Orgasm Queen: Do This For 20 Minutes Before Having Sex & Have Sex With Them Like When You First Met! I Never Orgasmed Until He Tried This!

From sexless to sizzling, Susan Bratton shares the sexual secrets to ignite intimacy and make it last. Susan Bratton is a renowned relationship and intimacy expert. She is the CEO of ‘The 20’ and ‘Personal Life Media’ and the bestselling author of 34 books including, ‘Relationship Magic’, ‘Revive Her Drive’, and ‘Sexual Soulmates: The Six Essentials for Connected Sex’. In this conversation, Susan and Steven discuss topics such as, how to fix a sexless marriage, how cheating can save your sex life, the best way to last longer in bed, and how to get unlimited orgasms. 00:00 Intro 02:04 What Do You Do and Why Do You Do It? 02:36 Advice for Someone Struggling With Their Sex Life 04:57 Common Questions From Women 05:35 Common Questions From Men 06:27 Quality vs. Quantity 06:41 Susan's Journey to Becoming a Sexpert 08:35 Lessons Learned From Sexual Trauma 09:52 What Is Dissociation? 12:38 Susan’s Personal Issues With Sex Life 15:49 Are You Giving Mercy Sex? 17:34 How Did You Fix Your Trauma? 20:34 Identifying Problems in a Relationship 21:41 Sex Injustice and Trauma 24:15 Affair in Susan's Marriage 28:46 Non-Monogamy 31:20 How to Talk About Sex With Your Partner 34:02 How Did You Become Polyamorous? 36:20 First Audience Question 42:07 Body Image Issues 43:01 Reconnecting With Your Partner: Two Techniques 46:47 Comparisons With Other People 48:53 Removing Pressure Around Sex 50:30 Erotic Playdates 54:25 Dealing With a Partner Who Mocks Sexual Fantasies 57:04 Managing Opposite Sex Communication in Relationships 59:23 Safety + Novelty = Desire 01:01:53 Early Ejaculation 01:07:26 What’s the Most Effective Sex Toy? 01:09:36 The Pulse Queen 01:10:11 The Vibe 01:13:45 Types of Orgasms 01:19:23 Third Audience Question 01:20:13 How to Have an Expanded Orgasm With a Partner 01:20:33 Women’s Favorite Sex Toy 01:22:17 The Pleasure Protocol 01:25:55 Fourth Audience Question 01:27:35 Ads 01:28:40 Menopause vs. Libido 01:29:12 Libido, Desire, and Arousal 01:29:59 Testosterone Levels and Libido Decrease 01:31:10 When Sex Becomes Routine 01:35:37 Pornography and Masturbation 01:40:05 STI Testing 01:42:35 Knowing When to Walk Away From a Partner 01:47:25 Question From the Previous Guest 01:48:11 Question for Steven 🚀 The 1% Diary is live - and it won’t be around for long, so act fast! https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-reads Follow Susan: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/Ivv8wcFA3Ob Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/EPecOdHA3Ob Website - https://susanbratton.com/ You can purchase Susan’s book, ‘Hot To Trot’, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/N9bCRMMA3Ob Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: PerfectTed - https://www.perfectted.com with code DIARY40 for 40% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Nobody even knows there's over 20 kinds of orgasms that you can have. There's

• 0:08Speaker 00

  that's a one and done, but then there's

• 0:22Speaker 00

  that's the queen of orgasms and to achieve that there are very specific techniques that work and it's not what you see on porn.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Dr. Susan Bratton is a world renowned sex specialist and bestselling author of over 30 books and programs.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  And for over two decades, her expertise has empowered millions to master pleasure and techniques, bedroom communication, and unlock their true sexual potential.

• 0:43Steven Bartlett?

  Why did you focus on sex as a career?

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Well, I was 12 years into our marriage. We had a beautiful daughter, gorgeous home, but I never had an orgasm from intercourse and we thought there was something wrong with me, but this is not unique. So many of us have had problems with sex and once we got some skills, it just lit our sex life on fire. So here are 48 of my best sex techniques. Number one, number two, you have to, number three, it's something that I love to teach men. And then there's these toys that I want to show you.

• 1:17Steven Bartlett?

  What is that?

• 1:17Speaker 00

  This is a device that no one's ever seen before.

• 1:21Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:22Speaker 00

  Doesn't that feel so good?

• 1:23Steven Bartlett?

  Susan, this is the first time we've ever done this. We reached out to some of our audience to send us their questions.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  Okay, let's unpack this and let's start with.

• 1:32Steven Bartlett?

  This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.

• 2:06Steven Bartlett?

  What do you do and why do you do it?

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Well, I teach passionate lovemaking techniques by publishing books and programs and audios. And I do it because my passion is passion. I like to say that my brand of sexual education is heart-connected, conscious, passionate lovemaking, which is very different than transactional sex or sex that looks like pornography.

• 2:36Steven Bartlett?

  If someone comes to you and they say, "I'm struggling with my sex life in some way, or I'm not at my sexual potential. What can you do for me?" How would you answer that question?

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Well, I'd say sex is such a vast landscape and people enter into it from so many different directions that often when someone is saying that their sex life isn't as good as they want it to be, I have to ask them, "What's it like? What do they want? What's the vision that they're holding for themselves?" And often, I recently had a young woman come to me and say,

• 3:15Speaker 00

  "All my friends talk about sex being so great, but I haven't experienced that. And I wonder if I'm asexual, because it's just not that good for me. It just seems like it's so fast and hurried and I don't know. I just, I just don't, I'm worried. Maybe something's wrong with me." That's what women think a lot, is they think there's something wrong with them. But remember, I'm not a therapist, so I don't sit in a room with a client and unearth all of the issues that they have. What I do is I author passionate lovemaking techniques. I teach you how to have really good bedroom communication, how to know what you want and

• 3:58Speaker 00

  ask for it confidently, have your partner love for you to ask them for what you want, feel good about it, not like they did anything wrong. And then know a whole bunch of pleasuring techniques, how their bodies work, what the possibilities are. Because if you're thinking about sexuality, because sex has been so censored...

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Nobody even knows what's possible. If I say to someone, you know, there's over 20 kinds of orgasms that you can have, they'll be like, "What?" And especially men, they don't even, they think there's one, maybe two. Where women are like, "There's 20?" They are at least aware that there's more than one or two, that they could have these different, you know, kinds of orgasms. And so, once you understand the communication piece and you understand the pleasure piece, then you can understand what's possible. And then you can begin to try things.

• 4:57Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so you get an email into your inbox.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:00Steven Bartlett?

  And it's from a woman.

• 5:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:03Steven Bartlett?

  If you had to bet.

• 5:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:05Steven Bartlett?

  What that question in that email was, and all you know is that it's from a lady called Suzanne. What would your guess be?

• 5:13Speaker 00

  My libido is gone. And I feel really guilty. I feel really bad. I'm not interested in sex. Or I, there's something wrong with me. I'm unhappy. I'm unfulfilled. I don't feel like what I'm doing is right. That's most common with women.

• 5:35Steven Bartlett?

  And if the email came in from a guy called David?

• 5:37Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:38Steven Bartlett?

  What would you think is, before you click the email, what do you think he's asking you?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  Sexual biohacking, erectile dysfunction, penis enlargement, male enhancement, all of those kinds of things. Guys, a lot of men ask me about, "I think there's something wrong with my penis." So that would be the number one thing that would be most likely to be in my inbox. But the second thing would be something around either I have some shame around part of my desire, or I'm frustrated with my partner that I'm not having the kind of sex that I want. What do I do to fix it? So fixing, fixing things. People are writing for fixing things, whether it's men or women.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  That's, that's what they reach out with, our, our problems.

• 6:27Steven Bartlett?

  Quality and quantity, or one more than the other?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  I would say quality generally, more so than qua- quantity you can fix when you fix quality. Right, quantity comes before quantity. Yeah.

• 6:41Steven Bartlett?

  You have a really atypical journey to becoming a sexpert. It's not something that you studied when you were younger in college or something. It's not something that you were, it's not sort of an off branch to some psychology degree you were doing. You became a sexpert at what age?

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Forty-two is when I went on my sexual expansion journey and started my company shortly after that.

• 7:03Steven Bartlett?

  Why sex? Why in your early 40s did you decide to focus on sex when previously your career had been about many other things? Did something happen?

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, it did, right? I was married to Tim, my husband, Sir Tim. He's the prince among men. I've been with him for 33 years now. And we were 12 years into our marriage. We were a very successful Silicon Valley company. My husband invented Rhapsody, the first, like, the OG Spotify. So we were both in high tech, having IPOs, doing incredibly well. We had a beautiful daughter. We had a gorgeous home overlooking the entire Silicon Valley. It was just incredible. But we had become platonic, not for my husband's lack of trying to have sex with me, but I

• 7:52Speaker 00

  just, I don't know, I just, I had sex with him for a dozen years and I never had an orgasm from intercourse. I could have an orgasm from a vibrator, but I couldn't have one from intercourse. And I'd had some sexual trauma as a child as well, which honestly, the majority of people have had sexual trauma, whether it's simple repression or actual physical abuse of some kind. So many of us have had trouble, and not just women, men too. People across the spectrum have had, you know, things happen to them. And I avoided him for sex.

• 8:35Steven Bartlett?

  What did your sexual trauma teach you about sex?

• 8:39Speaker 00

  Well, it taught me that I am who I've always been inside myself and that no one can take away who I am and my power and my sovereignty. I've learned that one can move through and heal from trauma and that it takes both talk therapy and empathy from someone as well as somatic release, physical body release, and that often our greatest wound can become our greatest gift, which is what that trauma did for me.

• 9:17Steven Bartlett?

  The trauma itself, what did that traumatic experience convince you that sex was or wasn't?

• 9:24Speaker 00

  I always liked sex and I refused to let that trauma hurt my sex life. But the problem was that I ended up doing something called dissociating during intimacy. And so if you kind of leave the scene emotionally and you're just there physically, you really don't get that thing, that heart connection. You don't find your humanity in your lover. You can't really touch source through your connection.

• 9:52Steven Bartlett?

  Can you explain that to me, dissociation? Because I think I've heard people tell me privately that that's the issue that they had in their sex life for many, many years, that they were basically disassociated from it. What is that?

• 10:04Speaker 00

  It's where you kind of, you just check out. You just, you go through the motions physically, but you're not emotionally there. It's protection against being hurt again. So, once I learned that that's what I was doing, my husband would help me, Tim would help me. Come back to him, come back to him, come back to him. And then we started going to sex workshops. We went beyond therapy and we started going to sex workshops. And we learned how to have sex. And by sex, I don't necessarily just mean intercourse. We learned all kinds of things. We went to tantra workshops. We went to sex, love and intimacy from the Human Awareness Institute. We did ecstatic loving.

• 10:49Speaker 00

  We did orgasmic meditation. We did all kinds of things. And it just lit our sex life on fire. Once we got some skills, we were the blind leading the blind. Everybody's the blind leading the blind. Everybody. We don't see any good examples of heart connected, passionate lovemaking. We don't see them in film and the movies. We don't see them in pornography. All of that is

• 11:17Speaker 00

  male patriarchal, religiously repressed styles of sex. Rather than female focused, heart connected, blissful, slow, pleasurable sex, highly orgasmic sex. So

• 11:40Speaker 00

  I think what what happened for us was we had such good sex so easily. Once someone told us what to do, that we said, oh, well, he's already, you know, sending MP3s all over the internet. And I'm already sending video all over the internet with cable modems. Why don't we bring all these courses online? Because very few people are going to go to a sex workshop. Number one, it costs money. Number two, you have to be able to do it. Number three, it's scary. It's really scary to take off all your clothes and go to a sex workshop and do hands on techniques in a room full of sweaty people. You know, there's a lot to it, right?

