Gwyneth on the Places That Changed Her

0:01When I travel, whether it's for work or just to take a break, I love staying in an Airbnb. I love the charm and how every place feels so different from a hotel. It gives me a sense of feeling grounded wherever I am, whether it's a weekend away in the country or filming somewhere far from home. There's something about waking up in a real home with a kitchen to make coffee in and a living room to spread out in. And whenever I'm in an Airbnb, I find myself thinking about the person whose home it is. While I'm making it mine for a few days, maybe they're off on their own adventure or simply opening their doors for someone else to enjoy the space they love.

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2:09When you are pioneering anything or introducing new ideas to the culture, you get criticized. You do? Yeah. Did you hear about that? I didn't find the one. I found someone I respected and we made it the one. In a sort of longing kind of view of love, people understand each other as if by magic. Nothing in itself is addictive on the one hand. On the other hand, everything could be addictive if there's an emptiness in that person that needs to be filled. I now know that nobody changes until they change their energy. And when you change your energy, you change your life. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. This is the Goop Podcast.

2:47Bringing together thought leaders, culture changers, creatives, founders and CEOs, scientists, doctors, healers and seekers. Here to start conversations. because simply asking questions and listening has the power to change the way we see the world. Here we go. Hi everyone. Welcome to the Goop Podcast. It's just me today for another edition of a solo pod. I am currently in Italy in a hotel room in Naples, which I thought would be kind of a fitting place to do this podcast from. Travel has been a really integral part of my life. And I think in these times that feel so turbulent and uncertain and demoralizing, I have felt incredibly grateful for the ability to travel and also to reflect back on the perspective and the size of your life, the size that it feels like when you live outside yourself, outside your city or take a foray out of your own country even.

4:02So as I sit here looking out at the harbor in the Mediterranean, I was reflecting on the last time I was here in Naples. We shot a day of the talented Mr. Ripley here in the Opera House many years ago now. Movies like that really afforded me an incredible opportunity to see the world. Some experiences were happier than others. Ripley, in fact, is a really tough movie for me. My father and my grandfather were both diagnosed with cancer within six weeks of each other when I was on that film. And I was in a very tough place personally. And it's interesting, you know, coming back to a certain place again, older, happier, more settled in a different frame of mind completely.

4:49it's been really interesting just to be here and reflect on the difference that you know 25 years can make or whatever and how incredibly lost I was or I felt when I was making that film unmoored homesick for a traveler I used to get quite homesick actually so I think I've always had a really interesting relationship with Italy because when I first came here, actually first came here when I was about 19 and did a really fun train trip through Europe. But I really came back and spent time here when I was doing Ripley. And as I said, it was a, it was a tough time. And you know, I've, I've always felt it's interesting.

5:35Like when a place doesn't totally feel right to me, I like to go back I like to understand why even if I have an aversion to it and I I definitely had that at first with Italy because I had such a hard time on the film and then I was invited back actually for my 30th birthday with some of my dear friends and my dad and my father and I ended up doing a road trip together from Tuscany. We were going up to get to Portofino. And unfortunately, he got sick and he died on the way with complications of cancer and his bronchioles that we did not know had come back. But as you can imagine, this sort of solidified my complicated feelings about Italy.

6:31and yet I've always been so drawn to it and so I I came back again with with Brad when we were dating it's got to be over 10 years ago now and started the process of healing my emotional relationship with this incredible country and fell so deeply in love with it that we ended up buying a little cottage here and it's become a second home to us. You know, I think about too, when I was an expat living in London and how I grew to love it there so much and have so much respect for really the differences that exist there. So fundamentally different to America and how, when I first started to make films there, I had a really hard time cracking Britain.

7:21You know, It was hard for me to understand the humor and the food and the weather. But I just kept going back. I kept going back for more until eventually moving there and being a complete expat. And I'll come back around to that in a minute. But it's funny. I thought that if I ever was lucky enough to get a little place in Europe, that it would be in Spain. Because I was an exchange student in Spain when I was 15. and I'll really never forget that trip it completely changed my life my worldview and I have such a deep relationship to Spain that I thought it would be I thought it might be there but lo and behold there were a series of events we we settled in in Italy and it's given me so much appreciation for produce and just the care with which things are farmed and made the parmesan cheese and wine and i think in america we we rush and we're so concerned with profits you know good old milton freeman who told us essentially the very purpose and nature of being American as to squeeze profit out of, out of every conceivable business.

