#755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/d11fb9d62478a960

I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that. Or
creepier still if you're at home and this has happened to me. I search for something or I type in a URL.
incorrectly and then a screen for ATT pops up.
And it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't love it. And
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Tim.

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Optimal minimal.
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And then I'll do personal questions.
Now we're seeing it.
My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal mental scale.
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers.
From every field imaginable to tease out the habits.
routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply.
And test in your own lives.
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its tenth year anniversary, which is insane to think about.
And past one billion downloads.
To celebrate.
I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favourites.
From more than seven hundred episodes over the last decade.
I could not be more excited.
To give you these super combo episodes, and internally we've been calling these
The Super Combo episodes.
Because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks.
But to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider
Stars.
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you.
Perhaps
They got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together.
And for the bios of all guests.
You can find that and more at Tim.blog slash.
Combo
And now, without further ado.
Please enjoy.
And thank you.
For listening.
First up
Hugh Jackman.
An Academy Award nominated
Golden Globe and Tony Award winning performer.
Whose roles include
Professor Harold Hill in Broadway's The Music Man Revival.
Jean Valjean in 2013's major motion picture adaptation of Les Miz.
And Wolverine.
In the Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
A role which he will reprise in the upcoming
Deadpool and Wolverine.
You can find Hugh on Instagram at
The Hugh Jackman.
What books?
If any come to mind. I know you read a lot.
Have you gifted the most
to other people.
I learnt this from a great mate of mine, Billy Shaw, who's often known as Saint Billy.
Runs no kid hungry, share our strength, you know, that organization.
I do. Yeah, they're incredible.
So
He came over to my place one day and he gave me
Two books that I now gift
very regularly.
One is E. B. White's Here is New York.
And the other one
Is David Foster Wallace's speech This is water.
His commencement speech.
I've heard you talk about the David Foster Wallace one, so I know you know that.
I said, Oh, I haven't read either of these and he said, Man, I learned a long time ago
It's really nice to give books.
But it can be a burning to give a big book.
Because people feel like
I'm gonna see him in a month.
Oh shit. Having dinner with him next week and share him with a book. But like the David Foster Wallace is a fifteen minute book.
And the E B Wide Book here is New York. The New York had had a
Program.
Close World War Two where they were invite the greatest writers in the world to come to New York and just pay them for three months just to write essays about New York.
So
That was his and it's amazing to read.
A nineteen forty nine account of New York and how much of the
Spirit.
still resonates now. So
That's the little book that anyone who lives in New York or likes New York I give.
And in terms of fiction, and this completely breaks that rule, Tim,'cause this is a long book.
But I was gifted actually uh by Gary Hart, Senator Gary Hart who I played in a movie.
The Overstory by Richard Powers. I'm not sure if you read that, but that's the most transformative bit of fiction I have read in a long time.
I need to read it. It's been recommended so many times. It's sitting on my Kindle and I started reading it and I remember I read for about a half hour and it said
Whatever it said, point zero zero one percent complete. And I went, Oh my God. How big is this book? Nice big. And stick with it. For those who don't
know the book, could you give it a just a quick description?
It's
Richard Balls, I believe it won the Pulitzer.
I think it did.
It's a piece of fiction interweaving
About eight storylines of humans.
But what do you realize that the
The misdirection of the book is
By the end you realize the book is completely about trees.
So we might
relegate trees or nature to some
Five or ten percent of our awareness.
And this book what it does is draws you in in these incredible human stories and these very varied characters and they're
varying degrees of interaction with nature in various different forms.
But by the end you realize
The book actually the main character of the book
Is trees.
is nature.
And it completely reverses
The way you look at the world when you walk outside.
Now I promise you
After you read that book, Tim, you will sit in your backyard and you'll notice things you have never noticed before.
I'm in. All right.
My complacency has been called. Stick with it. It it it it works on you
In the way nature does. It's patient.
And it's in no rush. It's it's slow and it's steady and it's true.
Could you describe your meditation practice and what you feel are the main benefits that are derived from that practice?
Sure.
I was introduced to meditation when I was at drama school.
And was a form of transcendental meditation.
There's lots of different types of of meditation. Just very briefly it involves the use of a mantra which you are given.
Which you repeatedly sound. And
the very basic concept is that
The nature of our minds is to always
Be working.
Always be thinking.
And the trip to life is not letting that
Mine be your master, but to let her be a servant.
Then it's an incredible thing. Once it's running the show, it you know, it's very easy to get off track. So
During this period of meditation, you are given a mantra.
Which was described to me as
The mind is often called the monkey mind in eastern philosophies.
So a monkey is very energetic and if not given something to do will be mischievous. So the mantra is like basically saying
to the monkey mind, I need you to climb to the top of that telegraph pole.
And when you get to the top, I need you to climb back down. And when you get to the bottom, I need you to climb back up.
And when you get to the top I need you to climb back down. So it's just giving this activity. So the mantra or this
word that is silently
Repeated ends up
fading away and
The best way I can describe it is
The effect that it has on me. I mean, sometimes I fall asleep, by the way.
Which is totally fine. And clearly what my body needed, but
When you first pour a glass of water
It's cloudy.
And then
In a period of time that all settles and you see crystal clear through the glass, through the water.
That's what meditation does for me. It's
Got that feeling where
Things drop down, I have a feeling of coming home.
the feeling of experiencing my true self and not just being caught up
in the monkey mind or
being reactive to life and it gives me a finer energy.
I don't always get out of meditation
Like
Ready to
do a one hour Peloton class, but I always come out with a finer energy. My intention feels clearer.
My listening is more purposeful and
Things feel easier and more connected.
Do you meditate then twice a day in these like a
one might consider the the traditional TM format. In if you meditate in the afternoons or later in the day, how do you time that for yourself?
I always did it twice a day, for years. So I started
Yeah, when I was twenty three, I'm fifty one now, so
I did it.
Very regularly.
twice a day. And about
three or four years ago I kind of
Let go of the duty element there was.
And I can't be guilty of this.
This is good for you. Shouldn't be doing this.
Don't fall off that wagon, you know, it's a slippery slope, so
And once I let go of that too, I I've just had
kind of experiment with with myself. I was like
Okay, why don't you meditate when you really want to meditate?
And that has
turned into a practice where it's every morning for sure.
And then
Definitely when I'm working, if I'm on a movie set.
Or I'm working in theatre, there will always be a second one. But sometimes
I'll let the
Afternoon one go. And when I say afternoon
I can't sit down or I get restless leg syndrome. So after about four or five o'clock
It's uncomfortable for me to sit.
The twenty minutes. So
I will
Do it around lunchtime or s just after lunch.
Could you describe your
Emotional.
Energy practices
And replenishing
approach when it comes to
let's just say stage performances and stage work because it it's really
hard for me to even wrap my head around how you
have that much energy output.
Hm.
Repeatedly in a given week.
I know.
In my heart.
That
I was born to be on the stage.
Right. It's taken me a long time to feel the same
Feeling on a sound stage.
Acting, but
M one of my favorite movies of all time and definitely my favorite quote from a movie of all time.
is from Cherry Sophia, which I loved as a kid. And
Eric Lidd.
Who's the religious runner.
who decides not to run on the Sabbath during the Olympics. You've seen the movie, right?
Uh yeah. So this is great scene. He's meant to be going off after the Olympics.
to do missionary work in China.
handing our Bibles or something, and his sister's talking to him.
She's
You gotta throw away this silly running thing.
We have really important work, God's work to do.
Why are you doing this and spending time on this, you know, basically kind of accusing him of not following God's will.
And he just says he looks at her and he says
But I feel his pleasure when I run.
And I've always
Somehow that line it always makes me tear up just
Sang it.
That's what I feel on stage.
There's a kind of natural energy and what I keep saying to my kids actually
Don't settle, find that thing.
That resonates with you in that way.
Where you feel
Some kind of
The pleasure of of the universe of consciousness. Like there's some
Joy where you feel you can do it longer. And in that way
It's not such a Herculean effort.
Well uh
I'm gonna
Tell you in a second, I have a bunch of sort of rituals and things that I do to make sure that I can be my best.
But there is a natural energy that I understand other people going, I don't know how you do that.
But maybe that's in the same way I don't know.
How you trying for ultra marathons, for example.
So in terms of self care.
On Broadway I have a bunch of rules.
Or when I was doing my tour.
I certainly don't drink.
Alcohol.
Before
And I really limited after.
It's really important for me to wake up.
Feeling in a good frame of mind.
rather than that feeling of catch up. You know, that feeling if you wake up and you go, I just want to go back to bed
Then that's a really difficult place to be in.
if you're going to perform that evening,'cause then an anxiety comes in that you're gonna be withdrawing on reserves that are not replenishable.
I don't go out.
After
Any show.
And
I would have loved you to come and see. I'm doing the music, man. Come, but
I never go out. That's a blanket rule. I don't go out with anybody.
Partly because
The party I've just had on stage is better than anything I can imagine anywhere else.
The other thing is I think it's
Really important.
To me.
To get quiet.
To allow what has happened, the energy of what has happened,'cause there is a lot of energy.
I think I'm the only actor I know who I can be asleep within forty five minutes after getting off stage. There's something very
It's like you've had your greatest work out.
You have a bath, that feeling after the bath after a great workout in the evening where you just
can sit and be at peace with yourself, that
I love it. So
I limit the amount of coffee I have just because you're battling dehydration with stage work all the time.
I know what my routine is before I go on stage and I'm religious about it.
And that's more about quieting my mind.
I don't ever want
My monkey mind saying all
You didn't do your warm up today, or you only half did it, or this or that. You haven't stretched, you haven't done that, you didn't really eat very well today. You might be you know
My mind can easily pick up on that.
The perfectionist side of me.
I always take a minute before I go on stage, literally before
To pause.
And just connect with the senses. So
Even if I'm not
In the opening of the show.
I will stand in the wings. I first of all like to just listen to that
titter of excitement as people come in.
to the theatre because I love the theatre myself and I remember that
And it reminds me
Of how
Privileged I am.
And how much I owe every single
Audience member at every single show.
They're not coming in to see my fourth show of the week. They're coming to see the show for the first and probably only time in their lives. So
You know who knows what they've sacrificed to get there. So
I really take that minute and then I fall still.
And
Remind myself that
This is all in service of something.
I say Om Karamatnaminama, which means I dedicate
This
Or show or whatever it is.
to the service of the absolute. There there is something
Beyond the show. Some
reason we're doing this. Same for your show. You know, there's gotta be a reason beyond
Just what the immediate thing is that
And that just connects me to that.
I'm pretty quiet during the day.
When I do a shot?
And
The other thing I really try to do is
Read and listen to other stuff. I had a great
acting teacher Lyle Jones has said to me, goes you you can't call yourself
A real act, uh
Unless you expose yourself to ballet.
And classical music and David Adam wrote like
You should be so inquisitive and curious and
Find inspiration from surprising places. Could be a walk in the woods, but
That stuff feeds you so that
In the act of performing, which he is very much giving out, you have enough
energy there and stores, I suppose.
They'd be the main things.
I'd love to ask about your
Dad, if that's possible. And I have a specific example that jumps to mind.
And this is from a piece.
some time ago in good housekeeping. So I want to give credit where credit is due. But the quote here, and feel free to correct it, this is from you. I remember at one point being in a fellowship and everyone used to wear the fish symbol. It said you're a Christian. So I asked my father, dad
Why don't you wear that at work? And he said, Your religion should be in your actions.
Yeah. He set a great, great example. Could you speak to what's
Impact

family had on you in terms of of lessons learned. Yeah.
I'm glad you mentioned that story.
That actually came to mind a couple of days ago. My dad
You know when people talk about the oh my father always told me this
There weren't many
times the dad would come up with a sentence like
But there's a few I remember.
You cannot
Over invest in education. That's one he would say to us.
He says if you're ever in doubt of what to do
Go and learn more.
Your actions.
I actually now remember it it was
We grew up very religious. My father was converted by Billy Graham.
And my mother and father I think went to the Billy Graham Crusade and my father was not religious at all and became a born again Christian.
My mother did not.
Things actually I think that
you know, by the end of their marriage.
They sort of went down different paths.
My dad was
Not a
A Bible basher. He d he rarely talked about it. And I remember saying Dad'cause I was really that
thirteen, fourteen, I was really
In school uh church groups, fellowship groups, and and I got one of those stickers.
That you put on the back of the car and I said, Dad, we should put that like we meant to do that. We meant to
Spread the word and do this.
When he said that to me, I was disappointed. I I thought he was clopping out, but only later did I realize that when he said
People should know you're a Christian through your actions.
He's so much more powerful.
If someone eventually comes up to you and says, You know, there's something about you, man
I don't know what it is, but I'd love to know
Where I can get it.
Then there's an opening, but someone
People have noticed how you act is far stronger than what you say. And we all know that.
I often speak a little more about my dad in interviews because my mom left when I was eight, so
I was brought up from that moment on primarily by my dad.
So I got a lot of those lessons as I was growing into a man.
with him being around. But my mum I always remember her saying she says it to this day.
Everyone needs to feel appreciated.
Doesn't matter what
They do.
It doesn't matter who they are.
That's a need in everybody.
And
I sort of have extrapolated that out to

