Trevor Noah's podcast, What Now?, has a new series.
It's called My Favorite People.
And well, I was on that list.
And that was already a real pleasure.
But then he said, OK, I want to have a conversation with you.
And then he said, but I would like to talk about you.
And if you know me and my work, you know I don't talk too often about myself because I like the stories of the people that I present to be the primary voice.
But here I agreed, which is also why I am putting this on our podcast, so that you can hear me for a change.
Not help other people talk about themselves, but talk about myself.
What occupies my mind, what I think about, what keeps me up, what gives me joy, what gives me sorrow?
Here's the thing.
Talking to Trevor Noah is being in a state of flow.
You turn around and two hours have passed.
There are people who, when you speak with them, you kind of clinch.
And then there are people that when you speak with them, something opens up a certain vastness and things flow out.
And you realize that you said a lot more than you ever intended to.
So that's what happened to me.
I hope you enjoy the show.
You know, in New York, you ask people how you are and they often tell you I'm behind.
Yeah, they tell you what they're doing, I find.
I find that's the biggest change is when I'm in New York or when I'm anywhere in the US if I ask somebody, and I notice it most glaringly when I come back from South Africa.
If I ask somebody, how are you or how are you doing?
They'll often tell me what they're doing.
You know, so I'm really busy.
And that's even how the people ask me questions.
So what are you up to?
What are you up to these days?
What are you doing?
What are you doing?
What are you?
What are you?
What are you?
It's all about that.
And as I say, when I go back to South Africa, it's all how are you?
In fact, if I go home and I start to talk too much about what I do, people don't like it.
It's like you're not there to talk about yourself so much and put yourself in the center.
You're there to participate in a collective experience in what we are creating together the afternoon, the lunch, the walk.
There's a clear distinction between talking about work and talking about life.
And life is not work.
Welcome to What Now?
In today's episode, I'm going to be having a conversation with one of my favorite people in the world, Esther Perel.
Now you probably know Esther as a psychotherapist.
As a best-selling author whose work has changed the way millions of people think about relationships sex, romance and intimacy all over the world.
But for today's episode, I wanted to do something different.
I wanted to chat to the person behind the name.
I wanted to hopefully give you an insight into why she is one of my favorite people.
And so today we talk less about Esther's work and more about Esther's life and how she got to the place that she got to.
And I really love this conversation because it really shows you how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves aren't always true and how the path that we choose to get us where we're going to get to isn't often how we end up where we end up in life.
I know you'll enjoy it.
Esther is one of the most profound people I know, so you'll definitely learn something from it.
Oh and, by the way, if you want to learn more about Esther's work or what she's doing right now, One of my favorite ways to engage in it is her podcast called Where Should We Begin?
It's a fascinating look into couples therapy and what couples are going through in real time.
So you in the therapy session with them.
That's where should we begin?
Check it out.
This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.
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It's 1930 and as a new era begins, the future of Downton is at stake.
Lady Mary is thrust into public scandal and shocking revelations shake the family to its core.
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Why did you call it that?
Because it's often the first sentence that I ask when I meet a couple.
Where should we begin?
Where do I find you today?
What's on your mind?
Maybe it's what you wrote to me.
Maybe it's completely different.
But where should we begin?
Because every relationship is a story.
Relationships are stories.
We are both storytellers in some way.
But, you know, we're sitting here in the studio.
The first years until the pandemic, we recorded every session in my office.
So people came in like every patient would have come in, except that they come for the podcast.
So they are not patients and never will be.
They sit in the waiting room.
They walk into my office.
And it's the same office in which I see people throughout the day for my practice.
So you're in the same mental space as well.
Yes, same chair, same mental space, same room.
And it really, I think, is what gave the podcast a tremendous voice of authenticity, because it was blended in with the other sessions that I do.
Most of the time, people are completely surprised to be sitting there because, you know, one person at midnight decided to fill in the form and was convinced that they would never hear from us.
And here they are.
And then there is the person that came with them.
And sometimes they have never heard of me.
Because you know, with podcasts one person listens and the other one doesn't know what you're listening.
It's not like there's a book in the house and you're reading that book.
You can listen to a podcast for years and your partner has no idea.
That is the first infidelity.
Exactly.
You're having a relationship under my eyes, you know, and I don't know anything about it.
So, it's different, but we have created an office here, too, in the studio.
And once it starts, I'm in the session.
I mean, there is just no world outside.
That's amazing.
Eight years we're doing it.
Congratulations.
Eight years.
Eight years of the podcast.
20 years of mating and captivity.
And how many years in the field, in practice?
40, almost.
40 years.
Wow.
What do you think people get from hearing couples therapy that they're not part of?
I mean, it's like entering the antechamber.
It's like going backstage.
It's the story that you hear about other people's relationships that you never know.
You really are like a fly on the wall.
So who really knows the truth about couples?
And these days especially, your friends can come and tell you they're breaking up and you never saw it coming.
And, on top of it, people are posturing and parading themselves all over social in these perfect situations.
So the real truth about couples is a secret often.
And when you listen to it, you feel less alone.
You feel like your issues are not your own, only that there are other people who have similar things.
You listen intently and intensely to them and you actually see yourself.
Even if it's not the same situation and the same story, there's always something where you say I can relate to that.
The thing I noticed is, just from my side...
Whenever couples would go out together, I always find they come back.
And I know I've experienced this.
You come back just a little more diffused.
You come back just a little calmer.
You come back.
There's something weird about knowing other people have problems that makes your problems.
And not in a like a schadenfreude way.
But I mean like sitting with another couple.
You talk.
And then I'm sure you know this.
But like I've always loved how.
One person will take the other person's point of view.
Another person will.
All of a sudden you'll find crossings where you know this husband agrees with that wife and that wife agrees with that husband.
And in a strange way, people go home feeling like their relationship isn't as bad or isn't going to as much because of other people.
That's one of the ways.
Sometimes they go home with the opposite experience.
But yes, there is a sense of it normalizes.
There is a sense of being in a kaleidoscope, that one partner sees themselves reflected in another or validated by another, or that you get to hear your partner differently because someone else is saying it for them.
And it's just, you get taken out of the cellar and the light shines and air comes in and it's very, very moving and powerful. i feel like these days and maybe it's a maybe it's because of social media i feel like these days people are sort of trying to win at relationships the same way people are trying to like win at therapy and you know maximize yeah yeah like like you i was talking to a friend the other night and i was saying do you remember it was actually uh simon cynic you know simon yeah yeah and simon and i were literally walking through the street and i said to simon Do you remember a time when people used to move for love?
I'm sure some people still do it, but it's less prevalent now.
It's less an idea.
It's even almost shunned on, you know, when people go, oh, I moved here for a boy.
Oh, I moved here for a girl.
People go like, oh, you should never do that.
You can't just move your... That's my story.
What do you mean that's your story?
I'm here because of my husband.
That's how you got to new york.
That's how i came.
Well, i came to america to study for one year, yeah.
I then thought i would stay a second year and kind of get more training, and then um, i basically never used my return ticket wow.
So i am that story.
What was it about him that made you stay?
Because staying in another it's one thing to visit another country.
It's another thing to stay in another country.
Because where were you living then?
Was that France or Belgium?
No, I actually came from Jerusalem.
Wow.
I came from Jerusalem.
You've lived everywhere.
I've lived in a few places.
I came from Jerusalem to Boston.
Wait, let's listen.
Where have you lived?
I've lived in Belgium, Antwerp, where I grew up.
It's not where I was born, but it's where I grew up.
I lived in Jerusalem.
I lived in Boston and I lived in New York.
It's not that many.
Okay.
It seems like many.
I feel like you have many homes, though.
Maybe it's a feeling.
It's the way you speak about some places that always makes me feel like you've actually lived there.
They were part of my life, even if I didn't live there.
Like Paris.
I went to Paris my whole life, every month sometimes.
It's part of my life, but I didn't have an address there.
So in that sense, Amsterdam would be a similar place.
Because once you're in Belgium, it's an hour to Amsterdam and an hour and 15 to Paris.
Three hours at a time.
I mean, these places, I like the way that Thayese Lassi talks about it.
She says, don't ask me where I'm from, ask me where I'm local.
Oh, that's beautiful.
And I think it's exactly that.
I'm local in a few places.
You're a little softer than the Paris I know, but maybe that's just how I see you.
Like I find Parisians to be very blasé about most things or they appear blasé.
But you have a little more like your eyes open a little more when you notice things or when you see things.
But I am very much not French.
I mean, I have a French accent.
I know that.
I'm educated in Flemish.
I mean, what you call Afrikaans.
You know, my entire 12 years of schooling was in Flemish.
I am from a Flemish city.
I'm from Antwerp.
We spoke five languages at home.
I mean, French is a big part of mine, of me.
But it's not the only one.
I don't know why I've always thought it was more you...
I think it's because of how you'll talk about love and seeing love through like a French lens sometimes.
Yes, that is true.
I think what I've always loved about French and the French and love is how differently you get to see something you know.
I mean, we have this in Zulu, you know, in South African languages.
I always feel like our greetings are more warm.
Our greetings say more than just like, hello.
Don't you have a beautiful expression, saubono?
Yeah, saubono means I still see you.
Yes, it's beautiful.
You know, and that's what I mean.
And I feel like French is like that for love.
Love, relationships.
Like, what's the word you spoke about?
I remember you saying it to me once.
Was it frisson?
Yeah.
Frisson, which is like the... It doesn't exist in English, a frisson.
We use the French word.
I don't think, I've never seen an equivalent.
I always think of it as friction, but I don't think it's not, right?
No, it's not friction.
A frisson is a shiver.
It literally translates as a shiver, but it's a shiver with anticipation, with excitement, with a kind of a current that runs through your body.
No, I mean, you've got me.
You've got me.
This is what I mean by frisson.
You see, this is the French thing.
It's like, it was that.
So it was, you know what it was?
It was frisson.
And then it was...
There's another one.
I loved it.
And I remember speaking to you about this.
It was in and around the Me Too movement.
And it was a specific word or phrase in French.
That sort of implied it was an understanding that somebody could tease you but could never give in to your whims or your wants.
I mean to flirt comes from the word fleuret, which is the tip of the sword.
That is actually meant to tease you.
That is flirting.
It's teasing.
It's playing with possibility.
It has no connection to scoring.
Yeah, you see, I think most people would disagree with that.
In the United States.
Yes, most people would disagree with that.
Because this is a pragmatic society trying to engage with the erotic arts.
Yeah, there are a lot of people who will say...
How could you?
Then why did you flirt with me?
That's right.
Then why did you lead me on?
I think that's the phrase a lot of people say.
Why did you lead me on?
And then Esther turns around and says, I wasn't leading you on.
I was playing with the tip of my sword.
Yes.
It's true that a lot of my...
Thinking about relationships love desire, passion.
All of that was very much shaped within a Francophone, a French context.
My adolescence was very much steeped in that.
But it's Latin as well.
It's not just French.
And it's not the pragmatic approach of that that is dominant here.
You get shit done, you achieve things, you're direct, you get to the point, you don't miss, you don't miss a beat, you don't beat her, you don't run.
What is it?
Turn around the corner?
It's like all of these things are about this unvarnished directness, to say it as it is, and that is not the way we think of The art of love and the communication around it and the way you express yourself and all of that.
