From Finite Wins to Infinite Living: Seduction, Strategy, and the Art of Continuing

We explore finite versus infinite games and stumble through seduction, strategy, and self-delusion, all while redefining boundaries and the stories we live inside. A strange love affair becomes a lesson in how to continue instead of conquer.

• finite vs infinite games and why continuation beats victory
• turning competition into collaboration and play
• boundaries reframed as submission gates
• collecting peak experiences without losing yourself
• choosing and using your illusion with intent
• winning breakups through calibration and agency
• seduction as presence, consent, and breath
• exposure, scapegoats, and public shame economics
• don’t believe your story; write a better one
• stay connected to the larger world when bubbles burst

Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program, at 7:00 p.m. Pacific Time. First Wednesdays of the month. If you miss it, or some of it went over your head, and you want to try again, it lives forever close to it at medicated-minutes.com as the only good podcast.

Chapters

• 0:00 Provocation And Opening Volley
• 0:34 Finite Vs Infinite Games Explained
• 2:44 Turning Competition Into Connection
• 4:11 Boundaries, Submission Gates, And Desire
• 6:41 Confessions of a Collector: Peak Experiences [Starring Helena the Brit]
• 10:45 You Have A Right To Be Wrong
• 17:37 Infinite Enmeshment: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller
• 33:34 Don’t Believe Your Own Story
• 35:40 Doing the Work Can Be Fun
• 37:25 Cynical Life Coach: Exposure, Scapegoats, And Survival
• 41:07 An Erotic Pep Talk from Isabella Rose
• 49:20 Closing Mantra And Sign-Off
• 1:02:40 JJ's Unsent Voice Note

Transcript

Emerson Dameron: 0:00

This is confidential to a person who's thinking about suing me. It also covers anyone else who's thinking about suing me. Please God, do it, do it, do it, do it. I am begging you. Ruin your own life. What is it that sweet stupidity straight from the source? What disclosure is it? You're gonna find out. It's gonna be fun to do it. Get it over with. You're in the right. Everyone would agree with that. You said so yourself. Finite and infinite games. What are they? What's the difference? Are those the only two kinds of games you can play? K CHUNG, Los Angeles, 1630 AM. K Chungradio.org. This is Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I am Emerson Damron. I love you personally. Levity Saves Lives. The concept of finite and infinite games was formally introduced to the world by James P. Cars in his book Finite and Infinite Games. The pronunciations of those two words are different, and they're different things. To call something infinite does not just mean it is not finite. It is a lot of things. In fact, it is everything that can be except for finite. That is the only thing that is not contained within the universe, is the universe's competitive resolution. So because it's not there, we have to try to find it everywhere and put it there when we can. That's what a finite game is. A finite game is a game with winners and losers and other people who would like to think that they're winners, but they're not. And so they get categorized as losers, which maybe is unfair. But the whole point of the finite game is that it moves toward its end, which is somebody being declared a winner, and that's the end of the game. That person has won that game. You can come back for another finite game to try to settle the score. If you lost, because they are finite, even a baseball game will end eventually. If you can just sit there, you may have to wait a thousand sunrises, a thousand sunsets, but the end will come. And when it does, I'll be sitting right there with you by the campfire, telling stories, about half of them true, most of them true enough, and I will walk you home. It will be my pleasure to do so, because that is how the infinite game is played. Well, not exactly. I'm sitting around the campfire telling some stories, anecdotes, bantering, mixing it up, chopping it up. All of that is part of the infinite game, which is relating to all of those around you through a means other than competition. Something genuinely friendly. Not friendly competition. You're not sizing each other up, because you're not gonna have to compete. You are in the business of making the game last as long as it possibly can, of getting as many people involved who want to be involved, who have some reason, some enjoyment of the infinite game that you've created. You can turn some finite games into infinite games. You can certainly do the opposite. And if you do, you're gonna get clowned and laughed off the block by me. Because you probably didn't even know you were doing that. And if even if you did, you probably thought, I'll just play this one last finite game, and then I'll play the infinite game. Of course, that ain't how it works, because there's always one more, because the finite games may be finite in and of themselves, but there's always one more. Nobody ever really wins. You win, but then you got a little red dot on your head. People are trying to get you, and you have to keep on winning, otherwise people forget that you ever did in the first place. There are two other kinds of games, besides finite and infinite, that don't fit into either of those categories neatly, whereas one of them is suicide, not something to play around with, particularly not in our barbaric theocracy of a country that I live in. If you live in Switzerland or the Netherlands, and you realize that human consciousness is hell and you want out, you could possibly make that happen. Here, you will probably just paralyze yourself with the luck that you've been having lately. I wouldn't do it. Instead, I find a nice infinite game to play. The fourth kind of game is not to be discussed on a family show or ever at all. In fact, I'm kinda sorry I already brought it up, and I'm gonna pretend that I never thought about it or knew what it was, or opened that door uh in the house that I was in. We're supposed to be a nice little soiree salon, a cocktail party with sparkling conversation, maybe some sparkling wine somewhere, certainly sparkling water for me to drink. I don't drink alcohol. I wasn't very good at it, and it's the dumbest drug available. If you could get MDMA at the bodega, nobody would be hanging around in the parking lot of a big lots to buy a 12-pack. Maybe they would. People are baffling in all sorts of continuously delightful, amazing ways. And that's one of the reasons to keep living. That's one of the reasons to keep playing if you're a player and a baller and you're balling hard in the infinite game.

