The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

Heal from Toxic Relationships with Psychotherapist Shannon Petrovitch

In this episode, psychotherapist Shannon Petrovich explains the difference between love and attachment, and why so many people stay in toxic relationships without realizing they're trauma-bonded rather than in love. KEY TAKEAWAYS: • Love is built on trust, respect, and mutual growth. Attachment is survival—rooted in trauma and fear. • When you're in fight-or-flight mode, you don't have access to your logical mind. You need to calm down your emotional system first. • Toxic partners isolate you through microaggressions and control—cutting you off from friends and family. • Before you walk away, do the inside work: journal what happened, process it with a professional, rebuild your sense of self. • Boundaries work both ways: they either save the relationship or give you the clarity to leave. Either way, you win. • People-pleasers and peacekeepers sabotage their own relationships by not showing up fully. • Setting boundaries doesn't mean cutting people off—it means saying "I won't live with this behavior anymore" and seeing how they respond. THERAPEUTIC STRATEGIES DISCUSSED: • CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) — retraining thought patterns • EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) — processing trauma through bilateral stimulation • DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) — includes grounding and self-calming skills for trauma survivors RESOURCES: Shannon's Website: therapistalks.com Book: "Out of the Fog into the Clear" (Amazon) Video Masterclasses: Available through therapistalks.com Coaching & Counseling: Licensed in select states; coaching available nationwide Find Shannon on PodMatch for guest appearances ABOUT SHANNON PETRoVICH: Shannon is a psychotherapist specializing in trauma-informed therapy. She works with clients in toxic relationships, helping them distinguish between love and attachment, set healthy boundaries, and do the inside work required for real change. CONNECT: https://www.therapisttalks.com/ John Passadino on PodMatch and on https://johnpwrites.com

38 Books, One Teenager, and a Trilogy About Clones

I get a lot of guests on Lens of Hopefulness who found self-improvement later in life — as adults, sometimes as retired adults, like me. So, when I got to sit down with Shanti Hershenson, I was genuinely excited, because here’s someone who found her purpose before she could even legally drive. Shanti has written 38 books. She’s published 22 of them, with number 23 on the way by the time this episode is out. And she’s about to head off to Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. I wanted to know how someone gets that much work done, that young, in a world absolutely stuffed with distractions — and what she’s learned along the way that the rest of us could use. Finding Purpose Early Shanti told me she’s never really doubted that writing would be her life. This is what she wanted to do as a kid, and it’s what she wants to do now. “This is what I wanted to do when I was a kid, it’s what I want to do now, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.” She’s in good company. She pointed out that S.E. Hinton was sixteen when she published The Outsiders, and Christopher Paolini was fifteen when he wrote the first Eragon book. So, a young author with a clear sense of direction isn’t unheard of — but doing it in this generation, with this much noise competing for her attention, is its own kind of feat. The Discipline Behind the Words I asked how she manages to write so much with a phone full of apps sitting right next to her — because I have that same phone, and I know how it goes. Her answer was refreshingly honest. She’s not immune to it. “One thing I do is that I have a goal, and I have to write a thousand words every single day. I have been doing this since I was in seventh grade. Not writing a thousand words is not an option.” She admitted she still catches herself two hundred words in, ready to scroll. Her fix is noticing the pattern and talking herself back: finish the writing first, then the scrolling will feel good, because it’s not standing between her and something she still owes herself. This connected for me to something I read years ago in M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled — his idea that so much of what troubles us as a society comes down to wanting immediate gratification instead of delayed gratification. Shanti described her writing sessions almost like a meditation — noise-cancelling headphones on, everything else locked out, fully present with the work and the characters she’s built. That’s not so different from what I feel when I’m on-stage improvising or lost in a scene. You disappear into it. Family, Environment, and Finding Your Footing I asked where the discipline came from — school, family, something else. Shanti said part of it was simply natural, an obsession with writing and creating for as long as she can remember. But she also said her family