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A podcast for the quietly overwhelmed and cautiously hopeful.
So here's how this is gonna work.
There's things in life that you can't do, and you do it, and then it feels really good.
Maybe you went to go like pass your driving test, and you failed.
And they were like, you gotta parallel park, and you were like, literally have never
parallel parked before.
And then you just do a bad job, you don't get it.
And you come back and you try again.
Sorry, you got a six month wait time now, and you come back and you try again.
And this time you do it.
That is a good feeling.
You're like, holy sxxx man.
We overcame something today.
I leveled up today.
Exposure therapy packages this in a small dose you get a benefit from that every time you
do it.
my.
laundry that I didn't fucking put in the dryer from a day ago I have to watch it again
I did that earlier.
I opened my washing machine to put another load of washing in and I was like, somehow
there's already washing in this washing machine.
That's bad.
And then, yeah.
The worst is when you have that little moment of reflexive anger where you're like, dude,
who the fuck is, it's me.
It's me that's doing it.
I'm the one.
the problem.
Yes.
intro, say hello.
episode of the Zero Dot Podcast, where we know that when our chips are down, that's when
we are strongest.
I'm joined by my good friends John and Daniel, I am Sam, and gentlemen, it's been a week,
hasn't it?
It has been a week.
It hasn't been less than a week.
And we're recording this on a similar day.
It's been an entire week.
That's what I'm telling everyone right now.
100%.
Absolutely.
I have this thing where I try to say 100 % at least seven times to accommodate for the
fact that we are in a week.
So that's my first time I'm saying it.
I'll say it more times throughout the session.
there are like two things that I do every episode other than saying A of all and B of all.
yeah, it's been good.
How are you guys?
of all?
We always skip G.
G's the good one.
well, like the grading system happened, which is ironic because it started with G, but
then with A, B, C, E, F, the end.
And she was like, dog, like what's gonna, well, G got some press though, because like G
unit was a thing for a hot second and like spending like a G grand, like five G's as a
speed, five G's is another kind of speed for planes or fast plane.
Am I doing, I don't know how fast planes go.
People in the chat who are Air Force pilots.
and centripetal force and stuff like that, like space stuff, G force, yeah?
This is, yeah, I didn't watch it, but I know that movie exists.
one of my favorite strings on a piano pervert.
on a guitar.
I do feel bad, you know?
I feel like there's a beef between me the listeners now.
And I hope that they can get the fuck over it.
created that beef.
Wasn't me.
right though.
Yeah.
You know what?
I'm gonna guess at you.
It was Sam.
Everybody, Sam started this.
Sam, he came to me.
in other words, starts with G, just saying, just saying.
Letter of the day, ghost gaslight girl boss, send it into the ether from whence it came.
There's a better one.
Ghost gaslight gatekeep.
That's what you're supposed to do.
Listeners, we don't have a war against the viewers, except for the viewers that John leads
because he's a monster.
But just so you know, we will rise above all of this and we will be okay.
I believe in you.
a war against the listeners.
We actually respect them, and we're glad they're here.
Once again, another silent segment with no context for the listening...
Tough day for the listening audience today.
Listeners, we will not let him smite us.
Anyway.
I feel like uh I don't want to be like a tyrant, ah but tyrants win sometimes and maybe
I'll be the one that gets away with it.
This isn't, don't, don't love this look.
So like in my day job, in case you're new to the show, I'm a therapist, clinical mental
health, right?
And I like to make people feel better.
And it's like part of my cause of life.
And on the show, I want people to hear me, but feel bad, but see me, but feel good.
It's a very complex agenda.
This is where we're, this is a little lore for a day one.
In any case.
How are you?
You can't answer.
You're listening or watching.
You can type in the comment.
I'll respond to it.
members get to listen to us on Mondays a little bit sooner than our public-facing folks.
They do.
They get more in-jokes.
They get more insight.
uh The insight might be terrible.
It might be awful, but you get more of us, which is fantastic.
I like more of us personally, but you know what?
You do you.
As a general rule, um if you ever hear us say a thing and you're like, why did that
doesn't make any sense?
Assume it's an in-joke and not a mistake.
Assume that there's like lot of pre-existing lore and we meant to do it.
And it was actually very clever.
A deep cut.
things and you're either not in the know, as in you're not in our Patreon, or even if
you're a Patreon member, which shout outs to you, and you're still like, I'm confused by
that, trust me, there's some lore dump happening like 20 years from now and it's gonna all
come together like some avatar slash lore of the rings synergy thing.
You just gotta, you gotta listen to the entire expanded universe.
It'll be big payoff.
It'll be a good time.
Absolutely.
And then by that point, we'll shut everything down because we're not going to top that.
We're done.
Zero Dot Extended Universe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
universe.
have we really jumped the shark this early that we're doing extended universe crap?
my god.
We're going to get into like time travel and multiverses, all sorts of stuff.
It's...
Yeah.
a John played by Toby McGuire in one of them?
Please, please do that for- No, Nicolas Cage!
my god.
yeah.
I will say, no offense to Toby McGuire, I think he's phenomenal actor.
I think Nick Cage can do a better John than Toby can.
That is a compliment to me, at the very least.
For those of you who don't know, I love Nick Cage more than I love most things.
Not my dog, my dog ekes him out by a tiny bit, but not by a lot.
Hot take.
think Marvel should have like taken a hard, hard ass break after, um, end game.
Is it end game?
mate, that is a freezing cold tray of ice cubes take.
That is a take.
That is not at all a take.
At least on this show, that take is well received.
that was such a beautiful, wonderful moment.
um Stop making stuff for a while.
Like literally let us take a break from it.
Let you take a break.
That everything was going to that moment.
One of the hardest things has been trying to watch any of that stuff.
Some of it's good.
Some of it is, but it's been like, okay, what's the point?
What are the stakes now?
Wait, we literally had an end of universe stakes situation.
You want me to care about this?
Like it's tough.
It's just tough.
yeah, it needed a break.
John, my dear John, please distract us from this multiverse of madness, if you would.
I will try.
Let me see which of other Johns concocted in the other universe.
This one's doing terrible things.
You know what may have happened?
I may have closed out of my tab.
Just kidding.
That's a different universe.
I still have it here.
uh This is a weird one.
This one feels a little bit like uh FernGully hath betrayed me.
Shout outs to FernGully.
If you are old enough to have watched FernGully, mean, like take care of your back.
like, ah Avatar.
narratively the same movie, but Fern Gaulley, yes.
I'm not joking.
No, I'm like a little upset.
I was gonna say a good thing.
And now you're doing that.
a good thing that's, you know, Ferngully-esque.
I'll tell you a good thing.
The actual title sequence to Avatar uses Papyrus, the generic font.
That's what they went with.
Moving on.
The thing that I'm going talk about now does feature Hexis's modality, which is abandoned
oil refineries.
How is this good news, say, dearest John, say, uttering your disbelief?
Well, to quote the article on, check this out, just positive dot news.
How fun is that?
Abandoned oil refineries are becoming unlikely havens for wildlife.
There's like a thing where sometimes humans can make coral reefs by like putting down
certain architectural structures.
and wildlife in the seas like, hey, cool.
And as it turns out, abandoned oil refineries have become a really neat place over in
there.
So when I'm noticing a thing, Daniel, where I'm constantly reporting on good things from
the UK, I don't know why this
is the way that this is happening to me.
uh
because all good things stem from the UK.
it well, America did come from there.
We're like your terrible child.
Yeah, erm it's not at all a nightmare half the time.
There's a shout out to one in California that happened.
There's one in Essex.
And this is the best thing I'm going to say today.
So after this, can actually turn on the show if you want to.
But today, the Brownfield Oasis, which is one of the places now that's becoming a nature
sanctuary, it's a designated site of special scientific interest.
It is managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, AKA the RSPB.
If you didn't know what to do with your life, you could join the Royal Society for the
Protection of Birds.
Mm-hmm.
fill you with joy in your heart, you're dead inside and I'm really, really sorry, but I'm
not.
RSPB.
um But yeah, there's been a huge change with this and I should have looked at the numbers
a little more out of time, but this was from a couple days ago.
Nightingales are coming back, birds are coming back, things that were on the decline that
weren't doing well.
It's been described as a fantastic success, said Canvie Wick, nature reserve manager.
Nope, I lied, Canvie Wick is the place.
The nature reserve manager's name is Mark Outen.
I'm new.
I'm new.
a solid name.
before.
I shouldn't do anything.
But they're talking about how these brownfield sites can be transformed into vibrant green
spaces that serve the community and provide more inhabitants room for their wildlife.
I'm not going to read you the numbers.
I've been kind of reskimming through this.
It's actually very boring data-wise.
And if you want, I will put the article somewhere.
Because it is fun.
It's cool to read.