Emerson Dameron: 5:53

Boundaries. You know, I'm not even sure what my new boundaries are. I used to have no boundaries. Now I'm re-strategizing that and just putting up one big boundary. It would be more accurate to say I have submission gates. There's a bare minimum I'll put up with. Another minimum I expect. Lots of nice to have. No one will ever have all of them except one one, with whom you will be compared and inevitably found wanting. I can't have her for reasons that are too complicated to explain to you. But if you really want to get through, you gotta at least be creative enough to figure out how to do it yourself. If I give you the answers, I have to give everyone the answers. And there's a whole lot of people I don't trust right now.

Helena Mayfair: 6:37

Oh darling. Where does one even begin? I suppose if we're being terribly honest. And I do try to be honest, at least with myself, though that's somewhat harder than it sounds after four glasses of Prosecco and a night that ended somewhere between Soho House and a dingy apartment over a kebab shop in Hackney. I'm what you might call a collector. Not of things, mind you. Things are boring. If you don't throw them out when you move, they make moving a miserable experience, and I will not be tied down with a mortgage. Not after that DJ wearing what he called stunner shades annihilated my credit rating in less than 72 hours in Monaco. I collect experiences, peak experiences, the sort of divine, debauched encounters that Jarvis Cocker and Sophie Ellis Baxter would spontaneously duet about. As he once put it, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, the common people will never know what it's like to live as we do, which is so regrettable, really, for them, don't you think? Be that as it may. Just last month I found myself at an absolutely ghastly warehouse party in Berlin. Or was it Rotterdam? One does lose track, where I met this sculptor. Danish. Enormous, beautiful tarantula hands. He kept calling me his, quote, pudding pop, unquote. And I thought, well, that's anthropologically fascinating. Before I knew it, I was bent over a Bauhaus chair in his studio explaining finer points of British restraint and its fascinating knock-on effects that ripple through our culture, society, and sometimes our more off-colour sexual fantasies. You know the ones. Danish affixed me with literal external restraints, after which he demonstrated precisely no restraint of his own. And I was in. I was all in. Perhaps I always had been. One must never do culture by halves, darling, you understand. Although perhaps such middling dilettantes who find that sort of thing acceptable aren't fully welcome in their homes either. I've been accused of being pretentious, which I find hilarious. Pretentious people pretend to have taste. I simply have it. There's a difference. I can discuss Goddard and reality television with equal facility. I've cried at the Rothcoe Chapel and in the Sedona McDonald's, also at a truly inspired drag brunch in Shoreditch. I contain multitudes, glamorous, prosecco-soaked, desperately hungover multitudes, and lately, none of them ever seems to stop crying or screaming or both. The truth, such as it is, and don't you dare tell anyone, is that I'm absolutely terrified that none of this means anything, that I'm just floating through life in a half-awake, half-delirious fugue state, accumulating experiences like stamps in a passport, waiting for someone to check my homework, to tell me I've done it right, that it's replicable, but not like too replicable. But then some devastatingly inappropriate man whispers something filthy and degrading in my ear, and I think, who cares? At least I'm not boring. I never bore myself, and I do have impossibly high standards that only the swashbuckling wild men who devote their Sundays to rabbinical passing of Schopenhauer after a long week of conquering windmills, especially the windmills with rent control, could ever even attempt to understand. But boredom, darling. Boring yourself, wishing your life away, pitting your own convenience and lassitude against your heart and all the people who will love it and you, whether you love your heart or not, or not yet. That, darling, to be boring, that is the only unforgivable sin. It's the fate of boring people and perhaps a long game masochist or two. Please do note that I don't need to forgive you to fuck you. Oftentimes it's more transgressive and better and fun and more delightfully post-everything if I don't, don't you think?

Emerson Dameron: 10:56

You are wrong in almost every respect. Almost everything you believe is absurdly wrong, if not not even wrong, meaning so wrong that it's off the spectrum, off the map. So wrong it's not right, but you have a right to be wrong. As do I, and that's good, because we're always wrong all the time. Which means once you recognize that, once you own it, once you truly appreciate and love your limited capacity for knowing what the hell is going on around you, because you're only perceiving things that your badly outdated, obsolete brain thinks are relevant to your continued survival. It doesn't even care about thriving. What are you even talking about, Maslow's hierarchy? Get out of town. We got large predators to escape the clutches of. That's your brain, and it's going to construct narratives and invent patterns in the landscape. Because we are pattern-matching machines, we are storytellers. Often the stories we tell ourselves don't help us out very much. Maybe they help us feel like better victims. And victimhood. Although I think the gold rush has probably become a race to the bottom of the mind. Because that's just no way to think about yourself. No way to present yourself, no way to be. If you are a listener to Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes, it is safe to assume, or at least uh the probability is there and high, that you've seen some stuff, you've been through the hard knocks, and you've learned from that. You've developed an appreciation of how cruel and miserable and uh ruthless, blood red and tooth and claw this life can be. And you have accepted that, and you continued to live despite all of the flaws of the reality that we s share more of than we recognize. The parts that we share are the parts that we don't see most of the time. Perhaps you'll get a little glimpse. If you know where to find the right peyote ceremonies, but you don't. I ain't hard to find. Unlike peyote ceremonies, which generally uh you need a reference. Again, just show up there. The peyote doesn't like that. It'll probably uh make you sick. But if you go there uh in good faith and you uh genuinely ingratiate yourself to the peyote, you're not just trying to play it, because it cannot be played. Not by someone of my skills and talents, uh, definitely not anyone else's. If you keep it real with the peyote and you come in, you will gain the enhanced ability to choose your illusion. You are using your illusion, but it's the illusion that was assigned to you or that you stumbled into by accident of birth, various other things. Doesn't have to be like that. You could realize right now that everything you see, except let's be generous, 3% of it, 97% of what you see is made up to serve a particular narrative that may have been useful at one time. Maybe that time is right now, in which case, just roll with that narrative until you're done with it. You don't like it, lay it down, do it to it, get it over with. Sometimes the greatest joy in life is an experience that makes you feel so good and so glad that you did it when it's over, even though you were rock solid miserable at the time. Do that and then come back and redefine, reframe, reinvent the game. And you can do that by deciding the ways in which you can best serve the infinite game, and thereby yourself, and thereby everybody else, because yourself is a lot more crowded than you think it is. You can line all of that up, you get an illusion that you can use. But before you use it, you gotta choose it. Before you play, determine what sort of game this is. Decide whether or not you wanna play it, because you don't have to play it. But if you do play it, play it right, play it hard, play it to the best of your ability, leave all your love laying down, don't take any of that love back to your hotel room, just go back and pass out, dead tired from giving all that love to the game, because you understand it and you are part of it. And if you can't make that happen, if you can't tolerate the game, good news, you can change the rules. It's not as hard as people want you to think it is. Characters, celebrities. People probably recommend that to me because they think they would be amused by the novelty of listening to me do the impressions poorly and then watching me do them even more poorly. I am what improv coach Susan Messing called cerebrally led, and I'm proud of it. My worst celebrity impression, which I guarantee you is very bad, is still better than the vast majority of the impressions that I've heard of me, and there have been many. Many have tried, all have failed. There can only be one, often imitated, never duplicated.

