[00:00.000 --> 00:03.320]  And would be happy to talk more about that kind of privately with people if you're interested.
[00:03.720 --> 00:09.740]  So, Darvin, would you like to give us a little bit, or would you like someone else to go first?
[00:12.320 --> 00:13.600]  I guess I can start.
[00:17.750 --> 00:28.290]  So, I got into the hacker community when I was about 17 or 18, and I had come from a very abusive childhood.
[00:28.290 --> 00:32.790]  And I was also very isolated as well.
[00:32.990 --> 00:42.310]  I was a homeschooled kid, and I had never been to public school, and I used going to college as a way to escape from the situation I was in.
[00:42.450 --> 00:50.090]  And I was actually also pretty woefully underprepared for, like, just life and people in general.
[00:50.090 --> 00:54.530]  But anything was better than what I had been experiencing previously.
[00:54.530 --> 00:59.930]  And in college, I met some people who were part of 2600.
[00:59.930 --> 01:06.730]  And I got introduced to other people in 2600, and I started going to meetings, and I started learning things from these people.
[01:07.290 --> 01:30.050]  And through my interaction with the hacker scene with 2600, I gained skills and the ability to support myself and to keep going and to stay out of a lot of, like, rock bottom places that I otherwise could have been and prevented myself from going back ever or having a reason to go back.
[01:30.990 --> 01:49.050]  At the same time, a lot of the people that I encountered within the hacker scene within 2600 were also similarly traumatized or disordered or had some kind of, like, emotional problems.
[01:49.050 --> 01:54.870]  And a lot of the people that I met were very helpful, and a lot of the people I met were also very abusive to me.
[01:56.770 --> 02:00.870]  And there's no talking about that.
[02:01.030 --> 02:02.130]  There's no outlet for it.
[02:02.190 --> 02:16.930]  There's no acknowledgment of the damage that we can do to each other within the hacker community once we get involved as friends or, like, in any sort of very close interpersonal interaction.
[02:18.390 --> 02:21.910]  And it's a weird balance for me, or it was a weird balance for me.
[02:22.050 --> 02:29.230]  It was like, on one hand, like, I was given a lot of opportunities to better myself and to keep myself going.
[02:29.230 --> 02:33.450]  And at the same time, there was a lot of shitty things still happening to me.
[02:35.230 --> 02:48.570]  And I did eventually get more and more isolated because I couldn't deal with the, like, the continued hazing that tends to go on within these communities among certain people.
[02:49.590 --> 02:51.910]  And eventually, I kind of withdrew completely.
[02:52.230 --> 02:58.690]  And I used to live here in New York, and I eventually moved to Chicago, where...
[02:59.350 --> 03:00.730]  And that was, like, three years ago.
[03:00.870 --> 03:01.670]  I was about 25.
[03:01.910 --> 03:16.430]  And there, I decided that it was time to either, as I put it in my head, either man up and kill myself or man up and actually try and fix what was going wrong internally.
[03:16.850 --> 03:23.870]  Because, like, no amount of moving could work on the things that were going on inside my head.
[03:24.050 --> 03:30.950]  Like, I was in a lot of pain, and I believed that it was my fault and that I deserved it or I had brought it on myself or something like that.
[03:32.450 --> 03:38.530]  And the only choice that I kept ending up seeing was just to remove myself from the world.
[03:39.710 --> 03:44.950]  But that is a very permanent solution to what might be a temporary problem.
[03:44.970 --> 03:51.310]  And I thought about it from the perspective of, like, okay, do I... am I ready for this?
[03:51.310 --> 03:52.670]  The answer was actually no.
[03:52.670 --> 03:54.090]  There's a lot of cool shit in the world.
[03:54.090 --> 03:55.510]  So let me try this other thing.
[03:55.510 --> 03:57.890]  And I called a suicide hotline.
[03:58.010 --> 03:59.170]  I got myself into therapy.
[03:59.170 --> 04:03.670]  And I was in a city where I had no friends and I was in an abusive relationship.
[04:05.210 --> 04:09.810]  And I left Chicago and I moved to San Francisco.
[04:09.890 --> 04:14.330]  And I kept working on things and working on myself.
[04:14.350 --> 04:17.350]  And it didn't go very well at first, to be honest.
[04:17.730 --> 04:19.530]  Like, I still felt shitty a lot of the time.
[04:19.530 --> 04:22.550]  I still didn't like myself most of the time.
[04:23.470 --> 04:35.430]  And it took a long time of repeated throwing myself against the wall, trying different things, trying various medications.
[04:35.870 --> 04:37.110]  I'm on Adderall.
[04:37.170 --> 04:38.530]  I've never been on SSRIs.
[04:38.570 --> 04:49.410]  I did that on purpose to try and work more on my emotional state than just, like, paste it over with chemicals.
[04:52.770 --> 04:53.810]  And I kept trying.
[04:54.070 --> 04:59.350]  I stopped interacting with people who were damaging me.
[04:59.470 --> 05:03.070]  I started reevaluating, like, the choices that I was making.
[05:03.070 --> 05:04.850]  Most importantly, why I was making them.
[05:04.890 --> 05:09.270]  And a lot of them came from a place of, well, I didn't feel that I deserved any better.
[05:09.270 --> 05:15.130]  Or I felt that these f*cked up people that I was interacting with were the only ones who could understand me.
[05:17.850 --> 05:31.310]  And so I just kind of, like, looked at those ideas and kind of let them go and started trying to deliberately make choices, even though they didn't feel right at the time, or they didn't feel natural.
[05:31.310 --> 05:33.130]  I just started making different choices.
[05:33.330 --> 05:36.190]  And it gets better if you try.
[05:37.090 --> 05:39.150]  And sometimes it doesn't get better right away.
[05:39.710 --> 05:42.670]  And it didn't get better right away for me, but it's getting better slowly.
[05:43.070 --> 05:55.930]  And sometimes I still think, like, okay, maybe not killing myself wasn't the right choice, but I still feel like I don't have enough data to draw a conclusion either way, so I'm going to keep trying.
[05:55.930 --> 06:18.230]  And in the meantime, I've, like, I've found a lot of good friends and a lot of value in the hacker scene, and I've taken part in a lot of interesting and valuable and life-changing experiences like volunteering for HOPE, which I've done for, like, from H2K2 onward to some degree,
[06:18.270 --> 06:21.510]  up until the last HOPE where I worked on the AMD project.
[06:22.730 --> 06:27.470]  And I had a great experience doing that, and I really appreciated all the people that I worked with.
[06:27.610 --> 06:35.130]  And I went to California and started getting involved with Noisebridge, and I met a lot of interesting and valuable people there as well.
[06:38.430 --> 06:40.650]  And so that's kind of where I'm at right now.
[06:54.920 --> 06:58.800]  So I've been dealing with depression since I was a teenager.
[06:59.440 --> 07:08.540]  Had a series of kind of, like, unfortunate events happen, and a very, very nasty divorce with my parents kind of set me off.
[07:08.660 --> 07:17.560]  I went from, like, being a, you know, happy kid making straight A's to purposefully making the lowest possible grades that I could and still passed just to piss everyone off.
[07:20.100 --> 07:22.160]  Yeah, it really pissed everyone off.
[07:24.900 --> 07:27.840]  So I was just a really, really angry teenager.
[07:28.120 --> 07:31.160]  And I unfortunately had some medical problems on top of that.
[07:31.300 --> 07:35.320]  My lung collapsed, then I spent a couple months in the hospital between a few things, had some surgery.
[07:36.330 --> 07:40.620]  I also got burned, had some physical therapy from that, and just a bunch of other things.
[07:41.160 --> 07:46.400]  And so, around the time I was 16, I was extremely, extremely unhappy.
[07:46.580 --> 07:51.280]  And finally, just one morning I woke up, and I found my state in that...
[07:51.280 --> 08:01.060]  I've described it to a number of other people, and they've had similar experiences, where you get completely apathetic, just, like, no emotions whatsoever, and everything is almost, like, pure logic.
[08:01.500 --> 08:07.060]  And I came to the logical conclusion that I should just kill myself, because that was the correct answer.
[08:07.180 --> 08:11.140]  Because otherwise, when I was outside of that, I thought I was going to be experiencing pain again.
[08:11.320 --> 08:12.440]  I couldn't end that pain.
[08:13.840 --> 08:18.760]  And I got to the point of having the gun in my mouth, being ready to pull the trigger, and then I heard my mom come home.
[08:18.860 --> 08:27.560]  And I just had this profound realization at that moment, of how much that would affect not just me being a permanent solution.
[08:29.140 --> 08:33.420]  You know, because that is a one-time thing, so you're done with that.
[08:33.680 --> 08:42.860]  And so then my mother came home, and I realized, oh, my mom being a nurse, she would try to resuscitate me, and if I had done this correctly, and I died, then she would probably just pick up the gun and kill herself.
[08:43.140 --> 08:45.960]  And then my sister would come home, and then she'd find both of us dead.
[08:46.120 --> 08:48.260]  And then that would scar her for life.
[08:48.360 --> 08:49.520]  And then, oh, yeah, my stepdad.
[08:49.710 --> 08:51.760]  And then all of this stuff, like, started cascading.
[08:51.920 --> 08:53.450]  And then I started thinking about friends and family.
[08:53.520 --> 09:00.280]  And it was just this moment of sitting on the floor, realizing just how much I affected everybody, and how much that was going to change everything.
[09:00.280 --> 09:04.740]  And so from that point on, I've actually never gotten back to the suicidal point.
[09:05.080 --> 09:15.540]  Whenever I get to that logical, emotionless state, my solution is always go to a crisis center or call somebody instead of continuing on.
[09:15.660 --> 09:20.260]  I've been there a couple of other times, and it always seems to build up over time and eventually get there.
[09:22.120 --> 09:25.710]  But yeah, I'm very open with talking to people about this.
[09:25.950 --> 09:34.660]  I've had, unfortunately, a couple of friends and even close family members both attempt and successfully kill themselves as well.
[09:34.980 --> 09:42.620]  And it's a really, I mean, it's difficult to deal with.
[09:42.760 --> 09:48.600]  So I'm seriously willing to talk to anybody at any time about these types of things.
[09:51.580 --> 09:54.600]  So various points in my life, I've been on and off medications.
[09:55.080 --> 09:59.360]  I highly recommend going on medications and seeing a good therapist when you get to these states.
[09:59.640 --> 10:05.070]  The medications aren't going to fix everything, but they do help you deal with some of the problems.
[10:05.210 --> 10:10.840]  It takes the edge off sometimes, because I get these crazy anxieties over just silly stuff.
[10:11.040 --> 10:18.740]  You know, it's like you get so depressed and like, I can't like bother like opening my email, just like even like looking at the email or, you know, it's like doing laundry.
[10:18.960 --> 10:20.360]  It's just some like arbitrary things.
[10:20.400 --> 10:29.180]  Like I need to do this one thing or the dishes are piled up or I need to go and like buy bread or, you know, it's just like these tiny things, but like they're so huge.
[10:29.450 --> 10:33.140]  They're like these huge walls and just very difficult to get past.
[10:33.450 --> 10:34.740]  Sometimes the medication can help.
[10:34.920 --> 10:35.980]  Therapy absolutely helps.
[10:36.520 --> 10:38.210]  Having people to talk to helps.
[10:38.340 --> 10:41.160]  I found for myself living with other people is pretty important.
[10:41.740 --> 10:42.920]  I can't live by myself.
[10:43.100 --> 10:44.480]  It's just that it doesn't work out.
[10:44.620 --> 10:50.160]  I end up kind of living in a pigsty and it's not good because I have OCD about things being clean.
[10:50.360 --> 10:53.380]  And so then I have this huge anxiety about things not being clean.
[10:53.900 --> 10:56.480]  And then I just can't do anything and I can't deal with it.
[10:56.640 --> 11:00.880]  And I don't want to go outside and I don't want to be in the apartment.
[11:01.220 --> 11:04.860]  And so, yeah, it's just, it's a terrible state to be in.
[11:04.860 --> 11:09.440]  And I experienced this actually, pretty much hacker burnout.
[11:10.880 --> 11:13.180]  And it happened a little bit before Congress.
[11:13.740 --> 11:17.380]  And for around eight months, I just pretty much dropped off the Internet.
[11:17.560 --> 11:24.220]  And I stopped posting to Twitter, which is a pretty good indicator that I'm not longer talking to anybody if I'm not on Twitter.
[11:25.300 --> 11:26.260]  Stopped emailing.
[11:26.300 --> 11:27.160]  I stopped running my business.
[11:27.320 --> 11:30.620]  I'm an open-source hardware developer and I just ran out of kits.
[11:31.380 --> 11:34.000]  It's just, I'm not going to make any money if I don't have kits.
