We Can Do Hard Things

And her bestselling book, Mating in Captivity and State of Affairs, both of which rocked my worlds, are global phenomena translated into nearly 30 languages.

And the reason why we liked it was because it was helpful, but also because the authors who are friends of this pod, Emily Nagoski, who wrote come as you are and her sister, who is also an author, Amelia Nagoski, they are just kind of the antidote to like the self-help or self care that there's no suggestion of we can just fix, you know, Burnout with a candle or a bath or a manicure.

So the book is Burnout, the secret to unlocking the stress cycle.

You all should really pick up their book, Burnout.

And the Come As You Are workbook and the co-author with her sister Amelia of New York Times bestseller Burnout, The Secret to Unlocking The Stress Cycle.

By the way, I want to say, Emily, that I did not know you wrote that freaking book and I read it twice last year. I didn't know that you wrote it. Oh my gosh. And with your sister. It's so good you all need to get Burnout.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller, Wilde, from lost to found, on the Pacific Crest Trail,

which has sold more than 4 million copies worldwide and was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Reese Witherspoon.

I'm a big fan of the five love languages, but listening to the podcast and something that sister said really made me re-evaluate it.

And it's talking about the ticker, you know, as a man, I grew up reading and understanding that the greatest act of service I could do for my spouse was to vacuum the rug and clean the bathroom, which I now know is just complete horseshit.

I'm reading a book right now. And a line in the book says, my wife's love language is acts of service. One of the things I do for her regularly as an act of love is vacuuming the floor.

Like this is what I was taught. And this is so offensive now because of the three of you. And thank you for that.

I now know that the greatest act of service is not doing things on the ticker list. It's actually seeing the ticker list.

What was it called? The Five Love Languages or something?

It was 1992 book and his idea is that everyone has preferences about how they would like to give and receive love.

So there's a preferred language that everyone speaks and it's either gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch or acts of service.

And the point is that that's how they express their love and that good partners, successful partners will take the time to figure out how to express their love in a way that translates to their partner's language.

It's so interesting when one of these books by a conservative fundamentalist type Christian pastor, which is what this man is, kind of leaks out into the general population.

I'm reading a book right now and a line in the book says, my wife's love language is acts of service. One of the things I do for her regularly as an act of love is vacuuming the floor.

I write Dare to Lead and Dare to Lead has been a really big book. But so many people in the beginning said, it's like women write, women read leadership books by men and women. Men read leadership books by men.

I read the entire thing. I told Abby as you. I read it as you, sister.

I'll read it if you read it.

What's interesting about codependency no more is I read it 20 years ago and it's totally different now.

Codependencies have shifted in many ways.

So those of us who are also laughing unknowingly with Jen might be able to dig a little bit.

She said, number one, you need to take absolute radical care of your body. Radical. Like this is your number one priority.

She told me, which I talked to you guys about this last time, but she was like, right. The second you're going to order the book, Codependent No More by Melody Betty.

And that's going to be your Bible. And that's what you're going to read. And that's, that's what you're going to start filling your brain with.

Get the book Codependent No More. Yes. Melody Beatty. Yeah. We have several copies. There are like six of them here.

It's just like part of the care package you get sent.

Yes, but it's Codependent Forevermore is what we call it.

We're back with Fun Expert, and author of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again, Catherine Price, to talk even more about fun, what it is, what it has the potential to be in our lives, and how to have it.

Catherine Price is the author of The Power of Fun, How to Feel Alive Again.

I distinctly remember listening to that episode that you guys did about fun in 2021, walking on a road in New Jersey and thinking, I want to talk to them about fun. So this is really full circle. I'm very excited.

I just thought fun was a fad. I thought it was going to pass. I knew this book was big, but I thought fun was just going to be the thing of the year and then we could just get on with it.

No. But no, it turns out fun is a fundamental thing. I like what you did there.

I feel like my evolution from that because I feel like the analogy is like Abby lives in fun. That's where she lives. Her address is like 555 Fun and Glennon visits fun. She knows where it is and she visits it. And I read about fun in a travel book and I'm like, that looks interesting.

She's she's more recently gotten obsessed with fun. She has this lovely book called The Power of Fun. And, you know, she's really tried to take this like empirical approach to like, what is fun? What do we get wrong? And how can you build more of it into your life?

But if you look at the research, as Catherine reviews this in such a lovely way in her book, what she finds is like, actually, if you put in more fun, it makes the productivity part better.

I felt like I couldn't have a thought and that I was like everyone was upset for very obvious reasons, but I felt like I couldn't even articulate what I wanted, how I felt or what I wanted to mourn or whatever.

It's like a place that capitalism might deem worthless. Right?

And it's like an end in itself. It's not a means to another end.

It's sort of like, I don't think that, you know, just learning to see things differently is the answer or the end of that sort of journey. Right? But it is, I think, a really important preliminary step of sort of like, okay, everything looks different and now you look around.

It's like paying attention to what? I used to become morbidly fascinated with how I would look when I was on social media, around the time that I wrote How to Do Nothing.

It's about this tree and there's this tree. It's like the single standing tree in this park in California somewhere. And the reason it's still standing is because when they came to cut down all the trees to use them for lumber, this tree was so twisty and weird and weak looking that they didn't take it down.

So what I'm doing right now is I'm rereading for, I think it might be the third time, this book that changes my life over and over again each time I read it because it's so dense that there's so much more I get from it. And it's called How to Do Nothing and it's by Jenny O'Dell.

This book, I think it's what everybody needs because it's about resisting the attention economy, which basically means that we are all living these less than human lives because we are constantly giving all we have to really give to life in this one wild and precious life we have is our attention, what we're paying attention to.