The Player: 16:46

I show up precisely five minutes late, already scanning for the exits. You would have regretted staying home, I tell myself. This is one of those things you do not so much for the experience of doing it, but that of having done it. The kind of thing you'll be happy to have done when it's over and you're at home playing with your advocates and updating your spreadsheets. If you know which ones I'm talking about, and I think you do. Before I talk myself out of it, I dove in and started circulating. If you want to be a strategist, the first thing you gotta do is strategize. So just start doing it is not only the easiest way to learn it, but it's the perfect accelerant for studying techniques and theory. That guy over there is probably worth about 65 points. Would have clacked him at 50 a couple years ago, but my life ever since has been so consistently a process of calibration and recalibration and perfection of strategies that I don't even actively strategize anymore. I don't feel myself doing it. Now I'm a strategist. And that's where you gotta be before you start calling yourself one. Like that guy over there, he wants to be a strategist. He thinks he already is. He wants me to help him. That would be minus 30 points, at least. That was the last time I saw him, and that was a couple of years ago. Over there we have uh Edith. Uh, her name's Eden, but I call her Edith. It puts her on edge, puts her on the back foot, gives me some leverage. Her stock goes up and down like Bitcoin. It crashed when she decided once and for all that she doesn't want to have kids, but it picked up right away after that. Because in sex dating and relationships, you always win when you buy the dip. You can call yourself a strategist when you get to the point where every breakup is a victory for you. If you can win every breakup, then you're ahead of 99% of people out there. In fact, it was losing breakups consistently that got me interested in this. It used to be, uh, I would be busy, as I always am, nearly. So it would take some doing for her to get my attention. And when she did, I would bask in the warm glow and beautiful sheet music crashing on the beach like waves. And because she put me on a pedestal initially, I would just have that much further to fall, which I would do faster than I planned on, which didn't give me enough time to find someone else and slash or pull the trigger and dump her before she had a chance to dump me. If that happens more than once, you need to take some responsibility for turning that around. At this point, I'm calibrated to the millimeter in terms of selecting the right candidates, finding weak spots, planning weeks in advance, because by the time I would get dumped in the old days, she would have already had months to get through whatever grieving process there was, and she'll be ready to be buddies again. I don't have any friends. I don't really need them. I don't have room for that in my life. They say you can either focus on family, career, or being social, going to art openings and museum openings, or going to the museum right now. Before they close, and then sneaking around and seeing if you can get a furtive hand job before you get thrown out. I have focused almost entirely on my career, but you can pick two of those. So I've sunk a sliver of an investment in being social. I've gotten to the point where I know how to pull back and I know when to go in, when to hold them, fold them, etc., and that means rocking the bedroom, or when that's a terrible idea. I've got all of this in my head. One of these days, I'm gonna teach it. I'm gonna write books, I'm gonna put a course on Udemy, I'll do one-on-one concerts. All of that's coming. Right now I got a little more partying to do, and I'm interested. Yeah, who is that? The staggeringly alluring woman with the blonde hair and blue eyes. Where did she come from? Cat-like, sliding through walls, funny secret passages, seem to appear and disappear and then reappear in defiance of the laws of physics as currently understood. Certain events in my life have challenged my old standby scientific materialist vision of the world, while I'm still desperately clinging to that. I'm in the early stages. I've moved from unconscious incompetence into conscious incompetence when it comes to understanding, you know, those layers that we're not always tuning into. And I'm tuned into so many frequencies on my layer, but I would need teachers and guides to get into the other ones. But because I'm entirely self-sufficient, I can't really inflict that on myself right now. Oh, there she is again. She almost looks like uh like she's CGI'd in, like Margot Robbie always does in films. Like she should have birds garland her with flowers while a wise old owl gives a graduation speech. But it's just for her. It's not for the class. The owl even came out during the daytime to do this. But then, oh, there's something spooky about it, too. Something darkly, deliciously, painfully, uh authentically smoking, burning, pavement melting, egg frying, hot about this. It's also scary. I'm not sure that those two things are separable here. I lose track of her and then all of a sudden there she is, right there in front of me. There's a famous, eccentric content creator from Canada who's been around forever. Nardwar the Human Serbiat. He's this very awkward, dorky guy who accosts people at pretty much any level of fame you can think of. Gets a forced warm reaction. The way that people greet fans, they're deathly and lightly afraid of really letting in, but are not worth losing. And then he starts spitting out things that no one could possibly know about them without some Library of Congress level research skills on something that probably isn't in the Library of Congress. The life of someone who has joined the ranks of the beautiful people, but wasn't always there, and has a past was probably poorly documented because at that point, who cared? And some of them are captured, enraptured by this, they fall in love with Nar War. Others get incensed because it's weird, and it was weird when it happened to me. And the most beautiful weird woman, or the weirdest, beautiful woman I had met in quite some time, appeared in front of me and spoke to me.

