Have you ever found yourself in the presence of someone you love dearly and had nothing to say? The silence, not indicative of your care for the other, nor of your desire to connect with them, and yet there were no words you could grasp to articulate the depth or quality of your connection to them.

Or, have you found yourself in the same looped pattern of conversation with someone you love? Feeling as though you were treading the same path repeatedly, and it was simply exhausting? Or, even worse, it was deteriorating your connection. We all crave connection. But sometimes we need help getting there.

Topaz Adizes offers a guide to having the conversations that can lead to that connection in his latest book, 12 Questions for Love: A Guide to Intimate Conversations and Deeper Relationships. After a decade of exploring human emotions and intimacy through more than 1200 conversations in his Emmy Award-winning experience design studio, The Skin Deep, Topaz has been studying and watching humans of all types, and in all kinds of Relationships, simply talk. And it’s resonating, having over 1.2 million followers on TikTok and 900,000 on YouTube.

Topaz is a writer, director, and experience design architect. He is an Edmund Hillary Fellow and Sundance/Skoll Stories of Change Fellow. His works have been selected to Cannes, Sundance, IDFA, and SXSW; featured in New Yorker magazine, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times; and have garnered an Emmy for New Approaches to Documentary, along with Two World Press photo awards for Immersive Storytelling and Interactive Documentary. 

He is currently the Founder and Executive Director of The Skin Deep. Topaz studied philosophy at UC Berkeley and Oxford University. He speaks four languages, and currently lives in Mexico with his wife and two children. 

In this episode, Topaz shares what he has learned from witnessing over 1200 conversations and the lessons from his own first-hand experiences. 

Topaz’s creativity, like his humanity, seems boundless. His work on relationship developments is a useful approach to helping us all have deeper and more intimate relationships that helps each us live our lives in full.

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Dr. Chris Stout Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Chris Stout is a licensed clinical psychologist and international humanitarian with a diverse background in various domains. He is the Founding Director of the Center for Global Initiatives (a Top-Rated Nonprofit) and is the Executive Producer and Host of the popular “Living a Life in Full” a top-ranked podcast with an audience of over 3 million. He was a Fellow in the School of Public Health and Full Professor in the Department of Psychiatry in the College of Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago and prior to that he held an academic appointment at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. He served as a NGO Special Representative and had the honor of speaking at the United Nations; he holds the distinction of being one of only 100 world-wide leaders appointed to the World Economic Forum’s Global Leaders of Tomorrow and was an Invited Faculty at the Annual Meeting in Davos.