[11:34.120 --> 11:35.020]  That's what I do full time.
[11:35.980 --> 11:40.400]  And so post Congress, I usually get a crash after a conference.
[11:40.600 --> 11:43.500]  Like that seems to be like a pretty norm for a lot of people.
[11:43.640 --> 11:47.580]  It's really intense, a bunch of amazing moments and then just boom crash.
[11:47.960 --> 11:51.800]  And so I crashed extremely hard and I just stayed in Berlin.
[11:51.980 --> 11:53.780]  I overstayed my visa by like four months.
[11:54.860 --> 12:01.160]  Yeah, luckily you can go to the government if you are an American and be like, Hey, sorry, German government, I'm a stupid American.
[12:01.540 --> 12:02.640]  I didn't understand the rules.
[12:04.440 --> 12:04.880]  Whoops.
[12:06.980 --> 12:10.720]  And they're like, no, stupid American.
[12:10.820 --> 12:11.700]  It's okay.
[12:12.600 --> 12:13.320]  They're there.
[12:15.320 --> 12:18.340]  So I will be going back to Berlin in October.
[12:18.740 --> 12:22.020]  But, you know, so it's just this time I'll be doing it properly.
[12:22.120 --> 12:26.420]  Oh, and that was the whole thing I told them, you know, it's like, no, no, this time I want to do it right and I'll have the paperwork ready.
[12:26.540 --> 12:28.100]  And they're like, okay, we like paperwork.
[12:28.300 --> 12:28.700]  That's good.
[12:29.100 --> 12:29.640]  That's good.
[12:30.720 --> 12:31.620]  You've learned your lesson.
[12:31.740 --> 12:32.000]  Excellent.
[12:34.480 --> 12:44.080]  So the past few months, even though I've largely been out of the bulk of the depression, you know, I'm still getting little flurries of it, but I've just been working my way out of it.
[12:44.080 --> 12:48.820]  And I guess we'll talk more about, like, recovery stuff a little bit later.
[12:49.240 --> 12:58.900]  But I only recently, like, the past couple of weeks popped my head up on the Internet and knew exactly what happened, which is I just got a fire hose straight to the face of, like, contact again.
[12:59.180 --> 13:01.360]  You know, but I was ready for it by that point.
[13:01.380 --> 13:01.760]  I knew.
[13:02.200 --> 13:12.320]  And overwhelmingly, it's been extremely positive, because this community is amazing and beautiful, and a lot of people understand where you're coming from.
[13:12.320 --> 13:27.120]  And for me to be publicly posting, from Mitch's posts and a few of our other friends, have also done, like, some pretty interesting blog posts and stuff about their...not even just depression, but, like, all kinds of other issues.
[13:28.020 --> 13:33.700]  The whole community has been extremely supportive, and I just...I love every single one of you because of it.
[13:33.900 --> 13:37.900]  I probably wouldn't continue to be here if it weren't for that.
[13:38.520 --> 13:39.320]  So, yeah.
[13:50.100 --> 13:55.540]  Yeah, well, I lived the first half of my life in total depression.
[13:57.640 --> 14:02.800]  My parents did what they were supposed to do, which was get married and have kids.
[14:03.120 --> 14:04.380]  They didn't even like kids.
[14:05.840 --> 14:07.060]  They weren't evil.
[14:07.340 --> 14:12.740]  They actually turned out to be really cool people, which helped me later on when we could become friends as adults.
[14:13.480 --> 14:16.480]  But as a kid, that doesn't do me any good.
[14:16.680 --> 14:21.920]  And I was severely, brutally bullied daily.
[14:22.320 --> 14:26.140]  I was physically abused by these bullies almost daily.
[14:27.340 --> 14:35.680]  Teachers in the school that I went to just stood by and watched as the bullies bullied me, and often even as they beat me.
[14:36.300 --> 14:37.740]  Especially the gym teacher.
[14:38.820 --> 14:40.400]  Have any of you had gym teachers?
[14:43.700 --> 14:45.260]  So...and my parents didn't know what to do.
[14:45.420 --> 14:51.140]  I mean, they were totally depressed, and when I told them about what was going on, they didn't know how to deal with it.
[14:51.240 --> 14:52.800]  They just wanted the pain to go away.
[14:53.140 --> 14:54.740]  And it wasn't going away.
[14:55.220 --> 14:58.720]  So they told me the logical thing to do, which is, it's not their problem.
[14:59.200 --> 15:00.260]  Just...or it's not your problem.
[15:00.380 --> 15:00.900]  It's their problem.
[15:01.020 --> 15:01.540]  They're insecure.
[15:01.540 --> 15:02.440]  So ignore them.
[15:03.340 --> 15:05.760]  What does that mean to a five- or a six-year-old?
[15:07.240 --> 15:12.840]  So, I did the best I could to ignore them, following instructions, as I was trained to do by my parents.
[15:13.500 --> 15:16.960]  And I would just sit there, and they would beat me, and I would try to ignore them.
[15:17.700 --> 15:19.140]  That made me more of a target.
[15:20.360 --> 15:26.840]  I retreated into television, my first hardcore addiction, when I got home, which made everything better.
[15:28.160 --> 15:29.660]  Until the end of the half hour.
[15:30.500 --> 15:31.920]  But then there was another show.
[15:33.780 --> 15:37.400]  I didn't like that show either, but I kept watching it, because I didn't know what else to do.
[15:37.680 --> 15:38.920]  And, yeah.
[15:39.300 --> 15:41.520]  And then I didn't learn any social skills.
[15:41.820 --> 15:45.740]  I became more unhealthy, more overweight.
[15:47.220 --> 15:50.760]  And I didn't get any better at sports, which I hated anyways.
[15:51.360 --> 15:56.120]  Making me more of a target when I went back to school, only to retreat back into television again.
[15:56.440 --> 15:58.280]  So, this is how addiction works.
[15:58.540 --> 16:03.020]  And I became really good at addiction, which didn't help my depression.
[16:05.620 --> 16:12.260]  And, yeah, that went on for, yeah, the first half of my life, really.
[16:13.300 --> 16:22.960]  And it wasn't until I was about 25 or so, when I was watching Gilligan's Island.
[16:24.300 --> 16:26.180]  I hated Gilligan's Island.
[16:27.120 --> 16:29.760]  I watched Gilligan's Island every day.
[16:30.600 --> 16:32.080]  I hated it every day.
[16:32.420 --> 16:35.940]  But it always had at least one line that kept me coming back for more.
[16:37.380 --> 16:42.900]  But I realized that one day, when I was about 25, that I'd been doing this for 25 years.
[16:43.200 --> 16:45.060]  And I'd been hating it for 25 years.
[16:45.120 --> 16:46.460]  And I didn't have to keep doing it.
[16:46.780 --> 16:50.460]  And I got rid of all 50 of my televisions.
[16:51.480 --> 16:52.560]  I am a geek.
[16:52.900 --> 16:55.340]  I would collect them, fix them, and give them away.
[16:56.120 --> 16:57.320]  But I kept a bunch.
[16:57.580 --> 17:00.160]  And I put them all out in the street.
[17:00.160 --> 17:07.920]  And it was the first time in my entire life that I made a decision for me, rather than making a decision based on what I believed other people wanted of me.
[17:08.740 --> 17:10.220]  After all, I hated myself.
[17:10.480 --> 17:11.220]  I was totally depressed.
[17:11.220 --> 17:12.180]  I was totally worthless.
[17:12.180 --> 17:14.380]  I was, you know, a worthless piece of shit.
[17:14.400 --> 17:17.040]  Why would I make decisions based on what I want?
[17:17.220 --> 17:18.460]  What I want doesn't even matter.
[17:18.520 --> 17:19.560]  It's what other people want.
[17:19.920 --> 17:22.880]  But that was the first time I made a decision for me.
[17:25.560 --> 17:27.120]  And it felt great.
[17:27.760 --> 17:35.260]  And then instantly, I realized I had way more time than I knew what to do with.
[17:37.600 --> 17:38.740]  It was terrible.
[17:39.500 --> 17:44.820]  Everything I'd been pushing away for all those years came screaming back, and it would not shut up.
[17:45.060 --> 17:47.940]  And I didn't have anything to blot it out with, like television.
[17:49.380 --> 17:51.220]  And I knew I didn't want to do that again.
[17:51.840 --> 17:54.700]  I explored other means of addiction.
[17:55.220 --> 17:57.580]  And pot was my first one.
[17:57.880 --> 17:58.680]  It was great.
[17:58.840 --> 18:03.000]  I could, in my high school, just to be cool, I'd smoke pot and people would talk to you.
[18:03.240 --> 18:04.180]  You could be silly.
[18:04.180 --> 18:05.500]  You could do fun things.
[18:05.720 --> 18:09.100]  You could be out in the woods smoking and being silly instead of going to math class.
[18:10.100 --> 18:14.440]  And, of course, I'm an intelligent geek, so I get A's anyways, so there's no consequences, right?
[18:17.100 --> 18:17.900]  So, yeah.
[18:18.160 --> 18:26.560]  And because it helped me so much in dealing with other people who wanted me to be around to be silly with rather than to beat me up, I wanted more.
[18:26.780 --> 18:28.160]  And boy, did I do more.
[18:29.600 --> 18:34.960]  It got in the way, and I get paranoid, and I get down on myself, and I started meditating.
[18:35.240 --> 18:36.760]  And meditating was a way to fix myself.
[18:36.760 --> 18:39.920]  And I didn't realize back then that I can't fix myself.
[18:39.920 --> 18:42.120]  I could only make myself crazy.
[18:43.160 --> 18:49.140]  And so I would focus on all the things that are wrong with me and then change my outward behavior surrounding it.
[18:49.140 --> 18:58.300]  And I became a perfect person, according to my 16-year-old brain, of what other people wanted me to be.
[18:58.680 --> 19:07.280]  And that became really interesting when there was someone from one group who I was like this, and someone from this other group who I was like that, all in the same room.
[19:08.100 --> 19:09.280]  Who am I?
[19:10.640 --> 19:14.180]  High on pot, unable to think, and only to be able to get down on myself.
[19:14.180 --> 19:19.840]  Yeah, so a bunch of experiences like that over a few years, and I realized, maybe I should just be me.
[19:21.060 --> 19:22.120]  Yeah, more choices.
[19:22.400 --> 19:22.940]  Quitting pot.
[19:23.100 --> 19:27.400]  Suddenly, everything I was pushing away by pot comes screaming back, and then I found other drugs.
[19:27.560 --> 19:29.380]  So anyways, going through a few of those.
[19:30.220 --> 19:43.620]  But still, all along the way, meditating, actually seeing more of who I am, becoming more of a unified whole, making choices, dealing with the consequences, choices for me rather than what I believed other people wanted of me.
[19:44.840 --> 20:07.760]  And years and years and years of doing that, a little bit of success, a lot of failure at learning from the consequences of my choices, doing things in my life that I actually didn't hate, choosing to make time to do things that I might like, making time by doing less things that I like so I can explore what I love,
[20:07.760 --> 20:15.840]  making more and more of these choices and learning from the consequences, which I had no control over, and learning and making new choices years and years.
[20:15.840 --> 20:20.660]  It takes time for this shit, and the hardest thing is to be patient.
[20:21.100 --> 20:23.820]  And boy, it was that hard for me to learn.
[20:24.380 --> 20:28.720]  But eventually, I was actually traveling to Alaska.
[20:28.720 --> 20:36.640]  I drove there, and I saw a metaphor for life in traveling.
[20:37.260 --> 20:40.200]  There was really only one road with very few choices.
[20:41.200 --> 20:45.240]  But every time there was an intersection, I could turn left.
[20:45.600 --> 20:46.580]  I could turn right.
[20:46.940 --> 20:47.980]  I could stay there.
[20:48.080 --> 20:48.840]  I could go back.
[20:49.180 --> 20:50.500]  I could move to Alaska.
[20:51.340 --> 20:52.400]  What am I going to do?
[20:53.400 --> 20:56.680]  I just decided I would do whatever felt best in that moment.
[20:58.400 --> 20:59.780]  And that's what I did.
[20:59.780 --> 21:12.700]  And it led me to an incredible set of experiences over several months traveling around in Alaska until I got a job, my first consulting job, ripping the guts out of fish in a fish cannery.
[21:13.300 --> 21:16.420]  It was the stupidest thing I've ever done job-wise.
[21:16.600 --> 21:18.360]  And I've done some stupid things job-wise.
[21:19.120 --> 21:21.960]  Yeah, covered knee-deep in fish heads and slime.
[21:21.960 --> 21:26.060]  And I kept telling myself, well, if it gets bad enough, I'll just quit.
[21:26.220 --> 21:27.260]  And that became a mantra.
[21:27.740 --> 21:32.100]  And eventually I realized I've been saying that mantra as it got way worse than possible.