I've learned a lot of that from Brene Brown.
They need to be seen.
for who they are and appreciated for what they give.
And
I've seen my mother in particular and my father do that, and that's something we were all taught. So it has become a natural thing.
I'd love to ask about
Journalism or communications is
Maybe gonna seem to be a little bit more.
Oh, firewall. Let's go there. Stickler on ethics.
If you get an invitation.
To go
Go across the road, teammates place.
For dinner. And then an hour later you get an invitation from the Queen of England.
To go to the Buckingham Palace?
You stick by your first one.
It was just a stickler on ethics. You keep your word.
Even if it does not
benefit you.
You always keep your word.
Big one. My dad was always big on ethics.
And the other beautiful one. I remember when my
'Cause his relationship didn't work out and it was a big source of pain for him.
You know, he shared with me it was
A real feeling of failure for him.
Around his marriage.
And when things started to take off from me with X Men, he very rarely offered advice.
At all. About parenting, nothing.
Even when I asked him for advice at one point.
I had an opportunity to be in a T V show. I got cast in a T V show and at the same time
I got a spot at a very revered acting school in Australia, the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts. And over the weekend I had to choose do I go on neighbour's
Which
Collin O, Guy Pierce, Smugger Robbie, you know, all these people
That was the breeding ground.
Or do I go and study for three years and I asked my dad.
On the Friday I said that
I don't know what to do.
I need your help. And and I was twenty two at the time.
And he said, I can't answer that for you.
And I was really
More play.
Anyway, by the Sunday it was clear to me I wanted
You know, obviously his lesson about education had sunk in and so I went, No, I need to go
And
Study.
Because I want to feel that not only do I belong
on a T V
Series.
Said, but I can also audition for the Royal Shakespeare Company in in England.
And so and I didn't feel I had that before I studied. So I went off and studied and when I told Dad the decision
He I remember he saw it, he goes, Oh thank goodness.
I said, You knew? And he goes, Of course I knew.
I see couldn't you just
Save me this grief the last days in told me he goes no
He says you're a man. You have to make those decisions
On your own now.
As a father, I have a twenty year old, I don't know if I've got to hold my tongue. If I could see it so clearly. Go right, don't go left.
To be able to hold back. That was another great bit of advice.
At the end of drama school
Did you make a contract with yourself about pursuing? And could you speak to that, please?
Yeah. Your research is good.
So I
had worked I don't know how many jobs. I graduated driver school at twenty six, so
gas station attendants, uh dressed up in a koala suit for the national parks and Wildlife Foundation.
Yes, I've been punched in the kidneys by fourteen year olds, you know, the whole thing.
Then yeah, so I told him to fuck off but all of that, you know.
Uh restaurants.
The thing I learnt
from working in all those jobs that if you start a business, it could be a pizzeria, it could be a bar, a restaurant, anything.
You have to give it seven days a week.
For five years.
And after five years you may be able to pull back a little bit and you may be able to
be in a position where you built the brand at a certain point, you may have to you may be able to hire a manager, you may be able to
hire staff to make things a little easier.
But no one really goes into owning their own business.
thinking, Oh, this is gonna be the easy life. They do it because they there's something they wanna create and they don't want to be told what to do, and they go out and make it happen.
And it dawned on me really only in the last semester of drama school that
That's what I'm doing.
I'm going out there.
No one's in

in their company to be an actor and then sending me out.
I have to go and rehire every time I go for a job.
And my brand is my name. So I have to build that up. And so I thought, Okay, what have I learned from all these jobs?
I'm gonna give it seven days a week. So I vowed to
Never wasted the phone to ring. I was gonna write letters, I was gonna start me and
Simon Linden, my fellow mate I graduated with. We're gonna start
A theater company.
Which he did, by the way. I ended up getting a job straight out of drama school, got lucky, but the Tamaroma Rock Surfers, which is uh you know, in Bondi in Australia, still going today after twenty five years. But
Mark the other words, you have to drive, you have to work.
You cannot be a victim. You cannot wait for the phone to ring. You have to go out and generate and get your brand out there and get going. So I figured
Five years was the time.
Because I was twenty six, so five years I'm like thirty one.
We all hear stories of people staying too long at a party. I mean if you go to LA
There's just so many people who stay a good ten years too long at the acting party.
You know, and they're like.
I met a guy
My gym and he's introduced me. He's the guy who parks the car around the corner of his place. He knows someone who's a friend of the casting agent and he's put in a way and I think I'm gonna get a you know, that story comes out and this feeling of
Gonna happen next week and
I figured thirty one.
Okay, thirty one. If it's not happening.
Be stoic.
By the way, thanks for Ryan Holiday and the stoicism, all that stuff. Love.
Be stoic.
Be hopeful.
But
Work your ass off, but know when it's time to leave the party. So after five years
Yeah, thirty one.
I don't X Men.
It was all sort of happening for me. It didn't happen immediately in terms of what
Most people think of as as success, but
Certainly after their first five years. I did actually mentally say to myself, All right.
Another five years and we'll see how it goes.
I don't like
The word career.
Particularly when I began and I say to actors, I said, I'd be wary of the word career. I said it's not a right.
What are you gonna act?
Ninety eight percent of actors are unemployed. It's a privilege when you get a job.
And don't expect there'll always be one around the corner. Work.
your ass off as though this is the last one and you have to m be at your best to get there'cause that's kinda what it takes.
So I'll admit I don't
redo the contract anymore.
What were some of the
best decisions that you made in the first few years of
Working hard, pounding the pavement.
as an aspiring
Slash working actor.
We'll definitely go into drama school. That was before that was
huge turning point. I just had also this attitude you gotta say yes to everything.
When you graduate, just say yes.
Go for everything.
When my agent called me and said they're looking for
Someone to play guest on and Beauty and the Beast in the musical, I was like, Well
I'm a theater actor, I'm I'm not a singer.
She said, Yeah, I just think you should go for it.
And
Me saying yes to that audition and going getting singing lessons was a huge turn point. I mean
You know, now I've done a bunch of musicals and I've learned a lot over those years, but
I did not
think I could ever do that.
That was a big one. And doing Beauty and the Beast.
And in my contract.
I think I must be the only actor in history. In my contract it said must get a singing lesson once a week, paid for by the company. So I was a professional
On paper, professional musical theater actor, and I had to go and get singing lessons. Which I love, man, because I was singing eight times a week in a show.
Getting a singing lesson every week, that's really where I learned how to sing. So that year was amazing for me. But
This was more of a turning point.
I remember when I was doing Beauty and the Beast.
I started that
Getting well known for that.
And I remember seeing
Something like They had a list of people, what do they do for Christmas kind of thing, and they had Hugh Jackman, comma, singer.
And
It was up at the theater. Someone put it up on the theater.
And I just remember going.
Uh oh.
I'm being labeled as a singer.
I'm an actor.
This is a problem. This is gonna affect me. And it did become a problem.
I couldn't get an audition for film.
Because there was I don't know about the rest of the world, but in Australia are kind of snobbishness about
musical theater, that you weren't an actor, you were
A performer.
Stage hand, you know, jazz hands and
That's not acting, so anyone in musical theater can't act. I I couldn't get an audition.
Drive me crazy. So I made a choice then.
To get out.
Basically.
I'm gonna get out of
musical theatre and I'm just gonna concentrate on acting until I've established that, then maybe I can go back to it.
And just as I decided that.
My agent Raymond said Trevis Sir Trevor Nunn is coming to do Sunset Boulevard in Melbourne.
I said I
I said I really want to meet Sir Trevor Nine, he was a huge hero of mine through drama school.
the Royal Shakespeare Company, everything I like huge. I really wanted to meet him. That's who that's really who I wanted to work for.
But it was a musical.
And this was another twelve months and I thought now it's gonna be back to back musicals.
I'm gonna be even more entrenched down this path. It you know, is a one way street.
And I think back is a pretty arrogant thing. I rang the casting director myself and I said
I need you to
Do me a favor.
And I had met her, I knew her.
I said I really want to meet Trevor and I wanna audition for him, but I don't want to do the job.
She said, What? What do you mean? I said
I really want to meet him, but
I've made this decision, I've got to go into acting, but can you just do me a favor? I just wanna meet him and I want him to see me act.
So
I went in.
The audition was
The most incredible hour I've ever spent. I learned so much. Like one hour on an audition.
He taught me so much about acting. He heard me sing and then he came and worked with me.
For forty minutes.
And I remember about halfway through that going
Okay.
If he gives me the power.
I'm gonna do it.
It doesn't matter to me.
If it's a musical or not.
I've got a
work with this guy, I I feel in my gut, I've got so much to learn from him.
And that was a massive turning point. I got the part
I learned
an incredible amount from him. He then went on to cast me in Oklahoma in London.
And
Really working with him
gave me the confidence to be able to take on the world stage. I'm not sure I would have had the confidence to do that before him, but
I suppose the lesson of that or the turning point of that was
When you have that gut feeling.
Go with.
And I haven't always done that, by the way.
Actually not long after. So after I did
Sunset Boulevard, I double down on my commitment to not doing musicals, right?
Or after Uncle Home. I've now done three musicals.
And I still couldn't get an audition for a film.
And
I
got an author to do The Boy From Oz, which I went on to do here in
On Broadway about fifteen years ago.
And when I heard the pitch for that show, I had that same feeling in my gut.
Oh my God, this is gonna be amazing, you gotta do it.
But my head was saying, You've done three musical stop. When are you gonna stop? You gotta stop. You made a commitment, so I turned it down.
And when I went to see that show two years later, by the way, I still hadn't got a film audition pretty much.
When I went to go and see.
That Sean.
I was actually
Sick to my stomach.
Because
It was everything I knew it was gonna be when they pitched it to me.
And there I was making some
Stratic
Clan in my head.
And it was wrong.
And
From that.
Moment on.
I've always followed my gut on stuff, even if it doesn't make sense.
How do you relate to
intuition or that gut feeling now.
Is there a certain way you think about it or have become more tuned?
to feeling it. And I'm I'm asking in part because
I've spent a lot of my life trapped in my
the front of my brain and hyper
analyzing things and it has often been a disservice because it's
Overpowered.
Feelings.
Intuition on deals, partnerships.
friends or foes that I should have listened to, right? So I'd just be curious to know how you have
Developed a relationship.
With listening to that.
I've never been asked this question. I think this is probably
The most vexing
most important vital thing to work out in your life. Certainly in my life.
And I think about it a lot. To answer the question what I do now
I think I need to take you back.
I've never really
Said this before publicly.
This particular thing I'm gonna say, but
As I told you, I was brought up in a very religious household.
So a lot of the messages I was getting and instructions for life came through the examples of Jesus and through all these characters and the parables.
in the Bible and
I carry them very close to my heart. I can remember
Crying.
nightly for I don't know how long.
To God. I used to s I remember saying I don't care God.
what it is you want me to do. If you want me to click
Trash. I'll click trash.
If you want me to
I do not care.
But please make it clear to me what you want me to do.
Please make that clear.
I had much more fear of being on the wrong path.
Then I had fear of
Failing at a path, if that makes sense.
that whatever that decision was, whatever that moment of clarity becomes, whatever
get you to that feeling of Eric Liddell on charity if I I feel his pleasure when I run.
For me
That was always and I carry it today, even though my feelings about religion are different than what they were when I was younger, the essence is the same. That there is some
Calling.
That Joseph Campbell would talk about follow your bliss. There is some calling
That is beyond
The
conscious brains strategizing of how to be happy and successful and or meaningful in life.
There's something elemental and instinctual.
And
Turning that.
The people I admire the most.
Really honey
That ability.
Big decisions in their life.
To small day to day decisions.
So now
I still
Like you, battle with that,'cause I can be dominated by my mind.
My brain, pros and cons.
Think this through.
And I should've mentioned this up front.
In terms of that first question you asked me in terms of performing and the things you do or you know, daily.
I do a daily design every day. I
Create
A zip in the past tense of what the day
And then.
Dreams can be crazy, it can be wild. And then at the end of the day I score it out of ten. I keep myself accountable to what I was trying to manifest or
make happen. And one thing I a consistent theme in that
is that I listen.
to the messages that they come in crazy ways.
They come in.
Strange.
But
Clear, concise ways.
Okay, so
I've just come full circle.
Let me give you an example. I'm gonna go back again.
In terms of knowing to get into acting, right, following those examples, I went and studied.
Audition for an acting school.
And I got in.
I got in on the reserve list, so I didn't get on the first time round. This was a one year course I did before my three year one.
I just snuck in.
And I was so excited after graduating as a journalist, I can't even go to acting school.
For one year.
And then I got
A letter in the mail.
A week later saying, Congratulations, you're in.
please make sure you come with the three and a half thousand dollars tuition fee.
And
It did never dawn on me that it was gonna cost anything,'cause when I was young in Australia
Secondary education was free, like all university was free.
So I was like uh oh.
And I thought I've got to go and ask my dad and I've just graduated from college and I thought I can't do that. I literally ripped up
The letter, screwed it up, put it in the bin.
And I'm not joking. This is to me one of those signs, crazy signs, that are just like a wallop in the face.
I got a
Check the next day.
From my grandmother's will, she died three months before, for three and a half thousand dollars.
The exact dollar amount.
Mild.
Yeah, I mean that that's an obvious example. That's when
The universe is going, All right, you're an idiot.
I've given you a lot of signs.
You went off and did the play, you walked into that house.
You got that sign, you knew this is where you're meant to be, this is it, and maybe you said it's time to move on.
And
You're about to throw it up because
the three and a half thousand dollars and that parts are made to go down, you're gonna kind of falter the first hurdle.
And then the wallop comes in my face. And so
I've had really clear moments of that, but I ask every single day, Tim.
Not ask. I manifest every single day that I will hear those messages. You've transformed yourself.
Multiple times, certainly.
And
I've seen you work out. It's enough to make me want to retire my sneakers.
Uh it's just outrageous the intensity involved. And I'd be curious to know
If there are any particular
exercises or types of exercise that you have found to be
particularly good bang for the bucks. If you had to just
Take the desert island test and you could only take
a handful of exercises or X, Y, and Z with you. Yeah. Does does anything come to mind?
Rolling machine.
Definitely.
Aroa
There's a reason the row is usually empty at the gym. Because it's typical.
And
A lot of people want to say it and feel they've worked out.
And they wanna get a sweat, but they don't necessarily and and I learned a lot of this from your book. And I worked at a gym, by the way. Yeah, the four hour body. I worked at a gym for three years.
So I saw a lot of people coming in five days a week and not really changing anything about them.
And
The rowing machine.
I think if you add in some chest work some
Push ups.
That's in e everything you need.
Two cabin.
Fit, healthy, strong.
I've learned a lot of that. I work with Beth Lewis, the trainer.
Who
You can look her up. She does a lot of free classes right now, I think, during Covid.
I found her through Peter. Do you know Beth? Have you met Beth?
I know of Beth. Well she was a power lifter and a dancer.
It really is great for me because
I mean in the past, even with someone like Wolverine, I have to prepare

