Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
LA’s #1 avant-garde personal development program. I'm Emerson Dameron. I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
The home of Ask a Sadist, Bite-Sized Erotic Thrillers, and the First Church of the Satanic Buddha. Levity saves lives.
Regularly scheduled episodes premiere on the first Wednesday of the month on KCHUNG Los Angeles.
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes
The Dance Between Fantasy and Reality in Relationships
CONGRATULATIONS, YOUR IDENTITY IS DYING
(AND THAT'S THE SEXIEST THING ABOUT YOU)
Your carefully constructed self is having an existential striptease, and honey, it's time to stop pretending you're not turned on by the show.
Meet James, found writhing in creative ecstasy at an underground party where the music industry's ghosts were having an orgy with tomorrow's sound. He'll teach you how to die to yourself nightly and wake up wearing whatever identity feels dangerous enough to be true.
Get ready for:
- The art of letting your old self commit suicide while your new self watches and takes notes
- Why your relationship is actually three people: who you were, who you are, and who you're becoming (and they're all sleeping with different people)
- How depression isn't your enemy – it's just existence giving you a cosmic lap dance
- The raw truth about why your partner can't evolve with you (and why that's tragically beautiful)
WARNING: Side effects may include:
- Sudden urges to destroy your current identity
- Uncomfortable levels of authentic self-expression
- The ability to find beauty in your own destruction
- Spontaneous outbreaks of philosophical arousal
- The death of your social media persona
This isn't another episode about "finding yourself." This is about losing yourself so completely that existence has no choice but to give you something better.
From performance art to profound isolation, we're teaching you to dance between reality and fantasy until you can't tell which one's leading.
Stop trying to fix your life. Start treating it like the avant-garde theater piece it is.
Available now wherever you get your permission to exist differently.
Remember: Your identity isn't having a crisis – it's having an awakening. And like all good deaths, it's just foreplay for what comes next.
Trust me. I've died to myself so many times, I've got frequent flyer miles in the afterlife.
Welcome to the space between who you were and who you're becoming.
P.S. If this episode doesn't make you question everything, you're not listening hard enough.
Plus! Not one, but two pop-ins from Helena the Brit.
And all the lessons in love, leadership, lechery, and letting go you've come to expect from The Only Good Podcast™!
Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes is LA's number-one avant-garde personal development program. New episodes premiere on KCHUNG Los Angeles on the first Wednesday of the month.
The writer, producer, host, and witty and wounded romantic hero is Emerson Dameron, who is wholly responsible for its content.
I love you, personally. Levity saves lives.
You're gonna run out of the thing that's killing you right now, and so you're not gonna be able to kill yourself in that way anymore, and even if you really, really want to, which you probably will it will likely take a few days to adjust. I encourage you to spend that time in pursuit of objectives that you're not able to or have not been able to pursue effectively under your previous circumstances, and you both know what I'm talking about.
Emerson Dameron:So don't look at me like that. Just do what you already know you need to do how to stop being self-conscious. I was going to say stop being yourself, stop being yourself. I did, I said it twice, two different contexts, but that's really all you need.
Emerson Dameron:If you stop being yourself, somebody might still be self-conscious, but it's not gonna be you, and when it's not you, it's not your problem, it's somebody else's and that makes it hilarious and kind of wonderful and magical and something you can feel good about and celebrate and toast to and say mazel tov and shoot fireworks, hook up and get wasted. Get your drink on, get your schmoke on, it's all good. You don't exist anymore. Nobody has to pay the bill, nobody has to do anything. It's all over. It never got started. There is no you. So throw yourself a party. God damn it. There is no you, but you got a nice ass.
Emerson Dameron:How does that work anyway? Pick up the vibe man, then the next one, put a of that old razzle-dazzle in it. Show them you still got it. You're the one with all these odd products that you want people to purchase to support you and to bring a little bit of your juju into their lives In an unprotected sexual way. For their ears and it's right into their brains, audio is an intimate medium. People like the video. People watch Joe Rogan talk to people for four hours. Why would you do that, unless you're uncomfortable with just the audio compared to the whole thing?
Emerson Dameron:I like the audio exclusive experiences.
Emerson Dameron:It's a certain very intense kind of intimacy. I'm an auditory, thinker and learner, et cetera. I can also understand pictures when I look at them. Frame don't aim, I can take photographs. I'm the only person that can get a photograph of a sunset in LA that does it justice on a Samsung phone, on that camera. I did it. Everybody else sucks because they can't do that. I'm the only one who can. People need to get on my level. Audio, the spoken word music. I wish I'd known when I was younger how easy music is to make. I always thought it was a craft practiced by professionals, all of whom seem to be rich, except for my dad and his friends. They were musicians and they were not especially wealthy. But all of the other musicians I could think of Phil Collins, prince Men at Work at one time were all wealthy To an extent. The late Steve Albini breaks it down how they're getting taken.
Emerson Dameron:Did you know?
Emerson Dameron:there used to be a whole music industry. Now it's the Kevin Kelly's 1,000 true fans economy, and boy is it more hellish than anyone could have possibly anticipated, except for people getting rich off of it, which you know. If there's a gold rush, somebody's gonna make money selling shovels. If there's a drug dealer busted under a streetlight, he'll come back and shoot out the streetlight and then you'll bust him again Because you're a cop and a rat and a sellout and it's like somebody said it to your face. So, like me, oh my god, what is this? What is the world? Can I only perceive things because I am those things. Projecting them onto other people is the cowardice Kicking the can. I'm developing myself, growth, healing. Who is this mage, this muse before me? My teacher, I would bow before you and go in between your toes if I thought that's what you wanted. I think we both know what you want.
