00;00;10;11 - 00;00;30;14
Jasmine
Hello and welcome to this episode of Psych Attack! I'm doctor Jasmine B McDonald. Today I have the pleasure of catching up with doctor Will Dobud. This is the third time we're catching up for Psych Attack. The first time will join me to discuss outdoor and adventure therapies. And then we caught up again to discuss his book called Kids These Days.

00;00;30;17 - 00;00;53;26
Jasmine
Kids These Days is currently on pre-sale and is being released in late September, so you should absolutely go to the pre-sale page and, register for that one or put your ordering, and if you haven't listened to this previous episodes, please do yourself a favor and go back and check those out. So this time around, I've asked Will to come and have a talk to me about his experience of writing and publishing and nonfiction book.

00;00;53;29 - 00;01;17;16
Jasmine
I kind of lessons learned, kind of a chat, rather than sharing insights from the book content, which you can hear in another episode. I want to really talk to Will about mechanics, processes, and experiences behind bringing together nonfiction and mental health focused book. As always, I am using psyche tech partly to share cool information, but also to learn stuff myself.

00;01;17;16 - 00;01;23;07
Jasmine
So this is not completely altruistic. Thanks for coming back to psych attack.

00;01;23;07 - 00;01;27;02
Will Dobud
We'll third time lucky. I'm very ready.

00;01;27;04 - 00;01;41;26
Jasmine
While we're not going to focus, so much on the content of the book kids these days, maybe it's useful to just give a little bit of background of the of the book and what you were focusing on as context for the chat that we're going to have.

00;01;41;28 - 00;02;06;05
Will Dobud
Sure. So basically, the process of the book was we simply asked a group of experts in their respective fields, what's going on with kids these days? You know, we hear on the news that there's a mental health crisis. What's really going on. And what we found is that depending on the lane that somebody comes from, their description of what's going on is totally different than somebody else's.

00;02;06;07 - 00;02;20;11
Will Dobud
Which leads to different kind of solutions. So, we just kind of zoomed out and thought of, how can we talk about youth mental health in a way that tries to cover as much as we could without obviously being totally exhaustive of the whole thing?

00;02;20;13 - 00;02;30;24
Jasmine
Yeah. Nice fun. I don't think we tapped into this in the last episode on the book, but I'm wondering, what are the personal drivers for you to create a book?

00;02;30;26 - 00;02;56;18
Will Dobud
There's a few of them. And in speaking to, like, being altruistic or not, like sometimes you write something and you go, this is something I really want to share with everybody. And I like this topic and I think I have a story to share, which is a weird thing to sit with because it means you think you have something other people care about.

00;02;56;20 - 00;03;21;24
Will Dobud
And for the most part, the majority of people probably don't care what you have to say. So you have to sit with, I'm doing this for other people while knowing no one's going to read this right. I think a lot of that comes from growing up as a musician and growing up and playing in punk bands where you can make the coolest, most punk rock flier.

00;03;21;26 - 00;03;41;18
Will Dobud
No one's coming to your show, and so then you have to fall in love with performing to nobody. I think when you like, when I have something stuck in my brain and being someone who at a young age was diagnosed with ADHD and I can struggle falling to sleep, I'm very good at staying asleep, but falling asleep.

00;03;41;18 - 00;04;18;00
Will Dobud
I'll go. Why? I even thought about that. The process of writing is quite cathartic to get things out of my brain. And so I do love writing, and I love, I love to the opportunity to write with my my friend Neven, who's been a mentor and and good friend of mine for many years, but at the same time to to try writing in a different style, to write not necessarily in APA referencing, and have to write a positionality statement and your methods and your limitations and this and that to write in a in a more freeing sort of way.

00;04;18;02 - 00;04;23;18
Jasmine
And was that as free or as ideal as you mentioned? It would be?

00;04;23;21 - 00;04;59;17
Will Dobud
It was really freeing. One of my passions with, if I'm writing a peer reviewed article or sharing something from the world of peer review, you can throw around terms like, well, the first meta analysis of psychotherapy really cemented that psychotherapy works. What that means to someone who doesn't know what a meta analysis is, is nothing. And so I often think if I can really make it simple enough that a ten year old could understand it, I'm probably writing really well.

00;04;59;20 - 00;05;21;01
Will Dobud
It was really freeing to be able to touch on topics that I was not an expert in, kind of zooming in a lot I think is, is where I like to really learn about something. So it was fulfilling. It was also hard knowing my audience for for kids these days is not the academic world. It's not people who agree with me.

00;05;21;03 - 00;05;30;04
Will Dobud
It could be people that really fundamentally disagree with me. And so how do I at least make that fun and not come across like a giant asshole?

