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I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T 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
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cybernetic organism living dissue over metal [Music] [Music] endoskeleton 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 worldclass 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 10th year anniversary which is insane to think about and past 1 billion downloads
to celebrate I've curated some of the best of the best some of my favorites from more than 700 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 name 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 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 Broadways The Music Man Revival jean valan in 2013's major Motion Picture adaptation of L 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 learned this from a gra M of mine Billy Shaw who's often known as St 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 eie wh'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 once so now 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 burden to give a big book because people feel like
oh I'm gonna see I'm gonna see him in a month oh having dinner with him next week and share read the book but like the David Foster Wallace is a 15minute book and the EB white book here is New York the New York had a program post World War II where they invite the
greatest writers in the world to come to New York and just they pay them for three months just to write essays about New York so that was his and it's amazing to read a 1949 account of New York and how much of the spirit still resonates now so that's a 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 Ro Tim because this is a long book but I was gifted actually uh by Gary Hart Senator Gary Hart who I played in a movie the over Story 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 I remember I read for about a half hour and it said whatever it said 01 % complete and I went oh my God how
big is this book it's 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 BS I believe it won the Pulitzer I think it did it's a piece of fiction into weaving about eight storylines of humans but what 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 5 or 10% of our awareness and this book what it does is draws you in in these incredible human stories and these very varied characters and
their 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 will notice things you have never noticed before amen all right my complacency has been called stick with it it it works on you in the way nature does it's patient and it's in no rush 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 trick to life is not letting that mind be your master but to let it be your 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
1hour pelaton 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 I guess one might consider the the traditional TM format and 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 four years so I started yeah when I was 23 I'm 51 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 should be doing this don't fall off that wagon you know it's a slippery slope so and once I let go of that to 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 theater 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 very I get
restless leg syndrome so after about 4 or 5:00 it's uncomfortable for me to sit for 20 minutes so I will do it around lunchtime or 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 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 my one of my favorite movies
movies of all time and definitely my favorite quote from a movie of all time is from Chariots of Fire which I loved as a kid and Eric liell who's the religious Runner who decides not to run on the Sabbath during the Olympics you've seen the movie right I have yeah
so there's this great scene he's meant to be going off after the Olympics to do missionary work in China handing out Bibles or something and his sister's talking to him she's like you got to throw away this silly running 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 saying 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 although I'm going to 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 train for ultramarathons 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 got to perform that evening because then an anxiety comes in that
you're going to be withdrawing on reserves that are not replenishable I don't go out after any show and I would 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 because there is a lot of energy I think I'm the only actor I know who I can be asleep within 45
minutes after getting off stage there's something very calming it's like you've had your greatest workout 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 so the 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 oh you didn't do your warmup 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 Perfection 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 a 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 theater because I love the theater 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 life so you who knows why they sacrif 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 which means I dedicate this show or whatever it is to the service of the absolute that there is something beyond the show some reason we're doing this same for your sh you know there's got to
be a reason Beyond just what the immediate thing is there and that just connects me to that I'm pretty quiet during the day when I do a show and the other thing I really try to do is read and listen to other stuff I had a great acting teacher LY Jones who said to me goes you can't call yourself a
real actor unless you expose yourself to ballet and classical music and David Adam 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 is very
much giving out you have enough energy there and stores I suppose there 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 feel to correct it this is from you I remember at one point being in a fellowship and everyone used to wear the fish symbol that said you were 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 impact your father or family had on you in terms of of Lessons Learned yeah I'm glad you mention 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 overinvestment 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 that was one of the things actually I think that you know brought the end of their marriage they sort of went down different paths my dad was not a a Bible Basher he did he rarely talked about it and I remember saying dad cuz I was really about 134 I
was really in school 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 and when he said that to me I was disappointed I
I thought he was cing out but only later did I realize that when he said people should know you're a Christian through your actions you're 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 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 mom 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 being people need to be seen I've learned a lot of that from ber 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 this is maybe going to seem strange I just remember what it was about my dad oh fire away go there stickler on ethics if you get an invitation to go go across the road to your mate's place for dinner
and then an hour later you get an invitation from the Queen of England to go to the Bucking 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 that was big one my dad was
