How to give and receive good advice (w/ Hola Papi’s John Paul Brammer) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Someone once told me that anytime someone gives you advice, they're really just saying the things that they themselves need to hear. And I know that that is definitely true. When I give advice, 30 seconds in, I hear myself saying things like, “You're gonna give a great podcast introduction.”

Just believe in yourself and don't overthink it. You have the skills. And then the other person who I'm talking to is like, um, actually was asking for advice about how to bake bread. So… My point being, it's hard to give good advice. It's hard to not make it about you. I am of the opinion that most times the best thing you could do to help another person is just listen to them.

But every once in a while, a solid piece of advice can lead to a breakthrough. It can make us feel less alone, and it can be really fun to witness. Today's guest, John Paul Brammer, is an expert on giving advice that is actually helpful, actually useful, and so much fun to listen to. So much fun that strangers, myself included, have been hanging on his every word for years.

John Paul is the author of Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons, and as a long-time advice columnist, he's here to teach us his craft. Here's a clip.

[00:01:12] John Paul Brammer:
I mean, I give the normal advice that, you know, a good buddy would give when someone's feeling down or like having issues in their relationship.

But most advice at its bare bones comes down to just communicate more with each other. It, it's often just someone being like, “Oh, I'm worried that my partner thinks this. What should I do?” And it's like, have you brought that up to them, and nine times outta 10, no, they just haven't. So it's me like dressing up, communicate better in different hats and outfits, and pretending that it's different columns.

[00:01:46] Chris Duffy:
We are gonna be looking at all of those hats with John Paul and laughing a lot over the course of this episode. But first, a couple of podcast ads.

Today we're talking about how to give and how to receive advice with John Paul Brammer.

[00:02:07] John Paul Brammer:
Hi everyone. My name is John Paul Brammer. I am the author of Hola Papi: How to Come Out in a Walmart Parking Lot and Other Life Lessons as well as ¡Hola Papi! the advice column.

[00:02:18] Chris Duffy:
I'm really, uh, I'm really excited to talk to you.

I've been a, a fan of your, of your writing and your work for a long time, so this is, this is a real honor.

[00:02:24] John Paul Brammer:
Oh, thank you.

[00:02:24] Chris Duffy:
So let's start, for people who maybe aren't familiar with, uh, your writing already, um, can you just tell us the story of how your column ¡Hola Papi! got started?

[00:02:34] John Paul Brammer:
¡Hola Papi! is sort of a joke that got taken too far.

I was working as a journalist back in 2017, kind of a reporter doing a mix of like some culture writing, but mostly beat reporting, and I was really trying to make it as a writer in New York City, which was very difficult.

I was barely making rent. I had a friend who had just started writing for this new outlet called INTO, and it was launched, of all things, by Grindr.

So Grindr, which is a mostly known as a gay hookup app. They were trying to do the Playboy “I'm just here for the articles” route at the time, and so they were sort of like snatching up queer writers here and there and trying to get them to do weekly columns or monthly columns or series and my friend Matthew Rodriguez was like, “Hey, I know that you're looking for freelance work in addition to some of your reporting, would you be interested in pitching a column?”

And of course I was. I was very keen on picking up as much freelance work as I could. The only issue was I was already really stressed. I was kind of overworked as it was, and I was unsure if I would be able to really come up with something new to write about every single week, which is what they wanted.

And that's when I got the idea for an advice column called ¡Hola Papi!, because hola, papi was something that people on Grindr would say to me sometimes. I have Latino listed as my ethnicity on the app. Uh, so I would get it now and then, and I was thinking about an advice column called ¡Hola Papi! because I was like, okay, I can't come up with a new topic to write about every single week.

I don't know if I'm that observational of a person, but the thing about an advice column is people come to you with the prompt and people ask you a question and you can just use that as the subject matter. So I sort of reverse engineered an advice column without really having, I would say, the requisite knowledge about what the medium was and what its requirements would be, and so to compensate for that, I thought, okay, it'll be a satirical advice column, so people will write into me, but my answers will be self-aggrandizing.

