You're listening ad-free on Amazon music.

Just a reminder that Big M. Little Mood with Daniel M. Lavery happens twice a week.

Slate Plus members get an additional mini-episode or Little Big Mood every Friday.

Sign up now to listen at slate.com slash mood.

Music Hello and welcome back to Big Mood Little Mood.

I'm your host, Daniel M. Lavery, and with me in the studio this week is Rose Tremlett,

who writes a weekly advice and life hat column and co-hosts an optimization podcast

for the online edition of the German national newspaper Dietzait. Rose, welcome to the show.

It's an honor and a privilege to be here, Danny.

I'm so pleased that you're here, and I think it's kind of fun and interesting that I was so anxious about pronouncing Dietzzi correctly that I ended up mispronouncing my own name and the

word podcast and had to retake your intro several times, which...

They're both very challenging. It's fine.

It just goes to show that the whack-a-mole principle applies to pretty much any situation that

you can think of. And wherever you're looking...

I love that, the whack-a-mole principle.

Wherever you're looking for danger, it will pop up right next to it instead.

How is that going? How is the optimization guidance for

Germans going as a sort of pursuit of life? It's going very well, thank you. Yeah, I've been doing the

column for a long while now, or at least it feels long. And it's a weekly thing.

I try to answer reader questions as often as I can,

and the reader questions are coming in more and more as time goes on.

And it's become a kind of permanent fixture of the weekend section,

...