always big on ethics and the other beautiful one I remember when my because 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 of 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 TV show I got cast in a TV show and at the same time I got a spotted a very revered acting school in Australia the
West Australian Academy performing arts and over the weekend I had to choose do I go on Neighbors which kie Mano Guy Pierce Mago 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 dad I
don't know what to do I need your help and and I was 22 at the time and he said I can't answer that for you and I was really come want that please Anyway by the Sunday it was clear to me I wanted you know obviously his lesson B 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 TV series set 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 he goes oh
thank goodness I said you knew and he goes of course I knew I said couldn't you just save me this grief the last two days in told and he goes man he says you're a man you have to make those decisions on your own now as a father I have a 20-year-old I don't know if I'd
be able 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 acting and could you speak to that please damn your
research is good so I had worked I don't know how many jobs I graduated drama school at 26 SO gas station attendant I dressed up in a koala suit for the national parks and wildli Foundation that I it's a tall koala yeah totally yes I've been punching the kidneys by 14 year olds you know the
whole thing and yes I told him to [ __ ] off all of that you know uh restaurants the thing I learned from working in all those jobs is 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 you may be able to be in a position where you built the brand to 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 going to be the easy life they do it because they there's something they want to create 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 employing me 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 going to
give it seven days a week so I vowed to never wait for the phone to ring I was going to write letters I was going to start me and Simon Lyndon my fellow made I graduated with we're going to 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 tamama rock Surfers which is you know in Bondi in Australia still going today after 25 years but my feeling was 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 5 years was the time but because I was 26 so 5 years I'm like 31 we all hear stories of people staying too long at the party I mean if you go to La there's just so many people who stay a good 10 years too long at the
acting party you know and they're like I met a guy my jym and he's introducing 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 the word I think I'm going to get a you know that story comes out and this feeling of it's
going to happen next week and I figured 30 31 okay 31 if it's not happening be stoic by the way thanks for Ryan holiday and the stoic 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 5 years at 31 I done
X-Men it was all sort of happening for me it didn't happen immediately in terms of what most people think of as success but certainly after that 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 or I say to actors I said I'd be wary of the word career I said it's not a right that you're going to act 98% 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 be at your best to get there because that's kind of 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 patting
the pavement as an aspiring slw workking actor we definitely go to drama school that was before that was huge turning point I just had also this attitude you got to 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 Gaston and Beauty the beast in the musical I was like well I'm a theater actor 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 turning 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 Bey the Beast Man 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 cuz 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 beating the Beast I started that getting well known for that and I remember seeing something like they had a list of people what are they doing for Christmas kind of thing and they had
Hugh Jackman comma singer and it was up at the theater someone put it up in 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 going to affect me and it did become a problem I couldn't get an audition for a film
because there was I don't know about the rest of the world but in Australia were kind of snobbishness about musical theater that you w 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 dve me crazy so I made a choice then to get out basically I'm going to get out of musical theater and I'm just going to 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 Trevor Sir
Trevor nun is coming to do Sunset Boulevard in Melbourne and I said I I said I really want to meet s Trevor n he was a huge hero of mine through drama school the Royal Shakespeare company everything like huge I really wanted to meet him that's who that's really who I wanted to work for that it
was a musical and this was another 12 months and I thought now it's going to be backtack musical I'm going to be even more entrenched down this path that you know was a one R Street and I think back is a pretty arrogant thing I ring 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 want to 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 made this decision I've got to go into acting but
can you just do me a favor I just want to meet him and I want him to see me act so I went in the audition was the most incredible hour I have 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 40 minutes and I
remember about halfway through that going okay if he gives me the part I'm going to do it it doesn't matter to me if it's a musical or not I've got to 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 it and I haven't always done that by the way actually not long after it so after I did Sunset Boulevard I doubled down on my commitment to not doing musicals right or after I go home I'd 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 on Broadway about 15 years ago and when I heard the pitch for that show I had that same feeling in my gut oh my God this is going to be
amazing you got to do it but my head was saying you've done three musicals stop when are you going to stop you got to 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 show I was actually sick to my stomach because it was everything I knew it was going to be when they pitched it to me and there I was making some strategic plan in my head and it was wrong and from that moment on I've always follow 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 asking in part because I've spent a lot of my life trapped in my the front of my brain 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 going to 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 praying nightly for I don't know how long to God I used just I remember it's just saying I don't care God what it is you want me to do if you want me to collect trash I'll collect 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 than I had fear of failing at a path if that makes sense that whatever that decision was whatever that Moment of clarity becomes whatever gets you to that feeling of Eric Liddell on Chariots of Fire 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 brain's strategizing of how to be happy and successful in or meaningful in life there's something element mental and instinctual and herning that the people I admire the most really hn that ability in in big decisions in their life to
