The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:00:06.480 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:12.740 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

00:00:20.100 With decades of experience helping patients, Dr. Peterson offers a unique understanding of why you might be feeling this way in his new series.

00:00:27.420 He provides a roadmap towards healing, showing that while the journey isn't easy, it's absolutely possible to find your way forward.

00:00:35.360 If you're suffering, please know you are not alone. There's hope, and there's a path to feeling better.

00:00:41.800 Go to Daily Wire Plus now and start watching Dr. Jordan B. Peterson on depression and anxiety.

00:00:47.460 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:00:50.980 Hello everyone watching and listening.

00:01:21.260 Today, I'm pleased to be talking to Mr. Aaron Stark.

00:01:24.420 You might recognize him from his TED Talk on YouTube, which has got about 13 million views.

00:01:31.380 Aaron went to some very dark places when he was a kid and a teenager and came from some very dark places.

00:01:37.400 At one point in his life, he had formulated very detailed plans that related to shooting up a school, and he decided not to do it.

00:01:49.400 And what we're talking about, what we're going to talk about is how he came to make those plans, let's say, what the rationale for it was and the cause of those plans.

00:02:00.880 And then also why he decided to back away from the precipice and what the consequence of that backing away has been.

00:02:09.860 So, Mr. Stark, you turned your life around.

00:02:12.780 Yes, sir.

00:02:13.200 Okay, so let's go back to when it wasn't turned around.

00:02:16.940 Now, you've been touring around and talking to people for how long?

00:02:21.220 How long have you been in the public eye?

00:02:23.420 About five years.

00:02:24.880 About five years.

00:02:25.580 How old are you now?

00:02:26.500 44.

00:02:26.880 44.

00:02:27.560 Okay.

00:02:28.160 And so, well, why don't you just tell us the story, and then I'll start delving into, well, the details.

00:02:34.900 Well, so, I was almost a school shooter when I was really young.

00:02:41.160 I went through a really violent, aggressive family.

00:02:44.440 My first five years are like living in a Stephen King movie.

00:02:47.780 My birth father was the most violent, depraved person I've ever met.

00:02:50.080 And beatings and rapes and just violence and aggression the entire time, running from him across state to state, trying to get away.

00:02:58.200 When my mom finally escaped him, got with my stepdad and went from Stephen King to Scarface.

00:03:02.240 So, it went from extreme violence to crack cocaine and crime.

00:03:06.100 And you were about six at that point?

00:03:07.360 I was about five or six at the time, yeah.

00:03:09.580 And I had an older brother who's two years older than I was.

00:03:12.280 And so, we were very nomadic.

00:03:14.920 I went to 30 or 40 different schools.

00:03:16.600 We were constantly moving from state to state, running away from the cops or the social workers or counselors or anybody trying to intervene, and lived a very nomadic lifestyle.

00:03:27.100 And went from early on being a really shy, sensitive, sweet kid who liked reading comic books and superheroes and that kind of stuff to, in my early teen years, really adapting that the way to survive was I'm going to be the aggressive one.

00:03:40.860 And I knew, I figured out early on that I was the dirty one, I was the nasty one, I was the worthless, I was the outcast.

00:03:47.700 I was the one that was pushed off.

00:03:48.840 Early on meaning when?

00:03:50.640 Six, seven years old.

00:03:52.600 So, you're assuming it was you?

00:03:55.000 Oh, yeah.

00:03:55.460 It was me.

00:03:56.160 Yeah.

00:03:57.020 My older brother, who's two years older than I was, because of my family dynamic, he had a lot of responsibility.

00:04:01.860 He had to be the early man of the house really early on, to the extent where he had, at 12 years old, had to handle the sheriff throwing all of our stuff in the front lawn and evicting us when my parents are getting drugged out and drunk at the bar, and we can't find him for days.

00:04:15.900 And he has to find us a place to stay, and I was the responsibility.

00:04:18.760 How much older than you was he?

00:04:20.120 Two years.

00:04:21.000 So, he was 12, I was 10.

00:04:22.860 And so, he was just another kid going through abuse the same way I was.

00:04:26.340 But he had to, he, I was a responsibility he had to take care of.

00:04:30.460 So, while he was shouldering all the responsibility, I'm like the burden.

00:04:34.160 And so, that was kind of the identities we adapted.

00:04:36.340 He was the one that took care of everything.

00:04:37.640 I was the one that was the broken thing that needed to be taken care of all the time.

00:04:42.240 And as that grew older, I became more and more toxic going into my early 10 years.

00:04:48.180 Why do you think there wasn't enough responsibility also for you?

00:04:51.380 Like, why did the, why do you think the roles between you and your brother had to be split that way?

00:04:56.040 I don't know if they had to be, but that's just kind of the way they ended up being.

00:04:59.440 I, the, he, just because of our personalities, he was more of a hands-on kid.

00:05:06.420 Well, he's older, too.

00:05:07.580 Well, he was a gearhead, too.

00:05:09.300 His likes were more, were more physical.

00:05:11.860 He liked doing things like building things, taking stuff apart, fixing cars, stuff like that.

00:05:15.380 I was more intellectual.

00:05:16.820 I liked reading and loved, I would read like the Bull Finch's mythology.

00:05:21.380 textbook when I was four or five years old.

00:05:23.280 I, my first book report was on Stephen King's misery when I was in kindergarten.

00:05:26.780 And because I, by, I read really early on, super early.

00:05:30.360 I was reading, I was reading full books by the time I was five years old.

00:05:33.720 And the, um, so I was, I would suck in information.

00:05:37.800 So that was my escape.

00:05:39.080 My escape when all the crime and the violence and people beating each other and digging through

00:05:42.700 crack rock for crack rock behind me was going on.

00:05:45.200 I would have my nose dug into an X-Men comic book.

00:05:47.860 My brother would be into taking apart his skateboard, putting his skateboard back together.

00:05:53.260 Right, so he was more oriented doing practical things in the world.

00:05:55.960 Practical things in the world.

00:05:57.400 And so when, as that girl, he was the one that had to do like, well, the car's broken

00:06:01.180 and Jake's going to try to fix it.

00:06:02.680 This, this thing's busted.

00:06:03.920 Jake's going to fix it.

00:06:05.000 I didn't fix anything.

00:06:06.300 I was off to the side reading a book.

00:06:07.680 I was out.

00:06:08.380 Like, I wasn't, I wasn't utilitarian.

00:06:10.100 You were more practically oriented.

00:06:11.640 Mm-hmm.

00:06:12.140 Mm-hmm.

00:06:12.420 I wasn't utilitarian to anything.

00:06:14.500 Okay, so you said you were a sweet kid, but that things started to change, well, maybe

00:06:18.900 about when you were 10, if I got that right?

00:06:20.980 Oh, earlier.

00:06:22.440 I'd say seven, eight, nine.

00:06:24.780 Yeah, I, I, because of the way that we moved, we were constantly moving from Colorado to

00:06:30.280 Oregon back and forth.

00:06:31.560 And this was the late 80s.

00:06:33.700 So it was before the age of the internet was really easy to make up your entire personality

00:06:37.060 and make up a whole new identity.

00:06:38.380 So my parents would get a job in a house out here, in Colorado, and then get evicted,

00:06:44.240 lose their job, move to Oregon, lie about their entire resume, lie about their entire

00:06:47.720 history, get an entirely new house and everything, and then wash, rinse, repeat every couple

00:06:52.080 of months.

00:06:52.680 Right, right.

00:06:53.200 And so we were always moving back and forth.

00:06:56.060 And they were doing that so that their scams could continue?

00:06:58.720 It was either their scams could continue or they would evade accountability.

00:07:04.660 They were trying to-

00:07:05.280 So that sort of behavior is generally rarer among women.

00:07:09.940 You said your birth father was a particularly nasty piece of work.

00:07:13.240 Yes.

00:07:13.700 And so did you have, did you have any sort of quality relationship with your mother or

00:07:18.860 your father?

00:07:19.340 At that time, yes.

00:07:20.440 Early on with my father, yes.

00:07:22.240 My mom at that time was much more like Linda Hamilton from T2.

00:07:25.440 Okay.

00:07:25.740 I don't, oh, yes.

00:07:26.920 From Terminator.

00:07:27.660 Right.

00:07:27.820 She was the survivalist mother who, like, to the point where when my father was so violent

00:07:33.920 and chasing us around, we were bouncing from batter woman shelter to batter woman shelter

00:07:36.820 to get away from him.

00:07:37.800 And my mom would have things like safety words.

00:07:41.360 So if we were out and about, if she just said the word pocket in conversation, that was

00:07:45.280 a safety tag.

00:07:45.940 So she could be at the grocery store and be like, oh, 295, here we go, pocket.

00:07:48.980 If that word came out of her mouth, I was to grab the back pocket of her pants and we

00:07:52.020 need to get out right now.

00:07:53.020 That meant my father was in sight.

00:07:55.020 There was trouble.

00:07:55.860 We need to go now.

00:07:57.100 We need to move.

00:07:58.300 And so it was that kind of survivalist.

00:08:00.300 And that was the first five years?

00:08:01.520 First five years of my life.

00:08:02.300 Okay, so why do you think your mother stayed with your father during that five-year period?

00:08:06.420 During that five-year period?

00:08:07.740 I think that from my stories that I heard, he was a Vietnam vet.

00:08:12.720 And when I was, when he left to go to the war, he was a good guy.

00:08:16.360 When he came back, he was kind of a monster.

00:08:18.280 Oh, yeah.

00:08:18.740 And so that was, I guess they were together.

00:08:21.100 Was she with him before he went to the war?

00:08:23.020 She was.

00:08:23.840 Because she already established a relationship with someone who was then damaged by the war.

00:08:27.200 Who was then damaged by the war, came back and was completely a monster and was just violent

00:08:31.100 and got into, he was epically violent.

00:08:35.720 Was he hurt physically, do you know, during the war?

00:08:38.580 He wasn't hurt physically during the war, I don't think.

00:08:41.040 I know he was hurt psychologically during the war.

00:08:43.160 Do you know why?

00:08:44.060 Do you know what happened?

00:08:45.080 He was a gunner on a ship.

00:08:46.560 He was one of the ones that would load the ammunition to shoot up off into Cambodia.

00:08:52.140 And he was on the ship and one of his best friends got his head taken off right next to him.

00:08:57.540 Just the ammunition blew his best friend away right next to him and that messed him up.

00:09:01.640 But that wasn't, that pales in comparison to the trauma he suffered from his family.

00:09:05.180 My father, from his own family, was circumcised at 15 years old.

00:09:10.100 Okay, so what does that mean exactly?

00:09:11.960 They circumcised him.

00:09:13.540 They cut off the foreskin of his penis at 15 years old because they caught him masturbating.

00:09:17.300 I see.

00:09:18.020 So that's just an example of the abuse that my father went through.

00:09:21.860 So that's, abuse in my opinion is generational.

00:09:24.480 It's trauma that rolls downhill.

00:09:26.580 And from both sides of my family, there were giant boulders of trauma that were rolling downhill.

00:09:31.300 From my father's side, there was that.

00:09:32.700 From my mother's side, I had a pedophile great-grandfather, a pedophile uncle rapist.

00:09:37.460 That there was a lot of violence and aggression on both sides.

00:09:40.900 On both sides.

00:09:41.320 And a lot of oppression.

00:09:42.140 What about alcoholism?

00:09:42.840 Lots of alcoholism, mental disorders, lots of, a lot of personality disorders, a lot of drug abuse.

00:09:51.260 Yeah.

00:09:51.860 Yeah, well, patterns of behavior are imitated, right?

00:09:56.100 Consciously and unconsciously.

00:09:57.580 And what that means is that if there is a pattern of pathology in a family, it will echo down the generations until someone digs into the underbelly of the problem, sorts it out and stops it.

00:10:12.520 And then, at least in principle, that'll stop the intergenerational transmission.

00:10:17.420 There are genetic predispositions, but they're complex.

00:10:21.380 So, you can have a genetic predisposition to depression, which would mean that you're likely to be higher in the trait neuroticism, which is a trait associated with negative emotion.

00:10:31.220 There are also heritable tendencies towards antisocial personality.

00:10:35.600 So, if you're extroverted and disagreeable, and even worse, if you're extroverted, disagreeable, and unconscientious, if you take a pathological turn, you'll tilt likely in a criminal direction.

00:10:50.180 And some of that has a heritable omen, too.

00:10:53.160 It doesn't mean that wrongdoing or the proclivity for criminal behavior is heritable precisely.

00:10:59.960 It means that we inherit different patterns of traits that predispose us to different categories of temptation, you might say.

00:11:07.860 Yeah.

00:11:08.160 The way I present it to my family is that we are taught different languages of how to express our emotions.

00:11:13.400 And if your vocabulary of emotional expression is violence and aggression, then that's the language you're going to teach everybody else.

00:11:19.860 Yeah.

00:11:20.120 Well, it also means that you don't know the alternatives.

00:11:22.380 Precisely.

00:11:22.800 And so, it's really hard to express yourself in a calm, rational manner if the only language you speak in your head and outside and in your world is violence, aggression, and toxicity.

00:11:32.360 It's really hard then to assess.

00:11:33.520 Yeah.

00:11:33.740 Well, it's also difficult for people who are temperamentally more aggressive to learn how to integrate that aggression in a socialized manner.

00:11:42.600 So, if you have a small child who's extroverted and disagreeable, they're going to push you.

00:11:48.360 And they're going to test constantly.

00:11:50.140 And now, if you take a firm tack and you're sophisticated, you can help those children become socialized and competitive, in which case their proclivity to push can be, well, usefully channeled into competitive victory, let's say.

00:12:08.340 But it's hard to do that, especially if the kid's particularly pushy.

00:12:12.340 And I see that proclivity to push actually manifests itself in a large scale, from my estimation and from what I've seen doing what I do.

00:12:20.980 And kids who are in that dark place, that are in that gray area of depression that might fall into the dark even further, that are trying to reach out for help.

00:12:30.200 Yeah.

00:12:30.460 The people that reach out to help, too, they're going to test.

00:12:32.560 They're going to push.

00:12:33.200 Yeah, right.

00:12:34.080 Are you faking the funk?

00:12:35.420 Are you lying like everybody else in my life that said they were here for me and then they disappeared when everything got hard?

00:12:41.740 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:12:42.060 And so, they're going to really test and test and test until you prove consistency.

00:12:46.000 And so, that proclivity to test, if you don't address that early on, it just sprouts and grows.

00:12:51.860 Right, it's going to be exacerbated by betrayal.

00:12:54.080 Yeah, it turns into a main defense mechanism and lifestyle that you're going to push and be aggressive to everybody until you can see that one person that actually can stand it.

00:13:03.700 Yeah, well, people who have been betrayed and rejected sufficiently can get to the point where they won't make a bond with anyone.

00:13:13.520 Right?

00:13:13.900 There's research conducted, I can't remember the people who did it, on children who were separated very young for too long from their parents.

00:13:24.540 And they go through a period of protest that's very intense to begin with.

00:13:28.960 Of course, they're distressed about being separated.

00:13:30.940 And then the protest behavior decreases, but it'll emerge sporadically.

00:13:36.200 And then that'll decrease.

00:13:37.580 And once the protest behavior has been eradicated completely, it's very difficult, even if the parent comes back, to reestablish contact.

00:13:47.400 The children put up a barrier, which is akin to the barrier that you're describing, that's very difficult to pierce.

00:13:53.200 And as you said, what will happen too to children who abandon is that because they've been betrayed repeatedly and deeply and hurt very badly,

00:14:00.640 is they will test like mad to see if they can break the bond, to see if it's reliable.

00:14:07.960 And that can actually get to the point, you see this in conditions like borderline personality disorder,

00:14:13.380 where the person will test everyone so completely that no one can actually put up with it.

00:14:19.120 Yeah, and I see that quite a lot.

00:14:21.460 And I think that the more we can, that's the advice that I give them when I get doing my talks,

00:14:27.680 is that be that island of normal in the ocean of chaos person.

00:14:30.640 That person is, everybody, when I was in that spot, everybody in my life thought that I was either a monster or a project.

00:14:37.020 You either wanted to fix me or you were afraid of me.

00:14:39.220 And neither one of those were a person.

00:14:42.560 And so...

00:14:43.460 Yeah, well, a project is often something that people undertake for their own self-glorification.

00:14:48.360 Precisely.

00:14:48.760 And if I'm just a mark on your checklist and I'm not actually, I'm an activity to you.

00:14:54.840 I'm not a person you're engaging with in a rational response and listening to my,

00:14:58.840 and having a rational, reasonable discussion and discourse, I'm an activity on your checklist.

00:15:03.140 And that means that I'm automatically under you.

00:15:05.680 When we have activities and we're doing things, that activity is a thing we are doing.

00:15:08.580 Yeah, well, that's the toxicity of pity.

00:15:10.860 The toxicity of pity.

00:15:11.900 It's demoralizing for that reason.

00:15:13.500 It is.

00:15:13.920 And the thing that my best friend did, and he's still my best friend to this day,

00:15:17.040 was he was the one person that saved my life by treating me like I was a respectful person that deserved help.

00:15:21.320 When did you meet him?

00:15:22.140 I met him when I was 10.

00:15:24.120 Okay, so did you have friends before the age of 10?

00:15:27.800 I, not really.

00:15:30.540 Well, it's hard with an itinerant lifestyle.

00:15:32.380 Yeah, yeah, I didn't have any real connections.

00:15:34.340 And then even after that, once they got slightly stabilized in my teen years,

00:15:39.680 the moving down slowed down a little bit.