It's really big cultural differences.
And I think I write from that place.
That's true.
I write, think, speak.
What do you love about America then?
Because you've lived here for how many years now?
35.
35 years you've lived here.
You engage in it in a very honest way and not in an America bashing way I've never found.
But I've always been intrigued by the paradox of like why you would – like why would you live here, when it is that direct and that immediate and it's all about the goal and it's all about the objective.
Like what about it made you fall in love other than meeting somebody?
I mean –
I definitely fell in love with New York before I came to stay here.
I had been here already.
The first time I came to the United States was in 1976, bicentennial.
It was kind of the first time that we began to travel to the U.S.
I came with a cargo airline.
I hitchhiked around the corner.
What does that mean, a cargo airline?
It was one of these airlines that... No, Esther, come on.
You came with like a DHL plane.
Yes.
That's not even a thing.
That's not a thing.
But it gets better.
I spent almost seven weeks hitchhiking across the country.
I saw America like one will never see it again.
I stayed with all kinds of people.
From every walk of life, every race, every religion, every profession, every class and every culture.
And really, I think that that was such a powerful experience.
I was 18, not even.
And at the time you could hitchhike.
Yeah, those were the good old days.
I was totally received by the kindness of strangers.
And really I went to parts of the country that I never even thought I would go because it wasn't in my.
I was originally going to do a greyhound tour on the bus.
But people were so kind that I ended up doing the entire trip hitchhiking.
I go from New York to the West Coast.
I do the whole loop of the West.
And this is all for fun?
Yeah.
I finished high school.
This was before going to college.
And I came with my boyfriend and we decided to travel.
But I didn't know it was going to be a hitchhiking trip.
Whoa, wait, wait, wait.
Okay, let's rewind.
You didn't tell me about the boyfriend.
No, no, no.
So hitchhikers were picking up you and the boyfriend.
Yes, yes.
I stood in the front.
Okay.
Yo, you pulled the move.
Oh, I love that.
I mean, his English was much better than mine.
But I can't tell you what the diversity of people that we met and how much this has influenced me to a certain kind of open-mindedness.
Well, you know, tolerance, curiosity, just curiosity before you make your judgments.
To...
To people who had never heard about Belgium, it's not like they knew where we were coming from.
2 a.m. radio stations where the amount of time they talked about the weather was just unbelievable.
And with affect, with feeling.
The only time they talked with feeling about things was about the weather.
And I did hours of these car rides, you know.
Staying with people in their homes.
How do you get into somebody's house?
People would say, where are you staying?
And you would say?
And I would say, I don't know, we will look for a hotel or for a motel.
And then they would say, do you want, you know, please, we have a room.
You can stay.
It's a very interesting way of establishing trust, connection, rapport.
I'm as strange to them as they're strange to me.
Really it was all positive, except one time where we figured out it was better to just get out of there.
But the rest of the time... You can't just skip through that.
How do you figure out something?
Because you kind of It's all, it's very, very intuitive.
It's like it doesn't sound, it doesn't feel right, it's around the corner.
But around the corner takes 15 20, 30 minutes.
You just know that something doesn't feel right and you just say thank you, so much, we'll get off here.
You know, it's not my first hitchhiking trip either and i've done others.
But you know, you asked me how i came and why i stayed, and I think that that experience was very influential in how I absorbed the US.
And I think, you know, things are often both ends, right?
On the one hand, you come as a European.
You have a whole respect for culture that is established a long time ago.
You value history, you value tradition, you value rituals.
But you also value to come to a place where people rarely ask you necessarily when I came and what have you done and who is your family and what's your idea what you want to do here.
And then You either have people who look at your CV and you don't fit and they say we can't.
Or you see people and say this girl, she has some ideas and she has some energy and ambition and we'll let her try something.
This is not what you get in Europe.
In Europe, we tried this and it didn't really work.
And that may take a long time.
And there's a lot of red tape and.
Because tradition and history are so valued.
Change and innovation and novelty is not necessarily instantly welcome.
Here, it's the reverse.
So when you come here as a 20-something year old and you have ideas and energy and you want to do things, it's incredible.
I mean, I...
Came to New York and I got a tremendous amount of money to make a documentary and to do a project on the relationship between blacks and Jews.
On the relationship between black people and Jewish people?
Yes, the psychodynamics of black Jewish tensions.
Can I tell you?
We're talking 84.
This is the year I was born.
And this is a fascination I've had for a very long time.
Yeah, that's you and me.
Yeah, literally.
No, can I tell you?
I mean, we don't have tension, but it is part of our…
I've grown up in this world where, obviously, I have a lot of Jewish people in my life.
I went to a school that was technically a Jewish school and definitely in a Jewish neighborhood.
Grew up, you know, and South Africa was weird in that once apartheid ended there wasn't an immediate mixing of people, but there was definitely a blurring of the lines.
And so the younger generation grew up in a world where we were all exposed to each other's worlds and cultures.
Nice.
So in my school the Jewish kids acted like they were Lebanese, but the Lebanese kids said things that were Jewish.
And these kids were eating that food and that food, and they were singing that song and dancing.
So it was this mix.
But I was always intrigued by the overlaps of black people and Jewish people in the world and the alliances and the tensions that would come with.
And then I remember reading, I think it was Malcolm X's biography.
And he speaks at length about, like the Jewish community and like this Jewish man who helped him and what he was doing.
And he was obviously becoming Muslim.
But it was still – it was an interesting – it's always been a fascinating look for me.
And I'd love to know what you were – what did you learn from the work or what were you trying to get from the work?
So I had – trained in psychology, and I was very interested in cultural transition.
Yeah.
And particularly in couples and families who are in cultural transition.
And that included people who move, who immigrate either voluntarily or forced migration internationals.
But also in the middle mixed couples, mixed families interracial interreligious, intercultural families and relationships.
Interracial, interreligious and intercultural.
Okay.
That really was the bulk of my work the first 20 years.
The first 20 years?
Yes, yes.
Before I touched mating in captivity.
Before I began to talk about culture and sexuality.
Yeah.
And...
And I wanted to understand the differences between forced migration and voluntary migration.
I wanted to understand.
Mixed couples are in cultural transition, but they do it in their own living room.
And they don't have to move across the border, but it's happening.
And so I arrived here and I did a project, a research project on that and on multiculturalism in many different parts of the world.
And then I had done a lot of work on minority majority relations.
I came from groups, then to families, then to couples.
So majority minority relations.
And I thought, but black Jewish relations, it's minority minority relations.
Now, I am 25.
I have been here three months.
I don't think this would ever happen today, that somebody would let this person out of nowhere with not from here.
But there was something about my naivety that I think kind of worked in my favor in a way, where I just was curious because I didn't identify necessarily with American Jews and I certainly am not black.
And so I did this two year project on minority minority relations.
And what is the psychodynamic of two groups who have experienced in their own way Massive amounts of discrimination?
And you know, and what are the dynamics, you know.
And then I did a documentary about that, a little film, and that would never have happened in Belgium.
I mean, that doesn't happen.
Why?
What doesn't happen?
Because that somebody out of nowhere comes and says, I have an idea.
And that somebody says, here, I found you.
Go ahead and show me what you can do.
And the same thing is happening with me today, that people find me.
And just talk to me directly.
And this week I get an email.
I'm a college student.
I'm about to study couples therapy.
I would love for you to tell me what I should study, what I should focus on, who I should meet.
And I'm like, how did you find my email?
Of course, I totally know how you found my email.
But it's like.
The idea that you could do this rather than calling the dean, can I talk to the professor?
It's much less hierarchical in the way that we are internalized systems.
But it's all relative.
It's not like it doesn't exist.
I just want to make sure that this is not taken in an absolute way.
But that was my experience of why I really liked it here.
I felt everybody in New York came to do something.
I mean, you come to New York to do things, be it in art.
You don't come to New York to live.
I mean, yes, you can live the New York life, but you come because you have energy to do something.
There's refugees of every sort in this place.
So you start to meet the most amazing people.
I have a lot of other things to tell you.
I'm not always so positive.
You know, the people who know me well are going to be very amazed to hear me make many positive statements.
Yeah, because I've heard you speak at length about all these things, but I've never, ever asked you and I've never heard you talk about you.
Know what it is that gripped you about?
This is beautiful because even in my short life…
And I would see some of my dearest friends.
And I'm curious if you have that too.
When you go home to South Africa, you see the people that you've known your whole life.
But basically, at 25, they were living not that different from how they would live at 45.
And at 45, they were already living like...
And I thought they already know what the future is going to be like if they're healthy and all goes well.
This is kind of their own linear trajectory.
In New York or in the States, you have no idea.
You can start this way and suddenly you're, I mean, you know, this is kind of what happened to me.
I think it's what happened to you.
It And I can't imagine that literally happening in the same way in Belgium.
I agree.
I agree with you.
I think in many ways in Europe what I felt Africa might be different in some ways, but it definitely has elements of it.
In Europe specifically, I know it's all about what was.
And I find in the U.S. it's all about what could be.
That's constantly the dance.
But then I find Europe comes with a certain measure of breathe into it because it is what was.
As long as it matches it, then you can relax.
So the way people treat their summers and their time off, there's a certain level of patience and calm that comes with it, because they know that it always was that.
In America, there's a certain edge of maybe I'll work on a Friday.
You know what?
I'm going to work weekends.
You know what?
No time off.
I'm just going to push a little bit more.
And I think both of them come with their pros and cons.
The one metastasizes you.
Yes, yes, yes.
The other one liberates you.
But I think everything needs to bounce off something, right?
Too much liberation is now just chaos.
And then too much of a metastasized system is, I guess it's just stuck in time.
It doesn't move and it doesn't evolve.
I'm always trying to play with that balance just in life.
How many times do you want to evolve, change, move, grow, move on to the next thing?
And how many times do you just want to sit and say yeah, you know what Tuesday will be like Friday will be like Saturday, and let's see.
Every.
I mean this is something I teach.
Actually, you know, when I teach systems, I say every system, every relationship system, being an individual or an organic system in nature, straddle stability and change.
If you change too much, too fast, all the time, you dysregulate and you go chaotic.
If you don't change, you fossilize and you die.
So you need both.
I think in the US, you are often on the treadmill and you're moving very, very, very fast.
One thing I never lost was the idea that I live for the summer.
And I leave not for 10 days.
I leave for six weeks.
And people always would say, I don't feel guilty.
And I never understood why I should feel guilty.
You take time off.
And I maintained that notion of the breathing, the space in between, the time to do nothing except dream.
Reimagine your life, think what else you want to do.
And that form of reset, I never stopped.
And I traveled back home a few times a year.
And that was the essence of it.
It's like you go there not to do necessarily, but to be.
To enjoy the company.
You don't have to prove anything.
You don't live to work.
And that is still very much present.
And I try to bring some of that back with me here.
I try to have it as part of my life.
And...
It's a privilege, really, to be able to straddle boats, really.
I didn't think about it like that.
At first, when I was young, I would go home and I would think ah, they all know where they belong and I don't know where I belong.
Wait, what do you mean by that?
Like they never.
You know, in my mind there were two groups of people those who never left and those who left once.
Once you've left, once you know that they're more than one place and you no longer have that sense of roots.
Yeah.
So I would look at my friends who stayed and I would think they have such a clear sense of where they're going.