small day-to-day decisions so now I still like you battle with that because I can be dominated by my mind my brain pros and cons think this through and I should have 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 as if in the past tense of what the day had been dreams can be crazy can be wild and then at the end of the day I score it out of 10 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 going to go back again in terms of knowing to get into acting
right following those examples I went and studied auditioned 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 came I'm
going to 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 a $35,000 tuition fee and it had never dawned me that it was going to cost anything because when I was young and Australia secondary education was free
like all University was free so I was like uh oh and I thought I 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 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 $35,000 the exact dollar amount and wild 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 meant to be this is it and maybe so it's time to move on and you're about to throw it up because the $35,000 and that pathum me to go down
you're going to kind of falter the first hurdle and then the wall up com to 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 buck
if you had to just take the desert island test and you could only take a handful of exercises or XY andz with you yeah does anything come to mind rolling machine definitely a rower there's a reason the rower is usually empty at the gym because it's typical and a lot of people want to say
and feel they've worked out and they want to get a sweat but they don't necessarily and I learned a lot of this from your book and I worked at a gym by the way the 4H hour body I worked at a gym for 3 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 everything you need to keep 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 Co I found her through Peter do you know Beth have you met Beth I know of Beth well she was a powerlifter and a dancer it really is great for me because I mean in the past even with someone like Wolverine I have to prepare to look physically away but 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 SL dancer because fighting is dance it is more relaxation in a fight scene than there is strength which is probably the case for if you think of 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 100 meters you know that sense of having the right level of relaxation I think they call it the 85% rule if you
tell most sort of a type athletes to run at their 85% capacity they will run faster than if you tell them to run 100 because it's more about relaxation and form and optimizing the muscles in the right way so be has really taught me that with 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 a film movie Australia B 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 they're lean they're all
lean lean lean and I'm like dude you ask me to get big up 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 want to get a lean row so as well as the ice bars that I learned from your book which I used all through the
Wolverines particularly the later Wolverines when you see me a better shape that's a great way to lose fat but 7 Minute row four times a week and the goal is 2,000 M and when you try it at some point you're going to hate me for it but still that's the quickest best
way just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by wealthfront there there is a lot happening in the US and Global economies right now a lot that's an understatement are we in a recession is it a bare
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Tim to get started that's wealthfront.com stim this was a paid endorsement by wealthfront and Now esther Perell psychotherapist New York Times best-selling author of mating in captivity and the State of Affairs rethinking infidelity and host of her toprated podcast where should we begin
you can find Esther on Twitter at eser Perell and Instagram at eser Perell 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 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 ANP in Belgium mostly antp is the Flemish part of Belgium and I was there till I finished high school I grew up with I have a big brother who is 12 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 moved 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 because I wanted to have the New York experience and I never used my return ticket and 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 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 truce both are written by Primo Levy which was recommended to Me by The
Illusionist David Blaine who actually has Primo Levy'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 10 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 60,000 Jews in Belgium before the war the vast
majority of them were decimated throughout the war and in camps and so after the war a 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 both the sole survivors of their entire family which means 200 people
lost I guess on every side they were both the youngest in their families my mother was in the camps from 18 to 22 and my father from 25 to 31 actually because the war started very early for them so they came 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 with what's going on in our
country here and I am born later so when I am born in 58 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 20,000 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 yish German polish French and Flemish in my home depending on the subject matter we changed and depending on who was speaking to home the language changed but there were five vibrant interchangeable languages going 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 antp were actually are in the diamond business my family was among the 2% that were not
and so they had clothing stores and I grew up in the 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 in
Fort one of the ways I can describe it is my father when he turned 50 had two birthday parties one birthday party was for his Jewish Survivor friends that took place in yish 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 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 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 B Vivant you know they loved life they didn't survive for nothing they were going to enjoy at best and as I have often said
they understood the erotic as an antidote to death okay 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 they could make you laugh and they 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 five 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 I would say maybe
the strongest value in that Community or not the strongest one of the very strong values one was definitely decency you know 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 or are there anyella what did you just say yes dude do you want me to say this in anop dialect how would you say how are you in like what's up in who called it say that one more time who called it oh oh boy
yes I I'll save my embarrassing rehearsal for when we meet in person 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 going to tell my stories in English
that is a fantastic idea so thank you for that I love ly 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 that that would be the primary focus but and at other Soul Survivors what did they credit the survival to 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 18 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 labor 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 14 camps and my mother definitely so the rest of their families was either Gast in Treblinka or in aitz basically his