has been supportive without that support directly explaining her output. What shapes her work more, she said, is the environment she lives in — real events, things she’s seen and felt, opinions she holds, all filtering into even her more fantastical stories. We talked a bit about how tough the teenage years can be for anyone trying to find their own independence. I shared that I didn’t really find mine until later, and that I drifted for a while into a crowd that experimented with drinking — something that, thankfully, never took hold in me. What did help, looking back at raising my own two sons, was giving kids as many outlets as they can handle. One of my boys found music and never stopped; the other found a camera in his hand young and became a professional videographer. Shanti’s experience, and the response she gets from other young people telling her they’re inspired to write too, felt like a good example of what happens when a kid finds that outlet early and it actually sticks. On Being a “Pantser” and the New Book Her twenty-third book, Wolfgang One, is the start of a planned trilogy. It imagines a society where everyone is cloned from an important historical figure and raised from birth to live up to that person’s legacy. The main character is a clone of Wolfgang Mozart, on the edge of adulthood, when a DNA test turns up something that sends him spiraling. As a fellow author, I wanted to know her process — plotter or pantser (A person who writes by the seat of their pants!), in the language we use in the Long Island Authors Group I sit on the board of. She’s mostly a pantser. “I do actually have a whiteboard in my room, but I haven’t touched it in like two years. I’m definitely — I’ve always been a little bit more of a pantser.” She’s not a pure one, though. She keeps bullet points and loose paragraphs of what needs to happen next, and by the halfway point of most books, she knows exactly where the rest of the story is going. It’s a process a lot of working authors will recognize — start loose, tighten as you go. AI, Authenticity, and What a Computer Can’t Do This was the part of the conversation I most wanted to have with her, since she’s coming up in a generation where AI in college and in writing is simply there, all the time, whether anyone likes it or not. I told her about a short story class I taught, where I asked an AI tool to outline a three-act structure just to demonstrate what it could do — and it offered, unprompted, to just write the whole thing for me. I asked why she doesn’t take that shortcut, given how much time it would save her. “So much of what I enjoy about writing is the process itself. I love sitting down every day, I love having my little cold drinks, my coffees, and just writing... So much of writing is relaying my own personal experience, and how deep down I have felt about certain things, and I just don’t feel like a computer can properly convey that.” That tracked with something I feel as an actor. When I’ve had to play a scene rooted in real loss, I’ve pulled from what I felt like when my own father passed away, and I had to play a scene about grief, and so I put that experience into the character. No tool replicates lived experience — it can only approximate it. Shanti and I agreed AI is a legitimate research tool and it isn’t going anywhere, but we agreed the writing it produces tends to come out oddly careful, almost afraid to commit to anything sharp or specific. There’s a place for it. It’s just not the place where the actual voice lives. Lessons Worth Sitting With ● Purpose found early doesn’t need to be rare — it needs room to grow. Give kids outlets, plural, and let them find the one that sticks. ● Discipline beats inspiration. A thousand words a day, kept since seventh grade, will outproduce waiting to feel like writing. ● Getting lost in the work — writing, acting, whatever your version is — is its own reward, and it’s the thing that no shortcut can replace. ● Structure and freedom aren’t opposites. You can start as a “pantser” and still end up with a story that holds together. ● AI can save you time on research and logistics. It can’t hand you your own voice, and it shouldn’t be asked to. Where to Find Shanti Shanti’s books span several series — including the Bio Gnome series, the Eris and Rest duology, Little Green Man, and the new Wolfgang One trilogy — and are available on Amazon in Kindle, paperback, and some hardcover editions, with several titles on Kindle Unlimited. You can find all of them, along with her newsletter and event schedule, at shantihershenson.com, and she’s active on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms if you want to follow her work as she heads off to college this fall. Listen to the Full Conversation There’s a lot more in the full episode — including how Shanti approaches cover design, her thoughts on adapting novels into film versus screenplays, and where she sees herself five years from now. Lens of Hopefulness podcast...

His Daughter Asked Him What Depression Was. Nine Years Later, He'd Defined 272 of Them.

