The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Eros, Self-Awareness, and Being a Good Partner — with Esther Perel

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Esther Perel is a psychotherapist and one of the leading voices on modern relationships. She discusses the challenges the pandemic has posed on our relationships, the importance of serendipitous moments, and why self-awareness is so important. Esther also shares how co-founders can overcome the various pain points they’ve experienced throughout the past year and parenting tips to ensure your children grow up to be great partners. Follow Esther on Twitter, @EstherPerel Scott opens with his thoughts on Facebook developing an AR/VR device, why he’s bullish on Neeva (the subscription search engine), and why Pinterest looking to acquire VSCO is a smart move. Algebra of Happiness: make proactive investments.  Esther’s podcast: “How’s Work?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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cards, savings accounts, mortgage rates, and more. NerdWallet, finance smarter. NerdWallet Compare Incorporated. NMLS 1617539. Episode 57. Agent 57 is the name of the master of disguise in the television series Danger Mouse. The atomic number of lanthanum, soft ductile silvery white metal that tarnishes slowly when exposed to air. When the dog is exposed to sunshine, it means a trip to the dermatologist. What's my favorite sunblock? A bar. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 57th episode of The Prop G Show. In today's episode, we speak with the one and only Esther Perel. Esther is a psychotherapist and one of the leading voices on modern relationships. She's led a therapy practice in New York City for more than 35 years

and is the podcast host of How's Work? Which is in its second season. We discuss with Esther all sorts of topics, including the importance of self-awareness in relationships, why eros is the antidote to deadness, deadness, that's an awful word. I need some less deadness in my life. The pain points co-founders experience

throughout the pandemic and parenting tips to ensure your children grow up to be great partners in all aspects of their lives. Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice? I think my youngest is gonna partner with some sort of terrorist organization based on his current behavior.

Okay, what's happening? What's brewing in the world of business? We'd like to bring you the unreported stories, the stuff that's kind of behind the scenes, underground, subterranean. The Information reported that Facebook has around 10,000, get this, 10,000 employees working on AR and VR developments. That's fully 20% of the company's global workforce. In a podcast interview with two reporters at The Information, Mark Zuckerberg said that it makes sense for the company to invest heavily in this area because the combination of augmented reality and virtual reality is going to be the next major computing

platform. Got to give it to him. He stuck it out for a while. I think VR is one of the biggest head fakes in the history of technology. Why? There is no prophylactic like putting a VR headset on your face. That'll guarantee you do not procreate. According to a report by Technovio, the global AR and VR market size is expected to grow around $125 billion by 2024 with compound annual growth rate of over 35% during the forecast period. Wow, wow. In addition, global unit sales of standalone VR headsets more than doubled from 1.2 million units in 2018

to 3.4 million in 2020, according to Statista. Statista, okay, that's a great name. Technavio, not so much, not so much. You know who else is investing heavily in virtual reality? Apple. Bloomberg reported that Apple is expected to announce a mixed reality headset in the coming months, which would be the company's first major new device since coming out with the Apple Watch in 2015. So what do we have here?

Facebook. Facebook realizes that in order to be a trillion-dollar company, it needs to innovate vertically. It needs to control the rails, something Apple has done exceptionally well. What's going on here? It is very difficult to get past a quarter of a trillion dollars without controlling the rails. Why? Why? Because once you get to that market cap, people think, you know, I'd like some of that margin, some of that cabbage. And if they have the rails, they can start starching margin from your product, or they can pull tricks like saying, you know, we're not going to allow cookies such that you

can't track people across multiple websites using iOS, which basically is a big kick in the nuts to Facebook. And Facebook is left sort of neutered. And Mark Zuckerberg doesn't like not being in control. Like he likes control of a third of the planet. He likes to be the sociopath in charge and surround himself with people that say, no, Mark, you're an innovator. No, you're not. You're a fucking sociopath. Anyways, most dangerous man in the world. I've been saying it for a while, but a brilliant business person realizes that it's very difficult to get beyond a quarter of a trillion, a half a trillion, and two a trillion without being vertical. That is Netflix's major weakness. That is Disney's major weakness. And if you look at the most powerful companies in the

world, whether it's Amazon that owns, it's vertical, including manufacturing facility for batteries and distribution, then the last mile, and then the website itself, they are vertical. Who have they taken share from? FedEx, who is not vertical. They have the backend, but they don't have the front end interface with the consumer. And then Walmart,Ex, who is not vertical. They have the backend, but they don't have the front end interface with the consumer. And then Walmart, yeah, Walmart is sort of vertical, sort of, but they haven't reverse engineered and they're also not as strong in the last mile.