00:15:41.160 Yeah.

00:15:41.320 I was able to stay in places for slightly longer.

00:15:43.300 I didn't really gather friends.

00:15:44.620 I got what I called disaster groupies.

00:15:46.880 They were people that wanted to kind of live vicariously through my darkness

00:15:49.720 because they didn't really have anything like me in their world.

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00:17:27.060 So, we were—there was a bunch of—

00:17:32.100 Right, so is that like a group of outcasts?

00:17:33.620 Mm-hmm.

00:17:33.940 Yeah, it was a bunch of team kids.

00:17:35.860 Yeah, so me and maybe one or two others that had a similar kind of background, because there's—

00:17:40.080 looking back, it was a bunch of depressed kids trying to navigate depression without any adult supervision.

00:17:44.140 But it was—in reality, what was going on was there was a house that one of my friends—one of my classmates at school,

00:17:50.800 his dad paid the rent, his dad bought all the food, but his dad didn't live there.

00:17:53.620 So, it was just my 16-year-old friend and his little brother that stayed there.

00:17:57.360 And so, that turned into just a flock house for a bunch of kids.

00:17:59.680 Right.

00:18:00.040 And so, that was—everybody else that was there—

00:18:02.800 And there's no older men there.

00:18:03.000 There's no guidance.

00:18:03.780 No guidance whatsoever.

00:18:05.220 And so, that turned into where all the other kids had houses and had families and could go there.

00:18:10.620 They were rebelling.

00:18:11.600 They were trying to find their own way.

00:18:13.980 These are all the other kids in the group.

00:18:14.820 All the other kids in the group.

00:18:16.140 Yeah.

00:18:16.280 They were like rebelling and stuff.

00:18:17.600 I didn't have a house to go back to.

00:18:19.560 I was going to go back and sleep in the field behind Casa Bonita in Denver.

00:18:21.880 I was going to go try to steal free samples out of the grocery store and evade my criminal family.

00:18:28.460 If I did hit my family's house, it was to grab a little bit of clothes so I could get out of there before the violence started.

00:18:34.540 So, I wasn't going home to any stability.

00:18:37.200 I was going to go live on the streets.

00:18:38.440 And I was going to go try to survive.

00:18:39.860 They all got to go home to their houses.

00:18:42.120 And so, in that—

00:18:42.720 So, you were in this right, like, neck deep.

00:18:45.080 And they were playing with it.

00:18:46.440 Yeah.

00:18:46.540 Yeah, exactly.

00:18:47.520 Exactly.

00:18:48.180 They were playing it with it.

00:18:49.680 I was living it fully.

00:18:52.120 And that kind of—they were, like, pushing me further off on the edge.

00:18:56.860 It was like a real-life Reddit forum.

00:18:58.400 It was like—

00:18:59.120 Were you getting rewarded, so to speak, for your more—the darker parts of your personality?

00:19:03.840 Yeah.

00:19:04.080 Rewarded, so to speak, in a social sense where it's like—it turns into, like, a party favor, almost.

00:19:09.480 Like, let me tell you the craziness of what happened to my family this day.

00:19:12.040 Yeah.

00:19:12.560 Yeah, and a friend like that who was extraordinarily comedic.

00:19:15.680 And he was probably the funniest person I've ever met in my life.

00:19:20.840 And it got—at one point, it got to be a burden to him because that's what people expected.

00:19:26.160 They expect it to be on and funny all the time.

00:19:28.660 Yes.

00:19:28.720 Yes.

00:19:29.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:19:29.540 I've had that time where I'm at a party and, like, oh, tell me what craziness your family went through today.

00:19:33.220 I'm like, I don't want to talk about it, dude.

00:19:34.420 I got cuts in my arms from it.

00:19:36.380 Like, I don't want to talk about this pain right now.

00:19:38.460 Yeah.

00:19:38.720 But it would turn into the fiction.

00:19:42.240 But so when we're talking about that, that leads into the toxicity of what fed my own anger, toxicity, and depression with going into that spot.

00:19:49.980 Because I, by that point, when I—that was—I started doing that when I was 14 years old.

00:19:53.500 Okay, what year is this?

00:19:55.520 So I was 14 years old.

00:19:56.780 I was born in 1979.

00:19:58.260 So we're talking—

00:19:59.640 93.

00:19:59.740 93.

00:20:00.440 93.

00:20:01.040 Okay, just to place it.

00:20:02.720 Just to place it.

00:20:03.500 And you're in Denver at this point?

00:20:04.800 Yep, Denver.

00:20:05.720 And you're 14.

00:20:06.520 14 years old, and that's when I finally left home because I couldn't deal with the violence and the crime and the beatings constantly and watching my mom stab my uncle in the gut with a doorknob.

00:20:15.540 If you take apart a doorknob, the inside gear parts.

00:20:17.920 Pointy.

00:20:18.580 Yeah.

00:20:19.080 That makes a very dangerous weapon.

00:20:20.420 Don't ever stab someone with it.

00:20:22.460 And so just violence like that constantly.

00:20:25.800 And what does constantly mean?

00:20:27.500 Like living in that fight-or-flight response every minute of every day.

00:20:30.400 How often did you see events that were violent in your house?

00:20:33.600 Three or four times daily.

00:20:34.980 And what kind of violence?

00:20:36.100 To the point where—here's an example.

00:20:38.260 I'm sitting in my bedroom, and nobody had seen that I came home from school.

00:20:42.360 Or I think I was working a day job.

00:20:44.320 I think I was 15 or 16 at the time.

00:20:45.900 I walked in, sat down in my bedroom.

00:20:47.900 Nobody heard that I was home.

00:20:49.040 I picked up the game controller, was playing PlayStation for a second, heard a rumble outside my bedroom.

00:20:53.580 And I stand outside, and my stepdad has my mom up against the wall by her throat, dangling like two feet off the ground, and he's choking her.

00:21:00.440 And so I immediately grabbed him.

00:21:02.900 I'm large.

00:21:04.200 I just had puberty, so I was getting into my body.

00:21:07.540 Grabbed him, slammed him into the microwave, broke the microwave, pushed him back, slammed him into the fridge, broke the fridge.

00:21:12.360 Pushed him back into the back wall.

00:21:13.700 Then I had him by his throat up against the wall, choking him.

00:21:16.620 And now my mom is smashing plates over the back of my head for me to drop him.

00:21:20.940 She's attacking me because I got into the fight.

00:21:23.400 So I drop him, go back to my video game, pick up the game controller, keep on playing.

00:21:27.580 Nothing happened.

00:21:28.360 Like, you go from zero to 60 instantly.

00:21:30.540 Right, right, right.

00:21:31.560 And then go back to nothing.

00:21:33.520 And do that four or five times a day.

00:21:36.980 And at the drop of a hat, stuff can go wrong.

00:21:39.820 And at the same time, dealing with my parents, their method of discipline or any kind of control was to threaten the absolute worst possible thing.

00:21:50.980 Right.

00:21:51.440 That's not discipline.

00:21:52.640 I'm going to beat you terribly.

00:21:54.140 I'm going to beat you terribly.

00:21:55.640 I'm going to kick you out.

00:21:56.580 You're going to be gone.

00:21:57.280 You're going to be out of here immediately.

00:21:58.780 And then five minutes later, act like nothing happened.

00:22:01.280 They wouldn't follow through with any kind of punishment, but act like nothing happened in that conversation at all, and we were just having a good day.

00:22:07.080 Were you ever disciplined in a manner that you regard as vaguely appropriate?

00:22:14.500 No.

00:22:15.200 No.

00:22:15.460 Never.

00:22:15.860 And when I was a kid, they had lost the ability to parent me by the time I was 12.

00:22:21.500 I didn't.

00:22:22.560 How are you going to tell me to be home by 10 o'clock when you're digging through the carpet for Crack Rock in front of me?

00:22:27.440 Yeah.

00:22:27.940 Because they didn't want to hide anything.

00:22:29.900 So they did it all right in front of me.

00:22:30.960 They would pull out the flat iron.

00:22:32.720 So why didn't they want to hide anything?

00:22:34.440 That was just my mom's philosophy.

00:22:35.620 She just didn't believe it.

00:22:37.000 So that's like a warped form of honesty.

00:22:39.360 So she, yeah, she would pull out the electric skillet with the water and the vials and the baking soda, and I watched her rock up Crack right in front of me.

00:22:45.480 I learned how to do it when I was five years old.

00:22:46.980 I took Crack to school as a so-and-tell for one of my schools.

00:22:50.180 That's not generally a very good idea.

00:22:52.000 No, it isn't.

00:22:52.520 Right, but that would also indicate how much you didn't know how strange what was going on in your family actually was.

00:22:58.040 And it was part of what built into me that help was a peril, that reaching out for help was a danger.

00:23:03.180 Okay.

00:23:03.660 That it was, because I, when I would do that, when I would, I took Crack Rock to school, and then the next day, we're out.

00:23:09.860 We moved out of state.

00:23:10.600 And so, as another example, I was really, I was very unkempt, very dirty, very smelly.

00:23:17.120 I wasn't, I never had clean clothes.

00:23:18.660 I never changed my clothes.

00:23:20.320 I would constantly be filthy.

00:23:22.240 And there was one school I was, I went to.

00:23:24.460 I must have been nine, ten years old, or really young.

00:23:28.760 And I went to the school, and on the walk to the school, I actually defecated in my pants and kept on going.

00:23:33.080 I crapped my pants and kept on going to school.

00:23:35.040 And so I walked, went to school, spent the entire day there.

00:23:37.740 Next day, I go to school, and there's a box of stuff for me, okay?

00:23:40.100 The teacher had brought a box of stuff.

00:23:41.860 They brought clothes and books and a coat and all these new school supports.

00:23:45.460 Yeah.

00:23:45.920 I take it home, and I show my mom, like, hey, check this out.

00:23:48.120 I got all this stuff.

00:23:48.780 Yeah.

00:23:49.260 The very next day, we're out.

00:23:50.240 We moved away.

00:23:51.080 Because that's the sign the teacher got too close, that someone's investigating too fast, and we need to go.

00:23:55.200 I see.

00:23:55.800 It turned into a danger signal, that if I'm, if I'm, if I reached out for help.

00:23:59.440 Someone's attending to you.

00:24:00.320 If I reached out for help, that meant that the police might get involved.

00:24:04.260 My parents might go to jail.

00:24:05.340 My brother might go to foster care.

00:24:06.680 I might go to foster care, all because I tried to get help.

00:24:09.300 Right, right.

00:24:10.100 So, okay.

00:24:11.440 So, let's go back to between one and five.

00:24:13.700 You talked a little bit about your mom and your dad.

00:24:16.060 You said your dad was particularly damaged in Vietnam.

00:24:18.700 Your mom had established a relationship with him before he went.

00:24:21.580 So, I imagine she felt somewhat beholden to him.

00:24:24.620 And also, I would imagine maybe she loved him.

00:24:27.100 Certainly, she would have felt sorry for him when he came back because he was so damaged.

00:24:30.740 And so, how did they, how did the two of them spiral into the trouble that they had?

00:24:36.720 And then, when did you and your brother come along?

00:24:39.260 So, were they married?

00:24:40.820 They were married.

00:24:41.440 They did get married.

00:24:42.140 They were married.

00:24:43.080 By the time I was born, the extreme violence had already started.

00:24:48.440 So, I'm not sure about how that spiraled in.

00:24:50.560 I have memories early on of my father sleeping on the couch.

00:24:54.720 And my mom realizing he's finally asleep.

00:24:56.700 So, she picked up a two-by-four and beat him bloody.

00:24:58.860 Beat him almost until he was dead because she tried to escape.

00:25:02.500 And she went, so she beat him.

00:25:04.620 How old do you think you are?

00:25:05.960 I was four.

00:25:07.420 And you can remember that?

00:25:08.580 I remember him beating, I remember him laying on the couch and over him slamming into him

00:25:12.380 with a two-by-four.

00:25:13.180 I remember that.

00:25:14.480 And then us going.

00:25:16.700 But then he found us.

00:25:20.200 Okay, you left, but he found us.

00:25:21.820 He found us.

00:25:22.840 And he would chase us down.

00:25:24.940 So, there's a distinct memory I have of us in a battered woman shelter.

00:25:29.780 Me and my mom and my older brother were living in a battered woman shelter.

00:25:32.240 And me and my brother were playing outside.

00:25:34.820 And a car pulls up, and my dad kidnaps me and my brother.

00:25:38.220 Takes us.

00:25:39.020 Convinces me particularly to get into the car.

00:25:40.820 I'm pretty sure my brother just followed us.

00:25:42.340 I just get in the car because it's my dad.

00:25:44.880 And so, he takes us and then calls the battered woman shelter, talks to my mom,

00:25:49.920 tells my mom that one of us are dead and the other one's going to be dead.

00:25:53.180 She doesn't show up at this restaurant to meet him.

00:25:56.840 And so, she, against the protestations of the battered woman shelter, of course,

00:26:00.160 she goes there to meet him at this restaurant.

00:26:01.820 And when she gets there, and I know the story both from vivid recounts from her from the story

00:26:07.780 and from news clippings that we had growing up.

00:26:09.780 So, she goes to the restaurant, and he's there, and he pulls, they're arguing,

00:26:16.860 and he flips the table over in the argument and pulls out his classic weapon,

00:26:20.000 which was a cross-shaped, X-shaped tire iron.

00:26:21.900 That was his weapon.

00:26:22.940 Oh, yeah.

00:26:23.620 So, he picked that up and went to go hit her with it.

00:26:26.760 And right then, everybody else in the restaurant pulled out guns and pointed them at him

00:26:29.820 because the battered woman shelter called ahead and filled it with undercover police officers.

00:26:33.100 And so, I had had a news clipping when I was a kid of my dad getting let out of a restaurant

00:26:37.780 with shotguns in his head.

00:26:39.160 Are your mom and dad still alive?

00:26:41.080 My mother is.

00:26:42.540 My father, I don't know.

00:26:44.580 And my stepdad died in 2015.

00:26:48.320 Do you still see your mom?

00:26:49.280 No, I haven't spoken to her since I came out with my story.

00:26:52.140 Last time I talked to my mom, I had just left a live TV show appearance in Denver.

00:26:58.580 I was having a really good moment.

00:27:01.020 I just was on live TV for the first time, took my daughter with me,

00:27:03.820 and she got to see a TV studio, so I was having a cool little silly moment.

00:27:05.780 How many kids do you have?

00:27:06.920 Four.

00:27:07.340 Four kids.

00:27:08.180 How old are they?

00:27:09.240 23, 20, 16, and 12.

00:27:11.660 The two older are my step.

00:27:13.000 16 is my age.

00:27:13.460 How long?

00:27:13.840 And you're married?

00:27:14.980 13 years.

00:27:15.680 13 years.

00:27:17.120 And how has your marriage been?

00:27:18.640 Great.

00:27:19.520 Fantastic.

00:27:20.300 Yeah, yeah.

00:27:20.740 Well, congratulations.

00:27:21.440 I am as happy as can be, and I successfully broke the cycle.

00:27:25.300 My family doesn't have any of the trauma that I went through.

00:27:27.620 Okay, good.

00:27:28.160 Well, we'll get into how you did that.

00:27:29.840 Okay, so now back when you were little, your mom and dad are in a very violent relationship.

00:27:34.920 They're married.

00:27:35.800 Your dad obviously wants you guys around for some reason.

00:27:39.600 I think it was more to control her.

00:27:41.560 I didn't think it had anything to do with us, because once we were gone, he didn't care.

00:27:44.700 He never came to contact.

00:27:47.380 In fact, I never had any time where dad tried to reach out.

00:27:50.120 I see.

00:27:50.400 Never had any of those loving conversations.

00:27:52.120 I don't have any loving memories with my father.

00:27:54.280 Okay, so you had no relationship.

00:27:55.260 The very first memory I have of my entire life, where I start my life, is me laying on my

00:28:00.080 bloody mom's body, looking up at my dad, screaming at him, you just killed my mom.

00:28:03.880 Oh, yeah.

00:28:04.580 That's where I start.

00:28:05.240 That's not a good, yeah.

00:28:07.200 Alfred Adler, a famous psychologist, he believed that those first memories, in some ways, are

00:28:14.080 determinative, right?

00:28:15.200 That they sort of set the frame, and so that's a hell of a first memory.

00:28:18.580 Mm-hmm.

00:28:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:19.840 Yeah.

00:28:20.000 Now, you had your older brother.

00:28:21.920 Did you have a relationship with him?

00:28:23.340 I did.

00:28:23.800 We were pretty close growing up.

00:28:24.980 Okay, so you had a male role model in the house who wasn't completely pathological.

00:28:30.720 Mm-hmm.

00:28:30.920 Do you see your brother?

00:28:32.160 I haven't talked to him since I started talking about it, but that side of the family

00:28:35.860 attacks me, not because I'm saying something that's not the truth, but just because I'm

00:28:39.200 talking.

00:28:40.500 Because I...

00:28:41.460 And your brother, as well, doesn't feel that that's appropriate?

00:28:43.920 Because I'm making my mom cry.

00:28:47.240 Because...

00:28:47.720 I see.

00:28:48.160 And so he feels that's inappropriate in relationship to your mother.

00:28:51.160 Does he still see your mother?

00:28:52.400 I believe so, yeah.

00:28:53.540 I don't know.

00:28:53.860 I haven't spoken to any of them.

00:28:55.000 I haven't spoken to that side of the family in five years.