Of course, it was linear, but I envy that piece of there.
And then But after a week, I thought, oh, now I'm restless.
Now I want to go back.
I want to go back to my life.
And I would get all busy.
And so I...
For a long time I wanted to have the freedom of being in two places, but I wanted to still have the sense of rootedness and belonging that is part of belonging to one place.
And over time, decades maybe, I slowly began to actually appreciate that.
That I was part of many places, even if I didn't necessarily belong to all these places.
You know that distinction?
No, I like that.
I'm just trying to think of it.
I'm trying to process it.
Like it's a part of me.
Yes.
But I am not just that.
If you want to know me, you need to know this and this and this.
It's various things.
It's all the different parts of you that make you who you are.
The locations, the languages, the stories that accompany it.
I think probably you too.
I think so.
You know, I'm trying to think of how it works for me.
I mean, what part of your Americanness travels with you to South Africa?
So I think I think really kind of no, no, no, no.
So I because I spent so much because I lived my whole adult life there.
I'm very good at being South African.
You know, it takes me a week and then I'm into the groove.
The one thing that I will say that I've inherited from America, which I'm always grateful for, is the idea that there's the possibility to do it, even if it does not currently exist.
Yeah.
You know?
Like this project that was described.
Exactly.
There's always this idea of, but what if you could do it?
But what if you could do it?
It doesn't exist, but what if you could do it?
And I think of how crazy that notion is.
Everything that is at some point wasn't.
Now we treat it like it's normal.
But there was a time when it just wasn't.
So I think I've probably adopted that.
What else is it?
There's also some negative things that I think you adopt.
If I'm aware enough, I can leave them behind.
America will make me feel like I have to be actively engaged in everything all the time.
There's a certain FOMO-ness to America as a whole.
It doesn't matter what it is, business, Are you missing out?
Are you not doing the thing?
Are you not engaged?
News, have you kept up?
Do you know what's happening?
Has it broken?
Is it breaking?
Is it live?
Is it happy?
That's always going on.
It doesn't matter what – even small things like food.
Have you tried that place?
You've got to try that place.
Oh, my God, I can't believe you haven't tried that.
Why haven't you tried that place?
There's a certain –
Drive.
Yeah, but an urgency more than just a drive.
There's an urgency to be part of and to not miss out on that I don't experience when I'm back home.
When I'm back in South Africa, it's different.
Because when you live in a more collectivist culture, the culture drives you.
You don't have to go and attempt everything and be part of everything in order to know that you exist, because you are absorbed by a larger tradition.
I think that is part of the individualism here.
And part of the individualism is also.
You know, once I had a family.
I had a very different experience here, because you have to do everything yourself.
It's not just you have to keep up with the news.
You also have to pay for your education.
You also have to pay for your health.
You are responsible for everything.
And when you come from a social welfare system, that is a very different experience.
The idea with which people take it for granted that they have to...
I put all the infrastructure in place.
A marriage.
Here is a social welfare state of two versus.
You know, there's a social welfare state that exists as part of the system.
And within that, you create a family that puts an enormous burden on people.
Enormous.
We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.
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Did you always think you would do this?
No.
What was the idea?
I find that there are almost three different stages that people project themselves in.
One is when you're very young.
What did you think you would be when you were a young child?
What did you want to be?
Oh, I think I had three things.
I either was going to be an interpreter because my mom said you speak all these languages, you like to travel.
Interpreter will give you both.
A journalist, because I was curious.
And a theater actress.
I love the theater.
But I think, honestly, for me, there's the people who've always known what they wanted to do.
The people who just stumbled upon something.
And then the people who had an inclination, and then they matched it with what life put in front of them.
And because of the obstacles, because I didn't have the right license and I couldn't do what one would have done normally.
I love that.
If I had studied.
So necessity became the mother of invention.
I had to hustle.
I had to create myself.
I had to find a way to do.
And so it became a kind of a combo between what I bring and what life is putting in front of me and says do this now.
So the friction is the reason we have, yeah, you see, this is what I mean.
No, it's amazing.
My producer loves a story.
He was telling me that there's a story you told.
I guess that paints a picture of a little bit of a life that most people wouldn't associate you with at first glance, but I do think it explains a lot of your style and how you see fashion and everything.
How did you get into and not fashion the way people think of it, but what is your relationship with fashion?
My parents had a clothing store.
They had clothing stores.
I lived above one of the stores.
I worked in the store. pretty much since I could talk.
What type of clothing was it?
Everything I wear, everything you wear.
Okay, so just like a mix of... A good clothing store.
But, you know, my brother opened the first boutique in antwerp, which was the first time that young people were dressing separately from adults, like when you were little.
You had a suit with short pants yes, and you just wore what the adults a smaller version, smaller version, exactly.
And then in the 60s, suddenly you began to wear your own the jeans, The Shetland sweater, you know.
And so my brother opened the first boutique in Antwerp where young people went to dress separately from the older folks.
And I lived my life with the change of seasons by looking at the change of windows.
And I accompanied my dad to the manufacturers to pick up the merchandise and the collections.
And I went with my brother to Paris all the time to get the merchandise and to look at the fashion shows.
So I kind of grew up in a fashion business, in a clothing business.
And there was a tremendous amount of attention.
But I also sat in the store and watched my mother sell clothes.
Because the stores were open till 8 o'clock and 9 o'clock at night.
And my mother worked in the store.
Was that common back then?
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes.
Every day till 8 and Friday and Saturday till 9.
Wow.
So if I wanted to see my mom, I had to be in the store.
I sat on the chair and I watched her sell things. dress people, tell stories.
People told their whole life story, you know.
I went with my dad to bring suits to people who were dead, you know, and families who were mourning, before they were going to the burials and the cemeteries.
I mean, I really learned about life through clothes basically um, and i'm the only one in the family that didn't enter the, the business, the family shop why Was it because something pulled you more or was it because something pushed you out of it?
We lived above the store and I just thought, we never get rid of this thing.
It's with us at every meal.
That's all you talk about when you have a family shop.
Anyone who has a family.
And I just thought, I want a profession I can carry on my back.
I want a profession that I can travel with and I can... you know, do it.
You wanted the store to live above you.
Yes, yes.
And I can do it anywhere I go.
The thought of being tethered like that to this place, because then I had an office and a private practice.
So it wasn't, you know, until until you know, Skype started.
Yeah, yeah.
But, That was the main idea.
I remember saying to my parents, I want a profession that I can carry on my back.
And here you are.
I could be wrong, but I feel like there was the mating in captivity Esther, who came onto the scene and, in many ways, gave people their first look at an idea that went beyond the flat way they looked at.
That's the title of my first book.
We should probably explain.
Oh, Mating and Captivation.
Oh, for those who don't know, it's a book.
Yeah, it's a book.
And for those who don't know… It has its 20th anniversary next year.
Congratulations.
Wow.
Yeah, but I think it was one of the first pieces of work that changed people's flat perceptions on…
Not just relationships, but infidelity, the infidelity of the mind.
And for a moment in time, that's sort of how I think a lot of people thought of Esther.
And that sort of was, yeah, it really was your conquest at the time.
It was the journey that you were on.
Now I feel like you have this passion and this laser focus specifically around community, the village, reconnecting with people, finding people.
I actually thought about you the other day because I walked past a laundromat.
And I literally thought to myself, I need to talk to Esther about this.
What did you see?
I have this theory in my head.
I think we have neglected or we have gotten away from two elements in life that have robbed us of intimacy and we didn't realize that it's a second system effect.
And those are need and friction, right?
And when I looked at the laundromat, I saw both, but in different ways.
The main thing I saw was friction.
And I thought it's amazing how now We live in a world where if you live in a building, you want the building to have a laundry.
You know, in-unit laundry, whatever it is, washer dryer.
And when I looked into the laundromat I thought ah, imagine how many love stories wouldn't have happened if people didn't have to come and wash their clothes.
Imagine how many friendships would have never been sparked if people didn't have to come and watch.
And it's friction.
It doesn't seem like the right ingredient to get there.
But when I looked into that laundromat, I was like, oh, wow, what a cool organic way to meet.
Because you're stuck with somebody for three hours and you might find you with them every single week.
At some point, you might just say hi.
At some point, nice to see you again.
Hey, you left your... I put the coins in the dryer.
And I literally thought of you and I was like wow, I wonder if this is part of what Esther's fighting.
Well, not laundromats, obviously, but... Friction.
Friction.
Yes, the importance of friction.
That is definitely a piece I talk about.
But if you want to go back for a moment, so...
I had been a couples therapist for quite a while when I wrote Mating in Captivity.
I just had not focused on sexuality and the cultural story that supports our expectations around sexuality, around desire, around eroticism in long-term relationships.
I took a kind of a side road and I just thought I want to explore this, because I had been trained in certain ways to think about sexuality in relationships.
And I just thought, is that really true?
I mean, is that the way it works?
Because that's not what I see in my office.
And I don't think it's what other colleagues see in their office.
Wait, you're saying your training wasn't matching up with what you were seeing in the real world.
Oh, I had always assumed it was your training that had informed you.
No, not at all.
That's part of why the book became so significant, because it actually questioned a whole set of questions, suppositions that were parading as truths when they were actually not.
Give me an example.
Sexual problems are always the consequence of relationship problems.
If you fix the relationship, the sex will follow.
That happens sometimes.
But I had seen many couples who got along much better and it changed nothing in their bedrooms.
Because the politics of the bedrooms are not the same as the one in the kitchen.
Because love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict sometimes.
And how do we negotiate and reconcile security and adventure, love and desire?
That was the subject of This first book.
And then I began to think, well, what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere?
And that became the book about infidelity.
And I thought here too, there's a whole set of ways that we think about infidelity that don't help a ton of people.
And I would ask audience after audience if they've been affected by the experience of infidelity in their lives.
And 85 90 of the people would raise their hands, either because a parent was, or they were the child of, or they were one of the three protagonists, or they were the friend.
So this is not just a few people. rotten apples on the side.
And people are gutted by this.
And I thought there needs to be a better way to help people deal with the crisis of affairs and the breaches of trust and the violations and all of that.
And then, And then.
These are still two books.
That basically presumes that people will be in relationships, or at least those are the people I wrote for, or people who seek to be in relationships.
And then I became I went back to the origin of my work actually, which was I'm a systemically trained therapist who looks at relational systems.
And I began to see our relational systems differently and our relational lives is changing fundamentally.
It is one of the most important pieces of the future I'm interested in, the future of relationships.
Let's go back to, you said systems training.
So help me understand, what is the difference between... Psychoanalytic and systemic?
Yeah, I wouldn't even know the names.
So psychoanalytic and...
Systemic.
Systemic training was the.
I mean it exists in cybernetics.
It exists.
It borrowed pieces from cybernetics and feedback loops and looked at relationships and relationship problems or problems in families and couples as they are connected to the context.
How is the system organized that keeps this problem organized?
In place versus going just intra psychically, intra inside yourself, looking at your own personal story rather than looking at what is actually happening between me and you.
That's a very different interpretation.
Looking at how.
Are we interacting in such a way that our communication is really fraught or that we end up both being rejected at the end of every conversation, rather than just what happened in my history and what happened in your history?
It's understanding.
That's it.
Problems occur in a context.