And the world has tricked us into paying attention to these little screens and these hot takes on everything and this angst and terror and fear and division through these little screens.

And really it's not benefiting us in any way, it's only benefiting like a very few social media companies. And so basically we've all been bamboozled and because we are choosing and have become addicted to paying attention to this other thing, we are missing real life, which is so beautiful and much less horrific and scary in many ways to be connected to the moment and to the human beings and to the place that we're in.

It's so good, y'all, it's so good.

Logan Ury is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach and the author of the bestselling dating book, How to Not Die Alone, the surprising science that will help you find love.

She is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach and the author of the bestselling dating book, How to Not Die Alone. The surprising science that will help you find love.

There's a chapter in my book called Fuck the Spark, but it's sort of taken on a life of its own and kind of become this motto.

She is a behavioral scientist turned dating coach and the author of the bestselling dating book, How to Not Die Alone. The surprising science that will help you find love.

There's a chapter in my book called 'Fuck the Spark', but it's sort of taken on a life of its own and kind of become this motto.

I know that you have in your possession, The Journey Toward Wholeness.

I love that at the end of every chapter, there's a things to do and it's just like a lit. It's so good. Very concrete and efficient.

So that you have enough space to bring up your repressed center.

So I want to separate those.

honestly, the best way you can love one another better is to agree that each of you is going to go to The Journey Toward Wholeness and pick out two things, just two that you're going to work on and share it with the other two and say, I'm asking you to hold my feet to the fire to see to it that I do these too.

and the best-selling collection Brave Enough.

as well as the bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, I know, and Torch.

Jen Hatmaker is the New York Times bestselling author of For the Love and Fierce, Free and Full of Fire along with 12 other books.

Jen Hatmaker is the New York Times bestselling author of For the Love and Fierce, Free and Full of Fire along with 12 other books.

When my life was new, I understood in my bones how little it mattered what anybody else was doing or what they thought about what I was doing. I believed my bones then.

Do me a favor, Ashley, when you write about you and me, just tell the truth, your truth. Don't worry about nobody's feelings, especially not mine.

You got to be tough to tell your truth. But it's the only thing worth doing next to loving somebody.

We won't be okay unless we talk about what hurts.

I could not make that feel right.

And then her freaking blockbuster, insanely beautiful memoir, Somebody's Daughter came out.

She's just been through some shit and she has dealt with it all head on and she has no secrets, no shame, no denial.

She's done the work and it just shows she's joyful, deeply kind, brilliant.

And she's the New York Times bestselling memoirist. She wrote Somebody's Daughter, which was published by Flatiron Books in June, 2021.

I love the parts in the book about how reading was like church to you.

J.D. Vance is the preferred candidate of the Biden campaign.

J.D. Vance is against abortion, even in the case of rape. He only makes an exception for the life of the mother.

He is, you know, has very conservative, or far-right positions on, Jen is against gender-affirming care.

He wants to strip language that's LGBTQ and, you know, sort of female-friendly, from a lot of our government policies. I mean, I could go on.

He's anti-IVF. He has suggested that we should get rid of no-fault divorces. He is, I mean, it's it's like turning back the clock in a very dramatic way.

So JD Vance writes Hillbilly Elegy.

He's at Yale, Peter Thiel is there. He meets him. Can you tell us who Peter Thiel is first of all?

But the first company that executive is on record saying that he gave Vance the job as a favor to Peter.

Well, it was a bad movie, but you know, the LA people, the New York people, all were like terrible making fun of this movie.

And that that coincided very closely with his 'I am anti-elites. I hate...' it was almost like a 'you made fun of me.'

And this wild thing happened, which is that I started opening a huge box of books and it was full of Rumi and Hafiz and Neruda and Eckhart Tolle and freaking The Case for Christ, I'll never forget opening.

we recently had probably our biggest guest of all time, we had Eckhart Tolle on our podcast and, and we got some shit from our audience, but they were like, I thought this was a safe space.

People often equate spirituality with culty. Right? Especially if they've been in a spiritual group, there's lots of overlap and the words sound the same.

I never said that he's the way or like, this is the only way. I'm like, this is a book that was helpful for me and my healing at the time.

He's an expert in the field of spirituality with billions of books sold.

I was reading this book called Sam. It's this new novel. I think it's freaking beautiful, but it is all from the consciousness of a girl child all the way from time she's four and now she's like 17.

And by the way, nothing happens in the whole book. But everything happens because it's just her life.

I was reading this book called Sam. It's this new novel. I think it's freaking beautiful, but it is all from the consciousness of a girl child all the way from time she's four and now she's like 17.

And by the way, nothing happens in the whole book. But everything happens because it's just her life.

And I was like, thank you universe for letting me read this during this time.

Maya Angelou, who of course wrote, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

People are comparing it to I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which I'm sure is just no big deal for you at all, right Tarana?

For years, you thought that the assault on you wasn't something that someone did to you or even, even something that happened to anyone else. And then one day you snuck Maya Angelou's I Know Where the Caged Bird Sings from your mother's collection.

When I read about what happened to a young Maya Angelou, I was able to read her as innocent in a way I didn't allow for myself.

That was in and around the same time that I was reading Susan Cain's book Quiet because Becky Sauerbrunn was also on the team and she's like this raging introvert.

Susan Cain, I have invited you here to connect our bittersweet pod squatters to the storied tradition of bittersweetness to tell them that they are not alone and that perhaps they were in fact made for just such a time as this.

Is the author of the bestsellers Quiet, Quiet journal, Quiet power, the secret strengths of introverts and Quiet the power of introverts in a world that can't stop talking.

A lot of people listening discovered Susan from the book Quiet, which was about introverts, which really helped me understand myself deeply.