00:28:56.720 Five years.

00:28:57.600 Five years.

00:28:58.000 Okay, so when you're little, how do you survive between one and five?

00:29:04.100 Like, you have your brother, so that's definitely a plus.

00:29:07.560 Okay, and you said that you were a very early reader, so you escaped into the world of fiction

00:29:12.240 and reading.

00:29:13.020 Yep.

00:29:13.620 Comic books and mythology.

00:29:14.600 Did you do well in school?

00:29:15.980 So I tested off the charts in my tests.

00:29:18.500 Did you pride yourself...

00:29:19.180 But I didn't do any of my assignments.

00:29:20.900 Okay.

00:29:21.360 I never did any work.

00:29:21.860 Well, that's not surprising.

00:29:22.980 Yeah.

00:29:23.600 Well, first of all, that's not all that atypical for smart kids, but you lived in

00:29:27.340 a pretty chaotic environment, so it would have been quite surprising had you managed

00:29:30.580 to buckle down and do your work.

00:29:32.240 Did you pride yourself on your intellect?

00:29:34.640 I did.

00:29:35.320 I did.

00:29:35.840 I would carry around both inches of mythology with me all the time, or giant stacks of

00:29:40.140 X-Men comic books, or the complete works of Shakespeare, and just read voraciously.

00:29:45.300 And I loved doing, like, oral reports and book reports.

00:29:49.260 And when I was in high school, at the final high school, North High in Denver, the only

00:29:55.820 two classes I ever actually attended were English class and choir class.

00:29:59.900 I would skip every other day, and I even failed those classes because of attendance rules.

00:30:04.360 Once you miss four days, you fail the semester.

00:30:06.620 Oh, yes.

00:30:06.920 And I would only attend class once every three weeks or so.

00:30:09.340 But the classes I would go to were English class and choir class.

00:30:12.200 Why choir?

00:30:13.100 Choir, because I think that actually has a superpower when it comes to kids who are depressed.

00:30:16.700 Did you sing?

00:30:17.740 I did.

00:30:18.140 I still do.

00:30:19.120 I still love singing.

00:30:20.280 Oh.

00:30:20.840 And I was in statewide choir and citywide choir and 16-person a cappella choirs.

00:30:25.120 I would always go whenever—all the schools I would go to, I would go to whatever the

00:30:28.000 advanced choir was and try out for it, because that's what I wanted to do.

00:30:31.400 What did they make of you in the choir?

00:30:32.900 Because you said you were, like, an unkempt kid.

00:30:34.880 You dressed badly.

00:30:36.320 You're dirty.

00:30:36.960 The teachers always put me in.

00:30:39.040 When I went to Oregon one time, and I managed, as a freshman in high school, to, through

00:30:43.660 a tryout, make it into the senior a cappella choir, that was just a 16-person a cappella

00:30:48.480 choir only for seniors.

00:30:49.660 And I was a freshman.

00:30:50.440 So you had literature and music to save you.

00:30:52.860 Yep.

00:30:53.200 Did you listen to a lot of music?

00:30:54.840 I did.

00:30:55.520 Lots and lots of music.

00:30:55.740 Who were your favorites?

00:30:56.520 Um, I—I'm very eclectic.

00:31:00.940 I like a wide range.

00:31:01.900 Back then, it was—I liked a lot of oldies.

00:31:03.780 I liked—I really liked the 50s music.

00:31:06.380 Yeah.

00:31:06.520 So I listened to a lot of, like, Buddy Holly.

00:31:07.800 It's very positive, eh?

00:31:08.700 The 60s music.

00:31:09.520 Yeah, I listened to a lot of, like, Buddy Holly and that kind of stuff, and the La Bamba

00:31:13.240 soundtrack.

00:31:13.920 Yeah.

00:31:14.120 I liked that a lot.

00:31:15.980 And then I didn't really like the 80s-style music, the poppy kind of stuff.

00:31:20.240 I didn't really like that.

00:31:21.080 But I got into metal when I was older.

00:31:23.440 Yeah.

00:31:23.620 So the Nine Inch Nails, Downward Spiral album is pretty much an autobiography.

00:31:28.440 Like, that's—that's pretty much how my life was going at the time.

00:31:32.360 And so it was—when I was a teen, it was Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Pantera, Tool,

00:31:38.980 that kind of stuff.

00:31:40.080 Right, right.

00:31:40.900 So the dark end of the metal spectrum.

00:31:43.600 Darker, yep.

00:31:43.900 But the more intelligent end of the metal spectrum.

00:31:45.880 Yeah, right.

00:31:46.600 I wasn't really into the death metal, screaming, anger kind.

00:31:49.420 I was into the stuff that was talking about the emotions.

00:31:51.440 I liked—I like singers that have heart.

00:31:53.720 So, like, Creedence Clearwater Revival.

00:31:55.560 Yeah.

00:31:55.920 Something where when you sing it, it feels like it's digging in your soul.

00:31:58.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:59.200 Yeah, they're great.

00:32:00.160 Their music has aged really well, too, Creedence Clearwater.

00:32:03.020 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:32:04.400 So, okay.

00:32:05.180 So, one to five, you had no relationship with your father except one that was extremely

00:32:11.580 negative.

00:32:12.200 All you saw from him was violence.

00:32:13.940 Mm-hmm.

00:32:14.180 You had some relationship with your mother.

00:32:16.120 Do you think your mother loved you?

00:32:17.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:18.260 Yeah, that's where the only time I have good memories with my mom is during that time.

00:32:22.060 Okay.

00:32:22.400 The best memory I have with my mom ever is sitting watching Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory

00:32:26.920 and singing every single song.

00:32:28.380 And we knew—I knew every word to that movie.

00:32:30.840 So, I would sit there and sing the entire movie, and we would go back and forth with the songs.

00:32:34.920 And that was the best memory of my childhood.

00:32:38.100 That's the highlight of those years.

00:32:40.720 And are you—during that time, one to five, are you playing with any kids?

00:32:45.800 Are you playing with your older brother?

00:32:46.940 Do you remember any play?

00:32:48.400 No, no, no, not really any playing.

00:32:50.400 Just reading.

00:32:51.380 I wasn't much of a player.

00:32:52.560 Everybody else would go out and play, and I'd sit with my books.

00:32:55.340 Oh, so, okay.

00:32:56.120 So, you were—now, let me ask you some questions about your personality.

00:33:00.600 Mm-hmm.

00:33:00.620 Totally.

00:33:00.960 Okay.

00:33:02.000 Introverted or extroverted?

00:33:03.660 Then or now.

00:33:06.040 That's changed, eh?

00:33:07.180 Mm-hmm.

00:33:08.340 Were you introverted before, or were you just afraid of people?

00:33:13.360 That's a good question.

00:33:14.800 I don't think I was afraid of people.

00:33:17.520 I think I was—well, back then I was, because it took a while for me to burn that out of myself.

00:33:21.720 When I—in my teen years, I think that I lost the ability to get embarrassed or ashamed or afraid of anybody, because when I was a kid, I made fun of myself more than anybody else did.

00:33:29.580 Oh, yeah, that's a good trick.

00:33:30.080 It was very self-deprecating.

00:33:31.320 Yeah, that's a good trick.

00:33:32.420 I had a better fat joke than you did, a better insult than you did.

00:33:35.240 Yeah, well, it would be surprising to me if you were introverted as a kid, because you appear to be very extroverted.

00:33:41.060 Yeah.

00:33:41.200 You smile a lot.

00:33:41.880 You talk quickly.

00:33:43.240 I think—I don't think that it would—I don't think introverted would fit, but I don't—I wasn't extroverted.

00:33:47.480 I was—I would—I kept to myself pretty much, but I liked the arts, so—

00:33:51.360 Right, right.

00:33:51.920 Okay, so maybe what happened was that your interest in literature, let's say, in the arts was so strong that if you had to choose between being with people and reading, you picked reading.

00:34:02.360 Yes, yes.

00:34:03.260 Yeah, okay.

00:34:03.660 So you're likely very—

00:34:04.620 I always wanted to learn more stuff.

00:34:05.860 I like to—even now, I'll be walking, listening to—I just finished Lawrence Krauss' book, Edge of Knowledge, which—so, like, bleeding-edge physics and science and philosophy, your podcasts.

00:34:19.260 And I listen to—I listen to a wide range of topics, and I try to—I try to get the entire spectrum of—of opinions.

00:34:26.480 So I'll listen to the farthest right, the farthest left, someone in the middle, all different sides of the topics, and try to—try to see the whole side of it.

00:34:34.980 And, yeah, so these days, I'm just—I'm all over with it.

00:34:37.960 But I don't think that back then I was introverted.

00:34:39.700 I think you might have hit the nail on that.

00:34:40.780 Yeah, well, you're—

00:34:41.580 More very old—

00:34:42.500 Tentative people.

00:34:43.540 Okay.

00:34:43.820 Are you compassionate, polite, or tough and—and—and—and—stubborn?

00:34:50.080 Yes.

00:34:50.660 Which one?

00:34:51.520 Yeah.

00:34:52.280 If you had to pick.

00:34:54.280 So, in general, I would think I'm compassionate and polite.

00:34:57.820 However, because of the—the survival mechanisms and the—the way I had to live a long time, I can turn on that hard note pretty easily, where I—I—I—I can easily cut people out of my life.

00:35:10.000 Mm-hmm.

00:35:10.240 I can easily decide that you—that it's done, and you are—you're hurting me more than you're good.

00:35:14.460 And I've given up—my philosophy these days is I give up too much time in my life to people that hurt me.

00:35:19.620 Mm-hmm.

00:35:19.800 So, I just don't do it anymore.

00:35:21.100 Mm-hmm.

00:35:21.440 And so, I—these days—

00:35:22.880 Are you likely to be taken advantage of or not?

00:35:25.860 No.

00:35:26.320 Not now.

00:35:27.060 Not now.

00:35:27.620 Not now.

00:35:28.060 Before?

00:35:28.660 I don't think so.

00:35:30.260 But I can't say no, because I might have been.

00:35:33.140 Yeah.

00:35:33.540 Okay.

00:35:33.960 I—

00:35:34.480 You said when you were in school, you never did your assignments.

00:35:37.600 Now, there are obviously situational reasons for that.

00:35:40.580 Are you—are you a conscientious person?

00:35:42.880 Dutiful?

00:35:43.620 Orderly?

00:35:44.680 Industrious?

00:35:45.360 Or more easygoing?

00:35:47.780 Kind of half and half.

00:35:49.200 Mm-hmm.

00:35:49.420 I—I tend to go—

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00:37:02.040 My wife is the one that does all the planning, so that's the best way to put it.

00:37:05.300 When I'm doing my events and stuff, my wife sets up the planning, make sure I have my interior.

00:37:08.960 She'll do the scheduling.

00:37:09.920 She'll do the scheduling.

00:37:10.860 I handle the material of it.

00:37:13.140 Yeah.

00:37:13.500 And the—I'm order detailed about certain things, but I'm very non-materialistic.

00:37:20.060 Very, very non-materialistic.

00:37:21.740 Nothing in my world matters physically.

00:37:24.140 It's all about experiences, and it's all about memories.

00:37:26.940 So, like, I've had—at more than five times in my life,

00:37:30.620 I had people burst in my bedroom at 3 o'clock in the morning with a duffel bag screaming,

00:37:33.920 I mean, we have five minutes to get out of here.

00:37:35.280 We need to grab everything and go.

00:37:37.080 And so, everything I had disappeared because the only thing I would grab—

00:37:40.320 I had time to grab was comic books.

00:37:41.820 So, I would lose all the toys I had or all the TV I had or all the different books I had.

00:37:46.700 I'd lose everything except for my comic books.

00:37:49.220 And so, over the years, nothing—none of the material stuff matters to me.

00:37:53.780 And so, it's really hard for people to buy me—like, my wife says,

00:37:57.480 I'm the hardest person to buy a Christmas present for it

00:37:59.100 because I don't want anything to give me the things that I want.

00:38:03.320 Yeah, that's about it.

00:38:06.340 Yeah.

00:38:07.120 But a memory.

00:38:08.240 Take me out on a trip.

00:38:09.280 Give me a memory.

00:38:10.200 Give me something fun.

00:38:10.920 Right, right.

00:38:11.220 So, you're very high in openness, right?

00:38:13.360 Creativity, interest in ideas, and interest in aesthetic experience.

00:38:16.560 Yep.

00:38:16.940 Yeah, so—

00:38:17.380 Love of learning.

00:38:18.060 Right, and that was one of the things that seems to have saved you,

00:38:20.660 that you could—

00:38:21.100 Yeah.

00:38:21.200 That you found that niche, and that was something you could do alone,

00:38:24.800 and you could even do that when you were moving from place to place.

00:38:27.580 Yep, and it was a deep escape.

00:38:29.800 So, there could be abject violence happening right next to me,

00:38:33.120 and I could be buried reading about what happened with Mike Crawler and the X-Men.

00:38:35.880 You ever watch the documentary Crumb?

00:38:38.460 Yep, I love Crumb.

00:38:39.660 Albert Crumb?

00:38:40.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:38:41.220 Or Robert Crumb.

00:38:41.760 Robert Crumb.

00:38:42.540 Well, Crumb, you know, what Crumb did reminds me a bit of what you did

00:38:46.000 because he took refuge in his RRT, and that really saved him.

00:38:49.460 You know, he had a life.

00:38:50.260 He had a wife, he had a child, he had a career.

00:38:53.180 I mean, Jesus, he's got a dark side that time.

00:38:55.840 And he came from one brutal family, man.

00:38:58.740 It's rough.

00:38:59.920 So, but he had that creative escape that sounds like it was there for you.

00:39:04.240 Yep.

00:39:04.460 Okay, so we covered a bit of your life from one to five,

00:39:08.420 and you talked about things starting to turn on you around eight, something like that.

00:39:15.140 Yeah, so that's when we got—so there's three steps in that, right?

00:39:19.180 From five to seven, there's like three steps that happened.

00:39:22.500 Okay.

00:39:22.600 Because the way my mom did it is she escaped my father by sending me—

00:39:27.900 I don't know how she actually got rid of him because we went to Oregon.

00:39:31.040 She sent me and my brother to Oregon for a year by ourselves,

00:39:34.560 just flew us out to Oregon to go live with grandparents.

00:39:36.580 With grandparents.

00:39:37.120 Oh, and did you have a relationship with your grandparents?

00:39:39.660 With my grandmother, yes.

00:39:41.380 But that was one of the most toxic times of my life in that year of Oregon

00:39:45.160 because that sent me out to go live with my pedophile rapist uncle.

00:39:49.260 That's right during that time.

00:39:51.540 So there was no escape during that.

00:39:53.040 No escaping that.

00:39:54.100 And that's when I figured out that that trauma hill is huge in my family,

00:39:57.480 that there's a large mountain of abuse.

00:39:59.580 Like, my grandfather, his name is H.L.

00:40:02.620 because that's the only two letters that his mom knew how to write when he was born

00:40:05.420 because she gave birth at 13 in the Ozarks.

00:40:08.420 So she—that trauma hill is big.

00:40:12.160 And that they—so it wasn't positive at all.

00:40:15.260 And so when we finally came back from that, after a year of that,

00:40:17.760 my mom brought us back and she had got with my stepdad.

00:40:20.600 And my stepdad was a smooth-talking—

00:40:22.700 Did she divorce your father?

00:40:24.840 I think.

00:40:26.480 I don't know.

00:40:27.700 I think she did.

00:40:28.100 But she's with another guy.

00:40:29.400 This is now your stepdad.

00:40:30.800 Yep, yep.

00:40:31.880 And so he is a smooth-talking criminal.

00:40:37.040 He is a manipulating, lying, smooth-talking,

00:40:42.560 can-sell-on-ice-to-an-eskimo kind of guy.

00:40:44.120 He's the kind of guy that will lie and steal every day all the time.

00:40:48.560 Right, right.

00:40:49.340 But also gets heavily involved into drinking.

00:40:52.100 When I met him, he was in prison for a strong-arm robbery.

00:40:55.660 He spent four years in prison for a strong-arm robbery.

00:40:57.580 He would steal entire delivery trucks that were going to grocery stores

00:41:00.240 and take all the stuff and go sell it at the flea market.

00:41:02.020 So why do you think your mother picked him?

00:41:04.460 And do you know how they met?

00:41:06.100 I mean, she's already hanging around in the dark side of the planet.

00:41:09.620 So I imagine she had the opportunity to run into people like him.

00:41:12.960 I think they met at a bar.

00:41:14.240 And I think when they met at a bar, he heard about my father and was like,

00:41:18.220 oh, yeah, I'll keep him away.

00:41:19.320 And it started as a protective thing.

00:41:22.760 I see.

00:41:23.320 So she found one monster to keep another one at bay.

00:41:26.080 Yep.

00:41:26.860 Aha.

00:41:27.380 Do you think that he was a project for her or an adventure?

00:41:30.580 No.

00:41:31.040 No.

00:41:31.420 No, you think the protection thing was genuine?

00:41:33.640 I think the protection thing was genuine at first,

00:41:36.140 and then it turned into a trauma bond from all the drugs.

00:41:40.400 So he might have, you said he was a narcissistic manipulator.

00:41:43.880 Very.

00:41:43.940 He offered her an escape that was false.

00:41:46.820 Yes.

00:41:47.620 Yes.

00:41:48.120 Right.

00:41:48.440 And, okay, and she stayed with him for how long?

00:41:51.400 Until he died.

00:41:52.360 He died in 2017 in the most, 16 or 17, in the most fitting way possible.

