The One You Feed - The Beauty and Power of Friendship with Will Schwalbe

Episode Date: June 4, 2024

In this episode, Will Schwalbe shares some of his insights and experiences about forming deep friendships in adulthood. He discusses his latest book about an unlikely friendship that formed years ago and explores how their lasting connection is so powerful. In this episode, you will be able to: Understand the lasting impact and deep connection of friendships Discover the power of finding shared values among the differences between friends Embrace the challenges when conflict arises among friends Grasp the healing power of vulnerability in strengthening relationships Learn the immense value of giving and receiving support in friendships To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think if you, as a young person, went through a really intense experience together, whatever that may be, you laid the tracks that last a lifetime. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor. What's in the museum of failure? And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our

podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Will Schwalbe. He's an American writer and businessman and the former editor-in-chief of Hyperion Books. In 2008, he founded the recipe website Cookster, which was acquired by Macmillan Publishing, where he is also executive vice president. Today, Will and Eric discuss his amazing new book, We Should Not Be Friends, The Story of a Friendship. Hi, Will. Welcome back. Thank you, Eric. Thanks so much for having me back. Yeah, I'm excited to have you on and talk again. We're going to be discussing your book,

We Should Not Be Friends, The Story of a Friendship. And I'm really eager to talk about that because friendship to me is such an important element of living a good life. And so I think we're going to explore it from a lot of different angles. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. They say, in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at

their grandparent. They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you and your life and in the work that you do. Well, I love that parable and I hadn't heard it before you and I first talked. And I've been thinking about it a lot recently in terms of friendship, because I've been thinking about friendship a lot. And for me, part of having a successful friendship is feeding the good wolf. And what I mean by that is a friend comes to town and doesn't call you, doesn't have time to see you.

If you feed the bad wolf, it's they no longer like me. They're obnoxious. They've gotten too big for their britches. There's no loyalty there. If you feed the good wolf, you're saying maybe they're busy and maybe something else is going on in their life and maybe I'll just see them the next time. It's not personal. And in friendship, I think the bad wolf is jealousy. It's paranoia. It's not telling somebody when they've done something that has irritated you and jumping to the worst conclusions about their motivation.

And feeding the good wolf in friendship is love and forgiveness and cutting each other slack and saying nice things about your friends behind their back. And it's all of that. So I'm trying to be much more conscious with my friendships of just pausing and thinking, in this friendship, am I feeding the good wolf or the bad wolf? Yeah, I love that. Listener, as you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I think a lot of us have some ideas of things that we can do to feed our good wolf. And here's a good tip to make it more likely that you do it.

It can be really helpful to reflect right before you do that thing on why you want to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation of what neuroscientists would call reward value. Basically, is this thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to do this thing that you want to do to feed your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make the reward value on that higher and makes it more likely that you're going to do that. For example, if what you're

trying to do is exercise, right before you're getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind yourself of why. For example, I want to exercise because it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. That's a great way to think about it. And friendship is really important to me. I started this podcast in part simply to spend more time with Chris, who's my best friend and is also on this trip

to New York with me. So it's a really special thing. And I actually contemplated a three-way conversation because Chris and I did an episode where we talked with each other about our friendship once upon a time. So, you know, I feel incredibly blessed to have Christopher and, I mean, several other friends that I've had for a long, long time. Your book is focused on a particular friendship more. And I think at the time you wrote the book, I think it was a 35-year friendship. My guess is 37 or 38 at this point. It'd be 40.

40. Okay. That's how long it takes to write and get a book out. That's how long it takes to write and get a book out. It started, but I'm happy to say it's ever stronger, our friendship, at 40 years. Yeah. Before we go more into that, though, I feel like we have to jump back a little bit to some of your previous work. And I have to ask you a question that you love to ask people, which is, what are you reading?

I just reread, and I love to reread, an absolutely marvelous novel called City of Thieves by David Benioff. And this is a book set during the World War II siege of St. Petersburg. And it's about two unlikely lads who are chucked together and form an astonishing friendship, a Jewish kid and kind of Cossack, handsome, aristocratic-ish kid, not really an aristocrat, but with that kind of Cossack, handsome, aristocratic-ish kid, not really an aristocrat, but with that kind of looks, who are given an impossible task to come up with a dozen eggs. And they have to go behind enemy lines to get them. And it's funny and crazy and filled with history and so moving,

because it's really a book about friendship as chosen family, which is a theme that resonates really deeply with me. Yeah, I've read that book. I should read it again. I don't do enough rereading. It really is very rewarding. It is. It's a constant battle because there's so many new books to read and exciting books to read.

And old books that I haven't read. Yeah. One of my favorite forms of rereading, and I think I stole this from Winston Churchill, but I've never been able to find the quote, is I think he called it visiting his books, where you just go to your bookshelf, you pull a book off it that you've read, flip to a random page, and read 10 or 15 pages. That's a great idea. Visiting your books.

Visiting your books. So it's just like a little chat with an old friend. Visiting your books. Visiting your books. So it's just like a little chat with an old friend. But one of the really magical things about it, and you have to believe in a certain type of universe, but I often find it's a passage that I need. Yeah. That just the randomness of it brings me a character, a bit of wisdom, just something that I need. Yeah.

And there are books that lend themselves to that. One of my favorite books of all time is the Tao Te Ching. I recently did my own interpretation of it. It's been translated countless times. So I've got like 15 English translations. And I was like, I'm going to do my own as part of another project. But given that that's a book of 81 short verses, you just flip it open and it's got a piece of wisdom for you kind of right there. But I love doing that with like a fiction book. Is it designed for that or is that just how you came to use it? No.

As part of this project, I was teaching on it as a project to use AI to have conversations with scholars about great books. Now, I'm not a scholar. I don't know why they chose me. But nonetheless, it's a book I love. So it's 81 verses that are not linear. It would be better to think of as 81 poems, honestly, I think is the way I would think of it. And there's a lot of repetition. As I was thinking about how to teach it, I was like, this is very difficult to teach because it doesn't just progress linearly. Like verse one is saying the same thing that verse 67 is with like a slight

twist on it. So it works perfectly for that. Wow. That's so cool. Yeah. It's a really amazing book in that way. My go-to for random passages that speak to me is weirdly enough, The Hobbit. Ah, okay. I find The Hobbit, if I go to a random page, it has something for me that would make no sense if you hadn't read The Hobbit. This doesn't work. With books you haven't read. With books you haven't read. It only works with books you've read. Right. It's like visiting with a friend is easier than visiting with somebody you've never met.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Exactly. So you've got this long-term friendship with this gentleman that you guys are kind of different in many ways. To talk about the initial or maybe even ongoing differences between the two of you is sort of a way to introduce the listeners to the other character in this book. Well, to do that, I have to take people back to the early 80s. In fact, 1983. This fellow's called Maxie. And we were both at Yale. And I had just come back from a term I had spent in Los Angeles.

