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In suerte, I examined power, who's got it and how it works. Esther Pareles power is the quiet kind. She may be the world's most famous couples counselor and her work has influenced millions of people.

I certainly know it's influenced me in Parole's podcasts.

Where should we begin? And housework?

People spill their deepest, darkest secrets and I can't get enough of an erection. Is it fair to say you're a little jealous of Jean-Claude? They made a crack about me not being their real father because the children I'm not going to give her any secrets here.

In fact, I don't really have any good secrets, but I am going to seek her advice in this crazy and exciting time.

You know, I just got married last month, I got married again for the second time, which I always call it a triumph of hope over experience. Now, I actually had a very good relationship previously to any relationship advice for me.

This is a month I've been married a month. So any anything I need to keep in mind, you have a baby. I have a baby. Oh, yeah. We did that before the marriage. Yes, exactly. So how old is your baby?

A year in a month essentially. Yeah. We married the day after her first birthday and she's amazing. She's it's been one of the no boons of the pandemic. The having the baby around has been one that's been a joy. So any advice for me in a month? I think I'm doing OK. I think I'm doing good.

Well, let me just thought of two questions that I think you could have fun with. All right.

So one is that you and both and both of you, for that matter, knowing yourself as well as you do know yourself, what would you say is one thing that makes it hard to live with, you know, in a.

I can be impatient. I like to do everything quickly. I'm very, very CANDU person and so even around logistics or everything else. So I think I move a little faster and I think I'm probably too fast to move. For most people, that's what I would say.

OK, so you can spend a little time, the two of you, and this goes on. So when I'm impatient, it manifests in this way and this is what effect it has in our relationship. And it may very well be that she was attracted to me in part because I'm quick on the girl, resolute, you know, action oriented, and that I have an attraction to the fact that she can be more contemplative or reflective and less reactive and all of that.

So then from there, you explore the complementarity. That's one question. And then the other one would be, what's a vulnerability? I can ask you to, but you and I can ask it about her. What's the vulnerability that you grapple with? Oh, I don't have a heart, but you can let me put it into what her what's a vulnerability that you would say she grapples with?

Well, I wouldn't say there's a lot of them, I think she probably would say her career and her career because she's focused on the baby now, which I think is wonderful and just as laudable, of course.

And then I would say, you know, because that's the question. One is a question about self-awareness. The other one is a question about empathic awareness. So the second one then becomes and how do you relate to that question of hers? And you just said, I actually totally support her. I don't look down on her. I think that it's laudable that, you know. And how does she respond to your support? I think that those are two questions that every relationship can ask itself one month into marriage or not.

You know, if you want to change the other, change yourself. That would be another one.

Oh, wow. That's a big one. Do that in the pandemic.

It's interesting because at the beginning of the pandemic, she was sort of doomed scrolling every terrible thing. And I'm like, let's just go. Let's just move on. We can't get stuck into this. But now with this election, the doom scrolling and I'm like, it'll work. It'll work.

No, don't worry about a thing. I mean, I think that any crisis will sharpen the differences in people's coping style. And one of the differences is that one person may want to charge ahead and do things and fix things and and try to control destiny in some way. And the other person wants to gather all the information and be really clear as to what is the course of action we should take. One person becomes highly practical. Yeah, except in the morning when I wake up to do so.

I guess what happened last night, I'm like, no, I don't want to know. I just for an hour I was like, go or anything for three, sometimes four. Sometimes I just don't want to know because it goes away.

Everybody needs to have a lot of details because they think in details there is some salvation, I guess.

And I don't think there is actually that the research does not necessarily support that. You know, there is a notion that there is overexposure and that actually you need to really know how much to limit your media intake, your news intake, or you basically start to dysregulated. You become really stressed out and then that becomes the next issue. Now you can start reading about stress. Right, right.

Exactly. So that's that's why I don't like doom. Scali So marriage expert Stephanie Coontz wrote an essay suggesting gay marriages are happier than heterosexual ones. Are you do you buy that? Yes.