00:41:58.020 That drunken, drugged-out violence never stopped in my family.

00:42:02.200 And they were having an argument while they were high and drunk,

00:42:05.200 and he went to the bathroom, had an aneurysm, collapsed on the floor,

00:42:07.720 and crapped all over himself.

00:42:09.140 Laid there for three hours while she screamed at him from the living room how worthless he was.

00:42:12.040 I really can't think of a more fitting way for the guy to end.

00:42:16.280 That's...

00:42:16.760 Why did she stay with him?

00:42:18.440 Why did she stay with him?

00:42:19.680 Yeah.

00:42:20.620 Because she had severe lack of self-respect and sense of self-accomplishment.

00:42:29.780 She didn't think she could do it.

00:42:31.240 She didn't think she could survive without him.

00:42:32.640 She thought that she was broken and couldn't do anything without her.

00:42:34.720 And he, over the years, had kind of built that into her.

00:42:39.520 Right, right.

00:42:40.300 I see.

00:42:40.900 And it's just...

00:42:41.740 She just thought that he was indispensable, and she couldn't do anything without him.

00:42:44.940 And so we tried...

00:42:45.820 Did she have any relations?

00:42:46.940 Me and my brother tried to have interventions.

00:42:48.340 I personally had an intervention with him.

00:42:50.140 By the age of 14, 15 years old, I'm big in beating him up now.

00:42:53.720 Because like I said, I was gone from home.

00:42:55.720 I was living on the streets.

00:42:56.640 But I was home occasionally because I had to come home to recharge.

00:42:59.200 Okay, so when were you with your grandparents?

00:43:01.420 13?

00:43:01.620 That was...

00:43:02.480 No, I was with my grandparents from 5 to 6.

00:43:04.880 Oh, so, okay, 5 to 6.

00:43:06.360 And then, so, first to 5, father, one year with my grandfather, and then back home with my stepdad.

00:43:13.300 With your stepdad.

00:43:14.000 And then it was my stepdad on...

00:43:15.240 And when did you get big?

00:43:18.620 13 years old.

00:43:20.280 Oh, how big?

00:43:21.720 6 foot, 280 pounds.

00:43:23.380 Oh, yeah.

00:43:23.940 Oh, yeah.

00:43:24.320 So that was handy.

00:43:26.400 I got big fast.

00:43:28.580 Right, right.

00:43:29.380 But I was also quiet, shy, and sensitive.

00:43:31.680 Didn't know how to use it at the time.

00:43:32.920 So I got picked on constantly.

00:43:34.020 I used to go to school and get bullied all the time.

00:43:37.260 I would get beaten at school, come home with bruises all over me, and I never defended

00:43:41.480 myself.

00:43:42.180 I would never stand up for myself.

00:43:43.580 Why didn't you defend yourself?

00:43:45.080 I don't know.

00:43:46.260 I started defending myself one day when I snapped.

00:43:49.640 And a kid had slammed my head into a locker, and I picked him up and kind of ragdolled him

00:43:53.380 and slammed him a bunch of times.

00:43:55.100 And I noticed that when I did that, after that, for the next four or five months I was

00:43:59.520 at the school, I didn't have anybody bothering me.

00:44:00.560 Right, right, right.

00:44:01.680 So that was the first time you realized that, eh?

00:44:03.720 Why do you think it happened then and hadn't happened before, despite the fact that you

00:44:07.820 were bullied?

00:44:08.500 I don't know.

00:44:09.540 I don't know.

00:44:10.000 I think it might have been because the chaos at home was really starting to spin up.

00:44:15.500 That's right about the same time.

00:44:17.000 Hit your limit.

00:44:17.840 You know, have you ever read about people going berserk?

00:44:21.120 Some.

00:44:22.120 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:23.780 Well, it often happens to people who are in a very chaotic environment, who are being abused

00:44:28.420 continually, and they hit their threshold, and it's something like a last-ditch do-or-die

00:44:34.660 response, right?

00:44:35.840 It's like, well, I've tried to retreat.

00:44:38.500 That's not working.

00:44:39.780 I'm cornered.

00:44:41.180 I've got nothing to lose.

00:44:42.680 It's a very dangerous position to put someone in.

00:44:46.320 And that's where I ended up being at the end of the story.

00:44:48.960 Yeah, I bet.

00:44:49.940 I bet.

00:44:50.520 Okay, so at 13, you're fairly large, and you learned one day at school that if you...

00:44:56.780 So that happened when I was about eight or nine, when I ragged all that cake, because

00:45:01.220 I was still pretty big.

00:45:02.720 I was by that...

00:45:03.380 That was when I was about five and a half foot tall and still pretty large.

00:45:06.780 I was growing into my body at that point.

00:45:08.160 Right.

00:45:08.560 So I was still pretty big.

00:45:09.400 So that's pretty tall for eight.

00:45:09.960 Big for eight.

00:45:10.540 That was when I first figured out that if I've lashed out, that people would leave me alone.

00:45:15.680 I also, right around that same time, figured out that one of the first things...

00:45:19.240 I would kind of do the reverse of what people talk about when they're going to prison.

00:45:22.620 You know when they talk about going to prison, they're going up to the biggest guy and try

00:45:25.280 to fight him and then establish a rule.

00:45:26.680 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:27.340 I would kind of do the opposite.

00:45:28.280 I'd go up to the biggest, the most popular kid and then insult myself to him.

00:45:31.780 And then...

00:45:32.440 And make fun of myself to that kid.

00:45:34.700 Uh-huh.

00:45:35.180 And kind of like establish the pecking order immediately.

00:45:37.360 Like I'd go find the biggest, whoever the ringleader is.

00:45:40.960 You did it with humor.

00:45:42.080 Yeah.

00:45:42.740 Well, kind of.

00:45:43.700 Self-deprecating humor that nobody else found funny but me.

00:45:46.820 That kind of insulting, kind of like...

00:45:49.280 I see.

00:45:49.780 So you got the pecking order problem over with as fast as you possibly could.

00:45:52.760 As fast as possibly could.

00:45:53.700 And you were willing at that point to accept a relatively low social position.

00:45:58.180 I knew I was.

00:45:59.260 By that point, I had internalized that I was the low social person.

00:46:01.980 I see.

00:46:02.500 I see.

00:46:02.860 So you thought you might as well just get it over with quickly.

00:46:05.120 Yeah.

00:46:05.700 Yeah.

00:46:06.280 I'm going to end up...

00:46:07.100 Well, then you don't have the conflict.

00:46:08.660 Yeah.

00:46:09.280 Exactly.

00:46:10.000 Uh-huh.

00:46:10.280 The sooner I can resolve it, the less fights I can.

00:46:11.840 Right, right, right.

00:46:12.720 Definitely.

00:46:12.980 The less bullying I'm going to go through.

00:46:14.380 If I can establish myself right there and make it...

00:46:17.020 And if I can do that and make fun of myself, I'm not an appealing target.

00:46:20.940 Because bullies only want to go after you if they get a response out of you and they

00:46:24.300 can make you cry.

00:46:24.740 So did that generally mean that you were left alone, even though you were at low man on

00:46:29.380 the totem pole?

00:46:30.100 Kind of.

00:46:31.000 But it was more left alone at a stabilized level of ridicule.

00:46:35.700 Okay.

00:46:36.460 Like left alone down here.

00:46:38.540 Yeah.

00:46:39.080 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:39.600 You know what I mean?

00:46:40.060 Yeah, yeah.

00:46:40.480 I know.

00:46:40.560 Like it's not left alone entirely like hands off.

00:46:43.260 He's okay.

00:46:43.660 We can't make fun of him anymore.

00:46:44.820 Right.

00:46:45.080 It's like we're going to make fun of him right here.

00:46:46.740 But we're not going to pick on him down there because he's not going to cry.

00:46:49.560 There's no fun in that.

00:46:51.000 Right.

00:46:51.260 So it's predictable, low status.

00:46:53.680 Predictable, low status.

00:46:55.280 Yeah, that's a good one.

00:46:56.000 Yeah.

00:46:56.200 Well, you see this.

00:46:57.100 You see that in primate social troops, too, is that sometimes this is one indication of

00:47:02.860 that is sometimes if an interloper comes in who could disrupt the whole hierarchy, you

00:47:09.360 might think that that would be useful for the lower ranking primates because they would

00:47:14.300 have an opportunity to move up.

00:47:16.060 But they'll generally resist the interloper, too, because the cost of social transition,

00:47:21.060 the conflict that goes along with social transition, the cost of that can be so high

00:47:25.280 that they would rather settle for the stable, low status than the unpredictable transition.

00:47:31.800 Yes.

00:47:32.180 That's a precise, that's a very apt description of what was going on with that.

00:47:35.800 I would rather just be what I think I am.

00:47:38.320 I'm the worthless one.

00:47:39.200 I'm the one you're going to make fun of anyway.

00:47:40.460 I'm the fat, smelly one.

00:47:41.880 Let's get this out of the way.

00:47:43.240 And then I can go ahead and try to live, try to be, I'm going to be out of here less

00:47:47.080 than six months anyway because I'm pretty sure my family's going to evaporate soon anyway.

00:47:50.140 Right, so it's temporary.

00:47:51.140 So let's just get this out of the way and we'll go.

00:47:53.740 And while you're doing that, you're solving yourself, so to speak, with books and so forth.

00:47:58.100 Yeah.

00:47:58.620 Right.

00:47:59.080 Yeah.

00:47:59.360 Right, so you have a life.

00:48:00.740 And right around then, that's when I really started to get more and more toxic.

00:48:04.080 And I really started to, between 9 and 13 was really when I started to become more, not toxic in an attacking way,

00:48:16.860 not like insulting everybody I'm around, just unappealing and filthy and off-putting

00:48:23.720 and, and, and just, just like, kind of like give off almost a xenophobic reaction.

00:48:30.920 Like, like, kind of like just don't want to touch it kind of thing.

00:48:33.660 Were you bitter?

00:48:35.180 I think, I think looking back, yeah, I think I was.

00:48:37.780 Well, you had reason to be.

00:48:39.120 Yeah.

00:48:39.200 I mean, it would be surprising if you weren't.

00:48:40.320 I didn't think I was then.

00:48:42.180 What did you think then?

00:48:43.380 I think I was just living, I, I, I didn't have, I didn't think that there was a tomorrow then.

00:48:48.220 But I would regularly say that I felt my life was like I was watching a movie.

00:48:52.540 Like it was, like I'm sitting in the audience watching my movie pass by and it sucks.

00:48:56.620 And I don't have any real control over it.

00:48:58.720 Like I, what, another description I would use is like I'm living in a tsunami of pain.

00:49:02.360 Like I'm just sloshing back and forth.

00:49:03.620 Like I don't, my feet are on the ground.

00:49:05.040 Well, that first, that first response, that's called derealization.

00:49:08.380 It's a symptom of trauma, which is to see your existence as separate from you.

00:49:14.420 Right?

00:49:14.780 The derealization is that this isn't, and I don't know if this accurately sums up what you're saying,

00:49:20.300 but that this isn't real, right?

00:49:21.880 Yeah.

00:49:22.220 You're like a watcher.

00:49:23.520 Yeah.

00:49:23.900 Yeah.

00:49:24.180 It was, felt very unreal.

00:49:25.660 It felt very much like I am not in my movie.

00:49:29.320 I'm sitting in the audience and my movie is passing me by.

00:49:31.940 And every now and then it pulls me into a scene and I have to be in it, but I'm not,

00:49:35.240 I'm not, I don't have any script in this.

00:49:37.800 I'm not engaged in this at all.

00:49:39.120 Well, yeah.

00:49:40.080 Well, that would also be reflective, at least in part of the fact that you had almost no agency.

00:49:44.780 Yeah.

00:49:45.180 Right.

00:49:45.460 I mean, you're being pulled from place to place.

00:49:47.420 It's not surprising that you felt that things around you were going on despite you because they were.

00:49:54.600 Yeah.

00:49:55.280 Yeah.

00:49:55.640 So, and that's a very difficult thing to contend with when you're like nine.

00:49:59.380 Yeah.

00:49:59.960 Yeah.

00:50:00.340 And, and my brother at the same time is getting a little more family status because he is assuming the responsibility.

00:50:08.440 He's the one that's handling getting the houses when we're getting evicted.

00:50:11.540 And he's the one that's handling the fixing the car.

00:50:13.520 And he's, and he's also joining in.

00:50:15.620 So he starts doing drugs with my family and he starts drinking with them.

00:50:19.120 He's really early on.

00:50:20.180 He just joins in.

00:50:21.440 So.

00:50:21.520 You don't?

00:50:21.960 I don't.

00:50:22.720 I don't at all.

00:50:23.660 I didn't.

00:50:23.900 Why not?

00:50:24.380 I just, I found it very unappealing.

00:50:26.740 Found it.

00:50:27.020 I, I, I would sit and watch those guys do it.

00:50:29.140 And I just, it was, I never understood why you would sit there.

00:50:32.720 Did you drink?

00:50:33.300 I, not until I was in my twenties.

00:50:36.200 Oh, is that, well, that was, that was a wise choice because you would have been in real trouble,

00:50:40.360 especially if you would have started.

00:50:41.240 Only drug I did as a teenager was LSD.

00:50:43.400 Uh-huh.

00:50:43.740 I tripped LSD when I was 16 years old, but I didn't, I didn't smoke weed till I was 19.

00:50:49.560 Uh-huh.

00:50:50.140 Yeah.

00:50:50.920 Uh-huh.

00:50:51.580 Okay.

00:50:52.000 So now you're starting to change somewhat dramatically around eight.

00:50:56.920 You said you start to become markedly, consciously unappealing.

00:51:01.180 Yeah.

00:51:01.320 Trying to turn people off, do you think?

00:51:03.800 But, or, it started unconscious and then gradually, and not, I wouldn't even say gradually.

00:51:08.900 It moved into conscious, yes.

00:51:10.420 Okay, and what, so what, what were your conscious strategies and thoughts at that time?

00:51:15.940 I wouldn't bathe.

00:51:17.000 I wouldn't change my clothes.

00:51:18.460 I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I wouldn't brush my teeth.

00:51:21.560 I would say the really inappropriate things about myself and about what was going on.

00:51:27.680 I would describe the stuff I was seeing in my house, like blatantly around people.

00:51:31.980 And it was the, just trying to be, and I think it was, again, trying to establish that social pecking order on a constant basis.

00:51:43.480 Well, it's also an attempt, it looks like an attempt also, to bring what was happening to you anyways under some degree of voluntary control.

00:51:51.540 Right?

00:51:52.020 You didn't, there wasn't any obvious way for you to improve it.

00:51:56.740 But one way to control it was to take, well, you might think, to take ownership of it.

00:52:01.580 And I don't know what that is, though, to make it even worse, you know, because in some ways you're spiting yourself.

00:52:07.380 Well, people will do that.

00:52:08.800 They'll punish themselves for being low status, for example.

00:52:12.300 Yeah.

00:52:12.740 Yeah.

00:52:13.160 So.

00:52:13.440 Yeah.

00:52:13.760 And I knew that I belonged there.

00:52:15.440 And I, and I really internalized that.

00:52:17.600 And the.

00:52:18.800 Right.

00:52:19.100 So then you're not worth taking care of either.

00:52:21.220 No, I wasn't worth taking care of at all.

00:52:23.000 Okay.

00:52:23.240 And, and the, at the same time, the violence and chaos at home is getting worse and worse.

00:52:28.280 Right.

00:52:28.480 Like that's, they are now entering late stage crack addiction and massive problems with alcoholism.

00:52:34.460 And the, the degradation of the, when you're an early drug addict, it's all right because your body might be able to do it.

00:52:41.420 But when you're 15 years in, you're, you're not as resilient and you're.

00:52:46.720 You could imagine, you could imagine you had a choice to make.

00:52:49.780 Imagine this is the choice.

00:52:50.720 It's something like either there's something wrong with you and that's why what's happening to you makes sense.

00:52:58.640 Or there's something unbelievably wrong with almost everyone in your family that goes back multiple generations.

00:53:06.400 That's so deep that it's terrifying.

00:53:08.520 And that's the decision that I made.

00:53:09.880 That's, that's what I mean when I say I changed because that's the decision that flipped.

00:53:13.320 I went from thinking that it was me to realizing that it was that.

00:53:16.960 Between 19 and 20.

00:53:22.060 Okay.

00:53:22.260 So that was, that was, that was what switched on you.

00:53:24.720 Okay.

00:53:25.200 Now you, you've talked publicly quite a bit about violent, the violent school shooter fantasies.

00:53:32.140 Okay.

00:53:32.580 So detail that out to me.

00:53:34.380 Do it chronologically so I can understand.

00:53:36.680 And so we'll go philosophy as well, because you're smart.

00:53:39.160 So the probability that you had a philosophy is very high.

00:53:42.580 So I'd like to know all of that.

00:53:44.140 So the, the, well, we'll start around the 14 years old age when I'm living with that disaster

00:53:49.480 be house where all the teenagers are there because that's right around when that starts.

00:53:52.300 Right.

00:53:52.600 Now you've got a gang.

00:53:54.140 Kind of.

00:53:54.700 Yeah.

00:53:55.180 We'll call it a gang.

00:53:56.100 Yeah.

00:53:56.280 That's a good way to put it.

00:53:56.940 Um, and so I've, I've got, I've got enablers, let's say, psychological enablers with that.

00:54:04.020 And so I am, I've now fully embraced that I'm the dirty, fat, right.