I'm just gonna talk about how amazing I am. I'm just gonna sort of ignore whatever the question they sent was. I don't know if you've ever seen the show Space Ghost Coast to Coast before?

[00:04:54] Chris Duffy:
Of course.

[00:04:55] John Paul Brammer:
So it was sort of like inspired by Space Ghost of all things where it's like, yeah, Space Ghost is a host of a talk show, but he's really bad at his job.

Like he ignores the celebrity guest, whoever it is, like some famous singer, some famous actor. He would just sort of ignore them and focus on himself or carry on with his work drama with his coworkers. And so I thought, okay, I'll do that. It'll be a fun, silly little advice column where someone sends me a question like, “Should I break up with my boyfriend?”

But I just start talking about my own love life. Or I just start talking about all the dates I'm having, or it's like, oh, I can't really relate to you. I'm like a winner. I don't know. Like just really jokey jokes, right? So I kind of launched it that way and it was a success at first because it was funny.

And I think that the first question was about, like, “Am I a racist because I'm into Latino guys and I'm like a white guy?” It was solicited from one of my friends in real life. I just needed a piñata. Like I was like, “Hey man, I need a funny question. Send me one.” And when he sent me that, I'm like, this is perfect.

So I got to just like roast him. I got to call him like, 'cause he was talking about learning Spanish and having this genuine interest in Latino cultures and I believe I called him like Chipotle Mayo in the piece or something. It was just really. Just, you know, funny and it worked. But the thing about ¡Hola Papi!, an advice column being sent through the app, which it was, which is how they advertised it.

So after it launched, they launched the first column. They sent it to people all over the gay sex having world, not just United States, but beyond. And within like a week, my inbox was completely flooded with letters. Because I think if you're on Grindr in the first place, you're probably lonely. You're probably looking for a connection of some kind and being able to just send someone a letter with the almost guarantee that they'll read it.

I think elicited a lot of feelings from people, and it made people think, oh, this is a place where I can really put my problems. And a lot of these people were from countries where gayness is not as accepted as it is here in the US and so a lot of them felt like this is a rare opportunity for me to express something that I'm not able to express in my real life.

Or even with strangers online. I am anonymous. This person says that they want to hear from me. And so. I started receiving all these letters and the thing about it was they were not letters I could make fun of. They were not situations that I could make jokes about. ¡Hola Papi! started as a joke, became earnest over time.

It's still funny, I would say, but yeah, I, I had to kind of grow into my role as an actual advice columnist because I put myself in that ridiculous situation.

[00:07:40] Chris Duffy:
You know, one thing I'm, I'm really struck by in reading ¡Hola Papi! is that it, it breaks the format of what it means to be like an advice columnist both in

[00:07:49] John Paul Brammer:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:07:49] Chris Duffy:
Who you are in, the people that you're giving advice to and the situations you're giving advice to. But, but mainly in the tone, right? Like when it comes to normal advice, columns are very like self serious and from this position of on high, I know it all. And let me tell you about where the fork is supposed to go next to the plate.

And instead, I think one of the reasons why. I at least love reading ¡Hola Papi! is that like you share the ways in which you are not sure about these things in which you're struggling. And many times there are letter writers where you say like, wow, it sounds like you've got something figured out that I don't.

And then you're able to turn that into a joke and also give some really meaningful thoughts about like connection and people.

[00:08:28] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah, I, I think back to my biggest inspirations in terms of advice giving and maybe inspiration is the wrong word. I think about the people who've actually given me material, tangible advice in my life.