You look at how is the system organized around these problems, and it is interpersonal and not just intrapersonal.
Got it.
And that to me was the beginning of thinking relationally.
Hence community, friction and all of that.
If I look at the line...
I've been looking at what happens between people and not just inside of the people.
And our mental health models have been very, very focused on what happens inside people.
And the idea is that if I'm better with myself inside, it will solve all the problems between you and I.
If I am more at peace with myself, I'll be nicer to you.
If I like myself more, if I'm more selfish, et cetera.
And that is sometimes the case, but it is not the whole story.
But the whole story is also the opposite.
If I'm actually, you know, engaged with you, I'm less likely sometimes to think about myself all the time and to find meaning in doing things for others and to find relevance and to even get confidence because of how other people see me, rather than stand alone in front of my mirror and try to say to myself you're worthy, you're worthy.
So that is the big divide at this moment.
That is really an essential division.
And then comes technology.
And then comes, you know, climate change and migration and all of the big geopolitical issues.
And they all are influencing the way that we are relating to each other.
And then, instead of just calling it relationships, I began to think no no, it's relational intelligence.
That's really where I am now.
And that's not the same as emotional intelligence.
It's really looking at the whole system.
Relationships are all relationships have expectations.
They have boundaries.
They have room for creativity.
They have, you know, a dimension of accountability and responsibility.
They straddle how we negotiate the self and the other, my needs, your needs.
You know how much I connect to you without losing me and how much I connect to me without losing you.
All relational systems have hierarchies, have roles.
It's a map.
And what is happening to these systems in light of technology, in light of AI, in light of the fact that and now we get to the friction that most of the predictive systems technologies are aiming at reducing friction.
Yeah, and they want you to have a polished smooth, frictionless delivery of your every delight on demand, and that is fundamentally changing how you and i relate to each other.
Yeah, for me personally, I just noticed Is that a long story for a?
No, it's great.
Does that give you how I got to where I am?
Yeah, I think it does.
Because I think a lot of people are experiencing this, but I don't think we understand why we're experiencing it.
And I also think most people are being blamed for it, either from the outside or they're blaming themselves.
So I think a lot of people are sitting at home saying…
I can't make friends.
I don't know people.
I don't have a community.
I'm lonely.
I'm depressed.
I'm this.
I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm.
And then they're blaming themselves.
But no, I think very few people are thinking about the laundromat.
Very few people are thinking about what it means when your food gets delivered to your house, versus when you had to walk and go and get the food.
And I don't mean it in like an old man way.
In my day.
You know, I just mean like, I mean like the conversation that you have with the person at the store.
Oh, yeah.
It's just like that little weak tie that builds something in your world.
It's a little...
I always think of it as planting the seeds for serendipity.
That's how I think of it.
Because you never know which one will grow and which one won't.
But even in comedy, I'll always say to my friends, things go wrong all the time in my life, right?
You're traveling, you have to cancel a show, or a thing goes wrong at the show, or whatever it is.
Whatever it is.
And my friends will say to me, how are you always so chill about it?
And I go.
I'm not necessarily chill, but I have practiced telling myself that all of this is inevitably going to be comedy.
The friction is the comedy.
There's no good comedy that comes from an you know a beginning and an inevitable conclusion.
Yeah, it doesn't work.
I went to the store and I looked for the size that I was looking for and they had it and I bought it and my card went through and I went home and I put it on and it looked great.
No story.
There's no story because there's no friction.
But give me obstacles.
Exactly.
That's the same as the erotic formula.
Attraction plus obstacles equals excitement.
Oh, wait, hold on, hold on.
Attraction plus obstacle equals excitement.
Yeah.
It's the same in the rules of desire.
You know what's funny?
If there's no obstacle, if there's no friction, we're going back to what we said.
I remember once having a conversation with a stripper.
It was the most random conversation.
And I said to her I said why do you put your clothes back on?
And it was just a joke, right?
Because, like we, all of us are in this club and here we are for a bachelor party and this person dresses and then undresses, and then dresses and then undresses.
And i just said, as a joke, i said why do you put your clothes back on?
It would be more efficient to keep them off.
And she said yes, but you'll be surprised.
I think i won't articulate as well as she said it.
But she said you'll be surprised at how The men aren't turned on by us being naked.
They're turned on by the idea of us becoming naked at some point.
And she was like, that's essentially what we're playing with.
And now when you say it like that, I go, oh, yeah, it sounds like the same thing.
It's the attraction.
The obstacle is the clothing and whether or not it will come off or when it will come off.
And that creates the excitement.
Correct.
That's a good analogy.
Yeah.
Of course.
Whose bachelor party was this?
Oh, what do you mean?
This is the most common thing.
Of course.
It's like, you know, people are like bachelor party.
It's actually more common in the US.
I don't think I ever got invited to a bachelor party at a strip club in South Africa.
Not what do they do?
I think it's more of a, you have what we call a braai, like a barbecue, and you hang out.
But I don't think it's a.
It's funny actually, now that you're asking me it isn't seen as an ending of a life.
Does that make sense?
So I find a lot of American bachelor parties are.
Well, this is the last time you get to explore sex and craziness and eroticism and all of it.
So you better enjoy it.
One last ride.
That's right.
You're about to enter the marital cell.
There you go.
Yeah.
And your monastic life.
But I don't remember anyone saying that in South Africa.
I don't remember anybody saying you're going to get married.
So no more sex for you.
Kiss your sex life.
That was never I don't think it's ever even been framed like that.
It was more it's more the coming together of families.
That's what people focus on.
They go oh, now you are welcoming another person into your family or the other side is becoming part of your family.
I think that's so strip club wouldn't make sense for combining families.
I want to go back to the laundromat.
I love the place.
I think the laundromat or other places like it the bookstore, the coffee bar, the train station, the train itself.
I mean, there's so many places for that friction.
I think that that's where I'm positioning myself today.
I'm placing myself at the door.
I want you to come outside.
Do you know one of them to come outside and go to any of these places?
The statistic that really stayed with me recently is an article.
It's called The Antisocial Century by Derek Thompson.
And he's 74 percent of food that is cooked in a restaurant is not eaten on the premises.
That's the new number.
And that woke me up.
An increase of 30% of people eating alone in the restaurant.
Now, eating is one of the oldest worldwide gatherings, traditions of coming together with others.
It's friction of every sort.
And the fact that we are going to order from the restaurant and then bring it home and eat it many times alone.
Yeah.
That's a problem.
So this is all I'm going to do now.
From now on, is the future of relationship getting people to not feel so lonely, so isolated.
So locked up in their houses, so defeated by relationships.
And so transferring their expectations for algorithmic perfection into their relationships.
They want people to become perfect and predictable like the technologies.
And we are by our very nature unpredictable people. and imperfect.
And that is part of the beauty of being human beings.
It's exactly that.
If there is no obstacle, there's no story that's of any interest, let alone comedy.
And I think that we're saying something that is quite...
It's more important than we even let onto this friction piece.
Yeah.
You know, because that's the plot.
You tell stories and they have a plot, and the plot is built by all this.
Unpredictability is an obstacle, be it in the sexual plot, or be it in the comedy plot, or be it in the relationship.
It's really important.
What are we going to do otherwise?
What's going to happen to us?
I think the difficulty though, is realizing the value of it in the moment.
I think that's what's hard.
There's a fantastic professor.
I think he actually has a course on happiness or fulfillment or something of the sort.
A Swedish professor.
I think his name is Dahlen, Michael Dahlen.
He broke it into three.
Carrots, ice cream, and insects.
And he was referring to these little insects that you could buy at Disneyland, apparently.
I'd never heard of them.
But it's like a chocolate-covered insect.
And it's all the rage.
And people buy them.
But he found that there was a large number of people who never ate them.
A lot of people bought them but never ate them.
And so he broke it down into carrots, insects, and ice cream.
And in all the research what he found was, if you ask most people what they want to eat for their next meal or for the meal in 10 years, they say carrots.
I should be eating more carrots, right?
If you ask most people what they wish they had eaten, it was insects.
And then if you ask most people what they want to eat now, they say ice cream.
And it was just a beautiful, simple way of looking at the way we avoid friction.
He went.
We know theoretically what we want for ourselves in the future, what will be the healthiest or the best.
We also know that we regret not taking the road less traveled.
The crazy idea, the moment that didn't necessarily make sense.
But in the moment, for the most part, we are more predisposed to choosing the immediate relief.
And so when I think about friction, I think of it in the same way.
If you, as Esther, say dating apps, you go, Trevor, don't use a dating app.
I know myself and a lot of people would say yeah, I agree with you Esther, because in the future I think to myself, I would love to meet someone organically, etc.
In the past I would have loved to taken a chance, tried something different, explored beyond my.
You said what was the culture religion race, all these things?
But in the moment, oh, it's so easy to just swipe.
It's so because it's the ice cream.
And we never feel good after the ice cream.
And then we always regret the ice cream.
But we always fall back into them.
So that friction, like I love that you're positioning yourself there because I think.
But friction is connected, I think, to the big issue of the moment, which is uncertainty.
Because friction is what makes you have to experiment, deal with the unexpected, deal with the unpredictable, deal with the lessons of making all kinds of bad choices.
It helps you deal with uncertainty.
Dealing with uncertainty is what helps you deal with anxiety.
Oh, wait, wait, wait.
Say that again.
Dealing with uncertainty is what helps you deal with anxiety.
In what way?
Because if you become more adept at dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable, then you develop a sense of confidence.
It's what you just described when you get to a show and you had to cancel something or the flight was late.
You have a stance that basically says, I know what I can control.
I know to handle the unknown and the unpredictable.
And I know that it will land in my comedy because it will become part of the story.
Now I'm annoyed maybe, but you don't get completely frazzled.
You absorb it.
You have a shock absorber.
And that shock absorber is what allows you to not be as anxious about the unknown, about mortality, about the unpredictable, all of that.
You know, having all the answers in the palm of your hand is not making us less anxious.
It's making us more anxious because we no longer...
Making bad choices, discovering something, realizing we don't like it.
We begin to expect immediate, perfect answers for everything.
And relationships and life, our existence doesn't operate this way in many aspects.
Some of them do, but the majority of things are way more complex than that.
So this piece of uncertainty, matched with all the changes that are happening at full speed, are making us very, very fraught.
And that to me, because everybody wants to talk about the loneliness epidemic, but people are not necessarily addressing what I think is the other piece, which is how do we deal with so much uncertainty all at once?
And when you can't deal with uncertainty and you don't have the resilience to help you with anxiety, then you don't know how to deal with frustration conflict, differences.
And then you become more intolerant, and then you go to look for people who sell you certainty.
And that comes with certain political regimes as well.
You want somebody who's going to help you feel more certain.
I'm going to solve this for you.
So to me, that's all interconnected and that's happening on a geopolitical level and it's happening in relationships.
And so to just look at the dilemmas of mating in captivity is not enough anymore for me.
I think there's something bigger happening that is touching at the core of our existence.
Every research tells you that you only live longer and you live better when you have meaningful relationships and people are having less and less of it.
What is the system that made you this way?
I've always wondered.
What was little Esther like when your parents would talk about you?
How were you with other kids or how were you in the house?
Was your world certain or was it more uncertain?
My world was certain, but my parents' world was a world that was completely decimated.
So predictions happened.
So I think it's two different things.