00:54:09.360 Right.

00:54:09.980 Right.

00:54:10.080 I like worn, wrap the darkness around me like a blanket and it's, it's, it's become my personality.

00:54:15.120 And now I, the, I started self-harming right around 14 years old.

00:54:20.980 What were you doing?

00:54:22.140 Cutting.

00:54:22.400 I would start with light cuts on my arms and it started, I think, as an emotional regulatory

00:54:27.300 thing where it would calm the tsunami.

00:54:30.000 It would, it would, when, when I felt like I was completely out of control and did you

00:54:34.260 have to draw blood?

00:54:35.460 Yeah.

00:54:36.100 So let me ask you something about that.

00:54:38.200 Cause I've wondered about that.

00:54:39.320 I've had clients who self-harmed.

00:54:41.160 I'm wondering, tell me what you think of this hypothesis.

00:54:43.960 So imagine, know that time you snapped.

00:54:46.920 So you could say you're out for blood.

00:54:48.780 Okay.

00:54:49.180 So imagine that there's a part of your brain, a relatively primordial part associated with

00:54:55.000 defensive aggression, which if pushed will only be satisfied with the sight of blood.

00:55:02.480 Well, so, because it's been, it's very common that people who self-harm will state very specifically

00:55:08.180 that unless they draw blood, they won't read, they won't calm down.

00:55:12.320 Yeah, no, that's, it's, it's, that's the, because it wasn't finished.

00:55:17.480 If you don't, if you didn't draw blood, you didn't do it.

00:55:19.220 And that was, that was very much, it started with very light superficial.

00:55:22.860 It's like a sacrificial gesture to offer blood up to the gods of emotional storm.

00:55:27.920 In a way, yeah.

00:55:28.960 And it would, and emotional storm is a good way to put it because it would really, it

00:55:32.400 would calm the tsunami.

00:55:33.420 It would like lower the thing.

00:55:34.980 It would maybe even not lower.

00:55:36.860 It would kind of like cut through that, that fuzz with something that was concrete in mine.

00:55:42.180 And even though I knew it was destructive and I knew doing it, it was bad.

00:55:45.600 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:46.500 It was still mine and it was real and nothing else in my life felt like it was real.

00:55:52.160 And so that, that little bit.

00:55:53.980 Well, blood is real.

00:55:55.160 Yeah, yeah.

00:55:56.060 And the scars afterwards are real and the pain was real and the cuts out, the scabs were real.

00:56:00.820 And all of that.

00:56:01.400 So that's interesting too, because that means that it also stood as an antithesis,

00:56:05.820 perhaps to that sense of derealization that you had.

00:56:09.320 Yeah.

00:56:09.760 And I was also at that time feeling a strong sense of, of anger at a complete lack of accountability

00:56:16.120 for anybody in my world.

00:56:18.800 Nobody in my world had any accountability, responsibility for anything.

00:56:22.780 When stuff went wrong, they didn't have to deal with it.

00:56:24.920 They evaporated and started over.

00:56:26.360 They didn't have to deal with the ramifications of the hell they were causing.

00:56:29.820 They just continued and continued and continued.

00:56:32.500 Why do you suppose that bothered you and not them?

00:56:34.860 I don't know.

00:56:36.300 That, I don't know.

00:56:37.380 I, it really, it really did start to bother me though.

00:56:39.500 That was a thing that was really getting to me.

00:56:40.720 Right.

00:56:40.900 So that's a violation.

00:56:42.180 Yeah, yeah.

00:56:42.620 Well, I can understand that, you know.

00:56:44.060 The complete lack of accountability.

00:56:45.660 Yeah.

00:56:45.940 When I see people in my life, in various places, failing to be held accountable for their pathological

00:56:54.440 actions, it's, I find that very, very difficult.

00:56:56.960 Especially when there's no, not even any self-reliability, not like, not self-reliability, self-acknowledgement.

00:57:03.960 Yeah.

00:57:04.520 Not even any self-awareness that this is what's going on.

00:57:07.240 Right.

00:57:07.260 It's like a, to me, it's a violation of the intrinsic moral order.

00:57:10.720 Yes, it's a violation of our social contract.

00:57:12.720 Yeah.

00:57:13.160 That we are supposed to at least engage in a rational, in a normal way where I'm supposed

00:57:16.680 to, if you say you're going to do something, I can reasonably accept that that's what you're

00:57:20.040 going to do, not that you're lying to me and doing something else entirely behind my back.

00:57:23.260 Yeah, right, right.

00:57:23.280 And then getting away with it.

00:57:24.140 And then getting away with it and smiling and doing it again and enjoying the fact that

00:57:27.240 that happened.

00:57:27.780 Oh, yeah.

00:57:28.240 Like, reveling over it.

00:57:28.760 That's rough, man.

00:57:29.180 Like, I had to sit and listen to them laugh about how the lies that they were doing and

00:57:33.000 how my stepdad was stealing.

00:57:34.480 He worked at a, he would lose jobs over and over again because he would get a job, steal

00:57:38.220 everything from the job and go sell it and then lose the job again.

00:57:40.220 Right.

00:57:40.420 And I would sit and laugh and listen to them revel about that and laugh about that stuff.

00:57:43.780 And it would just make me angry.

00:57:44.780 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:45.520 And so I'm now in this.

00:57:46.560 Yeah, well, everyone that a psychopathic thief robs is a fool.

00:57:52.080 That's how they justify it.

00:57:53.420 Well, if you're so stupid I can steal from you, then you're so stupid that you deserve it.

00:57:58.060 Exactly.

00:57:58.400 Right, everyone's a rube and everyone's a target and the person who's doing it is smarter

00:58:02.780 than everyone else.

00:58:03.800 Now, take that phenomenon and apply that in that dynamic to a depressed kid.

00:58:08.300 If you're depressed, you deserve it because you're the worthless one and you should have

00:58:10.800 deserved it.

00:58:11.380 Yeah, so you're in a weird situation there because on the one hand, you feel that strongly

00:58:16.380 that people should be held accountable for their moral shortcomings.

00:58:20.220 But on the other hand, you've accepted your role somewhat perversely as low status.

00:58:26.360 You've started to, in some way, revel in it.

00:58:30.360 A little bit, yeah.

00:58:31.320 Well, you've adopted it voluntarily and you said you were pushing it to its limit.

00:58:35.120 You said you wrapped the darkness around it like a cloak.

00:58:36.980 Yeah, no, it became a definite, not only personality trait, but survival technique.

00:58:43.020 Right.

00:58:43.420 Well, it's an identity as well.

00:58:44.740 It was an identity.

00:58:45.360 It worked in this house that you were in.

00:58:47.680 It was.

00:58:48.040 Yes, I was the dark unicorn in that house where they didn't have anything like me.

00:58:52.120 But at the same time, I was living three parallel lives at that exact moment, okay?

00:58:56.500 Because at that house, dark unicorn, where all the pain I was going through turned into

00:59:00.120 a party favor.

00:59:00.880 It turned into some weird positive in a negative way.

00:59:03.520 Yeah.

00:59:04.060 Like negative, positive toxicity.

00:59:06.000 Yeah, I've actually seen people like that.

00:59:07.680 And so there's that side.

00:59:09.580 Yeah.

00:59:09.700 Then I have my home life where it's just abject hell and now I'm the worst and now I'm the

00:59:12.760 bottom and I'm the cast off and I shouldn't even be there in the first place.

00:59:15.140 Why the hell am I even in the house?

00:59:16.480 Then I have the other side, which is I met at 12 years old, which is Mike.

00:59:20.940 And when I went to Mike's house, Mike, so it's a very important character to bring him

00:59:25.320 in the story right now.

00:59:26.160 So I met Mike when I was, he was 10, I was 12.

00:59:29.520 We met at a comic shop.

00:59:30.440 We bonded over comic books.

00:59:31.380 We met, we played, we met playing the original Mortal Kombat 1 video game to time it out to see

00:59:36.220 what time it was.

00:59:37.000 But we immediately bonded the first day we met, immediately hooked.

00:59:41.800 I went to his house, I basically never left.

00:59:43.620 We just, deep conversations.

00:59:45.460 How old were you?

00:59:45.900 I was 12, he was 10.

00:59:47.120 Oh yeah.

00:59:47.720 Oh yeah.

00:59:48.020 And so we just hooked up and I just basically never left his house for a week.

00:59:51.140 Why did his parents put up with you?

00:59:52.960 They were really, at the time, they were super sweet.

00:59:55.840 They lived in a giant four-story house.

00:59:58.500 They were both really well off.

00:59:59.720 His dad was a computer programmer, his mom was a lawyer, very well to do.

01:00:03.580 Um, he was, he was just, they thought that I was just a sweet kid down the street.

01:00:08.380 I lived at the opposite end of the, one of the blocks at that time.

01:00:11.280 So, at the opposite end of the block of one of the houses I lived in, is what I meant.

01:00:14.060 And so, we just bonded immediately, became good friends.

01:00:17.380 And it started where we were, I would stay there for weeks and his parents were fine with it.

01:00:22.760 And then over the years, I'd stay there for a couple days and they were okay with it.

01:00:25.140 By the time I'm 15, 16 years old, I can't stay there anymore because now I'm really dirty and filthy.

01:00:30.640 And if I sit on their couch, they have to clean it when I stand out.

01:00:32.660 I see, so you're, I see, so you weren't so bad at the beginning.

01:00:35.680 Mm-hmm.

01:00:36.500 I, okay.

01:00:37.200 It was an arc.

01:00:37.540 I was wondering why they would put up with you, but I get the picture now.

01:00:40.520 So, you were a more or less ordinary kid, as far as they were concerned, when the relationship started.

01:00:44.620 I was just, his kid's, his son's friend at the start, and I was having a rough life, so they were going to try to give me all the good.

01:00:50.040 I see, okay.

01:00:50.760 And then over the years, as I went from 12 to 13, 14, 15, that arc, that abusive arc I was going on made me go down and made that.

01:00:58.760 And what's Mike doing during the time that you're declining?

01:01:01.380 He, the whole time I've been friends with Mike, he's never treated me like anything but an equal.

01:01:07.200 Mm-hmm.

01:01:07.480 Mike did, Mike would tell me constantly, you're a good kid.

01:01:10.440 Can I have language in this podcast?

01:01:11.740 You say whatever you want.

01:01:12.820 You're a good kid in a shit world, he would say over and over.

01:01:14.980 Yeah.

01:01:15.140 You're a good kid in a shit world.

01:01:16.500 And he, that was like a constant refrain where he would tell me all the time and over at his house.

01:01:21.940 And we would, he would listen to me about my pain I was in, listen to all the abuse.

01:01:27.680 And it was right around that time when the self-harm started, he would notice that I would come in with cuts and he wouldn't really ask, but he would just like, dude, you're going to be okay.

01:01:37.480 He would try to tell me that.

01:01:38.640 And, but I'm also spinning out because I'm only there for a couple hours and I go out and my world is very chaotic.

01:01:44.820 I'm living through the normal part of you.

01:01:46.360 The normal part of my world is shrinking.

01:01:47.900 It's shrinking.

01:01:48.280 It's Mike.

01:01:49.040 Shrinking very quickly.

01:01:50.160 Yeah.

01:01:50.500 Okay.

01:01:51.200 And so I'm, the self-harm starts getting really bad, like deeper, deeper cuts.

01:01:56.680 And I can't stay at Mike's house because his parents won't let me there.

01:02:00.900 I'm too filthy.

01:02:01.860 Yeah.

01:02:02.100 And I'm burning out the rest of the friendship.

01:02:03.940 And then that disaster group of friends house ends in one incident where I'm having a big party.

01:02:09.700 There's like 20 kids there and all these kids from the school.

01:02:12.580 And there's even a band from one of the kids.

01:02:13.860 It's just at the house.

01:02:14.720 At that house.

01:02:15.280 We're at the big, big party.

01:02:16.900 And then right in the middle of it, there's like 13 kids tripping acid.

01:02:20.020 The parents arrive.

01:02:21.640 So party's over.

01:02:23.700 All the kids have to go home.

01:02:25.140 All the other kids get to go home.

01:02:26.880 I get to go sleep in the field behind Casa Bonita because that's the one last refuge,

01:02:30.880 the spot where if I couldn't, didn't have anywhere else to be, if I couldn't go to Mike's house behind

01:02:35.200 Casa Bonita, which is a big Mexican restaurant in Denver that if you ever watched the show,

01:02:38.760 South Park did an episode on Casa Bonita.

01:02:40.440 It's a big, and that episode is actually accurate.

01:02:42.820 It's got pink restaurant with its cliff divers.

01:02:44.500 It's really weird.

01:02:45.400 But behind there, there was a field.

01:02:47.400 And in the field, there was a little dip.

01:02:48.680 So if you laid in, you couldn't see it from the street.

01:02:50.660 So I was kind of invisible, little camping area.

01:02:53.000 And so that was one of the last places that I could be.

01:02:58.080 And so they got to go home.

01:03:00.140 I got to go there.

01:03:01.220 And so when that happened, that really sent me off on a really dark spin where that was

01:03:08.360 kind of like my last support that I had been staying at.

01:03:11.140 Right, right.

01:03:11.660 Because I couldn't go home because the violence at home was really bad at that time.

01:03:14.600 Like they were in the midst of a crack binge for months.

01:03:18.440 They were really, really bad.

01:03:20.180 And so I couldn't go home at all for more than an hour.

01:03:22.520 Right.

01:03:23.140 And so I'm now homeless.

01:03:25.300 Yeah, right.

01:03:25.880 And you don't have Mike.

01:03:26.880 I don't have Mike.

01:03:27.500 Either.

01:03:28.340 No.

01:03:28.680 And by this point, instead of sleeping in his house, the only place I can go, he lets me

01:03:32.420 sleep into his tool shed.

01:03:33.880 Mm-hmm.

01:03:34.300 Because in his tool shed behind his house, they had a big recliner chair they had in storage,

01:03:39.280 like a big, lazy boy.

01:03:40.500 Mm-hmm.

01:03:40.700 And so I would go in there.

01:03:41.740 And if I didn't have anywhere else to be, I could go to his tool shed and I could sleep.

01:03:45.260 Do you still know Mike?

01:03:46.460 Mm-hmm.

01:03:46.660 Still my best friend.

01:03:47.240 I just talked to him yesterday.

01:03:48.480 Oh, wow.

01:03:49.100 Yeah, still my best friend in this world.

01:03:50.560 Well, thank God for these small mercies.

01:03:52.060 Yeah.

01:03:52.520 So I'm in his shed and now I'm cutting myself so bad that there's a pool of blood on the

01:04:02.360 ground beneath me.

01:04:03.580 And it's like two o'clock in the morning and I look up and there's the roof and the shed

01:04:09.500 has gaps in it.

01:04:10.300 We see the stars in between.

01:04:11.860 And so looking up and thinking, I got to do something, I'm going to die.

01:04:14.660 If I don't get some help, I'm going to die.

01:04:16.760 And so over the years, social services had tried to intervene a couple of times.

01:04:20.440 So I think, well, I'll call social services on myself.

01:04:23.700 And so when Don-

01:04:24.980 And you're how old?

01:04:25.700 I'm 15.

01:04:26.720 15.

01:04:27.860 So when Don came, I go, and this is late 15, early 16.

01:04:32.040 So this is the end of that year, beginning of the next year.

01:04:34.900 My birthday's in May.

01:04:35.760 So it's about a, that this whole process takes almost a year for this process to take.

01:04:41.160 Okay.

01:04:41.740 So the, um, I, I think I got to get myself some help.

01:04:48.120 So I, the next day, when Don came, I knocked on Mike's back door and borrowed a bus fare

01:04:53.140 and phone, uh, um, a phone book from his mom and called social services and set an appointment

01:04:58.040 for that afternoon.

01:04:59.180 And so they brought me there and it was Don when I called, the appointment wasn't until

01:05:01.980 three or four in the afternoon.

01:05:02.860 By the time I got there, they brought my mom in too.

01:05:05.680 So we sit around at a table, big counseling table.

01:05:08.580 And there's, on one side, there's four or five counselors on the other side, there's

01:05:11.060 me and my mom.

01:05:11.960 They have us all sitting together.

01:05:14.040 And the counselor says, so what are we here for?

01:05:15.680 What's your problem?

01:05:16.540 And so I produced a bloody razor blade.

01:05:18.320 It's box cutter style razor blade.

01:05:19.780 And so I throw it on the table.

01:05:20.720 I said, that's my problem.

01:05:21.480 I lift up my arm.

01:05:22.200 I show him the cuts and say, I feel like I'm worthless.

01:05:24.280 Filling with the bottom.

01:05:25.060 I feel like there's nothing left.

01:05:26.800 My mom, who is the most practiced liar I've ever known, got them to believe I was just making

01:05:31.000 it all up.

01:05:31.580 I was just doing it for attention.

01:05:32.660 I just did it to get a rise out of people.

01:05:33.980 It wasn't that important.

01:05:35.240 And they sent me home with her.

01:05:36.400 And so we get three blocks from the place.

01:05:40.440 And she turns to me with this evil look on her face and snarls.

01:05:42.700 You should do a better job next time.

01:05:45.500 I'll buy you the razor blades.

01:05:48.100 And I'm like, okay, you think I'm a monster?

01:05:50.840 I'll show you what a monster is now.

01:05:52.380 And instead of wearing that dirt just like a blanket, I dove right into it.

01:05:55.880 I went on what I call a nine-month period, what I call scorched earth, where that was

01:06:02.080 where I hit my full toxicity.