Why is that? Yes. I don't know if I would say by definition happier, but here's the thing. You have the pros and the cons of not having to live in the midst of pre-existing structures, narrative scripts of life institutions. On the one hand, you like it. Therefore, legally, you are more vulnerable than you were before anyway, for sure. But interpersonally, you get to be much more creative. You get to create families of choice.

It's much more fluid. It's much less institutional and legacy history kind of passing on a one way of doing heterosexual marriage. And I think when when gay couples are able to tap into that, there is much more energy. Yes. And also the movies it's been standing. This is long known. Yeah.

But the expectations thing is when you see movies, when a lot of my friends see those movies, that there's all those imagery that they they seem in prison by in a lot of ways, I would say all couples who are able to not be constrained by preexisting ideas of how it should be, which gay couples have less of it, because nobody actually addressed that before as couples. Same thing with parenting, too, which is interesting.

I have two teenage children and we just had the baby. But everyone's like, which ones? Straight people constantly are like, which one's the dad? And I'm like, No one or everyone.

I think the distinction that you highlighted before is much more salient. You have a front line parent, which is your wife, who is basically at this point more dedicated to the daughter and her sense of time, her boundaries, her needs are much more permeated with the needs of the baby. Right. And you are, in that sense, able to maintain much more of a sense of separateness. You are at what you're doing, your thing. You know, that line between the front line parent and the other parent, between the parent who thinks about the needs of the child and the parent who thinks about the needs of the couple.

That's true. Those complementarities, I think, are much more functional. They are sometimes gender based in straight marriages, but they are actually I think that it narrows us to think about it actually. Only in general terms.

Yes, 100 percent. All right. Well, let's talk about that idea of power, then. You've called sex the oldest power exchange system. What role does power play in a romantic or sexual relationship?

Look, there is no relationship without power. The ingredient power appears the moment I need you. You have power over your baby. But if your baby decides not to sleep the whole night and cry, she has power over you. Right, anyone with a two year old car is not always vertical and coming from the top down, so power is something that you have to power to do things. It's a generative power and power over that you have over somebody else.

And it is a very intricate thing. The moment they depend on you in some way, you have power over me. And I decided we decide in the relationship how we manage it. So it starts from the beginning. It starts from the beginning. It's part of the basic ingredients of what goes into a relationship. The same way that we say trust starts. The moment you begin to develop a relationship, so does the existence of power around sexuality.

One power is the power to coerce. The other is the power to systematically refuse. The other is the power to oblige, to just make you feel like you get it done, get it over with, to demean, to trivialize, to humiliate. All of these have power in them.

Right. Is it typical that one person has power in a relationship or. It just depends on what moment?

I think that some relationships are very clearly positioned with one person having more power than the other. But we need to say about what it's one person. It's decision making, its money earning, it's its owns. The children has appropriated the children, gets to define the story of the relationship. What is the power we are talking about? It changes. It's extreme. You know, when people see a power dynamic, they think of a structure. In fact, they should be thinking about something that is highly dynamic.

It shifts all the time. Yeah.

So one of the things a lot of your work, like your book, The State of Affairs, focused on infidelity, which is another power exchange. You said people who cheat on their partners are exercising freedom and the power of transgression. What did you mean by that?

Every you know, when when you adultery is a taboo. Weaker than it was in some circles, but it is still majorly a therefore when you do the forbidden. You experience a sense of freedom and power, the power of agency, the power of doing what I want, which is sometimes even reinforced when I know that I do what I'm not supposed to. And so it empowers that, that in that sense, it becomes an act of freedom, an act of sometimes reclamation, sometimes agency, sometimes liberation, sometimes just simple selfishness.

It's all of that that's on the part of the person who does it, on the part of the receiving person. It's the experience of the violation of trust. The betrayal shatters all their assumptions about the shared reality. I thought we were in this together. I thought you had my back. I thought you would never do something like that to hurt me. I mean, it is painful beyond. So what what it means for one person is very different from what it does to the other person.