There's pictures of birds.
uh
okay John?
Some people really like data.
Data is pain.
No, you have to have data to make things legitimate, right?
So I would talk about science, just all of it at large real quick.
Science is based on data and research.
You do empirical research, you try to get data, independent variables, dependent
variables.
gotta do all the placebos to get involved.
I want to trust it, and I want to read the abstract of an article because I have ADHD, but
I also will read it if it's important.
This one I read a week and a half ago, so I have not refreshed myself on it since.
It actually is quite short.
I believe this is the part of the show where we take our favorite joke format and say,
that is the end of the show.
This time, it is.
We're done.
This isn't a joke this time.
Bye.
the entire rest of the show isn't even on Patreon, it's on OnlyFans.
So we're joining an OnlyFans where we'll make tons of money.
You can tell because Daniel has let his shirt go down just a little bit and you get to see
even more of that.
The, hang on, the site's in the trash, the show's in the trash, where it's bad, it's dumb,
and then it will become a sanctuary for birds.
Full circle.
beautiful, wonderful.
Thanks.
I feel like more plays should say narrative framing or exposition when those things
happen, just to like help people pay attention and stay along.
Well, that was lovely.
um think that's it.
I think we're done.
news.
I love hearing about positive nature, animal, animal news, animal related news.
Sometimes.
I do feel like I need something...
terrible.
Awful.
Sam.
Could you possibly be the one to provide this for me today?
okay, if you insist.
I'm excited.
uh But first, there's a reason why we talk about some of the stuff that isn't like super
great.
Here at Zero Dot, we try to remind ourselves of things that maybe might be under the radar
that aren't super great to try to illuminate certain issues for those of us that aren't
paying attention or maybe we wouldn't know otherwise.
Not because we want to be Debbie Downs to kind of empower ourselves with ways in which we
can kind of combat some of these things.
And it just so happens to be a Zero Dot tradition that whenever we talk about it on our
show, something cool happens and, you know.
We can take credit for saying that it only happened because it happened here at Zero Dot.
I don't want to say we're heroes, but maybe someone will type it.
You know, that lends a certain validity if somebody else does it.
Someone's gonna invent a alternate YouTube account and go into one of our videos and say,
we're a hero.
Won't be me.
Maybe someone else.
But for the main segment of our to-do about things that aren't super great, but we wanna
talk about a little bit, John, you're a movie buff.
You like movies, right?
people say that you're about to get quizzed, then I'm afraid.
Okay, I'm not afraid anymore, yes I am.
are our appreciator of cinema, if I recall.
You like a good film.
Yeah.
I find great joy in sitting and watching a flick.
Yes.
And I imagine in this wonderful age that we live in, in the year 2025, soon to be 2026,
with 4K coming up and Ultra HD and Dolby and all these wonderful, amazing technologies, if
we have access to the greatest high fidelity tools to watch said cinema, shouldn't that
just be the norm?
Shouldn't that be the standard for us?
Shouldn't that, you know, shouldn't that just all be a good thing?
Especially if it's an older film, right?
Every couple months, a studio blasts out a trailer claiming they've painstakingly restored
some classic film.
And then you pop the disc in and you look at it and the images on your wonderful 4K to 8K
resolution TV or monitor that you paid way too much money on and you're like, why does
everyone look kind of beige or gray?
You see, here's something that's really uncomfortable.
A lot of Blu-ray releases and 4K remasters that coming out right now are actually, if you
look at it, somewhat of a downgrade in two different ways.
We're seeing flatter colors.
We're also seeing missing surround mixes.
To give you an example, one of my favorite films of all time, which is going to surprise
some people.
I'm not the biggest anime fan, but I love the Cowaboo Bop movie, the Cowaboo Bop animated
film.
It's actually, it's a movie.
It takes place in between one of the episodes, I think it's between episode 22 and 23 of
the show.
It's great movie.
John, I own that on DVD and Blu-ray.
My DVD version of the movie has 5.1 surround sound.
My Blu-ray upscale to criterion edition version has stereo sound.
They just put stereo into that release of the movie.
So even though I thought I was getting a 4K wonderful amazing release of this movie, I'm
getting a worse sound mix.
And you know how important the soundtrack is in Calibri V.
It's like I want that full 5.1 experience.
of the show.
Seriously, and I have a 5.1, I have a 7.1 system in my home, so I definitely feel like I'm
being robbed in that way.
But not just that, we've all seen The Matrix, right?
We know The Matrix, the first one, by the way, they only ever made one movie, just The
First Matrix, right?
There's only one, don't fact check us, don't go into Wikipedia, don't check your source,
only been one version of that movie.
You might remember that they released like an upscaled criterion 4K release of that.
Well, if you check that out and you compare it to, say, one of the older DVD releases of
it, you might remember that the Matrix had a very specific greenish-pukish hue to the
earlier scenes of the film, the first 45 minutes of the film, especially to paint this
image of what it's like to be plugged in this fake mirage world.
But if you check out the 4K release, it's mostly gray and clean and white and black, not
white and black, but it's desaturated.
So I was I was being cute earlier when I was talking about movies like I'm actually like a
super awful.
I was one credit shot of a film.
But like I It was like an aesthetic choice.
It was like we're doing this to paint a picture that this world is synthetic.
So when you go into the second world, spoilers for the matrix, I would it's not real.
uh They're like, look, now it's like this grimy future thing.
Also, like Keanu Reeves naked in a poop pod.
That's pretty fun.
But
The main thing was that you were like, that texture is, it's kind of a cyclical signal,
they're in the computer world.
That's fucking dumb.
That's like taking Superman's cape off to make it look cleaner.
I'm sure you know this John probably as well that sickly green hue that's in a lot of
films It's it actually sends us biological signal to us that something is wrong Like it
actually forever reason the color green in that way it tells us wait something's not quite
right So that was intentional, right?
So those are just two examples John and Daniel but apparently there's thousands of these
examples where we have criterion collections or like up scalings or They delist the DVD
version.
You can't find them anymore
And you have to pick up some other versions available.
It's supposed to be better, but you're actually getting a far worse experience.
uh Even the Cowboy Bebop television show, not the movies anymore, the TV show, the
original DVD releases, they had a stereo mix to them and had this really nice echoey sound
to certain effects and things that I remember recall very vividly.
Like when they'd be in a hallway in a tunnel, they'd be speaking, there'd be an echoey
sound.
My friend got the 4K Blu-ray of the remastering of it, they got rid of that.
It's all gone.
Like all the stuff that was considered an imperfection, they got rid of it.
And now when they're in a hallway running and screaming at each other, you don't hear that
hallway effect anymore.
And there's thousands of these things.
And it's really aggravating as someone who loves film.
And it's aggravating to someone who I want to say to you, John, or Daniel, to anyone that
say, hey, what's a movie you recommend?
Or hey, is this movie any good?
I don't want to be the guy who's like, not that version.
you just sound like an asshole, and it sounds like I'm gatekeeping, but I'm trying not to
be.
I'm just like...
Thankfully, this is not part of my spiel, but there has been an appeal lately to get the
Star Wars original theatrical releases to be available, because as we know for a long
time, Disney slash Lucasfilm was like, no, only the Lucas 15th updated version with a lot
of CGI and again, de-filtering of things is available, but they are re-releasing that
thankfully, of course, for money.
Of course, it's always for money.
It's never not for money.
So that's a nice thing.
But.
I don't say this because I just want to be doom and gloom.
There are resources people can go to that I was not fully aware of that exists, such as
Blu-ray.com, the Digital Bits, Hi-Def Digest, AVFS Forum and Home Theater Forums, and of
course Films at Home, which is a common YouTube reviewer site that checks out all these
things and diagnoses when a release comes out, say, here are the changes, here are the
problems, and they recommend alternative versions for that.
So someone else can do that.
So you do have some resources for that.
And the best thing is
Studios make these changes and they don't think people notice.
People absolutely notice.
Like we now live in the age of the Internet.
Thank you, social media.
Someone is going to point the shit out of this.
And if you're a studio listening to us, which you probably aren't, but you are, please
know if you try to slip something by the Internet, if you haven't figured this out at
2025, they are going to catch you on this.
And also beyond all of that, if we go down the waters of piracy, I'm not advocating for
anything, but
There are places that I won't point out, but if you look for them, if you do, if you look
for them, there are wonderful fans who are doing the Lord's work in restoring these 4K
mixes to their former glory, which we always appreciate.
If you decide to go down that route, I must legally tell you and also ethically support
the releases financially.
You know, give your money to the creatives.
We want to make sure that happens, but that exists as well.
I also do want to point out there are a couple of foundations or companies that are
have a better track record for making better releases that are truer to the original
vision, like the Film Foundation, which is related to Martin Scorsese, BFI, Snedeka di
Bologna, which is an Italian company, as well as some boutique labels like Aero, Shout
Factory, Vinegar Syndrome, and Eureka.
