How to Become Inevitable

The world feels fine right up until you try to make sense of it, and then everything gets weird fast. We lean into that weirdness on purpose, using comedy and avant-garde personal development to get to something practical: a kind of confidence that does not depend on achievements, approval, or winning. We talk about feelings as real signals you should listen to, then we draw the line where they stop running your life. The antidote is commitment, not the perfect plan. Commit to the bit, accept that you will make bad decisions, and notice how courage shows up when you stop negotiating with fear.

Then we destroy the myth of hustle culture. Well, it was already destroyed, because that's been done before. What's new is that we also take down the backlash, the backlash to the backlash, and any more backlashes or forward lashes that may occur, because we are about to teach you the true meaning of making things happen. And how to do it. 

We explore hustle as courtship, presence, and restraint, not endless suffering for survival. Money becomes sustained attention. Work becomes choreography. Power becomes composure that makes people lean in. If you are tired of “please notice me” energy, this conversation maps a different route: fewer words, clearer boundaries, attention that must be earned, and the strange calm of inevitability.

Along the way, we tell two cinematic stories. Candy rides a motorcycle west through a desert where everyone tries to cage her with concern, desire, and moral certainty. Helena Mayfair falls for a jurisdictionally fluid operator and mistakes humiliation for authorship until the myth collapses in public. These stories land the same lesson in different keys: carry incompatible beliefs, stop apologizing for not being easy to explain, and do not trade your dignity for a hit of intensity.

We close with a blunt exercise to expose the hidden deal that keeps you trapped, plus prompts you can write on anything to reclaim your power daily. If it hits, subscribe, share this with a friend who needs a reset, and leave a review with the line you cannot stop thinking about.

Transcript

Make Your Feelings Obey You

Emerson Dameron 0:34

The world is okay until you start trying to make sense of it. And I have a feeling you do way too much of that. You're comedians, you're our philosophers of today, you are intelligent people. And some of you are intelligent enough to be voluntarily stupid when that's what's called for. And sometimes it is, because in order to manifest your intelligence, you need on call the confidence of an absolute war. And it can't be confidence from achievement or bragging about sex or anything else. The confidence has to be fake. It has to be based on nothing because that's the only thing they can't take away from you. Feelings come and go. It's good to have them. Pretending you don't will give you more worse and worse feelings. But you don't want your feelings making your decisions for you. You don't want them running the show. They're not good at that. It's too much drama. What you want to do is make your feelings your bitch. Because people don't want to deal with your feelings. They want to break down themselves and they want somebody to be there and take care of them. And that can be you, because you've already made your feelings your bitch. Why not bring this person into it as well? They're obviously willing. Commit to the bit, any bit. It doesn't matter. By the alchemy of the commitment itself, you could transform a bad idea into a good idea if you just commit to it hard enough. Find something to commit to, it doesn't matter what it is. There are plenty of bits lying around everywhere. If you find one by the side of the road, that probably means somebody else did not commit to it. You can give that belief a forever home. You'll make some bad decisions. I encourage that. Life is nothing without bad decisions. If you haven't married at least one stripper in Vegas, you don't really know what it is to stand for anything. And I don't know anything about you except that you want everyone to like you, and that's why you don't commit to anything. Because people hate that because they can't do it. They don't have the courage, and courage is just the ability to face the fear and go ahead and do the thing anyway, even if you know it's a terrible idea. There are some feelings that you're gonna have to come to some kind of arrangement with. I have tried to use my inner cynic to fight my inner romantic, and it's simply not up to the task. The cynic might seem to win for a little bit, but then the romantic will re-emerge as if digging itself out of the ground like the horror monster that it is, and its revenge will be bloody and brutal because it is love and intimacy is violence. And violence is the only way we've ever solved anything. Violence is good. More violence is better. Pacifism is stupid. If somebody takes a swing at you, what are you gonna do about it? Fight back. That's more violence in the bank. The rising tide of violence lifts all violent boats, and they don't all have the skull and crossbones. You'll know this when you get out and start really living. You also find you have to overcorrect for certain things, like agreeability. I don't enjoy conflict. I have lied to people to get out of having to tell them that, for instance, their movie script is terrible and the only way they're ever gonna make it good is to tear it down to the studs. If you lie and say that someone's manuscript is good when it's actually a piece of garbage, you are not doing that person any favors. You are doing yourself the favor of getting yourself out of a confrontation and screwing that person because eventually somebody's gonna tell them that the book sucks. And it could have been you, but it's probably the tenure committee or one of the fearsome book reviewers. Going back, people want to be told what to do. Don't keep them waiting. Look around. How many people do you see who have any idea what's going on? Help them by bossing them around. People love to suffer, so you can make it hurt, and you probably should. Pain is not just a good teacher, it's a fun thing to inflict on people to teach them a lesson. You should still make sure that you are properly compensated for the service. Having someone wash my car on roller skates is good enough for me. That's more valuable than any currency from where I'm sitting. Remember, you don't have to do anything. There are always alternatives. Some of them aren't ethical, some of them will land you in prison or wreck your marriage that may have already been on its last legs because of all the white lies and cowardice going on. You don't have to do anything. Sometimes you have limited options, but you almost always have options that you don't know you have. If you don't know that you have them, they aren't useful options. So get out of your own way and go find new better options. Because you deserve it. You're dead sexy as hell. Remember, sometimes you have to grieve. There's no timeline on grief. You're done grieving when I say so. You need incompatible beliefs. You need to juggle the sacred and the profane, the dark and the light. Stop making sense. In this case, David Bird was right and Sam Harris is wrong. Talk some nonsense to yourself, have incompatible beliefs and never apologize for it. Don't even try to explain. Because they don't need that. If they don't get it, they're not willing to. Don't be a martyr. Pity breeds contempt. Nobody likes hanging out with martyrs. And pity is that wonder drug that will take you down, down, down if you get a taste for it. Oh man. It's always both or more, it's always more than one thing. Be yourself as good advice, as long as it's for me. In your case, it would be be more like Emerson. I'm Emerson Dameron. I'm better than you, and it doesn't make me happy. So it's not anything you should really be upset about. In some ways, you live a charmed life. You're in the currency of obliviousness. You're more wealthy than you know. I'm also pretty oblivious. Especially if you're trying to send me the signals. What you really need to do is love bombing. Or if bombing gets a bad rap, I like it. It's the only way to get through to me. Most of my long-term relationships started with something tatamount to kidnapping, possibly legally actionable. But I decided to hit that instead. And that was the right decision. Let's bring back sex. Let's have some tonight. If there's a sex deficit, that's the one way to fix it. So go home or somewhere and pound it out like you're knocking down an abandoned hospital. Like you're knocking down an abandoned building that used to be a circuit city and still has the camera, and you're shooting homemade porn because that just seems appropriate.