So they're not as vertical. Where does Netflix's weak point? What happens when Roku or Apple or Android or even Samsung on the front end say, you know what, we don't like Netflix or Netflix has become too powerful and we're going to start starching margin from that. It's always kind of a, if you will, a healthy tension between the point of distribution and the manufacturer's brand. And

the manufacturer's brand tries to create pull through innovation and brand building. And the point of distribution tries to create advantage by access to the consumer, controlling the data set. And I would argue that slowly but surely, it's the distribution point or the person controlling the relationship with the consumer who has usurped, seized, acquiesced power from the supplier, if you will, or the manufacturer's brand, as we have seen. The sun has passed midday on brand. But anyways, verticalization is an enormous trend in the world of business.

Look at Lululemon going vertical saying, "'We want into your home with exercise.'" Look at Nike going vertical, 10, 20, 30% of their distribution. I consulted to Samsung and I said, "'Stop talking about innovation. "'Enough with the bullshit. "'You guys have to go vertical

"'and you have to take your direct-to-consumer "'share of sales from 2% to 20%.'" Because when I go buy a Samsung product, I speak to a guy with a name tag that says Roy in a place with bad carpeting and bad lighting called an AT&T or Verizon store. And as the valerian steel of pre-purchase branding gets duller and duller, more branding impact has moved to the point of distribution. And if AT&T, Verizon control that, you're always going to be relegated to doing bad U2 commercials or commercials featuring U2, which only people my age enjoy. So verticalization or the ability to control the end consumer relationship vis-a-vis hardware is hugely important.

The question is, what is the entry point for Facebook? It's probably not through a phone. It's probably not through a smart speaker. Amazon supposedly has more open job requisitions or hires in their voice group than Google has across their entire company. So Amazon is making an unprecedented investment in voice. They also, with Alexa, have tremendous vertical distribution. And then you have Apple with a billion iOS users. Obviously, they kind of control the distribution of the wealthiest cohort on the planet. Then you have Android, who has the other 4 billion people on the planet.

So how do you get in front of the consumer? How do you buy the distribution, if you will? And they seem to believe it's something around a VR headset. I don't buy this, but you got to give them props. 10,000 people, they are going deep. I sort of feel like Facebook is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and that is they are desperately trying to diversify away from this platform. Saudi Arabia wants to diversify away from an oil economy. And it feels to me that Zuckerberg is trying to diversify away from this app economy and get into an operating system or vertical such that they can diversify away from just being an app or one button on someone else's vertical distribution and as a result, being somewhat vulnerable to that distribution. Anyways, in other news, we've been thinking a lot about the company Neva, or more specifically, a move to the subscription search engine, a subscription search engine. Why? Why social

media is like nicotine. It's addictive, but it's not the shit that gives you cancer. It gives you cancer as the business model, specifically an ad model. Why does it give you cancer? Because it becomes all about engagement and trying to get as many eyeballs to view your content as possible. And the algorithms, which are benign, or totally indifferent, I should say, realize that to enrage you is to engage you.

And so slowly but surely, content including anti-vax or white supremacist content or the content that gets people the angriest or most upset gets promoted. Or simply put, freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. And what you have is content that organically would get 1%, 2% of the dialogue, getting 20 or 30% because it makes Mark Zuckerberg wealthier

to promote content that is bad for society and enrages us. Gee, isn't that great? So what's wrong here? What's the tobacco? What's the shit that gives you cancer? The ad model. And what happens over time? Google needs to tobacco? What's the shit that gives you cancer? The ad model. And what happens over time? Google needs to grow its earnings 25% a year. So instead of taking you to the best place, when you type in Steel Blue Great Danes and Google says, well, should we take Scott to the best place to find information on Puppy Great Danes? No, let's take them to another

site where we can further monetize it because we have to give our shareholders additional revenue. Whereas Netflix, which is subscription, is just focused on adding value to the end relationship with great content and taking you to the best place that I think will get you to renew again. You're focused on the relationship. That is really the most accretive move or the most accretive thing about moving from episodic transactional relationship, i.e. retail, is that someone has to sit in front of the store and you have to put your best and brightest people on getting more people into the store every day, as opposed to when you move to a recurring revenue relationship, you're focused on the relationship

or just adding value to the consumer over the long term. And that's what we have here, a subscription search engine in my view, and it's being run by the guy who ran Search for Google, so he's got serious technology chops. But I would imagine in the $160 billion market that is Search, right, that is Search, you are going to have a subscription player.

And right now, the leader in subscription search is this company Neva founded by the former head of Google Search. They recently raised $40 million in a Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to $78 million and has a valuation of $300 million. If I could invest in any company right now in the world, and I want to invest in this company, it would be Neva.

Subscription search. It is going to be the next big thing. It's the nicotine, not the tobacco, not the shit that gives you cancer, subscription search. Okay, so let's bring this home. Let's land this round with an interesting acquisition that's circling in the news. The New York Times reported that Pinterest is in talks to acquire VSCO, a photo editing and sharing app. VSCO founded in 2011, was last valued at 550 million, and of its 100 million users, 2 million are paying subscribers.

See a theme here? See a theme? Are we starting to see, is your mind starting to gestate, metastatize, coalesce around a theme here? Boom, boom, get out of the dating in business and get into a monogamous relationship. And I'm not suggesting dating isn't wonderful.

