Nightnight at Laura's

I was going to record this one in Italian. I started, froze, and realized there’s probably something interesting to unpack there eventually. But not today. Because something else was pushing harder: when did having a conversation become so f*****g complicated?

I grew up in Italy, where two people can interrupt each other, raise their voices, tell each other to f**k off and be amici come prima five minutes later. Then I moved to America, where someone can suggest getting coffee and apparently not mean actual coffee. It took some adjusting.

Living between the two has made me fascinated by how much meaning we attach to everyday interactions. A delayed reply becomes rejection. A disagreement becomes disrespect. A different tone becomes hostility. And sometimes, before anyone bothers to ask “Hey, are you mad?”, we’re already fighting about an argument that never needed to happen.

Then social media took that tendency and turned it into content. Someone says something. Someone reacts. Someone reacts to the reaction. Another person explains why the reaction was problematic. Somewhere in the comments, a complete stranger demands accountability. And we’ve somehow become incredibly good at prosecuting people based on thirty-second clips and incredibly bad at asking, “Wait—what did you mean?”

So this episode is about that increasingly blurry line between being harmed and being uncomfortable. About disagreement, cultural differences, outrage, freedom of expression, and our apparent inability to tolerate the possibility that another person might see something differently.

And, naturally, I somehow get Dante involved. Because if we’re going to argue about people refusing to take a side, the ignavi were sitting right there.

Are we actually becoming too easily offended? Or are people finally refusing to tolerate things they used to let slide? Probably both.

Come argue with me. I promise I can take it.

While I wait… Good night.

— L.

P.S. Yes, I’m fully aware of the irony of using the internet to complain about what the internet has done to us. I’m not anti-social media—I’m literally here, using it to publish a podcast about how social media affects the way we communicate. The point isn’t that the internet is inherently bad. It’s that maybe we should be able to use something, enjoy parts of it, and still question what it’s doing to us. If anything, participating in it probably makes that conversation more necessary, not less.

Also, if this post makes someone angry enough to share it, I suppose the algorithm and I both win.

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The Black Eyed Peas asked Where Is the Love? I’m asking where the f**k humanity went.

And before anyone tells me that people have always enjoyed watching other people suffer — I’m Italian. I know history. We had gladiators. I’m aware this isn’t exactly a new hobby for humankind.

I recently came across a news post about an execution, and the comments genuinely disturbed me. People were excited. Popcorn was mentioned. Apparently, the possibility of watching someone die is entertainment now. Meanwhile, we live in a society that can’t go five minutes without talking about empathy. Empathy at work, empathy in relationships, empathy in leadership. We’ve practically turned it into a marketing strategy. And somehow, we’ve become incredibly good at discussing something we’re increasingly terrible at practicing.

Which, naturally, got me thinking about Hollywood. Because apparently, my brain can connect a public execution to Girl, Interrupted in under thirty seconds. Welcome to my world.

I’ve been fascinated by the way movies portray emotional suffering for years. I watched Girl, Interrupted when I was younger and remember wondering why Winona Ryder’s character was even in a psychiatric hospital. She seemed sad, overwhelmed, sure. But Angelina Jolie’s character? Now that looked like someone who belonged there. Which tells you quite a lot about what I thought mental illness was supposed to look like. Years later, after studying psychology and cinema, I started revisiting those films with different eyes.

Fatal Attraction. Silver Linings Playbook. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Brain on Fire. Different stories, different decades, but the same fascination with people whose emotions don’t fit neatly into what society considers acceptable. Hollywood loves a breakdown. The obsessive girlfriend, the explosive husband, the unstable ex. Give someone an intense emotional reaction and you’ve got yourself a plot. Give them a particularly spectacular meltdown and congratulations, you’ve got a thriller.

And look, I’m a screenwriter. I understand conflict. Nobody wants to watch two hours of people communicating perfectly, respecting boundaries, and going to bed at nine. Although, personally, I’d watch that movie. Sounds peaceful.

What brought all this back recently was I Love You Forever. I actually watched it because of a discussion I came across on social media, which is rather ironic considering what happened next. The film explores an emotionally abusive relationship, but what fascinated me was how quickly the conversation around it became a psychological investigation. Suddenly, everyone seemed to know what was wrong with the characters, what diagnosis explained their behavior, and what that supposedly revealed about the real people viewers associated with the story.