Isabella Rose: 23:36

What never arrives, but always undresses you? What asks nothing offers everything and slips out the back door when named. What tastes sweeter when shared, but bites harder when clutched? What ruins your plans, rearranges your bones, and laughs like silk sliding off skin? What writes no rules, wears no armor, and always wins by losing? I'll give you a hint, Mortimer. It's what you've been running from in pressed collars and polite silences. But darling, I see you now. And I love you anyway.

The Player: 24:18

If you know that nickname, you are either someone I have taken pains, double-checked, triple-checked, to really most sincerely throw you out of my life because you know too much. Or there's something about you I gotta know. Especially if you're absolutely gorgeous and off-puttingly sexy in a way that threatens to get more powerful over time, and you start with something refreshing. I've met a lot of women on the apps and on the other apps, and sometimes in real life, but I've never met anyone who knew about that. What else does she know? Why is she paying me attention? Well, that's obvious. Everybody wants me, but the spoils are reserved for those bold enough to take the interpersonal risk of letting me know, taking the leap of faith. I'm not a Christian, but it makes sense that the reason that God doesn't reveal himself is that then you have no reason to believe. You would have the answer sheet. You could just do the rational thing without taking any risk on the highest level of thought, which is paradoxically thinking about the cessation of thinking. By now, the two of us had hooked up. We had been hooked up for some time. We started in the cobroom, fumbling around like horny teenagers, and tried to make enough noise to get caught. When we didn't, we took the show back to my apartment. There was something odd about inviting this woman in. If I could explain it, believe me I would, and if anyone could explain it, it would be me. It's this, I want to say holographic effect. That doesn't make any sense, and neither did anything else about this woman, whether it was her oddly ephemeral presence, which ran in stark contrast to her molten sensuality and skills as a generous, good giving and game, up for anything, sexual partner, and indeed romantic partner. The sex was so good that the talk started early. Neither one of us was ready for a real relationship, so I did what I usually do in those cases. I decided to freeze her out for three to six months. No contact whatsoever, no exceptions. The day that I announced that was also the day that she appeared in my house. There was no sign of a break-in. All of the keys were right where they were supposed to be, but there she was. We had some more ridiculous, volcanic sex. Then we took a break to watch Ghostbusters, which is a great first date movie. The innuendo in there is not subtle, followed by more sex. And then as we were drinking hot cocoa in her living room, her in a plush white bathrobe, and me in a sleeveless t-shirt and cargo shirts. My usual post-smash uniform. At least if I'm playing the home game. I don't remember what I said, but she said.

Isabella Rose: 27:53

And that's precisely when I'll take your hand and pull you into something wild and warm and worth it.

The Player: 28:01

And for the first time in a long time, I was scared. I was terrified. I went into a freeze response, but then I shook myself out of it before she had a chance to notice because I was in. As long as I could feel like I was leading the way. I said, I told, did not ask, when I said, let us begin. Make it possible for us to begin. Mash that button. Let's get started.

Isabella Rose: 28:29

And she said, Oh baby, you're becoming. I see it in your stillness. That storm behind your eyes, that's desire, real desire. Not for me, not even for glory, but for you, the man you ache to meet. Stronger, sharper, slower. Hmm. I want to watch you get there. Want to taste every lesson, lick every bruise. So don't stop now, handsome. You're almost unbearable. In the best way. And when you break, break forward. Break deeper. I'll be here. Lip biting, breathless, ready.

The Player: 29:15

I wasn't expecting any more sex after that, but you can see how under the circumstances it was necessary. Three days later, we went back to the party, which was still raging. At this point, everyone was completely out of their senses, and the fact that no one cared if we made a scene was frustrating at first, regrettable, because opportunities for the good kind of exhibitionism are getting more and more rare, which did nothing to slake our desire for exhibitionism. It was clear by now we were going through transitions, if not together, then parallel, as we broke out of our chrysalises and immediately jumped into a coat room to roll around a little bit, at which we were getting better every day. 300% improvement just in the first 72 hours. So, yes, new relationship energy. Yes, a match made in the fancy part of hell. We returned to the party. It's still going, but now it has a different internal logic, almost like a game board. I can see the players hitting their marks and hitting a winning streak, falling off of a winning streak, hitting it again, falling off again, which was even worse. At the same time, all of the other players around them are having these dramatic, life-changing experiences. I mean, buying a flavored drink at the local bodega may not seem like a big deal, and it isn't, but it's a life-changing experience because everything after that will be in some way a result of that. So everything that you get to actually enjoy, and everything that terrifies you that have the challenge and the honor of conquering in this lifetime will be dependent on buying the flavored soda, so think about that before you decide what flavor it's gonna be. We get back from the bodega and the game has gotten significantly more complex. And I'm the player. I live for a challenge. I had no idea this was gonna be this exciting. I told Blondie that I needed to go work the room for a while. I made the rounds in 15 minutes on the dot. Spoke with everyone I wanted to remember me in a way that guarantees that they will, without spending too much time on them, and then made a move to get out of there in such a way that nobody important would notice, and everybody I talked to would walk away with the belief, the memory, that I had been there for hours, and in fact was the toast of the party because I was the only person that convincingly pretended to care about them. When I got back, Blondie was gone. Then, as I made my escape down the back stairs, there she was on the fire escape. Not that fire escape, two fire escapes over.