I took a term off from school. I went out to Los Angeles, the kind of typical preppy kid. And I came back with my hair permed down the center, with it shaved tight on the sides, because I wanted to look like the artist who was still then known as Prince. I looked nothing like him. No, I was going to say, I don't think you, my guess is you didn't pull that off. I did not pull it off. The poor hairdresser who was given that task must have had some poker face, but she did

her best. I also loved Adam Ant, who was another popular. Chris loves Adam Ant. Yeah. Adam Ant was great. And he had his hair permed down the middle too um and i had a turquoise acid washed blue jean jacket and i had a leather wristband with studs and i was very into punk rock and i had been an out gay kid at yale from the day i arrived but i came back a very

committed not just gay rights advocate but but AIDS advocate in the very early days of the plague. And I was scared and angry and furious. And I had a very tight circle of friends who were theater kids and classicists and other gay and lesbian folk and basically decided I'd met everybody I needed to know at Yale. And then was invited to do something really weird, which was join a secret society. And the purpose of this secret society was to bring together the 15 most different kids at Yale, men and women, the kids who were just totally different from one another and who otherwise never would have met. And you had to have dinner twice a week, could never miss.

You had to, in one evening in the fall, tell the other kids the story of your life, your entire life, leaving nothing out. And you had to go on a weekend retreat together. I want to be in a secret society. It was so cool. I was very skeptical at first. I was like, I don't- Maybe that's your next business idea.

You help create secret societies like that in cities across the country. I think not just as a business, but as just a social cause. Yeah. Because that idea that there are 15 kids who you've never met at a college you've gone to for three years at that point. You wouldn't at first glance like each other. Yeah. So there were these kids. And on our first night, it's only for seniors, this society, in this stone building that

looks like something out of the Adams family off campus. And the other kids, I looked at them and I was like, yeah, these kids seem cool. I could be friends with these kids, except for one kid. And that was this kid, Maxie. And he was a legendary athlete. He, as a high school student, had won in the state of Pennsylvania the state track competition at 10 o'clock in the morning. And he captained his team to the state or league lacrosse championship at 3 p.m. that afternoon. Same day. His arms were so big he had to cut Vs in his lacrosse shirts because otherwise his arms

wouldn't fit through them. And he was loud and he was obnoxious. And when I met him, he was that kind of kid who says, think fast and throws a beer at your head. And he couldn't sit still and he came up with nicknames for everybody. And I just thought, I can't. I can't with this kid. Plus, he was one of the jocks.

He was one of this group of people that I found intimidating, menacing. And in packs, they were. So I just thought, I'm going to steer clear of this one. And it was interesting. He was probably a little prejudiced against me because I don't think he'd ever met an out gay kid before. But I was way, way, way more prejudiced against him. And I made a ton of assumptions about who he was based on how he presented himself. And so I actually learned that year that this kid had a heart of gold and had great values. And our friendship has only deepened over 40 years. That said, he's still loud. He's still obnoxious.

He still says, think fast and throws beers at your head. He is physically demonstrative, insists on giving me bear hugs. That you hate. I hate. I don't even really like to touch anybody else. And he loves to be outside and in groups and surrounded by people. And I like a little of that, but I just have to have my alone time, my quiet time, my introvert time. So it's not like we discovered we're the same. We are wildly different, but we discovered we have the same values. Yeah. There's so many things in what you said there. I think that that idea of how we judge other people is so ingrained in the human condition.

I think you can't not do it, right? I literally think it's impossible to meet somebody and not form judgments of them. The brain just does it like that. And so it's something that happens, but to learn to hold those pretty loosely. You and I were talking before this, and one of the questions you said you love to ask people is, what have you been wrong about in the last year? And I know that there are times in my life that when I am shown to be dead wrong about someone, I love it. Because it's almost always a reversal in a good direction. I can think of one guy at a company I worked at, and he's very similar to what you're describing with Maxie, very much a jock, very outgoing, very, you know, just high energy.

And I just immediately, I'm like, ugh, like, don't like, I don't like it, you know? And I judge him, right? I have all my stereotypes of somebody like that, right? And sure enough, I get to know him a little. I'm like, this guy's amazing. So I love being wrong in that way. That's such a great way to be wrong. And I want to go back for a second to this business of judging people, because I do think it's hardwired. And I think it's Darwinian. And I think we, early on in the evolution of our species, had to make really quick judgments about what kind of wild cat it was. Was it likely to eat us or not?

And what kind of group of people we encountered. Were they our people or were they people who wanted to kill us? So it's not entirely bad that we do this. There's a reason we do it. That said, I think we just rob ourselves of so many possible friendships and relationships. And I'll tell you a little game that I play with myself related to this. And it has to do with the person sitting next to you on an airplane. Okay.

So I used to be that guy who would pull down my laptop, put on my earphones, yanked out a book, whatever, and just sent the do not talk to me vibe. Yep. Familiar with that. Yep. And again, it's Darwinian. It's protective. But now I like to look at the person next to me and come up with a kind of story. Who do I think they are?

What kind of person do I think they are? And then I hate to say it, but I'm the guy who says, hey, how you doing? Are you returning to Columbus? Are you heading out from there? And it's so interesting talking about wrong about people. I'm always wrong. I'm always wrong about who they are. And most of the time, they're pretty happy to talk to me and I'm really happy to talk to them. And if they send the don't talk to me vibes, I honor that, of course. But I'm often wrong about whether they want to talk, and I'm always, almost always wrong about who they are. Yeah. The other thing that a lot of scientific studies show is that we imagine that talking to a stranger is going to be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and we're not going to like it. If you survey people and you ask them, that's what they say. And then you send

them out to do it. They almost inevitably come back and report, it was not that weird. And I actually really enjoyed it. You know, not only are we wrong about the person, we're wrong about oftentimes the entire nature of the interaction, that it will be something that's good and enjoyable. That's so interesting. I hadn't thought about just the very nature of the interaction. Right, right. I have one story about when I really robbed myself and I learned a lesson on this one.

I was flying to the West Coast and there was a guy sitting next to me and he seemed to really want to talk. And I was in that don't talk to me mode. I had my book and I answered everything monosyllabically and did the body language where I twisted away from him. And when we're landing, I thought, oh, the guy really wants to talk. Would it kill me to talk to him for a minute? So I said, you know, hey, are you flying into Los Angeles or returning home? And he said, I'm returning home. I said, what brings you home?