And that's why the experience of infidelity in a relationship is so polarizing. A little bit like what's happening in the nation at this moment.

Perfect transition, a little bit like what's happening to our nation, the toxicity to our country. It feels like a bad marriage.

I often think that couples therapists have a certain experience with polarized relationships. I mean, we sit very often with two people who have no shared well affects. You wonder if what they're talking about happened in the same relationship. They systematically think that they are a rainbow with many nuances and their partner is all in black and white. They think that when they do certain things that are not nice, that it's circumstantial and when their partner does mean things, it's characterological.

And they have very little ability to to not experience the other person's point of view as a threat. In that sense, they are quite a lot of similarities with what's happening on a national level. We have actually shifted at this moment from an engine that I said a beautiful sentence. We're a nation that is no longer just in disagreement. We have disgust and in relationships, in intimate relationships, contempt is the killer. That's the one that tops all of them.

And this is, in a way, this disgust that we have right now. There's a sense that the other people are fundamentally different creatures. What planet do they live on? So what do you do with that? How do you move on from that when it feels so personal and emotional and you're disgusted?

That's why I think that I look at this group of parents in the Middle East, Israeli and Palestinian parents. I just saw people who came together on the basis of the raw grief and loss, not on the politics. They that's one thing they shared. They could, of course, say it was a terrorist attack. It was your destruction of my house, you know, but they managed to first meet. As mothers who lost their beloved child, as fathers who lost and I think that since the one thing that we all have in common at this moment here is stress, acute stress and prolonged uncertainty and anticipatory grief.

That's where I would start. You meet people and you don't start talking about their ideas. Their ideas are often fueled by their fears, by their longings, by their scarcity, by their hopes. And then we apply to the American situation.

That's interesting because one of the things I just had, you know, I have a family, many tremors, and it's really hard to speak to them. I have to say, I find it they never shut up.

I actually am quite I talk less than they do about their grievances. And I have a particular problems, for example, with my mom. And one of the it's constantly because she's on Fox News and we had a big argument over the over the covid because she kept going out. But just recently it got even worse because I did this interview with Hillary Clinton and she hadn't heard my interview, but she was getting it filtered through Fox News and whatever the heck else she looks at, I guess Breitbart or whatever.

And she didn't even have the she she misrepresented my own reporting to me in order to attack Joe Biden, which I'm like it's just my choice for president. And it was like I didn't quite know what to do, except I just stopped talking. I was like, I'm just not good anymore. I'm just not going until this election's over. I cannot speak to you.

I'm going to try this from a different angle. What I would say is you're arguing with your mother over content. The form always precedes the content. This is extremely important for understanding, you know, this impasses in relationships. So you go to your mom and you say, you know, mom, I know you to be someone who usually cares a lot about people, pays attention to people. You have a big heart. You you know, and you go from that place and you say, and I was it was very upsetting to me today because I.

I have come to know you differently. Mm. And if she continues with content, you repeat it again, you just stay with the process because we are Homo sapiens, we really think that you resolve something by digging further into the topic when in fact if we were animals we would just be doing faces right now and sounds. And when you see that the sounds don't make sense and don't accomplish anything, you have got to go around to the to the to the feelings, to the emotional connection that you have with her.

You know, I know that it would devastate you if any of us were ever sick. I know that you are that kind of a mother. You know, maybe it doesn't matter if it's true. Yeah, that's true. That's probably who she wants to be. Yeah. It's how she wants to be seen, right? Yes, that's true. OK, fair point. Fair point. Understand, talk to the person not from their lowest part.

Talk to her from her aspiration.

But I'll have to tell you, a lot of people who have this problem with Trump supporters in their family, for example, they literally just don't not talking sometimes feels better, just like no communication.

I know that sounds crazy, but it's really and the pandemic makes it easy because you can like Thanksgiving is coming up.

