Meet Esther Perel – One of My Favorite People

In another "My Favorite People" episode, Trevor sits down with Esther Perel. This time around, Esther reflects on her early life experiences and how those experiences have shaped her life and career. They also discuss the importance of “friction” as an essential element of a life well lived, and why we should all maybe be hanging out at the laundromat.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Trevor Noah?

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• 0:35Trevor Noah?

  This segment is brought to you by Google Pixel. You know what's really frustrating? Knowing the exact information you need is somewhere on your phone, but still ending up wasting your time digging through five different apps just to actually find it. Thankfully, Google Pixel 11 is designed with Gemini intelligence, so it can proactively find the information I need right when I need it. Like my flight info on travel days or my calendar when Eugene texts me to hang out. Oh, sorry Eugene, I'm booked. Learn more about what Google Pixel 11 can do at googlestore.com. These AI features are available in select countries and languages for users 18 and over, and make sure to check responses.

• 1:20Trevor Noah?

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• 2:03Trevor Noah?

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• 2:19Speaker 01

  You know, in New York, you ask people how you are and they often tell you, "I'm behind."

• 2:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, they tell you what they're doing, I find. Yeah, I find that's the biggest change is when I'm in New York or when I'm anywhere in the US, if I ask somebody, and I notice it most glaringly when I come back from South Africa. If I ask somebody, "How are you?" or "How are you doing?" They'll often tell me what they're doing. You know, say, "Oh, I'm really busy." And that's even how people ask me questions. "So what are you up to these days?"

• 2:51Speaker 01

  What are you doing?

• 2:51Trevor Noah?

  "What are you doing?" What are you... It's all about that. And as I say, when I go back to South Africa, it's all, "How are you?"

• 3:00Speaker 01

  In fact, if I go home and I start to talk too much about what I do, people don't like it. It's like you're not there to talk about yourself and so much and put yourself in the centre. You're there to participate in a collective experience in what we are creating together, the afternoon, the lunch, the walk. You really... There's a clear distinction between talking about work and talking about life.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And life is not work.

• 3:35Trevor Noah?

  Welcome to What Now? In today's episode, I'm going to be having a conversation with one of my favourite people in the world, Esther Perel. Now, you probably know Esther as a psychotherapist, as a bestselling author whose work has changed the way millions of people think about relationships, sex, romance and intimacy all over the world. But for today's episode, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to chat to the person behind the name. I wanted to hopefully give you an insight into why she is one of my favourite people. And so today, we talk less about Esther's work

• 4:16Trevor Noah?

  and more about Esther's life and how she got to the place that she got to. And I really loved this conversation because it really shows you how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves aren't always true and how the path that we choose to get us where we're going to get to isn't often how we end up where we end up in life. I know you'll enjoy it. Esther is one of the most profound people I know, so you'll definitely learn something from it. Oh, and by the way, if you want to learn more about Esther's work or what she's doing right now, one of my favorite ways to engage in it is her podcast called Where Should We Begin? It's a fascinating look into couples' therapy and what couples are going through in real time. So you end the therapy session with

• 5:01Trevor Noah?

  them. That's where should we begin? Check it out.

• 5:15Trevor Noah?

  This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.

• 5:27Trevor Noah?

  Why did you call it that?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Because it's often the first sentence that I ask when I meet a couple, like, where should we begin? Where do I find you today? What's on your mind? Maybe it's what you wrote to me, maybe it's completely different. But where should we begin? Because every relationship is a story. Relationships are stories. We are both storytellers in some way. But, you know, we're sitting here in the studio, the first years until the pandemic, we recorded every session in my office. So people came in, like any patient would have

• 6:09Speaker 01

  come in, except that they come for the podcast, so they are not patients and never will be. They sit in the waiting room. They walk into my office and it's the same office in which I see people throughout the day for my practice.

• 6:24Trevor Noah?

  Right, so you in the same like.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I'm in the same.

• 6:27Trevor Noah?

  Mental space as well.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Same chair, same mental space, same room. It's, and it really, I think, is what gave the podcast a tremendous voice of authenticity because it, it, it was blended in with the other sessions that I do.

• 6:42Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Most of the time, people are completely surprised to be sitting there because, you know, one person at midnight decided to fill in the form and was convinced that they would never hear from us.

• 6:52Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  And here they are. And then there is the person that came with them. And, and sometimes they have never heard of me because, you know, with podcasts, one person listens and the other one doesn't know what you're listening.

• 7:05Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  It's not like there's a book in the house and you're reading that book. You can listen to a podcast for years and no, and your partner has no idea.

• 7:16Trevor Noah?

  That is the first infidelity.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're having a relationship under my eyes.

• 7:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  You know, and I don't know anything about it. So it's different, but we have created an office here too, in the studio. And once it starts, I'm in the session. I mean, there is just no world outside.

• 7:37Trevor Noah?

  That's amazing.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Eight years we're doing it.

• 7:40Trevor Noah?

  Congratulations, eight years. Eight years of the podcast, twenty years of mating and captivity, and how many years in the field in practice?

• 7:49Speaker 01

  Forty, almost.

• 7:50Trevor Noah?

  Forty years. Wow. What do you think people get from hearing couples therapy that they're not part of?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  I mean, it's like entering the antechamber. It's like going the backstage. It's the story that you hear about other people's relationships that you never know. You, you really are like a fly on the wall. So who really knows the truth about couples? In these days especially.

• 8:18Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Your friends can come and tell you they're breaking up and you never saw it coming. Because, and on top of it, people are posturing and parading themselves all over social in these perfect situations. So the real truth about couples is a secret often. And when you listen to it, you feel less alone. You feel like your issues are not your own only, that there are other people who have similar things.

• 8:44Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  You listen intently and intensely to them and you actually see yourself. Even if it's not the same situation and the same story, there's always something where you say, I can relate to that.

• 8:56Trevor Noah?

  The thing I noticed is, just, you know, from, from my side.

• 9:03Trevor Noah?

  Whenever couples would go out together.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 9:06Trevor Noah?

  I always find they come back, and I know I've experienced this, you come back just a little more diffused. You come back just a little calmer, you come back, there's something weird about knowing other people have problems. That makes your problems, and not, not in a, like a schadenfreude way, but I mean, like, sitting with another couple. You talk, you, and then, I'm, I'm sure you know this, but like, I've always, I've always loved how one person will take the other person's point of view, another person will, all of a sudden you'll find crossings where, you know, this husband agrees with that wife. And that wife agrees with that husband. And in a strange way, people go home feeling like their relationship isn't as bad or isn't going through as much because of other people.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  That's one of the ways. Sometimes they go home with the opposite experience, but yes, there is a sense of it normalizes. There is a sense of being in a kaleidoscope.

• 9:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  That one partner sees themselves reflected in another or validated by another, or that you get to hear your partner differently because someone else is saying it for them. And it's just, you get taken out of the cellar. And the light shines and you've, and, and air comes in and it's very, very moving and powerful.

• 10:16Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I feel like these days, and maybe it's a, maybe it's because of social media, I feel like these days people are sort of trying to win at relationships, the same way people are trying to like win at therapy and, you, you know?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Maximize.

• 10:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, like, like you, I was, I was talking to a friend the other night and I was saying. Do you remember, it was actually Simon Sinek, you know Simon?

• 10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:38Trevor Noah?

  And Simon and I were literally walking through the street and I said to Simon, do you remember a time when people used to move for love? I'm sure some people still do it, but it's less prevalent now, it's less an idea, it's even almost shunned on, you know, when people go, oh, I moved here for a boy, oh, I moved here for a girl. People go like, oh, you should never do that, you can't just move your.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  That's my story.

• 10:59Trevor Noah?

  What, what do you mean that's your story?

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I'm here because of my husband.

• 11:03Trevor Noah?

  That's how you got to New York?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  That's how I came, well, I came to America to study for one year.

• 11:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I then thought I would stay a second year and kind of get more training. And then um I basically never used my return ticket.

• 11:18Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  So I am that story.

• 11:22Trevor Noah?

  What was it about him that made you stay? Like what was, because staying in another, it's one thing to visit another country, it's another thing to stay in another country, because where were you living then, was that France or Belgium?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  No, I actually came from Jerusalem.

• 11:38Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I came from Jerusalem.

• 11:40Trevor Noah?

  You've lived everywhere.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Lived in a few places, I came from Jerusalem to Boston.

• 11:44Trevor Noah?

  Where, where have you lived?

• 11:45Speaker 01

  I've lived in Belgium, in Antwerp, where I grew up. Um it's not where I was born, but it's where I grew up, I lived in Jerusalem, I lived in Boston and I lived in New York. It's not that many.

• 11:55Trevor Noah?

  Oh, okay, seems like many, I feel like you, you have many homes though, it seems like as a, maybe it's a feeling, it's the way you speak about some places, that always makes me feel like you've actually lived there.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  They were part of my life, even if I didn't live there, like Paris. I went to Paris my whole life, every few, every month sometimes. It's part of my life, but I didn't have an address there, so in that sense I have more than, Amsterdam would be a similar place. Because once you're in Belgium, it's an hour to Amsterdam and an hour and fifteen to Paris. Three hours at a time, and I mean, these places, I like the, the, the way that Thais Elasy talks about it, she says, don't ask me where I'm from, ask me where I'm local.

• 12:41Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's beautiful.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And I think it's exactly that, I'm local in a few places.

• 12:46Trevor Noah?

  You're a little softer than the Paris I know, but maybe that's just how I see you.

• 12:53Trevor Noah?

  Like I find, I find Parisians to be very blasé about most things, or they appear blasé. But you, you have a little more, like your eyes open a little more when you notice things or when you see things.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  But I am very much not French. I mean, I have a French accent, I know that. I'm, I'm educated in Flemish. I mean, what you call Africans. You know, my entire twelve years of schooling was in Flemish. I am from a Flemish city, I'm from Antwerp. I have, uh, we spoke five languages at home. I mean, I, French is a big part of mine, of me. But it's, it's not, um, it's not the only one.

• 13:36Trevor Noah?

  I've always, I don't know why I've always thought it was more you. I think it's because of how you'll, you'll talk about love and seeing love through like a French lens sometimes, you know?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  That is true.

• 13:47Trevor Noah?

  Like, like, I, I think what I've always loved about French and the French and love is, is, is how differently you get to see something, you know? I mean, we have this in, in Zulu, you know, in, in South African languages. I always feel like our greetings are, are more warm. Our greetings say more than just like hello.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Don't you have a beautiful expression, saubono?

• 14:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, saubono means I still see you.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yes, it's beautiful.

• 14:13Trevor Noah?

  You know, that, and that's what I mean. And I feel like French is like that for love. Love, relationships, like, um, what's the word you, you, you spoke about? You, I remember you saying it to me once, was it frisson?

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:25Trevor Noah?

  Frisson, which is like the...

• 14:27Speaker 01

  It doesn't exist in English, a frisson. We use the French word. I don't think, I've never seen...

• 14:33Trevor Noah?

  I always think of it as friction, but I don't think it's, it's not, right?

• 14:36Speaker 01

  No, it's not friction. It's, a frisson is a shiver. It's a, the literal translation is a shiver, but it's a shiver with anticipation, with excitement, with a kind of a current that runs through your body.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Now I'm...

• 14:51Trevor Noah?

  No, I mean, you've got me, you've got me. This is, this is what I mean by frisson. You see, this is the French thing. It's like, it was that, so it was, you know what it was? It was frisson. And then it was, um, there's another one, ah, I, I loved it and I, I remember, I remember speaking to you about this. It was in and around, it was in and around the Me Too movement. And it was a specific word or phrase in French that sort of implied, i- it was an understanding that somebody could tease you but could never give in to your whims or your wants or your

• 15:26Speaker 01

  I mean, to flirt

• 15:28Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Comes from the word fleure

• 15:31Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Which is the tip of the sword that is actually meant to tease you. That is flirting, is teasing, is playing with possibility. It has no connection to scoring.

• 15:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, you see, I think most people would disagree with that.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  In the United States.

• 15:49Trevor Noah?

  Yes, most people would disagree with that.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  This is a pragmatic society trying to engage with the erotic arts.

• 15:56Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, there are a lot of people who say, how could you? Then why did you flirt with me?

• 16:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:01Trevor Noah?

  Then why did you, why did you lead me on? I think that's the phrase a lot of people say, why did you lead me on? And then Esther turns around and says like, I wasn't leading you on, I was playing with the tip of my sword.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yes, it's true that a lot of my thinking about relationships, love, desire, passion, all of that was very much shaped within a Francophone, a French context.

• 16:21Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  My adolescence was very much steeped in that and but it's Latin as well, it's not just French and it's not the pragmatic approach of that that is dominant here, you get shit done, you achieve things, you're direct, you get to the point, you don't miss, you don't miss a beat, you don't beat her, you don't run, what is it, turn around the corner?

• 16:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  It's like, all of these things are about this unvarnished directness to say it as it is. And that is not the way we think of

• 16:56Speaker 01

  the arts of love and the communication around it and the way you express yourself and all of that, it's really big cultural differences. Um, and I think I write from that place, that's true. I write things, speak.

• 17:09Trevor Noah?

  What do you love about America then? Cause you, you've lived here for how many years now?

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Hmm, thirty five.

• 17:16Trevor Noah?

  Thirty five years you've lived here.

• 17:20Trevor Noah?

  You you you'll engage in it in a very honest way and and not in an America bashing way, I've never found. But I I've always been intrigued by the paradox of like, why you would like, why would you live here when it is that direct and that immediate and it's all about the goal and it's all about the objective. Like, what about it made you fall in love, other than meeting somebody?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  I mean, I definitely fell in love with New York and before I came to stay here, I had been here already. The first time I came to the United States was in nineteen seventy six.