And I thought: when did watching a movie become a group diagnostic session?

Because we’ve been doing something similar in real life. Your ex was selfish? Narcissist. Your girlfriend needed reassurance? Borderline. Your boyfriend struggled to communicate? Avoidant. Someone remembers an argument differently? Gaslighting. At this point, I’m surprised nobody has diagnosed their refrigerator with an attachment disorder because it doesn’t respond when they talk to it.

The problem is that some of the psychology being shared online is perfectly legitimate. The terminology exists for a reason. But knowing a psychological concept doesn’t make you qualified to apply it to a stranger, much less someone you’ve only heard about through another person’s breakup story. And yet there are people building entire businesses around telling you exactly what’s wrong with your ex. Five signs you’re dating a narcissist. Seven ways to identify an avoidant. Ten red flags you missed. And if you’re still confused, don’t worry — there’s a course for that. Probably discounted if you subscribe before midnight.

Here’s something I wish we’d all sit with for a moment: someone who hurts you doesn’t need a psychiatric diagnosis for your pain to be valid. You can recognize that a relationship was unhealthy, establish boundaries, and leave without turning the other person into a clinical case study. Sometimes people are selfish. Sometimes they’re overwhelmed. Sometimes they’re incompatible. Sometimes they’re abusive. Those things aren’t interchangeable, and attaching a diagnosis doesn’t automatically make your interpretation more accurate.

This is where Hollywood and social media make a particularly interesting couple. Movies have spent decades giving us recognizable character types. Social media has turned those characters into checklists. We watch the obsessive girlfriend on screen, then scroll through a video explaining which personality disorder she supposedly has, and suddenly we’re applying the same logic to people whose entire lives we know absolutely nothing about.

Except real people don’t have screenwriters deciding their motivations. They don’t have editors choosing which moments we get to see. And they certainly don’t have a conveniently timed flashback explaining why they behaved the way they did.

There’s another part of this that bothers me. Think about Good Will Hunting, BoJack Horseman, or The Bear. We spend time understanding these men’s emotional struggles, their childhood experiences, their grief, their fear. We’re given context. Meanwhile, emotionally intense women are so often remembered as crazy, needy, obsessive, or unstable. I’m not saying this happens in every movie — we don’t deal in absolutes in this household — but I do wonder which characters we’re encouraged to understand and which ones we’re encouraged to fear.

And then there’s emotional dysregulation itself, which has become another one of those expressions people throw around without necessarily understanding. It isn’t a diagnosis. It can be associated with psychiatric or neurological conditions, but it can also happen when someone is grieving, exhausted, burned out, going through a divorce, dealing with chronic stress, or simply having a terrible f*****g year. Sometimes people struggle to manage their emotions because life is overwhelming. Sometimes an intense emotional response is entirely appropriate. And feeling something intensely doesn’t automatically tell us how someone will behave.

Which brings me to the thing I keep wishing Hollywood would show us more often: the next scene.

The one after the breakdown. After the relationship ends. After someone realizes they’ve hurt another person. Where’s the character who spends two years in therapy and learns to respond differently? The one who still feels everything intensely but has stopped letting every emotion dictate their behavior? The person who grows, changes, and builds a meaningful life while remaining beautifully, inconveniently human?

Those stories exist too. And as a writer, I’d love to see more of them.

Because we spend an extraordinary amount of time telling people to work on themselves, go to therapy, become more self-aware, and grow. But when someone actually changes, are we willing to recognize it? Or have we already decided who they are based on their worst moment? Nobody owes anyone forgiveness, and change doesn’t erase harm. But if we genuinely believe in personal growth, we have to believe that people are capable of becoming different from who they used to be.

I think that’s what connects all these seemingly unrelated things for me. The execution comments. The movies. The relationship influencers. The diagnoses thrown around like insults. We’ve become incredibly comfortable reducing human beings to whatever makes them easiest to judge, dismiss, or categorize. And the more certain we become about who everyone else is, the less curious we seem to be about what we might not know.

Hollywood created the character. Social media supplied the diagnosis. And somewhere along the way, the human being disappeared. I’d like to put them back.

So tonight, it’s just me, a microphone, a few movies, some actual research, and a considerable amount of frustration with the social media psychology circus. If you’ve ever watched a movie and wondered why we’re so quick to label people, or scrolled past another influencer who apparently knows your ex better than you do, this one’s for you.