It definitely has its moments, but in business you want monogamous relationships with the consumer. And that is you want to convince them to put a ring on it or you want to put on a ring and go all in in what is a monogamous relationship vis-a-vis recurring revenue. And Pinterest wants into this business. They want out of the ad model. And that is smart. These people are smart. And also, their stock price has increased substantially over the last year in what I would call the purity trade.

And that is people realize that being a handmade to sedition, that bludgeoning to death a Capitol police officer isn't a great business model, Facebook and Twitter. And you've seen both Pinterest and Snap who have tried to dye their hat kind of white, if you will, the good guys are doing really well. And this purity trade, their stocks are up.

And what do you do when your stock is up, maybe even beyond its full value or its fair value? You go shopping. Pinterest has a market cap of around 50 billion and had a half a billion monthly active users worldwide as of the fourth quarter of 2020. In sum, look at Facebook, trying to control the relationship going vertical.

Look at Neva, the hottest startup in my view in the world or the most undervalued company in the world. 300 million right now. Look for it to be 3 billion within 24 months. Look for it to be 30 billion within five years. You heard it here. Neva. Neva subscription, verticalization. Pinterest taking some of that cabbage from the purity trade and using it to reinvest in subscription, verticalization and subscription. The two questions every business leader needs to be asking themselves every day. Stay with us. We'll be right back for our conversation with from Constant Contact. You know what's not easy? Marketing. And when you're starting your small business, while you're so focused on the day-to-day, the personnel, and the finances,

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Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Client Group, Inc. Welcome back. Here's our conversation with Esther Perel, a psychotherapist and one of the leading voices on modern relationships. I think this is really important. We have a very male listenership. And I find that one of the reasons why males commit suicide at three times the rate of females, that escalated fast, is that we are not good at talking about our sadness or our relationships. The things that make us happiest or saddest are thriving or failing relationships. And I think it's important to have open and honest conversations about relationships, about emotion, about love, about sadness, about depression. Mental health is a sign of weakness,

at least according to most men, and so they don't speak openly about it. And I think a good place to start is for all of us to be more open and thoughtful about the source or the greatest source of happiness and also depression, and that is thriving or failed relationships. And I love Esther. I think she's fantastic. I think she's got just an interesting kind of, I don't know, provocative and raw view of relationships. Anyways, here's our conversation. So Esther, whether you own a puppy or you're a parent to young children, everybody talks about the importance of socialization. What happens when the population who has sort of been in this sensory deprivation or relationship deprivation, all of a sudden the world opens up again. What kind of problems do you anticipate? I anticipate both problems and resilience. You know, I don't think

that it's just going to be a dark picture. And it all depends on what happened with the puppy at home and with the children at home. To what extent was there sufficient interaction, stimulation, mirroring, empathy, reflecting back, joy, playfulness, you know, apprenticeship of responsibility. All the things that are part of socialization, right? Boundaries, responsibility, self-expression, accountability, the main relationship skills. We have never had an experience like this where such a young generation comes out of a year of basically being not schooled or schooled just long distance. In many parts of the world, if it's long distance, it means they're not schooled because there's not enough of a computer to even get them connected. I don't know that we can

completely predict if the gap will be closed and within a few years people will be on a track or if we will feel that there are long-term consequences to this, where 10 years from now, I'm in therapy with a person and I have to take into account, I was in lockdown for a year when I was six, nine, 12, you know, and it has an effect on me. I, you know, the question we always have when we attribute causality or correlation to certain challenges later on around mental health or relational health is that we often use what is available to us. You know, we can use 9-11, we can use the economic recession, we can use of the 30s I'm talking about when people always talk about my family went through the Great Depression. You know. There are marking events like that that seem to have created certain coping styles, coping skills and coping styles.

I don't think that is going to be different. We will be explaining some people's challenges by virtue of what they experienced this year. You refer to or you talk about the death of Eros. What do you mean by that? I think that we all straddle two fundamental human needs in life. Our need for security and safety and stability and predictability and our need for freedom, for adventure, for exploration, for discovery, for curiosity. This year, security became so fundamental that the balance snapped off its hinge. We had to completely suppress the life affirming elements of Eros, that life force that

lives on the side of happenstance, chance, curiosity, exploration, discovery, imagination, that whole side needed to be basically shut down. And partly, you know, Eros to me is an antidote to death or to deadness. It is a vibrant, important force in our life. It's not just sexual. Sex is a piece of this, but it is much bigger. It is everything that connects us to our sense of aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, curiosity. Curiosity is change. It's the openness to the world. And I think that people in the course of flattening, or I would say like in, in the process of flattening the curve, people basically had to flatten themselves. And you feel it, you talk to

people, every therapist I speak to, we're in this conversation about how do we keep people connected to a certain energy, to a certain libido, to a certain, you know, how do we help them know that freedom in confinement comes through our imagination? In that sense, when you asked me about the long-term effects on kids, or, you know, sometimes you see children and they were in their houses, but they took a box and the box became a set of rocks. And then they took a bunch of books and those books became the bridge. And they really use their imagination to transcend the limits of their reality. Adults often find that much more challenging. The loss of Eros is the loss of the side of us that remains connected to all those elements that help us fight our sense of deadness.