So people will be with their families. And I don't think that when people don't resolve a political difference or an ideological difference, that that's what it's about. What it's about is that one person feels disrespected by the other, betrayed by the other. It's these kind of things that create the breach, not the ideas themselves. Mm hmm.

You know, so you're essentially saying one person has to be the bigger person and move in and solve it.

If you don't solve, you don't solve. You just maintain a connection. You just say there are certain things we absolutely do not talk about or don't agree on. When we start, we have a screaming match, but we have a foundation underneath that. If anything happens between us or there is a love, there is a trust, there is a reliance, there is a dependability. And those things are holding us together. Like a friend of mine was telling me how in her family and her grandfather was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan.

Her aunties are white supremacists and her mother passed away and her aunties, her aunts are her connection to her mother. She wants a connection to her mother, and she disagrees fundamentally with the world view of this aunts. And how will she straddle that and everybody internally, you know, if really you get that, if you can tap into old memories, if you can still have a connection to the mother, if there is something, a motivation to remain with these people, then you do what you call the bridge.

You don't bridge your values. You don't bridge your ideology. You don't. And you sometimes live and you say, in my family, there are people who, if ever I was not their family member and something was to happen to me, they would not come to help me. And that is a very hard truth to live with, and some people will manage to live with the ambivalence about that person and still stay connected and some will say. I get sick from this and I don't want to be, you know, with these people, so there's there's some relationships not worth bridging or saving.

Of course, it's not that they're not worth you don't have the motivation even on the racist front. You know, I try to look in for me about situations that help me not get completely ensnared in an in a place from which there is no exit. So. As a child of Holocaust survivors, one of the things I remember often hearing about is the people who were hiding the Jewish children, they could be virulently anti-Semitic, but if a hungry kid stood at the door.

Of the farmer, which was usually the woman she was often likely to give him or her a piece of bread or even hide them in their attic for months on end, because the religious value, the Christian value of of charity and seeing a hungry child superseded the other ideology. I think in moments of choice, some people are completely linear and will act exactly according to their racist ideology. And some people have a mix of things. And on an individual level, they may act differently than on an ideological level.

Right. Right.

Because they're appealing to those particular characteristics, because we have other values inside of us, too, and right there warring with each other. Right. It helps me to think like this. It doesn't it doesn't apply to everybody. But I think that it helps me maintain the sense that it's not black and white because then we have no conversation to be had. Well, speaking of no conversation, I'm going to move you to politics, dysfunctional Congress. Nancy Pelosi, when I interviewed her, talked about having not talked to Trump for a year.

Obviously, she and Mitch McConnell have to get along. What tips do you give to Republicans and Democrats who have burned bridges with each other?

I mean, I think Nancy Pelosi is completely off because because I think that because he relishes her agur, he relishes. So she should, like, hug him. Yes. You know, I look, I think that what I'm going to say is good for her because I can I can put weight behind what I say for relationships on a political frame. It could sound naive what I'm going to say, but one piece that travels with me is sometimes it is more important to be wise than to be right.

I don't have to make your point. Everybody knows what you think. So ask yourself, does this serve me? If you don't talk to somebody, does this serve you, you know, or do you actually think you would get more by maintaining a communication, or are there other people that you can put in place to continue the communication because you want to play the part of the the angry one who doesn't bend, but you have other people who do stay in touch because you because if you have no connection to the people that you need to ultimately work something out with, then you won't work anything out.

And that's why we've had paralysis, paralysis, paralysis. One paralysis was I can't move until you agree with me and the other paralysis. I can't move because I need you to join me on some level. And if you don't join me, I can't do anything. So this is what we've had. The goal here is to find out how do you get things done? My fear is really that. So how are you?

You're the therapist. How do you what would you do? I would just say, you know, they obviously care about this as very much. They wouldn't be digging their heels if they didn't. It's a reframe. I think what I get into is big reframes that prevent me from being completely stuck in my mind. Thinking when I look at a system like that is what do I do with a stuck system? You know, it's like crossing in a pen.

