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The Let Them Theory Is Missing One Word · The Book Brief Project

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  Speaker 1: Near the end of the first century, in a Greek
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  Speaker 1: town called Nicopolis, an old man with a bad leg
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  Speaker 1: was teaching young Romans how to live. He had been
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  Speaker 1: born a slave. He had been owned by a secretary
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  Speaker 1: of the emperor Nero, and at some point freed. And
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  Speaker 1: by the time students were traveling across the sea to
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  Speaker 1: hear him, he had settled on a conclusion that sounded
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  Speaker 1: almost too plain to need a teacher. There are things
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  Speaker 1: within our power, and there are things beyond it. Our
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  Speaker 1: judgments belong to us. Other people's opinions, our reputations, what
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  Speaker 1: happens to our bodies, the choices of everyone around us
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  Speaker 1: belong to someone else or to no one. The man
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: was Epictetus, and he never wrote any of it down.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: A student named Arian did that, and the short version
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  Speaker 1: he assembled was called the Enchiridion, which means, more or less,
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  Speaker 1: the thing you keep at hand. The idea kept traveling,
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  Speaker 1: and every time it moved, it got shorter. Eighteen centuries later,
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  Speaker 1: a version of it turned up as a prayer about
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  Speaker 1: serenity and courage, printed on cards and read aloud in
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  Speaker 1: church basements where Alcoholics Anonymous met. Then it moved into
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  Speaker 1: the rooms next door, where the families of drinkers learned
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  Speaker 1: a word for it, detachment, and learned that you can
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  Speaker 1: love a person without managing them. In 1986, a writer
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  Speaker 1: named Melody Beattie put that lesson into a book called
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  Speaker 1: Codependent No More for people who had spent their lives
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  Speaker 1: rescuing others. After that, the idea shrank again. In 2022,
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  Speaker 1: it was a poem people tattooed on their forearms. In
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  Speaker 1: May of 2023, it was a video, barely a minute long.
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  Speaker 1: And by the end of 2025, it had become two
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  Speaker 1: words on the cover of the best-selling book of the year,
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  Speaker 1: with more than 11 million copies sold and a subtitle
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  Speaker 1: promising a life-changing tool. The book is The Let Them
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Theory by Mel Robbins, written with her daughter Sawyer, and
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  Speaker 1: the distance between Epictetus and that cover is worth keeping
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  Speaker 1: in mind because it tells you what the book does
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  Speaker 1: well and what it quietly loses on the way. The
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  Speaker 1: compression is the achievement. Two words fit inside a moment
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  Speaker 1: of panic, In a way, a handbook of stoic philosophy
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  Speaker 1: never will, and Robbins knows exactly how much a person
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  Speaker 1: can carry into a hard conversation. What she leaves behind
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  Speaker 1: in the compression is something the older versions held onto,
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  Speaker 1: and it takes most of the book to see what
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  Speaker 1: that is. Robbins came to self-help from an unusual direction.
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  Speaker 1: She trained as a lawyer and worked as a criminal
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  Speaker 1: defense attorney, and the courtroom never left her prose. The
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  Speaker 1: book argues the way a good closing argument does. It
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  Speaker 1: states the claim, hands the jury a story they will remember,
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  Speaker 1: anticipates the objection, and then states the claim again until
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  Speaker 1: repetition starts to feel like evidence. She is candid, too,
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  Speaker 1: about how she got here. At 41, she was out
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  Speaker 1: of work and deep in debt. Her husband's business was failing,
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  Speaker 1: and she describes that stretch as a run of bad
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  Speaker 1: habits and mourning she could not face. What pulled her
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  Speaker 1: out was a trick so simple it embarrassed her, counting
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  Speaker 1: backward from five and moving before her brain could argue.
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  Speaker 1: The five-second rule made her a speaker, then a brand,
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  Speaker 1: then the host of a podcast with an enormous audience.