If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this episode, it’s something I think we could all practice a little more often.

Be curious before you’re certain.

That’s it for now, from Nightnight at Laura’s — a podcast about everything and nothing…

Good night.

Further Reading & References

For those interested in exploring the research and psychology behind this episode, here are a few resources worth reading.

1. Mental Health Misinformation on TikTok — Journal of Medical Internet Research (2025)

Navigating the Maze of Social Media Disinformation on Psychiatric Illness

The study I reference in the episode. Researchers analyzed 1,000 TikTok videos across 26 mental health topics and found that 15.7% contained misinformation, 6.3% were classified as disinformation, and only 20.7% were reference-based. Particularly relevant to the discussion about personality disorders and online diagnoses.

2. Addressing Mental Health Misinformation — American Psychological Association (2024)

Addressing Misinformation About Mental Health With Patients

An examination of how misleading psychological information spreads online, why people believe it, and how it can interfere with understanding mental health conditions and seeking appropriate care.

3. Understanding Borderline Personality Disorder — National Institute of Mental Health

Borderline Personality Disorder: Overview, Symptoms, and Treatment

A clinical overview of BPD, emotional regulation difficulties, and treatment. Useful context for understanding why casually assigning psychiatric diagnoses to fictional characters or former partners can be misleading.

4. The Psychology of Misinformation — American Psychological Association

Using Psychological Science to Understand and Fight Health Misinformation

A research-based examination of how misinformation spreads, why repeated claims can become persuasive, and what psychological science tells us about recognizing unreliable information.

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Jahan and I hadn’t seen each other in six years, since right when the pandemic started, back when I was renting his mom’s pool house. We drifted, the way people do. And then, this year, his mom sent a text meant for his girlfriend, who is also named Laura, to me, accidentally.

When the world shut down, Jahan — living alone, watching every friend he had in Burbank pack up and move back to wherever they’d come from — did the thing a lot of us didn’t: he got in a Subaru Outback he wasn’t even sure he liked, and circumnavigated half the western United States for an entire summer. He traces the restlessness back further than the pandemic, actually — to 2015, a serious breakup, and a decision that if the people in his plans weren’t there anymore, the plans still were. He stopped waiting for someone to come explore the world with him and just went.

That’s how he found the festival and rave scene — generators towed into the desert, DJ equipment hooked up in the middle of nowhere, and what he calls one of the best nights of his life. He’s about to turn 47, still chasing new music instead of romanticizing old music, which he says is the thing that separates him from a lot of people his age: the ones who show up to a party still playing what was popular thirty-five years ago and call it the good stuff. He wants the new stuff. He still goes looking for it.

Then there’s the story about the Burning Man ticket he turned down in 2004. A friend — an actual original burner from the early scene — tried to sell him on it with a slideshow at a work lunch meeting, and somehow made the pitch almost entirely about the porta-potties overflowing by day three. Jahan said no. Twenty-some years later, he still hasn’t gone, and he counts it as a real regret, not just because he missed the party, but because he missed the version of it that existed before it became what it is now.

Which took us somewhere I keep landing on this show no matter who’s sitting across from me: money, access, and the human factor. Jahan’s take was more generous than mine: he doesn’t think a tech millionaire showing up to Burning Man ruins anything, he thinks closing the door on anyone, including people you disagree with, is how nothing ever changes. Fair. But I pushed back anyway, because a ticket that costs thousands of dollars isn’t really an open door, it’s a very polite “you can’t afford to be here.” He didn’t disagree with that part either. He just pointed out there’s another layer most people never see: the crew, the vendors, the people who live entirely outside the festival circuit and travel from one to the next just to build the thing for everyone else. That’s where he thinks the real counterculture still survives. Not in the ticket line. In the people who never bought one.

We never even got to how we originally met until the end: his cousin, who was my colleague at the time, told us we should be friends cuz I just moved to Los Angeles and didn’t know anybody, and so, we started talking thanks to his family. Fitting, honestly, because always through family, that’s how we reconnected recalling the good old days pre-pandemic.

Thank you, Jahan. And thank you Josephine, Jay’s mom! Miss you both.

Good night.

— L.

