I’m Worried, But I’m Doing It Anyway

What happens when you face your fears and put yourself out there on social media, only to be publicly criticized? Foster and Cesar honestly reflect on their experience going viral, navigating online negativity and learning to handle public vulnerability despite the anxiety. They discuss the biological need for social connection, why divisive content performs better than positive news, and how to protect your peace when internet strangers attack your choices. They share insights on exposure therapy through social media, meeting critics with compassion instead of defensiveness, and why it’s worth it to continue to spread good despite the uphill battle. 

In this episode: 

• Indie film Home Delivery written and directed by Thom Harp. Opens March 27th, 2026 in the US
• Foster + Cesar’s guest episode on Tell Me Something Messy with Brandon Kyle Goodman.

If this episode spoke to you, you will love The Beauty of Letting Go, where our hosts dive deeper into facing fears. You can also watch the episodes on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this episode, take a moment to follow Beauty in the Break on your favorite podcast app and leave a review—it really helps!

Reach out to the show—send an email or voice note to beautyinthebreakpod@gmail.com and be sure to follow on Instagram and TikTok. 

Cesar Cardona:

• Receive his newsletter Insights That Matter
• Get guided meditation from Cesar on his website 
• Listen to music from Cesar + The Clew on Apple Music and Spotify

Foster Wilson:

• Buy her poetry book Afternoon Abundance
• Learn about her postpartum services
• Receive her newsletter Foster’s Village

Created & Hosted by: Cesar Cardona and Foster Wilson

Executive Producer: Glenn Milley

This episode is brought to you by Jamaal Pittman. You can donate to his scholarship at WheelerScholarship.com, supporting college enrollment.

Transcript

- Ants.

I'm being infested by ants in my apartment.

- I wouldn't really call five ants an infestation.

- Fair.

What would you call it then?

- Some friendly visitors?

- They're not paying rent.

And I'm not giving them any tea.

Well, if they wanted to, I could give them tea.

Well, what's less than an infestation?

An accompaniment?

An occupation?

No, no, occupied.

I'm occupied by them.

- Okay.

- Anyway, these small little black ants

have shown up into my apartment

and there's like five of them.

And they just, there's no line.

You know how ants kind of go on a straight line

and back and forth?

- They're very random.

They pick different pieces of furniture to show up on.

- Yeah, and it's just been too furniture.

My two furniture?

No, furniture.

My kitchen.

- Wait, okay, go ahead.

- Yeah, what was that?

- Well, over the weekend, we were buying canvases

and I kept being like, I think it should be Canvai.

And I can't get it out of my head

that that's incorrect word.

It really should be Canvai, multiple Canvai.

Anyway, I'm gonna try.

- It's not.

I think it's the, when it's at the end of US,

plural for US, like fungus.

- Canvas though, it sounds like it, right?

- It sounds like it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Canvas is.

- I'm gonna guess that that word is derived

from something beyond like Latin or whatever.

That's not derived from the US.

- Whatever.

I bought eight Canvai over the weekend.

And I'm sticking to it.

- So, I don't know how we got to that part,

but I got these ants that are showing up everywhere.

- Multiple Furnitrai.

- Furnitrai, that's what it was.

Thank you for reminding me of that.

Furnitrai, it's not Furnitrai.

But they've just been randomly showing up.

I don't kill animals.

I don't kill any beings or any animals.

I put them all outside, but I will say I'm not gonna,

they're very small too, by the way.

They're very, very tiny.

One year, and I think this might be some

of what's going on now,

is that when the weather changes from super cold to hot,

I get more bugs that come in here

because it's cooler inside.

I'm gonna guess that's what it is.

But one year, I had a trail of ants coming in

through the water spout in the shower.

It would come through there, climb down,

like the typical line of ants.

And I go to Facebook and I comment and say,

"Hey everybody, does anyone know a humane way

"to remove these ants from my place?"

Everybody was like, "Bleach, rubbing alcohol."

- Hardly.

- Spray Windex on them, like all these things.

I had to go into the comments and say,

"Hey everyone, by the way, I said humane."

- Humane. - Humane.

- And then I learned from you, it's cinnamon.

- Cinnamon works.

- Sprinkle cinnamon, they take the scent back to their hive,

I don't know, anthill, and they don't like cinnamon.

Like, oh, this is not the spot to be,

and they just find somewhere else to go.

Mermicology is what the study is of ants, by the way.