And he said, my business partner was recently murdered. And it turned out his business partner was at the center of one of the most famous, emotional, difficult trials of our time. And I would have had the opportunity to be compassionate. I would have had the opportunity to learn so much about this thing that was obsessing everybody at the time. But I robbed myself of it because they're like, okay, folks, and off we went. Yep. I am still guilty far more often than not of the, I've got my book, I've got my work, I've got to get done. I've got a couple hours that interrupted on a plane. I'm sure I robbed myself often of those things. There's another thing that happens in the book that I would like to touch on. I'm just going to read what you write here. You said, and every time I thought to call

Maxie, I would remember that I hadn't sent anything, which was a donation to his new school that he'd started. I'd remember that I hadn't sent anything, feel guilty about that and put off calling him until I'd sent a check, which I would then neglect to do. And I think we can all relate to this, like, I haven't done something to uphold my end of something. So instead of crossing the difficult barrier to face that, I put it off again. And it's just this cycle, and it drives us oftentimes away from people we love. And sometimes it could do it almost permanently. Yeah. To me, that passage illustrates exactly where we started. That's feeding the bad wolf. When you do that, you are feeding the bad wolf and potentially rupturing a friendship forever.

Maxie had sent me this letter. He and his wife were starting this awesome school on the island of Eleuthera. It was everything he believed in. It was conservation and experiential education and treating young people like scientists and real human beings who can help make a difference. And it was just a form letter. And I was going to send in a check of 100 bucks or something like that. And I just kept forgetting. But rather than just pick up the phone and say, hey, Maxie, I'm an idiot. I've been meaning to send you a check.

And he would have said, oh, don't worry about that. Don't bother. I got so into my own head that I almost blew up our friendship over my guilt about not having done something that actually Maxie wouldn't have even cared. Our friendship wasn't contingent on my sending $100 to his school. Our friendship was a friendship. am I sending a hundred bucks to a school? Right. Our friendship was a friendship. But I think so often with friends, it's easy to accidentally torpedo a friendship out of that kind of guilt slash negligence. I mean, I can think of so many people that I used to be really good friends with

and I'm not anymore. I mean, they're just kind of gone. Yeah. And I think that's the nature of certain things. Not every relationship is meant to last. And just the fact that it doesn't, doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile and valuable relationship. But I often do wonder like, what, what happened there? Like, I wish I could just watch the process. My memory is so bad, but I wish I could sort of watch the process from my vantage point now and just see like, how did it unravel? You know? So it does mean, I think we talk about this in the beginning of the introduction that, you know, the music thing that goes on at the beginning of every show. And then Chris reads a little thing, constant, consistent, and creative

effort. That's not it. It's three C's. Two of them are creative and consistent effort to build a life worth living. But I think the same thing goes with friendship, right? It takes some sort of ongoing effort to do it. Not that it becomes a job, but that it does take some degree of conscious intention. I absolutely believe that. And there's actually one of the epigraphs, one of the quotes I use at the beginning of my book. Do you mind if I read the – because I don't want to get- We're in person.

We have a book here. This is so cool. I don't want to get it wrong because it's just so well put. And it's by the poet David White. Oh, I love David White. We got to have him on one time and it was such a gift. I'm so jealous. I got to hear more about that.

I got to hear the program. But he wrote, all friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness. I was gonna say, we're generally pretty easygoing with each other. But like, for example, I've had to fire Chris from like, two jobs in the past. Wow. You know, Chris and I both have a history of drug addiction. And so Chris would be in his addiction, I think, oh, you know, a good job would get him, you know, would get him out of this would help him give him some structure. So I'd hire him into some software company that I was working at, probably hire him into a position he wasn't even really qualified to do and and then eventually he would screw it up really badly and you know my bosses would be looking at me like what have you done and i would eventually be like well i guess i'm

gonna have to fire him which is sort of an uncomfortable thing but our friendship just sort of rolled on you know i think we have a natural sort of like whatever with each other. You know, like a sense of like, yeah, okay. You know. To me, that illustrates one of the things I've come to believe is an essential ingredient in a long friendship, especially a 40-year friendship, which is you have to be able to get mad at each other. Mm-hmm. You have to be able to tell each other that you are mad when you are mad. Yeah.

And you have to reveal enough of yourself to allow the other person to get mad. Yeah. I mean, that's a really interesting idea of being able to do that. Because I think that's common knowledge. We think about that as being pretty common if you're going to have a lasting romantic relationship, right? Of course, you're going to get upset with each other, right? Of course, there's going to be things. But I think friendship, we tend to think shouldn't have that. And, you know, I think like a good romantic relationship, I mean, if you have a ton of that, it's probably a problem. You know, maybe it's not the right friendship, but it's inevitable,

right? Over such a long period of time. I mean, there's another section that I loved in the book where Maxie got really pissed at you one time. Can you share about that? had a brain tumor. And it was an acoustic neuroma. It's not malignant, but it can be life-threatening. And the operation, like all brain operations, is scary and risky. And he had told me the minute he was diagnosed, he told me his fears. He allowed me to be there with him in the hospital when he was coming out of the general anesthetic and to help him walk down the hospital aisles as he regained his sense of balance. And some time later, Maxie discovered through a mutual friend, a guy named Singer, who's in the book a lot, that I was recently diagnosed with a nerve disease that's very debilitating. It's not necessarily progressive, and it's certainly nothing fatal, but it had a

huge effect on my life, a very painful neuropathy, and I hadn't told him. And I remember distinctly he was furious, and I thought he was joking at first, But he basically told me, you know, that's BS. That's not a friendship. And basically hung up on me. And I was worried that I'd lost the friendship over that. And it led me to a really deep revelation for me, which is that he had given me a huge gift by being vulnerable with me because he had allowed me to be a great friend to him. And I had robbed him of the opportunity to be a great friend because I hadn't shared with him

what I was going through. And at the time, I remember thinking like, oh, he has a brain tumor. I just have this stupid nerve disease. That's trivial compared to his brain tumor. I shouldn't bring it up. I'll be strong. I won't say anything. But it was selfish. It was just really selfish of me. And I realized that going forward, it's a real gift to allow someone else to be there for you. Now, you don't want to be constantly giving them opportunities to be there for you. There is a certain sense of balance that any good friendship has.