8:44And it's just very different here. They, they do it for the craft, of course, for, to make a living as well, but nothing is more important than quality, nothing. So I want to talk a little bit about growing up because we did, we did travel when I was a kid, but mostly within the United States, We went back and forth between Los Angeles and New York quite a lot. When my mother would film somewhere, we would go with her. We went to school in Beaufort, South Carolina for a semester. And I remember playing in the marshes and field trips to Charleston and just the other worlds that opened up for us through living different places, interacting with different kids.

9:34We spent every summer in the Berkshires at the Williamstown Theater Festival. Totally different in every way. So lush, so green, so peaceful. And I remember we went to Hawaii once for my father's 40th birthday, but we didn't travel that much internationally when I was a kid. And I remember the few times we did going to Germany again when my mother was doing a miniseries and being taken to Vienna and just bowled over. I thought it was like, it looked like the whole town was made of like, you know, those little towns that are made of sugar, like in eggs, like that's what it looked like to me, just a big confection.

10:16And the Christmas markets in Germany, which were so extraordinary and so like richly elaborated on the idea of Christmas. I remember being in the UK for the first time with my family when my mother was shooting something there as well and being so taken with how dressed up it was, buttoned up, you know. I remember that special trip actually very well because that was the trip when we were in the UK as a family that my father took me alone to Paris for the weekend, which is something that he did with my brother and I, you know, special father, kid trips. And I've told this story a million times before, but he took me to Paris and we stayed at the Ritz and he took me to all the museums and as he was wont to do all we did was see art everywhere we went and he let me order french fries for breakfast and he let me take a walk by myself I was 10 years old I'll never forget that he let me walk around the Place Vendôme all by myself and on the way back to London on the plane this is before the Eurostar he said do you know why I took you to Paris, just you and me and mommy and Jake didn't come with us.

11:29And I said, no, why? And he said, because I wanted you to see Paris for the first time with a man who will always love you no matter what. As you can imagine from that point forward, Paris became a very, very special idea in my head, a place that I've returned to many, many times and will always intrinsically hold the spirit of my father for me, even though he died in Rome. I never feel very far away from him when I'm there. It was his favorite city in the world. And I went back and did a film there, learned some French and really got to know the city well. And he came for a lot of that. And we had many, many days and in Paris together.

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13:13have 45 % more applications than non-sponsored jobs. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash listen. Just go to indeed.com slash listen right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash listen. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring, indeed, is all you need. It was interesting doing that film in Paris, actually, because when I look back, it was really the very early germination of the seed of goop happened there when I was doing that film called Jefferson in Paris.

14:01And I remember staying in a hotel and getting terrible suggestions from the concierge about where to go. and that's when I started keeping reams of notes about you know where where to go and eat and shop in every city and where to find the best baguette and the best cheese shop and that was really when I look back how goop started it was me trying to crack the code for myself and then my friends on a new place and it's interesting because I think when you're in a country where you don't speak the language you know of course it's a little destabilizing but it ends up being so rewarding when you really well first if you're able to learn a little bit enough of the language to get by and get around and also because I think it it really opens the aperture you know I'll go back to that incredibly special trip to Spain that I took well when I was an exchange student.

15:05And my dad took me to JFK, to the old TWA terminal, that masterpiece of architecture. And I remember him waving at me as I walked down the long red carpet towards my flight to Madrid, already feeling the homesickness rise in my body, not knowing if I could do it. And landing in Madrid, having barely slept a wink, finding my way on the bus that got me to my host city, Talavera de la Reina, near Toledo in Castilla-La Mancha. And I remember my Spanish mother picking me up from the bus, this torrent of Castilian Spanish coming out of her. I had absolutely no idea what she was saying. And she took me to the apartment where I spent the first few nights waking up at 3 a.m., looking out over these foreign rooftops and feeling like I had really descended on another planet.

