YouSaid · the spoken record

Esther Perel

lines on the record: 106
first: 2024-07-17
most recent: 2024-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sometimes, of course, it is, but it's not a given, it's not a dogma. I think that actually holding back, I think making space for the other person, I think dealing with your own feelings, I think this idea that because I love you, I should be able to tell you everything. And if you don't tell me everything, you know, then maybe you're not close. And this telling as becoming almost like a bit of a I deserve to know. What are you thinking? What are you feeling? Why don't you want to tell me like no, those are invitations, those are not rites.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if you don't say everything, then you must be keeping a secret because the opposite of transparency is secrecy. And there is a complete loss of privacy. And this is true in the intimate realm of relationships, as it is true in many other sectors of our society. Privacy is at risk. And so people respond either with the other extremes. Yes, I do think that there can be too much sharing. It's not too much honesty, but it is too much sharing and the sharing is problematic when you think that that's the definition of honesty.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or because you just don't see the point of it because there's almost something slightly, almost aggressive about it a little bit. It's like, what am I supposed to do with all of this now? You feel better. You've unloaded. What about? Here, this notion that connects with that is also that intimacy is about saying everything. It's kind of wholesale sharing.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't beat around the bush. Get to the point. I mean, there are so many expressions in this culture that favor explicit statement versus more opaque communication that conflates the concept of the moral cure of honesty has to do with true telling and transparency. That's the definition. There are many cultures in which honesty means something very different. Honesty is not about, you know, laying it all out there. It's actually about thinking about what the consequences will be for the other person to live with the truth. It's not a confessional model. It's not rooted in Protestantism. So honesty is not about, I have to tell you everything I feel or everything I've done. It's about what will it be like for you to live with the consequences of knowing. And so you don't say certain things because you want to say face for the other person.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. But you see, I think that you want to, there are two different cultural systems here. When it comes to the polyamorous model in San Francisco, you know, it is a bit of a growing movement in the hotbeds of startup cultures like Silicon Valley because it's people who choose a lifestyle that has to do with an entrepreneurial mindset that aspires to greater freedom of choice, to authenticity and flexibility. And so there's a kind of a marriage between the community that lives there and the appeal of a more polyamorous life. But for me, the question of honesty is actually much broader than it extends way beyond. And I think, look, you live in the United States and America prides itself on being a pragmatic culture and as a pragmatic culture, it likes unvarnished directness and it has all kinds of expressions for conflating honesty with factual truth.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you do with the loss of desire? How important is sex anyway? Can the relationship sustain without sex? Can the relationship sustain with sex with others while having a relationship? What are the boundaries? I mean, this is the conversation of modern love. It's one of them anyway. There's a few, but this is one of the dominant conversations of modern love. So I don't know if I've answered you, but I hope I've kind of highlighted some of the flashpoints.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know the question is simply do people want to have a negotiation with themselves that is private and secretive or do people want to incorporate this as part of the conversation of couple making at this point? We're not meant to have desire for one person for life for 60 years. That is not how we were conceived, neither where we have a conceived of having 60 year relationships with the same person either for that matter. So we are left with a host of new questions about the nature of erotic desire given, first of all, that until very recently we didn't have sex in relationships just because of a desire. We had it for procreation and generally for women it was a marital duty. So sex that is rooted in free will for pleasure and connection just because we want it and with you and hopefully at the same time and so forth is a very new model and we are all grappling with it. Everybody is one”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In which monogamy may be more emotionally determined rather than just sexually determined, like gay couples have done forever. I think we need to loosen up the term, not totally trash it or not totally bind it, but suddenly untie it, you know, loosen it up and redefine it. Within that, it's a choice, monogamy. It's something you choose to practice when you keep it in the definition you want. And then the question is, what do people do with their toward a desires, with their other attractions? Definitely they have them. They can acknowledge them. They can have a relationship in which they negotiate with each other what to do with these other desires. They can hopefully not always interpret them as you're not enough, which is the most powerful reaction that people have today to that term. And the majority of people have pride.