Keely and I met the way half of LA seems to meet each other: at the bottom of Runyon Canyon, before sunrise, hauling camera equipment up a hill for a stranger’s short film. I had an asthma attack that morning — the air was weirdly cold — which, in hindsight, is a pretty on-brand way for me to make a new friend.

She found her way into filmmaking through Tiziano, one of my friends, and through a director named Shane Hurlbutt, through a summer spent wrapping color-coded cable on a film set because someone needed hands. One of those projects turned into a night wandering LA’s metro stations with a composer named Javier, filming strangers-turned-collaborators as they rode the trains — the kind of project that only happens in this city, where someone says meet me at an apartment downtown at six, we promise we won’t murder you, and you just go.

But the real heart of this episode is her film Roses — and the fact that there isn’t a single rose in it.

Years ago, in college, she made an intaglio print — copper plate, acid, ink, a press — of her own face traced in different directions, with roses drawn around it. Like most art from college, it went into a box. Years later, mid-conversation with a filmmaker she’d just met — one of those rare four-hour talks where you don’t want to hang up because it feels like a spark lighting up in your chest — he saw the print on her wall and said: you should make a film out of that.

So she did, slowly, over years, stitched together from three unlikely threads: the seamless match-cuts in Hozier’s Work Song music video, where one dancing couple turns into another mid-spin; the way cinematographer Mandy Walker talked about filming Elvis, treating the camera not as equipment but as a third dancer in the room; and a folder of Pinterest stills she’d collected of bodies making shapes — the space between two curved arms, the focus pulled just to a pair of hands. She cast two real dancers who were already a couple, because she wanted the chemistry to be real before the camera ever rolled.

And she kept the title Roses — even though the roses never made it into the final film — because, as her composer put it when she asked whether it needed explaining: you told me it was called Roses, and I never once questioned why. Nobody does. It just is. That’s the whole soul of the project, right there in the title nobody questions.

We spent a long stretch of the conversation on the thing I keep circling on this show: why does the industry keep trying to strip the human part out of art? Keely’s answer was more honest than most — she doesn’t think it’s evil, she thinks it’s situational. An executive deciding whether to fund your project doesn’t need the five-year backstory of how you got there; they need thirty seconds and a budget. But put those same people in a museum, or on a studio tour, or at a dinner table — and suddenly they crave the human detail, the accident that became the best part, the story behind the story. The backstory isn’t unimportant. It’s just being asked for in the wrong room.

I still think that’s a little bit of a tragedy — that the story of why you made something only gets to exist once the selling is already done. But I loved that she didn’t let me stay simply outraged about it. She’s right. It depends on the room.

Before we wrapped, she gave me the practical, unglamorous truth of being an independent filmmaker in this city right now: festival submission fees add up fast with zero guarantee of ever being seen, so instead she’s routing Roses straight to local LA screenings, letting her own community find it first. And she’s also a photographer — her series Shaken Not Stirred is showing at an event here in LA on October 17th.

Thank you, Keely. Keep the door open — link’s yours whenever you want the world to find Roses.

— L.

Find more about Keely here

Keely’s INSTA PAGE

Keely’s website

Tonight’s guest is a ghost.

Not like that — nobody died, there’s no séance happening here. This one’s dedicated to everyone who didn’t feel like coming, or couldn’t, for whatever reason. So instead of canceling, I decided to just talk to them the way you talk to someone in your head. If you don’t know what that means, honestly — are you even human?

We all have a little graveyard of people like that. The college roommate whose wedding you found out about through a mutual friend’s Instagram story. The work best friend who was your whole personality for two years, until the project ended and so did you two. The person you dated for a handful of months who still, somehow, likes your posts at 2am like nothing happened.

Tonight was for them. And for a few real, current ghosts too — people who said “I’d love to, but I don’t feel comfortable,” or “I don’t have time right now, ask me in a month.” I want to be honest about something: I’m not mad at any of you. And I mean that — not the version of “I’m not mad” that actually means the opposite. Anyone gets to close a door. Nobody owes anyone, me included, an open one forever just because it used to swing easy.

Some of those doors, I’ve left cracked on purpose. If you’re one of the ghosts who actually wants to stop being one — you know where to find me.

I could tell every one of these stories the other way — make every “no” into a villain, cast myself as the woman who got left, said-no-to, ghosted by half of Los Angeles. That version exists. I could write that letter too. I just don’t want to.