• 17:58Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Bicentennial. It was kind of the first time that we began to travel to the US. I came with a cargo airline. I hitchhiked around the corner.

• 18:09Trevor Noah?

  But what does that mean, a cargo airline?

• 18:10Speaker 01

  It was one of these airlines that took all cargo.

• 18:13Trevor Noah?

  No, Esther, come on. You came with like a D H L plane.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:16Trevor Noah?

  That's not even a thing.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  But it gets better. I spent almost seven weeks hitchhiking across the country. I saw America like one will never see it again. I stayed with all kinds of people from every every walk of life, every race, every religion, every profession, every class and every culture. And really, I think that that was such a powerful experience. I was eighteen, not even. And at the time, you could hitchhike.

• 18:49Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, those were the good old days.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  I was totally received by the kindness of strangers. And really, I went to parts of the country that I never even thought I would go because it wasn't in my I was originally gonna do on a Greyhound tour on the bus. But people were so kind that I ended up doing the entire trip hitchhiking. I'd go from New York to the West Coast. I'd do the whole loop of the West.

• 19:15Trevor Noah?

  And this is, so what, this is all for fun?

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I finished high school. This was before going to college and I came with my boyfriend and we decided to travel. But I didn't know it was gonna be a hitchhiking.

• 19:26Trevor Noah?

  Whoa, wait, wait, okay, let's rewind. You came with the boy, you didn't tell me about the boyfriend.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Well, I just did.

• 19:30Trevor Noah?

  So, no, no, no. So they were, you were hitchhikers, we're picking up you and the boyfriend.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I stood in the front.

• 19:36Trevor Noah?

  Yo, you pulled the move.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And it's not like we spoke, I mean, his English was much better than mine, but I can't tell you what the diversity of people that we met and how much this has influenced me to to certain kind of open mindedness, well, you know, tolerance, curiosity, just curiosity, before you make your judgments, um, to to people who had never heard about Belgium. It's not like they knew where we were coming from, to AM radio stations where the only, you know, the amount of time they talked about the weather was just unbelievable. And with affect, with feeling, and the only time they talked with feeling about things was about the weather.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And I did hours of these car rides, you know, um, staying with people in their homes.

• 20:24Trevor Noah?

  How do you, how do you get into somebody's house?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  People would say, where are you staying?

• 20:28Trevor Noah?

  And you would say?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And I would say, I don't know, we will look for a hotel or for a motel or, and then they would say, do you want, you know, please, and we have a room, you can stay. It's a, it's a very interesting way of establishing trust, connection, rapport. You know, I'm as strange to them as they're strange to me, you know, really, I, I, it was all positive, except one time where I, we figured out it was better to just get out of there, but the rest of the time.

• 20:54Trevor Noah?

  Whoa, whoa, you can't, you can't just skip through that. How do you figure out something?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Because you kind of, it's all, it's, it's very, very intuitive. It's like, it doesn't sound, it doesn't feel right, it's a route, it's around the corner, but around the corner takes fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes, that kind. You just know that something doesn't feel right, and you just say, thank you so much, we'll get off here, you know. It's not my first hitchhiking trip either, and I've done others, but, you know, you asked me how I came and why I stayed, and I think that that experience was very influential in how I absorbed the US.

• 21:30Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  And, and I think, you know, things are often both and, right? On the one hand, you come as a European, you have a whole respect for culture that is established a long time ago, you value history, you value tradition, you value rituals, but you also value to come to a place where people rarely ask you necessar, that, when I came, and where, what have you done, and who is your family, and? What's your idea? What you wanna do here? And then you either have people who look at your C V and you don't fit and they say we can't. Or you see people and say, this girl, she has some ideas and she has some energy and ambition and we'll let her try something.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  This is not what you get in Europe. In Europe, we tried this and it didn't really work. And that may take a long time and there's a lot of red tape. And because tradition and history are so valued, change and innovation and novelty is not necessarily instantly welcome. Here, it's the reverse. So when you come here as a twenty something year old and you have ideas and energy and you wanna do things, it's incredible. I mean, I came to New York and I got a tremendous amount of money to make a documentary and to do a project on um on the relationship between blacks and Jews.

• 22:55Trevor Noah?

  On the relationship between black people and Jewish people?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Yes, the psychodynamics of black Jewish tensions.

• 23:00Trevor Noah?

  I, can I tell you?

• 23:01Speaker 01

  We're talking eighty four.

• 23:04Trevor Noah?

  This is the year I was born. And this is a fascination I've had for a very long time.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's you and me.

• 23:10Trevor Noah?

  In my, yeah, yeah, literally. No, can I tell you? I, I.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  I mean, we don't have tension, but it is, it is part of our.

• 23:16Trevor Noah?

  But uh actually, I'd love to know about that work because I've grown up in this world where obviously I have a lot of Jewish people in my life. I went to a school that was technically a Jewish school in a, definitely in a Jewish neighborhood. Um grew up, you know, and, and South Africa was weird in that once apartheid ended, there wasn't an immediate mixing of people, but there's definitely a blurring of the lines. And so the younger generation grew up in a world where we were all exposed to each other's worlds and cultures and, you know?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 23:49Trevor Noah?

  So, so in my school, the Jewish kids acted like they were Lebanese, but the Lebanese kids said things that were Jewish, you know, and, and, and these kids were eating that food and that food and they were singing that song and dancing like, so, so it was this mix. But I, I was always intrigued by the overlaps of black people and Jewish people in the world and the alliances and the tensions that would come with, you know? And then I remember reading, I think it was um. It was Malcolm X's biography. And he speaks at length about like the Jewish community and like this Jewish man who helped him and what he was doing and he was obviously becoming Muslim and but it was still it was

• 24:31Trevor Noah?

  it was an interesting it it's always been a fascinating look for me and I'd love to know what you were what did you learn from the work or what were you trying to get from the work?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  So I had trained as in psychology and I was very interested in cultural transition.

• 24:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  And particularly in couples and families who are in cultural transition and that included people who move who immigrate either voluntarily or forced migration, internationals, but also in the middle, mixed couples, mixed families, interracial, interreligious, intercultural families and relationships.

• 25:07Trevor Noah?

  Interracial, interreligious and intercultural, okay.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  That really was the bulk of my work, the first twenty years.

• 25:15Trevor Noah?

  The first twenty years?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, before I touched mating in captivity, before I began to talk about culture and sexuality.

• 25:23Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  And and I wanted to understand the differences between forced migration and voluntary migration. I wanted to understand mixed couples are in cultural transition, but they do it in their own living room and they don't have to move across a border, but it's happening. And so I arrived here and I did a project, a research project on that and on multiculturalism in many different parts of the world. And then I had done a lot of work on minority-majority relations. I came from groups, then to families, then to couples. So majority-minority relations and I thought but black Jewish relations, it's minority-minority relations. Now, I am

• 26:02Speaker 01

  twenty-five, I have been here three months. I don't think this would ever happen today, that somebody would let this person out of nowhere with not from here, but there was something about my naivete that I think kind of worked in my favor in a way where I I just was curious because I didn't identify necessarily with American Jews and I certainly am not black. And so I did this two-year project on minority-minority relations and what is the psychodynamic of two groups who have experienced in their own way massive amounts of discrimination and humiliation, you know, and what are the dynamics, you know? And

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Then I did a documentary about that, a little film. And that would never have happened in Belgium. I mean, that doesn't happen.

• 26:57Trevor Noah?

  What, why?

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Because that somebody out of nowhere comes and says, I have an idea. And that somebody says, here, I found you. Go ahead and show me what you can do. And the same thing is happening with me, but today, that people find me and just talk to me directly. This week, I get an email. I'm a college student. I'm about to study couple's therapy. I would love for you to tell me what I should study, what I should focus on, who I should meet. And I'm like, how did you find my email? Of course, I totally know how you found my email. But it's like, the idea that you could do this, you know, rather than calling the thing, can I talk to the professor? It's much less hierarchical in the way that we have,

• 27:43Speaker 01

  that we are internalized systems. But it's all relative. It's not like it doesn't exist. I just want to make sure that this is not taken in an absolute way. But that was my experience of why I really liked it here. And then I felt everybody in New York came to do something. I mean, you come to New York to do things, be it in art, being in... You don't come to New York to live... I mean, yes, you can live the New York life, but you come because you have energy to do something. There's refugees of every sort in this place. So you start to meet the most amazing people. I have a lot of other things to tell you. I'm not always so positive. You know, the people who know me well are going to be very amazed to hear me make...

• 28:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but that's what I wanted, that's what I wanted you to tell me. Yeah, because I've heard you speak at length about all these things, but I've never ever asked you and I've never heard you talk about, you know, what it is that gripped you about. This is, this is beautiful because... Even in my short life.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  When I would go home and I would see some of my dearest friends and I'm curious if you have that too. When you go home to South Africa, you see the people that you've known your whole life. But basically, at twenty five, they were living not that different from how they would live at forty five. And at forty five, they were already living like. And I thought they already know what the future is gonna be like if they're healthy and all goes well. This is the kind of they're on a linear trajectory. In New York or in the States, you have no idea. You can start this way and suddenly you're, I mean, you know, that's kind of what happened to me. I think it's what happened to you.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  And I can't imagine that literally happening in the same way in Belgium.

• 29:26Trevor Noah?

  I agree. I agree with you. I think I think in many ways. In Europe, what I felt, Africa might be different in some ways, but it it definitely has elements of it. In Europe specifically, I know it's all about what was. And I find in the US, it's all about what could be.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:43Trevor Noah?

  That's constantly the dance. But then I find Europe comes with a certain measure of breathe into it because it is what was. As long as it matches it, then you can relax. So the way people treat their their summers and their time off and there's a certain level of patience and calm that comes with it. Because they know what that it always was that. In America, there's a certain edge of, maybe I'll work on a Friday. You know what? I'm gonna work weekends. I'm gonna, you know, no time off. I'm just gonna push a little bit more. And I think both of them come with their their pros and cons. You know, the one metastasizes you.

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:20Trevor Noah?

  The other one liberates you. But I think everything needs to bounce off something, right? Too much liberation is now just chaos. And then too much of a metastasized system is is, I guess it's just stuck in time. It doesn't, it doesn't move and it doesn't evolve. I I'm always, I'm always trying to play with that balance just in life is you go. How many times do you wanna evolve, change, move, grow, move on to the next thing? And how many times do you just wanna sit and say, yeah, you know what? Tuesday will be like Friday will be like Saturday and let's see.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  Every, I mean, this is something I teach, actually, you know, when I teach systems. I'd say every system, every relationship system, being an individual or an organic system in nature. Straddle stability and change.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  If you change too much, too fast, all the time, you dysregulate and you go chaotic. If you don't change, you fossilize and you die.

• 31:15Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  So you need both. I think in the US, you are often on the treadmill and you're moving very, very, very fast. One thing I never lost was the idea that I leave for the summer and I leave not for ten days. I leave for six weeks and people always would say, I don't feel guilty.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  And I never understood why I should feel guilty. You take time off. And I maintained that notion of the breathing, the space in between, the time to do nothing except dream, reimagine your life, think what else you wanna do. And that form of reset was, I, I never stopped. And I traveled back home, you know, a few times a year. And that was the essence of, it's like, you, you go there not to do necessarily, but to be.

• 32:08Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  To enjoy the company, you don't have to prove anything. You don't live to work.

• 32:13Trevor Noah?

  Uh huh.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And that is still very much present. And I try to bring some of that back with me here. I try to, to have it as part of, of, of my life and um.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  It's a, it's a privilege really to be able to straddle boats, really. I, I didn't think about it like that. At first, when I was young, I would go home and I would think, ah, they all know where they belong. And I don't know where I belong.

• 32:41Trevor Noah?

  Wait, what do you mean by that?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Like they, they, they never, you know, this, in my mind, there were two groups of people, those who never left and those who left once. Once you've left once, you know that they're more than one place and you no longer have that sense of roots.

• 32:55Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  So I would look at my friends who stayed and I would think, they, they have such a clear sense of where they're going. Of course, it was linear, but I, I envied that piece of there. And then, but after a week, I thought, oh, now I'm, I'm restless. Now I wanna go back. I wanna go, go back to my life and I would get all busy. And so I, I.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  For a long time, I wanted to have the freedom of being in two places, but I wanted to still have the sense of rootedness and belonging that is part of belonging to one place. And over time, decades maybe, it's not, I slowly began to actually appreciate that I was part of many places, even if I didn't necessarily belong to all these places.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  You know that distinction?

• 33:46Trevor Noah?

  No, I like that. I'm just trying to think of it. I'm trying to process it.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  Like, it's a part of me.

• 33:51Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  But I am not just that. If you want to know me, you need to know this and this and this. It's various parts.

• 33:59Trevor Noah?

  It's all the different parts of you that make you who you are.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  The locations, the languages, the stories that accompanied. I think probably you too.

• 34:10Trevor Noah?

  I think so. You know, it's, I'm trying to think of how it works for me.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  I mean, what part of your American-ness travels with you to South Africa?

• 34:20Trevor Noah?

  So I think.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Or do you really kind of?

• 34:22Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no. So I, because I spent so much, because I lived my whole adult life there, I'm very good at being South African, you know? It takes me a week and then I'm into the groove. The one thing that I will say that I've inherited from America, which I'm always grateful for, is the idea that there's the possibility to do it, even if it does not currently exist.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Trevor Noah?

  You know?

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, like this project I was describing.

• 34:49Trevor Noah?