She just rolled her eyes.

(laughing)

There is a great, great bunch of cool things

about ants, by the way.

So some of me is like, "You guys wanna hang out with me?

"'Cause you're so cool.

"You wanna hang out with me, though?

"In my apartment?

"Okay." - I know.

- What I found was that they run on cycles.

One thing I found out, they run on cycles.

So they'll show up during the same time of day

and at night, they'll leave the same way they came in.

If you can find the entryway,

you can wait until they're gone

and then rub cinnamon on the entryway.

And they just won't like the smell

and they won't come back.

And you've killed none of them.

You have harmed none of them. - Conscience is clear.

- Your conscience is clear.

Ants.

- Welcome, welcome to Beauty and the Break.

- Can you give me your Southern auntie accent?

Foster, by the way, does accents and they're hilarious.

And because she's from North Carolina,

she happened to give me the best auntie

that's kind of wiry, that shows up.

She's always got a drink in her hands, Southern girl style.

Everyone else is playing by the rules.

She comes in with her friend who's a girl

that's lived with her for the last five years.

- I don't know how this character became a lesbian.

- I developed all of this.

- I didn't know any of that.

- In my head, that's how it is.

- Get over here, honey.

You should sit right next to me.

I'm gonna tell you something.

I'm gonna tell you something right now.

I know what has been going on down at the,

you know, the grocery store.

You know, the Pigley Wiggly.

The Pigley Wiggly, you know the one.

All right, now I saw that Bruce down there.

Bruce has been tickling his eyebrows,

and you know what that means, with Jeremiah.

Now, I love Jeremiah.

He is like a son to me, but,

but Bruce and Jeremiah, now you have to say,

that's a mismatch.

That is a match made in, I don't know where,

but not heaven.

That's true.

Did you get something to drink, honey?

I really wasn't sure.

Did you want some iced tea?

Sweet tea, right here, right here.

For you, you should drink.

You look thirsty.

Tickling the eye, Bruce.

You know what that means.

So good, so good.

I wish people could see it in person,

because you sometimes will also like do the thing

where they say it's so, like, percussively,

like do that there, and then you slap my leg when you do it.

You can, you go ahead and do that thing.

You do that thing.

Good on you.

God bless.

I grew up in the South.

There's a lot of us.

It kills me.

Just inside me, there's a lot of those characters.

Accents and dialects.

Speaking of movies, we saw it in a great, hilarious,

hilarious movie called Home Delivery last week.

It was, so first of all, this was written

by my friend Tom Harp, writer and director.

I don't know what I expected.

I knew it would be a comedy, but I'm like,

great, let's watch the movie.

We laughed out loud, so fucking funny, this movie.

It has an incredible cast.

It's Donald Faison and--

Joey Pants.

Joey Panteliano.

I keep saying Pantelione, but it's Panteliano.

When Joey came on the screen, you were like, Joey Pants!

Joey Pants.

He's Ralph Zifaretto from The Sopranos.

Yes, and Tracy Thompson's in it,

Rainn Wilson is in it, Melanie Field.

Oh my god, it's about a woman who is having a home birth

and invites her entire family over to her house

to watch the home birth and just a whole slew of characters.

It's so well written, it's so funny.

It comes out in theaters March 27th.

Oh, nice.

So if you haven't seen it, you should definitely go see it.

Also, what I love about that what they're doing

is they're letting pregnant women come for free to the movie.

Oh, wow.

In LA in Phoenix.

Oh, that's so smart.

Which is so great.

That's so smart.

Here's the thing.

OK, when I watch movies that have pregnant people in them,

birth, anything about having a baby,

I obviously have a very critical eye,

not only as a director and a mother, but as a doula.

A lot of birth and pregnancy is misrepresented in the movies.

It drives me bananas.

Give me the biggest one.

The one that's almost always wrong.

What labor looks like.

You see exactly what you think of in your head.

A woman screaming.

I need the drugs.

And the way they have her pushing and all of that stuff

is just incorrect.

And that's not what labor looks like.

And it's usually so often it's like, oh,

is written by a man, directed by a man.

They consulted no women.

They didn't have children themselves.

They just kept performing this misconception of labor

and delivery.

But Tom, my friend, is a dad.

He knows a lot of people who've given birth.

He did a lot of research.

He got so much right in this movie, so much right.

They have a midwife.

They're talking about placenta encapsulation.

The dual anatomy was like, yes, we are.