D. Earl Johnston came on Lens of Hopefulness to talk about a book unlike anything else I’ve come across in years of doing these interviews. It’s a 376-page reference work that defines 272 separate emotions, not through clinical theory, but through more than 8,000 quotes and phrases from people who actually lived through them. The book is called Choosing Emotions: Thinking with Your Head and Acting with Your Heart, and it took nine years to put together, drawing on more than 1,800 contributors across roughly 2,500 years of recorded human experience, from Confucius, Buddha, and Plato up through voices most of us would recognize today. Doug, as he goes by, didn’t come to this work through psychology. His career was spent as a finance executive in banking, mergers and acquisitions, and private equity in Los Angeles, and later as a professional researcher retained by national law firms to assess complicated business lawsuits. He’s also a world champion sailor. None of that is the typical background for someone who spends nine years cataloging the entire emotional range of being human, and that contrast turned out to be one of the more interesting threads in our conversation. Understanding feelings, he kept reminding me, isn’t the exclusive property of psychologists. It belongs to anyone who’s ever felt something and tried to put a name to it. A Question His Daughter Asked at the Dinner Table The book’s origin starts with a game. When Doug’s daughter was in eighth grade, the two of them began having dinner together once a week, just the two of them, and he’d bring a list of 150 to 200 trivia questions covering everything from geography to politics. They called it College Bowl, and every correct answer earned her a two-dollar bill slid across the table. It became something she looked forward to, and a way for a father to stay close to a teenager’s world, which isn’t always easy. Two years later, in tenth grade, after she’d been out of school for a month recovering from an injury and surgery, she came to dinner and told Doug it was her turn to ask the questions. Her question was simple: what is depression? Doug told me, plainly, that he faked it. He gave her the economic definition, a slowdown in business activity accompanied by a decline in interest rates, because he didn’t want to deal with the emotional one. She wasn’t fooled, and told him that wasn’t the kind of depression she meant. Doug admitted to her that he didn’t know enough to answer honestly, and spent the next two weeks researching it. What helped him most wasn’t the clinical literature, although he found plenty of it. It was quotes from people who had lived through depression themselves. The first one came from Rollo May, one of the original self-help writers from the 1950s, before the term even existed, and a depression survivor himself. “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” — Rollo May A few days later he found a quote from J.K. Rowling, who has spoken publicly about her own depression before she became one of the best-selling novelists in history. “Depression is that absence of being able to envision you will ever be cheerful again. It’s the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever experienced.” — J.K. Rowling And then one from a freelance writer named Haley Cornell, who Doug suspects will be well known in her own right one day. “Depression lies. It tells you you’ve always felt this way and you always will, but you haven’t and you won’t.” — Haley Cornell Doug texted the three quotes to his daughter, who was back at school. Three minutes later she wrote back: “I’m crying.” Alarmed, he asked why, since everyone in those quotes had survived what she was going through. Her answer: “That’s why I’m crying. Thank you, dad.” It’s a sweet father-daughter moment on its own, but Doug said it’s also when he realized something that shaped the entire book: clinical descriptions explain what an emotion looks like, while the words of someone who’s lived through it explain what it feels like. He was careful to add that this isn’t a knock on psychologists; he’s leaned on them himself and calls a good one “worth their weight in gold.” But there’s a gap that clinical language alone doesn’t close, and closing that gap is what eventually grew into 8,000 quotes across 272 emotions. From One Word to 272 What started with depression expanded to anxiety, codependence, and eventually every emotional state Doug could document, including the lighter ones: excitement, enthusiasm, charisma, even an entry on zeal. By the time the manuscript was finished, it covered 272 distinct emotional states. In January, a friend suggested Doug submit the finished book to AI just to see what it would say. He was hesitant; the book was done, and he wasn’t looking to change anything. He sent it anyway. Within minutes, both Claude AI and ChatGPT came back with nearly the same response: this was the single most comprehensive consumer-facing book on emotions in the English language. It has gone on to rank in the top three and top ten of three different Amazon categories. One thing Doug emphasized more than once is that the book isn’t political and isn’t tied to any single faith or culture. It draws on writers, scientists, and public figures of every kind, including a quote each from Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton sitting in the same reference work without commentary on any of them. His point: emotion is something every human being shares, regardless of where anyone lands on anything else. The Word “Ego,” His Mother’s Advice, and What the Project Taught Him About Himself I asked Doug what the project changed in him personally, and he didn’t hesitate. The most affecting night of the nine years, he said, came while researching the entry on ego. When Doug was around ten years old, he asked his mother, a successful athlete, writer, painter, and by his account a remarkable person in several different arenas, how she managed to do so many things well. Her answer was that it takes a big ego to succeed in life. Doug believed her, because he loved and admired her, and carried that belief through a corporate career in which, by his own description, he was “pretty autocratic.” Researching the ego entry years later, he came across a line from Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology. “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego. The second half is in going inward and letting go of it.” — Carl Jung Doug told me he read it several times, then put his head in his hands and cried, recognizing how much explaining and apologizing he owed people who’d had to tolerate, in his own words, his “frankly stupid ego.” Soon after, he found a related passage from Eckhart Tolle. “The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.” — Eckhart Tolle The same entry includes a line from Gandhi. “Many could forego heavy meals, a full wardrobe, a fine house, etc. It is the ego they cannot forego.” — Mahatma Gandhi And it closes with a far more contemporary voice, musician Nikki Sixx, who said the same thing in five words. “Your ego is not your amigo.” — Nikki Sixx I appreciated how openly Doug told that story. It would have been easy to keep the book’s origin story in the safer territory of his daughter’s question and leave his own reckoning out of it. He didn’t, and that kind of honesty is part of what makes the book land the way it does. Reaction or Decision? Churchill, and the Case for the Head and the Heart Doug also walked me through how he arrived at a working definition of emotion itself, since, surprisingly, even foundational figures like Freud and Jung ne...