  Exactly. There's just always this idea of, but what if you could do it? But what if you could do it? It doesn't exist, but what if you could do it? And I think of how crazy that notion is. Everything that is, at some point, wasn't. Now we treat it like it's normal. But there was a time when it just, it wasn't. So I think I've probably adopted that.

• 35:12Trevor Noah?

  What else is it? There's also some negative things that I think you adopt and then you, if I'm aware enough, I can leave them behind, you know, so. America will make me feel like I have to be actively engaged in everything all the time. There's a certain FOMO-ness to America as a whole. It doesn't matter what it is. Business, are you missing out? Are you not doing the thing? Are you not engaged? News, have you kept up? Do you know what's happening? Has it broken? Is it breaking? Is it live? Is it happy? You know, that's always going on. It doesn't matter what, even small things like food. Have you tried that place? You've got to try that place. Oh my God, I can't believe you haven't tried that. Why haven't you tried that place? There's a certain, you know.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Drive.

• 35:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, but an urgency more than just a drive. There's an urgency to be part of and to not miss out on that I don't experience when I'm back home. When I'm back in South Africa, it's different.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Because when you live in a more collectivist culture, the culture drives you. You don't have to go and attempt everything and be part of everything in order to know that you exist because you are absorbed by a larger tradition. I think that is part of the individualism here and part of the individualism is also, you know, once I had a family, I had a very different experience here because you have to do everything yourself. It's not just you have to go, you have to keep up with the news, you also have to pay for your education, you also have to pay for your health, you are responsible for everything. And when you come from a social welfare system, that is a very different experience.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  The idea with which people take it for granted that they have to put all the infrastructure in place, a marriage here is a social welfare state of two.

• 36:58Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Versus, you know, there's a social welfare state that exists as part of the system and within that you create a family. That puts an enormous burden on people, enormous.

• 37:11Trevor Noah?

  We're going to continue this conversation right after this short break.

• 37:18Trevor Noah?

  Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner while watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long-form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane Wi-Fi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is Smart Downloads. You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you

• 38:03Trevor Noah?

  based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, "Ah, I didn't download anything." Then it's like, "No, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox." And with Background Play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So, if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Pretty much every brand offers rewards these days. But most of them, let's be honest, they aren't that rewarding. Well, starting now, Verizon's doing rewards different. Rewards you'll love all year round for every customer.

• 38:47Trevor Noah?

  They're introducing Verizon Dollars, which gives you cash back every month just for being a customer. That's it. Plus, you have the flexibility to use those glorious new dollars how you want. Shop with Verizon. Get gift cards for the brands that you love or transfer them to our partner programs. They're also introducing Verizon Shine, where now, every Monday, you can snag once-in-a-lifetime experiences like NFL tickets across the globe, all-inclusive music festivals, and the chance to meet your favorite stars. Plus, daily drops, tickets, and pre-sale access all week. So, let's recap. Cash back in your pocket every month with Verizon Dollars

• 39:29Trevor Noah?

  and epic experiences from Verizon Shine every Monday all year round. Now, those are some rewarding rewards. Only from Verizon. Enroll today at verizon.com.

• 39:42Trevor Noah?

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• 40:22Trevor Noah?

  Did you always think you would do this?

• 40:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 40:25Trevor Noah?

  What was like the idea? I find that there are almost like three different stages that people

• 40:33Trevor Noah?

  sort of project themselves in. One is when you're very young. What did you think you would be when you were like a young child?

• 40:41Trevor Noah?

  What did you want to be?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Oh, I think I had different, I had three things. I either was gonna be an interpreter, because my mom said you speak all these languages, you like to travel. Interpreter will give you both. Or journalist.

• 40:56Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Because I was curious. And a theater actress.

• 41:00Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  I love the theater. But I think, honestly, for me, there's the people who've always known what they wanted to do.

• 41:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  The people who just stumbled upon something. And then the people who had an inclination and then they matched it with what life put in front of them. I think so much of what I did is because I arrived to the US because of the opportunities that the US gave. Because, and because of the

• 41:22Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  Because of the obstacles. Because I didn't have the right license and I couldn't do what one would have done normally.

• 41:29Trevor Noah?

  I love that.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  If I had studied here.

• 41:31Trevor Noah?

  So necessity became the mother of invention.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  I had to hustle. I had to create myself. I had to find a way to do. And so it became a kind of a combo between what I bring and what life is putting in front of me and says, "Do this now."

• 41:46Trevor Noah?

  So the friction is the reason we have, yeah. You see, this is what I mean. No, it's amazing. My producer loves a story. He was telling me that there's a story you told. I guess that paints a picture of a little bit of a life that most people wouldn't associate you with. At first glance, but I do think it explains a lot of like your style and how you see fashion and everything is like, how did you get into and not fashion, the way people think of it? But what is your relationship with fashion?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  I, my parents had a clothing store, they had clothing stores. I lived above one of the stores. I worked in the store pretty much since I could talk.

• 42:30Trevor Noah?

  What, what type of clothing was it?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Everything I wear, everything you wear.

• 42:33Trevor Noah?

  Okay, so just like a mix of?

• 42:35Speaker 01

  A good clothing store, but you know, my brother opened the first boutique in Antwerp, which was the first time that young people were dressing separately from adults. Like when you were little, you had a suit with short pants.

• 42:48Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  And a jacket.

• 42:49Trevor Noah?

  You just wore what the adults wore, a smaller version.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  A smaller version, exactly. And then in the sixties, suddenly you began to wear your own, the jeans, the sweats, the Shetland sweater, you know, and so my brother opened the first boutique in Antwerp, where young people went to dress separately from the older folks. And I lived my life with the change of seasons by looking at the change of windows. And I accompanied my dad to the manufacturers to pick up the merchandise and the collections. And I went with my brother to Paris all the time to, to get the merchandise and to look at the fashion shows.

• 43:24Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  So I kind of grew up in a fashion business, in a clothing business. And, and there was a tremendous amount of attention. But I also sat in the store and watched my mother sell, because the stores were open till eight o'clock and nine o'clock at night, and my mother worked in the store.

• 43:40Trevor Noah?

  Was that common back then?

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Every day till eight and Friday and Saturday till nine.

• 43:46Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  So if I wanted to see my mom, I had to be in the store. I sat on the chair and I watched her sell, dress people, tell stories. People told their whole life story, you know? I went with my dad to bring suits to people who were dead, you know, and families who were mourning before they were going to the burials and, and the cemeteries. And I mean, I really learned about life through. Clothes, basically. Um, and I'm the only one in the family that didn't enter the, the, the business, the family shop.

• 44:20Trevor Noah?

  Why? Was it because something pulled you more? Was it because something pushed you out of it?

• 44:24Speaker 01

  I just, we lived above the store and I just thought we never get rid of this thing. It's with us at every meal. It's all you talk about when you have a family shop.

• 44:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 01

  You know, anyone who's a family. And I just thought, I want a profession I can carry on my back. I want a profession that I can travel with and I can, you know, do it.

• 44:45Trevor Noah?

  You wanted the store to live above you.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And I can do it anywhere I go. The thought of being tethered like that to this place. Of course, then I had an office and a private practice, so it wasn't, you know, until, until, you know, Skype started.

• 45:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  But that was the main idea. I remember saying to my parents, I want a profession. Que je peux porter sur mon dos, that I can carry on my back.

• 45:11Trevor Noah?

  And here you are. I could be wrong, but I, I feel like there was the mating in captivity, Esther. Came onto the scene and in many ways gave people their first look at an idea that went beyond.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  That's the title of my first book, we should probably explain.

• 45:31Trevor Noah?

  Oh, mating in captivity. Oh, for those who don't know, it's a book. Yeah, it's a book. And for those who don't know.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  It has its twentieth anniversary next year.

• 45:38Trevor Noah?

  Congratulations. Wow. Um, yeah, but I think it, it, it was one of the first pieces of work that changed people's flat perceptions on not just relationships, but infidelity. The infidelity of the mind, how people, you know, and for a moment in time, that's sort of, you know, how I think a lot of people thought of Esther and that, that sort of was, yeah, it, it really was your, your conquest at the time. It was the, the, the journey that you were on. Now I feel like you have this, this passion and this laser focus specifically around community, the village, reconnecting with people, finding people. I actually thought about you the other day because I walked past a laundromat. And I literally thought to myself, I need to talk to Esther about this.

• 46:25Trevor Noah?

  I I I have this

• 46:26Speaker 01

  What did you see?

• 46:27Trevor Noah?

  I have this theory in my head. I think we have neglected or we have gotten away from two elements in life that have robbed us of intimacy and we didn't realize that it's a second system effect. And those are need and friction.

• 46:45Trevor Noah?

  Right? And when I looked at the laundromat, I saw both, but in different ways. The main thing I saw was friction. And I thought, it's amazing how now we live in a world where if you live in a building, you want the building to have a laundry, you know, in in unit laundry, whatever this is, washer dryer. And when I looked into the laundromat, I thought, ah, imagine how many love stories wouldn't have happened if people didn't have to come and wash their clothes.

• 47:13Trevor Noah?

  Imagine how many friendships would have never been sparked if people didn't have to come and wash. And it's friction. It's it's it doesn't seem like you you you know the right ingredient to get there. But when I looked into the laundromat, I was like, oh, wow, what a what a cool, organic way to meet, because you're stuck with somebody for three hours and you might find you with them every single week. At some point, you might just say hi. At some point, you might, nice to see you again. Hey, you left your, I put the the the coins in the dryer, I you know, and I I literally thought of you and I was like, wow, I wonder if this is like part of what Esther's fighting, well, not laundromats, obviously. But

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Friction.

• 47:51Trevor Noah?

  Friction.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yes, the importance of friction. That is definitely a piece I I talk about. But if you wanna go back for a moment, so I had been a couples therapist for quite a while when I wrote Mating in Captivity. I just had not focused on sexuality and the cultural story that supports our expectations around sexuality, around desire, around um eroticism in long term relationships and

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I took a, I took a kind of a side road and that, and I just thought, oh, I wanna, I wanna explore this because I had been trained in certain ways to think about sexuality in relationships. And I just thought, is that really true? I mean, is that the way it works? Because that's not what I see in my office. And I don't think it's what other colleagues see in their office.

• 48:45Trevor Noah?

  Wait, you're, you're saying your training wasn't matching up with what you were seeing in the real world?

• 48:50Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:50Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I had always assumed it was your training.

• 48:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 48:52Trevor Noah?

  That had informed you.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  No, not at all. That's part of why the book became so significant because it actually questioned a whole set of suppositions that were parading as truths when they were actually not.

• 49:06Trevor Noah?

  Give me an example of like one or two.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Sexual problems are always the consequence of relationship problems. If you fix the relationship, the sex will follow. That happens sometimes. But I had seen many couples who got along much better and it changed nothing in their bedrooms.

• 49:21Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Because the politics of the bedrooms are not the same as the one in the kitchen. Because love and desire, they relate, but they also conflict sometimes. And how do we negotiate and reconcile security and adventure, love and desire? That was the subject of this first book. And then I began to think, well, what happens when desire goes looking elsewhere? And that became the book about infidelity. And I thought, here too, there's a whole set of ways that we think about infidelity that don't help a ton of people. And I would ask in audience after audience if they've been affected by the experience of infidelity in their lives. And about eighty-five percent, ninety percent of the people would raise their

• 50:05Speaker 01

  hands, either because a parent was, or they were the child of, or they were one of the three protagonists, or they were the friend. So this is not just a few rotten apples on the side. And people are gutted by this. And I thought, there needs to be a better way to help people deal with the crisis of, of affairs and the breaches of trust and the violations and all of that. And then

• 50:30Speaker 01

  And then these are still two books that basically presumes that people will be in relationships, or at least those are the people I wrote for, or people who seek to be in relationships. And then I became, I went back to the origin of my work, actually, which was I'm a systemically trained therapist who looks at relational systems. And I began to see our relational systems and our relational lives is changing fundamentally. It is one of the most important pieces of the future I'm interested in, the future of relationships.

• 51:02Trevor Noah?

  Uh, let's, let's go, go back to, you said systems trained.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:05Trevor Noah?

  So, uh, uh, help me understand, what, what is, what is the difference between?

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Psychoanalytic and systemic?

• 51:10Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I wouldn't even know the names, yeah. So psychoanalytic and?

• 51:14Speaker 01

  Systemic.

• 51:15Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Systemic training was the, I mean, it, it, it exists in cybernetics, it exists, it, it borrowed pieces from cybernetics and feedback loops and looked at relationships and relationship problems, or problems in families and couples, as they are connected to the context.

• 51:33Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  How is the system organized that keeps this problem in place? Versus going just intra-psychically, intra, intra, inside yourself.

• 51:43Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  Looking at your own personal story, rather than looking at what is actually happening between me and you. That's a very different interpretation, looking at how are we interacting in such a way that our communication is really fraught?

• 51:59Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Or that we end up both being rejected at the end of every conversation, rather than just what happened in my history and what happened in your history. It's, it's understanding, um, that's it, it's, problems occur in a context, you look at how is the system organized around these problems, and it is interpersonal and not just intra-personal.

• 52:20Trevor Noah?