Emerson Dameron:You're going to be not running the show because you always have to make decisions. Your life is full of choices and responsibilities and zero-sum games that you have to play. You're a hustler and that's beautiful and you have a heart and you maintain those things and that's a lot of hard work and you're not gonna have to worry about that in a little bit, because I'm gonna take it from here. You're gonna take it as well If you beg for it. If you look me straight in the eyes, I give you a good smack across the face and not a Hollywood smack. I've received your feedback and I've taken it to heart. You want the real deal, the full production. It's coming, and that's far from the only thing that's coming. In that situation, I'm going to use you. However I want. You're going to love it, and that's the explanation for all of the previous content.
Orson W:Amen 20 times more for you people than any other commercial I've ever made. You are such pests. Now what is it you want in?
Daisy L:your depths of your ignorance. What is it you want? K Chung, los Angeles, 1630 AM. K Chung radioorg Emerson Dameron's Medicated Minutes L A Number 1 event guard, personal development program, home of the first church of the satanic Buddha, and bite-sized erotic thrillers. Improve yourself before everybody else does. That's kinky. Levity saves lives.
Helena the Brit:Oh, darling, you simply must. Let me tell you about poor James. Well, that's what he went by when I knew him, though he later insisted everyone call him Jay. Apparently, james wasn't edgy enough for his artistic vision. He was this absolutely fascinating creature I sort of adopted last summer you know how I have such a weakness for helping lost souls find themselves. I found him spinning at this frightfully underground warehouse party in Hackney, the kind of place where the bar doesn't even serve proper cocktails, just warm gin in plastic cups. But there was something so raw about him, unpolished like a diamond, that just needed the right person to shape him. He was wearing this absolutely tragic faux vintage leather jacket that was clearly from Topshop. But I saw potential. I let him take me home that night to show him what real culture feels like. You understand, what real culture feels like you understand.
Helena the Brit:His flat was this dreary little space above a kebab shop, but I found it sort of anthropologically fascinating. He had all these vinyl records displayed on his walls and I didn't have the heart to tell him that half of them were rather obvious choices. I mean, who doesn't own unknown pleasures? Just in the last week in Camden Town alone, I've seen the t-shirt in at least five different languages. But I did manage to ease him in a bit, started bringing him to all the right parties, introducing him to actually important people, even convinced daddy's friend Sebastian to let him DJ at Annabelle's though that was a bit of a disaster. Apparently, experimental noise artists don't understand the concept of reading the room.
Helena the Brit:He did have this charming way of making everything seem terribly urgent and passionate, always calling at 3am about some absolutely vital party we simply had to attend, or some mind-expanding substance we had to try immediately. And, yes, fine, I may have helped him out with rent once or twice, but only because he was on the verge of this enormous breakthrough. He had all these connections in Berlin, you see, very underground, very next wave. The sex was well, it was rather like performance art Lots of brilliant ideas, somewhat slipshod execution. He had this thing about filming everything for his video collage about loneliness or whatever. I'm sure it will be terribly avant-garde when it comes out, if it comes out. He took his laptop with all the footage when he left for Berlin, or was it Barthelona? His note was confusing, I assume pump and dump refers to one of his crypto scans, right? Oh, and he borrowed my grandmother's vintage Cartier watch For good luck, apparently. I'm sure he'll return it once he's established himself. I did make it clear I needed it back. I do hope he figures himself out.
Helena the Brit:Poor thing, he had such potential, even if he didn't quite know what to do with it. I mean, yes, he might have borrowed quite a bit of money and yes, perhaps he did sleep with Arabella the very night after I introduced them at my gallery opening, and fine, maybe he did use my contacts to book several gigs he never actually showed up for. But that's just how these artistic types are, isn't it? They need someone sophisticated to guide them, even if they don't always appreciate it. I should probably unblock him on Instagram actually just to check if he's posted anything about the watch or about me. Not that I care, obviously. I just think it's important to maintain anything about the watch or about me. Not that I care, obviously. I just think it's important to maintain connections in the industry. One never knows when someone might become relevant, though he could have at least tagged me in those photos with Sophie Dale's niece. I mean, that party was literally at my flat.
Emerson Dameron:Power dynamics. The truth is power is hot and imbalances of power are hot. Some people will always screw their TAs in the Iowa writing workshop so they can write novels about it, because that's the kind of seesaw power dynamics that people love. Comfort will be necessary for people to feel safe in relationships. But friction, polarity, conflict, those are necessary for the sparks and the smoke and the fire. That's how the meat sizzles. It depends how real the power dynamics have to be.
Emerson Dameron:Part of what the kink community does is kind of post-modernize power dynamics where it's all a bit theatrical and very well thought out and thoughtfully consented to. Will that work for everyone? I would not think it would. If it was implemented by force, it's hard to imagine how people would evolve into that. I think some people are going to want the real thing. There ain't nothing like the real thing if that's what you're into and a think some people are going to want the real thing Ain't nothing like the real thing if that's what you're into, and a lot of people are and don't know it, which makes it extremely dangerous.