• 12:17Speaker 00

  And so we said, why don't we put this on the internet? Because that's what we're good at. Let's put programs on the internet that people can access from anywhere in the world and learn how to make love together. Learn orgasm techniques and communication skills and pleasuring, how the body works in ways that will take them to places they never even imagined were possible.

• 12:38Steven Bartlett?

  Zooming in on that moment where you and Tim are struggling in the bedroom.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:41Steven Bartlett?

  How long had it been since you you'd had sex? Or how often were you having sex at that point?

• 12:46Speaker 00

  Well, it petered out over time. So when we first met, we had great new relationship energy. We were having sex, but it was it was the kind of sex that I would call these days, grab a boob and stick it in. Very intercourse focused.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  I know, exactly, like

• 13:09Speaker 00

  And, you know, I love intercourse. I teach intercourse skills because what you see modeled is really, oh, man, it's like kindergarten, what you see out in the market, out in the world. And so how do you have this massively, exquisitely orgasmic, mutually pleasurable intercourse? You just need to learn a couple of things. That's the great thing about sex. It's like, have you ever heard that phrase, "A little hinge that swings a big door"? It's like, it's like an example of leverage, right? One little hinge and a giant door, and how does that little hinge swing that giant door?

• 13:54Speaker 00

  That's what sex actually is, if somebody tells you what to do. Because, I mean, my operating system and your operating system are like everybody's operating systems, right? The human body works the way the human body does. And so, women who are walking around going, "I'm broke and I can't have an orgasm from intercourse", and her husband's like, "Well, I guess you can't, but we're still gonna have intercourse anyway." I say to them, "Yes, you can. You just need to learn how. You just need to cross the gasm chasm, close that orgasm gap." And so, if I can get more people to understand that if something isn't good, that they just haven't had it good yet, that's, I think, one of the biggest messages I can give to your audiences.

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Just keep learning, keep learning new skills. But, don't miss all the other things. I'll give you an example of something in sex that really chaps my lips. And that is this idea that there's foreplay and sex. That comes right out of religious repression. Because sex is for procreation only, so the only thing matters is sex. And sex is intercourse. Heck, no. Sex is everything. Sex is a hot make out. Sex is rubbing our bodies together. Sex is words of appreciation, adoration, encouragement. It's languorous kissing. It's stroking each other. It's oral pleasuring. It's intercourse.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  It's playing with toys. It's sex in new locations. It's, you know, filming yourselves and watching it while you're holding each other later and going, "Oh, you know what the best moment for me was?" "No, tell me." "The best moment for me was XYZ." And you're like, "Are you kidding? That was your best moment?" "Yeah, what was your best moment?" "My best moment?" I mean, those are the things that make sex great, that make you want to have it again.

• 15:49Steven Bartlett?

  In that moment when you and Tim hadn't been having sex, you, sex had completely dried up.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  I really avoided him as much as I possibly could. I was giving him what I now call mercy sex.

• 16:00Steven Bartlett?

  And what is that mercy sex?

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Well, it's like, well, he's gonna be a miserable man if I don't throw him a bone once in a while.

• 16:08Steven Bartlett?

  And how often was once in a while?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Oh, God, like, ah, a couple of times a month at the worst. Yeah.

• 16:16Steven Bartlett?

  Couple of times a month at the worst, so once every other week?

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, like every week or 10 days, I'd be like, "All right, I gotta do it again."

• 16:22Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you feel at the time about sex?

• 16:25Speaker 00

  Guilty. And he was like, "I wonder if I married a lesbian." Like, he just couldn't believe I didn't want to have sex.

• 16:31Steven Bartlett?

  But at the start of the relationship, you did?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:34Steven Bartlett?

  You were just kind of...

• 16:35Speaker 00

  The problem is the new relationship energy wears off. And when you have absolutely no skill, neither of you know what you're doing and it's not good for her, how long is she gonna wanna keep doing it? You know what's funny? I have, one of the programs that I wrote really early on is a program called Revive Her Drive. And it's a sneaky little name because guys will buy it. And I say to them, This program won't help you if sex has never been good. You need a therapist. But if sex used to be good, and now it's not, you can fix it. And so they buy it, thinking they're gonna revive her drive. They're gonna fix her. And then they're like, "Ooh, you sneaky little devil. You fixed me. It was me. I just was treating...

• 17:17Speaker 00

  I was like, trying to have sex with my wife, like, she's a dude. And now I understand what her body wants. And now I know what she needs for me. And she loves sex now." So that is very, very common.

• 17:34Steven Bartlett?

  But you had to fix your trauma as well in your situation.

• 17:37Speaker 00

  I did.

• 17:38Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you go about fixing that?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  I did a number of things. The first thing that I did was I worked with a sexual trauma therapist. And I also worked with someone who does more of a little bit of a different method called the circling method. And I also worked with some somatic therapists over the years. It was pretty quick for me. I'm very lucky. And I don't wanna say that it's as easy for other people as it is for me. I'm a fast changer. I have a lot of behavioral flexibility, and I'm very comfortable in discomfort. I'm very comfortable crossing a chasm,

• 18:23Speaker 00

  very comfortable in uncertainty. I think because I grew up in Silicon Valley, my career in my 20s and 30s was Silicon Valley. And it's always changing. It's always like, you know, "Oh, we're doing this now." You know, it's always a... So... And also, a lot of people have trouble because of their genetic SNPs, because they have serotonin pathways, where when they've experienced trauma, every time they think about it, it feels like a raw wound.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  They can't get over it because every time they think about it, it's like it's a fresh cut. Not, that's not me. So I was able to move through things. And mostly what helped me was being able to say, I remember one of the, one of the things I had to do was I had to write down every single sexual trauma, injustice, frustration, wound, hurt, pain that I'd ever experienced. And I thought, oh, this is really going to make me sick.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  And my therapist said, it won't. It won't, don't worry. Just get it out. I want you to come back on our next appointment. And I want you to tell me every single thing. I want to witness it. I want to know what you've been through. I want you to remember it all. And we're going to put it behind you. And that was very, very helpful for me. Finally, someone heard everything that I had gone through and all the things that had been done to me and all the injustices that had happened to me. And it really helped me move through it. But not, that's not the right therapy for any, everyone. People need different types of therapy. And remember, I'm not a therapist.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  So what I do is I deal in the, how do you have hot sex? Not in the, let me fix your problem. I had to fix my problems to learn about it. But once I did, I was like, tell, I want to know all about how to have the best sex that keeps getting better. What does that take? And that's been my decades of study.

• 20:34Steven Bartlett?

  How did you know you had a problem? And how did you know you had something that needed to be healed? And you, and it wasn't just a, you know, Tim's a little bit, I'm just not attracted to Tim anymore. Or maybe I just don't like sex. How did you know? How did you have the awareness to even go to a therapist?

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Because we thought there was something wrong with me.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  And so we went to a therapist. And she said, OK, well, tell me what your sex is like. And I started telling her and she said, OK. Let's unwind this, let's unpack this, let's heal all of this.

• 21:11Steven Bartlett?

  And how did you get to the point that you knew that the trauma is at the heart of many of these challenges?

• 21:17Speaker 00

  All she had to do was ask me what my sex life had been like and what I'd gone through. And I told her all the injustices and the horrible things that had happened to me, which are not unique. I, the thing about me is that I'm pretty much just like everybody else. I'm not special in any way. The only thing that's special about me is that I have the courage to talk about things that a lot of people don't. They feel embarrassed. That's just my, I don't know.

• 21:40Steven Bartlett?

  When you say sexual injustice and trauma, give me a, give me a menu of things that someone at home who's trying to understand if those things might have had an impact on their sex drive.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  Sure. It can be anything from

• 21:56Speaker 00

  never knowing how your parts work or what the names of them are, or understanding how your body works. It could be that you, that sex is bad or shaming. It could be, and this is something that many people struggle with. And that is, my parents never told me about sex and they never showed that they were sexual. I feel like I came from a very stoic, repressed family and it's impacted my sex life. And one of the things that I often have to say to people is, your mom and your dad did the best they could do.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  They didn't know anything, they were probably kids themselves. And they loved you, they just weren't equipped to help you with this. Not only that, but it's not really their job. Your sexuality and your sex life is your job. And when you take it on as something that's a part of what you have to learn, like the things you do for your career, or the things that you do to support your family. And when you put it in that bucket, and you let go of the victim mindset and the victim mentality, and you say, okay, what do I need to do? What is right? What is possible? Then you get into the fun parts. You can move through the trauma. So it could be abuse. It could be repression. It could be shame.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  It could be lack of knowledge, which lack of knowledge creates fear. Fear is the enemy of pleasure. So, once you start teaching people about their bodies, about pleasure, but we know that there's nature and there's nurture around sexuality, too. The nature is how my parts work versus your parts work. And I'd really like to talk to you about that, because I think that's one of those little hinges that swings big doors. Once you start to understand the difference between male and female arousal, you can begin to have much better sex together. Because when you don't understand, you're doing, you know, you know the golden rule, do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. That's what most people do in sex.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  They treat their partner the way they want to be treated. Instead of treating their partner the way their partner needs to be treated. That's the platinum rule.

• 24:15Steven Bartlett?

  So we've just got two more questions on this point before we move on to some of these real specific things we've been talking about. I read that Tim cheated on you at the time. He was having an affair.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  I don't even like that word.

• 24:26Steven Bartlett?

  Really?

• 24:26Speaker 00

  No, because I actually, I remember when I found out that Tim was having a relationship with a woman who was also in a sexless marriage. And we were in what was basically a sexless marriage at the time.

• 24:41Steven Bartlett?

  How did you find out?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  He told me. He came clean. And he told me. And I remember the shame.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  And I felt like it was my fault that I'd not been a good wife. When I look back at it, what I realized was that he was just trying to cope. He loved me and he loved our family. And he, he just wanted to feel pleasure and connection. And he wasn't getting that from me. And for some reason, it is just easier for women to give up their sexuality than for men generally. I want to say one thing about everything I'm going to say on your show. And that is that sex is a bell curve. There are people at one end of the spectrum and the other.

• 25:32Speaker 00

  But I'm almost always just talking to the big bell curve in the middle. The average dude and his lady. That's, that's where my sweet spot is. So when he, when he was having that affair, all he was trying to do was stay in the marriage and not be miserable. And once I got right with that and I realized he didn't do anything to me. And I didn't even look at it. I don't even look at it as cheating. I literally look at it as that man was still trying to stay married to me. He loved me. And so it was, it was our mutual problem, which was a lack of knowledge. He didn't understand how my body worked. I didn't understand how my body worked. Once we learned that, we learned technique and I was able to stay present and connected

• 26:14Speaker 00

  with him and not leave my body in worry that something bad was going to happen. When it started to be pleasurable, instead of me just servicing my husband.

• 26:25Steven Bartlett?

  Did you separate when he told you that or did you stay together?

• 26:28Speaker 00

  Well, there was a moment where in the beginning, when he told me that he was seeing someone else, I thought, maybe it's best that we stop being together. And I remember that he had packed up his things and he was driving out of our house and I was standing at the doorway of my big, beautiful Silicon Valley mansion. In the height of my career, my little daughter, our little daughter, was standing there, six years old, and she had this little blankie that she loved. You know how kids love their blankies? And she had, it had this little soft satin border on it and she would rub it on her lip to kind of soothe herself. And she was holding my hand and she was rubbing

• 27:10Speaker 00

  that blanket on her lip. And daddy drove around to the side, to the front of the house and he stopped and he was looking out the window and he was waving goodbye. And she said, "But..." This gets me every time I do, every time I even think about this moment in my life. She's like, "But will you still be my daddy?" And I was like, "Oh, what am I doing? I love this guy. How did we get here? I can't ruin her. I can't... I could never do better than Sir Tim. I could never do better than him. He's an amazing human

• 27:50Speaker 00

  being. My God, Stephen, he's been the wind beneath my wings for more than half my life. I've known him for longer than I haven't now. He's the solid, you know, person I sit on top of that allows me to be out here in the world, giving people hope and instructions on how to have what I have, which is amazing." And so when I, when she said that, I said,

• 28:20Speaker 00

  "Turn around, come back, we gotta fix it." And I had seen all of our friends were getting divorced and it wasn't money because we were all making money. It was Silicon Valley in the dot-com era. And so he came back, we said, "What are we gonna do about it?" And we started therapy and then we started going to sex workshops. And within, I mean, months, it sorted itself out and we started having great sex.