[21:32.560 --> 21:34.820]  And I realized, wow, I really can quit.
[21:34.960 --> 21:36.060]  And then I quit on the spot.
[21:36.600 --> 21:42.200]  And one of the women next to me said, well, if you quit and go away, who's going to keep us all happy?
[21:45.020 --> 21:48.220]  Me, the most depressed person on the planet, keep you happy?
[21:48.220 --> 21:49.680]  What are you talking about?
[21:49.760 --> 21:53.700]  But then I realized, for the first time in my life, I actually had been happy for an extended period.
[21:54.380 --> 21:55.760]  It was miraculous.
[21:57.640 --> 22:02.080]  And that was the first time I realized that it was really possible.
[22:02.980 --> 22:14.800]  And it was all because of making that conscious process happen, of making choices, learning from them, having no control over the consequences, but learning from them and making new choices based on what I think is the coolest.
[22:15.320 --> 22:16.280]  Often I'm wrong.
[22:17.240 --> 22:18.900]  But, you know, we live and learn.
[22:20.500 --> 22:24.760]  And all these years later, I'm 55 now.
[22:25.120 --> 22:26.240]  Time does keep happening.
[22:26.720 --> 22:33.140]  And I have not identified as a depressed person in so long.
[22:34.160 --> 22:35.640]  I still get depressed.
[22:36.060 --> 22:37.660]  It definitely still happens.
[22:38.060 --> 22:39.440]  Life is ups and downs.
[22:39.440 --> 22:42.100]  But I don't identify as a depressed person anymore.
[22:43.100 --> 22:46.620]  I identify myself as living a life that I love.
[22:47.320 --> 22:48.920]  And I do live a life I love.
[22:49.120 --> 22:51.500]  Even with things that happen that totally f*cking suck.
[22:51.740 --> 22:53.400]  Like a friend killing himself last November.
[22:55.260 --> 23:00.560]  But, you know, I'm really, really happy and grateful to be experiencing everything I experience.
[23:01.020 --> 23:06.000]  Which is so different than what I experience all my life.
[23:06.120 --> 23:08.040]  The exclusion of all else when I was a kid.
[23:08.780 --> 23:11.660]  So, it really, really is possible to go through this.
[23:11.880 --> 23:14.640]  And I love helping other people any way that I can.
[23:14.900 --> 23:18.920]  And now that I'm old enough to keep track of my boundaries, taking care of myself in the process.
[23:20.320 --> 23:22.260]  Which is why I do everything that I do.
[23:24.620 --> 23:25.620]  So, yeah.
[23:25.860 --> 23:30.970]  And that's why, you know, I help organize things like HOPE and hacker spaces and whatever.
[23:31.780 --> 23:37.060]  It feels great for me to help other people and do things that I love.
[23:37.360 --> 23:40.160]  So, that's been pretty much my experience.
[23:50.230 --> 23:53.430]  So, I'm not really going to be telling my story.
[23:53.930 --> 23:55.370]  But rather, Len's story.
[23:55.670 --> 24:02.530]  Which is, in large part, a story about the stigma that's attached to chronic depression.
[24:03.010 --> 24:06.790]  And, you know, to an extent, mental illness in general.
[24:07.010 --> 24:08.450]  But, you know, especially depression.
[24:10.370 --> 24:14.970]  So, you know, Len grew up in Pennsylvania.
[24:16.430 --> 24:20.110]  A small town with a, you know, with a boys prep school in it.
[24:22.010 --> 24:23.790]  You know, went to Catholic school as a kid.
[24:24.050 --> 24:26.050]  But he was always, he was always kind of the odd kid.
[24:26.230 --> 24:27.410]  You know, because he was smart.
[24:28.510 --> 24:30.330]  Had some, had some health problems.
[24:30.630 --> 24:33.090]  Which, you know, later turned out to be Crohn's disease.
[24:33.410 --> 24:36.610]  But, you know, when he was eight, he was just the weird kid who can't eat pizza on Fridays.
[24:39.870 --> 24:44.950]  He was diagnosed with depression when he was a kid.
[24:44.950 --> 24:45.490]  He was a teenager.
[24:46.470 --> 25:00.370]  And in his late teens, went through some pretty traumatic experiences that left him with a profound distrust of the, of psychiatric care in general.
[25:01.050 --> 25:07.050]  Pretty much entirely the fault of some, of some sufficiently incompetent as to be evil professionals.
[25:08.310 --> 25:16.890]  And, you know, when you're, when you're 17 and you don't even have power of attorney over yourself, you don't, you know, you don't have the ability to fire your doctor.
[25:18.970 --> 25:44.830]  But anyway, so after, after a rough separation of his parents, he ended up leaving town, moving to the Bay Area, and pretty rapidly getting catapulted into, into a certain amount of, of fame as an anonymity and privacy activist.
[25:45.750 --> 25:53.490]  You know, and, and he was, he was still struggling with, you know, with both the health problems, you know, the physical health problems and the depression.
[25:54.930 --> 26:02.810]  But with the, the help of, yeah, of SSRIs, you know, things were, things were staying fairly stable.
[26:05.270 --> 26:21.150]  So in about 2004, even without, without a, without a college degree, you know, he'd never, he never spent a day in college because when his parents separated, he had to take care of his mom and his little brother.
[26:22.870 --> 26:35.290]  But just from, from working as, as hard as he possibly could, I mean, this is, this is kind of the, this is kind of the dark side of the, the, the American up by your bootstraps myth.
[26:35.290 --> 26:46.810]  You know, people, you know, people get to feeling like, if they, you know, if, if, if, if they bring themselves up from a, you know, from a, from a, from a difficult or underprivileged background.
[26:49.130 --> 26:53.330]  And something goes wrong that it was their fault.
[26:53.470 --> 26:55.850]  That they weren't up to snuff or something.
[26:56.170 --> 27:02.410]  And that can be just particularly toxic to somebody who's living with depression.
[27:04.170 --> 27:14.790]  So, 2004, he got accepted to the PhD program in electrical engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium.
[27:14.790 --> 27:20.730]  And went over there to work on anonymity and privacy research full-time.
[27:21.170 --> 27:22.190]  You know, dream job, totally.
[27:23.950 --> 27:28.470]  We met in 2005 and started dating.
[27:29.350 --> 27:40.970]  And then in 2006, during a Crohn's flare-up, he went on prednisone, as is usually the case when your immune system decides it wants to hurt you.
[27:41.930 --> 27:43.870]  And suddenly started having seizures.
[27:45.790 --> 27:49.650]  And that was basically the point where everything started tumbling downhill.
[27:51.470 --> 28:00.370]  Although it did later turn out that the prednisone was implicated somehow in the onset of the seizures, they did continue.
[28:01.450 --> 28:19.530]  And over the course of the next several years, he started experiencing more and more neurological problems that we were just never able to track down the cause of.
[28:19.530 --> 28:28.610]  You know, those of you who met Len, you know, at any point in the last, I guess, four or five years probably remember he walked with a cane.
[28:28.610 --> 28:34.650]  That was because his back was slowly degenerating on him.
[28:35.910 --> 28:51.130]  And he was terrified, just absolutely terrified, of losing his mobility, of not being able to finish his PhD, of disappointing everybody that he respected and cared about him.
[28:51.130 --> 29:01.210]  And, you know, despite the fact that we always told him, you know, look, we love you, we know you're brilliant, you don't have to prove anything to us.
[29:01.210 --> 29:04.130]  And, you know, he still felt like he had to prove it to himself.
[29:05.950 --> 29:24.730]  And so, yeah, last summer, I had to go to Houston abruptly because of a, well, now it seems kind of silly, but my elderly cat who we left with my parents when I moved to Belgium.
[29:28.020 --> 29:29.220]  And, yeah, so the cat died.
[29:31.580 --> 29:33.400]  I flew home to see my family for a little bit.
[29:34.000 --> 29:36.840]  It turned out I was going to have to stick around for a bit longer for work.
[29:38.580 --> 29:46.180]  So I arranged for a friend of mine to, well, a friend of both of ours, really, to fly out to Belgium and just, you know, take care of him.
[29:47.900 --> 29:52.700]  You know, to take care of any of the stuff that he needed help with around the house because of the mobility problems he was having.
[29:55.260 --> 30:03.040]  And so, yeah, Ted gets to Belgium on the morning of July 3rd, goes to the apartment.
[30:05.140 --> 30:06.680]  No answer at the doorbell.
[30:07.120 --> 30:15.780]  So he went to the church up the street, borrowed a ladder, climbed in the window, and found Len hanging from a wardrobe.
[30:21.460 --> 30:34.480]  So, and I think the hardest part about that, really, was that there were very, very few people who had any idea just how far things had gone.
[30:34.480 --> 30:36.780]  I mean, even I really didn't know.
[30:37.780 --> 30:47.820]  But, you know, the one refrain that I just heard over and over again in the days following was, you know, we never knew.
[30:47.960 --> 30:49.560]  He always seemed like he was doing fine.
[30:49.840 --> 30:50.860]  But that's the point.
[30:51.060 --> 31:00.400]  You know, when he would come to conferences, that was, you know, we had friends, of course, you know, who would come over and hang out in Belgium.
[31:01.820 --> 31:05.960]  But, you know, he didn't really, he wasn't physically able to get out a lot.
[31:06.520 --> 31:09.520]  And, you know, he loved going to conferences and seeing people.
[31:10.200 --> 31:23.100]  But, you know, that was also a lot of stress on him because he just felt like he had to keep up this facade of being the same hyper-competent guy that everybody had gotten to know when he moved to the Bay Area back in 99.
[31:25.120 --> 31:34.460]  And I think the reason for, you know, for that is, like I said, there's this stigma that's attached to depression.
[31:34.540 --> 31:36.980]  People think, well, you know, what do you have to be sad about?
[31:36.980 --> 31:37.920]  Your life is fine.
[31:37.920 --> 31:40.040]  And it's not about being sad.
[31:40.360 --> 31:43.060]  You know, I've experienced episodic depression.
[31:43.060 --> 31:45.280]  I've had other friends of mine kill themselves too.
[31:47.140 --> 31:55.860]  But that's not the same as having, you know, your brain chemistry constantly sabotaging you on a daily basis.
[31:57.020 --> 31:58.820]  And that is nobody's f*cking fault.
[31:59.600 --> 32:00.860]  That is nobody's fault.
[32:00.960 --> 32:02.260]  That is just bad f*cking luck.
[32:02.840 --> 32:11.240]  And so, you know, if there's one thing I want to accomplish out of this, it's to get rid of that, it's to get rid of that f*cking stigma because that's what kills people.
[32:17.020 --> 32:18.000]  So, yeah.
[32:33.900 --> 32:39.360]  I just want to say thank you to all of these folks for being willing to share stories.
[32:40.360 --> 32:43.200]  Because hopefully people are feeling connected to the stories.
[32:43.900 --> 32:49.440]  And it's the emotional content that we, we're social beings, and so we resonate with that emotional content.
[32:50.780 --> 33:03.100]  Moving sort of into Q&A for our panelists, what are some of the things that you find to be difficult about being part of hacker culture?
[33:03.620 --> 33:11.680]  And what are some of the things that you find to be helpful about being part of hacker culture compared to mainstream when it comes to talking about mental health stuff?
[33:15.720 --> 33:22.660]  I'll say, I'm not sure it matters hacker culture or not.
[33:23.800 --> 33:30.520]  As Meredith is saying, there's a stigma around depression and suicidal thoughts in our whole society.
[33:31.160 --> 33:37.380]  And I think that goes across all cultures universally on our planet.
[33:39.440 --> 33:45.420]  In our culture, it's really bad, especially as males, to be considered weak.
[33:48.120 --> 33:50.640]  And depression makes you look weak.
[33:51.000 --> 33:53.280]  You have no control over your...
[33:53.280 --> 33:56.480]  I mean, none of us have control over our emotions or our feelings.
[33:56.820 --> 33:58.760]  We have our emotions and our feelings.
[33:58.920 --> 34:00.120]  We can't control them.
[34:00.280 --> 34:04.400]  But depression is so big and it's so bad.
[34:04.400 --> 34:06.740]  It's one of the things we're just not supposed to talk about.
[34:08.060 --> 34:10.040]  And yet so many of us feel it.
[34:10.480 --> 34:19.640]  I mean, maybe if there's one thing different in hacker culture, maybe more people in the geek scenes experience depression.
[34:19.960 --> 34:24.160]  Because so many of us grew up introverted and introverted geeks.
[34:24.380 --> 34:34.280]  And maybe it's hopefully better now when being a geek as a little kid is almost cool because everyone knows geeks make all the cool toys that we all play with.
[34:35.020 --> 34:41.800]  When I was a kid, as I related a little, being a geek was incredibly dangerous.