Right, right. But balance is the key. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That really resonates with me, given a tendency to go it alone. I think a few different

things feed into it for me. One is, and you say it here in the book, you don't like to be the person who needs help. There's some element of that. I think there's an element of, I think I'm burdening that person, you know? And it makes me think about something I saw in 12-step programs, which was, I think 12-step programs did this incredible thing where Bill Wilson realized early on that the relationship of one alcoholic talking to another was the healing element. And it was the healing element for both people. So if you're 10 years sober and you're talking to somebody who's three days sober, it seems like the person who's 10 years sober is giving something to the person who has three days sober. And they are. The person who's three days

sober is receiving something. But the person giving it is getting it back to the same measure and degree. But what I would see again and again is people who are new not understand that and feel like I don't want to reach out because I'm a burden. I don't want to call my sponsor because I'm probably bothering them. And of course they don't understand at that point because they're new to the process. And I think that's what you're speaking to here. That nature of being a friend is both having someone you can depend on and allowing somebody to depend on you or to call you. And to only do one side of that is not fair to the other people. You think, oh, I'm just not burdening them. My problems aren't that big of a deal. They've got plenty

going on. But legitimately, like you're taking something from them, which is the opportunity to be a supportive friend. Absolutely. And there's a word that when you were talking just was foremost in my mind, as it relates to some of the friends I know have been in 12-step and as it relates to my friendship with Maxie, and that word is service. And something that I haven't yet mentioned, but you know, of course, because you read the book, is that Maxie became an officer in the Navy SEALs and served for six years with the Navy SEALs. And he wanted to be jockey and outside and in the ocean, but he wanted to be much and he thinks there's a lot more interesting things and a lot of people who have been of service in specific ways that we don't celebrate teachers and nurses, for example. But a very important part of Maxie's life is this idea of

being of service. And I had robbed him in our friendship of the ability to be of service, of the ability to be of service, which is one of the central things who he is. And I can't help but think that unfortunately, a little of this is gendered and has to do with the way that boys are raised, certainly in America, but in many parts of the world, where whether you're a gay boy or a straight boy, you're supposed to be silent and you're supposed to endure and you're supposed to help but not need help. And so in our young male friendships too often, we don't build up healthy patterns of asking for help and giving help. Yeah, it was something about my friendship with Chris. I didn't understand it, but something happened between us so organically at like 18 that within like a month we were saying like, I love you to each other, which was, I mean, I'd never done

anything like that. I don't even know how it really happened, but there was some just breaking out of that male friendship straight jacket, you know? And again, I don't think it was a conscious thing. It just sort of evolved. But I remember being really struck by it. Like, wow, this is so great. Like, we're not playing that role with each other. The ironies of my story with Maxie is growing up as a gay boy in a time when the country was even more homophobic than it is now to an intense degree. I was very careful about never showing affection towards my male friends. Right. Yeah.

And Maxie, as this straight wrestler, lax player, rugby player, future military dude, was able to be much freer with it. Yeah. And so over the course of our 40-year friendship, Maxie had no trouble saying to me, I love you, man. Love you, Schwab. Love you. I couldn't say it back to him do that than the jock. That would be my assumption. And I was wrong. Weirdly enough, that was my assumption too. Yeah, totally. We were raised with that assumption. I had to learn that I was wrong. I didn't realize how freaked out I was about saying love you or love you, man. It was coded. about saying love you or love you, man. It was coded. It was deep. It was a prejudice I had.

And a real breakthrough, I think, in our friendship, it sounds silly, but was the first time he said, love you, Schwalves. And I said, love you too, Maxie. And it was like a burden was lifted off me. I felt lighter afterwards. I'd been living with this thing where I was scared to say it and didn't even know that I was scared to say it. It was so deeply ingrained and I was as prejudiced as anybody else. I made assumptions about myself and him that were not warranted. To what degree do you think that hesitancy to be able to say that to him came from an overall uncomfortableness with saying that to friends in general? And what extent of it was based on what you said earlier, which is as a gay man having friendships with men, I'm worried they're going to take something the wrong way. Are you able to parse apart like how much of it was what?

I think there's part of it, which is just how boys are raised in America. I think there's part of it, which is just how boys are raised in America. But a huge part of it was the protective as a gay man better not say that to any straight man. And growing up at a time when if a straight man beat up or even killed a gay man, it was a perfectly acceptable defense for the straight man to say, well, he came on to me. And that excused whatever followed. And juries time and again either let people off entirely or with a slap on the wrist with that, well, he came on to me. And so that was coded really deeply. Yeah. I am stunned oftentimes by the changes that have happened in this country around gay rights. It fills me with a certain degree of hope that society-wide opinions about something can change that much. Like, I mean, I watch mainstream TV and I see commercials with gay couples in it.

And I'm like, that as of somebody who grew up in the 80s, like there was no way that ever could have happened then. Gay people, gay men, especially gay women were invisible. Gay men either killed somebody or killed themselves. Those were basically the two roles. Because of AIDS. Or just because that was the plot. Oh, okay. They were a murderer or they were in despair.

Those were the two options. And groundbreaking, of course, was the TV show Will and Grace. Yeah. And the Ellen show. And it is fascinating, those of us who are culture workers, we do have the ability to reflect and to lead. Yeah. And I think the leading is really important, not just the reflecting. Say more about what that looks like for you. That looks like reflecting. We should have portraits of our lives and societies as they exist. But the leading is we should point our spotlights, whether it's in our nonfiction books or our fiction books or our TV shows or our movies on aspects of society that

have received less attention and in the best of all possible worlds, hand the pen, hand the camera over to people who don't always get to tell their stories and let them tell their stories as they wish, the way they wish. And I think there's a word that's very debated now, which is empathy. But I think about empathy a lot. And I do believe it's one of the greatest gifts that culture gives us, which is the ability to spend some time in someone else's shoes, see their story, meet their friends. And that happens in fiction, and it happens in nonfiction, especially memoir. So just by leading, allowing more stories to be told, giving people the pen, the camera, the spotlight, I think changes society. It's my little soapbox speech. Sorry.

No, I asked. You asked. I did, yes. One of the things that Maxie taught at his island school, which is a school he founded in the Bahamas, was he encouraged, maybe didn't even encourage, maybe mandated students find something called a carencia. Three syllables again. See, they get me. They get me. Tell me what that is. And then you had sort of an interesting insight around them for you. Before we were talking, I was thinking, I wonder what questions Eric's going to ask. And then I thought, Karencia. I know he's going to go for Karencia.

There you go. Yeah, predictable. I know, in such a happy way. So he founded, he and Pam, his wife, founded this amazing school. And it's a kind of a school term abroad for high school students. Some Bahamian kids, a lot of kids from the US. And when they get there, the very first thing that happens is they put their iPhone in a sealed bag and do not see it for 100 days. Yeah.

Can't imagine, but it's amazing. It's amazing. That in and of itself is an astonishing thing to do to a young person. Yeah. And they all have to read a book, The Rediscovery of North America by Barry Lopez, incredible little book that started as a speech. And they all have to find a spot, which is their place of carencia. And as Maxie explained it to me, carencia, it's a Spanish word, and a very particular meaning it has, as explained by Ernest Hemingway, is the place a bull goes in the bull ring to gather its strength and kind of center itself

before what might be its final salvo facing the matador. It's a place of quiet, a place of strength, a place where you gather yourself. And he insists that each one of these kids who is embarking on this 100-day journey find a place on the island of Eleuthera within easy walking distance of the school where they'll go, I think it's every day, for an hour, an hour and a half with no purpose, but just to sit with themselves and center themselves. They're surrounded by other kids all the time and they're learning and doing science and in whatever bunk, what do they call them? Dorms. Dorms.