Isabella Rose: 32:05

Hmm. Darling, come closer. Let me tempt you with a game that never ends. Not the kind you win. No, no, this one is far more delicious. This one is infinite. The others will rush, race, clench their jaws and fists, chasing trophies and ticking boxes like good little boys and girls. But not you, not us. We don't play to win, we play to play, to stretch the rules until they moan, to redraw the boundaries with a pout and a wink, to invite more players, more hands, more heat. Because the infinite game isn't about victory, it's about seduction. Evolution. Keeping the dance going long after the music should have stopped. It's lipstick on the rules and gold flakes in the ritual. It's soft chaos, divine teasing, every choice, an opening, every move, a moan. In the infinite game, darling, you don't conquer. You continue, you improvise, you beckon, you surrender, again and again. Not because you're weak, but because you're delicious, because you're the kind of player who knows the real power isn't in holding, it's in letting go. So toss the scoreboard, dismantle the throne, forget the finish line, and come play with me. Hmm, yes, right there. Now don't you dare stop.

The Player: 33:42

I said, uh, look, come over here. I'm gonna try to get in your pants eventually. I already got in your pants. I can't hear you from over here because I went to too many punk rock shows in basements when I was a teenager and didn't wear earplugs. And I don't want everyone else to hear this. And I don't want you to broadcast this over the rooftops, through the alleys, with the force of momentum that blows the clothes around that are heading on the line. I wanna keep this. I'm gonna keep you for myself. Doesn't mean I can, doesn't mean I will, just means I want to, so come here.

Emerson Dameron: 34:30

Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes LA's number one Avant Guard personal development program at seven o'clock p.m. Pacific Time. First Wednesdays of the month. If you miss it, or some of it went over your head and you want to try again, it lives forever close to it at medicated-minut.com as the only good podcast. What they call doing the work is really the process of getting to know oneself, and the work does not have to be hard work. Calvinist obscenity that is the work ethic. If you have a fetish for hard work, uh I suggest you look at where that came from. And look at the people who taught you to feel that way and what they might have had to gain from it. I think you'll be surprised. Doing the work can be fun. You can get to know yourself through games better than almost anything else, except smoking the venom of the Colorado River Toad, otherwise known as Five MEO DMT. If you've listened to this show at all, you're well aware of that. That's not an everyday thing. It's way too intense to be addictive. And it's just not convenient to smoke that much toad venom. It interferes with other areas of your life, and that's not what it's supposed to do. It's supposed to make everything easier by erasing your ego. That will at least give you a sense of humor about some of the bad stuff that falls on you. As a little yellow rain must fall. If you believe that, think about who instilled that belief in you and what they had to gain. I'll tell you straight up, I love giving golden showers. Not trying to be underhanded or trick you. I may be the most honest person you've met in quite some time. So judge me all you want. I know what's in my heart of hearts.

Cynical Life Coach: 36:30

In a just world, you'd be screwed. You would be damned. You could not survive that kind of exposure. Sunlight is a good disinfectant. It also acts like bleach. It will kill you dead. You cannot survive everyone knowing everything there is to know about you. Think about it. You have lied, cheated, withheld, and committed acts of evil. Almost everyone has committed a felony, some kind of imprisonable offense. A lot of them were not victimless. You've done it purely out of selfishness, out of greed, because you're mean, or just because you could. You're also courageous, compassionate, patient, present, and wise. No one cares. Think about it. Put your good qualities on one side, put everything else there is to know about you on the other side. Which side do you think is going to interest the perverts, the mouth-breathing morons, the ruffians, the haters of the general public? Eventually we're all gonna be exposed. Our privacy is being rapidly eroded. It's possible that the eternal judgment described in scripture is in fact just the end of our private lives. We'll know everything there is to know about each other, and when everything is out there, in a sense, nothing is. We're not ready for that. It's gonna get here before we're ready for it. But for now, we need scapegoats. The moral high ground is reserved for self-deluded, massive, shameless hypocrites. People who really do not get out very much. And the rest of us need human sacrifices to absolve us of our sins by proxy. That means there is money to be made in the business of scapegoating. Can either be a scapegoat yourself, which can be very lucrative, and also a short ride. Will be loved and hated, people will hate to love you, it will wear you out, your nervous system will take a beating, and you may end up with some regrets. On the other hand, I can also be a broker for scapegoats. You can be in the business of finding people who feel shame, sense of loss, they're hurting. You can find convenient scapegoats for them to go after. And they could be overflowing with gratitude for the service, and they could offer you payment or favors in return. In that case, take your payout immediately and get out. The more self-righteous someone is, the harder they're gonna screw you over. Because they think of themselves as being virtuous. Saves them the trouble of actually being virtuous. We are all terrible. We're wonderful by equal measure. Again, nobody cares. What is within you will destroy you if you don't let it out. It will destroy you if you keep it in and it is found out. Andy Warhol said something about how if you want to get famous, take your worst characteristic and lead with it. That could make you an artist or a scapegoat, perhaps a little bit of both. The role of the artist in society is to provoke. That can put one in the way of becoming a scapegoat. It's a bit complex. We need more scapegoats than Andy Warhol's factory can churn out. So be very careful. Do not assume that a just world would be kind. To you. It would not. If you're even thinking along those lines, that tells you what you need to know about how you would do in a just world. You're better off than a bloody, brutal, hypocritical one. And if you don't think that, get to know yourself.