And I came out as gay in Oklahoma where I'm from. I'm from a very rural part of the state, and I didn't even know gay people existed for a very long time. And so I didn't come out until I was around 20, and that was just because my environment was so hostile to the idea. I was bullied really badly in middle school for not even for being gay, but just for being suspected of being gay, for being effeminate and having interests that sort of deviated from what other boys my age should have been into, which looked a lot like hunting and driving ATVs and you know.

The typical rural country guy kind of activities that I just was not into. And so when I came out, I knew nothing. I remember the first time I dipped my toes into the gay community in college. And this guy was like, “So are you a top?” And I was like, “A top at what?” Because I thought he meant like a top student.

Like, uh, like I had no idea. Um, obviously there was very little sex education in Oklahoma for gay guys, so a lot of my education came very informally from just guys I met at bars. Like I forced myself to go to a gay bar. And I started talking to people and I would just listen and people would start filling me in, in terms of what the slang was, what the politics were, because it really is like learning a completely separate language, like all these little ways that we have to signal to each other like, this is the kind of person I am, this is what I'm into.

This is my sense of humor. There's like a separate vocabulary in the gay community that I just didn't know about. And so I was getting caught up to speed. And my teachers, my mentors were really just whoever was sitting around and whoever's ear I had and whoever I could ask questions. And I feel very fortunate that I met the right people when I came out, and people who were willing to kind of take me under their wing and sort of listen to what I had to say and kind of taught me the ropes, you know?

And so when I started doing ¡Hola Papi! I kind of thought of it as a less formal enterprise than some of the other advice columns are out there. I kind of wanted it to be like, I'm your friend at a bar, or I'm like this cool stranger that you just met, but I'm willing to listen to you and we can joke around together.

And I don't think I have all the answers, but I think we can have a good time in our conversation. And that's sort of where I drew inspiration because the community resources that were available to me were so informal, like I didn't pick up a booklet or a pamphlet and start reading stuff and be like, oh, that's how all this works.

And I think that now my favorite ¡Hola Papi! columns are those less formal ones where I'm having a good time. I'm kind of riffing on the person. I'm lightly ribbing them. But at the end we come to a place where it's like we both learn something from each other.

[00:11:31] Chris Duffy:
Hmm. Yeah. I, I think that's, that's really interesting.

And then I also see the, you know, the idea of feeling like you're not alone in your identity and that's also very much.

[00:11:40] John Paul Brammer:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:11:40] Chris Duffy:
A part of ¡Hola Papi! too. You know, that that kid who was in Oklahoma and felt like, well, there's not other people who are like me that clearly that kid who would now be reading your column and being like, oh wow, this is great.There are people like me.

[00:11:55] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah. And also, you know, we're having a good time with it.

[00:11:58] Chris Duffy:
In the, the interest of, of saying it. I have been reading the ¡Hola Papi! for several years now and I, I think I'm very much in that category of people you talk to where you're like, well, it's kind of surprising 'cause I'm like, I'm like, um, a straight white married father.

And I'm like, I love the column. It's so great. And it's just interesting to hear from people who have great voices and are able to write really compellingly. And part of it is I find really useful things that I can apply in my own life. And then part of it is I get to see the way that you see the world, and it's just cool to see through someone else's eyes always.

So I, I find that I get a ton out of it, even if it's not necessarily like the exact identity markers that I, I also identify with.

[00:12:41] John Paul Brammer:
I mean, I think to me the magic of reading something is being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. So whenever I do like author panels and most of the author panels I do are sort of diversity focused. I'm either there because it's like Latino Heritage Month or it's pride month. And the common question I get is like, when did you first see yourself in a book? And you know, the typical answer you're supposed to give there is like, oh, I first read about a gay character when r I first read a Latino character when…

But for me, I'm just like, I don't know. I saw myself in Neil Gaiman's Coraline. You know, I saw myself in the stuff I was reading, uh, as a child that were like women protagonists. Or a straight male protagonist because the cool thing to me about reading is that I'm able to put myself in the shoes of someone who's technically nothing like me, but I get to engage in their world for a little bit.