Callsign

Emerson Dameron 7:48

Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes is LA's number one avant-garde personal development program. Medicated-minutes.com. Episodes premiere first Wednesdays of the month, seven o'clock PM on K-Chung, Los Angeles. Sixteen thirty AM, K Chung Radio. I am Emerson Dameron, the writer, producer, host at all for Emerson Damron's Medicated Minutes. I love you personally. Levity saves lives.

I'll Pick the Topic, You Start the Conversation

Emerson Dameron 9:50

New York City, in Tokyo, Lithuania, Mongolia, this ocean, the other ocean on the other side of the country, the Gulf Coast, the whales, the Angor, the octopi, the bees, the trees, the sky, the fire, wind, water, earth, what it's worth, how you value things, how you let things go, how you get rid of things, and don't hold on to them unless they're the things that you want to hold on to. And then how do you tell the difference? Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, still there, demoted, but still in

The Erotic Semiotics of the Hustle

Emerson Dameron 10:28

effect. Most folks can't handle the voltage. The rest, well, they catch fire and fire it straight into the sun. You felt it, that slow, liquid heat curling through your chest the instant the number breaks a threshold. The deal seals with a click or eyes that used to slide right past you. Now fasten and hold and stay. Not the numbers, not the lines, not the signature, the shift. The situation suddenly acquired gravity. The way the room tilts in your direction, like it's been waiting for permission. Money is sustained eye contact. Work is the slowest, most deliberate foreplay imaginable. Power is the breath held right before the first touch. The ones who understand this stop thrashing around like prey and start moving like smooth predators who already had lunch. They glide through the world's various forms of traffic with the lazy confidence of someone who knows the next move is theirs, because they've already arranged the board, made their bets, and rigged the game. Here's the lie they told you to keep you docile and resentful. The hustle is about surviving. That kept you dehydrated. Shirt on tucked with coffee stains on it. Dignity, someday maybe, working without rhythm, striving with no silhouette. The truth is sharper, darker, and infinitely more delicious. The hustle, in its purest form, is courtship. It's a long, slow, shameless, sexy mating ritual where competence stands in for plumage, where discipline replaces muscle and raw brutality, where patient pixel perfect attention replaces musk in the wind. Look at yourself without flinching, without giggling. Why do you stay up until the sky turns the color of bruises? Polishing, doing little fixes no one wants? Why does a single I see what you did there from the right pair of lips send an eel current straight down your spine? Why does real respect land heavier and dreamier and steamier than any fleeting comfort or false sense of safety ever could? Because deeper than language, deeper than your cleverest defenses, there is one ancient directive etched into every cell, like its unspeakable name on a grain of rice. First choose yourself, then get chosen. And this is the elegant cruelty that drives most people barking bonkers. You cannot be chosen by pursuing. You can't get something by wanting it so bad that everyone knows you want it, and you're too beaten down to ask for it, so everyone just feels sorry for you, and then pity bleeds contempt. You get chosen by being impossible to overlook, not noisy, not needy, visible, like moonlight on bear skin. The lion doesn't beg for reality. The lion just moves, and the bliss follows him at a respectful distance, out of breath. I've eaten out at both of these restaurants too many times. I know which one tastes better. So do you. Most will misconstrue this game entirely. They think raw effort is seductive. It's not. No one's blood runs hot watching someone strain and sweat and plead to be noticed. Like the first time they needed something, they cried. The big people came and fixed it, and they are hoping that that happens again. What sets hearts aflutter is composure. The person who is clearly occupied with something vast, something private, something sacred and profane that matters, and who is absolutely uninterested in begging for your applause, your sex, or even your polite panami of paying attention. Seduction is restraint, throttled deep into the red. Always has been. The most magnetic figures carry an almost unbearable emotional density just beneath the surface of their eyes. People don't fall in love with facts. People don't ache for ideas. Most people don't even go down on morbid jokes. They fall passionately in love with the undercurrent. You are telling yourself in the world a dirty story, an erotic story. Every hour you work, whether intentionally or unconsciously. Your calendar is foreplay at scratch marks. Your focus, a slow revelation. Your refusal to scatter your attention is the hottest declaration of value anyone will