My experience that much more. Guest thank you. Great to be here. Host i want to dive right in and ask you to read a bit from the process. Host guest turning towards our house on the hillside i see movement of a different type, shadow is pushing for the current, my brothers are a weak testing the weather. I imagine my mother by the stove hovering over pancakes and my father by the backdoor with his steel toed boots and putting his hand into his gloves. The school bus goes past without stopping. I am only seven, but i understand it is this more than any other that makes my family different, we dont go to school. The government cant force us because it doesnt know about us. Four of my parents and children have no birth certificates or medical records because we were born at home and have never seen a doctor or nurse, no School Records because weve never stepped foot in a classroom. At nine i will be issued a delayed certificate of birth but at this moment is according to the state and government, i do not exist. Of course i did exist. I grew up attending for the days of abomination, waiting for the moon. I studied my supplies when the world of men failed my family would continue on the unaffect unaffected. Host that is quite an opening. I want to start there. I want to start in idaho where this takes place. Can you tell me a little bit, tell me what was it like as a 10yearold version of your self . Guest we had a farm that belonged to my grandfather, so it was really beautiful there were weak fields and it wasnt a particularly big mountain but it was beautifully made and formed into a perfect and ive always been told this beautiful story when the snow began to melt there would be an image of the womans body. My dad had a story b the nomadic indians would look for her sign, the sign of spring had ended and winter is over and its time to come back. It is a beautiful place. There was a junkyard with cars into this the kind of exotic playground. There was a lot of beauty in my childhood. I think it took me a long time to realize that there were, but it wasnt normal. To me it seemed normal and now im older and i see the wrong end of the unusual. My dad was supposed to a lot of the institutions most people take for granted, like public education, doctors, hospitals, anything to do with the government. What that meant if i was never able to go to the school, the doctor, and i didnt have a birth certificate until i was 9yearsold. Host its a kind of interplay between this idea likh existence, running around free in this environment that seems very foreign to me as a city kid, and almost a magical place that hurts to talk about this, but theres the other side. There were very much two sides to your childhood experience. Guest absolutely. The mountain was beautiful. Everything that had once id had another. My mother was an herbalist and midwife. We spent all these hours Walking Around the mountains gathering rose heads and beautiful things but it often had another side to it. So, the junkyard was an exotic playground, but they also got hurt quite a bit. There were a lot of injuries, like the time my brother lived a truck on fire and was covered in burns and we made the decision to return home because my father didnt believe in doctors and hospitals. So a situation like that, even with herbalism, which is a wonderful thing my mother was talented at, it can be scary when you are dealing with a real injury when you dont have morphine and things like that. Host can you speak about your fathers philosophy . I attribute it more to your father and your mother, because it seems to be reading the book it came mostly from your father is that fair to say . Guest it was mostly coming from him. Its a complicated thing. Sometimes i think it was a kind of spiritual doctrine he had, and sometimes i think that he was he had these theories that the government, public education, that they had been infiltrated by some kind of ill meaning organization. Sometimes he called it the neo noddy. His reason for opposing these things is because he believed that they were trying to do harm. He really believed it. It was a conviction that he had. Host if you can pinpoint what was he afraid of from the illuminati and that these different sources, what was the fear . Guest i think it depends on which institution you are talking about. I think he was concerned about what he called the medical establishment, but they were not actually doing good. He believed that a lot of the things people take, drugs for example, would damage your body and the effects would last for years and also they would damage you spiritually and you should really use natural healing, herbs. He called them gods pharmacy. The public education, he was worried that there was brainwashing the what kind of lead us away from god and that sort of thing. So, it depends on, hes a complicated person. Host brainwashing seems to be a big part of what he was talking about. And the fear of you being brainwashed into the illuminati coming in, i think a part of it is the fear of i guess someone coming in and changing the path that he had set for his children. Is that part of the fear of this kind of outside perception . Guest he had specific ideas about things, and i think that he was worried we might go to a doctor and we might kind of in some way compromise our health and spirituality. In his mind, the kind of path was narrow and you needed to do these things to have Good Standing with god and in order to be a good person and all these things. So i think that is the fear that you could sucked int have suckee world. This idea of the world being unworldly. I think a lot of people have that idea. I think it is a strong idea and a lot of religions. My father just included