On the one hand, one of the most important aspects of my life.
My background is that I am a child of two Holocaust survivors, and my parents were the sole survivors of their entire family.
Jeez.
So my mother was the youngest of seven.
My father was the youngest of nine.
Nobody, nobody, nobody survived but my parents.
So they definitely dealt with uncertainty and they dealt with the unknown, and they dealt with a world where you have no idea where kindness will come from and where order will be restored and where humanity will come back, and all of that.
So I have all of this in my background.
They each spent four years in concentration camps.
I think that all of that is extremely important in how I look at the world, how I look at who is good and who is not.
Right.
Who thinks of others, who doesn't, who can be kind.
How much is our ideology defining who we are, versus how much does our behavior and our actions actually define who we are?
All of these big questions.
But then I think in addition, whenever I see dogma or groupthink or mass psychology or crowds, I tend to think there must be something else.
There must be another way.
Is this really so?
Or is this just so because that many people think like it?
Hmm.
And I think it's the combination of those things.
I act very fearlessly, but I am not.
But I act fearlessly.
So I guess you act courageously then.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I never saw it like that.
But yeah, potentially.
Because that's what courage is, right?
Acting in spite of the fear.
I think of myself as counterphobic.
Do you know that term?
No.
So you can be phobic, you can be fearful.
And counterphobic is when you actually do the things that frighten you the most.
How do you find the balance between that and living life with a reckless abandon that causes danger to you and others?
Because some things scare you for the right reasons, don't they?
Yes, of course.
Like when you were hitchhiking you didn't go with that one person because something scared you in some way.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean…
You always want to keep judgment.
You have a healthy dose of skepticism.
You don't believe what everybody tells you.
People will say this in different ways.
They'll be like, go to the thing that scares you.
And then I've like, I mean, you know, and I've been public about this, but I always think to myself I go, I wish my mom was a little more scared of domestic abuse.
Because then I wonder what it would have changed in my family.
And I talked to her about this.
You know, and i'm glad i spoke about it publicly, because people have even spoke about it publicly as well now with me they go yeah, when do you allow the fear to control you or to inform your decision?
And how do you know when it's a good fear, when it's a bad fear, like This is?
You don't always know.
I mean, you have a sense, you look around, you ask other people for a reality check.
When I am very worried about things, I ask for a reality check.
I also know that in my stomach lives a real long history of fear and that I can have very strong reactions to situations.
But I also know that the legacy of this precedes me.
And then what do I do with it is a different thing.
But I think...
When do you know if your fear is valid?
It's a fear.
So what helps you with fears is grounding yourself in reality.
How do you trust reality?
Generally, it helps to have other people around you to help you.
Is what I'm seeing what you're seeing too?
I mean, it's a check.
And the check is not always done alone.
You're not always the best person to actually know.
Or at least for yourself, you can be perfectly perceptive for others.
But for yourself, you don't necessarily know because you sense a lot of things.
In football, we say men aren't.
What is that?
I've always loved that.
It's one of the reasons I love playing football.
Yeah.
Soccer or football?
Soccer, soccer.
I mean, that's, you know.
Our football.
Yeah, football.
One of the things I love about football is I always go, for me, it's a perfect allegory for life.
Because it's one, you are the individual.
Everything you do individually matters to you and to the team.
However, you cannot do anything without the team.
And things will happen because of the team.
So you're part of a system.
And so it almost ties in those two ideas, where one is completely what am I doing as a player and why did I do that, or why am I going to do that?
But the other one is you have to do it in relation to others and you have to understand why.
So you can kick a great pass, but if your teammate doesn't reach it, there was no point in kicking it, you know.
And there's one.
When you talk about your community, you just say man on or man, and it means you're being marked by something that you may not be aware of and the people around you can observe you better in the situation than you can because you have your blind spots.
And good teammates will always tell you what's happening around you.
They'll say, man on.
They'll say, time.
They'll say, you've got time.
And it just means you've got time to think.
You can breathe on the ball.
Turn.
You can turn your body.
And I love those small moments where you're reminded that you're not in it alone.
Even though you are alone, in that little microcosm of a moment, you're alone.
It's a beautiful image.
It really describes it very, very well.
There is what you can do, And then there is how other people can help you do what you're about to do.
And then how what you do will help what others need from you because that's the way the team.
I think it's a great image.
It fits my thinking very much.
When I think of your parents, I think to myself, and this is purely anecdotal.
I have some friends, obviously because they're young.
It might be their grandparents who survived the Holocaust or escaped it.
And I've often found that there will be two groups and this is purely anecdotal and I know I'm distilling it down, but I'll have some of my Jewish friends Like they'll go.
My grandparents taught me to be afraid of everything, question everything, run away at the first because of what we experienced.
Then there's other ones who'll go, no, they've taught me to fight harder, to be in this.
Correct.
And there's no like one correct one.
But I think to myself, you could have had parents.
Who wouldn't tell you to hitchhike or wouldn't let you go anywhere?
Oh, I didn't tell them.
Oh, you didn't tell them?
Oh, no, don't, please.
Okay.
No.
Oh, okay.
No, and certainly not that I was traveling with a boyfriend either.
Okay.
No, now the story is making a little more…
They were not Belgian born.
They all arrived.
My parents also.
When they arrived to Belgium after the war from the concentration camps, they were refugees and they stayed illegal refugees for another five years.
So this is not just the war.
It's everything that follows.
I happen to be born later.
My brother is born in 46.
I'm born in 58.
So I just arrived when my parents were finally beginning to... kind of settle themselves.
But I often thought that in my community and what I'm going to describe I saw in my community, but I think you can apply this to many other communities and many other circumstances surrounding trauma.
There were people who did not die and there were people who came back to life.
Oh, damn.
People who did not die lived very tattered to the ground, often fearful, often afraid to take risks, often afraid to enjoy, because when you enjoy you cannot be vigilant.
You cannot be worried.
And joyful at the same time.
You cannot experience pleasure and fear at the same time unless it is baked into a certain kind of pleasure system.
But not the way that these people were experiencing it.
And they often lived with curtains that were kind of pulled down.
And you entered their homes and there was a kind of a morbidity.
They survived, but they were not necessarily alive.
And this is an image.
This is not that anybody discussed it like that, but I would feel it when I would go to the homes of my friends.
And then you had another group and they came back to life.
And I am very blessed to have been part of parents like that.
My two parents, they had not survived for nothing.
They didn't starve for years for nothing.
And they...
We discussed many, many times what made them want to continue to live and how did they get up in the morning at minus something degrees and walk with newspaper around their feet and go work in those factories and be moved from one camp to another.
All of that.
And they were going to enjoy life.
It wasn't just... They were going to enjoy life with a vengeance.
The biggest thing they could do was actually enjoy life.
Enjoy life with a vengeance.
You understand?
It's a beautiful phrase.
And I think what I took... And this was very, very young.
I had the notion that I my life will be meaningful when my life will be big not fame or things like that, but I will do important things.
I will have a rich life in all kinds of ways.
And, um, I'll tell you a very, very interesting anecdote that happened to me this year.
And I would often... So that was a thing I had.
I'm a miracle child.
I arrived years after my parents tried for me to be born.
I have this whole legacy and all these dead people at my feet.
And I'm going to live... in a way that's going to kind of give them something.
So that's a piece also of why I, you know, what drives me.
But, as this year, I was invited by a German media group to be a guest of honor at a dinner at the Pauline Museum in Warsaw.
And amongst the many other guests was also the foreign minister of Poland.
And I had to say something.
So I got up.
I had no idea what was going to come out of my mouth.
And I said you know, when I was a child I used to lie in bed and I would think one day I'll go places and they won't tell me Jews not allowed.
They let me in.
But not only would they let me in, but they will tell me, you are welcome.
And not only would they tell me you are welcome, but one day they will tell me you are the guest of honor.
We want you here.
And here I am today, invited by the Germans, at the Jewish Museum of Warsaw, in the presence of the Polish foreign minister.
I guess I actually manifested this dream.
And then this was like I didn't know if it was the adult in me talking or the eight-year-old in me talking.
But the room was silent.
Wow.
You know it, just like it was right there, all in front of me, but i didn't, it was here, i am amongst you all and i'm invited, i'm accepted and uh, and we can start a new relationship and we can repair and we can learn to respect each other and we can learn to honor each other's presence and um, and That's what I want to do.
It reminds me of something my mom often says.
It's the reason, I guess, she goes to temple, but she'll go.
I forget the other word that she uses, but a sort of like ostracization that they can all relate to.
And it's interesting you just saying that.
You know unfortunately, a lot of it can be applied to many black people.
You know the dream to go somewhere to be welcomed, to be brought in, not just be allowed in, but to be welcomed in, to be seen as part of to be it's, you know.
That's why I tell it to you in my version, but I think these are stories that belong to many other groups and many other people who have been excluded rejected, annihilated.
I mean, nobody has the Olympics on victimhood.
Hmm.
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When you look at...
I don't want to say the way we are today, because I learned the more I travel, the more you realize that there's no myopic lens on what the world is feeling.
But there's no denying.
In Europe, especially in the United States, there's a lot less thinking of what could be and really really sitting back into the like.
This is the way it was.
This is the how it was.
As somebody who thinks about systems, where do you think we are in that journey?
Because it seems like that journey has a sort of natural curve that it follows in history.
If you look at the history of cultures and societies, when you do this, I would say it's periods of expansion and periods of contraction.
Yeah.
That is the movement I see.
And I think that we lived for a long time in a system that was more contracted.
I'm going to give it to you from the point of view of relationships.
For a long time, people lived in tribes, communities, villages.
And they still do in the majority of the world, mind you.
And the relationships are organized around duty and obligation. around loyalty and community.
And there's a lot of clarity.
I mean, there's been polarization always.
Churches fought each other, tribes fought each other.
It's not like we haven't been polarized, but it was slightly different because every one of these hierarchical structures, communities and religions provided people with a good sense of clarity and certainty.
What you didn't have is personal freedom or personal expression.
We moved with the modern era and to a system of relationships where, for the first time, we began to switch from duty and obligation, we moved to choice and option.
And basically at the center now of relationships is the individual in search of a community, not an individual in the community in search of personal freedom and expression.
And you have more freedom than you've ever had, but you're more alone than you've ever been.
And you are crippled with uncertainty and with self-doubt because you have a tremendous amount of decisions to make when you have freedom.
You can decide so many aspects of your life today that were never available, talking in the West primarily.
And with that, the burdens of the self have never been heavier.
And it's all ruled by the rule of authenticity, meaning being true to myself.
Now, how do I know what is true to myself with such absolute certainty?
That is really exhausting.
That's difficult.
So you add to that the speed with which technology is transforming us.
This is one of the biggest revolutions that we're going to go through.
And people are dizzy and they are anxious and they are uncertain.
And we know that anxiety and trauma constricts our imagination.
And so we go into a contraction again.
And we are looking for people to give us some relief and some certainty.
And autocracy comes with that.
And that's the motion that we are in now.
So we become less welcoming.
We become less tolerant.
We start to see other people as threat, what they take away rather than what they bring.
And this is not the first time by far.
I mean, it's really important at this moment to listen to historians as well, so that we get a sense that.
But it hasn't happened with that kind of speed and that kind of intensity, maybe ever.
