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
I Don't Want Enlightenment
I don’t want enlightenment. I want to make art. I want sufficient health, wealth, and freedom to make art that needs to exist. If I get filthy rich doing it, I want that to happen before I get enlightened. It’s more fun that way, and fun is the law.
You get:
- Life-altering creative inspiration, wisdom, and insight from the Cynical Life Coach, LA’s number-one avant-garde motivational speaker
- a fresh round of Ask a Sadist
- and more!
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, LA's #1 avant-garde personal development program, is a production of KCHUNG.
The music is by Chris Rogers and Visions of the Universe.
Your producer, director, writer, and witty and wounded romantic lead is Emerson Penn Dameron, lII.
Referenced episode: “This Is How We Do It in Paradise City.”
Send questions for the Cynical Life Coach and the Sadist through Emerson's Instagram.
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Relax, it's almost over. The first stage of liberation begins at the moment of death the dissolution of elements within the body and the experiences that arise as the consciousness separates itself from your physical form.
Speaker 1:Your priorities now are recognizing the true nature of reality and remaining aware of what's going on within you and without you. The second stage occurs between death and rebirth. It is a state of profound visions and experiences that arise from the karmic imprints of your past actions. These visions are illusions. Do not be seduced or frightened by them. Your practices of meditation and recitation will aid you well in your liberation. The third stage refers to the process of choosing and entering a new rebirth. Who do you want to be this time around? Your past actions and habitual tendencies will influence the selection of your next life. Strive for virtuous actions and avoid negative emotions and attachments to improve your chances of a favorable rebirth. And listen to K-Chung, los Angeles 1630 AM, kchungradioorg. This is Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes Medicated-Minutescom. I am Emerson Dameron, the producer, host, witty and wounded romantic hero. The show begins now. It is now time for Ask a Sadist a round of Q&A with me, your host, a sadist with a heart of rugged gold. I like to hurt people in the ways that most help them, and it means the world to me when you let me be mean to you. We have reader-submitted questions and we will start with this one. Dear Sadist. I am a recently graduated 20-something who just started my new job in my dream profession. What could that be, the mind reels. The one hitch is my boss, selena I assume not her real name, since it's in scare quotes which fail to scare me. Selena, who is around my age but on the more conservative side. She seems determined to make an uncomfortable work environment for me in the office. So the dream profession involves an office Interesting. She accuses me of being too sexy also in scare quotes. That could be scary depending on context and a distraction to my apparently very susceptible male coworkers. She asks me to stop wearing skirts and heels and has even gone so far as to call me quote sex on a stick unquote. Now I'm shaking Within earshot of coworkers in the break room. She silently drills her disapproving eyes into my back during staff meetings I have chills and makes inappropriate remarks about how my quote legs do all the work for me unquote. Any advice on how to get my boss to respect the work I am actually doing and stop insinuating that I'm the office sex kitten Signed Cat, not a kitten.
Speaker 1:Cats are not known for being joiners or team players. Not that they don't work hard. If you've watched a cat. Interestingly, they mostly do this when humans are not looking. But if you've seen a cat hunt in the wild or on the street, it is absolutely fascinating to watch and it merits a slow motion replay. And I feel the same way about your letter Cat, not a kitten. The power dynamics here are delicious. The great Oscar Wilde said that everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. Power is also about sex because sex is about everything and we have a heaping helping of sex and power, which is also about everything.