00;05;30;06 - 00;05;55;25
Jasmine
It's a pretty tough space, especially writing with part of the audience being parents of there can be a resistance sometimes of families with work that we've written in my current role. You know, you need to be conscious of not telling parents their job or what's expected of them while still trying to provide useful information. Was that something that you were kind of, struggling with in in writing the work?

00;05;55;27 - 00;06;20;01
Will Dobud
One of the things we acknowledged at the start was that there are too many parenting books, right? So you have, for instance, two big bestsellers in the last ten years and the last ten years was called The decade of the Parenting Manual. Right. So you have Amy Chew as the Tiger mom, right? Be ruthless. Be all over. You know, make sure your kids doing this make sure all responsibility.

00;06;20;03 - 00;06;43;00
Will Dobud
And you have, like, Lenore Skenazy free range kids. Let your kids go out and do it. Or both of them got absolutely eviscerated and both of them got absolutely praised. Yeah. So instead of saying there's one way to do this, we tried to present it from all circles. This is probably a horrible, not horrible in a bad way, but kind of a funny way to think about it.

00;06;43;03 - 00;07;07;06
Will Dobud
I grew up as South Park was emerging right. And South Park does things as as comedic writers that show a side of the story that you go, oh my gosh, that's a horrible thing to say. But if you give it 30s, they go full circle around the topic where the whole episode, you see every viewpoint of one thing.

00;07;07;08 - 00;07;34;25
Will Dobud
And I think that a good way if you're writing nonfiction. And my PhD supervisor, John Healy, taught me this, if you know what the critique is, that's going to happen and what you write, if you in group work, old school adventure therapy, group therapy, stuff, probably all Gruber. It's called front loading, where you might say some people might feel offended by this, but here's what we found in our research.

00;07;34;27 - 00;07;55;24
Will Dobud
You're kind of telling someone, we know this might be hard to read. So instead of going no, we found this in you need to not be offended by what we wrote. You're kind of showing all sides of what the critique could be. And I think that's a good way to show that, you know, all sides of an argument to the best of your ability.

00;07;55;27 - 00;07;57;03
Jasmine
That totally.

00;07;57;05 - 00;08;24;09
Will Dobud
And so when I was writing my PhD, John said to me, make sure to give your PhD to everybody before you submit, because you're going to want to be ripped apart. All the time until the last time that you get ripped apart. And so that was really helpful. And what it did is it made me try to strengthen ideas that I was originally quite resistant to being strong parts of my work.

00;08;24;11 - 00;08;25;09
Jasmine
Right.

00;08;25;12 - 00;08;48;02
Will Dobud
I think if you can sit and go, I really like this idea, but who hates this idea? Why do they hate this idea? And adding that in instead of going, I hope they don't realize where I was wrong about something. You know, I think that's a really good way to also know if you're ever going to have to debate someone about something or get challenged.

00;08;48;04 - 00;08;53;05
Will Dobud
You know that you can, that you've covered all the angles.

00;08;53;07 - 00;09;03;06
Jasmine
With that advice from John to give you a thesis to everybody. Did you do a similar thing with this book like giving it out to people to get lots of feedback. And what was that process like.

00;09;03;08 - 00;09;30;21
Will Dobud
We gave it out to a lot. We we wanted our publisher to, help us with content editing, which is a lot more money than copy editing of just finding typos. And so the acquisition person who acquired the book from us, he gave it probably the most thorough read of everyone. And one of the things he found was he said, you know, I love the book, I love the whole thing.

00;09;30;21 - 00;09;50;28
Will Dobud
But at the end of chapter one, I'm stuck with the notion, is there a youth mental health crisis? Because he goes half of it. I read and I go, yeah, this is really bad. And the other half I read and you're kind of saying, but hold on a second, let's pump the brakes. And he said, I think you need to make this really clear.

00;09;51;01 - 00;10;11;27
Will Dobud
And I love the nuance of letting the reader think about it. But he was so right in the sense that after he gave me this feedback and I read it, I went, oh, we answer this by like chapter seven, we need to move some stuff around and actually make this really clear. Cool. And so that was really great.

00;10;11;29 - 00;10;42;04
Will Dobud
There's also topics like we found in our searches that the younger a child is in their classroom age, right. The more likely they are to be diagnosed with ADHD. So there's a statistically significant finding there. The quick jump there is that teachers stink at working with younger kids in their classroom. Like, that's the judgment where we had to find a way to write that, because teachers are arguably the most important profession in the world.

00;10;42;06 - 00;10;47;23
Will Dobud
Brain surgeons had a teacher. Right. Every child on earth should have a teacher.

00;10;47;27 - 00;10;52;13
Jasmine
So you don't. Then will you inoculated the the rebuttal?

