Speaker 1: I think if you, as a young person, went through
Speaker 1: a really intense experience together, whatever that may be, you
Speaker 1: laid the tracks that last a lifetime.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the one you feed throughout time. Great thinkers
Speaker 2: have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes
Speaker 2: like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you
Speaker 2: think ring true. And yet for many of us, our
Speaker 2: thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their goods. Wolf, thanks
Speaker 2: for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Will Schwalby.
Speaker 2: He's an American writer and businessman and the former editor
Speaker 2: in chief of Hyperion Books. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 2: he founded the recipe website Kokster, which was acquired by
Speaker 2: McMillan Publishing, where he is also executive vice president. Today,
Speaker 2: Will and Eric discuss his amazing new book, We Should
Speaker 2: Not Be Friends The Story of a Friendship.
Speaker 3: Hi will welcome back.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Eric, thanks so much for having me back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on and talk again.
Speaker 3: We're going to be discussing your book, We Should Not
Speaker 3: Be Friends, The Story of a Friendship, And I'm really
Speaker 3: eager to talk about that because friendship, to me is
Speaker 3: such an important element of living a good life, and
Speaker 3: so I think we're going to expe blow it from
Speaker 3: a lot of different angles. But before we do that,
Speaker 3: we'll start, like we always do, with the parable. And
Speaker 3: in the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their
Speaker 3: grandchild and they say, in life, there's two wolves inside
Speaker 3: of us that are always a battle. One is a
Speaker 3: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 3: and the others a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 3: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They
Speaker 3: think about it for a second. They look up at
Speaker 3: their grandparent and they say which one wins, And the
Speaker 3: grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
Speaker 3: start off by asking you what that parable means to
Speaker 3: you and your life. And in the work that you
Speaker 3: do well.
Speaker 1: I love that parable and I hadn't heard it before
Speaker 1: you and I first talked. And I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: it a lot recently in terms of friendship. Mm hmm,
Speaker 1: because I've been thinking about friendship a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And for me, part of having a successful friendship is
Speaker 1: feeding the good wolf. And what I mean by that
Speaker 1: is a friend comes to town and doesn't call you,
Speaker 1: doesn't have time to see you. If you feed the
Speaker 1: bad wolf, it's they no longer like me, they're obnoxious,
Speaker 1: they've gotten too big for their birches. There's no loyalty there.
Speaker 1: If you feed the good wolf, you're saying, maybe they're
Speaker 1: busy and maybe something else is going on in their life,
Speaker 1: and maybe I'll just see them the next time. It's
Speaker 1: not personal. And in friendship, I think the bad wolf
Speaker 1: is jealousy, it's paranoia. It's not telling somebody when they've
Speaker 1: done something that has irritated you and jumping to the
Speaker 1: worst conclusions about their motivation. And feeding the good wolf
Speaker 1: in friendship is love and forgiveness and cutting each other
Speaker 1: slack and saying nice things about your friends behind their back.
Speaker 1: And it's all of that. So I'm trying to be
Speaker 1: much more conscious with my friendships of just pausing and
Speaker 1: thinking in this friendship, am I feeding the good wolf
Speaker 1: for the bad WOLFE that listener?
Speaker 4: As you're listening, what resonated with you in that? I
Speaker 4: think a lot of us have some ideas of things
Speaker 4: that we can do to feed our good wolf, and
Speaker 4: here's a good tip to make it more likely that
Speaker 4: you do it. It can be really helpful to reflect
Speaker 4: right before you do that thing on why you want
Speaker 4: to do it. Our brains are always making a calculation
Speaker 4: of what neuroscientists would call reward value, basically, is this
Speaker 4: thing worth doing? And so when you're getting ready to
Speaker 4: do this thing that you want to do to feed
Speaker 4: your good wolf, reflecting on why actually helps to make
Speaker 4: the reward value on that higher and makes it more
Speaker 4: likely that you're going to do that. For example, if
Speaker 4: what you're trying to do is exercise, right before you're
Speaker 4: getting ready to exercise, it can be useful to remind
Speaker 4: yourself of why, for example, I want to exercise because
Speaker 4: it makes my mental and emotional health better today. If
Speaker 4: you'd like a step by step guide for how you
Speaker 4: can easily build new habits that feed your good wolf,
Speaker 4: go to Goodwolf dot slash change and join the free masterclass.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to think about it. And friendship
Speaker 3: is really important to me. I started this podcast in
Speaker 3: part simply to spend more time with Chris, who's my
Speaker 3: best friend and is also on this trip to New
Speaker 3: York with me. So it's a really special thing. And
Speaker 3: I actually contemplated a three way conversation because Chris and
Speaker 3: I did an episode where we talked with each other
Speaker 3: about our friendship once upon a time. So you know,
Speaker 3: I feel incredibly blessed to have Christopher and I mean
Speaker 3: several other friends that I've had for a long long time.
Speaker 3: Your book is focused on a particular friendship more and
Speaker 3: I think at the time he wrote the book, I
Speaker 3: think it was a thirty five year friendship. My guess
Speaker 3: is thirty seven or thirty eight at this point. Forty
Speaker 3: forty Okay, that's how long it takes to write and
Speaker 3: get a book out.
Speaker 1: Long it takes right and get a book out it started,
Speaker 1: but I'm happy to say it's ever stronger our friendship.
Speaker 1: But forty years. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Before we go more into that, though, I feel like
Speaker 3: we have to jump back a little bit too. Do
Speaker 3: some of your previous work. And I have to ask
Speaker 3: you a question that you love to ask people, which
Speaker 3: is what are you reading.
Speaker 1: I just reread, and I love to reread an absolutely
Speaker 1: marvelous novel called City of Thieves by David Benioff. And
Speaker 1: this is a book set during the World War two
Speaker 1: siege of Saint Petersburg, and it's about two unlikely lads
Speaker 1: who are chucked together and form an astonishing friendship. A
Speaker 1: Jewish kid and kind of cossack, handsome aristocratic ish kid,
Speaker 1: not really an aristocrat, but with that kind of looks,
Speaker 1: who are given an impossible task to come up with
Speaker 1: a dozen eggs and they have to go behind enemy
Speaker 1: lines to get them. And it's funny and crazy and
Speaker 1: filled with history and so moving because it's really a
Speaker 1: book about friendship has chosen family, which is a theme
Speaker 1: that resonates really deeply with me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've read that book. I should read it again.
Speaker 3: I don't do enough rereading. It really is very rewarding.
Speaker 1: It is it's a constant battle because there's so many
Speaker 1: new books to read and exciting books.
Speaker 3: To the old books that I haven't read.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one of my favorite forms of rereading. And I
Speaker 1: think I stole this from Winston Churchill, but I've never
Speaker 1: been able to find the quote. Is I think he
Speaker 1: called it visiting his books, where you just go to
Speaker 1: your bookshelf, you pull a book off it that you've read,
Speaker 1: flip to a random page and read ten of fifteen pages.
Speaker 3: That's a great idea, visiting your books.
Speaker 1: Visiting your books. So it's just like a little chat
Speaker 1: with an old friend. But one of the really magical
Speaker 1: things about it, and you have to believe in a
Speaker 1: certain type of universe, but I often find it's a
Speaker 1: passage that I need, that just the randomness of it
Speaker 1: brings me a character, a bit of wisdom, just something
Speaker 1: that I need.
Speaker 3: And there are books that lend themselves to that. One
Speaker 3: of my favorite books of all time is The dowdey Ching.
Speaker 3: I recently did my own interpretation of it. You know,
Speaker 3: it's been translated countless times, so you know, I've got
Speaker 3: like fifteen English translations, and I was like, I'm going
Speaker 3: to do my own as part of another project. But
Speaker 3: given that that's a book of eighty one short verses,
Speaker 3: you just flip it open and it's got a piece
Speaker 3: of wisdom for you, kind of right there. But I
Speaker 3: love doing that with like a fiction book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, is it design for that or is that just
Speaker 1: how you came to use it?
Speaker 3: No, as part of this project, I was teaching on
Speaker 3: it as a project to use AI to have conversations
Speaker 3: with scholars about great books. Now I'm not a scholar.
Speaker 3: I don't know why they chose me, but nonetheless, that's
Speaker 3: a book I love. So it's eighty one verses that
Speaker 3: are not linear. It would be better to think of
Speaker 3: as eighty one poems. Honestly, I think is the way
Speaker 3: I would think of it. And there's a lot of repetition.
Speaker 3: As I was thinking about how to teach it, I
Speaker 3: was like, this is very difficult to teach because it
Speaker 3: doesn't just progress linearly, like verse one is saying the
Speaker 3: same thing that verse sixty seven is, with like a
Speaker 3: slight twist on it. So it works perfectly for that.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a really amazing book in that way.
Speaker 1: My go to for random passages that speak to me
Speaker 1: is weirdly enough of the Hobbit.
Speaker 3: Huh Okay, I find the Hobbit.
Speaker 1: If I go to a random page, it has something
Speaker 1: for me that would make no sense if you hadn't
Speaker 1: read the hobbit. This doesn't work with books you haven't read,
Speaker 1: With books you haven't read, it's till he works with
Speaker 1: books you've read.
Speaker 3: Right, It's like visiting with a friend is easier than
Speaker 3: visiting with somebody you've never met. Yeah, yeah, totally exactly.
Speaker 3: So you've got this long term friendship with this gentleman
Speaker 3: that you guys are kind of different in many ways.
Speaker 3: To talk about the initial or maybe even ongoing differences
Speaker 3: between the two of you is sort of a way
Speaker 3: to introduce the listeners to the other character in this book.
Speaker 1: Well, to do that, I have to take people back
Speaker 1: to the early eighties. In fact, in nineteen eighty three
Speaker 1: of this Spells called Maxie, and we were both at
Speaker 1: Yale and I had just come back from a term
Speaker 1: I had spent in Los Angeles. I took a term
Speaker 1: off from school. I went out to Los Angeles, a
Speaker 1: kind of typical preppy kid, and I came back with
Speaker 1: my hair permed down the center, with it shaved tight
Speaker 1: on the sides, because I wanted to look like the
Speaker 1: artist who was still then known as Prince. I looked
Speaker 1: nothing like him.