[34:42.840 --> 34:44.800]  It was one of the worst things you could be called.
[34:44.920 --> 34:46.900]  The only worst thing was fag and I'm both.
[34:48.240 --> 34:48.640]  So...
[34:50.840 --> 34:59.040]  Yeah, so growing up introverted geek means a lot of us dealt with a lot of stuff that is really something that would be better that no one ever dealt with.
[34:59.160 --> 35:01.640]  Being bullied for being who you are.
[35:03.320 --> 35:09.680]  And we internalized that, having no outlet, because there's no one to talk to about it for many of us, unfortunately.
[35:10.280 --> 35:12.500]  So we just learned it's better to hide it.
[35:14.180 --> 35:24.420]  So many people, including myself, we become really good actors at hiding what's inside of us, knowing that other people don't want to deal with it or believing it.
[35:24.420 --> 35:26.220]  And quite often it's true.
[35:27.880 --> 35:37.100]  So it's really difficult for people to know what we're going through and so we don't have any positive experiences in people supporting us.
[35:37.600 --> 35:46.080]  And we see that when we act like everything's okay, everyone around us seems okay, so that gives us positive reinforcement that we should keep doing that even more.
[35:47.920 --> 35:55.640]  But, you know, if we do that, then if we need help, no one's going to give it to us because no one knows.
[35:57.440 --> 36:06.420]  Things can get more and more out of hand, as happened to my friend Ilya, who I had no clue was so seriously depressed.
[36:08.520 --> 36:14.660]  And, you know, any number of people, including myself, would have done anything we could have to help, but no one knew.
[36:16.920 --> 36:21.920]  So, you know, and I find now if I need help, I can ask for it.
[36:22.540 --> 36:31.700]  And I would love it if, in our scene especially, we could be open and honest about all of who we are, even the parts we're not comfortable with in ourselves.
[36:32.320 --> 36:42.600]  because we can see that other people share many of those aspects, and we won't feel so alone with it, and we can ask for help and maybe live another day when we really need help.
[36:42.920 --> 36:51.700]  And even when it's not so bad, we can ask for help and live our lives much better, you know, friendly, supportive community.
[36:53.820 --> 37:11.200]  So, you know, that's, again, why all of us are here, sharing our stories, and hopefully, as Robin said, you resonate with some of it and can carry that on in your lives and maybe help other people when they reach out, or hopefully you can reach out when you want some help,
[37:11.320 --> 37:11.440]  too.
[37:12.900 --> 37:22.460]  Yeah, so I've generally found the hacker scene to just be fairly open-minded in general, much more than the standard population.
[37:22.460 --> 37:34.820]  So, I've yet to experience any kind of the same negative stigma that I've experienced in other cultures when I say that, you know, I'm suffering from depression and things like that.
[37:34.920 --> 37:40.840]  Because, I mean, like, a significant chunk of the hacker scene is varying degrees of autism and other problems.
[37:40.860 --> 37:42.500]  You know, it's just, it's out there.
[37:42.780 --> 37:46.800]  That doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's open and that there isn't a stigma.
[37:46.960 --> 37:48.700]  It's just that I haven't felt it as harshly.
[37:49.320 --> 37:59.100]  Something that Mitch and I talked about on the phone that I really want to get up and running, and hopefully other people are willing to do this as well, is get a list of emails that people can email.
[37:59.720 --> 38:02.720]  And hopefully, like, listing things that I'm willing to talk about.
[38:02.840 --> 38:09.660]  You know, so I'm, you know, I can deal with depression and being obsessive compulsive.
[38:09.660 --> 38:10.740]  I'm a rape survivor.
[38:11.000 --> 38:15.520]  And I've dealt with a lot of physical therapy and problems, physical problems.
[38:15.660 --> 38:20.500]  So it's like being able and willing to talk to others and have a way of doing that.
[38:21.000 --> 38:28.900]  And having these email addresses non-archived and an ability to email anonymously if you wish to keep yourself quiet.
[38:29.100 --> 38:31.460]  But I'm certainly going to put up an email address.
[38:31.580 --> 38:34.820]  It'll just end up ultimately being like, or depression at Jimmy P. Rogers.
[38:35.080 --> 38:42.420]  And even when I am in my most reclusive state, that is the kind of thing that I can check.
[38:42.420 --> 38:55.100]  Because it's kind of strange that even when I'm, like, mired in my own depression and not willing to talk to anybody about anything, for some reason, helping other people and talking to them about their own depression helps me.
[38:56.500 --> 39:03.760]  And that was something that was incredibly helpful in this most recent about one of my roommates in Berlin.
[39:04.540 --> 39:14.940]  We realized after a while that when we were in our rooms by ourselves, we were just kind of hanging out, just, like, watching movies or playing video games by ourselves in the room.
[39:14.960 --> 39:21.280]  And eventually we started hanging out and playing video games and watching movies together and being depressed together in the kitchen.
[39:21.520 --> 39:29.180]  But it was nice because then that took away a lot of the edge for, I don't feel like getting up to, like, boil the water to make the tea.
[39:29.320 --> 39:30.640]  That was just, like, so much trouble.
[39:31.180 --> 39:33.620]  But, you know, with the other person there, it's helpful.
[39:35.200 --> 39:37.780]  So having that email resource would be very nice.
[39:37.780 --> 39:41.460]  And I'd love to see other people add themselves on.
[39:41.560 --> 39:48.440]  We'll get together some kind of wiki page or some method of adding people to that, I guess, as we talk about it later.
[39:48.760 --> 39:49.100]  So, yeah.
[39:49.900 --> 39:58.840]  I definitely think in this community it's a lot easier to talk about, you know, the etiology of depression and other mental illnesses.
[39:59.340 --> 40:04.020]  I mean, hell, like, if I go over to my aunt and uncle's place, I don't think I can even use the word etiology.
[40:04.020 --> 40:05.040]  They wouldn't know what it meant.
[40:07.200 --> 40:17.320]  You know, and that's actually, that can be helpful from a practical standpoint, although, you know, it certainly is not a comfortable feeling to feel like a bug on a microscope slide either.
[40:18.700 --> 40:28.200]  But, you know, that said, you know, Len and I certainly struggled with, you know, the medical community.
[40:29.060 --> 40:44.900]  You know, when we were dealing with his seizure disorder, we had to fight tooth and nail against a neurologist who swore up and down that the prednisone could not possibly have been implicated in the seizures he was having.
[40:45.160 --> 40:56.820]  And then, like, while he was in the hospital, he accidentally got dosed with salumedrol, which is prednisone's bigger, nastier brother, instead of the hydrocortisone that he was supposed to be getting.
[40:57.000 --> 41:02.260]  And then, you know, within 12 hours, seizure so bad that four milligrams of Ativan didn't do anything to it.
[41:02.640 --> 41:06.680]  You know, and then the neurologist showed up and apologized, right?
[41:06.680 --> 41:18.940]  But, you know, there's a... I think there's sort of a lack of ego in this community when dealing with, you know, areas that we don't understand very well.
[41:19.080 --> 41:29.740]  So I think people are relatively good about just sort of trying to understand, you know, what is the physical root of this problem?
[41:31.140 --> 41:32.260]  So I guess there's that.
[41:33.520 --> 41:53.740]  My experience in the hacker community was that I was not really able to talk about feeling bad or being depressed because the overall attitude was partly just, well, everybody feels bad, so why are you complaining?
[41:54.400 --> 42:08.440]  And also, as a woman, when I entered the hacker scene, most women in the hacker scenes were still, like, having their credibility as actual geeks called into question on a basically constant basis.
[42:08.440 --> 42:10.740]  And I definitely had that experience as well.
[42:11.640 --> 42:19.560]  And the general response to me was, well, you're a girl, so everybody is giving you attention.
[42:19.560 --> 42:21.380]  You couldn't possibly have problems.
[42:21.380 --> 42:24.380]  And if you have problems, well, you're just being an attention whore.
[42:24.380 --> 42:29.620]  You're just seeking approval or attention from other people.
[42:30.620 --> 42:38.040]  And I eventually learned to pretty much just shut up and play, like, the mutual abuse game socially.
[42:39.560 --> 42:42.300]  And it got harder and harder and more unpleasant.
[42:43.720 --> 42:47.700]  And it pretty much led me to withdraw completely.
[42:47.700 --> 43:11.360]  And I didn't have an experience of acceptance of any of my mental, like, experiences or conditions until I went to the West Coast and went through a period of just talking openly about my feelings and experiences in a deliberate effort to get people to reject me and to get to the point where I would be socially ostracized for being f*cked up.
[43:11.680 --> 43:14.860]  And that didn't happen, thankfully.
[43:14.860 --> 43:27.200]  And it was a new experience for me because I was used to a very harsh and hard-edged type of social interaction, like a hurt or be hurt.
[43:27.800 --> 43:33.520]  If you were not hurting somebody, you were a target.
[43:34.940 --> 43:44.300]  And it also took me a while to work myself out of the mindset of people are just going to automatically target me if I'm not really, really, really careful.
[43:45.580 --> 43:52.500]  And I've relaxed a lot over the past couple of years and gotten able to, like, even talk about my experiences.
[43:52.500 --> 43:55.520]  But back then, I was never able to.
[43:55.760 --> 44:18.800]  And that external non-acknowledgement led also to an internal non-acknowledgement that I, like, all... it reinforced the internal monologue that all of my problems were my fault to begin with and anything that... that I wasn't able to fix on my own was just because I sucked that much.
[44:19.100 --> 44:21.080]  Or that I was that much of a failure.
[44:24.460 --> 44:27.660]  So I guess my experience was...
[44:28.240 --> 44:33.220]  In the hacker scene, like, you can do a lot of damage to each other by playing that game.
[44:33.220 --> 44:38.440]  And that game went on for a long, long time.
[44:47.240 --> 44:56.480]  So tell me a little bit more about addiction and self-harm and other self-sabotaging sorts of behaviors.
[44:56.840 --> 44:58.560]  What does that look like?
[44:58.800 --> 45:00.920]  How do you get out of that cycle?
[45:02.740 --> 45:03.960]  Speak more about that.
[45:05.780 --> 45:08.600]  So, I'll... go ahead.
[45:08.780 --> 45:22.300]  Because I've pretty much recently banned myself from, like, video games and watching anything by myself and a number of other things that I'm just like, you know what?
[45:22.560 --> 45:23.560]  It's... f*ck this.
[45:24.020 --> 45:26.000]  I'm getting absolutely nothing done.
[45:26.360 --> 45:34.320]  And so, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who I talk to, I'm actually allergic to pot and a few other substances.
[45:34.680 --> 45:37.820]  So I never... drug was never an option for escape for me.
[45:40.060 --> 45:42.060]  And I don't really like to be drunk.
[45:42.320 --> 45:46.580]  I like drinking good beer and good wine, but I don't actually like the side effects most of the time.
[45:48.860 --> 45:52.300]  And so my drug of choice has been escapism, just flat out.
[45:52.860 --> 46:01.500]  It's either watching an entire television series all the way through, like, Next Generation.
[46:01.540 --> 46:02.920]  I totally did that.
[46:03.340 --> 46:05.300]  And, like...
[46:05.300 --> 46:05.900]  One sitting.
[46:06.100 --> 46:07.200]  Well, oh, God, no.
[46:07.560 --> 46:08.040]  That's...
[46:08.040 --> 46:10.120]  Jesus, like 900 hours or something.
[46:10.300 --> 46:10.600]  It's crazy.
[46:13.600 --> 46:14.560]  So, yeah.
[46:14.560 --> 46:17.820]  So I've seen, like, pretty much all of the Star Trek ever.
[46:19.800 --> 46:25.000]  And, like, I'd pick up, like, a new TV show, and I would watch all of the seasons.
[46:25.420 --> 46:26.580]  You know, just all at once.
[46:26.780 --> 46:28.940]  Like, all five or six or whatever seasons.
[46:29.780 --> 46:31.880]  Or get into, like, a crazy video game.
[46:32.040 --> 46:41.460]  One of mine is Dwarf Fortress, which I don't know how many people know what that is, but it is the nerdiest, completely obsessive-compulsive game ever.
[46:41.840 --> 46:43.140]  Entirely text graphics.
[46:44.860 --> 46:49.160]  And you can go down as far as you want in that rabbit hole, and I went down pretty far.
[46:49.160 --> 46:56.260]  So, it's just constantly going somewhere else that I am not.
[46:57.700 --> 47:04.860]  And reading books, like, not just reading them, but, like, reading a lot of books just constantly.
[47:04.980 --> 47:08.060]  I seem to, like, pick a media and then stick with it for a little while.
[47:08.660 --> 47:10.420]  In short doses, that's totally fine.
[47:10.440 --> 47:12.960]  And, like, that's a way for me to relax or whatever.