00;10;52;17 - 00;11;04;04
Will Dobud
Yes, exactly. Where they're going? What do you know about a classroom with 13 year olds? Nothing. Right. So we wanted to bring in, like we're not judging. This is just something that we found.

00;11;04;06 - 00;11;24;09
Jasmine
Yeah. In the process of showing that nuance and there's different perspectives and arguments, you and Nevin, your coauthor, spoke to experts on a range of different topics and we talk about that in the previous episode, content wise. But it does make me wonder about what that process was like.

00;11;24;10 - 00;11;58;03
Will Dobud
Nevin, I think, started that process of talking to people and recording just zoom interviews. I think to combat my reluctance to dive in quickly to another book. But once I started seeing them, I started thinking to myself, like, we interviewed doctor doctor Sue Johnson, who created a motion focused therapy, and she unfortunately passed away before the book was finished, which was a real bummer because I think how we've talked about her story would I think she'd be really proud with the rebellious spirit that she had.

00;11;58;06 - 00;12;17;13
Will Dobud
But listening to that interview back over and over, like she grew up in a British pub and she she talked about growing up, being six years old, watching her dad manage a bar and then there'd be people who have lost their partner after the war. Sitting at the bar and she's like, I learned everything about emotions from my father.

00;12;17;17 - 00;12;39;18
Will Dobud
Like when it's important to hold someone's hand, how to break up a pub fight, how to do all this. And then she talked about when she tried to convince in the 90s psychotherapy to acknowledge emotions and stop being so stuck in cognition. The whole field was like, well, it's typical of a woman that they want to talk about emotions.

00;12;39;20 - 00;12;59;21
Will Dobud
And she's like, big mistake, as if I'm ever going to back down from a fight. So what was interesting when we started a book, we were never like, yeah, it's talk about this badass woman who takes no shit, and she's a member of the Order of Canada. That's the highest civilian rank in Canada. Like, she. She was unbelievable.

00;12;59;24 - 00;13;36;20
Will Dobud
And she never took shit. She was APA family psychologist of a year and I think 2015 and that stuff. Adding in the character made what they said really come to life. So it was an accidental really great thing talking to the people ended up taking us in different directions. And that I think, made us really learn and learn different things and like I know I spoke last time about environmental toxins like I know Nevin.

00;13;36;22 - 00;14;01;16
Will Dobud
He lives in Canada. He lives a very healthy, has a greenhouse on his property. I know who Nevin is. I know why environmental toxins could have been of interest. I had no idea what I was about to learn, and it blew me away. Where then you start. You start learning about when we. When we talk about what's causing a youth mental health crisis.

00;14;01;22 - 00;14;26;00
Will Dobud
Why is this topic off the radar, where it's something that we all kind of know. Right. And so I think that part, if you're really learning something new, and this is where I think about copying, mimicking other writers, which I'm sure we're going to talk about, a good story is often more important than what that story is really about.

00;14;26;03 - 00;14;40;18
Will Dobud
Malcolm Gladwell is fantastic at this tool. Gawande has, you know, the Checklist Manifesto, which we've both read, talks about Boeing and airplanes. Like, I'm a nervous flier. I should have never read that chapter. It's fantastic.

00;14;40;20 - 00;15;07;13
Jasmine
Oh, yeah. Aspects that I never thought I'd be interested in, of fields I didn't think really overlapped. And then you step back and see the cognitive processes, the social processes, the project management that's applicable across the board. And then as you say, I think this is your main point. The stories of the people behind it, like I'm reading about this guy who who, you know, builds skyscrapers and I'm like, who is this dude?

00;15;07;14 - 00;15;09;18
Jasmine
This guy's awesome.

00;15;09;20 - 00;15;35;22
Will Dobud
And what you can. And that's like where I often think I have a friend, a close friend. We met when Rene and I went to Antarctica, and he's a lawyer in Washington, DC and a lawyer in international things. Right. I've talked to him before about law. I don't I have no idea what he's talking about. He probably listens to me and goes, I have no idea what we're talking about.

00;15;35;24 - 00;15;53;08
Will Dobud
But I often think I've. I've sat in a hotel or a hotel room with him once and he said, sorry, I've got to make some work calls. And I said, okay. And I'm probably editing. I was grading papers. I'm grading student papers. I'm sitting there and he's on the phone like, if we can really get the Russians on board with this.

00;15;53;08 - 00;16;20;17
Will Dobud
And I was sitting there going, whoa, that's like a bond movie. It's which Russians? Putin. Who's he talking to? And so I, I try to be really curious about where someone has an expertise about something that is not really related to my work and what I can kind of learn, learn from that. And I've had this experience with you and the things we've written where we've written something.

