Talk Therapy

We have a new podcast!!! You're going to love it. It's called Ordinary Astronauts and it's about tech, product building, and the psychology of work.Find it in your favorite podcast app here: https://pod.link/1636172848  

Hey friends! It's been awhile! We figured, what better way to come back than with a conversation with Dan and Nathan's actual therapist: Dan Tarplin. Every Wednesday for almost two years we've been seeing Dan to work on our relationship with each other and with the business, and it's been one of the best investments we've ever made. In this conversation we talk about what we've figured out over these two years, and what we're still working on. Enjoy!

What does it mean to crave admiration and respect? How can we handle it if we feel we're not getting it? The usual Ted Lasso gang (Dan, Nathan, Rachel) convene to recap the finale of season 2. Of course we talk about everything that happened with Nate's storyline, but we also talk about how we've all been in similar situations as Nate, and what Ted could have done better. All in all, it's been a great season and really fun to unpack with y'all!

(Ahoy, there! Spoilers ahead!) This week, the gang obsesses over Dan's galaxy brain theory connecting Nate's downfall with Sam's courtship by the Ghanaian billionaire. Questions include: should Nate be fired? What do you do when forgiveness doesn't change a perpetrator's behavior? How do you design a consequence? Will Ted use the revelation of his panic attack to further the cause of mental health awareness in sports? Finally, Rachel explains how men should behave when a woman says she's been kissed without her consent. Star Wars references abound. Show notes: Rachel mentions a hilarious Twitter comedian's take on “Ted Lasso speak”—watch it here!

(Spoilers, as usual!) In this special double-header, the crew discusses some of the biggest episodes of the season so far. What is going on with Nate? What did Jamie's confrontation with his father unlock in Ted, and why? How do our parents affect us, and why is vulnerability so hard, yet so important? We explore all these questions and more!

In the this episode of Ted Lasso, Higgins decides to take Coach Beard aside and ask him whether he really thinks it's a good idea to get back into a relationship with Jane, because the last time they were together it was pretty tumultuous. We all face situations like this in the world of work: should we tell our founder when we're worried about their company? How can we tell our coworkers when we're worried about them? The paradox of these situations is on the one hand, we'll never have the context they do. But on the other hand, by having some distance we will have perspective that they can't. The key? Humility. After that discussion, we go over what's going on with Ted's breakdown, where things will go with Rebecca and her mystery lover, and predict what's happening in the rest of this season.

Dan, Nathan and Rachel, discuss what is perhaps the low point of a season that has already had its share of peaks and valleys. Why does the latest installment of Ted Lasso feel untrue to both the spirit of the show and the world beyond it? Listen through to find out—and to hear how each of the hosts hope the creators might turn it around in the season's back end.

Dan, Nathan, and Rachel compare their differing reactions to Ted Lasso's seasonably questionable Christmas episode. Is it a repreive from contrived plotting? Or a symptom of a followup season that hasn't decided on its core conflict yet?

We're partnering with Amazon this week to let our listeners know you can listen to Talk Therapy with a simple Alexa command!Just tell your Alexa speaker to play Talk Therapy—it's a great way to listen.

Dan, Nathan and Rachel reunite to discuss the second and third episodes of Ted Lasso's sophomore season, which they much prefer to the premiere. From deeply-felt thematic throughlines about mentor/mentee relationships, to the funniest gags in the show's history, the trio is engaging with Ted Lasso—or is it Led Tasso?—from every angle, so make this the recap podcast you listen to! Also, as a reminder, there are spoilers in this episode!

It's a very special time of year—a new season of Dan and Nathan's favorite show on management, positivity and leadership is starting back up. That's right, it's Ted Lasso time—and for the Apple show's second season, Talk Therapy will be welcoming fellow viewer and editor extraordinaire Rachel Jepsen to recap each episode after it airs! In this discussion of the season premiere—just in time for you to be caught up for today's followup—Dan, Nathan and Rachel discuss an opening beat that didn't quite land, the show's dip into therapy as a theme, and much more.

Nathan got himself a new fitness tracking device—and promptly found himself using it to track something unexpected: emotions. Returning to a recent management misunderstanding with Dan, he explains how the device alerted him to what he was feeling, and why his initial interpretation of his own reactions didn't hold up to scrutiny.