[47:13.120 --> 47:17.520]  But I had, in the past few years, allowed that to continue to creep into my daily life so much.
[47:17.520 --> 47:21.400]  I work for myself, so it's kind of dangerous to allow those activities.
[47:21.560 --> 47:29.840]  I've just finally just banned them a few months ago and had dramatic improvements with all the crap that I needed to do.
[47:30.000 --> 47:33.780]  Because then you're stuck, as Mitch pointed out, you're kind of left there like, well, crap.
[47:34.420 --> 47:36.060]  Now I've got to deal with my shit.
[47:37.040 --> 47:39.060]  And so I started dealing with it.
[47:39.620 --> 47:40.460]  Slowly at first.
[47:40.620 --> 47:44.600]  You know, just kind of dealing with one or two small things per day.
[47:45.140 --> 47:47.940]  And if I didn't feel like doing anything that day, I would just go make something.
[47:49.000 --> 47:50.280]  Or just go outside.
[47:52.080 --> 47:54.780]  I started working out a lot.
[47:55.480 --> 47:57.600]  And that's helped immensely.
[47:58.040 --> 48:06.000]  Because I got pretty sedentary after my stint and just kind of hanging around an apartment in Berlin, not doing anything.
[48:06.440 --> 48:09.600]  Also, moving to Berlin in the winter is not a good idea.
[48:11.440 --> 48:12.980]  Just in general.
[48:14.140 --> 48:16.620]  And yet I'm moving there again for the winter.
[48:16.820 --> 48:17.060]  Awesome.
[48:21.770 --> 48:31.140]  So, your kind of harmful behaviors don't necessarily have to be what a lot of people would consider harmful.
[48:31.730 --> 48:33.120]  But it can be.
[48:33.280 --> 48:36.680]  I mean, a lot of people have World of Warcraft addictions and all kinds of other stuff.
[48:36.800 --> 48:38.180]  I mean, it could be pornography addiction.
[48:38.180 --> 48:39.440]  It can be all kinds of stuff.
[48:41.160 --> 48:46.680]  And like I said, for me, it's just me not being where I am or who I am at that moment.
[48:48.060 --> 48:48.640]  And...
[48:48.640 --> 48:51.480]  Because it can be difficult to be you.
[48:51.710 --> 48:52.820]  It usually is.
[48:53.340 --> 48:56.980]  Life is hard for most people at some points.
[48:59.300 --> 49:00.320]  But, yeah.
[49:01.100 --> 49:03.340]  I don't think this is limited to depression.
[49:03.840 --> 49:05.820]  I mean, because I'm aspie.
[49:06.360 --> 49:11.080]  And one of the things that I struggle with, every freaking day is function paralysis.
[49:11.560 --> 49:16.680]  I mean, you know the metaphorical story about, like, the donkey between the two piles of hay.
[49:16.880 --> 49:17.960]  And they're the same size.
[49:18.080 --> 49:19.700]  And so he can't decide which one to eat first.
[49:19.780 --> 49:20.300]  Totally me.
[49:21.480 --> 49:25.100]  Like, I've got a to-do list as long as this table.
[49:25.760 --> 49:32.080]  And, you know, I oftentimes I just can't pick the most important thing to do.
[49:33.060 --> 49:37.700]  And the only thing productive that ends up getting done that day is the cat gets fed.
[49:38.240 --> 49:39.540]  And there's a whole lot of Reddit.
[49:40.750 --> 49:42.140]  And that's about it.
[49:43.120 --> 49:43.740]  And, yeah.
[49:43.900 --> 49:45.320]  No, I mean, it's challenging.
[49:45.320 --> 49:51.180]  And it really does negatively affect your mood even if chronic depression is not a problem you have.
[49:51.180 --> 49:54.660]  Because, you know, you realize, man, you know, I'm...
[49:55.680 --> 50:04.620]  Especially if you're one of those people like I am who's always, like, sort of evaluating their self-worth on the basis of the last thing they finished and how recently they finished it.
[50:06.060 --> 50:10.260]  Which, again, like, totally not limited to people with depression.
[50:10.260 --> 50:14.560]  I think that's a pretty common character trait just in the geek community in general.
[50:16.480 --> 50:17.340]  But, yeah.
[50:17.460 --> 50:22.420]  I mean, function paralysis can definitely lead to...can definitely lead to that downward spiral.
[50:24.120 --> 50:24.740]  Yeah.
[50:25.800 --> 50:29.700]  Yeah, well, addiction can take in many forms.
[50:30.000 --> 50:33.420]  And self-destructive behavior can take many forms.
[50:35.340 --> 50:47.300]  And I think, maybe for most people, maybe for everyone, or maybe just speaking for myself, it's a way to avoid myself.
[50:47.540 --> 50:50.420]  You know, when I engage in that, and it can be conscious or otherwise.
[50:51.000 --> 50:53.760]  When I was a little kid, it was almost always unconscious.
[50:54.860 --> 50:56.000]  I hated myself.
[50:56.180 --> 50:58.020]  That became part of my identity.
[50:58.680 --> 51:01.440]  You know, and it still affects me to this day.
[51:01.440 --> 51:03.210]  I'm someone who hates myself.
[51:03.480 --> 51:04.480]  That's part of my identity.
[51:05.240 --> 51:10.780]  I don't...it's not as important a part of my identity as it used to be, all-consuming.
[51:11.660 --> 51:16.640]  But that's a hard thing to confront on a moment-by-moment, day-to-day basis.
[51:16.640 --> 51:30.210]  And there are many, many, many, many things that are socially sanctioned, as well as illegal ways to avoid dealing with those things that are very, very difficult inside of myself.
[51:31.140 --> 51:32.640]  Watching TV, I mentioned.
[51:33.320 --> 51:34.840]  Pot, other drugs.
[51:35.280 --> 51:36.940]  But there's all sorts of behaviors.
[51:37.260 --> 51:39.380]  My father was a total workaholic.
[51:39.780 --> 51:44.540]  That was a great way for American dads to do things, and probably for many of us here.
[51:45.880 --> 51:51.380]  You know, and for many of us here in the geek community, we really love a lot of the things we do.
[51:51.380 --> 51:57.480]  And anything that gives us enjoyment, if a little bit gives us enjoyment, what about a lot?
[51:59.620 --> 52:04.640]  So, and the thing is, anything can be used to avoid oneself.
[52:04.920 --> 52:05.200]  Anything.
[52:05.580 --> 52:09.880]  Even things that are required to live a healthy, happy existence.
[52:10.780 --> 52:11.300]  Sex.
[52:11.740 --> 52:12.180]  Food.
[52:12.520 --> 52:12.880]  Chocolate.
[52:14.140 --> 52:17.240]  All these things can be used to avoid ourselves.
[52:17.580 --> 52:24.240]  And it's up to you, and you alone, whether those things are helping you, or hurting you, or indifferent.
[52:24.860 --> 52:28.440]  Whether doing more of it would be a good thing, or a bad thing.
[52:28.780 --> 52:33.780]  Or maybe doing less of it might give you more time to do something more fulfilling.
[52:33.800 --> 52:35.080]  That's totally up to you.
[52:35.760 --> 52:38.560]  Whether it's destructive or not, it's up to you as well.
[52:40.400 --> 52:44.540]  And, you know, again, this shit takes time to learn.
[52:46.640 --> 52:53.940]  And, wow, it took me years and years to stop, to learn to stop doing things that are getting in the way of living the life I want to live.
[52:54.420 --> 52:56.480]  And I don't think there are any shortcuts.
[52:57.480 --> 53:03.560]  You know, we have as long as we have on the planet to work through this as much as we can if we want to.
[53:03.920 --> 53:04.920]  We don't have to.
[53:06.500 --> 53:08.240]  Again, that's totally up to you.
[53:09.580 --> 53:10.260]  Yeah.
[53:10.560 --> 53:14.240]  It can also be kind of hard to distinguish, like...
[53:15.100 --> 53:20.880]  It's not necessarily clear-cut whether a particular behavior is helpful or harmful.
[53:21.060 --> 53:21.880]  Sometimes it's both.
[53:22.710 --> 53:27.140]  You know, my primary escape route is reading.
[53:28.040 --> 53:38.080]  And while I'm certainly learning a lot when I, you know, pile up a stack of PDFs and, you know, read papers all day, that's still, you know, I...
[53:38.080 --> 53:46.210]  It is still frequently the case that, you know, that I'm doing that because I'm avoiding something else.
[53:47.310 --> 53:56.000]  You know, okay, sure, on the one hand I'm learning lots of math and that's great and may even prove useful later, but it's still not a particularly healthy behavior to the extent that I often carry it.
[53:57.100 --> 54:09.240]  When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time pretty isolated and I also was not allowed to watch TV.
[54:09.700 --> 54:14.640]  I wasn't really allowed to listen to music most of the time.
[54:16.540 --> 54:23.710]  After a while, I didn't really have friends because my mom was... I don't know what she was.
[54:23.840 --> 54:29.540]  She never saw a therapist, but she got more and more nuts as time went on and more and more isolated.
[54:29.740 --> 54:31.800]  And I got more and more isolated with her as well.
[54:32.000 --> 54:39.900]  And I would go for periods of months to like a year at a time without seeing other people besides her.
[54:42.900 --> 54:59.560]  And because of the treatment I was receiving from her and the general like, honestly, just lack of things to do to things to like distract myself with or engage in escapism with, I became disassociative.
[55:00.240 --> 55:20.500]  And I got to a point like if I had to spend a lot of time just sitting in one place for a while or like not really have anything to do, I could just kind of like blink myself out and go into like this inner like world that I didn't exist in.
[55:20.920 --> 55:24.640]  And that was just kind of how I coped with being a kid.
[55:25.660 --> 55:28.140]  And as an adult, it became a problem.
[55:28.320 --> 55:32.920]  Like I have a lot of the functional paralysis that Meredith was talking about.
[55:33.440 --> 55:35.040]  And I have to write lists.
[55:35.460 --> 55:38.040]  And I have to write different lists and different types of lists.
[55:38.200 --> 55:44.280]  And I have to trick myself into completing tasks or sets of tasks.
[55:44.900 --> 55:53.040]  Because if I write a list, and if I keep writing the same style of list, I'll be able to write things on the list and put it away and forget about it.
[55:53.140 --> 55:54.240]  And then I haven't done anything.
[55:56.000 --> 55:58.060]  So I have to change the types of lists.
[55:58.240 --> 56:01.710]  I have to change how I implement reminders to do things.
[56:02.140 --> 56:05.500]  Or how I pattern routines.
[56:05.600 --> 56:09.600]  Because I'll do a routine completely for like several weeks.
[56:09.640 --> 56:11.640]  And then I will just be unable to do it.
[56:11.710 --> 56:13.280]  And I'll have to switch to a different routine.
[56:14.580 --> 56:20.400]  And I got into drugs as a means of escapism at one point.
[56:21.040 --> 56:25.760]  And I did a lot of MDMA for quite a while.
[56:26.210 --> 56:28.860]  And I burned some receptors out doing it.
[56:28.940 --> 56:31.040]  But eventually I stopped on my own.
[56:31.040 --> 56:32.800]  Because it just pretty much stopped working.
[56:33.480 --> 56:43.020]  But in the process, I had been able to crack open some things inside my head just through the effects of what it does.
[56:44.360 --> 56:50.940]  And the talking that I was able to do, even though it was not to a therapist or anyone remotely helpful.
[56:51.000 --> 56:54.040]  I was just able to start unpacking things and looking at them.
[56:54.400 --> 57:01.180]  And even though the overall effect on my physical body was actually really detrimental.
[57:02.440 --> 57:11.320]  The hooks into my psyche that it gave me were actually very, very helpful and possibly like crucial to me getting into any kind of recovery state.
[57:14.640 --> 57:18.280]  And that's not a path that I recommend that people just take.
[57:18.760 --> 57:20.540]  I don't recommend you do that.
[57:22.460 --> 57:28.360]  I was kind of lucky in being able to recover from it to the extent that I have.
[57:29.700 --> 57:31.180]  So drugs can be helpful.
[57:31.320 --> 57:33.760]  Drugs can hurt a lot as well.
[57:33.760 --> 57:40.560]  And it's kind of a personal exercise as to what you're capable of and what you feel that you can undertake.
[57:40.760 --> 57:43.300]  And if you say, no, this is not for me, then absolutely.
[57:44.040 --> 57:45.640]  Like, that's your prerogative.
[57:45.780 --> 57:50.880]  Don't do something that you find damaging for yourself just because it worked for somebody else.
[57:51.500 --> 57:52.700]  Because everybody's different.
[57:52.960 --> 57:54.760]  And everybody needs different things.
[57:54.760 --> 58:00.420]  I've heard of therapists actually using MDMA as an adjuvant to therapy.
[58:00.860 --> 58:05.260]  But that's not something that can really be done openly in this country, unfortunately.
[58:05.700 --> 58:21.060]  I actually just went to a seminar that talked about a study, a pretty rigorous formal study that was done on MDMA therapy for people with PTSD, both veterans and, like, childhood abuse victims.
[58:21.100 --> 58:26.040]  And the recovery rate that they found was absolutely profound.
[58:26.520 --> 58:31.520]  Like, knock you over, pretty much almost everybody recovered to an amazing degree.
[58:31.700 --> 58:35.280]  And the drug was maybe 10% of the interaction.
[58:35.280 --> 58:48.200]  And it was a full-day therapy session with two therapists while you were on the MDMA, daily check-ins for a week after with the therapists, and then, like, weekly therapy for a few months after that.
[58:48.580 --> 58:55.400]  There was a lot of, like, very intensive therapeutic assistance integrating the experience.
[58:55.960 --> 59:00.960]  But everybody who took part in the study found it to be profoundly helpful.
[59:00.960 --> 59:06.620]  Even the people who had the experience once and said, this was great and I'm never doing it again.
[59:06.840 --> 59:11.080]  They still came out of it profoundly better for it.
[59:11.080 --> 59:13.460]  You probably want to check out maps.org.
[59:13.660 --> 59:15.140]  That was who put on the study.
[59:15.780 --> 59:26.560]  Yeah, and all the drugs I've done, I did them because of their therapeutic effect on me, positive therapeutic effect on me, but not in a therapeutic setting.
[59:27.860 --> 59:30.480]  Oh, I just want to repeat what the person in the audience said.
[59:30.480 --> 59:41.560]  Maps.org is the organization that is helping do the studies for MDMA and other drugs in therapeutic settings.
[59:41.980 --> 59:44.800]  So, if you want to check that out and support them, please do.
[59:45.020 --> 59:46.100]  And also for migraines.
[59:47.020 --> 59:55.440]  Yeah, and so again, you know, not in a therapeutic setting and being, you know, a young teenager or even 20s or whatever, any age, it doesn't really matter.
[59:55.940 --> 01:00:05.160]  Being in an environment where it's not conducive for necessarily healing, I can use it in a healing way and learn a lot from it.
[01:00:05.280 --> 01:00:10.340]  And I wouldn't trade any of that away for anything, but I wouldn't recommend necessarily that route for anybody.
[01:00:12.100 --> 01:00:17.140]  And again, if a little bit helped, what would a lot do?
[01:00:17.260 --> 01:00:22.300]  And I wanted a lot, and I wanted it now, and I was not being patient with myself, so...
[01:00:22.300 --> 01:00:29.540]  And a lot feels awesome at the time, it really does, but it's not going to help you in a therapeutic long-term sense at all.
[01:00:30.440 --> 01:00:41.060]  So, in the vein of talking about too much versus not enough, talk to me about who you are versus what you do.
[01:00:41.280 --> 01:00:52.760]  And how we support each other in feeling good about who we are because of who we are, not because of what we achieve.
[01:00:53.020 --> 01:00:53.960]  Talk to me about that.
[01:00:55.760 --> 01:00:57.160]  I can address that.
[01:00:59.660 --> 01:01:07.280]  You know, we all have different world views, necessarily, and we have to put the world together each in our own way.
[01:01:08.640 --> 01:01:20.900]  Due to my experiences, a big part of the way I put the world together for me is I have absolutely no control whatsoever in the world out there that I perceive out there.
[01:01:20.900 --> 01:01:25.480]  I have very little control over the world inside of me.
[01:01:26.820 --> 01:01:31.520]  No control, absolutely no control whatsoever over what I feel.
[01:01:31.780 --> 01:01:33.180]  I feel what I feel.
[01:01:33.480 --> 01:01:35.710]  I have very little control over what I think.
[01:01:37.060 --> 01:01:44.620]  I have some control over what I think to the extent that I have a lot of control over what I choose to do.
[01:01:46.380 --> 01:01:52.460]  And there's a lot of external circumstances that impinge on that, but ultimately it's up to me what I choose to do.
[01:01:52.760 --> 01:01:56.940]  And I have a lot of control over that, but I have no control over the consequences of that.
[01:01:57.160 --> 01:01:57.360]  None.
[01:01:57.860 --> 01:02:06.660]  But due to the choice, I will have feelings, there will be consequences in the external world that I'll perceive, and I'll have feelings about it, and I'll have thoughts about it.
[01:02:06.660 --> 01:02:15.580]  And if I choose to, I can learn from all of that, and then make new choices, basically, of what to do.
[01:02:16.120 --> 01:02:23.620]  What I do is not who I am, but what I do definitely has consequences, and as a result I have feelings and I have thoughts.
[01:02:24.710 --> 01:02:28.260]  And all of that ends up changing me a great deal.
[01:02:30.600 --> 01:02:36.260]  And so what I choose to do indirectly does affect in a great way who I am.
[01:02:36.980 --> 01:02:40.040]  But I can't choose who I am.
[01:02:40.160 --> 01:02:44.710]  I can only choose what to do and then see what happens and then learn from it if I choose to, and then make new choices.
[01:02:45.380 --> 01:02:49.700]  And this is the process of my life in one way of looking at it.
[01:02:50.120 --> 01:02:54.120]  And that process, for me, is what gives my life meaning.
[01:02:55.380 --> 01:02:56.540]  It's not about goals.
[01:02:56.710 --> 01:02:57.780]  It's not about accomplishments.
[01:02:59.500 --> 01:03:05.320]  Throughout all of that, I do make goals, which gives me a direction to go in.
[01:03:05.900 --> 01:03:07.140]  I do have accomplishments.
[01:03:07.140 --> 01:03:09.400]  I do have failures, some of them spectacular.
[01:03:10.330 --> 01:03:12.740]  Sometimes successes that are really incredibly cool.
[01:03:14.000 --> 01:03:15.900]  But I have no control over any of that.
[01:03:16.020 --> 01:03:21.660]  I have control over what I choose to do as a result of having those experiences, which can lead to really cool things.
[01:03:21.820 --> 01:03:29.020]  And hopefully as I get more experience knowing myself and the world around me, more and more of that can come my way.
[01:03:29.120 --> 01:03:30.280]  But I have no control over that.
[01:03:31.470 --> 01:03:38.640]  So, you know, these are the differences as I see it between, you know, what I do, my accomplishments, and who I am.
[01:03:40.400 --> 01:03:44.360]  And all because of the choices that I make.
[01:03:47.220 --> 01:03:53.920]  So I actually spend a good bit of my time kind of disassociated from my body.
[01:03:55.020 --> 01:03:56.140]  It's kind of strange.
[01:03:56.240 --> 01:03:59.340]  I've only met a few other people that have had the same experience.
[01:03:59.340 --> 01:04:02.760]  I'm usually piloting some kind of meat robot.
[01:04:03.080 --> 01:04:06.940]  And I'm actually kind of behind myself piloting this meat robot.
[01:04:07.600 --> 01:04:12.680]  And it's the meat robot that gives talks at conferences.
[01:04:13.660 --> 01:04:17.340]  And so I don't have to feel those emotions that's over there.
[01:04:17.480 --> 01:04:19.460]  That's the robot feeling those emotions.
[01:04:21.180 --> 01:04:27.860]  So oftentimes the person that I present in public is not necessarily who I am in private.
[01:04:27.860 --> 01:04:30.820]  I'm actually kind of an introverted type of person.
[01:04:31.880 --> 01:04:42.480]  It's kind of interesting because this depression panel is hitting so close to home and pulling so many things that I'm actually here piloting directly inside the body.
[01:04:43.680 --> 01:04:45.860]  Smaller separation, but it's still there.
[01:04:49.000 --> 01:05:01.440]  But, yeah, one of the things that is vaguely positive about having depression is that you do get a lot of time to think when you do allow yourself to.
[01:05:01.640 --> 01:05:04.940]  Because when I get too far down into it, I just kind of lay in bed.
[01:05:04.960 --> 01:05:13.120]  And I don't even bother with turning on my computer to start any kind of video game or TV show or anything like that.
[01:05:13.200 --> 01:05:14.580]  I just kind of like lay there and think.
[01:05:14.840 --> 01:05:19.740]  And every time I'm there, I learn significant and profound things about myself.
[01:05:19.740 --> 01:05:32.460]  And I'm constantly in a state of learning what makes me depressed and why I get there and why I feel these separations of myself from everything external.
[01:05:34.600 --> 01:05:37.380]  And, you know, as Mitch said, like, you know, it's...
[01:05:38.200 --> 01:05:41.340]  You can't really change any of the stuff that's out there unless you can.
[01:05:41.540 --> 01:05:43.800]  I mean, like, some of the stuff you can, but it's just like...
[01:05:45.160 --> 01:05:50.080]  You never know, like, how well one thing is going to do or how well another thing is going to do.
[01:05:52.290 --> 01:05:55.940]  And, yeah, so I guess that I'm in a constant state of learning.
[01:05:55.940 --> 01:06:03.960]  And every time I go into a significant depression, I come back out understanding what led me into it and then I don't let it happen again.
[01:06:04.760 --> 01:06:06.780]  So... or at least I try not to.
[01:06:07.160 --> 01:06:10.640]  Oftentimes it's, you know, external things that you can't do anything about.
[01:06:10.900 --> 01:06:12.800]  But, yeah.
[01:06:16.380 --> 01:06:26.200]  So when I was first entering the hacker scene, and I was unfamiliar with handles up until that point.
[01:06:26.580 --> 01:06:33.400]  And I just picked a name and became somebody else for a bit.
[01:06:33.560 --> 01:06:42.210]  And that was the first time that I was able to split myself into two separate identities.
[01:06:42.210 --> 01:06:52.420]  And one of those identities was going and doing things and interacting with people and gaining value.
[01:06:53.380 --> 01:07:06.360]  And the other one was the person that I had also been up to that point that was very depressed and hated themselves and had no internal sense of value.
[01:07:06.360 --> 01:07:10.710]  So for a while I became this other person, this hacker handle persona.
[01:07:11.760 --> 01:07:23.710]  And it wasn't... it was a little dissociative, but I was just able to step into being this other person for a while and to build value as that person.
[01:07:25.540 --> 01:07:29.600]  And after a while I realized that there was another split that had occurred.
[01:07:29.600 --> 01:07:40.210]  that internally there was a third person, quote-unquote, that I was being, that was holding all the pain that I was feeling that I couldn't really deal with at the time.
[01:07:42.950 --> 01:07:48.440]  And I realized this after a few years of being in the hacker scene, that I was actually three different people.
[01:07:50.120 --> 01:07:52.920]  And for some reason I said to myself, oh, God, that's not good.
[01:07:53.040 --> 01:07:54.580]  I don't want to be like three different people.
[01:07:54.820 --> 01:07:56.600]  Like, oh, God, multiple personalities, whatever.
[01:07:56.600 --> 01:07:57.900]  This was bad.
[01:07:58.280 --> 01:08:05.820]  And I tried to reintegrate all of these separate identities into one.
[01:08:06.000 --> 01:08:07.580]  And that was a terrible, terrible idea.
[01:08:08.900 --> 01:08:22.240]  Because it reintroduced the pain that I was feeling and the lack of value in myself that I perceived to an identity that I had been building value with, which was the hacker identity that I was using.
[01:08:22.800 --> 01:08:24.660]  And it pretty much took me down.
[01:08:24.680 --> 01:08:26.780]  And I stopped being social.
[01:08:26.940 --> 01:08:29.020]  And I kind of became a hermit for a very long time.
[01:08:29.220 --> 01:08:37.340]  And then went into my downward spiral, which led to me leaving New York and almost deciding to kill myself.
[01:08:38.340 --> 01:08:46.780]  And after I started coming out of all of that, I thought about the separation of identity.
[01:08:46.780 --> 01:08:49.420]  And, like, the Nim Wars thing was starting to go on as well.
[01:08:50.420 --> 01:08:53.600]  And, like, your real name versus who you are on the Internet.
[01:08:54.360 --> 01:09:23.800]  And I started thinking about this in the context of, like, self-image and PTSD and who you are and the fact that if your internal self-image is so, so broken, then having another identity that you can be, that you can step into and add value to and draw on and eventually become in some more constructive way could actually be a really good thing.
[01:09:24.460 --> 01:09:41.080]  And in culture, in a lot of cultures, especially old cultures and tribal cultures, you weren't just yourself, but you were aspects of other things that were, like, unique to your culture, like, deity manifestations or your ancestors or things like that.
[01:09:41.180 --> 01:09:47.760]  And these were things that you could put on when you needed to draw on the positive attributes of whatever it was.