01:06:04.280 I was consciously going to anybody that was nice or good or positive in my world and offending

01:06:10.460 you on purpose.

01:06:11.640 If there was something that you liked, I would find that and break that.

01:06:14.640 If you like something, I would steal it.

01:06:16.400 If whatever would offend you the most, I'd do that.

01:06:19.200 And it was to the most important people in my world.

01:06:21.300 I even went to Mike's house and stole three of the big boxes of comic books and sold them

01:06:24.580 to a comic shop.

01:06:25.440 I was trying to break every bit of positive in my world.

01:06:28.760 For nine solid months, I did that.

01:06:30.680 And then at the end of, during that period, I also snuck and charmed my way into every

01:06:35.240 family member I could and like smoothed my way in and got into all their picture albums,

01:06:39.960 got into photo albums, gathered every picture of me into a pile and burned them.

01:06:43.280 So currently there's only like five pictures of me that exist before the age of 15 because

01:06:47.280 my, my...

01:06:48.580 So you, you went and established good relationships?

01:06:51.280 Just, just briefly, specifically to get the pictures.

01:06:53.420 Why?

01:06:54.060 Because I wanted to erase my past.

01:06:55.460 I wanted to annihilate my history.

01:06:57.580 I was trying to erase me.

01:07:00.180 And so after nine months of that...

01:07:02.920 Do you think that what you were doing...

01:07:05.040 Look, the story that you've told so far makes why you did what you were doing, even in this

01:07:11.840 situation, understandable.

01:07:13.860 Did you know it was wrong at that time?

01:07:16.800 Oh, yeah.

01:07:17.600 You knew it was wrong.

01:07:18.420 Well, why do you think it was wrong given that you had all the reasons that you've described

01:07:23.840 to do it?

01:07:24.440 Why is it wrong?

01:07:24.800 Because I was hurting myself.

01:07:26.400 At the time I, I, I was in, in that self-destructive mode.

01:07:30.620 I would, Mike, for instance, as an example, when I did that, Mike's like, dude, what the

01:07:35.140 hell are you doing?

01:07:35.680 Right.

01:07:36.000 Like I'm, I'm your best friend.

01:07:36.520 So now you're doing to yourself what, what has been done unjustly to you.

01:07:40.840 Yes.

01:07:41.060 So you're actually participating.

01:07:42.680 Now you're participating in the hell that should be torturing you.

01:07:45.620 Yes.

01:07:46.120 Now I'm fully given into it and I'm going to do all the self-destruction myself.

01:07:49.800 I'm, I'm going to go all the way with it.

01:07:52.300 The, the, that I, I think I was told I was worthless and a monster enough.

01:07:57.240 And I told myself enough that I fully believed it.

01:07:59.320 And now I'm going to make everybody agree with me.

01:08:01.360 And I went to try to offend everybody.

01:08:04.380 Right, right.

01:08:04.900 And so after nine months of that, I have, of personal societal destruction, I was alone,

01:08:12.520 completely alone.

01:08:13.380 And I had been alone for over a month.

01:08:15.120 And I was in that field behind Casa Bonita.

01:08:17.200 And I'd been living there for about a month.

01:08:19.140 And I hadn't taken my clothes off.

01:08:20.340 How are you eating?

01:08:21.320 I was stealing free samples from the grocery store at the top of the hill.

01:08:25.280 Did you, did you ever engage in any criminal activity during that time, a part of that?

01:08:29.580 Yeah, I would, I would, I would go, I would walk up to the comic shop and steal a whole

01:08:34.780 shelf full of comic books, walk down the street and hand them to the first kid I saw.

01:08:39.260 During that period, what about, what about, what about criminal behavior?

01:08:43.660 Minor shoplifting.

01:08:44.780 I would go to the store and steal candy bars, stuff like that.

01:08:47.300 Nothing major, just minor shoplifting.

01:08:49.300 Okay.

01:08:49.760 But during that period, I was doing it like, like egregiously and, and blatantly.

01:08:54.860 Right.

01:08:55.100 So that's part of the pattern of, of, of self-destruction.

01:08:58.280 Yeah.

01:08:58.440 I would go to the grocery store, steal an entire shelf worth of comic books.

01:09:01.320 And the first kid that I would see walking down the street, I'd just hand them to him.

01:09:04.260 Here, you want some comics?

01:09:05.060 Mm-hmm.

01:09:05.980 And because that, that didn't matter to me.

01:09:07.960 Mm-hmm.

01:09:08.620 And the, so yeah, I was that, that kind of crime.

01:09:12.520 Okay.

01:09:12.880 So now you're out in the field.

01:09:14.260 Mm-hmm.

01:09:14.460 You're completely alone because you've cut yourself off from everybody.

01:09:17.180 And I wake up in the snow.

01:09:20.020 And I, because I had been there for months, I hadn't taken my shoes off in weeks, but I also

01:09:25.000 wasn't wearing socks.

01:09:25.880 My feet were just rotting off of my body.

01:09:27.220 I, like I said, I was surviving by eating free samples from the grocery store and stealing

01:09:31.340 whatever food I can from up there and going dumpster diving.

01:09:33.460 I was trying to evade the police during school hours by being on school campus, but not going

01:09:38.640 to class.

01:09:39.120 I was, because I had to be, otherwise you'd get arrested for truancy.

01:09:41.920 So I'm, I'm evading the police.

01:09:44.540 I'm, and then I wake up in the snow and it's so cold.

01:09:49.260 The two block walk to get up to the grocery store, I wasn't just shaking.

01:09:53.020 I was seizing.

01:09:53.700 I was like, could barely breathe.

01:09:55.700 Like my body was, could barely move.

01:09:57.680 And I get up there and I'm looking in the mirror and I'm trying to wash my face off.

01:10:00.700 And I'm like, I've got to do something.

01:10:02.200 I'm going to die.

01:10:02.880 If I don't do something now, I'm going to die.

01:10:05.420 And so across the street from the school I was at, there was a building that said mental health.

01:10:10.140 Why didn't you just want to die?

01:10:12.660 I don't know.

01:10:14.180 I don't know.

01:10:14.620 Okay.

01:10:15.760 Across the street from the school that I was nominally at was a building that said mental health.

01:10:19.620 And I didn't know what it was for.

01:10:20.940 I just knew that the sign said mental health.

01:10:22.400 I didn't, I, but I knew the last time I warned them, they brought my mom and I'm not doing that

01:10:25.500 shit again.

01:10:26.160 So I'm just going to go in cold.

01:10:27.980 And so I went to the place and that afternoon and they had me meet a young lady.

01:10:34.000 She was, it was a counseling center.

01:10:35.500 They had me meet a young lady that she was in her early twenties, I think.

01:10:38.540 And I don't really remember much about that conversation because all I remember is the very end

01:10:42.460 where she said, I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do.

01:10:44.100 I can't help you.

01:10:45.760 And I walked out of that door and I remember vividly standing on that porch and it was

01:10:51.600 early, early night.

01:10:53.580 So like that evening hour.

01:10:55.400 Why had you not gone for any, well, I guess you said why you, when you did try to go to

01:11:00.780 social services, it always worked out badly for you.

01:11:03.340 And then they brought your mom in and that went even worse.

01:11:05.500 Yeah.

01:11:05.820 And now you went to this mental health place.

01:11:07.540 And so when I stepped out that door, my brain broke like a mirror, like standing on

01:11:11.120 that step.

01:11:11.600 That's the spot right then and there that my brain snapped like a mirror and felt like

01:11:15.540 shards of glass in my brain.

01:11:17.180 And instantly three things happened, like one right after the other one.

01:11:21.000 First thing was I found what was at the bottom of that tsunami.

01:11:24.560 Like that tsunami of pain I was living in went all the way down to the bottom.

01:11:27.700 And at the bottom, there's no more waves.

01:11:29.360 It gets really quiet.

01:11:30.260 It gets really still.

01:11:31.060 And all the waves go away because there's nothing left to lose.

01:11:34.300 Like, what are you going to do to cut my arm off?

01:11:35.700 Right, right.

01:11:36.340 You're going to put me in jail?

01:11:37.060 They're going to feed me.

01:11:37.560 I don't have any more down from here.

01:11:40.200 And so right then, the plans that I wanted to do crystallized in my head.

01:11:43.660 I had talked them through with those disaster group of friends.

01:11:45.340 Because when we were sitting with those disaster group of friends, instead of talking about

01:11:48.340 sports or girls or football, we'd talk about killing people.

01:11:51.480 We'd talk about, so if you're going to shoot 10 people, how would you do it?

01:11:53.860 If you're going to shoot up a school, what would you do?

01:11:55.720 And that was the fiction of the group.

01:11:57.860 And so over the years, I had already talked.

01:11:59.740 And based on why did that be, now you said you were at the center of that.

01:12:03.920 So was that, were they showboating?

01:12:06.040 Were they bragging?

01:12:06.800 It was, a lot of it was showboating and bragging.

01:12:08.940 And it started off as just like, we're looking at mass murder things and crazy videos and stuff.

01:12:15.680 Right, so you're toying with the dark side.

01:12:17.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:18.200 And I always would go further into that dark than anybody else would.

01:12:22.660 So when you were looking up the...

01:12:24.000 So that's a status issue as well.

01:12:25.660 Yeah, kind of.

01:12:26.680 And so that's initially how those started.

01:12:29.260 It was kind of like status conversations.

01:12:31.060 Who can be the darkest?

01:12:32.440 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:33.080 But for me then, it was plans.

01:12:37.220 I knew.

01:12:37.760 I had talked it through.

01:12:38.820 I had already knew what I was going to do.

01:12:40.760 I was going to go either through the windows into the food court.

01:12:45.360 This was open campus area.

01:12:46.640 This was at the school that you were supposed to be attending.

01:12:48.900 At the school I was supposed to be attending, North High and Denver.

01:12:51.080 And this was open campus era.

01:12:53.020 So they didn't lock the doors or nothing.

01:12:54.400 So you could get in and out easily.

01:12:55.880 You could leave the campus and go to lunch and then come back.

01:12:57.860 So I knew if I went in, I could go in through the doors and go right into the food court

01:13:01.400 and kill everybody in the food court.

01:13:03.460 And how were you going to do that?

01:13:05.740 Well, so the two...

01:13:06.960 Let me...

01:13:07.520 That portion of it.

01:13:08.620 Yeah, okay.

01:13:09.080 The two plans was either the food court there or the mall food court.

01:13:12.980 And it was both the same things.

01:13:15.020 Neither one of those spots were soft targets.

01:13:17.200 The school had uniformed armed police officers stationed at all times.

01:13:20.320 And the mall had a police station a couple of hours down from the food court.

01:13:23.420 The plan was to cause as much damage as possible and die while doing it.

01:13:26.640 But that wasn't really the goal of my attack.

01:13:30.040 The goal of my attack was to cause my parents to deal with making me.

01:13:33.480 I wanted to have them deal with the ramifications of creating me.

01:13:37.060 So I wanted to cause as much damage as possible, as visibly as possible, die while doing it

01:13:42.180 so that they had to deal with creating a monster.

01:13:45.320 Do you think that would have made any difference?

01:13:46.820 I don't know.

01:13:47.900 But that was the goal at the time.

01:13:49.620 That was what was in my head at the time.

01:13:51.520 And so was that a form of revenge, yeah.

01:13:57.900 But I felt that attacking them would have been useless.

01:14:01.400 They're going to hurt for one day and that's going to be nothing.

01:14:03.440 But they've never faced accountability for anything they've ever done.

01:14:06.980 And they did me.

01:14:08.480 So now they have to face up with making me.

01:14:11.140 And that was the goal of that.

01:14:13.060 And I knew where to get a gun because this was Boys in the Hood era.

01:14:17.180 This was late 90s.

01:14:18.240 So the gangbangers were all over.

01:14:19.600 And they would bring guns into school and flash them.

01:14:21.140 In the school because it was before the age of metal detectors.

01:14:24.140 So they would just flash handguns.

01:14:25.500 And they bought and sold drugs from my family.

01:14:27.280 So they knew me.

01:14:28.100 They knew I was living in the field.

01:14:30.220 They would regularly buy drugs from my family.

01:14:32.900 And so I went up to them like, hey, can you get me a gun?

01:14:34.780 Hopefully one that shoots a lot of bullets.

01:14:36.240 Yeah, sure.

01:14:36.720 Get me an ounce of weed.

01:14:39.060 And these days, that's walking down to a store and getting it.

01:14:43.020 Back then, that's like 300 bucks worth of illicit narcotics.

01:14:45.540 But for me, that was easy.

01:14:46.640 They knew my parents were drug dealers.

01:14:47.880 I just went to my family's house, stole it out of a druggish pant, sleeping on my brother's

01:14:51.080 bedroom floor.

01:14:52.820 Like, he had three ounces in his pocket.

01:14:54.200 I just took one out of his pocket.

01:14:55.040 Took it.

01:14:56.100 So did you get a gun?

01:14:57.200 I didn't get a gun.

01:14:58.340 I went and gave him the weed.

01:15:00.020 I was set to get the gun.

01:15:01.480 He told me three days.

01:15:02.800 Okay.

01:15:03.100 In three days' time, I was going to have the gun.

01:15:04.420 And in that three-day time, that's when I was set.

01:15:09.520 The instant I got the gun, I was going to cause the attack.

01:15:11.860 If it was daytime, go to the school.

01:15:13.380 Nighttime, go to the mall.

01:15:14.380 That was the only difference.

01:15:14.800 And how detailed had your plans been?

01:15:16.780 I knew exactly what door I was going to go into and what I was going to do.

01:15:19.760 How much time do you suppose you spent setting up those plans?

01:15:23.420 Oh.

01:15:25.660 So that's a two-sided question.

01:15:28.680 The plan itself crystallized instantly, but I had set months planning that because we talked

01:15:32.380 about it.

01:15:33.460 How much time do you suppose you spent with your guys talking about it?

01:15:37.260 Oh, weeks and weeks.

01:15:38.980 So how many hours?

01:15:40.820 At least 30 or 40.

01:15:42.820 Okay.

01:15:43.480 Okay.

01:15:43.860 Yeah.

01:15:44.280 Long times of just that dark conversation of planning it.

01:15:47.960 So that's fantasizing and planning.

01:15:49.860 And in that, you're working through the—and I didn't realize it then.

01:15:54.440 I don't think they realized it then, but we were working through the ins and outs and

01:15:57.080 the problems with it and what's going to work and what's not going to work.

01:15:59.380 So, yeah, by the time it all happened, I had the plan and it came out crystallized.

01:16:03.280 Yeah, yeah.

01:16:03.620 Well, that's the danger of practicing something.

01:16:06.260 Yeah.

01:16:06.860 And so I knew right then.

01:16:08.560 And so in that three-day time, I didn't think about it then, but looking back, I think I

01:16:13.200 was saying goodbye.

01:16:14.340 Okay.

01:16:14.780 Because I didn't know that was what I was doing then.

01:16:17.340 But I was going to people in a much more peaceful way and like saying thank you and

01:16:22.180 went to my ex-girlfriend and said thank you for letting me sleep on the gravel outside

01:16:24.980 your window and I was going just saying sorry for things.

01:16:30.540 And I was—I think I was saying goodbye.

01:16:33.260 And at the end of that, I went to Mike's house.

01:16:35.800 And when I went to Mike's house, I knocked on his door and he opened it and I was in

01:16:40.960 tears and I was just crying.

01:16:43.280 And he brought me in and he never asked what I was there for.

01:16:46.120 He never asked what it was about.

01:16:47.640 He knew intimately the hell I had been living in.

01:16:49.460 It was his bedroom that I was in there when I was—with the cuts in my arms.

01:16:52.280 And he saw the pain from my family.

01:16:53.840 He knew intimately the hell I was in.

01:16:55.760 But he didn't ask.

01:16:56.680 He just brought me in and sat me down and kept on telling me over and over again,

01:16:59.760 you're a good kid in a shit world.

01:17:01.460 That's what he kept on saying to me.

01:17:03.380 And he sat me down and he gave me some food and we watched a movie.

01:17:08.040 And he acted like that nine months of destruction never happened.

01:17:12.240 And it wasn't hanging out with a friend that saved my life.

01:17:14.940 That wasn't what did it.

01:17:16.400 It was that when I knocked on his door, I felt like I was a walking ball of nothing.

01:17:20.400 I was just there to close off my life and write the last line and say,

01:17:24.880 thank you, goodbye, I'm done, turn the lights off, I'm out.

01:17:28.020 And so I thought that I was just a nothing waiting to explode.

01:17:33.900 And what he did, I think, was he put the tiny granular bits of being a person

01:17:38.600 back on the bottom shelf of my life.

01:17:41.500 So why was he able to do that, do you think?

01:17:43.580 What is it about Mike?

01:17:44.500 Like, if you asked him what he did, he just said he just did what a friend's supposed to do.

01:17:50.080 Yeah, but he was the only person that you found who did that for you.

01:17:53.100 Yeah, and I don't know what it is, but he's the only one that, no matter what happened,

01:17:56.820 he never treated me like I was anything but an equal.

01:17:59.120 He never looked at me like I was broken.

01:18:00.800 He never looked at me like I was a project.

01:18:02.260 He looked at me like I was a kid in pain.

01:18:04.440 And so he would talk to me about it.

01:18:06.120 And we would, he never looked down on me.

01:18:10.620 We would have deep discussions.

01:18:12.020 He was going to high school for philosophy and going to college and all this stuff.

01:18:15.560 I was a dropout, and I was living in this crime-infested hellhole.