doctors. Host you were mormons, but this is not a mormon perspective at all. Guest most, almost all mormons support education. Most send their kids to school oschoolwith a belief in homescht they really believe in it. They definitely believe in doctors and things. Host and i found that interesting in the process coming you wanted to make that point. Guest i did because right now, the political environment is so polarized, and i think people will latch onto any story to confirm their own preconceptions about something. I think that my dad had some irregular ideas. I think that the way his mind worked and im not a medical professional, so i dont know what it was but i felt he had some kind of mental irregulari irregularity. I just, in my mind, the religious extremism i think was a vehicle for that. So i would say whatever was happening in his mind, i think call it religious extremism, dont think it was the other way around. I dont want people to take this story and they all religious people are like this or ill mormons are like this, all these people that are different from us. Its easy when people are different from you to just make them into a caricature. Host let me tell you from reading the book, that is not to take away. This is a foreign land to me, in many ways. And that is not to take away at all, so i think you can rest assured. What is interesting to me, you have no idea of people kind of taking from Popular Culture on the news and applying it to their worldview. There is an example of that you called your first memory that is not a memory and that is the ruby ridge massacre. Can you talk a little bit about the role and how it shaped the fearbased belief that your father kind of established . Guest he did have these ideas about the government, the government specifically around at the time of the ruby ridge incident, our family wasnt so different from the Weaver Family in the way that we lived and a little bit isolated, we didnt go to school and all that. So i think when it happened to them, there was a pur a period y dad was quite worried it could happen to anyone, which is an irrational. I mean if it happened to someone else. I was about five when it happened, and so we kind of went into this period that we were camping a lot and we were preparing. We got bags that if we needed to run and hide in the mountains we were going to have them. I had a journal i have written a few years later when i still had this bad and i documented all of the content. Pages of, you know, a heater for the emergency food and water purifier and mosquito nets in all these things you would need if youre going to live on the mountain. So, for me that event, i dont know how long it lasted for my dad. But it lived in my mind as this very frightening thing that made me feel like the government could come at any moment. He never told us the end of the story. Host can you tell us a little bit of . Guest the weavers were a family that lived in idaho, and they the way that it began as a believe it had to do with a conflict over a rifle that randy weaver and sol had sold apparenn undercover atf agent and he missed a court date i think into the fbi and federal marshals began to secure surveillance and somehow there was a conflict where the dog was shot indian agent was shot and his son and i think was 11. It got out of hand very quickly. It ended up being that he was shot and agents surrounded the cow in and ultimately, his wife, vicki, was chalked while holding the baby. She was killed by a sniper. A sort of her in this story and that is the version that i was told, that my dad told us that looked like have happened if it could happen to them it could happen to us. I remember having dreams we would be crawling around on the floor, it really lived in my mind in this way because he didnt really tell me the end of the story. So when i was 17, i was at the university and i heard the end of the story. And i heard how there had been his massivthis Massive Public od congressional inquiries and newspapers, every major newspaper covered the story, and it became different. When i was a child, it was how in the government they were going to come for us and it was this secret thing. Obviously i realized, i mean, it was a terrible thing that happened, that its how democracy works in a lot of ways and it wasnt something that was kept secret or covered up. It was very much public. There were Massive Public outcry is. Host part of the fear as a 5yearold, the story is terrifying especially in the situation you were in. You very much identified with the family, that you kind of feel they idea that you were not alone, your family wasnt alone and that knowledge would have been comforting to you, do you feel had you known . Guest if i had an understanding of how the institutions edsel responded, but it wasnt like the government wasnt this evil force that obviously that was an incident for the abuse of power and callous disregard for human life. I think that might be what the congressional report on it said. That is a very different idea of the government, that there is a free press and people find out about things. When i went to the university i didnt just learn the story of ruby ridge. I also learned how the constitution works and what is the role of the free press. And of that changes the way the story felt quite a bit. Host i want to go back to kind of three stages in your education assuming thats what you call it educated. Can you talk a little bit of how the education that you learned with your family and you know, it isnt a traditional education, but tell me some of the values that youve learned that most of the people in this country happened. Guest when my oldest brothers were younger i think my mother did a pretty