family in aitz her family in trinka my mother would say it was a combination of premonitions dreams she was very very superstitious 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 because it's going to be really really cold she had all these premonitions 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 aitz 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 me noticed the day before and they began some correspondence which I have no idea
how he wrote cuz 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 60 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 and factories meant 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 put him back in the kitchen and so he always said it was a combination of chance and Ingenuity Street Smart what he would call and doing for others doing for others gave 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 end 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 because if the others were not going to make it they 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 meting in
captivity at 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 bro 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 antp you know I remember since my entire
classroom with Children of similar families that there were always two groups of families in my 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 they did not die you could feel it when
you went to their houses you know they often had Plastics over the couches and the the curtains were pulled down it was morbid it was just you know you you're not dead but you're not celebrating your 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 antido to death how in the face of adversity do you continue to imagine yourself 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 ways 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 because if we have a child then 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 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 $110,000 in 99 she received $10,000 from one of the factories of slave labor and then like decades later she took the $10,000 and she went and planted an entire Forest that had just burned and
she replanted a 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 want to 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
in 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 child needs to be able to
trust in order to get off from your lap and to run into the world and to 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 want to also ask you about impermanence and I've tried to focus much more in a sense on things that are impermanent 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 BJ Miller who is a hospice care physician so he's helped more than a thousand people to die great guy he lives here we were at Ted together so 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 in an electrocution accident a few years before I went to school there I asked him what purchase of less than $100 had most positively impacted his
life in the last you know 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 going to paraphrase here but he said it was the fact that it went away and how
that encouraged you to enjoy something that you knew was impermanent 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 to savor 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 acious 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 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 cobic way which means I act as if I'm fearless but I'm actually petrified with
Dread please elaborate counterphobic I act as if I'm fearless counterop phobic means like I I act like it doesn't not nothing but like there's a lot of things I do that 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 going to be able to do this and I put the bike back but I was thinking how many times I do things thinking nothing's going to happen and at the same time as I do it I think at some point something bad is going to happen it's that what I mean it's like I live I you would think that then 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 going to happen every day I think something bad's going to happen do you wish that we're different or do you think that helps you in some way oh
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 an 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 right I expect it mhm that's what I mean it's like 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 a 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 18 18 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 hitched across the country for seven weeks in 1976 calculate you know in the bicentennial and uh at the time you could still h hike 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 and 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 a 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 19th century system it really was not at all a useful way of learning and I had done that already for 12 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 hot beds 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 theater 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 thought 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 of 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 the psychotherapy Symposium and I am doing an homage to my mentor but the mentor from America who is 95 and I have 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 what am I going to
say to one of the most influential teachers of my life we could also talk about that 95y old Mentor that's totally fine as well or both both both I mean it's an interesting question I am the product of mentorship this is true throughout from the Hebrew University to Cambridge massachusett to
studying with Salvador minuchin that's the name of this Mentor I have been mentored pretty much throughout but even in my adolescence 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 into in Belgian life who could help me believe in myself as well you know guide me my brother was 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 minuchin who is one of the fathers of the field of systemic family therapy how do you spell Salvador's last name minin m i n u c h i n got it minin
artinian I mean you know you're anointed when you have studied with him it's like studying with Freud but a century later I knocked at his door I arrived to New York I was here I know 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 going to tell tomorrow like at the time you could still knock at somebody's door and say I want to learn from you you inspire me and then he let me stay there 10 weeks and then after 10 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 and then it 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 by 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 sha who was at Princeton and was a very eclectic character he was similar in his appeal to me as Richard Fineman because they were so diverse in their interest 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
is 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 his classroom I mean I called I said I'm in New York and so and so suggested that I Comm 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 because 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 have been you know and then they show me not just I had like 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 21 year old you know and I had no papers I had no Visa I mean I was I came here with love and fresh water really and I
just and that's what I mean Street smile it's like you know Refugee go for it knock at the doors and if they say no come back again if 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 sense it's very know 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 10 weeks when
you said you're out and I said please please he 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 family and it was actually a holocaust survival family