We were talking about--

it's so good.

And even just to have a home birth concept in a movie

is, I think, mildly revolutionary.

Look, you know, I, for one, don't really

lean towards comedies.

I try to find serious things that have the humor in it.

But you love laughing.

I love laughing.

I love-- I love laughing.

But I also-- I like things that are played for serious.

This can be.

And sometimes comedies, and for the most part comedies,

are just so set up to be funny.

And I'm like, it doesn't hit me in that way.

I'm like, you're supposed to be funny.

That's funny.

Cool.

Let's keep going.

From the first scene, I already laughed out loud

watching that thing.

It was hilarious.

You and I get into the good space

where when we find something funny, we have to pause it.

Right at the moment, we just stop.

And then it welds up in us, and we start cracking up.

We laugh about it.

We break it down while it's funny, because that's us.

And then we rewind it, and then watch it and experience

it like normal humans do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh my god.

It was so, so good.

It's great.

I haven't laughed out loud in a movie like that

in a really long time, especially at home.

Like in the theater, it's easier to laugh out loud,

because in the group experience.

But I want to see this in the theater.

It's called home delivery.

That sounds really good.

That sounds really good.

And Tom was your friend, you said?

Tom Harper, yeah.

Is it true for Thomas?

I don't know.

OK, because there's two of them.

We could be Tom Eye.

We really took that full circle.

Had to.

Well, in other news, we were on an episode of the podcast

Tell Me Something Messy with Brandon Kyle Goodman

a couple of weeks ago.

That was really fun.

It was a fantastic time.

It was the great yin-tu-ar yang of this show.

Yes, it was.

So that show is about shame-free conversations about sex,

which is not something that we talk about on this show

a whole lot, a little bit, but not a whole lot.

I was really nervous to go on that show, actually.

You were super nervous.

Yeah, I mean, A, I love Brandon.

I just love what they do.

But that part didn't make me nervous,

because I knew that they would make me feel at home.

But I was nervous about the sex of it all.

And the whole point of the show is

to talk about sex, to de-stigmatize sex,

and to talk about the messy sides of things.

Brandon on their Instagram does a whole messy Mondays,

and they talk about something messy that happened over the weekend.

And they break it down.

And I was like, I am so vanilla.

I don't know if I have anything to talk about here.

And that really--

it was a head and posture syndrome going on.

That made you nervous?

It wasn't saying something wrong or saying something too far over.

It was not having enough to share.

It was not having enough.

Like, not being cool enough, I feel like.

Like, you have all these experiences and litany of stories.

They said, tell me something messy.

And you said, here's--

I'm going to pull out my list of 12 stories you pick,

which one you want me to tell.

But messy didn't always have to be sex.

It could be other things.

And my messy story was not about sex.

But yeah, that's what made me nervous.

OK.

I just didn't think it would be cool enough for it.

OK.

I give myself a note before I give a talk or anything for that matter.

I usually--

I found this out by watching the self and learning my cycles

of pattern recognition.

I found that I usually only get nervous just before the thing,

like right before it.

When there's some sort of threshold passing of like,

there's no more turning around now.

And I feel it.

Once I learned that, then I know just to expect it.

And so in this case, days go by.

I'm making-- I'm comprising this list of all the filthy, wild stuff

that I had done in my life.

And we get there.

We pull into the lot.

It's in the studio lot in Burbank.

And by the time we get to the parking spot,

I take one step out of the car.

My foot hits the ground on the property.

And then a whole shot of nerves shoot up in my stomach and in my chest.

And I make a note.

Because once I've learned this pattern recognition, now I say,

oh, oh, I'm nervous now.

Oh, there's my nerves.

Or I'll just say to myself, nervous.

And you kind of just mentally check it.

And there's been studies now that show that you can name it to tame it.

And so I've just been practicing that over and over again.

I feel like we were right on point where we needed to be.

Yeah, well, the nerve spot--

I'm going to say something about that because what I remember

from that day is my pattern of nerves about big things, especially

big creative things where there's a whole lot of unknown.

Like I prepared best as best I can.

There's a bunch of unknown factors here.

And I might be put on the spot.

I get really nervous and not my nerves start maybe the day before,

especially the day of.

I was nervous, excited.

Like I wasn't terrified, but I was kind of sick to my stomach a little bit.

And I talked to a friend and was really trying to talk this out

because you know what? I'm tired of it.

I'm tired of feeling nervous.

