I'm Yo-A. Shaw. I have been calling myself an emotional investigative journalist lately, mainly as a bit.

I like it, though. Oh, really? Do you? Yeah. Okay. Thank you. It makes, it makes sense. It also, you don't, you're not saying, like, you're a life coach or anything.

Okay. This is very validating to hear from you.

Because sometimes, like, I had a conversation kind of recently with, you know, a journalist I really, really respect.

And she said this thing that has stayed with me ever since, where she was kind of like, yeah, what you do is, it's not so different from like, you know, like life

coaching. And I was like, no.

So my show is called proxy.

We take on personal problems that make people feel confused and isolated for whatever reason. And then we scour the world for a proxy for them to talk to. So like a stranger who has experience, you know, so like either someone who's been through the exact same thing,

or, you know, maybe a researcher who studied their issue for decades and has insight to share.

Is this something your brain does naturally?

Oh, absolutely. This is something that I used to do as a reporter just like for my own

personal problems. That's kind of how I

came up with the show, which sort of like I'll just call, you know, sources who've been through

the same thing and experts and then magically by the end of it feel a little better. And I feel like

that's one of my favorite parts of the job.

Yeah.

You just feel like a detective.

We had a listener who wrote in whose wife had left him after coming out as queer.

And he was very happy for her.

I always feel like I have to make that disclaimer.

Because it sounds like this could go left very quickly.

But he had a lot of questions and she didn't want to talk about it and he didn't feel like

...