I can't get injured. So I can't prepare as a bodybuilder. I have to be able to prepare
As a really jacked ripped athlete slash dancer because
Fighting is dance. It is more relaxation in a fight scene.
Then there is strength.
Which is probably the case for if you think about all the great
Athletes you see.
There's relaxation. And that movement has moved in sports. That's why you see every sprinter.
poking their tongue out now and dancing around with joy before they run the hundred meters, you know.
That sense of having the right level of relaxation. I think they call it the eighty five percent rule. If you tell most sort of
A type athletes
to run at their eighty five percent capacity, they will run faster than if you tell'em to run at a hundred.
Because it's more about relaxation and form and optimising the muscles in the right way.
So Beth has really taught me that.
The rowing machine, man. You can't go wrong.
And
To get time, just do the seven minute thing.
And I had to do this for film, uh movie Australian.
Bad's wanted me to be big and so I was big and then about a month before he said, Ah
Doing a lot of research about these jackaroos or cowboys, he goes.
In lane.
They're all lean, lean, lean.
And I'm like
T.
You ask me to get big, I've been getting big.
And he goes, I need you lean.
So I went to my trainer and he goes, Who was a rower?
And he said, You wanna get him lane?
Right.
So as well as the ice bars that I learned from your book.
Which I used all through the Wolverine, particularly
The later Wolverine, when you see me in better shape.
That's a great way to lose fat.
But
Seven minute row.
Four times a week.
And the goal is two thousand meters.
And
When you try it.
At some point you're gonna hate me for it.
But still.
That's the quickest best way.

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I
And now
Esther Perel
Psychotherapist.
New York Times best selling author of
Mating in captivity and
The state of affairs.
Rethinking infidelity.
And host of her top rated podcast.
Where should we begin?
You can find Esther on Twitter.
At Esther Perell
And Instagram.
That
Esther Perel Official
Esther, welcome to the show. Thank you. Hello.
I am
Thrilled.
to finally have connected with you and you have one of the hottest possible areas of expertise
Imaginable. And uh there's so many questions that I would like to ask, and so many questions that my fans would like to ask, but I thought we could start.
with a bit of background. And if you could tell us just a bit about
Where you grew up.
and what your childhood was like, I think that'd be good as context to get us started.
So I grew up in Antwerp.
In Belgium, mostly.
Antwerp is the Flemish part of Belgium.
And I was there till I finished high school. I grew up
We I have a big brother who is twelve years older than me, so I was the
The young girl and my parents who were actually Polish refugees who came to Belgium after the war.
From Belgium.
I move to Jerusalem.
And I studied at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem.
And I lived there for almost six years.
And then I came to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to finish my master's degree, and I really thought I was coming for one year.
To America.
But that one year became two years in Cambridge, and then after that I came to New York and I thought I would do that for one year'cause I wanted to have the New York experience.
And I never used my return ticket. Here I am. You're still having the New York experience. I'm still having the New York experience, exactly. So you as I understand it grew up
among Holocaust survivors. And I would love to
Hear you
elaborate on that experience and
What it was like, what you learned from it.
And then we can talk about I'd like to talk about Jerusalem, but I am very interested, as many people are, in the history of the Holocaust, but even more than that, the
Personal.
The lived experience. The lived experience. And there's a book called If This Is a Man and there's another book called The Truth. Both are written by Primo Levi, which was recommended to me by
the illusionist David Blaine, who actually has Primo Levi's inmate number or prisoner number tattooed on his forearm. And it was one of the most impactful books I would say I've read in the last ten years.
But I have no direct experience with Holocaust survivors. What was that like and what did you learn?
So interesting that we're starting from there. So I think that if this was a man by Primo Levi is one of the most
Powerful books one ought to read. I think it's a a unique, unique uh testament.
So it's very simple. There were sixty thousand Jews
In Belgium before the war.
the vast majority of them were decimated throughout the war and in camps, and so after the war in group of
Eastern European Jews basically came to Belgium.
Through all kinds of means, that's kind of where they arrived.
And
My parents who were b de so survivors of their entire family.
Which means two hundred people lost, I guess, on every side. They were both the youngest in their families. My mother was in the camps from eighteen to twenty two.
And my father from twenty five to thirty one actually because the war started very early for them. So they
Came f you know, with nothing. They were legal refugees for three months who were meant to continue from there to other countries where they had been given refugee status, but they chose not to leave, and so they stayed for another five years as illegal refugees in Belgium, which is very
telling for me right now it's what's going on in our country here. And
I am born later, so when I am born in fifty eight, they already found a way to legalize themselves, to become a Belgian citizens and
And I grew up in a different environment, but I am growing up in a community of twenty thousand Jews that are all Holocaust survivors. That's basically all
We knew in the Jewish community of course there was the larger
Belgian community around.
And
You know, you saw numbers, you asked why don't we have grandparents? You asked what are these numbers, you
It came with mother's milk is the best way I could say it. It was so ever present. We spoke Yiddish.
German
Polish, French, and Flemish in my home.
Depending on the subject matter we changed and depending on who was speaking to whom, uh the language changed. But there were five vibrant interchangeable languages going on the whole time.
And if you can imagine that a language is a door to a world.
Then you can imagine how many worlds were coexisting at the same time, that had nothing to do with each other, actually.
I grew up above the store.
Because most of the Jews of Antwerp were actually are in the diamond business. My family was among the two percent that were not.
And so they had clothing stores and I grew up in a neighborhood where there were two Jewish families.
So it's like the daily store with the foreigner in the neighborhood, you know, and you know who they are, the two foreigners, and they have an accent and they look different and the whole thing.
And I lived above the store and in this very popular
neighborhood, lower middle class neighborhood, and
Where we spoke actually not even just Flemish, but we spoke dialect Flemish from the street, like from the hood, the equivalent of the hood, basically. And I would straddle back and forth.
One of the ways I can describe it is my father when he turned fifty had two birthday parties. One birthday party was for his Jewish survival friends that took place in Yiddish and in Polish and with a lot of vodka.
And one birthday party was with his Flemish
Friends and that was in dialect and with a lot of beer.
Ha ha
And by the code, by the drinks, you knew exactly which world you were traveling in and
How you had to behave and
How much you could show that side of you versus the other side of you.
You know, and there was a sense I think
Maybe more than anything, when you grow up in that kind of a community, you you grow up with a notion of impermanence, that what is today could disappear any moment. I think that's probably one of the strongest experiences. You don't ever think that
There is a notion of
You know, what is now will be there tomorrow. You'd never know. And so you learn to adapt.
to that notion of impermanence
of insecurity, if you want. And my parents were bon vivant, you know, they loved life. They didn't survive for nothing. They were gonna enjoy at best. And
As I have often said, they understood the erotic as an antidote to death. As as in they knew how to keep themselves alive and
and and enjoy not everybody was like that. You had very different kind of moods. They were storytellers, so people would come from everywhere and they would tell about their life and their experiences, and they were good storytellers, which means that they knew how to screen out
And it could make you laugh and it didn't make you
completely tense when you would listen, and everybody wanted to know their stories. They were
Amazing, amazing, amazing stories of survival, of subversion of you know, my dad was illiterate. He spoke languages, but he was basically illiterate, and he was a grand grand
human being, you know, who had done a lot and had saved quantities of people.
Because
Yeah, we'd say maybe
The strongest value
In that community, or not the strongest, but one of the very strong values. One was definitely decency.
You know, on how you behave towards your fellow other people.
And the other one was to manage street smart to be street smart.
You know, to know to survive basically, to find your way out of situations and to be able to
to survive. Survival was
the central organizing experience of all these people.
And then the second experience was revival.
And I have so many different directions that I would love to take this, so I'll try to do it.
One at a time.
Dialect Flemish from the hood. Could you give us any example?
Of what
Street Flemish.
Sounds like are there any? Moet ik dat eens even zijn uitwaarts vertellen?
W what did you just say?
Yes, dude. Do you want me to say this in Antrop dialect? How would you say how are you in uh like what's up in Quad?
Say that one more time?
Hoe gaat het? Oh boy, yes. I'll save my embarrassing rehearsal for when we meet in person. Kunnen dat allemaal wel in het eind waarops klappen. En dat kan ik ook allemaal wel zoiets vertellen, maar nu kan ik dat toch in in Engels even zeggen, hè?

I think you might have just insulted my ancestors, but I'm not sure what just happened. I said I could say all of this in Anthrop dialect, but in order to be sure we all understand it, I'm gonna tell my stories in English. That is a fantastic idea. So thank you for that. I love languages, so I just wanted to hear something that I had never heard before.
You mentioned that your parents were soul survivors.
in their families, if I heard you correctly. When you
Look at your parents.
I don't know if it was simply because of their age or other factors, but when you look at your parents, though that would be the primary focus, but
And that other soul survivors.
What did they credit?
This survival too.
Oh, that is a great question. I did get to ask them this question. So
My mother she first spent one year in the woods at eighteen.
Running from farm to farm, hiding?
In the woods of Poland and then she was so
Terrified that she actually surrendered by herself to a
Camp to a labour camp.
To a man's camp.
Because she thought if I am in a camp at least they probably will put me in the kitchens or in the laundry and I could at least wake up every morning in the same place.
My mother ended up going to nine different labor camps. Now labor camps were generally next door to the concentration camps and as long as you could work you were in a labor camp and if you were not selected that morning
for transport, then you could continue work, but the distinction is often a very narrow distinction.
And my father was in fourteen camps.
And
My mother definitely
So the rest of their families was either cast in Treblinka or in
Auschwitz, basically, his family in Auschwitz, her family in Triblinka. My mother would say it was a combination of premoniticious dreams.
She was very very superstious, and she really believed her dreams.
That would tell her tomorrow don't go there, tomorrow be a little bit late there, tomorrow
make sure to have an extra layer of newspaper on your feet'cause it's gonna be really, really cold. She had all these premonitious dreams of her father talking to her and things like that.
And she will always say chance came first.
My father too. I think ultimately both of them said chance came first.
And then there was what you did with the chance that was given to you.
So there is always a mixture between choice and coincidence, choice and chance.
And my mother said
She always made sure that she was clean, that she was groomed, that she was mending her socks.
that she maintained her humanity.
That she didn't allow
herself to become dehumanized and degraded the way that she was being treated by the Nazis.

