All Episodes
Previous Next
June 5, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:06:53
"Why I Brought A Dead Fox to School..." Freedomain Call In
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Okay, what's on your mind, my friend?
I don't know.
I don't get a lot of things done.
I listened to your show for a long time, so I get the principles behind taxation and theft.
And the reality is, I don't really obey those principles, because I get a lot of money from the government.
How do you get money from the government?
What's the word in English?
Like... Disability or welfare or unemployment or... Yeah, welfare.
But it's the kind of... Because of autism, I get it.
So it's because of disability.
And how does your autism manifest?
What does it seem like for you?
Mostly like in the city or large groups of people.
My head gets filled up and then I can't think clearly and then it takes a long time to recover, like a full day.
And when you say your head gets filled up, what do you mean?
Chaotic.
I can't think clearly and I just want to be alone.
And I can't hear people.
Like, I literally... Yeah, that's a really good one.
I was on vacation this summer with my sister in... Shit, what's it called?
No, don't tell me where.
Just give me the story.
Sorry, yeah.
But it was busy.
It was busy.
And... You know, like, long days, you know, sleeping not too well.
And then she would talk to me.
Like I said, yeah, cool.
Or, you know, a short answer.
And I would literally say a minute later, like, did you see that?
And then she got angry at me because she literally talked about that.
And I didn't hear a thing about it.
So.
Wait, wait.
You mean you physically didn't hear it or you just kind of weren't paying attention or what?
It's a little more than not paying attention.
It's the information.
I can't process the information anymore.
Like.
My head is like filled up and after that I just kind of stopped processing all the extra information.
And when did this first show up for you in your life?
I think I've always been kind of like the kid that liked the quiet place or liked to stay indoors.
So in that sense always, but it didn't show up until my parents got divorced and I became a teenager.
And then people started like doing tests on me and then it became like a problem.
How old were you when your parents got divorced?
Nine.
Do you know why they got divorced?
Yeah, they didn't love each other.
I understand that.
I mean, everybody says that they weren't getting along.
They didn't love each other.
But what was the cause behind them falling out of love or that?
Oh, yeah, I apologize.
I don't actually know the cause.
No, I can be I can hit the gas with you because you listen to the show for a bunch of times.
So you kind of know how this stuff goes, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I fall for the same traps.
I know.
It's funny.
Soon you'll start laughing about trauma.
And anyway, okay, go on.
Um, yes, it, it kind of started with my mother, I think I can honestly say was the fault of my mother, my parents got divorced, or at least the cause.
And she started loving another woman.
And we had a dog and like a dog whisperer and dog expert came in to help out with the dog.
And yeah, my mother started writing emails of this woman.
And I don't know if it was physical or not, but like at least an emotional, like really strong relationship.
I honestly I think it was physical, but I have no proof for that.
And my father found out through the emails.
He saw those emails.
And then they were like in turmoil for like six months and they rented another house so they could live apart for a bit and they decided to stay together and then after half a year or three quarters of a year they got divorced anyway because my father still wanted to try but my mother said he didn't love him anymore and shortly after that she started living with the
woman she said she wasn't in love with.
But well, after that they had a relationship for like 15 months, two years, I don't know.
That was really hard on my sister.
It was really hard on your sister?
Well, I guess I didn't get any better from it.
But yeah, my sister had a good relationship with that woman.
The dog walker or dog whisperer?
Yes, yes, the dog whisperer.
Yeah.
And after my mother got a relationship with her, they My sister didn't like that at all, so lots of fights.
I'm not sure I follow.
So your sister had a good relationship with the Dark Whisperer when your mother... Was it when the affair was announced or found or when she went into a relationship with her?
No, sorry.
My sister had a good relationship with the Dark Whisperer when she was just the Dark Whisperer.
Right.
No, but did the relationship, I guess, broke with your sister when the affair was discovered, or the emotional affair was discovered, right, by your dad?
Yeah, I was around nine or eight at that time, but yeah, I think so, yes.
Right.
And what about your sister's relationship with your mother?
If you ask her, she would say it's good.
She would never share anything that she has trouble with or emotional trouble or like she will tell if like she solved the problem.
Right.
And you were eight or nine when this was all going on.
And how was it for you?
I felt torn apart because my sister, I remember this one time when we were renting the other house and, you know, we were like switching places, like we were going to the mom and like, you know, that kind of chaos.
And my sister was crying in the arms of my mother and I was like, well, now I have to like hug my father because else he's all alone.
So, and it wasn't even like I really want to hug him over my mother, you know, I was like, now I have to choose and it was kind of like a hard moment for me.
That's really what stuck by me.
And how did your parents get along before this affair?
Verbal fights.
Do you remember about what or do you know about what?
Yes, yes, yes, about absolutely nothing.
But it always started with my father looking at her, at my mother, and then my mother said, what?
And then my father said nothing.
And then they started to fight.
Like, just like clockwork.
Oh, that's so interesting.
And tragic, obviously, but it's kind of like recreational fighting, like you're bored.
And so you just look and what?
And then off you go.
Because you're bored and you're empty.
You've got nothing going on emotionally.
You're not connected.
You're not contacted.
Contacted with each other or intimate or emotional with each other.
Connected.
So you just fight I guess.
You just pick fights because you're bored right?
Yeah.
Yeah I guess that's what happens.
Because I mean if there's no inciting incident then I mean there are a large number of people out there who just Get really, really bored and end up just picking fights, causing trouble, feeling restless and discontented within themselves.
And then they had to spread, they have to spread that discontentedness to other people, usually through just picking fights and stuff like that.
Um, it may be because if there wasn't any huge issue, you know, like one was a drunk or, or, or I guess this affair showed up at some point.
Uh, but, um, it sounds like it just kind of came out of restlessness and, and boredom.
Yeah.
Now, did your mother, you said she was with this other woman for a while and then that didn't work out, right?
Yeah, she was there for like probably two years.
I don't exactly remember.
Then they broke up.
Oh, they broke up like seven times, like five, six, seven times.
I literally lost count.
Like such a chaotic relationship ultimately didn't work out.
I don't really know why.
And after that she had a couple of boyfriends and ultimately she got to find a relatively good guy.
I think, I mean, he has some weird ideas if you talk to him about like population and how many people there should be and like stuff like that, but like just talking to him and normal, like, well, but she's married now, so.
Is he one of these 500 million guys?
Like the population should go down to 500 million?
Because there are some environmentalists like that.
No, he's more like one child policy.
I don't think he thinks 500 million is the exact number or something, but he's more like, yeah, less people would be better.
I guess he didn't have any kids then.
Oh, you're right.
No, he does not.
No.
Yeah I mean the real issue with world population is the five kids per woman in parts of Africa.
That's the real issue with world population but everybody focuses on the developed world which is already below replacement levels.
The white population or the East Asian population already below the replacement levels.
Everybody focuses on that rather than on where the real fertility issue is going on which is in places in Africa but I guess that's neither here nor there.
So she did settle down with this guy and that's been chugging along for how long?
Mmm Like they're probably gonna break up but they like literally never had a fight Like they don't have any arguments.
It's like still they're like Constantly like sweet to each other and like sort of honeymoon fits and I don't know For five years ish and you say you think they're gonna break up I thought so but They literally never had a fight, and I don't think they're gonna start fighting anytime soon, so I guess they're gonna stay together.
I don't really understand their relationship, but it's not like there's anything kinky or weird or anything like that.
Wait, what's wrong with not fighting?
Yeah, exactly!
Well, that's good, right?
Yeah.
So wait, you said you don't understand their relationship because they get along, because they don't fight?
What do you mean?
Or is there something else that's odd about it?
I don't know.
I just think it's odd that they never ever had a... It's always like, if my mom always says yes, he immediately does it.
So I don't... I wouldn't like a guy like that.
Sorry, you just broke up there for a second.
If your mother does what, he immediately does it?
Yeah, he... Mother wants something, he just does it for her.
I guess that's why they don't fight.
Huh.
Interesting.
I mean, I don't fight with my wife, so I don't particularly... I don't think there's anything wrong with not fighting, but if you stop fighting because you don't have a personality, well, that's a problem.
If you're just appeasing all the time, then yeah.
I mean, maybe it's more like that, and that's the part of not relationship.
Yeah, I guess they invest a lot in avoiding conflict.
Right.
Yeah, which is also, if you've been in a bunch of relationships that are volatile and you realize where anger leads, then of course what can happen is you say, well, I'm just not going to have any disagreements and that can involve a certain kind of self erasure that is, I don't think, particularly healthy, but still in general more healthy than crazy fights for no reason.
Yes.
Now, have you dated at all?
When I was younger, when I was 16.
So that's almost nine years ago.
Yeah, that was about it.
Not even really physical.
And after that, no, no.
Do you find that you're not particularly attracted to women?
Or is it more that it's overwhelming or low, low sex drive?
Or do you have any idea why?
It's been, I guess, what, close to a decade since you dated?
No, I try to, but... I always want to say no luck, obviously it has nothing to do with luck, but... Yeah, for a long time... I was afraid I couldn't get anyone, but... After... Oh no, wait, when I was 19, there was a chick, but she like...
How do you say it in English?
She came up to me and she engaged with me, right?
Not the other way around, because especially back then I had no clue how to do that.
I didn't learn anything about women from my parents or friends.
So she engaged me and I had a short relationship with her, but I was like, how do you call that?
Her replacement guy.
A rebound guy?
Yeah, after you have a relationship, you have a guy for a short while and then you find a real boyfriend again.
Well, I was the short-term guy.
Has your father ever talked to you about dating or how to talk to women or anything like that?
I don't think I would listen to him.
Why is that?
I mean, he had three marriages filled already.
Well, no, I mean, he's good at getting women, he's just not good at keeping women, right?
True that, yes.
So he has the, I guess, the entry point, but I guess maybe his techniques would be better at attracting crazy women than a sane woman.
Yes.
Now, what about your mom?
Has she ever talked about dating with you?
No.
Why do you think your parents have never brought this up with you?
I mean, they assume... I assume that they would imagine that you'd want to go on a date.
Is that fair to say that if you found a nice, good, smart woman that you'd want to go on a date?
Hell yeah.
Okay, hell yeah!
Okay, I hear you brother.
So why do you think your parents are just letting you languish like a toadstool in the incel community when you, with some advice, I'm sure, some prompting, some tricks and tips, might be able to get out there?
All I can think of is that they don't really care.
And what about your sister?
Would she help you at all with this?
Maybe if I ask, but ...
Okay.
So what is everyone's plan?
Is everyone's plan that you're just gonna sit in your room?
I mean, when was the last time you worked?
Mmm Half a year ago.
