Neil Strauss is a seven-time New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and coach. His books, The Game and Rules Of The Game, for which he went undercover in a secret society of pickup artists for two years, made him an international celebrity and…

Neil Strauss is a seven-time New York Times best-selling author, speaker, and coach. His books, The Game and Rules Of The Game, for which he went undercover in a secret society of pickup artists for two years, made him an international celebrity and an accidental hero (and villain) to singles around the world. Both books topped The New York Times best-seller list and were #1 on Amazon, and the former has the dubious distinction of being the most stolen book at Barnes & Noble besides The Bible. 

In his follow-up book, The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships, Strauss dives deep into his greatest challenge to date: love. In the book, he explores the hidden forces that cause people to choose each other, stay together, and break up.

He was a music critic, cultural reporter, and columnist at The New York Times for a decade, where he won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. He has also won awards for his cover stories for Rolling Stone, for which he’s well-known for earning the trust of some of the most guarded and secretive celebrities in the world. These interviews were collected in his best-selling book Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead.

His book Emergency, which Rolling Stone described as “an escape plan” for a “world in crisis,” spent three months on the New York Times bestseller list and cemented Strauss’s reputation as, in the words of Maxim magazine, “a George Plimpton for the 21st century.” While going undercover during these books, Strauss has been named everything from the best pickup artist in the world (by Associated Press during The Game) to receiving the Presidents Volunteer Service Award (for his search-and-rescue work during Emergency). 

His other best-selling books include How to Make Love Like a Porn Star with Jenna Jameson, The Dirt with Motley Crue, and The Long Hard Road Out of Hell with Marilyn Manson. The Dirt was hailed by Q magazine as “the most unputdownable rock book of the year, or possibly any year,” while Publishers Weekly cited The Long Hard Road Out of Hell as “possibly the highest-selling rock biography of all time.”

Strauss has also contributed to Esquire, Maxim, Spin, Entertainment Weekly, Details, The Source, New York Newsday, and many other magazines and newspapers. He began his career on the staff of Village Voice while still a college undergraduate. In 1990, also while in college, he edited the book Radiotext(e) for the publisher Semiotext(e). Since then, his work has appeared in over thirty books, including several other bestsellers.

Beyond writing, Strauss has acted in everything from Curb Your Enthusiasm to rock videos by Beck and Jared Leto. And he has appeared on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, The View, The Carson Daly Show, and dozens of other talk shows. He also hosted his own interview show, The Inner Circle with Neil Strauss, on SiriusXM.

Sex, love, and intimacy - The great mysteries of life. Our guest Neil Strauss is a seven-time New York Times best-selling author and has spent the better part of ten years devoting his life (and writing) to learning the ins and outs of romantic relationships, and how to make them work. From his days as a pickup artist in his book The Game to his recent awakening to the merits of true love, kids, and marriage in The Truth, Neil has committed himself to the study and practice of relationships with a tenacity few others have. 

In this episode, you'll learn the secrets to identifying dysfunctional relationships, codependency, sex addiction, and every other form of romantic pathology, and how to avoid them. 

Whether you're happily married, single, or on the hunt for romance, this episode will no doubt prove to be a powerful catalyst of truth and self-realization, as Neil and I take a very real and raw analysis of ourselves for the benefit of the audience, and anyone they might love. 

May you find peace, companionship, and fulfillment in your current, or future affairs of the heart. Share this episode with a friend or partner, in hopes that we might all get a little better at this thing called love. 

Luke


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 EPISODE BREAKDOWN

  • How Neil's book The Truth changed my life forever
  • Becoming emotionally healthy enough to have a fulfilling relationship
  • What are the different stages of a romantic relationship? 
  • Identifying co-dependency, and how to break the cycle
  • The curse of emotional enmeshment, and how to trade that for true intimacy
  • How to stop pleasing and pathological accommodation
  • Taking responsibility over blaming: to overcome your wiring first you gotta understand it
  • Behavior vs. belief: understanding what creates lasting change
  • Is sex addiction a real thing, and how to tell if you're got it
  • The dangers of trauma bonding with a romantic partner
  • How our childhood shaped our brain, and as a result the way we behave in relationships 
  • How to define commitment? Is monogamy possible? 
  • Lifestyle recommendations


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CREDITS

Intro music: Jeordie White
Show production: Tatiana Melo
Sound editing: Dustin Smith


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