working with the with the therapist behind the oneway mirror that's how we were learning at a time and then Som suddenly he looks at me and he says you there in the back don't you you know something about this he said what would you do you know and then I 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 that's amazing so spy is the word in Yiddish oh yes kpaa good healthy creative imaginative kPa yeah need morea I'm not saying it correctly and less it perfectly well less less mishas right is that Mish yes ex that's crazy but another you know 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 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 because 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 with these people or you know glass one 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 it can't be 10 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 4our body and and some
other projects because he heard me talking about things that I needed or read about certain projects I was going to be working on he said oh I just went ahead and did AB 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 oh okay that's very proactive 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 going to do this I've been reading you I've been listening to you something in the way
you say it strikes it right 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 mean 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're 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 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 at 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 describe does sounds similar so I promise to get back to this and I know people are going to want to dig into this we'll continue to bounce all over the place but you mention 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 the erotic is the meaning that you have tribute to sexuality it's the Poetics of sex it's not nature
Instinct primary force it's everything that gives it a meaning and in a context it's everything that turns 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
aliveness with renewal with life force with Vitality with mystery and that's when it becomes an antidote 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 AOS
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 the sex takes on a whole other dimension so for me to understand that I wasn't just working on sexuality because
I'm not interested in what people do theact 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 an orgasm and all the like and never touch anybody just cuz we can imagine it and that imagination is ability to transport ourselves outside of this moment that we are in into something completely different that is
the erotic El and I am very interested in that because because 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 that and you know when people complain about the listlessness of their sex lives they sometimes make come 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 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 80s and you do whatever 80y 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 a Liv 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 loaded 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 but I'm very good let to 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 half I have to or I feel like I have to suffocate a part of myself that subjugates my sex drive so that I don't wander and that 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 there are like four subtopics yes no exactly there there's 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 no it's it's 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 or 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 one leads 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 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 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 the way 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 right right and everybody goes around saying I'm monogamous in all my
relationships you know they just follow 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 to we have a bottle of sequential monogamy right you know 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 mhm 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 sex 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 certainly untie it you know loosen it up and redefine it now 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
tarted desires with their other attractions definitely they have them 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 most powerful reaction that people have today to that term and the majority of people have practiced proclaimed monogamy and clandestine adultery I mean that's been the dominant model sure you know the question is simply do people want to have a negotiation with themselves El
that is private and secretive or do people want to incorporate this as part of the conversation of coupl making at this point we not meant to have desire for one person for life for 60 years that is not how we were conceived neither way we ever conceived of having
60 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 is 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 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 you have and I think we can I mean we've we've got the time so we're
going to 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 going to 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 relationship
ship I'd say for the last 10 to 15 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
would consider monogamish 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 Al the time radical cander 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 is too much honesty and how do you think about that when you are advising 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 ear muffs cover your ears but there are people out there who can have a high tolerance for say what they would call compersion 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 doesn't work 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 want to 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 hot BS 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 be it 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 conflict 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 like for you want to live with the consequences of knowing and so you don't say certain things because you want to say facei 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 what about me kind of 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 trth 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 of 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 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 was that clear what I just it was clear no it was clear and I think the honesty does honesty or 100% 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 the answer is 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 is 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 don't have a right to enter another person you're invited in and 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 AJ 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 want to tell you want to tell that you fell in love with
