Joshua Bassett: Healing in the Public Eye
The Squeeze
Taylor Lautner
4.6 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 20 May 2026
⏱️ 70 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s episode, Tay sits down with singer, actor, and author Joshua Bassett! Joshua opens up about first experiencing anxiety and depression at a young age, how overwhelming online hate and constant criticism affected him, and the ways he learned to cope during some of the hardest seasons of his life. He shares how being misunderstood publicly impacted his mental health, why social media can be so harmful, and how staying grounded in your own purpose can help make outside opinions feel less consuming. Joshua also talks through the boundaries he now has with social media, what motivates him to continue speaking openly about mental health, and why he believes it’s so important for men to have spaces where they can be emotional, vulnerable, and honest about what they’re going through. Joshua also opens up about some of the difficult topics he addresses in his book, including his experience with sexual abuse, addiction, trust issues in friendships, and the emotions that came with releasing something so vulnerable into the world. He shares where the idea for the book first came from, the topic he was most afraid to write about, and what he hopes readers take away after finishing it.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast is a Dear Media production. |
| 0:03.5 | It's a very intimidating thing, a blank page. |
| 0:06.1 | I didn't even know if I was going to talk about it. |
| 0:07.5 | I was just like, I'm going to see this through it and write it out and get it on the page. And then I can decide later, I detail some trigger warning, some sexual abuse that I experienced. When I was like a teenager, my friend read the book. And he was like, oh man, I didn't know another guy had ever gone through what I had gone through. |
| 0:19.8 | And he never told anybody about what he'd been through. |
| 0:22.0 | And so that was the beginning of him being able to one process it, but also speak about it. I'm actually not scared at all to talk about it because I know how freeing it is. We wonder why toxic masculinity is so prevalent. I think the most masculine thing you can do is be emotional and tender and sincere. I think that, |
| 0:38.4 | you know, when you suppress emotions, then you become numb. And when you become numb, |
| 0:42.8 | then you're less sensitive to the ways in which you're hurting the people around you. |
| 0:45.7 | If I'm numb, you just assume other people are numb or you don't feel that sensitivity. So |
| 0:49.3 | you're more reckless and more harmful. And so I think that a huge part of the way we're going to make the world |
| 0:54.8 | a better place is by creating space for men to be honest, vulnerable, and emotional. I really also want to |
| 1:01.1 | speak to men of all ages and hope that it can bring some sense of vulnerability and healing and |
| 1:06.3 | give people the permission to be honest about how they really feel because a lot of people take |
| 1:10.8 | their secrets to the grave and they are very much buried in shame and in guilt. And that's why you see |
| 1:16.0 | so many people, I think, taking their own lives is because they found that there's no place |
| 1:20.1 | for them to get help or healing or to be honest or they're afraid that their biggest secrets or |
| 1:24.8 | their biggest shames are unredeemable. |
| 1:50.8 | Lemon drops, lemon drops, lemon drops. I hope you are having a fabulous day, and I have a fabulous episode for you. Today's guest is Joshua Bassett. He is an Emmy Award-winning actor, |
| 1:56.9 | singer, and songwriter. He has worked across film, music, and television, and is best known for his |
| 2:02.1 | role in the Disney Plus series High School Musical, The Musical, The Series. Joshua's rise to |
| 2:07.3 | fame has not been the easiest he has been met with a lot of public scrutiny that he since |
| 2:13.2 | has shared about how deeply that impacted his mental health. In this episode, we really cover |
... |
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