Emerson Dameron:Sex is God. It is the force of creation itself. Desire and seduction flow from that. Powerful seducers will always have power, either personally and in society. If they put a lot of wins on the board, confidence will come from that and that will escalate things further. And some people are talented at creating sensual experiences for themselves and others. They could be sensuous, self-indulgent gluttons who don't really care about other people's experience, and that can certainly be intoxicating If you're used to having to make people feel like they're doing the right thing, somebody who just does what they want and has some swagger. They're always right and no one else matters.
Emerson Dameron:It can be pretty seductive and explosive for you. They don't care If something goes wrong. You will be left to absorb most of the impact of that. So it's a dangerous place to be. And that does nothing to diminish the excitement, the erotic and sensory stimulation granted extra power by the risk of danger, enhancing the play, exacerbating the thrills, because there's skin in the game and you're hitting skins when you indulge in your desires. The belief is that you have to suffer for that. Feeling good must be punished. It's taught by religions and society and if you believe that, it becomes true for you.
Emerson Dameron:Emotional vulnerability. As we get into any sort of relationship, we are going to be vulnerable and be exposed, enmeshed, entangled, tossed to and fro by the power of our passions and emotions. And we may just struggle to maintain our identities, our senses of ourselves, particularly if it's been a while, if we've been starved for this kind of excitement and in connection with someone else, if it's intimate and particularly if that person exerts a lot of power on us, if we lose track of ourselves. This can be a wonderful thing. Reality is malleable. Borders are more porous than you realize. Blurring of ourselves can be an opportunity for self-exploration, self-redefinition, rebirth, in a sense, a journey from here to there we bring the elixir back to our own lives and become someone somewhat different, no longer beholden to nostalgia of the people around us. But that requires confronting our own limitations and finding out we are not who we thought we were. We are not the people that we became comfortable with, and we have to surrender ourselves to experiences that will change us, redefine us and end relationships.
Emerson Dameron:That means surrendering somewhat to the thrall of another person who's not perfect and may not know what the hell they're doing may be openly malicious. That might actually be better. On the whole, malice is less dangerous than incompetence. Combined with the Dunning-Kruger effect, there's nothing worse than a bumbler who thinks he's a villain or she Although women are getting really good at villainy, I don't know if you've noticed.
Emerson Dameron:It's in the air, it's in the zeitgeist, this kind of passion, excitement, particularly when we're likely to bestow some of the credit for our own experiences and who. We are, becoming Another person. It's much like an addiction, something we can feel dependent on. We can freak the hell out when it's pulled away. The kind of people that create these experiences are good at push-pull dynamics. Whether they know it or not, they could be doing it by accident, they could just be selfish, but the fact is that they drive us nuts because it's hot and cold, yes and no, in and out, up and down, and it can be addictive. And the addiction can encroach into other areas of our lives. We can be out top of the world at one moment, trudging around through the slush in chicago in february. Our socks are wet, but we don't care, because we're in love. We're making a 2 am booty call. We're volunteer firemen and the next day when we don't get that call back, it can make us want to kill ourselves and we can question is this sustainable? Obviously not. Will this survive a real grown-ass, grown-up relationship? Probably not. Most of those are terrible and the good ones tend to end poorly.
Emerson Dameron:I was told by a psychology teacher that I had in high school that 10% of people could be happy with any romantic partner and the remaining 90% will never be happy with any romantic partner. I don't think that's scientific, but I don't think I'm in the 10%. I used to think that I tried to be, but invested in my personal growth. My plan was to bring it on home and enrich my relationship. At one point my then-partner confided in me that she didn't like the personal growth stuff I was doing. She was afraid I would become self-actualized and realize that I didn't love her anymore. I was trying to become self-actualized for both of us. She was obviously not interested. It was more prescient than I think either of us realized. We are alone ultimately, and the more we evolve, the more, if we are extreme individuals or we go our own way, it will be lonely. You feel isolated. You might be rejected by people that have a certain image of us that is no longer accurate. It doesn't fit, it creates conflict, and we could alienate people.
Emerson Dameron:They could alienate us, you could think they were backing away and we could cling to them, when really they're the ones that are pissing us off. You know, like a mutual dropping. No one really knows, and both people kind of feel guilty and kind of feel ashamed and also kind of feel slighted and disrespected and abandoned. It's very confusing and having an honest conversation about it, particularly after some damage has been done, can be very difficult. If you're lonely to begin with, then you have an intense connection with somebody that really changes everything for you. It could be your escape from your solitude, your loneliness.
Emerson Dameron:Everything that stoked the flames of your existential horror or made you feel like you were freezing to death can drive you a little bit nuts, because nothing makes you more insane bonkers than getting what you want is often the worst thing that could happen. Fantasy blurs into reality and you can't really tell the difference, because reality has gotten so psychedelic, so strange, so much weirder than anything you would have had the imagination or the boldness or the wildness to ask for or imagine or expect. It can be hard to tell the difference. You will start to question where the lines are. Why are there no right angles? Well, maybe there never were.