someone else you want to tell that you realized 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 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 you partner you know that's the first thing and do you want to 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 guil is the guil that you realize that you don't have desire for your partner it's the guil that you realize that your partner must have been really terribly frustrated because you've been a terrible lover to your partner what is it and so the before I ever wouldn't 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 for your own conscience and then the other person can churn 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 your 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 thought 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 this honesty right there's simple omissions there's partial truths there's white lies there's blatant aisc 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 reversal in which sometimes you realize 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 TW T and Tangles of lines before you send people out because you can never take anything back right you know and the next thing that's going to happen you're
going to say I slept with someone and then they want to know how was it and then they want to know did you fall in love with that person and then they want to know maybe they don't want to know so slow down 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 there 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 veilance you
know people there's a a lot of effort goes into making something not mean anything paradoxically for sure so 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 going to go there and sit and we write a letter
and you're first going to hand write that letter and you're going to 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'd want to 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
experimented 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 and what are some of these strategies or coping mechanisms if so but what if I told you that the person
who experiences that fear more openly and is 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 n 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 your saying but but that doesn't mean that their strategy isn't in fact one that is meant to address an even bigger fear of Abandonment that the other it's just that in this relationship the other one is the one who gets to fill the
quota okay that Fe sure okay mhm you understand couples have complimentary 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 no I agree with that that's the secret of a lot of relationships no I agree 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 okay well 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 feel all your needs is very very painful to them and they bought into that idea in with 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
know 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 when both people have that same curiosity when both people experience
the fluidity as something that is additive and not something that's an anxiolytic 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 going
to stop hedging all my comments so obviously everybody listening 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 to that but doesn't have the same sexual drive necessarily as 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 am not seeing y number equivalent of people then the likelihood of him disappearing is is higher and the remember 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 fears that it's more likely to happen and 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 at least one of them is viewed as pretty unfashionable and so wanted to get your take on it so the first one is 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 60s been married for I want to say 20 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 continued talking he said the way 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 goes 1 to 10 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 going to
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 tenant 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 I'm 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 and attachment come in many forms and when you describe this example and you like it because of its measurements I would say I like it
because of its creativity because there's thoughtfulness 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 gets 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 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 coupledom does not benefit from the same Innovative spirit that every other company an entrepreneurial 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 loss 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 going to 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 emphasize my desire for flexibility to become part also of coupledom 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 right it 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 works extremely well it gives them enough privacy it makes them both know that there is still a primary loyalty and commitment there is an implicit sense of knowing where one can go how far one can
go etc etc 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 are rigid 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 maybe 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 criterias you go back and forth like aidos scopic 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 s satisfy other needs etc etc
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 negotiation 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 is a dynamic of power in all of these issues and the question is is there an equity in the decision making do both people feel that they have equal power in their ability to say 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 it's Authority 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 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 incing other Revenue 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 Rel 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 live for a while and then switch I wanted to say that I would say that to the polyamory people as well I mean it's like 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 60s and the 70s 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 and I think that the form you know can vary enormously you can have occasional hall passes you can have swingers who play with others you can
have established threesums forums 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 wild who said everything in the world is
about sex except sex sex is about power yes yes yes yes yes youth 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 20 countries
on book tour for mating and 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 wondering you know what do 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 seriously it's like and it took me a
while this is 10 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 thrs love affairs [ __ ] bodies 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 I see 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 El 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 MH you know it's not just that you're denying is 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 te is hot it's actually hot 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 it's really cruel actually it's a very common but it's a cruel thing to do I saw you know I'm 34 years a couple therapist I have 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 which has you know seven and a half million people in a year or two and I I
thought okay I've got 1500 letters I thought my God I'm 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 any experience with Affairs or infidelity you know nobody is going to lift their hand nobody's going to say I cheated or I've been cheated on so easily but if I ask the same audience have you been affected by infidelity in your life I probably
