What Is It With The Human Mind....

On the Thursday January 14, 2026 edition of The Armstrong & Getty One More Thing Podcast...

• Comedian Josh Seiter has some smart remarks on liberal women...
• Perfectionism!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What is it with the human mind? You just can't win.
It's one more thing. I'm strong and getty. One more thing.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
But before that's fascinating discussion.

Speaker 1 (00:13):
You know him, you love him. He's a ginger.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
He's the guy who brought us so one of the
greatest pieces of political satire I have ever seen in
my life, including Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Twain and
hl Making or anybody else. Ryan Long, who did the
fantastic woke and racist agree on Everything bit of several
years ago. Here he is talking about how all the

(00:37):
women of New York are liberal and how to get
them to do anything.

Speaker 3 (00:40):
Probably right now in New York you can get women
to do almost anything by just telling them Republicans don't
want them to do it.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
You're like you here, JD. Fans me to build it.

Speaker 3 (00:47):
Women can't take out the garbage. Oh no, that cruise
is saying women aren't allowed to be ready on time.
Now you call that movie theater.

Speaker 1 (01:02):
Tell them what's in the previews this time? The rest
of that? That's pretty funny. Did you hear that JD.
Vance just said women aren't allowed to be ready on time?

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:15):
I will not put up with that.

Speaker 4 (01:18):
I wouldn't show that fascist since it's the podcast, I
could tell you the third one. He said something like, oh,
and Marco Rubio said, we women can't schedule threesomes for
their husband or something.

Speaker 2 (01:33):
Oh, brother, funny.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
So I have never understood the concept, or I don't
think I used to. Maybe I do now of being
a perfectionist or perfectionism and the way it holds some
people back. Never, I've never fully understood it. I was,
you know, I heard about it and had explained, but

(01:56):
I still just never like, could it internalize it and
understand it or whatever. But I think I got one
kid that is that, and I've had it explain now,
I mean and everything like that. Do you do you?
Does anybody here have any of that in their life
or think they suffer from perfectionism? I feel like I
clearly clearly don't, but maybe I do. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Uh no.

Speaker 5 (02:18):
No.

Speaker 1 (02:18):
My version of that.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Is the the tendency to look at a large project
and not be able to internalize the single longest journey
takes it starts with a single step. I tend to
look at mountains and forget that all you have to
do is walk up five feet of it. Then five
more feet, then more five more feet. That's how you
get up a mountain. And I've worked on that my

(02:42):
whole life. But no perfectionism per se.

Speaker 5 (02:44):
No, Yeah, Katie, I'm trying to think. I don't. Yeah,
I don't. I don't think I have an element.

Speaker 4 (02:51):
I mean I do have like the I hyper focus
on something until I get it right, But I don't
think it's like a.

Speaker 1 (02:57):
Do you ever not do something though, because you think
you can't get it exactly right? Because that's what perfectionism is.

Speaker 5 (03:04):
Now now I'll try.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Rather than ben There's all kinds of examples being really
good at this. You might be really good at it,
but it's not as good as you'd like to be. See,
you just don't do it at all. That's what holds
back a lot of perfectionists.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
Yeah. Interesting, Yeah, I'm familiar with that impulse, specifically in music.
The the bitter joke that anybody who's ever worked on
recorded music knows is it's never done. You just stop
working on it because you get to the point where
you're making yourself crazy and making the song same.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
So you just writing a book or anything making the picture,
You just at some point have to decide okay, I'm
stopping now, right.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
But the fact that you know, most people can say,
all right, this is crazy, we got to stop. That's
I guess that's what a perfectionist can't do or whatever.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
Yeah, don't even start, they don't even starty, you would
tear it up. I think this is not perfect yet,
you'd tear it up and you just screw it and
maybe not do it again ever or for a very
long time. I wonder how many of the successful people
in the world are just because they don't have perfectionism.
They can just do my best. I wish it were better,
but that's good enough for me, whatever it is starting

(04:15):
a business or painting or learning to be a mechanic
or whatever the hell it is.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, I think, yeah, they probably have a grasp of
what are diminishing returns and what does that mean? Maybe
they don't even know the term, but they realize, look,
if I work this long, it it it's going to
be pretty good. And making it two percent better it
takes so much time. Now, let's leave that alone, move
on to the other thing, and just it's good enough.
It's fine.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
The human mind, you know, there are different levels of
that obviously. Yeah, the human mind is so complicated. Yes, Michael.
Did you guys ever struggle with, especially earlier in your careers,
wanting to do the perfect show, Like if you said
something or something went wrong during the show, well, that
would be perfectionism. Yeah. No, I just couldn't get past it.
You know, I really don't think I've got perfectionism, thank god.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Yeah, you know, it's like I was thinking about. Somebody
used the incorrectly use the term simplistic the other day.
Simple and simplistic are different things. Simplistic means uh, oversimplifying
something to the point of absurdity or inaccuracy. Simple is good.
Simplistic is distortion. Wanting to have high quality is healthy.