Emerson Dameron:That's something I created, Part of a narrative that I used to give myself the illusion of structure that I needed to support my illusion of free will. My shoes tied in the morning, go through the day, but now I have this person that I think they really love me, but I'm not sure that makes it exciting. If it works out the way I want it to, this could really change my life and save it and change it, and you can find the edges where you're able to connect, fire up the emotions. The physical stuff could shut down or the physical magic could overwhelm your senses so much that you don't realize that you're not really communicating. On a deeper level. You could get really invested in what you think someone else is and then after a while you realize that you just weren't really communicating and you don't know this person and they don't know you. It's really challenging and at best people over-communicate.
Emerson Dameron:And when people genuinely love each other and have each other's best interests at heart, things can go awicate. And when people genuinely love each other and have each other's best interests at heart, things can go awry. And when it's escapism it results from pain, from flight from the way things were before. When it becomes a vector for personal struggles, insecurities, and that quest for redefinition has a certain desperation to it, because you don't really know what you want. You just know you don't like this and you gotta get out of here.
Emerson Dameron:You can go a little bit crazy, but ultimately you have to reckon with it, the only way out is the way through, not around To confront who you are and your emotions, who you thought you were and the difference between that and who you turned out to be, and all the rest of it, all of your disappointments, all of your illusions about yourself, everything that you've lost everything that you know is really your responsibility, but you find it impossible to take responsibility for and all the things that you would take responsibility for, because you're so long for a sense of agency, any semblance of an inkling of control.
Emerson Dameron:They would take responsibility for the worst bad luck that you've ever had. That it really is just bad luck. Sometimes bad things just happen and it's neither here nor there, and neither are you, and you can't really own it as much as you want to and that can be so frightening.
Emerson Dameron:It's the power of love, whether it's dominating another person or having it happen to you. Generally it's like what goes on in your real life. You'll probably play with the opposite In the sex container. Sex is where we hide things. There's also God. It is explosive. It's also God. It is explosive. It's the force of creation itself, like a million exploding stars it is. It can absolutely destroy you and bring you back to life.
Emerson Dameron:But, you have to get out of your own way to be effectively destroyed, otherwise you'll just take the whole operation down with you. I want you to cry during sex for the right reasons. I want you to ride that threshold of terror and excitement, not know the difference and not know what time is anymore, lose all sense of gravity, reality, physics, your physical self, and cry at the astounding beauty and drama and comedy and richness of the experience. And also because I'm pounding it out and beating it up and drilling the fuck out of you and you're in a state of love and owned by me. Get on the outfit and get to work.
Emerson Dameron:Suicide. You really haven't lived until you've at least thought about suicide. It's the one philosophical problem that really carries any weight. Life is pretty meaningless if you don't go around with death stapled to your forehead. And once you figure out that that is in your control at least to some degree, you always have that ace in the hole. You got that cyanide capsule in your pocket in case you're cornered by the black dogs and the goons. In case you're cornered by the black dogs and the goons, the badness of civilization come to track you down and punish you for daring to color outside the lines. You're punished for that.
Emerson Dameron:Deeply into adulthood. You always have the sanctity of your own mind, but eventually it gets lonely in there and you're gonna want to get out. You're gonna want to get rid of yourself yourself, your internal monologue, your self-concept, your awareness that you exist. As your biggest problem in life it's the one that follows you around. It's perennial. The truth is, there is suffering in life. Life is suffering. The Buddhists are correct about that. There is suffering that is more bad than most of the good things can possibly be good, at least on an ongoing basis. There's the issue of ask yourself if you are happy and you cease to be so, you start to question it. But ask yourself if you are suffering and you're going to want to commit suicide. I've thought about it.
Emerson Dameron:The idea can be empowering that really you're not under any obligation to keep doing this. If you don't absolutely want to, you're going to devastate your family and the people who really care about you and the people you're trying to hurt will probably not care. But you've always got that get out of existence free card. There's no coming back and no one's reported back from wherever you go when you do that, so you're giving up everything that you have, everything that you ever will have, and probably every last trace of you. If you do continue to exist, I doubt it's in a recognizable form. Perhaps the best deal would be to have never been born in the first place. That's nice work if you can get it. Having never been sounds so unbelievably peaceful. But as long as you're here, you're gonna die anyway. You will join the choir invisible.
Emerson Dameron:I don't necessarily see the point in auditioning ahead of time. If you are and I think depression in some cases can be a terminal illness I'm not gonna take that away from you. If you want to kill yourself, do I support that? I don't know. The idea of it can be very powerful and really put things into perspective. I think it's the one philosophical problem that matters.
Emerson Dameron:You don't need to share everything You're allowed to shut up, especially about yourself. Not everything that goes through your head is gold. You're not Bob Pollard or Tupac Shakur, and even they have a lot of skips on their records. You should create a little mystery. Allow people to have questions about you. Allow them to fantasize. Leave some gaps where people can make up some stories about you, because that's interesting, that's fun. That is such a relief from this oppressive, suffocating, always-on narcissistic obsession with sharing everything because that's somehow authentic. No, it's just thoughtless, it's selfish. It deprives people of the mystery and this oxygen and the space that is necessary for seduction, persuasion, fun, and you can allow that space by caring about other people. That could be such a relief. It gives you a break from performing analingus on yourself 24 hours a day and thinking that that's impressive to people.
