate, just crying and my face was so wet. And then I was like, I'm gonna let you go to sleep.

And I knew, and I just was standing at her door and I just kissed her, kissed her, kissed her and just looked right at her and said, I will miss you so much. Like nobody was saying that to her. Nobody was saying, I know you're dying. I'm not going to try to pretend this isn't happening to totally expand your boundaries like that,

where you're saying words that you just never could have imagined saying to another person, that you would never again be pissed off about spilling some coffee. And you are. And that's so disappointing. I felt when I returned more to my usual ways after that whole experience, I felt really disappointed in myself. And then this guy that taught meditation, who's actually the son of Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is famous for writing wherever you go, there you are. He's like the father of transcendental meditation. His son,

Will Kabat-Zinn, was doing meditation at this place where I was working. He said, it's like this. It's like this in the meditation meditation and then afterwards I followed up and I was like, you know, I was just berating myself. I was just so, so kind of disgusted, which is a terrible emotion, but disgusted with myself for being so, taking my nonsense so seriously. And I just thought I would be recalibrated permanently. And he said, oh, it's like this. It's like this. And I was like, that's really good. That phrase is really helping me. What I came out thinking is like, just go back to her. Just go back to the conversation. I think for me, one of the things that has been really important and meaningful about having intergenerational friendships is that when you are on the younger side of the friendship and you're going through something really hard, there often aren't that many of your peers that have the experience,

right? Like you were one of the few people that had gone through chemo and had experienced that. And I've talked about this several times on the podcast, but like there was this period of time where my wife was really sick and things were just getting bad. Things were already bad and they were getting worse and they were getting worse. It was like the train careened off the rails and the track was not visible. And it was on the one hand, like very destabilizing to think like, but we're not doing the things that are everyone else is doing. And then on the other hand, also just really scary to be in this, like she's in pain. She's really struggling mentally, physically.

I don't know what to do. She doesn't know what to do. It was so helpful to have a friend who was a good friend who was in her seventies who said, oh, I had like a terrible five years, horrible. Whole five years were horrible. And then it was good after that. Sometimes you have a bad five years. Yes, time horizons.

Like that's something that you learn in the wise era. That blew my mind. The idea that this like happy, lovely, wonderful person was like, I had five whole years that were horrible. There are seasons. You know, I'm really allergic to the idea of like, there's a silver lining or you're stronger in the places that are broken because that's just not how breaking works. You know, if I break the table, it's not stronger there.

It's like I can repair it, but it's probably going to break in that same spot again. So I don't buy that. But I do think that something that happens when you break or when you have these really brutal, horrible moments, if you get through them, you are able to understand what someone else in that same or similar position is going through in a different way. Like being useful is the sweet spot, in my opinion. And I became so much more useful the minute I got cancer. But I had to give a graduation speech and I was trying to whittle it down to like, you know, something really memorable

because, you know, you work so hard on these and you know they're not listening and, you know, and then they're going to walk away. And like a month later, somebody would say, who was your graduation speech? No idea. Was it a man or a woman? No idea. What did they say? No idea. So I was trying to beat that, which is a bad idea. It's not doable. But anyway, I whittled it down to make yourself useful, doing something hard with good people. I love that. Thanks. So there it is. I'm giving it to you because the kids I gave it to in San Francisco at that graduation 10 years ago do not remember it. I'm going to remember it. This is my graduation. Okay.

We're going to be back with more from Kelly in just a moment. And we're back. Here's another clip from Kelly's TED Talk. The really big things often come with a game plan and a team of experts and enough adrenaline to lift a school bus over your head. But inside every crisis you think you might be ready for are a hundred dirty surprises that are not in the playbook. I had stage three cancer in my 30s, and I can tell you that following the chemo schedule didn't take nearly as much courage as admitting to my husband that sex felt less sexy after my boobs, which were once a real strong suit for me, were made weird and uneven by a surgeon's knife.

You did go through cancer earlier than many people go through some big health things. So now that you have a little space from that, what advice would you give to other people who are in this moment where life is not working according to plan? Your first time of that happening. Right. Your first big surprise. One of my great gifts in this life is that I'm not afraid to ask for help. And I think many people feel uncomfortable with that. And I think that if you could try this Jedi mind trick, it might help you become more comfortable with it. The mind trick is you are doing them a favor. So a feeling I had really strongly as soon as I got diagnosed, 36 years old, two kids in diapers, seven centimeter tumor, like the whole town. I

lived in a very small town and everyone knew within an hour. And was that I had brought mortality into the room. And when you bring mortality into the room, you better give people something to do. So if they want to make you a pie or knit you a beret or take your kids to the movies, you let them because they need it. They need it more than you need it. And their kids need to see this is how you do. This is what community is. So like we had so much more food than we needed. Many people have had this situation before.