And I get to find that actually we're not so different or we experience things in similar ways. And what's cool about ¡Hola Papi! the really life affirming, human affirming thing about it for me is that it launched as this niche advice column on a dating app that was predominantly geared towards gay men, which is a really specific subset of the world population.

But seeing it grow and seeing it be syndicated on The Cut and seeing all people from all walks of life start reading it, I'm like, no, we've all been in sort of the same emotional rooms together, we've all sort of felt what it's like to be different or to not fit in, or to feel like there's something about myself that I don't understand.

I don't have the right vocabulary to express this facet of myself as a writer, my mission was always like, I wanna bring as many people into this experience as I can. And so it's really affirming and really cool to see just how many people are able to access the words I'm putting down. And it's not just for people who are exactly like me.

[00:14:29] Chris Duffy:
It's been really interesting to see how you are starting to share some of the work from Samara, which is your second book, a a semi autobiographical illustrated novel about quote, “young love, Oklahoma and the wind”. And the reason why what we're talking about makes me think about that is to me, one of the interesting and powerful parts about graphic novels is they can often capture emotions and feelings and moments that are almost impossible to put into words. And that those illustrations, the, the visuals convey something that wouldn't be possible to put into words. And, and I think what you're saying right here is like how there's this universal human experience of having something about ourselves that we don't quite have the vocabulary for.

So it's interesting that now you're kind of going into an art form in a medium of writing that allows for that, in fact, relies on that not having the vocabulary and instead switching to an entirely different way of communicating.

[00:15:31] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah, so I am a visual artist as well. I do drawings, I do digital paintings, and I think what's always drawn me to visual art is that I, I'm kind of obsessed with this idea of language and language, not just being words that we say out loud and not being things we write down, but I think that there's a visual language, there's an emotional language, there's body language, and all that stuff is our attempt to communicate some form of interiority and how hard that can be using a tool that does crude as language.

So whenever we're writing something down or we're trying to put pen to paper to get someone else to read it, I'm always struck by how like there's a universe, there's multiple universes where that sentence I just wrote is a better sentence and it can kind of convey what I'm trying to say even better.

And just knowing that I didn't find it or that you only sometimes find every once in a while as a writer. And so with this next book that's half illustrated, half written, I'm sort of doing an homage to the weird kids like me. Back when I was in middle school, I had a, a spiral notebook that I would draw in all the time, and I would write stuff in it, and I tried to invent my own little alphabet in it.

It was clearly like copy pasted from art. Uh, I was also like trying to steal a little bit from hieroglyphics because I didn't have the greatest grasp on what Egyptian hieroglyphics were. I thought it was just communicating with cool little pictures, so I was like making my own little analog emojis in my notebook, just being like, yeah, okay, this means bird and it looks like a bird.

But the point is, back then I think that language in my head was this free roaming thing that sort of went back and forth between visuals and writing. And so with this book, what I'm really trying to communicate is how hard it is to communicate that level of interiority to really bring your true self out in the form of any kind of language and how that's kind of okay.

And it's all right because that's a really tall order at the end of the day. Uh, especially, you know, touching on the Latino experience and speaking Spanish and English and how we kind of find our reflections in our own faces and whatever we write down and whatever language we put it out in. I, I'm very interested in digging into themes about how impossible it is to use language to tell the truth.

Uh, but we try our best anyway.

[00:17:52] Chris Duffy:
How do you go about expressing yourself in the world? What are some ways in which you can actually make yourself be understood and known and seen in the way you want to be?

[00:18:05] John Paul Brammer:
So for me, and I think this is sort of what the whole point of ¡Hola Papi! the book is, it's sort of what I was going for here, is recognizing that we as human beings really rely on storytelling.

We rely on narratives to understand the world around us. And ourselves. And so I think we often have this misconception that we're telling stories to other people, but we have some sort of innate truth in our own heads about who we are and where we come from and what kind of person we are, but being able to recognize that those are narratives as well.