I worked in like how you call that moving houses?
so packing all the stuff of people and then put it into boxes and I'm moving it to another place and what about Give me just a brief resume of times that you've worked in where you've worked.
I Worked when I was 16 At a do-it-yourself store I worked there for like A year?
No, three quarters of a year.
I worked at a supermarket when I was even younger, but that was a lot to take in, lots of colors, and after a while it kind of got to my head, and I didn't work as fast as the other guys, and in the beginning, you know, no one really cares, because you kind of need to get in the flow and learn it, but I got around like 70% of the speed of the other guys, so I got fired.
All right.
I worked a couple days in a big warehouse, but I got treated like a robot and I quit job because, you know, there wasn't a real consequence for me.
It wasn't like I wasn't going to get any money because, yeah, you know, I get money.
You mean you could quit your job because you could go on welfare, right?
Yeah, yes.
And how long ago was that?
Oh, that was already like three, four years ago.
So what do you do with your day?
Oh my god, waste it.
Okay, but how?
I'd go nuts myself.
I mean, that may or may not be a good thing, but I kinda have to have a purpose.
I spent an hour and a half today putting together furniture, which I find incredibly satisfying, and I'm prepared for this call, and I'm going to work on a presentation for tonight, and so for me, you know, it's nice to relax, good to have fun.
I have to have a kind of like a hop, skip, and a jump over the stepping stones of purpose, and without a purpose I Go a little squirrelly.
Well, a lot squirrelly, in fact.
I can't even remember the last time I didn't have some particular purpose.
So tell me, what time do you wake up and how do you spend your day?
Recently I got a dog, so I wake up around like 8 now, these days.
Oh, because of the dog, right?
Yes, otherwise it was like 11, 12.
And now even earlier than that.
I think it's like 7.15, 7.30.
But yeah, I just walk the dog and I got good at gaming.
Like really good, like top 1% of players.
I play a lot of Overwatch and some other shooters.
I practice my aim a lot.
But it's not really like a passion, passion of mine.
Well, could you make a living at that?
I mean, there are people who are professional gamers, right?
Fatality and others.
Yeah, but then I still have to make another like two, three thousand hours before I would be good enough to go that direction.
So that's still like, that's like actually a lot of discipline and a lot of work.
And I was thinking about doing YouTube and just be kind of an entertainer, but then I never ever did.
You know, I downloaded a software program or editing program, but never did anything with it.
And I uploaded some some videos to youtube but without any editing this straight-up gameplay and just without any editing throw it on youtube and it got some decent views because i have decent skills at the games but well these like a few hundred views here a few hundred views there but like nothing major because i didn't put in like real effort well you
i mean certainly when you're styling out like when i was starting out i spent way more time publicizing and marketing than i did creating stuff the creating stuff is fun the publicizing and marketing not so much but so you did that but you have no urgency right i mean you can just bump along okay so you do some gaming you've done a couple videos what else um i work out
um and i'm Of course, I see some friends here and there.
I listened to your show and I picked up Garraf Maga, the fighting sport.
That's about it, I guess.
Sorry, the last thing, the fighting sport.
Can you just tell me a bit about that?
Yeah, it's like MMA.
I guess you should ask Joe Rogan more about this.
It's all about self-defense, like defending yourself from a knife attack, or what about if two or three people attack you, or how do you yell in the streets, or how do you keep somebody at bay.
It's only meant for practical applications.
One of the main focuses is hitting your opponent in the groin.
So it's disabled by any means necessary, right?
Yes, exactly.
Okay.
Are you planning on visiting London anytime soon?
I was in England a couple months ago.
It's kind of grim.
Yeah, it's very grim in England.
And so what time do you go to bed?
I still need to work on that.
Like now for kind of a reason to go to bed because of the dog.
So like 11, 12, usually 12.
And then I sleep at like 12, 15, 12, 30.
Right, okay.
So what do you want out of life?
I mean, what would be the best thing to get out of this call?
Well, those are some big questions. - Yeah.
Well, you wanted to talk to me, so I assume you have some goal here.
I know it goes against the grain a little bit, but what do you want?
I mean, how happy are you?
Say, minus ten, worst misery, plus ten, greatest happiness.
Where would you put your average happiness?
Minus three.
Minus three, okay.
So, ennui, kind of dysthymia, just a kind of down but not like looking over bridges, right?
No, some days I have that, but like, most of my days are like, stable.
Okay, so tell me about your worst day or worst days.
What happens then?
Yeah, I feel absolutely miserable.
Like I don't, I just realize the, The gravity of it and the failures I've made and that I've really not... And yeah, it just eats at you, alright?
It just eats at you from the inside out.
It's just like this agonizing pain that you... I think it's crushingly lonely that...
That you haven't reached your potential.
It's just very painful.
Haven't reached your potential?
I mean, where are you relative to your potential?
I mean, I don't know if I've reached my potential yet, but I'm working hard at it.
I mean, what do you mean by, like, how close are you to reaching your potential?
You move some boxes around and play some video games.
Yeah, like light years away.
Yeah.
Yeah, and so what do you think your potential could be?
What would you like to achieve?
What do you think would take away that sense of uselessness and futility and misery?
A meaningful job.
Or really a job to start with?
Well, you could get a job, right?
I mean, you can go and get a job, it's just it's not as much fun as walking the dog playing video games, right?
Hanging out with friends?
Exactly.
Right.
And you have no particular skills, as far as I know, other than, I guess you're fairly well versed in philosophy if you listen to this show, but you have a lot of skills.
And you've got big giant holes in your resume that are going to give an employer, like if you were coming for a job for me, right?
I'd look at your resume and say, well, this guy's had like three jobs in five years.
Or three jobs in ten years, or five jobs in ten years, and he spent a long time unemployed, which means that he doesn't really like to work, and he's got options, which means that if I ask him to do something he's not happy with, or if he's unhappy, he's just gonna quit, right?
Yeah.
So you're really behind the eight ball, as the old saying goes, because you haven't dug in and applied yourself to the point where people say, yeah, this guy can overcome all of the inevitable obstacles that come with entering any career or any job.
You have to have a willingness to just kind of grit down and bear with things and push through problems in order to Yeah, and I think it's not just work, it also showed really in my studies.
And maybe I'm kind of dodging this here, but I think it's also like insecurity that I think really fast, like, oh, I can't do this, so I just give up.
because that's terrible for the employer, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I think it's not just work.
It also showed really in my studies.
And maybe I'm kind of dodging this here, but I think it's also like insecurity that I think really fast, like, oh, I can't do this, so I just give up.
So that's like a clear weakness.
But it's like I often think like, especially if something with writing, I have dyslexia, and then it's like, oh, I can't read this, or I made a spelling mistake, or just walk away, like, whatever, done, done.
Like, okay, okay, no, that's, that's interesting.
So what does it mean?
If you can't do it?
What does it mean?
What does it mean about you if you can't do something?
That I'm a failure.
So you'd rather withdraw from the competition than not come in first or come in last, right?
Yes, yes.
Do you think, I mean logically, right?
Sound like a logical guy, right?
So logically, does withdrawing from the competition mean that you haven't lost?
Just, you know, taking yourself out of the equation, just from a pure logic standpoint, if you refuse to compete, does that mean you haven't lost?
Next.
No, no, you have lost, because you quit the game.
Of course you have!
Think of things genetically, right?
Think of your sperm, right?
If you never date, have you lost the capacity to have children?
Yes.
Yes, you have.
Right?
If you never apply for a job, have you lost the capacity to earn your own income?
Yes.
Of course.
If you never even... There's something worse than being rejected, which is never being in the game.
There's something worse than losing, which is not even fucking trying, right?
So this idea that you're somehow escaping losing by not even playing is completely false.
Do you see what I mean?
Yes, yes, I do.
So you're not solving the problem of losing.
You're entrenching the problem of losing, right?
Yes.
And what do you think of that perspective?
It sounds new, so what do you think?
I don't know why I think about this, but I'll just go with it.
It makes me think of a time when I was 15, 16, and refusing to play the game.
In this case, it was school.
It really worked out super well for me.
Because my parents sent me to a private school.
Long days, didn't like it.
Got kind of bullied there.
So I really didn't like it.
So I just skipped days and whatever.
I just kept picking fights so I got like...
expelled or, like, thrown out of school, right?
And... Wait a minute!
It worked!
You kept picking fights.
Do you know what that reminds me of?
Not my parents!
Yes, your parents, my friend!
Yes, your parents, right?
Because we were talking about that, about how your dad would just kind of pick fights with your mom, or maybe it was vice versa, right?
Yeah.
Because they were unhappy or bored, and here's the situation, right?
You're unhappy in school, so you pick fights till you get expelled, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Very interesting.
Now, did you pick fights like physical fights or just emotional fights?
Both.
Whatever was available easiest.
And you did you actually get into physical fights?
A few.
I'm not very proud of this now, but like, I made sure I would win them like I guess that not playing fair is something I'm really good at.
Well, I mean, now you're studying kicking guys in the groin, right?
Yeah, so like that kind of stuff.
So by any means necessary, and so you got kicked out.
So here's the funny thing, is that you told me just now you were bullied, right?
Yes.
But you were the bully!
You were picking fights with other people and kicking them in the groin!
What do you mean you're being bullied?
What am I missing here?
Well, there were different groups.
So, like, I was the bully to one group and I got bullied by another group.
But I also fought with those kids.
So, like, there was a group.
Hang on.
If you can pick fights and kick people in the groin, why are you being bullied?
Is it because the other kids were older or bigger or what?
A bigger group.
I was alone.
I didn't have many friends.
Right, okay, so who did you pick on?
Was it smaller kids or was it kids?
So you picked and beat up and kicked in the groin smaller children.
Yes.
And what do you think of that?
Kind of disgusting.
Like, yeah, I'm honestly, like, I haven't come back to the, or thought about those times.
Because, yeah, I'm like, Yeah, I feel kind of shitty about it.
They didn't deserve that.
All right, so tell me a time, please, and I'll tell you why afterwards.
So tell me a time that's most vivid for you, or is vivid for you, where you picked on a smaller child and then beat him up.
What happened?
Yeah, it was a smaller kid.
He was verbally kind of making fun of me.
Nothing too bad.
And the day after, I just walked up to him and kind of soccer punched him into the belly.
He didn't know actually what he did wrong, I think.
Because he didn't really do that much wrong.
Yeah, I just walked up to him and sucker punched him and yeah, he kind of went down because, you know, you get fucking sucker punched.
And how old were you and how old was he?
I think we were two years apart.
I was like 14, 15.
He was like 13.
Was he much smaller, like half a head smaller?
