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