01:18:19.000 And he never once acted like I was in anything but a buddy that deserved respect that he could talk to.

01:18:25.200 And it was the only part of my life that did that.

01:18:27.120 Mike have other friends?

01:18:28.260 Yeah, yeah.

01:18:28.740 Mike had a big social circle, and that's going to tie into the next part of the story.

01:18:32.000 So what he did with that, it wasn't just that I could, like, have a meal.

01:18:38.220 It was that I can enjoy food now.

01:18:40.640 Like, I couldn't be reminded of the base human things.

01:18:45.220 And for me, it was absolutely cathartic.

01:18:47.060 It was like rolling the clock back on my humanity.

01:18:52.140 So you had abandoned any sense of value in yourself.

01:18:55.160 Yeah, totally.

01:18:56.080 But he was unwilling to let that go.

01:18:57.900 Unwilling.

01:18:58.500 Unwilling to let it go.

01:18:59.800 And not even unwilling to let it go.

01:19:02.460 It was that he didn't even see that it was leaving.

01:19:05.600 It was like, that's a weird dynamic.

01:19:08.200 It wasn't that he didn't let me slide off the cliff.

01:19:11.000 So he didn't even see that I was on a cliff.

01:19:13.540 Like, or didn't even treat me like I was on a cliff.

01:19:16.400 And that was extremely powerful.

01:19:18.880 To be seen when you feel fundamentally invisible.

01:19:22.100 Like, I would walk around and ask my classmates, do you remember when I leave the room?

01:19:25.740 When I'm gone, do you remember that I was here?

01:19:27.900 Because I thought I was...

01:19:28.340 Oh, and you'd just been ignored by the mental health clinic, too.

01:19:30.900 Yeah, I felt completely invisible.

01:19:32.880 I felt alone and nothing.

01:19:34.620 And to be seen and validated in the most normal ways.

01:19:39.500 Just like it was just a regular Tuesday.

01:19:42.220 And to me, I was on the precipice of a life-altering madness.

01:19:48.740 And it was just a Tuesday.

01:19:51.660 And it fundamentally changed my life.

01:19:54.320 And I didn't leave his house for a week.

01:19:55.760 I never went and got the gun.

01:19:57.820 Now, was Mike still living with his parents?

01:19:59.960 Uh-huh.

01:20:00.420 So why were you allowed to stay there for that week?

01:20:02.340 I think he went and talked to him.

01:20:04.060 I don't know why.

01:20:04.840 Okay.

01:20:05.100 I didn't ever ask him.

01:20:06.040 I never even saw his parents that week.

01:20:08.080 Uh-huh.

01:20:08.720 I just went and basically stayed in his bedroom.

01:20:11.040 I think he just went and talked to him.

01:20:12.900 I think he just was like, hey, Aaron really needs this.

01:20:16.240 And so, yeah, he's staying in my bedroom.

01:20:17.900 So I can get in trouble for it if you want to.

01:20:19.280 But he's there.

01:20:20.540 Because by that point, that's kind of the attitude that he had.

01:20:22.960 He had had it with his friends' groups.

01:20:24.880 He went to art school.

01:20:26.080 And so he had a bunch of art friends.

01:20:28.360 And so they were really preppy and yuppie.

01:20:30.140 And so well to do.

01:20:31.040 And not all of them were very as charitable as Mike was to someone like me.

01:20:37.140 And so there were friend groups where they were like, well, Aaron needs to go.

01:20:39.800 He smells.

01:20:40.360 And Mike would stand up in the middle of him like, no, dude, if you're staying, he needs

01:20:42.520 to go.

01:20:42.740 You go ahead and bounce right now because he's not going anywhere.

01:20:45.600 And so that kind of validation and belonging, it fundamentally changed me to my core.

01:20:51.600 And during that week?

01:20:53.400 During that week.

01:20:54.420 It changed me.

01:20:55.640 Well, that's the start.

01:20:57.220 Okay.

01:20:57.960 It's important to note that it's not like it's a magic light switch.

01:21:00.640 It's not like, ding, everything's better and it's all fixed.

01:21:02.860 This was a process.

01:21:04.200 And this was the start of the process.

01:21:05.920 So what he did was give me a frame shift.

01:21:08.420 He let me change my perspective a bit.

01:21:11.700 The clock rolled back.

01:21:12.880 It was like I said, instead of washing in that tsunami and going through crazy and sloshing

01:21:17.060 around, I could set my feet down for the first time.

01:21:19.000 So he reminded you that you were rotten to the core.

01:21:21.120 That I wasn't rotten to my core.

01:21:22.540 And so I could be for a little while.

01:21:25.060 And so that, and he also talked to one of his friends and let me stay with one of his

01:21:28.820 friends for a while.

01:21:29.360 So I was able to get a house, a sleeping arrangement and reassess and shift my frame of reference

01:21:35.120 just a bit enough to take a breath and reestablish with my personhood.

01:21:39.860 But the chaos at home was still the same.

01:21:42.060 The abuse at home was still the same.

01:21:43.200 The violence all there was still the same.

01:21:44.500 The self-hatred was still the same.

01:21:46.100 That hell was still there.

01:21:48.300 But I was able to step back off that edge and take a breath.

01:21:52.040 But now we're going to fast forward three years, okay?

01:21:54.300 Because that was between 15 and 16.

01:21:56.080 Now to go to the night of my 19th birthday, okay?

01:21:58.500 The night of my 19th birthday, I was planning on committing suicide.

01:22:02.060 The depression had started.

01:22:03.080 So now you dropped the school shooting plans?

01:22:05.220 Dropped the school shooting.

01:22:06.460 Dropped the school shooting.

01:22:07.560 Why?

01:22:08.080 It had went from outward anger to—because almost instantly when Mike did that, I felt

01:22:12.320 ashamed and remorseful.

01:22:14.000 Almost instantly.

01:22:15.040 When that reestablishment of my humanity hit, the remorse and the shame of what I had planned

01:22:20.420 was pretty crushing.

01:22:21.440 So what's interesting, one of the things that you're claiming is that you would have only

01:22:25.980 been able to go through with what you had planned.

01:22:29.820 If you had, in fact, successfully severed every tie you had, right?

01:22:36.040 You would have had to have been genuinely alone and alienated.

01:22:39.740 And Mike reminded you that you weren't.

01:22:41.800 So I thought that I was.

01:22:43.440 Right.

01:22:43.880 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:44.360 The Mike reminded me that I wasn't with that.

01:22:46.480 Right.

01:22:46.700 And sort of despite your best efforts, right?

01:22:49.180 Yeah.

01:22:49.300 Because you'd spent, you said, eight months trying to alienate everyone.

01:22:52.080 Nine months.

01:22:52.400 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:53.020 Despite all my best efforts and despite massive effort on my part that he just wouldn't let

01:22:58.520 go.

01:22:59.520 That's love.

01:23:00.480 Very much so.

01:23:01.740 Here's a great example of that love.

01:23:03.240 That's why I like telling this part of the story.

01:23:04.920 So my 19th birthday, I was planning on committing suicide.

01:23:07.440 And I was going to do it by overdose.

01:23:09.340 I had gotten a bunch of LSD off the streets, stolen a bunch of pills from cocaine from my mom.

01:23:13.260 I had copious amounts of drugs, way more than we're going to need to do the job.

01:23:16.740 And because my depression had spun up and I was, but I was inward.

01:23:20.100 I was, I wasn't outward regressed anymore.

01:23:21.780 It was just, I was ashamed and depressed.

01:23:23.080 I just wanted to end it, but tired of dealing with this anymore.

01:23:25.340 But I had interventions in the past.

01:23:26.760 My kid'd be like, dude, you're depressed.

01:23:27.820 We need to stop it.

01:23:28.500 I didn't want any of that.

01:23:29.600 So I was trying to act as normal as possible.

01:23:31.580 Trying to act like nothing was wrong in my day.

01:23:33.820 So I went to Mike's house and Mike's a very social guy.

01:23:37.340 He has a social circle of his own.

01:23:38.640 And one of this group friends is a girl named Amber.

01:23:40.840 Okay.

01:23:40.980 And Amber was really friendly with me.

01:23:42.200 She was always really nice to me.

01:23:43.520 But she was his contact.

01:23:44.580 She was definitely his friend.

01:23:46.020 And we would go over to her house every now and then, watch a movie, listen to music,

01:23:48.660 whatever.

01:23:49.400 And so he's like, hey, we're going to kick it at Amber's today.

01:23:51.980 Like, right.

01:23:52.940 That sounds like a great last day.

01:23:54.520 I'm going to spend it with two of my favorite people and then go back to the field buying

01:23:57.460 Casa Bonita and end my life.

01:23:58.680 That was the plan.

01:24:00.180 And so I get there and that wasn't it at all.

01:24:02.920 I actually walked into a surprise birthday party for me.

01:24:05.500 And I walked into about 14 people saying happy birthday and Amber had baked a blueberry peach

01:24:09.320 pie.

01:24:09.580 And I walked past him and dropped all my drugs on the toilet.

01:24:12.040 That was the last time I ever tried to kill myself.

01:24:14.460 And that's what really set me on my path.

01:24:17.080 And here's where the love portion comes in.

01:24:18.780 Because when we left Mike's house, there was no birthday party.

01:24:21.700 Mike called ahead to Amber's house and said, hey, Amber, I'm taking Aaron over there.

01:24:24.600 And this is his birthday today.

01:24:25.760 Then Amber was having a get together.

01:24:26.980 She had already had a bunch of people over.

01:24:28.040 She had already baked the pie.

01:24:28.800 And she's like, hey, Aaron's coming over and it's his birthday.

01:24:31.400 Let's make it a birthday party for him.

01:24:32.680 So they all got together and made a bunch of decorations and stuff and threw up a quick

01:24:35.040 birthday party.

01:24:35.840 I walked into a fundamentally life-changing thing that changed my opinion of myself to

01:24:40.240 my core that my friend put up in five minutes of being nice to another friend.

01:24:44.160 So, yeah, just a simple act of kindness.

01:24:48.160 Nothing.

01:24:48.780 The people who tried to be the overbearing yanks.

01:24:50.800 Well, not so simple.

01:24:51.760 Not so simple.

01:24:52.500 Awake, man.

01:24:53.020 But real.

01:24:55.200 Yeah, right.

01:24:55.680 And fundamental.

01:24:57.260 Genuine.

01:24:57.980 Genuine.

01:24:58.260 Genuinely thoughtful.

01:24:59.540 Genuinely thoughtful.

01:25:00.420 Right, right.

01:25:00.960 And that, it changed me.

01:25:03.220 That's what really started me on the path to, that was the time when I reassessed.

01:25:08.020 And right after that, I did some serious soul searching about, is this me?

01:25:13.000 Uh-huh.

01:25:13.540 Or is this not me?

01:25:15.080 And had a deep conversation with Mike and Amber and other friends about how, no, dude,

01:25:18.700 this isn't me.

01:25:19.760 This is, I lived through hell.

01:25:22.200 And yeah, I maladapted to it.

01:25:23.560 I made some really bad decisions and I made some really toxic choices.

01:25:26.540 But I don't have to stay there.

01:25:28.000 I can move out of this hell now and I can keep going.

01:25:30.840 And I can let them live their hell out on that side.

01:25:33.360 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:33.820 Well, now you're old enough too because you're 19 at that point.

01:25:36.900 And at that point, Mike actually saved my life one more time by he moved me out to Kansas

01:25:40.280 City.

01:25:40.500 The final clip that cut the family hooks out of me was he went to college in Kansas City

01:25:45.160 and moved me out there for a summer.

01:25:46.280 I got to go live with him out in KC.

01:25:47.520 And I'm from Denver, so I got to go spend a summer out away from my family.

01:25:51.320 That did two things.

01:25:52.540 It gave me the confidence that I could do something on my own, went and get a job, pay bills, pay

01:25:57.200 rent, be stable.

01:25:58.640 Yeah, yeah.

01:25:59.000 It also pissed my family off when I got back.

01:26:01.260 How dare you leave?

01:26:02.120 How dare you think you're better than us?

01:26:03.860 How dare you?

01:26:04.160 Right.

01:26:04.460 How dare you have a life?

01:26:05.600 How dare you think you can exist without us?

01:26:08.120 Yeah.

01:26:08.460 And so that was where I was able to be like, all right, fine.

01:26:11.360 Dude, they're attacking me for making myself better.

01:26:13.720 Yeah.

01:26:13.920 This isn't me.

01:26:15.380 Yeah.

01:26:15.660 This is them.

01:26:16.540 Yeah.

01:26:17.040 And so that's where I finally made that flip.

01:26:19.560 And right about that same time, I started on the real process of my recovery, which I

01:26:24.660 call acknowledgement.

01:26:25.720 So I was about 19 years old.

01:26:27.980 And I still, again, mom still has her hooks on me at the time.

01:26:31.380 I was working with her at a Veterans of Foreign Wars bar.

01:26:33.460 And so she, it was right certainly after I had kind of started to serve her contact.

01:26:40.380 And I'm in this process, but I was working there.

01:26:41.920 So she was running the bar.

01:26:43.620 I was a bartender there.

01:26:45.620 And it was a Veterans of Foreign Wars bar.

01:26:47.320 So veterans go in there and start drinking.

01:26:48.460 How old?

01:26:49.320 I was 19 years old.

01:26:50.360 Okay.

01:26:50.900 So, and the, my aunt is on the other side of the bar and it's a bunch of people drinking

01:26:56.320 a whole busy night.

01:26:58.200 And she's on the other side of the bar.

01:26:59.160 And she's one of the people who had tried to molest me when I was younger, dug through

01:27:02.840 the carpet for crack rock, tried to kill herself a couple times in front of me.

01:27:06.100 Toxic, toxic person.

01:27:07.700 And she's on the other side of the bar.

01:27:09.140 And she's just offhandedly talking.

01:27:10.580 I don't even hear the conversation they're having.

01:27:11.900 All I hear is her say, oh, Aaron, you know, you love me.

01:27:15.260 And I stopped and said, no, I don't.

01:27:17.360 And I didn't mean to say that.

01:27:18.960 It just came out.

01:27:20.240 I said, no, I don't.

01:27:21.440 And she said, what?

01:27:22.120 I said, no, I don't actually love you.

01:27:23.300 Tried to kill yourself in front of me.

01:27:24.320 You tried to molest me and I don't actually love you.

01:27:26.000 I'm done.

01:27:26.900 And she started screaming.

01:27:28.140 She blew up and had a big old screaming fit.

01:27:30.220 And to me, it was like white noise.

01:27:31.440 I didn't hear any of it.

01:27:32.380 It turned into static because it was like an anvil jumped off of my chest, like instantly,

01:27:36.780 just instant release.

01:27:38.240 And I felt so good afterwards that I just walked out like, oh my God, I just, I just did that.

01:27:44.120 And it was like peace.

01:27:45.300 So that was a declaration of freedom.

01:27:46.780 Yeah.

01:27:47.020 And so that started a process where I did that exact thing to everybody in my life that

01:27:51.260 abused me.

01:27:52.040 I went in a process of acknowledgement and I made sure it was purposeful, very purposeful

01:27:56.240 that it wasn't retaliatory.

01:27:57.940 I didn't go to anybody and say, you did this and you need to pay for it.

01:28:01.140 I went to him and said, this is our, our relationship has fundamentally changed.

01:28:04.940 I don't actually love you and I'm done.

01:28:07.180 And I walked away.

01:28:08.100 And that had such a cathartic effect on me.

01:28:12.760 How did you know that it shouldn't be retaliatory?

01:28:15.560 I just felt it in my core that it shouldn't be because I felt if it was retaliatory, that

01:28:19.300 just continues the argument.

01:28:20.840 Yeah, right.

01:28:21.220 It engages and continues the contest.

01:28:23.240 You're still hooked.

01:28:23.920 It's still hooked.

01:28:24.720 And it still continues the back and forth.

01:28:26.440 And it's still the toxicity.

01:28:27.340 You're not going to come back with, well, you did this.

01:28:29.180 I don't care about that.

01:28:29.960 Maybe that's why you turn the other cheek.

01:28:31.360 Yeah.

01:28:31.640 And this isn't about retaliation.

01:28:33.540 This isn't about me getting something back because you hurt me.

01:28:36.320 You hurt me and I'm dealing with it.

01:28:38.620 Right.

01:28:38.980 And I'm dealing with it by being done with it.

01:28:40.860 Yeah.

01:28:41.140 I'm dealing with it.

01:28:41.840 I'm done with it.

01:28:42.500 And I'm going to walk away and I'm going to stop having that hurt.

01:28:44.700 And what sort of response did you get from people?

01:28:46.580 Some of them screamed and some of them yelled and some of them begged me to stay and I

01:28:49.720 didn't care.

01:28:50.580 None of it mattered to me.

01:28:51.640 I just made sure that I said it.

01:28:53.640 Why do you think you were able to not be manipulated into feeling guilty?

01:28:59.180 I think because by that point I had burned out the ability to get embarrassed or ashamed

01:29:02.640 about anything.

01:29:03.680 I had burned out the ability for any of those family members' judgment to hurt me anymore.

01:29:08.220 Yeah.

01:29:08.400 Well, and as you said, too, you'd be down in Kansas City and you had that break.

01:29:11.840 You couldn't take care of yourself and have your life.

01:29:14.020 And that gave me a breath and light on that to see.

01:29:17.180 It shone a bright light on that toxicity to see that that was its own sense of hell.

01:29:24.580 Like it's their insults cause other people to insult them back, cause a fight to happen.