So one of the chapters in my book called How to Lose a Rabbit, it's about me, and I'm working for Condé Nast at the time. I have a desk at One World Trade. You know, I've been, I, I've seen Anna Wintour in an elevator. I really think that I'm all that, like I, I'm running all, ¡Hola Papi!, the advice column, I'm getting a lot of letters every single week and I really think that I've made it in the world.

And I go back to my podunk little hometown, and I am driving past the rural middle school where I got bullied really badly. And I have this idea in my head, okay, I'm gonna park my car, I'm gonna walk over to the school. Thankfully it's summertime, there's no one around. And I am going to declare victory over this dumb building.

And the way I'm going to do that is I'm gonna walk up to this wall that I always used to sit by when I was a loser little kid, and I had no friends and I had to hide. So, uh, behind this wall so that I wouldn't be bullied and while looking at this wall, I would entertain myself by finding shapes in the pebbles because it was sort of like this pebbled thing, and they were all different colors, and so I would connect dots between the different rocks and find shapes in them.

And there was one shape I was looking for in particular, which was this rabbit face, and I wanted to go see the rabbit, and I wanted to tell the rabbit, “Hey, you suck. You've always sucked. I'm better than you now. I don't need you anymore.” That was gonna move my way of just telling this rabbit to its big, stupid face that I had overcome everything that this building had put me through.

And then I go, and what I find is that I can't find the rabbit anymore. It's the same wall, it's the same everything. But I've changed as a person. The way I see the world has changed, and I just don't have the same eyes or the same brain that as a child, let me see this rabbit's face, and I'm making new shapes and I'm seeing new things in it, but I can't find the one that I used to look at every single day.

And it really made me think about how we kind of abide by these really crystallized narratives in our heads about how things went or what the past looked like or the events in our lives that made us who we are. And we kind of forget that those things are narratives to begin with, and then we encounter something that disrupts the narrative, new information.

We revisit the memory enough times and we try to put it out there in the real world, or we try to tell someone about it, and as it's coming out of our mouths, we realize, oh wait. Every time I try to write about how I was bullied and how bad it was, it always feels inadequate because in my head it exists a certain way.

And no doubt the way it exists in my head is completely different from what actually went down. I think that understanding that storytelling isn't just the stories we tell other people, they're the stories we tell ourselves. And so recognizing that our memories and those core things in our brains that like, okay, this is the most important thing that ever happened to me.

This is a time that my heart was broken. This is when I became a better person. This is when I overcame adversity. All those things are still stories, and as authors, we do have some agency over them. And so remembering, yes, I'm a storyteller both to myself and to other people. I think it makes it a little bit easier to understand an approach when it comes time to tell your truth.

Because knowing that I have my truth, it's my interpretation of it. This is the way I see it, and this is how I'm gonna communicate it, I, I think it's healthier in a way than trying to set yourself up and be like, okay, my truth is gonna be everyone's truth. And you know. I'm going to try to force the way this person sees it, because that's how I see it.

Letting that go and sort of being, having the humility to sort of accept this person's gonna interpret it a different way than how I interpret it, because that's how stories work I think, is really freeing and it makes it easier to communicate yourself.

[00:22:23] Chris Duffy:
We've got more with John Paul in just a moment, but first we're gonna tell a short story that is called Podcast Ads that starts right now.

And we are back. What makes good advice? What are some of the practical pieces that make advice be helpful and not harmful? Because I think a lot of people, when they hear the word advice, they think about unsolicited advice, which is like condescending or triggering or just annoying. And I don't think that your advice ever comes into that, and of course it's clearly solicited since they're sending a letter in, but I'm sure you've thought about what makes good advice and what makes bad advice.

[00:23:05] John Paul Brammer:
Oh my God, all the time. Well, you know, after I kind of broke into the advice column as a medium, a genre that I really didn't have any business being in, I was like, okay, let me start researching the history of the advice column, because now that I'm here.