Yeah, my kids have just been playing more video games. I like your version of kids better. What about when you look across your sample set of patients and why people are coming to you, how has that changed? What do you see less of? What do you see more of? The majority of the issues that patients bring to therapy, and I would say the same thing was true for the people

who we interviewed in the whole new season of the podcast of How's Work, which was really done throughout the pandemic. So I didn't choose the topics I did like in therapy. I read hundreds and hundreds of applicants and I saw what do people want to talk about? What are their pain points? They are evergreen, but they are exacerbated. So the people who found it it you know they lockdown made it so that you were delocalized you couldn't leave your house to go to work to the gym to see friends to see your family you you had to spend so much time with one person and i typically say one person cannot be a whole village and here this one person kind of had to be a whole village. So then you begin to see all the things that you have and all the things you don't have, the things you can't talk about, the times you don't turn to your partner, the places where you don't trust them, the differences in aspirations about life at this moment, the lack of energy, the chronic resentments,

the bickering, the who does what, the shift in power dynamics, the gender roles that are being completely kind of re-divided along very binary lines. Whose job matters more? Who gets a chance to say, you know, I need to go upstairs to work and who gets a chance to say, I want to I need to go upstairs to work? And who gets a chance to

say, I want to leave my job? You know, whose priorities matter most? It's all of those things that, but without the resources, without the ability to reach out to the air, the other people, the other activities that usually sustain us in a certain rhythm with our partner. You've been taking sort of relationship therapy into the workplace and counseling co-founders. What are you finding are the pain points, your term with co-founders during a time of COVID? So the difference if the co-founders are also partner in life, which I explored a few, versus whether they are friends, two friends, and what stage of the business that they are in. There's an episode that really gripped me because it's a gay couple. They have a thriving macaroon business.

And, you know, it was so visual. That's why I keep remembering them because they talk about how they sell bites of happiness in the middle of the pandemic, this macaroon business thrived, right? Because it is an experience of Eros to open a beautiful box of colored cookies that are just beckoning to be eaten. And they're so crummy and, uh, you know, they filled with little crumbs like that. And while they were selling happiness, they were themselves becoming more and more miserable because again, there was no rhythm for the rupture and repairs cycles that are in relationships. Um, the other thing is, I would say the vast majority of arguments that you will see or impasses relationship impasses that you will see between the co-founders basically amount to three major issues, power, trust, and integrity. So whose priorities matter most? Who, you know, who gets to make the

big decisions? Whose face appears on the pictures? You know, who is typically associated as the leading person, et cetera. Trust. Who has my back? Are we in this together? Can I count on you? And integrity and recognition. Do you value me? Am I being respected as a person? Much of the conversations you can basically distill into these three major areas. And what made it more challenging now was the fact that it all happened in a pressure cooker with uncertainty around, prolonged uncertainty, not really knowing. So when you have uncertainty, it is very easy to polarize and fragment in a relationship

because the fact is nobody knows what is the right thing to do. But people use certainty to fend off fears and uncertainty, if you want. So they polarize. We should do this. No, we should do that. And the more you have an uncertain world outside, which now impacts the business inside, and the more likely when problems occur, you see that kind of polarization where each one becomes more intransigent about which thing to do. We should expand. We should not. We should contract.

We should wait. We should act. We should move. You know, these either or kind of stances. That's the polarization that occurs. The more uncertainty you have on the outside, the more possibility for polarization on the inside. As it happened in the society at large, similar process happens between co-founders.

It's interesting. We always like to take a pause when the guest says something that strikes us or resonates with us. And the thing you said that struck me was there's been an acceleration or a concentration of what I'll call major life decisions during COVID. Just in my circle, a disproportionate number of people have decided to move. They've said they've taken this as an opportunity, and we mostly see it as a good thing. They say, we're moving to Florida, or we're moving out to the country. But people also tell you not to make big decisions when you're in a period of flux or crisis, that your judgment may not be at the top of its game. Is it dangerous for people to be making these big decisions where to live, whether to continue a relationship or not during a crisis like this? No, I don't think it's dangerous.

I think it's very normal and understandable. You experience a certain sharpening of your perception you have you also feel if you make a decision at a time like that it gives you a sense of agency a sense that there is something you can do to fend off helplessness when you actually don't know what's going to happen in the world. Look, I think it's a broader answer. There are people who are quick on action and could use more time to think. And there are people who are prolonged thinkers who could on occasion get a little bit of a kick and move and act. You have both, you know, you have both kinds of people in the time of a disaster action

that makes you feel like you have a say over your life that destiny somewhat is not completely eluding you that you still have some kind of control it always reminds me of the sentence of victor frankl that you can't control the circumstances, but you can control your response to the circumstances. That's where your ultimate freedom lies in your choice to react. And it is in that frame that I understand all the decisions that people have made about moving, slowing down, being more at home, being less on a plane, you know, being in a place that feels more friendly, less, you know, putting focus on relationships and on life quality and not only on output and production and success, et cetera.