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's another consideration. And then there is, you know, maybe if we stop just looking at monogamy from the exclusivity model, because the exclusivity model is an economics model. Monogamy generally throughout history has been an imposition on women. It has not necessarily been a requirement for men. In fact, men practically had a license not to be. And they have had all kinds of theories to justify why they shouldn't have to be because we needed to know about paternity and about patrimony and lineage. So monogamy had nothing to do with love. It had everything to do with an economic system. That word has transformed since romanticism so much that at this point, I think that the conversation about monogamy should probably be less a conversation about sex and sexual boundaries and sexual exclusivity and more about the multiplicity of relationship configurations.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a model of sequential monogamy. We don't arrive monogamous to our relationships. We've had previous ones. So at this point, where does monogamy exist? In reality But not in your history and not in your fantasies”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that's one definition of monogamy because, you know, monogamy is a term that has continuously evolved in its meaning, right? I mean, for most of history, monogamy was one person for life. At this point, monogamy is one person at a time.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's the first one what does that mean? Is desire faded to degrade? Is the degradation of desire inevitable? And what does it mean? And how does one rekindle it? And can one rekindle it? And can you want what you already have, which is the fundamental question of desire? And then there is the second part to what you're asking, which is the question of monogamy. And when you say, I can do monogamy very well for a year, then you are defining monogamy by one criteria only, at least in the way I've understood the way you speak, is that you're defining monogamy as a sexual exclusivity.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. No, no, no. So mating in captivity for me was really a conversation on that very question that you just asked, right? People would come to me and they would say, we love each other very much. We have no sex or we love each other very much. Where is the desire, which was very different from the traditional model that you would normally learn in school, which was, of course, if there is no sex, people mustn't love each other because when one leads automatically to the other. And therefore, sexual problems are always the consequence of relationship problems. And you should fix the relationship and the sex will automatically follow. That was the premise. And I decided to question that premise because it didn't really work like that in my office. I saw people who got along much better and it still didn't change anything for the desire. And so I began to ask, what is the relationship between love and desire?”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what they want to reconnect with. And so then that metaphor that I talked before about not dead versus alive, survival versus revival, that's, you know, you can survive and have sex and have children, but you may feel dead. Whereas you can have an experience in which you feel utterly alive and you're in your 80s and you do whatever 80-year-old people do. It doesn't really matter because the force transcends the act. And that's for me the interest of working on eroticism. I work with people who want to feel alive.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And a wonderful connection and orgasms and all the legs and never touch anybody just because we can imagine it. And that imagination, his ability to transport ourselves outside of this moment that we are in into something completely different. That is the erotic Elon. And I am very interested in that because I work with people who come and complain about the loss of desire and the loss of that energy. And they want to reconnect with that force. And they don't know why they lose it and they confuse it with arousal and it has not much to do with that. And, you know, when people complain about the listlessness of their sex lives, they sometimes make them want more sex, but they always want better. And that better, when you analyze it with them, it's about that life force, that vitality, that vibrancy, that mystery, that imaginative play, that curiosity, curiosity is an essential ingredient of the erotic.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mystery, and that's why it becomes an antidote today. So that's why people often talk about it in spiritual terms, in religious terms. It has a transcending quality to it. It's really the more mystical meaning of the word erotic, Eros, Zohar, life force. It's really modernity that narrowed the meaning of eroticism to something that is more blatantly sexual rather than life force. But that life force often expressed through the sex takes on a whole other dimension. So for me, to understand that I wasn't just working on sexuality because I'm not interested in what people do, the act. You can do sex and feel nothing. Women have done sex and felt dead for centuries. It's really that other side of it. And that you don't have to do much of anything. Your own imagination, you know, we are the only ones who can have sex for hours, blissful sex.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Animals have sex, and we have the erotic. And the erotic is sexuality that is transformed by our human imagination. The erotic is the meaning that you attribute to sexuality. It's the poetics of sex. It's not nature, instinct, primary force. It's everything that gives it a meaning in a context. It's everything that turns sex not into an act, but into a place you go, not just something you do, but a place that you go. And that place that you go is a place where you connect with vibrancy, with aliveness, with renewal, with life force, with vitality.