Nathan and Dan welcome Joshua Ogundu, a fellow member of the LA tech community, to the podcast for an open and insightful conversation about the benefits of therapy, and why it's never too late to begin. Take it from Joshua, whose openness about recently starting therapy is an inspiration, and a reminder that the practice can yield surprising results, from pattern recognition to being in touch with your senses.

Read Ali's Divinations piece, "The Inner Ring of the Internet."

Hot off a week spent brushing up on the finer points of game theory, Dan tells Nathan why a study in human behavior—specifically, cooperation—has conclusions that put cofounder relationships into a fresh new context. It turns out that just because the stakes of every interaction between founders may not be life and death, social biology makes a good rubric for understanding power and collaboration.

Nathan's been staying up to write into the wee hours of the night. Talking with Dan about how he balances sporadic work habits with a cohabitating relationship, he drills down on a larger question: how do we decide what's important? As the cofounders exchange their ongoing rubrics for prioritizing tasks, they hit on something crucial about running a business: you don't just prioritize in order to get the work done—you do it to give yourself cause for optimism.

Nathan's working more than ever, but it's also paradoxically helped to solve his burnout. In this episode, Dan and Nathan explore Nathan's experience with ADHD, and how working on things he's excited about—rather than things he thinks he *should* do—can work as a strategy that helps him be extremely productive.

Listen to Talk Therapy #5 from last year, in which Dan and Nathan reflect on how adding Tiago Forte to the bundle defied their growth expectations, and what they learned.

After talking with previous guest Alex Lieberman about panic and anxiety, Dan and Nathan walk through their memories of a panic attack that Dan experienced. In an effort to make peace with something that was deeply troubling at the time it happened, Dan has a lot of questions to answer for himself—and luckily, Nathan is there to ask them.

“I would say the last 3 months have been probably the most anxious months of the last 6 years for me.” Alex Lieberman's identity for the past 7 years has been almost entirely about being the co-founder and CEO of Morning Brew. He created it from scratch, grew it to a $20m business, and then sold it for a reported ~$75m to Axel Springer, the parent company of Insider. But now all of that is in the past. While Alex will always be a co-founder of Morning Brew, he doesn't own the business anymore. And, about a month ago, an even bigger change happened: Alex stepped out of the CEO role, and his co-founder Austin Rief stepped up. Exiting is always an awkward topic. On the one hand, it can make you very rich. On the other hand, it carries with it a whole host of complicated issues: a loss of identity, a loss of purpose, and a changed relationship with the people you work with most closely. Unfortunately, most founders never talk about this to anyone beyond their inner circle. There is a fear of being seen as weak, or as a complainer. But the best leaders understand the power that comes from honest vulnerability. Fortunately, in the first few minutes of this interview Alex Lieberman refers to himself as an “oversharer.” And he doesn't shy away from talking about exactly the kinds of things that most people think they need to keep to themselves. In this interview we talk about: - What it was like to sell his business, and to move from CEO to Executive Chairman. - Why the last few months have been the most anxious of his career since founded Morning Brew - His worries about how people might perceive his move to Executive Chairman, and his relationship with his co-founder - His feelings of lost identity, and his fears around losing what he is most passionate about - His struggles with OCD and panic during his years building Morning Brew, and the ways he's worked to cope with them Alex comes off as vulnerable, honest, and extremely self-aware. We were honored to have him on, and we think you'll learn a lot from this episode. We did too.

Dan had a dream about Nathan, and in this episode they unpack it together to try to figure what it means. It turns into a conversation about perfectionism, managing different zones of responsibility, and one of Dan’s deepest fears: is Nathan unmanageable?

Celebrating their first (!) episode recorded on the same microphone, Dan and Nathan reflect on the birth Talk Therapy—and Every—amidst the pandemic, and wonder about the future of working remotely and in person. Will Every buy a house for writing residencies? Join forces with a bookstore? Both?

Dan and Nathan are joined by Talk Therapy's inaugural guest host, Every community member (and investor!) Freia Lobo—who also happens to be an avid listener. Answering Freia's questions about their podcast's near-yearlong journey, the cohosts and cofounders discuss their boundaries for on-air discussions, why the pod has become an integral part of their working mental health, and what they hope the business community at large might take away from their show.

Dan and Nathan celebrate Rachel Jepsen's official introduction as Every's Executive Editor! Since last year, Rachel has been working with Every writers—and hosting her own show, The Long conversation. Now, she talks to Nathan and Dan about her shift from writing to editing, and how the collective has pushed her back towards fostering her passion for the former.

