By the time someone who runs a company sits down across from me, they have read the book, watched the talk, asked the chatbot, and run the experiment twice with modifications. If the answer had been available anywhere else, they would have found it and implemented it by Tuesday. What they bring instead is a question they find humiliating to say out loud: I have solved harder problems than this.

They have. That is exactly the trouble.

Before Dr. Emma was a sex therapist she was headed for public accounting — a business-club kid who went to nationals in sales and marketing, got handed a slip of paper with a scenario on it and ten minutes to move a couple off the stroller they came in for, and later spent audit season walking through the guts of other people's companies. Which means she learned, early, how a person gets taught to run a business. Clubs, mentors, internships, a first job where somebody senior tells you what you did wrong. Later, masterminds and coaches and advisory boards. Nobody is expected to figure it out alone.

This week she and Alivia go looking for the equivalent on the other side of the ledger, and find a five-pound sack of flour. An egg, then flour, then an animatronic doll with a key strapped to your wrist. A curriculum built end to end to make teenagers afraid of pregnancy, and nothing whatsoever about how two people who have decided to stay build something that survives the staying.

They get into why the resistance these clients bring is not stubbornness but success — the strategy has been reinforced for twenty years and it works everywhere except the one room it was built to protect. They get into what happens when decisiveness reads as dismissal at your own kitchen table, and why that moment tends to arrive feeling existential rather than tactical. And they get into the difference between what a skill set can fix and what actually requires the basement.

You would never have run the company on instinct plus whatever you absorbed watching your parents do it. So what convinced you it would be enough at home?

Full show notes

Reignite Desire masterclass, September 18 → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/mcsept

Supported in part by Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

Tell us what landed → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

In session, I sometimes ask whether someone has tried something. A lubricant, a toy, an article of clothing they would have to carry to a register. The answer often arrives before the question has finished landing, and it arrives in multiples. No. No, no. Not for me.

One no is information. Four in a row is a position being defended.

This month I gave a talk at Stimulate, the sexual wellness symposium and trade show that runs here in Nashville, on the main exhibit floor, delivered through silent disco headphones — which meant a crowd of people were having a conversation about desire that was inaudible from three feet away. The argument I brought them: every brand names a competitor, and in this industry the named competitor is another store, another site, another product line. The real one never appears in the deck. It is the story the customer is already carrying about what it means to want.

Alivia and I take that argument off the trade show floor and back into the office, where it started. We get into the gas pedal and the brake, and why most people who arrive with low desire arrive convinced the accelerator is broken when something is usually standing on the inhibitor instead. We get into why an industry organized around more cannot reach a person whose parking brake is jammed to the floorboards. We get into the difference between a preference and a prohibition, and how to hear which one just left your mouth.

And we get into what neither of us expected from a trade show: a hall full of designers and retailers who wanted to talk about meaning, who cared in granular detail about what it actually feels like to use the thing they made, and who were relieved to hear the podcast is not about inserting tab A into slot B. That was Alivia's favorite part of the event. Mine came the night before we recorded, at dinner with a former guest, over how completely sex and death are wound around each other and how strange it is that we are not having that conversation everywhere.

What do you want is the easy question, and mostly a useless one — people produce an answer to it under mild social pressure every day. The harder one: what would you have to believe about yourself for the answer to be yes?

Full show notes → [here]

Reignite Desire masterclass, August 29 → https://soliloquie.myflodesk.com/desire

Supported in part by Nine to Kind Planners, code EMMA20 for 20% off → https://ninetokind.com/

Tell us what landed (or the questions you have!) → http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6

Ask a man where he learned to have sex and he will point at a girlfriend, a movie, a website. Kirsten Trammell's answer is earlier and lonelier: behind a locked bathroom door, at speed, in secrecy, listening for footsteps in the hall. Fast. Silent. Finish. The nervous system is an excellent student and a terrible editor, and it files that entire sequence under this is what arousal is.

Kirsten is a psychotherapist, a tantric sex coach, and the host of The Naked Connection — a top-twenty sex show on Spotify with listeners in more than 140 countries. She went looking for the men's version of the bookshelf every woman in this field has read, found nothing there, and built it herself.

This week she joins Dr. Emma to talk about male arousal patterning and what it costs a man decades later, when he is forty-five, has revised nearly everything else about how he lives, and is still running a script he wrote at thirteen. They get into tantra as a working frame rather than a mystique, why the toys are not the center of it, how to introduce a desire without a different person simply appearing in the bedroom unannounced, and Kirsten's term for the skill she teaches instead of technique: erotic vigilance. Rather than asking a goal-driven man to abandon the goal, she moves it.

And late in the hour, almost by accident, the question that stayed with us. Many men are fluent in function and illiterate in pleasure. They can read one signal in their own bodies and have never been asked to read the rest. Which means a man may not believe he is the expert on his own body at all.

So who has he been consulting?

Full show notes

Support for the show: Nine to Kind Planners — ninetokind.com, code EMMA20 for 20% off.

Say something back: http://forms.gle/sS7z5AFH1DohJjAU6