decent job of homeschooling. By the time i came along, she had seven kids, she was a midwife, herbalists, there wasnt a lot of homeschooling going on. So i never took an exam, there was never anything like a lecture or anything like that. That. Homeschool that i received was pretty limited. But there was one thing i valued, just the way that they raised us. They had this philosophy and they would say to us all the time, you can teac teach yoursef anything better than some amounts can teach it to you. It is a principle i agree with and i worry a lot but when we talk about education in this country, and i was in england its become something that is really passive and there should be an individual component. If it is just social, it is a big propaganda. People need to feel actively engaged i think in designing their own curriculum. I do think at some level, i hate the word disempowered, but i do worry that a lot of people seem to take to heart this idea to learn something you have to have a degree and institution in place to teach it to you. I am grateful i wasnt raised like that so i decided to go to college and it felt like something i could do, because okay i need to learn algebra, i will buy a book and i will learned. I kept going. My parents took it too far, i arrived really underprepared and wanted to raise my hand in the class. Ive never heard of it. People thought i was denying it but i had never heard of it before. I wouldnt say that this is an ideal education, but i do think that they had something about people feeling ownership over what they learn because if you think of education i think a few people talk about education as a way to make money and get the job, that it about making a person and people should have the opportunity to participate in the making of their own mind, and i just think that it needs to be more active and people need to be more involved in their own education. Host how did the way that you relate to this obviously in a literal sense. Guest i didnt know how to write narratives. I had a phd because when i got to school i had really committed and ten years later after i stepped foot in a classroom and ten years later i graduated so i know how to do academic writing. But i didnt know how to write the pros but it was that same principle i thought this is a skill i want and what are the ways i can get it. The thing for me that maybe the biggest differencmade thebiggesw york fiction podcast which is amazing. Then they explain to you how they work and it is an amazing curriculum more to the point it was a curriculum that works for me so i could pursue it and i didnt have to spend a lot of time perceiving a curriculum that didnt work for me because i think everybody is different which is why it is always going to be better than what other people would make. Host were there any books that were particularly helpful during the creation of this book . Guest i had never read a short story. I didnt know what the short stories were they found him so helpful. I read a lot of the year of magical thinking and a lot of Toni Morrison because she was a genius and a ton of short stories. You take those that speak to you and there are some amazing writers that i enjoyed but they dont give me ideas of how to write and then some that do and i think that is the beauty of having control over how you learn. Host back to your childhood, what were you reading . Guest i read a lot of religious books. We have others in the house but didnt really read them. I read a lot of 19th century speeches by the kind of founding mormon prophets, so that is a language. Host pretty interesting when you went to school for the first time at 17, you wrote in this kind of stilted archaic style. Guest in a very stilted style because that is what i have been reading. I think a lot of my professors were just very bewildered by why i sounded like a 19th century it took a while to kind of get that voice out great host isnt it amazing it is so much different than a talking voice in that you really have to look at how you didnt speak in that way i am assuming. Is it interesting that is the part guest theguest co. They fa certain selfconsciousness about writing. I noticed this in a lot of writing not just of my own, but people will use words like establishment. Words that you would never use e because i think they feel like they sound more intellectual or something. So i had fact that i just had a bad case of it. Host how long did it take you to get that kind of exercise back . Guest rewrote the whole book the first draft in about a year and first four months everything i wrote was absolutely terrible. So about four months. Host are you being hard on yourself or guest it was really bad. I took it to a writing group once. I didnt really think of myself as a writer. I was literally trying to learn how to write because i wanted to write this one book. It wasnt a part of my identity when they said this is terrible i would say i know, of course it is. I am not a writer. Just tell me how to make it better so that is a wonderful place to learn to write because i ha have no personal feelings about it at all. There was no reason i should know how to do this. Ive literally never written a story like this before but i want to try to learn. Was a great place. Host your journals are a good portion of your life. When did you start coming in to talk about the journals you have. Guest i have a couple when i was eight but i get really serious about it when i was ten, and i was very tasteful about it. I have all of them, two or three stacks. They are all different. Some are about my grandmother and they tend to have a picture on all of them up to the age of 16. Host i know i journal as well and for me i dont think they really