• 28:46Steven Bartlett?

  Did your sex life change in terms of the dynamics of it? Are you in a monogamous relationship?

• 28:53Speaker 00

  We were in a monogamous relationship for many years, but we opened our relationship when we got really good in bed together. We were like, "Hey, this is so much fun. Let's have some sex with some other people."

• 29:07Speaker 00

  And so we did. And it was not without its challenges. It's never without its challenges when you, you know, when you go beyond the scope of monogamy. But I don't regret any of it, even the bad parts.

• 29:22Steven Bartlett?

  And what is that called? Because there's all these names for different relationship dynamics. Do you have a name for it?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Well, if you think about it as a tree, there's it's non-monogamy is the tree. It could be called ethical non-monogamy or consensual non-monogamy. There's there's polyamory. There's open relationships. There's lifestyles and swingers and the pineapple people. There's, you know, all kinds of things. And then there's my latest favorite flavor, which is a kind of a new flavor. And that is because I've been in an open relationship with my husband for over two decades now. So for 20 years, 20 out of 33 years. We've been open longer than we've been closed. And we were shepherded by people who are now in their 70s and 80s, who are still in their open relationships. And they taught us a lot about what to do

• 30:09Speaker 00

  to keep ourselves safe, both physically and emotionally, which is something interesting. And the one that I'm enjoying right now is relationship anarchy.

• 30:22Steven Bartlett?

  That's what you call it?

• 30:23Speaker 00

  That's what people call some. Some people call it that. And that's one of the that's one of the branches on the tree of non-monogamy. And the thing that I want to say about non-monogamy, whatever flavor you like, is that two things. Number one, I'm not here to tell anyone that what I do is better than what they do. I am not a polyamorous proponent or any of those things. It's just what I do. But Steve, I mean, I'm a sexpert. I'm I stand up here telling you that I can teach you how to be better in bed than you are. If I only had one partner, how much could I know? Every single partner I've ever had,

• 31:07Speaker 00

  I've had them safely, using safe sex techniques, which I'd love to explain to you. And I've had so many incredible experiences.

• 31:20Steven Bartlett?

  Who initiates that conversation in your relationship? Because I think this is the first challenge in most relationships is figuring out like, how do you go about having that conversation with someone without them butting your head off potentially?

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Well, here's an interesting thing. One of the things that really helped us save our marriage, at the time that we went to the therapists and we went to the sex workshops, we did another thing. We did, one of our friends was a coach for Brad Blanton, and he wrote a book called Radical Honesty. And we said, Tim and I said, look, we just have to be totally honest with each other. We've been pussyfooting, sugarcoating, withholding, you know, for 12 years now, 14 years. We've got to be honest if we're going to save our marriage. And so we started the practice of telling the truth.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Because my God, when you start actually trying to tell the truth, you realize how societally embedded not telling the truth is.

• 32:24Steven Bartlett?

  What was the most painful truth he told you?

• 32:31Speaker 00

  Maybe just the one that he was with someone else. Might have been the worst one, and I felt so much shame about that, like I'd done something wrong. But nothing. It turns out the truth is juicy, exciting, interesting.

• 32:47Steven Bartlett?

  Offensive?

• 32:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 32:48Steven Bartlett?

  No?

• 32:49Speaker 00

  No. Because if it's said with love, if honesty doesn't have to be mean. Honesty is just your truth, your boundaries, your desires, your foibles, your, you know.

• 33:03Steven Bartlett?

  What's the most offensive truth? Like, someone turns to, my partner turns to me and goes, listen, you are out of shape and I'm just not feeling it.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  Yeah? Well, why wouldn't your partner turn to you and say, first of all, you're not, you're absolutely gorgeous.

• 33:17Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, thank you.

• 33:18Speaker 00

  But if in fact you feel like your partner is not taking care of themselves, it would be more kind to say, I'm worried about your health.

• 33:29Speaker 00

  I don't think you're taking care of yourself well enough. And I love you and I want you to do a better job. How can I support you? You know what? You can love me more fully if you know exactly who I am and where my boundaries and edges are. And you get to honor and respect those. Then you know you're loving me exactly the way I want you to love me.

• 33:52Steven Bartlett?

  Or I can decide I don't love you, I guess.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, you could decide you don't love me. Yeah, that's okay. Hey, I'm not for everyone. And I'm okay with that, too.

• 34:02Steven Bartlett?

  So how did you come to be polyamorous?

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Polyamorous, right. Well, we started to have experiences with people.

• 34:12Steven Bartlett?

  Was it your idea or his idea?

• 34:14Speaker 00

  It was our mutual idea because we had gone to workshops where we had experienced light with groups of people. Like, I remember one time I was at a workshop and there were four of us paired together. And Tim was in a different group. And we were doing like sensation play, where one person would lie down and receive sensation. And the other three people would give it to them. And at the same time that they were giving them sensation, like, oh, rubbing your feet, playing with your boobs, you know, whatever, kissing or stroking your hair, whatever. And then they would also give you an angel shower. They would tell, all at the same time, they would tell you things they loved about you, things that they thought were really attractive about you

• 34:59Speaker 00

  or things that they'd noticed about you. And when you get an angel shower from a group of people, you can't negate it. It goes in because there's so much kindness coming at you that you're defenseless against it. And so you kind of take it in instead of going, oh, no, no, that's not true, that's not true. That's what people are taught to do. It's like, one of my favorite games that I like to teach people is a game called Three Things I Love About You. And Tim and I have been playing it for decades now. And whenever I want, I say to him, can you tell me three things that you love about me? And I particularly like it when we start our love-making dates.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  Because I notice that I really need that reassurance that I'm loved and appreciated. And so I'll want him to tell me three things that he loves about me. And we have this little, the little part of our game is never say the same thing twice. So for decades, we've been telling each other what we love about each other and not repeating things. And when you really start to get good at offering up love and noticing what you love about someone,

• 36:13Speaker 00

  you're in love more. You're just in love with people more. You're in love instead of in judgment.

• 36:20Steven Bartlett?

  We reached out to some of our audience ahead of this conversation and we asked them to send us their questions.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 36:27Steven Bartlett?

  And then my team sat down with some of these individuals. We masked them through using some actors and got them to say, we got them to talk about some of the problems they have in their lives. This is the first time we've ever done this. So I wanted to play to you some of the challenges that they have. Especially, I'm going to play one that kind of overlaps with the experience you went through with Tim.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  My name is Eliza. I'm in my 40s. I'm a mother of two lovely little girls. And that big question I have is how can I find

• 37:06Speaker 04

  that intimacy again with someone that has just been so disconnected?

• 37:17Speaker 00

  So is she saying that her partner is disconnected? And she wants to find her way back to intimacy with her partner?

• 37:23Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to play you a few more from Eliza. Because I think this will help sort of fill the jigsaw puzzle a little bit. There's another one here.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Work, doctor's appointments. And yeah, we get very little time together, the two of us. And I think it's really easy to just pass like ships in the night. And it'd be nice to have a conversation that wasn't about what's for dinner or you know, what the kids have going on the next day. I really miss having real conversations. I don't remember the last time we had one.

• 38:16Steven Bartlett?

  Is that a familiar situation?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, especially during the time of children raising. You think about your sexuality in eras. Generally, your twenties, you don't know nothing from nothing and it's all new and exciting. And you know, you're just finding out what it's like and experimenting. In your thirties, you're, if you're going to have your children, that's typically when most people are having them now. And you know, all of a sudden, you have no sleep, you're exhausted. Those kids are just like, ha, draining you and you can barely keep up. And your relationship heads south, your sexual relationship heads south.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  By the time you're in your forties, you're like, wait a minute. I've got to fight for my sex life now. I mean, like, I can't let it go. You begin to realize that you've missed a lot and you want more. In your fifties, you think to yourself, oh, I better get it now because I'm going to get old. And in your sixties, you go, oh, I'm still alive and I did get some good sex and it is really good. And I'm looking forward to my seventies and my eighties too, you know? So if you keep your body in good shape.

• 39:35Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's quite a pertinent point because one of the things Eliza said

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:40Steven Bartlett?

  is this.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  I think one thing that I wasn't prepared for at all was how much my body was going to change.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  I mean, everything changed, like my...

• 39:58Speaker 04

  It got to the point where I

• 40:02Speaker 04

  didn't recognize, I don't recognize my own body anymore. I don't feel comfortable.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  My body doesn't feel like it's mine.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  And I've really fallen out of love with

• 40:22Speaker 04

  me and with my body.

• 40:24Speaker 00

  Estrogen is a molecule, a hormone of protection. Because women are prey and men are predators in the general scheme of things, we have to be very, very careful. And so estrogen protects us in many, many ways. And one of the ways that it does is it makes us judgmental, makes us judgy. And one of the ways that spills over is that we become judgy about ourselves and we become very judgy about our bodies. We have body image issues that we fight against. And she's...

• 40:56Speaker 00

  Eliza is probably beautiful, but she doesn't think she is. She thinks that she doesn't look good anymore. And then she thinks that makes her less desirable. Her husband likely is working very hard and kind of has thrown himself into work. And he's probably in overwhelm as well, trying to do all of this. And he feels disconnected from her. And so he's probably feeling pretty lost and he doesn't know how to get back to her either. He doesn't have the skills to do that. And one of the things that I often say to women especially is that sex is a mindfulness practice. You just have to keep bringing yourself back to connection, to your heart. You have to bring yourself back to your husband.

• 41:41Speaker 00

  Nobody cares what your body looks like. It's your cell bag. You've got 72 trillion cells. There they are. Take good care of them. You've got only so much time. Enjoy your life. When you're stressed and you're producing cortisol and adrenaline and you're exhausted, this is when you need to say, oh, I really need to have some good orgasms. I really need to be held by my husband.

• 42:07Steven Bartlett?

  On these body image issues, is it usually the person saying... They're unhappy with their own body? Or is it the partner saying they're unhappy with their partner's body?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  It's almost always the woman saying she doesn't think she looks good. And I would say the large majority of the partners say, she looks great to me. I picked her because I like the way she looks. She still looks good to me.

• 42:28Steven Bartlett?

  Is it ever the guy saying he doesn't like how he looks?

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Not that often. Because testosterone has rose colored lenses. Testosterone makes you the warrior, the single minded focus. You know how if a guy is doing something, you can't interrupt him with another thing because he's on the task? And women are multitaskers, their eyes and ears are on everything. That's the difference between testosterone and estrogen. And so he thinks he looks better than he does, and she thinks she looks worse than she does.

• 43:01Steven Bartlett?

  If they now feel like two ships passing in the night, as Eliza said in that video.

• 43:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:06Steven Bartlett?