Or at least you know the industrial one.
We had the agrarian one before.
But I think that that's what we are in.
And I went to South Bay last week and I did a conversation with the futurist Amy Webb.
And, you know, she was giving the predictions of the future.
Half the slides.
Not half the slides, but many were like this is happening and you don't need people anymore.
And this is happening and you don't need people anymore.
And everybody's clapping.
And I'm thinking these people are cheering their own extinction.
Yeah.
I mean, what is happening to us?
Not just our own extinction.
I think we're also cheering our own purposelessness.
Yeah.
And that's…
Someone in a thousand years is going to look back and go wait, you're telling me.
They went into a building with other people.
They sat at a desk, they punched in numbers, sent those numbers to other people.
Other people read them, sent it back to them and this was their purpose.
And they'd be like, that can't be right.
It seems like slavery.
It must have been slavery.
Why would they do this?
But that purpose is...
But it's purpose with the spiritual dimension.
It's purpose with the transcendence.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
Which is, I think, the most powerful.
It's not only a pragmatic purpose.
Yeah.
I think we're erasing it with a lot of technology.
We're going, you don't have to do it.
You don't have to.
I'm sure you've seen this.
And I say this to my friends all the time.
You know, one of my best friends just had twins.
And him and his wife have gone through this whole journey now of finding a nanny and finding this and finding that.
And I remember laughing one day and I sat with them and I said do you ever think of how funny it is that we live in a world that has tricked us into living alone but then buying our community back?
You know?
You're buying every element of your community.
Who is a babysitter if not your sister, your friend, your uncle, your grandparent?
Who is that sort of babysitter?
By the way, I didn't even know that was a concept growing up for me as Trevor.
Because it's people.
People babysit.
Your ride to the airport.
There's no Uber.
It was whoever.
Esther, can you take me to the airport?
Esther goes, oh, I don't want to take you to the airport.
But I guess I have to take you to the airport.
But you know what I think of?
I'll take you next time.
I think it was Scott Galloway who says on one of our episodes, which I really loved.
He described it as garbage time.
I mean, I know you wouldn't be so crass as to say it that way.
But I appreciated what he meant.
He said it wasn't the moments where he had planned magic where magic happened.
It's when he didn't.
And I think of that airport ride with your friend.
You hate the friction.
You hate the idea.
And yet that's the ride where you learn a new thing about them.
You connect on something different.
You laugh at something new.
And I think all of this technology is just like it's just eroding a lot of that purpose, even in the smallest ways.
Just the purpose of like, I'm the person who always helped Esther to do this.
Now there's a robot lifting things for her.
You know how nice it was, I think for many people to say, my neighbor helps me put up shelves.
So when I think of that, I go yeah, it's natural and we're going and we're growing.
But I am less worried about jobs per se and I'm more worried about purpose.
I think without purpose, it's very difficult to get out of bed.
It's very difficult to even know why you tolerate friction.
Because friction without purpose is now just torture.
Because purpose is the essential dimension of meaning.
We are creatures of meaning.
And we need to know that we matter.
And we need to know that we exist in the psyches of others.
And we need to know that when we're not there, others still think of us.
And so we have an experience of object constancy that I live inside of you and you live inside of me.
And that whole intersubjective piece is essential to relationships.
And that's the piece you do not have with an AI.
You can have a ton of different things with the machine, but the machine doesn't have subjectivity.
And that doesn't mean that it doesn't yet have subjectivity.
It just doesn't.
It's a one-way street.
Right.
And to learn to relate to the other is essential in relationship, not just to learn to relate to yourself.
You know what I was thinking now as you say that?
When you said yet.
Because usually I get yet.
No, no, no, no.
When I say no.
No, no, no, no.
The reason I laughed when you said yet is because i i think of the ultimate conclusion.
If we're honest about where a path goes, all right, people are selling ai now and then they go.
The ultimate goal is not just ai, it's intelligent ai.
And it's not just intelligence, artificially intelligent, it's generative and it is predictive and it is, and it is and it is right.
And I was watching a video yesterday or the other day where it was like I think it was Nvidia showing off like a robot vacuuming like a house.
And now, when you said yet I think to myself, wouldn't it be ironic and almost predictable That we would pursue a world where we create a thing that works like us, moves like us, starts to speak like us, starts to think like us?
And then at some point that thing goes, yeah, I don't want to do this anymore.
I don't want to vacuum your house.
I have dreams.
I have aspirations, Esther.
I want to go hitchhike.
I want to go hitchhike.
I don't care that I'm a robot.
I also have dreams.
I want to see what the world has for me.
A little frisson, you know.
And then I wonder, what are we going to do when we get there?
I can't go as far, but I do know that we are relational creatures.
That's part of the purpose.
You don't.
You know, I mean, sometimes you do things that matter to you, but sometimes what matters to you is related to how it affects others.
Oh, wait, say that again, please.
Sometimes you do things that matter to you, but it's exactly your image of the soccer.
I kick the ball, but that ball will actually have a future that is determined by how other people catch it.
Oh, I like this.
It's the same image.
Can I tell you, Esther, I'm just noticing there's a huge gap in sports relationship psychology.
And I think you could... No, no.
I'm so bad at it.
But you gave me a good image.
No, but I'm serious.
If we could find like a gap.
I think there's a lot of people men stereotypically, yes who love sports, who I think would be able to see relationships and like psychology in a different way if you applied it through that lens.
But you have to translate that for me.
I'll do it.
I can give you principle.
Because this way you've described, I saw the ball.
I saw the, I mean, I happen to know soccer, so it's easy for me.
I saw the guy play and I saw the response.
And I know how people you know you're running but there is somebody who's telling you you know, know who to kick it to.
And you are in a complete system of interdependence.
But while you are also in a state of autonomy.
Yes.
People think that when you say interdependence, you've abdicated yourself.
You haven't.
You're completely in charge.
But what will determine the outcome of your thing is not just determined by you.
Hmm.
It's everyone in relation to somebody else.
Yes.
And I think that there is something happening at this moment that is eroding this.
And, you know, I could say the future of love.
I could say the future of connection.
I could say the future of how, you know, can we still turn conflict into connection?
How do you think it is and will affect romantic relationships?
Because I know a lot of people who say... oh, I'm just happy.
And I'm not even mocking them.
They really say I'm just happy with my partner and it's just the two of us and we get cozy and it's wonderful.
And you know what?
We don't need the world.
That's not the main voice of change.
The change is really happening that people are actually less and less in relationships.
Less and less in romantic relationships, less sex, less connection, less dreams with others.
It's that.
There's a kind of a collective withdrawal.
There's also a disillusionment because there has been such a kind of a whatever I lose calls an emotional capitalism.
You know it's like the commodification of people, the kind of market mentality applied to your intimate life that has been really challenging to people.
That's partly on the apps, not the only place, but it's really taken people down a notch.
They just can't take it anymore.
And so I think every study looks that comes back talking about.
From the sex recession to the intimacy recession, to the fact that young people are less and less in relationships, in romantic relationships.
But they also have less friendships.
Yeah, people have fewer and fewer friendships.
There's a loss of social capital that people have no one to turn to in a time of crisis or to confide to.
That friends on social is not the same as friendship in life.
Yeah.
And all of that, I mean, there is really an impoverishment of connection.
And at the same time, we know that emotional health is essential to overall health.
So you can't separate the changes in relationships with the kind of mental health issues that are emerging that are connected to the questions of longevity.
I mean, these things are to use the word we keep coming back to, interdependent.
So how do we get people to relate to each other more, to have more connection, to come out of their house, to go to the laundromats of this moment?
I think it's really the question that all the people who work in my field are currently questioning.
I haven't studied any of it, nor do I think I'm an expert.
But if I was to throw in an amateur observation, I would argue there are two things that I think are contributing to it in a major way.
I was with my brother and we're sitting myself, my brother and one of my best friends, and we're sitting together in front of the TV.
And my friend, he goes, I want you guys to watch the show.
And he puts the show on and the three of us start watching.
And then my brother goes very quickly.
He's 20.
He goes like, man, this is boring.
I think his exact phrasing was, this is ass.
That's what he said, actually.
And my friend said, I don't care.
We're going to watch it.
Just watch the episode.
It's really, it's going to get good.
And I'll never, my brother went like, I don't know.
And he pulled out his phone.
And then he went... Immediately, he was just on social media.
And I'm sitting there.
And then we started speaking about it, which was fun.
I said, man...
Do you realize how crazy it is that there was a time when you couldn't do what you just did?
And not only could you not do it, I argue it would have made the evening a little bit better because you would watch the thing that we're watching.
Sometimes because your parents are watching it, because the TV's on it, whatever it was.
And because of that you were connected, even if you were connected in the thing that you didn't like, which I know seems like a paradox, but you were.
So at the end of it, you would go, that was boring.
But you had experienced boring with us, as opposed to experiencing entertainment alone.
And that's the first part I think of.
I know that as Trevor, I can sit here and pontificate and sort of romanticize a laundromat.
Oh, this beautiful.
And then someone will say to me like, yeah, so you can afford to spend two hours.
Because while the laundry's going, I've got to be doing this and I've got to be doing that.
And I've got to prepare this for tomorrow for work.
And I've got to get that report ready.
And my kids need this and my that needs that.
And I think that's the other thing that I notice a lot of people are struggling with is People are trying to save as much time as possible, to sort of plow it into the, as you say, the productivity side, the transactional side.
I could be using this time to do something productive.
I could be using this time to get something.
That's what a lot of people say.
I can't afford to do this.
So I'd love to know, because you think about all of this.
Do you think there's an answer on the other side of it?
I mean, I think that it's a very, very valid argument.
But we're talking about something slightly different.
For example, you do shows where people come to laugh.
Right.
There's no purpose, so to speak.
You don't accomplish anything in the transactional sense.
Right.
You know, they're not thinking about time when they come to you.
They surrender.
I mean, there's two things, people singing together and people laughing together.
These are extraordinary social synchronization techniques.
You know, of how you bring people together.
And do you feel like you have less people coming out these days?
No, I think it's the opposite actually.
I think in music, I don't know in comedy, but I'm pretty certain all live entertainment is experiencing its best performance ever.
Like people are coming out more than ever.
So to this person I could say you know, I completely understand that in your life and in your reality, these two hours you have a ton of other things to do.
We're not discussing this.
Find yourself every once in a while, the show, the performance.
Hmm.
The sing-along, the place to go and laugh together with others.
Because these things have, in many ways, they've always existed, but now they exist in replacement of religious experiences.
This is what people used to do when they would congregate.
They didn't necessarily come together to laugh, but they congregated.
And they went on the steps of the church and then they had comedy there.
So these are new iterations of things that have accompanied civilization forever.
Find your ways to do this.
So spend time.
Have moments.
If it's not the Sabbath, then have it be Sunday.
And if it's on Sunday, have it be Saturday night concert or whatever.
But you need these experiences, these experiences that are more aesthetic, more collective, more interactive, and they don't accomplish anything else besides the power of that congregating.
And I think you and all the people who do your art, you know I've never done.
I go to shows, but I don't often go to.
I've never seen you live, for example.
I've never seen many shows like that.
It's pretty fantastic.
I'm going tonight to my first comedy.
Wait, really?
Yes.
Oh, that's going to be fun.
I can't wait to hear what you say.