ever see. Anyone will ever have soak into their soul. They feel it before they can say it. They sense you are oriented toward a horizon beyond them and their claustrophobic existing purview. And because the universe is deliciously perverse, that very orientation is what draws them in. Closer, closer until the space between you feels charged up and inevitable. The next part of this is where a lot of people get off the SS dameron. Money is attention suspended in amber and put in the back of the freezer. It is tangible proof that reality, the market systems, other people, has already bent in your direction. Not because you whined hard enough, because you became a presence. A legend. A name above the title. None dare speak without scanning the perimeter and chuckling uncommittedly. Once that clicks, something in you unclinches. You stop performing exertion. You start performing inevitability. Taste the difference. Effort whispers, please look at me. Inevitability just says, watch this. That's why the most lethal operators among us are not the ones who never sleep. They're the ones who move slowest. Precise, economical, every gesture awaited, every directive defined with an old fossilized rod. They don't react. Their bodies generate pull. You've been in elevators with them. They don't explain, they don't overshare. They are not messy bitches who love drama. They let silence stretch taut between you. Watch your breath change and your pupils dilate when it does. Because silence is space. Space is tension. Tension is an ancient and powerful aphrodisiac. This is not manipulation. It's not even persuasion. It's tuning yourself to a frequency older than shame. Older than etiquette. Older than the apse. The same deep rhythm that keeps moons circling planets that makes you lean in when you catch a faint scent of danger at play across a dimly lit room. Depth is erotic, not crude heat. Eroticism, the slow pull towards something that promises more than it shows. Your work turns erotic the instant it stops begging to be validated and starts just expressing what is. You rise, you build, you refine, not to fill some hole inside of you. But because creation is how you throw up a flare. It's how you breathe. Your presence grows present. Your words become rarer and farther between. Your attention becomes something people have to earn. And then, without fanfare, without announcement, without so much as a glance in the mirror, the polarity flips. Opportunities come your way and then orbit you. People start adeptly qualifying themselves in your presence. Respect shows up uninvited. Like an old flame who finally figured out the address, because at some unmarked moment, you stopped chasing attention and became the thing attention haunts. That is the real secret, dreaded through every hustle of having. It was never about the money. Money was just the scent that lingered. It was never about the work. Work was only the choreography. It was never about the power. Power was only the gaze held one illicit second longer than protocol allows. It was always about becoming the kind of presence that old Scratch, Jesus F Christ, and the abyss itself cannot look away from. And once you soak that up, not nod at it, not bookmark it, but let it settle low in your belly. You stop grinding and you start seducing.

Doling Out Dollops of Discipline

Emerson Dameron 21:13

There is no failure. There is only feedback and love. Love will conquer fear. Bring the fear into the war. The fear is just an evolutionary gift to make you tough, to make you on edge, so you notice what's going on. Then you've trained yourself to not only notice what's going on, but to notice what you notice. And to love it all.

Candy Rider: A Desert Tale

Emerson Dameron 22:00

It's the morning, or it's the thing the desert does instead of morning. A gray that warms at the edges, like milk going off in reverse. A woman sleeps in the open bed of a truck. The truck is not moving. The truck has not moved in some time. There's sand in the wheel wells and the bird's nest, the cab. Her name is Candy. She's 19 years old. She's been 19 years old. For as long as anyone has bothered to keep track, which is not long, because no one here keeps track of anything.

Candy Rider 22:31

I dreamed in the key of orange, not the color. The cord, you know the one. It's the sound a peach makes when you press your thumb through the skin and it just gives, and the juice runs down to your elbow, warm and sticky and intimate, and you think, oh, so that's what being forgiven would taste like if anybody ever got around to offering. I woke up with the sun sitting on my chest like a big gold cat that had decided, for no reason at all, to love me.

Emerson Dameron 22:55

There's a motorcycle park beside the truck. No one remembers leaving it there. It's the kind of detail this country specializes in. The convenient, the unexplained, the already arranged. And there it was.

Candy Rider 23:08

Chrome going pink in the milk light. Like it had stayed up all night just to be the first thing I saw.