Yes.
Yes.
I think we were like 10, 12, 13 kilos apart.
Okay.
And how did you sucker punch him?
Where were you and what happened?
in the gut like Uppercut into into his like belly area So you punched him kind of like solar plexus and how did you sucker punch him like were you Were you like coming down the stairs or how did that happen?
No, there was a table.
There was no room to move right or left really and you have to like in a really crowded area you like move kind of past each other and Sort of before that happened, he kind of exposed himself and then I hit him.
And one to ten, how hard did you hit him?
Eight.
Eight point five.
So you could have hit him harder, but you didn't.
No, I think... Or did you hit him as hard as you could?
No, no, no.
I was like calculated.
I wasn't like even really angry.
I just knew if I do this with this intensity, I get these consequences.
And what are these consequences?
They mean being suspended or kicked out?
Yeah, making that more likely and not getting into any like legal trouble.
Oh, so you hit him hard enough to get kicked out, but not so hard that you could get charged or your parents could get sued or something like that, right?
Yes, that was kind of a psycho move.
Yes.
And why?
So you did it and did you get what you wanted?
Is that the incident that got you kicked out?
No, man.
I think eventually I had to bring a dead fox to school and that did the trick, I think.
I'm so sorry, I shouldn't laugh, but these conversations do go in some rather fascinating directions.
That's why I keep having them, I guess.
You brought a dead fox?
Did you mispronounce the American Canadian's name?
What do you mean you brought a dead fox into... what?
Yeah, I was doing the sport like with bow shooting, like shooting with a bow and arrow.
And somebody gave that to me.
I can't really remember who it was or why, but I just had that.
You know, I just had it.
You just had a dead fox.
Yeah.
You know, you're a young kid, you think it's cool.
And I was like, yeah, at school, they're not going to like that.
And the day before I already said to the, I call that, uh, gun rector.
No, the boss at school.
Oh, the principal?
Um, that.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The principal.
That like, Hey, um, I was talking about the dead fox and like talking about the other kids about it.
And he said, like, don't bring that because I was like, yeah, you don't have a dead fox.
I was like, I'll bring it to school tomorrow.
I'll bet you.
And he was like, don't do that.
I was like, huh?
So the next day I brought a dead fox to school and yeah, they weren't happy.
How did you bring the dead fox to school?
Did you put it in a sports bag or a backpack or just?
No, no, it was it was like it was It sounds maybe a little more interesting and vivid than it really was.
It was only like the skin and his head were left.
You put a skinned and head of a dead fox.
Who skinned it?
Somebody at the club for bow shooting.
That wasn't me.
Oh, so it was somebody shot a fox with a bow?
Yes.
Never ever watch the movie, there's something about Kevin, or we have to talk about Kevin, or whatever it is.
All right.
So that's when you got kicked out.
Now, you obviously didn't want to go to the school, and how old were you when this was going on?
I was right around the time I was getting diagnosed with autism and ADD.
So that must have been like, I was like 15, 15, 16.
And what happened to you after you, I mean, this is when you got kicked out and what happened to you after that?
Well, for school, I went to a school for autistic people and it kind of let me do whatever for a whole year.
Like literally, I just could walk into other classes and have fun and like, not make homework and the subject matter wasn't that hard, so I didn't have to do homework.
I had great fun there, but at home I was switching places, living a month here, living a month there.
You mean between your mom and dad?
Yeah, and it got worse and worse because my father was in his third marriage and I was hating the chick he was with a lot.
Why did you hate her?
Oh, I think you talked about this on the other show.
She was one of those people who had to, like, was really about her physical things.
So her car and the wine glasses and the, like... Oh, she had this stuff fetish, like everything's got to be clean and pure and pristine and perfect and... Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And I was a teenager, so that didn't really, like, coexist in peace.
She was a control freak.
So that just didn't work for me.
Yeah, so that was kind of rough.
And after... What was it?
Yeah, at the end of that year, just before summer, my parents tried to throw me into an asylum where I had to be in for a year because my mom was constantly on the verge of
Collapsed like you know really stressed out and all that and my father was kind of done with me because his marriage wasn't going well because of me and But I managed to fought my way out of that one as well So so how sorry how old were you your parents tried to get you institutionalized?
How old were you there?
16 and a half I think and What I mean, what were you facing there?
I mean, what would have happened?
Um Yeah, I don't know.
I don't think anything good.
I think that's fair to say.
Were you on meds at this point?
Were you on medication at this point?
No, no.
I quit that.
I got really itchy from it.
I never did cocaine, but it felt like doing cocaine.
It was a really intense medication.
Did it help your symptoms at all or just give you the itch?
Yeah, it just gave me like really aggressive thoughts, like constantly thinking about like people getting decapitated or like, you know, really violent, gruesome stuff.
So that was mostly it.
Wait, wait, wait, sorry.
When did you go on this med?
Right after my diagnosis, so 15-ish.
Now, were you on the meds when you brought the skinned fox to school?
Yeah.
Do you think that might be related?
Well, you think it is?
I think it might be.
I'm not a doctor, but it seems like, I mean, if you're having these crazy thoughts, I mean, violent thoughts, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now you say it like that.
I could be for sure.
So tell me a little bit about the thoughts that you were having.
Tell me more like, were they vivid?
Were they almost like hallucinatory?
Were they dream states?
How did these visions, these aggressive visions, how did they manifest?
They were just really emotional.
They weren't like, they were in my head.
I wasn't hallucinating but like, I didn't even have to watch the news or anything.
But I just remember like, After taking the pill, I just thought so much about, like, my arm gets chopped off or, you know, what if a change saw this and that.
I won't get into too much details, but... No, no, listen, details are fine.
I mean, I'm curious because there is this talk about how these meds mess with your sense of aggression.
I'm just curious what your experience was of that.
I never heard that.
Yeah, just really...
Thinking about like chainsaws and like mowing people down.
And I don't know if that was exactly at that time, but I must have been on the Mets, I think.
That guy in, was it Sweden?
Andrik Breivik, you know, who killed like 80 people.
Yeah, I thought about that guy a bunch and like how he did it.
And I was like, yeah, I could have done a better job.
And I remember that pretty vividly.
Like, I was like, yeah, I could do that shit.
Like, I would do that shit better.
And I could clearly visualize better strategies or whatever you want to call it.
At least I thought at the time.
I don't know.
It doesn't even matter.
But I really thought about that.
Just evil, violent acts and seeing how far you could take that.
Yeah, it was pretty dark.
And how long were you on the Mets for?
1.5 years, I think.
At the end, I wanted to stop.
Were they tough to stop?
No, I wasn't addicting or anything, but sometimes it helps you concentrate in school.
It does work in the sense that your head doesn't get filled up as fast, so you can process more information.
And did the vision stop when you stopped the meds?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, you have a bad dream every now and then, but nothing major, nothing special.
I occasionally get those.
They can be quite instructive, but you've got to pay attention.
Do you, I mean, I don't know if you've read, and again, I'm no doctor, but I mean, if you want to read some of the labels, some of these psychotropics, and I don't know if you were on psychotropics or not, but yeah, they've been
violent ideation as far as I understand it is is one of the side effects potentially of these meds so it may not have been a personality issue on your part it may have been just that's the uh you know like if you take certain kinds of strong medicines for your teeth and gums it can turn your teeth brown but it's not because you're a smoker or or don't take care of your teeth it's just the effects of the meds right?
Yeah.
And yeah, it's just, I would look that up, because if you've said, there's this darkness within me when it may have been summoned by, I mean, I hate to even call these things meds, but let's just use, right, if it may have been summoned by these pills to some degree, you wouldn't want to confuse the effects of these pills with something innate to your personality, if that makes sense?
Yeah, I'll definitely look into that and read something about that.
Yeah.
Well, and I, again, I don't know what you were on, but if you do find out that this is one of these side effects, then I guess it would have been kind of nice if you'd been told, hey, by the way, you know, here's some of the pluses.
Some of the minuses will be that you will think that you could do a better job than Breivik, right?
Yeah, that's not great.
No, it's not.
It's really not great to avoid telling you about these, if these were related, because then you're going to think, my gosh, what kind of darkness is within me that I'm having these thoughts for so long?
Yeah, there was this one woman.
She made sure eventually this social work can get institutionalized.
And she was the only one who saw that within me that I wanted to massacre a bunch of people or whatever.
And she also saw that I was afraid that I was actually going to do that.
And she was like, yeah, I think you're not going to do it.
But she was the only one who got to that point, got to know me that well.
And I'm sure I mean, I'm assuming here, correct me of course, but I'm assuming here that these were ideas, but you weren't sitting there getting blueprints and making plans, right?
Yeah, they stayed with ideas.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, how did you avoid getting institutionalized?
Man, that was a fight.
That was one hell of a fight.
Not physical this time though.
I got advice from that social worker who got to know me and she like warned me about my father and especially my stepmother from my father's side.
What do you mean she warned you?
What did she say?
Well, she said like, well, she doesn't like you.
Like and she will try to get you institutionalized and whatever you say it won't be good enough so whatever you do just stay calm don't don't engage with her and just admit mistakes and you know try to keep the conversation on another path, you know and And my father was kind of like agreeing with her.
I'm sorry, your father was what?
My father was agreeing with his wife.
About you?
Yeah, whatever she said basically.
And I was kind of, you know, I was hoping that he would at least, you know, agree with some things on me.
So I was kind of disappointed in him about that.
But he wasn't the aggressor and I managed at the end of like a really long conversation to like convince my mom I could stay with her because else I had to go to the institution.
But I really wasn't welcome anymore at my father's place.
Was there a particular incident that moved this into the top part of the agenda?
Like made this happen?
Yeah, I think so.
There was like It was the year around the private school and after that I got into a physical altercation with my father's wife.
Okay, physical altercation.
I feel like I'm reading a police report.
What happened in layman's terms?
She had this tendency to grab my forearm as hard as she could.
Clearly her face was all angry and I'm tensed up.
She wanted to take my phone for something I did wrong.
I really can't remember what it was.
At that point I just pushed her back pretty hard.
I remember I even Calculated the angle in my head so she kind of hit her hip on like a draw but like not that hard that it would break but hard enough that it would be a big fucking bruise.
So that kind of pissed her off and after that there was really no way going back.
And was the outcome of that altercation, of that push, was the outcome kind of what you expected, or did it go a lot further in terms of her wanting to put you in an institution?
Oh yeah, that went way further than I expected.
So, because it reminds me of the calculation that you had with the boy that you sucker-punched when you were 15?
Yeah, this time I was more emotional, I think.
Right, it also reminds me of you practicing your aim in the video games, right?