I, I should probably become a student of this advice giving business because, you know, I don't want to be a fraud the whole way through being a silly fraud at the beginning. That's fine. But at some point, if you're gonna engage in a genre, you should have some respect for the genre. And if you're gonna break the rules, you should be aware of the rules.

I read Dear Abby, of course I read Cheryl Strayed, of course, but I went even deeper. I found the roots of the thing and the roots. The advice column is very funny to me. So most sources point to the Athenian Society. I believe it's like Victorian England, where the people who gave advice were college educated men.

And it was used as a prototypical Google. So the questions were sort of like, where does the wind come from? That was the advice people wanted. And so.

[00:24:08] Chris Duffy:
Uh huh.

[00:24:08] John Paul Brammer:
Someone would say, “Oh my dear fellow, here's how the wind works.” Back then, obviously good advice looked like what would've, whatever was factually correct.

Uh, but as time went on, the advice column started dealing more with emotions and etiquette and matters of the home. And so the men who ran newspapers were like, well, we're men. We don't wanna deal with this. Let's have women do it. And so the advice column became this rare form where women could actually make names for themselves as writers.

The advice column has always been where the misfits go. It's where people who aren't allowed to write about other things go because, yeah, no one trusts you to write big breaking news stories. No one trusts you to write like big cultural essays about what it all means, but we'll trust you enough to run an advice column.

And so it's always been voicey. It's always been this character forward place. It's accepted people who don't have bylines anywhere else. And so it's kind of funny that I fell into it as like a gay Latino man who didn't have connections in media and came from rural Oklahoma and it was the place that had opened doors for me.

I just didn't know that was why, and that there was historical precedence for it. But it quickly became the case that good advice looked like whatever was the maximally appropriate thing to say given the situation. And so it's less about like, here's the advice that I think would fix you. And it's almost more about the advice columnists themselves flexing about how culturally astute they are or how much etiquette they know, or like.

I can read the room really well. And so an advice columnist knows how to use the letter that was given to them as a prompt for discussing something broader, something that affects almost everyone. 'Cause usually in whatever era of media you're talking about, people have questions that involve, how do I be a proper member of society?

And even me who's dealing with people at the margins of society most often. So it's people who are like L-G-B-T-Q or people who feel like they don't belong or they don't fit in. It's almost the same thing. I've, I get a lot of letters from people being like, “Oh, hi. I'm like a bisexual woman. Am I allowed to be in a gay bar?”

It's stuff like that. It's still the questions of like where am I allowed to go? What am I allowed to do? What is the culturally appropriate way for me to act in this situation? And so the advice columnist is sort of this like oracle of manners, who is like, “Oh my dear fellow, here's how you should behave in that situation.”

But they're talking to the person who wrote in the letter as much as they're talking to a broader audience, because it can't be super specific. It has to be general enough that a reader can come in and find themselves in it. But also there has to be a degree of spectacle. I think that's why you have a lot of advice, columnists, whose whole thing is like wily cutting people down or bringing people to task.

It's just like, oh you fool, why would you do that? And that you sort of like dress them down in a way. And people like that because they like this idea of someone with authority coming in and sort of saying like, you are in the wrong. So one of my most read advice columns I've written in the Substack era and The Cut era of ¡Hola Papi!, he is this guy who wrote in and said, “Hey, I am in this reading group and I was reading some fiction from some of the people who submitted, and there was this element in one of them about a daddy fetish, and I got so uncomfortable with that because I thought it was predatory and wrong.” And so it touched a little bit on this broader trend of people reacting to literature as if the characters within the book are real people.

