 Dr. Joy Brown. I think one key reason is that Jews tend to feel really good about themselves. I've never met a Jew who feels burdened by sin. Normally, you give a Jew a compliment and they will appreciate it and say, thank you. And often, they'll you know, ask for more, right? You try to give a Protestant traditional Protestant a compliment. They'll say, Hey, no, not me, not me 40. I'm a great sinner. Right. I grew up out there. I'd read as a lot of people around me were just burdened by sin. They didn't tend to feel great about themselves. Jews tend to have a very high self esteem. Lucy's thinking and over her heart that Lucy will say things like, Well, you know, we didn't always agree on everything, but, but mostly the phrase we didn't agree about everything implies that like she was in on this relationship too. Well, sort of, although we didn't agree on everything, you know, she had some beliefs that I didn't believe in. She just didn't know. There's no we. I guess you're right. I look in your face and like I said that and your feelings looked really hurt. And I suddenly thought sort of bad. No, don't feel bad. I mean, I guess my relationship with Dr. Joy Brown is at the intersection of incredibly light hearted and really, really deep seated and emotional for me. So this is the missing part of this segment. They should have explored the nature of parasocial relationships. Why did Ira glasses friend Lucy? Why was she obsessed with Dr. Joy Brown? Why was I obsessed with Dennis Prager? It's because broken people like me, like Lucy, we encounter often public figures who make us feel better, make us feel whole, who we just feel like if we could just listen more to them or be more like them, that we could overcome our problems and become normal. And this is the fertile ground that this segment completely misses out on. Why? It's not accidental that she became obsessed with Joy Brown. Like healthy people don't become obsessed with radio psychologists like Joy Brown or Dennis Prager. Right? It's a symptom, right? Most of our problems or most of our issues are symptoms of much deeper problems and issues that we don't want to look at. So we just get obsessed with the symptom. Like a radio call in show, psychologists, you know, it's low stakes, right? Except for it's not really because people call in with real problems. And so with her, the relationship sits right in the middle of the So 99% of people can listen to Joy Brown and not become obsessed with Joy Brown. 99% of people can listen to Dennis Prager, not become obsessed with Dennis Prager. 99.99% of people can listen to Luke Ford and not become obsessed with Luke Ford. If you become obsessed with some, you know, public figure who does a live stream or a podcast or news radio show, that's because it's something incredibly broken in you and their presence there, your parasocial relationship with this person fills an incredible void in your soul. But that's only a delusion, right? You still have a lot of very difficult internal rearrangement work to fill the hole in your soul so that you don't go down this route unexamined. So I have a problem. I speak to frankly. And so it can be very painful on Shabbat. It can be very painful on Jewish holidays when I see what seems like all my friends going somewhere. And I am not invited. And it can be particularly painful if I used to be invited and was invited for years, but I'm no longer invited. But there's a very good reason why I'm no longer invited is because the last time I was at this place, I made a complete ass of myself. I hurt people. I bothered people. I involuntarily insulted people. I, you know, I tarnished what they held sacred. I was just a joke. And I had no idea I was just feeling happy and making jokes. But my jokes were deeply painful and hurtful to other people. And I do this again and again and again and again. And so a normal person might say, well, just stop doing this. All right. But I do this because it comes out of probably my greatest character flaw, lack of consideration for other people and for myself. I showed a lack of consideration for my own well-being by repeatedly making, you know, inappropriate jokes at places that should be sacred and precious to me. But I blow up these relationships and cordial, you know, arrangements again and again and again and again by saying, you know, carelessly cruel cutting remarks. But why do I do this? Right? It's the character defect. Yeah, of lack of consideration. But then what's underneath that character defect of lack of consideration? And what's underneath that are gaping psychic wounds from essentially growing up for years without a mother and looking to fill that hole in my soul that void in my psyche by getting attention. And so I have developed as an attention seeking missile. And so I just toss things off without, you know, even thinking about the consequences, what I'm doing without thinking about the consequences to my own well- being let alone other people. But you know, just trying to address these careless remarks is not going to cut it. And just trying to address the character defect that they come out of lack of consideration for myself and others. That's not going to get it done. That's so tempting to just, you know, go at that surface level, go a layer deeper. But what's going on is that I have to address the gaping hole in my soul. But I walk around often with gaping psychic wounds that are just bleeding all over the place. And the way I've learned to live my life is by distracting myself from these gaping wounds. So imagine you're walking down the street and someone's walking down the street beside you. And they keep trying to make you laugh. Because that distracts them from all the blood that's like pouring out of their side. You would not find that tasteful, right? You would find that disturbing and troubling. And you might say to that person, Hey, you need to go to the hospital. Let me call 911 right now, you've got a gaping wound. And what if the person was like me and they said, Oh, now I'm fine. You know, really, all I need you to do is laugh at my jokes. And then I'll be off to ignore my gaping psychic wound. So I'm 57 years of age and I've spent probably, you know, 52 years going through life trying to get people to laugh at my jokes so that I could then be distracted from all the blood that's pouring out of me, you know, on the ground and splashing and, you know, just making a mess everywhere I go. So unless I address that this this gaping psychic wound this this hole in my soul that's just pouring out my blood over everybody and everything that I touch, right? Nothing's gonna get it done. And so I have to achieve an internal rearrangement of myself so that I feel at ease with myself that I basically feel okay between me and God between me and reality between me and myself and my closest friends, because when I'm at ease with myself, right, I don't need to act out to get unnecessary amounts of attention or, you know, maladaptive amounts of attention. When I can calm down, be at ease with myself when I can staunch those psychic wounds, right, then I can be calm and I can be vulnerable. I tend to go through life with a cynical hard cutting exterior. And I use my, you know, verbal judo abilities to put people down and to make fun of them. And to talk them into wound them, because that distracts me from my gaping psychic wounds, but that's not an adaptive path for me to go through life. Right? Now, I found methods and techniques and practices and communities and people that enable me to calm down and staunch my psychic wounds. But there's no so far at age 57, there's no permanent solution to them, right? Unless I pay attention to them and deal with them through prayer, through meditation, through 12 step work, through having sponsors, through journaling, right? Through maybe psychotherapy has helped. And unless I deal with them and calm down and, you know, rearrange what was going on inside of me so the blood stops pouring out, I can't help but make an ass of myself on a regular basis, thus isolating myself so that I spent a great deal of time doing live streams, because I have sabotaged and destroyed and pissed on and urinated all over and blown up and destroyed what should be normal, healthy human relationships. And this is what's going on with Ira Glass's friend Lucy as well, who's become obsessed with Dr. Joy Brown. I'm kind of like a joke and being like a super serious part of my psyche, you know? Yeah. Lucy is so in tune with what Dr. Joy Brown would say in any situation that sometimes when friends and family turn to her for advice, she just doles out whatever she thinks Dr. Joy Brown would say. Like when her aunt was in a relationship where So I would go to Dennis Prager talks and there'd be 40 people crowded around Dennis Prager and they'd all want to get their answer, you know, their question answered or even during public question and answer periods with Dennis Prager. Dennis would sometimes say, Oh, look, there's the answers to this, because I so knew Dennis Prager's thought. And so I was always willing to dispense to people, you know, what Dennis Prager thought about this or that, because I knew him so thoroughly. But why the hell was I so obsessed with with Dennis Prager? Because it distracted me from all the blood that was pouring out of my soul. He was not getting what she wanted. Very unhappy, feeling awful. And I said to her that, you know, think about what the relationship is like now. Think if you knew you were never going to get any more than this, and you were never going to get any less than this out of the situation, would you stay or go? And if you would