Emerson Dameron 23:15

The bike starts on the first kick. This is unremarkable. In this country, every engine starts on the first kick, every tank reads full, and the road runs west. No matter which way you point the front wheels, there are no maps. There has never been any call for maps.

Candy Rider 23:32

Somebody told me once that a road is a ribbon. Somebody always tells you things like that. Usually a man, usually right before he tries to tie a ribbon around your wrist. But a ribbon is for tying things shut, for keeping. This isn't that. This releases. It flows. It pours out ahead of me like somebody upended a whole spool of silver off the edge of the morning, and it keeps falling and falling and never once hits the floor. I put my foot down on it and it was cool and it was humming. Everything here hums. Did you know that? The light hums. The cactus hums. Low. The way men hum in church when they've forgotten the words.

Emerson Dameron 24:18

She does not say goodbye. She has not, to anyone's recollection, ever said goodbye. She simply is somewhere and then she is not. This is noted in the town she passes through, as a great many things about candy are noted in the towns through which she passes.

Candy Rider 24:35

The first town was the color of cough syrup, that deep red that pretends to be cherry and isn't. And that's its own thing, medicine red. And the whole place was steeped in it. The porches, the dogs, the slow ceiling fans, the men sat out front of the gas station, the way men sit, uh, which is like furniture that resents you. They watched me ride through with their eyes gone narrow and wet. And uh their wives came to the screen doors and watched the men watching. And I waved. I always wave. It seems rude not to when you've made such an impression on a person's whole afternoon.

Emerson Dameron 25:19

The men want to marry her. The women want her gone by sundown. These are not opposite desires. They're the same desire, wearing two different hats or their handkerchiefs in opposite pockets. Candy understands neither and smiles and waves at both.

Candy Rider 25:36

One of them ran out into the road. Sweet thing. Held his hand up like he could stop the silver from falling. Said, young lady, this is no place for a girl alone. And I said, I really did say this, I'm not making it up. I said, but I'm not alone. I've got the whole road. And he looked at me like I'd gone and taken off all my clothes, which I hadn't. Though I could tell he'd already done the arithmetic.

Emerson Dameron 26:02

She is mistaken for many things. A mirage, a warm front, a vacation you can't afford. The truth that she is simply a person moving is the one explanation no one in any town will accept.

Candy Rider 26:16

Um, it's funny what people will build a cage out of. A wedding ring, a kind word, a worried look. For your own good. They put me in a kitchen, the color of cherry medicine, and call it love, and then stand there genuinely heartbroken that I'd want the road instead. The road that doesn't want one single thing from me. That just lets me go.

Emerson Dameron 26:38

There's always a noon. The noon is enormous and arrives like a summons. She has left the town behind. The road climbs, the land empties out. There's a man hitchhiking at the top of the grade. There is always a man.

Candy Rider 26:52

He had a coyote's grin and a guitar with no strings on it, and he climbed up on the back like he'd booked the seat in advance. Said his name was, uh, well, he said a lot of names, one after the other, like he was trying them on for fit. Settled on one that sounded like a sneeze, and he talked. Dear God, he talked.

Emerson Dameron 27:15

The passenger explains at length that this is the best of all possible deserts, that every stone is exactly where it must be, that the heat is the correct amount of heat, the distance, the correct distance, and that any suffering they encounter will be revealed in time to have been necessary, perhaps even kind.

Candy Rider 27:35

He said the vultures overhead were a good sign. He said the dry river bed was the river being generous with its absence. He said when his last two friends rode this road, they came to a beautiful end. That was his word, beautiful. And I asked what happened to them. And he smiled wider and said, the best thing that could have. The only thing. And I held on a little tighter, and I watched the vultures make their slow black wheel against all that blue, and I thought, I love him, and I do not believe one single word, and both of those are true, and neither one is going to slow us down.

Emerson Dameron 28:17

This is in fact the worst of all possible deserts, but it's the only desert on offer, and Candy has never once in her life been given a second option, so she has developed a gift for adoring the first.

Candy Rider 28:29

We stopped at the Violet Hour, built a fire out of mesquite, and it burned the most extraordinary color. Green at the heart of it. Whoever told fire it could do green, and it crackled in a rhythm I could have danced to. And the smoke went up and turned into every person I'd ever almost been. I saw a bride in the smoke, I saw a Cortesan, a painted lady, I saw an old woman, I saw a girl in a kitchen, the color of cough syrup, smiling, gone soft and safe and sad. And I felt sorry for her the way you feel sorry for a Polaroid.

Emerson Dameron 29:08

Such visions are not unusual. In this country, the fire shows you the lives you declined. It's not a punishment, nor is it a mercy. It's simply what the fire is for.

Candy Rider 29:18

He passed me something to smoke, and the stars came down lower to listen, and the whole sky went cold and tasted like tin and black licorice. And I lay back in the sand that was still warm from the enormous noon. And I told the coyote man I wasn't afraid of the beautiful end his friends found. And he said, I know sugar, that's the saddest thing about you. And he said it's so tender. Tender as anyone's ever been with me, which is exactly how I knew it was probably the truest thing anybody had said all day.