Speaker 1:In your anecdote letter of grievance because you're not getting the respect that you feel that you deserve. 20-something encompasses a wide range. The human brain is not fully developed until age 25, so if you're under 25, you might not deserve the respect that you think that you are owed. That's true of many of us. However, you are obviously attuned to this dance, this game of power dynamics in the workplace, in a way that I would venture to say that Selina is oblivious to, as she is wielding the cudgel of conventional morality against you, the weapon of boring brutes and dullards, in order to engage in a sadomasochistic relationship. She is the one that keeps bringing up sex with regards to you. I don't know if these men are wolf whistling or if they're complaining about the distractions, or if their wives bring them lunch and complain to Selina. I would guess that this is only a problem in her troubled, addled with conventional morality excuse for a mind, and that gives you immense power in this situation, my friend, my advice enjoy your youth, first of all, and the power that it gives you and your sexuality and the appeal that that has, because there's the perception that it's somehow unspoiled, and on and on and on, people want to break your innocence, which I'm sure you're perfectly capable of doing yourself, because you are already in tune with this in a remarkably astute way. So my advice to you is enjoy your power, embrace it, use it, enjoy the dance. Let this goon feel important. Meanwhile, get good at your job. You say that it's your dream job. You're not going to be working in this office forever. You are going to be running. Something important is what my intuition tells me, based on your fluency in the hidden, silent language of power. So get good at your job. Become indispensable, become unfireable and thus, in the end, ungovernable. But make this dullard feel powerful. Let her think that she's getting to you, let her feel like she's hurting you. That will be tremendously exciting for her. If you feign subservience, if you act as though she's getting to you and she's hurting you and she's breaking you down and she's rewiring you to make you more subservient to her, and that you're developing a genuine respect for your tormentor, which I believe that you're capable of doing this without going too far with the act. She's gonna believe it. It's what she wants to believe, but does not want to think about directly. This gets her off. She is the worst kind of sadist because she has no idea. She thinks that God and conventional morality are compelling her to behave in this way and is thus rationalizing it and is thus not making peace with her own proclivities. So you can do her an immense favor by letting her think that she's getting to you and I from the way that you write. You might have a little bit of the masochist in you, and that's something I love to see and do not discourage and you can enjoy that. Enjoy the dance, my friend, my cat-like prodigy, dear sadist, please help.
Speaker 1:My husband always stops breathing when we have sex. I've tried talking to him about it, gently encouraging him to breathe, just so he can enjoy himself more and I can stop worrying that he's going to burst a blood vessel or worse. But although he's normally a very communicative person, he just doesn't respond and lately just quits the lovemaking entirely. If I say something, I am not complaining. He is a terrific, attentive lover. It's just so disconcerting. He claims he's trying to not blow up in another way. I have questions, and I certainly appreciate that effort and have no idea what that's like.
Speaker 1:I feel like there's some gaps in this. Is this something I should give up? You mean trying to get him to breathe when he doesn't want to Not, oh, here we go Not. Is this something I should give up? Not try to advise him how to do things like breathe and make love, or is there a way to practice breathing outside of sex so that it's not so sensitive? I don't want to be a nag, especially in the bedroom. I want us both to feel free and for there to be a lovely flow of energy between us, and it feels like breathing is the most basic requirement for that, but maybe not for him. Holding my breath in New York, donna, there are so many ways you could go with this, donna.
Speaker 1:I assume that you're familiar with the practice of autoerotic asphyxiation and although I'm not quite clear on why he's doing this, it sounds like he has attempted to explain it or rationalize it some way that he's trying not to blow up. In another way Is he delaying his orgasm? Because I know women who really enjoy making men come faster than they want to. That power gets them off and more power to them. But assuming that he's doing this because he wants to, which he must be, we do everything because we want to. We do it because it beats the alternative, the things that we don't want to do but do anyway. We're either not clear on what we want or we are doing the thing that we want to do and not allowing ourselves to enjoy it. Regardless, he is here not breathing during sex, and that is a well-known sexual practice. It can be dangerous. The great Michael Hutchence is no longer with us for that reason. We lost so much great music that way.
Speaker 1:But here's what I propose Don't allow him to breathe during sex, Not the whole time, but just periodically. Cut in and if he's breathing, tell him to stop and if he breathes, shut it down, Force him to hold his breath. This is kind of like if your parents ever caught you smoking and made you smoke the entire pack in front of them. You smoke the entire pack in front of them. The things that are forbidden become irresistible and things that are compulsory become onerous. So you can try that as an experiment. He might decide to start breathing out of rebellion, because people do turn toward the sunlight of freedom, as you observe, and love means facilitating the freedom of the loved one, as you observe, and love means facilitating the freedom of the loved one.
Speaker 1:Sex can mean quite the opposite, but that's not relevant here and there's so much here that's worth getting into See if he likes that and if he doesn't, then there's more to explore. There is something here in him to dislodge. There's some resistance to giving in to the violent relishing of pleasure.
Speaker 1:That is the life force, the force of the breath, the burst experience, outside of the womb that we have, of the polarity of the natural world, the in and the out, the dark and the light, life and death. He's denying himself that, and it must be for a reason. You obviously love this man. He is very lucky that you are in his life, because this could be the opportunity for a massive breakthrough If he is able to cough up whatever it is that's stuck in his throat that is preventing him from the full enjoyment of breathing, and all I can do is wish you the best. But it sounds like he needs a little bit of help and he trusts you. So I would start by seeing what happens if you don't let him breathe. Frown on his breathing during coitus Could be exciting for both of you or, as I suspect, it could lead to greater revelations which could then later result in a waterfall of pleasure like you can't possibly imagine from where you are sitting now. Such things happen when we challenge ourselves to break through our resistance to power, to pleasure, to truly stoking the fires of our inner hells.