I’d rather be the person who wants good things for people, even the ones who didn’t choose me. Because I’ve done the grudge version before, and here’s what it actually costs: nothing, to them. They’re out there living their lives, blissfully unaware I’ve been renting them space in my head, rent-free, for months. The only person who ever pays rent on a grudge is the one holding it.

I’ve built this whole podcast around being the woman who writes letters — most of which I never send, because sending was never the point. The point was saying the true thing out loud so it stops living in my chest, and then closing the notebook. Tonight, I just did that into a microphone instead of a journal. Same thing, louder room.

And then, near the end, my brother gave me the ending I needed. He keeps a photo album with room for ten pictures — and he always leaves one slot empty. I asked him why, once. He said: that one’s for the best picture. It hasn’t happened yet.

The empty chair is the slot my brother leaves open — space held for the guest who’s still coming, the ones who’ll walk through the door someday because they want to, not because they were asked. I’d love that, genuinely — someone showing up one day just to say I love your podcast, put me on it. Until then, the chair stays empty on purpose. Not sad. Just waiting for its picture.

If you’ve got a ghost of your own — someone who left, someone who said no, someone you’re still quietly rooting for from a distance — do what I did tonight. Talk to them. In the car, in the shower, wherever. You don’t have to send it anywhere. You just have to say it.

That’s it for now, from Nightnight at Laura’s — a podcast about everything and nothing…

Good night.

We met at the Rainbow — the rock-and-roll landmark in West Hollywood, sister venue to the Whiskey a Go Go — at Jowell’s 39th birthday party. She was quietly telling a small circle of friends that she was finally writing the book she’d been carrying since she was 27. I was in that circle. I said, wait, I can help — do you need my help? And that’s the whole origin story of this episode: two strangers, one book, one very fated party.

Jowell wanted to be a rock star as a kid (remind you of someone? lol) — she has a letter she wrote to her best friend in elementary school saying so, but she can’t sing, so the dream took a different shape. It became Imperfect Rockstar, her brand, her coaching practice, and now her memoir, all built on a mantra she loves so much she has it tattooed on her skin: perfectly imperfect.

The book is really about growing up first-generation Middle Eastern in Los Angeles, inside a version of “supposed to” that left very little room to actually be a person — perfect grades, perfect marriage, perfect obedience, perfect everything. She told me she didn’t understand how not American she still was until she started dating someone who was — the exact cultural whiplash I felt getting my own citizenship here, discovering which parts of me were still entirely my own culture, even after a lifetime in this one. Neither of us grew up in the same place, but we both grew up between two worlds — which, fittingly, is a chapter title in her book. She thinks it’s less about which two cultures you’re straddling and more about the specific ache of straddling any two — and I think she’s right.

She almost wrote this book at 27, right after a breakup, and didn’t. Life gave her ten more years, another relationship that reopened the same old wound, and — she said it herself — more maturity to actually write it whole. Turning 40 became the finish line she set for herself, and she made it.

The part of this episode that’s really her, underneath the branding, is what she does with the pain she’s already survived. Her nonprofit, Show Me the Truth — named for the Audioslave lyric — was born out of the same week in 2017 when the music world lost two of its own to suicide. She’d already been planning a small charity show for mental-health awareness; she had to remake the flyer twice that week. What started as one bar show became Midnight Wonderland, now heading into its tenth year at the Whiskey a Go Go every December, raising money for the Midnight Mission of Downtown LA — which she was careful to point out isn’t just a homeless shelter, it’s a place people choose to walk into to get clean, get a GED, get counseling, get their kids a safe place to sleep.

That’s the whole shape of Jowell, if you ask me: someone who took her own hardest years and turned them into other people’s exits. What a star! Actually, rockstar!

She told me she’s a little tired — it’s been a hard year, and she’s ready to close it with a bang and breathe a little in the next one. Fair. She’s earned it. Book, wellness retreats, and Midnight Wonderland’s tenth anniversary, all landing at once — that’s not overwhelm, Jowell, that’s a rockstar’s year.

I hope we’re doing round two once the book is actually in our hands, so she can read us her own chapters in her own voice and I can’t wait.

Thank you, Jowell. Perfectly imperfect, exactly as advertised.

Good night,

— L.