And my father
My father when we went to visit Auschwitz actually ended up telling me a story of
A Dutch convoy that arrived of women
And he somehow picked a woman out of the crowd and he decided that he would help this woman.
And basically the next day they were shaven and so he couldn't even recognize her, so he asked the capo
Who is the other woman?
that he had mention noticed the day before and they began some correspondence, which I have no idea how he wrote,'cause he couldn't write and I never bothered asking him who wrote for you.
But
he fell in love with this woman and he just decided that there were certain things that
The Germans couldn't take away from him.
And that had to do with feelings and with love in the most dire of circumstances. And then
He basically developed this black market in one of the camps where he was with his best friend, where they were for almost a year and a half.
Where he ended up feeding sixty young
men who would otherwise not have had enough to eat and therefore to work and therefore to survive.
And he ended up feeding the Nazis too.
So when he got caught with those letters.
one of the Germans basically sent him back to the factories and said, You're not staying in here. You can and factories meant you'd you have one week to live, basically.
But he had been feeding the German guy so well that the guy said, I eat better when you work in the kitchens and he'd put him back in the kitchen.
And so you always said it was a combination of chance and ingenuity.
Street Smart what he would call
And doing for others.
Doing for others.
give you a purpose to stay alive and to wake up in the morning.
If you
Look at then the survivors, whether by
Chance first, like you mentioned.
choice, some combination of those factors and others.
You mentioned survival and revival.
When you look at the
Survivors who ended up
being able to revive themselves.
And who did not?
So the third reason my mother always said is that she always thought
that they wanted her to stay alive'cause if the others were not gonna be make it, there needed to be at least someone from the family. And she always thought that she would somehow be reunited with somebody.
So she maintained this very deep connection inside of her
that they were waiting for her somewhere. Then they realized that there was nobody. So
You know, it's an interesting question that I organized in my mind like this.
And I organized it when I was actually writing mating.
My first book, Mating in Captivity. I at the time I had a conversation with my husband, who was working with survivors of torture and political violence.
And I would ask him, when do you know?
That people come back.
And what does it mean to come back, right? Come back from different war zones, to come back from having been kidnapped, to come back from solitary confinement.
And what does it mean to come back to life?
And then
As we were talking
It became very clear that
When you reconnect with life, not just when you are surviving, but when you are living, it means that you're once again able to take risks.
Able to
brought out to go into the world, able to play, because you cannot play if you are in a constant state of vigilance and guardedness, and able to trust
And
Then I thought to myself, Oh my God, this is so much what I saw in Antwerp. You know, I remember
since my entire classroom with children of similar families, that there were always two groups of families in my uh community. And then I decided that I would call this
There was one group that did not die.
And one group that came back to life.
And
the did not die, you couldn't feel it when you went to their houses, you know, they often had plastics over the couches and the the curtains were pulled down. They was morbid.
It was just, you know, you're you're not dead, but you're not celebrating yeah life. You certainly are not enjoying because if you enjoy then you are not being careful
And you have guilt, you often have survival guilt. Why am I here and none of the others made it?
And you are weighted down and the world is a dangerous place and you are not to trust anyone outside the family and all of that.
And then I thought there is those who came back to life. And that's what led me actually to really want to explore what is eroticism. What is this antidote to death? How in the face of adversity do you continue
To imagine yourselves.
Rising above it, connected to joy, to love, to pleasure, to beauty, to adventure, to mystery, to all of that.
And those people
You know, it was very interesting. You had people who came together because they were the survivors of this camp and the survivors of that camp, and then you had people who came together
for this kind of holiday or that kind of celebration, and they never discussed their experiences. It was all implicit.
But
They were together and they
They were charging ahead at life. You know, the first thing they did when they would come out of the camps, by the way, is have a child.
Because I'm alone, you're alone, I have nothing, you have nothing, let's get married and let's have children. Cause if we have a child and we know that we are still human, we are able to procreate and we create legacy and they didn't kill everything off.
And so
My parents, you know, they planted trees in v all kinds of places in the world. They put plaques on in the memory of all the other people of their families. My mother at one point received ten thousand dollars
in ninety nine, she received ten thousand dollars from one of the factories.
the of slave labor.
And then like decades later, she took the ten thousand dollars and she went and planted an entire forest that had just burned and she replanted the forest because it was like affirming life.
With a sense of defiance, you didn't all die inside.
Um, and I think it's that energy, that life force that really
I think defines and this is true for my community, but I would apply this to any
large scale trauma that communities experience. I don't think it's unique.
I agree. And
I don't know why I wanna ask you this question right now, but you mentioned
Trust as
One of the elements, one of the ingredients.
In
the group that was revived, that was living and not just
having avoided death.
Do you think that and these are not mutually exclusive, but
Does trust come first and then vulnerability, or does vulnerability come first and that's how you develop trust?
That depends on your theory of trust.
This is the big debate on trust theorists. Rachel Botsman will tell you that trust is an active engagement with the unknown.
You know, so that's one direction.
And the other direction is
that it is the actual experience of vulnerability that allows you to then trust. And it goes in both directions. It really
I don't think there is a definitive answer for that.
And maybe it's not an either or, but it's a both end. Both end, right.
You know, for some people it's like do you need to know in order to taste?
Or do you want to taste first and then be told what it was? Definitely depends on what type of cuisine and what type of chef. But I understand what you mean.
in order to get off from your lap and to run into the world and to be become and to explore and discover and play and be gone in their own space
And at the same time
It is the act of doing all of that and coming back to base and sitting themselves popping themselves back on your lap that reinforces the trust. I actually tend to think more in dialectic terms at both end rather than either or. But I think
It's a fantastic question, the question of trust, you know. Does the act
Of trusting.
release the option the possibilities to experience the vulnerability
Or is the vulnerability of the unknown
that you actually engage with ultimately what builds the trust. Right.
This is something I've been thinking quite a lot about, but I I want to
Also ask you about
Impermanence.
I've tried to
Focus much more in a sense on
Things that
are in permanent in my life in the last year, year and a half. And in part that was a result of a conversation I had on this podcast with
B J Miller, who is a
hospice care physician. So he's helped more than a thousand people to die.
Great guy. He lives here. Yes. So fantastic guy. I was actually so I went to Princeton undergraduate and he was one of the warning stories because he lost three of his limbs an electrocution accident a few years before I went to school there.
I asked him what purchase of less than a hundred dollars had most positively impacted his life in the last
Yeah, six months a year, whatever.
he could pull from memory and he mentioned a bottle of wine and it wasn't an expensive bottle of wine and the reason he mentioned it was and I'm gonna paraphrase here, but he said it was the fact that it went away.
And
How that
encouraged you to enjoy something that you knew wasn't permanent.
And so I've thought about that a lot since and how to
Not fear things being impermanent, but really use it as
A source of
leverage to maximally enjoy those things while you can.
And
I'm I'm curious how your parents ability
Two
Savour.
Impermanence impacted you.
Or your behaviors or your routines or anything.
If it did, I don't know.
Oh, I would say in two ways.
First of all, I'm rather voracious in living.
If there's one more experience I can have, one more thing I can discover, one more place I can travel to
One more conversation that could be interesting. I am quite voracious, not because I'm insatiable, but because a part of me always says, Who knows what will be tomorrow?
Right. You know, I I don't live with the there is always a tomorrow.
I live with the who knows if there will be a tomorrow. And that's very simple.
And then the other thing I would say that's that maybe something that's not always so known about me, but
I also live
in a bit of a what we call in my jargon a counterphobic
Way which means
I act as if I'm feeling.
But I'm actually
Petrified with dread.
Please elaborate.
could be very scary sometimes to other people anyway. And
And I leave it as if I have no fear. You know, even today I was
driving down on on on my bike and and I was thinking like
Last week it was filled with snow here. Why am I always just pushing the edge and seeing if I can get away with it? And you know, the truth is I got on my bike in the snow and and I realized there was no way I was gonna be able to do this and I put the bike back. But I was thinking
How many times I do things
Thinking nothing's gonna happen.
And at the same time as I do it, I think
At some point.
something bad is gonna happen. It's that what I mean. It's like I live I you would think that and I wouldn't do it. If I think something bad can happen, it would stop me. But no, I do it and at the same time I think something bad's gonna happen. Every day I think something bad's gonna happen.
Do you wish that were different or do you think that helps you?
Mm.
God.
I wish it was different.
I mean, yes, I'm sure it it pushes me and stuff, but there must be a way to live without that constant fear like that. It prepares me very well for the modern times we live in. I can tolerate a lot of uncertainty.
And the the political climate we're in, all of that. But today in Antwerp there was another car that drove on the main drag
Driving into people.
You know, it's like
That's not a surprise to me.
I expect it.
That's what I mean. It's I I live with that expectation. It's just a matter of when, not a matter of if
But I think it creates a level of anxiety.
That I don't wish on anybody. No, I don't think it's uh it's normal.
I think it's normal given the history I come from.
I don't think it's a good way to live.
Well let's talk about
This
Antidote that you mentioned.
earlier. So the the erotic is an antidote to death. But actually
I'm going to interrupt myself and before we get there.
How old were you when you went to Jerusalem?
Eighteen?
eighteen.
And why did you go to Jerusalem? Was that your choice, someone else's suggestion? Why did that happen?
So before I went to Jerusalem, I actually came to the states and I hitchtagged across the country.
for seven weeks in nineteen seventy six, calculate. You know.
In the bicentennial and uh at the time you could still hitchhike very freely, and I had one of the most formative experiences of my life.
Because I saw America like I don't think I will ever see it again, since I had zero reference.
I had no judgment and I just was welcoming of anybody who was willing to pick me up and take me in.
I really saw the country in and out in ways that I wish my kids could have an experience like this, but I don't know that this is happening these days. And then I went to Jerusalem because I didn't want to study in Belgium. I didn't like the university system in Belgium. Why not? And um
Why not? Because we have a system where you have to study curriculum that is prepared by the teacher and you have to regurgitate it and study it rather by heart. And I thought it was a nineteenth century system.
It really was not at all a useful way of learning. And I had done that already for twelve years before, you know, I studied Latin, I studied Greek five, six hours a week. I mean I have the whole classic education, humanistic education. And I thought Jerusalem was mysterious, mystical, beautiful, complex.
you know, in in the middle of these hotbeds of all religions and we were going to Israel a lot with my family, so that
It's not like it was a place I didn't know and I thought
It was the one place that I could leave to study abroad with my parents' blessing.
So it was very, very easy. It's like for them
You know, you didn't come to study in America at that time or
And
I had a choice between
I was very passionate about theater and
My mother said if you want to do theatre you stay in Belgium and if you want to travel then you have to go to university. I want you to have a structure.
And I said if it's university
Hebrew University is a great university. The city is magnificent, and at the time it was
Really a spectacular place and it was much more open than it is now. And I thought, What an adventure. I mean, I didn't need much explanation at that time. It didn't make sense and it made perfect sense.
If you look back at your time in Belgium and Jerusalem, were there any
particular mentors.
Who
Leap out at you if you had to
Give them credit for helping steer your life in the direction that it's gone or
Help you to make any
Very important decisions. Is there anyone who really jumps out at you besides your parents? It's interesting you're asking me today because I am
Going to
Washington tomorrow to a big psychotherapy conference called the S the Psychotherapy Symposium, and I am doing an homage.
To my mentor.
But the mentor from America who is ninety five
And I've been asked to be one of three people to be the the person to thank him. So I'm in the midst of this.
experience right now. We could also talk about that ninety five year old mentor. That's totally fine as well. Or both. I mean it's an interesting question. I am the product of mentorship.
This is true throughout from the Hebrew university
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to studying with Salvador Minuchin, that's the name of this mentor.
I have been mentored.
pretty much to out but even in my adolescent to my theater teacher and dance teacher mainly because my parents couldn't always help me with any of these things. They had zero reference to the world I lived in.
I sought
teachers, I sought mentors, I sought
People who could help me integrate in Belgian life, who could help me
believe in myself as well, you know, uh guide me. My brother that's definitely one of them.
Every book I read was recommended by him.
But I am totally the product of mentorship.
It's like I sought them out one after the other. I this man that I'm going to be commemorating tomorrow is alive, but Salvador Minucin, who is one of the fathers of the field of systemic family therapy. How do you spell Salvador's last name?
Minutin M I N U C H I N
Got it. Argentinian. I mean
You know, you're anointed when you have studied with him. It's like studying with Freud if but a century later.
I knocked at his door.
I arrived in New York, I was here, I knew I have a year to be in New York, I knocked at his door and I said, Can I come and observe?
He looked at me like who are you?
And that's the story I'm gonna tell tomorrow. Like at the time you could still knock at somebody's door and say, I wanna learn from you.
You inspire me. And then he let me stay there s ten weeks and then after ten weeks he said, That's it, that's about as much as one can learn from
from observing. You can go now. And I said no no no no no I have to you know, please, please let me stay. That kind of thing always says like I entered through the window, you know?
So I I actually want to sorry to interrupt, but I I want to dig a little deeper on that because I am constantly asked
But
Well, I'm I'm asked to mentor, which usually means
unpaid consultant for life. So I don't often say yes to that. But
The question of how should I approach mentors.
Or how should I
Seek
people out like Salvador and somewhat along the lines of your story, a little bit different, but
I remember Professor had a profound impact on me, Ed Shao, who was at
Princeton and
was a very eclectic character. He was similar in his appeal to me as Richard Feynman because they were so diverse in their interests. So he was a competitive figure skater, had
taken several companies public.
was the first, I believe the first computer science professor at Stanford because the person who was supposed to teach it didn't show up and then the administration asked if anyone would volunteer and he did.
I was a congressman for a few terms and I really wanted to be in his class, but I came back from overseas
And I was late to apply to this class, which had become very, very popular called high tech entrepreneurship.
So I went to the first class.
And I appealed to him and I said, I'll sit on the floor, I'll clean the erasers, I'll do whatever's necessary, can I just sit in on a few classes? It was a somewhat similar approach, but when people ask you, and I'm sure they do, how should I seek out mentors? How should I
approach people I want to learn from. What advice would you give them and maybe
Any specifics from what you've done in the past. Did you just knock on the door of his classroom or was it his office?
It's classroom. I mean I called, I said I'm in New York and so and so suggested that I come meet with you. I would love to learn with you. I had nothing, no credentials, I had no reason to be there.
Could I please No, it was like get my foot in the door. I like like you, I would have done exactly what you did.
I would have said I'll do anything, I'll bring you coffee every morning. Can I just be here?'Cause I just needed my foot in the door and then I can start thinking and now what? I and I admire the people who do that with me, I have to say. When they come and they fly and they write and they say
you have been reading you I've been you know and then they show me not just I like you or I
Or I admire you, but also they say a few things that let me know that they get what I'm talking about. So I also feel deeply understood.
And then I feel like, oh man, I was there. I was that twenty-one year old, you know?
And
I had no papers, I had no visa. I mean I was uh
I came here with love and fresh water, really. And that's what I mean, street smart. It's like
You know, refugee, go for it, knock at the doors, and if they say no, come back again. If you at the third time, if you don't act crazy, they will understand that you are deeply motivated.
And if you do it with somebody who did it too. That if you don't act crazy is a really important bolded part of that sentence.
Yeah, you have to be really
You're not a cuckoo. You're not like just some loose screw, but you really show that
You I see you and I want your trajectory, or I want to learn from your trajectory.
After ten weeks when you said you're out.
I na I said Please Please si said you can be a fly on the wall.
And I said, Fine, I'll be a fly on the wall, you will I will melt in the wall
You know, let me be as invisible as can be. And then one day
There was a couple that was there, a family, and it was actually a Holocaust survival family working with the with the therapist behind the one way mirror. That's how we were learning at the time.
And then
Somehow suddenly he looks at me and he says, You there in the back, don't you know something about this?
He said, What would you do?
I know, and then I've like spouted something out and then he says
That's an interesting thought. Go tell them.
And he literally sends me to the other side of the room into the session. You know?
And I thought, Oh, I'm no longer invisible. I exist. And uh and that was the beginning. Then I worked with him for the next four years.
It's amazing.
So is the word in Yiddish. Oh yes, Kutzpa.
Goed spawn.
Good.
Healthy creative imaginative good spa.
Yeah. Less less Michigas, right?
I think that mentors I agree that sometimes it's kind of consultant gig for life, but sometimes
It's just
You must have had authors or books or or musicians, those that you read when you were young that kind of really shaped you. And it's a very strange thing when suddenly you become a shaping force in someone else's life.
For some reason you speak to them, and I am always curious, why me? Like
What is it that I say'cause other people talk about some of these things that
Touches you.
That you would want to come here from far away countries.
Just to meet with me.
And on occasion I'll go and have a cup of coffee with these people or the you know, a glass of wine. I I have responded more than once just by the way they write the letter. It's all in how they write that mail to me.
I can't explain, you know, it's no logic.
Are there any key ingredients?
that you can think of I'll share from my side as well. So one of the things
That
And we both get, I'm sure, a lot more inbound than we could possibly ever respond to, but
One of the things that
I would say certainly there's a can't be ten pages long, but that's obvious. I would say that
Very often people think that it is
A form of
optimism that'll be rewarded if they end with and I look forward to your favorable response or how about next Tuesday? And I'm not personally someone who generally responds to that very well. I'm I'm more likely to respond if they close with something like
I completely understand if I never hear from you because you must have an incredible amount of
inbound requests like this, but if you've read this far, thank you at least for reading this far. It lets me off the hook.
Counterintuitively, maybe that makes it more likely that
I'll respond because I perceive they have some
Empathy or ability to understand.
the situation that I'm in. So that would be one in contributing.
ingredient for me.
And then the other I remember I ended up hiring
someone years ago to work on help me work on the four hour body and and some other projects.
Because he heard me talking about things that I needed or read about.
certain projects I was gonna be working on and he said, Oh, I just went ahead and did A, B, C, D, and E. Here's the work. You don't have to respond. I just thought this would be helpful. And I was like, Well, okay, that's very proactive.
Well what about yourself?
Yes, it's a combination. I mean what you just described for me, it's a combination between boldness and humility.
Right.
You know, the boldness is
I'm gonna do this. I've been reading you, I've been listening to you, something in the way you say it.
strikes it red for me.
But I don't expect it. I totally know what I'm asking you, and it would mean an enormous amount.
You have no reason to do this, but if you were to do this
It could change my life, it would mine so much.
It's not so much that I can say no or yes, it's that they really understand the vulnerability of the request. You feel that they
They are prepared for you to say no.
And they are so if they were to hear a yes, it would mean so much.
And I have been there, I remember, you know, I've been that person. So
You can't
Write to me as if you already know everything.
But at the same time you have to be bold enough to want to say, What do I have to lose?
What do I have to lose? And then they say sometimes I have never written something like this. And then
I would probably say one thing for me that makes difference is if they just say, you know, I've always wanted to be a s a therapist who works with sexuality and couples. No, but if they say in the way if they reflect back something about me
in which I recognize myself and it's a mirror that I like to look in.
Uh.
then I feel like they really get what I'm about and what I'm talking. They're not just projecting onto me.
You know?
That helps. That I feel also really understood. It's a variation of what you're describing in terms of the empathy.
So I think it's similar. It's a different wording for something that's quite similar to what you described. Does sound similar. So I promise to get back to this and I know people are gonna want to dig into this. We'll continue to bounce all over the place, but you mentioned the the erotic as an antidote to death.
What is
eroticism and can you explain what you mean by
It being an antidote to death.
Animals have sex.
And we have
The erotic. And the erotic
is sexuality that is transformed by our
Human imagination.