understand something until i write it down. What was your reason of doing it, do you have an idea . Guest i think there were a couple of reasons. There was a bit of loneliness. Sometimes i detect, i didnt have a lot of friends commit any friends actually. There was another family that lived in my town but i was never invited to things and it was isolated. I had my siblings. I would write in this journal so i could tell someone all this stuff and i think that is one of the reasons and there was a processing element to it. And i dont know, other than that i dont know why but i latched onto it. Host and you are grateful for them now in writing this book. Guest they were really helpful. Host do you still journal now . Guest i do. Host what is interesting going back to the child, being part of something i didnt recognize was physical pain, threats of physical pain. There was a part where you had an accident in the junkyard. Can you talk about that a little bit . Guest my dad ran a junkyard and i dont know why but for whatever reason, he didnt have that part in his head that would tell him this is a dangerous thing, do not do this thing. But even after someone was hurt he didnt understand how serious it was and he kind of felt everything that happens happens for the best and we are going to be protected. They didnt really believe in safety equipment. We would build these buildings, didnt wear safety hat, just a dangerous place and i dont think that its because he didnt kick about our safety, i think he did care about our safety i just dont think that he understood how dangerous it was even after what happened and there is one example of that after i was probably around 14 i was filling up and it had to be picked up by a forklift and then it had to be taken over and dumped into a semi trailer. So i filled it up and said okay but stump the band and he wanted someone to go into the big trailer and several scrapped after he dumped it at heat thought it would be faster if i wrote up and then he said i wont hold it level with the trailer. Then everything will be great. I got in the van, and as he was turning to rotate around to where the trailer was, a bit of scraps came loose and they had a really jagged energy and it pierced like a nice and i couldnt move. So he was waiting for me to crawl out and i was trying to shout down to him i couldnt move that it was a really loud engine and he couldnt hear me. So then he starts raising it up and i know its going to be like going through a meat grinder, 2,000 pounds of falling scrap metal. Especially when they are to follow thing came out of my leg and if thou and i was able to throw myself to the side. So i hit the side of the trailer and i was injured i was okay. I just remember and im feeling really, i think i first experienced anger that he let it happen but that dissipated really quickly and after that i just felt kind of ashamed. It seemed like a simple thing and i didnt know why i havent been able to do it. What i was missing in that moment, i knew that my dad would never hurt me on purpose. I didnt have that information that there might be something going on in his head where he could balance you my safety but not be able to keep me safe. But there might be an explanation besides it was my fault because i know he would never hurt me but somehow i got hurt so that had to be me. I think its so easy to internalize it and internalize guilt and i had to be much older before i could look back on the event and not feel ashamed about it and i was just really angry at my father, how could he let this happen to me, how could he be this kind of father, and i think now i have all the pieces and i can put it together and say he would never want me to get hurt, however, for whatever reason, he wasnt able to run the scrap yard any other way. He wasnt able to run the risk of how he was doing things. Host i am just blown away by the fact that you are not angry. So many people are angry at their parents and sometimes minor transgressions, but this is a pretty major one and you seem to not really hold any anger towards him. Guest i have a theory about anger. I think anger is important and its a mechanism of the brain to keep us from going back in situations on people that will harm us. But i think the risk with anger as well is if you let it take over too much of your life i think it can be really consuming. And adding a spoiler alert, i am estranged from my parents and that circumstance was a really hard thing. Sometime after that happened, i was full of rage. Every beautiful memory i had from my childhood was completely, it just turned to rot. I was a person with no beautiful memories. Whose whole life was rage, and i just think we need anger maybe to get out of these situations but then once youre out in a safe, im not sure you need it. And i wonder if you can just get rid of it and lived a better life without it. I think if i still have my family in my life, i would need my anger every day. But now i dont feel like i need is particularly, and its been important for me to reclaim the beautiful parts of my childhood, but to remember that yes the scrap yard was frightening but it was also fun and yes my father but those things happen to me that he would never have wanted that to happen and there were wonderful things about him, to ask who i think its a delicate balance because i would never want to take the good things about them and say im only going to focus on the good and dismiss the bad because you let yourself get hurt or someone else get hurt. But you dont want to obsess about the bad either so i aspire to the idea of mental integrity which means, to me anyway, that no one can take from you the good but no one can obscure the bad. So i just want to live in