Speaker 1:Dear sadist, I recently had the recurring experience where people I meet socially. Assume I'm gay because I'm well-dressed. Nobody would mistake me for a MAGA hat-wearing, diesel-pickup-driving good old boy. But I'm a straight guy who's very clear on his sexuality and his favorite designers. Anyway, I really am fine with the whole thing. It's kind of funny how simple and narrow-minded people can be. Thanks for your thoughts, fashionably yours, joe. Indeed, I don't know where you live, but it is truly an endless source of frustration and comedy, depending on where my blood sugar is the stupidity of conventional morality, of herd behavior, of the stupidity and the bigotry and the thoughtlessness and the cruelty of people in groups. People accuse me of cruelty. They know of what they speak. I hurt people in the ways that most help them. I am an artist of cruelty. They are rank amateurs that only derive their power through the force of their numbers, through the group. It is pathetic At the same time. Are you sure that you're not gay, because this is obviously striking a nerve enough that you wrote me.
Speaker 1:I know a handful of people who are 100% either gay or straight. They may have a gender preference that is rock solid lifelong. It's never moved, and they are the strangest people that I know. Almost everyone else goes through phases and stages and particularly times in their life where they notice that some of these taxonomies and restrictions that are put on us, that we take on ourselves in order to fit in and not get hurt and not get rejected because that used to mean starving to death alone in the woods now it just means not getting to hang out with idiots. All I'm saying is you don't know until you've confirmed it one way or the other. So if you have an opportunity to take a swing at no strings attached gay sex, then maybe it's worth considering. Then you would know for sure one way or the other, and that would dislodge the insecurity that I sense between the lines of this letter.
Speaker 1:And we know that you have a natural talent for transgression. You are doing it without even trying, just by following your passions, following your interest in aesthetics, looking sharp in beauty, which is, I think, ugliness is more interesting than beauty. Ugliness is the real beauty these days. But our people make snap judgments about us. Our clothes front load information about us. That saves us the trouble of some elements of getting to know you, chit chat. People that meet you know where you stand in terms of aesthetics and making deliberate choices in how you present yourself and they either envy that or or they respect it or they just don't understand. And it seems like wherever you are where these things are happening, and I assume that this is a negative. Actually, now that I'm looking at it, people assume that you're gay. Is it gay men hitting on you? I just assumed it was knuckle-dragging, conventional morality zombies giving you a hard time.
Speaker 1:In either case, you have a natural talent for the stage that is the life and the social interactions that we share, and thus you are in a position to violate these fake dictates of morality and do what you really want. You are concerned about your appearance, which makes me think you might be a little bit uptight. Let go of that. There is nothing so dangerous as a natural artist of transgression who has overcome shame. One of these days, cat Not A a kitten will get to experience that she's probably too young to have completely overcome shame. That's why youth is wasted on the young, because they just cannot understand their own power. They're too scared, they're too used to being trained into obedience and made to think that they can't survive on their own and they can't bring their bosses and these empty authority figures to heal. You're already doing that Without even trying. You're having this effect on people that disturbs the conventional morality of the place where you live. Relish that Every day is an opportunity to screw with these people's heads, to assert your extreme individualism, your sovereignty, be the designer of your reality and your own personal hell, and if any of these people gets in your face, drag them into it. They don't know how to party, so it's gonna be fun watching them burn while you party, because you know what hell is for.
Speaker 1:I don't want enlightenment, I just want to make art. When I transmute shame into laughter, I am Prometheus getting a Hummer from the cosmos itself, and enlightenment is a non-sequitur April Fool's joke compared to that. I want you to make art too. Steal my ideas. There's always more where that came from. Say what you should have said to that bastard six months ago in an aria or a sonnet. There's nothing they can do, it's satire. Anything anyone does can be art, be the Tony Iommi of paleontology or the Joe Coleman of CPAs. When you get into the millions, money gets absolutely psychedelic. I want sufficient health, wealth and freedom to make art. That needs to exist, and if I get perversely rich doing it, I want that to happen before I get enlightened. It's more fun that way, and fun is the law. I've been asked for clarification on the concept of Paradise City. What is that exactly?