Dorms. They're in dorms. But this place of Karencia is something that he teaches them to find not just when they're in Eleuthera, but wherever they go in the world. And I love this concept. And I was thinking about it and thinking about it. And I came to the realization one night as I was hanging out with Maxie in Eleuthera, that books were my carencia. That actually, for me, it wasn't a physical place. It was when I need to center myself, whether I'm starting a book anew or visiting one of my old friends from the bookshelf. It's that just act of disconnecting, not looking at my smartphone and spending hour and hour and a half by myself with a book. I wanted to pause for a quick good wolf reminder. This one's about a habit change and a mistake I

see people making. And that's really that we don't think about these new habits that we want to add in the context of our entire life, right? Habits don't happen in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life that we have. So when we just keep adding, I should do this, I should do that, I should do this, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about what we're not going to do in order to make that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think about where is this going to fit and what in my life might I need to remove. If you want a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that's true for me too, for sure. I think

they've been that to me for a long, long time. I think growing up in a household where there was a lot of anger, it was just the safe place to be. Off with a book, you can't do anything wrong, you're not causing any trouble, just be left alone. But the thing that I thought, A, I thought that was amazing that you discovered that. But you also go on to say that sometimes books were a way that took you out of life. Yeah. I love what you just said about the idea of when you're in a chaotic or angry environment, that books can center you or give you that escape. But I find that that escape can also become a bit of an addiction in and of itself. And it can be too easy to go to that instead of joining the fray.

And I also love the point you made. Part of the reason I think books are my carencia and part of the idea behind this carencia is you're not interacting with anybody else. You can't be harmed and you can't harm anyone. I can read a book. I'm not changing the words on the page no matter what I think of them. They're just there. And so that's lovely, extraordinary, necessary. But I realized that weekend when I was hanging out with Maxie and Eleuthera that sometimes I went to it too soon or too often. And that, again, I robbed myself and my friends of my presence. And presence is scary. You can hurt someone.

You can say the wrong thing. You can say a stupid thing. Someone can do the same. You can be hurt. You can hurt someone. You can say the wrong thing. You can say a stupid thing. Someone can do the same. You can be hurt. You can be offended. You can be upset. But again, coming back to this idea, if you surround yourself with people in an environment of tolerance and mercy and mutual forgiveness, maybe it's not so scary.

Yeah. Another thing that I've noticed around books or movies or, you know, great streaming shows or whatever they are is sort of, as we've said, one of the great things about them is they offer comfort. They're comfortable. Right. And I've noticed as I've gotten older, and I've seen this in lots of other older people, is that we tend to start to prioritize comfort over other values. And so like you're saying, you're describing in the book a night where your inclination would have been like, all right, I'm done. Go to bed with my book, right?

It's 7 p.m. Everybody else is going to go do something, but I'm going to go retreat because it's comfortable. It's easier, right? And it's not that that's always the wrong choice sometimes that is absolutely the right choice and there are times that the right choice at least for me is to push a little bit against that you know it's a cliche now you know out of your comfort zone but it seems to be something that feels really important to me you know as, as I get older, it feels like pushing out of my comfort zone in just normal day to day things is more important to me than it used to be. Maybe I did

it more naturally when I was younger. I'm not sure. For me, when I thought about that, and the idea of pushing myself more out of my comfort zone and not being so quick to retreat to my currency of books, I realized that there's this happy medium, which is taking the friendships that I have and changing the rules of engagement. Meaning something like there will be a friend who every couple weeks will meet for coffee. And I'll now try to say, hey, do you want to go to a museum and walk

through the mat? Let's bag the coffee and go walk through the mat. Or let's do something different than we normally do. And it allows you to see them in a new light and have them see you in a new light. And it takes you both out of your comfort zone. It's a little bit of an adventure. So to me, that's been part of it. And Maxie is always taking me out of my comfort zone. He wants me to free dive. He wants me to... Have you ever done free diving? I couldn't do it.

Okay. Nope. All right. I didn't know if you'd, in the intervening years, worked your way up to it. I sort of joke now that when he asks me when I'll do it, I say never. It's never good for you. Yeah. I don't think I'll ever do it. I sort of joke now that when he asks me when I'll do it, I say never is never good for you. Yeah. I don't think I'll ever do it. Would you scuba dive? I snorkel. Okay. Well, all right. So you'll get, you'll put your head under the water and breathe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

reading about free diving makes me anxious. Oh yeah. Just reading about it. And there was a terrifying documentary on Nat Geo or something. It's terrifying. Yeah. And people who love it really love it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it strikes me as, you know, a lot of sort of quote unquote adventure sports. Like there's a certain element of the, I don't want to use the word danger, but that adds an element to it, right? It does. You know, I noticed I've more and more, like I took up surfing a few years ago, which I always say is a stupid hobby for an Ohioan. But when I did it, I just felt like very rarely in life anymore am I so excited that I want to, like, pump my fist in the air like I'd won the Masters or something, right? It just doesn't happen that often.

That's how surfing sometimes makes me feel. I need more of that. Yeah. More of that is good. I mean, I will say that the way Maxie practices free diving, it is the opposite of adventure sport. That what he's trying to do is bring all his body systems down to as still as they can possibly be. His blood pressure, whatever it is, blood pumping, I don't know what that is, and get to the point where he can sit near the bottom of the ocean

without tanks, without anything, and just be there looking up at the light coming through the top of the water. It sounds fantastic. I just can't do it. Yep, yep. My son and I went to Mexico, not the Christmas we just had, but the one before. And we went scuba diving. And one of the things she was like, I don't think they should have let me go scuba diving with the level of experience that I had. I think I should have been in a pool for a little while. It was in many ways, it was a

frightening experience. But the first thing she had me do was descend and sit on the ocean floor. Yeah. And even with a tank on, I liked it because I was like, you have to calm yourself. You have to find a way to calm yourself and be like, okay, I can breathe. It's weird breathing, but I can breathe. I'm safe. It was interesting. And there is this cool thing that Maxie told me about, which is the mammalian diving reflex that actually when you put your face in water, your heart naturally slows.

It's just some weird reflex we have, the mammalian diving reflex. I feel like I have the opposite. I do too. When I was learning to swim as a kid, I would not put my head in the water. And they eventually passed me through like whatever the badge I had to get, like turtle or whatever. Right. Because I could swim the distance, but I wouldn't do it with my head in the water. That's a riot. And, you know, so to me, like I tried to learn to swim to do a triathlon last year and it was really hard for me.