Emerson Dameron 29:51

She sleeps. The fire goes green to gold, to gray to nothing. The motorcycle ticks as it cools somewhere ahead. Perhaps a day's ride, perhaps a less. Two men in a pickup truck are claiming a shotgun for reasons they have not yet thought of and will not need. The road does not warn Candy. The road is not built to warn. The road is built only to keep going and to make her want to keep going on it. And in this, it's one talent. The road is undefeated.

Candy Rider 30:21

Last thing before sleep, I always do the same thing. I close my eyes and I try to land somewhere way out past all the towns, all the men, all the rings, and the worried looks and the green fire and the scavenger birds being such a good sign. Somewhere I'm a thousand years old and the road's behind me now instead of under me. And I take one long breath and I say it out loud, the way you're supposed to. What a wonderful life. I practice the line so it'll be ready. So that whenever the beautiful end comes for me, the way it came for the coyote man's friends, I'll have it loaded. I'll get to say it first.

Emerson Dameron 31:07

She does not know where she's going. This has been confused by nearly everyone who meets her for not knowing anything at all. It is the opposite. It's the one enormous thing she knows, that the going is the whole of it, that the silver keeps falling, that no one is coming to tie the ribbon shut.

Candy Rider 31:26

Where is my mind anyway? I keep leaving it places, a little on a porch in that red town, a little in the green of the fire, a little on the back of every man who climbs off and waves and gets smaller in the mirror. By the time I get where I'm going, there won't be hardly any of me left to arrive. Isn't that funny? Isn't that the most beautiful thing you ever heard?

Emerson Dameron 31:50

Morning, or the thing the desert does instead. The bike starts on the first kick.

Candy Rider 31:55

West then. West, like the spool's still falling.

Emerson Dameron 31:58

West. As if there were any other direction. As if she had ever even once been offered the choice.

The Jewelry Game

Emerson Dameron 32:08

Go find your box of jewelry, box of flair, box of buttons, certain failed political campaigns. Pete DuPont. Michael Bennett ran at one point. Bloomberg was everywhere. You gotta have a few of those buttons rolling around, so bring those out. I mean, I would rather it be real jewelry. If you have the stones for it. Yeah, that's right. If you have your birth stone, definitely bring that. But throw in a couple of other people's birthstones too. If you have a rose gold anklet and you know who you are, put that on. Only that. Otherwise, bring all of your jewelry as an offering to. Make a list. You can send photos of the jewels, but not of yourself. Because you probably don't know how to scrape off the metadata from those. And I don't want your metadata, especially if it can't be scraped off. I have enough trouble with plain old data. Offer it all to me. I might take some of it, but you'll hardly notice, because the next thing we're gonna do is I'm gonna tell you which ones of these to put on. And like the young woman with a metallic rose gold anklet over here that you probably haven't noticed yet, you might have to take some stuff off. You're playing by my rules right now. You can opt out. You opt in by default. Now that you're here, you might as well make the most of it. Take a fearless searching inventory of your jewelry collection. Your collection of other items. A talisman, maybe some collectibles, cheap knockoff here or there, one of those things you buy on the beach that uh loses half of its value as soon as you get it less than a mile inland. Let's braid it all. Let's see what works for you, because I'm gonna keep telling you what to do until it starts working for me. At which point I'll know it's working for you. That's how things work around here. You want the inside details? You want the scoop? Well, in that case, you've got some maturity to show. And you're gonna be wearing it, so get ready to look ridiculous. More importantly, and this will require more preparation. Get ready to be hot, even if you don't wanna be. Get ready to be so hot that you turn yourself down. Get ready to cancel your plans and go home. Because the streets at night might be risky, but the real danger is within you. And you're gonna have some fun with that. Other people are gonna try to get in. Don't let 'em. Those people are enemies until further notice. Make them dance for you. Make them put on some jewelry if you're choosing. See how this works? Are you starting to get it? Well, you don't, because first you have to get some. Maybe it's gonna be from yourself. Maybe you're gonna be surprised. In the process of collecting contrary evidence to all of your cynical, misanthropic associations. What I'm saying is you're gonna be busy and you're gonna need some of that afternoon delight, so don't speed walk to getting it. There's a lot of stuff you wanna do before, because once you get it, everything changes. So look at this weak, inferior version of yourself and throw that person a party. You know what I'm talking about. Don't pretend you don't.