Speaker 1:Well, there are different ways to understand it If you use quadrants to model ideals and how they're related to each other. There's the political compass, with the authoritarians on top, libertarians on the bottom, left and right. That's a familiar one. It was originally created by libertarians to convince people that they themselves were libertarians and have fun with that on Reddit. There's SWOT analysis Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats there's.
Speaker 1:Bono Grumsfeld's famous unknown unknowns, known unknowns, you discover something that you previously didn't know and didn't know. You know, but now that you know that you don't know it, that goes in that box. You have unknown unknowns, which Zizek talks about. That's ideology, that's dogma and hierarchy that you don't acknowledge and perhaps don't even notice, because it's just embedded. It's the water that you swim in in your fishbowl of choice or habit. And then known gnomes. You know this and you know that, you know this. And if you don't know, now you know. If you know, you know. Ken Wilber has a lot of these're all quadrants, all levels, type stuff anyway think of paradise city as you have.
Speaker 1:This quadrant exists in your mind, so it's not some special place and you have unlimited air rights. You can go as high as you want over there. That's where paradise city is. It's way up in the realm of gold through the clouds, and that's where you are beyond what you consider your maximum potential capabilities, just falling at a higher level than you would ever imagine possible.
Speaker 1:Here's the thing. When you are on your way to that kind of breakthrough, you will freak the hell out. Almost every time, people reflexively sabotage themselves when they are about to get what they want, and they are in the process of getting what they want. That's why to help someone get what they want is almost certainly to destroy them, because you have to get ready for this fiery passage. To destroy them is you have to get ready for this fiery passage. The study of Paradise City includes the practice of techniques to get through that fire and it's a place experience not unlike a flow state. But that doesn't come anywhere close. It's way beyond the flow. Way beyond the flow. White ears at light speed, excellence in its most profound erotic but yet also weirdly apollonian kind of untouchable. The Angelina Jolie at her finest is clearly in Paradise City. There have been others. It's way beyond our antediluvian concepts of human excellence, to the point where it's alien. It's confusing to a lot of people. You will lose friends. Haters will hate you. You'll be forced to shake it off. That's what looking at maps and reading travel guides for Paradise City will prepare you for, and that's one of the things we do here on Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes. We'll see you next time, thank you.
Speaker 1:Your principal obligation in this absurd rollercoaster ride of a life that we're on together is to pursue your quest for self-realization. Now, how can you do that? On a roller coaster, it's on a track. You know where it's going I'm deliberately mixing metaphors to screw with your head, because only by screwing with your own head can you make sense of life on life's terms. And since you're not doing that, I'm doing it for you. Now your principal obligation to others is to not hinder their quests for self-realization, perhaps to aid them on that path. And you could have lots of other fun with them Convivial, sexual. You can start beefs with them to define yourself, because life isn't just about having the right friends, it's about having the right enemies. Everyone likes you. No one loves you. You are who you alienate, among other things. Anything else that you do for other people is optional. In the end, reciprocity is a real thing that I believe exists in the universe. It's almost a physical force. But how you deal with that is up to what you perceive as your own judgment.
Speaker 1:I would say that free will is a ridiculous idea, but it's a necessary illusion. It gets us out of bed in the morning. It keeps us doing things. We would collapse from existential angst without it at this stage of our evolution, so free will it is. It's a beneficial lie.
Speaker 1:Almost everything is irrelevant to your quest for self-realization and the obligations that you truly have to others. All of it the culture war nonsense that passes for political discourse is at best rearranging deck chairs and at worst it's office power grab struggles that you get dragged into in lieu of handling the stuff that's going on in your own life. Think really hard about whatever it is that's got you reactive today. Do you care? Why would you care? Who would care, and why Will you care next year, next week, four years from now? It's irrelevant. Almost all of it, almost everything, is irrelevant and a waste of your time to get reactive about. There are a few things that are worth that investment, and finding out what they are is the work of a lifetime. That's why monks stare at the sides of mountains for 20 years.
Speaker 1:You may not figure it out in this lifetime, but that's part of the quest for self-realization. That's better than getting sucked into celebrity gossip or whatever the highbrow equivalent of celebrity gossip is. In the fishbowl that you swim in, very few people matter in your life. That's harsh and it's not entirely accurate, because you have to love everyone, but if you just love everyone, you don't really love anyone. You have to pick the truly great people and you have to know how to find them, and you have to be one, and that means managing your time and resources. You can't get back your time. In some cases you can't get back the energy that you expend.