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  Speaker 1: That history matters because it explains the shape of what
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  Speaker 1: came next. Robin spent years teaching people to push themselves
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  Speaker 1: into action, and at some point, She started asking why
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  Speaker 1: so many of them needed pushing at all. Her answer,
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  Speaker 1: in this book, is that people are worn out before
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  Speaker 1: they begin, and the specific thing wearing them down is
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  Speaker 1: the unpaid job of managing everyone else. The scene she
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  Speaker 1: builds everything on is small and domestic, and that is
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  Speaker 1: part of its force. Her son Oakley was going to
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  Speaker 1: his high school prom. He and about 20 friends had
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  Speaker 1: no dinner reservations. and their plan was to walk through
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  Speaker 1: a downpour to a tiny taco bar before the dance. Robbins,
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  Speaker 1: watching this unfold, started doing what a certain kind of
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  Speaker 1: parent does. She picked up her phone and began hunting
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  Speaker 1: for a nicer restaurant with a table big enough for
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  Speaker 1: all of them, some way to keep the suits dry.
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  Speaker 1: Her daughter Kendall watched the anxiety climb and finally told her,
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  Speaker 1: more or less, that if Oakley and his friends wanted tacos,
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  Speaker 1: she should let them. Let them get soaked. What stays
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  Speaker 1: with me about this scene is who gets released first.
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  Speaker 1: The first person the theory frees Robbins from isn't a
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  Speaker 1: hostile coworker or a judgmental relative. It is her own
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  Speaker 1: child on a night she wanted to make perfect for him.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: The book opens with a mother discovering that her care
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  Speaker 1: had turned into control and that the two had become
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  Speaker 1: hard to tell apart. Twenty teenagers crammed into a small
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  Speaker 1: restaurant in the rain might be the part of the
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  Speaker 1: night they remember longest, and Robbins, to her credit, lets
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  Speaker 1: the story say so without dressing it up. From there,
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  Speaker 1: the book pushes the principle outward, and it keeps a
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  Speaker 1: steady beat while it does. A group of friends plans
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  Speaker 1: a weekend without you, and you let them. Your father
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  Speaker 1: makes his usual remark about your career, and you let him.
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  Speaker 1: A colleague arrives in a foul mood and wants the
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  Speaker 1: whole office to share it. Robbins' claim is that each
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  Speaker 1: of these moments triggers the same reflex, an urge to
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  Speaker 1: fix or to rescue, and that the reflex costs you
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  Speaker 1: far more than the situation does. Other people will think
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  Speaker 1: what they think. They will choose what they choose. Your
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  Speaker 1: stress about it changes nothing except the state of your
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  Speaker 1: own body, and she spends real time on why that
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  Speaker 1: stress feels so physical. Then comes the second half. which
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  Speaker 1: almost nobody tattoos. After let them, Robbins says, you have
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  Speaker 1: to say let me. Let them leave you out of
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  Speaker 1: the trip, and let me ask whether I have actually
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  Speaker 1: been showing up for those friendships. Let them judge the
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  Speaker 1: thing you want to build, and let me build it anyway.
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  Speaker 1: The first phrase releases what was never yours, the second
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  Speaker 1: hands back what is, and the book insists the pair
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  Speaker 1: only works together. This is the part that gives the
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  Speaker 1: book a spine. Let Them On Its Own is a sedative,
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  Speaker 1: and Let Me turns the sedative into a decision. The
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  Speaker 1: clearest demonstration comes in her treatment of comparison, which is
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  Speaker 1: also where the book gets most personal. Robin separates two kinds.
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  Speaker 1: The first she calls torture, fixating on something another person
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  Speaker 1: has that you can never have, a body type or
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  Speaker 1: a family. Her daughter Sawyer spent years measuring herself against
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  Speaker 1: her sister Kendall, against a different build and a different metabolism,
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  Speaker 1: and getting nowhere, because nothing about those differences could be earned.