This week, Dan and Nathan tell a story from the before times... (ya know, before therapy). It's about a situation that was extremely difficult at the time, but wouldn't be a big deal at all now. Sometimes a little trust and knowledge of each other's personality traits goes a long way.

Dan and Nathan welcome Every's newest lead writer, Fadeke Adegbuyi, for a discussion about her newsletter Cybernaut, which examines internet culture by asking what it can tell us about ourselves. Fadeke discusses what led her to write for Every, the transition to placing herself within her writing, and her latest article on Clubhouse's future.

After listening to an anxiety-centered episode of Ezra Klein's podcast, Dan and Nathan dive into their own past and current experiences with anxiety, asking whether one can truly battle it as they would a craving. While they don't reach any clean answers, they agree that everyone's anxiety is triggered in different ways, and by different sources.

After Nathan shares his recent run of reading material, he and Dan wonder if the more intense leadership styles layed out in books on management have any place at Every. Can you run a writing collective like a football team—or are the two as dissonant as Dan's Jocko Willink impression?

Dan & Nathan welcome Evan Armstrong, Every's new Napkin Math lead, to the show. Walking through Evan's path to joining the collective, the trio discuss imposter syndrome, Evan's passion for increasing access to knowledge about finance and tech, and much more. Read Evan's first post here: https://every.to/napkin-math/cogs-how-i-bankrupted-moviepass-09e6aa23-a102-40eb-92ff-3f920a291927

After their last conversation about Jungian therapy and how "Shadow Work" can help us get a better look at the more difficult parts of ourselves, Dan and Nathan decide to make things less abstract, and apply their findings to their relationship as cofounders. Taking a recent misunderstanding about growth as a test case, they explore the benefits of validating people despite your skepticism, pushing back against our refusal to see ourselves, and why a return to Ted Lasso might help Nathan gain some clarity.

Taking a listener's recommendation to do some "shadow work"—a therapy technique culled from a New Yorker article about an unconventional Hollywood therapist—Dan takes Nathan through a brief primer on differing modalities, and why they shouldn't necessarily be pitted against each other. Then, they discuss where Jung and Freud's theories are embedded in modern thought, identifying the value of picking out what's useful as we wrestle with what it means to be human.

Taking stock of the positive feedback they've received on the last few episodes, which have taken raw, unfiltered looks and the bumps and peaks in their working dynamic, Dan and Nathan look to continue their trend of examining what's worked, what hasn't, and how far they've come as collaborators and cofounders. Topics include: judging how bad the low points of your working relationship actually are, why it's crucial to track your disagreements until you found their actual roots, and what truly letting go of your ownership over a project looks like.

Hot off the latest all-hands meeting, (or "Every One," in company parlance), Dan and Nathan reflect on the beauty of having created a space to talk shop and share visions with some of their favorite minds, why Acceptance and Commitment therapy has a lot of relevance for companies, and what the balance is between the individual and the collective at Every publications.

This one goes deep. Recalling their first days working together, Dan and Nathan discuss the ways their relationship has evolved over the past year. To be honest it started out rough. In this episode, they talk about what that was like and how it changed over the first year of the business to be something they're both proud of.

Dan and Nathan welcome Taylor Majewski to the podcast on the inaugural week of her brand new Every newsletter, Glassy. A weekly study of technology through the lens of gender, Glassy will see Taylor digging into the themes that have guided her career thus far. She sat down to talk about how tech and gender came to sit at the center of her work, why Every is the best place for her to write about these topics, and why founders shouldn't be defensive or shy away from difficult conversations.

Co-founder relationships require respect, but what happens when one co-founder falls down on the job? How do you manage around it without losing respect for each other? More importantly, how can you accept your own shortcomings without losing respect for yourself? It’s something that Dan and Nathan have struggled with before, and in this episode they take an unfiltered, clear-eyed look at the the role respect plays in their relationship—and the times they’ve both felt small in each other’s eyes. They talk about Dan’s embarrassment over his inattention to small details, and Nathan’s fear about being able to manage many projects at once. Though they each deal with a different set of insecurities they find that, when they dig down to the root, their fears aren’t so different after all.

Returning from a weeklong vacation, Nathan fills Dan in on the thinking he's been doing about burnout and its causes. They discuss how to temper (or lean into) inspiration when reading something exciting, dealing with the transitional phase between rest and work, and why we make it so hard for ourselves to start new projects.