Because it's all calculated aim and Yeah.
Yeah.
So then you went to live with your mom.
And then what happened?
I was as nice to her as I could be.
And I managed to ride it out until I was 18.
And then I started to live on my own.
Because I had that government money so I could just kind of leave.
So you could just move out and then get welfare based upon the autism, the ADD, the dyslexia, that kind of stuff, right?
Yep.
Did you experience any violence as a child, as a young child?
Yeah, a little bit.
One incident I remember Right now is, uh, I had, um, I was alone at home with my sister and my father had a garbage can, uh, in this like, uh, work area at home.
And we had stairs down, uh, our, how do you say that?
Uh, our backyard.
And it was this big plastic garbage can and she threw it down the stairs and Then she said, like, don't tell me and daddy.
And I was like, I was really young.
So I was like, yes, OK, I won't tell.
And then my mother came home and my sister read me out and she was like, he did it, you know, and my mother got angry at me and I started to cry and I said I didn't do it, but I didn't read out my sister.
And like I said, I just didn't do it.
That's what I remember, at least.
And my mother, like, she grabbed me so hard, again, by my hands.
It was just painful.
And yeah, it was a pretty painful experience.
What was the problem with the garbage?
You said it was a plastic garbage can lid.
I know the kind, like these big giant Frisbees.
What was the problem with that going down the stairs?
What did it do?
What did it harm?
Well, it broke.
So they had to buy a new one.
Which costs, what, $1.50?
Like, I don't quite understand.
I can't rationalize it either.
Like, I could say she had a long day, but what do I know?
I don't know, it was three or four.
So she'd rather break your heart than say, oh, well, you know, you're a little kid and you broke, right?
You broke something, who cares, right?
I mean, little kids are supposed to explore, they're supposed to, right?
Yeah.
Wow.
I'm so sorry.
That's terrible.
It's terrible.
And there's this theme of betrayal, right?
Theme of betrayal.
Betrayal.
Like, I mean, I get this incident with my sister a little bit, but what do you mean?
Well, your mother betrayed your father, right?
By having an affair, right?
Yes.
Your father betrayed you by not standing up for you.
Your parents betrayed you by putting you in a school where you had to bring a skin-dead animal to school in order to get out, and where you sucker-punched kids because people wouldn't listen to you.
Like, if you said, I don't want to be in the school, I hate this school, if your parents listen to you, you don't end up being so desperate that you're punching children and bringing skinned animals to school, right?
Yeah, I said that so many times to my mother.
That you wanted out, right?
Yeah, I wanted out.
I was terrible.
They didn't listen.
They really didn't listen.
They were like, this is good for you.
And I was like, whatever.
Well, I mean, I don't, obviously, and neither do you, right?
I don't approve of the way in which you ended up getting your way, but you did end up getting your way, right?
Yes.
And the only person that I can see so far in this entire life history, my friend, who did not betray you, was the social worker.
Oh, yeah, I love her, man.
I would like, I would literally still take a bullet for her.
Like, I miss her so much.
It is strange, you know, when you go through a life where nobody listens to a damn thing you're saying.
And then someone listens and provides some good advice and useful feedback and believes you.
It's incredible, right?
Oh, yeah, man, the love I still have for that woman, like, eventually we had a fall out because I think I couldn't handle Like her honesty and her love.
So it's just like, I don't know if I would trade her.
It's hard to get into that story, but yeah, we got into a fight and I think I eventually kind of left her.
So that's kind of stupid.
Right.
What else did you experience as a young child that was aggressive or violent?
I don't know.
This weird thing with my father.
He liked to play with us, rough and tumble, you know?
But he had this weird thing in his eyes when he managed to get on top of me.
I managed when he decided that, because he was quite literally eight times my body weight, so it could have been that hard.
You know, when he could, like, when he had, like, ground control over you, and he could, like, and you were on the bottom, and he looked you in the eyes, and he had that weird fucking look in his eyes of excitement, and I was like, I never liked that.
That always scared the shit out of me.
Tell me what you mean more about excitement, like, what?
Like, what do you think the mindset was, if you had to guess?
I don't know, it really made me always think about, like, a warrior achieving victory, like, at the end of a war movie, like, that kind of a look, like,
The final blow like that like or domination like victory slash domination that kind of Yeah, I was like I didn't never got it because it was just like playing it was never Real for me, you know so that like switch when he like one because because the mindset like in his eyes when you're just playing this like
You know, like just having fun, and then when he wins, it's like... Not just, haha, got you, but like... Huh.
Now I can do whatever the fuck I want.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, I was older, but it reminds me of being at a friend's place, and there was a guy there with a beard who was, I guess, in his 40s.
Somebody said he was a priest.
And we were kind of all wrestling in the pool, and under the water he would wrestle so fiercely, like, you'd feel bruised.
And it's like, dude, what are you doing?
We're 15!
What are you doing?
Because, like, roughhousing with kids, you have to be so careful.
You have to make sure it's fun, you have to make sure they're enjoying yourself, and you constantly have to make sure that you're not physically dominating them, that it remains play, right?
Because the play is really, really important.
You see dogs do it all the time.
They can wrestle with each other like crazy, and there may be a domination thing, but it's pretty rare.
And you see this with lions and cubs, they don't actually bite each other, right?
It's just play.
And it's supposed to be a lot of fun.
But occasionally you just come across these people, and it sounds like this is your dad, who just, they go all kinds of, I mean, I hate to say simian, 'cause it's kind of an insult to apes, 'cause apes play without injuring or dominating each other.
But people who are so starved for any kind of victory or authority that they dominate a child and somehow this vindicates like they've just won the Olympic wrestling match or something.
It's like, dude, as you say, eight times the body mass, it's really not much of a contest.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
Yeah, that's odd.
And it is because when you talk about your dad, And I sort of veer between, like this metronome, veer between, he doesn't say anything to your mom, or to his third wife, doesn't stand up for you.
So this is a beaten down guy.
This is a guy who is owned and controlled by women, as far as I can see.
And again, tell me if I'm going astray.
And, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, he, hmm, I don't know, because he also like, There was this weird thing with his third wife as well.
There were some other things, of course, of other wives.
But this really stuck by me that he wanted a kid, another kid, right?
And his third wife was like 50.
So, you know, if you think 30 is old, like 50 is not going to happen, right?
So, you know, he was not going to get another kid from her.
So he gave some lessons at some universities.
Economics or something.
I don't fucking know and then he met this like 26 year old girl there and his plan was to like bring her into the house have a kid with her and like then raise it with his wife and then she could like stay or like leave again and well, his third wife didn't like that but You got no kidding pretty yeah but he really wanted that idea and he got like he pushed it pretty hard and he was like
pretty serious about it.
And I don't know, he was really controlling and like, yeah, and his third wife like stayed with him after that for more than a year.
Eventually, I think it broke the relationship.
But yeah.
And is he alone now?
No, he has, he lives together again with, I found this really weird psychiatrist, a woman.
And she's actually pretty nice, but her husband died from Cancer so it's like actually a bad luck example like neck cancer or something But after that she dated a sociopath, so I guess like So your father's living with this woman now?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Not married?
Not yet, but they moved in together, but they know each other like five months.
So they met and then like five months later they moved in together?
Yep.
How long after the death of her husband?
Quite a long time, I think.
Okay, okay.
So it's still not great, right?
I mean, it's not great.
So does your father, I mean, does he have some sort of an inability to be alone?
Yeah, I would say so.
See, he has too little ability to be alone and you have too much ability to be alone.
I think somewhere in the middle is probably the Aristotelian sweet spot, right?
Yes.
Aristotelian?
Yeah, you know, the Aristotelian mean, like, too much courage is foolhardiness, too little courage is cowardice, and the right amount of courage at the right time.
So somewhere, you know, you don't want to be completely dependent on other people being around in order to be even remotely happy, because then you're desperate, right?
And you also at the same time don't want to have a life of solitude, because we're social animals, right?
Standards but contact is kind of key, right?
So let me ask you this.
Have you seen what you would consider a happy human relationship?
A positive, virtuous, happy, like something you'd say, oh yeah, if I had that, that'd be great.
I've seen people walk down the street with... No, no, no, no, I don't mean that, because that could be bullshit, right?
I mean, they could just be on coke, right?
I mean, that you know... The social worker, the social worker, she loved her husband, and her husband loved her, and they have kids now, so... Yeah, they love each other so much.
And she saved you, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so...
Tell me then, what happened with her and you?
Sorry, that sounds like an order.
I respectfully request that you tell me.
me?
Oh, well, I got sent for the like autism and there were like camps, like to like socialize as like kids there.
And yeah, the mindset and the environment, it was completely different.
So I really wasn't feeling like... I was still taking my meds, but I wasn't, like, soccer-punching anybody, right?
I was, like, relatively nice, but I was, like, afraid to touch anybody.
And, like, then that was already when she started talking to me.
And, yeah, that was great.
Like, it was such a breath of fresh air, talking to somebody who listens and, like, showed interest and...
Just such a lovely lady.
You know that you're leading me down a garden path here because you don't want to tell me the negative stuff, right?
No.
You already established she's a great woman, so I don't need the sales pitch.
Just tell me about what happened that was a problem.
I have honestly trouble remembering.
What I remember to start with is I had a kind of girlfriend I met there.
I started to fight with that girlfriend, I think really for no reason.
Again, maybe I was bored, I don't know.
Yeah, no, I remember.
She pushed me to be better and I started showing worse sides of myself.
Well, my girlfriend was good friends with the social worker.
So, the social worker confronted me with that and
We kind of resolved that for for like a few days in another camp and it was kind of okay for a few days then I had like a massive panic attack and after that I was just like fake nice for for a bit like like yeah I learned from it and then like totally do the wrong thing consistently and
Yeah, I honestly don't remember specific things about those days.
I think I was pretty rough.
She kind of had to know where I was, but I was just anywhere and everywhere.
She had to put a lot of effort to find me and stuff like that.
I wasn't actively finding her.
I wasn't good.
I wasn't good.
It's weird to talk about that.
But you don't remember the exact incident that caused the break?
Yeah, there was an evening and I just didn't know what to say anymore because I knew I screwed up.
And I remember just like sort of emotionally closing off and I was like, okay, And she still tried to, like, reach me, but I was like... I was clearly not there anymore, so I was just like... Okay.
I was literally like... She said, like, but don't you, like, want to improve or this or that?
But, like, what about what we worked on for all this time?
What are you gonna do now?
I was like, oh, whatever.
And, like, I was just not there emotionally anymore.
I was just kind of cut off.
And I think that, yeah, that must have crushed it.
Wait, were you not there, like you weren't feeling anything, or you were feeling things that you didn't want to share?
No, I couldn't feel anything.
I couldn't feel it.
I could stab myself, I wouldn't feel it.
Just like this monumental interstellar indifference?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah.
Absolutely.
Yes.
So it wasn't exactly conflict, you just weren't willing to work with her for whatever reason, and did she just then withdraw from, like, okay, if he's not listening, then I'm gonna talk to someone who will.
Yes.
She was honestly really disappointed.
So it wasn't a huge blow up or anything like that.
She was honestly really disappointed.
Right.
Did she know you were dating this girl?
Yes.
Now the girl who was saying, hey, man, you just got to be better.
I mean, how are you supposed to be better?
What examples did you have of better?
It's like someone nagging me, Hey man, you just should speak Japanese better.
It's like, I don't, I don't speak Japanese.
Like, I don't know what you're saying.
Like, what do you, how am I supposed to know Japanese?
Uh, just speak it lol.
I'm sorry, say again?
Just speak it.
Yeah, just speak it, man.
Just speak Japanese, you know, like the Japanese people do.
They've got five-year-olds, three-year-olds, two-year-olds speaking Japanese.
It's like, yeah, but I don't... No speak of the language.
I mean, just be better.
What is that?
I mean, I don't know.
Yeah, she said focus on other things.
Yeah, all useless garbage, right?
In hindsight, yes.
Well, it was, right?
And you said this gave you a panic attack, right?
Yeah, the only one I ever had in my life.
Right.
I mean, I can go out on a limb and say why I think you had the panic attack.
I still don't really know to this day.
Okay, well, you had the panic attack because the constant theme of betrayal was rising again.
This girlfriend betrayed you by saying, just be better.
Oh.
You see?
She sided with your parents.
I bet you your parents just said, be better or do better or just got impatient or didn't understand the pathologies that had been rooted in you by your terrible childhood.
Just be better, man.
Work harder.
Work harder!
You know, like you got some terrible sunburn and it's like, just don't be sunburned.
It's like, what the fuck are you talking about?
It's like some woman yelling at me, grow hair!
It's like, um, that's insane, right?
I don't mean to laugh, but I mean, isn't this kind of a betrayal of your history to just say, well, you know, just be a better person and do better.
And it's like, the only way that you're going to do better is if the cycle is broken.
Right?
That's the only way we do better, is if the cycle is broken, and people... When someone says to you, do better, they're saying that all the causes of your problems are you, and your choice, and your free will, there's no environment, there's no history, there's no modeling, there's no betrayal, there's no abuse, there's no trauma, there are no dysfunctions, it's all you!
You're the problem.
And you just need to fix it to better focus on other things like you're just carrying this entire fucking burden of your dysfunctional family that might go back for 50,000 fucking years.
And people just say, well, just be better.
And I can't share it with anyone because I don't trust anyone.
Well, I trust you enough.
Right.
But yeah, it's so lonely, man.
It's fucking painful.
Like, no, like I have this deep conversations with myself.
When they're productive, like when I have good days.
And then it's like, at the end of the conversation, I'm like, yeah, well, who gives a shit?
What do I even care?
Right.
Well, it's like the people who say, well, you know, if your kid's homeschooled, how are they going to learn how to socialize?
It's like, kids don't socialize.
They are on tablets all the time.
They don't know how to have conversations.
They don't know how to negotiate.
They don't know how to create games.
My daughter and I go to a park, and she's just on the edge of getting too old for this.
She's kind of losing interest.
But we go to parks, and the kids are all just milling around.
They have no idea.
Like, when I was a kid, you'd spontaneously say, OK, let's play this.
Let's play Manhunt.
Let's play Red Rover.
Let's play Freeze Tag.
Something, right?
Let's get some damn game going.
But the kids are just all sitting around, milling around.
They have no idea how to self-organize, because I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe it's the tablets.
So it's tough, it's tough, like, what is the value of other human beings?
This is the fundamental question I think that you're wrestling with.
What's the plus of other human beings?
What's the benefit?
What's the upside of opening up?
What's the upside of getting connected?
What's the purpose?
What's the point?
What's the value?
Where's the pleasure?
Yeah, well, like, that's it for me, like, pleasure, like, that's it.
Like, just physical pleasure, but besides that, I don't... No, no, no, yeah, I mean, outside of sex, and we get all of that, right?
But I mean, what is the plus of having other people around?
It's a big question.
It's a big question, and it's a tough question.
I don't know if it's more of a tough question these days, or just a tough... maybe it's always been a tough question.
I don't know.
But when you look back in your history, my friend, and you say, okay, well, probably a thousand people.
Like when I was in boarding school way back in the day, I used to, and I used to test myself, I used to know the names of I think about like 500 plus kids.
And I used to know that I used to remember the names of all of them.
Now, of course, I remember the names of only one or two.
But There were like 500 kids there, and then I went to a whole bunch of different schools.
I've extended family.
Just when I was a kid, I met probably a thousand or two thousand people, kind of passed through my life in one way or another.
And I remember in my twenties just sitting down and saying, okay, so I've met like a thousand or two thousand people, and I don't just mean like a waiter or something, but met and had some kind of interaction with, right?
And of those thousand or two thousand people, how many were quality people?
That I could talk to, that were interesting, that I could trust, right?
So few to none, yeah.
Well, okay, so let me ask you this, right?
You've probably met a thousand or two thousand people over the course of your life, maybe more.
What, of those people, you've got like one, this woman, Who also, you know, and I again, I'm not a social worker, not a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, not a doctor, not a therapist.
But she was not able to crack your isolation or your reserve, right?
No.
And I would say, I mean, my guess would be that you went rubber bones emotionally.
Because you were in a terribly familiar situation, and the fact that you'd had the panic attack was you saying, okay, there's a potential for something different here, and when something different didn't happen, you just went back into early dissociative mode.
You know, like the bear might wake up from the hibernation and say, is it spring yet?
Sticks its nose out, sees its breath fog, sees ice all over the trees, and goes the hell back to bed, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember that.
I was so like, numb emotionally.
Right.
Because we get emotions through allies.
This is something people think that these emotions that we have are just somehow spontaneously generated within us.
But we have emotions when we have allies.
We have emotions when we're listened to.
We have emotions when we're empathized with.
In the absence of any of that I mean, think of living on a desert island.
I guess for you that's not a huge stretch, right?
But think of living on a desert island.
How many emotions are you going to have other than some occasional despair and frustration and a desperate hope to be rescued or something?
But emotions are social things.
They're not just mere isolated rocket sleds of Neurological stimuli within our hearts and minds.
They're social things.
And if we are cut off from society, we generally tend to get cut off from our emotions.
And the despair that you probably are feeling has more to do with not feeling emotions due to isolation, rather than any specific emotion.
And so when you had a panic attack, that was like, okay, I'm going to signal distress.
Does anyone care?
Is anyone going to notice?
Is anyone going to identify the source, which is my history?
And when you were blamed, In a sense, by someone just saying, your girlfriend's saying, just do better, just be better, think of other things and so on, putting the entire burden of a massively dysfunctional family and extended family and three marriages from your dad and boyfriends, sorry, husband and girlfriend and boyfriend and new husband, I mean, just, you went through a hell of a lot of family structures.
None of whom supported you or cared about you or listened to you or sympathized with you as far as I can see.
So you have a panic attack because you're in a situation where you think you have an ally, turns out with the girlfriend you don't, and you shut down because you're, okay, this was my, you know, I mean maybe in your mind it was as dramatic as this was the last chance I had to not be isolated, but turns out everybody's shitty.
And isolation.
Yeah, that was the loneliness.
Yeah, I never felt so lonely as that day.
Yeah.
Right.
It's painful.
Because it's like, okay, I give up.
I give up on connecting.
I give up on trying to find people because nobody's trustworthy.
Everybody's dangerous.
Everybody's selfish.
Everybody projects.
Yeah, I like, I even feel that way about myself.
I like, I had to like, let's call it privilege or like, Dumb luck to save two people's lives.
One time some idiot like Los was jumping on the ice on the red bridge so guess what he fell through and you know I pulled him out of the ice and he was like panicking you know he was like already like how you say that his muscles were cramping so he could so he was like half drowning I don't know what would have happened I didn't do it but it felt like I saved him at least from a lot of trouble and another time I was like
This is another stupid story, but I had a bit of a psycho friend because I didn't really select friends and he attacked another friend and tried to choke him out and I had to pull him off and fight him for like 10 minutes.
It was crazy.
And after that I just felt like, eh, it doesn't even matter.
Like, why the fuck did I even put in the effort?
Like, why did I bother saving someone who's just going to go around betraying everyone anyway?
Yeah.
Right.
And that's the nihilism that is going to arise from just being surrounded by crappy people all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Damn.
And it's a dangerous state, right?
Because you just mark in time till you die, right?
Oh yeah, I even thought about this lately, having a clear conversation, I was like, damn, I was thinking about dying for a while, I was like, man, I'm not that unhappy that I don't want to kill myself, but if I could go back and decide not to be born, I think I would choose not to be born.
I wrote a novel called Just Poor, and I'm, you know, people, and I just want to point this out to the listeners, right?
You know, people say, Oh, you know, this guy, Steph was talking about himself.
And it's like, I'm not just talking about myself.
I'm talking about things we have in common, right?
Because connection is key.
And this novel, there was a young woman who had a very abusive mother.
And she had a terrible dream.
I can't remember exactly how this was set up.
But the basically the The gist of it was this question.
If someone were to show you a movie of your life until the age of 18, would you choose to be born?
Not knowing anything that might happen after that.
Answering that question is very revelatory.
It was for me.
I mean, I tell you straight up, I would not have chosen to be born if somebody had just shown me my life up to the age of, like I say, 15 for me, like when I started living outside of parental influence, right?
So if somebody would say to me, okay, here's your life to the age of 15, You know, here's the violence, here's the craziness, here's the terrible education, here's the propaganda, here's like, this is your life until 15.
And you're floating around like a soul, like in a sort of Plato's forms, or John Rawls' theory of justice planet, or like, you're just floating around, and they say, listen, you can go and enter this body and be born, and this is your life until the age of 15.
Do you want it or not?
That's terrible.
Who would?
Right.
That is a tough question.
And I wrote this book when I was in my mid-twenties.
It's a hell of a question to ask, right?
Do you want the life you get for the first decade and a half not knowing anything that might come after?
You want to be born?
You want to walk in this meat bag?
You want to be abandoned, isolated?
You want to be abused?
You want to be neglected?
You want to be betrayed?
You want to walk through this veil of fucking tears for a decade and a half?
Or do you want to just stay up here in the null zone, floating in the unborn souls like the ring of Saturn?
Do you want to just stay up here or do you want to go down there?
And what would you say?
Stay over here, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Now, if somebody said to me, here's your life up to 52, I'd be like, man, that first 15 fucking years are kind of a doozy.
But it's worth sticking around for the later stuff.
But if somebody, because you know, when you're 15 or 16 or so, you don't know what your life's going to be like later.
But if you just look at that first bit, I'd be like, nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
It would have to be a pretty low level of hell for me to want to escape up to the surface.
For my first 15 years, I'll tell you that straight up.
But that's really now my main motivation to at least make something of my life, because I've been through those 15 years.
So it's like, well, I already did it.
I literally can't go back.
So I might as well make it now.
Right.
Right.
Okay, so let's get to your future.
I really, really appreciate this history talk.
It's been really revelatory, and I really appreciate this kind of honesty.
Of course, right?
It's beautiful.
Okay, so you're stuck, right?
You're stuck.
Yeah.
Okay, which means you want something, and someone else doesn't want you to have it.
That's what being stuck is.
Right?
You want something, but someone else doesn't want you to have it.
You want a girlfriend, But someone else around you doesn't, or other people around you don't.
And so you're stuck.
You want what you want, but you also want what the other people want.
Because you've internalized that.
Like, you don't want it, but... So, you know, for me, I wanted to be big and powerful in the world, and other people wanted me to be small and insignificant.
And I had to really fight that big battle to break out of that low-ceiling life.
You know, stay down here in the underworld, be insignificant.
Be useful to others.
Be compliant.
Be helpful.
Don't upset people.
Don't ruffle people's feathers.
Don't speak truths that discomfort people.
I mean, we get a lot of pressure for that shit.
And it's not just from family.
It's from teachers and the society and the reporters and the government and you name it, right?
Yeah.
So who wants you stuck?
Who benefits from you being stuck?
In other words, who would Who would it cost if you became unstuck and began to achieve your potential?
Who would be harmed by that in some way?
Yeah, my mother definitely.
All right, all right.
So what happens if you break out of this lost interstellar shell of isolation and distraction and you start achieving your potential?
What happens with your mom?
I don't know.
Yeah, you know.
Don't go all rubber bones on me now, man.
I'm not a social worker.
No, no, no.
I was going to say, I don't know because I wouldn't have much contact with her then.
No, you have huge contact with her.
Are you kidding me?
You think you can get away from your mom?
She can be cremated and she's still doing the jig in your head, man.
You can't get away from your mom.
What are you, crazy?
You can move away.
You can not talk to her, but she's always there.
Always.
All right, so let's just talk about the mom in your head, right?
If you don't have much contact with her, that's fine.
What about the mom in your head?
You know, it's like if somebody sneezes a cold up in your sinuses, and you get a cold, you don't sit there and say, well, I don't have much contact with the guy who gave me the cold.
It's like, I don't care, you still have the cold.
Oh, yeah.
That actually makes sense.
Okay, so, the mom in your head, inner mom.
Yeah.
What happens to her if you start to achieve your potential?
I don't know.
I think she would make me feel guilty.
Okay, so why does she benefit from you living this nothing life, this lackluster life?
How does she benefit?
What does it cost her?
How is it bad for her if you start to break out and achieve?
I don't have a direct answer to that.
I could say something stupid like would make her feel good, but I don't know.
Well, I can tell you, but I want to give you the answer because you're smart enough to get this on your own pretty quickly.
What was the story as to why you were dysfunctional as a child and a teenager?
Where was the blame?
What was the story within your family as to what the hell was going on?
My mother having an affair to start it all.
No.
That can't be it.
Why would you be institutionalized and put on drugs because your mom had an affair?
So she doesn't have to take the blame?
No, no, no.
I'm not talking about... What was your family's story about what was going on?
Who was blamed?
Who was causal?
Who was responsible?
For the divorce?
Sorry, I... No, no, no.
You were having a lot of trouble as a teenager, right?
Yes, okay.
So what was the family story about why that was happening?
Oh, like... I'm so sorry if I'm not being clear.
Don't blame yourself.
I'm not being very clear.
I apologize for that.
But you know what I mean now, right?
Yeah, the story was like autism and dyslexia and like just a troubled kid who needs help.
I think that was the story.
Were you blamed for any of this?
Were you held responsible?
with your head to account?
No, I think.
No.
Well, listen, your father's third wife seems to have done that.
True.
Okay, did anyone else do it?
Story fell apart.
Yeah, my father took my father as well.
Okay, so what was his, what was his, if he could say, like if I haven't, if I, if he didn't know me from Adam and we were just chatting on a plane or something like that, right?
And I said, and he was telling me about you and I'd say, well, You know, what's the story there?
What would he say? - Boyce will be Boyce.
No, that's a joke, that's a joke.
It's actually kind of a funny joke.
I don't have any jokes though.
I get no problem with that.
Okay, let me ask you this.
Do you think that your parents thought you could will your way out of this?
Like, if you wanted it enough, if you concentrated enough, if you were good enough, if you changed enough, if you committed enough.
Yes, I would definitely think that.
They did think that, right?
Yeah.
Okay, so then you were blamed.
Yes.
Right?
I mean, let's put it this way.
If you were one of the ten percent of adult males, or I don't know when it happens, right, some, some, who had Who was colorblind, right?
You had, like, two black-and-white television sets for eyes.
Sorry, you're so young you don't even know what the hell a black-and-white television set is, but it's a filter somewhere on Snapchat, right?
Yes.
So if you had... If you were colorblind, your parents wouldn't say, well, just will your way out of it, right?
No.
Right.
If you were 5'3", Your parents wouldn't say, just will yourself to be taller, right?
Nope.
If you had brown eyes, your parents wouldn't say, well girls really like blue eyes, so you gotta work on that, right?
That was the problem.
What do you mean?
No, they wouldn't.
Right.
So, if your issues are biological, right, like the autism, the dyslexia and so on, right, if they're... then you can't will your way out of these things, right?
No.
You are the biggest victim of this issue, and your family is a tertiary victim, and I understand their frustration and so on, but it's not you doing something to people.
You know what I mean?
Like, you can't morally castigate someone for autism.
You can't morally condemn someone for autism, right?
No.
It's not something you choose.
You didn't say, well, you know, I think I'm going to go to work in the supermarket, and there's just going to be too many colors.
Nobody does that.
Nobody wants that, right?
Thank God.
So you have a challenge, and it's very easy for dysfunctional families to ascribe moral problems to non-moral situations.
Like, when your sister threw the garbage can lid down the stairs and it broke, it's not a moral issue.
Now, maybe if she's ten and torturing cats, you can start to bring ethics into the situation, but she was terrified, so terrified that she betrayed you.
And sibling treachery?
I wrote once in a novel, I said, you know, there's an old phrase that says, as close as siblings ought to be.
As close as siblings, as close as brothers and whatever.
People say, we're as close as brothers.
It's like, nope!
The best you can hope for is as close as siblings seem to see until memories of early treachery arise.
That's a good sentence.
So, the idea that you would be Morally blamed for something that wasn't your fault is Absolutely wrong.
Absolutely wrong because then they're adding to your burden.
So you've got this burden or challenge or whatever you want to call it of autism and then you also get blamed for it and They don't listen to what you want what you need which is to not be in the school and That you were in, right?
Yeah.
You say the school is making me a bad person, or rather you not listening to me not wanting to be in the school is making me into a bad person.
Which is kinda true, right?
You became someone that you didn't like about yourself.
Because you weren't listened to.
And because you weren't listened to... Yeah, I love that.
Isolation.
Sorry to interrupt.
Because you weren't listened to, and tell me if I'm wrong on the timeline here but because you weren't listened to you end up acting in such a way that you get dragged they'd rather drug you than listen oh Oh yeah, that actually makes sense.
They'd rather drug you with stuff that gives you violent ideation, violent ideas, than just listen to you.
That's terrible.
Now, I'll give you something even worse.
Since we're diving deep in the bath escape here, I'll give you something even worse.
What if all of the stuff that causes you dysfunction with other people, I mean I don't know, I don't know about autism, I don't know about the biochemical, the physical or anything like that, but I'll tell you this as a possibility, what if at least some of these problems you had with other people come directly from your parents not listening to you and your mom being violent with you and Your mom having an affair with some woman and busting up the family and then breaking up with that woman seven times and not staying together with him and like what the hell did you leave the family for?
What the hell did you bust up the family for?
To be with some crazed lesbian?
Probably violence in that relationship, too, because lesbian relationships are just about the most violent place to be on the earth, other than between Michael Moore and a buffet.
Yeah, lots of verbal fights.
So what if your social dysfunctions or awkwardness or feelings of... Like, what if this just comes from being surrounded by pretty terrible people?
I mean, I did a show years ago.
Yeah, maybe it's social anxiety or maybe you're just surrounded by assholes.
You know, if I fall into a lion pit at the zoo, I don't have lion anxiety, I have being eaten anxiety.
Oh, I have this weird panic attack when I fell into the lion cage.
It's like, that's not a weird panic attack.
That's your body saying, fight or flight.
Yeah.
So what if you become functional, you see, or more functional, or I don't know, again, I'm just throwing out possibilities here.
But if you become more functional, then you shrug off a burden, I think, that your parents desperately want you to hold, which is it's your fault.
My fault for autism.
Your fault for whatever.
Your fault for any all of it, any part of it.
Your fault for hitting kids.
Your fault for bringing skinned foxes to school.
Like, your fault.
Your fault for causing them trouble.
Your fault for being difficult.
Your fault for not complying with social norms.
Whatever, right?
if you become functional.
See, when I was faced with, I want to become big and powerful, And everyone around me had the perception that I was small and insignificant.
I had a real challenge.
And breaking out of social conventions, it feels like, breaking out of familial expectations feels like a death and a rebirth.
It really does.
It's what I wrote when I was a poem when I was 17.
I was 17, I said, to be resurrected, first we have to die.
Bye.
To take a new shape, we have to cast off the old shape.
It's like a skin coming off the back of a snake.
A snake can't grow if it doesn't shed its skin, but the skin dies when it's shed.
The old self dies.
The self that is molded like powerless, indifferent, dead water into the weird twisty tubes of familial expectations, that self It has to die in order for real growth to emerge.
So I remember once watching a show called, it's a long British show called The Singing Detective I think it was called, and there's this whiny complainy guy whose unconscious is in full revolts and he's in hospital and he's got sores all over his body and his new cell comes along and just puts a bullet in his head.
And it's like, that's harsh, man, that's harsh!