Like I feel like when I put my head under the water, it just feels totally unnatural to me. Now, again, what he's doing is different, but it feels totally unnatural to me to be doing something that is causing me to be out of breath and at the same time have my head somewhere it can't breathe. There's some part of me that's like, this isn't, no, this isn't right. I've gotten better at it. It's been an interesting challenge. It is a funny kind of mastery. mastery and it's also one of those things like flipping expectations on their head because maxi has become he does yoga he's a deeply spiritual person and his ability to control his body is unbelievable i can't remember if i put this in the book but while having a routine

colonoscopy which he did without sedation he was able able to get his heartbeat so low in the early 30-something beats per minute that they kept thinking he died. Like, they kept wanting to revive him. Wow. Because he could control his heartbeat. I will not be doing it under that. Bring on the propofil. Exactly.

Like, you know, I'm not ready to do that. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park.

Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We talked earlier about, you know, how there are oftentimes a pause and a friendship. And that my experience has been sometimes that pause just becomes permanent. But within you and Maxie's friendship, there were pauses there, you know. So writing a book about my best friend. And Maxie's not my best friend. And I'm not his best friend. We're very dear friends. We love each other. And there have been times in our friendship when we've gone literally a decade without talking. Nothing went wrong. No one insulted anybody.

He had four kids, started a school. I had difficult demanding jobs in the world of book publishing. And I think that a lot of people, after a friendship has gone 10 years without contact, kind of assume the friendship's dead. Right. Yeah. And in fact, it just is unused. It's like a bicycle that's in the garage. We know how to ride the bicycle and it's still there. So you just have to pick it up and ride it. And one of the most powerful things is periodically through this 40 years, either one of us would contact the other just out of the blue. Hey, how are you doing? There was a, for example, a massive hurricane that hit his island. I'm like, I need to call Maxie. Or often there would be a friend who was kind of the connector.

And I think these people, connector friends are golden. They're kind of like the sheepdog that nips at everyone's ankles. And we all know that person. And that's the person who says, hey, I was talking to Maxie the other day, you should call him. Or who says, I'm coming to town, let's all get together. And I had a really moving experience a couple weeks ago. And I'm telling this story with permission. One of the people who'd been in our secret society, we just hadn't heard from for 40 years. Nothing happened, nothing bad. He just went off and lived his life and we lived ours and we didn't really know how to contact each other and lost track. And he reached out through a Facebook page to everybody in our class saying that he had been diagnosed with cancer, that it

was stage four, that it wasn't responding well to treatment and wanted us to know what he was up to. and wanted us to know what he was up to. And two of us from the secret society got on the phone and were like, hey, what are you doing on Thursday? And this is a kid who lives, no longer a kid, a man who lives in Texas. And he said nothing. And we said, well, we're hopping on a plane. We're coming to see you. And we flew out and we had drinks and dinner and more drinks.

We talked until 1.30 in the morning. We picked up after 40 years exactly where we'd left off. And, you know, it shouldn't take a prompt like a dire health situation to get us to do that. That's in our power. Like I kept thinking now, that was so great. Who else can I do that with? And as a result, last week, I had dinner with someone I met 42 years ago. And we had a like a cool bond. And she's awesome. And we we met at a party and met a couple times after that and kept in touch through Facebook. But we had dinner and had a blast.

through Facebook, but we had dinner and had a blast. So, you know, my brother calls this part of our life the back nine, referring to the great game of golf. And what a cool thing to spend the back nine doing is calling people we had a bond with and just having a meal. That's a really interesting idea because I'm a forward-looking, thinking, moving person in general. So when I think about more friendship and community in my life, I think new friendships, right? But until you said that, it hadn't occurred to me that like, well, maybe there's lots of old friendships that are out there that would be far easier to get going again than a new friendship, right?

Because like you said, with some people, you just kind of pick back up. Yeah. Right? You just sort of pick back up. And it makes me think of a friend of mine who was like my first sponsor in a 12-step. Well, he was not my first sponsor. He was my most important sponsor in a 12-step program. And then we went on to play in bands together and but he moved away quite some time ago to Tennessee in the first couple years I went and saw him more often but we haven't seen each other in

quite some time and we just got on a text thread recently we're texting each other and I just was like you know what I need to like reinvest here. Yeah. Because this was a really special friendship to me. And it is the sort of friendship, sounds like a little bit like you and Maxie, where there's no weirdness about the fact that we haven't been in contact. He's got his life and he's had kids and I've had my life and my, you know,

there's no weirdness there. It would be easy to pick back up. It would be easy. And there's probably more like that that I haven't thought of. Yeah, and especially people, I think if you as a young person went through a really intense experience together, whatever that may be, it's just you laid the tracks that last a lifetime. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I've renewed another friendship recently with somebody. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, Oh, I actually am doing this somebody that I played music a lot with. And when I was drinking and using, we were like best

friends. And then when I would stop doing that, the friendship sort of fell off. And I've realized that's because I am making the association of alcohol and drugs with that person. I mean, they still drink and they still do their thing, right? It's not, but that association is mine, you know? And the fact that we could be friends without that, like, why not try? And I also think what I'm getting a lot of satisfaction from as I've been trying to implement this is this person I contact after 40 years doesn't mean now we're going to talk every three days for the rest of our lives. Yeah.

We might let it go, You know, everything has its natural rhythm. But I also, coming back to something I chatted about earlier, like switching it up. So that friend who you were in a band with, who you'd go and drink and use. I love the idea of you guys like taking a walk through a museum together. You know what I mean? There's so many or... That's a great idea, you know, because the way we've chosen to reconnect is around music yeah which is good because i mean i want to play music but it does occur to me that like that friendship would be really interesting in a completely different environment completely different set of circumstances when i went to visit maxi at the school he created which is is a beautiful, magical place.

Sounds like it. That also had a huge effect on our friendship. That changed our friendship. Yep. And for the longest time, actually, until this book came out, Maxie and my secret society friends were one set of friends. So jealous of that phrase. My secret society friends.

It just sounds so cool. New Yorkers have got it all. I know. It secret society friends. I mean, it just sounds so cool. New Yorkers have got it all. I know. It was so cool. And of the 14 of us, one, and this story is told in the book, died tragically very young. But 11 of us are in contact I've seen in the last year. That's amazing. Incredible. But I didn't used to mix them with my other friends. And now that's another really fun thing to do. It doesn't always work, but it's just fun to introduce people, too. And I'm getting a lot of pleasure out of that.