I do big creative things all the time.

I was going to ask that.

I was like, isn't that exhausting?

Don't you--

I would really rather not feel this way.

I don't have control over it.

But I was talking it out with someone in a hopes to do what you said,

like name it to tame it.

But acknowledging it and saying out loud to somebody what it is that I'm feeling.

And I said, I'm really tired of this.

And the advice that I got was so helpful.

She said to me, essentially show up and let universe speak through you.

Whatever you want to call it.

Let source speak through you.

Let it flow through you.

And I sort of translate that if you don't have a relationship to like a higher power.

I sort of translate that to like being in the flow state.

To really just like letting whatever needs to come through me,

come through me and hit the ears that it needs to hit and let that be that.

It's for one person.

You're not trying to hear to try to change the world in this moment.

Because if you think of it like that, the pressure becomes so insurmountable.

One person, tell your truth and let it hit one person.

And that's it.

And when we were taping was so fun.

I mean, it was really so fun.

And I knew it would be in Brandon's delight and just as real as ever.

I did kind of leave my body at some point.

And I felt that it was whatever was needed to come through me came through me.

And I was flowing with it.

And I've learned a lot from that because that is taking something that feels so big

and so much pressure down to just like the core essence of one thing.

Yeah.

Say one thing for one person.

What can I do?

Right.

I thought you did wonderful.

I thought you were just on it as usual.

I am always expecting you to walk out and be like, yes.

Because you always do, girl.

You always do.

Every single time you go in somewhere, there are a bunch of nerves and then you're in it.

And I know you're killing it.

And when I'm with you or not.

And then right afterward, you come right to me and you are like just full raptured.

You're in full bliss about what you did.

And again, pattern recognition.

Yeah.

I know you.

You don't worry me.

You're amazing.

It's amazing that the worry machine in our brains can take over so much.

I'm thinking, what was I worried about?

I even had this easy in because I know that Brandon is amazing.

And I knew the way this show is structured.

It's going to be so fun.

I knew all of that was going to happen.

And still I had these nerves come up.

What was going through my head?

I think it's all of the fears of the worst possible scenario.

I could mess something up, say something, say too much, say the wrong thing, not know

what to say, say nothing, clam up.

I mean, like a litany of the worst case scenarios.

But I never imagined the best possible scenario.

I love that.

There's all those memes online that say stuff like, what if it all goes right?

Why are there a million things that could go wrong but only one way of it going right?

In our minds?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm sure some of it is biology.

It's up to us to always try to calculate the worst possible scenarios to be prepared

for them.

That's how we're here because our ancestors were really good at that.

We don't have those problems anymore.

So I feel like maybe sometimes that thing needs a job and it's just spiraling and spiraling

and spiraling.

My friend and I were both sober and we were talking some years ago about why we started

drinking and using.

It was to get rid of the worry and the depression and the who am I?

What am I going to be?

How can I be the coolest person in the room and all this stuff?

Then we stopped drinking and using.

What do you know?

That still showed up.

Then we both talked about how we separately got through those issues.

Then the worry just went somewhere else.

It just got to show itself.

That voice is so clever.

It's so sneaky but it's not wise.

It doesn't remember before but you can.

You can and I can.

You listening, you can.

That pattern recognition has saved my life because I start to look at the times before

and say, "Okay.

I think I'll be fine.

You keep talking about being nervous and whatnot.

When I see you nerves, I'll call you out and say, "Hey, there you are, nerves.

Nice to see you."

But we just forget that stuff over and over again.

I personally feel like we're amalgamating ourselves with the nerves instead of saying,

"Nerves are showing up."

Once we de-amalgamate with it, then we're able to remember all the times things went

quite well.

Usually they do.

I think that this comes up a lot with worry.

You could replace nerves with worry.

Maybe somebody doesn't have a ton of nerves in their life but worry is something that's

pretty common.

That we're constantly worried about the next, whatever the next thing is or whatever may

happen or may not happen.

That worry that comes up and this is getting into stuff that my dad teaches, right?

When worry comes up, we can't shove it down.

If we shove it back down and say, "No, no, no.

I don't want to feel worried.

I don't want to feel worried."

It's coming right back.

Way worse.

And so the idea of saying, "Oh, hey, worry.

There you are again.

Yeah, no, you're welcome to be here.

I'm in charge, but you're welcome to be here.

Take a seat.

You're here at the table with me.

