Okay, so tell me about your other productions.

The thing that I love doing the most and the thing that when I'm daydreaming, I'm thinking about or when I'm supposed to be paying attention to someone's story in a conversation.

Instead, I'm thinking about how could this be an episode of my show? It's a show called Weirdly Helpful.

It used to be called The Best Advice Show, but now it's called Weirdly Helpful because I'm really interested in just the little kind of weird... esoteric kind of private things we do in our lives like between meetings between the big stuff that just kind of help us find a little joy a little happiness a little comfort a little calm the show's been on for six and a half years like I've made like 700 or so episodes I believe that like this is something that like kind of like Dave I say at StoryCorps believes like everyone has a story I believe everyone has a weirdly helpful thing that they do that someone else could hear and be like I like that maybe I'll try that

Tell us about this episode.

Sure.

This is one of the favorite ones I've done in a while.

I asked this woman, who I know through a mutual friend, her name is Rebecca Garza-Bortman, and she's a writer and a designer and a musician.

But other than that.

Yeah.

So the counter argument was that why are we trying to make our...

Why do we have to optimize every goddamn thing in our life? You know, can't we just like do this without thinking about optimization and efficiency? So I take that point.

And yet...

And unloading the dishwasher, I find, is a lot more fun because I can just grab all the forks and just throw them in the cutlery drawer.

It makes it a pleasure.

Zach, this is a tip that came to you by way of your podcast, which is called Weirdly Helpful.

And Zach, what is today's tip?

I got this one from a hospice worker who works in a hospital and who is constantly riding elevators.

And she hums in the elevator.

Sometimes people give her funny looks like, what is this woman doing? But it just brings some joy to her day.

It's kind of like become this fun ritual.

And I do something similar.

When I go into an elevator...

What is Weirdly Helpful?

like

I was kind of just like rushing through the the title so I could like start telling them about like specific episodes.

Cause I was, I was always proud of the stuff that I was making, but the name, I felt like it was really alienating to some people or could be.

Some people would be like, wait, best? Who is this guy? What is he talking about? Like, not knowing that I'm being tongue-in-cheek or not knowing the kind of double meaning of it.

Like, what's your best advice, which was my intention.

And then the word advice.

People are like, oh, no, no, no, no, no.

I love that.

You are just living in this moment, and I've got you." You know what I mean? So, uh, I hope that at the very least, this conversation is just a, we're out here struggling with this, too, and here's how it's going.

Yeah, of course.

And, like, I think what you all are saying is so helpful.

It's like there's no way to avoid-...

the dumpster fire, and we pair it with these things in our lives.

We pair it with the Jason Reynolds lectures, and the protests, and, you know, talking about how legal processes work.

You know, like, it's all- it's like a, a- it's not just the news and nothing else.

[upbeat music]