  What is step one?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, step one is often just holding each other. One of the techniques, I have these two techniques that come from one of my books. One of my most popular books is a book called Sexual Soulmates. Because sexual soulmates are not out there waiting for you. You co-create your connection with your partner. And even if you've lost that connection, you can have many renaissance in your relationship throughout the years. You can come back together and it can be better than ever again. And there are two techniques out of that book that I think are kind of like a foundation. One of them is called the sexual soulmate pact.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  And that pact is an agreement between partners where I can say anything I want to you. And you're going to be happy I told you. And you're not going to take it as criticism or you did anything wrong. You're going to be hungry for me to tell you what I have an appetite for, what I want, how I'm feeling. Am I a kitty cat? Do you need to hold me in your arms? Do you need to pet me? Do you need to let me release and calm down and get some things off my chest? Do you just need to provide that holding?

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Or am I a lioness? Do I want you to ravish me? Do I want to be pounced on? Do you, I want you to carry me to the bedroom and throw me down on the bed and rip my clothes off and tell me how gorgeous I am and eat me up? We want those things in that range all the time. But what couples forget is to start with holding and being held. Because when we do that, we generate oxytocin. And the oxytocin is kind of like the antidote to all the cortisol we're pumping out constantly with the kids and the school and the stress and the job and the politics and the, you know, all this crazy stuff. We need to be held and to hold.

• 45:08Steven Bartlett?

  So step one, then, is have the conversation. And step two is to just hold, essentially, hold each other.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  You don't even need to have a conversation. You can just go crawl into your partner's arms and say, and this is something that I love to teach men. I love to teach men how to run a woman a menu of small offers. So the problem is that they're both feeling, Eliza and her husband are likely both, they're dissatisfied, they feel disconnected.

• 45:35Steven Bartlett?

  They're not speaking about it?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  They're not speaking about it. And she feels like we should be having sex, but we're not, right? It's the should, I should be having sex. And what is sex? Intercourse. Well, she's not turned on. She hasn't had sex in God knows how long. She's not ready to be penetrated. She needs to get warmed up. You know, it's very, very slow, the female arousal system. And it takes 15, 20, 30 minutes when it's been a long time between lovemaking sessions to get out of your head, into your body, calmed down. Because arousal, it's not, I'm gonna push your buttons and I'm gonna spin your dials, which is what guys try to do. They're like, I've got a goal.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  I gotta give her an orgasm. Let's go, I'm full speed ahead. Where in reality, it's, oh, I need to hold her. I need to grab her up in my big, muscly arms. And I need to just let her calm down and. Relax. Remember what she loved about you and how much she loves you and how, how good you smell and how good you feel and how safe she feels right in this moment.

• 46:47Steven Bartlett?

  You used the word should. Should is such a-

• 46:50Speaker 00

  What did I say?

• 46:51Steven Bartlett?

  Gross. When you were saying, "We should be having."

• 46:54Speaker 00

  Right.

• 46:55Steven Bartlett?

  How often, how much harm do you think should does? As in, when I say should, I really mean it's a social comparison. It's like an external comparison. I've watched this movie, I spoke to my friend, they're doing it this often, they're doing it like this, so we should be doing it like them. How much harm do you think that does?

• 47:12Speaker 00

  Ton.

• 47:12Steven Bartlett?

  I've seen it in all my relationships, I've seen-

• 47:14Speaker 00

  Guilt, guilt, guilt.

• 47:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, like the comparison to other people who are just not you. It can do so much harm and I, I think in my current relationship, we've basically banned comparison. So we've banned-

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Good.

• 47:25Steven Bartlett?

  -each other speaking about our unmet needs through the lens of other people or our past relationships.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Good.

• 47:31Steven Bartlett?

  And I think it really helps.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:33Steven Bartlett?

  You know?

• 47:33Speaker 00

  I do too. I think that if Eliza stopped feeling guilty and said, "Okay, I just, I'm just gonna start small." And if her husband, if she said to her husband, "I just wanna start small again, I just wanna, let's crawl and then walk and then run back to lovemaking when we can. Let's acknowledge that we're in the time of our relationship when the kids make it really hard. Let's acknowledge that we want to have more intimacy together and let's start with small offers." And then if he starts saying to her, "How about Thursday night? I bring home some Chinese. We get the kids in the bath, we get them in bed, we divide and conquer, we put them

• 48:18Speaker 00

  down, I'll go in, take a quick shower, I'll set up the bedroom, I'll set up the nest, I'll light a candle, I'll lay out some fresh towels, I'll get your favorite lube, I'll put on the sexy playlist that you like. And all I want you to do is relax. There's no pressure to do anything. I won't be mad if we don't have intercourse. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hold you, I'm gonna get my hands on you, I'm gonna rub whatever hurts, I'm gonna tell you how much I love you, I'm gonna snuggle you, I might kiss you if you wanna kiss me, we'll see how it goes. No pressure."

• 48:53Steven Bartlett?

  Wine. Why an impression?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  Because if she has pressure, then she's going to feel stressed. And if she feels stressed, she can't get into arousal. As soon as you take the pressure off and let her just see what happens, then her body will go into arousal and connection and feel safe and relaxed. And she'll start to let down and get that turn on going.

• 49:24Steven Bartlett?

  I guess the starting point then, as you said, is the communication part, right? Because you can't even get to that point if you're in a situation. I've been in that situation once in my sexual history where it was so awkward that, like it just gets, the awkwardness just compounds where you're not even speaking about something. And so you're getting in bed.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  It's a hot potato.

• 49:45Steven Bartlett?

  Laying in silence and, oh my god, he's thinking about it and I'm thinking about it.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Right, I hope you don't.

• 49:50Steven Bartlett?

  She's thinking about it and I hope he doesn't ask and I'll pretend to sleep. And all of that stuff, I've been there.

• 49:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:55Steven Bartlett?

  And really what broke it was the two things you said. The first thing was you've got to talk about it. And the second thing was removing the pressure.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 50:02Steven Bartlett?

  And the blame.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:03Steven Bartlett?

  And the judgment.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:05Steven Bartlett?

  And if you can get there, and I think much of the reason why people don't want to talk about it sometimes is because they might have a little bit of a risk that if they're honest about how they're feeling, then the other person might leave or they might be mad or they might not hang around long enough for you to fix it together. You know, and also you don't know how to fix it. So it's difficult sometimes in life to say, I've got a problem, but I have no idea what the solution is, you know?

• 50:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is one of the reasons that I like erotic playdates so much.

• 50:35Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Erotic playdates are so, all right, I've written hundreds of sex techniques. I've written dozens of communication skills.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  And what people really want, they don't necessarily just want a technique or a skill. They just want to have fun. They want erotic adventure. I just want to have fun having sex with you. I don't want it to be like, I'm going to be finding your, you know, G-spot or whatever. Like, that's fun. That's fun. That could be one of the things you want to do. That could be one of your erotic playdates. It's like, let's find our G-spot. Let's try this sex toy. Let's do a lingerie photo shoot. Let's have sex on the dining room table when the kids are away. Let's do whatever. When you start to think about your sexuality, not as, oh, we have to grab a boob and stick it in. We have to have intercourse. And when you move away from that and you take the pressure off,

• 51:32Speaker 00

  you have a lot more intercourse. Because you have, you start having fun. You start trying things. And when you try things, you have new relationship energy. Sex is an equation.

• 51:47Speaker 00

  It is two things. Good sex is, half of it is safety and security. I trust this person. They're not going to give me STIs. You know, they're, they're gonna, they're gonna be fun. I like them. They smell good. They taste good. You know, they're, they're gonna be good to have sex with. But if you, you just have that. Boring. You know, it's like, that's the death knell for your sex life is, when it's just safe. Boring, it sounds so boring. So, variety, novelty, erotic adventures, erotic playdates, learning new things together. When you have this seat,

• 52:32Speaker 00

  this foundation of trust and safety and good communication, I can say anything I want to you and you're gonna love me and you're gonna appreciate that I'm telling you what I need all the time. When you have that, and then you add all the novelty. Ooh, did you hear about that heated sex toy? Or that one that blows up in your vagina? Inflates? What's that like? Or, oh, let's find your P-spot. Or, let's try this penis ring. Or whatever it might be. Once you start doing those things, then, not only that, but you have something to look forward to. You're like, okay. So, one of the things that I like to offer people is, is understanding what's on your sex life bucket list.

• 53:14Speaker 00

  So what I did was I took forty-eight of my best sexy ideas and I made a sex life bucket list with all forty-eight of them. And then it's basically this little printout here. I'll just give you one.

• 53:27Steven Bartlett?

  For me?

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:30Steven Bartlett?

  Or for Tim?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Well, this is for you. So what's interesting about the sex life bucket list is that I give you a video and I give you a printout. And if you both do the printout and you watch the video and you go through and I tell you what all forty-eight ideas are. And then when you do that, you go, okay, well, these are my As. I definitely want to do a lingerie photo shoot with you. My Bs are, I mean, I'd find your P-spot with you and I'm happy to do it, but it wouldn't be like on my A-list.

• 53:59Steven Bartlett?

  Please do.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Your prostate, your P-spot.

• 54:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is that your bum?

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, up your bum.

• 54:04Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  And Cs are, it's not for me right now. Never say never, because as you mature, if you think about your sexual development like your personal development, it's just one more thing you're learning, you get better and better and you increment your skills. And so what you used to look at it and go, why would anybody want to be spanked? Now you're like, oh, my God, I want to be spanked.

• 54:26Steven Bartlett?

  I've been there in my, I've been there in my sexual history where I was with a partner and I remember first introducing the idea of using sex toys.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:35Steven Bartlett?

  And my partner responded at the time, many, many years ago, saying that, no, that's for fifty-year-old people. And I was like, what? And that was, I found it really disappointing because I thought, I was, I was in search of novelty in the bedroom. So I was looking to try new things and I'd heard of like my best friend was doing all sorts of like bondage and whips and stuff. So I was like, I'll get, I'll get involved in that.

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:55Steven Bartlett?

  And they just kind of shut it down.

• 54:57Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 54:58Steven Bartlett?

  And what is someone supposed to do in such a situation where they've proposed something which is in line with their sort of their sex language, but their partner has shut it down, dismissed it, mocked it, ridiculed it, whatever? What are they supposed to do?

• 55:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. First of all, I cannot wait to do my Susan's Sexy Show and Tell with you today because I have brought you some things that I've never shown anyone before. I have brand new things that no one's ever seen in the whole world for you today. So I'm excited about that. The second thing is that understanding that your girlfriend was afraid. She was just afraid. It was lack of knowledge makes fear. So how can you educate her? Say, you know, I think you'd really enjoy us playing with a toy together. You know, I'd love to be inside you while you have a toy on the outside. And I think you'd really enjoy it and it might give you some different kinds of orgasms.

• 55:54Speaker 00

  So why don't we have a date and I'll take you to a store and we can look at them.

• 55:59Steven Bartlett?

  And she goes, no, I'm not interested in that. I don't like it.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  Say, well, tell me what it is you don't like about it. Is it something where you think that it might do what? Replace? You'd think I'd be worried about being replaced.

• 56:12Steven Bartlett?

  I don't think it's good for us. I think that we're better doing it naturally. And I think that that's for people that are 50. It's what she said to me. It's a quote she said. I think that's for people that are 50.

• 56:22Speaker 00

  Well.

• 56:23Steven Bartlett?

  And we at the time must have been early twenties or something, so.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  I mean, I use an electric toothbrush and an oral irrigator and I drive a car and I have a mobile device and I use a laptop and I use all kinds of tools. So these are tools of pleasure. And all I think is that we might experiment with some fun things. But if the toys aren't of interest to you right now, let's talk about what else might be of interest. Let's do this sex life bucket list and see what does sound good to you. And let's just start with your A's. I'm perfectly willing to meet you where you are with the things that might be on your bucket list. Let's knock a few of those things off and try some fun new things together.