01:29:29.020 It's just a violent circle that just spins around and around.

01:29:31.760 Yeah.

01:29:32.000 And if I engage in that at all, I get sucked into it.

01:29:34.700 Yeah.

01:29:35.120 But looking at it, it looks really stupid.

01:29:37.340 So the more I can step back and look at it, the easier it got.

01:29:41.100 Right.

01:29:41.560 Right.

01:29:41.860 And so your life-

01:29:42.820 It was very important to me to not have it be retaliatory and to make sure that it was

01:29:47.700 just get it out of me.

01:29:49.880 And every time I did, it was like a step.

01:29:52.800 It was like flying.

01:29:54.580 It was like elation.

01:29:57.040 Yeah.

01:29:57.640 Just pure elation that I was able to do it.

01:29:59.860 And now today, I can confidently say that I never sit and have the regret that, oh my

01:30:04.540 God, I wish this person knew how I felt.

01:30:06.440 Uh-huh.

01:30:06.960 They all know.

01:30:07.820 They all know.

01:30:08.520 They all know I'm fine with telling them again.

01:30:10.480 So you started to get your life together fairly seriously at about 19.

01:30:14.480 Uh-huh.

01:30:14.720 At about 19.

01:30:15.520 That's when I started, well, kind of, emotionally, I started to get myself better.

01:30:20.000 Yeah.

01:30:20.220 And I started to reassess that I can do it, get myself some stability, and drop a lot

01:30:25.200 of that toxic affectation.

01:30:27.420 Did you go back to Kansas City?

01:30:28.660 I did not.

01:30:29.280 I actually came back to Colorado and got by living by myself and got my own apartment.

01:30:34.040 Mike was helping me and got my own job.

01:30:35.360 Okay.

01:30:36.060 Out of that family hook.

01:30:37.380 And what job did you get?

01:30:38.520 I was actually, let's see, right around then, I was working at a Starbucks in Barnes & Noble,

01:30:44.780 downtown Denver.

01:30:45.820 Uh-huh.

01:30:46.100 So I was just working at a coffee shop, service jobs.

01:30:48.280 And did you learn to do a good job?

01:30:50.340 Yeah.

01:30:50.900 Yeah.

01:30:51.640 I've always been, every job I go to, they always want me to be manager.

01:30:55.340 I see.

01:30:55.900 I see.

01:30:56.320 First job I ever had, I became assistant manager my second day.

01:30:59.120 Okay, well, you said that you didn't do your assignments and so forth at school.

01:31:02.100 So how did, how was it that you were able to do a good job when you got a job?

01:31:07.320 The, because when I, when my, the assignments, I just never found them to be important.

01:31:14.540 For me, I engaged with things that I think are important.

01:31:16.460 I used to, so you felt it was important to do a good job.

01:31:19.400 And important to do a good job and beneficial to do a good job.

01:31:21.860 The assignments of the school I felt were rote busy work.

01:31:24.520 The, if I, if I know the subject, for instance, English class, the reason why I always went

01:31:28.320 to English class was because the, I had a teacher that I had gotten kicked out of the

01:31:33.160 advanced placement English class for correcting the teacher on Shakespeare.

01:31:35.820 I, he, I, first day of class, I corrected him on Shakespeare.

01:31:38.440 I had happened to be in my acid field parties with my disaster group friends.

01:31:42.300 We were acting out the plays of Shakespeare at night.

01:31:44.080 That's what we would do.

01:31:44.760 We had the complete works of Shakespeare.

01:31:46.020 We got the Midsummer Night's Dream and just pick a character and go through the play.

01:31:49.540 That's what we would do, trip an acid, 16 year old.

01:31:51.400 And so I went to school and my teacher was teaching Shakespeare first day and he was

01:31:55.540 getting it wrong.

01:31:56.360 And it happened to be in the Midsummer Night's Dream.

01:31:58.320 And so I corrected him.

01:31:59.460 And the teacher does that thing you see on the TV.

01:32:01.120 We're like, well, Mr. Stark, would you like to get up and teach the class?

01:32:03.420 I'm like, yeah.

01:32:05.000 So I stood up and started holding court.

01:32:06.880 And so I started talking about it and he pulled me out of class, opened up the door

01:32:10.800 of the class so everybody could see, stood me in front of the class, started berating

01:32:13.200 me and screaming at me.

01:32:14.000 Don't you ever contradict me like that.

01:32:15.340 How dare you confront me in front of the class like that.

01:32:17.160 Don't you ever do that.

01:32:17.940 Get out of here.

01:32:18.800 Kick me out of his class.

01:32:19.620 Send me down to remedial English.

01:32:21.440 So I got kicked out of the class where I'm correcting him on Shakespeare, go into the

01:32:24.520 class where they're teaching sentence structure and punctuation.

01:32:26.780 And I'm like, I go to the teacher.

01:32:27.920 I'm like, hey.

01:32:28.020 You didn't find that particularly motivating you?

01:32:29.580 No, not really.

01:32:30.340 I went to the teacher.

01:32:30.860 I'm like, hey, I know this.

01:32:32.380 Can I do this?

01:32:33.020 Can I get your final?

01:32:33.900 Because I know this stuff.

01:32:34.840 I write and I read.

01:32:36.360 I'm really good at this.

01:32:37.380 Like, you can do that?

01:32:38.180 Like, please just let me prove it.

01:32:40.100 And so she did.

01:32:40.900 She gave me the final.

01:32:41.540 Same teacher?

01:32:42.180 Same teacher.

01:32:42.540 Nope, different teacher.

01:32:43.200 Oh, different teacher.

01:32:44.260 Remedial English.

01:32:45.280 Oh, oh, oh, I see.

01:32:46.520 Good end remedial English.

01:32:47.340 Remedial English teacher is a lady.

01:32:48.620 And she's like, can you do it?

01:32:49.480 I'm like, yeah, sure.

01:32:50.280 So I take her final.

01:32:51.380 I ace the final for Remedial English.

01:32:53.240 Got 100%.

01:32:53.940 And so from then on, I was her de facto class assistant.

01:32:58.280 So even though I never went to class and even though I was only there once every three

01:33:01.140 weeks, when I was there, I didn't have to do the assignments.

01:33:03.580 I could just walk around and help everybody else with their assignments.

01:33:05.900 And on book report day, I didn't have to read the book.

01:33:08.900 If I could walk up to her and explain what the book was, if I'd go to her and tell her

01:33:12.240 the story and tell her what happened to the book and explain that I know what it is, I

01:33:15.140 didn't have to write the report.

01:33:17.080 And it was...

01:33:17.780 So she was the real teacher.

01:33:18.740 She was the real teacher.

01:33:19.380 And she saw me as being smart.

01:33:22.400 And so I would, even though it was Remedial English, I went to that class every day.

01:33:26.840 Every day I could.

01:33:27.740 Every day I could get to that class, I could go to that class.

01:33:29.540 Because that was one little hour where I felt valued and like I belonged.

01:33:35.140 Right, right.

01:33:35.860 Yeah, well, part of the story that you're telling has that motif in it, is that what you needed,

01:33:42.020 and unsurprisingly, given the structure of your family and the fact that you were moving

01:33:46.500 constantly and that you were generally friendless, was a sense of genuine belonging.

01:33:53.240 And you had that to some degree with your group of discreants.

01:33:58.000 But it was based on something that was very bad at its core.

01:34:02.200 Yeah, very toxic.

01:34:02.880 Whereas with Mike, you had an actual relationship, an actual relationship.

01:34:06.760 Yeah.

01:34:07.120 And with Mike, I valued it so much that I memorized his phone number.

01:34:10.220 And every time I moved out of state, I had...

01:34:12.880 He was my home base.

01:34:14.300 Yeah.

01:34:14.500 So, I, like, every other attachment could disappear.

01:34:20.280 And, but Mike was always...

01:34:21.720 Right, right.

01:34:22.300 ...always there.

01:34:22.940 Right.

01:34:23.380 Okay, so I'm going to, we've got to close this up.

01:34:25.880 Yep.

01:34:26.500 Unfortunately, because I'd like to find out, you know, what happened later in your life,

01:34:29.760 too.

01:34:29.900 Yeah.

01:34:29.920 Because you got married and you have kids and like, you have a life.

01:34:33.160 And, yeah.

01:34:34.100 So, we're going to, well, we can fast forward to when I came out with my story.

01:34:37.120 Well, I want to ask you a specific question.

01:34:39.100 Sure, yeah.

01:34:39.400 If you don't mind, well, there's going to be people who are watching this and listening

01:34:43.700 to it who are feeling both desperate, and they probably have the reasons for it, and

01:34:48.960 who are feeling not only desperate, but resentful and vengeful, right?

01:34:54.020 And who are toying with those sorts of dark ideas that you toyed with.

01:34:58.000 And so, if you could say something to them, other than everything that you've just said,

01:35:03.000 is there anything specific you would say that you know that would be helpful to someone

01:35:08.040 who is tempted by that, those darkest of motivations?

01:35:13.040 What I tell my own kids all the time is that the only thing constant in life is change.

01:35:17.720 That the only thing that's absolutely certain is that tomorrow's going to be different than

01:35:20.500 today.

01:35:21.400 That it might not be better and it might not be worse, but it is going to be different.

01:35:25.500 And so, we can, we have choices with that.

01:35:28.000 We can either resist that change and get worn down like the rocks on the beach turn into

01:35:32.640 sand and just get annihilated.

01:35:34.260 Or we can adapt with those changes and move like the water itself.

01:35:36.800 And the more we can be that change and realize that the past that we are carrying and the

01:35:43.800 damage and the destruction that we are, that we have experienced is not us.

01:35:47.680 It's just luggage that we're carrying around with us.

01:35:50.120 It's just the baggage that we carry.

01:35:52.340 That the more we can maybe set that baggage down.

01:35:54.680 It's part of not accept that damning judgment of yourself and others.

01:36:00.320 It's fine.

01:36:01.140 When you tell yourself that you're worthless enough and that you hate yourself and everybody

01:36:05.260 hurts you too, that's your brain lying to you.

01:36:07.780 That's your brain lying to you.

01:36:08.940 You are, in fact, good enough.

01:36:10.200 You woke up good enough today.

01:36:11.440 And it's okay that you messed up.

01:36:12.780 And it's okay that you were wrong.

01:36:14.320 And it's okay that you got mad.

01:36:15.180 And it's okay if your future's okay.

01:36:16.680 And it's okay to be okay.

01:36:18.820 It's okay to be good sometimes.

01:36:20.700 Yeah.

01:36:21.000 That's not a bad thing.

01:36:22.140 It's okay to feel emotion for people.

01:36:23.760 Well, that's a weird thing to conclude if you have, for example, bargained to accept

01:36:28.500 a very low social status because you've already, in some ways, made a contract with yourself

01:36:32.800 that you're going to be an outsider, you're going to be unpopular, and that you are worthless.

01:36:36.940 And one thing that happens when you internalize that so much is that it gets to be repellent

01:36:42.300 to any positivity.

01:36:43.680 Yeah, right.

01:36:44.180 Like if someone were to come up and say, oh, you're a really good person.

01:36:47.260 Well, you don't really know me then.

01:36:48.260 If you see me, then you'd see the monster because I'm not really a good person.

01:36:51.060 Yeah.

01:36:51.200 Well, it also violates the contract.

01:36:52.900 It does.

01:36:53.380 It does.

01:36:53.960 Because we've established now that I'm the low impeccable.

01:36:55.580 Yeah, yeah.

01:36:56.420 And the only way that I've seen for an outside source to be able to combat that is with

01:37:01.460 consistency.

01:37:02.440 And the only way I've seen it by being the one that doesn't break when the waves crash

01:37:06.220 against you to not, to be a Mike, to not give up when the stuff gets hard.

01:37:11.760 But when you're in that dark to realize that just keep going.

01:37:16.160 So why do you think Mike likes it?

01:37:17.260 Why do you do so much?

01:37:18.400 Because I was smart.

01:37:19.580 Because he always says it was because of the deep conversations.

01:37:22.420 Because we could sit and talk for hours and never be bored.

01:37:25.640 We can sit and talk and talk.

01:37:27.600 So he really valued that in you?

01:37:28.500 Really valued that in me.

01:37:30.020 And that I was always, that I would give everything of myself for my friends.

01:37:34.900 Even from back then, like if I had it, I didn't value my stuff.

01:37:37.980 So if I had something you needed, I'm fine with giving it to you.

01:37:40.600 And I would give Mike the shirt off my back.

01:37:42.480 I'd tell him today, dude, I'd give you the skin off my back if you ever have a need for

01:37:45.660 black skin.

01:37:45.760 So you were also a friend to Mike.

01:37:48.140 Yeah.

01:37:48.720 And it was intellectual respect.

01:37:52.780 Like the meeting of peers.

01:37:54.100 All right.

01:37:56.780 Well, I'm going to close this up.

01:37:58.560 I think that's a very good place to end.

01:38:00.880 Thank you for walking us through that.

01:38:03.760 One of the things I did notice from a clinical perspective, by the way, is that you showed

01:38:08.700 very little emotion, negative emotion, when you were describing what happened to you in

01:38:14.200 your past.

01:38:14.760 And there's two possible explanations for that when you see it.

01:38:18.080 And one is that a person is hurt so bad that the emotion is just, they're just flat.

01:38:22.940 But the other possibility is that the events have been put in their proper place and stripped

01:38:29.420 of their emotional significance and transcended so that they're no longer relevant.

01:38:34.180 And that looks to me like what you've managed.

01:38:36.920 And congratulations on that.

01:38:38.400 Thank you very much.

01:38:39.220 Given what you went through, that's a major moral achievement.

01:38:43.340 And the fact that you were able to deal with that and to stop it from being transmitted

01:38:49.520 to your children, that's work of incalculable significance.

01:38:53.100 Yeah.

01:38:53.320 Today, my kids have all gone to the same middle school, elementary school, and high school.

01:38:57.060 They've all gone.

01:38:58.360 They've never been evicted.

01:38:59.860 They've never had their mom beaten their dad or their dad beaten their mom.

01:39:02.840 None of that.

01:39:03.840 I say, I use what happened to me growing up as exact examples of how to parent my children.

01:39:08.540 I just do the opposite.

01:39:09.120 Isn't it interesting, you know, that this is a real mystery about human beings, too, is

01:39:13.200 that, like, really, in some fundamental sense, all you had were bad examples.

01:39:20.260 Now, it's not exactly true, because you had your brother and you had Mike and you had some

01:39:24.180 friendships.

01:39:24.720 And so you could see how reasonable and positive human relationships were structured.

01:39:31.580 But anyone listening to the story that you relayed would say, well, you have every reason to

01:39:39.060 not know how to be a good husband and a good father.

01:39:42.560 And yet, despite all that, and despite the determinism of a multi-generational family of

01:39:49.580 pathology on both sides, you were able to step away from it and establish something positive

01:39:54.960 in the confines of your own life.

01:39:56.420 And I do it specifically by using what happened to me as a kid, like, exact examples of the

01:40:00.920 parenting that I went through, and just do the opposite.

01:40:03.220 Right, right.

01:40:03.900 Well, it's so interesting, because, like, if you're a bully, there are two things you can

01:40:08.240 learn from that, or at least two things.

01:40:09.820 One is how to bully.

01:40:10.960 And the other is that you should never bully.

01:40:13.280 Right?

01:40:13.700 And it's the same lesson.

01:40:15.440 There's something about the manner in which the lesson is received that determines the

01:40:19.040 consequences.

01:40:19.580 It's not a deterministic course in that, like, well, we do know that most people, and this

01:40:25.240 is actually the truth, almost all people who abuse as adults were abused as children.

01:40:31.840 But most people who were abused as children don't abuse as adults.

01:40:37.000 Yep.

01:40:37.380 Right, right, right.

01:40:38.780 Yep.

01:40:38.820 And so now I think that I won, because today my kids are happy and healthy and friendly.

01:40:45.880 And my 12-year-old, when there's a new kid in her class, the teacher puts the new kid

01:40:51.180 next to her, because she's the class ambassador.

01:40:53.800 So she's the welcomer for the class.

01:40:55.540 Right.

01:40:55.960 So, yeah, you said that I don't get emotional with that.

01:40:58.420 That's a good one.

01:40:59.160 That's a good way to end, man.

01:41:00.620 Well, congratulations on that.

01:41:02.280 Thank you, sir.

01:41:03.120 That's a major accomplishment.

01:41:04.700 Thank you.

01:41:04.940 Yeah, and say hi to your 12-year-old.

01:41:06.500 Thank you, I will.

01:41:07.420 You bet.

01:41:07.940 You bet.

01:41:08.680 All right, everyone.

01:41:09.720 Thank you very much for watching and listening today.

01:41:12.600 Your time and attention is always much appreciated.

01:41:15.340 Thank you to the Daily Wire Plus people for facilitating this live conversation.

01:41:19.180 We're going to be doing a bunch of them over the next couple of months.

01:41:21.440 To the film crew here in Scottsdale, thank you for, well, setting this up and making it

01:41:28.060 run so professionally.

01:41:30.740 And we'll see you all very soon.

01:41:33.040 Thank you for having me.

01:41:34.020 That was great.

01:41:34.860 Yeah, appreciate it.

01:41:35.880 Thank you.

01:41:45.340 Thank you.

01:41:53.700 Thank you.

01:41:53.800 Thank you.

01:41:54.100 Thank you.

405. Anatomy of an (almost) School Shooter ｜ Aaron Stark

Summary

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