Speaker 3: No, I was going to say, I don't think My
Speaker 3: guess is he didn't pull that off.
Speaker 1: I did not pull it off. The poor hair dresser
Speaker 1: who was given that task must have had some poker face,
Speaker 1: but she did her best. I also loved adam Ant,
Speaker 1: who was another.
Speaker 3: Popular Chris loves adam Ant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, adam Ant was great, and he had his hair
Speaker 1: permed down the mouth too. And I had a turquoise,
Speaker 1: acid washed blue jean jacket, and I had a leather
Speaker 1: wristband with studs. And I was very into punk rock.
Speaker 1: And I had been an out gay kid at Yale
Speaker 1: from the day I arrived, but I came back a
Speaker 1: very committed not just gay rights advocate, but AIDS advocate
Speaker 1: in the very early days of the plague, and I was.
Speaker 1: I was scared and angry and furious. And I had
Speaker 1: a very tight circle of friends who were theater kids
Speaker 1: and classicists and other gay and lesbian folk. And basically
Speaker 1: decided I'd met everybody I needed to know it Yale,
Speaker 1: and then was invited to do something really weird, which
Speaker 1: was join a secret society. And the purpose of this
Speaker 1: secret society was to bring together the fifteen most different
Speaker 1: kids at Yale, men and women, the kids who were
Speaker 1: just totally different from one another and who otherwise never
Speaker 1: would have met. And you had to have dinner twice
Speaker 1: a week, could never miss. You had to in one
Speaker 1: evening in the fall, tell the other kids the story
Speaker 1: of your life, your entire life, leaving nothing out, and
Speaker 1: you had to go on a weekend or treat together.
Speaker 3: I want to be in a secret society.
Speaker 1: It was so cool. I was very skeptical at first.
Speaker 3: I was like, maybe that's your next business idea. You
Speaker 3: helped create secret societies like that in cities across the country.
Speaker 1: I think this is a business, but as just a
Speaker 1: social cause because that idea that there are fifteen kids
Speaker 1: who you've never met at a college you've gone to
Speaker 1: for three years.
Speaker 3: At that point, you wouldn't at first glance like each other.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So there were these kids and on our first night,
Speaker 1: it's only for seniors, this society in this stone building
Speaker 1: that looks like something out of the Adams family off campus,
Speaker 1: and the other kids. I looked at them and I
Speaker 1: was like, Yeah, these kids seem cool. I could be
Speaker 1: friends with these kids except for one kid, and that
Speaker 1: was this kid, Maxie. And he was a legendary athlete.
Speaker 1: He as a high school student, had won in the
Speaker 1: state of Pennsylvania the state track competition at ten o'clock
Speaker 1: in the morning, and he captained his team to the
Speaker 1: state or League lacrosse championship at three pm that afternoon.
Speaker 1: Same crazy. His arms were so big he had to
Speaker 1: cut v's in his lacas shirts because otherwise his arms
Speaker 1: wouldn't fit through them. And he was loud and he
Speaker 1: was obnoxious, and when I met him, he was that
Speaker 1: kind of kid who says think fast and throws a
Speaker 1: beer at your head, and he couldn't sit still, and
Speaker 1: he came up with nicknames for everybody, and I just thought,
Speaker 1: I can I can't with this kid. Plus he was
Speaker 1: one of the jocks. He was one of this group
Speaker 1: of people that I found intimidating, menacing, and in packs
Speaker 1: they were so I just thought, I'm going to steer
Speaker 1: clear of this one. And it was interesting. He was
Speaker 1: probably a little prejudiced against me, because I don't think
Speaker 1: he'd ever met now gay kid before. But I was way, way,
Speaker 1: way more prejudiced against him, and I made a ton
Speaker 1: of assumptions about who he was based on how he
Speaker 1: presented himself. And so I actually learned that year that
Speaker 1: this kid had a heart of gold and had great values,
Speaker 1: and our friendship has only deepened over forty years. That said,
Speaker 1: he's still loud, he's still obnoxious. He still says thing
Speaker 1: fast and throws beers at your head. He is physically demonstrative,
Speaker 1: insists on giving me bear.
Speaker 3: Hugs that you hate.
Speaker 1: I hate. I don't even really like to touch anybody else.
Speaker 1: And he loves to be outside and in groups and
Speaker 1: surrounded by people, and I like a little of that,
Speaker 1: but I just have to have my alone time, my
Speaker 1: quiet time, my introvert time. So it's not like we
Speaker 1: discovered we're the same. We are wildly different, but we
Speaker 1: discovered we have the same values.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's so many things in what you said there.
Speaker 3: I think that that idea of how we judge other
Speaker 3: people is so ingrained in the human condition, Like I think,
Speaker 3: you can't not do it right. I literally think, like
Speaker 3: it's impossible to meet somebody and not form judgments of them.
Speaker 3: The brain just does it like that, and so it's
Speaker 3: something that happens. But to learn to hold those pretty loosely.
Speaker 3: You and I were talking before this. In one of
Speaker 3: the questions, you said he loved it ask people, is
Speaker 3: what have you been wrong about in the last year.
Speaker 3: And I know that there are times in my life
Speaker 3: that when I am shown to be dead wrong about someone,
Speaker 3: I love it because it's almost always a reversal in
Speaker 3: a good direction. I can think of one guy at
Speaker 3: a company I worked at, and he's very similar to
Speaker 3: what you're describing with MAXI very much a jock, very outgoing,
Speaker 3: very you know, just high energy. And I just immediately
Speaker 3: I'm like, ugh, like, don't like I don't like it,
Speaker 3: you know, and I judge him, right. I have all
Speaker 3: my stereotypes of somebody like that, right, And sure enough
Speaker 3: I get to know him, I'm like, this guy's amazing,
Speaker 3: you know. So I love being wrong in that way.
Speaker 1: That's such a great way to be wrong. And I
Speaker 1: want to go back for a second to this business
Speaker 1: of judging people, because I do think it's hardwired and
Speaker 1: I think it's star winning. And I think we early
Speaker 1: on in the evolution of our species had to make
Speaker 1: really quick judgments, right, yeah about you know what kind
Speaker 1: of wild cat it was, was it likely to eat
Speaker 1: us or not? And what kind of group of people
Speaker 1: we encountered. Were they are people or were they people
Speaker 1: who wanted to kill us? So it's not entirely bad
Speaker 1: that we do this, right, there's a reason we do it.
Speaker 1: That said, I think we just rob ourselves of so
Speaker 1: many possible friendships and relationships. And I'll tell you a
Speaker 1: little game that I play with myself related to this,
Speaker 1: and it has to do with the person sitting next
Speaker 1: to you on an airplane. Okay, so I used to
Speaker 1: be that guy who was pulled out my laptop, put
Speaker 1: on my earphones, yanked out a book, whatever, and just
Speaker 1: sent the do not talk to me vibe yep, yep,
Speaker 1: and again it's start winning. It's protective. But now I
Speaker 1: like to look at the person next to me and
Speaker 1: come up with a kind of story. Who do I
Speaker 1: think they are? What kind of person do I think
Speaker 1: they are? And then I hate to say it, but
Speaker 1: I'm the guy who says, hey, how you doing? Are
Speaker 1: you know, you returning to Columbus or you heading out
Speaker 1: from there? And it's so interesting talk about wrong about people.
Speaker 1: I'm always wrong. I'm always wrong about who they are.
Speaker 1: And most of the time they're pretty happy to talk
Speaker 1: to me, and I'm really happy to talk to them.
Speaker 1: And if they send the don't talk to me vibes,
Speaker 1: I honor that of course, but I'm often wrong about
Speaker 1: whether they want to talk, and I'm always almost always
Speaker 1: wrong about who they are.
Speaker 3: The other thing that a lot of scientific studies show
Speaker 3: is that we imagine that talking to a stranger is
Speaker 3: going to be uncomfortable and pleasant and we're not going
Speaker 3: to like it. If you survey people and you ask them,
Speaker 3: that's what they say, and then you send them out
Speaker 3: to do it, they almost inevitably come back and report
Speaker 3: it was not that weird, and I actually really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: You know, not only are we wrong about the person,
Speaker 3: we're wrong about oftentimes the entire nature of the interaction.
Speaker 3: That it will be something that's good and enjoyable.
Speaker 1: That's so interesting. I hadn't thought about just the very
Speaker 1: nature of the interaction, right right. I have one story
Speaker 1: about when I really rob myself and I learned a
Speaker 1: lesson on this one. I was flying to the West
Speaker 1: Coast and there was a guy sitting next to me,
Speaker 1: and he seemed to really want to talk, and I
Speaker 1: was in that don't talk to me mode. I had
Speaker 1: my book and I answered everything monosyllabically and did the
Speaker 1: body language where I twisted away from him. And when
Speaker 1: we're landing. I thought, the guy really wants to talk.
Speaker 1: Would it kill me to talk to him for a minute.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I said, you know, hey, are you flying into
Speaker 1: Los Angeles or or returning home? And he said, I'm
Speaker 1: returning home. I said, what brings you home? And he said,
Speaker 1: my business partner was recently murdered. And it turned out
Speaker 1: his business partner was at the center of one of
Speaker 1: the most famous, emotional, difficult trials of our time. And
Speaker 1: I would have had the opportunity to be compassionate. I
Speaker 1: would have had the opportunity to learn so much about
Speaker 1: this thing that was obsessing everybody at the time. But
Speaker 1: I robbed myself of it because they're like, okay, folks,
Speaker 1: and off we went. Yep.