Oh, you're going to make my stomach start turning?

All right, thanks.

Well, I can handle that."

There are physical symptoms that can pop up when it comes to nervousness, worry, clammy

hands, heart racing, pits sweating.

Oh, my pits are sweating right now.

And so you do the thing anyway, right?

And you go, "If I'm not afraid of these physical symptoms, give me more of that.

Give me sweat.

Okay, great.

I got it.

And I'm going to do this scary thing anyway."

We have heart racing and pit stains and sweaty palms in those moments because we're preparing

to fight or flight, right?

We're preparing to have some big catastrophic thing happen.

But all that's happening is I'm sitting down in front of a microphone and telling my story.

Not exactly something I need sweaty pits for.

Right.

There's a little tiger chasing you.

Yeah.

No other tribe trying to take you over your tribe.

Yeah.

It's quite amazing that we have evolved so far to get to this stage.

And we would assume that that fear, that scarcity mindset would have evolved to, and somehow

it didn't.

It didn't.

It just kind of went along with us.

I think that a lot of people are out there with all of these feelings and doing it anyway.

The actors you see, you talk to a lot of actors about nerves and about getting up before they

get on stage or go to film a movie.

And a lot of people have nerves still.

I think it's very, very human.

How do we handle the situation even though that's going on?

We can't rid ourselves of that.

How do we move forward anyway and not let it debilitate us?

Not let the fact that we have worries mean that we're not going to take the action that

we want to take.

We do it anyway.

We do it anyway.

I'm right.

And that's what makes people break through certain barriers.

That look completely unbreakable.

I think that our society imagines courage and bravery as this sort of never scared,

ready to go into the war, standing on the top of the building with the cape flying behind

you in the chest out.

But that's not it.

What we're really seeing in the courage and the bravery is doing the work, the struggle

itself.

Because that same hero that we see in the world or in film, there is a moment where they almost

die.

They're always at their worst in there as well and they keep fighting.

That's the actual courage part.

The standing up there with your chest out is a celebration that you're here still.

But the actual image of strength, bravery and courage is the nasty parts to struggle,

the misery, the doing it anyway.

Yeah.

What it feels like in that moment is having all these physical symptoms, sick to your stomach,

anxious, terrified and stepping into it and opening yourself up to, yeah, all that crazy,

horrible things might happen, but also something beautiful might come through.

And we just don't know.

And that is surrendering to the unknown.

And I see people do that every day.

And it looks different on the outside than it feels on the inside.

I think that's what's important to remember.

It feels really different on the inside.

What you imagine it's going to take place, first off, happens you hold on to that longer

than the actual occurrence.

So you're holding on to that stress longer than the actual thing you're worried about.

We did the episode, "Tell Me Something Messy" for what, an hour, hour and a half?

How long did you hold on to that?

Two days?

Maybe subtly leading up into it before that?

That worry did worse for you than anything that could have happened in that show.

Secondly, what happens between where you stand and where you want to go?

You, in my opinion, should always be keeping yourself open for the weird variables, the

unplanned for variables, the illogical variables that will occur in your life that you can't

plan for.

That's just going to show up and you say, "Oh, this worked."

I didn't realize that this would happen as well.

The map that you're thinking in your head does not have the terrain that you're going

to actually walk.

I bet my money every time on the mystery, every time.

You and I, we don't say it to each other, but we butt heads in that way.

Very often I'm like, "I'm good.

Okay, let's do this."

Not in a ragadossious way, but in a like, "I'm going to bet on the mystery and see

what I can get out of this."

No, I really like to know what's going to happen.

Exactly.

Is Alishan fun, like the most diplomatic way to say, "Yeah, you would like to."

I really like the control on knowing what's going to happen.

We're not giving that.

We're not giving that at all in this life, no matter how much we try.

Every time we think we have a controller or something, we will be reminded quickly that

we don't.

I will say it feels really good to come out the other side of something like that, though,

and to know I had all these things going in.

I had all this stuff going on internally.

I went and I did it anyway.

Not only did I survive, which is kind of like that worried part.

All it wants to know is that you're going to survive, and surviving includes not being

socially massacred.

In our day and age, part of the fears involve social stuff.

I don't think us, we're putting us out in the world in a mass scale.

A lot of things.

I'm afraid my boss is going to shame me.

I'm afraid my kid's not going to get into college, and then I'm going to look like a

terrible parent.