These particular teams do release better upscaled releases of these films that seem to be
truer in the fashion of what the original vision was, and they don't try to min-max the
visual clarity to the point of ruining it of its filmic character.
There's a level of like you're cleaning things because that's a trend right now.
That's what we want to do right now.
But that's not purer.
That's a stylistic choice that you're making because it will get you stuff.
I don't know.
But this is power to the viewer, power to everyone else.
If you see that movie you've heard on the shelf and it's just there, you got a phone,
quickly just do a quick search like, hey,
Go to some of those websites, just check it out, just make sure that's the right release
before you do it.
If you want just that quick film release, if you see it on streaming, I'm not gonna stop
you, know, ease of comfort, ease of use, all that kind of thing.
But I mean, it just breaks my heart that like, this isn't more of a known issue.
And I know I am sounding passionate and dumb and weird about this, but I mean.
I picked those two examples because it seemed the most extreme.
Like, the Matrix has a very specific way of looking into a rabbit of that visual identity
is insane to me.
um And I'm just so sad for everyone that watched the Matrix the cleaned up way.
And I wonder what their experience was like if they were like, was pretty good, pretty
neat, and just walked away instead of being like, wow, I really felt the world that they
were in.
Like, there's a difference there.
um And it's sad.
Jaws and the movie Halloween are both examples from what I recall where they showed the
movie before the soundtrack was completed and both times audiences were like, is this a
comedy?
But then the soundtrack got completed and like, oh, this hits, this is scary now, this is
iconic, this is doing what it needs to do.
Shaws is the perfect example of that.
The theme is so iconic that like...
Anyway, I agree.
I do think, once again, this isn't like a go storm the gates thing, but I do think this is
a thing where people respond to feedback.
So if on mass works, turns out, not buying things works, out.
But the important thing is that we are empowered and we know that this thing exists.
uh I love people, but I don't trust corporations.
know, any product that's fed to you, if you take just a moment to pause, check your
sources just a bit before you make that purchase or that stream.
If you have the spoons for it, if you don't, no disrespect.
But if you do, you might be able to find the better version or find that someone else is
making that version
So, you mentioned, Jaws, sharks, scary, right?
Scary, really scary.
eh I've got, I don't wanna get myself started on sharks because I've got a whole thing
about sharks, about how they are misrepresented as the villains of nature.
However, moving on to our main topic for today, scary things.
You wanna stay far away from them, right?
Yeah, yeah, if it's scary, get away.
of that.
You don't want to be involved in all of that.
It's scary.
It's bad.
Hear me out.
And I think both of you would probably have a lot to say about this topic.
What if you were to say, just take a little bit of the scary at a time.
And then gradually, over time, as you are exposed to this fear, maybe, or this bad thing,
this negative thing that you perceive as bad, it might get a little bit better and easier
to handle.
Lads, gents.
I would like for you to talk to me today and to a beautiful audience about exposure work
slash therapy.
John, I'm so glad Daniel asked us about this question, because I've been meaning to ask
you about all the different kinds of things.
I have a larger question I want to ask, as someone who specializes in exposure therapy for
your patients, as Daniel just pointed out, why would I want to get close to the thing that
causes me so much fear, so much anxiety, whatever?
How could that possibly help me?
Explain to me in ways that you understand, but maybe I don't, and our viewers, or
listeners.
That's right, I'm listener biased today.
might not comprehend the benefits of exposure therapy.
What base it lying it down for me, how does it make sense for the people to start thinking
that this isn't as bad as it sounds?
So I would talk first to the listeners because you can't see me as we've been previously
established, courtesy of the definition of listing the modality you selected.
I had been smiling for like a minute and a half straight ever since Daniel introduced the
topic.
This is like the passion of my life.
This is like the only thing in the world professionally that gets me going.
And that's not because other stuff isn't great in therapy, but like this is the thing, you
know, creeping in.
I'm not all the way to 20 years in the but I've been here for a while.
And this really makes me, I love exposure therapy.
First thing I to do is kind of bounce off of Sam's question here.
It's a really good question.
And what the secret preface of the question is, is it's going off of the stereotype of
exposure therapy.
Exposure therapy gets a terrible rap.
It's people don't know what it is.
The is exposure therapy when done poorly is a disaster and you shouldn't do it.
I am certified by the IOCD.
I'm an IOCD certified specialist to help treat people with OCD and anxiety and exposure
therapy.
And if you don't know how to do it, doesn't work.
It's a calibration thing.
If you do exposure therapy, it should be exciting and it should be incredibly functional.
So here's how this is gonna work.
There's things in life that you can't do, and you do it, and then it feels really good.
Maybe you went to go like pass your driving test, and you failed.
And they were like, you gotta parallel park, and you were like, literally have never
parallel parked before.
And then you just do a bad job, you don't get it.
And you come back and you try again.
Sorry, you got a six month wait time now, and you come back and you try again.
And this time you do it.
That is a good feeling.
You're like, holy sxxx man.
We overcame something today.
I leveled up today.
Exposure therapy packages this in a small you get a benefit from that every time you do
it.
The other reason that I like talking about exposure therapy, and I'm maybe oversimplify
this a tiny bit because I can't say the long term very well, the gist of it is exposure
therapy has a definition is it is poking your amygdala.
part of your brain in charge of fight or flight and it activates it and it goes uh-oh
we're in danger as I probably said before the explosion the amygdala can't learn from
knowledge a thing can be known to my brain is like that's not dangerous that's a movie a
movie can't hurt you it can't emerge you the screen and hurt your body it's just a horror
movie but your middle goes that was a scary noise and it's dark I have to be prepared for
dangerous I'm an amygdala but if you watch lots of horror movies eventually your brains
like no
I don't care.
You attune to it.
It starts to become very normal.
I'm talking right now.
I'm talk for long form content.
I talk for an hour at a time for all of my sessions when I'm doing my job.
I've talked in public speaking.
I've run D &D campaigns.
I love talking.
I used to be shy.
Isn't that fun?
I was like a really shy person.
And what happened was I had a speech class in eighth grade and I talked and they had us do
a off the cuff about horses.
Mine was horses.
It was random topics for everybody.
And I don't know, if you think I'm like a horse guy, like swinging a miss.
They have four legs.
what's happening here, is the idea that my brain had some data of I don't know I'm doing,
I put some stuff out there, and my classmates didn't tear me down.
They were just like, okay.
Some of them laughed, some of them were like, that's kind of fun.
My brain was like, oh, is this not dangerous?
And then over the course of the speech class, I had other speech, other speech, other
speech.
I was in French classes at the same time.
Je peux pas l'emprunter franƧais.
My mom's a French professor, so that's why I kind of grabbed it.
But the point being, I was scared to do that too.
I was a very shy, little, anxious kid.
And then you would do it.
You talk in front of the class in French.
And then you'd be like, oh, OK.
And they bring their stuff, build this nice data set for it.
To tie all this back together to the original question of why do people want to do this?
Why do they not want to do this?
They don't want to do it because if you gauge the difficulty of the exposure wrong, it's a
fucking nightmare.
If you are a kid and you have anxiety about public speaking and I'm like, okay, go ahead
and talk in front of these 400 people who will all judge you.
It's like, we have too much.
So, exposure therapy fact.
And somebody told me they went to a training recently and they didn't say this anymore and
that has me a little concerned.
But there's like a window.
Therapists love 1 to 10 scales.
I'm sorry on behalf of therapists, we do this, we know.
But on a 1 to 10 scale,
the goal is you want an exposure goal to hit between like a two and a four.
Should never be like a five or a six or a seven or an eight or a nine or a 10.
There's a very classic thing where a parent goes, I'm gonna teach my kid to swim.
And they throw the kid in the lake.
And then the kid is, yeah, exactly, sink or swim.
And then the kid starts to panic.
I think they're gonna die.
And guess what?
That kid just had a little teeny tiny trauma.
Trauma by definition is exposure to a situation where you could potentially die.
That's the textbook definition.
Or your brain perceives it.
Something, something first responder disclosure piece.
exception piece.
But the point being, that's too high and the amygdala freaks out so it can't get used to
it.
When therapists say sit with something, what we're talking about is literally just being
in existence with the stressor.
So your amygdala goes, oh, okay, all right.
Okay, and then it regulates.
If you have a good exposure therapist, or you have one whose ADHD isn't acting up that
day, what they'll do at the start of the exposure is say, like, where do you see yourself
on a one to 10 right now, on how stressed you're feeling?
So my client says like, five.
I'm like, okay, we don't necessarily have to do this.
Maybe we find a slightly easier version of this.
Now some clients are like, I'm doing the five, let's go.