00;16;20;19 - 00;16;48;05
Will Dobud
You and I both say, this is perfect, and we send it up the ladder and it comes back and they say, this is not clear. Be very specific with what you're trying to say. And I read it and go, yeah, that's not clear at all. And we need to fix it and just say what we mean. And so I think being around people that you can just learn about what makes them fabulous, usually leads to some sort of understanding of how they got to where they are.

00;16;48;07 - 00;17;04;18
Will Dobud
Right. So yeah, I think there's a lot you can learn just from talking to other people, whether it's recorded and it becomes text in your book or not. Like I think just talking to other people more and more from outside of your outside of our bubble is really important.

00;17;04;20 - 00;17;28;06
Jasmine
One of the things that stands out to me, what you're saying is thinking about the threads as you're pulling on one thread, the other threads that come out. Right. Because in academic work we can be quite structured. We can set a really specific scope to answer a question. Academic papers usually are quite short and, you know, there's a lot of formula involved.

00;17;28;09 - 00;17;50;08
Jasmine
And knowledge translation work can be similar as well. The stuff we've done in that space like this is a structure we're going to use. This is the level of detail that will go into. But when you describe to me, talking to all these different experts, you and never and having your own expertise, all the literature that you're also reading, that's a lot of content to process, to weave together.

00;17;50;08 - 00;17;58;11
Jasmine
But even just the pragmatic aspect of storing this information for later and comparing, can you talk to that?

00;17;58;17 - 00;18;25;05
Will Dobud
So what I did, I actually did a process. Neven and I just like you and I and our writing collaborations, we said early on, we will never fight about whose project something is right and who can be first author a second. And I think that ruins good collaboration with friends. And usually I think most people, if there isn't a weird hierarchy, we'll know whose project something is.

00;18;25;05 - 00;18;58;01
Will Dobud
And so that's just being kind with your writing partner. Neven started the lion's share of the interviews, and then what I started doing was very similar to when I was stuck with my PhD. I knew that we needed a proposal for the book to submit to publishers, so we accidentally made a fake table of contents. And what I did was I took A3 paper and I put it a chapter on every wall, and I listened to every interview with sticky notes and just wrote a random quote.

00;18;58;01 - 00;19;20;01
Will Dobud
Someone said, and I stuck it somewhere, and I put. And then I actually got like string and tied things together to a point. I had a zoom, which one of my friends at like it was one in the morning in Adelaide. I had a zoom with a dear friend. She was in North Carolina and I had lived when I worked in Alaska.

00;19;20;01 - 00;19;56;06
Will Dobud
I had lived with her now husband, so we all met at the same time. So I'm talking to my friend and her husband walks up and goes, when did Will become the Unabomber? Because they were. All this thread and stories. And I actually think mapping is really important when you're covering too much and then simplifying what are the themes and so when Nevin said, we're talking about interference, we're talking about trying to help too much, which became intervention, and then we're talking about ideologies of over protection, safety trap.

00;19;56;08 - 00;20;24;26
Will Dobud
Young people don't know how to make decisions like ways of systems of belief. And that was just good alliteration, inter interference, intervention ideology. And we went there's the structure. So interference phones the dismantling of the neighborhood, lack of social connection, environmental toxins. There you go. One of the problems with the toxins chapter is we thought this would be something that nobody cares about.

00;20;24;28 - 00;20;48;08
Will Dobud
And it just I was like, oh, it's buried at the end of the book. But it just crept up and up and up and up. And so that became an interesting arc where we're going. There's nothing we can do about a lot of this. You have to protect your children as best you can and make informed decisions the best you can, while also not living in a constant state of anxiety about these things.

00;20;48;10 - 00;21;07;04
Will Dobud
Like, for the most part, we're all probably going to be fine, but it's a topic that's kind of off the table. And so it kept moving up. Yeah. So I think eat, whether they become a books character or not, really talking with a wide range of people helps to get you outside of your own box. I think.

00;21;07;06 - 00;21;32;14
Jasmine
I like that idea of, quite visual myself. And I do a lot of mapping, especially when I'm stuck as well. Or to be. Yeah, it's the start of a project. I like that idea of this topic creeping its way up or basically like to, you can no longer avoid it. I'm here and I'm important. On the flip of that, were there things that you wanted to write about that really became less and less important or that you had to cut?

00;21;32;14 - 00;21;41;16
Jasmine
Like maybe there's not a specific example you have, or we could just talk about the idea of, you know, letting go of ideas that you wanted to keep and what that's like as a writer.

