In a repost of a fan favorite from 2022, Laurel S. Braitman (re-)joins the podcast to talk about her most recent book, "What Looks Like Bravery: A Journey Through Love & Loss" about losing her father to cancer and finding herself in the process.

She is the Writer-in-Residence at the Stanford School of Medicine. Her work has appeared in The Guardian,[5] The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company,[6] The New Inquiry,[7] Salon,[8] and a variety of other publications. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Cornell, and a TED talk fellow.

She authored in 2015, "Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves."

Braitman is a Thacher alumni and grew up over the hill in Santa Paula. Besides her father's (and mother's) remarkable life stories, we talked about the changes we've seen in Ventura County and Ojai over the decades, the writing process, how the publishing business has changed and where it's headed, and the saga of Monarch, the grizzly on the state flag. Laurel said it was captured in the Tehachapi Mountains, I believe it was in the Sespe wilderness.

We did not talk about the Consumer Protection Bureau, Ventuckian musical genres or local mafia connections.

Check out more about Laurel at https://www.laurelbraitman.com/