Theoretic is the meaning
That you attribute.
It's the poetics of sex.
It's not nature.
Instinct.
Primary force.
It's everything that gives it.
a meaning in a in a context.
It's everything.
Then turn sex not into an act.
But into a place you go. Not just something you do, but a place that you go.
And that place that you go is a place where you connect with vibrancy.
With a liveness.
With renewal.
With life force
With vitality.
With mystery.
And that's when it becomes an antidote. So that's why people often talk about it in spiritual terms, in religious terms. It has a transcending quality to it.
It's really the more mystical meaning of the word erotic.
It was Zohar life force.
It's really modernity that narrowed the meaning of of eroticism to something that is more blatantly sexual rather than life force. But that life force.
often expressed through t the sex.
Takes on a whole other dimension. So
For me
To understand that I wasn't just working on sexuality'cause I'm not interested in what people do.
The act the you know, you can do sex and feel nothing.
Women have done sex and felt dead for centuries.
It's really that other side of it.
And that you don't have to do much of anything, your own imagination. You know, we are the only ones who can have
Sex for hours.
You know, blissful sex and
And a wonderful connection and and orgasms and all the like and never touch anybody, just'cause we can imagine it.
And that imagination, his ability to transport ourselves outside of this moment that we are in into something completely different.
That is the erotic alone.
And I am very interested in that because
'Cause I work with people who come and complain about the loss of desire and the loss of that energy.
And they want to reconnect with that force and they don't know why they lose it and they confuse it with arousal and it has not much to do with that.
And
You know, when people complain.
about the listlessness of their sex lives, they sometimes make em want more sex, but they always want better.
And that better.
when you analyze it with them, it's about that life force, that vitality, that vibrancy, that mystery, that
imaginative play that curiosity. Curiosity is an essential ingredient of the erotic.
And that's what they want to reconnect with.
And so then that metaphor that I talked before about not dead
Versus alive.
survival versus revival, that's you know
You can survive and have sex and have children.
But you may feel dead.
Whereas you can have an experience in which you feel utterly alive and you're in your eighties and you do whatever eighty year old people do. It doesn't really matter because the force transcends the act.
And that's for me the interest of working on eroticism. I work with people who want to feel alive.
If you say look at your group of of patients.
And
you then look at a subset who are
what they would consider happily married in the sense or h happily in a committed relationship. Maybe committed is too low to a term. They're happily in a relationship.
And they
Don't want to leave that relationship. There are many incredible elements of that.
Yet they've hit that point which
many people have hit, certainly I've hit before.
I'm very good. Let's make this personal. So I'm very good at monogamy. I can do it.
I'm very, very good at it. But after say a year, a year and a half, I have to where I feel like I have to suffocate a part of myself.
That
Or subjugates my sex drive so that I don't
Wander
ends up affecting sex with my primary partner, with my
partner in this case. So if you're talking to these people
And they hit a point where they feel
sex drive decrease or listlessness.
What do you view as the ethical options that are on the table?
to address that.
Okay, but uh
Like four subtopics. Yes. No, exactly. There's there's there's there's a there's a lot. A lot of that that was probably
far too complex a question, but I I suppose making it personal is leading me to do that. No, no, it's it's it you know, so
Mating in captivity for me
was really
A conversation
On that very question that you just asked.
Right?
People would come to me and they would say we love each other very much.
We have no sex.
Oh we love each other very much. Where is the desire?
Which was very different from the traditional model that you would normally learn in school, which was of course, if there is no sex, people mustn't love each other.
Because when the one leads uh automatically to the other, and therefore sexual problems are always the consequence of relationship problems. And you should fix the relationship and the sex will automatically follow.
That was the premise.
And I decided to question that premise because it didn't really work like that in my office. I saw people who got along much better, and it still didn't change anything for the desire. And so I began to ask what is the relationship between love and desire?
Yeah.
So that's
The first one is what does that mean? This is is desire faded to degrade? You know, is the degradation of desire inevitable? And what does it mean?
And how does one rekindle it, and can one rekindle it? And can you want what you already have?
Which is the fundamental question of desire.