It's Nathan's turn to take a break. After going over his plans with for a week of relaxing and cooking, he and Dan open up about why it can be hard to turn your productivity brain off during time away from the proverbial desk, and why workplaces should build structured time off into their workflows more frequently.

Using a current work in progress—the exit survey page for departing subscribers—as an example of their differing communication styles, Dan and Nathan explore the benefits of having unique skillsets and thought processes. Listen through to learn why cofounders should strive to be more like the Spanish national soccer team.

Nathan and Dan discuss their differing approaches to writing, and wonder how they can manage to still be effective sounding boards for each other. Taking specific examples from their respective experiences writing and critiquing each other's work earlier in their working relationship, they end up exploring the process of starting a piece of work.

Returning from a well-earned week off, Dan takes Nathan through his return to Superorganizers: a look at My First Million cohost Shaan Puri's approach to personal growth. Topics include which types of goals we should consider genuinely accomplishable, how to be a healthy 'splainer, and why you sometimes need to write about what you want to do with your life until you cry.

Nathan and Dan reflect on their first week spent using Discord instead of Slack, and lay out their reasoning for making the jump to begin with. The answer has a lot to do with building a community to last and grow, and it leads them to think about where value—internal and external—comes from.

Dan and Nathan peel back the curtain on the editing process they've cultivated (and are still cultivating!) for the collective. Shifting between their experiences in both writer and editor positions, they explain why editing is a privilege and a responsibility, how they fill the role for each other—and why doing more of it has given them new shades of empathy for writers.

With the news that Twitter has acquired the podcasting company Breaker, Nathan walks Dan through his latest Divinations article on the state of podcasts over the past decade—or at least 2016, when he wrote an article in search of a platform dedicated to podcast discovery via social connections. After discussing the piece's three hypotheses, they both agree: we have yet to get a social network exclusively and effectively dedicated to content discovery...but podcasts are continuing to trend upwards, so there's still hope.

Taking to Clubhouse for their first-ever live episode of Talk Therapy, Dan and Nathan attempt to answer a question they've gotten a lot since the launch: why did they go after VC backers for Every? In bucking tradition, they've taught themselves a lot about the difference between media and software products, and the unique experience of making decisions about and seeking funding as a team.

Dan brings Nathan in on a problem he's having with the inherent contradictions in much of the theory-based nonfiction writing out there––and the fact that the writers don't always seem to be interested in engaging with other ideas. To Nathan, the answer lies in the weeds of granular differences and deep research––which is not a place everyone's willing to go. The answers go deeper, and end up having a suprising amount to do with their freshly-launched writer collective.

With the long-awaited, semi-prolonged launch and rebrand of Every behind them, Nathan and Dan take a collective breath. Only a quick one, though, because then they're back to it: tracing the history of their collaboration and its evolution into a writer collective, they consider the benefits of building your own platform, why Substack isn't actually on the edge of a mass exodus, and why their main goal for the next year involves sharing their collaborative success with a larger group of writers.

Dan and Nathan welcome Andre Plaut, creator of The Prediction Game—a competition to predict the events of the coming year for a tantalizing prize—which Everything will be hosting next year. Giving the details on the game’s more intimate origins and the wild year it had in 2020, Andre reveals how he built the game, how it works as a time capsule, and some of the predictions made by this year’s frontrunner. When you’re done listening, make sure you sign up for the Prediction Game!

Nathan takes Dan behind his latest Divinations essay, “Why Content is King,” from the writing process—which included drafting the piece in longhand—to why some of its claims aren’t heard very often. One of those claims? That network effects, most commonly associated with software, belong in the conversation about why media businesses hold as much power as they do today.

Dan and Nathan address the news that’s been dominating the Everything Slack all day: Substack’s long-awaited reader, which collects your newsletters in one place and points you to new ones. The guys aren’t totally euphoric on it just yet…but of course, there’s time. Listen for what the reader is missing right now, what functions future versions might add, and the lessons Dan and Nathan have learned about feeds from the Bundle Digest.

After giving Nathan proper credit for getting him to finally listen to—and enjoy—podcasts, Dan takes a pressing question from a recent one to the air: Why are are humans uniquely good at stressing out? The conversation is honest, hopeful, and includes Dan’s dream to get on the phone with the biggest anxiety researchers out there.