my own head, and i want to have a grasp on the reality. Of the reality. I dont want to get consumed with anger that walks out the wonderful things about the person that they also dont want to expose myself to risk boycott recognizing it. Host that sounds extremely evolved. Are you in therapy or have you come to this on your own . Guest therapy. I had to come to some of it on my own that i have done therapy. I think that therapy is really helpful, because it never feels like it is, that is the tragedy is that never feels hopeful that i think it is because you set aside time to think about how you vie feel and do you want tol that way. And ive spent a lot of time and there could be thinking about how angry i feel and i dont feel that way but i dont want to go back to the host what is the middle road . Was a catharsis ordered this book bring a lot of things back . Guest it ended up being cathartic. I didnt think that it would be, but it was exciting for one thing it was hard to write abo about. I really reconciled with the bad things. What i reconciled as the beautiful things into the way ie mountains looked into the way my mother would laugh when she was canning peaches and the good things about my older brother. I think that ended up being the hardest thing to write about and it was the reclaim of that in a strange way. Host was there any part of is particularly hard to write that surprised you . Guest there were a couple of moments about my dad were hard to write about and moments that my brother saved my life. Basically we were breaking in horses and i went on one that was completely berserk and he weighs on the ones that have never been written. It was a matter of time and that is pretty much game over. My brother is somehow on this completely unbroken horse managed to capture mine and so this is a brother that was very manipulative and controlling it with twist my wrist behind my back that he had a wonderful side and i think what took me a long time as i said before is for me it was something to say he is kind and can be wonderful and i still think that but i dont want to dismiss the fact he can be manipulative and violent. Host i was wondering if that was hard for you to talk about but you seemed pretty open. Guest host very psychologically violent as well so not just physical violence. Psychological torture in some ways. Guest i think some people fixate and i tried not to go off on this very much because it wasnt the important part. I have this idea that no matter what kind of abuse is if you are going to be someone you have this reality to distort it and you have to convince them of two things. Was pretty easy to convince people to internalize that kind of guilt when they are hurting the first thing in a matter of minutes he could convince me something hasnt happened that happened two minutes before and he could convince me to have a completely different interpretation of it and one example of that after thanksgiving dinner i think my brother felt the need to demonstrate control and so befordo sobefore it even startee grabbed me by my hair and shoved my head in the toilet and when it was all over, he told me that he had just been a game and next time we were having fu fun i shd really be sure to tell him if i had any pain. And i completely took the perspective on board he also knew that reality had no bearing on me and he could see how far under my brothers power and he tried to reason with me for a while. But then theres another incident a couple of months later id been at the university for a while and i think going to the university helped me learn a lot of my own ideas and opinions and gave me the ability to say i disagree with something and a few months later it happened again and he attacked me in a parking lot and that evening when it was over he came into my room and he said im really sorry. We were just having a good time and i had no idea that i could hurt you the next time make sure you speak up if youre in any pain. After he left i was writing in my journal and i wrote that i didnt know which version to believe that i wrote down my version, i wrote down that i became terrified and in pain. I wrote it in that moment if i had been able and would have torn him apart. So i had these in my mind, and in that moment i didnt necessarily come i didnt know if he had experienced it as a game but i knew i didnt and that was an important moment because that is the first time i think i didnt immediately see the reality to someone elses and i think that it was the first time my brother attempted to dominate me and at the end of the process there were still two minds present hi among two distt minds, not one having control over another. Host it is almost like a testament that they were putting this down as your experience. You are still engaging in what you call reality bending. He was so much nicer to me before the accident, you said something to the effect that he was my best friend before and then you go back and realize no, he was violent and abusive before the accident and was almost as if you were playing a game with yourself. Guest army had revised in my mind he had a really serious head injury. I had revised when the accident took place but i had to just somehow in my mind and it was when i was writing the book i got my own journal and i talked to my brothers who also kept journals. It happened when i was much older. I think when i was 17 or 16. I think i was 16. I thought that doesnt explain any of it as it has been going on for so much longer than that. And that was hard. Even that night things happened, i had emails i wrote to him that night saying he would never hurt me. I was writing this with a broken toe. Its hard to underestimate how powerful that reality distortion