• 57:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting because as you were speaking, I was reflecting on that sentence that this former partner said many years ago about, I think it's for people that are 50. Because A, when I'm 50, I still want to be having the best sex of my life. I've spoken to 50 year olds and they're having a great time. But C, it also comes back to this idea of like should, which is again a comparative measure. I don't, you know, like this expectation and this how stereotypes can be so corrosive for like sexual exploration and openness. The other thing I was thinking about is what if you want to try something with your partner? You have a fantasy and.

• 57:46Steven Bartlett?

  It is opposed to their fantasy. So like, I, I think we talk about love languages a lot, but what about like sex languages? Could you, could you, is it possible to have the opposite sex language to your partner? For example, you might wanna be, um, you might wanna feel really safe, but your partner wants to tie you up and dominate.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:11Steven Bartlett?

  And that's like, and that's, maybe that's their thing.

• 58:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:14Steven Bartlett?

  And you, but you wanna be really, you wanna feel really safe, so that's like diametrically opposed.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. So there's a couple of things. The first is that, uh, Jaya's erotic blueprints are a good place to start. She's come up with five different archetypes, uh, sexual archetypes. And I think that's wonderful, but it's very similar also to the, um, love languages, where it's like, well, Steve, I want you to love me in all five ways, like making me think I have a love language. It's also, starting with the erotic blueprint that you have is great, but maybe you are really enjoying being passive, but then why not try and be a little switchy? Why not learn and become more confident in your sexuality?

• 59:02Speaker 00

  And learn how to take control? Or maybe you're the one that's always dominant and it's time for you to learn how to surrender. I think that you can start in one place with your comfort zone, but begin to learn more things so that you get out of your comfort zone and you start trying new things.

• 59:23Steven Bartlett?

  How often? You, you said, um, safety plus novelty equals desire.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 59:27Steven Bartlett?

  So the novelty part, I mean, if you live a hundred years, that's a lot of new ideas you're gonna need.

• 59:33Speaker 00

  I have not run out of ideas. As a matter of fact, Sir Tim, I joke that his like epitaph on his gravestone, which he's like, I don't even need a gravestone, I don't, I don't care about that. But I always joke that his epitaph is up for anything. Like, I can't come up with something that guy wouldn't be willing to try with me. And I keep coming up with stuff and he keeps being a yes. And it's really, really fun when you're with a partner like that or when the two of you have ideas. And a lot of times when we have a date, we'll sit down and, and, or if we have a date with a third person. So I have a boyfriend as well, and the three of us make love. And we'll get together for our date and we'll

• 1:00:18Steven Bartlett?

  And Tim watches that?

• 1:00:19Speaker 00

  No, we were all together. They're straight, but we all make love together. And we'll sit down and we'll be like, okay, well, what do you guys feel like? And they'll throw out some ideas and I'll throw out some ideas. And then we'll decide what we want to start with first. And then we'll come up with a game plan and then we'll start that game plan. But then I'll be like, oh, no, you know what I want to do? I want to do this instead. And they're like, okay, we'll do that instead. So you can just get to the point where you're so comfortable that you can listen to your animal. One of the reasons I use the word homo sapien when I talked to you earlier is that we can't forget that we are part of, if you think about the tree of life,

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  we're on the branch with the bonobos and the great apes. We are homo sapien. We are part of the great apes. And so we're an animal. We are subject to the vagaries of how much sugar we've eaten. Have we been drinking? Have we been, you know, have we been sad? Have we been stressed out, et cetera? Have we been working out or not? And so every time you enter into an experience together, every time you begin a lovemaking date, to not have some prescribed thing that you're going to do, but to see what your appetite, what your animal desires, what he or she is in the mood for. I'm the kitty cat, I'm the lioness. Where am I? I want to try a new toy.

• 1:01:44Speaker 00

  I want to have sex in a different location, whatever it might be. What am I in the mood for? What does she want?

• 1:01:51Steven Bartlett?

  I've got another question. So this is from a young man.

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:01:54Steven Bartlett?

  Who is a Diary of a Seer listener. And this is his situation.

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  I feel like

• 1:02:02Speaker 05

  when whenever I am having sex with someone, that she's not really having as good of a time as she's acting like. And the reason that I think so is because I only last like two or three minutes in bed. And I just don't think that that's enough time for her to, you know, for her to get off also. And this has been an issue dating back to my first relationship.

• 1:02:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is very, very common. So Kit, you are not alone. One in four men of all ages suffer from what some people call premature ejaculation or performance anxiety. But one of the things that I have been doing is working with Jim Benson. I publish his program called Multiorgasmic Lover for Men. And basically, what it does is it helps men attain something called ejaculatory choice. And that is essentially you get to ejaculate when you want to, not because you can't help it. So for the guys that are coming too fast, it slows them down.

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  It's essentially a technique called the ME breath, M E. And it is a way to use three things in your body. It's a body-based technique. It's very similar to like learning how to swing a golf club or learning how to drive a car. Where you, you know, when you're driving a car, you're gassing, you're braking, you're looking in the rearview mirror, you're looking out the front, you're steering, you might even be shifting.

• 1:03:46Speaker 00

  And golf swing, you know, you're setting it up, you get the head tilted right, you're doing your swing, your pullback and all these kinds of things. The ME breath uses three things. It uses a squeeze of the PC muscle, the pubococcygeus muscle. It's like the Kegeli area. It uses a breath that is called a cool draw. This comes from Daoist techniques for semen retention, but it's not a semen retention technique, but it leverages that. And it uses what we call a thrust or a pelvic rock to relax guys. Guys end up often with intercourse, kind of doing like, like a piston. They think about the vagina as like an inside out penis

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  and it's just this friction that's supposed to feel good to her. The vagina is a vast cavern of pleasure. It is not an inside out penis and it likes all kinds of other things. But when they end up with that friction. And they're stiff and they're not relaxed. It accelerates ejaculation. So when they learn the squeeze, the breathe and the thrust, and they do them during masturbation, often men who come before they want to are suffering from kind of almost training themselves to come too fast. Like they've masturbated in ways that, you know, gets them off quickly. Often they don't have privacy or, you know,

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  they're just, they just don't have leisurely time for masturbation. So you practice the me breath during masturbation and it teaches your body to gas and break your arousal so you can slow down. And the other component is the mental component, which is that you get really nervous. You're gonna do it again and then that makes you do it again. And so there are some somatic techniques that allow you to be present right here, right now. Because a lot of guys, guys say to me all the time, "I don't really care about my own pleasure. I'm just in it for her." And it's like, well, that's a lot of pressure for her, dude. It would be nice if you showed your pleasure too.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Like always just trying to make her have an orgasm is not really what you want to do either. You need to get out of your head and into your body. You gotta slow down. You gotta get present. Because if you're thinking about something that happened in the past, "Oh, I'm gonna come too fast again." Or, "Oh, my God, what if I come too fast?" You're not with me. And so if he stops trying to make her have fun, if he stops worrying, he practices the me breath at home. And then when he's making love to her, he knows how to breathe and rock his hips. And by the way, that pelvic rock feels really good and intercourse for her. So that's nice, too.

• 1:06:39Steven Bartlett?

  If I was to try and relate to our friend here, Kit. I think for the first sort of season of my sexual journey, I thought of sex as this thing where you kind of climb on. And it needs to be like as quick as you can. And in fact,

• 1:06:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Steven Bartlett?

  Because of, because you watch pornography, when you're young, you think that

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:06:59Steven Bartlett?

  The faster and harder you go,

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:07:00Steven Bartlett?

  The better the job you're doing.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, I know.

• 1:07:02Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I think in my wisdom, I've learnt that there's no rush. And also, you know, I get off by watching my partner get off. So this is where a lot of the things you have on this table come in because it wasn't until later in my sexual journey that I started using these kind of things, these toys

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:20Steven Bartlett?

  that you've brought. I mean, you've brought seven hundred and twenty of them, but I recognize a couple of them.

• 1:07:26Steven Bartlett?

  Which ones are like a fan favorite? If you're a guy and you're looking to pleasure your partner, which one of these is like, you know, easy money is like, is gonna hit the spot?

• 1:07:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, there's a couple of different ones. One of the things that I think is really important is yoni massage. Do you know what a yoni is?

• 1:07:44Steven Bartlett?

  I do.

• 1:07:45Speaker 00

  Good for you.

• 1:07:46Steven Bartlett?

  Because my

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  A plus student.

• 1:07:47Steven Bartlett?

  My partner has told me what yoni massages are and she was in Bali for many years doing, she's done tantra training and I've been with her and stuff. So yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  Great.

• 1:07:57Steven Bartlett?

  Yoni means vagina.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  It really means, you know, the vagina is just the internal cavern. And the vulva is just the external facing tissue.

• 1:08:09Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:08:10Speaker 00

  Like the outside and the inside. And so vagina is not technically accurate and vulva is not technically accurate. The whole thing.

• 1:08:16Steven Bartlett?

  I think of a vagina as the whole thing.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  Right, but it's not because the vagina is just the internal. So I like the word yoni because it's comprehensive. And it's also reverential.

• 1:08:30Steven Bartlett?

  Which means?

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  It means that you are not looking at it as like, this is just a thing that I'm sticking my penis in. This is actually connected to this woman. This is her, the seat of her passion. This is the seat of her creativity. This is, she is a goddess and I will pleasure every part of her. And so I think that's the number one thing that's important to, when I, when I use the word yoni, I'm really thinking about it in a very loving, gentle, kind and pleasurable perspective. And so if you want to do a good job for a yoni, the best thing that you can do is give it a massage before you make love to it.

• 1:09:15Speaker 00

  And so toys that I would recommend for that are lay on toys. This is a pretty burgeoning category of toys. And I think about them as tools. I don't even think they're toys. I feel like toys is like, okay, yeah, that's fine, but they're tools.

• 1:09:32Steven Bartlett?

  What's a lay on toy?

• 1:09:34Speaker 00

  So here are two lay on tools. This is called the Pulse Queen, and this one actually has a vibrating plate. Let me turn it on for you. Actually, you'd probably figure it out right away. Hold the middle button down for a minute and it'll go on. There you go. This pulse plate technology actually penetrates the vulva, the outside of her yoni. And it feels great on the clitoral structures. It feels great on the moms.

• 1:10:01Steven Bartlett?

  It's good for headaches.

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  It feels great on the outer labia and the inner labia and the vestibule. So what it does.

• 1:10:09Steven Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, it'll, there's plenty of power. Here's another one. That's called the Vibe, and that's also a lay on tool. And they send penetrating, pulsating pleasure into the yoni. And what's nice about that is that, here's my banana. So if you imagine this banana is a penis, that's pretty easy. You can do that. And half of your penis sticks out of your body and half of it actually goes down and in towards your testicles. So it's a double, almost double what you see sticking out, fully erect is twice that size. And inside it is erectile tissue, spongy tissue. And that spongy tissue holds blood.

• 1:10:56Speaker 00

  So remember when I was talking about being held and holding and how women need to get out of their head? And they need to slow down?

• 1:11:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:05Speaker 00

  If, a lot of guys say to me, what's the number one sex technique I need to know? And I'm like, okay, well, there's a lot of them. But the number one sex technique you need to know is slow down. Turn around and come back and get us because you're ready to go. And we're not because your erection happens in a minute or two. You can usually get a hard on because this spongy tissue in your penis has these three straight shoots and the blood runs right in there. You see the boob and you get an erection. Boom. But not a female body. A female body has the same amount of erectile tissue as is inside your penis only. And I'm doing a little demo here. If you're listening to us, I'm stretching this erectile tissue from the penis into

• 1:11:50Speaker 00

  this little teardrop shape. The vagina is in here and the urethral canal, which is what's called the G-spot, but it's not a spot, it's a long tube. So here is the vagina. It is wrapped in the same amount of erectile tissue that's in your penis, but it's in these little arms, little legs, little shaft, little sponge, little sponge. And so it takes about 20 minutes for her to achieve her clitoral erection.