  Got it.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  And that to me was the beginning of thinking relationally, hence community friction and all of that. If I look at the line, I, I, I've been looking at what happens between people and not just inside of the people. And our mental health models have been very, very focused on what happens inside people. And the idea is that if I am better with myself inside, it will solve all the problems between you and I. If I am more at peace with myself, I'll be nicer to you. If I like myself more, if I'm more selfish, et cetera. And that is sometimes the case, but it is not the whole story. And, um, but the whole story is also the opposite.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  If I'm actually, you know, engaged with you, I'm much less likely sometimes to think about myself all the time. Yeah. And to find meaning in doing things for others and to find relevance and to even get confidence because of how other people see me, rather than stand alone in front of my mirror and try to say to myself, you're worthy, you're worthy. So that is the big divide at this moment. That is really an essential division. And then comes technology and then comes, you know, climate change and migration, then all of the big geopolitical issues, and they all are influencing the way that we are relating to each other.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  And then, instead of just calling it relationships, I began to think, no, no, it's relational intelligence. That's really where I am now. And that's not the same as emotional intelligence. It's really looking at the whole system. Relationships are, all relationships have expectations. They have boundaries. They have room for creativity. They have, you know, a dimension of accountability and responsibility. They straddle how we negotiate, the self and the other, my needs, your needs. You know, how much I connect to you without losing me and how much I connect to me without losing you. Uh huh. All relational systems have hierarchies, have roles. It's a map.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  And what is happening to these systems? In light of technology, in light of AI, in light of the fact that now we get to the friction, that most of the predictive.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Technologies are aiming at reducing friction.

• 54:48Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  And they want you to have a polished, smooth, frictionless

• 54:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  delivery of your every delight on demand. And that is fundamentally changing how you and I relate to each other.

• 55:02Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, for me personally, I just noticed.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  That a long story for a.

• 55:06Trevor Noah?

  No, it's great.

• 55:07Speaker 01

  Does that give you a.

• 55:08Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I think it does. Yeah, I think it does, because I think, I think a lot of people are experiencing this. But I don't think we understand why we're experiencing it. And I also think most people are being blamed for it. Either from the outside or they blame, they blaming themselves. So I, I think a lot of people are sitting at home saying, I can't make friends. I don't know people. I don't have a community. I'm lonely. I'm depressed. I'm this. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. And then they're blaming themselves. But no, I, I think very few people are thinking about the laundromat, very few people are thinking about what it means when your food gets delivered to your house versus when you had to walk and go and get the food. And I don't mean it in like an old man way, in my day.

• 55:53Trevor Noah?

  You know, I just mean like, I mean, like the conversation that you have with the person at the, at the store.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:59Trevor Noah?

  It's just, it's just like that little weak tie that, that, that builds something in your world. It's a, it's a little. I always think of it as planting the seeds for serendipity. That's how I think of it. Because you, you never know which one will grow and which one won't. But even in comedy, you know, I, I, I'll always say to my friends, things go wrong all the time in my life, right? Uh, you're traveling, you have to cancel a show or a thing goes wrong at the show or whatever it is, whatever it is. And my friends will say to me, how are you always so chill about it? And I go, I'm not necessarily chill. But I have practiced telling myself that all of this is inevitably going to be comedy. The friction is the comedy. There's no good comedy that comes from an, you know, a beginning and an inevitable conclusion.

• 56:43Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it doesn't work. I went to the store and I looked for the size that I was looking for and they had it. And I bought it and my card went through and I went home and I put it on and it looked great.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  No story.

• 56:53Trevor Noah?

  There's no story because there's no friction. Exactly.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  That's the same as the erotic formula. Attraction plus obstacles equals excitement.

• 57:01Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wait, hold on, hold on. Attraction plus obstacle.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Equals excitement.

• 57:06Trevor Noah?

  Excitement.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  It's the same in the in the rules of desire.

• 57:11Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's funny.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  If there's no obstacle, if there's no friction.

• 57:14Trevor Noah?

  It's so funny you say this.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  We said.

• 57:16Trevor Noah?

  I remember once having a conversation with a stripper who's like, it was the most random conversation. And I said to her, I said, why do you put your clothes back on? And it was just a joke, right? Because like we, we, all of us are in this club and here we are for a bachelor party. And this person dresses and then undresses and then dresses and then undresses. And I just said as a joke, I said, why do you put your clothes back on? It would be more efficient to keep them off. And she said, yes, but you'll be surprised. I think I, I, I won't articulate it as well as she said it, but she said, you'll be surprised at how the men aren't turned on by us being naked. They're turned on by the idea of us becoming naked at some point. And she was like, that's essentially what we're playing with. And now, when you say it like that, I go, oh, yeah.

• 58:02Trevor Noah?

  It sounds like the same thing. It's the attraction. The obstacle is the clothing and whether or not it will come off or when it will come off. And that creates the excitement.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Correct. That's a good analogy.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Of course, whose bachelor party was this?

• 58:18Trevor Noah?

  Oh, what do you mean? This is the most common thing.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 58:21Trevor Noah?

  It's like, you know, people are like bachelor party. Um, it's actually more common in the U S. I, I don't think I ever got invited to a bachelor party at a strip club in South Africa.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Not what do they do?

• 58:32Trevor Noah?

  I think it's more, it's more of a, you have a, what we call a bribe, like a barbecue. And you, you hang out, but I, I don't think it's a, it's funny, actually, now that you're asking me. It isn't seen as an ending of a life. Does that make sense? So I find, I find a lot of American bachelor parties are, well, this is the last time you get to explore sex and craziness and eroticism and all of it. So you better enjoy it. One last ride.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  That's right. You're about to enter the marital cell.

• 59:04Trevor Noah?

  There you go.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  And, and your monastic life.

• 59:07Trevor Noah?

  But I don't remember anyone saying that in South Africa. I don't remember anybody saying, you're gonna get married, so, ah, no more sex for you. Kiss your sex life. That was never, I don't think it's ever even been framed like that. It was more. It's more the coming together of families. That's what people focus on. They go, oh, now you are welcoming another person into your family, or the other side is becoming part of your family. I think that's so a strip club wouldn't make sense for combining families.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  I want to go back to the laundromat. I love the place. I really, I think the laundromat or other places like it, the bookstore, um, the coffee bar, the train station, the train itself. I mean, there's so many places for that friction.

• 59:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  I think that that's where I'm positioning myself today. I'm placing myself at the door. I want you to come outside. You know, one of the more to come outside and go to any of these places. The statistic that really stayed with me recently is an article, it's called the the antisocial century by Derek Thompson, and he's seventy four percent of food that is cooked in a restaurant is not eaten on the premises.

• 1:00:21Trevor Noah?

  That's the new number.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  And that woke me up.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  An increase of thirty percent of people eating alone in the restaurant. Now, eating is one of the oldest worldwide gatherings, traditions of coming together with others. It's friction of every sort. And the fact that we are going to order from the restaurant and then bring it home and eat it many times alone.

• 1:00:50Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  That's a problem. So this is all I'm gonna do now, from now on, is the future of relationship, getting people to not feel so lonely, so isolated, so locked up in their houses, so defeated by relationships.

• 1:01:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Um, and so, um, and so transferring their expectations for algorithmic perfection into their relationships.

• 1:01:15Trevor Noah?

  Oh.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  They want people to become perfect and predictable like the technologies, and we are by our very nature unpredictable and imperfect, and that is the part of the beauty of and being human beings. It's exactly that. If there is no obstacle, there's no story that's of any interest, let alone comedy. And I think that we're saying something that is quite, it's more important than we even let on to. This friction piece.

• 1:01:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 01

  You know, because that's the plot. You tell stories and they have a plot and the plot is built by all these unpredictabilities, obstacles, be it in the sexual plot, or be it in the comedy plot, or be it in the relationship. It's really important. What are we gonna do otherwise? What's gonna happen to us?

• 1:02:07Trevor Noah?

  I think the difficulty though is

• 1:02:10Trevor Noah?

  realizing the value of it in the moment. I think that's what's hard. There's a fantastic professor. I think he actually has a course on happiness or fulfillment or something of the sort, a Swedish professor. I think his name is Dallin, Michael Dallin. And one of the things they found was, if you asked most people, most, most, most people, what they would like to eat in the future, he broke it into three.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:36Trevor Noah?

  Carrots.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:38Trevor Noah?

  Ice cream.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:39Trevor Noah?

  And insects.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:02:41Trevor Noah?

  And he was referring to like these little insects that you could buy at Disneyland, apparently. I'd never heard of them. But it's like a chocolate-covered insect. And it's, you know, it's all the rage and people buy them. But he found that there was a large number of people who never ate them. A lot of people bought them but never ate them. And so he broke it down into carrots, insects and ice cream. And in all the research, what he found was, if you asked most people what they want to eat for their next meal or for the meal in ten years, they say carrots. I should be eating more carrots.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:03:13Trevor Noah?

  Right? If you ask most people what they, what they wish they had eaten, it was insects. And then if you ask most people what they want to eat now, they say ice cream. And it was just a beautiful, simple way of looking at the way we avoid friction. He went, we know theoretically what we want for ourselves in the future, what'll be the healthiest or the best. We also know that we regret not taking the road less traveled. You know, the crazy idea, the moment that didn't necessarily make sense. But in the moment, for the most part, we are more predisposed to choosing the immediate relief and the, and so when I think about friction, I think of it in the same way. If you, as Esther say,

• 1:03:58Trevor Noah?

  dating apps, you go, Trevor, don't use a dating app.

• 1:04:02Trevor Noah?

  I know myself and a lot of people would say, yeah, I agree with you, Esther. Because in the future, I think to myself, I would love to meet someone organically, etc. In the past, I would have loved to taken a chance, tried something different, explored beyond my, you said, what was a culture, religion, race, all these things. But in the moment, oh, it's so easy to just swipe. It's so, because it's the ice cream. And we never feel good after the ice cream. And then we always regret the ice cream. But we always fall back into them. So that friction, like, I love that you're positioning yourself there, because I think.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  But friction is connected. I think to the big issue of the moment.

• 1:04:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Which is uncertainty. Because friction is what makes you have to experiment, deal with the unexpected.

• 1:04:49Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Deal with the unpredictable, deal with the lessons of making all kinds of bad choices. It helps you deal with uncertainty. Dealing with uncertainty is what helps you deal with anxiety. That's what.

• 1:05:04Trevor Noah?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, say that again. Dealing with uncertainty is what helps you deal with anxiety. In what way?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Because if you become more adept at dealing with the unknown, the unexpected, the unpredictable, then you develop a sense of confidence. It's what you just described when you get to a show and you had to cancel something or the flight was late. You have a stance that basically says, I know what I can control. I know to handle the unknown and the unpredictable. And I know that it will land in my comedy, because it will become part of the story. Now I'm annoyed, maybe, but I, you know, that, you don't get completely frazzled. You absorb it, you have a shock absorber. And that shock absorber is what allows you to not be as anxious about the unknown,

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  about mortality, about the unpredictable, all of that. You know, having all the answers in the palm of your hand is not making us less anxious. It's making us more anxious. Because we're no longer making bad choices, discovering something, realizing we don't like it. We begin to expect immediate, perfect answers for everything. And relationships and life, our existence, doesn't operate this way. In many aspects, some of them do, but the majority of things are way more complex than that. So this piece of uncertainty, matched with all the changes that are happening at full speed, are making us very, very fraught.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  We, and, and, and that to me, because everybody wants to talk about the loneliness epidemic, but people are not necessarily addressing what I think is the other piece, which is how do we deal with so much uncertainty all at once? And when you can't deal with uncertainty and you don't have the resilience to help you with anxiety, then you don't know how to deal with frustration, conflict, differences. And then you become more intolerant and then you go to look for people who sell you certainty.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  And that comes with certain political regimes as well. You want somebody who's gonna help you feel more certain. I'm gonna solve this for you. So to me, that's all interconnected and that's happening on a geopolitical level and it's happening in relationships. And so to just look at the dilemmas of mating in captivity is not enough anymore for me.

• 1:07:34Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  I think there's something bigger happening that is touching at the core of our existence. Every research tells you that you only live longer and you live better when you have meaningful relationships and people are having less and less of it.

• 1:07:50Trevor Noah?

  What was the system that, that made you this way?

• 1:07:55Trevor Noah?

  Like I've, I've always wondered, like, what was little Esther like? When, you know, when, when your parents would talk about you, how were you with other kids? Or how were you in the house? Was your world certain or was it more uncertain or?

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  My world was certain, but my parents' world was a world that was completely decimated. So predictions. So I, I think it's two different things. On the one hand, you know, one of the most important aspects of my, my background is that I am a child of two Holocaust survivors and my parents were the sole survivors of their entire family.

• 1:08:36Trevor Noah?

  Jeez.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  So my mother was the youngest of seven, my father was the youngest of nine. Nobody, nobody, nobody survived but my parents.

• 1:08:46Speaker 01

  So they definitely dealt with uncertainty. And they dealt with the unknown and they dealt with a world where you have no idea where kindness will come from and where order will be restored and where humanity will come back and all of that. So I have all of this in my background. They each spent four years in concentration camps. I think that all of that is extremely important in how I look at the world. How I look at who is, who is good and who is not.

• 1:09:17Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Who thinks of others, who doesn't, who can be kind. How much is our ideology defining who we are versus how much does our behavior and our actions actually define who we are? All of these big questions, but then I think in addition, whenever I see dogma or group think or mass psychology or crowds, I tend to think there must be something else. There must be another way. Is this really so? Or is this just so because that many people think like it?

• 1:09:51Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  And I think it's the combination of those things. I, I, I act very fearlessly, but I am not. But I act fearlessly.

• 1:10:00Trevor Noah?

  No, so I guess you act courageously then.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting. I never, I never saw it like that, but yeah, put it actually.

• 1:10:07Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because that's, because that's what courage is, right? Acting in spite of the fear.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  I think, I think of myself as, as counter phobic. Do you know that term?

• 1:10:15Trevor Noah?

  No.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  So you can be phobic, you can be fearful. And counter phobic is when you actually do the things that frighten you the most.