The Answer Is Too Big for Us: Lolo of the REALMS Podcast on Psychology, the Paranormal & Finding Hope

I was not sure what to expect from my recent Lens of Hopefulness interview with Lolo—psychotherapist, paranormal explorer, and host of the REALMS Podcast but was happy to cover ground that I had honestly been wanting to explore for a long time: the space where clinical psychology and the unexplained overlap, where grief and ghost voices coexist, and where a practicing therapist can sit with questions that have no clean answers. REALMS is Lolo’s YouTube channel. It stands for Real Experiences, Answers, Lore, Myth and Sanctuary. I had watched his YouTube channel and liked what I saw. As I told him on air, it was the kind of show where you cannot bring yourself to turn it off. The approach is open, unhurried, and—something I rarely see in the paranormal space—genuinely humble. From Existential Anxiety to Podcast Host Lolo did not arrive at the paranormal through fascination alone. He describes a history of existential anxiety that pushed him to ask the hard questions about life, death, and meaning. Several close brushes with death sharpened the urgency. His background in therapy—he is a licensed psychotherapist who works with trauma, anxiety, and grief, currently through Teladoc—gave him a clinical lens. But clinical tools, he found, have limits. “Things have to be proven, it has to be very black and white,” he said, describing the constraints of evidence-based practice, “but that’s also not real life. There’s so much that we can’t explain and we don’t fully understand.” That recognition—that the clinical model has a ceiling—drove him to create a community rather than a stage. REALMS is less a ghost-hunting show and more a conversation space where people with unusual experiences can share without being laughed out of the room. No slick host, no click-bait production values. Just people telling their stories, his co-host included, in a space where grief, wonder, and uncertainty are all allowed in at once. The Big Conclusion: The Answer Is Too Big for Us I asked Lolo what his most profound discovery has been after years of investigating, interviewing, and questioning. His answer was not what I expected. After all of it, he has arrived at a kind of acceptance of not-knowing. “Whatever the answer is, it’s too big for us to understand,” he said. “It’s just so out of our perception that we just can’t even try to understand.” He followed that with something even more practical: truth, he observed, is a little bit relative. And if a belief system makes a person feel better and helps them function, you have to ask yourself how much it matters whether it is objectively provable—as long as the person is not losing themselves in it. Balance, he said, is everything. He understands why people go all-in on certain systems; the exhaustion of seeking direction makes it tempting. But he holds back from that himself, always taking baby steps and staying skeptical enough to keep perspective. Personal Experiences That Are Hard to Dismiss This is where the conversation got personal—on both sides of the microphone. Lolo described being present at a Catholic exorcism ritual—a full church closed down for a three-to-four-hour event, presided over by a priest, for a single individual. He witnessed the person behaving in ways he still cannot fully account for, while also noting, with his therapist’s eye, how much the cultural and media landscape (particularly the enormous impact of The Exorcist) could influence a person’s presentation. He does not dismiss what he saw. He does not fully explain it either. That tension is exactly where he lives. I brought my own experience to the table as well. I shared that when my father passed away, during a period of deep grief, I had what felt like a channeling experience. I asked him to give me a piece of information I could not have known—my grandmother’s maiden name—and I received the name Ingrassia. When I checked with my mother, she confirmed it. I also shared that during a particularly intense period of spiritual engagement, I found I could touch someone in pain and the pain would stop—and that the experience frightened me enough that I stepped back from it entirely. And there was a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island that a family had opened for viewings by appointment, once a year, after seeing the image of their late son in the painting. My family went. I saw my father’s face in that picture. These are not things I trot out in casual conversation. But with Lolo, there was no performance required, in either direction. He listened as a therapist does—with interest and without the need to nail it down. Science, Scripture, and the Surprising Overlap One moment in this conversation that surprised me was when Lolo pointed out that the Big Bang theory was developed by a Catholic astrophysicist—and that its core concept, a sudden explosive emergence of light from nothing, aligns rather neatly with the opening of Genesis: “In the beginning, God said, let there be light.” I thought that was worth sitting with for a moment. He also referenced something that resonated with me personally: the statistical near impossibility