You just want to have it first move a tiny bit to create movement and then generally, you know, goes from humor to ingratiating to taking the other person by surprise and doing the opposite of what they expect you to do. They expect you to be angry to shout at them. You actually basically go and you say, how are you today? You know, you you take them. We call it discontinuity. You take them by surprise because the more you do what they expect you to do, the more they will respond the way that you've expected them to respond.

And off we go. So it's these small micro movements that you do when you want to take a stuck system and bring bring it to life, give it possibilities. I don't know if that works in in on the larger scale. I am not an expert on that. And so I'm going to stick to what I know. All right.

So let's talk a little bit about Trump himself. How do we move on from him? He is like a bad boyfriend.

You know, he occupies our little minds, our political minds, our cultural minds. It's an addiction in a lot of ways.

No, I think that you have to have to Trump ism is going to stay. National populism from the right is on the rise all over the world. This is the American version of it. And he embodies that he this is not a, you know, a bad boyfriend that you pass, that you pass over at all, he's not going anywhere. He represents and has cultivated and has been shaped by that and the institutional aspiration in which he is the master.

He's utterly brilliant transgressions of of delusion, not of transgression, of delusion. This is grandiosity.

So why does that work and why the addiction to him? Because I think everybody on both sides has an addiction to this personality. Why can nobody look away?

Because malignant narcissism has tremendous power over people. In that sense. It has the power when it is charming, it is the power when it is vindictive, it has the power. When it is vengeful and punitive, it is the power. When it creates delusions, it is the power because it makes you see what you would like to see, even if that's not what is there, it is the power because it says, trust me, I've got your in my hands, leave it up to me.

You know, I'll make it happen for you. It is seductive on so many levels, not just in America.

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Hey everyone. It's a stat Herndon political reporter for The New York Times. I think that journalism that is accurate and fair is a bedrock of democracy is how folks make informed decisions. It's how we learn things that other people, many times people in power are trying to hide. And when you are taking the idea of fairness seriously, that means that you have made clear to both sides of the aisle what you intend to report. You have made sure it's accurate and that it lives up to the standards of independence that The New York Times believes in.

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So I want to get to the Pentagon to finish up talking about the pandemic, so you wrote this book in 2006 called Mating in Captivity, which I think is very resonant today. The title is taken on a new meaning in the quarantine. And you've called the pandemic a petri dish moment for relationships. How is the experiment going?

Right now, it's like swimming through molasses. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

You know, petri dish bigger than that. Look, I would say like this, pandemics, disasters are relationship accelerator's, you know, you become aware of mortality. You say, I live once, life is short. What am I waiting for and what am I waiting for? Can be let's have babies, let's get married. Otherwise, what am I waiting for? Can be I'm out of here. So I think in general, when we are facing this existential reality, we rearrange our priorities.

So that's one thing that is happening in many, many people's lives. What matters to us truly at this moment and let's throw the rest overboard a little bit. The next thing is some people have been really dealing with the suffocation of 24 seven. Some people have really enjoyed coming together as families like they hadn't in a long time. Some people are so appreciative of the fact that they haven't had to fly all the time and they've been able to say, I'm the latter.

I've been enjoying time with my kids. You have? Yeah. And my partner. Yeah, it's been great, actually.

So that's one story we hear a lot, is people really feel that they've had time to slow down, to connect with their kids. And all of the other people have dealt with, you know, the excruciating choices of where they were to put their grandparents, how not to let the grandparents come and see the grandchildren dealing with illness, dealing with death, dealing with loneliness, dealing with not seeing their family that is living abroad. I mean, people are struggling with the too much.

And the two little people are struggling with redefining our relationship to space. I mean, we are avoiding the stranger like never before. Everything that is happenstance, chance encounter, curiosity. The erotic side of life has been cut off from us. That is very challenging to people. Many people are touched, starved. That's happening to many of us.

