How Tay & Taylor Lautner Brush Off The Haters

Over on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, Tay and Taylor Lautner — everyone’s favorite couple with the same name — host a podcast called The Squeeze. Since it launched in 2023, the show has become the couple’s outlet to talk about mental health with celebrity friends and guests. Their goal? To help everyone realize how common it is to not feel 100% all the time.

As part of Advertising Week New York, Bustle’s Editor in Chief Charlotte Owen sat down with the Lautners on Oct. 7 to dive deeper into self-care, their favorite podcast guests, and the backlash they received after having The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives’ star Whitney Leavitt on the show. They also shared the best advice fellow podcast host Alex Cooper ever gave them.

To kick off the Bustle x The Squeeze Advertising Week panel discussion, the trio chatted about how tough it can be to find a therapist that you truly connect with. “I need someone to boss me around,” Taylor joked. According to the actor, The Squeeze has also become a form of free therapy for the couple. “We're so blessed to have these conversations with our guests,” he told Owen. “We get so much out of it [and] we just see the impact that it's had on people. I swear I get stopped more for The Squeeze than Twilight today. I love that.”

Opening up to guests is one thing, but the Lautners noted that they’ve also learned how to open up to each other throughout their relationship. “Both of us are similar in the sense that we went through traumatic things, but never really addressed it,” said Tay. “We kind of just tend to push things down and bury them under the rug. And I think it took meeting each other to bring some of that stuff to the surface.”

On Tay’s Favorite Podcast Guest

When Tay was asked about her favorite episode of The Squeeze, she said it had to be when Abbey Romeo from Love on the Spectrum stopped by. (All the episodes are recorded at the Lautner’s house.) “I just love her so much,” she said. “It was really cool to get to sit down and hear from her and hear from inside her brain and how she thinks.”

On The Mormon Wives’ Backlash

On the Hulu show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, Whitney is shown as one of the villains in the #MomTok group, and some people weren’t happy that The Squeeze gave her a platform. “With the Whitney one, I was very much on the fence about it,” said Tay. “But mental health is for everyone, [and] we wanted to give her a space to open up and share.”

“We had to remind people after that episode came out that we're a mental health podcast,” Taylor added. “We will ask tough questions and allow them to address, you know, anything they wish, but we're not going to grill them.”

On The Best Advice From Alex Cooper

After the Mormon Wives’ episode, Tay chatted with podcast superstar Alex Cooper of Call Her Daddy fame and asked for some advice about dealing with hate. “She gave us some really great advice: To not listen to the noise. She is just a talented woman, and we love her dearly. She's one of the best to ever do it.”

On Self-Care

Of course, one of the most important aspects of maintaining your well-being is practicing self-care. For Taylor, that means taking salt baths with pumpkin spice bath bombs. For Tay, it often means muting people on Instagram. “That's key,” she said. “Unfollow or mute the [people] that don't make you feel good. If you can't hit the unfollow, mute is beautiful.”