of any individual human being here at all. The probability of the specific sperm and egg that created any given person has been estimated at one in 400 trillion. Add to that the extraordinary series of cosmic accidents that make Earth habitable—Jupiter shielding us from asteroids, a sun at just the right distance—and the odds of existing become almost theoretical. “We are a like theoretic impossibility of existing,” Lolo said, “and here we are. So it’s like if I am and I’m only here for a blink of an eye, it has to mean something, has to be worth something.” Prayer, Meditation, and the Anxiety Connection Lolo made an observation that felt important in its simplicity: praying is a form of grounding. Psychologically, he said, it does the same thing that mindfulness and meditation do. The act of saying a prayer is functionally a mantra. Why do we work so hard to keep these two things separate? I told him about my own attempt at morning prayer that very day. My mind kept jumping ahead—I have ADD, which I was fairly upfront about—and I finally said, God, help me pray. And the response that came to me was simply: breathe slowly. I did. My mind quieted. Whatever you want to call that, it worked. Lolo was not surprised. He said that in his clinical work, he has noticed that purpose and direction and motivation are deeply intertwined, and that a lot of what religion offers—community, ritual, a sense of being held—overlaps substantially with what good therapy offers. His take on the confessional was particularly candid: a priest hearing confession, he noted, is essentially an untrained therapist. You go in, you unburden yourself, you walk out lighter. Trauma, Anxiety, and the Bear at the Door Toward the end of our conversation, Lolo got into the mechanics of anxiety in a way I found useful—and personally recognizable. He described the way the anxious brain cannot reliably distinguish between a perceived threat and a real one. His analogy: if you are doing your taxes and a bear shows up at the door, the bear wins your attention. That is the right response. The problem is that anxiety treats the taxes themselves as the bear. “Your brain is like analyzing the world and perceiving a threat,” he said. I told him that described a good portion of my own life. For much of it, everything was urgent and dramatic and felt like a crisis. As I have gotten older—I am in my sixties now—I have settled into something different. The sands in the hourglass are visible. And I find I am less interested in spending them in a state of alarm. Lolo’s approach to coping with his own anxiety, when I asked him directly, came down to two things: grounding—feet on the floor, present in...

From the Red Sox to Brain Cancer: Michael Bugary on Addiction, Personal Responsibility, and the Disease of Me

I read Michael Bougari’s book The Disease of Me before we sat down to record this episode, and that was the right call. By the time we got on, I felt like I already knew who he was — not because the book is a polished, carefully packaged personal brand, but because it reads exactly like the person who wrote it: honest, unguarded, and sometimes uncomfortable in the best possible way. The book opens with a section called “Why You Shouldn’t Read This Book,” which Michael basically uses as a disclaimer. Right there, before chapter one, he writes: I am not a psychologist, nor do I have any fancy initials after my name. I do have a bachelor’s degree that took more than six years to finish. I’m not a self-help guru. For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to help myself, and I have failed miserably at it. That sets the tone for everything that follows. No toxic positivity. No memes. No pretending that the answers are easy if you just follow the right steps. What Michael offers instead is his story — the unvarnished version. And the story is a lot. The Triple Count of Adversity Michael describes his book as being organized around what he calls “the triple count of adversity”: sports, addiction, and cancer. He argues that just about everyone is touched by at least one of these three — either directly or through someone they love. Michael went through all three, and he went through the extremes of each. He was drafted by the Boston Red Sox and had everything physically to make it in professional baseball. What he didn’t have, by his own account, was the mental piece. He describes being driven almost entirely by insecurity and a desperate need for external validation — chasing something he could never quite name. Baseball was my first addiction. Drugs and alcohol are a symptom of my disease. They make me worse. Addiction is not my disease. It’s me. His career ended before it really began. He was hurt in his first spring training and never got the chance to find out how far his physical gifts might have taken him. What followed was years of substance use, self-destruction, and gradually burning through the patience of just about everyone around him. The Brain Tumor The cancer part of the story is the one that stops you cold. Michael was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma, described in the book as an extremely rare tumor of the central nervous system. The MRI scan is