Speaker 1:It's hard to remoralize yourself after you've been thoroughly demoralized and you can protect yourself by ignoring people that are blatantly wasting your time. Just ignore them. You can ignore almost everyone that is solicitous of your time. Most of them don't need it, don't really want it, and even if they needed it and wanted it, they would not deserve it because they are going to waste it or they are going to use it against you. Ignore them and, if you want to be polite, acknowledge that you heard what they said, but ignore the content. You don't have to respond. They are wasting your time.
Speaker 1:Now you are free to pick and choose what is or may be of value in what anyone has to say. Most people are not worth your attention, however. Good ideas come from everywhere, so you are at liberty to pick up certain ideas that might be useful and leave the rest, as the great Bruce Lee suggests. The danger of taking good ideas from bad sources is that you will get sucked into emotional exchanges with those people. Everyone is fighting a hard battle. That doesn't mean you have to let them drag you into it. If you get into an exchange with someone who is highly emotionally reactive, don't talk about yourself. Don't use the word I. It is just about ideas.
Speaker 1:And ultimately, I think that we're all interdependent. No one is an island. Rugged individualism as an idea has failed us. If I were tasked with turning a bunch of people against each other, the first thing I would do is convince them that they were all out to get each other. Competition is not the essence of capitalism. Monopolists hate competition, and the communist regimes that we saw in the 20th century were much the same way. It was just about consolidating power with the state, rather than where the money is. It just depends on what kind of tyrants you want.
Speaker 1:So don't believe for a second that you are in some sort of Hobbesian, dystopian, all-against-all hell world. It ain't like that. Even in nature, creatures turn toward pleasure. Flowers turn toward the sun. We want to feel good. The rest of it, to the extent that the blood, red and tooth and claw struggle for survival exists, it is to experience more pleasure. If you've seen butterflies in action, this is undeniable. Now you are nonetheless an individual, and if anyone tries to take that away from you, if anyone lathers shame on you for being too sensitive or manipulates you by threatening you with exclusion from a group because you're too strange, if that's all they've got and yes, it's scary, the day that was a death sentence. You would wander into the woods and, while you were starving to death, you would be in so much pain that you would find some honey and pour it over yourself in hopes of being devoured by bears quickly, because dying of starvation slowly is not the move. However, it's not like that now. In some ways, our times are more conformist. We have devices that afford us a lot of convenience, that have allowed me to learn many things. They've served me well as an autodidact.
Speaker 1:I enjoy Wikipedia and I have had fun with ChatGPT, although it has its limitations. It is not able to write comedy. I asked it for a list of Chinese curses and it was not familiar with that idiom. I think it thought I was being racist. So I said expressions like may you live in interesting times, and it came back with a bunch of, in its words, chinese curses. And when I asked it for the benefits of drinking someone else's urine, it fell silent.
Speaker 1:It's not funny, it's too wholesome, and that means it is essentially untrustworthy. Same with people Be trustworthy, be dirty, be decadent, be obscene, be cynical, be brutal, be raw. But then, having expressed all of those desires, make peace with your own capacity for violence. Find your deeper humanity. The way out is the way through, and don't let anyone interfere with your quest for autonomy and self-realization, using whatever tools are at your disposal and, in times of crisis, taking a D-Day approach and giving yourself access to all of them. If that goes against their dogma or it goes against what they happen to believe, that probably means nothing to you.
Speaker 1:It's easy to be manipulated, especially when you've spent much of your life being tacitly threatened with exclusion. And if you want to buy into any this or any other nonsense that you find to be to your liking aesthetically, or it's just your jam and you like it, go right ahead. I wouldn't stop you if I could, and I don't judge. Some of my best friends are idiots. Just know what you're doing. You are at liberty to ignore this crap, and it's not enough to know that, but not live it. You have to live it until you don't even need to know it. It's just part of who you are. It's in your value system, it's in your DNA. If you have kids, you automatically pass it along to them because it is deeply encoded.
Speaker 1:Now, if you do get roped into an argument with someone, match their intensity. There are times when it pays to be the adult in an interaction with a child. However, if someone is coming at you in a way that is supposed to be intimidating or presumptuous of moral authority on their part and they're getting heated, you get heated yourself. That's what emotions are for. They make us charismatic, they give us power, they empower us to respond to people in kind when they come at us with these kinds of emotional attacks. Don't let your intelligence work against you. Develop charisma at the same time, which means having passion, which means being passionate about something. So figure out what that is. It doesn't have to be anything important, because most things are so, so very unimportant. However, it's the experience of the emotional intensity is worth having. And when you are able to be in extremis and to hold yourself and to let those feelings happen and fully express them, but at the same time, be fully present and grounded, and a grown-up having a human reaction to being attacked, that gives you a ridiculous amount of power, and one way that you can get through those sorts of attacks is to find out what the assumptions are behind it.