There is going to be an exodus from the cities and there's going to be a re-entry into the cities by those who couldn't previously be there. Yeah, life isn't about what happens to you. It's about how you respond to what happens to you. You talk about invisible forces that can help bring perspective to relationships. What do you mean by invisible forces? I think that when people come to work, they always show up with two resumes, an official resume that tells you their work history and an unofficial resume that is basically their relationship history. to live and work with others, whether they had an emphasis on self-reliance, as co-founders often do, whether there was an emphasis on interdependence and loyalty, whether they were told that it's okay to ask for help. of relational history around boundaries, communication, accountability, apology, creativity, the relation between the self and the other, all of that is your relationship history

that comes to work. That's the invisible forces. They will influence the way you communicate, you conflict, you connect, you create. It's underneath whether you compete or whether you collaborate. And these dimensions, by the way, are very important also to your questions about the co-founders. What is your culture? What is the way that you organize your thinking and your responses when you are in relationships?

For example, do you come with a sense that things are always on your shoulders, that you're always the one who has to do more, that if you don't do it, nobody else will? If you have that worldview, it influences. It's a filter with which you will interpret many situations. If your sense is people don't really respect me, people don't really value me, people never really listen to me, you know,

because they always listen to my three siblings who were ahead of me. It's a filter. And those invisible forces, we don't pay enough attention to. And in fact, they run the show. They run the relational dynamics from underneath. There's a lot of studies around or articles around kind of the tells or indicators when a therapist knows a partnership is going to work or not work.

What are your series of tells when you're speaking to co-founders or people in a relationship around the likelihood that it'll work or not work? That's a great question, Scott. You know, there's a lot of research in the romantic sphere that John Gottman did with his colleagues about how within the first opening of a conversation, in the beginning of a relationship, they can predict divorce. Mm-hmm. You know, there are a few things I look at. And one is, A, the degree of self-awareness. How much are these people able to see themselves? How much do they understand their relational dowry? And how it influences the way they interact with others? Two, what is the kind of complementarity

that exists in this partnership? The complementarity is how their roles, how their styles build on each other and how they are more together than each one alone. So complementarity is based in differences, but the differences themselves is not the issue. It's how are they being played out? I'm a detailed person. You're a big picture person that's fine but when it is used complementary meaning i appreciate that what you

think about is not the way i think about and i can continue be the way i am because you are the way you are and i accept your influence. I accept my dependence on your point of view. You're willing to take more risks. I'm the one who is, first of all, needing to check all the numbers all the time, making sure, can we do this? Instead of you telling me, oh, you always counting pennies. You're actually telling me I rely on you to take my big dreams and tell me if they are doable. That's complementarity is I need you in the way that you are, because it helps me to and allows me to continue to be who I am. Complementarity.

I can't even go enough about that term. And when I start to analyze it with people and I i say give me some of the major complementarities between you you also get a quick sense of are people able to accept influence or are they too defensive and too insecure and they they'd rather say you know it's me rather than i can't without you um how much are people able to have difficult conversations? And are you able to take time to work on the relationship and not just on the business? After all, 65% of startups fail

because the relationships between the co-founder falls apart. And that's a waste of a lot of good ideas and often it is because there is such an excitement over the business and such a lack of attention to needing to really look at um at the relationship in the in in one of the episodes of this season it starts with one of them saying he's the creative, I'm the logistics. That's a complementarity, right? And then you, but the issue is, okay, and how does that play out? And does that mean that you have certain things that you can never talk about because you're not a creative?

Does that mean that you feel that you both need each other and you rely on each other and it's working really great? Or is there a sense constantly that you're fighting each one of you saying to the other, you couldn't without me. That is not the same as I couldn't without you. Mm-hmm. So complementarity and difficult conversations, those problems seem to me to have specific recommendations and action items to overcome those. One, a greater appreciation, recognizing that one plus one equals three, maybe having regular time, maybe with a moderator to have to kind of clear the air, so to speak. Back to your first one, though, self-awareness, that's a little less obvious. Say somebody is in a relationship and they're committed to making it work, to expending the effort to try and make the relationship stronger.

And they recognize that self-awareness is an issue. And I think some people don't even know what it means to be self-aware. What are the practices or the tools for becoming a more self-aware partner? I would ask you, Scott, like this, because there's actually another piece that I didn't include, which is how have you dealt with your previous breakups? Because whenever you are two people in a room, these two people are also accompanied by all the ones that preceded them.