Isabella Rose: 40:19

Sit with me. No rush. No role to perform. You don't even have to speak. Just be here. With me. In this little pocket of time we're stealing from the world. Let me look at you. Really look? Hmm. There you are. That face. So guarded. So gorgeous. Do you even realize how much longing you carry in your eyes? I see it. That tension humming beneath your skin. That ache you keep camouflaged with to-do list and polite smiles. You've been carrying so much. Like it's your job to hold the sky up with your bare hands. But baby, what if you didn't have to, just for now? Just for this moment. Put it all down, the weight, the worry, the pretending. Let me be the one thing you don't have to manage. Let me be the place where you can be soft. Where you can unravel. Where you can make the kind of sounds you only make when no one's listening. Or when someone is very closely. Hmm. Come even closer. Here. I want to touch you. Relax, sweetness. I'm not going to break you. I'm just going to explore. There. My hand on your arm. Feel that warmth? That low, slow current buzzing just beneath your skin? That's not just touch. That's invitation. A little whisper under the surface saying, Yes, this is good. Yes, you're safe. Yes. More, please. Let's breathe together. Inhale like you're sipping something sinful. Like the air is thick with honey and heat. Hold it. Feel it stretch you open. And now, exhale. Let it all melt. Let your shoulders drop. Let your tongue fall from the roof of your mouth. Like it's too lazy to pretend anymore. There. Do you feel that? That subtle slide from I'm bracing to I'm receiving? God, that's sexy. Because strength isn't always the clench love. Sometimes, it's the collapse, the moan, the sigh, the shameless little shiver that says, I'm letting go. Let me see your back. Hmm, yes. Turn for me. I'm sliding my hands up now, just beneath the curve of your neck. My thumbs pressing gently into the knots you've been nursing like secrets. Let them go. You don't have to carry this alone. You don't have to hold anything right now. Except the rising heat in your belly and the sound of my voice sinking deeper into you. Can I tell you something? You're exquisite when you soften. There's a kind of beauty that only shows up when someone lets themselves unravel. When they go from holding it together to being held. And oh, sweetheart, I would hold you. I would wrap myself around you like breath, like warmth, like a secret you didn't know you were allowed to want. You're humming now, aren't you? Your body's waking up, your spine lengthening, your chest widening, your lips parting just enough to taste something imagined. God, you're easy to adore. Touch yourself, just a hand on your belly. Feel how tender it is, how responsive. You don't even have to go lower. Yet, this isn't about performance. This is about presence, feeling the whole of you, the trembling, aching, golden mess of it all. Wiggle your toes for me. Mmm. Good. Now feel your thighs warm and weighted. Feel your back, your neck, the soft hollow behind your ear. I want you to feel the heat pooling in places that don't usually get thanked. The backs of your knees, the insides of your elbows, that place just under your waistband that makes you twitch when someone brushes too close. Yeah. That place. Hmm. There's that flush. That twitch of your mouth when you're not sure if you're being seduced or sanctified. Why not both? Let me say this like a spell. You are not too much. You are not too broken. You are not behind. You are right here, gloriously, obscenely alive. And the fact that you ache like this, that your body buzzes at the sound of my voice, that's not weakness. That's proof. Proof that you're not numb, not shut down, not cold. You're simmering, darling. And I want to taste every drop. Let me be greedy for a moment. I want all of it. The soft parts, the sharp parts, the part of you that feels like a child, and the part of you that feels like a god. The polite version, the dirty version, the undone version, the one who wants to be kissed where it hurts. The one who wants to be told what to do. Yes, baby. That one. Look at me. Let your lips soften. Let your eyes blur. And give me that smile. You know the one. The one that says, Oh, you figured me out. The one that says, Yes, I do want more. Mmm, there it is. Let it bloom across your face like heat after pleasure. That's not fake. That's you remembering. Remembering how good it feels to want, to ache, to be undone in the presence of someone who sees everything and still wants more. Now inhale one last time. Hold it like it's mine, like it's sacred. And as you exhale, let everything else go. Let it slide off you like a silk slip, pooling around your ankles. You don't need it now. You're glowing, dripping, devastating. You've arrived. Not at perfection, at presence. So come back to me anytime. When your world is loud, when your jaw clenches, when you forget how much magic hums inside your skin. Come back, and I'll be right here, moaning your name between breaths, smiling like a sin, dripping with reverence. Because you, darling, are not a mess. You're a masterpiece in progress. And I can't wait to feel you come undone again.