• 1:10:25Trevor Noah?

  How do you find the balance between that and living life with a reckless abandon that causes danger to you and others? Because some things scare you for the right reasons, don't they?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Yes, of course.

• 1:10:37Trevor Noah?

  Like, like when you were hitchhiking, you didn't go with that one person because something scared you in some way.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean. You always wanna keep judgment. You have a healthy dose of skepticism. You don't believe what everybody tells you.

• 1:10:54Trevor Noah?

  People will say this in different ways. They'll be like, go, go to the thing that scares you. And then I like, I mean, you know, and I've been public about this. But I always think to myself, I go, I wish my mom was a little more scared of domestic abuse. Because then I I wonder what it would have changed in my family. And I talked to her about this, you know. And I I'm glad I spoke about it publicly because people have even spoke about it publicly as well now with me. They go, yeah, I, when do you allow the fear to control you or to inform your decision? And how do you know when it's a good fear, when it's a bad fear like?

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  This is, you don't always know. I mean, you you have a sense, you look around, you ask other people for a reality check.

• 1:11:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  When I am very worried about things, I ask for a reality check. I I also know that in my stomach lives a really long history of of of fear. And and and that I can have very strong reactions, you know, to to situations. But I also know that that the legacy of this is is precedes me. And then what do I do with it is a different thing. But I think, when do you know if your fear is valid? It's a fear. So what helps you with fears is grounding yourself in reality. How do you trust reality? Generally, it helps to have other people around you to help you. You know, am I, is what I'm seeing, what you're seeing too?

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  I mean, is is a check.

• 1:12:21Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:12:22Speaker 01

  And the check is not all, is not always done alone. You're not always the best person to actually know, or at least for yourself. You can be perfectly perceptive for others. But for yourself, you don't necessarily know because you have all, you sense a lot of things.

• 1:12:36Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, in football, we say man on.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  What is that?

• 1:12:39Trevor Noah?

  I've always loved that as it's one of the reasons I love playing football.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, soccer or football?

• 1:12:43Trevor Noah?

  Soccer, soccer. I mean, that's, you know.

• 1:12:45Speaker 01

  Our football.

• 1:12:46Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, football.

• 1:12:48Trevor Noah?

  One of the things I love about football is I always go, for me, it's it's a perfect allegory for life. Because it's one, you are you are the individual. Everything you do individually matters to you and to the team. However, you cannot do anything without the team. And things will happen because of the team. So you're part of a system. And so it almost ties in those two ideas where one is completely what am I doing as a player? And why did I do that? Or why am I going to do that? But the other one is you have to do it in relation to others and you have to understand why. You so you can kick a great pass, but if your teammate doesn't reach it, there was no point in kicking it, you know? And and there's one, when you talk about your community, you just say man on or man.

• 1:13:32Trevor Noah?

  And it means you're being marked by something that you may not be aware of. And the people around you can observe you better in the situation than you can, because you have your blind spots. And good teammates will always tell you what's happening around you. They'll say man on, they'll say time, they'll say you've got time. And it just means you've got time to think, you can breathe on the ball, turn, you can turn your body, you can, you know? And I I I love those small moments where you're reminded that you're not in it alone. Even though you are alone in that in that little microcosm of a moment, you're alone.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful image. It it really describes it very, very well. You you there is what you can do. And then there is how other people can help you do what you're about to do.

• 1:14:13Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  And then how what you do will help what others need from you, because that's the way the team. I think it's it's a great image. I it it fits my thinking, my thinking very much.

• 1:14:25Trevor Noah?

  When when I think of your parents, I think to myself, and this is this is purely anecdotal. I have some friends, well, obviously because they're young, it might be their grandparents who survived the Holocaust or escaped it. And I've often found that there will be two groups, and this is purely anecdotal, and I'm, you know, I know I'm distilling it down. But I'll have some of my Jewish friends, like they'll go, my grandparents taught me to be afraid of everything, question everything, run away at the first because, because of what we experienced. Then there's other ones who'll go, no, they've taught me to fight harder, to be in the

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:14:58Trevor Noah?

  And there's no like one correct one, but I, I think to myself, you could have had parents who wouldn't tell you to hitchhike or wouldn't let you go anywhere.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  I didn't tell them.

• 1:15:07Trevor Noah?

  Oh, you didn't tell them?

• 1:15:07Speaker 01

  Oh, no, don't please.

• 1:15:08Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:09Trevor Noah?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  No, and certainly not that I was traveling with a boyfriend either.

• 1:15:14Trevor Noah?

  Okay, no, now the story, you see, now the story is making a little more.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  But your distinction is very important because I, I've often described that I grew up in a community that was all Holocaust survivors. They were not Belgian born, they all arrived. My parents also, when they arrived to Belgium after the war, from the concentration camps, they were refugees and they stayed illegal refugees for another five years. So this is not just the war, it's everything that follows. I happened to be born later. My brother is born in forty six, I'm born in fifty eight. So I just arrived when my parents were finally beginning to kind of settle themselves. But I often thought that in my community, and what I'm going to describe, I saw in my community, but I think you can apply this to many other

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  communities and many other circumstances surrounding trauma. There were people who did not die and there were people who came back to life.

• 1:16:13Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  The people who did not die lived very tethered to the ground, often fearful, often afraid to take risks, often afraid to enjoy, because when you enjoy, you cannot be vigilant, you cannot be worried.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  And joyful at the same time. You cannot experience pleasure and fear at the same time unless it is baked into a certain kind of pleasure system.

• 1:16:41Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  But not the way that these people were experiencing it. And they often lived with curtains that were kind of pulled down. And you entered their homes and there was a kind of a morbidity. They survived, but they were not necessarily alive. And this is an image. This is not that anybody discussed it like that, but I would feel it when I would go to the homes of my friends. And then you had another group and they came back to life. And I am very blessed to have been part of parents like that. My two parents, they had not survived for nothing. They, they didn't starve for years for nothing. And they, we discussed many, many times what made them wanna continue to live and how

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  did they get up in the morning on minus something degrees and, and walk with newspaper around their feet and go work in those factories and be moved from one camp to another, all of that. And they were gonna enjoy life. It wasn't just a, they were gonna enjoy life with a vengeance. The biggest thing they could do was actually enjoy life.

• 1:17:45Trevor Noah?

  Enjoy life with a vengeance.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 1:17:48Trevor Noah?

  It's a beautiful phrase.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  And I think what I took, and this when I was very, very young, I had the notion that I, my life will be meaningful, my life will be big, not fame or things like that, but I will do important things. I will have a rich life in all kinds of ways.

• 1:18:06Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  And I'll tell you a very, very interesting anecdote that happened to me this year. And I would often, so that was a thing I had. I'm gonna, I, I'm not, I'm the, I'm a miracle child. I arrived, you know, years after my parents tried for me to be born. I have this whole legacy and all these dead people at my feet and I'm going to live in a way that's going to kind of give them something. So that's a piece also of how, why I, you know, what, what drives me.

• 1:18:40Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  But as, this year I was invited by a German media group to be a guest of honor at a dinner at the Poland Museum in Warsaw. And amongst the many other guests was also the Foreign Minister of Poland.

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  And I had to say something. So I got up. I had no idea what was gonna come out of my mouth. And I said, you know, when I was a child, I used to lie in bed and I would think, one day I'll go places and they won't tell me Jews not allowed. They let me in. But not only would they let me in, but they will tell me, you are welcome. And not only would they tell me you are welcome, but one day they will tell me, you are the guest of honor. We want you here.

• 1:19:31Trevor Noah?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  And here I am today, invited by the Germans at the Jewish Museum of Warsaw, in the presence of the Polish Foreign Minister. I guess I actually manifested this dream. And then this was like, I didn't know if it was the adult in me talking or the eight-year-old in me talking. But the room was silent.

• 1:19:59Trevor Noah?

  Wow.

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  You know, it just like, it was right there, all in front of me. But I didn't, it was, here I am amongst you all. And I'm invited, I'm accepted, and we can start a new relationship. And we can repair, and we can learn to respect each other, and we can learn to honor each other's presence. And that's what I wanna do.

• 1:20:29Trevor Noah?

  It reminds me of something my mom often says. It's the reason, I guess, she goes to temple, but she'll go, she says like she feels like Jewish people and black people are natural allies. Because unfortunately, there's a shared trauma and, I forget the other word that she uses, but a sort of like ostracization that they can all relate to. And it's interesting, you just saying that, you know, unfortunately, a lot of it can be applied to many black people. You know, the dream to go somewhere, to be welcomed, to be brought in, not just be allowed in, but to be welcomed in, to be seen as part of, to be, it's, you know?

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  That's why I tell it to you in my version, but I think these are stories that belong to many other groups and many other people who have been.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Excluded, rejected, annihilated. I mean, nobody has the Olympics on victimhood.

• 1:21:32Trevor Noah?

  Don't go anywhere because we got more What Now after this. Some of the most interesting things you learn happen while you're doing something completely ordinary. Maybe you're cooking dinner or watching a history video. Maybe you're on a flight catching up on a long-form interview. Or maybe you're trying to figure out how to fix something in your house because apparently owning a screwdriver means you're an electrician now. But you see, that's one of the things I love about YouTube Premium. I travel a lot, so I download videos before a flight. That way, I'm not leaving my entertainment in the hands of airplane wifi. Yeah, I've made that mistake before. You think you're gonna watch something in 4K and suddenly everyone's face is pixels. But one of my favorite features is smart downloads.

• 1:22:17Trevor Noah?

  You see, YouTube Premium can automatically download recommended videos for you based on what you already watch. So sometimes I'll get on a plane, I look at my phone, I'm like, ah, I didn't download anything. And it's like, no, YouTube already thought about this. They packed entertainment for me in my little lunchbox. And with background play, I can lock my phone, switch apps, and whatever I'm watching just keeps on going. So if you like YouTube, you will love YouTube Premium. Sign up now for your free trial at youtube.com/premium. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. Thanksgiving is one of those meals where every dish carries a little more meaning because the table is really about the people around it.

• 1:22:59Trevor Noah?

  Whole Foods Market helps take some of the pressure off with quality proteins, seasonal treats, and easy solutions for the days surrounding the holiday. Start with turkey, or a bone-in or boneless ham from the meat department, all with no antibiotics ever. Add seasonal bakery favorites like holiday cookie platters, tea breads, and pies, all made without high fructose corn syrup. For the days before or after Thanksgiving, marinated meats and prepared sides make dinner easier. Build your own family meal fees for for thirty five dollars in store only. Seasonal candles and body care essentials can help with gifting or serve as a well earned treat for the host.

• 1:23:42Trevor Noah?

  Their standards leave out artificial sweetness, artificial colors and high fructose corn syrup, helping the flavors you want stay at the center of the table. Shop Thanksgiving favorites with higher standards at Whole Foods Markets. Therapy is one of those things lots of people talk themselves out of without even realizing it. Like it's too expensive or it's too overwhelming figuring out even where you're gonna start. But Rula is one way to make that first step feel a lot more doable. Offering accessible, affordable therapy that fits your needs. Sign up in just a few minutes and get matched with a therapist who fits what you're looking for. Need to talk to someone quickly? Appointments are often available as soon as the next day.

• 1:24:25Trevor Noah?

  And with insurance, sessions average around a fifteen dollar copay. You can also see estimated costs upfront, so there's a lot more clarity going in. And in terms of outcomes, ninety three percent of Rula patients report symptom improvement. If therapy's been sitting in the back of your mind, Rula is a pretty simple way to take that first step. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from progress and head to rula.com. That's R U L A dot com to find a therapist the easy way.

• 1:25:02Trevor Noah?

  When you look at, um, I don't wanna say the way we are today because I've, because I, I learn the more I travel, the more you realize that there's no myopic lens on what the world is feeling. But there's, there's no denying in Europe, especially in, in the United States, there's a lot less thinking of what could be. And really, really sitting back into the like, this is the way it was, this is, this is the how. As somebody who thinks about systems. Where do you think we are in that journey? Because it seems like that journey has, you know, a sort of natural curve that it follows in history.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  If you look at the history of cultures and societies, it's when you do this, I would say it's periods of expansion and periods of contraction.

• 1:25:51Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:52Speaker 01

  That is the movement I see. And I think that we lived for a long time in a system that was more contracted. I'm going to give it to you from the point of view of relationships.

• 1:26:04Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  For a long time, people lived in tribes, communities, villages. But relations, and they still do in the majority of the world, mind you. And the relationships are organized around duty and obligation, around loyalty and community. And there's a lot of clarity. I mean, there's been polarization always. There's churches fought each other, tribes fought each other. It's not like we haven't been polarized. But it was slightly different because every one of these hierarchical structures, communities and religions, provided people with a good sense of clarity and certainty. What you didn't have is personal freedom or personal expression.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  We moved with the modern era and with two, a system of relationships where for the first time we began to switch from duty and obligation, we moved to choice and option. And from, and, and, and basically at the center now of relationships is the individual in search of a community, not an individual in the community in search of personal freedom and expression. And you have more freedom than you've ever had, but you're more alone than you've ever been. And you are crippled with uncertainty and with self doubt because you have a tremendous amount of decisions to make when you have freedom.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  You can decide so many aspects of your life today that were never available, talking in the West primarily. And with that, the burdens of the self have never been heavier. And it's all ruled by the rule of authenticity, meaning being true to myself. Now, how do I know what is true to myself with such absolute certainty? That is really exhausting. That's difficult. So you add to that the speed with which technology is transforming us. This is one of the biggest revolutions that we're gonna go through. And people are dizzy and they are anxious and they are uncertain. And we know that anxiety and trauma constricts our imagination.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  And so we go into a contraction again.