And I will react differently to you based on how my relationship with my previous co-founders or my other co-founders have played out. So I will ask you a series of questions. You know, they range from when you are upset, what would I be? If I was a camera that followed you and I knew what happens inside, but nobody else can see it or hear it. When you're upset, what are the internal voices? How do you speak to yourself? And what are the voices and how do they speak to others? And upset can be when you're angry, when you're hurt,

when you need something. How good are you at expressing your needs? How good are you, meaning tell me about you when you express your need. Tell me about you. What could I learn from you in how you apologize or don't apologize or are able to deal with your mistakes, or deal with other people's mistakes? Do you tend to be someone who takes things on you? And you make yourself the center and you say, it's my fault? Do you tend to be an externalizer? And basically, you know, there's always reasons for why things happen the way they did, but they never have to do with you. And I don't say it as bluntly, but those are the themes that I'm looking at. Give me a time when you brave the unknown. Describe a time when you changed your mind.

That's an amazingly good one, because I want to also look at flexibility versus rigidity. What is something that you wouldn't want your mother to know about you or your best friend to know about you? What's the best prank that you've ever put on somebody? What's a time when you surprised even yourself? If there was one thing in your personality that you would want me to know about, what would it be? If there was one thing in your personality that you would want to change, what would it be? If there was one thing you presented. That you would want to change.

What would it be? You basically never use the word self-awareness. You ask. You know. Dozens of questions. That basically are like a kaleidoscope. Of how we are. In our relational self.

And you look at the relational self. You don't just look at the inner self-awareness for me is your knowledge of yourself in relation to others as well as to yourself but i am very much a relational thinker and if i'm looking at a co-founder relationship i'm looking at a relationship what i'm saying by that is that what you feel inside and how it plays out between you and others are two narratives. They're not one narrative. Inside, you may feel lousy or down or depressed. But interpersonally, you wield tremendous power because you have a person there that is constantly trying to cheer you up, prop you up, activate you, energize you.

You may feel powerless on the inside and very powerful in the relationship. Coming up after the break. Confidence or self-esteem is the ability to make mistakes and be flawed and yet still hold yourself in high regard. Stay with us. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge, to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So, tune into AI Basics, How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than you want it to be. The average US company deploys more than 100 apps, and ideas about the work we do can be radically changed by the tools we use to do it.

So what is enterprise software anyway? What is productivity software? How will AI affect both? And how are these tools changing the way we use our computers to make stuff, communicate, and plan for the future? In this three-part special series, Decoder is surveying the IT landscape presented by AWS. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. So let's shift to parenting. I have 10 and 13-year-old boys. Right. And say I want to increase the likelihood that they're going to be great partners, that they're going to be great co-founders, they're going to be great spouses, they're going to be great friends. Any advice to parents around what we can do to increase the likelihood that our children grow up to be great partners? Yes, I have two sons and it was a mission of mine.

I remember when they were very little, I said, I would like them to become men later on that I would want to date. Like I would I would want them to be the kind of person I would be drawn to men or women. It doesn't matter. The first thing I would say is that it is an absolutely ongoing project. It's not something you do once or on occasion. And it starts really, uh, for me, it included, uh, very early on having sleepovers, um, in my place and then going to others so that they would see different rules, different norms, different ways of being and become adaptive and flexible and understand that the world doesn't revolve around them.

That was a major one. The second one was, uh, I taught, I and we, my partner and I would talk about our relationships in front of them, not our relationship with each other, our friends, our colleagues, things that were happening to us, because very often kids don't know that adults have fights too, that adults lose friends, that adults need to have difficult conversations with their own friends, that the stories we chose to read to them, the movies we chose to watch together, the conversations we had about these movies afterwards, where we actually didn't just ask them a question. They saw us talk.

Major piece, which I think is less common in the United States, is have the kids at the dinner tables whenever we have gatherings, which we have many, so that they learn to talk with their own age and older people.

And they actually enjoy the company of adults and see how much they have to learn with their own age and older people. And they actually enjoy the company of adults and see how much they have to learn from them and vice versa. That's a big, big one. It became a major piece in which their own friends wanted to be at our dinner table. So that because the conversation was interesting and often more interesting than the one they had with each other. To talk about peer pressure and our own experiences with peer pressure

when we were younger and the times when we dared to speak out and the times when we wished we had spoken out and the times when we were there to help someone who was being bullied and the time when we feel like we complicitously kind of let things happen around us and we feel still icky about it today so it's an ongoing conversation about the multiple aspects of relationships of thinking of others of helping others of knowing that the more you give the more you have of uh caring not just in the abstract about the well-being of people on another part of the

planet, but literally about the person next to you. You know, not just to be magnanimous in concept, but actually in action, to be great hosts. I think that's another piece in which you learn to receive people, to understand their needs, etc. It's all of that. It's sharing articles together that we read, uh, that we say that would be interesting for you on different things happening in the world. It's sharing music. It's going to listen to live music together. It's, it's having experiences with them. I mean, it's, it's been one of my major projects in my life was to have that experience of two sons that I was raising in a country that wasn't mine and in a culture that wasn't mine. And I think once you, when, I'll give you one moment where I knew something special had

happened. We had a conversation one day on the four of us what are some of the values that are important to you and that you feel that you received from us and when they answered we looked at each other and it was like we've done a lot of things and a lot of things that i regret but this stuff i feel like yes I did it. I plunged into that idea. I'm going to turn these young men, boys into, you know, great guys. And by their values, I knew the message had passed. And I was relentless. So what, just along the lines of your talk.