Speaker 3: I am still guilty far more often than not of
Speaker 3: the I've got my book, I've got my work, I've
Speaker 3: got to get done, I've got a couple hours and
Speaker 3: interrupt it on a plane. I'm sure I rob myself
Speaker 3: often of those things. There's another thing that happens in
Speaker 3: the book that I would like to touch on. I'm
Speaker 3: just going to read what you write here, you said,
Speaker 3: And every time I thought to call Maxie, I would
Speaker 3: remember that I hadn't sent anything, which was a donation
Speaker 3: to his new school that he'd started. I'd remember that
Speaker 3: I hadn't sent anything, feel guilty about that, and put
Speaker 3: off calling him until i'd sent a check, which I
Speaker 3: would then neglect to do. And I think we can
Speaker 3: all relate to this, like I haven't done something to
Speaker 3: uphold my end of something. So instead of crossing the
Speaker 3: difficult barrier to face that, I put it off again.
Speaker 3: And it's just this cycle, and it drives us oftentimes
Speaker 3: away from people we love, and sometimes it could do
Speaker 3: it almost permanently.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to me, that passage illustrates exactly where we started.
Speaker 1: That's feeding the bad wolf. M h. When you do that,
Speaker 1: you are feeding the bad wolf and potentially rupturing a
Speaker 1: friendship forever. Maxie had sent me this letter. He and
Speaker 1: his wife were starting this awesome school on the island
Speaker 1: of Aluthro. I was everything he believed in. It was
Speaker 1: conservation and experiential education and treating young people like scientists
Speaker 1: and real human beings who can help make a difference.
Speaker 1: And it was just a form letter and I was
Speaker 1: going to send in a check of one hundred bucks
Speaker 1: or something like that, and I just kept forgetting but
Speaker 1: rather then just pick up the phone and say, hey,
Speaker 1: MAXI I'm an idiot. I've been meaning to send you
Speaker 1: a check, and he would have said, oh, don't worry
Speaker 1: about that, don't bother. I got so into my own
Speaker 1: head that I almost blew up our friendship over my
Speaker 1: guilt about not having done something that actually MAXI wouldn't
Speaker 1: have even cared. Our friendship wasn't contingent on my sending
Speaker 1: one hundred bucks to his school, right, Our friendship was
Speaker 1: a friendship. But I think so often with friends, it's
Speaker 1: easy to accidentally torpedo a friendship out of that kind
Speaker 1: of guilt slash negligence.
Speaker 3: I mean, I can think of so many people that
Speaker 3: I used to be really good friends with them I'm
Speaker 3: not anymore. I mean they're just kind of gone yeah,
Speaker 3: And I think that's the nature of certain things. Not
Speaker 3: every relationship is meant to last, and just the fact
Speaker 3: that it doesn't doesn't mean it wasn't a worthwhile and
Speaker 3: valuable relationship. But I often do wonder, like what what
Speaker 3: happened there? Like I wish I could just watch the process.
Speaker 3: My memory is so bad, but I wish I could
Speaker 3: sort of watch the process from my vantage point now
Speaker 3: and just see, like how did it unravel? You know?
Speaker 3: So it does mean I think we talk about this
Speaker 3: in the beginning of the introduction, that you know, the
Speaker 3: music thing that goes on at the beginning of every show,
Speaker 3: and then Chris reads a little thing constant, consistent and
Speaker 3: creative effort. That's not it. It's three c's. Two of
Speaker 3: them are creative and consistent effort to build a life
Speaker 3: worth living. But I think the same thing goes with friendship, right.
Speaker 3: It takes some sort of ongoing effort to do it,
Speaker 3: not that it becomes a job, but that it does
Speaker 3: take some degree of conscious intention.
Speaker 1: I absolutely believe that. And there's actually one of the epigraphs,
Speaker 1: one of the quotes I use at the beginning of
Speaker 1: my book. Do you mind if I read the because
Speaker 1: I don't want.
Speaker 3: To hear a person. We have a book here. This
Speaker 3: is so cool.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get it wrong because it's just
Speaker 1: so well put. And it's by the poet David White.
Speaker 3: I love David White. We got to have him on
Speaker 3: one time and it was such a gift.
Speaker 1: I'm so jealous. I got to hear more about that.
Speaker 1: I got to hear the program, but he wrote, all
Speaker 1: friendships of any length are based on a continued mutual forgiveness,
Speaker 1: without tolerance and mercy, all friendships die.
Speaker 3: That's really beautiful, Yep. Reading your book makes me reflect
Speaker 3: on Chris and then having Chris here, and I think
Speaker 3: Chris is one friendship where I'm trying to reflect whether
Speaker 3: that's true, and actually now I realize it is true.
Speaker 3: I was gonna say, we're generally pretty easy going with
Speaker 3: each other, but like, for example, I've had to fire
Speaker 3: Chris from like two two jobs in the past. Wow.
Speaker 3: You know, Chris and I both have a history of
Speaker 3: drug addiction, and so Chris would be in his addiction.
Speaker 3: I think, oh, you know, a good job would get him,
Speaker 3: you know, would get him out of this, would help him,
Speaker 3: give him some structure. So I'd hire him into some
Speaker 3: software company that I was working at, probably hire him
Speaker 3: into a position he wasn't even really qualified to do,
Speaker 3: and then eventually he would screw it up really badly,
Speaker 3: and you know, my bosses would be looking at me
Speaker 3: like what have you done? And I would eventually be like, well,
Speaker 3: I guess I'm going to have to fire him, which
Speaker 3: is sort of an uncomfortable thing. But our friendship just
Speaker 3: sort of rolled on, you know. I think we have
Speaker 3: a natural sort of like whatever with each other, you know,
Speaker 3: like a sense of like yeah, okay, you know.
Speaker 1: To me, that illustrates one of the things I've come
Speaker 1: to believe is an essential ingredient in a long friendship,
Speaker 1: especially a forty year friendship, which is you have to
Speaker 1: be able to get mad at each other. You have
Speaker 1: to be able to tell each other that you are mad.
Speaker 1: When you are mad, you have to reveal enough of
Speaker 1: yourself to allow the other person to get mad.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean that's a really interesting idea of being
Speaker 3: able to do that, because I think that's common knowledge.
Speaker 3: We think about that as being pretty common. If you're
Speaker 3: going to have a lasting romantic relationship, right of course,
Speaker 3: you're going to get upset with each other. Right of
Speaker 3: course there's going to be things. But I think friendship
Speaker 3: we tend to think shouldn't have that. And you know,
Speaker 3: I think, like a good romantic relationship, I mean, if
Speaker 3: you have a ton of that, it's probably a problem.
Speaker 3: You know, maybe it's not the right friendship, but it's
Speaker 3: inevitable right over such a long period of time. I mean,
Speaker 3: there's another section that I loved in the book where
Speaker 3: Maxi got really pissed at you one time. Can you
Speaker 3: share about that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was one of the very few times Maxi
Speaker 1: got livid with me. So, Maxi had a brain tumor,
Speaker 1: and it was an acoustic neuroma. It's not malignant, but
Speaker 1: it can be life threatening and the operation, like all
Speaker 1: brain operations, is scary and risky. And he had told
Speaker 1: me the minute he was diagnosed. He told me his fears.
Speaker 1: He allowed me to be there with him in the
Speaker 1: hospital when he was coming out of the general anesthetic
Speaker 1: and to help him walk down the hospital aisles as
Speaker 1: he regained his sense of balance. And some time later,
Speaker 1: Maxi discovered through a mutual friend, a guy named Singer
Speaker 1: who's in the book a lot, that I was recently
Speaker 1: diagnosed with a nerve disease that's very debilitating. It's not
Speaker 1: necessarily progressive, and it's certainly nothing fatal, but it had
Speaker 1: a huge effect on my life, a very painful neuropathy.
Speaker 1: And I hadn't told him, and I remember distinctly he
Speaker 1: was furious, and I thought he was joking at first,
Speaker 1: but he basically told me, you know, that's BS, that's
Speaker 1: not a friendship and basically hung up on me, and
Speaker 1: I was worried that I'd lost the friendship over that,
Speaker 1: And it led me to really deep revelation for me,
Speaker 1: which is that he had given me a huge gift
Speaker 1: by being vulnerable with me, because he had allowed me
Speaker 1: to be a great friend to him, and I had
Speaker 1: robbed him of the opportunity to be a great friend
Speaker 1: because I hadn't shared with him what I was going through.
Speaker 1: And at the time, I remember thinking like, Oh, he
Speaker 1: has a brain tumor. I just have this stupid nerve disease.
Speaker 1: You know, that's trivial compared to his brain tumor. I
Speaker 1: shouldn't bring it up. I'll be strong, I won't say anything.
Speaker 1: But it was selfish. It was just really selfish of me.
Speaker 1: And I realized that going forward, it's a real gift
Speaker 1: to allow someone else to be there for you. Now
Speaker 1: you don't want to be constantly giving them opportunities to
Speaker 1: be there for you. That there is a certain sense
Speaker 1: of balance that any good friendship has, right, but balance
Speaker 1: is the.
Speaker 3: Key that really resonates with me. Given a tendency to
Speaker 3: go it alone, I think a few different things feed
Speaker 3: into it for me. One is, and you say it
Speaker 3: here in the book, you don't like to be the
Speaker 3: person who needs help. There's some element of that. I
Speaker 3: think there's an element of I think I'm burdening that person,
Speaker 3: you know, And it makes me think about something I
Speaker 3: saw in twelve Step programs, which was I think twelve
Speaker 3: Step Programs did this incredible thing where Bill Wilson realized
Speaker 3: early on that the relationship of one alcoholic talking to
Speaker 3: another was the healing element, and it was the healing
Speaker 3: element for both people. So if you're ten years sober
Speaker 3: and you're talking to somebody who's three days sober, it
Speaker 3: seems like the person who's ten years sober is giving
Speaker 3: something to the person who has three days sober, and
Speaker 3: they are the person who's three days sober is receiving something,
Speaker 3: but the person giving it is getting it back to
Speaker 3: the same measure and degree. But what I would see
Speaker 3: again and again is people who are new not understand
Speaker 3: that and feel like I don't want to reach out
Speaker 3: because I'm a burden. I don't want to call my
Speaker 3: sponsor because I'm probably bothering them. And of course they
Speaker 3: don't understand at that point because they're new to the process.
Speaker 3: And I think that's what you're speaking to here. That
Speaker 3: nature of being a friend is both having someone you
Speaker 3: can depend on and allowing somebody to depend on you
Speaker 3: or to call you. And to only do one side
Speaker 3: of that is not fair to the other people. You think, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm just not bird and in them, my problems aren't
Speaker 3: that big of a deal. They've got plenty going on,
Speaker 3: but legitimately like you're taking something from them, which is
Speaker 3: the opportunity to be a supportive friend.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And there's a word that when you were talking,
Speaker 1: just was foremost in my mind as it relates to
Speaker 1: some of the friends I know have been in twelve Step,
Speaker 1: and as it relates to my friendship with Maxi. And
Speaker 1: that word is service. And something that I haven't yet mentioned,
Speaker 1: but you know, of course because he read the book,
Speaker 1: is that Maxi became an officer in the Navy Seals
Speaker 1: and served for six years with the Navy Seals, and
Speaker 1: he wanted to be jockey and outside and in the ocean,
Speaker 1: but he wanted to be useful and he wanted to
Speaker 1: be literally of service. And I will say that Maxi
Speaker 1: doesn't talk about the Seals much, and he thinks there's
Speaker 1: a lot more interesting things than a lot of people
Speaker 1: who have been of service in specific ways that we
Speaker 1: don't celebrate teachers and nurses, for example. But a very
Speaker 1: important part of Maxi's life is this idea of being
Speaker 1: of service. And I had robbed him in our friendship
Speaker 1: of the ability to be of service, which is one
Speaker 1: of the central things who he is. And I can't
Speaker 1: help but think that unfortunately little of this is gendered
Speaker 1: and has to do with the way that boys are raised,
Speaker 1: certainly in America, but in many parts of the world,
Speaker 1: where whether you're a gay boy or a straight boy,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be silent and you're supposed to endure,
Speaker 1: and you're supposed to help but not need help. And
Speaker 1: so in our young male friendships, too often we don't
Speaker 1: build up healthy patterns of asking for help and giving help.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was something about my friendship with Chris. I
Speaker 3: didn't understand it, but something happened between us so organically
Speaker 3: at like eighteen that within like a month we were
Speaker 3: saying like I love you to each other, which was
Speaker 3: I mean, I'd never done anything like that. I don't
Speaker 3: even know how it really happened, but there was some
Speaker 3: just breaking out of that male friendship straight jacket. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know. And again I don't think it was a
Speaker 3: conscious thing. It just sort of evolved. But I remember
Speaker 3: being really struck by it, like wow, this is so great,
Speaker 3: Like we're not playing that role with each other.
Speaker 1: The ironies of my story with Maxie is growing up
Speaker 1: as a gay boy in a time when the country
Speaker 1: was even more homophobic than it is now. To an
Speaker 1: intense degree. I was very careful about never showing affection
Speaker 1: towards my male friends, right yeah, and Maxi, as this
Speaker 1: straight wrestler, lax player, rugby player, future military dude, was
Speaker 1: able to be much freer with it. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: over the course of our forty year friendship, Maxi had
Speaker 1: no trouble saying to me a love you man, love you,
Speaker 1: Schwalves love you. I couldn't say it back to him
Speaker 1: until less than ten years ago, just couldn't do it.
Speaker 3: I think what's interesting about that is I would assume,
Speaker 3: based on my prejudices, that the artistic writer, gay young
Speaker 3: man would be more able to do that than the jock.
Speaker 3: That would be my assumption, and I was wrong.
Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, that was my assumption too.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 1: We were raised with that assumption. I had to learn
Speaker 1: that I was wrong. I didn't realize how freaked out
Speaker 1: I was about saying love you or love you man
Speaker 1: or It was coded, It was deep. It was a
Speaker 1: prejudice I had, and a real breakthrough. I think in
Speaker 1: our friendship. It sounds silly, but was the first time
Speaker 1: he said love you Schwalves and I said love you too, Maxi,
Speaker 1: and it was like a burden was lifted off me.
Speaker 1: I felt lighter afterwards. I'd been living with this thing
Speaker 1: where I was scared to say it and didn't even
Speaker 1: know that I was scared to say it was so
Speaker 1: deeply ingrained, and I was as prejudiced as anybody else.
Speaker 1: I made assumptions about myself and him that were not warrant.
Speaker 3: To what degree do you think that hesitancy to be
Speaker 3: able to say that to him came from an overall
Speaker 3: uncomfortableness was saying that to friends in general? And what
Speaker 3: extent of it was based on what you said earlier,
Speaker 3: which is, as a gay man having friendships with men,
Speaker 3: I'm worried they're going to take something the wrong way.
Speaker 3: Are you able to parse apart like how much of
Speaker 3: it was what I think?
Speaker 1: There's part of it, which is just how boys are
Speaker 1: raised in America, but a huge part of it was
Speaker 1: the protective as a gay man be or not say
Speaker 1: that tenny straight man, and the growing up at a
Speaker 1: time when if a straight man beat up or even
Speaker 1: killed the gay man, it was a perfectly acceptable defense
Speaker 1: for the straight man to say, well, he came on
Speaker 1: to me, and that excused whatever followed, and jury's time
Speaker 1: and again either let people off entirely or with a
Speaker 1: slap on wrist with that, well he came on to me,
Speaker 1: and so that was coded really deeply.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I am stunned oftentimes by the changes that have
Speaker 3: happened in this country around gay rights. It fills me
Speaker 3: with a certain degree of hope that society wide opinions
Speaker 3: about something can change that much. Yeah, Like, I mean,
Speaker 3: I watched mainstream TV and I see commercials with gay
Speaker 3: couples in it, and I'm like that as of somebody
Speaker 3: who grew up in the eighties, Like, there was no
Speaker 3: way that ever could have happened.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 1: Gay people, gay men, especially gay women, were invisible. Gay
Speaker 1: men either killed somebody or killed themselves. Those were basically
Speaker 1: the two roles. Because of AIDS or just because that
Speaker 1: was the plot. Oh okay, they were a murderer or
Speaker 1: they were in despair. Those were the two options. And groundbreaking,
Speaker 1: of course, was the TV show Will and Grace, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Ellen Show. And it is fascinating those of
Speaker 1: us who are culture workers. We do have the ability
Speaker 1: to reflect and to lead. And I think the leading
Speaker 1: is really important.
Speaker 3: Not just the reflecting, say more about what that looks
Speaker 3: like for you.
Speaker 1: That looks like reflecting. We should have portraits of our
Speaker 1: lives and societies as they exist. But the leading is
Speaker 1: we should point our spotlights, whether it's in our nonfiction
Speaker 1: books or our fiction books, or our TV shows or
Speaker 1: our movies, on aspects of society that have received less attention.
Speaker 1: And in the best of all possible worlds, hand the pen,
Speaker 1: hand the camera over people who don't always get to
Speaker 1: tell their stories, and let them tell their stories as
Speaker 1: they wish, the way they wish. And I think there's
Speaker 1: a word that's very debated now, which is empathy. But
Speaker 1: I think about empathy a lot, and I do believe
Speaker 1: it's one of the greatest gifts that culture gives us,
Speaker 1: which is the ability to spend some time in someone
Speaker 1: else's shoes, see their story, meet their friends, and that
Speaker 1: happens in fiction, it happens in nonfiction, especially memoir. So
Speaker 1: just by leading allowing more stories to be told, of
Speaker 1: giving people the pan in the camera, the spotlight, I
Speaker 1: think changes society. My little soapbox speech.
Speaker 3: Sorry, no, I asked, you asked I did.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: One of the things that MAXI taught at his Island School,
Speaker 3: which is a school he founded in the Bahamas, was
Speaker 3: he encouraged, Maybe he didn't even encourage. Maybe mandated students
Speaker 3: find something called a corensia three syllables against see they
Speaker 3: get me, they get me, Tell me what that is?
Speaker 3: And then you had a sort of an interesting insight
Speaker 3: around them for you.
Speaker 1: Before we were talking, I was thinking, I wonder what
Speaker 1: questions Eric's gonna ask, and then I thought, Crensia, I
Speaker 1: know he's.
Speaker 3: Gonna go for there you go. Yeah, predictable.
Speaker 1: It's such a happy way. So he founded he and
Speaker 1: Pam is why I founded the Amazing School. And it's
Speaker 1: a kind of a school term abroad for high school students,
Speaker 1: some Bahamian kids, a lot of kids from the US.
Speaker 1: And when they get there, the very first thing that
Speaker 1: happens is they put their iPhone in a sealed bag
Speaker 1: and do not see it for one hundred days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't imagine, but it's amazing.
Speaker 1: It's amazing that in and of itself, is an astonishing
Speaker 1: thing to do to a young person.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they all have.
Speaker 1: To read a book, The Rediscovery of North America by
Speaker 1: Barry Lopez, an incredible little book that started as a speech.
Speaker 1: And they all have to find a spot which is
Speaker 1: their place of corrensia. And as MAXI explained it to me,
Speaker 1: Corrensia it's a Spanish word and a very particular meaning
Speaker 1: it has, as explained by Ernest Hemingway, is the place
Speaker 1: of bull goes in the bull ring to gather its
Speaker 1: strength and kind of center itself before or what might
Speaker 1: be its final salvo facing them out a door. It's
Speaker 1: a place of quiet, a place of strength, a place
Speaker 1: where you gather yourself. And he insists that each one
Speaker 1: of these kids who is embarking on this one hundred
Speaker 1: day journey find a place on the island of a Luthra,
Speaker 1: within easy walking distance of the school where they'll go.