That does sound enjoyable. And one thing also, it's been great fun, too. And this is hard. This is a lot of alchemy. But my husband and I have now been together for 40 years. Congratulations. Thank you. have now been together for 40 years. Congratulations. Thank you. Maxie and his wife, who's awesome,

have an incredible marriage and are so great together. And it's been such a joy spending time, the four of us. Yeah. Yep. And one of my favorite books of all time is Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, which is about the friendship between two couples. And that's a really special relationship too, I think. Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to change direction out of the book in a minute. But before I do, I want to hit one thing that's not central to the book, but you referenced it, which is the nerve disease that you have. And I just want to read something that you wrote because I think it's really relevant to a lot of what many of us go through with difficulty. And you say, taking my anti-nausea medication earlier in the day or later? Should I have eaten more or less or something different? When I was in pain, I beat myself up for walking too much or too little, for working out at the gym too hard or not enough. I love that idea because in most lives,

particularly as you get older, there's some sort of difficulty. And that may be an emotional difficulty, right? At any age, right? Depression, anxiety, alcoholism, whatever it might be. As you get older, the physical ailments tend to pile up, right? And there is this sense that many, many people have, and I know I have, that it should be fixable and that I'm just not doing it right. And if I was, this just would go away. I don't think that's really realistic, but it is something we all engage in. And I'm curious to think how you've begun to work with that differently over time. So I think there are two things at work here for me. One is that very human sense to think that we can control things that we can't control.

Yep. And one of the things, and the nerve disease I have, it's kind of interesting. It's called small fiber neuropathy. And it is a disease where the pain nerves die. So weirdly enough, you would think you wouldn't feel pain, but you feel constant pain. And it dysregulates your ability to control your temperature and digestion and all that. But I always say, at a certain age, everybody gets something and you don't get to choose what you get.

Yep. So easy to say, but important to try to repeat to myself. There is, I think for me also, a very lasting effect of having come of age during the early years of AIDS. So as a young gay man in the early 80s, mid 80s, there was this horrible disease that was affecting primarily at first, as reported by the media, turned out to be a little different later, very different later, gay men in certain communities. And there was this overwhelming message that it was our fault, that we had in some way deserved this, or that our behavior had brought it upon us. And especially in the early years before they knew exactly how it was transmitted, it was also tied to youize this idea that we're at fault for our illnesses. Yeah.

And so I carried with me this sense that whenever anything went wrong, it was somehow my fault. Yeah. And my inability later to control my symptoms, therefore, was also my fault yeah yeah and my inability later to control my symptoms therefore was also my fault yeah and separating illness from blame i think is really hard and i think it's not just me i haven't studied this so i'm just talking about things that i know other people have studied at length and i may be saying things that are naive and presenting them as revelations. But I also think that there's so much in childhood that reinforces that. So, you know, I told you to put on sunblock. If you have sunburn, it's your own damn fault. Or, you know, you shouldn't have drunk so much. Or it's fault.

Yeah. I love Calvin and Hobbes. And there's a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon I used to teach in my Habits That Matter program and he's lost his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, which is everything to him. And he's so upset and he goes to his mom and his mom's something like, I told you if you keep leaving that tiger around, whatever, this will happen. And Calvin said, there's no situation so bad

that a little guilt won't make it worse. Yeah, exactly. And all of those, you know, growing up, don't tip your chair back. You'll fall over and split your head open. You're just filled with these things. And that's very reasonable. I mean, if you tip back and you fall over and split your head, but I just got this sense that not controlling my symptoms was my fault. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's really common, you know, regardless of where we get it from. I mean, your insight about the AIDS crisis makes total sense. Like, of course, I mean, we were very blamed.

And childhood makes total sense. Even the Buddha, though, taught a parable about the second arrow, right? And the second arrow parable is basically like you get shot with one arrow and that's bad enough. But then, you know, you get shot with a second arrow and the second arrow is the feeling bad about feeling bad. It's the, you know, why did I do this to myself? It's that element that, you know, makes things worse. And I've joked before that sometimes you could boil everything I teach down to like how to not make things worse, which is an absolutely unmarketable idea, right? It's just nobody's

going to buy that. But when we look at all the ways that we tend to make things in our lives worse, it's actually quite a skill. It's quite a skill to just take life at what it is without the suffering that we layer on top of. And when I read that paragraph from you, I related so deeply, you know, with multiple aspects of my life, whether it be a physical condition or it be a mental condition. I think I was lucky, unlike you in your formative years, I was lucky that I got to go into recovery where I was taught that, yeah, you're responsible for getting better from your you know being a homeless heroin addict but you're not at fault right so in in those very formative years for you and me we were getting different messages like i was lucky to stumble into a place with the sort of thing that carries about as much moral shame as anything else addiction yeah right i was lucky to be in a

community that said again not that you're, but it's not your fault, right? It's a disease. Now, I don't know that I believe that about disease. It's a weird concept, but I feel like it was a really important step from moral failing, right? Because that's the way addiction was seen, moral failing. Disease at least sort of took it out there a little bit and gave you some distance. And so I was lucky to learn that, but I still am that way. One of the things that this just popped back into my head I hadn't thought about for so long is, of course, one of the other communities that was blamed in the early days of AIDS were IV drug users. Yes, yes. And so gay men and IV drug users were thought to be morally reprehensible,

deserving of all they got, and also thought to be public health threats. Yeah. Like radioactive. So there was so much, and they were said always in the same breath almost. Yeah, and they were very different things. I mean, like to equate gay people with IV drug addicts is just a, that's such a messed

up characterization. As I was reading about you, you know, growing up during the AIDS crisis, I'm always fascinated by reading accounts of people through that time because it's just such an extreme situation. To see that level of death happening around you and not know what's causing, I mean, it's just such an extreme situation to see that level of death happening around you and not know what's causing. I mean, it's just terrifying. And in my own, you know, minor way though, as an IV drug addict, right, you know, getting HIV tests were terrifying. Terrifying. I mean, I can remember two of them. One was when I first tried to get sober. This is a couple years

before I eventually did. It scared me to death. You know, and then two years later I had hepatitis C, you know, I caught that, which back then was not a good thing to have. Now it's relatively minor. They treat it pretty easily. But back then was, you know, if they could treat it, which they couldn't in a lot of cases, the treatment itself was miserable. Interferon and, you know, I guess I was in one of those communities. itself was miserable, interferon. And, you know, I guess I was in one of those communities. And then that period between, for the first couple of years when AIDS hit, there was no test, then there was a test. But early in the early days of the test, there was a two-week wait for the results. Took them two weeks. And that two-week period was the most intense guilt and shame. Totally. And fear.

And fear. All wrapped up. All wrapped up. Yeah. And what that does to the body must be just, I can't imagine how it affects every aspect of us. And it does leave the idea of illness and fault. And we do that so often, too. Yeah. We want to ascribe fault to illness. Because then we believe we can control it. Yeah. Right. It gives us a sense of agency

and control. If this can be fixed, if it can be controlled, you just didn't control it. So that's good. Good. You know, too bad. Too bad for you. But I will do will do this you know i think about that i really focus hard on taking good care of myself physically both for myself today but i've also seen like in my parents like we're not taking care of themselves led so i'm i'm extremely focused on it i'm also not naive enough to know that like i mean it matters i feel like it's like playing the lottery like i'm buying a lot of tickets yeah right like it's like playing the lottery. Like I'm buying a lot of tickets, right? Like I'm just buying a lot of tickets. I've got a better chance. I've got a better chance if I got a lot of tickets. Yeah. And it's still the lottery. And it's still the lottery.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a very funny path to cross. And I go to the gym and I try to eat healthfully and I try to control things for all sorts of reasons, health and happiness related. Right, right. But I love your lottery ticket analogy. Those are lottery tickets, but it's not a pension. Yeah, right. It's not. I wish it was, but it's just not.