[01:09:47.840 --> 01:09:53.860]  And I thought, why can't we do this with identities that we create and take on ourselves?
[01:09:54.580 --> 01:10:03.840]  That if we are a person with a name, with a label in the hacker community, we're doing good things, but over here or someplace else, we feel bad.
[01:10:04.480 --> 01:10:05.300]  That's okay.
[01:10:05.660 --> 01:10:09.400]  It's okay to be two different people for as long as it's useful for you.
[01:10:11.680 --> 01:10:13.660]  And for a while, it was very useful.
[01:10:13.660 --> 01:10:14.760]  It's still useful for me.
[01:10:14.900 --> 01:10:27.340]  You can take on a lot more as a person if you have different identities to be at different times that don't run over each other, trip over each other, cause those conflicts that Mitch was talking about.
[01:10:27.740 --> 01:10:30.080]  And you can still be yourself as well.
[01:10:30.080 --> 01:10:34.940]  Cause I think there's a little bit of a stigma with like being different people right now.
[01:10:35.300 --> 01:10:40.300]  And I think that's also more negative than it, than it really has to be.
[01:10:44.160 --> 01:10:57.480]  So yeah, like being somebody else for a while is helping me become more of the person that I eventually want to be, no matter how many manifestations it ends up being.
[01:10:57.480 --> 01:11:04.780]  I am one physical person with one set of chemical reactions that's going on.
[01:11:05.020 --> 01:11:09.420]  But I can shape those to manifest differently at different times.
[01:11:12.340 --> 01:11:13.100]  Yeah.
[01:11:14.600 --> 01:11:20.300]  I was talking earlier about that accomplishment driven sense of self.
[01:11:20.940 --> 01:11:28.320]  And I think the point where that becomes paralyzing is when it becomes a fear of failure.
[01:11:29.360 --> 01:11:35.360]  And you know, in an academic environment especially, you know, where you're under a lot of pressure to produce results.
[01:11:37.600 --> 01:11:39.960]  You know, it can just get overwhelming.
[01:11:40.460 --> 01:11:44.860]  You know, because when you're under all this pressure to...
[01:11:44.860 --> 01:11:46.240]  Side tangent actually.
[01:11:46.360 --> 01:11:53.140]  So one big problem I have with academia that's actually I think less of a problem in the hacker scene is that we're a lot cooler with negative results.
[01:11:53.140 --> 01:11:56.700]  Like, if it turns out that X doesn't work, that's actually interesting.
[01:11:57.860 --> 01:11:59.480]  And so, you know, it was...
[01:11:59.480 --> 01:12:05.520]  I came out of an academic background and didn't really get involved in the hacker community until about 2005, 2006.
[01:12:06.900 --> 01:12:17.060]  And it was, I guess, around that time that I consciously made the decision that I just wasn't going to be afraid to be wrong in public anymore.
[01:12:18.440 --> 01:12:23.900]  You know, because if I failed at 10 different things this week, that means I tried 10 different things this week.
[01:12:24.800 --> 01:12:26.540]  You know, if it turns out that...
[01:12:26.540 --> 01:12:31.660]  And if it turns out that, like, two of them are actually straight-up impossible, that's good to know.
[01:12:32.120 --> 01:12:32.780]  That's the...
[01:12:34.960 --> 01:12:36.820]  So, you know, it's...
[01:12:36.820 --> 01:12:42.420]  Again, I think just a lot of it has to do with the environment, you know, that you're in.
[01:12:42.600 --> 01:12:58.660]  You know, if you're constantly being pressured to produce and that's hurting you, you need to get the hell out of that environment and find some place that's more supportive of trying and failing.
[01:13:00.740 --> 01:13:01.880]  And that can be hard to do.
[01:13:02.000 --> 01:13:03.120]  I mean, because if you're...
[01:13:03.120 --> 01:13:09.480]  You know, if you're stuck in the job that you're in and can't find another one, you know, it's...
[01:13:10.120 --> 01:13:12.100]  That's not something to feel guilty about.
[01:13:12.100 --> 01:13:27.980]  But the nice thing about having other communities to be part of is that you can find one that's, you know, that's more tolerant of not necessarily producing, you know, the positive results all the time.
[01:13:29.820 --> 01:13:31.020]  So, it's about...
[01:13:31.020 --> 01:13:32.560]  Not quite 20 after four.
[01:13:32.840 --> 01:13:34.460]  And I'm wondering if you would...
[01:13:34.460 --> 01:13:35.920]  I know that we have...
[01:13:35.920 --> 01:13:37.580]  We could keep talking about this for a long time.
[01:13:37.580 --> 01:13:42.000]  I wonder if you are ready for about 10 minutes of audience questions.
[01:13:42.400 --> 01:13:45.280]  And then we can come back up to the panel for a last word.
[01:13:45.660 --> 01:13:46.020]  Okay.
[01:13:46.020 --> 01:13:47.080]  I think it's gonna...
[01:13:47.080 --> 01:13:50.100]  Sorry, it should be about five minutes of audience questions.
[01:13:50.300 --> 01:13:51.080]  We need a little bit of time.
[01:13:51.500 --> 01:13:52.180]  Okay, thank you.
[01:13:52.260 --> 01:13:53.720]  So, about five minutes of audience questions.
[01:13:53.880 --> 01:13:55.080]  If the house lights could come up, please.
[01:14:03.430 --> 01:14:05.630]  Just sort of wanted to add a couple of thoughts.
[01:14:05.810 --> 01:14:09.490]  One stigma that I feel like I've dealt with and a lot of people I've seen dealing with is...
[01:14:09.490 --> 01:14:12.250]  It was the idea that therapy was somehow because...
[01:14:12.250 --> 01:14:14.170]  It was a doctor because your brain was sick.
[01:14:15.070 --> 01:14:15.790]  And that...
[01:14:15.790 --> 01:14:20.710]  When you hear how therapy talks about itself, like in academia, that's not really what goes on.
[01:14:20.790 --> 01:14:23.110]  It's more about the discussion and it's more like having a friend.
[01:14:23.190 --> 01:14:24.810]  And it took me a while to get to that point.
[01:14:26.270 --> 01:14:29.070]  And specifically, also sort of rethink what therapy was going to be about.
[01:14:29.190 --> 01:14:32.990]  Like, I went in for a long time being like, I'm gonna talk about my parents and how everything was crappy that way.
[01:14:33.330 --> 01:14:36.410]  And then, a couple of years ago, I started talking about my job.
[01:14:37.670 --> 01:14:40.490]  And suddenly, there was this entire other world of things to think about.
[01:14:40.690 --> 01:14:45.030]  So maybe, can we all put aside this idea that, like, the shrink is for your broken head.
[01:14:45.130 --> 01:14:46.070]  It's not for your broken head.
[01:14:46.170 --> 01:14:47.390]  It's just a way to talk these things out.
[01:14:48.170 --> 01:14:51.790]  Another thing I'm wondering, can we, as a culture, as geeks, can we think about...
[01:14:52.230 --> 01:14:58.090]  I was lucky when I was 12 to find a group of friends who were irregular.
[01:14:58.610 --> 01:15:00.470]  And that was sort of the thing that held us together.
[01:15:00.690 --> 01:15:06.050]  And can we sort of have that be what we're about, is accepting irregularity and accepting flaws and strangeness?
[01:15:06.050 --> 01:15:06.550]  Yeah.
[01:15:07.410 --> 01:15:07.770]  Because...
[01:15:08.630 --> 01:15:09.270]  I'd like...
[01:15:09.270 --> 01:15:09.710]  Thank you!
[01:15:09.910 --> 01:15:10.090]  Yay!
[01:15:10.270 --> 01:15:11.550]  I'm glad we're all in agreement about this.
[01:15:11.710 --> 01:15:19.990]  Because if we make it about who is the most elite hacker, if we make it about who is the most hardcore about staying up and working really hard, we begin to put ourselves in drama.
[01:15:20.110 --> 01:15:25.470]  So, and I feel like if we, as hackers, we say, let's find the strange things, then we have more roots for creativity.
[01:15:25.690 --> 01:15:26.710]  So let's think about it that way.
[01:15:27.030 --> 01:15:28.430]  I'd like to speak to that, actually.
[01:15:29.070 --> 01:15:35.490]  Because I was actually not diagnosed as being on the spectrum until just before I left for graduate school.
[01:15:36.510 --> 01:15:49.610]  And I didn't really start seeing a therapist to help me deal with some of the social problems that that brought on for me until I was actually well into the PhD that I ended up dropping out of.
[01:15:49.610 --> 01:16:10.850]  And really, you know, I think the most useful thing that I got out of therapy was, you know, my therapist helped me come up with ways to communicate to other people, you know, that, look, this is just how I am.
[01:16:10.950 --> 01:16:17.190]  There is not something wrong about the fact that I'm looking you in the nostrils and not the eye when I'm talking to you.
[01:16:17.390 --> 01:16:21.970]  You know, there's not something wrong about the fact that I have a flat affect all the time.
[01:16:22.110 --> 01:16:27.010]  There's not something wrong about, you know, all these other, like, you know, quirky, aspie behaviors I have.
[01:16:28.210 --> 01:16:32.230]  You know, there's not something wrong about the fact that I really am just going to take you literally.
[01:16:33.010 --> 01:16:43.450]  And, you know, it was hard at first to, you know, feel comfortable, you know, presenting that to people.
[01:16:43.830 --> 01:16:49.610]  But, you know, really just, you know, with time, it just sort of got easier to live in my own skin.
[01:16:49.930 --> 01:16:56.470]  And that was really the beneficial thing that I got out of that experience with my therapist in Iowa.
[01:16:57.390 --> 01:17:00.010]  We have about two and a half minutes in our five minutes left.
[01:17:00.030 --> 01:17:00.570]  I'm so sorry.
[01:17:00.990 --> 01:17:01.490]  Okay.
[01:17:03.150 --> 01:17:03.650]  Okay.
[01:17:03.750 --> 01:17:04.490]  Thanks for this talk.
[01:17:04.650 --> 01:17:05.650]  It's really great.
[01:17:06.430 --> 01:17:08.110]  So I have a question about medication.
[01:17:08.210 --> 01:17:12.370]  And I wonder when do you decide to go on or off medication?
[01:17:12.410 --> 01:17:13.590]  And what are some of the alternatives?
[01:17:13.870 --> 01:17:20.150]  And specifically, any experience with the medication or the non in relation to, like, creativity and productivity?
[01:17:20.410 --> 01:17:22.610]  Any pros, cons, stuff like that?
[01:17:23.390 --> 01:17:26.830]  So I've been on and off medications for a long time.
[01:17:26.850 --> 01:17:28.690]  I'm currently not on medication.
[01:17:29.690 --> 01:17:54.610]  And I would have been on medication if I would have been in a single area or long enough to do But I basically go on medication when I feel that I need it.
[01:17:54.790 --> 01:17:58.550]  And usually when I need it is when I'm not able to deal with the stuff myself.
[01:17:58.550 --> 01:18:01.010]  And I'm not dealing with the stuff myself.
[01:18:01.590 --> 01:18:03.610]  At that point, I need help in general.
[01:18:04.130 --> 01:18:07.810]  So that's when I start seeing therapists and I get on medication.
[01:18:07.970 --> 01:18:08.830]  And it takes the edge off.
[01:18:10.850 --> 01:18:13.130]  Creativity wise, I don't know.
[01:18:13.210 --> 01:18:16.150]  I found it in effect a little bit.
[01:18:16.350 --> 01:18:19.870]  But it's sort of like all of the edges get rounded off.
[01:18:20.030 --> 01:18:25.650]  Instead of these sharp points, you just kind of have like dull ones that go a little bit less high or less low.
[01:18:27.450 --> 01:18:27.890]  But...
[01:18:27.890 --> 01:18:30.110]  Caveat on the going on and off of meds thing.
[01:18:30.270 --> 01:18:31.410]  That can work with depression.
[01:18:31.410 --> 01:18:33.410]  It absolutely does not work with schizophrenia.
[01:18:34.410 --> 01:18:34.690]  Yeah.
[01:18:35.610 --> 01:18:36.170]  Yeah.
[01:18:37.450 --> 01:18:40.950]  So my question was very much similar to that.
[01:18:41.810 --> 01:18:46.430]  So the other comment I had though about that or an observation is sort of the trend these days.
[01:18:46.930 --> 01:18:56.390]  So I actually didn't realize this, but a lot of people getting prescribed medication but not seeking treatment and not doing like talk therapy, which I found...
[01:18:56.390 --> 01:18:57.010]  Terrible idea.
[01:18:57.370 --> 01:18:57.930]  Yeah.
[01:18:58.210 --> 01:18:58.490]  Yeah.
[01:18:58.490 --> 01:18:58.570]  Terrible idea.