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  Speaker 1: The second kind Robbins treats as a teacher. A friend
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  Speaker 1: of hers, Molly, a gifted interior designer, fell apart when
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  Speaker 1: a neighbor with no real design background launched a polished
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  Speaker 1: website and took off online. Robbins' reading is unsentimental. The
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  Speaker 1: neighbor hadn't taken anything from Molly. She had simply done
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  Speaker 1: the visible, repetitive work Molly had been avoiding for years,
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  Speaker 1: and the jealousy was pointing at the reps Molly hadn't
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  Speaker 1: put in. That is good advice, and it is also
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  Speaker 1: where the book shows its method. Every area of life
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  Speaker 1: gets the same treatment. Work. Friendship. Love. Family. Motivation. The
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  Speaker 1: way you absorb criticism. Each gets run through the same
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  Speaker 1: two phrases and set aside. By the middle of the book,
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  Speaker 1: you can predict the next move. And the predictability is
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  Speaker 1: either the weakness or the design. A mantra that has
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  Speaker 1: to work in a moment of panic needs to be
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  Speaker 1: drilled until it fires on its own. And a book
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  Speaker 1: that repeats itself for 300 pages is, in that sense,
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  Speaker 1: a training program. A reader who wants an argument will
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  Speaker 1: find it thin. A reader who wants a reflex will
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  Speaker 1: find it exactly right. And here, the story around the
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  Speaker 1: book turns strange, in a way that bears directly on
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  Speaker 1: what the book argues. That poem from 2022, the one
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  Speaker 1: people were tattooing on themselves before any video existed, was
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  Speaker 1: written by a poet named Cassie Phillips, and it was
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  Speaker 1: called Let Them. It had gone viral a full year
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  Speaker 1: before Robbins posted her short clip, and critics have pointed
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  Speaker 1: out that the book never mentions her. When the Guardian
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  Speaker 1: raised the omission, Robbins' answer amounted to saying the idea
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  Speaker 1: is ancient, which, as the opening of this episode suggests,
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  Speaker 1: is true as far as it goes. Nobody owns the
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  Speaker 1: dichotomy of control. A specific two-word phrase that had already
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  Speaker 1: gathered a movement around it is a different matter, though,
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  Speaker 1: and the silence about where that phrase had been circulating
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  Speaker 1: is hard to overlook. Plagiarism strikes me as the less
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  Speaker 1: interesting question. The more interesting one is what the omission reveals.
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  Speaker 1: Here's a book about releasing control, about letting the world
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  Speaker 1: be whatever it is, and it holds very tightly to
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  Speaker 1: its own origin story, the taco bar in the rain
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  Speaker 1: and the moment of discovery. You can read that as
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  Speaker 1: ordinary brand discipline. You can also read it as a
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  Speaker 1: small and precise illustration of the gap I mentioned earlier,
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  Speaker 1: because the theory has a word for other people and
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  Speaker 1: a word for yourself and nothing in between for the
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  Speaker 1: obligations that connect the two. Crediting someone is one of
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  Speaker 1: those obligations. It belongs neither to them nor to me. Robbins,
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  Speaker 1: to be fair, sees part of this. At one point,
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  Speaker 1: she turns on her own tool and warns that if
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  Speaker 1: let them is all you ever say, you will end
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  Speaker 1: up more isolated. It is the most honest sentence in
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  Speaker 1: the book, and it leads into its best material on friendship.
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  Speaker 1: She describes what she calls the great scattering, the stretch
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  Speaker 1: in your twenties when school ends and the structure that
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  Speaker 1: used to produce friendships quietly disappears. Children make friends because
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  Speaker 1: they are thrown together for hundreds of hours, and adults
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  Speaker 1: mostly aren't. Robbins cites an estimate that a close friendship
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  Speaker 1: takes more than 200 hours to form, and nobody stumbles
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  Speaker 1: into 200 hours by accident. So, in this part of
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  Speaker 1: the book, Let Me has to carry nearly all the weight.
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  Speaker 1: You go first, and you put up with the awkwardness
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  Speaker 1: of being the one who wanted it more. Read Closely
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  Speaker 1: this section almost breaks the theory. Friendship, as she describes it,
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  Speaker 1: is precisely the thing you cannot build with let them,
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  Speaker 1: because it requires wanting something from another person and continuing
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  Speaker 1: to ask. Robbins resolves the problem by folding the asking
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  Speaker 1: into let me, and on the page, it works. Underneath her, though,
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  Speaker 1: the grammar has shifted. The book's world has two pronouns.