16:01I was terribly homesick and trying to get used to the food and the way of life. And it was, it just, it seemed like a world away from my upbringing and everything that I was comfortable with and familiar with. I used to sleep on a cot in the room of my little sister, Christina. She was nine when I was there. And every night I would pull the cot out and as I learned to speak more and more Spanish, would tell her stories at night. And I learned Spanish pretty quickly because it was a matter of survival. Nobody spoke Spanish in the house. So I think a week later, I basically spoke Spanish. I took that indelible experience with me through the rest of my adult life, stayed very close with my Spanish family.

16:48But it was a moment where my world really shifted on its axis. And I realized that you could have this incredibly rich and layered experience if you steep yourself in other countries and other cultures and other languages. And I think it really cemented this lust that I have to understand different ways of being and relating and talking and eating and seeing the world. Also, I think it really changed my palate because I tried so many new things and new flavors and I loved something called morcilla which is like a blood sausage which i had no idea if i had known no i definitely wouldn't have eaten it i learned to smoke i learned to drink underage it was fabulous it was really really it was a very free time and it was a very sweet city kind of innocent and just the the pageantry of semana santa i was there during that and to see a country again like tied to the rituals of its religion was totally new to me.

18:01And it really did forever, forever change me. The places that I have returned to again and again, I think until I'm no longer on this planet, I will. You will find me on the East Coast seashore in the summer for the rest of my life. I have such a deep connection to our home there and life there and the simplicity of, you know, even though there are people around, we managed to cultivate a very quiet and simple life there based around the garden and walking to the beach, riding bikes into town, surfing. There's a kind of groundedness and a timelessness to those East Coast summers at the beach that I think also for my husband, Brad, who grew up with his version of that in Cape Cod, it's an area where we really dovetail.

19:04And he's my favorite travel partner anyway. And I've noticed too, you know, we are in our older age, we're tending to go back and back to places, you know, Italy, Long Island. We do like a bit of an adventure, but I think we also like to return places where we feel a kind of grounding and traditions being sewn. And we like to keep adding to those canvases. I fall so in love with the familial aspects of places, you know, whether it's in the South of the United States or here in Italy, Spain, you know, the way that you see families love each other and how they interact. I think I've taken back into my life a number of European influences as well.

19:58Again, especially Italy around the quality of making things, the integrity of making something well, prioritizing quality, family, love, something that has influenced me a lot. I guess I'd like to talk about a little bit what I would like to do next in travel now that the kids are all out of the house. I'd like to do a bit of wellness travel. Surprisingly, that's something that I have not done before. Like I would love to go to one of these places like Lanzerhof or Viva Mayer or Cheneau, one of these European health spas, Shaw Wellness in Spain. I would love to do that. Those have more of like a medical bent.

20:43I think they take your blood and kind of deal with inflammation and stuff. I would love to do Ayurveda in India. I've always wanted to go to We Care, that spa in the desert. I've never been to the Golden Door. I mean, you would think that I would have gone to some of these wellness retreats, but I guess I had kids for so long and I could never pull myself away for five or seven days. The one place that I have gone to dipped in and out of over and over and over again is a place called Mi Amo in Sedona, Arizona, surrounded by red rocks with the most incredible healing energy vortexes. And it's such a beautiful place.

21:27The hikes are so amazing. The practitioners are so amazing. But I would really love to kind of take seven days or something or 10 days. You know, you hear about these people who go and do that. So that's something on my radar very much in the future. Oh, yeah. There's that other place I wanted to go to Chivasam in Thailand. That's supposed to be incredible. See, I could spend a year just going to all these wellness places and reporting them back to you guys, giving you the tips. I guess the other thing to talk about is England and how much I learned traveling there and then living there, being an expat, how much I loved noticing and observing everything.