00;21;41;19 - 00;22;25;26
Will Dobud
Especially when you're writing with other people. I think many of us know how to use track changes and to write things. And I know some people say, don't edit until you're done writing. I like both at the same time. I know that's not conventional or everyone needs to find their own way. I do think it's really important, especially in a writing partnership, to never be precious about words, because what will happen is you'll end up arguing about what's important, and you'll end up arguing about your perspective on what you've written, where if it's all about the reader, no reader knows what they didn't read.

00;22;25;29 - 00;22;47;20
Will Dobud
So kind of when you're ever you're doing a presentation and you say, and you're starting to run out of time, right? And a lot of people say, let me just jump ahead. Why do they need to know that you're jumping ahead like, so you can do things instead of going, this has to be here. Let your writing partner delete what's not important.

00;22;47;22 - 00;23;14;06
Will Dobud
And so I think there are always things that we heard or you're kind of thinking, well, the the person we interviewed not like being cast in this light. Or maybe this is a called controversial topic, something about a mainstream event that they disagree with. Or maybe their politics are too far in the present, that maybe we can write it in our own example and not about something else.

00;23;14;08 - 00;23;47;28
Will Dobud
And not lay that on the expert. But I think if you're not precious about the words you're using, you know that it's a much more collaborative and cooperative writing experience. So trusting that your co author knows that their opinion about what's good or not good is really helpful. So that's been something I've really benefited from learning from Neven, learning from our writing partnership is trusting that the other person knows how they're reading your words.

00;23;48;01 - 00;24;10;02
Will Dobud
And so like sometimes, for instance, if you tell a joke when you're writing and I don't think I'm a writing expert, I just love geeking out about it. If you tell a joke, sometimes the joke is there without you telling the reader it's a joke, right? So like, for instance, we start with a kind of a case vignette about OxyContin, right?

00;24;10;04 - 00;24;43;02
Will Dobud
Everybody knows the story. In 2020, when all the Netflix specials came out, we all watched them and goes, that's that's really messed up. Yeah. Makes sense. Big pharma. And you go, it's it's a sad story, but it's also so obvious. It's like, oh, we gave everyone legal heroin. Was that smart? Probably not. But then like some things that we don't hear in the media today, like Purdue Pharma that created OxyContin, they've rebranded as I think it's called Noah Pharmaceutical Noah.

00;24;43;04 - 00;25;10;25
Will Dobud
And their mission statement is donating money to combat that. And you just go, oh, come on. But you don't need to say come on to the person like they get it. If you told the story well enough, the punchline is there. And so I think that quite often, being precious about words ends up leading to not as good of a project, because at the end of the day, if it still is important in your brain, you're going to type it again anyway.

00;25;10;27 - 00;25;29;04
Jasmine
It's a good point. Yeah. And do you think not being precious with that and being happy for you know that both of you being able to cut and trim or change helps with it. Making it sound like it's not obviously written by two people like, you know, yeah. Flicking through and it's jumping between voices.

00;25;29;10 - 00;25;55;22
Will Dobud
That's another big thing is when I think our publisher and the acquisition person told us he had never he could have just been being nice to us. So I don't know. The jury's out. He said he hadn't read a book written by two people where he cannot find the distinct voice of different people. And I think the reason that is, is it wasn't like Nevins going to write about environmental toxins.

00;25;55;22 - 00;26;17;11
Will Dobud
And that's his thing and not not my thing for me to learn about. And then I'm going to write about, let's say, the labeling of mental disorders with youth. And that not be Nevins thing. So if you collaboratively think this isn't mine, this isn't yours, this is ours. I think that's an easy way to write together.

00;26;17;13 - 00;26;19;20
Jasmine
Takes longer than surely.

00;26;19;22 - 00;26;35;26
Will Dobud
Oh, it could take longer. Absolutely. Especially if you're editing the whole time. But sometimes I think it takes clear communication and telling your your coauthor. Don't touch this chapter till I have an idea, and I need the space to do it.

00;26;35;29 - 00;26;39;08
Jasmine
Yes. Yeah. So that communication is really important.

00;26;39;09 - 00;27;02;24
Will Dobud
Yeah. Really important. And then but it can take longer. I do think it's just so important that if you're writing as a team, you're writing to try to find one voice as a tool. And so I think that is something that can be hard. And then you have to think of, why are you inviting in the other person that you're inviting in to do this project?

00;27;02;25 - 00;27;44;07
Will Dobud
So I think it's hard, but I think all of us become better writers learning from other people. I think Nevin is one of the most assertive peer review writers I've ever read. Where me? I try to just mimic Scott Miller's writing, which is to tell a story that shows something that someone else, that they show you a story in a way that gets you to think about what I want you to think about, similar to A21 day that we brought up with positive deviants and things like that, to tell a story about how I want you to think about this without telling you really what to think and saying and start going, oh, that kind

00;27;44;07 - 00;27;58;19
Will Dobud
of makes sense. So I think that stuff can be really important. But yeah. So knowing what your strengths are and then being with someone who complements your strengths is really good.

00;27;58;21 - 00;28;26;23
Jasmine
So you, you kind of co-create this intellectual baby together and it has the one voice which is nice. And actually you've drawn on all these different experts and research in your own experiences as professionals. And then you hand it over to a publisher and then you start to manage that process. So I want to keep that quote open of any insights you might want to share for people, especially folks who haven't gone through this process yet.

00;28;26;23 - 00;28;29;00
Jasmine
What's what is that like?

00;28;29;02 - 00;28;53;20
Will Dobud
Yeah. So handing a book over it depends on who your publisher is in in academic publishers, they're usually just happy the book is done. And then it will be copy edited and then it will go out. And it's not two hands on of a process. It's pretty fast and quick with a more engaged publisher where there their money is on the line of are we really going to print this thing?

00;28;53;20 - 00;29;18;14
Will Dobud
And then is anyone going to? Is anyone going to care? They might be really hands on a good rule of this. Again, going back to music as a metaphor, I recorded a lot of music as a as a drummer, right. You sit down. They've set up in microphones your drums. You said, yes, that looks like a good microphone of the drum set.

00;29;18;16 - 00;29;35;12
Will Dobud
Put on headphones and they start playing a metronome, and then you start playing and they will interrupt you and go, you're off the metronome. Yeah. Okay. Then you start again and you start again, and then they go, you go. I did a great one minute and then I went off the metronome and they go, yep, you're off the metronome.

00;29;35;12 - 00;29;53;16
Will Dobud
Start again. Then you've recorded it all the way through and they go, I think you could do that better. And you go, okay, I guess I'll just do that better. And if you aren't willing to really accept the belief that nobody cares about your intellectual baby as much as you do, it's okay because they're still invested in it.

00;29;53;16 - 00;29;55;01
Will Dobud
Going somewhere?

00;29;55;03 - 00;29;55;21
Jasmine
Yeah.

00;29;55;24 - 00;30;31;00
Will Dobud
So you have to give away some creative control while maintaining some sort of. We're sticking with this point of this topic, you know, so it is hard the process and also it's slow. And the hard part of slow is my brain is already on to the next project. But you have to sit with the fact that, you know that New Year's 2025, 2026 is around the corner and we're all going to say, oh, that year flew by.

00;30;31;03 - 00;30;45;29
Will Dobud
So don't get stuck in the moment, hand it off and wait for it to come back. Just like peer review, you have to hand it off and go work on something else. When you give a study to a journal because you know they're going to be slower than ever.

00;30;46;01 - 00;30;51;12
Jasmine
Yeah, but still increase the frequency, right. Which you check your emails.

00;30;51;14 - 00;31;26;14
Will Dobud
Yeah. Horrible. Maybe today maybe as much as peer review is, is sort of a broken system at a macro level, a good peer review, just like I was saying about my thesis work, they usually catch things that once it's in print, it's gone. You can't fix it. So things they catch can be really helpful sometimes. And that gets into a different thing of if you're asked to read something for somebody else.

00;31;26;16 - 00;31;55;06
Will Dobud
One don't demand being a coauthor, just read it because you're nice to your friends and to actually care about what they've written and what they've done, and the process they all went through to write something. So I, I'm a huge believer of I'll help anybody with their writing in the sense of I hope that maybe they'll return that favor or, you know, phone call away if I'm stuck.

00;31;55;09 - 00;32;21;24
Jasmine
Yes. That community's early important aspect of of anything. But I think especially for writers and for academics or for people thinking about nonfiction, and because I think the reason for that is a lot of what we do can be solo, but also because we go, we deep dive on stuff. We share a common interest in deep diving on things, but we're not deep dive in on the same stuff.

00;32;21;26 - 00;32;58;14
Will Dobud
Yeah, totally. And I think my favorite thing I learned about writing is actually the more legwork I do, the more interesting of something I found that hasn't been shared before. And I think that ends up giving me another angle to figure something out. Right. I know the first time I was on this podcast years ago, you brought up the Dodo Birds paper and how that was written and that was me really finding my voice and finding out how to tell a story in a peer reviewed paper.

00;32;58;17 - 00;33;32;25
Will Dobud
But I think the reason that landed and was received well enough or whatever, was because you're talking about how the person that first wrote about bringing an extinct flightless bird into psychotherapy research was because he was the understudy of Skinner and B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist, and was saw the fate of behaviorists in psycho in analysts, where if I just said it's called the dodo bird verdict because you don't tell the story of it.