And then I'd love to get back to the you know, in this pandemic, not only have our partners, we all have have them around all the time. What happens to sex, drive and intimacy?

Look, I think that it's well known that stress can go in both directions when it comes to sex, but most of the time it goes in the direction of shutting you down. I was talking yesterday with Justin Garcia. I was the head of the Kinsey Institute. He said, look to Gisele's want made in front of a lion. There's a great line to go. You know, that's what's happening at this point. It's like, yeah, but they have done research on sex under covid.

And on the other end, while stress has constricted us, there is also in findings that show that people have shared more fantasy with each other when they do remain active. You know, freedom in confinement comes to your imagination. That's interesting. But some people at this point, even their friends, they don't touch and their children they don't touch and people are touched, starved. And you can live without sex, but we don't live well with our touch.

We become irritable, depressed, aggressive touch is vital food for us. You know, our bodies are our biggest organ that the skin. And it needs to be touched. It soothes us. It calms us. It reassures us. It connects us. What does it mean to work remote? When are we going to be able to once again come together like this?

How do you get back from that? And do you think people will or do they kind of like this state? Do you feel that remote? Will, you know, your counseling sessions, focus on working on your podcast? How's work?

How is that going to change when you work at this moment? You're not working from home. You're working with home. All your roles are collapsing while you're sitting on the same chair at the same table. Your colleague Busse. Parent, lover, friend, all of it, and no boundaries, no transitions, that is part of the exhaustion. People usually experience their activities in a localized way. You go to the gym, you go to the restaurant, you go to see friends, you go, you change, you drive in between.

It's in space and in time, you transition. You don't have any of that right now. So it's very important for people to create routines, boundaries, rituals that delineate between the personal, the professional, the day and the evening, the work and the and the leisure. And more than ever, people will probably impress you, continue to appreciate whatever can be digitized. You can do remote, whatever is interpersonal. That is the serendipitous, the creative, the connections of people that come together to work, to do things.

You will need to at some point find ways to come back together.

Do you think people will stay in the remote zone because they are talking about it? Everybody's talking about relational intelligence in the workplace at this moment. Everyone's talking about empathic leadership, the soft skills gap. I mean, Demet, the importance of wellness and mental health in the workplace. Everyone understands that certain things can remain remote and maybe there's an advantage to that, and if there is an option for hybrids, that's OK. But everything that touches on the interpersonal people.

Are seeing the effects of the lack thereof and that we may not come back to the same office in the same way with open tubes and all of this stuff, but we understand that you cannot replace in person, in person relationships.

So you don't think personal and interpersonal, but people feel you can't because people have done OK with Zoom or I mean, how do you look at something like Zoom?

You can do you can you can do tasks. You can do projects. But can I walk with you and to the to the coffee machine and in between you say, what are you working on. And I say something and I say, why don't you come see me in my office for a second? And then suddenly you discover that there's a whole other division in the company that I didn't know of. And now you become my mentor and then I.

I mean this.

You cannot do those without being physically present because the meetings are stilted. We are sitting here on the screen. We only see have bodies and and then we basically close and we go into the next one. Into the next one. We can accomplish things. It's not like we can't do. But task is only one portion of what happens at work, and especially today. Work is an identity project. It's a place where we go, you know, to experience meaning community, belonging, purpose, you know, and money and survival.

Right.

So how do we if this is going to go on for six more months or if people really move? How do you maintain the intimacy of work?

I have done a lot with my own team. We have tried out, you know, ways to really talk with each other, check in with each other about all kinds of things that are not specifically related to what we are doing in work so that we're asking people about how they cared for their self care. We're asking people we have conversations about political differences inside our family. We talk actually not about what they do, but who they are and what's happening for them.

So that's a technique to, you know, so that there's a sense we did so that now I have a small team. So I but as a whole, the idea is take time away from those meetings and make sure to reach out to the people and to talk to them and to find out what's going on in their home.

And in terms of in creating the boundary between life and work, what's the one or two things people should do?