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I would probably say one thing for me that makes a difference is if they just say, you know, I've always wanted to be a therapist who works with sexuality and couples. No, but if they say in the way, if they reflect back something about me in which I recognize myself and it's a mirror that I like to look in, then I feel like they really get what I'm about and what I'm talking. They're not just projecting onto me. You know, that helps, then I feel also really understood. It's a variation of what you're describing in terms of the empathy. So I think it's similar. It's a different wording for something that's quite similar to what you described”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's a combination. I mean, what you just described for me, it's a combination between boldness and humility. You know, the borgness is, I'm going to do this. I've been reading, you've been listening to you, something in the way you say it strikes it right for me. But I don't expect it. I totally know what I'm asking you. And it would mean an enormous amount. You have no reason to do this. But if you were to do this, it could change my life. It would mean so much. It's not so much that I can say no or yes, it's that they really understand the vulnerability of the request. You feel that they are prepared for you to say no. And so if they were to hear a yes, it would mean so much. And I have been there. I remember, you know, I've been that person. So you can't write to me as if you already know everything. But at the same time, you have to be bold enough to want to say, what do I have to lose? What do I have to lose? And then they say sometimes, I have never written something like this.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's crazy, but not, you know, I think that mentors, I agree that sometimes it's kind of consultant geek for life, but sometimes it's just, you must have had authors or books or musicians, those that you read when you were young, that kind of really shaped you. And it's a very strange thing when suddenly you become a shaping force in someone else's life. For some reason, you speak to them. And I am always curious why me. Like, what is it that I say? Because other people talk about some of these things that touches you, that you would want to come here from far away countries just to meet with me. And on occasion, I'll go and have a cup of coffee with these people or, you know, a glass of wine. I have responded more than once just by the way they write the letter. It's all in how they write that nail to me.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he literally sends me to the other side of the Into the session And I thought, Oh, I'm no longer invisible, I exist. And that was the beginning. Then I worked with him for the next four years.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have to be really, you're not a cuckoo, you're not like just some loose screw, but you really show that I see you and I want your trajectory or I want to learn from your trajectory. After 10 weeks when you said you're out and I said, please, please. He said, you can be a fly on the wall. And I said, fine, I'll be a fly on the wall. I will melt in the wall. Let me be as invisible as can be. And then one day there was a couple that was there, a family, and it was actually a Holocaust survivor family working with the therapist behind the one-way mirror. That's how we were learning at the time. And then somehow, suddenly he looks at me and he says, you there in the back, don't you know something about this? He said, what would you do? You know, and then I spouted something out. And then he says, that's an interesting thought. Go tell them.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No visa. I mean, I came here with love and fresh water, really. And that's what I mean, street smart. It's like You know, refugee, go for it, knock at the doors, and if they say no, come back again at the third time, if you don't act crazy, they will understand that you are deeply motivated. And if you do it with somebody who did it too.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Classroom. I mean, I called. I said, I'm in New York, and so and so suggested that I commit with you. I would love to learn with you. I had nothing, no credentials. I had no reason to be there. Could I please? No, it was like, get my foot in the door. I like you. I would have done exactly what you did. I would have said, I'll do anything. I'll bring you coffee every morning. Can I just be here? Because I just needed my foot in the door. And then I can start thinking. And now what? And I admire the people who do that with me, I have to say. When they come and they fly and they write and they say, you have been reading you. I've been, you know, and then they show me not just I like you or I or I admire you, but also they say a few things that let me know that they get what I'm talking about. So I also feel deeply understood. And then I feel like, oh man, I was there. I was that 21 year old, you know, and I had no papers.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Argentinian. I mean, you know, you're anointed when you have studied with him. It's like studying with Freud, but a century later. I knocked at his door. I arrived to New York. I was here. I knew I have a year to be in New York. I knocked at his door and I said, can I come and observe? He looked at me like, who are you? And that's the story I'm going to tell tomorrow. Like at the time, you could still knock at somebody's door and say, I want to learn from you. You inspire me. And then he let me stay there 10 weeks. And then after 10 weeks, he said, that's it. That's about as much as one can learn from observing. You can go now. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. I have to, you know, please, please let me stay that candidate. And then he always says, okay, I entered through the window, you know.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Be fine as well, or both. I mean, it's an interesting question. I am the product of mentorship. This is true throughout. From Hebrew University to Cambridge, Massachusetts to studying with Salvador Minucciin, that's the name of this mentor. I have been mentored pretty much throughout, but even in my adolescent through my theater teacher and dance teacher, mainly because my parents could always help me with any of these things. They had zero reference to the world I lived in. I sought teachers, I sought mentors, I sought people who could help me integrate in Belgian life who could help me believe in myself as well, you know, guide me. My brother has definitely one of them. Every book I read was recommended by him. But I am totally the product of mentorship. It's like I sought them out one after the other. This man that I'm going to be commemorating tomorrow is a”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's interesting you're asking me today because I am going to Washington tomorrow to a big psychotherapy conference called the Psychotherapy Symposium. And I am doing an homage to my mentor, but the mentor from America, who is 95, and I have been asked to be one of three people to be the person to thank him. So I'm in the midst of this experience right now. to say to one of the most influential teachers of my life”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I thought if it's university, Hebrew University is a great university. The city is magnificent. And at the time, it was really a spectacular place and it was much more open than it is now. And I thought, what an adventure. I mean, I didn't need much explanation at that time. It didn't make sense and it made perfect sense.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It really was not at all a useful way of learning. And I had done that already for 12 years before. You know, I studied Latin, I studied Greek five, six hours a week. I mean, I have the whole classic education, humanistic education. And I taught Jerusalem was mysterious, mystical, beautiful, complex, you know, in the middle of these hotbeds of all religions. And we were going to Israel a lot with my family. It's not like it was a place I didn't know. And I thought it was the one place that I could leave to study abroad with my parents' blessing. So it was very, very easy. It's like for them, you know, you didn't come to study in America at that time. And I had a choice between, I was very passionate about theater. And my mother said, if you want to do theater, you stay in Belgium. And if you want to travel, then you have to go to university. I want you to have a structure.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had no judgment, and I just was welcoming of anybody who was willing to pick me up and take me in. I really saw the country in and out in ways that I wish my kids could have an experience like this, but I don't know that this is happening these days. And then I went to Jerusalem because I didn't want to study in Belgium. I didn't like the university system in Belgium. Why not? Why not? Because we have a system where you have to study a curriculum that is prepared by the teacher and you have to regurgitate it and study it rather by heart. And I thought it was a 19th century system.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So before I went to Jerusalem, I actually came to the States and I hitchhiked across the country for seven weeks in 1976, calculate. You know, in the bicentennial and at the time you could still hitchhike very freely. And I had one of the most formative experiences of my life because I saw America like I don't think I will ever see it again since I had zero reference.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“God. I wish it was different. I mean, yes, I'm sure it pushes me and stuff, but there must be a way to live without that constant fear like that. It prepares me very well for. I expect it. That's what I mean. I live with that expectation. It's just a matter of when, not a matter of if. But I think it creates a level of anxiety that I don't wish on anybody. No, I don't think it's normal. I think it's normal given the history I come from. I don't think it's a good way to live.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Act as if I'm fearless. Counterphobic means like I act like it doesn't, nothing, but like there's a lot of things I do that could be very scary sometimes to other people anyway. And I leave it as if I have no fear. Even today I was driving down my bike and I was thinking like last week it was filled with snow here. Why am I always just pushing the edge and seeing if I can get away with it? And the truth is I got on my bike in the snow and I realized there was no way I was going to be able to do this and I put the bike back. But I was thinking how many times I do things, thinking nothing's going to happen. And at the same time as I do it, I think at some point something bad is going to happen. It's that what I mean. It's like I live, you would think that I wouldn't do it if I think something bad can happen, it would stop me. But no, I do it. And at the same time, I think something bad's going to happen.