Helena the Brit and the Man from Everywhere

Helena Mayfair 36:03

Darling, I know what you're thinking, because Arabella thought it, Mummy thought it, my accountant thought it, and even the waiter at Chilton Firehouse thought it, while pretending not to listen. "Helena, he was obviously a criminal." But "criminal" is such a small word, isn 't it? So, Daily Mail, so polyester, psychological projection in its most shameless and self-incriminating form. I preferred to think of him as jurisdictionally fluid. His name was Alexander, except when it was Matteo, except once, during a weekend in Geneva, a woman in white linen called him Nico, and he went absolutely still, like a panther hearing its own indictment. He had the sort of accent that moved through Europe without ever passing passport control. He claimed to be involved in energy logistics, which I naturally took to mean petrol or solar, or perhaps the erotic redistribution of consequence. Everyone else took it to mean fraud. Pardon me for your lack of imagination. At any rate, he wore suits with no labels and watches with too many complications. He never ordered from menus. Men like that don't crave or choose food. They allow protein to arrive. He had eyes like smoked glass and a mouth that always looked faintly amused as though the world were a luxury hotel he had no intention of paying for. Naturally, I fell catastrophically in love. Not love love, obviously. I'm not provincial. It was more sophisticated than that. A destabilizing, erotic thesis on power, glamour, and the post-national masculine parasite. Foucault would have understood. Or perhaps he would have quietly taken my phone away. The first ritual humiliation took place at Soho House. Because where else does one stage a moral collapse with sufficient oat milk? Alexander had asked me to wear something black, small, and apologetic. So of course I arrived in an elegantly minimalistic cocktail dress that made me look like a widow at her own alibi. He seated me at a long table with three men who seemed to be either financiers, arms dealers, or producers of prestige television. There is overlap. Halfway through dinner, he slid an envelope across the table. Read, he said.

Speaker 2 38:18

Inside was a printed list titled, Helena Mayfair's false claims to worldliness.

Helena Mayfair 38:25

Darling. Item one pretends to understand Balkan geopolitics. Item two, calls all oligarchs Russian when nervous. Item three. Believes airport lounges are evidence of character. The men laughed, not cruelly exactly, efficiently, like laughter was an asset class. I should have left. Naturally, I performed. I read the whole thing aloud in my clearest St. Catherine's voice while Alexander watched me with that bored, surgical calm. By the end, I was flushed, trembling, absolutely incandescent with shame. He kissed my hand afterwards and said those two most dodgy and explosive words in the English language: Good girl, you are learning not to decorate ignorance with champagne. I told everyone it was playful. Everyone knows that, darling. At least everyone who matters. The second humiliation was more Bond villain ritual theatre, very Montenegro, by way of an interior's magazine for divorced dictators. He flew me to a villa overlooking the Adriatic, though technically I paid for the flights because his accounts were temporarily under compliance review. Which sounded frightfully glamorous at the time. The villa had marble floors, black orchids, and a dining room table long enough to negotiate the surrender of a small democracy. After dinner, he produced an exquisite satin blindfold. Trust exercise, he said. I adore trust exercises, particularly when they involve exceptional sartorial choices. He led me barefoot through the villa while guests, yes, there were guests. No, I'd not been informed, murmured in various expensive languages. Each of them asked me a question about Alexander. Where was he born? What was his company called? Had I met his partners? Why had three separate women in Vienna filed civil claims using three separate surnames? For every answer I got wrong, which was all of them, I had to remove one piece of jewellery and place it in a silver bowl. My Cartier bracelet, my grandmother's sapphire ring, the little gold chain Daddy gave me after the Oxford debacle when he said, Darling, please stop confusing humiliation with politics. Alexander called it the altar of evidence. I called it immersive theatre. When the bowl disappeared, I assumed it had become part of the symbolism. The third was the occult TED Talk with erotic catering, and honestly, even now I feel it was underrated as an experience. He hosted it in the hidden library in Mayfair. Silk swaddled, candlelit, smelling of cedar, truffle oil, and moral anemia. The theme, apparently, was surrendering the sovereign self. There were canopes shaped like little passports. A woman from Milan played a glass harmonica. Someone had projected my Instagram grid onto the wall. Alexander stood before a small invited audience and delivered a lecture on the Western woman's addiction to narrative control. I remember feeling almost proud. To be analyzed publicly by a man under investigation in four countries is, in its way, a form of being seen. Then he invited me to kneel on a cushion beneath my own photographs while he asked the room. What is Helena without witnesses? Silence. I smiled. I thought, news. I thought, femme fatale. I thought the champagne darkened daughter of empire, undone but ungovernable. Someone whispered, content, and Alexander laughed so softly it barely existed. That was the part that hurt, though of course I didn't know it then. I thought the pain was erotic. I thought the shame was chosen. I thought because I could narrate my own degradation, I had not been degraded. He bruised me like a semiotic accident, and I mistook the bruise for authorship. There was, admittedly, the money. A small investment. Well, smallish. A liquidity bridge for an energy corridor between Trieste and somewhere that may not have existed. Daddy sighed when I mentioned it and sent funds through the family office with the air of a man paying ransom for a kidnapped spaniel. Money returns. Reputation does not. Spiritual integrity, I'm told, is harder to refinance. The strange thing, the anecdote I always forget to omit, is that on our last morning together, in a hotel in Vienna, I woke early and saw him sitting at the desk, not dressed, not predatory, not magnificent. Just tired. He was transferring something from my laptop to a little silver drive, humming ordinary world under his breath. Duran Duran, darling. My song. Our song, I briefly thought, though I had never told him it mattered to me. Then he looked over and said almost kindly, Go back to sleep, Helena. This is not the part you are good at. And I did. Can you imagine? I actually did. By noon he was gone. By dinner, Arabella had screenshots. By Friday, half of London knew I'd been fleeced by a man whose LinkedIn profile contained a stock image of Dubai. People were sympathetic in that lethal English way, touching my arm and saying, Oh darling, how cinematic, which means, thank heavens it was you. But was I ruined? No. Ruined is for women without tailoring. I emerged in black satin, defiantly tasteful diamonds, and a winter overcoat so inconspicuously marvelous, it made betrayal look seasonal. I told everyone Alexander had been a study in transnational desire, a living critique of late capitalism, a dangerous man who mistook me for prey when in fact I was the archive. And perhaps that's true. Perhaps I was never conned at all. Perhaps I merely paid rather handsomely to become mythological, which is quite different, isn't it?