And if they do that, I'm like, all right, cool.
But I give them the disclaimer, you do not get better benefits from exposure therapy for
doing harder exposures.
That's not a thing.
That's not a thing.
If you're like, I'm afraid of spiders and spiders be all over me, doesn't actually make
you get better faster than looking at a spider on a screen, having a picture of a spider
on your phone next to you you're talking.
Because what you want to do is just activate the amygdala and let it sit with that
distress for a little bit.
And then over time, it just kind of cools down, kind of calms down.
And this is so amazing.
This is one of my favorite parts of this is if you do that and you don't go back and undo,
we can talk about that later, what will happen is you get eight
hours of that ongoing Sustain and Make Reveal activation, that reward is insane because
the exposure is like two to five minutes and you have like a third of your day just like
healing from that.
You know how good that reward on return is?
If I could practice like a combo in a video game for five minutes and get like eight hours
of being better at that combo, not a thing.
Not a return you can get.
If I put five dollars in and get like hundreds back to any system, this is amazing.
And also exposure work kinda can't
fail as long as you're doing it at all.
We'll talk more about that later, to answer your question in just a few bullet points.
One, it is very, very gentle.
It's famous for being brutal and scary.
The thing I wrote down earlier was toilet seat.
There's this stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid thing that's perpetuated.
There's a certain institution that talked about this recently and they should feel really
bad.
And they talked about how exposure therapy is like having people lick the toilet to prove
the germs aren't bad.
That's fxxxxxx dumb.
Nobody wants to lick a toilet, and if you do, and that's your thing, I'm not here to shame
you, but as a form of exposure therapy, I wouldn't do that, right?
Because if have a germ phobia, I'm not like, what am gonna do with my life?
Lick toilets.
No, I wanna shake hands with people.
I wanna eat at a restaurant.
I wanna play a video game without cleaning off my controller three times.
It's not about doing weird sxxx to face your fears like some, that's kind of dumb and
frankly overkill.
If I'm the person who's afraid of being in tight spaces, crawling into nutty putty caves,
batsxxx insane like don't do that that's crazy start with an elevator ride it up and down
twice go to a parked car sit in it right like the goal should always be a two to three or
maybe four somebody recently said four to six and I have beef with that because six is too
high but that's that's the goal is it should make you feel like a champion you handled a
thing and as an aside and trying to say this because I don't want to speak for other
therapists out there uh but what I was taught back in the day is if
You come to me and we build an exposure goal and you go home and you're like, my God, this
is actually too hard.
When you come back and tell me that, my job is to say, that's my bad.
We didn't build it right.
That's okay, my fault.
It's not your fault.
You can not do an exposure goal.
That's not a knock on you.
That's a healthy assessment of this was actually too hard.
And the other beautiful thing about exposure that I really, really like is you can't do
too small of a goal.
The worst case is you're going to get less than optimal benefit.
That's still good.
That's still good.
Okay.
I will keep branding.
So I would stop there.
Sam, does that answer your question?
It does.
So I want to keep leading us on.
I mean, there's a lot of tendential benefits.
It's not as scary as a lot of people might think it is.
If you're doing it right, uh the therapist hopefully knows that any amount of exposure,
even if it's not quote unquote optimal, which I don't like that word at all, let's pretend
that we know what that word means in this context.
That's all it is.
You're still gaining some kind of benefit.
So you describe the amygdala.
Yeah.
limbic brain is this part of the brain that reacts first, then thinks about it, and then
we rationalize it.
the limbic brain reacts and the limbic brain's job is to protect protect you.
That's all it's trying to do.
So when you have this intense emotional reaction,
Positive or negative, fight or flight as we might say, it's there to protect you.
So what you're talking about with trauma, someone is now having a protective barrier,
their limbic brain is trying to protect them.
I'm bringing this all up because people feel like it's their fault.
People feel like it's their fault that they are holding onto this trauma.
It's their fault that I'm so sensitive to this.
What do you have to say about that,
Not at all.
And I would talk about a couple of things, right?
So the fight or flight system, there's the four Fs.
The four Fs are as follows, fight, flight, the two famous ones.
Then got freeze, then you have fawn, which I think is kind of a forced word, but it had to
be an F.
To go into those ever so briefly, fight, obvious.
This is a stressor, I'm going to kxxx the stressor.
Flight, that's a big stressor and I need to get away from it.
Freeze is, you know just like, and freeze also isn't just like, you know, squirrel mode,
like freeze.
It's also like, just don't offend it.
Just don't make it mad.
just kind of go inside yourself.
It's really small.
I've done work with people on trauma before.
Frankly, I've people with just exposure before and they just like lock up.
And that was a sign that we did a little too hard of a goal.
Because what's happening there is their brain's just like, I can't, I'm not okay.
And then finally, of course, the fawn is befriend the stressor and make sure that it likes
you so it doesn't kxxx you.
You see this less commonly, but it's a thing you see it a lot of times in people who are
children of narcissists or otherwise have been emotionally abused because there's a level
of like, can't ever stop this from happening so I can at least make it not be as mad at
me.
The reason that, Sam's question is a really good one, and the reason I think he asked it
is because I want to help kind of crowbar off that guilt and shame.
Super fast reminder, guilt's a behavioral motivator.
Guilt should help you change your behavior.
can do something.
Guilt's cool because it stops.
Guilt, I don't know.
I called Sam a big poop butt earlier and he was like, that hurt my feelings.
I'm oh shit, man, I'm sorry about that.
Problem solved.
We got over it, Shame is like, you're an idiot for doing that and you're bad.
And with trauma, sometimes shame goes in there and you'll hear, this is, oh man, it breaks
my fucking heart to say this, but.
I've had people I've worked with and people that I'm close with in my personal life uh go
into a place, start to get panicky, feel their anxiety, and go, I'm too much.
I'm too much.
No, you're not.
What's happening is your brain is telling you that you're bad because it's trying to go,
it's kind of a frizzy, fawny combination of like, just be small, don't be seen, don't make
this worse.
A lot of this comes from a thing called the double bind, which I'll talk about every time
it ever comes up.
Double bind is when you get, okay, choice A, choice A is gonna go pretty bad.
We're gonna get yelled at and we're gonna be foolish, we're gonna lose resources.
Choice B.
we're gonna get yelled at and lose resources.
And that feels terrible.
And if you keep putting children, specifically young minds that are developing in this
position, bad stuff happens.
One fun fact, and I find I mean kind of scary fact, is it increases the likelihood of
schizophrenia.
Because your brain is now, it's struggling to feel like it can figure problems out, and it
starts to find ways to, anyway, I'll come at it another time.
But the point being, em are not responsible for your brain and the things that it
auto-generates.
It's gonna give you all kinds of thoughts that are bananas, and it's gonna give you all
kinds of reactions that are involuntary.
A bit of a vulnerable thing that I would share with you, dear viewer slash listener, is
I've had some kind of fucked up shit happen in my life.
And at the end of the day, I'm a fairly capable physical specimen.
I'm six foot one, and I'm not a total lack of healthy shape at this point in my life.
And there's things that'll happen.
If you're not six foot one, then maybe you should, I don't know, become a stronger person.
No!
Just grow idiot.
uh
agendas, I'm sorry.
No, you're great, you're fine.
Height doesn't matter, nothing matters.
um But the thing that I want to get to is I've done a couple of relatively physically
impressive tasks.
I've handled some business in my day.
Not a lot, I'm not like a badass here, but I can deal with a thing.
I've physically saved my own life on more than one occasion.
And yet, when I, me, person who's been driving for 20 plus years, I live in Minnesota, by
the way, in case you haven't talked about it before.
It snows here a lot.
I'll be driving a car and I'll feel the tires like start to like slippy slidey uh and my
brain will freak the fuck out.
And I want you to know, it's not when I'm on the highway going 70, it's like I'm parking
in a coffee store.
Like it's fine, like there's literally no danger.
But what my brain goes is, remember that time you were a kid?
and you didn't have a cell phone and you got stuck at the bottom of a hill and you
couldn't go home and the car ran out of gas and you didn't know what to do and people came
and they didn't help you and you were stuck and you started to freeze.
Like, that messed me up.
And everybody's got a couple of those, right?
So when that, I feel that.
And once again, I have AAA, I have a phone, I'm actually totally safe.
It's also a parking lot.
It's like 2 p.m.
It doesn't matter, it's fine.
But my brain doesn't know that because he is a monkey from the past and he just wants to
be like, we're gonna fucking die, do something.
And in that moment, you can't reason with him because the amygdala is, I'm kind of making
this up, like, the amygdala that could be reasoned with died.
Because if the tiger came and said, I'm going to eat you, and you were just like, maybe
don't, he would just do it.
So at this point in time, when it goes off, you, because you are a smart person, will go,
I can think my way through this.
You kind of can't.
What you can do is go, oh, I'm activated.
I'm currently impacted by this.
It's impacted my perception.
This may not be as bad as it feels.
But you can't be like, well, it's not real.
It's just true.
I'm fine.
And people who say that you can do that have not been there.
And if that's a bit of a gauntlet thrown down, cool, I'm ready to fight that fight.
Not like a mean way, I'm just like, have science about this.
Like, amygdala's don't listen to reason, they listen to reactions.
They're very good in the clutch.
You need them in the clutch.
But it's not your fault.
It's not your fault.
And also, once again, exposure things, you'll notice I wasn't smiling, talk about this.
It's reversible.
You can heal from this.
People who've had the worst traumas, like terrible shit that they've gone through.
are able to come back and live entirely full lives by recalibrating their brains
effectively like danger monitoring system and things that felt so threatening before can
start to be totally fine.
I think that I would talk about really quick within this and then I'll shut up is maybe
perhaps you've noticed that I have a beard.
As previously mentioned, I have a relatively tall individual.
I can be a physically triggering presence for somebody even though I'm a big old
sweetheart.
Some people will talk to me and they will get scared and I'm like, what's going on?
And they can struggle to say, you are a man who looks like a person that hurt me once.
And it's not their fault.
And it's not my fault that I'm the shape and size that I am.
I try to be a fun little silly guy, but at the same time, there's just a level of like,
it's a biological instant reaction.
However, if you talk to me on a sustained basis, you will find out that I am kind of like
a harmless dork and your brain will biologically realize that a little slower than it
might.
It's like, cognitively realize that.
Which is why, last piece of exposure therapy lore for now, uh if you engage with exposure
therapy, this is the recommended modality, literally every day if possible.
We know daily goals are very hard, but you do it for two minutes.
You sit with the distressor at a two to three out of 10 for two to five minutes.
You're going to make things that you never thought you could do be possible.
And the people who are housebound that drive for a living now, you can come back from
anything.
It's amazing.
Exposure therapy rules, if done correctly.
All right, end of answer.
Sorry for rambling.
Yeah, it's good.
As you explained that to me, and you kind of talking about the benefits and how anyone can
benefit and almost no tranche, no trauma is unsalvageable.
We can get you back into places you've never been to.
I think about what people's coping strategies have been either in spite of or because they
don't know about exposure therapy or they've never even tried.
Like for instance, one of the most common ones I see.
This coping strategy that people do is actually something that the workforce celebrates.
Like companies love if you have this particular ism, I'm gonna say what it is in just a
moment.
They reward you for it, they give you monetary gain for it, they promote you for it, they
think this is just truly the remarkable, you know, uh trait for people to have.
Yet I know that if someone has this particular trait, it's a response to trauma.
And it's perfectionism.
Like perfectionism to the nth, nth, nth degree.
Now, before I go on, I'm not at all describing someone who just has an attention to
detail.
That's beautiful, that's lovely, we need that.
I'm talking about the person that everything has to literally be perfect before I finish
sending it off.
This is a response to trauma.
Well, I want John to talk a little bit more about this, but I I see it all the time where
companies reward people that are just, God, their attention to detail is so incredible,
their quality is incredible, and yet when I talk to these people who have this trait about
them,
They're anxious.
They're nervous.
They're upset They're they're worried that if something isn't gonna have the thing they
need and they're worried someone's gonna be mad at them or whatever and they just know
that the external world seems to like it when they hyper fixate on this stuff and they and
you know, they they keep going with that pathway and You know, I try to tell them, know,
hey look and the teams that I manage like if anyone on my team has perfectionism or I see
those tendencies I want to pay special attention to you and I want to give whatever way
that I can because I'm not
I'm not licensed to do this.
I would never be try to be an exposure therapist of any kind because I'm not qualified to
do it But give you the opportunity to know that hey, man, you know that that thing that
everyone else is celebrating I'm not quite celebrating that because I want you to be
healthy I want you to know that if you ship out that thing and it's not quite perfect.
That's okay.
I got your back I'll take care of it.
You're fine.
I want you to I'd rather it be 85 % good And then you have a healthy life and you know,
I'm not gonna come down on you But I mean this stuff hits deep John people with these
tendencies.
I mean literally just
sending a brief note of like, can we make this one quick little tweak?
They go, my gosh, I failed.
I should have been perfect.
I should have done this everything in the exact way I should have done.
And I'm like, oh geez, I just wanna give you a big hug, but legally I can't do that
because we work together.
So um I think about that quite a bit.
And I wonder what you say to people that have been coping without this.
Really, really excellent point.
um I would validate too, perfectionism is one of those things you say during job
interviews, well I'm a perfectionist, I gotta do things to the max, because it's one those
kind of good answers.
And once again, I wanna validate what you said too, that if somebody's like, I just really
give a shit about this, I just work really hard at it, that's not perfectionism, that's
just you caring about your stuff, that's pretty cool.
Perfectionism is the first of the things that I will be talking about today called
safety-seeking behaviors.
A safety-seeking behavior has a really nice name, solid marketing from that company.
um
but it's things that are meant to make you feel okay.
Which doesn't sound bad, but here's why it's kinda tricky with the amygdala.
The amygdala, when it's anxious, especially for anxious people, especially people with
OCD, it goes, I can't feel anxious.
Feeling anxious means we're gonna die.
We have to put this fire out.
We can't risk this.
We're gonna fucking die.
But the secret is, you take risks literally constantly.
I'm currently in a building made by people, drinking a product made by people.
I'm gonna...
go get in a car later and drive to see a friend.
uh I could get hit by a car.
This could be poison.
This building could collapse.
My friends here could dox me and sell my personal information to people on the internet.
Like, terrible shit could always happen.
dang it.
On the one hand, it's taken care of now.
um But the other thing is, what you can do is you can take those risks and accept them.
And frankly, when you don't think about it, you mostly can without even any address.
As a person who's been driving since he was 16, and I'm way older than 16 now, 38.
uh
I don't like think about it.
I just get in the car and I'm like, all right, know, check your left, check your right, do
your whole turning thing, turn signal, get some gas, this is our stop.
It's just very boring and mundane to me.
But when I first started driving, this is true, I was 15 at my permit and I backed down
the driveway and I bumped into a trash can.
No harm, no foul, trash can fell over and I was like, fuck this.
I got out of the car and I like, I'm just gonna ride a motorcycle.
I'm not doing this, this is too fucking scary.
And I just couldn't do it, which is hilarious.
Can I drive all the time?
It's not a problem.
The difference is,
That me had one sample test of driving and it was he ran into a thing on his first time.
What an absolute moron.
You're fucked.
You can't do this.
But as I've done it and done it and done it done it and done it and done it and done it
done it done it it.
Hey, come on, camera, it's fine.
It kind of like loses its scariness.
You build your self-efficacy through prior data.
Like, look at all the times I've done it, so now I know I'm um reasonably going to be
effective at doing it.
Yeah.
love efficacy in this house.
All of exposure work is related to efficacy, which we'll talk about later.
But I'll talk about perfectionism.
So Sam brought up a couple of really good examples I wanted to of go little further into.
And these are also examples of actual exposure work I with people.
One of these things is emails.
If you have a job, you probably have sent an email, you probably received an email.
And usually it's a pretty boring thing.
uh I get a bunch every day and I go click, click, click, respond to this one, respond to
that one, delete that one, But if you're sending one and your brain's like,
This person is in charge of our job.
If they don't think we're doing a good enough job, they can fire us.
If they fire us, we'll lose our money.
And if we lose our money, we die.
The brain, amygdala, goes really, really fast and it's like, make the email, good or we
die.
Like it just skips a whole bunch of steps and now your body physically feels like you're
going to die if you do this wrong.
And that's the thing that I want to defend people with anxiety about is like, it does feel
that bad.
Like you're not just like, I'm comfy.
No, you're like terrified.
So what I'll have people do, and if you're at home, you're like, this is too hard, that's
okay.
We can do easier ones.
But I'll have people send an email to their boss, and they'll be like, okay, cool, we'll
get you the Johnson account report on Monday, and you don't put a period after Monday.
Or you put a period for Monday and you don't capitalize Monday.
And this person goes, I can't do this.
And I'll tell you, the number of people I've get fired over this is only like 43 or so.
No, it's zero, it's none.
No one's ever been fired over this.
In fact, I think I've never even had a person have a get mentioned to them.
Another one that I had somebody do their month, other year, time is very slippery to me,
is I had that person go on social media and I had them just like tweet like a letter.
had them roll, like effectively I had like a 26-sided die.
It's not real, it's computer.
But they...
They picked a letter from there they just like tweeted that letter.
And they were like, I'm gonna do it.
Like it just felt really bad.