Speaker 1: I think it's every day for an hour an hour
Speaker 1: and a half with no purpose, but just to sit
Speaker 1: with themselves and center themselves. They're surrounded by other kids
Speaker 1: all the time in they're learning and doing science and whatever.
Speaker 1: Bunk what do they call them, dorms, dorms, dorms on
Speaker 1: their dorms. But this place of corensia is something that
Speaker 1: he teaches them to find, not just when they're in
Speaker 1: a Lutherra, but wherever they go in the world. And
Speaker 1: I love this concept, and I was thinking about it
Speaker 1: and thinking about it, and I came to the realization
Speaker 1: one night as I was hanging out with Maxi and
Speaker 1: a Luthra that books were my crensia. That actually, for me,
Speaker 1: it wasn't a physical place. It was when I need
Speaker 1: to center myself, whether I'm starting a book, a new
Speaker 1: or visiting one of my old friends from the bookshelf.
Speaker 1: It's that just act of disconnecting, not looking at my
Speaker 1: smartphone and spending hour an hour and a half by
Speaker 1: myself with the book.
Speaker 3: I want to pause for a quick good Wolf reminder.
Speaker 3: This one's about a habit change and a mistake I
Speaker 3: see people making. And that's really that we don't think
Speaker 3: about these new habits that we want to add in
Speaker 3: the context of our entire life. Right habits don't happen
Speaker 3: in a vacuum. They have to fit in the life
Speaker 3: that we have. So when we just keep adding.
Speaker 4: I should do this, I should do that, I should do.
Speaker 3: This, we get discouraged because we haven't really thought about
Speaker 3: what we're not going to do in order to make
Speaker 3: that happen. So it's really helpful for you to think
Speaker 3: about where is this going to fit and what in
Speaker 3: my life might I need to remove. If you want
Speaker 3: to step by step guide for how you can easily
Speaker 3: build new habits that feed your good Wolf, go to
Speaker 3: good Wolf dot me, slash change and join the free masterclass.
Speaker 3: I think that's true for me too, for sure. I
Speaker 3: think they've been that to me for a long long time.
Speaker 3: You know, I think grow them up in a household
Speaker 3: where there was a lot of anger, Like it was
Speaker 3: just the safe place to be off with a book.
Speaker 3: You can't do anything wrong, you're not causing any trouble,
Speaker 3: you know, just be left alone. But the thing that
Speaker 3: I thought, ay, I thought that was amazing that you
Speaker 3: discovered that. But you also go on to say that
Speaker 3: sometimes books were a way that took you out of life.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love what you just said about the idea
Speaker 1: of when you're in a chaotic or angry environment, that
Speaker 1: books can center you or give you that escape. But
Speaker 1: I find that that escape can also become a bit
Speaker 1: of an adjection in and of itself, and it can
Speaker 1: be too easy to go to that instead of joining
Speaker 1: the fray. And I also love the point you made.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason I think books are my crensia,
Speaker 1: and part of the idea behind this crensia is you're
Speaker 1: not interacting with anybody else. You can't be harmed, and
Speaker 1: you can't harm anyone. I can read a book. I'm
Speaker 1: not changing the words on the page, no matter what
Speaker 1: I think of them. They're just there. And so that's lovely, extraordinary, necessary.
Speaker 1: But I realized that weekend when I was hanging out
Speaker 1: with MAXI and a Lutherra that sometimes I went to
Speaker 1: it too soon or too often, and that again I
Speaker 1: robbed myself and my friends of my presence. And presence
Speaker 1: is scary. You can hurt someone. You can say the
Speaker 1: wrong thing, you can say stupid thing. Someone can do
Speaker 1: the same. You can be hurt, you can be offended,
Speaker 1: you can be upset. But again coming back to this idea,
Speaker 1: if you surround yourself with people in an environment of time, laurance,
Speaker 1: and mercy, a mutual forgiveness. Maybe it's not so scary. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another thing that I've noticed around books or movies or
Speaker 3: you know, great streaming shows or whatever they are, is
Speaker 3: sort of, as we've said, one of the great things
Speaker 3: about them is they offer comfort. They're comfortable, right. And
Speaker 3: I've noticed as I've gotten older, and I've seen this
Speaker 3: in lots of other older people, is that we tend
Speaker 3: to start to prioritize comfort over other values. And so,
Speaker 3: like you're saying, you know, you're describing in the book
Speaker 3: a night where your inclination would have been like, all right,
Speaker 3: I'm done, go to bed with my book. Right, it's
Speaker 3: seven pm. Everybody else is going to go do something,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to go retreat because it's comfortable. It's easier, right.
Speaker 3: And it's not that that's always the wrong choice. Sometimes
Speaker 3: that is absolutely the right choice. And there are times
Speaker 3: that the right choice, at least for me, is to
Speaker 3: push a little bit against that. You know, it's a
Speaker 3: cliche now, you know, out of your comfort zone, but
Speaker 3: it seems to be something that feels really important to me.
Speaker 3: You know, as I get older, it feels like pushing
Speaker 3: out of my comfort zone in just normal day to
Speaker 3: day things is more important to me than it used
Speaker 3: to be. Maybe I did it more naturally when I
Speaker 3: was younger, I'm not sure.
Speaker 1: For me. When I thought about that and the idea
Speaker 1: of pushing myself more out of my comfort zone and
Speaker 1: not being so quick to retreat to my currency of books,
Speaker 1: I realized that there's this happy medium which is taking
Speaker 1: the friendships that I have and changing the rules of engagement,
Speaker 1: meaning something like there will be a friend who every
Speaker 1: couple weeks will meet for coffee and I'll now try
Speaker 1: to say, Hey, do you want to get a museum
Speaker 1: walk through, walk through the met Let's let's let's bag
Speaker 1: the coffee and go walk through the mat or let's
Speaker 1: do something different than we normally do. And it allows
Speaker 1: you to see them in a new light and have
Speaker 1: them see you in a new light, and it takes
Speaker 1: you both out of your comfort zone. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit of an adventure. So to me, that's been part
Speaker 1: of it. And MAXI is always taking me out of
Speaker 1: my comfort zone. He wants me to free dive, he
Speaker 1: wants me to.
Speaker 3: Have you ever done free diving? I couldn't do it, Okay,
Speaker 3: all right, I didn't know if you'd in the intervening
Speaker 3: years worked your way up to it.
Speaker 1: I sort of joke now that when he asked me
Speaker 1: when I'll do it, I say never? Is never good
Speaker 1: for you? Yeah, I don't think I'll ever do it?
Speaker 3: Would you scuba dive?
Speaker 1: I snorkel?
Speaker 3: Okay, well, all right, so you'll get you'll put your
Speaker 3: head under the wire, yeah, blah ren for while. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean reading about free diving makes me anxious. Oh,
Speaker 3: just reading about it, and.
Speaker 1: There was a terrible domentary on that geo or something.
Speaker 1: It's terrifying.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And people who love it really love it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I mean it strikes me as you know,
Speaker 3: a lot of sort of quote unquote adventure sports, like
Speaker 3: there's a certain element of of the I don't want
Speaker 3: to use the word danger, but that adds an element
Speaker 3: to it, right it does? You know? I notice I've
Speaker 3: more and more Like I took up surfing a few
Speaker 3: years ago, which is I always say, is a stupid
Speaker 3: hobby for an Ohioan. But when I did it, I
Speaker 3: just felt like, very rarely in life anymore, am I
Speaker 3: so excited that I want to like pump my fist
Speaker 3: in the air like I'd won the Masters or something. Right,
Speaker 3: it just doesn't happen that often. Yeah, that's how surfing
Speaker 3: sometimes makes me feel. Anymore of that, more of that
Speaker 3: is good?
Speaker 1: I mean, I will say that the way MAXI practices
Speaker 1: free diving, it is the opposite of adventure sport. That
Speaker 1: what he's trying to do is bring all his body
Speaker 1: systems down to as still as they can possibly be. Hm,
Speaker 1: his blood pressure whatever it is, blood pumping, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it is, and get to the point where
Speaker 1: he can sit near the bottom of the ocean without tanks,
Speaker 1: without anything, and just be there, Yeah, looking up at
Speaker 1: the light coming through the top of the water. It
Speaker 1: sounds fantastic. I just can't do it.
Speaker 3: Yep, yep. My son and I went to Mexico, not
Speaker 3: the Christmas we just had, but the one before, and
Speaker 3: we went scuba diving, and one of the things she
Speaker 3: was like, I don't think they should have let me
Speaker 3: go scuba diving with the level of experience that I had.
Speaker 3: I think I should have been in a pool for
Speaker 3: a little while. It was in many ways it was
Speaker 3: a frightening experience, but the first thing she had me
Speaker 3: to do was descend and sit on the ocean floor. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and even with a tank on. I liked it because
Speaker 3: I was like, you have to calm yourself. You have
Speaker 3: to find a way to calm yourself and be like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I can breathe. It's weird breathing, but I can breathe.
Speaker 3: I'm safe, I'm you know. It was interesting.
Speaker 1: And there is this cool thing that Maxie told me about,
Speaker 1: which is the mammalian diving reflex that actually, when you
Speaker 1: put your face in water, your heart naturally slows. It's
Speaker 1: just some weird reflex we have, the mammalian diving reflex.
Speaker 3: I feel like I have the I do too. When
Speaker 3: I was learning to swim as a kid, I would
Speaker 3: not put my head in the water, and they eventually
Speaker 3: passed me through like whatever the badge I had to get,
Speaker 3: like turtle or whatever, right, because I could swim the distance,
Speaker 3: but I wouldn't do it with my head in the water.
Speaker 3: That's a riot and you know, so to me, like
Speaker 3: I tried to learn to swim to do a triathlon
Speaker 3: last year and it was really hard for me. Like
Speaker 3: I feel like when I put my head under the water,
Speaker 3: it just feels totally unnatural to me. Now again, what
Speaker 3: he's doing is different, but it feels totally unnatural to
Speaker 3: me to be doing something that is causing me to
Speaker 3: be out of breath and at the same time have
Speaker 3: my head somewhere it can't breathe, Like there's some part
Speaker 3: of me that's like, this isn't no, this isn't right.