Emerson Dameron:No, you genuinely care about people and you show up for them and you're interested. First of all, people are interesting. Some of them are even more interesting than you, and that's saying something. They're more interesting than me. So the world's a fascinating place. People are crystals of fractal stardust from beyond good and evil. We contain infinity within us, each and every one. Most of it we don't even recognize. You can learn things about people that they don't know about themselves, but you don't have to always be on. You don't have to always be talking or posting. You don't even have to always be around to give people the gift of missing you. There was a show I'm dating myself and it's fun because I'm a masterful lover. There was a show called my So-Called Life and there was a character called Tito never appeared. Everyone remembers him and watched the show because we're always talking about him, anticipating his appearance, which never happened.
Emerson Dameron:They saved money because they didn't have to hire an actor to create one of the classic characters of 90s television. Everybody was thinking Tito was going to show up and hang out and it never happened and it would have killed a lot of the mystery. Had he done that, you could be like Jaws A lot of the intrigue of Jaws, which is a horror trope that goes back to HP, lovecraft and earlier. You don't see the monster, you just sense its presence. It's part of the conversation, but it's not always around. You don't have to always be around. That's the reason we have mixing boards. You go in and out of the mix. You don't have to always be all the way up in the red blowing out the speakers. That's rude and thoughtless and clumsy and boring. But know that you have the power to blow out the speakers.
Emerson Dameron:Own your power. If you're afraid of your power, you're missing out and you might want to think about where that notion that owning your power is bad. You should worship humility and self-sacrifice and thinking less of yourself. Where did that come from? Who taught you that and what did they have to gain by it? Is it working for you? If it's not, there's good news you have more power than you could possibly comprehend. And to be afraid of that. It can kill you. It can take out three city blocks, but not if you use it well. And in order to use it well, you have to recognize it, own it, learn about it, figure out how to use it, master it. It is a horrible master but a wonderful servant. And you're going to be the master If you don't know how. Stay tuned.
Emerson Dameron:But first, be unpredictable. Break patterns. That is the way to keep your mind from stagnating, to keep your creativity and your joie de vivre and your lust for life from atrophying. And it is hard, hard work. We're pattern matching machines. We fall so easily into patterns. It takes work to break them.
Emerson Dameron:It generally has to be a deliberate, conscious decision to take a different route home from work. I did an exercise a couple of weeks ago where you're not allowed to take the same kind of breath two times in a row. You have to breathe differently every time you breathe. So if you take a deep breath this time, you take a shallow one the next time and then you take a middle one after that, and then a little bit on the deep side, a little bit on the shallow, a little bit on the shut. It's hard, hard work. By the time you get into it you'll feel like you're on really good drugs and you'll understand the power of scrambling things up. And now you can throw off all of your assumptions and break yourself out of the jail that you didn't even know you were in allopic, misinformed, self-defeating, self-sabotaging, self-limiting things you believe, don't even know it.
Emerson Dameron:The unknown, knows it's the filthy aquarium water that you're swimming in. If you learn to screw with your own head, you'll see that happening and that'll give you power to make a change. Life is art. There's obviously science involved. You can't decide to defy the laws of physics and have that work out. Some things are true and some things are not permitted. But at the same time you have a lot more choices than you know that you have, and you only really have the choices that you know that you have.
Emerson Dameron:So, in order to discover the other, ones you need to go a little bonkers.
Emerson Dameron:You need to be an artist, love the questions and love the ridiculous questions and love the dangerous, explosive questions. The purpose of art is to provoke. You have something to say If you agree with consensus opinion about everything you might want to think about, that you would be awfully improbably fortunate to be born at the time when people are finally correct about everything. Challenge the world, challenge yourself, get in people's faces, but do it with the thoughtfulness and interest in that person's experience that you cultivated a while ago.
Emerson Dameron:See how all the puzzle pieces fit together. If you're afraid of sex, you're missing out. Sex is nothing to be afraid of. Sex is what life is all about. It's the force of creation. Sex is God. Sex is an exuberant celebration of human creativity and the highest form of physical comedy, and it's the best way to get to know people. Sex is where we hide things, and when we have sex, all that comes out. That's why a lot of people's sexual preferences are almost like a photo negative of who they present themselves as on their LinkedIn profile. You compare their LinkedIn to their fet life. They're going to be very different people, unless they're very strange, which maybe they are, and that's hot.
Daisy L:And again you own your complexity.
Emerson Dameron:Owning your sexuality doesn't mean you have to broadcast it all the time that can be dangerous but own it in your own heart and soul and mind and crotch. That's where your power is and you can use that to do all sorts of wonderful things. That's how people sailed across the ocean. It's how empires were created and destroyed. It's how revolutions happen. It's how symphonies are written destroyed. It's how revolutions happen. It's how symphonies are written and skyscrapers are built and torn down.
Emerson Dameron:It has the potential to save the world. You have to own it first. If you're afraid of your own sexuality, if you think there's something wrong with that, it's gonna creep into other parts of your life and it's gonna absolutely destroy you, because you're gonna get really kinky and weird in areas like declaring war or suing people or doing other weird things. No, bring it back into the bedroom or the dungeon, or perhaps on the roof under the stars, perhaps in the pouring rain. That's for you to discover. But first you gotta own it. You are a sexy emf and there's nothing wrong with that. There's everything right with that.
Daisy L:Own it.
?:Grow up.