Do not call them off. If they want to, they're going to make a pie in front of their children, maybe with their children. They're going to clean the counters together. They're going to write a little note. They're going to walk it down my front steps in a little box. They're going to come and give me a hug. And their kids are going to watch that the whole time. That's a better day. That's a better day than the day before or the day after when all they did was run their errands and be a little pissed off and work through their dumb to-do lists. And when crisis comes, maybe you could

let people do something for you as a way of calming them down because you're scaring everybody. And so let them cut your lawn. Let them be useful to you. I also think you don't have to let them do it every day. Like if it's making you crazy, you're allowed to say, I'm going to have some downtime. A lesson that I really had to learn, and I think is especially hard for like straight men, at least in America, is the idea that sometimes, often, you don't have to solve it. Worst to try and solve it. It's better to just be there, to listen, to be present, to validate rather than to say, okay, I'm going to do these things. If you're asked to do them, fine, but that is such a gift and so often solves the problem more than you could possibly by offering solutions.

Okay, so my Jedi mind trick on this, because I'm a solver and a fixer and I spring into action. The Jedi mind trick that I say to myself is don't be greedy. And what I mean is it's fun to untie knots. It's very satisfying. If someone hands you like a big pile of jewelry that's all knotted up and you can calmly, slowly separate it all, then you get the thrill of solving this little conundrum. So especially with kids, I think,

when you do probably have a couple of really good ideas because you're just that much further down the road, you probably are leaving them with this terrible feeling of like god she solved it in like two seconds like why couldn't i figure it out like she made me feel so worthless it's like the fight in your heart between like watching a kid make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich versus making it for them. Like it's a mess and they're not doing it right and there's way too much jelly on there and they're cutting the bread when they're trying to spread the peanut butter. And I would guess that any normal person literally has to look away. You cannot watch it without intervening. And it's so natural. But really what you're saying is, I can't stand thinking long term. I have to stay in the short term. And the short term is, I can make this sandwich in one-tenth the time with one-tenth the mess. And so fuck the long term. Like, let's just get it done.

When you're with kids, like I think somebody told me on the pod, some guest we had said, you're trying to raise a competent 35-year-old. That's what you're doing. That's your Jedi mind trick. You're not like trying to make an Olympic sandwich maker who's going to compete tomorrow. You're just trying to raise a competent, sane, lovely 35-year-old. Another moment that I really wanted to highlight from Tell Me More is this idea of like we have to do it and get it right. An idea that is ingrained in me is you right here. Maybe being wrong is not the same as being bad, I thought.

Not a sign that your insides were rotten. Maybe you can still be a decent-ish person, a person with a personal mission statement, a person who aspires to be someone habitually good and highly effective and fuck up. My cousin Kathy's 10 years older than I am. And she was my go-to on parenting stuff, still is, just to say, am I crazy? And she'd say, oh, Kelly, let it go, hon. Let it go. I think a great favor that you can do for your kids that the originals were doing for me and that Kathy's helped me do is to gently, lovingly make fun of yourself and your failings in front of your children. And I think it's a practice that has kind of that ability to change your own insides as well. But even if you're faking it,

even if you're just doing it to show your child, like don't be so hard on yourself. Like people make mistakes all day long because you can have a completely successful career and make mistakes regularly. Lovely human moment where you could even like end up better than where you started to acknowledge it like the only mistakes that are really gonna get you in trouble are the ones you try to hide or deny

it's also like those are the only people that anyone likes to be around no one wants to be around the perfect person who never makes a mistake like little mr perfect is like okay not at all interesting the person is like, I am a mess. But you know what? I'm trying and thanks for bearing with me. Like that's a fun person. And that's a person who lets you be yourself around them too. Yes.

Just try to make different mistakes. Definitely. Yeah. You know, we had Dr. Becky on the show, acclaimed parenting expert. She said the number one parenting skill, if you master no other skill, is admitting when you made a mistake and repairing the relationship. You and I agree that it is inappropriate to yell and point, to scream at somebody and point. But then I screamed and pointed.