Thought Experiments and Exercises

Emerson Dameron 45:53

I'm not counting the conspiracy against the human race, which is the fact that human consciousness itself is hell. I would include most of the big conspiracies don't matter to you too much. When it comes to conspiracies against you, think locally and expose the hidden deal that keeps you trapped, to which you've been roped in, or you have subjected yourself, either for the right reasons or because you didn't know you were subjecting yourself to it. Get a notebook, get a yellow legal pad, get a bar napkin, get a Del Taco napkin, a Burger Lord's napkin, write it on your hand, or if anyone really loves you, blindfold that person, write it on their skin, tiggle them with a feather so they'll be laughing when they wake up. They'll have a good sense of humor about all of this, and will probably really get off on it, because you're about to turn yourself into the kind of person that kills it. You don't have to talk. You can take a vow of silence for a week, and you'll have people you're wildly attracted to falling all over you. But first, get your writing utensil of choice appropriate for the medium, the surface. Do this in your notes app, if you must. Or on the flesh of your AI sex friend. I don't know if you could say lover. They're getting loved. You're doing a loving. It's not reciprocal. So you already know that. That's why you're resistant to this. Whether you're resistant to it or not, especially if you're resistant to it, do it. Complete these lines with brutal, unforgiving, not cruel, but kind in the purest way, in the way that does not allow you to continue to humiliate yourself in the ways that you have been unconsciously, because it points those out to you. It's gonna hurt. You're gonna get mad at them, but it's gonna improve your future. And that's the kind of friend you want. Somebody that's willing to take a little bit of crap off of you now in order to see you bawling, shining and rolling sooner than you think. Complete these statements. I tolerate inconsistency because I get blank. If I demanded steadiness, I would risk blank. The payoff of heartbreak is blank. If I became fully, quote, okay, unquote, and I realized that that was the case, I might stand to lose blank. Identity, intensity, purpose, custody of the cats. What are you afraid of losing? And when you're done with all of this, make a new bargain with yourself, with the world. I've loved this intensity, this swirling chaos. I had a hell of a time. I got what I needed. I'm trading intensity for dignity, which I sold off a long time ago. Didn't get it back. I missed the time frame for that. But I got some new dignity after that, which I lost in the same way. It's been feast or famine, but this time. I'm getting it back. Because I see how I have an essential hand in creating these traps for myself. I see my power. I see it hanging out of your pocket. I'm taking it back. I'm taking it back over and over again in this daily ritual. Takes about an hour. I'm gonna do every day for 90 days. I'm gonna fill out those sentences up there. Hopefully on somebody's skin. Mine is fine. Yours is a lot better. Every woman's skin feels different. Nobody's skin feels like yours does. I got the candles, I got my breath. I didn't take that anywhere. It's fully portable. My posture is on point, not slouched, not ramrod, stiff and rigid. I'm chilling. Or rather, it looks like I'm chilling. I'm making things happen. Chill about it. You wanna get in my ride? Sure you do. Join me in speaking as Val. I trade intensity for dignity. Because once you're dignified, they're gonna bring the intensity to you. You don't have to create your own intensity anymore. You don't have to find people German engineered to ruin your life in the way that most hurts and you could have most easily predicted.

Sometimes You Get What You Need: A Bite-Sized Erotic Thriller

Emerson Dameron 50:16

Not the first time, not the second time, but the third time. Which put me back in a city that was a wonderful place to spend my 20s bumming around. And remains a great city with too many ghosts for my tastes. And not the ghosts that I would pick for myself. Almost to a one, not my kind of ghosts. So even if I have to be there, I don't want to live there. I have to change my address for legal reasons. I have to get a driver's license because apparently I have to be perfect. But that doesn't necessarily extend to telling anyone I was there or making any sort of public appearances. I ran into a woman. We got along. We made each other laugh. It wasn't forced. I said, I'd like to continue this conversation sometime. She said, we can do that right now. I'm not going anywhere. We had sex on the same night. Three days later, I was done. I'd been through the full cycle of a relationship. From passionate, anxious attachment to fear, loathing, I came to despise this woman. And that was just the first 48 hours. The last 72 was basically trying to find a reason to snake this poor horse out the back and straight to the glue factory. Because we've all suffered enough. In the past, I've noticed that neediness, clinginess, inappropriate, uncalibrated expressions of emotion or revealing any sensitivity is a great way to drive people away from you. I've used it to clear out bars after closing time, and I used it again. She took off and made fun of me to her friends, which is fine, because I'm never gonna see any of those people again. And now I'm back on the scene. Maybe this is where I belong. It doesn't feel good, but maybe I'll just adapt, and every time I get an opportunity to get out of here and do something that feels better, I'll come back to this, because at least I know what I'm getting, and then I'll get really good at it, and then I'll get jaded and cynical and teach my ways to younger people who don't know what I know, and also haven't felt the chill of their own mortality the way I have through life choices that have resulted in long, dry spells and periods of painful loneliness, knowing on a deep felt level that we are sacks of organs sealed in skin. Nothing fixed is there within. Ow, nice. I just forgot all about that last woman I dated. Let's hit the club. I know you got some new wines. I got a whole new self I want to try. Let's go out there and get rejected.