Find out more about Jowell and her work:

* Jowell’s Instagram

* Jowell’s brand

* Jowell’s jewelry line Stone and Relic

* Jowell’s coaching — imperfectrockstar.com

* Midnight Wonderland (Dec 13, at the Whisky a Go Go) @midnightwonderland_

* The Midnight Mission (who Midnight Wonderland benefits): midnightmission.org

* Show Me the Truth Foundation — showmethetruthfoundation.org

* To Write Love on Her Arms — twloha.com

I spend my life trying to catch things in words, and I always feel like something gets lost in the translation. My friend Matteo catches them in light. So I asked him the question this whole show is built on: can a photo say something a sentence can’t? And he gave me an hour I didn’t want to end.

We met at Boston College in 2015, one of a little group of three. He’s the kind of friend I’d lose to time and then text out of nowhere, and it’d pick right back up, which is its own small proof of the thing I keep saying, that real friendship just stays there.

But the heart of it was photography, and how he thinks about it, which turns out to be a quiet rebellion against AI. His argument: a machine can only reassemble what already exists. It’s read every poem, seen every painting, and it can remix them into something that looks new, but it didn’t come from anywhere. It didn’t cost anything. And for him, the cost is the whole point. Great things are hard, he said and if they weren’t hard, they wouldn’t be great. He compared it to a marathon: the people who finish two hours after the winner aren’t happy because of the medal. They’re happy because they did the hard thing. AI hands you the medal without the miles. You didn’t win.

Great things are hard; if they weren’t hard, they wouldn’t be great. Matteo

(I’ll cop to the irony here, because he was too kind to press it: my podcast cover is AI-made, and I got laid off from Verizon partly because of AI. He just smiled and said AI is fine for your laundry — he’d just rather it not write the poems. Fair. Deeply fair.)

Then he told me about an ice cream shop. In Rockport, Massachusetts, he found an ordinary little storefront and something about the light stopped him cold, so he went back. For three days and four hundred photos. No joke. He stood in one spot for three hours watching the light change minute by minute — morning, sun, dusk, the artificial light coming on — because he wanted to catch the exact instant it all lined up. Of four hundred photos, he loves maybe two or three and the wildest part is that he said the experience of standing there was probably better than any photo he got.

That’s almost like a storyteller’s dream. We think of a photograph as static, one frozen click, no story. What he’s describing is the opposite: a photo is the last page of a long, invisible story. I told him I wish every picture in the world came with a preface — this took me three days and four hundred tries. Wouldn’t be cool? He mentioned captions and those not being useful, but that’s not really what I meant…

He walked me through the rest of his religion of light. The word photography means “writing with light” — that’s literally all it is, catching light on a sensor. Edward Hopper is his patron saint, the master of a window lit at exactly the right angle. And his favorite analogy, the one that got me because it’s my world too: light is the script, and the subject is the actor. A great script lets an ordinary actor shine; a mediocre one, and even Bryan Cranston can only do so much. The light, he said, elevated the performance of that little ice cream shop. (Yes, you can giggle at the Bryan Cranston’s reference, lol, I did too!)

The answer to my real question came right after: can a photo say what a sentence can’t? He said: every medium has its limits, and the art is learning to live inside them. Writing, photography, music… none of them is perfect, none of them closes the whole gap between what you felt and what you can hand to someone else. Trying to bridge that gap anyway is the entire fun of it. And, he pointed out, grinning — this podcast is exactly that. A guy talking about photographs, on a show you can only hear. No pictures. Just us, trying to make you see something you can’t see. He even likes the idea of not showing you the photo, so you build it yourself.

I asked him one other closing question: if he handed his younger self one of his photos, which one would it be? And instead of choosing one, he opened a door I wasn’t ready for: he told me he’s afraid of forgetting. He watched someone he loved lose their memory near the end of their life, lose it completely, and it marked him. So he photographs to keep a way back, like a proof that the moment happened, something to return to when the details start to blur. Travel and photography are so fused for him now that he can’t imagine going anywhere without a camera, because the camera is how he refuses to lose it. Bittersweet is the right word, and it’s the right note to end on.

Grazie, Matteo. You catch the light before it leaves. I catch the words before they do. Same instinct, different tools, both of us just trying to keep something from… slipping away.

Good night, everyone.

— L.

Matteo’s PhotoInsta

Matteo’s Portfolio

Some guests are just sent from the Source. I swear.