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, I would say in two ways. First of all, I'm rather voracious in living. If there's one more experience I can have, one more thing I can discover, one more place I can travel to, one more conversation that could be interesting. I am quite voracious. Not because I'm insatiable, but because a part of me always says, who knows what will be tomorrow? You know, I don't live with that. There is always a tomorrow. I live with who knows if there will be a tomorrow. And that's very simple. And then the other thing I would say, that may be something that's not always so known about me, but I also live in a bit of what we call in my jargon a counterphobic way, which means I act as if I'm fearless, but I'm actually petrified with dread.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I understand what you mean. Needs to be able to trust in order to get aft from your lap and to run into the world and to explore and discover and play and be gone in their own space. And at the same time, it is the act of doing all of that and coming back to base and sitting themselves back on your lap. That reinforces the trust. I actually tend to think more in dialectic terms at both ends rather than either or. But I think It's a fantastic question, the question of trust, you know, does the act of trusting release the option, the possibilities to experience the vulnerability, or is the vulnerability of the unknown that you actually engage with ultimately what builds the trust?”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, for some people, it's like, do you need to know in order to taste or do you want to taste first and then be told what it was?”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That depends on your theory of trust. This is the big debate on trust theorists. Rachel Botsman will tell you that trust is an active engagement with the unknown. So that's one direction. And the other direction is that it is the actual experience of vulnerability that allows you to then trust. And it goes in both directions. It really, I don't think there is a definitive answer for that. And maybe it's not an either or, but it's a both end.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we are still human, we are able to procreate and we create legacy. And they didn't kill everything off. And so my parents, you know, they planted trees in all kinds of places in the world. They put plaques in the memory of all the other people of their families. My mother at one point received $10,000 in 1999. She received $10,000 from one of the factories of slave labor. And then decades later, she took the $10,000 and she went and planted an entire forest that had just burned and she replanted a forest because he was like a therming life with a sense of defiance. You didn't all die inside. And I think it's that energy, that life force that really, I think, defines, and this is true for my community, but I would apply this to any large scale trauma that communities experience. I don't think it's unique.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then I thought there is those who came back to life. And that's what led me actually to really want to explore what is eroticism. What is this antidote to death? How in the face of adversity do you continue to imagine yourself rising above it, connected to joy, to love, to pleasure, to beauty, to adventure, to mystery, to all of that? And those people, you know, it was very interesting. You had people who came together because they were the survivors of this camp and the survivors of that camp. And then you had people who came together for this kind of holiday or that kind of celebration. And they never discussed their experiences. It was all implicit, but they were together and they were charging ahead at life. You know, the first thing they did when they would come out of the camps, by the way, is have a child. Because I'm alone, you're alone. I have nothing. You have nothing. Let's get married and let's have children. Because if we have a child, then we know.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The curtains were pulled down. It was morbid. It was just, you know, you're not dead, but you're not celebrating life. You certainly are not enjoying because if you enjoy, then you are not being careful and you have guilt. You often have survival guilt. Why am I here and none of the others made it? And you are weighted down and the world is a dangerous place and you are not to trust anyone.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to life. And then as we were talking, it became very clear that when you reconnect with life, not just when you are surviving, but when you are living, it means that you're once again able to take risks, able to broach out, to go into the world, able to play because you cannot play if you are in a constant state of vigilance and guardedness and able to trust. And then I thought to myself, oh my God, this is so much what I saw in Antwerp. You know, I remember since my entire classroom with children of similar families that they were always two groups of families in my community. And then I decided that I would call this, there was one group that did not die and one group that came back to life. And the did not die, you could feel it when you went to their houses, you know, they often had plastics over the couches.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the third reason my mother always said is that she always thought that they wanted her to stay alive because if the others were not going to make it, they needed to be at least someone from the family. And she always thought that she would somehow be reunited with somebody. So she maintained this very deep connection inside of her that they were waiting for her somewhere. Then they realized that there was nobody. You know, it's an interesting question that I organized in my mind like this. And I organized it when I was actually writing mating, my first book, mating in captivity. At the time, I had a conversation with my husband who was working with survivors of torture and political violence. And I would ask him, when do you know that people come back? And what does it mean to come back, right? Come back from different war zones to come back from having been kidnapped, to come back from solitary confinement. And what does it mean to come?”