00;33;32;27 - 00;33;56;25
Will Dobud
And I think that the deeper you dive, the more you find out where terms have come from. I love that Michael White, the the late narrative therapy guru, used to say, you know, who here has, you know, relational dynamics. And then you talk about when that word was first used, that term, and it's like, well, no one had relational dynamics before the 1930s.

00;33;56;28 - 00;34;20;25
Will Dobud
No one talked about it. Yeah. Or like for instance, strategic therapy, family systems, systems approaches all emerged during the Cold War where people were moving nukes around. So it's like strategically, you know, that's it. I think that's the word George Bush is incorrectly. But so if you can find where these ideas came from, it gives you a bit more authority as to why these words are used.

00;34;20;27 - 00;34;49;05
Will Dobud
And that can be really funny as a way to build more knowledge about a topic that's out there. So all the therapies have that history. Like why did Freud want people to lie down? Well, it was Austria at the time was highly patriarchal world, and people didn't talk about feelings or emotions or their inner world or their unconscious or even all the sexual stuff about your mother or your father and the ego, the superego.

00;34;49;08 - 00;35;08;22
Will Dobud
So it made sense not to make eye contact with your therapist, but then you get to America, and Americans are typically a little bit more oppositional, and they go, I'm not laying down. We're having a conversation. So it's it's one of those things where you go, the cultural aspect, all the historical context leads to a bit more understanding about something.

00;35;08;29 - 00;35;16;05
Will Dobud
And I think doing that legwork will always make for a better writing, something like that.

00;35;16;08 - 00;35;38;19
Jasmine
It's really awesome. Well, we have not covered all of the things that I would like to cover, but also you've got other things that you should be able to do today. So, nothing. I think that's a good space to to wrap it up. And before we do that, I'm wondering if you might have just any, any other things like.

00;35;38;19 - 00;35;43;01
Jasmine
No, actually, I just really want to mention this before we finish or if you feel like content.

00;35;43;03 - 00;36;09;01
Will Dobud
No one thing and I please tell me to shut up if this goes too far into a tangent. I went to boarding school in Massachusetts, and I remember I think it was my junior year. So year 11 we went and visited. Henry David Thoreau was the remake of his cabin and Walden Pond, and I couldn't read Thoreau. It was too wordy.

00;36;09;01 - 00;36;36;15
Will Dobud
And and I just had the most wonderful teacher who was talking about how she built a cabin in her backyard in Massachusetts and wanted to do all this stuff. And I always remember the quote from Thoreau that when I finally really read it and started to understand what he was saying, and Thoreau said, if I can drive life into the corner, into a corner, this is paraphrasing, maybe I'll understand what it means to really be alive.

00;36;36;18 - 00;37;01;27
Will Dobud
And I think if you can get passionate about something that's really small and you can drive that into a corner, you'll make it big for everybody else. So if you look at bestselling books, Atomic Habits Checklist, Manifesto, you don't need to read the Checklist Manifesto to understand what this book is going to tell you. Right. So I think that's the same thing with research.

00;37;01;27 - 00;37;29;28
Will Dobud
People try to stay way too global and big. You know, this will solve therapy forever or find something tiny and really drive into it and figure it out. And then that actually will lead to learning things about just like notions of like learning about toxins or learning really more of the story about OxyContin is much more fascinating than just going the pharmaceutical industry is messed up.

00;37;29;28 - 00;37;52;21
Will Dobud
Everyone knows that. But going really deep into something and getting it really in there, I think that ends up helping a lot of people to tell a story from different angles. If you're ever reading something and someone says, I know we talked about like, for instance, last time the phones are causing a youth mental health crisis, right?

00;37;52;23 - 00;38;16;19
Will Dobud
Go read something from the 1980s. And what you'll find is they were all talking the exact same way. And then you have a good critique of it. So I think if you can drive something into a corner and really sit there with it, you'll learn so much more than you anticipated. And that will give you some some good ammunition to to bold in your writing.

00;38;16;21 - 00;38;46;07
Will Dobud
The last thing I would say is reading and reading your favorite authors is a really good idea, but also everyone has different accessibility to the written word. So if you're an audiobook person, if you're a podcast person, if you're a reader, if you're a journal, or if you're watching movies, it's okay. You can always take clever lines that people say and learn how to use them in your own way.

00;38;46;09 - 00;39;16;29
Will Dobud
So what I started doing was, if I'm listening to a podcast, I just have a pad of paper next to me. And so, for instance, one person said on a podcast, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this is the alphabet soup. And I forget exactly what they were talking about, but some fancy acronym about something. And I thought cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, eMDR, Borderline personality Disorder, BPD, you know.

00;39;17;01 - 00;39;40;13
Will Dobud
Q9 the patient health questionnaire. And I and I went actually our field is an alphabet soup div. And so it gives you little creative things to go that was super clever. And I like that term. And I'll be here so you can take those I think they're idioms or colloquial and that helps you to be evocative and illustrative of your point a bit more.