And so people sort of chastising this character for doing a bad thing and the writer must be a bad person. 'cause you wrote a person doing a bad thing. And so I was able to turn that column into like, you're all crazy. You're all infantilizing yourselves.You need to get over it. It's not real. It can't hurt you. You're not a child. You need to be able to read stuff about people doing bad things without having a mental breakdown. So that was like a piece about something very specific that got turned into a broader cultural piece about how we are responding to literature in the social media era.

So I think, yeah, there's good advice that you could give to an individual that maybe helps them with their life and their situation. But as an advice columnist, your job isn't always to give someone the perfect advice. Oftentimes, your job is to make sure that more people can read it, and even though the situation is specific.

You give them a little something as well, or you give them your take, you give them your opinion on how people should be behaving in society right now.

[00:26:32] Chris Duffy:
But I also imagine that as a, an advice columnist, sometimes your friends come to you and say, hey, not for the column, but just for my life, can I get some advice?

Do you have any thoughts about how to give advice one-to-one.

[00:28:48] John Paul Brammer:
What does it say about me that my friends don't really do that? I dunno.

[00:28:52] Chris Duffy:
Maybe they know you well.

[00:28:53] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah. It's funny, I don't have a lot of times where friends come up to me and like, okay, take the ¡Hola Papi! hat off. I need advice right now it's almost exclusively through ¡Hola Papi!

It, it's great when I get a letter that is like really unhinged, my favorite letters to get. I remember I got one that was like. ¡Hola Papi! I've been dating this guy for several months. I'm really into him. Uh, he's Colombian. I'm Latino as well. The only issue is he invited me home for Thanksgiving and I met his family and they're decidedly not Colombian.

They're just white people from Massachusetts. What should I do? And it was like just this man who'd been lied to for several months about being Colombian. Like letters like that are few and far between, but they're my favorite ones because they're not just that perennial like. Yeah, I don't know. Talk to your partner.

[00:29:41] Chris Duffy:
Although honestly that one is still like, sounds like you need to talk to your partner. That's a communicate more one as well.

[00:29:46] John Paul Brammer:
In an extreme case. Yeah, I think about it, you're right. It's the same thing.

[00:29:51] Chris Duffy:
Who do you go to for advice?

[00:29:54] John Paul Brammer:
It's always my mom all the time because she always gives me the same advice, which is she asks me, “Have you slept?”

And I often say, no, I haven't slept. And she'll just tell me to sleep. And it always works. I wake up and everything's better.

[00:30:07] Chris Duffy:
Incredible.

[00:30:08] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah.

[00:30:08] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:30:08] John Paul Brammer:
And anytime I'm like suffering, I will just call my mom and she'll give me that really bare bones, like, oh, you're not taking care of yourself probably. And she's right.

[00:30:17] Chris Duffy:
Well, I wanna just share two of my favorite ¡Hola Papi! columns. So this is from, um, January, 2021. Someone wrote in and they said, I'm 27, and I just admitted that I have a crush on a long distance friend, and they also have a crush on me. But I'm worried because I, I'm so awkward at flirting and I'm worried that I'm not gonna communicate properly and how do I tell if I'm saying something weird or, you know, all of this kind of stuff.

You know, you said to them that language is imperfect at its best. It can give form and texture to the abstract thoughts as they surface from our depths. It provides a foggy window into our desires, our motives, and the unknowable architecture of our souls. When someone replies, crush me with your thighs, daddy on your Instagram, friends close post, that's what's happening.

So, but then you also say, you know, you don't have to suddenly switch languages with this person because it's a different type of relationship, right? Like, that's not how language works. If we are all just people trying to do our best, trying to communicate and it changes and I think that's so great.

'Cause like obviously there's a hilarious joke in there. You're going somewhere where other columnists maybe wouldn't go tonally. But in a much more recent column, you, someone wrote in and said that they were concerned that their friend group was too online. And they said in it, you know, we do go outside, we touch grass, and in your response you said, basically if you use the phrase touch grass, you are already terminally online.

It might be too late for you, which I just thought was absolutely hilarious and loved.