Any of this list that you would pick? Around how to turn your boys into men. Look, I think about this a lot. And the CEO of a company that actually acquired my last company said something that always stuck with me. And that is, even when you think they're not listening, they're listening. Even when they roll their eyes, even when they don't want to hear you, they're listening. And I tried it with my oldest son. I try to have these, you know, I think toxicity and masculinity have been conflated. I think masculinity is a wonderful thing. And I have a 13-year-old and I have these, I don't want to call them man talks, but I will

say to him, I bring him upstairs all the time and I say, the way you just offered to take the suitcase of our guests out to their car. I'm like, that's what a man does. The way you took an active role in defending your younger brother, that is what a man does. How you embarrass somebody else for your own pleasure, that is not what men do. And I try to do these things. Whenever I notice, even I think the little do. And I try to do these things whenever I notice, even I think the little things are almost as important as the big things.

And not to be judgmental or punish, you know, always castigating, but also reward the good things. But I take to heart or I hope that they're listening. So I think of it just as, you know, when you talk about relationships, I think one of the biggest mistakes we make as men and as fathers and as husbands is that we assume people are telepathic. We assume that because we

appreciate and love our partners that they know that. If they look fantastic or they do something that really impresses us, we just assume that they know that and they feel that. And I think that men have trouble recognizing they need to articulate those things. And I think with our kids, it's just so important to constantly verbalize and reinforce. I'd like to think that they're listening. It's concrete, it's granular, it's verbalized, and it's reinforced. It's in the details, you know, and you take action and then you show the reaction and then you show the emotion and then you show the thought and then you show the value. It's all five of these elements in each situation. I also always suggest

to parents to take each child alone and go do things if possible, more than one day, days together where you, when you take the child out of the family context and when the parent is out of their parental context. Different people. So along the lines of self-awareness and asking a series of questions, and also we always like to end the podcast with advice to your younger self, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions. So when Esther Perel looks back on her life, what decisions do you think?

I'm just so glad I made those decisions. What were the best decisions that you made, if you will? And what decisions do you wish you could take back? I mean, I think that some of the best decisions I made was leaving Belgium and then studying in Jerusalem, then from Jerusalem to Boston, then from Boston to New York. And I made every decision by virtue of people and lifestyle decisions. They never were driven by work. I always felt wherever I am, I'll find something to do. And work always was very important.

It never was the determining factor of my life. If work went well, but the rest was not going well, things were not good. And I was afraid in a little bit because on the one hand I saw that in the United States work really is such a central defining feature of your identity and I wanted it to be more than what I thought I would have if I stayed in Belgium but I didn't want it to become the first thing I'd say when people say and what do you do or what's your life like i think to always keep having a rich life a full life an interesting life as the primary thing is something that i i've done consistently and i still think was the right decision um i don't anymore feel that i have decisions that were wrong decisions i just understand why i made them I understood that if I wanted to be

in the theater and remain an artist, that coming to New York city, where you have to put food on your table is not going to be the place where I'm going to have to find other survival skills. I'm going to have to do other things. Um, for a long time I thought, oh, I wasn't confident enough to, you know, I didn't continue to work in the theater. But then I understood that there was a reason I needed to bifurcate and make other choices. So I no longer think in terms of wrong, wrong choices. I think that as a young person, for a long time, I did things that I was completely sure that I could do. There were many, but somewhere inside of me, I did think that I could do it. The thing that I ended up doing that I had no idea if I was capable of was writing a

book. Um, that was the first time that I did something without any sense I can do it, at the level that I want to do it. And mating in captivity did change my career. And then I wrote a second one. But the shift was beginning to do things without knowing if I can do it and knowing that if it doesn't happen, it's not the end of me. It feels like a lot of this goes back to risk-taking and pushing the limits of your comfort zone, that nothing extraordinary is going to happen to you unless you take an uncomfortable risk. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah, I mean, my language, I would say that confidence is your ability to see yourself as a flawed individual and still hold yourself in high regard. Whereas in the past, I thought confidence meant, you know, certainty and perfection in that sense. And that is, I got from my friend and colleague, Terry Real, confidence or self-esteem is the ability to make mistakes and be flawed and yet still hold yourself in high regard. The ability to make mistakes and still hold yourself in high self-regard. Esther Perel is recognized as one of today's most insightful and original voices on modern relationships. And she is the best-selling author of The State of Affairs and Mating in Captivity.