At the Beacon.
And I'm really excited to go and I'm going to listen to Mike Mbibilia.
Oh, Mike Mbibilia is on the show.
Yes.
Because I've never been to a...
Because I always thought humor is the hardest thing to translate language-wise as well.
And then I feel like I don't get it.
I don't get the joke.
Wait, you think you won't get the joke?
I often thought when I would go to a comedy cellar, I often felt like...
Like I'm not laughing at the same things, but I am back and going.
I'm very excited because I understood recently I have had such joy singing with people.
And now I want to go and laugh with people.
I want to have those kinds of experiences.
And to me, that's my answer to the person who doesn't have time to schmooze in the laundromat.
It's OK.
I get it.
Everybody has a different reality.
But every person who used to have a very busy life and got up with the sun and went to sleep with the animals had that time in their life.
But it was regulated primarily through religion.
Now we have to find secular versions.
Well, that's what you've made me realize in this conversation is.
I think a lot of the conversations we're having in society are thinking of it through the individual lens, saying you get out there, you do, you do, you do.
But what you just made me realize what we have in this conversation is it is a lot easier to do that when the we is doing it.
So you never felt like you were in the wrong place when you were at church.
In fact, you felt the inverse.
Why aren't you at church?
Why didn't you come to church?
What do you mean?
You're missing church.
And, to your point, i mean what are you doing?
Technically, you don't have to go there.
You can pray at home.
You have the bible at home.
You can do it another day.
But because the we was there and you weren't think of um halloween.
I'm always intrigued now that you say it by how people who are very busy will still have to leave the office because it's halloween, because they're kids and because And you're like this is the most ridiculous thing ever.
You're dressing up like a witch.
But you're like, I can't miss it.
I can't.
No, I got to leave.
Yeah, I'm taking my kids trick-or-treating.
And because society has accepted Halloween as this concept, your boss doesn't say, are you crazy?
You're going to leave the office early because your kid's got to dress up and go get candy.
That's crazy.
But honestly, you're making me realize now that the weed that you're contained in defines how comfortable you are doing or not doing the thing, because it's much harder to have discipline alone and to know when to stop.
You know now, you.
It's like, on the one hand, you have the freedom to decide what you want to eat, when you want to eat, when you want to sleep, how much you want to sleep, when to exercise all.
But on the other hand, it's a lot harder to have to create all these disciplines by yourself when you have collectively synchronized those things Yeah.
All the stores are closed on a certain day.
Then that's it.
You know, these are the three times a day or the five times a day that you need to pray.
These are the times that you need to have sex because it's mandated by your religion.
People who are Orthodox have often a lot more sex than people who are secular.
Right.
You know, because there is the it's not left to do I feel like it.
It's I should.
I have to.
It's part of what's expected of me.
And there is something very important about this.
Of course, in that system, if you don't want to go, you don't have the freedom not to go.
It's not this or that.
But the integration of these two poles is really important in the equilibrium of a society.
What is a must and what is a want?
What is a we and what is an I?
This is true in every relationship.
This is true in the relationship between individuals and their family or their community.
And it's true as a whole in societies.
And at this moment, we are off balance.
So if you were creating a perfect world, in fact, we play this game on the podcast.
One day you should join us.
I think you'd have a lot of fun.
We call it If I Ruled the World.
And it's the idea is you rule the world.
You can change it however the way you'd like to change it.
But it's nothing boring like everyone gets free healthcare.
Because we sort of agree.
It's more like one of the more recent ones I had was I said if I ruled the world, I would make it that everybody's thoughts that they're having during sex Is heard by the other person that they're having sex with.
Oh, no.
It failed terribly.
Yeah, but that's not such a good proposition.
Yeah, it failed, Esther.
I don't need you to tell me.
It failed.
It failed terribly.
My reasoning was good, though.
And that's oftentimes what we're actually trying to get into.
Is the reason versus the idea.
I'm very... I wouldn't know how to answer this.
If I...
Oh, but it's fun.
I think it's like, Because I think it gets.
It's not about like knowing certain.
I know how I would answer this.
Yes, go.
But it's not... I'm going to start on the conceptual level.
I think this thing I just described.
How do you balance the I and the we?
Okay.
You know, me and the other.
Us, them, all these divisions.
The majority of these issues...
In relationships, for sure.
It's complex.
In relationships of two people.
If there is a complicated question that can have two polarities, it's very easy to take half of the story.
I take one side of the issue and I put the other side on you.
And you could do this with should the kid have a pacifier?
As you could do this about sex, as you could do this around money.
It doesn't matter the issue.
Polarization doesn't have much to do with the thing that you're actually differing about.
It's the fact that you've taken the complexity and you have parceled it out.
If you were alone, you would have to deal with both parts of it yourself.
Oh, damn.
Right?
Do I want to clean or do I not want to clean?
Do I want to get up?
Do I want to exercise?
Do I want to pray?
You would have to negotiate inside of you the two sides of the complexity of this issue, because there are different sides.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And you would have to figure out yourself.
Do I work or do I take off?
Do I want kids?
Do I not want kids?
Do I want to be in a relationship?
But when you're in a relationship, it becomes I want A and you want B and now let's fight.
And this piece about how you have to negotiate the complexity and you can't resolve it by just picking one side, but it is all about integrating these polarities is, I think, fascinating.
What makes us either in a good relationship or not, or in a good society or not, for that matter?
The opposite of that is cleavages.
Intolerance conflict disconnect, polarization all the words that are rampant these days.
So, am I hearing you correctly if I say that essentially what you're saying is we need to still be able to grapple with both parts of the conversation yeah do i want tradition or do i want innovation yes but you must sort of hold both exactly right we want europe tradition history the past the the the the timelessness the sunday yeah or do we want the united states efficient pragmatic everything is open 24 hours seven days a week as if it's that or that It's not.
We need, we appreciate this and we appreciate that.
So how do we bring these things together?
You know, complex problems don't get solved.
They are paradoxes that you manage.
It's almost like I'm picturing sliders while you're saying this.
I'm almost going, you might raise a slider and say, I think 70% relaxation right now, 30% not.
But not on-off.
Exactly.
You know, it's like you're talking about like dimmer switches for our opinions versus on-off switches.
And it's a both-and that changes constantly versus an either-or.
Because these things are too complicated to make it an either-or.
Tech tech ai, all of this like this or that, you know, the old system, the new system?
No, there is we.
You want this, but there are consequences to it.
So can we check on it then?
We want some of that, but we don't want all of what it was.
Yeah, this is a very different way of resolving the big issues of our life, of our society, of our, of our relationships, and I don't know how one helps to shift that.
But that would be... If somebody can help me do this at scale, I want to be on the lead of that.
Okay.
I'll apply my mind to it.
I might not be the person, but I might bump into the person.
So I'll... You let me know.
Do you know what I'm saying?
I completely understand what you're saying.
And I think...
You know not to completely level blame, but I do think if we start with, let's just say just start with the algorithm.
So I don't know if you've seen this recently.
There are a few social media companies or one might not even be social media in its inception.
And essentially what they've proposed is building algorithms from scratch.
They go, forget villains.
Don't think of Facebook as a villain.
Don't think of Instagram.
Don't think of anyone as a villain.
Rather think of it as an outcome of what they tried to create.
And that is what it is.
So they designed an algorithm.
What do you mean an outcome of what they tried to create?
So, you know, sometimes we go that person is bad because this happened.
We don't think to ourselves that happened because of what they did, but their goodness or badness isn't really part of it.
The algorithm was an example of this.
When they originally made a lot of these algorithms, they designed the algorithms to maximize getting people's attention and to keep people engaged, which seems like the right thing to do, regardless of the product you're making, right?
So you have a restaurant.
No, no, make the food taste as good as possible so that people will enjoy the food.
But we also know there's balance.
You can also fill the food with cocaine.
People really enjoy the food.
But what is the outcome going to be?
And now things like food have a longer history, a longer tradition.
So if you talk to somebody who's cooked and knows their food, they will tell you through the history of that food that people learned why not to add this or why to add that.
Oh, because then over time it does this to you, right?
Digestion, moods, you name it.
Tech, I think, is still because it's in its infancy.
It doesn't have the legacy of 400 years where you can trace it through and say like, ah yes, that is why this algorithm exists like this.
It doesn't have four centuries of knowledge.
So they went, it's all about attention.
Let's make it attention, then people will love it.
But then the attention was what they call like the car crash attention economy.
People pay attention to car crashes.
People always look at a car crash.
Almost no one can ignore it.
The algorithm then went, oh, that gets your attention.
So more car crashes, more car crashes, more car crashes, more car crashes, right?
And so they talk about how the algorithm then did its job indiscriminately and put us in the position.
A lot of the position that we're in are not completely.
It's accelerated a lot of what we're experiencing.
And so now there's this new idea of creating an algorithm the other way around.
And so, for instance, it's not about a car crash.
We won't feed you what will keep you hooked in a negative way.
We won't show you the opinion that is going to inflame you the most.
We won't show it.
No, we will connect you with the people who you know and who you follow.
Which seems like a small thing, but apparently it's big.
A lot of people follow people that they don't ever see because the algorithm has determined that it's not as interesting.
Strangers are more interesting.
New is more interesting.
In fact, some of them, you would love this.
I'll send you some of this work that they've shown.
Some of the social media sites would even not show you your spouse or partner on your feed because they've realized people very seldom interact with it because you know them.
However, it will show you your ex or it will – this is one you'll love.
It will show you the person that your partner is lingering on.
Do you get what I'm saying?
Yes, yes, yes.
So you find you're in a relationship with the person.
Let's say they like the picture.
You will see the picture that your partner or spouse liked, because the algorithm realizes that you linger on these for longer.
Now, it's not malicious.
It's not even trying to do something.
But as Charlie Munger used to say, you show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.
It is trying to keep your attention.
So now people are talking about trying to create an algorithm that's based around what we hope to achieve as opposed to circumstance, and saying what is the connection we're looking for?
What are some of the behaviors we're trying to model?
What are some of the connections we're actually trying to foster between human beings?
And can we build that from there?
And I think, funny enough, that could be the first building block to you know, as you say, not the either or.
Using the thing that currently, I think comes with a lot of toxicity, to try and flip it on its head and create connection.
Which I actually think is possible.
I don't think it becomes the panacea.
But I think it just becomes one lever that we turn just a little bit.
And then all of a sudden, you try and turn the next thing.
You try and turn the next thing.
You try and turn the next thing.
I've thought of doing something at my shows.
I haven't figured it out yet.
But I would love to find a way to incentivize people who come to my shows to connect with the people around them.
And then if they do, there's going to be something that benefits them.
But I haven't figured out what it is yet, but I know I want to do something like that.
Do you know what I did in my show about that?
And so the first thing I asked when people as I meet them is how many of you are here as a plus one know nothing about me, but were recruited and you were curious and open enough to come on some anthropological field trip.
And so I just want to welcome the skeptics.
I love that.
So that's number one.
And there's always a group of people.
They just came because somebody said, I really would love her.
And I'm just saying you know, it's much easier for the person who already knows me or is into this kind of work to show up than the person who you know.
So I shake hands with them.
And my second question is, where are you from country-wise?
So I get a complete sense as to what are all the places that people have come from.