• 1:28:17Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  And we are looking for people to give us some relief and some certainty. And autocracy comes with that. And that's the motion that we are in now. So we become less welcoming. We become less tolerant. We start to see other people as threat, what they take away rather than what they bring. And this is not the first time by far. I mean, it's really important at this moment to listen to historians as well, so that we get a sense that. But it hasn't happened with that kind of speed and that kind of intensity, maybe ever, or at least, you know, we had the industrial one, we had the agrarian one before. But I think that that's what we are in.

• 1:29:02Speaker 01

  And I went to South by last week and I did a conversation with the futurist Amy Webb. And, you know, she was giving the predictions of the future. And half the slides, not half the slides, but many, it was like, this is happening and you don't need people anymore. And this is happening and you don't need people anymore. And everybody's clapping. And I'm thinking, these people are cheering their own extinction.

• 1:29:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Speaker 01

  I mean, what is happening to us?

• 1:29:32Trevor Noah?

  Not just our own extinction. I think we're also cheering our own purposelessness.

• 1:29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:36Trevor Noah?

  And that's, that's, someone in a thousand years is gonna look back and go, wait, you're telling me they went into a building with other people? They sat at a desk, they punched in numbers, sent those numbers to other people, the other people read them, sent it back to them, and this was their purpose? This was their, and they'd be like, that can't be right. It seems like slavery. It must have been slavery. Why would they do this? But that purpose is.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  But it's purpose with the spiritual dimension. It's purpose with the transcendence.

• 1:30:05Trevor Noah?

  Oh, yeah, definitely, which is I think the most powerful.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  It's not a prag- only a pragmatic purpose.

• 1:30:09Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I think we're erasing it with um with a lot of technology. Is we we are we're we're going. You don't have to do it. You don't have to. I I'm I'm sure you've you've seen this and I I say this to my friends all the time. You know, one of my best friends just had twins. And he they him and his wife have gone through this whole journey now of finding a nanny and finding this and finding that find. And I remember laughing one day and I sat with them and I said, do you ever think it's? Do you ever think of how funny it is? That we live in a world that has tricked us into living alone. But then buying our community back.

• 1:30:47Trevor Noah?

  You know? You're buying every element of your community. Who is a babysitter if not your sister, your friend, your uncle, your grandparent, your the? Who is that sort of babysitter? I, by the way, I didn't grow up with, I didn't even know that was a concept growing up for me as Trevor. Um, cause it's people, people babysit. Uh, you're right to the airport, there's there's no Uber. It was whoever. Esther, can you take me to the airport? Esther goes, oh, I don't want to take you to there, but I I guess I have to take you to the airport. But you know what I think of?

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  I'll take you next time.

• 1:31:16Trevor Noah?

  I think it was Scott Galloway who says on one of our episodes, which I really loved. He he he described it as garbage time. And I mean, I know you wouldn't be so crass as to say it that way. But I I appreciated what he meant. He said. It wasn't the moments where he had planned magic where magic happened. It's when he didn't. And I think of that airport ride with your friend. You hate the friction, you hate the idea. And yet that's the ride where you learn a new thing about them. You connect on something different, you laugh at something new, you you know? And I think all of this technology is just like. It's just eroding a lot of that purpose, even in the smallest ways. Just the purpose of like, I'm the person who always helped Esther to do this. Now there's a robot lifting things for her. You know how nice it was?

• 1:32:01Trevor Noah?

  I think for many people to say, uh, my neighbor helps me put up shelves. So I I, when I think of that, I go, yeah, it's natural and we're going and we're growing. But I I am less worried about. Jobs per se, and I'm more worried about purpose. I think without purpose, it's very difficult to get out of bed. It's very difficult to even know why you tolerate friction. Because friction without purpose is now just torture.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Because purpose is the essential dimension of meaning. We are creatures of meaning. And we need to know that we matter, and we need to know that we exist in the psyches of others. And we need to know that when we're not there, others still think of us. And so we have an experience of object constancy, that I live inside of you and you live inside of me. And that whole intersubjective piece is essential to relationships. And that's the piece you do not have with an AI. You can have a ton of different things with the machine, but the machine doesn't have subjectivity. And that doesn't mean that it doesn't yet have subjectivity. It just doesn't. It's a one-way street.

• 1:33:08Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  And to learn to relate to the other is essential in relationship, not just to learn to relate to yourself.

• 1:33:15Trevor Noah?

  You know what I was just thinking now, as you say that, when you said yet.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  Because usually I get yet.

• 1:33:21Trevor Noah?

  No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. The reason I laughed when you said yet is because I think of the ultimate conclusion, if we're honest about where a path goes, alright? People are selling AI now, and then they go, the ultimate goal is not just AI. It's intelligent AI. And it's not just intelligent, it's artificially intelligent, and it's generative, and it is predictive, and it is, and it is, and it is, right? And I was watching a video yesterday or the other day where it was like, um, I think it was Nvidia showing off like a robot vacuuming like a house. And now when you said yet, I think to myself, wouldn't it be ironic and almost predictable

• 1:34:04Trevor Noah?

  that we would pursue a world where we create a thing that works like us, moves like us, starts to speak like us, starts to think like us? And then at some point, that thing goes, yeah, I don't wanna, I don't wanna do this anymore. I don't wanna vacuum your house. I have dreams. I have aspirations, Esther.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  I wanna go hitchhike.

• 1:34:25Trevor Noah?

  I wanna go hitchhike. I don't care that I'm a robot. I also have dreams. I wanna see what the world has for me. A little frisson, you know? And then I wonder, what are we gonna do when we get there?

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Ah, God, I, I, I can't go as far, but I do know that we are relational creatures. That's part of the purpose. You, you don't, you know, I mean, sometimes you do things that matter to you, but sometimes what matters to you is related to how it affects others.

• 1:34:57Trevor Noah?

  Oh, wait, say that again, please.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  Sometimes you do things that matter to you, but they get, it's exactly what, what your image of the soccer. I kick the ball, but that ball will actually have a future that is determined by how other people catch it.

• 1:35:13Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like this.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  It's the same image.

• 1:35:16Trevor Noah?

  Can I tell you, Esther, I'm just noticing there's a huge gap in sports relationship psychology, and I think you could.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  No, no, I.

• 1:35:24Trevor Noah?

  No, I'm telling you.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  I'm so bad at it, but you gave me a good image.

• 1:35:27Trevor Noah?

  No, but I'm serious. If, if we could find like a gap, I think there's a lot of people, men stereotypically, yes, who love sports, who I think would be able to see relationships and, and like psychology in a different way. If you, if you applied it through that lens.

• 1:35:41Speaker 01

  But you have to translate that for me.

• 1:35:42Trevor Noah?

  I'll do it. Great.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  I can give you principle, because this way you've described, I saw the ball, I saw the, I saw, I mean, I happen to know soccer, so it's easy for me. I saw the guy play and I saw the response and, and I know how people, you know, you're, you're running, but there is somebody who's, who's telling you, you know, who to kick it to, and you are in a complete system of interdependence, but while you are also in a state of autonomy.

• 1:36:06Trevor Noah?

  Yes.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  It's, it's, people think that when you say interdependence, you've abdicated yourself. You haven't. You're completely in charge. But what will determine the outcome of your thing is not just determined by you.

• 1:36:19Trevor Noah?

  Hmm. It's everyone in relation to somebody else.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Yes. And that, that, I, I, I think that there is something happening at this moment that is eroding this. And you know, I could say the future of love, I could say the future of connection. I could say the future of how, you know, can we still turn conflict into connection?

• 1:36:40Trevor Noah?

  Wait, how, how, how do you think, how do you think it is and will affect romantic relationships? Cause I know, I know, I know a lot of people who say, oh, I'm just happy. And I'm not even mocking them, they really say, I'm just happy with my partner and it's just the two of us and we get cozy and it's wonderful and you know what?

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Oh, that's not, that's not the main voice of change. The, the change is really happening that people are actually less and less in relationships. Less and less in romantic relationships, less sex, less connection, less dreams with others. Um, it's that, it's a, there's a kind of a collective withdrawal. Uh, there's also disillusionment because there has been such a kind of a, a, a, whatever he loose calls an emotional capitalism, you know? It's like the, the commodification of people, the kind of market mentality applied to, to your intimate life. That has been really challenging to people. That's partly on the apps, not the only place, but it's really taken people down a notch.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  They just can't take it anymore. And, uh, so I think every study looks that, that comes back talking about from the sex recession to the intimacy recession, to the fact that young people are less and less in relationships, in romantic relationships.

• 1:37:58Trevor Noah?

  Right, right.

• 1:37:58Speaker 01

  But they also have less friendships.

• 1:38:00Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, people have fewer and fewer friendships now.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  There's a loss of social capital that people have no one to turn to in a time of crisis or to confide to. That friends on social is not the same as friendship in life.

• 1:38:11Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  And all of that, I mean, there is, there is really an impoverishment of connection. And at the same time, we know that emotional health is essential to overall health. So you can't separate the changes in relationships with the kind of mental health issues that are emerging that are connected to the questions of longevity. I mean, these things are, to use the word we keep coming back to, interdependent. So how do we get people to relate to each other more? To have more connection, to come out of their house, to go to the laundromats of this moment? I think is really the question that all the people who work in my field are currently questioning.

• 1:38:55Trevor Noah?

  So I haven't studied any of it, nor do I think I'm an expert. But if I was to throw in an amateur observation, I would argue there are two things that I think are contributing to it in a major way. I was with my brother and we're sitting, myself, my brother and one of my best friends. And we're sitting together in front of the TV. And my friend, he goes, I want you guys to watch the show. And he puts the show on and the three of us start watching.

• 1:39:25Trevor Noah?

  And then my brother goes very quickly, he's 20, he goes like, man, this is boring. I think his exact phrasing was, this is ass. That's what he said, actually. And my friend said, I don't care, we're gonna watch it, just watch the episode, it's really, it's gonna get good. And I'll never, my brother went like, I don't know. And he pulled out his phone and then he went, immediately, he was just on social media. And I'm sitting there.

• 1:39:49Trevor Noah?

  And then we started speaking about it, which was fun. I said, man, do you realize how crazy it is that there was a time when you couldn't do what you just did? And not only could you not do it, I argue it would have made the evening a little bit better. Because you would watch the thing that we're watching. Sometimes because your parents are watching it, because the TV's on it, whatever it was. And because of that, you were connected, even if you were connected in the thing that you didn't like, which I know seems like a paradox, but you were. So at the end of it, you would go, that was boring. But you had experienced boring with us as opposed to experiencing entertainment alone.

• 1:40:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26Trevor Noah?

  You know? And that's the first part I think of. I know that as Trevor, I can, I can sit here and pontificate and sort of romanticize a laundromat. Oh, this beautiful, and then someone will say to me like, yeah, so you can afford to spend two hours in. I, I, because while the laundry's going, I've got to be doing this and I've got to be doing that. And I've got to prepare this for tomorrow for work and I've got to get that report ready. And my kids need this and my that needs that and my. And I think that's the other thing that I notice a lot of people are struggling with is people are trying to save as much time as possible. To sort of plow it into the, as you say, the productivity side, the, you know, the, the, the, um,

• 1:41:08Trevor Noah?

  transactional side. I could be using this time to do something productive. I could be using this time to get something. I could be using, and I can't, that's what a lot of people say, I can't afford to do this. So I'd love to know, like, because you think about all of this. Do you think, do you think there's an, do you think there's an answer on the other side of it?

• 1:41:25Speaker 01

  I mean, I think that it's a very, very valid argument, but we're talking about something slightly different. For example, you do shows.

• 1:41:34Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  Where people come to laugh.

• 1:41:37Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  There's no purpose.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  So to speak, you don't accomplish anything in the transactional sense.

• 1:41:46Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  You know, they, they're not thinking about time when they come to you. They, they, they surrender. I mean, there's two things, people singing together and people laughing together.

• 1:41:56Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  These are extraordinary social synchronization techniques, you know, of, of, of how you bring people together. And do you feel like you have less people coming out these days?

• 1:42:07Trevor Noah?

  No, I think it's the opposite, actually. I think in music, I, I don't know in comedy, but I'm pretty certain all live entertainment is experiencing its best performance ever, like people are coming out more than ever.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  So to this person, I could say, you know, I completely understand that in your, in your life and in your reality, these two hours, you have a ton of other things to do. This is, we're not discussing this. Find yourself every once in a while. The show, the performance. The sing-along, the place to go and laugh together with others. Because these things have in many ways, they've always existed, but now they exist in their, in replacement of religious experiences. This is what people used to do and they would congregate. They didn't necessarily come together to laugh, but they congregated. So, and they went on the steps of the church and then they had comedy there.

• 1:43:03Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:43:04Speaker 01

  So. These are new iterations of things that have accompanied civilization forever. Find your ways to do this. Suspend time. Have moments. If it's not the Sabbath, then have it be Sunday. And if it's on Sunday, have it be Saturday night concert or whatever. But you need these experiences. These experiences that are more aesthetic, more collective, more interactive, and they don't accomplish anything else besides the power of that congregating. And I think you are, you and all the people who do your art, you know. It's, I've never done, I've never, in my, I go to shows, but I don't often go to, I've never seen your life, for example.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  I've never seen many shows like that.

• 1:43:50Trevor Noah?

  It's pretty fantastic.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  I'm going tonight to my first comedy.

• 1:43:54Trevor Noah?

  Wait, really?

• 1:43:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:43:55Trevor Noah?

  Oh, that's gonna be fun. I can't wait to hear what you think.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  At a beacon. And I am really excited to go in. I'm going to listen to Mike Bibilia.