Today I had the honor to talk to my friend Narae, and I just wanted to keep talking but we’ll do it in person, without microphones. She’s a friend, an artist working in immersive storytelling, and a tech co-founder building VR for pain and anxiety management, but what the episode is really about is the thing she and I both circle constantly: how you protect your inner state, and what you let in.

She said her whole life — the art, the tech, the way she moves through people — sits on three connected things: who she meets, what she eats, and how she feels. Social connection, nutrition, meditation. Mind and body as one system, given outward to the people around her. It’s the most coherent way I’ve heard anyone describe living holistically, and it came out of her like she’d known it forever.

Then we got into boundaries, and she said something that reframed the whole idea for me. Her green flag isn’t charm or chemistry — it’s someone who can say no in a way that’s kind, and tell you why. Someone who protects themselves cleanly enough that you trust they’ll respect your limits too. She’s noticed that boundaries are contagious. When you’re around someone who does it naturally, you can suddenly do it too. When you’re around people who never do, you spend the whole time braced and guarded. The skill is the room you’re standing in.

The centerpiece of the whole conversation was a story her therapist pointed her to, from The Four Agreements — the smoky mirror. The idea that we each see everyone through our own reflection; that when someone’s cruel to you, they’re not really handing you a fact about yourself, they’re offering you a drink of their own poison, and you get to say thank you, but no. You can recognize the offer, even honor the intention behind it, and still decline to drink it. I told her about the man who screamed at me at a gas station on a good day, for the crime of existing near him, and how, years later, it’s still lodged in me. Her answer was gentle and devastating: that anger was his. He just never named it, so he handed it to the nearest person instead.

Because that’s her real practice: naming the feeling. She learned in therapy that when you name a bad emotion, it shrinks and loses its grip and when you name a good one, it grows. But she couldn’t always find the words, so she found another door. She’s a visual person, an athlete who grew up in a culture where you endured feelings instead of speaking them, so when she can’t write the feeling, she draws it. Doodles, colors, jagged lines or round ones. She gets the thing out of her head and onto the paper so she can look at it from the outside and ask: is this anger worth three weeks, or three minutes?

Is this anger worth three weeks, or three minutes? —Narae

And then she told me about the letters. Yes, she writes letters too! When she’s furious at someone, she writes the letter. The long one, the real one, revised until it says exactly how she feels. And then she reads it back and realizes she doesn’t need to send it. She already got what she needed: she knows how she feels now. Sending it would just cost her another day of her own energy. So she closes it, and moves on.

Narae. I’m the woman who writes the letters she doesn’t send. I’ve built a whole podcast on it. And here you were, on the other side of the mic, telling me you do the exact same thing, for the exact same reason. Different countries, different lives, same instinct: say the whole true thing, out loud or on paper, and then let it go. We were meant to meet. Period.

We ended, of course, on the animals. Her two cats, ten years old, who draw boundaries better than any human she knows — they take what they want, refuse what they don’t, and do it so cutely you can’t be mad. She taught me something I didn’t know: cats don’t meow at each other. They only meow at us. They invented a language just to talk to the humans they love. Which felt like the truest note to end on, these small creatures building a whole vocabulary to reach us, and us barely noticing they’re speaking.

Thank you, Narae. Same instinct, different tools, different worlds — and somehow always the same conversation. I feel very lucky to know you in this lifetime.

Good night!

— L.

Find out more about Narae and her work at the following links:

Narae

* Website / portfolio: kimnarae.com — her art, immersive/VR work, exhibitions

* On Instagram

* On LinkedIn

Her work

* Flowly — the VR app for pain and anxiety management she co-founded with Celine Tien and Julien Soros; she created the app’s virtual worlds; founded 2019, went through Y Combinator, it’s on Instagram

* Rallie — a social tech platform that helps friend groups turn every “we should hang out”

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Three and a half years ago, a guy named Gianluca won the green card lottery, quit his job in Luxembourg, and moved to Los Angeles with no plan, no job, and — his words — “go big or go home.” We met in the Italians-in-LA Facebook group, back when he was panicking, surrounded by Americans, hunting for anyone who’d speak Italian with him. This week he came on the show to tell the whole story… in English.