Speaker 3: I've gotten better at it. It's been an interesting challenge.
Speaker 1: It is a funny kind of mastery, and it's also
Speaker 1: one of those things like flipping expectations on their head.
Speaker 1: Because Maxi has become he does yoga, he's a deeply
Speaker 1: spiritual person, and his ability to control his body is
Speaker 1: unbelieve I can't remember if I put this in the book,
Speaker 1: but while having a routine colonoscopy, which he did without sedation,
Speaker 1: he was able to get his heart beat so low
Speaker 1: in the early thirty something beats per minute that they
Speaker 1: kept thinking he died, like they kept wanting to revive. Wow,
Speaker 1: because he could control his heartbeat.
Speaker 3: I will not be doing it under that exactly, like
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not ready to do that. We talked
Speaker 3: earlier about, you know how there are oftentimes a pause
Speaker 3: and a friendship, and that my experience has been sometimes
Speaker 3: that pause just becomes permanent. But within you and Maxie's friendship,
Speaker 3: there were pauses there, you know, So talk to me
Speaker 3: about picking a friendship back up after there's been a pause.
Speaker 3: That might feel slightly uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: Yeah. One of the things that when I first told
Speaker 1: people about the book, they kind of made an assumption
Speaker 1: was that I was writing a book about my best friend,
Speaker 1: and Maxie's not my best friend, and I'm not his
Speaker 1: best friend. Yeah, we're very dear friends. We love each other,
Speaker 1: and there have been times in our friendship when we've
Speaker 1: gone literally a decade without talking. Nothing went wrong, no
Speaker 1: one insulted anybody. He had four kids, started a school,
Speaker 1: I had difficult, demanding jobs in the world of book publishing.
Speaker 1: And I think that a lot of people after friendship
Speaker 1: has gone ten years without contact kind of assume the
Speaker 1: friendship's dead, right, Yeah, And in fact, it just it's unused.
Speaker 1: It's like a bicycle that's in the garage. We know
Speaker 1: how to ride the bicycle and it's still there, so
Speaker 1: you just have to pick it up and ride it.
Speaker 1: And one of the most powerful things is periodically through
Speaker 1: this forty years either one of us would contact the
Speaker 1: other just out of the blue, Hey, how are you doing.
Speaker 1: There was a for example, a massive hurricane that hit
Speaker 1: his island, I'm like, I need to call Maxie. Or
Speaker 1: often there would be a friend who was kind of
Speaker 1: the connector. And I think these people connector friends are golden.
Speaker 1: They're kind of like the sheep dog that nips at
Speaker 1: everyone's ankles. And we all know that person. And that's
Speaker 1: the person who says, hey, I was talking to Maxie
Speaker 1: the other day, you should call him, Or who says
Speaker 1: I'm coming to town, let's all get together. And I
Speaker 1: had a really moving experience a couple weeks ago. I'm
Speaker 1: telling this story with permission. One of the people who
Speaker 1: had been in our secret society we just hadn't heard
Speaker 1: from from forty years. Nothing happened, nothing bad. He just
Speaker 1: went off and lived his life and we lived ours,
Speaker 1: and we didn't really know how to contact each other
Speaker 1: and lost track. And he reached out through a Facebook
Speaker 1: page to everybody in our class saying that he had
Speaker 1: been diagnosed with cancer, that it was stage four, that
Speaker 1: it wasn't responding well to treatment, and wanted us to
Speaker 1: know what he was up to and two of us
Speaker 1: from the Secret Society got on the phone and we're like, hey,
Speaker 1: what are you doing on Thursday? And this is a
Speaker 1: kid who lives a no longer kid, a man who
Speaker 1: lives in Texas And he said nothing, and we said, well,
Speaker 1: we're hopping on a plane. We're coming to see you.
Speaker 1: And we flew out and we had drinks and dinner
Speaker 1: and more drinks. We talked until one thirty in the morning.
Speaker 1: We picked up after forty years, exactly where we'd left off.
Speaker 1: And you know, we shouldn't take a prompt like a
Speaker 1: dire health situation to get us to do that. That's
Speaker 1: in our power. Like I kept thinking, now that was
Speaker 1: so great. Who else can I do that with? And
Speaker 1: as a result, last week I had dinner with someone
Speaker 1: I met forty two years ago and we had like
Speaker 1: a cool bond and she's awesome and we met at
Speaker 1: a party and met a couple times after that and
Speaker 1: kept in touch through Facebook. But we had dinner and
Speaker 1: had a blast. So you know, my brother calls this
Speaker 1: part of our life the back nine, referring to the
Speaker 1: great game of golf, and what a cool thing to
Speaker 1: spend the back nine doing is calling people We had
Speaker 1: a bond with and just having a meal.
Speaker 3: That's a really interesting idea because I'm a forward looking, thinking,
Speaker 3: moving person in general. So when I think about more
Speaker 3: friendship and community in my life, I think new friendships. Right,
Speaker 3: But until you said that, it hadn't occurred to me that, like, well,
Speaker 3: maybe there's lots of old friendships that are out there
Speaker 3: that would be far easier to get going again than
Speaker 3: a new friendship, right, because like you said, with some people,
Speaker 3: you just kind of picked back up. Yeah, right, you
Speaker 3: just sort of picked back up. And makes me think
Speaker 3: of a friend of mine who's like my first sponsor
Speaker 3: in a twelve step when it was not my first sponsor.
Speaker 3: He was my most important sponsor in a twelve step program.
Speaker 3: And then we went on to play in bands together,
Speaker 3: and but he moved away quite some time ago to Tennessee.
Speaker 3: In the first couple of years, I went and saw
Speaker 3: him more often, but we haven't seen each other and
Speaker 3: quite some time, and we just got on a text thread. Recently,
Speaker 3: we're texting each other and I just was like, you
Speaker 3: know what I need to like reinvest here, Yeah, because
Speaker 3: this was a really special friendship to me and it
Speaker 3: is the sort of friendship sounds like a little bit
Speaker 3: like you and Maxie, where there's no weirdness about the
Speaker 3: fact that we haven't been in contact. He's got his
Speaker 3: life and he's had kids, and I've had my life
Speaker 3: and my you know, there's no weirdness. There would be
Speaker 3: easy to pick back. It would be easy. And there's
Speaker 3: probably more like that that I haven't thought of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially people. I think if you, as a
Speaker 1: young person, went through a really intense experience together, whatever
Speaker 1: that may be, it's just you laid the tracks that
Speaker 1: last a lifetime.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, it's interesting. I've renewed another friendship recently with somebody.
Speaker 3: Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, oh, I
Speaker 3: actually I am doing this. Somebody that I played music
Speaker 3: a lot with and when I was drinking and using,
Speaker 3: we were like best friends. And then when I would
Speaker 3: stop doing that, the friendship sort of fell off. And
Speaker 3: I've realized that's because I am making the association of
Speaker 3: alcohol and drugs with that person. I mean, they still
Speaker 3: drink and they still do their thing, right, it's not,
Speaker 3: but that association is mine, you know. And the fact
Speaker 3: that we could be friends without that, like, why not try?
Speaker 1: And I also think when I'm getting a lot of
Speaker 1: satisfaction from as I've been trying to implement. This is
Speaker 1: this person i'd contact after forty years. Doesn't mean now
Speaker 1: we're going to talk every three days for the rest
Speaker 1: of our lives.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we might let it go.
Speaker 1: You know, everything has its natural rhythm mm hm. But
Speaker 1: I also coming back to something I chatted about earlier,
Speaker 1: like switching it up, so that friend who you were
Speaker 1: in a band with, who you'd go and drink and use.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love the idea of your guys like taking a
Speaker 1: walk through a museum together. Yeah, right, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. It's there's so many organs.
Speaker 3: That's a great idea, you know, because the way we've
Speaker 3: chosen to reconnect is around music. Yeah, which is good
Speaker 3: because I mean, I want to play music. But it
Speaker 3: does occur to me that like that friendship would be
Speaker 3: really interesting in a completely different environment, completely different set
Speaker 3: of circumstances.
Speaker 1: When I went to visit Maxie at the school he created,
Speaker 1: which is a beautiful, magical place, sounds like it that
Speaker 1: also had a huge effect on our friendship. That changed
Speaker 1: our friendship. Yep, and for the longest time actually, until
Speaker 1: this book came out, MAXI and my Secret Society friends
Speaker 1: were one set of friends.
Speaker 3: So jealous of that phrase. My secret society friends is
Speaker 3: so cool. New Yorkers have got it all.
Speaker 1: I know. It was so cool. And of the fourteen
Speaker 1: of us, one and this story is told in the
Speaker 1: book died tragically very young. But eleven of us are
Speaker 1: in contact I've seen in the last year.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, incredible.
Speaker 1: But I didn't used to mix them with my other friends,
Speaker 1: and now that's another really fun thing to do. It
Speaker 1: doesn't always work, but it's just fun to introduce people too,
Speaker 1: and I'm getting a lot of pleasure at that.
Speaker 3: That does sound enjoyable.
Speaker 1: And one thing also, it's been great fun too. And
Speaker 1: this is hard. This is a lot of alchemy. But
Speaker 1: my husband and I have now been together for forty years.
Speaker 3: Congratulations, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Maxie and his wife, who's awesome, have an incredible marriage
Speaker 1: and are so great together. And it's been such a
Speaker 1: joy spending time the four of us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yep.
Speaker 1: And one of my favorite books of all time is
Speaker 1: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, which is about the
Speaker 1: friendship between two couples, and that's a really special relationship too.