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  Speaker 1: There is them, to be accepted like weather, and there
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  Speaker 1: is me, responsible for everything I do next. What the
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  Speaker 1: book never quite writes is us, the space where two
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  Speaker 1: people owe each other things, where I have a legitimate
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  Speaker 1: claim on your behavior and you have one on mine.
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  Speaker 1: The older versions of the idea were wiser on this point.
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  Speaker 1: Epictetus taught in a school among students who argued back.
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  Speaker 1: The serenity prayer was said aloud together, by people who
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  Speaker 1: then drank bad coffee with each other and picked up
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  Speaker 1: the phone at 2 in the morning. Melody Beatty's detachment
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  Speaker 1: came out of support groups, and her book assumed you
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  Speaker 1: would carry what you learned back into a circle of
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  Speaker 1: people doing the same work. The acceptance was private, but
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  Speaker 1: the practice was shared. Let Them arrives on a screen
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  Speaker 1: to someone scrolling alone and asks that person to set
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  Speaker 1: down the weight of everyone else. For a great many readers,
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  Speaker 1: that is exactly the right instruction. The parents who still
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  Speaker 1: manage their grown children's dinner plans, the colleagues who absorb
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  Speaker 1: a whole team's anxiety, have been over-functioning for decades, and
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  Speaker 1: this book gives them permission to stop, in language they
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  Speaker 1: can recall at the worst possible moment. That permission is
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  Speaker 1: not trivial. For some people, it is the first full
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  Speaker 1: breath they have taken in years. The same instruction reads
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  Speaker 1: differently to someone already halfway out of their relationships. A
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  Speaker 1: person who has been withdrawing, who is tired of being
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  Speaker 1: disappointed and would rather not ask anymore, can here let
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  Speaker 1: them as a blessing on the retreat. Robbins would call
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  Speaker 1: that a misreading, and she would be right. The trouble
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  Speaker 1: is that a two-word tool travels without its instructions. The
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  Speaker 1: usual complaint that the book is obvious misses what is
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  Speaker 1: really at stake. Obviousness is how the phrase spreads, and
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  Speaker 1: the risk sits in what it does once it leaves
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  Speaker 1: the page and starts running people's lives unsupervised. I can't
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  Speaker 1: settle on this book, and I think that is the
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  Speaker 1: honest place to stand. It is better than its critics allow.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: The Let Me Have is a real idea about responsibility,
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  Speaker 1: and the material on comparison would help nearly anyone who
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: read it with care. It is also a book that
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: treats other people mostly as conditions to be accepted and
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  Speaker 1: the life it imagines is calmer and a little lonelier
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  Speaker 1: than the one it promises. Both of those things are
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  Speaker 1: in the text and neither cancels the other. The question
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  Speaker 1: I can't close is where the line sits. Somewhere, letting
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  Speaker 1: a person be who they are stops being acceptance and
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  Speaker 1: becomes a quiet resignation, a decision to stop expecting anything
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  Speaker 1: of each other From the outside, you can sometimes see
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  Speaker 1: which one is happening. From the inside, with the phone
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  Speaker 1: in your hand and the phrase already in your head,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: I am not sure anyone can tell. If this kind
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: of reading is useful to you, the slow kind, the
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: kind that stays with a book after the summary has
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: run out, follow the podcast. You won't find quick takes here,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: just books. Read with the seriousness they ask for. Epictetus
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: never wrote down a word of what he taught about
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  Speaker 1: letting go. Arian took the notes, and they reached us
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  Speaker 1: only because a long line of people refused to let
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  Speaker 1: them disappear, copying them by hand and reading them aloud
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  Speaker 1: to rooms of strangers who needed them. The two words
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: on the cover leave that part out. Every teaching about
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: letting go survived because someone refused to let go of it.