is a. Host in the kind of questions that they flirt with and the text about memory and putting the the book together ss like it involved interviewing a lot of people into putting together a lot of distant forces and trying to kind of stare out the truth and what happened. What are your thoughts on that and on the reliability of your own memory having done all this . Guest it is a difficult thing because you dont want to overly rely on your memory but you dont want to be vulnerable to people coming in. My family culture had a culture of justifying a rationalizing. There was a lot of this term gaslighting and things were happening, almost as they were happening. And i think that we were so affected by it, so deeply affected. The became really difficult to sort out. Luckily my brothers were wonderful, they were helpful. And its nice, inlaws or a wonderful thing because they come in from the outside and see things through different eyes and they are a lot less vulnerable i think in some of those distortions of things that happened. So, memory is complicated and i think sometimes the stories that maybe they are right and maybe they are wrong. Host how much do you think now, you touch on this as well explicitly actually, you talk about your Fathers Mental Health and so you are not a psychiatrist, however, there are things that you experienced firsthand that would lead one to believe there was no stability there and there was a moment that they were in a psych class at school and hear about bipolar disorder and this kind of turns a light on in your mind and you think this sounds like my father. Guest my whole idea of mental illness, i thought to be a lunatic, that was my idea of it. So it gave me another way to think about Mental Health and the brain. Im not a medical professional. I have no idea, but i do feel like there is a gap between the fact that my father loves me and get we could be so terribly hurt by the things he did, physically especially. There were just irrational behaviors. And i know that it wasnt malicious, so having that other category helped me understand that sometimes people do the best they can but that doesnt mean that everything is okay. Host it seems you were kind of subsuming some of the shame you were focusing on your salt when you describe that experience in the junkyard you were the one i was wrong, not your father. Hearing this outside perspective from the Mental Health perspective guest it helped me go back and reexperience fa re experied have empathy for my dad and also for myself. Its hard to have empathy for your thoughts to think things that happened shouldnt have happened. And its important to let yourself off the hook for those kind of feelings youve been carrying around a postcode might be a cheesy question but if you could talk to your self when you were ten is there something you would say in particular . Guest i dont know. I kind of thing think, and thiss going to be cynical, sorry to your heartfelt question, i dont think theres anything anyone could have said to me that would have made any difference. One of the things he said to me that night when i was telling him, it wasnt that night, it was a little bit later we ended up breaking up because i was too dysfunctional to be in a relationship and one of the things he said to me he basically said this is out of my league. No one is going to give you the permission, you have to give it to your self. There is when he introduces you to music and shows the facility and it probably wasnt even in your ideas as a future. A sort of house on a farm. Maybe be a midwife like my mother. That is how i thought my life would go until i was 16 and my older brother who educated himself and got himself into the university came home and said i think that you should try to do this. Can you describe that for me . Guest . I also didnt belong there either. I didnt set any time with what i would call Public School kids. The. Maybe they are very observant because they drink coke and the women but occasionally wear a tank top around the apartment and things like that but i was just appalled by. Most people wash their hands after they go to the bathroom, and my dad had always taught us, like my grandmother, m my mothes mother would get after him for this because they never did and then he would always say to her i dont teach my kids to wash their hands, i just teach them not to piss on their hands, and i thought it was a great philosophy. My roommates did not think that was a great philosophy. So no i didnt feel like building, i felt like i was on the outside. And i had made have made a fews and i was doing okay in school. It was really hard that i was making it. I was even more confused because i could go back to idaho and i would have my main stream friends and all these things were becoming more normal, then i would go back to idaho and see where my family lived and it would be completely foreign and at the same time utterly familiar. My dad he gets really injured where hes standing next to a car trying to take the fuel tank off and rather than taking it off any other way, the spark from the torch makes it into the fuel tank that he hasnt drained into the car explodes and he was burned horribly. The whole other half of his body, so many thirddegree burns. And my family made the decision to treat it at home, and i remember the the swabs that my mother had and they had no morphine and she almost died. I closed my eyes and started praying wanting to say goodbye. In the months of this healing process there was so much pain and the whole time i was at war with myself and i didnt know whether i thought they were right and this is what god wanted them to do or whether they were insane were torturing for no reason. That is the