Speaker 3: I think yeah, yeah, So I'm going to change direction
Speaker 3: out of the book in a minute, but before I do,
Speaker 3: I want to hit one thing that's not central to
Speaker 3: the book, but you referenced it, which is the nerve
Speaker 3: disease that you have. And I just want to read
Speaker 3: something that you wrote because I think it's really relevant
Speaker 3: to a lot of what many of us go through
Speaker 3: with difficulty. And you say, one of the hardest things
Speaker 3: was the feeling that I was somehow to blame not
Speaker 3: for the illness, but for failing to come up with
Speaker 3: a more effective way of handling it. I was always
Speaker 3: second guessing myself. Should I have taken my anti nause
Speaker 3: medication earlier in the day or later, Should I have
Speaker 3: eaten more or less or something different? When I was
Speaker 3: in pain, I beat myself up for walking too much
Speaker 3: or too little, for working out at the gym too
Speaker 3: hard or not enough. I love that idea because in
Speaker 3: most lives, particularly as you get older, there's some sort
Speaker 3: of difficulty, and that maybe in a montional difficulty at
Speaker 3: any age, right, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, whatever it might be.
Speaker 3: As you get older, the physical ailments tend to pile up, right,
Speaker 3: and there is this sense that many many people have,
Speaker 3: and I know I have that it should be fixable
Speaker 3: and that I'm just not doing it right and if
Speaker 3: I was, this just would go away. I don't think
Speaker 3: that's really realistic, but it is something we all engage in,
Speaker 3: and I'm curious to think how you've begun to work
Speaker 3: with that differently over time.
Speaker 1: So I think there are two things at work here.
Speaker 1: For me. One is that very human sense to think
Speaker 1: that we can control things that we can't control, yep.
Speaker 1: And one of the things and the nerve disease I have.
Speaker 1: It's kind of interesting. It's called small fiber neuropathy, and
Speaker 1: it is a disease where the pain nerves die. So
Speaker 1: weirdly enough, you would think you wouldn't feel pain, but
Speaker 1: you feel constant pain and disregulates your ability to control
Speaker 1: your temperature, indigestion and all that. But I always say,
Speaker 1: at a certain age, everybody gets something and you don't
Speaker 1: get to choose what you get. So easy to say,
Speaker 1: but important to try to repeat to myself. There is,
Speaker 1: I think for me also a very lasting effect of
Speaker 1: having come of age during the early years of age,
Speaker 1: so as a young gay man in the early eighties
Speaker 1: mid eighties, there was this horrible disease that was affecting
Speaker 1: primarily at first as reported by the media, turned out
Speaker 1: to be a little different later very different later gay
Speaker 1: men in certain communities, and there was this overwhelming message
Speaker 1: that it was our fault, that we had in some
Speaker 1: way deserved this, or that our behavior had brought it
Speaker 1: upon us, And especially in the early years before they
Speaker 1: knew exactly how it was transmitted, it was also tied
Speaker 1: to you shouldn't have done poppers, or you shouldn't have
Speaker 1: had so many other venereal diseases, or you had too
Speaker 1: many partners, or you shouldn't have done this act or
Speaker 1: that act, or there was so much guilt and blame
Speaker 1: that I think it was hard not to internalize this
Speaker 1: idea that where to fault for our illnesses, and so
Speaker 1: I carried with me this sense that whenever anything went
Speaker 1: wrong it was somehow my fault, and my inability later
Speaker 1: to control my symptoms therefore was also my fault. And
Speaker 1: separating illness from blame, I think is really hard, and
Speaker 1: I think it's not just me. I haven't studied this,
Speaker 1: so I'm just talking about things that I know other
Speaker 1: people have stated at length, and I'm may be saying
Speaker 1: things that are not even presenting them as revelations. But
Speaker 1: I also think that there's so much in childhood that
Speaker 1: reinforces that. Yeah, so you know I told you to
Speaker 1: put on sunblock. If you have sunburn, it's your own
Speaker 1: damn fault. Or you know, you shouldn't have drunk so much,
Speaker 1: or it's fault.
Speaker 3: I love Calvin and Hobbes, and there's a Calvin and
Speaker 3: Hobbs cartoon I used to teach in my Habits at
Speaker 3: Matter program. And he's lost his stuff, Tiger Hobbes, which
Speaker 3: is everything to him, and you know, he's so upset
Speaker 3: and he goes to his mom, and his mom something
Speaker 3: like I told you, if you keep leaving that you
Speaker 3: know Tiger around whatever, this will happen. And kinda said,
Speaker 3: there's no situation so bad that a little guilt won't
Speaker 3: make it worse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. And all of those growing up, don't tip
Speaker 1: your chair back, you'll follow. Let'split your head open, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: filled with these things, and that's very reasonable. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you tip back and you follow her, split your other.
Speaker 1: But I just got this sense that not controlling my
Speaker 1: symptoms was my fault.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I think it's really common, you know, regardless
Speaker 3: of where we get it from. I mean, you're insight
Speaker 3: about the AIDS crisis makes total sense, Like of course,
Speaker 3: I mean we were very blamed and childhood makes total sense.
Speaker 3: Even the Buddha, though, taught a parable about the second arrow, right,
Speaker 3: and the second arrow parable is basically like, you get
Speaker 3: shot with one arrow and that's bad enough, but then
Speaker 3: you know, you get shot with a second arrow, and
Speaker 3: the second arrow is the feeling bad about feeling bad.
Speaker 3: It's the you know, why did I do this to myself?
Speaker 3: It's that element that you know makes things worse. And
Speaker 3: I've joked before that sometimes you could boil everything I
Speaker 3: teach down to like how to not make things worse,
Speaker 3: which is an absolutely unmarketable idea, right, It's just nobody's
Speaker 3: going to buy that. But when we look at all
Speaker 3: the ways that we tend to make things in our
Speaker 3: lives worse, it's actually quite a skill. It's quite a
Speaker 3: skill to just take life at what it is without
Speaker 3: the suffering that we layer on top. And when I
Speaker 3: read that paragraph from you, I related so deeply, you know,
Speaker 3: with multiple aspects of my life, whether it be a
Speaker 3: physical condition or it be a mental condition. I think
Speaker 3: I was lucky, unlike you in your formative years. I
Speaker 3: was lucky that I got to go into recovery where
Speaker 3: I was taught that, yeah, you're responsible for getting better
Speaker 3: from your you know, being a homeless heroin addict, but
Speaker 3: you're not at fault. Right. So in those very formative
Speaker 3: years for you and me, we were getting different messages,
Speaker 3: like I was lucky to stumble into a place with
Speaker 3: the sort of thing that carries about as much moral
Speaker 3: shame as anything else, addiction.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right.
Speaker 3: I was lucky to be in a community that said, again,
Speaker 3: not that you're responsible, but it's not your fault, right,
Speaker 3: it's a disease. Now, I don't know that I believe
Speaker 3: that about disease. It's a weird concept, but I feel
Speaker 3: like it was a really important step from moral failane, right,
Speaker 3: because that's the way addiction was seen. Moral failing. Disease
Speaker 3: at least sort of took it out there a little
Speaker 3: bit and gave you some distance. And so I was
Speaker 3: lucky to learn that, but I still am that way.
Speaker 1: One of the things that this just popped back into
Speaker 1: my head I hadn't thought about for so long, is,
Speaker 1: of course One of the other communities that was blamed
Speaker 1: in the early days of AIDS were IVY drug users. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: and so gay men and IVY drug users were thought
Speaker 1: to be morally reprehensible, deserving of all they got, and
Speaker 1: also thought to be public health threats like radioactive. So
Speaker 1: there was so much and they were said always in
Speaker 1: the same breath, almost.
Speaker 3: And they were very different things. I mean, like to
Speaker 3: e quate gay people with IVY drug addicts is just
Speaker 3: that's such a messed up characterization. As I was reading about, you,
Speaker 3: you know, growing up during the AIDS crisis, I'm always
Speaker 3: fascinated by reading accounts of people through that time because
Speaker 3: it's just such an extreme situation to see that level
Speaker 3: of death happening around you and not know what's causing.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's just terrifying. And in my own you know,
Speaker 3: minor way though, as an iv drug addict, right, you know,
Speaker 3: get an HIV test, were terrifying, terrifying. I mean I
Speaker 3: can remember two of them. One was when I first
Speaker 3: tried to get sober. This is a couple of years
Speaker 3: before I eventually did. Scared me to death, you know.
Speaker 3: And then two years later I had hepatias c you know,
Speaker 3: I caught that, which back then was not a good
Speaker 3: thing to have. Now it's relatively minor. They treat it
Speaker 3: pretty easily, but back then was you know, if they
Speaker 3: could treat it, which they couldn't in a lot of cases,
Speaker 3: the treatment itself was miserable interfere on and you know,
Speaker 3: oh yeah, I guess I was in one of those communities.
Speaker 1: And then that period between for the first couple of
Speaker 1: years when AIDS hit there was no test. Then there
Speaker 1: was a test, but early in the early days of
Speaker 1: the test, there was a two week wait for the results.
Speaker 1: Took them two weeks. Yeah, and that two week period
Speaker 1: was the most intense guilt and.
Speaker 3: Shame totally like and fear and fear all wrapped up. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what that does to the body, yeah, must
Speaker 1: be just I can't imagine how it affects every aspect
Speaker 1: of us. And it does leave the idea that of
Speaker 1: illness and fault. And we do that so often too.
Speaker 1: We want to ascribe.
Speaker 3: Fault to illness because then we believe we can control it. Yeah, right,
Speaker 3: It gives us a sense of agency and control. If
Speaker 3: this can be fixed, if it can be controlled, You
Speaker 3: just didn't control it. So that's good good, you know,
Speaker 3: too bad, too bad. But I will do this, you know,
Speaker 3: I think about that. I really focus hard on taking
Speaker 3: good care of myself physically, both for myself today. But
Speaker 3: I've also seen like in my parents like where not
Speaker 3: taking care of themselves led. So I'm extremely focused on it.