on the book cover and it’s a striking photo. Here is where Michael’s brand of radical honesty gets particularly hard to argue with. He spent years blaming God for the brain tumor. Until he stopped. His words: I was the one that chose to go out and buy human growth hormone and other anabolic steroids from a shady source and misuse them without medical supervision. That most likely gave me my brain tumor. I caused my brain tumor, not God. He came up in the steroid era of baseball — McGuire, Bonds, Sosa were his heroes at age twelve. He thought he could do both: be the talented player and the party guy. That thinking caught up with him in a way he didn’t see coming. But getting there, and surviving it, became the basis for everything that came after. He lost his hair. He lost feeling in his toes. He didn’t know if he’d walk normally again. Ten years later, he says he’s stronger physically than when he played baseball. His dog Lingo — a military base dog that found its way into Michael’s life through his mother — was born the same month Michael’s tumor was removed. That coincidence isn’t lost on either of them. He was what saved me. He came to me in my darkest moment. The Disease of Me The title of the book is the key to understanding Michael’s whole framework. He distinguishes between addiction as a disease (which he understands scientifically and doesn’t dismiss for others) and his own experience, where he sees himself as the problem — not the substances. His logic is straightforward: if he views his substance use as a disease, it gives him an easy out. “Oh, I have a disease, I can’t help myself.” Instead, he holds himself accountable in a more direct way — he calls himself the disease. The drugs and alcohol just made it worse. What changed everything was personal responsibility. Once he was willing to stop blaming the Red Sox for his arm injury, stop blaming God for his tumor, and start looking at his own choices honestly, something shifted: All the bad things that happened to me in my life were my fault, right? They’re just products of the choices that I’ve made. Once I started to take that personal responsibility, I began to look at things in a different way. He’s careful to say he didn’t get better quickly or cleanly. His description of the process: “I just clawed my way out of it. I dragged myself.” There was no single breakthrough moment, no sudden switch that flipped. It was accumulative, gritty, and ongoing. What Actually Helped Throughout the book (and the conversation), Michael returns to the same theme: therapy rarely gave him hope. What gave him hope was other people’s stories. Not people with the same experiences, but people who found something inside themselves to get through impossible circumstances and came out with a different view of the world. That’s why the book is full of other people’s stories — they’re what kept him going. He also makes an interesting point about credibility. He’s drawn to people who have actual skin in the game — people who have lived what they’re talking about. His ears, he says, open differently when he hears from someone who has been through something. Which is exactly why he says things in the book that a more calculated author might have left out. And there’s his dog. Michael and Lingo now participate in the PEP house program at University Hospitals and Rainbow Babies Children’s Hospital in Cleveland, visiting adult cancer patients. He avoided it at first. Now it’s part of how he sustains everything he’s built: I can only have those thoughts when I help somebody else without the expectation of something in return. That’s how helping other people helps me. Lessons From This Conversation A few things from this episode: Honesty before help. Michael’s whole approach starts with the acknowledgment that he can’t help you with your issues — he has enough of his own. But he can share his experience. That distinction matters. There’s a version of this that sounds like a disclaimer, but with Michael it’s the foundation of why the book lands the way it does. The thoughts don’t go away. He makes the point that writing this book didn’t change his thinking. He still has the same judgmental, arrogant thoughts he always had. What changed is that he learned to identify them and not act on them. This is refreshing. It doesn’t ask you to become someone you’re not — it asks you to work with who you actually are. Personal responsibility is painful to accept. I said this during the interview and I meant it. Getting to a place where you stop blaming everything and everyone else and look at your own choices is not easy. Michael argues it’s necessary. But he doesn’t claim it happened quickly or without a fight. Real influence looks different from the highlight reel. Michael has a way of framing this that I think is worth holding onto and that is that the real question isn’t how many followers you have, it’s whether you put your shopping cart back, hold the door, and treat strangers decently when no camera is rolling. That’s what he tells the kids he speaks to. I think that’s what he means when he says he’s a real influencer. Connection beats therapy (sometimes). This isn’t anti-therapy, but it’s an honest observation: for Mich...