00;39;40;15 - 00;40;04;20
Will Dobud
And don't worry about pleasing square science academic rigor like write your voice and don't worry. Like you can still have fun with sharing your perspective, and you don't have to worry about coming across like you're the smartest person in the room. The best room you'll ever be in is when you're the dumbest person in the room, because then you'll learn everything from people.

00;40;04;23 - 00;40;15;07
Will Dobud
Yeah, so those are just things that I always think about when I'm thinking about writing in general, of which I'm a lifelong learner, and I don't think I've got it.

00;40;15;09 - 00;40;35;05
Jasmine
Or some tips to finish on, like a actually really nice kind of, wholesome and like lovely motivational cool at the end. Appreciate that. Will. I think that we better round out the episode by talking about where people can access your latest book, Kids These Days. It's, currently on pre-sale.

00;40;35;07 - 00;40;57;23
Will Dobud
So we have a website, Kids These Days, book.com. Of course, there's like all book titles. There's probably like a thousand kids these days books. But kids these days books, is a place not only to go and find places to, to purchase the book, if that's your interest. At the same time, I sit with the mantra of share everything.

00;40;57;26 - 00;41;25;01
Will Dobud
And so our whole reference list is there. We have a whole resources packet which has the abstracts of those references where you can find them, the links to that, so you can make up your own mind about what we included in the book. You can get to know the experts we interviewed. There will be podcast content. Nevin has a good Substack called adults in the room, which is, of course, the play that we're not really crapping on the kids.

00;41;25;01 - 00;41;46;07
Will Dobud
It's much more about us as the adults and how we can step up. And so that is a place that I know some people don't like reading books, don't want to pay an academic for their book, even though we're not getting rich off a book unless all of you buy it. But I think what's really important is just that that information is shared widely.

00;41;46;07 - 00;42;08;26
Will Dobud
So there's a lot there. There's tons of links to other things that you can find from different thinkers. There's controversy and debate, and maybe the whole idea is to inspire people to think about what's going on in the current sociopolitical, environmental context that we live. Not to tell you to agree with us or anything like that. So that's a good place to start.

00;42;08;29 - 00;42;34;15
Will Dobud
You can also, if you're interested in outdoor therapy stuff, there's outdoor therapy, Centcom, which is not there's no money to be made out of that project. And that is center spelled the British Australian Way Center. But that has dozens of hours of free presentations. It's got one from you. I'm from Social Sciences Week about nature based and risky play in childhood.

00;42;34;18 - 00;42;56;11
Will Dobud
That's another good place for if you just want to have free content to go through and no one's taking a credit card, there's no mailing list there, stuff like that. So Amazon, anywhere you get your books, all that stuff is out there and most of it's free and accessible for the most part. So that would be a cool place to go if, that's of interest to you.

00;42;56;13 - 00;43;16;27
Will Dobud
There is a sign up on the kids these days, Bbc.com, that's not a mailing list. We're not messaging you every week or telling you that Nevin wrote a new Substack, or Will was on a podcast that's just on the important things related to the book. So, no spam there. If you want to register for that as well.

00;43;16;29 - 00;43;44;23
Jasmine
Awesome. Thank you. Well, thanks for coming in. Doing that kind of ranch thing that we don't get to do very much. We talk about the processes behind what we create and. Yeah, on you mentioning the websites and the various content that you create, you do do a really excellent job of bringing people together and sharing ideas in a really open way without hiding it behind a paywall or making it unnecessarily complicated or siloed.

00;43;44;23 - 00;43;47;24
Jasmine
So thanks. Always a pleasure.

00;43;47;26 - 00;44;17;05
Will Dobud
I think that one thing in this is just my last door handle conversation. I think that it's really important that we really focus. I mean, I'm from the United States. I grew up in Washington, DC. I've worked in red states, blue states. I've worked in indigenous communities in Australia and North America. I actually think the most important human quality is to bring people together and allow their opinion of what we've done, what anyone has done to to rule the roost.

00;44;17;12 - 00;44;41;10
Will Dobud
That will help us all find where we all settle. And if we become tribal ized by politics or our profession, we're not going to do the best for kids these days because we're going to silo them away where we should really be entering their worldview, their cultural experience, and bring everyone together to make up our minds about what we think as individuals and in the communities that we live.

00;44;41;12 - 00;44;43;05
Jasmine
Hack here.

00;44;43;08 - 00;44;43;23
Will Dobud
Now I'll show.

00;44;43;26 - 00;44;52;03
Jasmine
You will,

00;44;52;06 - 00;44;54;19
Unknown
And I think that.