• 1:44:02Trevor Noah?

  Oh, Mike Bibilia is at the show, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  And because I've never been to a, you know, where I, because I always thought, ah, humor is the hardest thing to translate language-wise as well. And then I feel like I'm, I don't get it. I don't get the joke.

• 1:44:16Trevor Noah?

  Wait, you think you won't get the joke?

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  I often thought, when I would go to a comedy cellar, I've often felt like,

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  like, I'm not laughing at the same things. But I am back. I'm going. I'm very excited. And because I, I've understood recently, I have had such joy singing with people. And now I want to go and laugh with people. I want to have those kinds of experiences. And to me, that's my answer to the person who doesn't have time to schmooze in the laundromat. It's okay. I get it. Everybody has a different reality. But every person who used to have a very busy life and got up with the sun and went to sleep with the animals, had that time in their life. But it was regulated through, primarily through religion. Now we have to find secular versions.

• 1:45:04Trevor Noah?

  Well, that's what, that's what you've made me realize in this conversation is, I think a lot of the conversations we're having in society are thinking of it through the individual lens, saying, you get out there, you do, you do, you do. But what you've just made me realize while we're having this conversation is,

• 1:45:23Trevor Noah?

  It is a lot easier to do that when the we is doing it. So you never felt like you were in the wrong place when you were at church. In fact, you felt the inverse. Why aren't you at church? Why didn't you come to church? What do you mean you're missing church? And to your point, I mean, what are you doing? Technically, you don't have to go there. You can pray at home. You have the Bible at home. You can do it another day. But because the we was there and you weren't. Think of Halloween. I'm always intrigued, now that you say it, by how people who are very busy will still have to leave the office because it's Halloween, because they're kids and because. And you're like, this is, this is the most ridiculous thing ever. You're dressing up like a witch, but you're, you're like, I can't miss it.

• 1:46:07Trevor Noah?

  I can't, no, I gotta, I gotta leave. Yeah, I'm, I'm taking my kids trick or treating and, and because society has accepted Halloween as this concept. Your boss doesn't say, are you crazy? You're gonna leave the office early because your, your kids gotta dress up and go get candy. That's crazy. But you, honestly, you're making me realize now that the, the.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  So was the day off.

• 1:46:27Trevor Noah?

  That we that you're contained in defines how comfortable you are doing or not doing the thing.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  Because it's much harder to have discipline alone and to know when to stop. You know, now you, it's like, on the one hand, you have the freedom to decide what you wanna eat, when you wanna eat, when you wanna sleep, how much you wanna sleep, when to exercise. All, but on the other hand, it's a lot harder to have to create all these disciplines by yourself when you have collectively synchronized those things.

• 1:46:53Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  That all the stores are closed on a certain day, then that's it, you know? These are the three times a day or the five times a day that you need to pray. These are the times that you need to have sex because it's mandated by your religion. People who are orthodox have often a lot more sex than people who are secular.

• 1:47:09Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  You know, because there is the, it's not left to, do I feel like it? It's, I should, I have to, it's part of what's expected of me. And there is something very important about this. Of course, in that system, if you don't wanna go, you don't have the freedom not to go. We don't, it's not this or that.

• 1:47:26Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

  But the integration of these two poles is really important in the equilibrium of a society. What is a must and what is a want? What is a we and what is an I? This is true in every relationship. This is true in the relationship between individuals and their family or their community.

• 1:47:47Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 01

  And it's true as a whole in societies. And at this moment, we are off balance.

• 1:47:53Trevor Noah?

  So if you were creating a perfect world, in fact, we play this game on the podcast. One day you should join us.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:47:58Trevor Noah?

  I think you'd have a lot of fun. We call it If I Ruled the World.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:48:01Trevor Noah?

  And it's, um, it's, it's, the idea is you, you rule the world, you can change it however the way you, you'd like to change it. But it's nothing boring like, um, you know, everyone gets free healthcare or that. It's like, because we sort of agree. It's more, like, one of the more recent ones I had was I said, um, if I ruled the world, I would make it that everybody's thoughts that they're having during sex is heard by the other person that they're having sex with.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:48:29Trevor Noah?

  It failed terribly.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's not such a good proposition.

• 1:48:32Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, it failed, Esther. I don't need you to tell me. It failed.

• 1:48:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:48:35Trevor Noah?

  It failed terribly. Um, my reasoning was good, though, and that's oftentimes what we're actually trying to get into, is the reason versus the idea.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  I'm very, I wouldn't know how to answer this. If I, I.

• 1:48:47Trevor Noah?

  Oh, but it's fun. I think it's like.

• 1:48:49Speaker 01

  It's a.

• 1:48:50Trevor Noah?

  Because I think it gets, it, it's not about like knowing certainly.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  I, I know how I would answer this.

• 1:48:55Trevor Noah?

  Yes, go.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  But it's not, I'm gonna start on the conceptual level. I think this thing I just described, how do you balance the I and the we?

• 1:49:03Trevor Noah?

  Okay.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  You know, me and the other. Us, them, all these divisions. The majority of these issues.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  In relationships, for sure, it's complex. In relationships of two people, if there is a complicated question that can have two as, two polarities, it's very easy to take half of the story. I take one side of the issue and I put the other side on you. And you could do this with, should the kid have a pacifier? As you could do this about sex, as you could do this about money. It doesn't matter, the issue polarization doesn't have much to do with the thing that you're actually differing about. It's the fact that you've taken the complexity and you have parceled it out. If you were alone, you would have to deal with both parts of it yourself.

• 1:49:58Trevor Noah?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Right? Do I want to clean or do I not want to clean? Do I want to get up? Do I want to exercise? Do I want to pray? You would have to negotiate inside of you the two sides of the complex, of the complexity of this issue. Because there are different sides.

• 1:50:16Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:16Speaker 01

  And you would have to figure out yourself. Do I work or do I take off? Do I want kids? Do I not want kids? Do I want to be in a relationship? But when you're in a relationship, it becomes I want A and you want B and now let's fight.

• 1:50:32Speaker 01

  And this piece about how you have to negotiate the complexity and you can't resolve it by just picking one side, but it is all about integrating these polarities, is I think what makes us either in a good relationship or not, or in a good society or not, for that matter. The opposite of that is cleavage, intolerance, conflict, disconnect, polarization, all the words that are rampant these days.

• 1:51:01Trevor Noah?

  So, am I hearing you correctly if I say that essentially what you're saying is? We need to still be able to grapple with both parts of the conversation.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, do I want tradition or do I want innovation?

• 1:51:16Trevor Noah?

  Yes, but you must, you must sort of hold both.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. Do we want Europe, tradition, history, the past, the, the, the, the timelessness, the Sunday?

• 1:51:25Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  Or do we want the United States, efficient, pragmatic, everything is open, twenty four hours, seven days a week, da, da, da, da? As if it's that or that. It's not. We need, we appreciate this and we appreciate that. So how do we bring these things together? You know, complex problems don't get solved. They are paradoxes that you manage.

• 1:51:48Trevor Noah?

  Hmm, it's like, it's almost like, I'm picturing sliders while you're saying this. I'm almost going, you, you might raise a slider and say, I think seventy percent relaxation right now, thirty percent not, but not on off.

• 1:51:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:52:00Trevor Noah?

  You know, it's like, you, you, you're talking about like dimmer switches for our, for our opinions versus on off switches.

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  And it's an, it's a both end that changes constantly versus an either or. Because these things are completely, they're too complicated to make it an either or.

• 1:52:19Speaker 01

  Tech, tech, AI, all of this, like this or that, you know, the old system, the new system, no. There is, we, you want this, but there are consequences to it. So can we check on it? Then we want some of that, but we don't want all of what it was.

• 1:52:33Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  This is a very different way of resolving the big issues of our life, of our society, of our, of our relationships. And I don't know how one helps to shift that, but that would be, if somebody can help me, you know, do this at scale.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  I wanna be on the lead of that.

• 1:52:54Trevor Noah?

  Okay, I'll apply my mind to it. I might not be the person, but I might bump into the person, so I'll.

• 1:53:00Speaker 01

  You let me know. But do you, do you know what I'm saying?

• 1:53:03Trevor Noah?

  I, I completely, I completely understand what you're saying and I think.

• 1:53:08Trevor Noah?

  You know, not not to completely level blame, but I I do think if we start with, let's just say, just start with the algorithm. So I don't know if you've seen this recently, there are a few social media companies, or one might not not even be social media in its inception. And essentially, what they've proposed is building algorithms from scratch.

• 1:53:29Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:29Trevor Noah?

  They go, forget villains. Don't think of Facebook as a villain. Don't think of Instagram. Don't think of anyone as a villain. Rather think of it as an outcome of what they tried to create. And that that is what it is. So they designed an algorithm.

• 1:53:42Speaker 01

  What do you mean, an outcome of what is right?

• 1:53:44Trevor Noah?

  So so you know, sometimes we go, that person is bad because this happened. We don't think to ourselves, that happened because of what they did, but their goodness or badness isn't really part of it. The algorithm was was an example of this. When they originally made a lot of these algorithms, they designed the algorithms to maximize getting people's attention and to keep people engaged, and which seems like the right thing to do, regardless of the product you're making, right? So you have a restaurant? No, no, make the food taste as good as possible, so that people will enjoy the food. But we also know there's balance. You can also fill the food with cocaine. People will really enjoy the food.

• 1:54:24Trevor Noah?

  But what is the outcome going to be? You can and now things like food have a longer history, a longer tradition. So if you talk to somebody who's cooked and knows their food, they will tell you through the history of that food that people learned why not to add this or why to add that. Oh, because then over time it does this to you, right? Digestion, moods, you name it. Tech, I think, is still, because it's in its infancy, it doesn't have the legacy of four hundred years where you can trace it through and say like, ah, yes, that is why, you know, this algorithm exists like this. It doesn't have four centuries of knowledge. So they went, it's all about attention. Let's make it attention, then people will love it. But then the attention was what they call like the car crash attention economy.

• 1:55:10Trevor Noah?

  People pay attention to car crashes. People always look at a car crash, almost no one can ignore it. The algorithm then went, oh, that gets your attention. So more car crashes, more car crashes, more car crashes, more car crashes, right? And so they talk about how the algorithm then did its job indiscriminately and put us in the position, a lot of the position that we're in, not completely. It's accelerated a lot of what we're experiencing. And so now there's this new idea of creating an algorithm the other way around. And so for instance, saying

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  The other way around being?

• 1:55:42Trevor Noah?

  Being, it's not about a car crash.

• 1:55:45Trevor Noah?

  We won't feed you what will keep you hooked in a negative way. We won't show you the opinion that is going to inflame you the most. We won't show, no, we will connect you with the people who you know and who you follow, which seems like a small thing, but apparently it's big. A lot of people follow people that they don't ever see because the algorithm has determined that it's not as interesting. Strangers are more interesting. New is more interesting. In fact, some of them, you would love this, I'll, I'll, I'll send you some of this work that they've shown. Some of the like social media sites would even not show you your spouse or partner on your feed because they've realized people very seldom interact with it because you know them.

• 1:56:30Trevor Noah?

  However, it will show you

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Exes.

• 1:56:33Trevor Noah?

  Your ex. Or it will, this is one you'll love. It will show you the person that your partner is lingering on. Do you get what I'm saying?

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:56:45Trevor Noah?

  So you, you'll find, yeah, you find you're in a relationship with the person. Let's say they liked the picture. You will see the picture that your partner or spouse liked because the algorithm realizes that you linger on these for longer. Now, it's not malicious, it's not even trying to do something. But as Charlie Munger used to say, you show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. It is trying to keep your attention. So now people are talking about trying to create an algorithm that's based around what we hope to achieve as opposed to circumstance and saying, what is the connection we're looking for? What are some of the behaviors we're trying to model? What are some of the connections we're actually trying to foster between human beings? And can we build that from there?

• 1:57:30Trevor Noah?

  And I think, funny enough, that could be the first building block to, you know, as you say, not the either or, using the thing that currently, I think, comes with a lot of toxicity to try and flip it on its head and create connection, which I think, I actually think is possible. I don't think it becomes the panacea, but I think it just becomes one lever that we turn just, just a little bit. And then all of a sudden, you know, you try and turn the next thing, you try and turn the next thing, you try and turn the next thing. You know, I've, I've thought of doing something at my shows. I haven't figured it out yet, but I would love to find a way to incentivize people who come to my shows.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06Trevor Noah?

  To connect with the people around them. And then if they do, there's gonna be something that benefits them. But I haven't figured out what it is yet, but I know I wanna do something like that.

• 1:58:15Speaker 01

  You know what I did in my show about that? And so the first thing I asked when people, when, as, as I meet them is, um, how many of you are here as a plus one? Know nothing about me, but were recruited? And you were curious and open enough to come on some anthropological field trip? And so I just wanna welcome the skeptics.

• 1:58:38Trevor Noah?

  I love that.

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  So that's number one. So that, and it's, there's always a group of people, they, they just came because somebody said, I really would love for you. And, and I'm just saying, you know, it's much easier for the person who already knows me or is into this kind of work to show up than the person who, you know, so I shake hands with them. And my second question is where are you from country-wise? So I get a complete sense as to what are all the places that people have come from.

• 1:59:05Trevor Noah?

  Right.

• 1:59:06Speaker 01

  And knowing that each of you is gonna hear me with a different ear because you come from different relationship traditions, different relational systems and cultures, et cetera. And then my third question is, um, how many of you have ever been involved in a consensual sexual experience that was also unsatisfying, but you went along with it anyway and you said nothing?