• 1:12:18Steven Bartlett?

  So we'll start with her first then.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  Right. So Yoni massages are fantastic because you're going to get that blood flowing into her vulva so that all this tissue gets nice and plump so she gets an erection. Because how does sex feel if you're flaccid?

• 1:12:36Steven Bartlett?

  Not great.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  It feels great when you're erect. And that's because it has more surface area that sends more signals to your biggest sex organ, your

• 1:12:47Steven Bartlett?

  Right.

• 1:12:48Speaker 00

  Your brain. And so when women are rushed for sex, which is, has been almost all the time because everything you see in the movies, what is it? What's the typical movie scene? We get together, we kiss, you rip off my shirt, my bra is still on, you haven't even touched my boobs, which are one of the three, not you, you're, you're perfect, but you know, he hasn't even touched her boobs and he's ripped her pants off and he's plunged inside her. She's not ready. She doesn't have a lady boner. She's not ready to go. That tissue needs to be filled up with blood so that it feels as good to her so it sends the signals to her brain. So all those women who are like, I'm just the kind of woman who can't have an orgasm from intercourse.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  I'm like, "Uh, girl, yeah, you can. You can basically have orgasms the entire time you're having intercourse if you get enough pleasuring before you're penetrated."

• 1:13:45Steven Bartlett?

  You said there's multiple types of orgasms.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Twenty.

• 1:13:48Steven Bartlett?

  Twenty different types.

• 1:13:49Speaker 00

  Twenty plus. One is wild card because I'm always leaving opportunity open for more orgasms.

• 1:13:55Steven Bartlett?

  I read this quantum orgasm.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, quantum orgasm, yeah.

• 1:13:58Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 1:13:59Speaker 00

  So...

• 1:13:59Steven Bartlett?

  That sounds nice.

• 1:14:00Speaker 00

  Of the 20 kinds of orgasms, there are locations to touch. Clital, vaginal, anal, breast gasms, nipple gasms, throat gasms, et cetera. And then there are techniques to use. So for female ejaculation, which all women can do, there are very specific techniques that work and it's not what you see on porn. And then there's expanded orgasm techniques as well. And an expanded orgasm, or like a quantum gasm, is this. So... And then there are tools of desire. So there's three different types of orgasm. I'll finish that sentence.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  So there's locations to touch, techniques to use, and tools or objects of desire. Because who's to say that that crop that spanks your bottom isn't an object of desire to give you orgasms? It is too. But the quantum gasm... So a regular orgasm is, okay, it's very similar to what men think about an orgasm being. Like, I'm gonna... And this is like the 1960s, you know, Masters and Johnson style. Almost 80 years ago, we have moved on from this style of orgasm. This is just one kind. But it's the...

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  And you have the orgasm. That's a one and done. And often, women who say, or, and a lot of men complain about this to me. After she has an orgasm, she doesn't want me to touch her. It's over. She's done. And I'm like, you're driving her too hard. You haven't given her enough engorgement. If you go slower, she'll be able to have multiple orgasms. Because you haven't driven her nervous system so hard to get the first one done. So, slow down, lighter touch, more engorgement, more foreplay, make out, play with her boobs, stroke her body, tell her she's beautiful, all of these things. And then she can move into multiple orgasms.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  She can do that, right? But then, there's extended orgasms. So, this is where she starts being able to sit in sensation. And this is back to sex as a mindfulness practice. Now, she's right there. She's in the orgasm. And now, she's like,

• 1:16:37Speaker 00

  That's a sound, that's a grovel, please.

• 1:16:40Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I recognize that.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Right? That's an extended orgasm. Now, she's taken that moment of time, and she's stretched it out like taffy, right? So, now, she's in the orgasm, right? So, she's starting to ride a big wave. But then, there's an expanded orgasm. And that's, that's the king, the queen of orgasms. And that is, now, I'm a big wave rider. You're towing me out. You're stroking me. You're pleasuring me. It's feeling good. You get me up in that wave, and I'm riding that wave. And I just ride and ride and ride and ride that wave and you tow me back out. And a big set just came in. And now you tow me into a bigger wave.

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  It's more intense. It lasts even longer. And I am just coming and coming and coming. And you just keep delivering. And you're delivering it to me with the lightest of touch. Because now I'm so good at orgasming that all you barely have to do is stroke a little finger on all that delicious, plump, juicy tissue that's now sending massive amounts of signals to my brain. And I am coming for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Now I'm gonna come with you for until I can't anymore. Let's see how long we can go.

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  And you start having orgasms that keep getting bigger and better until you're just tired. You need to stop. You have to get some water. You need to recover. And I remember when I was learning the expanded orgasm technique. This was from my mentor, Dr. Patty Taylor. And I called her one day when I had one of those hour-long orgasms with Tim. And I was like, let's see how long I can come, how hard I can come, and how much I can come. And so I came and came and came. And I thought, oh, man, I'm at this precipice. And I'm afraid to let go, like I'm riding the waves. But I, there's more and it's out there, but I'm afraid. And I called Patty and I was like, what do I do? And she goes, step off.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  Go, go out there. When I stepped off, I touched Source. I touched God. I felt Gaia. I felt my connection. I felt what connects us all. That's why sex is repressed. That's why people hold you away from sexuality and shame you. Because if you felt God in your lovemaking, why would you need to go to God in a church?

• 1:19:23Steven Bartlett?

  He's Ethan. He's far away from God.

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

  My girlfriend and I just moved in together about a year ago. We've been together for two years and we're looking down the barrel of a dry bedroom. And things have gotten real mechanical, especially in the last several months. And I'm just afraid of where it's gonna go. And I wanna help us.

• 1:19:45Speaker 00

  Good.

• 1:19:47Speaker 00

  It's not good for her. She's not enjoying it. He's bummed out. So he's probably doing. He probably, I mean, how can you blame anyone for not knowing when there's? My work's always censored. I teach passionate lovemaking techniques. I, I, I, but I can't advertise. I can't advertise expanded orgasm practice.

• 1:20:12Steven Bartlett?

  If you're trying to teach Ethan how to have an expanded orgasm with his partner?

• 1:20:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Steven Bartlett?

  What would, how'd you go about that?

• 1:20:18Speaker 00

  I'd just give him the program. It's 21 erotic play dates. You learn the, it's a five stroke technique. But I would say, start with sex life bucket list. Start with trying some toys. Start with yoni massages.

• 1:20:33Steven Bartlett?

  If you had to recommend one toy for Ethan then? Well, that's just gonna, she's, it's gonna blow her mind. Which one would you, which one is the favorite? Like of all these toys, there's, I mean, there's some more over there as well. What is, there's gotta be one that's most popular amongst women.

• 1:20:48Speaker 00

  It depends. I would say that if he wants to have partnered sex with her, then one could be a double vibrating penis ring that he could put on her and she could ride him. And then she could put her clitoral structure up against the, here, let me help you with it.

• 1:21:07Steven Bartlett?

  No, I've got it. Don't worry.

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  You do? Oh, good for you.

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  I'm like trying to open a bottle with it.

• 1:21:12Speaker 00

  I know. It's on the bottom. You have to sure know on the bottom, hold the button on the bottom and hold it for just a second and it'll go on.

• 1:21:17Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:21:18Speaker 00

  And there you go. And then you can press it again. Press the button at the top again.

• 1:21:20Steven Bartlett?

  At the top.

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm sorry, at the bottom. The same one. Press it again. There it goes on.

• 1:21:25Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, so that vibrates on their clitoris while it's attached to your penis?

• 1:21:28Speaker 00

  Yes, you're actually, your penis and your testicles go through there.

• 1:21:31Steven Bartlett?

  And your testicles?

• 1:21:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  All your junk goes through there. And then you get perineal pleasure while she gets clitoral pleasure. So you could try that or you could give her something like this. This is a little, this is called the digit. And this is like a little ring pop. So that if you have lube all over your hands, you don't lose it. It's, it's not hard to hold on to. And this'll dance like a little hummingbird on her clitoral structure while you're penetrating her.

• 1:21:56Steven Bartlett?

  That's a good idea. I love, I love this one. This one's great because sometimes.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  Give a girl a digit.

• 1:22:01Steven Bartlett?

  I'm messing around trying to hold on to this thing and it's sliding around. So that's fantastic. You've just gotta rest it there. That's fantastic.

• 1:22:06Speaker 00

  So I'd say.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  Introduce her to toys, but also start giving her yoni massages. Just really lay her down, get out the oil. I'd like to tell you about this. I brought these for you. So this is, um, foria, and this is my pleasure protocol. And there are three components to it. The first is this. Put a melt, have your partner put a melt inside her vagina. This is cocoa butter, botanicals.

• 1:22:40Steven Bartlett?

  For people that can't see, what have you just handed me?

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  I've handed you just a little, a little cocoa butter. It almost looks like a little fingertip of cocoa butter that goes up inside the vagina.

• 1:22:51Steven Bartlett?

  To me, it looks like a double sized tablet is inside here.

• 1:22:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's reasonable. And you can take, open it up and take one out. Yeah. Um, and the cocoa butter melts up in there with CBD and botanicals. There you go. Doesn't it smell good?

• 1:23:10Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my gosh, it's, it smells like, um, dark chocolate.

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  It's cocoa.

• 1:23:15Steven Bartlett?

  Ah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  Cocoa butter is from cacao. It is chocolate.

• 1:23:19Steven Bartlett?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:23:19Speaker 00

  It's the fat of chocolate. Which is an aphrodisiac, right? Doesn't it smell good?

• 1:23:26Steven Bartlett?

  It smells, it smells like cacao, yeah.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's so nice.

• 1:23:29Steven Bartlett?

  So she puts that inside her?

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Pops it right in. It melts almost immediately and it makes her vagina feel like velvety and luscious. And then this is the intimacy, this is the awaken arousal oil. So when you take this home for your girlfriend, I want you to just put a few drops in your hand. And then I want you to coat it on the outside, on the vulva, on her mons, her outer labia, her inner labia, her clitoral shaft and tip, and the vestibule, the inside between the two labia.

• 1:24:01Steven Bartlett?

  No wonder what I'm doing.

• 1:24:02Speaker 00

  Doesn't that smell so good? And then when you want more slide and glide, you just put as much of the sex oil on as you want. So you've got some, you've got the melt on the inside, you've got the arousal, the awakening, which is going to be like bing. It essentially makes your yoni, when you put the arousal oil on the awaken, it makes your yoni go. Mmm.

• 1:24:24Speaker 00

  Like that. It's so good. And then this is, oh, I need more slide. I need more glide. And then this I absolutely love. I, I used to think, I used to not really like my breasts. And I've got great boobs. And I didn't think I did because I'm a woman and we think there's something wrong with us. Everybody in the world wants to get their hands on my boobs, but I didn't think they would look good. It's ridiculous what we women do to ourselves. So when I discovered nipple gasms, I was like, oh, have I been missing out? And I love having orgasms from my breasts being pleasured. It is so nice.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  And I've done an A B split test, one nipple with and one nipple without this breast oil. And nipple A loves this breast oil. So when you play with your girlfriend, take little droppers full of this and have her, have her hold her boobs up and dribble it on her boobs and then spread it around and play with her breasts and nipples. Maybe while you're making out. Or, you know, a lot of times what I like to do is I like to have Tim lean up against the back of the bed, the headboard. And then I put a pillow on his belly and I lean back against him. And he gives me breast pleasuring with the breast oil.

• 1:25:49Speaker 00

  While I tell him about my day and we talk about things and we just connect with each other.

• 1:25:55Steven Bartlett?

  I think Kit had something to say about this.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Tell me.

• 1:25:57Speaker 05

  I mean, I probably need to get better at oral sex. I think oral sex is probably expected at this point. So I guess I, I would want to learn more about that. And I would want to learn more about like, this is going to sound so crazy, but like, what, like, what are you supposed to do with nipples?