But the number of people who responded to it were like, I don't know, they were like,
what?
And it was like two people, like nobody cares.
And that's the thing is it's not that we're, okay, all right.
Hello dear observer of this show.
I gotta be really intentional with this one.
Cause this is actually really like kind of a nuanced take.
If I, as your therapist, friend, ally, buddy, podcast guy, human, I'm telling you,
So don't worry, it's not gonna happen.
I'm doing you a massive disservice.
Because what I'll end up doing is routing you right back to perfectionism and saying as
long as you do the best a person can possibly do, no one can be mad at you, you won't
experience consequences.
What I wanna help your brain begin to accept, both logically and exposure-wise, is the
idea that it will probably be fine.
And not because the actual thing is fine, but because you can live with the risk.
I really like being alive.
I really like it.
I like it so much.
I have this mango orange spin-drift.
Feel free to sponsor a spin-drift if you want.
It's so tasty.
I'm gonna go play a tabletop role-playing game later.
I won't tell you which one it is, but there's two Ds involved.
I'm pretty excited about that.
It's gonna be a lot of fun to see my friends.
think we're eating maybe some tacos.
I really hope I don't have a stroke and suddenly die right now.
And if I do, put it on the show, because that'd be fucking insane.
I do, I'm fine.
But I've talked about this people before, and they get really scared.
Because they're like, well, what do I do?
How do I not die?
I could die any time.
And you can.
But most people don't.
And then what you're choosing to say is, I can live with that risk.
And sometimes what will happen when you're doing this work is you will learn that maybe
you need to make some changes so you can live with that risk.
For instance, if you're hanging out in places where people stab you and rob you and stuff,
and you're like, well, I can't trust people here.
Well, you shouldn't.
That's a dangerous place.
But the tricky part is differentiating what's actually a dangerous thing from what your
amygdala telling you is a dangerous thing because it's really tough.
Enter the Billy test.
One of our shorts is about this.
um The Billy test, really quick reminder is you think of a person, we call them Billy, and
you say, what I recommend Billy do this.
So if it's like classic one, you have to call a job company, a job company.
I'm a real person.
You have to call a company you interviewed with and say, hello.
Remember me?
My name is John.
I interviewed for this position.
I to follow up and inquire about the status of my interview.
If you've never done that before, it feels terrible.
It's weird.
Nobody does this.
A of all, they do.
um And B of all, it's going to be fine even if they didn't.
People will be like, that's weird.
And they'll hang up on you.
But your body goes, if I do this wrong, I won't get a job and I won't have money and I'll
die.
So you go ahead and you say, well, would I have Billy call them?
Would Billy die if he did this?
No.
Worst case, they're like, what are you talking about?
And they hang up on
But if it's like, would I have Billy jump off this cliff with no thing?
Would I have Billy get drunk and go to work?
Probably not.
Probably not a great idea.
That's a shout out to a commenter in YouTube, by the way.
feel like it's so much I to say with this.
Quick caveat on this.
This is a cute thing, I think.
So I work very well with a variety of populations.
One of the kinds of people that I work very well with is engineers.
fucking love working with engineers.
They're some of my favorite people I've ever worked with.
They have brilliant high powered brains and they're incredible problem solvers.
And they come to me and my stupid squishy bullshit feelings club.
I'm like, talk about that.
And they struggle with certainty really bad because in their professional realms, they are
literally needing to be sure.
Right?
I can't have a person who's working for say like an airline company be like, does the door
stay on?
Yeah, probably.
Like you need to know.
Yeah, I need that just a bit, a smidge.
Yet I annoying therapist that I am would submit to you you need to probably probably
probably know you don't need to actually know Because if you actually like have to know
for sure what you're doing is perfectionism You should be pretty fucking sure but then
once again, and this is a once again, Nuance moment.
Hello again.
It's me saying a very complex thing.
This is hard right questions about it I want you to say what you need to say
I want me to say what I'm going to say correctly.
Certainty is a feeling, not a body of data, and certain kinds of brains, especially with
certain anxiety disorders, OCD screaming to the top of this list for the record,
generalized anxiety disorder, any anxiety disorder way up here on this list, will say, but
we can't feel certain about this.
And that's really frustrating.
That's the point of exposure work is you become able to feel certain more about things
because they don't fire off the scary death juice from your amygdala as much.
The other thing is you can gauge tests a la with the Billy test and go like, okay, but I
think people can be certain with this.
Not fun me fact, I'm afraid of flying.
There's some Lauren in my family, a member of my family.
He's my grandpa, he's dead, he doesn't care.
He was a pilot.
No, he didn't die from being a pilot, but he was flying.
And he had my dad in the plane, my dad was a little boy.
and the plane lost power midair.
And they're just like free falling and my dad's a child.
He tells me this story, excuse me, he didn't die, he's fine.
But like little me was like, oh no, that's a terrible thing.
And I inherited this fear of flying.
I think my dad is afraid of flying.
I my dad, I don't know, maybe exposure to something.
But like, I just didn't fly very often.
I think the first time I ever flew was like 19.
um So when I go to a plane to this day, my brain's like.
we're gonna die.
Like it just immediately goes right to the terror stuff and I can feel it.
And what really helps me is to look at how bored the airline people are.
Because they're always just like, you've never seen a person being like, put your
seatbelt, here's the thing.
And they're not like, huh, huh.
And if they are, get off the plane, because that's not okay.
But for the grand majority, they're like, here you go, do this thing.
And they're so chill.
The other passengers, with the exception of maybe the one or two other anxious ones, are
just like trying to find their seat and it's too uncalled.
Everyone's bored.
which is a really good gauge for me that maybe my anxiety is going crazy about this, and
it's actually okay.
And as you kind of accumulate experience, like Sam was talking about earlier with the
self-efficacy piece.
So like recently, I had the best night.
I went out for some new friends with sushi.
With sushi, we ate the sushi.
We tricked the sushi into going, we kxxxxx it and ate it.
But on the way there, my brain was like, what if they hate you?
What if they're like, this guy sucks and he can't be our friend.
He's a big, stupid idiot.
Cause I didn't know some of the people.
And spoiler alert, I had a great time.
We're buddies now, it worked out, hooray.
And I knew that it would.
I've been talking for my whole life.
I'm generally a pretty good conversationalist.
It was set to be good experience.
I knew some people there who already liked me, But my brain was like, well, what if you
felt really scared about it?
Boop, and then just started to feel scared.
I did an audio journal in my car, hands-free, don't worry.
And I was like talking it out loud.
And I remember being like, this is annoying because my body is afraid of this and I know
it will be okay.
So sometimes even when you have data that's like, can do it, your amygdala will go, and
it'll be scary, but you can go, you're a fxxxxxx amygdala though.
You're not me.
I can take this risk.
The risk in this case being like, they'll be like, you suck, you have to leave.
That would be awful.
I would feel really bad, but I can take that risk.
So last rant, and then I will stop.
uh If you feel like you can't take that risk.
and it's from an exposure therapy standpoint, cool, we should move down.
We shouldn't do that hard of a thing.
And that's okay.
Something that I think people feel bad about, and I wanna heal this, I wanna take this
from them, is they'll say, I should be further along than this.
That's a garbage narrative.
I didn't make that up for you.
An insurance company might have.
They might have said, you only have X sessions to get Y progress, which for the record is
absolutely garbage and not made for therapists who are doing that.
I have a lot of takes about this.
They're very spicy.
But.
um
Progress comes at the speed that it comes, right?
Perhaps if you do X, Y, and Z, you could go a little faster, great, cool.
That's not relevant.
And if you listened really carefully there, you might've heard it was perfectionism.
Because it was.
The fastest progress possible is perfect.
You don't have to do that.
Sustainable trumps perfection every single time.
Small exposures work.
um So, that is the end.
No, there's one last piece.
I say that like three times in a row.
I'm a devious liar and I apologize, but it's about the engineers from before.
I wanted to address this.
This is so cute.
This is so fun.
I love this so much.
I'll work with these people who finish college at the top of their class.
They're genuinely elite.
They have fancy degrees from fancy places and they're going to go work at a fancy job and
make pretty damn good money.
And they start going there and they have a really friendly manager and they have great
senior people around who are teaching them.
And then they have a project.
from a big fancy name company.
I don't know, like you're Microsoft, you're Boeing, you're whatever, like something like a
big thing.
And then the company's like, we'll need the prototype by Tuesday.
And they're like, we just got this project last week, we can't possibly do this.
What's gonna happen?
And they have this reflexive inward, I'm not good enough.
And then they learn about business.
Because that's not what happens at all.
What happens is you go, my gosh, we're so sorry, we hope to get you that by this time, da
da da.
And there's this whole soft skill set that these people who are really.
amazing in their fields have to learn by getting hit in the face with it because they're
like, but they keep saying to do this and you don't do this.