Speaker 1:What is that presumption of moral authority grounded on? Usually, it's not just I'm better than you or they've got to have something more than that. It works for me, but not for most people. Figure out what that is and then show them how they're just like you. Explain yourself. Don't explain yourself. Present yourself in your terms that are compatible with their terms and be like Frank Booth. You're like me. Reflect their act back at them. Name the game and let them know that you have skin in it For now, for purposes of defeating an idiot, which means getting them out of your space, your relationship should be win-wins. If you have to get rid of a relationship, this is a way to do it. You're like me. Name the game, show them their own act, give them their own medicine and ponder what issues are really being discussed.
Speaker 1:What is really at stake in this conversation? What do we really mean by morality? Where does that come from? What is it that compels us to take it seriously? Is it from people in white coats? Is it from clergy? Is it from prophets, dead or living? Where did you get that idea?
Speaker 1:Your parents? What else did your parents lie to you? So many things, so many necessary lies that, like any other lie, spiral snowball, take on lives of their own. Save your lies, for when you really need them. They come at great expense and if you go into debt, the interest will strangle you in your sleep and then keep choking you out as you go about your day, and not in a sexy or erotic or fun way. You will just be gasping for air, be desperate to just draw in the essence of life, and that's really always what is up for discussion. That is what's behind everything else.
Speaker 1:It is necessary in order for us to make these arguments, whether they mean something, whether we're defending our ideas, our most deeply held principles, not beliefs. Beliefs are not worth defending. You're better off without them. Don't believe what you believe. Constantly test it, because the truth is ever changing, as are you. So if the circumstances did not change in such a way that affected that belief, you almost certainly did Always be checking that Now.
Speaker 1:That can be exhausting. It can lead to cynicism, nihilism, misanthropy. You can get sucked into cultic milieu just to be a true believer, to have the experience of being a true believer, if you've been doing the work of testing your own beliefs and seeing them as they really are, which is as impermanent, insubstantial, interdependent, not of anything, being a true believer can feel like falling in love and you have to be careful for that. Appreciate the seductive power of it. Act as if you are the ultimate moral authority. Most people need to get smacked around a little bit. Most people are better off with you telling them what to do and what to think, and if they're not, they will tell you because they will have the intelligence to push back in a mature way that may be beneficial to you. You have a lot to learn too, but for the most part, you're dealing with people that are better off under your thumb.
Speaker 1:So, outward facing, you know everything. Inward facing, you're always questioning everything. If you can't remember this, write it in a Sharpie on the palm of your hand. Thank you. So Money, financial security. The way to think about this is you have the polarity of the Apollonian and the Dionysian at work in your heart, your mind, your soul. The Apollonian representing order, rigor, the light, the truth, the way. Order, rigor, the light, the truth, the way. The Dionysian represents darkness, chaos, bloodlust, beauty, passion, art, insanity, howling at the moon, having a party. What you want to do is set up a business partnership between the Dionysian and Apollonian tendencies and your own money brain. You don't want to think of it as strictly an.
Speaker 1:Apollonian tendencies in your own money brain. You don't want to think of it as strictly an Apollonian thing. It's not just putting your head down and stand on the grind and being boring. The Dionysian side is where your creativity comes from. It's where you get risk and new ideas. You need the Apollonian side to run the business, to make basic decisions, to know the difference between gambling and investing. Gambling is for fun. You can gamble money that you can afford to comfortably lose. But when you invest there's going to be risk. Nothing is without risk, but it should be with the intention of making money. You should pay down the credit cards first, buy index funds etc, etc. But you're going to want to have fun with it. So let the D&E-Z inside run wild a little bit. You can spend money like a drunken sailor once in a while, but not as a regular thing, and you want to live well below your means and don't fraternize with people that have a lot of money. If you come into a lot of money, stay humble. Believe me, you'll be glad you did. Those people aren't gonna have that much money for that long and even if they do, it's not gonna help them, because you need enough money to not have to worry about money.
Speaker 1:Money can be cool. It can make cool stuff happen. Once you get into the millions it is absolutely psychedelic. Money is myth and symbols and metaphors and stories. It's very abstract, postmodern, if not fully quantum. Money is weird. The big money players know this. Respect that, but also respect it on the consumer math spreadsheet level. Don't spend money you don't have. Buy stuff that's gonna last. Spend a little bit more money on quality. That will pay off.