I thought we both agreed on this. I thought we thought this was the way good, nice people behaved. So then I say, I was wrong. I agree with you. I am back on team, don't yell and point. And I was wrong to slip away from it. I think that's soothing to the union that we have built on top of this set of shared values. So I had this moment where I just lost my mind at one of my kids. And you too will have this moment, even though that kid is so adorable now. Like something will happen. You'll get on the wrong day at the wrong time, wrong amount of sleep.

Maybe you're dehydrated. Who knows? But like the stars will align in just the wrong way, and you'll fly off the handle. And I went up to, it was Georgia, I think. And I went up to a room and I said, um, I was so wrong to flip out like that. And like the idea that I may have misled you to think that anyone in your entire life should ever talk to you that way is killing me. No boyfriend should talk to you that way. No girlfriend, no boss, no colleague, no guy at the garage, and not me. And even though you're 13, you still have that right. And I broke a contract.

And I want you to know that was wrong. I was wrong. I do not accept that behavior. And she was kind of like, okay, like, whatever. Wasn't that crazy, mom? That makes me think that I had kind of been in therapy and then had not done therapy. And then as I knew we were going to have a baby, I went back to therapy. And one of the things that I was saying is my goal there is I was like, you know, I know

I have some things that I'm working on and I really want to solve them before the baby arrives so that I cannot pass this along to him. My therapist, wise person that he is, worth the money that he is paid. He was like, you know, that's actually not how you don't pass something along. Like you can't solve all your things. The way you don't pass something along is you are aware of it and you are open about it. Because it's breaking the myth that I'm locked. I think it's a really trippy idea the first time you as a child realize that your parent is still working on things, is still in pain over some things, is still unsatisfied in some ways. I mean, it's part of

like that great awakening that happens in your 20s where you start to actually think of your parents as people with their own sets of issues and desires. When my wife Molly, when she was really in the worst of it, really struggling and it kind of was like she was in a very hopeless place, I felt a little bit the opposite of what you said before. I was like, I can't, I would give anything to be back in a place where I'm worried about the delivery coming late. I would love to have those be my concerns because right now that stuff does not matter right and i felt like all of the calloused rough outer protective layer of emotional skin was completely off i was just like i can sob at the drop of a pin and like anything can make i feel everything and it felt uncontrolled

and scary the amount that i was feeling in that in those moments because there was no capacity. And in an interesting way that I didn't necessarily expect, having our son, it was the kind of not scary, not bad version of that where I was like, oh, and the skin is off again. Like I am just sobbing. And like today. It's too much emotion. sobbing and like I get like today it's too much emotion you know it makes me realize that while there's a lot it's overwhelming to be in those periods where you're in grief or suffering or sadness and you just feel everything it's also like man it's like you are so alive in those moments so this is the whole resolution of the TED talk which is almost cataloging in a list everything that my friends had someone in their family say to them that was like, well, that'll take you to a moment.

That will light your nervous system on fire. And then how are they doing this? How are they coming up with the words? And then I felt almost guilty at the precision with which I drew this picture of how challenging these little moments, these little shocks can be for just us ordinary people. And of course, the reward is a full human experience. And isn't that what we're here to get? But the full human experience means that you're going to experience every emotion at maximum dosage.

And a lot of the emotions are not that pleasant to experience. But it is part of the total package and it must happen for the high side to happen. Like you can't know relief without knowing the burn. This is the only way actually that you could ever get what you came for. So, you know, welcome. You're about to get your full human experience. Well, Kelly, thank you so much for being here on the show. It's been

really like such an honor and privilege to talk to you. Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for reading the book. Thanks for listening to the talk. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Kelly Corrigan. Her podcast is called Kelly Corrigan Wonders, and her PBS show is called Tell Me More, which is also the title of her most recent book. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by a team of wonders. Daniela Balarezo, Ban Ban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Lainey Lott, Antonio Le, and Joseph DeBrine. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, who believe that the full human experience should contain a minimum of factual errors.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a group that encourages our guests to always tell them more. Morgan Flannery, Norgill, Patrick Grant, Maggie Gorville, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. And if you're listening on the Spotify app, answer the discussion question that we've put up there on mobile. Please share this episode with a friend, someone you think would appreciate it. The biggest way that we get out to new listeners is word of mouth.

It really, really, really makes a huge difference. We will be back next week with more How to Be a Better Human. In the meantime, take care.