You do what you can do and you accept those consequences because that's all you can do and
it's okay.
And I also want to just like low key normalize everybody who goes into businesses on this
ride at some point.
I've been on that, right?
You to get your numbers up, John.
Okay, I'll try.
And as soon as you're doing that value card and effort, you're doing enough.
That's not me being cheesy.
That's me telling your amygdala there isn't there is and this is true.
There's no benefit in psyching yourself up unless you have to physically fight or
physically run from something.
You do not need extra athletic prowess to handle anything at work.
Anxiety is not helping you.
The notion of I should be more worried about this inherently wrong.
Inherently wrong.
Worrying serves no purpose.
Worrying gets you amped to do combat stuff.
If we're not doing combat stuff, it's literally not good for you at all.
Also to my business people, it is a recurring theme.
People are taught this, so they do it all the time, so don't feel bad.
Project managers often make projections that they are only 60 % confident they'll make.
They're only 60 % confident, so when a projection fails because of a deadline you didn't
sign up for because you had to deliver on something, it's their job to do the song and
dance of apologizing to the external customer, and that's part of their training, it's
what they do.
So yeah, don't feel bad about that either.
And I would add on that because there's a, it is insane.
It is insane.
There's a, there's another, there's a, it's a accidentally occurring phenomenon you see
all the time.
And I'm sure Sam, you've seen this before where people who are younger in the field will
see the people who are older in the field, hear the scary data.
And they're like, like fine.
But they're just like chilling.
And then people's like, Oh, why are they confident about this?
We are not going to be able to do that at all.
Am I dumb?
And we go back and we reflect on ourselves.
And what I would offer, and this is like a way too broad way to say this, is this is a
institutionalized macro work culture.
This is like, we have to swing for the fences and promise perfection because that's what
we do.
That's not what actually happens though.
It's all just smoke and mirrors.
And this is true across every field.
I mean, I brought up engineering, right?
But like, one of cool parts of my job, frankly, one of the coolest, coolest parts of being
a therapist.
is all of your worries about like, what does everybody else do?
Am I normal?
You get to learn that.
I know so many people on a close level and we're all the same.
We're all different.
We all have our own unique idiosyncrasies and all kinds of fun stuff, but like everybody's
trying.
Nobody knows what they're doing.
They all kind of do.
And frankly, they all kind of really do, just not to the degree that they expect to
because that degree is perfect.
yeah.
Well, John, I was gonna ask you another one question, but you kind of ended on such a
beautiful note.
I think it's important that we reflect on this.
You brought up business and you brought up this theme of like, sometimes the brain
over-engineers things, not by any fault of anything, but we have a really, we do a good
job of that.
And I'd like to end our note by reminding ourselves of the fisherman and the businessman
story.
Are you familiar with this one?
It's an old tale.
Let me just recite it for everyone.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
And as he sat, he saw Brazilian fishermen rowing a small boat towards the shore, having
caught quite a few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, how long does it take you to catch
so many fish?
The fisherman replied, oh, just a short while.
Oh, then why don't you stay longer in the sea and catch even more?
The businessman was astonished.
There's enough to feed my whole family, the fisherman said.
The businessman then said, so,
What do you do for the rest of the day?
And the fisherman replied, well, I usually wake up early in the morning and go out to sea
and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids.
In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife.
And evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink.
We play guitar, sing, dance throughout the night.
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
I'm a PhD in business management.
I could help you to become a more successful person.
From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible.
When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish.
Soon you'll be able to afford to buy more boats to set up your own company, your own
production plant for canned food and distribution network.
The fisherman continues.
And after that.
The businessman laughs heartily and says, that, you can live like a king in your own
house.
And when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the stock exchange
and you'll be rich.
And the fisherman asks, and after that, the businessman says, well, after that, you can
finally retire.
You can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few
fish, then return home to play with the kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife.
And when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink and play the guitar, sing
and dance throughout the night.
The fisherman was puzzled.
Isn't that what I'm already
That's a good one.
That's a good one.
We have a really good propensity of over-engineering things.
We have a really good propensity of making people rush, hurry up and wait for no reason.
So anyone feeling anxiety about anything they're going through, I hear you and I see you.
The good ones, and hopefully I'm one of the good ones, hopefully John's one of the good
ones, I think Daniel's one of the good ones, we see you and hear you, and we'll do
whatever we can to help you out.
uh But if exposure therapy is something that you want to explore, there are wonderful
professionals that can help you out with that.
uh I'm excited by the fact that it exists, John.
I do a quick plug on this, right?
So quick shout out to the homies who are therapists that are watching this.
If you are not included in this group, please know that I adore you and respect you and
I'm not knocking you, that's not a thing, okay?
um So like therapists, when you come out the factory, you come out with one of several
degrees, several licenses, you've got your psychologists, your social workers, your LMFTs,
marriage and family therapists, um you've got your counselors, which are the best one,
just in case we need to pause on that.
And then there's a couple other things too.
There's different tiers of licensure in different states.
We'll about how find a therapist to start with you another time.
It's actually really a pain in the ass because it's different names per state.
But the point being, what you want to look for is someone who is trained in ERP if you're
looking for exposure work.
ERP is a simple...
Yeah, I was hoping someone would take that chance.
Yeah
The therapist community and the terrible internet acronym community are 100 % the same.
I personally do ERP and CBT.
Let's take a moment.
Note that I do those professionally.
So what they are in my case is exposure and response prevention, which we'll be talking
about today.
And there is more to say on this for the record, so maybe we'll do a little more that
later.
um But in cognitive behavioral therapy, which is just like fucking therapy at this point,
it's kind of the gold standard.
I also do acceptance and commitment therapy, AKA ACT, which you really should be trained
in if you're gonna do ERP, just to be honest with you.
It's like a huge part of accepting what you can't do.
Anyway, but the main thing I wanna get to you is,
You want someone who's trained in ERP.
Now have a personal bias that I think the best ERP training available comes from IOCD.
So you want somebody who has an IOCD certification after their name.
And this is okay.
I feel like I'm slightly inflammatory with this.
I really don't want to be, but I also just care about people.
So if you go to somebody and you're doing exposure therapy and you're leaving feeling
scared more often than not, that's not exposure therapy.
If someone doesn't have a certification from IOCD, frankly, they could be so good at it,
but you're kind of chancing it.
I used to do exposure therapy.
So this is what happened.
had a colleague, name was Dr.
Lisa Conway.
If you ever watched Dr.
Lisa Conway, you're the fucking best.
Lisa Conway shaped my life.
She rules.
She is one of the best I've ever met.
But she was like, I'm abandoning you.
And I was like, rude.
And then she gave me a ton of her case.
I was like, a little less rude.
What do you do?
And she was like, oh, I treat mostly OCD.
And I was like, OK, I'm new.
How does that work?
And she gave me a very quick rundown on this.
And I did OK.
I did fine.
And then I got the training at her suggestion.
And I did much better.
because having the knowledge of how to do this and formulate these treatment plans is a
big fucking deal.
And I think that if you have had bad exposure therapy experiences, I want to first of all,
I'm sorry, that sucks.
That happens.
People who don't calibrate this well, it can be kind of shitty.
But exposure therapy should feel, in my opinion, lightly heroic.
You should feel like you're going on a little bit of a quest and you're knocking some shit
out and then you're a little bit stronger afterward.
Eventually, if you get a lot of it, which I have,
you start to like look forward to it.
So I'm like pretty confident about a lot of things.
Not driving based things we picked up on earlier.
So a while ago had a friend at the airport and I didn't remember quite when he was going
get in but what I chose to do was just go to the airport and just drive around in airport
bullshit for a while on purpose just to help my brain be like we're going to just sit with
this because I would recommend Billy do this.
I would say not should Billy just drive around an airport but I was like would Billy would
it be dangerous for him to go to an airport should he never go people from airport well of
course not that's fine he can go to people it's not a big deal.
so could label it as a value-accordant risk.
And I wanted to do it because my values say, pick up your friend to show him compassion
and gentleness.
So I did.
And it felt great.
And guess who's way less scared of that now?
Me.
To be clear, he's talking about Billy, Billy Lee from Double Dragon.
Jimmy can go screw himself, but Billy's doing great.
out the belly.
um But in general, like once this is like a really cool thing.
I love this.
Sometimes you'll have folks who come to work with you for exposure therapy and like day
one, day one is this by the way, you're getting kind of a freebie here.
This is not therapy.
This is not constitute therapy.
Importantly goes, um but it's a lot of the same knowledge.
And then day two through whatever is like trying to find ways to apply that to a person's
individual, like things they want to work on, which is called a value hierarchy or now
they say menu or now they have an eye.