[01:18:58.650 --> 01:18:58.810]  Yeah.
[01:18:59.410 --> 01:18:59.850]  Yeah.
[01:18:59.850 --> 01:19:08.130]  Which I found pretty shocking because one of the, I mean, one of the first things, I was diagnosed with depression when I was like 17 or something.
[01:19:09.290 --> 01:19:11.830]  And, but I was seeing someone, but also medication.
[01:19:12.030 --> 01:19:14.190]  That was on and off and it's been working.
[01:19:14.190 --> 01:19:20.490]  But, I would never think to do that without seeing someone so it's just, it's shocking to me.
[01:19:20.490 --> 01:19:29.250]  And keep in mind, if you get prescribed medication and you want to do talk therapy, you're probably going to have to have a different therapist for the talk therapy.
[01:19:29.550 --> 01:19:33.890]  The psychiatrist is there to prescribe you medication and make sure that it's working appropriately.
[01:19:34.330 --> 01:19:41.890]  But he's usually... that person is not going to be really somebody that you can go and talk to every week.
[01:19:41.890 --> 01:19:45.790]  You should have another specific talk therapist for that as well.
[01:19:45.790 --> 01:19:48.750]  I have a talk therapist and a psychiatrist right now.
[01:19:48.750 --> 01:19:58.690]  And then make sure both of them and other people in your life who are supposedly there to help you are people you relate to and you know and feel good that they are on your side.
[01:19:59.010 --> 01:20:01.570]  And if they're not, don't be afraid to shop around.
[01:20:01.830 --> 01:20:02.710]  It is totally...
[01:20:02.710 --> 01:20:02.870]  Absolutely.
[01:20:03.210 --> 01:20:06.470]  You can totally fire doctors if they don't work.
[01:20:09.550 --> 01:20:10.590]  Yeah, that's...
[01:20:12.570 --> 01:20:14.170]  I brought this up earlier.
[01:20:14.330 --> 01:20:17.870]  The medication by itself will do absolutely nothing.
[01:20:19.550 --> 01:20:23.110]  Unless you have some way of working through it, so...
[01:20:23.110 --> 01:20:28.630]  Yeah, it puts your mind in a chemical state where it's easier for you to get to the state that you want to be in.
[01:20:28.750 --> 01:20:30.170]  But it's not going to do it by yourself.
[01:20:30.170 --> 01:20:35.010]  You still have to also be doing the work, doing the talking, doing the thinking.
[01:20:35.550 --> 01:20:35.990]  Yeah.
[01:20:36.310 --> 01:20:46.030]  It just kind of like keeps that anxiety point from being so sharp so I can actually get up and take the garbage out or floss my teeth or answer some emails.
[01:20:46.030 --> 01:20:51.530]  It's not a thing that is just going to magically fix everything because, you know, that's...
[01:20:52.010 --> 01:20:54.510]  You don't fix these things.
[01:20:54.710 --> 01:20:55.550]  You're not broken.
[01:20:55.770 --> 01:21:01.830]  It's just something you need to, like, learn about and, yeah, the therapist...
[01:21:02.670 --> 01:21:09.950]  It's just find a therapist that you are comfortable talking to and you feel better about when you see them.
[01:21:09.950 --> 01:21:17.170]  That's, I mean, that's a significant point, is, like, if you feel like shit every single time you go to your therapist, find a new f*cking therapist.
[01:21:18.910 --> 01:21:19.310]  Um...
[01:21:19.310 --> 01:21:20.090]  So...
[01:21:20.630 --> 01:21:22.170]  It's okay to feel like shit.
[01:21:22.430 --> 01:21:28.170]  Occasionally, when you've talked about some huge thing, you're gonna feel crappy for probably weeks afterwards.
[01:21:28.450 --> 01:21:32.910]  But then eventually you feel this huge relief, like, wow, I can't believe I was, like, holding on to that.
[01:21:33.110 --> 01:21:33.510]  Like...
[01:21:33.510 --> 01:21:35.610]  So, we've been given the two-minute warning.
[01:21:35.850 --> 01:21:35.850]  Yeah.
[01:21:36.550 --> 01:21:37.110]  So, anyway...
[01:21:37.110 --> 01:21:42.230]  If I can just offer a quick metaphor, um, medication can be a great soldering iron, but you have to do the rewiring yourself.
[01:21:42.670 --> 01:21:42.730]  Yeah.
[01:21:42.790 --> 01:21:42.790]  Yeah.
[01:21:43.430 --> 01:21:43.790]  Exactly.
[01:21:44.090 --> 01:21:47.370]  So, can we do one more question and then come back to the last word of the panel?
[01:21:47.590 --> 01:21:48.530]  One question, Jonah.
[01:21:48.650 --> 01:21:49.070]  Thank you.
[01:21:50.050 --> 01:21:51.190]  I'll try to keep it short.
[01:21:51.370 --> 01:21:54.190]  Um, first of all, I want to applaud the panel for the courage to put it together.
[01:21:54.810 --> 01:21:56.810]  And, uh...
[01:21:56.810 --> 01:22:02.990]  I think it was Du Bois who talked about how often it takes a lot of courage to stay alive and not everybody realizes that's a choice.
[01:22:02.990 --> 01:22:09.090]  Um, I really want to invite everyone in the audience, if they're not familiar, uh, with the new wave of radical mental health.
[01:22:09.230 --> 01:22:21.750]  There's a lot of groups out there, like the Icarus Project, who are all about trying to change the language we use to describe mental illness and talk about it more in terms of dangerous gifts and create safer spaces like these to share subjective narratives.
[01:22:21.990 --> 01:22:26.530]  Um, I doubt we have time to really engage in some of the questions around languages of compassion.
[01:22:26.530 --> 01:22:30.050]  I think most of you spoke from the I, which is incredible, and started with stories.
[01:22:30.050 --> 01:22:38.390]  But we are operating in this context where, um, the psychiatric establishment and the pharmaceutical complex can be critiqued outside of informed consent.
[01:22:38.690 --> 01:22:40.270]  And so, people should really understand.
[01:22:40.270 --> 01:22:51.150]  I think that, um, uh, there's been a move beyond the dogmatic anti-psychiatry, which is just black or white, meds or no meds, and towards a much more nuanced critique of psychiatry and pharma.
[01:22:51.150 --> 01:22:56.950]  And to that point, if it was time, I was curious if people on the panel thought that anything ought to be stigmatized.
[01:22:57.250 --> 01:23:10.650]  So, I know that pharma now, themselves, are working on de-stigma-fication campaigns that, in the same breath as de-stigma-fying illness, might also require you to swallow the notion that you're sick, there is no cure, and you need to be on drugs for the rest of your life.
[01:23:10.650 --> 01:23:16.350]  So, should toddlers on anti-psychotics, because sometimes they're happy and sad, be stigmatized?
[01:23:17.170 --> 01:23:19.630]  I think it's a fascinating question, and I love it.
[01:23:19.690 --> 01:23:24.230]  And let's talk about it on Sunday at the, um, How to Stay Alive When Your Brain Wants You to Die.
[01:23:24.770 --> 01:23:25.370]  Can I defer?
[01:23:25.870 --> 01:23:26.070]  Yes.
[01:23:26.070 --> 01:23:27.590]  Okay, so last word from the panel.
[01:23:27.870 --> 01:23:29.810]  What do you want people to take away from here today?
[01:23:32.410 --> 01:23:39.990]  Well, actually, what I want people to take away kind of relates to what he was just saying, which is that I think the sick versus not sick thing is a red herring.
[01:23:40.650 --> 01:23:50.530]  You know, you're sick if it's causing, you know, if it's causing your life not to work.
[01:23:50.930 --> 01:23:51.330]  Right?
[01:23:51.490 --> 01:23:58.010]  You know, you can live with, you know, you live with, you know, bacteria in your body all the time.
[01:23:58.290 --> 01:23:58.450]  Right?
[01:23:58.570 --> 01:23:59.990]  You know, and, you know, some of them are E.
[01:24:00.110 --> 01:24:00.510]  coli.
[01:24:01.090 --> 01:24:05.510]  And, you know, but you can still live with them, you still live with them in your body.
[01:24:05.830 --> 01:24:06.230]  Right?
[01:24:06.230 --> 01:24:10.590]  You know, if your brain is trying to kill you, that's a problem.
[01:24:10.890 --> 01:24:18.070]  But if your brain goes through cycles where you need support sometimes, that's who you are.
[01:24:18.550 --> 01:24:21.710]  You know, it's acute versus chronic, I guess.
[01:24:22.030 --> 01:24:23.370]  I don't know, I'm kind of rambling at this point.
[01:24:23.610 --> 01:24:23.610]  Great.
[01:24:23.610 --> 01:24:25.090]  So last words from other panelists?
[01:24:25.910 --> 01:24:27.190]  Since we're out of time.
[01:24:27.930 --> 01:24:34.050]  Yeah, I mean, that's really the point I would love for each and every one of you and all of us.
[01:24:34.810 --> 01:24:38.370]  It's totally okay to be who you are.
[01:24:39.570 --> 01:24:40.790]  You are who you are.
[01:24:40.990 --> 01:24:42.370]  We are constantly changing.
[01:24:42.590 --> 01:24:43.570]  But you are who you are now.
[01:24:43.690 --> 01:24:49.270]  And it's totally okay to be who you are, even if part of who you are you think it sucks.
[01:24:49.710 --> 01:24:50.450]  Accept that.
[01:24:50.590 --> 01:24:51.730]  It's part of who you are.
[01:24:51.850 --> 01:24:53.110]  It's not something you need to fix.
[01:24:53.130 --> 01:24:53.910]  It's who you are.
[01:24:54.570 --> 01:24:58.830]  And we can all be open with who we are if you want to.
[01:25:00.330 --> 01:25:03.410]  You know, if you can accept who you are, you can accept others for who they are.
[01:25:03.410 --> 01:25:06.250]  And we can accept all of us for who we are.
[01:25:06.370 --> 01:25:09.610]  And this is what makes a really wonderful community to be a part of.
[01:25:09.970 --> 01:25:10.290]  Great.
[01:25:16.150 --> 01:25:33.270]  I just want everyone to know that there are people that you can talk to about these things who are not going to look down upon you or stigmatize you for having these thoughts or feelings because we've experienced this ourselves.
[01:25:34.270 --> 01:25:36.670]  And you can always reach out for help.
[01:25:37.510 --> 01:25:44.290]  It's kind of amazing every time I hold my hand up, somebody is there to grab it and help pull me off the ground.
[01:25:47.290 --> 01:25:51.630]  And I don't know, just find something that you love and f*cking do it.
[01:25:53.270 --> 01:26:00.670]  If you hate your job, if you hate various things in your life, if watching TV sucks for you, stop doing it.
[01:26:01.330 --> 01:26:02.930]  That's not always that easy.
[01:26:03.170 --> 01:26:03.810]  It really isn't.
[01:26:04.530 --> 01:26:08.230]  I know this more than most other people, but it sometimes can be.
[01:26:09.270 --> 01:26:13.070]  But yes, there's people you can talk to and we'll have the resources up.
[01:26:13.310 --> 01:26:17.010]  I'll certainly have it on jimmyprogers.com slash depression.
[01:26:17.850 --> 01:26:19.990]  All of this stuff will be on there eventually.
[01:26:19.990 --> 01:26:22.290]  And there's some of it already up there right now.
[01:26:22.570 --> 01:26:23.370]  So the page is live.
[01:26:24.390 --> 01:26:24.790]  Darvin?
[01:26:25.010 --> 01:26:25.370]  Last word?
[01:26:29.930 --> 01:26:36.090]  I don't have very much to add to what they've said, but I am a big proponent of hacking your brain.
[01:26:36.090 --> 01:26:37.010]  Your brain is yours.
[01:26:37.010 --> 01:26:41.070]  It is the biggest tool that you have at your disposal.
[01:26:41.370 --> 01:26:44.570]  And don't be afraid to experiment with yourself.
[01:26:44.570 --> 01:26:47.030]  To treat yourself as a project.
[01:26:47.030 --> 01:26:55.090]  To go forward and say, I want to do the best with myself that I can.
[01:26:56.290 --> 01:26:58.310]  And don't be afraid to accept yourself.
[01:26:59.430 --> 01:27:00.770]  Thank you all so very much.
[01:27:06.480 --> 01:27:11.080]  Do you remember that in half an hour, is it, you guys are going to be doing also a workshop on the sixth floor?
[01:27:11.300 --> 01:27:11.400]  Yep.
[01:27:11.460 --> 01:27:14.180]  Okay, so there will be a workshop on the sixth floor following up on some of these issues.
[01:27:14.900 --> 01:27:16.380]  And another one tomorrow as well.
[01:27:16.480 --> 01:27:17.660]  The Staying Live When Your Body Wants.