As a psychotherapist, Esther has led a therapy practice in New York City for more than 35 years. And she also serves as an organizational consultant for Fortune 500 companies around the world. She joins us from her home in Manhattan, New York. Esther, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us and stay safe. Thank you so much. Algebra of Happiness. Who are the most patriotic citizens? Who feel most strongly or most fervent about the nation? Simple. Veterans. Why? Why? Because they have made the biggest investment and biggest sacrifice in that relationship with their country. So something wonderful happened to me this weekend. Our dog Zoe passed away about a month ago,

a real hole in our household. And I decided to do something I've wanted to do my entire life. When I was eight years old and my parents split up, I came home one day, I was a latchkey kid, which meant I let myself in early. Think about that, at the age of eight, I was coming home early from school and I was alone for a couple hours. Today they'd call child services. And one day over the wall in the neighbor's house, I noticed, I heard this barking and I looked over the gate

and I saw this demon animal. And this thing came running toward me and barked. I have never been that scared. I ran back into the house and what was the demon animal? It was a Great Dane. And our neighbor saw how terrified I was and then brought this Great Dane over, Thor, this beautiful, big, black Great Dane, male Great Dane.

The thing must've been, I mean, I was maybe 50 pounds and this thing was 180 pounds. And I remember just being terrified of this thing. And my dad was home and I was hiding behind my dad and I was really upset and crying. And so they left and they brought it back the next day. And then slowly but surely I got to know Thor. And as you would imagine,

Thor was the sweetest, most loving creature I had ever encountered. And every day I remember in school with the last day we would have, or the last hour we'd have spelling and other stuff. And I remember I would just start thinking about Thor and I would run home. I didn't have a lot of friends

and I would hang out with Thor. And occasionally we lived near the beach. I'd go to the beach with Thor. And it was just hilarious, this 50-pound or 60-pound eight-year-old and this enormous black Great Dane. And I just loved this dog. And unfortunately, the dog got very sick about 18 months later at a fairly young age and had to be put down. But my whole life, my whole life, I have wanted a Great Dane. And I've been told for 40 years, they're too big. They're not good dogs. They're unhealthy. I like getting rescue dogs, not pure breeds. They have bad hips. And I would say that a finite nature or a sense of the finite nature of your life is such a blessing. And I decided I'm blessed. I have

pretty much everything I want other than relevance and self-awareness and a deep sense of meaning. Other than those things, I have pretty much everything I want, at least material things. And I thought the one thing I'd really like, I would really like is a great date,

which makes no sense. Anyways, long story short, I flew to Kentucky and then drove a half an hour to a breeder, by the way, dog breeders, strange people. They're strange people, I'm not gonna lie. I almost enjoy going to a dog breeder because I know I'm just in for a little heaping of estranha. So got our steel blue Great Dane puppy.

And this thing has been, I mean, it's the cutest thing ever. And it's been a fucking nightmare. It's crying all night. It's shitting and peeing everywhere as puppies do. I forgot what it's like to have a puppy. And I'm already so attached to this thing. I'm already so invested. And when you think about the people

who are really important to you, you think about the relationships, you think about the reason you are just so attached to somebody or they mean so much to you is you have invested so much. You will never invest as much in anything, at least if you're a decent parent, as you do in your kids. The amount of stress, the amount of worry, the resources, the time you invest in your kids

is unparalleled and as a result, there's nothing you feel that strongly about because you've never invested so much in anything. And already I'm just so emotionally attached to our little Leah because I'm already just so invested in this damn thing. And I guess the question is, how do you flip that? Are there a series of relationships, whether it's friends,

whether it's a parent who's struggling, whether it's your relationship with your spouse, where could you proactively make an investment? Where could you sort of go all in? Because to really invest in a relationship is to become more committed to it and more appreciative of it. So ask yourself, ask yourself,

where is an opportunity for you for investment? Where do you wanna become emotionally invested in a relationship? You don't necessarily just have to wait until the baby's crying or until somebody needs something. Where could you make proactive investments? This is the key to happiness, to feel a sense of deep, meaningful relationships. And some of that is on you. Where do you want to invest? You are in charge of that. Your bandwidth, your emotion, your generosity, your grace, these are assets you control. Where do you

want to become invested? Our producers are Caroline Shagrin and Drew Burrows. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. Thank you for listening to The Prof G Show from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We'll catch you next week on Monday and Thursday. Check that out. And oh my God, to resist is futile. You're surrounded by the dog. Support for this podcast comes from Klaviyo. You know that feeling when your favorite brand really gets you, deliver that feeling to your customers every time. Klaviyo turns your customer data into real-time connections across AI-powered email, SMS, and more, making every moment count. Over 100,000 brands trust Klaviyo's unified data and marketing platform to build smarter digital relationships with their customers during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and beyond. Make every moment count with Klaviyo. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash BFCM.

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