Talk Therapy

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.

Dan and Nathan are joined by writer and reporter Ali Montag, whose guest post on "The Inner Ring of the Internet" was published on Divinations last week. Using Ali's piece—which explores how the cultural push to 'build in public' endangers our understandings of our own creative work—as a jumping-off point, the trio discuss media's insular issues, the crucial nature of writing in a group setting, and why ad and subscription-based business models are best understood as donuts and kale.

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.

Commemorating the one-year anniversary of incorporating Every, Dan and Nathan reflect on those early, stressful days when their audience wasn't clear, their differing memories of the fundraising process, and how their working relationship has improved their individual self-perception.

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?