Emerson Dameron: 47:42

Damarin, Damarin, you can pronounce it any way you want. I can't tell you what to do. People can't tell you what to think. They can limit your options so that it may seem as though you only have the option that they want you to take, which doesn't speak highly of that option or their self-confidence that they would assume given any other option you would take. Any other option over the one that they want you to take. That's a foundation for a very bad relationship. Six months of good sex that turn into a decade of maybe not abject misery. Not all misery is abject misery. Most misery should not be referred to as such. You can't just go around throwing qualifiers on things and expect them not to lose their meaning, and you might need that meaning later. Something close to it. Don't believe your own stories. We all do it. We're all compulsive storytellers, telling ourselves all kind of stories all the time to try to make sense out of chaos. Because we are pattern matching machines, and you're delightfully adept at constructing memories that serve our current narratives. If you're feeling bad today, then everything that led you to this point was bad. Because even if it was good, it was part of a bad system that was rotted to the foundations, should have been torn down years ago. Things are going well, which could be five seconds later. You see blinking lights, or you are pulled over by a police car in the snow, because you are unfortunate enough to live in, let's say, Wisconsin or North Dakota. South Dakota has a lot of snow too. Even LA has snow sometimes. It was snowing on the Hollywood sign a couple of years ago. There was nothing I could do about it. If you're doing well, if you get pulled over in the snow, and as you're sitting there, you understand that you you truly do not care, because this is just part of the ride. Maybe it's a little scary. Maybe it's gonna be a little boring if you have to do some time. I don't know, your life. I certainly don't judge you. Whatever you get into, I don't know. Be ready for the consequences of that, because they're gonna happen, and when they do, you can either freak the hell out, wet yourself, and make a bad situation worse, or you can make a bad situation kind of sublime. If you just sit there and you notice how damn pretty those blue lights look. And they're flashing, reflecting off of the snow. The snow's still coming down, those blue lights are bouncing off all of those snowflakes, each one a little bit different. As far as we know, there's one guy who's checked all of the snowflakes and what they're all like, and that's pretty much all he does. And nobody even really knows who he is because he doesn't have much of a life. If you can do that, if you can disbelieve your own story enough to be in it when it is useful, and push it aside when you've got a better story in mind, or fully discard it when it no longer serves you consistently, if at all. Don't believe your own story, and then make up another story. And don't believe that one either, but you can live in that one for a while. You can try on different characters, not just hats, different underwear. You can have the intimate experience of being someone that you now are. Maybe you weren't that person before, but you became that person. Nobody could stop you. You will still be all kinds of other things and nothing. You don't exist. Throw yourself a party to celebrate that. If that's not worth celebrating, then you tell me what is, and you really should, because I'm trying to have more fun in this year as time moves forward. And I want to know what fun is. I wanna know what fun is for me. I wanna have all kinds of fun, figure out what kind of fun I like, maybe have some of that fun for a while, maybe have some other different fun after that, just to mix things up, maybe get in the mix and have a lot of different kinds of fun simultaneously. I need hot tips and resources. So if you know new ways to have fun, or interesting ones, or rediscovered classics that were lost for a given time because the hyper capitalist beast exists to crush fun. If not, it certainly enjoys doing that. And people are very defensive of their jobs. They don't want their jobs taken away, they want to keep working. You know, I can I can see a little bit of that. You gotta provide for yourself, and that has been made challenging to do outside of the this one very particular way that capitalism likes, which is to inherit the money and to own things rather than having to buy them. If you can't do it that way, you are looking at less and less appetizing options for other ways to do it, and you might get defensive about that, and you might get mad that your job is about to be obsolete. That can all be true. None of it changes the fact that work is stupid and nobody should be doing it. I'm gonna run on that platform and I'm gonna win. That's gonna be a finite game, and I'm gonna use that to sneak the infinite game in through the back door. You just watch it. When you see it happen, when you see me shine, you will need to come up with yet another story to explain that to yourself. And I hope you don't regard me as an enemy or nemesis in that story. I have a collection of nemeses. I'm still looking for my arch nemesis, so ain't nothing wrong with it. I would think that I I would more appropriately be cast as the wizard. Cerebral and yet sensual, sexy, passionate, patient, present, all of those things. That kind of wizard. We can get down later. That won't even blow up your spot. We can just do it and see how it goes. If you want to get back to the stories we were telling before, that's okay. I will take it to my grave. If you ever need to dispose of a body, I'll just put this right out there. Testimonials are the best marketing. Longtime friend of mine, a member of a group of friends, and another guy who is also affiliated with that group were discussing who in the group they would go to first if they had to hide a dead body or evidence of other horrific crimes. I was the name that came up. I was the only one, because I was the obvious one, because your secrets are sacred to me. I will not rat you out. I mean, you'd have to really piss me off. K-Chobradio.org. This is Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes, LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. I am Emerson Damron. I love you personally. Levity saves lives. Every game is a world of its own. When you play the game, you enter the world of a game. Sometimes it's self-contained or can feel that way. Sometimes you're building it. Sometimes you're building a beautiful place. Sometimes it's even more wonderful, steamy, dreamy, sexy, out of sight than anything you could ever come up with on your own, because you are building it in collaboration with someone who just gets it and digs it and likes you and loves you and is curious about everything and is curious about things because you are curious about them. Curious about what you do, think, feel, say. Even though that person seems to already know, even if you cannot hope to get one past the goalie because you will be called out and clowned. And that's what you'll deserve because you are making life harder for yourself rather than easier. Because you gotta be straight with at least the one person who gets it, who understands. That's especially true. If that person's syrupy voice just saturates your ears, your heart, soul, and mind. Soothing and yet stimulating, galvanizing, sexy, appetizing, tantalizing, peachy, creamy way of perceiving things. If they have synesthesia, forget about it. You will create wonders beyond your own imagination. You will create wonders that you will not understand. You may want to run. You may be frightened to behold the things that came out of your imagination, and now you're perceiving them with your imagination, but they're unlike anything your imagination is used to, because your imagination has been on a steady diet of crap. Because you've been alone all the time, reading the news, looking at stuff that's gonna upset you, and when it does exactly what it says it's gonna do, you get more mad than you were before. When you decamp for the infinite game, and you got somebody, a playmate, perhaps, who's right there with you and for you, and the two of you together are channeling psychic lightning. You are effing the ineffable. When that happens, keep this in mind. You can enjoy yourself in that self-contained world as much as you can, and I recommend it. Again, life's pleasures are fleeting, few and far between. You might as well get the most that you can, pleasure-wise, especially if you're sharing it with somebody else, especially if they got it like that. And I think you know exactly what I'm talking about. I know what I'm talking about. Okay, you do too, if you're pretending that you don't. Especially in such heightened circumstances where judgment can and will be impaired. Make sure that you stay in touch with the larger world outside of this world. This self-contained world that's part of a game that can be anything but self-contained because it is infinite. Perhaps it is the only thing that can contain it, but why would you even bother with that? If you're infinity, if you're uh team infinity, if you even have a few spare moments a day to be infinite, which involves some breathing exercises that I can teach you in a one-on-one. Get in touch, ain't hard to find. Stay in touch with the larger world. Uh, because you might need some help from the outside world. If perhaps you need to evacuate the world of the game. If uh perhaps you get your heart broken so badly that you are shocked by how painful it is. Shocked that you could still experience these enormous high school-sized emotions without dying. If you're loved and then you lose that, and you lose it to perhaps somebody you don't care for too much. Even if you never met them, that probably helps. It's easier to hate people. You don't know them unless they're terrible. And some of my best friends are terrible. Some of my best friends are idiots. If they cause any problems, it's usually by uh blurring the line where incompetence crosses over into malice. I'm also friends with a lot of assholes. That came from being friends with a lot of nice people. And nice is distinct from kind. Nice means I'll do anything as long as you still like me. I will not do anything at the risk of being disliked or uncurrying your favor, getting on the not-so-great side of the moon, of the self-contained moon, orbiting the self-contained world. If you get in that kind of mentality, then all of a sudden you're playing a finite game again, and you have already lost. So don't do that. Don't hang out in the world that you made, but it's burning down. Don't keep singing the blues in that language that you made up that is now dead, that's collapsing with everything else that dies at the end of a relationship. Get out. Go see something else. Some other part of the world, some other world, some other action. Have some reactions that you never had before. Don't shut down. On me. Stay in touch. For real. I'm bad at staying in touch, so if you stay in touch with me, that's gonna bring all kinds of advantages into your life, into your existing purview, and ideas that might change it, broaden it, give you options that you did not know that you have, do not even need to be bestowed on you, only realized, only seen.