Small things of all sorts change. Get dressed when you go to work, change when you, you know, change, make a demarcation if you want to. If you say that we're going to spend the evening together, you know, and imagine if you go out is one thing, but if you're not going to stay home, imagine yourself actually going up. Demarkation, demarkation, clothing is a very good demarkation, but also clearing the space. It's a demarkation is going outside for a walk for a moment and just half an hour.

Twenty minutes. Something that takes you away from the thing. Demarkation is music is listening to not just words, but music. Demarkation is movement to not status. This is extremely stilted. You know, you get exhausted also partly because I think I'm looking at you, but I'm actually not we can't have eye contact, you know. And I think I look at you, but I'm searching for you on the on the screen the whole time. Yeah.

Yeah. And you sit and you sit. So all of these things are basic, small interventions that I think you see everywhere. There's nothing unique in what I will prescribe on on how people and removing technology is one thing, you know, whether you're on your Peladon or you're on your phones or other things.

I'm I'm I'm in love with my phone. I wanted to marry my phone.

At one point you say we should look to children for ways to deal with these stressful times. I agree with you having a baby and my kids have been really great, not perfect, but I think my kids are handling it better than I am in a lot of ways. What can we learn from children?

I think that freedom in confinement comes through. Our imagination is directly taken from children. A child is in front of you. They stand up, they turn around and they say, and now I am the sheriff. Yeah. And now I am a teacher. They can't instantly, through their imagination, elude reality, enter another world, play and escape the limits of reality that are weighing on them. The one thing we have is our imagination. It's what people have used in confinement, in jail, in concentration camps always.

It is so hard to do it now. It's you're so stressed. It is. I watched my my daughter play with keys for half an hour the other day. I was so comforted by her playing and she was obsessed with the kids just staring at them over and over again. And I thought, how is she doing that? Partly if you.

Diminish some of the news watching and you diminish some of the you know, you you need to wean yourself. There there's an election at stake and I have an impact on it. If I only I watched, I will be the one affecting it.

But more more of the same will actually not be the thing that helps you. You may have a chance to have a new thought if you're less listening to the cacophony and you actually remove yourself for a moment and you let your mind open up and thoughts will come and you actually may have insights that you don't have when all you hear is the same, same, same all the time, whichever side you're on. Yeah, that is a fair point. So, Esther, do you want a therapist, Donald Trump, any more?

You said it's impossible. Do you feel like you could do enough if he leaves, if he has some time?

No, no. I would be working harder than him and that would make me more responsible for his change than he himself. And that is never a good option for a therapist.

So is are there people not available for therapy? Of course. Yeah, of course. There are people who have zero who who there are people who do not experience the eight. Because the egg is deflected on others, others experience the consequences of their behaviour, so they have to carry no responsibility for it. And when you work with people like that, you work harder than them. You can never work harder than the patient that sits in therapy. You cannot want you can't want your kids to do their homework more than they would want them.

I agree. You take it, you ZRP, you know, and then you carry the burden. And why would they do it then? Because you're holding it for them. So you cannot work in therapy? No, not everybody is is a candidate for therapy.

All right. So for those of us who are are we going to be OK?

Esther, you have to say you don't. Yes, I think we will be OK. I think I think we know that people have endured a lot. I actually think this is a moment to look at everybody in America, black people in America, people who have not had, you know, privilege, anybody who hasn't had privilege. And we will learn a lot from these people. They continue to love. They continue to celebrate. They continue to have children.

You know, my parents came out of five years of concentration camp and the first thing they did was have a child because that showed that they were still human. And I think that there is a spirit in us that will continue to create the world that we live in and and then mixed with grief and mixed with sadness and mixed with loss and mixed with rage. And we will continue to do what we've done forever. Esther, thank you so much, as usual.

It's a pleasure. Thank you. Me too. Beautiful, beautiful discussion.

I really appreciate it.

You liked it? Yes, very much. I'm going to listen to my partner right now.

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