Speaker 3: I'm also not naive enough to know that, like I mean,
Speaker 3: it matters. I feel like it's like playing the lottery,
Speaker 3: like I'm buying a lot of tickets. Yeah, right, Like
Speaker 3: I'm just buying a lot of tickets. I got a
Speaker 3: better chance. I have a better chance if I got
Speaker 3: a lot of tickets. Yeah, And it's still the lottery.
Speaker 1: And it's still the lottery. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very
Speaker 1: funny path to cross. And I go to the gym,
Speaker 1: and I try to eat healthfully, and I try to
Speaker 1: control things for all sorts of reasons, help and happiness related.
Speaker 1: But I love your lottery ticket analogy. Those are lottery tickets.
Speaker 1: But it's not a pension.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, it's not. I wish it was, but it's
Speaker 3: just not. I think we'll wrap up here with a
Speaker 3: phraseer mother used, and she used to say, in the
Speaker 3: grand scheme of things and I'd love you to explain that,
Speaker 3: and I think there are some nuances to it that
Speaker 3: we can talk about also, Right.
Speaker 1: So I wrote a book called The End of Your
Speaker 1: Life Book Club about the two years I spent with
Speaker 1: my mother when she was dying in pancreatic cancer. And
Speaker 1: she died a date seventy five, and I used to
Speaker 1: go to chemo with her and and have great conversations
Speaker 1: about books. And it's a book about her life and
Speaker 1: lessons I learned from her. She was a refugee advocate
Speaker 1: and educator. And one of the phrases that she used
Speaker 1: throughout our life was in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: And you would come home from school with some desperate
Speaker 1: complaint Bobby stole my lunchbox. You know, something that just
Speaker 1: had rocked your world. You were inconsolable, and my mother
Speaker 1: would remind you, well, in the grand scheme of things,
Speaker 1: it's not that big a deal. And therein would follow
Speaker 1: you can get another lunch box, you can talk to
Speaker 1: Bobby that. It wasn't just resignation. It was the idea
Speaker 1: of perspective that whatever you were going through, there might
Speaker 1: well be other people who were going through something worse
Speaker 1: or more dire or that you in fact were yourself
Speaker 1: going through something worse or more dire, and a kind
Speaker 1: of lesson to always try to pull the lens out
Speaker 1: and see whatever we're going through through a bigger worldview.
Speaker 3: Yep, yeah, I love that, And I mean in the
Speaker 3: Habits That Matter program, one of the whole modules is
Speaker 3: around perspective, and the basic idea is exactly what you said.
Speaker 3: The wider perspective you can have, the less you tend
Speaker 3: to suffer. But I find this phrase interesting because it
Speaker 3: is also an absolute way of minimizing any emotions you
Speaker 3: might have about anything, right, Like, it can be used
Speaker 3: in a very empowering way, and it can be used
Speaker 3: in a what are you complaining about? You don't have
Speaker 3: real problems, look at the starving kids in Africa, right,
Speaker 3: And it can be used in a way where we're
Speaker 3: not allowed to feel our feelings and we can do
Speaker 3: it to ourselves.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: I'm always interested in like the tension between two things, right,
Speaker 3: And I think there's a fundamental tension there, right, And
Speaker 3: the tension is I don't want to minimize my own
Speaker 3: emotional experience and I do want to tend to it
Speaker 3: and give it what it needs, But I also don't
Speaker 3: want to get lost in it, right. I do want
Speaker 3: to be able to see in the grand scheme of
Speaker 3: things right, And it's that tension or that middle point
Speaker 3: that always really interests me, and I always think it's
Speaker 3: nuanced to find.
Speaker 1: I hadn't thought about that way, but I love that
Speaker 1: idea about the balance and the tension. It is undeniably
Speaker 1: true that some of the worst pain I've ever had
Speaker 1: in my life physical pain was from paper cuts. Sounds
Speaker 1: so stupid, but a paper.
Speaker 3: Cut is really extremely painful. It really hurts.
Speaker 1: It goes away quickly, but in that millisecond that is
Speaker 1: intense pain. It's really bad. So if you take in
Speaker 1: the grander scheme of things, approach to an extreme, you
Speaker 1: wouldn't allow yourself to even for a moment, acknowledge the pain,
Speaker 1: the pain of a paper cut. But for me, neither
Speaker 1: of my parents is left in the land of the living.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that I think a healthy
Speaker 1: parent child relationship does, and my mother was really able
Speaker 1: to do this for us, is help the child learn
Speaker 1: the balance, learn to negotiate the tension, and in the
Speaker 1: greater scheme of things, when properly deployed is not the
Speaker 1: first reaction, right.
Speaker 3: That's where I've landed.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: For me, the place I've landed is allowing myself to
Speaker 3: feel whatever emotion or feeling is tied up in this thing,
Speaker 3: and then move to perspective because I'm absolutely capable of
Speaker 3: to myself moving right to perspective. Yeah, which I'm telling
Speaker 3: myself internally, your experience of that isn't valid, so don't
Speaker 3: feel it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So like, if I get angry with someone, I can
Speaker 3: usually within thirty seconds start telling their side of the story,
Speaker 3: right yep, and be like, so, Eric, you're not right
Speaker 3: to be mad, right, because I can take their perspective.
Speaker 3: It's one of my gifts. And if I do it reflexively,
Speaker 3: I'm basically saying to myself, shove that anger away. It's
Speaker 3: not valid, which we know is not healthy. And so
Speaker 3: that balance I find really so useful to get right.
Speaker 3: But in general, I lean towards the better to have
Speaker 3: a good perspective than wallow in your difficult.
Speaker 1: For me now, parents dead gone. The people who help
Speaker 1: me find that perspective are my friends, and that is
Speaker 1: to me also why friendship is the topic that is
Speaker 1: more important to me than almost anything else. At this point,
Speaker 1: because I find I don't know if you have the
Speaker 1: same thing, Like when I'm too much wallowing, when I'm
Speaker 1: too much in the anger. If I call a friend,
Speaker 1: the very act of telling them about it starts to
Speaker 1: release the anger. And on the flip side, if I've
Speaker 1: gone too quickly to the greater scheme of things, if
Speaker 1: I've gone too quickly towards a place of minimizing my feelings,
Speaker 1: A really good friend who's intuitive will say, hold on
Speaker 1: a second, will I'm kind of pissed off on your behalf,
Speaker 1: like I'm mad about what just happened to you or
Speaker 1: what someone said to you. And so for me, I've
Speaker 1: always been lucky to have great friends, and I've always
Speaker 1: relied on my friends for that. I just have to
Speaker 1: tell you a quick story. This was a college story.
Speaker 1: But there was a gorgeous boy who was two years
Speaker 1: older than I was. I was a sophomore. He was
Speaker 1: a senior, and he'd just come back from San Francisco.
Speaker 1: He had the coolest haircut I'd ever seen. It's nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two and it was just one of those super
Speaker 1: cool hair band haircuts. It was awesome. It was a
Speaker 1: little more I don't know if it was new romantic,
Speaker 1: I don't know how you would describe it was cool, haircut, okay,
Speaker 1: and he was super handsome, and I just thought, I'm
Speaker 1: just going to grab the bull by the horns, invite
Speaker 1: him out for a coffee and tell him that I'm
Speaker 1: desperately in love with him. So there we go. See John,
Speaker 1: I just got to tell you I'm head over heels
Speaker 1: in love with you. And then there was that awful pause,
Speaker 1: and then he said, you know, oh you're a nice guy,
Speaker 1: and I'm really you know, I love being friends with you,
Speaker 1: and hopefully we can spend more time as friends. Da
Speaker 1: da da da. So I was humiliated. I was ashamed.
Speaker 1: I was inconsolable. Finished the coffee. I went to New
Speaker 1: Haven train station without going back to my room, I
Speaker 1: bought a train ticket for Boston, just got on the train.
Speaker 1: When I got off at Bossesation, I called a really
Speaker 1: great friend of mine who I'd met in Summerstock theater
Speaker 1: and said, I got to meet you. We got to
Speaker 1: go have some drinks and we met up. And as
Speaker 1: soon as I saw him, I burst out laughing and
Speaker 1: I said, oh my god, I behaved like such an ass.
Speaker 1: I can't wait to tell you this thing, and it
Speaker 1: instantly became a funny story that I saw the greater
Speaker 1: scheme of things the minute I saw my friend, I
Speaker 1: was inconsolable on the rod. And so that to me is,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the valuable gifts of friendship.
Speaker 3: So listener and thinking about that and all the other
Speaker 3: great wisdom from today's episode. If you were going to
Speaker 3: isolate just one time insight that you're taking away, what
Speaker 3: would it be. Remember, little by little, a little becomes
Speaker 3: a lot. Change happens by us repeatedly taking positive action.
Speaker 3: And I want to give you a tip on that,
Speaker 3: and it's to start small. It's really important when we're
Speaker 3: trying to implement new habits to often start smaller than
Speaker 3: we think we need to because what that does is
Speaker 3: it allows us to get victories. And victories are really
Speaker 3: important because we become more motivated when we're feeling good
Speaker 3: about ourselves, and we become less motivated when we're feeling
Speaker 3: bad about ourselves. So by starting small and making sure
Speaker 3: that you succeed, you build your motivation for further change
Speaker 3: down the road. If you'd like a step by step
Speaker 3: guide for how you can easily build new habits that
Speaker 3: feed your good Wolf. Go to good Wolf dot me,
Speaker 3: slash change and join the free masterclass. I think that
Speaker 3: is a great place to wrap up. You and I
Speaker 3: are going to talk a little bit in the post
Speaker 3: show conversation a little bit more about reading, I think,
Speaker 3: and I know many of our listeners love to read,
Speaker 3: so I think this is going to be great conversation. Listeners,
Speaker 3: you can get access to the post show conversations ad
Speaker 3: free episodes, and you can support a show that needs
Speaker 3: your help at oneufeed dot net slash join. Well, thank
Speaker 3: you so much, such a pleasure to talk again.
Speaker 1: Thank you. I love talking with you.
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