• 1:26:16Speaker 05

  I don't know. I don't know any, any other way to say that, but it's like, you know, does it feel good to like, how long should I, should I like suck on them for a while? Or should I like tweak them or like what's, you know? It, it, it just seems like awkward. So I guess I'm more awkward than I should be. And I think if someone could tell me some, some things that I could do that are not awkward, then I would feel so much better about everything.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, everybody feels like that. This is just a process of learning what to do. And I'm so glad that he wants to and he's aware that he wants to learn some things. I think having great oral techniques is so good. Anybody that says to me, I just don't like oral sex. I'm like, uh, because you haven't had good oral sex. Oral sex is incredible, highly orgasmic, amazing all on its own. And a lot of people say, oh, I don't like 69, which is mutual oral pleasuring. And I'm like, they're like, I can't concentrate. I'm like, you don't have to concentrate. You can just sometimes be giving and sometimes be receiving. But being connected like that, being, think about the energy you're circulating

• 1:27:30Speaker 00

  and the pleasure that you're creating. Practice makes perfect with sex.

• 1:27:36Steven Bartlett?

  Chuck me that perfect Ted. One of the things that I think about all the time, because my life is quite hectic and busy, is how to manage my energy load. And as a podcaster, you kind of have to manage your energy in such a way that you can have these articulate conversations with experts on subjects you don't understand. And this is why Perfect Ted has become so important in my life. Because previously, when it came to energy products, I had to make a trade off that I wasn't happy with. Typically, if I wanted the energy, I had to deal with high sugar. I had to deal with jitters and crashes that come along with a lot of the mainstream energy products. And I also just had to tolerate the fact that if I want energy, I have to put up with a lot of artificial ingredients which my body didn't like. And that's why I invested in Perfect Ted and why they're one of the sponsors of this podcast. It has changed not just my life, but my entire team's life.

• 1:28:20Steven Bartlett?

  And for me, it's drastically improved my cognitive performance, but also my physical performance. So if you haven't tried Perfect Ted yet, you must have been living under a rock. Now is the time. You can find Perfect Ted at Tesco and Waitrose or online where you can enjoy 40% off with code DAILY40 at checkout. Head to perfectted.com.

• 1:28:39Steven Bartlett?

  And does the people's libidos drop when they go into menopause?

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  It depends on so many factors. Some people say that they're having the best sex of their life through menopause, and some people say that their libido flatlines. Everybody's so different. There's genetics, there's diets, there's belief systems, there's, you know, whether your sex life's already good or not, so many things.

• 1:29:06Steven Bartlett?

  Does low testosterone equal low libido typically?

• 1:29:08Speaker 00

  It can, yes.

• 1:29:10Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  And I want to explain libido, desire, and arousal, because they're really three different things, but people use them interchangeably. Libido is your health. How healthy are you? One of the most common things that happens to couples is someone becomes ill, emotionally, physically, or both. And then they can't have intercourse, so they think their sex life is over, and they stop even touching each other. And so what you have to do is you have to have that... I like to say I'm like a Timex watch. I can take a licking and keep on ticking, right? Anything that happens to me, I just find a way to fix it, work around it, take care of it. Like, I just don't want to succumb to old age and atrophy and all of those things.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  So I do all kinds of this sexual biohacking and these sexual regenerative therapies. And then desire is, how do you feel about yourself? Just like Eliza, where she feels like she's not desirable anymore. You have to really work with those body issues and love yourself and get over those things and bring yourself back to the pleasure and the connection and the joy that you create and not hold yourself up to some perfect thing. You've had kids, you're aging, okay? But that doesn't mean you can't have really great sex with your husband. It makes you both so, so happy and makes your kids happy, because they're growing up in a household where their parents aren't all stressed out and disconnected.

• 1:30:37Speaker 00

  They're growing up in a household where mommy and daddy are going to go in the other room, and you need to watch Barney for a while, or whatever. And then arousal is this notion that men get erect very quickly and they're ready to go. They'll drop trou at a moment's notice and have sex anywhere, anytime. And women need relaxation to begin to climb the arousal ladder. They need that blood flow to come in. That takes 20 or 30 minutes, depending on frequency of engorgement. And so we need that, too.

• 1:31:10Steven Bartlett?

  I wanted to ask another question for one of my listeners. It was a guy, and we had this question come in quite a lot from our audience.

• 1:31:19Speaker 00

  Good.

• 1:31:20Steven Bartlett?

  And it was about routine. Where is it? This one here. This is Ethan.

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's just, it's just, it's just the same thing over and over again. It's, we can, we can pretty much do one, maybe two, you know, positions. And, and yeah, it's gotta be nighttime bed.

• 1:31:44Speaker 06

  Same, same day, you know, every, every fucking Saturday. I finally get it. Yippee.

• 1:31:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can, I just feel the frustration in his voice. And it, it breaks my heart. And this is probably a woman who has one pathway that she's found to orgasm. And that's her comfortable pathway. And so she wants a sure thing. And she needs it to be the same every time so she can have that. So what I would say to him is that, again, his partner's working without a lot of knowledge. So she has much more fear. And so the control that she's putting on to her sex life, like it's only this way, it's only in the dark, it's only this day, it's, you know, that's her, that's

• 1:32:37Speaker 00

  her groove. She's found her groove. And that's fine. But it would be, what I would want her to know is that there's 20 kinds of orgasms. There's so many pathways. Try orgasmic cross-training.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  So start with the thing that you know works and then add something else in. And when you are working on that one thing that works and then you add the new thing in, let's try, let's try breast play. Okay, so I'm going to do what you want to do, but I'm also going to stimulate your breasts and nipples. I'm going to slowly trace my fingers. I'm going to put on some breast oil. I'm going to pleasure you. Pretty soon, that at first might not feel good to her. It might make her feel, this is, this is, if you touch a woman in, on her breasts, on her nipples, on her vulva, on her clitoris, in her opening to her vagina, which is called

• 1:33:35Speaker 00

  her entroidal sphincter, which is a little round muscle, inside her vagina, on her labia, all these different places, and you ask her, what do you feel? All different women will say basically four things. The first thing they'll say is, it feels, it hurts, it feels painful. It feels numb. I feel shame. Or I feel pleasure. All that's standing between the pain, the shame, the numbness, and the pleasure is orgasmic activation. It's being touched in a loving way that feels safe.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  So that you can begin to start those neural pathways to the brain. I'm back to the biggest sex organ again, which is, the third time you touched me in a loving way on my labia, it actually started to not feel numb. It started to feel good. Great, let's do it some more. And so when you bring all the sensation online, when you get all those corpuscles and nerve endings and all of that tissue thrumming with pleasure, your orgasms become so easy.

• 1:34:54Speaker 00

  So I would recommend for him, offer yoni massages without intercourse on a separate day of the week to begin to activate that tissue. So she's not so reliant on the pathway that works for her. And she begins to understand how beautiful her vulva is to him, how much he loves to give her pleasure, how to relax and stay in sensation. Because women have a lot of time staying in their body and staying in sensation. One of the number one things that a sex therapist will do is teach you how to stay in sensation and feel it. People are disconnected from their sensation.

• 1:35:37Steven Bartlett?

  Where does masturbation and pornography fit into all of this? Is that a good thing for a relationship? Is it a good thing to be doing it alone? Is it something that's full of shame? We had a conversation on this podcast recently about pornography and

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  I saw it, I listened to it.

• 1:35:50Steven Bartlett?

  one of the really surprising things that came off the back of it was women messaging me privately saying that we didn't talk about women who have an addiction to pornography.

• 1:36:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:03Steven Bartlett?

  Which was quite surprising to me.

• 1:36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, well.

• 1:36:05Steven Bartlett?

  Because it's not, it's not in keeping with the stereotype.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:36:08Steven Bartlett?

  So it hadn't, it hadn't crossed my mind.

• 1:36:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:09Steven Bartlett?

  But I wanted to give that a little bit of airtime because it's something I didn't talk about last time. Is that something, you know, how do you think about pornography and masturbation? Is it good, bad, indifferent, shameful?

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Oh, you're talking to the lady that likes heart-connected, passionate lovemaking. And most pornography is just friction. I like to transform friction into connection. And so I'm not against pornography. It's just not in my realm of what I like to help people with.

• 1:36:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:36:40Speaker 00

  Because I want to teach you how to have much better sex than the stuff you're seeing on porn.

• 1:36:46Steven Bartlett?

  What's the harm of the stuff we see on porn?

• 1:36:48Speaker 00

  I'm not saying that it's harmful. I'm just saying, why live someone else's agenda? Why not live your own agenda? Have your own life, have your own fantasies, have your own sexuality, have your own experiences.

• 1:37:00Steven Bartlett?

  Have you met a woman addicted to pornography?

• 1:37:02Speaker 00

  No, I have not.

• 1:37:03Steven Bartlett?

  Have you met a man addicted to pornography?

• 1:37:05Speaker 00

  Many.

• 1:37:08Speaker 00

  Yeah. And they have to go off it cold turkey and they go through withdrawal and it's friggin' hard. So I feel badly for people who do get addicted to it.

• 1:37:18Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it ruins the real thing?

• 1:37:20Speaker 00

  I do. Because I don't even want to watch it. First of all, Time Magazine had an article that said that they did a, there was a study that randomly sampled something like 340 clips of porn. And then they looked at them and they said 96% of them were degrading to women in some way. And that's what we're raising generations to think is sex. What I like to teach is passionate, erotic, sensual, heart-connected, ecstatic, orgasmic bliss.

• 1:37:59Steven Bartlett?

  What about masturbation without the pornography?

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  Masturbation is fantastic. It helps activate all of the tissue. It helps you have pleasure and fantasy. So my recommendation is fantasy, although there are some new, interesting things that are coming up too, like, for example, two of these toys that I want to show you. These are really interesting new technology. One of them heats up. So it gets warm. There's nothing better than sticking a nice, warm thing in your vagina. And I love that. Try this one. I don't know if you tried that one yet. These are from Satisfier. And this one, check this out, man. This is so interesting.

• 1:38:46Speaker 00

  This particular vibrator gets, it gets a balloon and it blows up. Look, I'm blowing it up.

• 1:38:57Steven Bartlett?

  For anyone that can't see, the end, it's like a normal vibrator, but the end is swelling.

• 1:39:01Speaker 00

  Look at that. And then, if you want to let it out, you just press it. Whoops. Uh oh.

• 1:39:09Speaker 00

  There it goes. Phew, and all the air goes out. If you put this inside your vagina, it feels incredible to have that blowing up inside there and filling up all that cavern of space. These now are app-connected, and you can listen to fantasy or music. And the music will take you on an orgasmic journey. The fantasies will read you stories in time with the vibrations and sensations that come from the devices. So if you want to watch pornography, do it. For me personally, I would rather you have a couple of hot lovers and great fun. And, you know, have... A lot of women are like, "Well, I don't have a boyfriend."

• 1:39:53Speaker 00

  And I'm like, "Well, take a lover." Why do you need someone who checks off all the boxes? Why not just get a hot side piece and have great sex with them? And they're like, "Oh, my God, I never thought of that." I'm like, "Girl, stick with me." And I recommend that for anyone. You don't have to wait for the be-all and end-all. You can just have great sex as long as you do STI testing, which is one of the last things I wanted to talk to you about. Oh, it's like I spilled a little oil on this. I'm sorry. This is so interesting because this is Basis DX. Now, I have to say, full disclosure in this particular thing, I'm on their... I'm their chief advocacy officer.