And then there is the second part to what you're asking, which is the question of monogamy.
And
When you say I can do monogamy very well for a year,
Then you are defining monogamy by one criteria only.
At least in the way I've understood you where you speak, is that you're defining monogamy as a sexual exclusivity. Sure. In this particular case, that's what that means. But that's one definition of monogamy because
You know.
Monogamy is a term that has continuously evolved in its meaning, right? I mean, for most of history monogamy was one person for life.
At this point, monogamy is one person at a time.
And everybody goes around saying I'm monogamous in all my relationships, you know. Well that doesn't mean I had like an orgy in it every five minutes it was one person at a time. It did no, I know, I'm kidding. It's a sequential. We have a model of sequential monogamy. Right.
We don't arrive monogamous to our relationships. We've had previous ones. So at this point, where does monogamy exist? In reality
But not in your history and not in your fantasies.
Mm-hmm.
So that's another consideration. And then there is
You know, maybe if we stop just looking at monogamy
from the exclusivity model because the exclusivity model is an economics model.
Monogamy generally throughout history has been an imposition on women.
it has not necessarily been a requirement for men. In fact men practically had a license not to be, and they have had all kinds of theories to justify why they shouldn't have to be.
Because we needed to know about paternity and about patrimony and lineage.
So monogamy had nothing to do with love.
It had everything to do with an economic system.
That word has transformed since Romanticism so much that at this point
I think that
The conversation about monogamy should probably be less a conversation about sex and sexual boundaries and sexual exclusivity and more about
the multiplicity of relationship configurations.
In which monogamy may be more emotionally.
determined rather than just sexually determined like gay couples have done forever. I think we need to loosen up the term, not totally trash it or not totally bind it, but suddenly untie it, you know, loosen it up and redefine it.
No.
Within that
It's a choice.
Monogamy. It's something you choose to practice.
When you keep it in the definition you want. And then the question is
What do people do with their
Twarted desires with their other attractions.
Definitely they have'em.
They can acknowledge them?
they can have a relationship in which they
negotiate with each other what to do with these other desires.
they can hopefully not always interpret them as you're not enough.
Which is the n most powerful
reaction that people have today to that term.
And
The majority of people have practiced proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery.
And that's been the dominant model. Sure.
The question is simply do people want to have a a negotiation with themselves that is private and secretive, or do people want to incorporate this as part of the conversation of couple making at this point?
We're not meant to have desire for one person for life.
for sixty years. That is not how we were conceived. Neither were we ever conceived of having sixty year relationships with the same person either, for that matter. So we are left with a host of new
questions about the nature of erotic desire.
given first of all that for until very recently we didn't have sex in relationships just because of a desire. We had it for procreation and generally for women it was a marital duty. So sex that is rooted in free will.
For pleasure and connection, just because we want it and with you, and hopefully at the same time, and so forth, is a very new model.
And we are all grappling with it. Everybody's wondering, you know, what do you do with the loss of desire? How important is sex anyway? Can the relationship sustain without sex? Can the relationship sustain with sex?
with others while having a relationship
What are the boundaries?
I mean, this is the conversation of modern love. There's one of them anyway. There's a few, but this is one of the dominant conversation of modern love.
So I don't know if I've I've I've I've answered you, but I hope I've kind of
Highlighted some of the
The flash points.
I mean we've we've got the time, so we're gonna keep going. You mentioned
And I think this is a
Very important observation that you know adultery used to threaten
economic stability. Now it threatens more so emotional stability. Although
In some senses, certainly if you're within the legal construct of marriage, there can be economic ramifications, certainly.
And
I'm gonna bring it home to
San Francisco.
For a second. So I live in San Francisco. That's home base.
And
I've tried different relationship configurations in the past. I'm not married. I don't have kids. And I've had some wonderful relationships. I'd say for the last ten to fifteen years I've I've done a better job of
Setting my own boundaries, understanding other people's boundaries, making sure that all of those are very explicit so that whatever agreement we have
At the very least the agreement is clear. So I've had some really good relationships. What I've seen in the last say
Let's call it five years. It's certainly existed for longer than that, but whether it's books like More Than Two or Opening Up or
Or others, there is a trend, at least in the Bay Area, for people to try what they would consider
Monogamous or
polyamorous relationships. And
I have
Just in the cohort that I've
observed and there are a lot in the Bay Area.
the always honest, all the time radical candor approach.
Seems to
implode with pretty spectacular fireworks on a regular basis. So the
question I want to pose is is there such a thing as too much honesty?
And
How do you think about that when you are
advising
Wha how do you think about it, whether yourself or in your own relationships, or how do you advise your clients
when they're grappling with this. You know, should we because for instance I'll give you
And uh for you out there who are sensitive earmuffs cover your ears, but there are people out there who
can t have a high tolerance for, say, what they would call conversion.
For people who who don't know that word, that is
At least the way it's been explained to me, getting gratification or pleasure from someone else's pleasure. So if your partner is having sex with someone else, you derive a certain amount of pleasure from that.
I know couples who have tried this because they've been told it's a more highly evolved
approach. And so they'll sit down to dinner and the let's just say in a heteronormative relationship, the male will say, So, what was it like having so and so inside you last night? And they'll try to have that conversation and everything blows apart at the axles.
And it just gets a little bit more.
doesn't work. I there's some people for whom it works very well, but
How much honesty is too much honesty. Is there such a thing as too much honesty? Are there other parameters
that you've seen work for people.
Yes.
But you see, I think that you wanna
There are two different cultural systems here. So
When it comes to the polyamorous model in San Francisco.
You know, it is a bit of a growing movement in
the hotbeds of startup cultures like uh like Silicon Valley, because it's people who choose a lifestyle that has to do with an entrepreneurial mindset.
That aspires to greater freedom of choice, to authenticity and flexibility.
And so
There's a kind of a marriage between
the community that lives there and the appeal of a more polyamorous life. But for me
The question of honesty is actually much broader than
It extends way beyond. And I think look, you live in the United States, and America prides itself on being a pragmatic culture.
And as a pragmatic culture, it likes unvarnished directness.
And it has all kinds of expressions for
conflating honesty with factual truth. Say it as it is
Don't beat around the bush, get to the point. I mean there are so many expressions in this culture that favor
Explicit statement.
Versus
More
Opaque.
communication, you know, that conflates the concept of the moral cure of honesty has to do with truth telling and transparency.
That's the definition. There are many cultures in which honesty means something very different. Honesty is not about, you know, laying it all out there. It's actually about thinking about what the consequences will be for the other person to live with the truth.
It's not a confessional model. It's not rooted in Protestantism.
So honesty is not about I have to tell you everything I feel or everything I've done. It's about what will it be like for you one to live with the consequences of knowing.
And so you don't say certain things because you want to say face for the other person, or because you you just don't see the point of it, because there's almost something slightly
almost aggressive about it a little bit, you know? It's like what am I supposed to do with all of this now? You know, you feel better. You've unloaded the what about me kinda thing. And I think it's very cultural for me, certainly coming from
from Europe, we don't necessarily think that saying everything and putting it all out there and truth telling and transparency are the only
markers of importance. I think we think that sometimes keeping things to yourself is just as important. Not everything must be said.
And
here this notion as uh that connects with that is also that intimacy is about saying everything. It's kind of wholesale sharing. Right. You know? And if you don't say everything then you must be keeping a secret.
Because the opposite of transparency is secrecy, and there is a complete loss of privacy. And this is true in the intimate realm of relationships, as it is true in many other sectors of our society. Privacy is at risk.
And so people respond either with the the with the other extremes. Yes, I do think.
That
there can be too much sharing. It's not too much honesty, but it is too much sharing.
And the sharing is problematic when you think that
That's the definition of honesty. This is a really important thing.
Honesty does honesty or
One hundred percent sharing always equal.
caring for the other person or
fostering intimacy, I think is an interesting question. And the answer is no. The answer is no. Yes. Sometimes of course it is, but it's not a given. It's not a dogma.
You know, I think that actually holding back, I think making space for the other person, I think dealing with your own feelings, I think this idea that because I love you, I should be able to tell you everything. And if you don't tell me everything, you know, then maybe you're not close. And this telling as becoming almost like a a bit of a
I deserve to know. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Why don't you want to tell me? Like
No, those are invitations, those are not rights.
Right. No. You don't have a right to enter another person. You're invited in.
For those people listening who want to have a very illuminating but entertaining read.
short read on this type of question and radical honesty. There's a great article. I think it's called
I think you're fat by A.J. Jacobs at Esquire, who is
hilarious and a good friend. So you should read that, but I want to bring up an anecdote and
Get your
advice on or how you would hear how you would advise someone. So I I remember having lunch with a close friend of mine.
About two years ago, I would say, and he had a friend approach him
Who had cheated on his wife.
He had had an affair.
And he was grappling with whether to tell his wife or not.
And
My friend's advice was
He said
No.
That is your burden to carry and you carry that with you. It's not fair to inflict that on her because you want to make yourself feel better.
After a very, very long conversation, that was his conclusion. And so I'm curious to know
In a say patient setting.
If you have someone, male or female, because certainly women cheat and I've been cheated on before, I mean it happens, certainly.
When someone is grappling with whether to tell their partner or not, how do you walk them through that decision?
What is it that you want to tell your partner?
What is it that you wanna tell? You wanna tell that you fell in love with someone else? You wanna tell that
You realised in
Having a fling with someone else, how much you loved her or him?
You realize that you have been lying to yourself all these years?
you realize that it's time to get back into gear because you've become lazy and complacent.
Do you realize that you have been keeping all kinds of sexual secrets that have nothing to do with non monogamy, but more with your history?
What is it you want to tell your partner?
You know, that's the first thing. And
Do you wanna tell something about what happened to you?
In the meeting with the other person.
Do you want to tell what that meeting with the other person made you think about your life?
You know, we're not just talking about a series of facts, we're talking about the meaning and the motives.
Of the transgression.
So that's the first thing I ask.
What is the meanings and the motives? Why did you do this? How did this happen to you? Were you looking for it? Did you choose it? Did you just stumble into it? Did you resist it? Did you not resist it? Did you hope it would not, you know, are you living with conflict? Are you what is the guilt that you're feeling? What is the guilt? Is the guilt that you realize that you don't have desire for your partner?
It's the guilt that you realize that your partner must have been really f terribly frustrated because you've been a terrible lover to your partner. What is it? And so uh the before I ever
Wouldn't d I don't have to tell people do or don't tell or don't tell. I help people
Figure out
What it is that they would tell
Why would they want to tell it?
And what do they think will happen to the other person when they tell it to them? I think the notion that sometimes
Not to tell is kinder.
than to tell the way that your friend did is also one of the many options. It's not the only one, but it is definitely in the repertoire.
That sometimes you tell you
for your own conscience and then the other person can shurn the whole night.
So there is
The positives.
The liabilities and the positives of
Telling and then there is
the liabilities and the positive of not telling.
What do you think you partner?
would want to know. That's the other thing. And when you want to tell, do you ask yourself, do you think your partner would want to know?
Are you speaking because of your thoughts about the other person, or are you thinking of speaking because of how you feel about yourself?
You know, there's a full spectrum of dishonesty, right? There's simple omissions, there's partial truths.
There's white lies, there's blatant obfuscations, and there's mental hijacking.
I mean secrecy can be cruel and secrecy can be benevolent.
You know, and sometimes you lie to protect yourself, and sometimes you lie in order to protect your partner.
And then there is
The ironic role reversing in which sometimes you realise that you've been
Lying to yourself and it was you that you were deceiving. And it's all of that that you want to unpack.
All those twists and tangles of lines
before you'd send people out because you can never take anything back.
Right.
You know? And the next thing that's gonna happen, you're gonna say, I slept with someone and then they wanna know, How was it? And then they wanna know, Did you fall in love with that person? And then they wanna know maybe they don't want to know. So slow down.
Mm-hmm.
Sit with this.
Ponder it.
Figure out what this was about for you.
If it really meant nothing?
What does that mean when you say it meant nothing? You mean to say it is not supposed to threaten the future of your relationship. This is not a person with whom you want to live?
But even something that is meant to mean nothing has psychological valence.
So there's an effort a lot of effort goes into making something not mean anything.
Paradoxically. For sure.
You know
Sit with that. And I will sit with you.
for whatever time it takes, till we figure this out. And then maybe we'll write a letter.
You're not just gonna go there and sit.
I will write a letter and you're first gonna handwrite that letter and you're gonna get your first version out, which you probably won't send, in which you just cleanse your soul. You do your own conscience cleaning. And the next letter will be the one in which you're less thinking about you and more thinking about your partner and your relationship.
That's the steps.
That's very smart.
The next question I wanna ask, which is actually from the audience, do you think it's possible for a partner in a non monogamous marriage, could be relationship, to get over the fear of being left by opening that door? I think this is very, very
This is a very common question because maybe one person is more enthusiastic or feels the need
For
Some form of non monogamy meaning
sexual monogamy than the other. Or they're both open to it, but they haven't
experimenting or experienced this for an extended period of time or maybe they have and they've been burned.
Do you think it's possible for someone
to get over that fear of being left by opening that door and
What are some of these strategies or
Coping mechanisms, if so.
But what if I told you
Та персоєнців.
More openly.
And he's able to say
For me
This
Triggers the fear of losing you all together.
is actually experiencing a lesser fear than the one who is wanting to have other partners.
Could you say that again, please?
Yes.
Couples have a setup.
In a setup.
Every couple has a setup. It's an organization, right? In every couple
You will often find one person.
who is more in touch
With the fear of losing the other.
And one person who is more in touch with the fear of losing themselves.
One person more in touch with the fear of abandonment and one person more in touch with the fear of suffocation.
And that tells you which is the one that is more interested sometimes in experiencing
Open boundaries and non monogamy.
Or non exclusiveness anyway.
But
The person
Who wants the open relationship?
presents as the one who doesn't have the fear of abandonment.
I see what you're saying. But that doesn't mean
That there
Strategy
isn't in fact one that is meant to address an even bigger fear of abandonment than the other. It's just that in this relationship the other one is the one who gets to feel the quota.
Okay. Sure. Okay. Mm-hmm.
You understand? Couples have complementary systems, so I don't at face value
would believe that the one who says I'm afraid to lose you is the only one with that fear.
I believe we all have it.
But I believe that the one who expresses it in the couple isn't always the one for whom it is actually the most intense.
Sure.
That may no, I agree with that.
Secret of a lot of relationships. No, I agree. You understand the person who gets to voice it.
is actually sometimes only voicing a fear that the other one doesn't even voice.
Oh no, I agree. I agree. That said
I think it really depends. I would not have a set answer for this. There are plenty of people who at first felt very scared.
and then have learned to trust differently and have learned to understand that their partner really comes back to them. And in fact the more they feel free, the more they want to come back to them.
And they they really have learned to trust that. And then there are others for whom it's excruciating.
It just feels
Either a replay from childhood.
Either a sense that they're not enough
Because they have really
The notion that you would need more than me and that I can't fill all your needs.
It's very, very painful to them and they bought into that idea and with v very powerfully.
sometimes there is the sense that, you know, you allow yourself something that I don't
Why can't you stop yourself? There are other things that I don't get and I don't go and get them elsewhere. Compromise should be a part of what both of us do in the name of our relationship.
I've seen it go both ways. I've seen people for whom it really became
A way to live that they never knew existed?
And I've seen people for whom
This is just not
the way they want to live. They don't want that fear. They don't want to remember every time their parents went out that they didn't know if they were coming back. They don't want that notion of what if you will fall in love somewhere else, which of course, in and of itself, would happen no matter what.
that threat is always there that reality is part of any couple
But somehow I don't want to have to know it with such vividness. Or because I feel that there is something lacking in me, or I feel my own insecurities, and therefore every time you go, my insecurities get awakened. It's a complex system. I would just say that it generally works better when both people are from the same tribe.
Mm-hmm.
When both people have that same curiosity when both people
Experience the fluidity as something that is additive and not something that's an axiolytic.
then it becomes an enhancing experience rather than a dreadful experience each time.
It's very complicated when one person says to the other
I really want this and the other one says
This is hell for me.
I can't live with this.
And there's very little flexibility sometimes in that system because both people feel it very intensely and more than one relationship has had to end.
On that basis.
So what I'd like to ask
Following up on that.
Because I think this question is
And I'm gonna stop hedging all my comments. So obviously everybody listening to this
There are a million different ways to organize relationship and a million different
sort of combinatorial.
approaches to it, right? Whether it's homosexual, heterosexual, unisexual. I have no idea. You're right. There are a million different ways to go about it. So I'm just going to assume for the
sake of simplicity that a lot of people are in heterosexual relationships.
This question is very common, I think, from
Women
Who are
You have a male in a
in a relationship who wants
More sexual variety.
And the the woman
In many cases, not all cases.
Is
At least around San Francisco. Potentially open.