JJ: 1:00:22

Okay, okay, okay. Don't tell Lila I'm recording this, or do. I don't care. She's still sleeping with her cross on, like some kind of martyrdom cosplay. I'm the one who needs church. Is Nova asleep? No. He's doing that thing again where he breathes real slow, so I think he is, but his heart's still beating like boom boom boom like it knows I'm about to say something embarrassing or spiritual or both. Anyway I took your dose. Nova's I didn't mean to. I just you handed it to me and I thought you were just being sweet, like here baby, here's yours and I thought, wow, I love when men give me things without asking for blowjobs first. Oops. I feel like I've been talking for six years. I probably have. Sorry. My jaw keeps clenching, and I can't stop moving my fingers. Is that a sign? Like okay, no, sorry, focus, right? This is a love story, kind of. Maybe or a eulogy, or like a Yelp review for my own emotional damage. Would not recommend unless you like crying on rooftops and tasting your own regret, God. Remember student counsel? You don't. Nobody does. I had a bob. I used to tuck in my polos. I wanted to be the kind of girl who dated guys named Josh, who did model UN and fingered respectfully. Now I get off to humiliation, and I can't look my dad in the eye without picturing Cole between my legs, calling me class president of slut school. Thanks for the character arc, I guess. You want to know when I changed? When I started faking my orgasms like speeches? When I started smiling like it was an answer to a question nobody asked? When someone no he when he spit in my mouth and said You've always been like this. I'm just letting you stop pretending. Fuck. I hate that he was right. I hate that I like being the girl people whisper about, that I started dressing for scandal, started crying in bathrooms not because I was sad, but because I wanted to walk out with mascara running and have someone ask why, even better if it was his friend, even better if it was him. You know how people talk about your person, like the one who just gets you? He doesn't get me, he dismantled me, and then kissed the pieces like he was proud of the mess. I love him. There, I said it. You happy Nova? You can stop fake sleeping now. You knew. I know you knew. You always know. That time we played Monopoly Blackout Drunk, and I sold him boardwalk for a back rub. Or when he told me my laugh was what a cigarette break sounds like at a really good party, do you think he even remembers that? Or was I just another Tuesday? He called me a disaster with dimples. I asked if he liked that. He said, I like setting fire, sweetheart. I don't care what they look like when they burn. And I still let him. I still let him. What does that say about me? Don't answer that. I need a water. Maybe a priest. I'm gonna forget to send this. I'm gonna pretend I didn't say any of it. I'm gonna climb into it if nobody doesn't do it. I feel it's an idiot. But if you're listening, if you ever do hear this, if somebody forwards it to you, it is even some digital demistrifier of my reputation. You are the first boy I ever proved myself for. The only one I like to say, whatever it is you say when the damage is done, and all that's left is this video.