• 1:59:28Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:59:29Speaker 01

  And they all stand up. This is always this.

• 1:59:31Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  So they all stand up and it becomes very clear that there's a ton of bad sex in the theater. And that, you know, all, all genders, all orientations, all backgrounds included. So that kind of creates a... And then I ask how many to stand up if you know no one here. And then I ask every person that is sitting next to someone standing to actually introduce themselves, so that if you came alone, you won't leave alone. That's the kind of opening thing. And, and then I do a lot of, you know, they play the card game during the, the, the, the show as well. So they have four cards and they, they tell each other stories, but it's really such an important thing to, I mean, what if you actually asked people if they could tell

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  a joke to each other and you make, you give them five minutes or four minutes to talk to each other?

• 2:00:23Trevor Noah?

  I mean, jokes are, are dangerous, but no, I'll try.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  Of course, to each other, to the people they're sitting with. Or just to, to tell a, uh, pick some question.

• 2:00:32Trevor Noah?

  No, they, they could be, they could be something. I actually think they could. I, I think, I think, um, a lot of the reason crowd work has become so popular in comedy now is because it's connected audiences to each other in a way that it hadn't before.

• 2:00:46Speaker 01

  So give me an example of crowd work, because is it you to the audience or is it the audience with each other?

• 2:00:51Trevor Noah?

  Well, I think what happens is a lot of comedians will talk to the audience, but they also sort of facilitate a conversation between people.

• 2:00:57Speaker 01

  For example?

• 2:00:58Trevor Noah?

  Um, someone goes, hey, uh, what's your name? Where are you from? Oh, Esther, Esther. Oh, that's a nice name. It sounds like a grandmother's name though. So Esther, where are you from? Belgium. Oh, Belgium. You don't know anybody from Belgium. Tell me something.

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Any other Belgians in the room?

• 2:01:11Trevor Noah?

  Any other Belgians in the room? Woo, oh, wow. I didn't know there were this many Belgians. And then it's like, what, what are you guys doing here? What is this like a, an invasion? And then Esther says something, what's that? Oh, no, we're not the Europeans who invade. Aha, very funny, Esther. And then, you know, the play, they play with the person. Then someone else might say something in the room and they go, what's that? Oh, uh, they wanna know, the Belgians, wait, what happened? What, what did they do in Africa? Wait, what did they do in Africa, Esther? And now there's this connection and it's tension and there's laughter and there's, and it's, it's, it's like a very... And it's funny, because some comedians don't like it.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Yes. It all gets mediated through you.

• 2:01:45Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, because otherwise it's chaos.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  But there is something about having them, I'll look in my card deck for you and see if there's one or two things that you can translate.

• 2:01:55Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna, I'll try it.

• 2:01:56Speaker 01

  Where they, they, there's something about them talking to each other, because then you say, and when you leave here, you continue these conversations.

• 2:02:05Trevor Noah?

  I'm open.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  That kind of thing. You know, you have, it's so, I mean.

• 2:02:10Trevor Noah?

  I love this.

• 2:02:11Speaker 01

  You have them in the palm of your head.

• 2:02:12Trevor Noah?

  Love it. I'll try it.

• 2:02:13Speaker 01

  You can test a few things.

• 2:02:14Trevor Noah?

  I will try it gladly, and it will either work, or I will get comedy from it.

• 2:02:19Speaker 01

  I mean, because so much of my show was about creating the communal experience. So then I say, please stand up if you're currently in a romantic relationship.

• 2:02:29Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  And stand up if you would like to be in a relationship. Stand up if you would like to be out of the relationship that you're in.

• 2:02:38Trevor Noah?

  Damn.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  Or at least on occasion.

• 2:02:41Trevor Noah?

  Who stands, how many people have stood for the first one? Nobody?

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  For the being in a romantic?

• 2:02:46Trevor Noah?

  No, no, would you like to be out of the relationship you're in?

• 2:02:48Speaker 01

  Oh, you would be surprised.

• 2:02:49Trevor Noah?

  People stand?

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 2:02:50Trevor Noah?

  Are they there with the person?

• 2:02:51Speaker 01

  Sometimes, yes.

• 2:02:52Trevor Noah?

  No ways, Esther.

• 2:02:53Speaker 01

  Actually, in the New York show, there was a person who stood up literally in front of her. She stood up in front of her wife and then announced to her that she was done. But it's meant to be funny, like on occasion, who hasn't on occasion thought, you know, what am I doing here? And I'm done with this.

• 2:03:11Trevor Noah?

  No, I can see the humor in this.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  But sometimes people don't see that so, so, and so you have both voices. The, the one that is taking this light and is taking this with humor and the one that is actually sending a message. Sometimes they're there alone, sometimes they're with the partner. And I raise my hand, I say, me too, I've been, I've had those thoughts. But let's be honest for a minute, come on, who, we can't start a conversation if we don't at least include this. It's another way of saying relationships, relationship ambivalence is a part of being in a relationship.

• 2:03:45Trevor Noah?

  I'm gonna do this. I love, now you've given me homework and like a challenge. How do, how do I connect my audiences more? Half of it because I think there can be beautiful outcomes and the other half is just because I like the possibility that things might not go well.

• 2:04:00Speaker 01

  You'll tell me.

• 2:04:01Trevor Noah?

  Oh, definitely. There's a story on the other side of it. I think there's a beautiful story on the side of everything that doesn't go well. I was saying this the other day to a friend of mine. It was about relationships and I said,

• 2:04:15Trevor Noah?

  this is genuinely how I feel. I was like, I, I really do feel sad that now more than ever, people seem to discard everyone that has been in their lives as a quote unquote mistake, as a waste of time, as a, you know what I mean? And I, I don't know, I don't know why I have such an aversion to that, but I go like, no, it's, and I, and by the way, I'm also not one of those people who's very pro the like, it all happens to you for a reason and it was meant to be. No, I don't think of it like that. But I, I, I don't know. I don't know why.

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  But you think it has something to do with the perfection? You can't, that, that people are, you know, it's like bad investment?

• 2:04:54Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I, I do think so.

• 2:04:55Speaker 01

  It's like a market mentality applied to people too?

• 2:04:58Trevor Noah?

  It's bad ROI. That person wasted my time. She said that she wanted this and then four years later and then, what a waste of time. And then I go, but how was it a waste of time? When you were in it, what were you feeling? What were you experiencing? What were you doing? What were you, you know what I mean? Like, how was it a waste of time? Did it have a bad outcome? Or do you feel like the whole time was a waste? Did it not end the way you wanted it to end? And then I'll often say to them, what if they died? Because that's the thing I was like, okay, I go, what if they died? What if they died? And so the promises they made to you could not be fulfilled. What if they died? And then they go, oh, but that's different.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  That's different.

• 2:05:38Trevor Noah?

  And then I go, but in a way it isn't.

• 2:05:39Speaker 01

  This is romantic consumerism, huh? This is, you know, this is transaction. You wasted my time?

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  That's an amazing statement to make on a relationship. You know, it wasn't worth it, it didn't deliver. It didn't deliver, they had a poor ROI.

• 2:05:57Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  I mean, it's really.

• 2:06:01Speaker 01

  We have done an interesting thing, right? We've brought psychology to the business world and to, and we've brought the market to the relational world. We brought the business mentality into our relationship, you know? Is it worth my time? Should I invest in here?

• 2:06:20Speaker 01

  I don't, you know, when you really look at what it does to people,

• 2:06:25Speaker 01

  it's not the most pleasant thing.

• 2:06:28Trevor Noah?

  Right. Yeah, you were one of the first people who told me, and this like opened my eyes completely. We were talking about Europe, the French, France, you know, just this whole idea. And I remember I had gone to Mexico City. And one of the things I noticed in Mexico City was how many groups of mixed gender friends were hanging out. Just dinners, lunches, you name it. And I would, I love, when I'm in a place, I love asking people, where are you from? How did you come here? Who are you? You know, especially in a city that has a mix of the natives and then people who are relocating or visiting. And yeah, I was surprised, so many people were like, oh, no, we're friends. I was like, oh, I thought you were a couple. No, no, we're friends.

• 2:07:13Trevor Noah?

  What about you? Oh, no, we're this and oh. And, and I remember talking to you about it and you said something that fascinated me. You said like, in America, because I had experienced this when talking to people, a lot of people will say, what are you looking for? Oh, well, then what's the point? It's, it seems like many people live in the binary of, is there romance on the other side? Not just romance, is there a happy ending on the other side of this? And if there's not, why are we even? Why are we speaking? Why are we, you know? And and then I remember you saying you grew up in a world where oh, men and women were friends and going out for dinners and it it it was more, yeah, it was more nuanced, I guess.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  Nuanced and less goal oriented, less outcome driven.

• 2:08:00Trevor Noah?

  Outcome, yeah.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  It's like the experience itself has value, the process is interesting, the, you know, as they often call the journey. But it's really, it it's the the experience itself has meaning and value of its own. It doesn't get measured by the outcome. Um, this, I would apply this to a lot of things in life. It's like, but it is the fundamental difference between task oriented versus relationally oriented. Task oriented is, what does it deliver? What does, what do I get from this? What's in it for me? This is an amazing expression, doesn't even translate in French. What's in it for me?

• 2:08:38Trevor Noah?

  Like the phrase.

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  The phrase, no, no, what's in it for me? It's succinct to the point, it's very, very clear what it means, you know? It it, is there something for me to gain here? It is a, it's a very interesting sentence. What's in it for me? You know, and uh versus, you know, pleasure, the fun, the discovery, the exploration, the mystery, the surprise. I mean, that's, those elements, which I consider the elements that are essential ingredients of the of the erotic, of the feeling alive.

• 2:09:12Trevor Noah?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  Because you can accomplish a lot of things, that doesn't mean you feel alive. It just means that you feel like you've accomplished a lot of things. And it's a different level of existence. You know, and that does go back to the thing I described about my parents before. It's like, they definitely, that was very central to them. You know, I thought of that recently, because you you you, as I listen to you, I bring, it brings back memories. My mom used to tell me that um when they arrived to Belgium, they would go on Saturday night to the ball, talk about the coming together, and they would go dancing. And they would have to dress up and take the trolleys, the tramway, and go to Brussels and go dancing.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  And I'm just thinking, oh la la. After all of this, you just went dancing. Didn't you want to first lick your wounds? And it made me think that there really, there are two stances at this moment that stand out. And suddenly in thinking about mental health and trauma, and what we're talking about, relationships, joy, loneliness, all of these things. You know, you can think that healing comes from focusing on the trauma and finding meaning in it and understanding its resonance for you and its long-lasting legacy and all of that. But healing can also happen by creating new experiences

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  that bring you joy and hope and energy and connection and exploration and all of that, that that in itself is healing.

• 2:10:53Speaker 01

  And I think that those are two very important doors that we stand in front at this moment, individually and as groups, as communities.

• 2:11:05Trevor Noah?

  Yeah, I like that for us as a society right now to ask ourselves, do we want to create new memories

• 2:11:13Trevor Noah?

  and new ideas that will heal the wounds that we've experienced? Or do we want to shut it all down and focus on not losing what we think we have?

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  Or in a couple, you know, sometimes you need to first start by addressing all the problems. Or sometimes you start by actually talking about the things that are going really well and the things in which you connect beautifully and the things that never pose a problem, so you don't even think about them. And you first need to like the person again and the first need to feel like you want to be touched by them again. And then maybe you can go and sit down and think about what happened when you had this mega argument. You know, and a lot of people in the field of conflict are talking about eighty, twenty, right? It's the eighty percent that you actually agree upon or share a vision for or care for.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  And the twenty percent that you don't, but we have a real knack at this moment to go to the twenty percent first. And I think that we have a lot to gain to rebalance that a little bit.

• 2:12:23Speaker 01

  That's where I'm at.

• 2:12:26Trevor Noah?

  I think that's where we're at. This has been fun. This has really been great. I like that. I think let's, um, yeah, let's wrap it there. We could go forever, which is what I always think makes a great conversation and what makes you one of my favorite people. The infinite nature of pondering life is what makes it very enjoyable.

• 2:12:48Trevor Noah?

  And I think one of the main things I admire about you is how doubtful and yet adventurous you are. It's a fantastic combination. Because some people are doubtful, but that limits their ability to want to go out and see, explore, discover. And then there are other people who are adventurous, but they almost approach it with a reckless abandon that can bulldoze through certain ideas and people around them. I think there's something really wonderful in being doubtful, but also adventurous.

• 2:13:23Speaker 01

  And you know how I do it?

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  By holding the hands of others.

• 2:13:28Trevor Noah?

  Oh, I like this.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  If I go into nature, and I know I'm a city person and I really don't know nature and I feel very vulnerable in nature. But I'll go into all kinds of adventurous trips in nature because I'll attach myself to someone who I trust and knows it well. So I hold the hand.

• 2:13:52Speaker 01

  But I do this in my work too, and I mediate the dangers of the world by the trust that I have in other people.

• 2:14:00Trevor Noah?

  I love this. You've left me a lot to think. I'm gonna, yeah, I'll apply myself. Let's get people back into laundromats. Esther, thank you so much.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:14:09Trevor Noah?

  This has been wonderful.

• 2:14:16Trevor Noah?

  What Now with Trevor Noah is produced by Spotify Studios in partnership with Day Zero Productions. The show is executive produced by Trevor Noah, Sanaz Yamin, and Jodi Avigan. Our senior producer is Jess Hackel. Claire Slaughter is our producer. Music, mixing, and mastering by Hannes Brown. Thank you so much for listening. Join me next Thursday for another episode of What Now.

• 2:14:55Speaker 02

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