Danny Miranda
speaker
148 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Danny Miranda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And so I think what a lot of people need to do is figure out the games they need to play in the meantime. And so experts at things don't really have more impulse control. I think it's a fallacy. They figure out more ways to win in the meantime.
Just for the audience sake, how have we spent time together, Danny?
Yeah, sure. So I, like many young men, had lots of angst and felt like the world was not fair and that I had not gotten what I, quote, deserved and that I thought that my parents could have done a better job of parenting me in general. And I resented them for that.
um and so i had an intro to psychology course and the assignment was as you said pick somebody who had any pathology that we had cut you know studied over the whole semester and then write the story from their perspective of how that pathology might have developed right and um what happened through the course of going through that assignment was not what i expected uh because as i went through and i picked my mother and she's you know she's been public about
suffering from, you know, depression and ADD and things like that. That I picked that and in kind of inhabiting her shoes as an immigrant who came here not speaking the language and having, you know, a Serbian father who is very authoritative, rightfully so. We're talking 1950s. You know what I mean? Just different times. And
what her upbringing must have been like and having a split life between being an American at school and, you know, getting beat up for not being able to speak because back then it was almost, uh, expected and, and normalized to beat up the foreigners, um, to, to, you know, then being the, the first person to, you know, first female class at Hopkins, um, to be in that, um, as a doctor.
And so thinking about that trajectory, I all of a sudden realized the amount of pressures that she had put on externally, that other people had put on her externally throughout her whole life. And what happened was I felt like I understood. And Blaise Pascal, who's Pascal's triangle, some people remember him, he was a mathematician and also a theologian.
He had this quote that I love, which is, to understand is to forgive. And I believe that you cannot both hate someone and understand them at the same time. And so like, if I am very angry with someone, it's become a check for me where I'm like, oh, I must not understand something.
Like there's something about them or something about their experience that has made me not understand why they do what they do. And then you have the secondary statement of most people, if you were born with the same genetics and live the same life as that person, you would see the world the same way as they do.
And so carried within that is this very jarring idea that what if our viewpoint of the world is something that someone else hates? entirely. And in their mind, we are wrong. But in their mind, like hard to even really get into that and like empathize with someone else's point of view to that degree.
But me going through that process has actually been one that I've repeated multiple times in my life when I was extremely angry with someone. And it's usually around loyalty or betrayals or things like that that happened to all humans. But when I started writing narratives around how someone experienced life
that would make it reasonable that they would act or behave or believe what they believe, all of a sudden, I felt like I understood. And so in a matter of a few weeks, what felt like a decade of hate and anger directed towards my mother, I went back from school to complete the story. And I remember she picked a fight about something. I can't remember what it was.
And you have your normal routine of getting into a fight with someone, right? And I just remember having no like emotional, I had no adrenaline spike. And I just felt very like, it felt like she'd hit a button, but the button wasn't hitting the normal trigger path that it was supposed to. And so I just remember looking at her and being like, I understand. And I'm sorry.
And she, of course, you know, burst out into tears and it was, you know, a huge emotional moment. But like at the end of the day, it was like, I get it. Like you went through a lot and I'm sorry that you've had to deal with these demons. And it wasn't about me. And I think it's a lot of us.
We have these like self-centered viewpoint because like we are the center of our own universes and therefore expect that everything that has ever happened is because of us. Right. When we're children, we just expect our parents got divorced. It must be my fault because like you think that way. It's like at a base level. And so realizing that it wasn't my fault necessarily that she felt that way.
And I guess in some way giving her permission to just be who she was. And not constantly tell her why she shouldn't be this way or why her basic existence was insulting to me. Unpacking that made for a less contentious relationship because then the triggers were somewhat removed because...
if you understand why someone doesn't speak English and they keep looking at you and making noises at you, it's hard to get upset because you know they don't speak the language. And so even you can just replace like speaking English with speaking Alex and it works the same way.
And so that's how that little intro to psychology assignment both changed my life with my mother, but then also helped me unpack anger driven situations that I had with other close people throughout the rest of my life.
I think it's just very hard to step out of the emotion in the moment and sidestep it and try and get outside or above whatever analogy you want to try and say like, okay. What do I not understand? And then it becomes a question to solve rather than a person to attack.
I mean, with something that's like super deep, like anger, stuff like that, I mean, that was years and years. I think it takes more work to do that. But in terms of frames around... decreasing the stakes of a situation, I have lots of them. So like, for example, one of them is You know, if you zoom out far enough, you realize that you can't even see the earth.
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