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he always said it was a combination of chance and ingenuity, street smart, what he would call, and doing for others, doing for others gave you a purpose to stay alive and to wake up in the morning.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that had to do with feelings and with love in the most dire of circumstances. And then he basically developed this black market in one of the camps where he was with his best friend, where they were for almost a year and a half, where he ended up feeding 60 young men who would otherwise not have had enough to eat and therefore to work and therefore to survive. And he ended up feeding the Nazis too. So when he got caught with those letters, one of the Germans basically sent him back to the factories and said, you're not staying in here. And factories meant you have one week to live, basically. But he had been feeding the German guy so well that the guy said, I eat better when you work in the kitchens. And he'd put him back in the kitchen.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was mending her socks, that she maintained her humanity, that she didn't allow herself to become dehumanized and degraded the way that she was being treated by the Nazis. And my father, my father, when we went to visit Auschwitz actually ended up telling me a story of a Dutch convoy that arrived of women, and he somehow picked a woman out of the crowd and he decided that he would help this woman. And basically the next day they were shaven and so he couldn't even recognize her. So he asked the capo, who is the other woman that he had noticed the day before and they began some correspondence, which I have no idea how he wrote because he couldn't write and I never bothered asking him who wrote for you. But he fell in love with this woman and he just decided that there were certain things that the Germans couldn't take away from him.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Either guest in Treblinka or in Auschwitz, basically, his family in Auschwitz, her family in Treblinka. My mother would say it was a combination of premonitious dreams. She was very, very superstitious and she really believed her dreams that would tell her tomorrow don't go there, tomorrow be a little bit late there, tomorrow make sure to have an extra layer of newspaper on your feet because it's going to be really, really cold. She had all these premonitious dreams of her father talking to her and things like that. And she will always say chance came first, my father too. I think ultimately both of them said chance came first. And then there was what you did with the chance that was given to you. So there is always a mixture between choice and coincidence, choice and chance. And my mother said she always made sure that she was clean, that she was groomed, that”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, that is a great question. I did get to ask them this question. So my mother, she first spent one year in the woods at 18 running from farm to farm, hiding in the woods of Poland. And then she was so terrified that she actually surrendered by herself to a camp, to a labor camp, to a man's camp, because she thought if I am in a camp, at least they probably will put me in the kitchens or in the laundry and I could at least wake up every morning in the same place. My mother ended up going to nine different labor camps. Now, labor camps were generally next door to the concentration camps, and as long as you could work, you were in a labor camp, and if you were not selected that morning for transport, then you could continue work. But the distinction is often a very narrow distinction. And my father was in 14 camps. And my mother definitely, so the rest of their families were...”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I said I could say all of this in Antwerp dialect, but in order to be sure, we all understand it, I'm going to tell my stories in English. That is”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Completely tense when you would listen, and everybody wanted to know their stories. They were amazing, amazing, amazing stories of survival, of subversion, of my dad was illiterate. He spoke five languages, but he was basically illiterate. And he was a grand, grand human being, you know, who had done a lot and had saved quantities of people. Because I would say maybe the strongest value in that community or not the strongest, but one of the very strong values. One was definitely decency, you know, how you behave towards your fellow other people. And the other one was to manage, street smart, to be street smart, you know, to know, to survive, basically, to find your way out of situations and to be able to survive. Survival was the central organizing experience of all these people. And then the second experience was revival.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alive and then enjoy. Not everybody was like that. You had very different kind of moods. They were storytellers, so people would come from everywhere and they would tell about their life and their experiences. And they were good storytellers, which means that they knew how to screen out. And it could make you laugh and they didn't make you.”
2024-07-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #755: Hugh Jackman and Esther Perel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT