Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
The Experiment Requires That You Continue
Tonight's episode is a tribute to Stanley Milgram—and a reminder to trust the experts, distinguished by their coats and clipboards.
It includes:
- Gems, jewels, and avant-garde life advice to help you become who you are—if not someone far superior
- Advice from Ask a Sadist, LA's most feared agony columnist
- How to use meditation for dominance and revenge
- Two Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers:
- A rogue behavioral science experiment that punishes bad taste
- A dark love triangle of cults, wine, drugs, graffiti, karaoke, shock humor, transgressive literature, and abysmal communication
- ...and more!
CW: Emotional abuse, drug abuse, cynical and dubious life advice, hate, misery, various forms of sex and violence, severe depression, suicide.
Emerson Dameron bears sole responsibility for the content of this show. If you'd rather skip this one, it's all good. Take care of yourself.
Music by Mr. Pancakes, Chris Rogers, and Emerson Dameron.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is a production of Emerson Dameron and KCHUNG.
Donate to KCHUNG now—while you're thinking about it.
http://kchungradio.org/donate
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Emerson Dameron's Sophistication Nation - April 4th - All major music-delivery platforms
It's OUT! Sophistication Nation: Brief Interviews with Women I Pretend to Understand: https://emersondameron.hearnow.com/sophistication-nation
The following program contains content some listeners may find disturbing, including material related to emotional abuse, substance abuse, suicide and general human horrendousness. If you're struggling, help is available, although you may not find it in the first place you look. Listener, discretion is advised.
Speaker 2:For now, 1630 am. Kchungradioorg. I am Emerson Dameron, the writer, producer, host et al for Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. I love you personally. Levity saves lives. This life right here is all you get.
Speaker 2:The meek inherit nothing. There's nothing to look forward to after this. If you repeat the cycle, you will do so likely with no conscious memory of who you are now or most of the things you experienced. So if you're going to experience it, get it done. Do it to it like we always do about this time, the present moment, where the action is the time you are alive.
Speaker 2:Expand your tastes. People with narrow tastes have no idea what they're missing. There's a good chance that there's stuff out there that you have always wanted to experience, that if you experienced it, you could give yourself the chance for the thrill of a lifetime or to be disappointed. And there's stuff that you have no idea you're into and you'll only find out by getting curious. Get curious about the process, curious about making mistakes of your own, watching people make mistakes. Go see an A-lister to see how the masters perform. And go see an open mic-er and see the differences and see how the open mic-ers have more fun in some ways, and never let go of that. Fun is something you have to forget that you forgot how to have. Children are endlessly creative, endlessly fun. They say what they mean. You don't want to do that to the extent that they do, because you're not that cute. You won't get away with it like kids do. But bring back some of that razzle dazzle. Always be curious. Be curious about everything. Be curious about whatever's going on. Approach your life from the mindset, the beginner's mind. The beginner's mindset, we could call it. That's catchy. Only know that you know nothing. See everything as though you've never seen it before. Know that you know nothing. See everything as though you've never seen it before. You haven't read the reviews or the spoilers. You don't know what's going to happen. Dare to be surprised and whatever's going on, get into it.
Speaker 2:Life is a journey of inquiry, self-inquiry and curiosity about the world. Power is doing small things in great ways, because how you do anything is how you do everything. If there's something going on in front of you that seems mundane and quotidian, ask great questions about it and you may transform it into a great adventure. If not, it'll be good practice. But when a great adventure calls upon you and it will so be prepared you don't want to go into the next cycle hating yourself for missing out on that. Stay curious like it's your job. Treat life as your laboratory. Life is a series of experiments to get information, to challenge your self-limiting, closed-minded beliefs and document contrary evidence. Remember, there is no failure, only feedback. Some things are true and some things are not permitted. But once you get valuable information on them, you can iterate and innovate, and manipulate in some cases.
Speaker 2:You can't recreate your experience, but you can alter its DNA and change it fundamentally, and you can change your past. The past is a story that you tell yourself to explain how you got where you are now. Change where you are now. Change your own history, like completely revamping the context Sometimes. You just have to think about it differently, at least at first. Then it'll be easier to find the great adventurers that are calling your name, showing you the big flashing green lights, saying this is a rough road, it's longer than you think it's gonna be, and at the end there's a big old banquet and guess who's sitting at the head of the tent.
Speaker 2:Try life experiments. Always talk to strangers. Get curious about new people. Introduce yourself, figure out what's going on with them. Start by making a situational observation and then notice something about that person. It could be something obvious Some flashing button on their chest or a cold read. Just take a guess Do you seem like you might be from Montana?
Speaker 2:They're probably not, but if they were, wouldn't that be hilarious? Let people talk about themselves. They'll give you valuable information that you can use for blackmail and they'll think that you're a brilliant conversationist and you'll be rewarding your own curiosity by discovering a little bit every day, a little bit at a time, that life is more mysterious than you give it credit for, and there's always a reason to stay in the game, because there's always another surprise Treat your life as if it's a dream. And if this was a dream, what would these things, these events, these characters, these odd synchronicities, what would they symbolize? What are they trying to tell you? Reality is a controlled hallucination. You're not far off. It makes a lot more sense than assuming what you perceive is what's actually going on, to the last detail, and that you're getting factual, unfiltered information. That's just prima facie ridiculous.
Speaker 2:You can also forget everything you know. Bring ego death upon yourself, experience something that discredits everything that you assume to be true. Smoke 5-MeO-DMT, the venom of the Colorado River, toad Bufo Alvarez. Stop being yourself. Think about it. That's your biggest problem. That takes care of all the other problems. Someone will still have those problems, but it won't be you. When they aren't your problems, kind of hilarious Laugh at the danger. You'll get knocked down.
Speaker 2:You'll need people who love you, people who support you, people who want to see you bawling, people who love it when you shine, people who can talk you off the ledge and pull you off the pedestal and bring you down to earth and help you dig in the dirt and meet all the little devils and beasties in your unconscious that drag you into self-sabotage, that explain why you let yourself down, why you don't follow through on things that you promised yourself, so that you can know where you're putting your attention, know what your mind is doing, know what you're doing. The left hand can know what the right hand is doing. They converse with the third eye and take in that information. You can be mindful of your diet, food and information and always remember that you know nothing and let the great experiment continue.
Speaker 2:After Ptolemy went down, the rest of our institutions fell in rapid succession. Science suffered from a catastrophic replication crisis. There was a typo in the paper of record which wiped out the last of the media's credibility. The military is laid low by a wave of rampant venereal disease. A new one. Some scrub picked it up from a prostitute in Mongolia, and soon they all had it. You know they're murderers too. Nobody ever brings that up. Anyway, there was no organized group left except artists. That's a lot of heavy lifting from the word organized, and some of the artists could do heavy lifting the Burning man crowd with their outdoor installations and whatnot.
Speaker 2:So they had might and muscle enough to reshape society under their own rule. Until all was art and decadence. At first, things went better than most people anticipated. All of a sudden, everyone could just sit around and be creative all day. Everything was art Communication currency. There's our lingua franca, our stock and trade. Art was everything and everything was art communication currency. There was our lingua franca, our stock and trade. Art was everything and everything was art. Eventually, things started to go wrong.
Speaker 2:The kind of logistical and engineering and plumbing problems that you might expect. Much of society was plunged into poverty and chaos. We needed catharsis. We needed really good art from people with skill and talent. Whatever that is, you can dismiss it, but it's like charisma it's undeniable up close and you want it to be around when you need it.
Speaker 2:There was good percative art that came out of that period, but eventually fascism crept in Artists of poor ideological immune systems. There was an appetite for order and structure that was promised by snobs. They were friends with a lot of celebrities and they were always right. No one else matters, we're a bunch of neurotics. This is intoxicating to be around.
Speaker 2:The worldview does have its hazards and limitations, but the snobs rapidly consolidated their power in spite of a few internal struggles, to which most of us were kept unpretty. The snobs presented a relatively unified front and they had good aesthetics. They dug up some really good art from the underground and got a wider audience and took the edge off of the societal collapse that was happening for long enough for the snobs to move in and do everything correctly until they got worn out and then put other people to work and look over their shoulders to make sure they were doing everything correctly. Art was still what mattered, and a very specific sort of art was disproportionately privileged Sleazy 70s rock music the kind of stuff that you might use to pump yourself up for a date you're really insecure about by somebody who was hoping to get dogged. Confidence is easily mistaken for competence.
Speaker 2:Cracks started to show in the art society after the snobs have been in charge for a while. The National Defense was something called Darvo Classic Slaying the messenger, playing the victim role themselves, complaining that they were misunderstood, that their interest in professional wrestling was more pure than anything else in this corrupted world. And y'all just ain't ready for it. Women want men, other women want, and men say they want women but end up alone watching videos about women who pretend to want women. People want to be wanted and then get what they want and don't want it anymore, or don't get what they want because they're too needy. Right now, in this moment, all I want is for everyone to admit they don't know anything about anything. I'm a radical agnostic.
Speaker 2:I don't know and you don't either. The one thing I'm almost sure I believe is that most of us are fathoms more oblivious and ignorant than we think we are, and we'd all be better off if everyone owned this. I still have to trust my empirical experience and animal instincts to some degree. Even if I'm wrong, that's not the worst thing to be wrong about as long as I have to use the freeway system, set boundaries with people, tie my shoes in the morning, etc. The philosopher Ken Wilber said no one is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time. I'm not on that level, but I'm getting there. You were born to be a leader, but you're not a real leader until you have followers. Here's how to get up. When recruiting, be selective. Your ideal follower is a quick study dumber than you, but smart enough. It's not worth the trouble to be a leader of idiots.
Speaker 2:Lead with confidence, authority and mixed signals. Don't give people what they say they want. Give them what they really want, which you may have noticed, is to be told what to do when intermittently thrown off balance. Make them feel special. Your followers are changing the world and they can stay special until they screw you over. If everyone likes you, no one loves you and no one takes you seriously. So be polarizing. Be the kind of leader only you can be. Pick your weirdest quality and lead with that. Haters will hate, but it'll be easy to shake it off, because your followers will want to simultaneously be you and screw you, which they can totally do in the glorious quantum afterlife you promised them.
Speaker 2:I'm a sadist. My great joy is to inflict pain on other people, and I'm not afraid to admit it. Did you know that sadists face discrimination every day simply because of who we are? With so many people competing for the status of victimhood, we need sadists more than ever. If you really dig deep, you might find we have a lot more in common than you'd hoped. Join us in the fight for fair treatment, equal opportunities and respect for the sadist community. Be kind to the cruel Visit AskASadistcom to learn more. Ask a Sadist A round of Q&A with me, la's most feared agony columnist and a sadist with a heart of rugged gold.
Speaker 2:I like to hurt people in the ways that most help them, and it means the world to me. You, let me be mean to you, dear sadist. I started seeing my new boyfriend a month ago. It may just be the afterglow talking, but I really like like this guy. Our sex has been great, if a little bland for my tastes, and we're super compatible. Recently he told me that his lifelong dream is to have sex and then get severely beaten by the partner. He wants me to do the honors. I'm thrilled that we're finally getting kinky up in here. I've never been in a fight or even played sports. How do you beat up a person without doing real damage?
Speaker 2:There's an anecdote from the making of one of the Rocky movies, possibly apocryphal, but true enough to support my thesis. Sylvester Stallone asked Dolph Lundgren to really hit him. Dolph Lundgren is a professional fighter. Lundgren to really hit him. Dolph Lundgren is a professional fighter. Stallone is an actor Quite an interesting one. The stories behind the making of First Blood are fascinating. Stallone was offered a princely sum for the script for that film and said that he would not sell the script unless he was going to star in it. Put his foot down, turned down tons of money, is now internationally known as an actor. In a sense, lundgren beats up people for a living and he gave Sly what he wanted. Sly was the main person on that film and he promptly put him in the hospital for a couple of days because Stallone didn't know what he was signing up for.
Speaker 2:Your boyfriend wants you to beat him up. I'm flattered that you came to me to get more information about that. However, if you really were interested in beating people, surely you would notice that there are a lot of martial arts academies, boxing gyms, institutions dedicated to teaching the art of giving someone the business. You can learn how to beat someone up and not really hurt them or not do severe damage. You can learn these things in kink dungeons. They have classes taught by experts. Some of the doms can be rather aggressive in their pedagogy, but what do you expect? You can still learn to beat someone. That sort of thing in the kink sphere is very high level. You have to go through a lot of other stuff to get there Basic fundamentals of understanding consent and all the complexities of engaging with these sort of practices in an intentional way, which is kind of revolutionary.
Speaker 2:It is easy to be a sadist in this country if you are dishonest about it and it's nearly effortless, and in fact this society is very much optimized for sadism. As long as you can lie to yourself, it's not a lie if you believe it. That way, you don't have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being a cop or a dentist or a bill collector and also supporting the farce of conventional morality. You can have it both ways, as long as you don't know that you're having it both ways. It's a cruel world, but so much of it is sublimated which I think is so dangerous, and I think that rough sex can save the world. What I'm getting at here? You've been seeing this man for a month. He's lucky to have found someone who is enthusiastic about this, to the point where they didn't ask him why. Or maybe you did and his answer was acceptable. But if you didn't, that's remarkable and noteworthy and I would think about why you want to beat up this man If it's not on your yes list, if it's a maybe, I would consider doubling up finding something on his maybe list that's on your yes list and seeing if he wants to do that.
Speaker 2:Beating someone up without doing damage is a serious undertaking. I could not describe myself as an amateur in that field at this point, in the pejorative sense that the term is usually intended. However, you could pay me a billion dollars a year to inflict pain on people and I would still be in it for the love of the game. And you have to love it to get good at it. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of practice. It's not the kind of thing that you can practice in the skate park on Venice Beach unless you're very slick about it. It's a calling, almost. You have to be devoted to cruelty to become an artist and a scientist in that field, and I don't get the sense that you are doing this for your own pleasure, which is the only thing that life is about. It's empty outside of that, but all creatures seek out pleasure. Plants turn toward the sun and if you want to beat them up, I would learn how to do that through the proper channels. The help is available. It comes in many different flavors. You could find the one that's right for you and get good at it and learn the particulars of kink in this sort of pursuit.
Speaker 2:I would not describe myself as a dom. I don't want to run anyone else's life. That sounds like an inconvenience. The women I typically engage with can very much run their own lives. They're in control, high status, and that's the problem. They have a lot of responsibility. People depend on them. That is exhausting and they come to me to shrug that off for a while. Because sex is where people hide things and our sexuality in many ways is a photo-negative of the image we present to the world, unless we've worked very hard to come to terms with it and forget that we forgot to be honest with ourselves about what gets us off. I would wager to say the modal person never gets that.
Speaker 2:Your boyfriend wants you to beat him up. You don't want to let him down. If that's the only reason you're doing this, that may be a call to self-inquiry. I would not be entirely at ease giving information about how to do this to someone whose motives are as obscure as yours. Four months is not a long time. There's obviously a lot you don't know about this guy. I don't say this a lot, but proceed with caution, thank you.
Speaker 2:Life as a grown-ass grown-up is about having the right friends, and also about having the right enemies. Break bread with masters beef, mostly with masters the occasional, uncategorizable, myopic, blowhard delusion casualty. If they start it, you can finish it. They tangle with you. Make an example of them. Other than that, the company you keep your inner chambers should consist of Masters peers, not unlike yourself. However, you are gonna need goons, minions, automatrons, slaves. You're going to need a lot more of them than there are masters, and so create them. You need to figure out how to commandeer, how to cannibalize people for your purposes.
Speaker 2:The process is pretty simple. One thing to keep in mind do not make threats. That is a sign of weakness. Do not make them directly is a sign of weakness. Do not make them directly. All threats should be implied. You have the Metabomb. You are able to maim, to kill, to badly disappoint, to wreck shop, with the right combination of insight and compassion, applied with the right focus, with surgical precision. Make sure that they know that. Make sure to let them know that you have the metabomb, that you are at peace with your own capacity for violence, the thing that gives weight force meaning to your survival instinct and the marching orders that you dispense. Let them know that you got it. Let them know that you know that. They know that you have it, but you don't have to bring it up directly. The shadow, the implication, is more than sufficient.
Speaker 2:What you want to do when you encounter a new person, a likely prospect, and if they're not a likely prospect, just practice. Practice on anyone, anyone who seems like easy to medium strength pickings. Be curious, find out their name, find out where they fall in the taxonomy that we discussed. Make an educated guess. At least Hone your intuition about people. Be genuinely curious, listen, use their name More than anything else. Let them talk about themselves. You should be something of a cryptic enigma. You should be not a blank, not a cipher, certainly not unengaging, mysterious, sufficiently insufficient in terms of what they know to handle their psycho to be a screen for whatever psychological projections they might have a psychological need to project. This has several advantages. If you let people talk about themselves and refrain from interjecting with stuff that's not about them, so that the whole conversation is about them, invariably that person will think that you are a brilliant conversationalist and you can determine how you can help. What keeps them up at night? How can you help them solve their problems? What resources can you provide when you figure this out conclusively enough. Provide that and do so with no immediate expectation of anything in return. No reciprocity, no favor trading, no, nothing. Continue to provide those resources and do so nothing. Continue to provide those resources and do so intermittently.
Speaker 2:The process of dispensing the rewards and punishment, both through deprivation and shame, should be pseudo-random, not entirely random. Look into how video game designers deal with this. Things that appear to be left up to chance are in fact carefully designed to simulate what the player thinks chants is like, rather than actual chants, which could involve flipping a coin 50 times and getting tails every time. They're going to lose interest. Reward compliance, punish insubordination, but not every time. If you come through, every time, they take you for granted. If you stop coming through at all, it's completely unreliable. They get bored or they find another supply, unless you have a monopoly, which eventually you should. This is how you get there. So listen carefully. It's a delicate balance. It varies from case to case.
Speaker 2:You will learn this in part by screwing it up, so have self-compassion and don't screw up the same way more than once. We've talked about this. It's extremely frustrating to me. You have to go over these things repeatedly. You pass the quiz, you're not dumb, you're one of the most not dumb people on the staff and yet screw up repeatedly in the same ways. You know better. It's like you're screwing up to get attention. Oh, I'm so clumsy. Help me. I can't help myself. I'm not an adult. If this happens again, you're going to write another three-page essay about where your life went wrong and you are going to give a sincere and meaningful apology for wasting my time and by proxy, wasting the time of the other people I could have been helping or hypnotizing or enslaving.
Speaker 2:For now, follow this process exactly. Repeat to me exactly what I said, step by step, preferably verbatim, including the ums and ahs and the verbal tics. Do that. Don't get creative until you've earned the right to do so. I see that. Look on your face. You are not going to quit on me. You are not going to threaten to quit on me. If you're going to quit, just quit. You're just riding my sack when you do that. Anyway, you can't quit. The experiment requires that you continue.
Speaker 5:You know, this so I told my husband I'm done. Could I actually show up on Tuesday? Would you be mad at me?
Speaker 3:No, I wouldn't be mad. You have a place to stay and figure your shit out. And you promise I won't piss some girl off when I beg you up on Tuesday. Would you be mad at me? No, I wouldn't be mad. You have a place to stay and figure your shit out.
Speaker 5:And you promise I won't piss some girl off when I beg you to fuck me.
Speaker 3:Ha, ha ha. I promise I don't know anyone that'd be upset.
Speaker 5:And you're okay with that. I'm a fan of suck it and see. Oh, I can't wait to pay you for my new life in blowjobs.
Speaker 3:No in blowjobs. No, seriously, so hot, ha ha ha. And begging. I've been thinking about it for weeks. I had a couple of guilty moments watching you walk away no longer guilty.
Speaker 5:That makes me feel so good, bb. By the way, I hope I don't have to say this, but don't feel guilty. My marriage has been over for a while.
Speaker 3:It had nothing to do with you I kinda assumed but, but felt mildly guilty for assuming too.
Speaker 5:No guilt, guilt is so boring. Wasted emotion. Obvs, tell me about your boner. I bet it's perfect.
Speaker 3:Ha, ha ha. How about we do some discovery when you get here, yeah?
Speaker 5:That works too, thank you Bye.
Speaker 2:By now you know all the benefits of meditation? Do you know you could use it to get literally anything you want? That's especially true if what you want is to own your innate capacity for violence and use kindness and insight to absolutely destroy everything that blocks, frustrates or annoys you. That's right. Kindness and insight can be transmuted into destruction. I used to be a good person and a smart person. What good did it do me? Not a lot. Not until I figured out how to channel it into and blast her around the world and drop a metabomb on this pathetic excuse for reality. The issue is crucial. The world is full of betrayal, disrespect. People treat you like garbage. So, because you are garbage, maybe you need to take out the garbage. Maybe they're garbage. There's only one answer Blast them with a metapom. Give people the punishments they deserve, punishments they fit the crime.
Speaker 2:If you're rough on another person, the world can be rough on you. Face the wrath of Poseidon. Have a plan. Have a vision.
Speaker 2:Can you drop a metapom, there are going to be surprises. Control what you can control. You can control a lot when you can drop a metapom on the world. You are what you do every day. Don't kill people every day. You don't want to be a murderer. Unless you kill people every day, you're not. You're a meditator Hard, brutally, focus your mind, drill holes through the wall. Start by killing bugs. They're gonna die anyway. Who cares? Kill plants in your apartment. You're gonna do that anyway. But if you do it intentionally, maybe that's better you need practice dropping meta balls.
Speaker 2:So figure out some way to get that in. And the more you kill, the easier it gets. Just don't do that constantly, but meditate as much as you can. Make everything a meditative practice. Do it the way that you do everything Violently. Sex is violent, the force of creation. By violating boundaries can we achieve intimacy? Get everything you want out of this. Money, power, sex All of it accrues to the. You can drop a well-placed meta-bomb on cowards, liars, disingenuous fools who will make it so hard to live in this world. Your art form is creative destruction. Your tool is the metapalm Palette is black and deep red. Sexy as hell. Cultivate resilience. Be normal in your waking life. Fit in.
Speaker 2:Be an absolute killer. In private. Meditation is also the best way to absolutely annihilate your emotions. Emotions last for 90 seconds until you start telling yourself stories about them. To hell with that. Let the critics decide who you are. Brutally strangle your emotions, kill them dead, fill up a little self-compassion.
Speaker 2:You can do that by annihilating your own weakness. Carve the block that is you. Make a beautiful statue. Create yourself. You are your finest creation. Creative destruction is how you got started.
Speaker 2:Destructive creation is what comes next. Build supportive relationships with other brutal stone cold killers. You'll find them. At some point your reputation will precede you. Sure, you can make that happen by taking action. Put your name out there. Put your signature out there. Shake the ground in a way that only you can Trademark meta bombs you drop. Taking action every day, you can overcome the natural frustration of living in this world, being surrounded by fools, cowards, liars, scum. Take out the garbage. You probably have too many friends. Make real friends, friends of stone cold killers. I'm sure you're always doing some killing kicking ass yours and everybody else's. A meta bomb on this world. That is inside.
Speaker 2:And kindness, you're not using it to murder people, try to screw you over. Make an example of somebody, break something or humiliate somebody. That's what makes you feel alive. Sex is violent. Sex is God, first of all. It's the force of creation itself. Sex is violent, has to be. It's transgression, crossing boundaries and you're breaking taboos and friction. Just come for violation.
Speaker 2:Kill your limiting beliefs. Exterminate anxiety, destroy low self-esteem, obliterate it, annihilate it. Visualize total annihilation. Kill your feelings, murder your emotions. In meditation, learn to kill with kindness. Treat people well, so well that it drives them absolutely insane.
Speaker 2:Read the Killer Inside Me. Learn how to nice people to death. Treat people well, so well that it drives them absolutely insane. Treat the killer inside me. Learn how to nice people to death. The boredom of niceness. Kindness is brutal. Kindness is real. Niceness is fake. Niceness is for polite cowards. Absolutely pound, crucify rail, destroy. Start killing today.
Speaker 2:If you don't do it now, you're not going to do it at all. You will make excuses to put this off and you'll kick this can forever. You've got to own your power, man. You're scared of your own power. It's only going to get worse if you go in. Three. Second rule Do it right now. Start killing. Kill a spider. You have unimaginable power.
Speaker 2:Do you think prison, as we know it, has anything to do with rehabilitation? Do you think public schools or cubicle farms are meaningfully distinct from prison? That's a distinction without a difference. You're smart enough to know what you're doing. Setting me up to fail. You're trying to bait me into doing something that is going to amuse you and make you feel superior. And then you get to make fun of me for doing the thing that I never would have done if you hadn't tricked me into it. But you screw up because you don't have a filter.
Speaker 2:You still have this residual fascination with your own authenticity. That's gonna do you in, because that's tacky. When people talk about themselves, let them talk about themselves. They'll love you for it and eventually they'll tell on themselves. They'll give you ammo.
Speaker 2:Don't change the subject back to yourself. From your vantage point, almost everyone is more interesting, or should be. You may not know yourself that well. You might benefit from knowing yourself better. You don't have to grow up in public. Nobody wants to see that.
Speaker 2:And control is not a ceremony. It's baked in. It's so ubiquitous as to be largely unnoticed. You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're in love with your own intelligence, but you rely on plausible deniability. You want to play dumb pick one. You can hold two contradictory ideas, but trying to play both of those parts is too much work for you. It's not convincing. It's not working. You're making a fool of yourself, and I made you do it. How's that for a smack on the ass? The most important ingredient is surveillance, violation of privacy, forced intimacy. It's not actively accepted, it is completely normalized to the point where it is practically invisible Outsource judgment. If it was my job to stop anyone from shaking off the yoke of my control, I would convince all of my subjects that they all had it in for one another. Is that true of you? Is that why you talk smack about your friends? Do you respect anybody? I need to feel that. I need to feel that for my friends.
Speaker 2:The good kind of respect, not the crush that inevitably goes south when you find out I'm a person more complicated than you wanted me to be, Not just a character in your cinematic universe. I have my own thoughts, feelings. You care about how I make you feel. You don't see me, which gives me an inordinate amount of power. What's particularly fun and juicy and, dare I say, erotic is using that kind of wu-wei against the most brilliant person I've ever met Wildly intelligent, fiercely independent, pure sex on two legs.
Speaker 2:the most fascinating person I've ever met Wildly intelligent, fiercely independent, pure sex on two legs. The most fascinating person west of the Mississippi. Everyone and everything in the five boroughs is fascinating. Neither of us can help to compete with that. I love finding your buttons that I can push. It's such a challenge. They're hard to find when you're wearing them on your chest and they're flashing. Don't push me. Are you close to the edge? Are you gonna lose your head? You probably should Think about certain things too much. You think about yourself too much. Come out, it's a beautiful day. Get out of your own way, get over yourself. See how it goes. What have you got to lose? You're miserable right now and I own you and you know that. And now that I've said it, you're gonna deny it, mostly to yourself. That's a renewal on my ownership. Congratulations, I like you. I really do. You have no idea. You could see yourself the way I do for a fraction of a second. You would be salivating because you look delicious.
Speaker 2:Max Sinclair was a different kind of scientist. He'd survived the replication crisis and managed to align himself with the snobs that had taken over the government through his charisma and work that was multidisciplinary and enigmatic so that no one person really had the qualifications to argue with him. He was running a series of interesting experiments for the government. The snobs had come up with a scale for aesthetic value. On one of their Zoom calls, somebody jokingly brought up the idea that hey, maybe we could punish people for bad aesthetics. They physically punish them like, torture them like yeah, bitch, take that. What do you think of Led Zeppelin now? Huh, oh, you want your dignity back. Why don't you go steal it from a black person, bitch?
Speaker 2:Everyone laughed, including Sinclair, who was outranked by that member and always knew when to bring the courtesy laughter. But a lightbulb went on in his remarkable brain. He sought the services of Laura Harper, a brilliant psychology graduate student who was a big fan of Sinclair's and keenly interested in the darker side of human nature and not interested in the disinterested way, her ardently affectionate boyfriend, daniel Hayes, who managed to get his grades up so he could tag along with Laura to college. He was skeptical and protective, as usual, and never liked Sinclair at all. It's hard to believe they could exist on the same planet. Together, sinclair and Laura came up with an idea Leveraging a network Prior to the rise of the art society, concurrent with the fall of everything else the government had been controlled by a group that was dedicated to the cross-societal elimination cringe.
Speaker 2:Among many other things, they installed breathalyzers and any electronic device that was connected to the internet. Before you could log up or boot on or whatever, you had to blow just high enough to be witty, but not high enough to make an ass of yourself. It's a fine line. That's one of the factors that led to the fall of that government, point being the breathalyzers were all connected. It was a system with very few holes in it, because when things go wrong that's cringe. And Sinclair had the idea that the same system could be just as easily used to administer electric shocks. And when people expressed bad opinions about aesthetics or put bad art out there for unwitting consumers to stumble on, they could be tortured. For that. Somebody would have to administer the shocks.
Speaker 2:Laura was almost ready to volunteer. She didn't even care about art. She liked David Lynch She'd seen, but she was highly interested in torture. Her bookshelf was lined with books on corporal punishment. She'd been wanting to study E-STEM but hadn't had the chance until now.
Speaker 2:Laura was intuitively fluent in the language of power and perversity, but on a highly effective end, soliciting people from across the spectrum of society to come in and try out for the role of administering electric shocks to people with bad taste. Some of them got way too into it to the point of pure cringe Teenage goth sadism as as pure, transparent overcompensation. Cringe had become kind of fashionable and the job was getting done. Volunteers were signing up on both sides. Unemployed former art critics, the stands of various performers, casual aficionados all signed up to get shocks when they had wrong opinions. Having right opinions was important to them and they realized that the best way to learn is to have some skin in the game and you remember things that hurt. Pain is just bad taste leaving the body. Laura started to notice some irregularities in both groups, but it didn't bother her much. She was having very liberated, exuberantly creative, extremely decadent and mutually degrading sex with Sinclair every single night. Daniel had a lot of free time on his hands and he was doing a little investigation of his own. After Laura figures it out, it's hard for her to believe she couldn't see it before.
Speaker 2:This study is self-selecting for sadists and masochists. Obviously, sadists giving the shocks and masochists taking them. Masochism can be a pretty good adaptation in a society like this, and the few non-masochists that got shuffled into the subject pool were masochists. By the time it was over, if one was caught visibly enjoying the electric shocks, they switched to slime falling from overhead, like this show on Nickelodeon. Some of them didn't like that, others did. Everything is someone's fetish. Never say that you'll never be able to date again. Somebody out there has a fetish for you. Anyway, the study did not work with vanilla types. Those giving the shocks were disgusted with themselves and the ones taking them finally saw through the veil of the snobs. Who cares what subgenre of horror this is? Who could possibly care which of Mayo Thompson's albums are worth owning? Well, I do, but I wouldn't base a society on it.
Speaker 2:Laura didn't say anything. She wanted to continue exploring her true desires. While she was doing that, daniel had found his mission and felt like he was becoming a man. He studied Sinclair's work in some depth. He wasn't born with a brain for this stuff. He was self-taught through immersion. It was an impressive and quick study Found out in short order that the reason Sinclair escaped the replication crisis is because he created it.
Speaker 2:The whole thing was a massive hoax. Sinclair had framed all of his rivals in the discipline so that he would finally look impressive by virtue of standing alone. Academia is super bitchy, you don't even know. Daniel confided this in Laura and Laura said she wasn't surprised and in turn confided that she'd been taking the D from Sinclair.
Speaker 2:For some time she thought Daniel would be upset, but that opened a new dimension in his sexuality. He decided that he wanted Laura to sleep with other men all the time, which kind of took the fun out of it Either way. By then she got more interested in the links between sex and violence and how unconventional beauty was truly everywhere. And anyway, what did it matter? Society was crumbling around them. The snob government was weakening the people whose feelings they hurt were collectivizing and rising up. The artists they dismissed as hacks, leveraged their suffering and got really really good.
Speaker 2:Through her study of power dynamics, the one thing Laura emerged certain of is that power is always in flux. It takes many shapes and by the end of it she became kind of a prude, but not before she wrote Sinclair until he fell asleep. She knew how to do, which gave Daniel a chance to sneak in. They stole some of Sinclair's papers revealing his ruse and he was exposed. The snobs tried to suppress it, but the media was making a hard comeback. The journalists were pissed and very drunk. After a few months Daniel had become a decadent playboy. Laura had become a shut-in crew. She just stayed home every day, never saw anybody never went out barely used the internet was happier than she ever imagined possible. She did have one house guest during that period. She invited Daniel to come over and drink watery domestic with her, while they stood on her balcony and watched society finally collapse, while they listened to William Basinski's disintegration loops on repeat. This was truly the most unconventional of beauty which they celebrated with some very unconventional beauty of their own.
Speaker 2:Thank you Ask a sadist lightning round answering frequently asked questions for listeners who are not perceptive enough to read between the lines. I am, as always, a sadist with a heart of rugged gold. I like to hurt people in the ways that most help them. It means the world to me when you let me be mean to you. Dear sadist, do you support the subjugation of women? Yes, I do support the subjugation of women. Yes, I do support the subjugation of women. I hope it goes without saying that I believe it should be optional.
Speaker 2:In an open society, people have rights the right to the pursuit of pleasure, the only thing that makes this otherwise absurd existence worthwhile. That includes an array of free choices, some of which are not for everyone, some of which you might wish were not for anyone, but you don't get to make that call. Those rights include the liberty to be verbally and physically degraded, humiliated, flogged, bound, smacked around. For consenting adults who know what they're doing and know how to communicate, subjugation should be safe, legal and readily available, and I think it would be a lot more common than you might expect. People are exhausted. They're tired of working themselves to death, working harder for less. They're tired of running a race as the floor caves in under their feet. People want to give up, give in, let go. Let the ecstasy happen. I obviously have a dog in this fight. I also know that there's a market for my services and everyone would be a lot happier if we could put more of our libidinal energy where it belongs Rough. Sex can save the world. If we keep sublimating our sadism and masochism into wars, arguments, other non-sexy forms of cruelty, that will be the end of the species. Let's get out of the tanks, out of the boardrooms and into the dungeons. I support the subjugation of women and I believe that you should too. Sadist, masochist, we're run-of-the-mill pervert, like everyone else.
Speaker 2:This was the year that Paul was going to save his relationship with his girlfriend Texas. It was a New Year's relationship with his girlfriend Texas. It was a New Year's resolution. It basically already happened. Full confidence, full commitment. He's all in.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, texas is feeling a little boxed in. She feels neglected, at the same time Like it's too close for comfort. She needs space, but more than that, she needs to be loved. Wanting space is sour grapes. She doesn't even know if she wants this relationship back, but she's not feeling good about herself and she wishes someone would do something about that. She runs in different circles from Paul.
Speaker 2:She makes good friends with one of her frenemies' exes, brayden Young. He calls himself Young Brayden, but people don't enjoy humoring him about that. He's a graffiti artist, gets tickets written to him, has eclectic, expensive, particular drug habits. He's a connoisseur of altered states. He runs a dirtbag left Twitter account specializing in ironic misogyny and anti-Semitism. He reads a lot of red pill stuff too. Hasn't got much of an audience, but give it time, it's funny stuff. He's really an optimist at heart. Just likes screwing with people because that's what most of them deserve.
Speaker 2:Texas thinks Braden Young would be a good friend for Paul. They compliment each other in a lot of ways Compliment with an E, not an I. Young Braden doesn't give compliments and Paul doesn't really have friends. He doesn't know if he wants or needs them. He does spend too much time in his own head. That's not helped. By following through on his other New Year's resolutions he's really committing to his New Age mindset writing class, which is mostly just sitting there in silence, whereas it's never silent. There are the sounds of the city and you hear those and hone in on your sound. Don't look for it. You're listening, not looking. This is about listening. Find it, let it happen. Let your soul be called in by your sound.
Speaker 2:During one of her marathon drinking sessions with Brayden, texas discovers that they're both fans of JG Ballard. So she starts the JG Ballard Book Club and invites Paul to tag along on the first meeting, knowing that he'll eventually love Brayden Young as much as she does. Paul isn't drinking right now and Texas and Brayden are drinking a lot. They throw back some red wine and there's a brief discussion of high-rise and Paul takes off. He's got a therapy session and normally he skips and goes somewhere to be alone for a while, but this time he's going. That was his third New Year's resolution Plus. He's not having fun here at all and Brayden doesn't seem to like him that much, and the feeling is mutual on an unconscious level, although Paul hasn't acknowledged that yet. Paul gets therapized and goes home and is surprised to find that he has the apartment to himself. He looks to see if he has a text from Texas, but there's nothing. He sends her a series of adorable emojis that mean something in their own private language that just the two of them share.
Speaker 2:By this time Texas is drunk enough to be confident that it's a good idea to make a pass at Brayton. Paul jerks himself off furiously while Texas and Brayton are deep kissing. Paul smokes a joint and gets badly stoned and paranoid while Texas is getting peed on and forced to do karaoke. Texas doesn't like getting peed on much but she's into it. Young Brayden loves it. She has appreciative joy for young Brayden and it feels appropriate considering the situation.
Speaker 2:It's getting late. Paul sends some texts to Texas and then goes to sleep. He's coming down from his high but he's worn out from ruminating for the last four hours and listening to Radiohead in a futile attempt to calm himself down. It just makes it worse. He's never really listened to those lyrics before.
Speaker 2:While Texas is getting dominated, paul is dreaming about his college town. Young Braden smirks and snickers to himself a little bit as he fills Texas up with seed. She's not under birth control, but that's not his problem. They're too excited to sleep and do some of Young Braden's really good coke and he's more surprised than she is that he's got another round left in him. Young Braden gruffly tells Texas to put on her glasses as he's about to give her a facial. By the time he wakes up, texas has been completely destroyed sexually, physically, emotionally, all together. She comes home as the sun is coming up and gives him a ridiculous story about why she was out so late. It has a wealth of detail because Texas thinks that specificity makes it more believable, but there's a lot of internal contradictions and it's prima facie ridiculous. Nevertheless, paul decides to accept it, because what else is he going to do?
Speaker 2:This had been my year. I don't know if it's been anybody's year. It's not all about me. I'm not special. I have been depressed, broke and, as of a few months ago, out of work, and what I've discovered is that nobody cares as long as you don't let them in. I may be a miserable bastard, but I'm not going to drag you into it and that's why the correct attachment style is avoidant. But I have been at want for money and I needed a windfall a few months ago, so I liquidated my most valuable asset. I sold my car and I convinced myself that I wasn't going to miss it.
Speaker 2:Emerson, you never leave Venice, you barely leave the house. The only time you really drive this thing is to move it across the street for cleaning. Cars are for people with jobs and friends. Theoretically you could have those one day, but realistically, what are the odds? You make some good points. And also the car is a relic of my marriage. I bought it with my then-wife.
Speaker 2:It's been said that when a relationship dies, a language dies with it. All the inside jokes, ip that you built up through joint world building all gone Dead. If you're lucky. It might just hang around to torment you. The through joint world building All gone Dead. If you're lucky, it might just hang around to torment you. The car had a personality. Its name was Carlotta. It was very vivacious and curious and gregarious with other cars and my wife and I didn't want kids. So this was probably sublimation. There was a lot of sublimation in that marriage.
Speaker 2:The main problem was I have a long track record of selling myself short, which is one of the things that happens when you have severe chronic depression, and I try to overcorrect for that. So I think it's better to be high on yourself and wrong than down on yourself and right. So I'm always looking for ideas about how to value myself, perhaps overvalue myself and good ideas come from anywhere. For example, many years ago I'd just gone through a breakup. I was at loose ends. Generally, I was alone in a new city and I called a suicide hotline. The operator was a very kind, compassionate, certainly well-intentioned woman. She recommended that I read a book called Think Big and Kick Ass by Donald Trump. We know a lot more about Trump now. At that point. He was just a guy on TV and he does have some good ideas.
Speaker 2:To wit, if you're negotiating and you have to name a number, come in ridiculously high, higher than you think you're allowed. Name a number, come in ridiculously high, higher than you think you're allowed to think you can come in, because you're not setting your price. You're starting a conversation. Let them talk you down. So I hypnotized myself to believe that this piece of shit Honda Civic Coupe was masterpiece gold tank. It's worth a million million dollars. Sewn into the upholstery is pure uncut cocaine. There's like air going up your nose. You wouldn't believe it. Also, in my dalliances in the theater, I've come to believe that life is theater, that all the world's a stage and we decide who we want to be at given moments. And it's always a good idea to speak in the language that people understand when you're speaking to them and to show up as the person that they're expecting to see, or that they need to see, depending on context.
Speaker 2:So when I went in to sell my car, I knew I was dealing with used car dealers, so I decided to show up as an absolutely massive dick. I wore sunglasses inside. I was as obnoxious as I could be. When they left me to seethe in the waiting area, I draped myself over the furniture in this obviously parodic, ridiculous approximation of what looking relaxed is supposed to look like, but at the same time I was fidgeting and audibly sighing and just trying to create some bad energy for the other customers, make this a toxic environment. I did talk them up from their initial offer and when they said you can expect your check in the mail in two weeks, I looked at them like they spit at me. I said no, I expect my check in my hand now, today. I can send you the car in the mail in two weeks, break it down and send the parts postage due separate packages. So they cut me a check. They were delighted to see me go and went out and hailed my first Uber as a carless Angeleno.
Speaker 2:The driver was very chatty. When people want to talk about themselves, I like to just let them do it. They end up thinking that I'm a brilliant conversationist and sometimes I get valuable information about them. This guy had this kind of patrician outlook on life. He started talking about the homeless situation, which the entire city of LA is a mnemonic device to remind you that that issue exists. It was not a great topic. I felt closer to the homeless recently than I do to functional citizens, which is obviously how this guy saw himself. He was talking about all the people in his life that can't really hack it as adults and how he has to step in and fix everything for them. And I remember thinking that my life felt more out of control than usual. My life is always out of my control, everyone's is, but it just felt more out of reach than usual, and I was reminded of an Uber ride that I took in January. You know, I think I might have had a worse 23 than you, and I am special because I have the microphone.
Speaker 2:I attempted suicide in January of this year. Obviously, I didn't succeed. The point is that I tried via drug overdose, which is not as much fun as it sounds like. I called 911, which you should absolutely never do if you have any better options. 911 is a joke and it punches down.
Speaker 2:Another thing if you're in this situation and I hope that you never are don't tell them that it was a suicide attempt. Oops, I goofed. No more speedballs for me. If you tell them the truth, you're going in the psych ward, and in this case, not only was the psych ward full, but the hospital itself was full, and so I spent the whole night on a stretcher in a hallway utter chaos. Half the people were screaming and crying, the other half were yelling at them to shut up. This was not good for my mental state. I needed to get out of here. I just did a tap dancing act all night long, doing everything I could think of, pulling out all the stops to convince them to let me go home, which eventually they did and I rode home in an Uber at eight o'clock in the morning, as everyone else was going to work. I didn't have any shoes because in the hubbub of my bot's suicide attempt, I'd forgotten to put on shoes. I will say this at least this driver was not chatty.
Speaker 2:Take a beat, breathe into the experience of being here and ask yourself what am I so afraid of? Maybe you're afraid of missing some essential life experience You're afraid you already have, or that it doesn't matter because nothing does. Maybe it's nothing, maybe you're just a regular nerves McGee, or maybe you're afraid of your own glorious cataclysmic power, the riotous multitude you contain. You are smart enough to know how nearly infinitely ignorant you are, but you're not too smart to be hot, and you may already be a satanic Buddhist. Nothing is good or bad in isolation, only in context. The Buddha and the Beastmaster are a good team. This right here, is all you get. Life is for living up down across, diagonally, sideways, because nothing matters. You may already be a Satanic Buddhist.