Emerson Dameron:You're an adult. Adults have sex. That's what we do. It's pure joy and exuberant catharsis, and it may be our last hope for redemption. Don't miss out. Your life is pretty empty without that. You're gonna fill it up with really, really gnarly stuff. I'm just telling you now, like you don't want to see that happen, you're going to fill it up with really, really gnarly stuff. I'm just telling you now, like you don't want to see that happen. You're an adult. You're allowed to get crushed out and hot in the crotch and have brutal, mutually degrading, explosive, ecstatic, mind-melting, soul-lifting sex. That's what life is all about.
Emerson Dameron:What you'll discover as you get good at sex is it's not hard to make people feel good. You don't have to trick them into liking you. All you have to do is be interested in them and point out the things that they're good at, and you don't have to flatter them. You don't have to make stuff up. You don't need to be obsessed with being authentic and true to yourself all the time.
Emerson Dameron:Be true to the truth, though. As you see it, don't lie to people. Don't mislead them. If they write a lousy aria and you tell them it's the best thing they've ever heard, you're setting them up for disappointment. That's a mean thing to do. It would be more kind to let them know what you think were that you're not qualified to have an opinion. That could also be the case. You don't have to share everything, but don't actively hide anything. If you tell the truth and live in your truth, you will still be wrong about everything, but you'll be open to making adjustments and updating your priors and learning and growing and embracing your ignorance and resting in the joy of not knowing, and you won't have to keep track of your own BS.
Daisy L:Which for?
Emerson Dameron:some of the really dedicated liars that I've known seems to require this Princeton MBA level of project management skills that I would not have thought that they had, particularly with how much some of them drink. Sincerity is your friend in that regard. Balance it with a little bit of mystery. You don't have to share everything. It's push-pull. It's the polarity of all things. All things have polarity, except when they don't. Polarity is duality. It's yin and yang, masculine and feminine, in and out. The moment you're born screaming, the moment you die in the gutter alone and also still screaming. Maybe you never stopped, maybe you're always screaming, on the inside or out loud. You should probably write a book about that if that's the case, if you're not already dead. So it's, in this case, duality. Polarity is the sincerity mixed with the mystery. Turn it up and turn it back down a little bit. All hot and cold.
Emerson Dameron:Best of both worlds. Give people more than they want, particularly in the bedroom. Own your sensuality, get into your physical experience, be embodied, be here, be present, engage the sensory experience of life that is so full of delicious miracles. And when you get to the sex, give people more than they want, and we'll get into why you should do that in a minute. And then you get to the sex, give people more than they want and we'll get into why you should do that in a minute and then pull back a little bit, bring back the mystery that you don't have to be all up in their business or blow up their spot. You can give them a little space, give them the gift of missing you.
Emerson Dameron:Here's something to keep in mind, which is a technique that I learned in my brief career in sales. It's called negative selling, and that means persuading the prospect that they actually don't want the thing that you're selling, with the implication that they're not ready for it. Maybe you're not the right kind of person for this thing that I'm selling, because what happens is they will start arguing the opposite position, because that's what people love to do, especially if they feel like you're disqualifying them. They will try to re-qualify themselves and that's the takeaway. It's not the negging that the pickup artists of the Audis were doing exactly. You're not deliberately trying to put someone who probably already has low self-esteem into a place of lower self-esteem.
Emerson Dameron:Don't treat people like garbage if you want the world to be the kind of world that you want to live in. But it is okay to pull back a little bit and give people a chance to come to you. That is exciting for them. Allow them to do that. That is a gift that gets them juiced up and charged up and makes them feel good about themselves because they're thinking about their own positive qualities and qualifying themselves, and that actually raises their self-esteem and makes them hotter. That works out for everyone. This requires a little bit of emotional mastery. It's about understanding your feelings so that you can manage them. The full expression of an emotion is allowing that emotion to pass through. There's nothing wrong with your feelings. Your feelings are always right, and so are everyone else's At the same time. An emotion lasts for 90 seconds, unless you start telling yourself a story about it. So figure out how you're getting wrapped around the axle and how you're getting invested in your own stories and invested in your own suffering, because we love to suffer.
Emerson Dameron:We love to tell ourselves stories about our suffering to justify the suffering. Cut that out. Understand your feelings. Be able to zoom out. Look at them objectively, figure out what happened. What attachment wound is this? What unresolved thing is it that I'm trying to solve?
Emerson Dameron:because I'm trying to fix the past and I can't do that because the past is over and it never, really happened the way that I think it did, because my memories are just made up stories that I'm telling myself, and these are all just stories. Cut it out. Life doesn't have a narrative arc. Decide what stories you want to tell yourself about yourself, and that's part of mastering your emotions. You can also benefit from yoga meditation and other things.
Emerson Dameron:There are a lot of ways to do this Getting to know yourself and be cool with yourself, because if you get to know yourself, you'll understand that you're pretty chill on balance. Balance is what we're talking about here. It's always both Try the other.
Emerson Dameron:If you're living on an extreme, try living on the other one for a minute, go out and see what those people are doing. One thing I always admired about my dad is he was a lifelong Democrat who was very interested in what was going on on the right. He would listen to right-wing talk radio and would switch over to their news channels during election returns and big news stories to see how they were spinning it. He never thought that he had a monopoly on truth. He always wanted to understand what the other people were thinking. And there's a technique in debate called steel manning, which is creating the strongest possible version of the other people's argument and then going at that. It's the opposite of straw manning, where you're creating a weak version and attacking that which just telegraphs that you're not ready for a real grown-up engagement. What you want to do is know their argument better than they do and then destroy it.