It doesn't matter, but it's just a list of things you want to conquer and how hard they
are.
Sidebar, really quick mention on that.
When we go through these with you, when I, a good therapist, go through these, I wanna
talk about something you can't do.
If you're afraid of small spaces, but you're like, really want to go to my nephew's tree
house and go up in the little tiny thing, and you're like, that's a 10 though, I can't do
it, sick.
I still wanna write it down, because what I wanna do is watch, as you've been doing with
the elevator one, the parked car one, you'll see it move from a 10 to a nine, and a nine
to a seven.
And things start to feel possible that weren't before.
And it's a fun therapy because it's super fucking crunchy.
As long as you're doing it and tailoring the exposure to your experiences so it's not
harder than that two to three, maybe a four, you get crazy benefit super consistently.
It's not a lot of whole like deep digging or hard super cerebral crap.
It's just really, really powerful.
I think I had another point.
I'll probably get back to it later.
I'm super passionate about this.
I hope you can tell.
I get it.
I have a feeling we'll talk about this for quite a few more times, but I wanted to have
that quick little introductory section about exposure therapy.
uh Because I know there's a lot of key takeaways about it on my field as well, so I
appreciate your insight on that, John.
Yeah?
Yeah.
ever so briefly reiterate, because it is actually really important to me.
Once again, if a regular old therapist is like, we can do exposure work, ask them what
they know about ERP before you start.
Also, fun fact, all of my colleagues learn about ERP because I talk about it all the time.
It's a trending thing right now.
It's very effective.
It's very crunchy.
But if someone doesn't know what it is, any good therapist should be comfortable referring
you to another therapist that does especially that they don't.
Anyone who doesn't do that is criminal.
So don't.
And like, it's okay if they're like, they try to talk about it with you and you, like,
they're not like doing a crime immediately, but if someone's doing a thing that's not
helping you, it's maybe because they haven't learned how to do it.
So ask them, see if they do.
yeah.
Well, definitely one of our future episodes is definitely going to be about the criminals
of our industry.
There's many in mine.
There's many in yours and how to detect them and how to stay away and all that good stuff.
But Daniel, what do you got for us since we just did a nice little seg into that?
I wanna play a little game.
All right.
The game is, the point of the game is, as I said earlier, I'm very passionate about making
sure that people know sharks are okay.
Sharks are fine.
So this isn't necessarily related to our topic, but we did mention sharks and I really
think that this should be fun for us.
So I'm gonna post some things to you and I want you to tell me what you think is.
More dangerous.
What has killed more people.
I want to give you some shark myths, maybe some ones that are true.
I want you to try and work out what's going on.
What is what?
What is responsible for more human deaths per year?
Sharks?
Scary.
Predatory.
Evil, some might say.
Or cows.
It's gotta be cows.
As an American Midwestern, it's gotta be cows.
I'm sure of it, it's cows.
midwesterner, you are correct, You are correct.
It is cows.
uh Cows, whether that is through kicking, from them toppling over on top of people,
various different things, cows kill far more people than sharks ever do.
What kills more people?
What is more likely to happen to you?
getting bit by a shark, getting struck by lightning.
I'm pretty sure I've heard this and I'm pretty sure it is in fact lightning.
Is that real?
Is that true?
That's crazy.
You are more likely to be struck by lightning than to be attacked by a shark.
Let's have a look at some other fun facts.
Let's see.
hand logically it's like that makes sense because you know we us as human beings we're on
land and sharks are in the ocean so we're very just we're apart right but uh there's a
part of the brain that's going no but they're scary they're gonna kill you
yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sharks or deer?
OHHHH
Does it count if I drive into the deer?
you know deer?
So this is relevant, the whole driving into a deer.
So essentially, you know, deer, those things that you see them in the woods and you're
just like, look, a deer!
And it notices you and it goes arm out of here.
See you later.
What kills more people, deer or sharks?
Again, you think sharks, but I also, grew up in an area in Philadelphia that is filled
with deer.
In fact, it's called Bucks County.
Buck is not a name for deer.
And those deer can be either because they can't see you and they're just in a blind rage,
just going in a direction, or sometimes they do get a the expression rammy.
Yeah, I could, it's hard to believe, but I think deer.
You'll notice a recurring pattern here.
It's the deer.
So most likely, uh the most likely cause of people uh passing away, dying due to being
involved with a deer is hitting one with your vehicle and being in a car accident.
So not, you know, a deer biting you or anything or chomping down on you like a, like a
scary predator.
So also some of the things that kill more people, accidental poisoning.
falling.
Hospital infections.
coconuts.
Lovely bunch of coconuts.
Champagne corks, just the popping of the cork.
Champagne corks responsible for approximately 24 deaths per year in France.
Yes.
Yeah.
It's a lot of people.
It's a lot of people.
So Jaws admittedly as a film did not help shark's case.
They really, really did not help them whatsoever.
They are not vicious predators in terms of humans.
They do not see us as prey.
They do not see us as a threat.
They do not see us and intentionally bite people, attack people.
You've probably heard that the only reason that they attack people, attack, is if it's a
surfer, maybe from below, it looks a bit like a seal or something like that, that's on the
surface.
That's the only reason.
That's literally the only reason.
And if you think about it,
It's the whole thing of shark-infested waters.
Those waters aren't infested with sharks.
That's their house, dude.
That's their home.
You wouldn't say that this house is a human infested house.
That's where they live.
That is where they live and they are just trying to go about their day and they don't want
anything to do with you.
So to say shark infested waters is horrible.
all these different things that we interact with on a daily basis or perhaps don't
interact with on a daily basis such as coconut trees kill far more people than sharks they
are massively important for the ecosystems they are wonderful creatures fascinating
creatures they have got do you know they're older than trees
Some of them, yeah, yeah.
makes sense, because they come from the sea and the sea beats the tree.
That's what they taught us in school.
trees.
so doesn't.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Makes sense.
sharks, a thing have been around for longer than trees.
They are fascinating, wonderful creatures.
And thankfully shark attacks are on the decline.
They're on the decline.
They are getting lower.
I'm probably misremembering this, so there's the classic example of the James Bond film
Thunderball, where James Bond is in the water and he puts blood in the ocean and that
attracts the shark and he's able to attack the vicious, terrible shark that's killing
people.
And Mythbusters did a video on this where they got someone into a cage and into a place
where the law sharks and they put blood in the area.
And it did attract the shark, but it didn't make the shark want to attack.
It just attracted it, and then the shark just kind of went about its way, if I recall
correctly.
ah So.
So, just something that was tangentially related to what we were speaking about earlier on
in the show, but I just, I'm-
said this before.
That's the one you know, Indiana Jones is afraid of snakes.
It's the one thing sharks.
That's the one thing because I've actually head butted into a shark underwater.
Literally right there.
And I panicked.
I was OK.
And I gave me a boop.
And then one time I was on the beach and there was an actual shark attack and someone had
gotten they were visually being thrown about.
We had to get them.
You know, it was a thing.
So I do have that visceral fear, right?
But that helps, it helps to just know context-wise, like whatever, it's okay.
Yes, it's just something I'm very passionate about.
I am very against the misrepresentation and the labelling of animals as villains and you
know, it's always, they've got an intent to kill and attack and stuff like that.
No, no.
species.
Like they're afraid of us.
They're running away from us.
just leave them alone.
Just leave them.
Yeah, please, please seek.
And they do kill us, not saying anyone dead, but if they did kill us, you we probably have
it coming.
Just saying.
We probably do.
But I'd just ask that you
Seek to understand not only animals that are misrepresented, anything that you think may
have been sensationalized a little bit too much.
And that's the root of the fear.
Seek to understand it.
Obviously.
Just wanted to put that out there, put some good shark vibes out there.
And it's not even shark week.
Look at me.
Look at me making my own shark week.
at you're making your own sharkweed.
it's always Shark Week for some people.
know, I'm here to celebrate.
always, it's shark year every year.
I love those guys.
eh I just wanted to draw attention.
Viewer, listener, you already know this, but the way that Daniel says shark is great.
It makes me feel so happy about sharks.
If sharks were said by a British person more often, I'd be less afraid of them.
That's just a fact.
They just sound great when they're said that way, so.
All right, folks, well, that's been our show this week here at the Zero Dot Podcast.
It's been a pleasure having you.
Hopefully you had the pleasure of listening to us in your ear holes, speaking only as an
advocate for the listeners, not the viewers.
You can find us on thezerodotpodcast.com.
You can always find us where podcasts are streamed.
They're all over the place, and Amazon, Apple, YouTube, our RSS feed.
No, our RSS feed.
You got it.
it in one, got it in one.
Got it in one.
And we'll see you next time.
Hopefully there's no sharks in your waters.
Or if they are, give them a hug.
They deserve it.
Yeah.
Bye bye.