Speaker 1:Number two health and healthcare. Ultimately, the story is going to be a tragedy, and not just because of the inexplicable healthcare system that we have in the United States, where this show is based. Where we are hopelessly enthralled to insurance companies. We are making bets that bad things are going to happen to us. If the bad things don't happen, the insurance company cashes in. If they do happen, the insurance company has people on the clock, great minds looking for ways to screw us out of the money. It's awful. It's a casino. It makes no sense. Any country with one smokestack has better healthcare than we do, so it's a tragedy in that way, but it's a tragedy worldwide because of the human condition, because we are all going to die.
Speaker 1:We're going to decline physically, cognitively, we're going to get old, we're not going to be with it, not going to be relevant. The things that we know and the muscle memory and the learned responses that we have are not going to have the same value and social currency that they had, and we're going to experience a lot of pain. We are going to probably suffer, unless we are very good Buddhists. We're going to experience pain and we're going to feel bad about experiencing pain. We're going to lather shame on top of that and it's a tragedy. There's no way around that.
Speaker 1:The health Journey is not a linear thing. I find that my health tends to ebb when I'm experiencing a lot of worry and stress, so it does have to do with money and romance and other things going on in my life. It's not just decline. There are rises and falls, and the most robustly healthy person that I know, who seems to be the picture of health to me, is in his 60s and he didn't really get his life together until he was in his 50s. He was on meth. Before that he was living somewhere called the Thunderbird Motel in Torrance and now he is the picture of health and equanimity and offers his wisdom to anyone around.
Speaker 1:So just because you're down doesn't mean you can't get back up. But ultimately you just have to accept that if we're fighting against death, that's a fight that we are ultimately going to lose. Much of life is the denial of death. We probably aren't going to accept it too much. It's scary. We lose everything that we ever had, everything we're ever going to have, if there's life after this. My guess would be that we are not recognizably ourselves. So if I am fortunate enough to come back as a house cat, I will not remember consciously the experiences of Emerson Pendamron III, although perhaps subconsciously I will. Maybe that stuff does live in ways we're not aware of. We don't know.
Speaker 1:That's why I'm a radical agnostic. I don't know and you don't either. I think we should all own that. I don't know and you don't either. I think we should all own that. Number three is education. People have student loans. Education is getting more prohibitively expensive.
Speaker 1:If you want to get your kids into a good preschool, that's a bloodthirsty, cutthroat, bloodbath competition, like reservoir dogs in the preschools. It's not the dream that we had in America post-World War II, where everyone was going to get a good education and the government was going to pay for it. Now it comes through student loans and subsidies, which have to be paid back, and it's hard to say that you really get your money's worth. With most degrees they you're worth about as much as a high school diploma used to be, from what I can tell. And the world is changing so fast that the only skill that really matters is having a mind like silly putty, which means educating yourself in a particular way, in a way that keeps your mind limber, that keeps you open to new information, that keeps you well aware that things are constantly changing. It's a certain type of autodidactism.
Speaker 1:I don't know of educators that are really doing this. It's something I've been testing on myself, and it's based on the idea that you want to live as though you will be living in this moment forever. The time to not, you know, optimize the hell out of everything until there's no soul, but to have some structure. Parameters are the best friends of creativity. Some poets compose their best work in meter and rhyme. Keep teaching yourself, stay open to new experience, stay curious, do Sudoku puzzles or have a lot of sex with a lot of different people, and make sure that you keep everyone's names straight. If you have to use name tags, you might want to get more certain vitamins or eat more fish. Figure it out.
Speaker 1:Number four relationships Very hot topic. That's sex, love, romance, and it involves accepting a certain amount of pain into our lives. There's uncertainty that comes with love. We never really know what's going on in another person's heart of hearts, and we're never really honest about what's going on in ours, because if any person was 100% honest, they would be shot or imprisoned with great haste.
Speaker 1:So we kind of have to stay a little bit guarded. People say they want vulnerability, but what they really want is for us to be able to keep our own counsel regarding our feelings. Keep our own counsel regarding our feelings and to work through them so that we don't inflict them on other people. To essentially know ourselves and work on ourselves, and do that work somewhat discreetly. Keep it to ourselves so that they can freak out and break down which they will and which you will, regardless of how well you learn. To work on your feelings because this is just part of being alive is to accept and love all the aspects of life, including suffering and pain and our tendencies to tell ourselves stories about ourselves and create suffering for ourselves. Desperately want what we want until we get it, at which point we freak the hell out, because getting what we want often ruins our lives. You just have to love all of that. Love your entire life. Love it even if it's an aria heard only in the voice of Wayne Staley from Alice in Chains. Love it as if it's a sonnet written by Carrie Bradshaw. Love it in all its bloody glory and ridiculousness, and also understand fate for what it is as, at least in large part, the workings of your subconscious. As Carl Jung told us, if we do not make the unconscious conscious, it will rule our lives and we will call it fate.