But doesn't have the same
sexual drive necessarily is the male. So the male is going to exercise that option more than she will.
And that leads to or contributes to
Perhaps fostering some degree of insecurity.
if he's going to be seeing X number of other people and I'm
not seeing Y number equivalent of people, then the likelihood of him disappearing is is higher.
And
The
I was told once by someone they said well
No one can take the person you're meant to be with. Now the way that
The context in which that was provided was
to underscore the fact that like you said, whether you're you're married, not married
in a relationship have an explicit agreement or not, the potential and the risk for digression or meeting someone else is always there. But I guess the
fuel on the fire here is that when you explicitly give someone the option, the fear is that it's more likely
To happen.
That's just more of an observation. I wanted to mention two things.
I've been very curious about
recently that seem, at least in the group that I've observed, to work pretty well, even though
I think they are
least one of them is viewed as pretty unfashionable. And so I wanted to get your take on it. So the first one
As an arrangement.
And this I've only heard once, but I thought it was very clever.
Actually no, not once. Twice.
was older gentleman, he's in his sixties, been married for I want to say twenty plus years, has a number of kids.
And I was asking him about his marriage and he said, Well we have
An open relationship. Okay. When we're having some wine, tell me more. So we continue to talk and he said
The way and I asked him, how do you prevent it from causing problems? And he said, Well
Every relationship has problems, so it's not like one is immune and one is not.
But his wife gives him a
Report card.
Every quarter. So every three months he gets a report card.
I think it was one to ten scale.
In four categories.
Lover.
Husband
Provider father.
And he's allowed to have a low score in any one of those as long as his average is high enough. So they agreed on what his average had to be. So he might say
be overseas for a period of time.
on business trips and he might also sleep with other women. So he's gonna get a low lover score, a high provider score, and then the other two are sort of up for debate. But
I found that appealing, maybe just because I like measuring things as a way of
course correcting and and keeping things in check.
The second, which I'd particularly like your thoughts on, although we can go anywhere with this.
Is
That
looking at maybe a contrast to the tell me everything, I'll tell you everything.
Breed of
polyamorous relationships where
radical honesty is an underlying tenet.
I've run into more than a few people who effectively have a don't ask, don't tell policy.
And
It pains not doesn't pain me to say it, but I suspect I'll get a decent amount of
backlash from my audience, it seems to work pretty well in the sense that
more than a few couples have said, look, that whole polyamorous tell everything, and I know those are not mutually dependent.
Is not for us, but
As long as you're safe.
As long as you don't embarrass me.
then you can do what you want and the policies don't ask, don't tell.
That seems very old fashioned. I mean, maybe the fact that it's a two way street makes it
less old fashioned, but what are your thoughts on that? Because it seems to me just intuitively
To be
And maybe it's highly dependent on the person, but to be less prone to
Kind of supernova.
Destruction.
versus the radical honesty piece for most people.
Do you have any thoughts? That's a mouthful, I know, but um
I've been thinking about a lot of this stuff for a long time.
So
I think that I would start and I would say that trust
Loyalty.
An attachment.

And when you describe this example
And you like it because of its measurements? I would say I like it because of its creativity.
Mm-hmm.
Because there's a shared complicity.
Because
It seems to have worked.
because there's imaginativeness and resourcefulness in it, and because I think that couples often lack a lot of that. Every other system gets innovators
and get new ideas and put into it all the time. And it is extraordinary how much relationships enter into a certain mode and then stay in it for decades. Right.
So anything where I see couples
Coming up.
with their own imaginative uh solutions to various situations and then be flexible about it and review it and change it.
to me is great. That's it. I think that unfortunately coupled them does not benefit from the same
innovative spirit that every other company in entrepreneurial has uh space these days gets to benefit. There isn't one model fits all.
And
A certain couple may have lived for a while in a monogamous arrangement and exclusive arrangements, but then decided at some point because of all kinds of issues having to do with age, with illness, with success, with you name it, with children leaving, with
A new awakening with lots of weight, you name it, you name it. There's lots of triggers that make suddenly people want to change their relational arrangement.
And I think that if people are gonna stay together a long time, they need that ability.
To review their relational arrangements.
And to negotiate it and then to try something and then to see if it works and to ch I mean, I can't
Enough emphasized my desire for flexibility.
to become part also
of coupled them so that it doesn't just be it enters a groove, it goes until it can't, and then it just kind of ends there.
There needs to be something a little bit more enriching there. So
The first thing. I think for some people, don't ask, don't tell.
Wormely well.
It gives them enough
Privacy it makes them both know that there is
stile primary loyalty and commitment
There is an implicit sense of knowing where one can go, how far one can go.
Et cetera, et cetera. And there needs to be ample continuous investment and reassurance and building into the relationship itself. The point is not that you should have
the leftovers at home and everything else that is meaningful and exciting and and interesting and engaging elsewhere.
By definition you still want to be able to put some
Logs in your own fire.
For other people.
Transparency and radical honesty has become an ideology. The problem is
Ideologies
Generally
I reach it.
Right. You know, they don't lend themselves to being adaptive and fluid to what's in front of you. It becomes a matter of principle rather than a matter of what makes sense. I still I may be a little bit
You know, of the school still where does it make sense?
Just does it is it does it work? I don't care if it's true or if it's right. Does it work? Is it decent? Is it caring? Is it warm? You know, has it been adapted? Does it fit both people?
Those are the criteria you go back and forth, like a kaleidoscopic, not just like two ideas, you know.
For many people, the notion of radical honesty, transparency, truth telling, authenticity, those have become the values of the economy of today, and so is it in the economy of the home. We want
experience, you know, we want purposeful, transformative, you know, experiences. We want them at home, we want them at work, everywhere.
For other people.
Home is a different thing.
And home is meant to satisfy other needs, et cetera, et cetera. And
There is a segmentation that is accepted.
We share these kind of things, we share other things with other people.
And
To me it's really a matter of does it fit this particular couple?
Does it work for them? Or is there one person who is quietly
hurting over a long time and kind of
giving in, but there's a power dynamic because the word we haven't used is that in all these negotiations
There is an element of power.
You know, there is power when you bring in other people, there is power when you feel that the other person can leave you, there is power when you have faced with the hurt of a person who is constraining you.
There was
A dynamic of power in all of these issues.
And
The question is, is there an equity in the decision making? Do both people
Sheel
That they have equal power in their ability
to see what works for them. In this instance that you describe, what's beautiful is you feel like, you know
Whatever he does, she gets to evaluate him. And so the evaluation is power.
Right.
You know, in a good sense of the word, I use the word power. And so they are calibrating power, you know, you get to do things
But I don't want to have to suffer because of it. I want to know that I still get the primary goods. I want to know that I come first. And so
Yeah, you want to go play, go play. But don't play on my behalf and don't play on my account. I don't want a devaluation of our assets because you are growing other revenues somewhere else.
You know
And
They play with this. And so for this couple
To me, you know, I'm playing my I'm putting my script onto it, but I
when I listen to the description I'm looking at what is the power distribution, because the power is the sovereignty, the power is the dignity of this. Otherwise
you know, all these things become not power but power maneuvers. And that's a whole other thing and that has nothing to do
With just sex alone, you know, these things take place in a
All every relationship is a power dynamic.
I think that that has to be laid out first.
Inside of that
We can come up with
so many different arrangements that people will leave for a while and then switch. I wanted to say that.
There is a a beautiful proliferation of non monogamy thinking that is taking place, okay? And they're very different from the the free love pioneers of the sixties and the seventies. And
But then of course, you know, many of those people are the children of the divorced and the disillusioned.
And they're not rebelling against commitment per se, but they're looking for more realistic ways to make their vows last.
And they've concluded that
That
Includes other lovers.
you know, can vary enormously. You can have occasional hall passes, you can have swingers who play with others, you can have established treesoms, foursoms, complex polyamorous networks.
All of these things have one purpose.
To reconfigure love and family life.
Which we have done from time immemorial.
Right.
Your comment on power reminded me of
I think it was Oscar Wilde said everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes.
spent so much time with people grappling with these issues.
What was the research process for your new book and
that is, I mean, really kind of fresh on the mind, I would think, at this point for you.
Why do another book?
And what was the research process like?
So
You know
Mating in captivity looked at the dilemmas of desire inside the relationships.
And the state of affairs which is my new book looks at what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere.
And
I had gone to twenty countries on book tour for meeting an
In many places the only chapter people wanted to talk about was the shadow of the third.
the chapter on monogamy, which was only one chapter in that whole book.
And I thought
There's no way that I can do a thorough study of desire without looking at desire that goes wandering.
You know, what is roaming desire like? What is the power of transgression? Why is the forbidden so erotic?
What is this thing called adultery which has been historically condemned and universally practiced?
You know and so
It took me a while. This is ten years since I wrote Mating in Captivity. I'm not I take a long time to think and I only write if I feel I have something to say.
And something to say means that I want to change the conversation on the subject. I don't want to just add one or two thoughts. I want to really frame the conversation. I want to take something.
And make a cultural shift around it. So for the past six years.
About
I began to travel the globe and have conversations about the subject of infidelity.
Transgression.
Twists.
Love affairs.
Fuck bad.
Betrayal.
Trauma, lying, deception.
Cheating, gaslighting from both sides. What is gaslighting? I've heard this expression before and I don't know what it is.
Is when I say I know you are seeing somebody else. I know, I know it, I feel it, or I've even and you say no, no, you're crazy, this is because of what your father did to you. You you're just paranoid. And you literally destroy the coherence of my reality.
Got it. When you're accused of something you turn it around and then sort of fracture
Yes, but you also literally begin to make me feel like I have no longer a grasp on reality.
I see. Got it. It's a real mental torture.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's not just that you're denying, it's that you're also saying is what's wrong with me that I'm thinking this.
And then you basically make me doubt myself.
And you make me doubt that when I think the tea is hot, it's actually hot.
Sure.