get 90% 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 you know 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 yes 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 you know and it is a one of the most complex Human Experience es 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 so related to that 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 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 constructive marriage because I have more and more difficulty as I see friends marriages imploding exploiting good people often faithful people it gets harder and harder for me yeah but Americans love to marry 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 fair enough you know
no matter how much 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 a two questions why is a deep meaningful connection with another human being with whom you weave a store you know along the stages of life that
is one thing does it need to take place within the construct of marriage is a very different thing agreed 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 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 50% of the time would you buy it and yet
that's what happens to marriage for you know 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 new things but I think there are very few rituals at this moment you know with the loss of traditional religion they're very few
rituals there have very few structures very few institutions 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 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 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 you know everything is about the self and the burdens of the selves are very heavy at
this moment so marriage has become that that institution that still tells you how how to go about about doing these things in life to me the very interesting thing when you ask about why marry I think about the gay marriage gay marriage really 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 constructs 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 butus in the same way the marriage is the buttress it's the fulcrum and I don't know if relationships actually that's would be an interesting thing to look at numbers do relationships that are not held
together by the contract of marriage do they dissolve anymore in Europe than they do here I'm not sure you know it's 52% or 48 at this point maybe it's gone down a bit on first marriage but the fascinating data is not first marriage it's 65% divorce rate on second marriages
65% yeah that is the much more interesting data yeah why yeah why why do you find it interesting because it touches on something else that I think is much more interesting as a certainly as a couple's 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 Etc 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 going to do it with but 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 50% failure rate perhaps you that the structure should also be a variable
under consideration I would say think absolutely but that's coupledom that's not that's not just marriage you know I I think that to me I am really fascinated by how creative having just written a book about infidelity I can tell you if people took 1% 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 imag and attention and focus and and generosity and kindness and desire it's like it's not marriage per se as
coupledom and for some reasons the expectations of coupledom have never been higher but what people invest in it hasn't really measured up bring the best of themselves not to their partner they bring the best of themselves at work to their friends 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 sometimes especially in my office I have to say do you treat your best friend like this right what what kind of BS is this 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
going to 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 allow people to then behave subar 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 so you have we can 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 talks and 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 vestage 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 yes yeah if you wouldn't mind describing that just a little bit yes I'm very excited about I 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 to also have you know the opportunity of letting people come into my office and actually be 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 island
sometimes the women may talk to somebody and the men talk to very few and so we have no idea what's in the anti- chamber you know of the couple and I did a series with Audible and we're going to do a second one already that of 10 couple 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 the people of your life your
partners or others about where you are in relation to these questions so say then they ask stories of infidelity and stories of sexuality and stories of raising children and stories of of infertility and stories of unemployment and it's it's a very very poignant experience because it's intimate in your
ear you don't see them but you hear them 10 couples who have volunteered to 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 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 every session starts indeed where should we begin and for people listening in the show notes I will have links to everything that I can get links to that we've discussed the podcast comes out
May 18 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 10 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 or the book I've probably gifted the most is Victor Frankle the search for meaning since I'm 16 that is a fantastic book and what
about reread 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 from I reread the erotic mind by Jack Moren I reread for this book I reread Madame bvari which was very disappointing how
I'll tell you what I reread that I L because one of my kids was reading it in school Crime and Punishment yeah no you can rad the Russians that that we just I don't they they are [Laughter] 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 sense could be whatever to get out to millions of people what would you put on that billboard or what might 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 I love it and any parting
comments requests of the audience could be the same thing that you just said but are 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 Health you know and it is the most powerful anti-depressant 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 no more powerful anti-depressant 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 coupl 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 and they say fix him do something you know 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 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 as snapshots of what I say in short what I often say long I'll tell you what I want is we have often these days is try to simplify things and I think what I try to do is create a conversation on
relationships and love and all of that at work as well as at home both levels of relationships in business in companies Etc 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 definitely say hello to Esther Esther Perell on Facebook Instagram Esther Perell official YouTube Perell Esther switch and I'll 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 thought
provoking 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 the books the podcast
everything imaginable in the show notes as usual with every other episode you can just go to tim. Blog 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
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