It's about what our perception to other people socially, because we're not actually being

murdered and mauled by tigers.

That worried part wants us to just survive and not die socially.

Status quo, do it work so far, what's familiar?

It doesn't leave room for the fact that how I felt on the other side was elation, was

I was in the flow of things.

I was doing the thing that I actually love to do, which is a wild and crazy thing that

I felt so sick before and felt so amazing after.

What am I doing to myself?

Then it reminds me, I am an artist, and this is one of the things that I do.

It is that terrifying and overjoyed experience.

Beyond that, when the episode came out and people received it and it hit the people that

it needed to hit, and it affected the people that it needed to affect, I'm so proud of

that episode.

I'm so proud that I got, not just got through that, but there is actually all of this to

be gained on the other side.

In addition to that, the social part, to go back to our ancestors, being ostracized from

the group, the organization, the tribe, whatever it was, our ancestors, it was just as bad

as being attacked.

Because if you're by yourself, you're going to be attacked, and you're going to potentially

starve.

It was just as bad.

We do this now in this society as well.

Get out of my face.

Get out of here.

Go to hell.

Go to jail.

We still do that because we don't like that sort of separation from the human society.

I'm an introvert and I still biologically need it.

I think that people get rewarded more and more in this society who forego it anyway.

This is why we do revere people so much that are on television, celebrities, artists, politicians,

whoever, because they're putting themselves straight into the line of fire of something

that hits us at a deeper level than ever.

An intellectual, emotional, psychological, biological level that we can't touch.

We get to watch these people go out there and just do it anyway.

We love them for it.

The post on Tell Me Something Messy where I was talking about some of the stuff that

I had done before, the comments, the people consistently just attacked me because of the

choices that I made when I was young, how I did it, and also how I was explaining it

as well.

True, yes.

First of all, it makes me wonder what you think about that sort of stuff.

Then two, it reminds me that the thing that most of us are super scared of being called

out online happens.

We've gone viral on TikTok three or four times.

We were doing this show, we had an episode, and I was talking about how worried I am for

you sometimes as you stress a lot.

I started getting emotional.

It's because I don't want to lose you because I love you.

You're my best fucking friend.

You're everything to me.

You're my whole world.

The thought of losing you made me emotional, and it was very tender.

We decided to put that up online and say, "Wow, what a beautiful moment that we connected."

Someone in the comments goes, "She looks uncomfortable."

The Buddha says that there hasn't been someone.

There never will be someone, nor is there someone now who's entirely famed or entirely

faulted.

I hold that with me every time I look at those comments.

People have taken the shit out of you, and they've taken the shit out of me as well.

That social pressure is something that we probably all worry about by putting ourselves

out there in the world.

Listen, it is incredibly debilitating to experience what could be a semi-public shaming, or public

shaming, I guess.

This goes back to the witches on trial, Salem Witch trial, and being publicly shamed in

the world, and then being beheaded, or stoned to death, or whatever.

It's very real.

It's a very visceral feeling.

I have come a long way with it, a long way.

I wasn't even using social media, I think, when you and I met.

I was mostly out of fear of putting myself, my face, out there in the world.

I did overtime with poetry, and then the show.

I've had experiences on social media where I've posted something, and I've been totally

torn down by multiple people attacking my character and my humanity.

And your choices.

And my choices about how I make art has taken me out for a day just feeling so terrible

inside.

Now, I'm at the point where when we post something, I'm less connected to what it means for people

to say something positive or negative, honestly.

Because I don't have to have exposure therapy, essentially, through this process.

Being like, "Oh, that's stung.

Ouch."

But I'm still here, and I'm still speaking, and this is my platform.

Thanks for feeding the algorithm.

Honestly, I mean, you see, the more divisive people are online, the more people comment,

the more the algorithm pushes it to the front.

It makes me understand why the media does what they do, why the news does social media

film, you name it.

We just have something in us that we just like the divisive nature.

So then the question that becomes for us, how do you continue to make good with your

words and still gain traction?

We're not out here trying to be divisive.

We're trying to do the opposite.

Your whole Instagram is sharing good news.

Your whole newsletter is sharing good news about things happening in the world.

Unfortunately, that doesn't get as many eyeballs as the negative stuff.

It sure doesn't.

And I don't know the answer for that, but we got to keep doing it.

We have the, and I say you and me, we, but also just a large percentage of people in

the world who are trying to unify and bring more people together.