And I know I'm talking about aggressive imagery and I, you know, I'm all talking about inner states of mind and so on, but, and I'm, you know, I'm very keen on this idea of the Miko system, that even the part of me that prefers to stay small and powerless because it serves the narcissistic needs of the actual powerless people around me, or the people all calling me small and powerless, they're the actual powerless ones.
They don't want to feel that they're powerless.
They don't want to feel that they're petty.
So if I become large and powerful, then they're wrong.
And you know, you ever seen that election day meltdown of the Young Turks and other people who, you know, when it turned out Trump was going to win and they were all wrong, they don't like that feeling at all.
And they've been revolting and rebelling against it for the past two and a half years.
People don't like to be wrong.
And they don't like it when you reject their stereotypes of you.
But I think, if I had to guess, that you're encased in other people's stereotypes of you.
And you need to challenge that within your own mind.
And it's not a bullet, and it's like, these are all dramatic ways of, but you know, for me, the old compliance staff, I had to integrate him and incorporate him in order to have the power that I have now.
I mean, I just, I had to.
And your potential, I think, who's standing in between you and your potential is an internalized family, an internalized society, an internalized entire social system of control and that says you're dysfunctional.
You have the problem.
You don't fit.
You don't comply.
Now you can't comply, like it or not, because you are who you are.
All you can do is new to yourself.
All you can do is not choose, is not act, is not live in a way.
But you can't undo who you are.
But you can neuter who you are and be inconsequential to the world.
And that serves all the people who say, you are the problem, you are the issue, you have the dysfunction.
But, you know, just based upon your family history, you know, maybe you do have these dysfunctions.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not an expert in these things.
But if I had to go out on a limb and guess, I'd say that part of your paralysis is serving the need for other people, for you to be the identified patient in the family, for you to be the identified problem in the family, rather than the people who've had multiple marriages and affairs and dating crazy women and crazy men and crazy dog whisperers and shit like that, right?
Yeah.
You know, maybe they're crazy!
Maybe they're crazy and you're sane!
It's like this old Twilight episode where the doctors are sitting around saying, man, this woman, I've never seen such horrible disfiguring.
This is like a terrible thing.
I don't know what happened to her, but she's so distorted and disfigured.
We can only do our very best to try and give her a normal face, right?
Now, of course, when the camera pans back, the woman is absolutely beautiful and all the doctors are horribly distorted and disfigured, right?
Hmm.
Yeah.
But one thing I don't get, like, You said, like, to be resurrected is to die first, but you also said that, like, you had to, like, incorporate or include that part of you when you became the new Steph.
I don't remember your exact words, but can you elaborate there?
Sure.
So, the people, and this is a great question, so, and I've put a lot of thought into this all, but I'll try and keep this brief anyway, just out of basic humanity, but So when you want to speak truths in the world you have to be cautious because blowback and reaction and entrenched interest and so on will obviously try and cut you off at the knees, right?
That's inevitable.
That's just the dance you do with the world and the future and human potential and truth and all that.
So the part of me that was cautious and wanted to stay small, if I had not incorporated that part into my current mindset then I would have Gone so far, so big, so fast, so hard that I wouldn't be a voice in the world at the moment.
You have to have that caution when bringing the truth to the world because the truth appears to most people in the world as a weapon.
You start speaking the truth a lot of people react like you're pulling a sword or something.
It's like I mean, what is this hate speech?
You know, it's just the truth a lot of times.
People just fear the truth.
They hate the truth, and so they just came up with this hate speech thing.
So, you know, there are people who've gone out to try and speak the truth to the world, and a lot of them haven't done very well, right?
So, I had to say, listen, to small staff, let's say, I had to say to small staff, listen, A, great job.
Great job.
You know, we had to stay small so that we could survive.
Because if you have narcissistic people, and narcissism is this big giant tent erected over nothing but hot air, and it's empty, and it only looks big, and it's hollow, and so narcissism comes out of It's the scar tissue that builds over a desperate terror of non-existence.
And so, if you are large and powerful around narcissists, they will lash out because it exposes their own emptiness.
And so, if I had been big and powerful as a child, I could have been abandoned, I could have been thrown into government protection, so to speak, I could have ended up in a foster family, I could have been injured, I could... It was incredibly dangerous, right?
So, and in school, I mean, I was caned as a child, right?
A physical assault and all of that.
And so, as a child, I had to stay small because the price of size was Injury, death, abandonment, it's not just what you fear, it's what can actually happen.
So you have to stay small, you have to play it small when you're surrounded by selfish people, empty people, narcissistic people as a kid.
Now when you get older, you have this challenge.
If you say, well I'm just going to live large no matter what, I'm just going to live large no matter what.
then you lose your caution.
You lose your sensible caution and you just go out and you do your stuff in the world and the blowback is way too intense and whatever happens, happens, right?
But you don't have the sensible caution that you need.
The skills, like when you get older, it's not like, oh now I can just be big and powerful and no one's going to have a problem with it because the world is sadly full of people like you, your parents, sorry, I mean the world is full of people like my parents and your parents and the teachers and whoever, right?
The principal of your A private school.
The world is full of those people.
It's not like we escaped childhood and we can just be who we are as adults and everyone's just like, yay, good for you, you made it.
There's a reason our parents are able to get away with this kind of abuse and that's because most people agree with them.
Most people are like them.
Fact about the world.
It's a tough fact to swallow, like I remember as a kid thinking, oh man, I can't wait to get out of this fucking madhouse.
And all I did was get out of this madhouse into a bigger madhouse.
So you need the caution when you go out there speaking truth to the world or being powerful in the world.
So if I had just said, oh, well, you know, that petty little side of me that wanted to stay small, to hell with that.
I'm going to go live big and live larger.
Wouldn't have made it.
I wouldn't have made it.
And it would be a disservice to the truth.
So I need to say to little Steph, to small Steph, to cautious Steph, you know, great job.
You kept us alive.
And I still need your counsel.
But you can't be in charge.
You can't be in control.
Because we're not children anymore.
We have more freedom.
We have more flexibility.
We have more choice.
We have more options.
So I need your counsel.
Everyone gets a seat at the table.
You know, my inner mom gets a seat at the table.
Why?
Because my inner mom was there to protect me from my dangerous mom.
She's not the danger.
She was there to protect me from the danger.
And there's lots of people out there like my mom.
So I need The wisdom of my inner mom.
I need the counsel of my inner mom.
I need the counsel of my inner dad.
I need the counsel of everyone who was there to save me from the predators of my childhood.
I need everyone at the table.
Everyone gets to say.
Everyone gets to talk.
And this idea that we can just kill our smaller selves and we just... It's like then being out in the world and you have no sense of pain.
What's dangerous?
You step on nails, you stub your toe, you get stung by bees, right?
It's really, really bad.
You have no sense of pain and you're climbing a tree and you get stung by bees.
You don't feel anything.
You eventually get overwhelmed.
You fall out of the tree and you die or you break a leg.
You need that sense of pain.
You need that sense of caution.
You need all of the old mechanisms of your childhood that had you survive crazy people because there's a lot of crazy people in the world and you still need those protections, you still need those cautions, but you can't let them run your life because then the crazy people are in charge and you never make the world saner.
Does that make sense at all? - Yeah, I still need to think a lot about it, how to incorporate that, those like inner people, like my inner dad and inner mother.
Yeah, because we experienced them like my inner mom would yell at me if I made crazy people angry.
But it wasn't because she wanted to abuse me.
She was there trying to save me from being abused by having me stop doing stuff that would be directly triggering to crazy, angry, dangerous people like my mom who had the power of life and death over me because I was trapped in the flat, trapped in the apartment, trapped with her.
Right?
So you listen to that caution, but I'm not a three-year-old getting his head beaten against the door anymore.
I'm not under the direct coercive control and power of a dangerous person.
I'm an adult, which means I can speak more truth, but I still need the caution.
Of course, right?
Because there are still crazy people out there.
Quite a few in fact, right?
And they seem to have quite a lot of power at times.
So that's what I want to say.
So there is a death.
The death is the death of the dominance of the small self.
In other words, the small self, or the self that keeps you small, because you're scared, and you have every right and reason to be scared.
So it's perfectly just.
It's not crazy to be scared if you're in shark-infested water.
It's not crazy to be scared of sharks, right?
In a bathtub maybe.
So it's not the death of the self, it's the expansion of the self into multiplicity.
It's the expansion of the self so that everyone has a seat at the table and they don't all get screamed down by the small self who's there to protect you from a danger that is no longer imminent and all-powerful.
It's the death of the monopoly of fear.
And you still want fear.
You still want caution.
Right?
A deficiency of fear is foolhardiness.
Like where you rush in and you don't take steps and you don't take precautions and you just rush over the parapet into the World War I gunfire and you're dead before you take ten steps.
So you need fear.
But fear can't be the tyrant.
It has to let other people sit at the table, because you've got fear, but you also have now fear of the next 60 years of your life, and what the hell are you going to do?
And fear of underachievement and fear of lack of potential, fear of isolation, fear of loneliness, all of these things.
Yeah.
So it's not like I took little Steph and threw him off a cliff, so to speak, right?
Because I still need his counsel.
Because just because I don't live with my mom anymore doesn't mean that there aren't crazy dangerous people out there in the world.
So I need wisdom, I need... But he's got to let other people sit at the table.
Now, he couldn't afford to let other people sit at the table while I was still under the thumb of my mom, right?
Because she was violent and she was dangerous and he had to be in charge.
He had to!
No, no, no, no one else can be... No, no.
Courage?
No, no, no.
Gotta cut courage off the knees, because courage can get you killed in that kind of situation, right?
So, it is saying we are no longer in the situation where fear needs to be dominant.
We are now in a situation where we need something richer and more complex.
We need fear, we also need courage.
Because it's a recognition that you're out of the lion's den.
Now, you're still in the Serengeti, so to speak.
There are still lions around, but you're not in the lion's den.
Yeah.
So, what you need, of course, I think, is to break out of the conceptions of everyone around you about who you are.
And I think people's perceptions of who you are need to be expanded because look I mean let me ask you this thanks for listening I hope this is helpful but let me ask you this so we've been talking what close to two hours now right how's it been for you?
mind-blowing but has it been like agonizing tough horrible like if you wanted to curl into a ball has it been like I mean how's it been as far as is it no no more like Yeah, more like looking at the stars kind of feeling.
Go on.
Like expansion, like there's so much out there and just the feeling of clarity.
And also like literal eye-openers.
No, figural eye-openers for like betrayal.
I never thought about that.
And what we just all talked about for like half an hour, I think, or you talked about with like little stuff and like, you know, like the mother in your head, the father in your head, stuff like that.