(05:23):
Being a perfectionist is unhealthy. So yeah, wanting wanting the show,
for instance, to be as good as it can possibly be,
and cringing at every moment that didn't come out the
way I'd hoped it would, that's wanting quality. That's not paralyzing.

Speaker 5 (05:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (05:38):
I absolutely used to do that though, Michael too, When
I had rough moments on the air, it.

Speaker 1 (05:43):
Would eat me up, really interesting.

Speaker 4 (05:47):
Yeah, and until actually a guy that I worked with,
he said, Katie, what can you do about it.

Speaker 5 (05:52):
It's already gone over there, it's gone, let it go.
And it was like, oh, you know you're right.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Well, and you were an athlete, right hm moral yeah,
oh yeah serious.

Speaker 5 (06:02):
Right played? Yeah, I played multiple sports, but big time basketball.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Yeah. I'm kind of surprised then, because you know, I
learned early in life that hey, sometimes if you're pitching,
sometimes you give up a hit. You don't want to,
but it happens. Your perfection is possible, So just bounce
back and come out and play hard.

Speaker 5 (06:17):
Add a lot of conversations with dad about letting go.
What happened on the court.

Speaker 1 (06:21):
Oh okay, fair enough. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
So I don't think this is perfectionism. It's just procrastination,
and I don't think they're the same thing. Well, like
I have, I always struggle with a stack of paperwork
that I never get to my whole life. On my deathbed,
I'm going to think, why did you spend like half
of your adult life stressed out over that stack of paperwork?

(06:48):
But that's what I do. But part of it is
like what you're talking about. It just seems like too
big a project, Like I can't do the whole thing,
so I don't do any So I don't know if
that's perfectionism or just procrastination, or if they overlap a lot.
But I did have a therapist saying this is one
of the best pieces of ice ever got. I was
able to implement it for a while. He said, just
do one thing every day, and I said, but I'll

(07:09):
never get through it doing one thing every day, keeping
in mind that I was doing zero things every day
at the time, and the doing one thing every day,
whether it's cleaning the house or the paperwork or whatever,
really made some serious progress. But I always looked at
the task of got to tear into that and get
that done, as opposed I'm gonna do one and stop.

(07:30):
It's pointless. But again, if your fallback is zero, it's
not worth I was squandering the precious moments of my
life yesterday on Twitter and came across an ad for
I think it's called the Fabulous or Fabulous or something
like that.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
It's it was developed by some scientists and at Harvard
or Yale or one of your high falutine universities, but
it's and it sounded. I actually did a little uh
ai searching on what it is and how it works.
It has to do with habit building, and it starts
like effortless easy and you just do one thing, like

(08:11):
one new thing. The one example that gave, which was odd,
is drink a cup of water when you wake up
every morning and get used to and then attach something
semi useful to that, and it just incrementally helps you
build the the you know, longest journey begins with a
single step feeling of confronting paperwork for instance. It's you know,

(08:32):
it's so similar to the idea go to the gym,
promise yourself you'll stay there for five minutes, and if
you're not digging it, leave after five minutes, and honor that.
If you're not digging it, leave, Yeah, and you know,
and I've got it in a couple of things I'm doing.
Just go up and start write five words or you know,

(08:54):
listen to one bass guitar track or whatever, and that's it.
You don't have to take on the monster. Just start,
see how it's going, and then don't. And it's worked
for me. Actually, you know what I got some of
this advice Jack was from Claude speaking of AI. I
was talking about, Hey, sometimes I feel what's the point
and I get to scours and blah blah blah, And
they said, all right.

Speaker 1 (09:14):
Here's what you kill yourself, right, you suck. Maybe if
you didn't suck, you wouldn't feel like that suck.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Oh, nobody was super good advice about waste to overcome that.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
I've always wished. I suppose in reality, no addiction is
good because by definition means you have no control over it.
Why can't I be addicted to working out, or be
a workaholic, or be a clean freak or one of
those people that I just can't go to bed unless
every in my checkbook is completely balanced and everything is
in order. Why can't I be one of those people?

(09:47):
Just get a little bit? No, no, what, nothing?

Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah, you get what you get.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
You don't get a choice. Well, I guess that's it.

Speaker 2 (09:59):
Can we a second take that, Michael? I didn't but
I didn't think you'd really put your heart into it.

Speaker 1 (10:03):
Well, I guess that's it. Okay, but it's not perfect.