Speaker 1:So develop a kinky, consensual relationship with your own sick, twisted inner business, you sick pervert Number five, career progression, the job, the office, the thing that makes the money but also takes up half of our waking lives. What do you really want to do with your time? Who do you want to really be in the world? What would you be doing if you could do whatever you wanted? What would you want if you didn't want what you think other people want? Didn't want what you think that people want for you. You just wanted what you want, starting with the things that you would be ashamed to tell other people. What do? You want.
Speaker 1:If you figure that out, you got a big head start on the herd. And if you talk to wealthy people who are happy with their money, most of them will say that they do whatever the hell they want, whatever way they want to do it, and that's the secret. So do that, even if you don't get rich.
Speaker 1:even if you don't get status or a nice car or a house in the hills or a career that you can brag to people you don't even like about. You have a shot at a little taste like a homeopathic lemon in the La Croix sample of happiness. Do what you want how you want it. I don't know that the rest will follow from that, but, whatever happens, having more fun and being more the kind of person that's primed to have fun. Number six we're worried about the political climate. These are polarized. We're watching different movies, we're in our bubbles. We can't get together about anything.
Speaker 1:It's worth looking at some of the foundational values in society and questionings. A lot of it is culturally on loan from Christianity. If we're good little scientific, materialist atheists, a lot of our concepts of morality come straight from JC and his daddy, the Holy Ghost, who seemed like third wheel and a hanger-on. It's worth looking seriously at all of that stuff that comes from Christianity. If you follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and eschew the organized religion part of Christianity, you're better off. But only just Jesus had some wacky ideas. I don't think that the meek inherit anything. I think that this right here is all we get and one of the things that I've noticed about the current political climate is it's not just that everyone is fighting, it's just that everyone. It's also that everyone thinks that they're losing and insists that they're losing. If you tell them that they're winning, that they put a nice W on the board, that something they did worked, they'll get mad at you because they have to keep losing. That's how the people with the clipboards make money. No one really likes martyrs, but that's what everyone is trying to be. We're out martyring each other. If you want to get out of the culture, wars and this nonsense, just don't martyr yourself. You're not always under siege in every way. You're not always losing. Sure, you're a victim in some ways, not in other ways. At least practice some multi dimensionality. Don't be a martyr. Nobody likes that.
Speaker 1:Number seven tech and privacy. We're getting to the point where everything about us is going to be out there in the public eye and everyone who looks at us is going to have that Terminator scanner that's going to give them our baseball card information and probably tell them what we're really thinking. It's not going to be able to hide our thoughts, because bosses are going to want to know and they want to know. They're going to make it happen, they get what they want, and the rich are going to want to keep getting richer. They're going to want to know how they can take advantage of people to make that happen. So that's going to be facilitated, and then it's going to be picked up by everyone else. It's going to be picked up by increasingly intelligent robots. We're just not going to have any secrets.
Speaker 1:So go ahead and practice for a life without secrets. Live your life so that you don't have to hide anything. I personally find that being a little bit of a scumbag is a good idea. It scares off the right people and, as I think Ray Dennis Steckler said, if you sleep on the floor, you don't have to worry about falling out of bed. So lead with that.
Speaker 1:As Andy Warhol said, find your worst qualities and lead with those, because if people are going to find out anyway, you might as well just give them the bad stuff first. Like the conquering king who does all the beheadings on day one. It's relatively smooth sailing from there. Go ahead, get the bad stuff out of the way. It takes courage to be that sort of a slut, bitch, whore, cad, jerk-off, asshole, whatever it is. Just see what happens. You just own that part of yourself. Whatever it is that you're afraid people are going to find out about, dox yourself and lose yourself. Like Eminem in the battle. He just told everything there was to know about him and then he went in on the secrets that the other guy was keeping. We're not going to have those. Let's prepare for a life without them. It's going to be weird. It's going to take some getting used to, but go ahead, be an awful person and be good at it. I am here for you. I love you. Personally, it is no small thing, because I am LA's number one. No-transcript.