We have the harder side because it's quite easy to speak divisively.

It's easy to say something divisive, drop it and walk away from it.

It's harder to stand behind something that requires integrity and time and heartfelt

thinking and then get minimal response from it.

We have the harder job.

In my opinion, it's worth it.

Absolutely.

In my opinion, we, we will see the other side of the wheel turn over time.

I think the last 10 years has been quite divisive, a little more divisive than they've been for

a long time.

Because cycles turn over, it's not exactly the same, but they reiterate.

We are due for this culture to turn around and say, you know what, can we just have some

fun?

Can we just chill?

And my intention is to have all of my platforms set up so when that turnover happens, I have

a funnel of people that can say, oh, wow, I want to know about these lists of companies

that pay their employees well and make sure that the company is at least 40% employee-owned.

And I want to know about these companies that take care of the environment or say, if you

want to invest in us, then you got to be ethically sound as well.

I want to know that there's also good things happening in the world.

I don't know exactly the answer to that, but I'm just going to keep doing this.

I found this way, and to quote Charles Darwin, there's grandeur in this view of life.

I have found it's so grand that I want to do nothing except preserve it.

Nothing will get in the way of my peace within my inner self.

That includes comments on social media.

And good for them for adding to our algorithm.

You sure can.

I find that the most people who do say that sort of stuff, who are commenting negatively,

if I look at their page, they don't seem to be distracted with their own joy.

That's a good way of putting it.

Yeah, somebody said something to our kid.

Our kid took it into heart.

And it wasn't very kind.

And I said, "This boy said that to you."

All that means is that's something that's going on for him.

That's all that means.

It's not a reflection of you at all, actually.

And I think that's what these comments and social media can really spawn is somebody,

unfortunately, telling the truth about what's going on inside them.

Yeah, I don't think people know that it's...

We're seeing more of you than the thing you're pointing to.

When I go in there to comment on it, for the most part, I try not to combat them, even

if I disagree.

I try to meet them where they are and then either walk them to a different way.

One person commented and really argued their side a lot.

And they were being a bit combative.

And I just started responding with, "I can see how you see it that way."

But what I think was, we should be maybe seeing it as more than just one option or whatever

I said.

At the end of the conversation, she had followed us and she said, "Thank you for the time.

I appreciate it."

Because most people just want to be heard.

It's also really easy to judge from behind the phone.

It's very easy to criticize.

It's harder to put yourself out there and be criticized.

I remind myself when I see commenters, the first thing I think of is there's a small

chance they're doing something that's this raw on the public stage.

It's hard to do this.

And then two, they're making a grand assumption on something of a 10 to 20 second clip.

Usually my comments are like, "Yeah, maybe sort of.

Check out the rest of the episode though."

Because you've missed the entirety of it.

We don't know what happened in that person's life.

Why that clip of you talking about something with your coworker from 15 years ago, why that

triggered them so badly.

And they clearly have something real going on about what you said that reminded them

of something that happened to them, their friend, their ex-boyfriend, whatever it is.

That's real.

That's real.

And they're taking it out in that way.

And that's the way they know how right now.

That's really all any of it is.

And recognizing that is what absolves me from trying to respond back and pit back against

them.

It's even more of a level of discipline to spot that sort of projecting in someone and

not point it out.

Because then it's combative.

You can tell, "Oh, this person is really upset.

I'm sorry."

And if I type, "I'm sorry this is upset to you," they're like, "Oh, now you're being

condescending."

I'm like, "No, no, no, no, no.

I'm not even going to do that.

I'm not.

I'm not even going to do it."

Well, beloveds and haters.

Feed the algorithm.

I don't care.

What is it?

Whitney Uland on the podcast, How to Be Famous?

She alwayscesar says, "Leave your hate messages, love messages.

I don't care."

All of it feeds the algorithm.

Yeah, really and truly.

And let's have a dialogue about it on top of that.

Thanks for tuning in.

Thanks for listening.

I hope wherever you are, you are in a state of peace.

And as always, please be kind to yourself.

If this episode spoke to you, take a moment and send it to someone else who might need it.

That's the best way to spread these conversations to the people who need them the most.

And if you want to keep exploring with us, make sure to follow Beauty and the Break wherever

you get your podcasts.

We'll see you next time.

Beauty and the Break is created and hosted by Foster Wilson and Cesar Cardona.

Our executive producer is Glenn Milley.

Original music by Cesar and the Clew.