22:11When you're an expat, you don't get that sort of glazed over familiarity where you've driven past that corner a million times and you grew up walking past this restaurant. every corner is like demands attention and just the architecture the provenance the history of everything i remember taking my kids to school and seeing over the gate their school was established by queen elizabeth the first and 15 whatever in the 16th century and that kind of the depth of centuries of family and dharma and and it took me a while to crack it you know I thought it was a very tough place at first insular guarded which I suppose a lot of island cultures are like that in their own way but none more so than than Britain very proud and also not not terribly emotionally expressive as a country, which I think leads to the most incredible creation of art, like the culture in the UK, London, the ballet, the music, the acting, my God, the actors that come out of that country.

23:31I think when countries that tend to be less vulnerable emotionally come online in art they're able to I don't know at least in in the UK just the the the expression the depth and the and the rawness of the emotional life when channeled through an appropriate art form is just incredible to me so I learned so much living there made some incredibly close friendships and loved being in the countryside the British countryside is probably one of the one of my favorite places to be that verdant beautiful charming part of the world I used to love and have country weekends and beautiful country house hotels and now they're like lime wood but now there are all these beautiful ones to go to heckfield house and estelle manor and I've got to I've got to put those on the list as well people sometimes ask me too what are my favorite my favorite hotels and if you want to know what my favorite hotels are you can look at the goop list on goop.com and you will see all of my favorite hotels in the whole world so far are are on there.

25:00We're in the quickfire round. Most overpacked item I do not overpack because I'm such a psycho while I'm packing that I literally try on what I'm going to wear every day. I think it all out. I lay it all out. It takes me hours, but then I have a perfect little suitcase and I don't overpack. I don't under pack. I have to say this is an art that I feel I have mastered after years of travel mistakes. I now front load it with time and attention and then I have a stress-free trip. Always in my carry-on are my computer, a book, a notebook to write in, vitamin C, my skincare, especially our goop oil and our fix and restore balm and our eye masks, which I always wear while I'm sitting on a plane.

26:02I always bring a pack of electrolytes to put in my water yeah lip balm all the moisturizing stuff face mist I get so dry on planes so and headphones of course very important underrated city I'm gonna say Naples I'm here as you know I'm here in Naples today you don't hear a lot about Naples as a destination and I gotta tell you I just spent the day walking around it was incredible I had delicious pizza. There's also a lot of overhyped pizza here. That's not that good, but I had an incredible pizza and did some shopping, which is really fun. And it's a really special place actually. So I'm going to, I'm going to go with Naples today.

26:42A place that changed my palate, Spain, definitely Spain and in Japan too. You know, I'd like to spend some more time in Japan. I've been to Tokyo a couple of times. I would love that. And I would love to do a family trip to the various islands in Japan, I think that would be really amazing. My favorite holiday ever took with my kids was Indonesia. We rented one of those old-fashioned kind of hand-carved wooden traditional boats and we sailed around the archipelago and went to pink sand beaches and you can run your hand through the water at night and see the phosphorus glowing. It was incredible.

27:23beach city or countryside that's tough all all three depending on the season my level of exhaustion and who i'm going with what's a place i still dream about but have not been to yet vietnam i'd love to do that vietnam laos cambodia trip and again those little all the islands of Japan. If I could create the perfect nourishing trip for my closest friends, what would it look like? Listen, I'm stuck on this wellness retreat idea. I think I would like to take a group of girlfriends and do one of these either wellness or healing trips. I'm going to put that at the top of my list. Thank you so much for tuning in today and joining me at my beautiful hotel room at the Grand Vesuvius Hotel in Naples, which I have not been to in 20 plus years.

28:24It's been wonderful to circle back here and just be reminded of the passage of time, how much I've grown up. Well, I guess thanks for just being with me today while I ruminated a little bit on travel and how life-changing it's been for me, how nourishing it can be to see the world and how much you know you can the filters that you put on things change when you're exposed to different places so I hope you enjoyed and I hope maybe it stirred something in you to think about where you might want to go next and explore who you are in whatever place thanks for joining

29:12thanks for tuning in this has been a presentation of cadence 13 studios i hope you'll listen follow rate and review all of our episodes which are available for free on apple podcasts spotify odyssey or wherever you get your podcasts