You know, I no longer know to trust.
The world that I live in, my perceptions, my thoughts, my feelings.
And that becomes an internal breakdown.
It drives people crazy.
really cruel actually. It's a very common, but it's a cruel thing to do. I saw
You know, I'm thirty four years a couples therapist. I have a a fascination for couples. I work in seven languages. I can take them from all over the world and uh and I began to only see couples who have been affected by infidelity.
In one variation or another.
I also did a TED talk in pa in passant.
Which has
you know, seven and a half million people in a year or two, and I I thought, Okay, I've got fifteen hundred letters
I thought, My God, I'm a walking confessional.
The world is pouring their secrets onto me.
on this subject anyway, and let me try to think it through. Let me really delve into this and look at it from a systemic point of view. Meaning if I ask an audience
Have you had ex any experience with affairs or infidelity? You know, nobody's gonna lift their hand. I nobody's gonna say I cheated or have been cheated on so easily. But if I ask the same audience, have you been affected by infidelity in your life?
I probably get ninety percent of the fingers up.
It's an amazing thing.
as the child of, as the friend of, as the boss of, as the lover, as the other woman, as the partner, as the person who went out, you name it. And now it becomes really a collective experience. So I wanted to look at it from all angles.
And I see couples two, three hours at a time.
And I delve into the labyrinth of passion.
All of it.
You know, from all sides.
And then I collected all the data, I wrote, I transcribed hundreds of hours of sessions.
I transcribed all the letters and I began to gather and then decide what are the main assumptions at this point about this subject. How does our culture think about this?
Because no matter
And by the way, infidelity happens in polyamorous couples too, you know. The fact that you get an open license doesn't prevent people from climbing the fence. Something about transgression is deeply human. And you've also observed the definition of cheating.
continues to expand, right? Where you have sexting, texting, dating apps, watching porn. I mean the
inside of the wall is getting uh narrower and narrower in some respects also. Absolutely. The definition is elastic. It's unbelievable.
what people today how many more ways that we we define something as being outside of the of the boundaries and we consider them infidelities and it is one of the experiences
That encompasses the entire human drama.
Everything.
Jealousy, hurt, betrayal.
Pain.
Lust.
Love, passion.
All of it. It's like every opera, there's a reason.
And it is a one of the most complex human experiences to really
delve into, but it is endlessly fascinating. And so
I wanted to rethink infidelity. What does it mean today?
Why does it happen?
in any kind of relationship, what does it mean to know that
that your partner never really belongs to you. They're only on loan and with an option to renew.
Or not.
I get asked about marriage and kids a lot, even though I feel very unqualified to comment on either.
But
What is the argument for
Marriage.
these days because I have trouble coming up with one the argument that comes to mind because the legal construct, the financial consequences, the
difficulty in the sort of unraveling.
If you want to change direction or a new chapter.
means a new partner, whatever it might be. There are a lot of consequences. Now the only argument that I can come up with for it.
Is
related to loss aversion, where maybe if you really want to make a strong committed effort to maintain a relationship for a long period of time,
that if you have something to lose, if you don't enforce that.
That in this case.
takes the form of a legal construct that you're not going to put in the requisite effort. So okay, but it just seems to me that there's so much downside.
that prevents flexibility.
How do you think about that? Or is there an argument for the legal construct of marriage? Cause I have more and more difficulty as I see friends' marriages imploding, exploding good people, often faithful people.
It gets harder and harder for me.
Yeah.
But Americans love to marry.
You know once, twice, three times. You know, part of the way that I began the project of writing about infidelity
came out of the Lewinsky Clinton scandal because
I was very intrigued. Why was this country so tolerant about multiple divorces and so intransigent about the slightest transgression?
Right, fairness. You know, no matter how much uh sex becomes open, they remain intransigent about the subject of infidelity. And the rest of the world, by the way, that is more family oriented, has always opted the other way around.
You protect the family.
You know, and you don't divorce. So
Why Americans love to marry I have never fully
Understood. I mean I have my thoughts but it's not like I I I have a definitive
Answer to that. I think
There's the two questions.
A deep meaningful connection with another human being with whom you weave a story.
you know, along the stages of life.
That is one thing. Does it need to take place?
We didn't
The construct of marriage is a very different thing.
You know, in Europe we marry much less.
But we have families.
And we try to create families with what modernity has given us, which is a rather nuclear model of family, which is a very difficult model for family and v and a terrible model for couples.
We were not meant to be two adults with four or two or three or four children all alone in cities. I mean none of it is is the way we were meant to do it. And so it's extremely
Taxing on the couple.
And at the same time, the only reason families today survive is if the couple is doing relatively well.
Right. That's the only thing keeping families together. So we're facing a very interesting thing. At the same time, if if Apple sold you a product that fails fifty percent of the time, would you buy it?
Yeah, that's what happens to marriage. Well if you think that that's a guarantee, think again, because at this point it is really not doing that well in terms of guaranteeing you things.
But I think
There are very few rituals at this moment.
You know, with the loss of r traditional religion
There very few rituals, there very few structures, very few інституtions.
to which we can adhere.
And I can see that in that sense the importance of marriage as a ritual.
That is rooted in a tradition
And that comes with a code of conduct.
and with an official uh norm to it, and so that's where I place marriage. I don't think of it in legal terms at all. I think of it f very much in terms of its cultural meaning.
You know, it's like a spine. There are very few things people can hang themselves on these days. Uh you know, everything is about the self.
And the burdens of the self are very heavy at this moment. So
marriage has become that that institution that still tells you how how to go about
doing these things in life.
To me the very interesting thing when you ask about why Mary I think about the gay marriage. Gay marriage really w was one of the ways to try to understand
What does it mean to legalize, to give rights to queer families, to to allow people to to adhere to a norm?
when there are so few norms at this moment. Everything has been re evaluated and redefined, and I think people are
Sometimes very desperate for norms.
Structures.
pillars, architecture. Everything else is fluid, fluid, fluid, you know, but we all need solid as well as we need fluid, and marriage has remained one of the last
Solid.
construct even though it fractures.
Way too fast and way too often.
Can you do it without marriage completely.
You know, but for some reason people feel that commitment without the structure isn't buttressed in the same way.
The marriage is the buttress. It's the fulcrum. And
I don't know if relationships actually that would be an interesting thing to look at numbers. Do relationships that are not
held together by the contract of marriage.
Do they dissolve any more in Europe than they do here?
I'm not sure. You know, it's fifty two percent or forty eight at this point, maybe it's gone down a bit on first marriage, but the fascinating data is not first marriage, it's sixty five percent divorce rate on second marriages.
Sixty five percent.
Yeah.
That is the much more interesting data.
Yeah.
Why why? Why do you find it interesting?
Because
it touches on something else that I think is much more interesting as a suddenly as a couples therapist is that okay, let's assume the second time it's easier, you've done it the first time, you may not have the young children
Et cetera, et cetera. But to me the more interesting thing is that the first time you still actually adhere to the model.
You know, I think that often the divorcees are the true idealists.
They believe in the model, they just chose the wrong person and they'll do better next time.
The second time they begin to think that maybe it's not all about the other person and that maybe it's time to take some responsibility for themselves.
Everybody at some point has some relationship things to work out and the only question is with whom.
Who are you gonna do it with?
But it it would seem that at some point.
You should also ask, wait a second, if the people are coming out of the same factory
Meaning the structure that has a fifty percent failure rate.

Perhaps you the the structure should also be a a variable under consideration, I would think.
Absolutely.
But that's coupled them.
That's not that's not just marriage. You know, I I think that
To me I'm
Really fascinated by how creative.
Having just written a book about infidelity, I can tell you, if people took
one percent of the creativity that they put in their affairs and brought it to their marriages or to their relationships you know, it's astounding. It's the same people.
Change context and they suddenly are filled with imagination and attention and focus and and generosity and kindness and desire. It's like
It's not marriage per se as coupled, and for some reason the expectations of coupledom have never been higher.
But what people invest in it
hasn't really measured up.
So to bring the best of themselves not to their partner.
They bring the best of themselves at work.

to their colleagues, to their hobbies, to to their children for that matter, much more, not to their partner. And that is a much more interesting thing to me.
than marriage per se. It's like I don't ask so much why do people marry. I ask more why do people
so often bring the leftovers to their partner while at the same time wanting their relationships to be so glorious.
Something doesn't click.
What do you think the answer is?
You know, it's like when people say my partner is my best friend.
And I'm f sometimes, especially in my office, I have to say, do you treat your best friend like this? Right.
I mean, no, no, that's not how you you know, would you say this to somebody else?
Could you imagine being that critical with your friends?
What is the idea? And this is where marriage comes in. It's because you really think that because you married the other person is just gonna be there and take it.
Vice versa, this is in both directions, right? It's like
There is something about the seal
Underneath that has locked this that allows people to then
behave subpar.
Right.
And maybe if there was more of a fear that they of losing it, because your friends won't take it. Certainly your boss won't take it, your colleagues won't take it, you behave that way at work, you're out.
But at home?
You think you can do these things.
You can treat people really poorly.
You can put them down, you can disqualify them, you cannot listen to them, you can shout, you can kick, you can neglect them, you can be indifferent. I mean, my God, there is so many ways to not behave well at home.
And then call them you you know.
It's like to me this is where I make people accountable. It's like excuse me, you you can't trap another person. This is like
You know.
Marital sadism.
See you have we could talk for hours and you have
a number of different venues and vehicles through which you're exploring these topics. The
Book is one, of course. And what could you say the title of the new book one more time, please? So the book is The State of Affairs, Rethinking Infidelity.
So I suspect that that will be as your talk's end.
Previous work has been very, very
Popular and topical? I would say this. I would say
Why do people cheat?
Why do happy people cheat?
Is infidelity always a deal breaker?
Why do we think that men need variety?
And are bored, and whereas we think that women are hungry for intimacy and lonely. Why do we have such complete different ideas about why men and women cheat?
What do we do with jealousy?
Can love ever be plural?
Is possessiveness an arcane vestige of patriarchy or is it intrinsic to love?
It's all these questions that I'm taking on.
And you're also
going to be exploring that
In
Your own.
program on an audible channel soon.
As I understand it.
Yeah, if you wouldn't mind describing that just a little bit.
Yes, I'm very excited about I'm I mean it's really
different ways of exploring you know, the book The State of Affairs is not really a book about infidelity. It's really a book about what do we learn from infidelity about the human heart and the human condition. So
I use that lens.
to enter and to excavate many, many subjects. And I wanted

you know, the opportunity of letting people come into my office and actually
B
in those conversations that I have with couples, because most of the time we have no idea what happens in a couple.
You know, couples are isolated islands. Sometimes the women may talk to somebody and the men talk to very few.
And so we have no idea what's in the antechamber, you know, of the couple. And I
Did a series with Audible and we're gonna do a second one already, that of ten couples therapy sessions.
Covering a range of subjects.
Where
You think you are actually entering into the intimacy of these other relationships and you very quickly realize that you're actually looking inside you're looking at your own mirror.
And you're looking at yourselves.
And you start to talk with the persons, uh the people of your life, your partners or others
about where you are in relation to these questions. So say then there are stories of infidelity and stories of sexuality and stories of
raising children and stories of of infertility and stories of unemployment and it's um
very, very poignant experience because it's intimate in your ear. You don't see them, but you hear them. Ten couples who have volunteered.
Чу
Come and have a session with me, like I do generally in my office. It's exactly what I would normally do, but this time
Recorded and told.
to as stories to share and stories to
Invest ourselves in.
What is the name of the series?
Where should we begin?
Where should we begin?
Isn't that what every session starts to do it? Where should we begin?
And for people listening in the show notes I will have link to everything that I can get links to that we've discussed. This podcast comes out May eighteenth, and at first it will be on Audible and on Amazon Prime.
And then the book comes out in September, will be in stores october ten, and then
the podcast will also be released on iTunes and so it will be re released
At the same time as the book comes out.
So I have just a few more questions. I want to let you get back to your day, but just as we wrap up a few
Quick questions.
One is
What books besides your own have you gifted the most
To other people.
Oh, the book I've probably gifted the most is Victor Frankel The Search for Meaning.
Mm-hmm.
Since I'm sixteen.
Mm-hmm
That is a fantastic book. And what about re-read the most yourself? What book have you reread or books, anything that any books that come to mind that you've reread?
I recently reread The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm.
I re read
The erotic mind
By Jack Morin.
I
Re read
For this book, I reread Madame Bovarie, which was very disappointing. How I'll tell you what I reread that I love because one of my kids was reading it in school, Crime and Punishment.
No, you can reread the Russians.
Timeless.
And
If you had a billboard, this is a metaphorical question, but if you had a huge billboard where you could put a short message on it.
non commercial, but a short message up could be one word, could be a sentence, could be whatever.
to get out to millions of people. What would you put on that billboard?

There's always more you can do for another.
Just don't have your day.
Without having done something for someone that you don't know for that matter.
Not just for the ones that are in your little circle.
I don't know. In a billboard it would say
Do your part.
Love it. And any
Parting comments, requests of the audience could be the same thing that you just said, but uh
Any parting thoughts, questions?
Or
suggestions for people who are listening. Any ask of the audience.
You know, the reason I see do you part is because so much
of the culture we live in is about doing things for ourselves, enhancing ourselves, pushing ourselves, being more successful, being more healthy, you know. And it is the most powerful
antidepressant. I know that you do something on the depression front as well, and I think that
The curse of today is isolation.
There's a lot of other things we have gained, but we have lost something, and isolation
And disconnection. It's a curse of modern life.
And
I think that
There is no more powerful antidepressant, nothing that will give us more meaning in life than to know that we matter for others.
And that means to do for others.
Which is a little bit what couples therapy is about. You know, most of the time people come to couples therapy, they don't come in order to say, I came to check myself out. They've usually come to be an expert on the other end, they say, fix it.
uh do something, you know, or or I came to drop off, you know? So I'm all the time thinking, you know, and what are you doing? Take responsibility. You know, it's freedom responsibility.
And for the rest, it's like if any of you are inspired by what I say is join me on all the platforms where you can find me so easily and
There's nothing I think I value more than to be in conversation. Like I've so enjoyed our conversation.
You and I and
to talk about these things. It's part of everybody's life all the time. Love
Sex, trust, loyalty, commitment.
What else is there, you know?
Absolutely.
And where is the best place on social media for people to say hello to you if they wanted to say hello? Is there any one preferred place?
F I would say my fan page on uh on Facebook probably, but I am on Twitter and I'm on Instagram and I'm on YouTube.
I'm doing this whole beautiful series actually of videos that I'm putting up on YouTube on relational intelligence.
That I think kind of are snapshots of what I say in short, what I often say in long
I'll tell you.
What I want is
We have often these days tried to simplify things and I think what I try to do is create
A conversation and relationships and love and all of that.
at work as well as at home, both levels of relationships, in business, in companies, et cetera.
That embraces complexity.
That's multicultural and that's inclusive. And I think that the more people join this
The more you will help me do my piece of social change.
So everybody's going to be able to do it
Definitely say hello to Esther. Esther.parell on Facebook, Instagram, Esther Perell Official.
YouTube Perell Esther. Switch now put all of these in the show notes. Esther
Thank you so much for taking the time. This was a real joy.
And tremendously
Stimulating.
And I have a lot to a lot to think on. So I appreciate you.
sharing your expertise and your experiences with us.
Thank you. It's a treat. Thanks a lot. And to everybody listening, you can find links to everything that has been mentioned, the books, the podcast.
Everything imaginable.
In the show notes, as usual, with every other episode, you can just go to Tim.blog forward slash podcast.
And until next time, thank you for listening.
Hey guys, this is Tim again, just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.