The thread that runs through all of it is a mentality clash he keeps bumping into. In Europe, he says, you work for a stable salary — you sign the contract, you’re safe, you’re maybe a little mediocre forever, but you don’t panic. In America, people work for passion — they’ll grind in the field they love even when it’s not paying, enthusiasm through the roof, because they actually love the thing. He landed with the European operating system installed, and the whole episode is him slowly, reluctantly switching over.

It cost him something to get there. Three months burning through savings. A job he found (partly thanks to a $45 round of three spritzes with me — a price that now sounds like a bargain). Watching coworkers disappear one by one until he got laid off himself — and the strange relief of it, because sometimes it’s easier when someone else makes the decision for you. A car-rental business with a friend — three Fiat 500s, three Mustangs, a Volkswagen — that turned out not to be profitable. And, finally, finanzamille — the finance platform he built with his business partner Amedeo, where people can actually learn how money works.

Here’s what I want to flag, because he was careful about it and so am I: finanzamille teaches — it breaks down the news, analyzes a stock a week, shows you their reasoning — but as he said himself, plainly, they don’t give financial advice, because they can’t. This episode is his story, not a stock tip. Nothing here is advice; it’s one immigrant’s road from accountant to aspiring financial planner, studying at UCLA, chasing a genuinely big dream.

I also asked him whether showing your face online actually matters. He didn’t hesitate. In an age when everything’s made by AI, he said, showing your face, being visibly human, is more important than ever. People don’t follow a product. They follow a person, they want to feel your emotion.

The human factor wins over everything else. I keep saying it, episode after episode, and my guests keep saying it back to me.

His advice to the version of himself who started with no audience and no proof it’d work? Be consistent. Follow the passion. You’ll find your people eventually.

Grazie, Gianluca. From a $45 spritz to a 50-million-dollar dream — go big, my friend.

— L.

Buona notte.

You can find Gianluca here

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Years ago, I taught a serious, intense, wildly motivated Italian soldier how to speak English. This week he sat across from me in California and told me — in that English — that learning it didn’t just change his job. It changed who he is.

That’s the whole episode, really. The teacher, interviewing the student who took the lesson somewhere the lesson never imagined.

Gianluigi is an Italian Army Sergeant Major with almost three decades of service. His specialty is being the voice between two worlds that move at completely different speeds — the ground, where everything is chaos and adrenaline, and the air, where everything is exact. He’s one of the few people who can do that job, and a huge part of why is the language. Right now he’s in Coronado, training with the US military, nine hours from home, the only Italian in the room.

We got into the thing this whole show is secretly about: the difference between learning a language and living one.

He said classroom English is safe — you can pause, rewind, correct yourself, make mistakes with no consequences. But operational English, the real thing, is fast and compressed and unforgiving. “In the classroom, English is a subject. In the field, English is a weapon.” And the moment he understood that was standing on a radio with US pilots talking so fast there were no pauses, no “say again,” just pure flow — and realizing that if he couldn’t keep up, he wasn’t part of the solution, he was part of the problem.

He talked about landing in America and discovering that fluency wasn’t enough — that his humor didn’t survive the crossing, that his timing was off, that jokes which would kill in Italy came out flat or serious or confusing. “It’s like having the instinct, but not the tools.” Like a part of your personality is locked behind a door that only opens in your first language. Nobody warns you, he said, that learning a new language means temporarily losing yourself — your humor, your spontaneity — and slowly rebuilding it in a new form.

I told him: 100%. Same. Because that’s the thing I’ve been circling for fourteen episodes, and here was a soldier saying it back to me from the inside of a military base.

He talked about the accent as a filter — “people hear it before they hear YOU” — how his directness got read as anger, how being taken for “less” until the language proved otherwise is its own quiet battle. And how English didn’t just open doors for him; it changed the way people listened when he walked through them.

And the line I can’t stop thinking about is “In English, I can be clear. In Italian, I can be me.” We always get to that “human factor”… every single time, my friends. This is why this podcast exist. Emotions. Everywhere.

He doesn’t think the second language replaced who he is. He thinks it expanded it — gave him access to new versions of himself. More adaptable, more patient, more open.

After ten years, he said, this is the man I became. His one regret this trip: his wife couldn’t be here to see it.

Grazie, Gianluigi. The last time you needed me, I was correcting your grammar. Now you correct the space between two languages for a living. I’m so proud of you I could cry.

— L. Buonanotte.