[00:31:48] John Paul Brammer:
The, the touching grass community isn't aware they're touching grass at all. You know?

[00:31:52] Chris Duffy:
That's exactly how they all, that's so good. I love that. That's so funny that the people who actually touch grass don't call it touching grass.They're just outside. That's so, so, so good. Okay, well I wanna ask you a couple of, uh, advice scenarios that came up from the team that works on the show. Someone who works on the show said, “A lot of times the advice I seek is more about whether I should be asking anyone for input about a personal struggle at all.”

It takes a certain amount of vulnerability to ask for advice, and in your columns you're often quite vulnerable in return. So what's your advice to someone who's sometimes too scared to even pose a question or put themselves out there to be seen?

[00:32:26] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah, it brings me no pleasure to report that oftentimes the good stuff in life is outside your comfort zone.

And so whatever it is, if you're slightly anxious about it, if you're kind of afraid of it, I, I think of this all the time in terms of plans that I've made. So I will agree to do some sort of like after work happy hour with some person that I've been dying to meet for a long time, or maybe like some writer that I'm very eager to talk to.

And as it approaches, I'm like, ugh, I just wanna stay home. It's like kind of raining. I don't want to do this anymore. But every time that I've sort of forced myself to get up and do it, something good has come out of it. And so, uh, it, it doesn't make me happy to say that sometimes the good things in life, you have to risk a little something or you have to compromise, or you have to just suck it up and do it.

And vulnerability is one of those things. It's something you practice. It's not something that you can just like one off do every once in a while. I think you really have to prove to yourself like, I am willing to do this. I think that it can bring me good things. And then sometimes when you get burned you have to acknowledge like, yeah, that's part of living life.

We're gonna get nicked a bit. We're gonna get a little banged up as we go through this, but the important thing is that I have proven to myself that I am willing and able to do that if it means getting the reward for it later.

[00:33:48] Chris Duffy:
Okay, this is another one. Is it a good idea to hook up with my neighbor who lives in the same building as me without giving too much identifying information away? He also has a dangerous job and possibly has enemies.

[00:34:00] John Paul Brammer:
Yeah, I was like, so following up until the end when he became a mercenary.

[00:34:05] Chris Duffy:
Uh huh.

[00:34:05] John Paul Brammer:
Um, that's, that's fun. I mean, I'm gonna be honest with this person.

I'm not gonna pretend like I'm above this sort of thing. Him having a dangerous job would just get me over there faster. Which I know says something not so great about me. Um, that's just a bonus in my, my little world.

[00:34:23] Chris Duffy:
Okay, so the answer to this one is absolutely yes. And you gotta get there before JP is there.

[00:34:05] John Paul Brammer:
Yes. Also, like, imagine me being like, oh my God, absolutely do it, girl. And then like months later, there's this news story about like, international, like espionage incident occurred. ¡Hola Papi! implicated.

[00:34:41] Chris Duffy:
That's, that's so good. Honestly, that could only be good for the brand. Well, John Paul Brammer, this has been an absolute pleasure.

I, I can't tell you how, uh, delighted I'm, that you've made time to be on the show and, and it's been an amazing conversation. Thank you. Thank you, thank you.

[00:34:55] John Paul Brammer:
Thank you. I really appreciate it.

[00:35:00] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, John Paul Brammer. His column and his book are both called ¡Hola Papi! I am your host Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to Be a Better Human is brought to you on the TED side by the Carrie Bradshaws of Audio, Daniella Balarezo, Banban Cheng, Cloe Shasha Brooks and Joseph DeBrine.

This episode was fact checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, whose advice is always to tell the truth. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who will never reveal which one of them asked which of those hypothetical advice scenarios. That is Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzales.

And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five star rating and review, and if you're listening on the Spotify app, answer the discussion question that we've put up there on mobile. We will be back next week with even more How to be a Better Human.

Until then, take care and give good advice.