Emerson Dameron:And be able to do that from both sides. People love extremes, especially in this country. It has to be one thing or the other, it has to be all the way, one way or the other. The more extreme you are, the more attention you get, because people like it when you're wrong in exciting ways. Everyone's always wrong about everything. People that are wrong in the inflammatory, explosive ways, cheap provocation. There's nothing artistic or really creative or built to last about it.
Emerson Dameron:Don't do that Nobody is a monopoly on truth. Good ideas come from everywhere. As the philosopher Ken Wilber says, no one is smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time.
Emerson Dameron:And that means, if you're on the dominant side, understand vulnerability and submission, understand what's exciting about that, understand subspace, etc. Because as a master, as a sadist with a heart of gold, in my case, I love to inflict pain, and the more I understand somebody's experience, the more pain I can inflict. It's a responsibility because I also have to take care of that person, and that involves knowing things about them that they don't necessarily know about themselves, and I have to make it exciting for them and then I can just tear them apart, inflict the kind of shattering pain that could be their one last hope for salvation. This world of postmodern existential horror is a lot of responsibility, but it is also my great joy. I love inflicting pain, I love dominating people, I love owning them. It means the world to me. When you let me be mean to you, I'm a sadist with a heart of gold. I like to hurt people in the ways that most help them, and that involves understanding them and their perspectives, which involves embracing the parts of me represented in their perspectives, because we all contain multitudes, nearly infinite varieties. We are all crystals of fractal stardust from beyond. Good and evil Act like it, thank you.
Emerson Dameron:This is Ask a Sadist. Our question today is one that I've received repeatedly rarely in good faith, I would assume, not having direct access to my interlocutors. In most cases, the question is dear sadist, do you support the subjugation of women? That's not a serious question, of course I support the subjugation of women. I believe it should be optional. I support every woman's right to be subjugated. The world is a horrifying place, and one of the things that makes it horrifying is the amount of control and responsibility that we are expected to have, and that has increased for women, and I'm glad that option is available. I think any way you want to punish yourself and suffer and destroy your life should be available to you, especially if you can hurt others in the process, which certainly as a boss, you certainly can. That requires the option of being beaten down to contrast. For that you need a place to lose control.
Emerson Dameron:The right to not be subjugated implies the right to be subjugated. In my book, it's not a right, it's a privilege. I think that only certain women are qualified to be subjugated, at least by me. What I do does not work on submissives who are weak. It only really works if you truly believe in yourself and you have developed self-confidence. More than that integrity and you truly want to be subjugated. You know what you're getting into and you are able to get a lot out of it.
Emerson Dameron:In many cases, our sex lives are almost photo negatives, the professional, social coffee-clatch selves that we present to other people, coffee-clatch selves that we present to other people and, as women, are more expected and tacitly required to present themselves as being in control at all times. I believe creating alternatives, eg the option of being subjugated by a loving, dominant or a sadist with a heart of rugged gold who certainly has your best interests at heart, appreciates the complexity of the human condition and knows that you are not who you are when you're in a headlock, being put in your place. Your place is somewhere you can go when you feel like it. It's a place you can rest. It's a place you can fall apart, lose control, go a little bit insane with someone you trust to take care of you. As that happens, of course, I support the subjugation of women.
Daisy L:You look like a wound stitched shut with bad intentions.
Orson W:That's because I am Someone rewired my nerves for the wrong voltage. Every time I feel anything, it's the wrong feeling.
Daisy L:Lucky girl. I have to work to misinterpret my own suffering. You get yours prepackaged, Factory sealed despair.
Orson W:I'd return it if I could, but there's no receipt for desire malfunctions. That's the problem with secondhand sold Big glitch. Does yours?
Daisy L:Oh darling, I sold mine long ago for a pocket mirror and a box of rusted razors. A steal, really.
Orson W:A clearance sale on self-respect. And what did you do when you realized you'd been undercharged?
Daisy L:I spent years trying to become someone worth ruining. Did it work? I was offered a franchise.
Orson W:Sometimes I think I'm the world's most beautiful malfunction. I short circuit when I shouldn't. I moan when I need to scream.
Daisy L:And when do you mean to moan?
Orson W:When I'm suffering correctly.
Daisy L:A purist how?
Orson W:quiet I tried to love. Once it felt like being hacked with a serrated knife made of bad poetry.
Daisy L:You should try hate. It's more efficient.
Orson W:I don't have that setting Worship. I have ruin. I have dying beautifully in 16 different languages. I keep waiting for the blackout.
Daisy L:Here you are still flickering.
Orson W:Let me know if you want to be unplugged, Not yet I want to see what happens when the circuit breaks all on its own.