• 1:40:32Speaker 00

  So because I work with people who are in poly groups and who go to sex parties and, you know, they're... I'm encouraging people to have sex. I cannot do it without the caveat that one must do STI testing before they go any further than kissing or hands on a body. So you can keep a couple of STI kits at home. And then if you meet your hot lover, you can do your STI test. And when you get them back, then you know you're safe. Everything's OK. Because there's a lot of long-term downstream negative effects from getting STIs. It's not as simple as, oh, just take an antibiotic and you're done. Some of these things last forever,

• 1:41:16Speaker 00

  and you can never get rid of them.

• 1:41:18Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing that we haven't talked about? And really, there I'm asking for the audience. What is the question that they're probably sat home saying, "Steve, you didn't ask the bloody question, which I've got a huge issue with here at home in my bedroom with my love life, with my partner?"

• 1:41:34Speaker 00

  Well, we've talked a lot about how the body works and slowing down. We've talked a lot about creating your own experiences, that sex is a lifetime journey of pleasure and learning, that ignorance creates fear. So, learning solves that problem. And the best way to learn is to try new things. We've talked about so many different things that you can try. We've talked about the fact that if you have no path to orgasm, you can get one, then you can get two, then you can get three. By the way, all bodies can have over 20 kinds of orgasms. You can have as many orgasms as I can. We have the same parts, they're just an in and an out.

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  So, men think they have one ejaculatory orgasm and they're done, or maybe a short refractory period. But no, you have so many kinds of orgasms waiting to come out. They're all in there, waiting for you to let them exist in your life. So, we've talked about that.

• 1:42:35Steven Bartlett?

  How do you know when to leave? How do you know when to walk away?

• 1:42:40Speaker 00

  There are so many good sex therapists out there now, that you have to try that first before you leave. If you can afford to seek therapy and you have a mismatch in your style, desire, libido, whatever it might be, there's been trauma, there's, you know, whatever it might be.

• 1:43:04Steven Bartlett?

  What if they don't want to see one? What if you propose the idea and they say, "No, I'm not going to therapy"? Because talking about the bedroom to a total stranger is not the easiest of things to do. I think, I would say, especially for a man. I'm not saying just for men.

• 1:43:18Speaker 00

  Therapists are good at that, though. They know what they're doing. They can help you with that. They can open you to the discussions.

• 1:43:25Steven Bartlett?

  I went to see a therapist with my partner and we talked about a lot, a big range of things, and we still go to couples' therapy all the time. It's more of like a preventative measure, but it's just nice to have a dedicated space. And even in there, especially the first couple of times that I went, I was like, "I fucking hate this." I was like, it was embarrassing, it was like embarrassing. I didn't want to say anything. I was hoping she wasn't going to say anything.

• 1:43:49Steven Bartlett?

  Because you feel like the stranger's judging you, but also, you know.

• 1:43:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's it's not. But the reason why it's a good thing is because

• 1:44:03Steven Bartlett?

  in your relationship, knowing that there's a space where you're going to get to be honest with each other.

• 1:44:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Steven Bartlett?

  And you're going to get to vocalize it makes the other six point nine days, the other like the rest of the week, much more enjoyable because you know where the spaces for these things. You know when we're going to sit down and have the sort of dedicated conversation. So it makes it makes the rest of the relationship better. And also, I think men have a bias where we don't, we're not typically the ones to initiate these kinds of things. Sometimes we might seem like resentful or reserved, but over time, even though my partner initiates these kind of conversations about unmet needs and sex life and all these kinds of things.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:41Steven Bartlett?

  Over time and in hindsight, thank God she did.

• 1:44:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:45Steven Bartlett?

  Because she, I think women are sometimes better at like ringing the alarm.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  Well, we're generally more articulate. So men, you know, they how they say I'm a man of few words. But men are, men are like that. Partially it's nature and partially it's nurture. And so guys don't feel like they can, they feel like it's not a level playing field when they have to have a conversation about things with their female partner. They feel like she's going to be able to talk circles around him. So it is dangerous to navigate, which is why it's nice to have a therapist to help you navigate navigate really difficult issues.

• 1:45:19Steven Bartlett?

  And you know, that old phrase, happy wife, happy life.

• 1:45:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:22Steven Bartlett?

  It's a cliche, it's a stereotype, whatever, but there is a hint of truth in where that stereotype comes from. And I think it originates from this idea that men are quite simple in what they express that their needs are.

• 1:45:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:36Steven Bartlett?

  And women are more articulate, are more complex, they're more like.

• 1:45:42Steven Bartlett?

  Aware of unmet needs.

• 1:45:43Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:45:44Steven Bartlett?

  So they vocalise them more often, typically, not always. Which means that there's this dynamics formed, which the man sometimes thinks his job is just to keep her happy. And if I keep her happy, then we're happy.

• 1:45:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Steven Bartlett?

  But in hindsight, I've come to learn that it's a really good thing that she does sound the alarm. It's a really good thing that she is sensitive to unmet needs because unmet needs for her are probably unmet needs for me. I just can't see them yet.

• 1:46:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:09Steven Bartlett?

  I'm just unaware of it. So I'm just saying that to men who who might feel the same way that I've often felt where you're like, oh, my God, another problem or whatever. And I've just come to be so grateful for the fact that my partner is like very aware of these.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  Good early warning system.

• 1:46:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, very good. Because I would never. I'm so like busy and like, she's smiling, I'm fine.

• 1:46:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:46:28Steven Bartlett?

  But and you know this, you come to learn this because the things that when she sounds the alarm, the things that it ends up solving. Make the relationship better, makes me happier. And that's that's the goal at the end of the day. So, yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 00

  So reviewing everything we've talked about, the other thing we talked about was making her small offers, filling her up with orgasms, giving her yoni massages, slowing down. Those are very important, holding her. It makes you feel as good to hold your woman as it does for her to be held. That's a very symbiotic thing, not thinking that sex is just intercourse, right? Learning more skills, having more experiences together, doing your sex life bucket list, and keeping your body in good shape, right? So making sure you're getting your exercise and your sleep and all those things so you can go the distance and that sex keeps getting better your whole life long. So I think we've covered a lot of terrain.

• 1:47:25Steven Bartlett?

  Well, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that left for you, if you could go back and tell your 20 year old self something, something that would have made you happier, healthier, more successful, if you'd heard it, if it was whispered in your ear at 20 years old, what would you tell your 20 year old self?

• 1:47:48Speaker 00

  Play full fucking out. Never compromise all of your gifts and your talents. Never play small. It is not your job to make other people feel comfortable. Of course, you can bring your heart to everyone. But it is your job to live the best, most amazing life that you possibly can. I have a question for you.

• 1:48:12Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 1:48:14Speaker 00

  What are you gonna do differently now that I've had this conversation with you? What shifted for you?

• 1:48:19Steven Bartlett?

  There's quite a few things. I mean, so the first is I have this new, this new set of toys that I'm gonna be bringing home, which is interesting. I learned actually a lot about the limbic system, which we didn't actually talk about today from reading through your work, and the implications that it'll have for our relationship and our feeling of connection. I learned a lot about Tantra from reading through your work as well, which again, we didn't talk about today. I think for my audience, one of the things that I think is really critical is to remove pressure, which is, I remember a phase of my life where sex had become like the elephant in the room. Sorry, the lack of sex had become the evident elephant in the room,

• 1:49:01Steven Bartlett?

  and the pressure to fix it made it worse. So your approach to that is to schedule these like play dates.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  Not try to get sex.

• 1:49:11Steven Bartlett?

  Where there's no like penetrative intercourse guaranteed on the menu. And just to, just to start from the foundations of being connected. And then the other thing, of course, is just the importance of novelty in sex, which is something that, you know, I'm five, six years into my relationship now, so.

• 1:49:27Speaker 00

  It's done.

• 1:49:27Steven Bartlett?

  Something I think about a lot. I think about keeping it fresh and, and stuff like that. And I talk to my friends a lot about this a lot. I call it desire management, which is how you manage desire so it doesn't fade out. And I like a flame that needs the right amount of oxygen. Too much oxygen and it's gonna blow out, but just like the right amount of oxygen. When I say too much oxygen, I mean, what's, what's that in the analogy? That would be like, I guess it would be too much distance, like, and a lack of safety. Whereas just the right amount of oxygen is like the right amount of safety and right amount of novelty. The way I look at it is like if you took a candle and you put one of these like.

• 1:50:08Steven Bartlett?

  Things over it, it would go out. And that's okay, that in that analogy, what you've done there is there's no novelty, there's routine, you're there all the time, they see you when they wake up, you're just, you never leave the house, you're attached to each other. And then there's like, let a little bit of oxygen in, but not too much that it's going to blow out, which is, you know, keep yourself high desire, maybe, you know, go on work trips every once in a while, be away from each other, miss each other, go to new places, wear new things, bring home new toys.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39Steven Bartlett?

  You know, so I think about that a lot.

• 1:50:41Speaker 00

  Such a simple equation. I learned that from Dossie Eaton. She wrote The Ethical Slut, and she was the one that taught me, um, safety and variety equals desire.

• 1:50:56Steven Bartlett?

  Interesting.

• 1:50:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:50:57Steven Bartlett?

  I've come to, I've come to, come to learn that mainly from watching my friends. And my friends have taken all these different approaches. My one friend, he knows who he is, he listens to this and always sends me the clips. He like stifles a lot of the women that he ends up with.

• 1:51:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, insecurity.

• 1:51:09Steven Bartlett?

  He will move in, honestly, in two situations, he moved in with them on either the first or the second date.

• 1:51:16Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 1:51:16Steven Bartlett?

  The second date twice. And they became his girlfriends that lasted about a month. One of them lasted about two years. But just the fact that he's moving in on the second date was like problematic. In both situations, one of them was COVID, the other one was, she just lived in a faraway land, so she had to fly over. And then where's she gonna live? She, she lived with him. And then I've seen my other friends play it in other ways. I've seen the long distance and how that can fade out, if it's too far away.

• 1:51:39Speaker 00

  It's hard.

• 1:51:40Steven Bartlett?

  And I've always thought there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle there.

• 1:51:42Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 1:51:43Steven Bartlett?

  But again, this is subjective. It's probably different for me as it is for you and Tim. Thank you.

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  All right, sweetheart.

• 1:51:49Steven Bartlett?

  The work you're doing is helping a huge, huge amount of people sort of demystify these subjects, which are so stigmatized and seem to be so elusive and mysterious in so many people's lives. The reason why I have these conversations on the podcast and invite people like you on is because I'm trying to say the like quiet part out loud.

• 1:52:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05Steven Bartlett?

  This is going to be the diary of a CEO. And what would be in your diary, it wouldn't just, it wouldn't be P and L's and spreadsheets. It would be worries about erectile dysfunction. It would be, I'm not having sex with my partner. It would be, how do I improve my sex life? What the fuck do I do with nipples? Like it said, it would be these kinds of things. And that's what you do in your work, and you do it better than anybody. And it's, um,

• 1:52:23Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:52:24Steven Bartlett?

  Honestly, you're doing something really amazing for a lot of people. A lot of people you'll never even get to see. So on behalf of all of them and me, thank you for what you do.

• 1:52:29Speaker 00

  Thank you so much for giving me the light. So that I could help people. I appreciate that.

• 1:52:39Steven Bartlett?

  I'm going to let you into a little bit of a secret. And you're probably going to think that I'm a little bit weird for saying this, but our team are our team because we absolutely obsess about the smallest things, even with this podcast. When we're recording this podcast, we measure the CO2 levels in the studio because if it gets above a thousand parts per million, cognitive performance dips. This is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show, and that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding 1%, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins. It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes. So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it's truly beautiful. Inside, there's

• 1:53:23Steven Bartlett?

  lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interactive elements. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life. We're only going to do a limited run of these diaries. So if you want one for yourself, or for a friend, or for a colleague, or for your team, then head to thediary.com right now. I'll link it below.