Yeah, no, no, all like positive.
Yeah, but it's not hard to have these conversations, right?
I mean, it could be hard sometimes to think of, you know, the next, but it's not hard to have this, it's not work, is it?
No.
It's not like, you know, if you've ever been trapped in this world of small talk?
Now that's work!
Oh my god!
That's work!
Oh man, that's work!
The worst.
Right?
But this is not work, right?
It's easy.
No.
It's easy and it's engaging.
I mean, I've kept your attention for two hours.
We haven't had any completely awkward pauses where we have no idea what the hell to talk about, right?
I mean, this has been easy.
And so this, I mean, tell me all about your ADD We're just talking, you can't even see me for two hours!
Did you feel yourself massively distracted and bored and dissociated?
Nope.
Right!
So where's all this famous ADD?
It didn't take my pills, that must be the problem.
Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's ADD, maybe people are just boring.
I don't know.
Because here's the thing, man, you have asked, I gotta tell you, like, I mean, I've had a lot of these, I've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe a thousand or two thousand, I don't know, whatever conversations.
You have asked some of the most brilliant fucking questions I've ever been asked on this.
I'm one of these conversations.
This is why your potential is driving you nuts.
Because you have been like zeroing in, like bang in, cutting through.
I say a lot of words, man.
You cut right through like this thing about, okay, kill the self versus resurrect us.
I mean, that's a stone genius question, man.
That is right to the heart.
Of that.
And I haven't talked about this kind of stuff in years because I haven't had people ask me that kind of question.
Now, other people have asked other great questions, so I don't want to, you know, rank listeners or anything, but holy shit, man, you got it going on up there.
You got some serious fucking horsepower between the ears.
And as far as self-knowledge goes and insight and cutting to the core of things, you are way up there as far as that goes.
And that's an incredibly impressive thing to be a part of.
Thank you.
That means a lot.
Thank you.
So, what do you think is next for you?
What do you need to do?
The stupid part where, you know, we can't play tennis without the net.
I get it, I get it.
Well, I don't know.
That's the rough part.
I already thought about it while you were talking.
What's the answer?
Because we established a problem or problems.
Where to go from here?
I don't really have a great answer yet.
Tomorrow I'm going to a place for looking to a job.
Looking at a couple of jobs and seeing if something You know, seeing what's out there.
Right.
But that's not really enough.
No, I mean, it's a start.
I can give you... I mean, to tell you what I don't know what you should do, and I never know what other people should do, other than don't do evil, which you're not going to do, but I would sort of say, if I were in your shoes, I'd say, okay, I'm going to give myself... the figure that pops into my head is three months.
It could be right, could be wrong, whatever, right?
Three months, I'm off welfare.
Like, you know it's not good for you, right?
You know it's keeping you in a state of perpetual adolescence if not childhood, and it's not...
It's not going to be attractive for a woman either, right?
Not a quality woman, right?
Quality women say, oh, you want welfare?
Oh, that's great.
I can't wait to have three kids with you, right?
So, I'd give, like, you know, you've been on for a while, and I don't know about cold turkey and all that, but I would say, okay, I got myself three months.
Now, in those three months, I need to figure out what the hell's been happening with my history.
Now, if you can find a great therapist, find a good therapist, and maybe you can get it through the state, and, you know, that can, I think that would be a good thing to do.
If it's any help, my podcast 1939 is my thoughts about how to find a good therapist, but I'd strongly recommend that.
Journal, and you know, John Gray's got some books, Nathaniel Brandon has some great books with journaling and sentence completion.
I think the sentence completion from Brandon is pretty good stuff.
And I would sit there and say, okay, I gotta work out what the hell's going on in my head.
Because you are seriously brilliant and it is a shame, no it's more than a shame, it's an absolute biblical tragedy that you're not bringing your talents to bear on the problems of the world because you could do an enormous amount to help the planet.
I completely believe that to the tips of my toes.
To say okay well I've had my underachieving stuff, I've had my compliance with other people's low expectations, I've internalized those low expectations because it was necessary to survive.
I was surrounded by some pretty selfish people who didn't listen to me and who just pursued their own pleasures regardless of what expense it did to me.
And, you know, I've done all of that.
And that's all been helpful.
That's all been useful.
But I have to change because I don't want to be miserable in the future.
And if you think it's tough now, just fast forward five years or ten years and if you're in the same position it's going to be a hell of a lot worse.
So I would say, okay, I'm going to give myself a couple of months.
I'm going to get into some therapy.
I'm going to journal.
I'm going to just like it's my job now is figuring out what's going on within my head to limit my potential, which is no longer necessary because you're not a kid anymore.
You're an adult and you've got a big wide world that you can go and travel and live in and reason.
And maybe you don't have to work with people.
Maybe you can write books.
Maybe you can create a website and you can document your journey.
Maybe you can do a blog.
Maybe you can do a blog.
I mean, I don't know.
You don't have to work with people if that's not your thing.
And, you know, given your experience with people, I can understand that.
And so, I would say, give yourself some time to really get yourself ready.
Because if you want to join the Olympics of high potential, you don't just go and run the first race.
You've got to train, you've got to build up for it, you've got to race.
And you've got to stretch, you've got to limber up, and you've got to change your diet, and all this kind of stuff, right?
So I'd give myself some time, my thought is three months, although whatever it can be, and say, okay, well... Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I've got three months of, quote, leisure now, and I'm not going to distract myself.
So no video games, lay off the porn, whatever it is.
Your job now is to get ready for a better life.
And that's going to require some serious introspection, get some therapy, just go get a bunch of books.
And if stuff works for you, it works for you.
If it doesn't work for you, but like, it's your job now to get ready to leave this old life behind.
To incorporate the lessons that you need to incorporate, but to no longer let small you be in charge.
without consultation, without opposition, without cross-examination, without a table that everyone can sit at and you can negotiate your way into a better life.
So give yourself some time, don't go cold turkey, because I think that might provoke backlash, and recognize that it probably is going to cause some real problems in your relationships if you start to live large.
If you start to live powerfully, it's going to cause problems in your relationships because a lot of people are around you who haven't disturbed the smallness of your life.
And that means that they're benefiting it from it in some manner.
So that would be my suggestion in terms of practical timeframes.
And then, you know, and if you need more time, If you do it sooner, so much the better.
But I would definitely give myself at least a rough schedule of when to end.
Because once you have a schedule, say I've got three months to get ready for a bigger life, a more powerful life, if you say, well, I'll just get off welfare when I feel big and powerful, that's not enough, right?
It's not enough of an incentive.
It's not enough of a drop-dead date.
At least you're working out, right?
It's good, you're not unhealthy that way, so that's great.
But that would be my particular approach, you know, have a good night's sleep and then tomorrow morning I'll say, okay, well, you know, big honor to the small life, big honor to the life that I lived.
It was great, it was wonderful, it kept me going.
But, you know, things have to change, obviously, and you can get every part of you to agree with that, that, you know, But I would really focus on just self-excavation, self-understanding, and then start to be bigger and start to talk to people and find out why the hell you're so small!
Right?
In your effect on the world.
I mean, sit down and say, you can talk to your parents, you can talk to your sister, you can talk to your friends and say, you know, just out of curiosity, why the hell have you let me rot like a mushroom in my room?
You know, like, what did you think was gonna, like, and you'll learn a lot from that about the resistances that you have to living larger.
And once you can map that, you can navigate around them, right?
It's like, Once you have a map of the reefs around the island, you can sail off, right?
But without them, you're just gonna crack the boat and end up back on the island, right?
So you gotta figure out what's tough for you getting out into the world, and that's gonna have a lot to do with people's perspectives around you, which you've internalized.
So that would be my approach.
Whether that works for you, obviously, is up to you.
Yeah, that's really the one thing you just said that really gives me some anxiety, like talking to my sister, talking to my parents.
One, I feel like I kind of know how the conversation is going to go.
And two, I don't want to have it because it's...
I don't know, it just immediately feels wrong.
And you don't have to.
Now what you can do, of course, is you can, we all have, you say you know how these conversations are going to go, write them down.
Right, go to a cafe, that's what I used to do, I used to go to a cafe and I'd put on some headphones with some non-vocal music, like some choral music that you, you know, in Latin, or Gregorian chants were good, or some people use trance, or classical music, or whatever it is, as long as it's not too familiar.
For me that would help and I would just sit there and I would say, okay, I would say this, my mom would say this, I would say this, my mom would say this, right?
And play out those conversations so that they're not just in your head as instincts but they're on the page.
You don't have to do it, you can burn it right afterwards if you want.
But play out those conversations so that you know the resistances that you have.
Because you're not having a conversation with your mom, you're having a conversation with your inner mom and she's the one you've got to watch out for.
She's the one you've got to win over.
And to support you, because if she's in your way, right?
And this is the kind of, the bulletproof sense that you get out of this is really powerful.
People like don't know how I keep going against all resistances because my resistance is not internal.
I have, everyone, every part of me is In line with the mission.
Every part of me is in line with the mission.
And, you know, I can't sit there and complain that people didn't listen to my difficulties and then not listen to the world's difficulties, right?
It's just the way things work when you have that kind of integrity.
So you don't have to have these conversations.
As long as you know how they map out in your head, That's great.
And then you're more in control of the variables, if that makes sense.
And if it gives you less anxiety to write out the conversations, it's maybe even more useful to do it that way.
All right.
I'll do that.
And you, I'm just going to ask you something here, right?
Because I know you've talked about feeling like the bridge, like looking over the edge of the bridge and stuff like that.
I just want you to promise me that in the turmoil that comes up, that if you do start to feel self-destructive or destructive to others, that you will call a hotline, that you will call your therapist and you won't do anything that would be horribly counterproductive and bad, right?
I'll promise.
You promise that, right?
I mean, just call whoever, right?
I mean, call me if you can't get through to anyone, but just don't... and can you afford... I mean, do you need money for therapy?
I'm happy to ship that to you if that would help.
I mean, if you can't get it through the state, just let me know and I'll forward you the cash for therapy so that you can get that going.
Like, whatever you need, man, whatever you need.
You are golden and you gotta get yourself out of the ground.
Thank you.
No, I have some money left behind.
I'll get it done.
Will you keep me posted?
Absolutely.
Good call for you?
Yeah, definitely.
I'm already thinking about business opportunities down the future.
I don't know.
Fantastic.
Well, listen, you did a great job and, you know, roll out of the mud, go take on the world.
We need you and we'll... I mean, I feel like I missed you and you haven't even shown up that much in the world except at this conversation, but you're gonna do some great stuff.
I guarantee it.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks for all the time you gave me.
▲
Export Selection