stuff that you experienced when you see a different perspective. You remember in school, learning about the holocaust and not coming about the holocaust not exactly. I get a lot of smiling and nodding. I never heard of the Civil Rights Movement. I had heard of slavery but i definitely learned it from a very different perspective i think than reading accounts of slavery like Frederick Douglass was really eyeopening for me because i never had that perspective but it was the Civil Rights Movement that blew my mind. And i realized my other had been a child and this was happening. And it wasnt so far in the past. You know, that time could be measured in the wrinkle of my mothers skin. It wasnt measured in geological time. Really, really recent and that it really blew my mind. You end up going to cambridge. Actually trinity first. Did you have an experience of imposter syndrome when you were there, it sounds like a little bit of what you are describing. The professor craig chooses you as a person he feels have a lot of potential. Guest he really helped me. There was a Study Program at cambridge and he applied, told me i should and then i didnt get him. He wrote them and said i think a person debate could she is learning a lot. In the beginning you describe a little bit of i dont belong here, these people are different. This seems to be a turning point that you start hearing about the positive liberty and all these different ideas and at some point you kind of writing the book i belong to a. It was so interesting. Blew my mind because the whole point of the negative and positive liberty is the idea that if there are external obstacles people have a positive liberty says that there are obstacles that people have better internal and exist in the mind so if you are tired of you may not be able to go outside but also if you believe someone outside is going to shoot you in this and someone likus and someonelike that it dr whether they are there or not. So for this idea that might be the most important thing determining how much freedom you have and how much ability you have that never occurred to me and it was around this time a friend of mine sent me a song i never heard of a and i got really obsessed with that lyric. I became really obsessed with a fat into these doctors had told him that he didnt. She died and she was young and when i was reading that, i realized i had stopped believing in my density with doctors and hospitals at least i told myself i had but i never have my vaccinations, and i called and i got them, i got all of them and i left the hospital looking like a pin cushion because i had it all in one day. It took me a long time to convince the nurse i needed all of them. But it was the moment i had to f the world worldview. Post the therpost that there ist you do find that courage and if that happens after he completely kind of damages you. Guest we both experienced something with my brother. My father decided that i was lying. They set up my memories couldnt be trusted but i think the hardest thing was after that, they called my brother and what followed after that was the period he called me and said he hired an assassin to come and kill me and all these kind of things and then he cut me out of his life and my parents supported the position. That christmas they said you are not allowed to come home because it will make your brother uncomfortable. Host i was most upset by your mother in that situation. I felt there was an opportunity when you approached your mother about these things and she seemed to be of equal mind. She had seen the things. She said i can see this now. Of course it is happening and we are going to help you and take care of it and i are going to get him into therapy and it is going to be okay. And she apologized to me. She said she was sorry she hadnt been able to keep us safe. When my father took the position that he did. I have a million questions for you. Will you talk to me about that, that is kind of where your education comes full circle. Guest i was ostracized for about ten months and i was a ia fellowship at harvard and my father came to visit it was surprising because my dad hates traveling and he really hates liberals. He didnt fit in that he came. They had only been there for a few days before i realized they had come to offer me back into the family come and what that looked like they had been telling people and they believed i was possessed and that is why i said these things i said about my brother and they were going to kind of alternative splicing if i could just go along with it i could say that i didnt mean the things i said. I could trade out their memories for mine and that was a couple of days we pretended like we were a happy family and when i kind of thought i could make that bargain. I thought it was a pretty good deal and i was arguing with myself trying to convince myself maybe i was denying my own memories and my own perceptions and maybe it was justified somehow in surrendering but i knew to be true and they really thought i found a delay could make that before they returned to idaho my father offered me his blessing and i couldnt, i couldnt do it. There were a couple of things that i realized in that moment and the first thing i realized is the daughter my father had come to reclaim just didnt exist anymore. I had gone off and gained a whole different perspective. I couldnt surrender to it and it was clear to me of course i had been the one that said it wasnt a daemon that said those things. And my father had come to cast out was me. Host i want to end this with a final rating at the end of the book but is also full circle and brings it back to the education that they were able to use for this experience. Just give me one second