Helena the Brit:Oh darling. My glorious whirlwind descent into high stakes, passion deep in the moor of madness, began, as many such things do, with a man who existed in the rarefied air of the truly untouchable. He was cruel, cold and oh so devastatingly chic, a sort of metamodern Heathcliff with expensive tastes and excellent sartorial instincts to match the pain blurred into pleasure. His disinterest only intensified his mystique. For the first time I visited oh, what's it called? Darling Subspace. I promptly purchased a timeshare. I became insatiable, a woman of omnivorous appetites, a connoisseur of exquisite suffering, always demanding more. I want to feel everything. I want life-altering humiliation to understand all this shame business. Finally, once and for all, at any rate, I wanted to impress him and to that end I invented new sex acts, ingenious, avant-garde expressions of desire. These were feats of creativity, atrocity exhibitions, veritable performance, art, spectacles of the flesh. One night I executed a move I dubbed the Devil's Spiral, a balletic contortion of elegance and daring. He shoved me off with a sneer, an artistic critique surely gripped me by the throat and elevated our rendezvous into something truly magnificent. I gasped in exhilaration. He was my muse, my cruel Pygmalion, sculpting me in the language of the sublime. Next time I get such a sterling idea, I resolved I'll make him think it was his.
Helena the Brit:But one man could never be enough for a woman with my expansive erotic portfolio of peak experiences. My hunger was a thing of legend, of stage, song and screen. My thirst, a tale, whispered in late night salons over opium and wormwood, and so, in want of an outlet, I graciously accepted a proposition for the most cultured and intellectually daring arrangement, a threesome with my dear companions Ben and Dylan, devoted admirers whose ardour gave me a certain sense of security. If you follow, we secured an atmospheric hotel suite, so decadently dishevelled it could only be deliberate, smuggled in an excellent whiskey all the way from Kentucky and engaged in the most deliciously charged railing, in the most deliciously charged railing. Then, overcome with awe at the beauty of life's indescribable detail as represented in microcosm by my left, areola retreated to a chair, murmuring something about wanting to observe. How utterly French of him.
Helena the Brit:Dylan, overwhelmed by the gravity of the moment, indulged too heartily in the whiskey and drifted into a catatonic slumber. Ah, the tragedy of excess, practiced in excess, flaming out too soon to bear any truly transcendent narrative fruit. Undeterred, I found myself alone amidst the wreckage of our grand design, a creature of desire still yearning for completion. My lover's phantom touch lingered on my skin. The brutal poetry of his impact play still fresh in my mind, although the bruises were beginning to heal. Thankfully, this was not failure. It was narrative tension, the unpredictable plot twist that turns a good story into legend, a Jezebel's journey worthy of the finest union pornographers. And so, undaunted, I made one final inspired move, shocking even myself, with a bid for ecstasy that would surely go down in the annals of my glamorous misadventures. The night, the city and the universe itself had other plans, but I walked out onto the neon-lit boulevard, draped in starlight and mystery. My hunger undimmed. The world pulsed beneath my heels and I was splendid and insatiable walked on.
Emerson Dameron:Thank you. The hardest work I do is getting people to do work for me.
Emerson Dameron:Hard work very important part of this complete breakfast. I encourage you to do lots of hard work on my behalf, at my request to do my bidding. Other than that, work is for suckers. The harder you work, the less value you get out of your time. You're literally selling your life, your experience on earth, this precious, ridiculously weird, thoroughly absurd opportunity that we have to wander this planet in these wonderful, sexy bodies. You're auctioning it off to assholes and you have nothing put away. You're not investing anything. You don't know the difference between spending and investing. Stop, Own something or don't own anything. There are no winners in that game. They make you think that, well, it's mostly losers. But if you want to win, you have to play. That's how you get your 1% chance to win the fucking lottery. You won't, so just go ahead, Relax.
Daisy L:Go live on the beach In a van.
Emerson Dameron:Nothing wrong with it. You'll still get laid a lot. Maybe you do not have a relationship, but that's the mother of all win-wins. Coming all the way back, art is one of our two great hopes Art, creativity. You know it's hard when you're not getting laid. You get touch, hungry and sex is a part of adult life and it's great and it's a huge priority for me. And when I'm not having it I don't like it. But there's something you can do with that energy. It's called sex transmutation. You just sit basking, soaking, sizzling, boiling in your own just pure molten horniness Channel, that lightning into a piece of art, a piece of creative work. I happen to think performance art is where it's at in terms of saving this sad sack, ridiculous species.
Emerson Dameron:We've been out of our bodies for too long. I don't think the world needs products, I think it needs experiences. It needs vulnerability, genius, the kinesthetic element, pictures, sounds and feelings. A combination of mischief, pranks, dance, conceptual art, absurdity, weirdness, realism, the return of the avant-garde. The performance art is coming, coming back, it's going to be happening.
Emerson Dameron:And the other great hope, as I've said before and will continue to say, because I'm hammering away at this, so to speak is rough sex. Performance art and rough sex are twin flames of hope. Most of our cruelty and self-sabotage is we're accidentally doing sex transmutation. We're channeling our sex drives, which are freaky and fucked up and warped, into our behavior outside of the bedrooms, where the alleys of the coat rooms, the closets, the dungeons, the fuck lounges that we really should be in become the highly competent sadists and masochists. In the context of kinky rough sex that we know we can beat, we won't have to hurt each other's feelings or go to war anymore. We might get rid of road rage. We might be a hell of a lot happier. Rough sex can save the world and performance art.
?:They go hand in hand k chung, los angeles, 16 30 am. K chung radioorg immersing dameron's medicated minutes, the only good podcast, la's number one event, guard personal development program, home of ask a sadist, the first church of the satanic buddha, bite sized erotic thrillers and the most interesting person alive. You improve yourself before everyone else does, and medicated-minutescom levity saves lives. Outro Music.