"I Sell No Wine Before It's Time"

Emerson Dameron 52:56

So, how's this for blatant hypocrisy? It's no secret, nor should it be that my name is intimately associated with the phrase, I sell no wine before it's time. I live by it, and I say it almost constantly. That's why I live by it, because if you keep talking about something, you'll start to see it everywhere, and then it'll start to show up, and things will get weird, and then before you know it, you'll be doing it without realizing it. Doing the do, whatever that is in this case, and it will become who you are, because who you are is what you do. That's all we got to go on. I say it all the time. It might be the only thing I do say. Don't sell no wine be f excuse me, I'm so sorry. I sell no wine before it's time. Or I'm setting up for that or transitioning into something else. But it always gets said, and everything I say, even if it doesn't sound like the expression, I sell no wine before it's time, it includes that idea. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, get ready for a rough couple of decades. Here I am talking unprepared because I am selling this wine way ahead of its time. I'm hoping you don't notice, but I'm knowing you will. And why am I doing it? There's no reason. I don't do this show because it's due. I do the do of the show, and that's doing it right, and this time I'm not doing it right. I'm showing up like a hypocrite and selling my wine before it's time, and you know what? It's a party. What's gather around and celebrate having nothing to say and nothing to say about it. I don't know what's in your heart of hearts, what you really believe, and I don't really care because I got enough on my mind, as do most people, but I can see what you do. I can see how you carry yourself, I can see that little smile that crosses your face, right? As you get bad news about someone you don't like. But then you have to get right back into character and feel bad. You can't feel good, you gotta feel bad, and you gotta offer to help with no real intention to do so. And I can see you doing that because I can see that in your eyes, and it's not the malice that I dislike, but you're letting yourself entertain some pretty dark thoughts there, and nothing happens in a vacuum, so that's gonna affect me at some point, and that can't happen because I got enough bad thoughts. I'm trying to cut back, actually. I'm on a self-deprecation diet, which is much harder than I would have expected. It's like when in the early COVID lockdown days, and they told us we couldn't touch our faces anymore, and I didn't know how I could possibly live without that simple pleasure. The one thing that I don't have to ask permission for, except for all the other things I don't have to ask permission for, some of which are a lot more fun, but this was the one that was salient at the time, the one under discussion. So naturally that's the one that I needed the most. And then they just stopped talking about it after a while. I think they moved on to wash your hands as long as you can sing the Jeopardy theme to yourself. You would be singing, yeah. You don't have to sing words, you just vocalize. If you can vocalize the Jeopardy theme and you can wash your hands the entire time that you do it, apparently you're gonna be okay. You will not get or spread COVID. Or you might, because at some point everyone might, and probably will, because at some point we have to decide between death and economic stagnation, because we've always got more room to grow, and that's the only way we can do it, the only direction that growth has allowed, up and out. It's gotta be done if you're standing in the way of that. I gotta admire it a little bit. I will say that right up front. I almost envy the swag of the true believer that you're willing to go down that hard because you're gonna be surprised when the economy comes after you. Not the economy itself. The economy itself is spitchy and unpredictable, and no one really understands it, and that's why it drives people insane. You could actually figure out what was going on, which you can't, because I read a book about economics one time. I still don't understand it. You can't even get a basic understanding of something, what good is it? Like I know the laugher curve where the rarer something gets, the funnier it gets. Uh, or the more demand for humor, the more valuable it's gonna be with the laughing, and yet you understand the joke. That's great. Now I can drop it and thank God for that.

May You Live in Boring Times

Emerson Dameron 57:50

May you live in boring times. May you hurt yourself just to have something to do. May you feel free to disengage from current events. If an earthquake or a twister is a coming, just let it happen. May you have a spectacular meltdown from the guilt and shame of being overpaid to sit in your courtyard, stare at your fountain, and half-heartedly scratch your ass. May you live in such absurd comfort and abundance that you indulge in conspiracy theories and beef with your neighbors because surely there must be more. This can't be all there is. May this be the last day yet you immediately forget. May you live in times so profoundly boring. May you almost get all the way back around a fascination.

Speaker 3 58:42

Los Angeles.