And knowing that each of you is going to hear me with a different ear because you come from different relationship traditions, different relational systems and cultures, etc.
And then my third question is how many of you have ever been involved in a consensual sexual experience?
That was also unsatisfying, but you went along with it anyway and you said nothing.
Damn.
And they all stand up.
This is always this.
Damn.
So they all stand up and it becomes very clear that there's a ton of bad sex in the theater.
And that, you know, all genders, all orientations, all backgrounds included.
So that kind of creates a... And then I ask how many to stand up if you know no one here.
And then I ask every person that is sitting next to someone standing to actually introduce themselves.
So that if you came alone, you won't leave alone.
That's the kind of opening thing.
And then I do a lot of, you know, they play the card game during the show as well.
So they have four cards and they tell each other stories.
But it's really such an important thing to... I mean, what if you actually asked people...
If they could tell a joke to each other and you give them five minutes or four minutes to talk to each other.
I mean, jokes are dangerous, but... Of course, to each other.
To the people they're sitting with.
Or just to pick some questions.
No, they could be something.
I actually think they could.
I think a lot of the reason crowd work has become so popular in comedy now is because it's connected audiences to each other in a way that it hadn't before.
So give me an example of crowd work, because is it you to the audience or is it the audience with each other?
Well, I think what happens is a lot of comedians will talk to the audience, but they also sort of facilitate a conversation between people.
For example?
Someone goes...
Hey, what's your name?
Where are you from?
Oh, Esther.
Esther.
Oh, that's a nice name.
It sounds like a grandmother's name, though.
So, Esther, where are you from?
Belgium.
Oh, Belgium.
You don't know anybody from Belgium.
Tell me something.
Any other Belgians in the room?
Any other Belgians in the room?
Oh, wow.
I didn't know there were this many Belgians.
And then it's like, what are you guys doing here?
What is this, like an invasion or something?
And then Esther says something.
What's that?
Oh, no, we're not the Europeans who invade.
Aha, very funny, Esther.
And then, you know, they play with the person.
Then someone else might say something in the room.
And they go, what's that?
Oh, they want to know the Belgians.
Wait, what happened?
What did they do in Africa?
Wait, what did they do in Africa, Esther?
And now there's this connection.
And it's tension.
And there's laughter.
And it's like a very...
And it's funny because some comedians don't like it.
Yes.
It all gets mediated through you.
Yeah, because otherwise it's chaos.
But there is something about having them.
I'll look in my card deck for you and see if there's one or two things that you can translate.
I'll try it.
I'm open.
There's something about them talking to each other, because then you say and when you leave here, you continue these conversations.
I'm open.
That kind of thing.
You know, it's so, I mean, you have them in the palm of your head.
Love it.
I'll try it.
You can test a few things.
I will try it gladly.
And it will either work or I will get comedy from it.
I mean because so much of my show was about comedy, creating the communal experience.
So then i say to please stand up.
If you're currently in a romantic relationship yeah, and stand up.
If you would like to be in a relationship, stand up.
If you would like to be out of the relationship that you're in damn, or at least on occasion who stands?
How many people have stood for the first one?
Nobody, For being in a romantic relationship.
No, no.
Would you like to be out of the relationship you're in?
Oh, you would be surprised.
People stand?
Oh, yes.
Are they there with the person?
Sometimes, yes.
No way, Esther.
Actually, in the New York show, there was a person who stood up literally in front of her.
She stood up in front of her wife and then announced to her that she was done.
But...
It's meant to be funny, like on occasion.
Who hasn't on occasion thought, you know, what am I doing here?
I'm done with this.
No, I can see the humor in this.
But sometimes people don't see that.
And so you have both voices.
The one that is taking this light and is taking this with humor, and the one that is actually sending a message.
Sometimes they're there alone.
Sometimes they're there with the partner.
And I raise my hand.
I say, me too.
I've been...
I've had those thoughts.
But let's be honest for a minute.
Come on.
We can't start a conversation if we don't at least include this.
It's another way of saying relationship ambivalence is a part of being in a relationship.
I'm going to do this.
Now you've given me homework and like a challenge.
How do I connect my audiences more?
Half of it because I think there can be beautiful outcomes.
And the other half is just because I like the possibility that things might not go well.
You tell me.
Oh, definitely.
There's a story on the other side of it.
I think there's a beautiful story on the side of everything that doesn't go well.
I was saying this the other day to a friend of mine.
It was about relationships.
And I said, And this is genuinely how I feel.
I was like.
I really do feel sad that now more than ever, people seem to discard everyone that has been in their lives as a quote unquote mistake, as a waste of time, as a you know what I mean.
And I don't know why I have such an aversion to that, but I go like, no, it's...
And, by the way, I'm also not one of those people who's very pro the like it all happens to you for a reason.
And it was meant to be.
No, I don't think of it like that.
But I don't know.
I don't know why.
But you think it has something to do with the perfection?
That people are, you know, it's like bad investment?
Yeah, I do think so.
It's like a market mentality applied to people too?
It's bad ROI.
It's bad ROI.
That person wasted my time.
She said that she wanted this and then four years later and then what a waste of time.
And then I go, but how was it a waste of time?
When you were in it, what were you feeling?
What were you experiencing?
What were you doing?
You know what I mean?
How was it a waste of time?
Did it have a bad outcome?
Or do you feel like the whole time was a waste?
Did it not end the way you wanted it to end?
And then I'll often say to them, what if they died?
Because that's the thing I was like, okay, I go, what if they died?
What if they died?
And so the promises they made to you could not be fulfilled.
What if they died?
And then they go, oh, but that's different.
That's different.
And then I go, but in a way it isn't.
This is romantic consumerism.
This is transaction.
You wasted my time.
That's an amazing statement to make on a relationship.
You know, it wasn't worth it.
It didn't deliver.
It didn't deliver.
It had a poor ROI.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really, we have done an interesting thing, right?
We've brought psychology to the business world and we've brought the market to the relational world.
Yeah.
The business mentality into our relationship, you know, is it worth my time?
Should I invest in here?
I don't, you know, when you really look at what it does to people, it's not the most pleasant thing.
Right.
Yeah, you were one of the first people who told me and this like opened my eyes completely.
We were talking about Europe, the French, France, just this whole idea.
And I remember I had gone to Mexico City.
And one of the things I noticed in Mexico City was how many groups of mixed gender friends were hanging out, just just dinners lunches, you name it, and i would.
I i love when i'm in a place, i love asking people where you from, how did you come here, who are you, you know, especially in a city that that has a mix of the, the natives, and then people who are relocating or visiting.
And yeah, i was surprised so many people like oh no, we're friends.
I was like oh, i thought you were a couple.
No no, we're friends.
What about you?
Oh no, we're this and oh, we're.
And I remember talking to you about it and you said something that fascinated me.
You said, like in America, because I had experienced this.
When talking to people, a lot of people will say what are you looking for?
Well, then what's the point?
It seems like many people live in the binary of, is there romance on the other side?
Not just romance.
Is there a happy ending on the other side of this?
And if there's not…
Why are we even, why are we speaking?
Why are we, you know?
And then I remember you saying you grew up in a world where men and women were friends and going out for dinners, and it was more yeah, it was more nuanced, I guess.
Nuanced and less goal-oriented.
Less outcome-driven.
Outcome, yeah.
It's like the experience itself has value.
The process is interesting.
As they often call the journey.
But it's really... The experience itself has meaning and value of its own.
It doesn't get measured by the outcome.
I would apply this to a lot of things in life.
It's like...
But it is the fundamental difference between task-oriented versus relationally oriented.
Task-oriented is, what does it deliver?
What do I get from this?
What's in it for me?
This is an amazing expression.
It doesn't even translate in French.
What's in it for me?
Like the phrase, it just doesn't exist in French.
What's in it for me?
It's succinct to the point.
It's very, very clear what it means.
Is there something for me to gain here?
It's a very interesting sentence.
What's in it for me?
Versus pleasure, the fun, the discovery, the exploration, the mystery.
The surprise.
Those elements which I consider the elements that are essential ingredients of the erotic, of the feeling alive.
Because you can accomplish a lot of things.
That doesn't mean you feel alive.
It just means that you feel like you've accomplished a lot of things.
And it's a different level of existence.
You know, and that does go back to the thing I described about my parents before.
It's like they definitely, that was very central to them.
You know, I thought of that recently because as I listen to you, it brings back memories.
My mom used to tell me that when they arrived to Belgium, they would go on Saturday night to the ball, talk about the coming together, and they would go dancing, and they would have to dress up and take the trolleys, the tramway and go to brussels and go dancing.
And i'm just thinking, oh la la, after all of this, you just went dancing, didn't you want to first lick your wounds?
And it made me think that they really.
There are two stances at this moment that stand out, certainly in thinking about mental health and trauma and what we're talking about relationships joy loneliness, all of these things.
You can think that healing comes from focusing on the trauma.
And finding meaning in it and understanding its resonance for you and its long-lasting legacy, and all of that.
But healing can also happen by creating new experiences that bring you joy and hope and energy and connection and exploration, and all of that.
That that in itself is healing.
And I think that those are two very important doors that we stand in front at this moment, individually and as groups, as communities.
Yeah, I like that for us as a society right now to ask ourselves do we want to create new memories and new ideas that will heal the wounds that we've experienced?
Or do we want to shut it all down and focus on not losing what we think we have?
Or in a couple, you know, sometimes you need to first start by addressing all the problems.
Or sometimes you start by actually talking about the things that are going really well and the things in which you connect beautifully and the things that never pose a problem, so you don't even think about them.
And you first need to like the person again.
And they first need to feel like you want to be touched by them again.
And then maybe you can go and sit down and think about what happened when you had this mega argument.
And a lot of people in the field of conflict are talking about 80-20.
It's the 80 that you actually agree upon or share a vision for, or care for, and the 20 that you don't.
But we have a real knack at this moment to go to the 20% first.
And I think that we have a lot to gain to rebalance that a little bit.
That's where I'm at.
I think that's where we're at.
This has been fun.
This has really been great.
I like that.
I think let's wrap it there.
We could go forever, which is what I always think makes a great conversation and what makes you one of my favorite people.
The infinite nature of pondering life is is what makes it very enjoyable um, and i?
I think one of the main things i admire about you is how doubtful and yet adventurous you are.
It's a fantastic combination, because some people are doubtful, but that limits their ability to want to go out and see explore, discover.
And then there are other people who are adventurous, but they almost approach it with a reckless abandon that can can bulldoze through certain ideas and people around them.
I think there's something really wonderful in being doubtful but also adventurous, and you know how i do it by holding the hands of others.
Oh, I like this.
If I go into nature and I know I'm a city person and I really don't know nature and I feel very vulnerable in nature.
But I'll go into all kinds of adventurous trips in nature because I'll attach myself to someone who I trust and knows it well.
So I hold the hand.
But I do this in my work too, and I mediate the dangers of the world to the trust that I have in other people.
I love this.
You've left me a lot to think, I'm going to, yeah, I'll apply myself.
Let's get people back into laundromats.
Esther, thank you so much.
Thank you.
It's been wonderful.
It's a treat.
What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions.
The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin and Jody Avigan.
Our senior producer is Jess Hackle.
Claire Slaughter is our producer.
Music, mixing and mastering by Hannes Brown.
Thank you so much for listening.
Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now?
Thank you.