I think we'll wrap up here with a phrase your mother used. And she used to say, in the grand scheme of things. And I'd love you to explain that. And I think there are some nuances to it that we can scheme of things. And I'd love you to explain that. And I think there are some nuances to it that we can talk about also. Great. So I wrote a book called The End of Your Life Book Club about the two years I spent with my mother when she was dying of pancreatic cancer and she died at age 75. And I used to go to chemo with her and have great conversations about books. And it's a book about her life and lessons I learned from her. She was a refugee advocate and educator.

And one of the phrases that she used throughout our life was, in the grand scheme of things. And you would come home from school with some desperate complaint. Bobby stole my lunchbox. You know, something that just had rocked your world. You were inconsolable. And my mother would remind you well in the grand scheme of things yeah yeah it's not that big a deal and therein would follow you can get another lunchbox you can talk to bobby that that it wasn't just

resignation it was the idea of perspective that whatever you were going through there might well be other people who are going through something worse or more dire. Or that you, in fact, were yourself going through something worse or more dire. And a kind of lesson to always try to pull the lens out and see whatever we're going through through a bigger worldview. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. And I mean, in the Habits That Matter program, one of the whole modules is around perspective. And the basic idea is exactly what you said.

The wider perspective you can have, the less you tend to suffer. But I find this phrase interesting because it is also an absolute way of minimizing any emotions you might have about anything, right? Like it can be used in a very empowering way. And it can be used in a, what are you complaining about? You don't have real problems. Look at the starving kids in Africa, right? And it can be, it can be used in a way where we're not allowed to feel our feelings. And we can do it to ourselves, right? I'm always interested in like the tension between two things, right? I'm always interested in like the tension between two things, right? And I think there's a fundamental tension there,

right? And the tension is, I don't want to minimize my own emotional experience. And I do want to tend to it and give it what it needs. But I also don't want to get lost in it, right? I do want to be able to see in the grand scheme of things, right? And it's that tension or that middle point that always really interests me. I always think it's nuanced to find. I hadn't thought about it that way, but I love that idea about the balance and the tension. It is undeniably true that some of the worst pain I've ever had in my life, physical pain, was from paper cuts.

It sounds so stupid. But a paper cut is really extremely painful. It really hurts. It goes away quickly. But in that millisecond, that is intense pain. It's really bad. So if you take the, in the grander scheme of things, approach to an extreme, you wouldn't allow yourself to even for a moment acknowledge the pain of a paper cut. But for me, neither of my parents is left in the land of the living. But one of the things that I think a healthy parent-child relationship does, and my mother

was really able to do this for us, is help the child learn the balance, learn to negotiate the tension. And in the greater scheme of things, when properly deployed is not the first reaction. Right. That's where I've landed, right? For me, the place I've landed is allow myself to feel whatever emotion or feeling is tied up in this thing and then move to perspective because i'm absolutely capable of to myself moving right to perspective yeah which i'm telling myself internally your experience of that isn't valid so don't feel it right so like if i get angry with someone i can usually within 30 seconds start telling their side of the story. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And be like, so Eric, you're not right to be mad, right? Because I can take their perspective. It's one of my gifts. And if I do it reflexively, I'm basically saying to myself, shove that anger away. It's not valid, right? Which we know is not healthy.

And so that balance I find really so useful to get right. But in general, I lean towards the better to have a good perspective than wallow in your difficulty. Yeah, right. For me now, parents dead, gone, the people who helped me find that perspective are my friends. Yeah. And that is to me also why friendship is the topic that is more important to me than almost anything else at this point. Because I find, I don't know if you have the same thing, like when I'm too much wallowing, when I'm too much in the anger, if I call a friend, the very act of telling them about it starts to release the anger. And on the flip side, if I've gone too quickly to the greater scheme of things, if I've gone too quickly towards a place of

minimizing my feelings, a really good friend who's intuitive will say, hold on a second, Will, I'm kind of pissed off on your behalf. Like I'm mad about what just happened to you or what someone said to you. And so for me, I've always been lucky to have great friends. Yeah. And I've always relied on my friends for that. I just have to tell you a quick story. This is a college story. But there was a gorgeous boy who was two years older than I was.

I was a sophomore. He was a senior. And he'd just come back from San Francisco. He had the coolest haircut I'd ever seen. It's 1982. And it was just one of those super cool hair band haircuts. It was awesome. It was a little more, I don't know if it was new romantic. I don't know how you would describe it. It was a cool haircut. And he was super handsome. And I just thought, I'm just going to grab the bull by the horns, invite him out for a coffee, and tell him that I'm desperately in love with him. So out we go.

I said, John, I just got to tell you, I'm head over heels in love with you. And then there was that awful pause. And then he said, you know, oh, you're such a nice guy. And I'm really, you know, I love being friends with you. And hopefully we can spend more time as friends. So I was humiliated. I was ashamed. I was inconsolable. Finished the coffee. I went to New Haven train station without going back to my room. I bought a train ticket for Boston. Just got on the train. When I got off at Boston station, I called a really great friend of mine who I'd met in Summerstock Theater and said, I got to meet you. We I got off at Boston Station, I called a really great friend of mine who I'd met

in Summer Stock Theater and said, I got to meet you. We got to go have some drinks. And we met up. And as soon as I saw him, I burst out laughing. And I said, oh, my God, I behave like such an ass. I can't wait to tell you this thing. And it instantly became a funny story that I saw the greater scheme of things the minute I saw my friend.

I was inconsolable on the ride. And so that to me is one of the valuable gifts of friendship. So listener, in thinking about that and all the other great wisdom from today's episode, if you were going to isolate just one top insight that you're taking away, what would it be? Remember, little by little, a little becomes a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action. And I want to give you a tip on that, and it's to start small. It's really important when we're trying to implement new habits to

often start smaller than we think we need to, because what that does is it allows us to get victories. And victories are really important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good about ourselves. And we become less motivated when we're feeling bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change down the road. If you'd like a step-by-step guide for how you can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf, go to goodwolf.me slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that is a great place to wrap up. You and I are going to talk a little bit in the post-show conversation, a little bit more about reading, I think. And I know many of our listeners love to read. So I think this is going to be a great conversation. Listeners, you can get access to the post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and you can support a show that needs your help

at oneyoufeed.net slash join. Will, thank you so much. Such a pleasure to talk again. Thank you. I was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support,

and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really no really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts