Adam Has a Podcast Episode 21; Fear

... Fear is mind, kill Killer. Fear is an illusion. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Scary, scary, scary, fear, fear. Are you scared? Yeah. Fear is an illusion. There is nothing to fear besides fear itself. Now, fear is fucky, because I've been putting this episode off off because I don't want to fucking do it because I'm afraid of it. Just thinking about fear, its essence, fear in and of itself puts puts a pit in my stomach. It makes me uneasy and I just don't even want to think about it. But we've reached a point in my Halloween podcasts where I feel as it is a logistic necessity to do this episode about fear before I start moving on to everything else. because Halloween is basically all about fear. Halloween is a time in a year where we actively seek out those things that scare us. And historically speaking, Halloween was based around a tradition of scaring away those things that scare you. But nowadays, it kind of, it has reversed a little bit where we're're not scaring away the things that used to scare us. We're actually, we filled up an entire month of those things that scare us. We pull it all together and we actively seek out those things like horror movies or spooktober fests, wherever. Those kind of festivals that get held at amusement parks all across the nation. They all have different names. It's like. Spooktoberfest,toberfest, all that shit. We actively seek out horror houses and terrifying experiences because nowadays we live in a world where we don't have to scare away the scary things. We don't have wild animals. Most of us don't have wild animals right at our doorstep. And if you've seen that lady with the bears on TikTok, we don't even treat wild animals like wild animals anymore. This lady has wild bears up on her front doorstep and they love her and she loves them and she gives them treats and one of the bears brings her babies by so the lady can see it. And it's fucking crazy. Like, I don't think that anybody in history has ever had a relationship like that with a wild animal. And it's just because we are so far away from the fearful, crazy, wild, magical world that our species had to evolve through in order to get to this point. And that's why you hear people say things like fear is an illusion. In today's world, yes, a lot of the fear that we do experience is an illusion. But that fear response is based off of an innumerablemerable amount of years worth of evolution just trying to keep this thing this species alive. But now that we've reached a point where we don't have giant sloths waiting for us at the mouth of our caves, a lot of the fear that we experience in our day daily lives is unfounded. But fear played such a large role in our survival that it's basically hard-coded into our system now. We can't remove it. It is part of our system because it played such a vital role in keeping us alive. But because it played such a vital role in keeping us alive, all of us have these instinctual triggers that will trigger f fear or that will trigger a fear response from the brain and how your brain handles it logically is how much that fear will dictate your next move. Things like horror movies play a certain tone range in order to induce fear in your brain. And that tone range can induce fear. It really can. If you play that tone range apart from a movie and you just play it in somebody's house, they're going to start feeling afraid because those were tones and noises made by things that would have harmed us in the past, like earthquakes, volcanoes, mammoths, giant sloths, whatever else kind of magical fucking creatures that we just pushed to the edge of extinction because they were too fucking scary to deal with. That's where, like, fear also plays a role on how you interpret reality. Like I said a moment ago, how you logically process the fear response will dictate your action towards the fear and what you choose to do about it next. So say somebody who didn't know a whole lot about nothing sees an elephant they're not going to know what the fuck to think of that giant monster. That's why I think it was Alexander the Great used him in his conquering partyies because they were just these terrifying things that people had never seen before in Greece coming over from India. I think it was from India. That's where he got his elephants. I don't know. I'm not a real historian, buff. I just like bullshitting. That's kind of the point of Adam has a podcast. But we already know that by now, now, don't we? There's some, you know, there's some historiricality. My point is, I want to spark interest to the point where you're like, hmm, I'm going to go look into that. And then maybe, hey, such a fucking dumbass. And then you can learn something at the fault of my own folly or you can be like, wow, that dumbass is so smart and you can be surprised by this dumbassery's dumbassnessness. But anyways, that can totally explain why you have like, medieval paintings of dragons and shit. Because these were just fucking country bumpkin hodunk, fucking middle of Europe in the middle of the fucking woods people. And they traveled or maybe somebody else traveled and brought it there. And maybe even just the animal traveled itself, came to their fucking land and suddenly there's a Komodo dragon and you're like, what the fuck is that, dude? What is that fucking thing? And you start freaking out. You're like, it's a dragon, it's spits fire. If it fucking gets its saliva on you, you dissolve, it fucking tears you limb from limb, it will swallow you whole. And those were all true things. I just said about a fucking Komodo dragon, a real life thing that we know about today. So imagine the kind of shit that they knew about back then and were like, I'm gonna go out and slay that fucking thing. Fear. Now that we've kind of departed from it as a society, really was an illusion. You can say things like fearear is an illusion, because now we can look back and we can say, oh, yeah, that unicorn was a rhinoceros. Dude just never saw a rhinoceros before in his life, thought it was a unicorn. We can look back with knowledge and say, oh, well, that's what we call this thing. We don't look as giraffes as these terrifying, long necked, whipped beasts. We think of them as giraffes because they're a giraffe, because we know about giraffe. The only true remedy to fear is knowledge, is known about something. And me myself, I grew up very fearful. I had lots of fears growing up. I was just scared of fucking everything, bro. I got I got a couple for a few episodes later, but right now I figured I would focus on the dark. I was terrified in the dark, bro. My brother used to have his Freddy Cougar mask. He used to scare the shit out of me with it. And this one, it scared me so bad that I would think I would see this Freddy Cougar mask floating in the dark when it wasn't there. And that's how much fear can cause illusions. They even have a fear-induced hallucinations. It's not just something that scarecrow from the Batman fucking series does. It is a real thing. You can have a fear-induced hallucination and you'll see something that's not there just because you're afraid of seeing that thing right there. So me, I was a little kid. This Freddy Cougar mask scared the shit out of me so bad that it would cause fear-induced hallucinations. I remember this one time that I would always make my parents go or somebody, it doesn't have to be my parents. I would always make somebody go in the room if it was dark and turn on the light for me because I was fucking terrified of the dark, dude. It felt like knives. The dark felt like knives against my skin. That's how much like fear can change your perception of something. I couldn't do it. This one day I thought I saw that Freddy Ker mask fucking floating there like a ghost. And I was like, dude, I don't know what the fuck is going on. I don't know, man. I was freaking out, running up Dallas stairs like, "Somebody please go turn on that fucking light for me. Nobody was turning on the fucking light for me. Nobody understood what the fuck was going on with me. I was so terrified of the dark that it would create monsters and illusions that were right there in front of me and I could see it and I was like, dude, that Fredeck Cougar Mass was floating all by itself right there in the fucking room. And they were like, no, Adam, this is it. We've had enough. Just go into that room and turn on the light. And I was like, fuck you guys. I fucking hate all of you. Nobody would help me. They all refused. They're like, noah, this is something he's gotta fucking do. It's getting ridiculous at this point. And I was like, fuck, I hate all of you. You're not understanding the pure terror that it is that I'm feeling like deep inside me. I don't know if that was because, you know, going back to it, my siblings like to scare the shit out of me for fun. Maybe that just made me a very fearful fucking child. Dude, I.. I remember running into that room and it was painful and it hurt. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to fucking die right now. I'm going to die in my own bedroom because it's dark. And I ran all the way over the light and I turned on the light. Everything was fine. No Freddy Cougar mask. Everything was all right. And I realized, oh, my God. The light will save you. The light is magical. The light is the good thing. I didn't realize, oh, there was nothing there. I thought as a kid, and that persisted for a while, that the light was the good thing. And it's because you can see everything that's there. And I used to fall asleep with the lights on all the time. It would get I would be so scared at points. Sometimes that I would stay up the entire night until I started to. I couldn't anymore. I would have to pass out with the lights on because I was just so like, I can't sleep with the lights off. Some bad's gonna happen. I was just so afraid of the fucking dark, dude. And it's ironic because now I'm an adult and I've had my own apartment and stuff like that and the dark is actually like a very comfortable place for me now. Like, I get migraines. I'm very light sensitive. So even when you turn out all the lights, I can still see. There is no darkness to me anymore. And on one hand, maybe I'm not afraid of the dark because no matter what level of darkness I encounter, I can still see at some level. So I'm like not afraid of it anymore. Or maybe my brain evolved to be able to see in the dark, so I wouldn't be able to, you know, be afraid in the dark so much. And that's why I'm light sensitive. I don't know. But nowadays, the dark is actually like a comfort for me. It's very ironic that I was so terrified of it as a kid, but now that I really, truly understand it and I know what the dark is, it's comfortable to me. And like, sometimes when the sun goes down, I won't turn on lights in the house because I'll just let my eyes adapt with the waning of the light. and suddenly I can see everything at night, especially living in a city. There's like street lights everywhere. You don't get pure darkness, like how you used to get in the suburbs, dude. Suburb darkness, like, especially like Massachusetts suburb darkness Fucking terrifying, dude. You know the only thing that I saw worse than that shit was New York suburb Darkness. Upstate New York suburb Darkness. I don't like it. I don't like it. I don't like it. There's still parts of me that are like, yeah, I understand why there's a fear of the dark because maybe I am not as afraid of the dark now because I understand it. it. I'm like, dude, you're afraid of the dark because you can't see what's right in front of you. Going back to it, maybe that's why I adapted to have hypersensitive vision so I could always see in the dark, but I still have encountered true darkness. Like, there's this one patch of the.. I forget what the fuck they call it. The Tri-city bikeway and Stoneham. The Greenway. The Greenway and the Stoneham. And it's a bike path that connects like three cities. And there's this one portion like behind Bottvale leading up to the tunnel where if you skate. night, dude, it's fucking scary, dude. It is so fucking dark. And imagine just like bombing it down that shit, going like 10 miles per hour on a skateboard. I'd be so paranoid that I'd not even an animal or something, a fucking rocked, dude. Because imagine like falling into pure blackness. It's just trippy. I can't. I don't want to. That's why I said at the beginning of this episode. I don't want to do this because I I shudder fear so far away from my mind that even just opening up the doors to invite it back in to do an episode on the topic is like, oh, dude, I spent a lot of time building up the walls between me and you, bro. Like, fuck, what am I doing bringing down these walls, man? Um. But. I ain't got no reason why the word and the concept of fear itself should actually give me fear. That is not jiving well with me internally. And that is part of fear as well. I think part of fear is confronting it. You can't live your life in spite of it. You have to like maybe fear that thing that you have to actively run towards so you can understand it more so it stops dictating your life. And going back to it, I think I gained that kind of perspective because that Freddy Cougar mask that my brother used to scare me with, he realized at a certain point, that that thing really fucking terrified me. And he taught me, like, dude, you can't like be avoidant of your fear all the time. You got to confront it and you got to stand up to it. And his way of teaching me to stand up to it was when we took our Swiss Army knives and we put it on his desk and we stabbed at it and we cut at it and he's like, it's just a mask. It's just a thing. It's not even real. It doesn't even have any emotions to it. It's just a mask. It won't get mad at you for stabbing it. And he showed me like, dude, it's just a thing. You got to confront this fear and realize, you know, what things are just things and what things are actually scary, you know? What makes the mask scary is that you don't know who's underneath it. And that that can be a little bit scary, especially where it's such a scary outside. It makes you think that the person underneath it has a nefarious intent, but it's not true. It's just that person wanted to wear the mask and they don't always have nefarious intent. They just are participating in Halloween and it's a Halloween mask and it's fun. And I remember even my sisters were having a sleepover and this was after I had stabbed the mask and I had, you know, conquered the fear and I had faced the fear and I was like, yo, let me be the one that induces fear now. I totally forgot about this shit. And I think I even got my mom in on it and I was like, help me find the mask. I'm going to go scare them. And I put on the Freddy Kueger mask and now I was the one inside of the mask with the, you know, questionable intent, and they were in the middle of watching Friday, like Friday the 13th or Freddy Cougar Nightmare on Elm Street, one of those two movies. I think it was Nightmare on Elm Street and I fucking came in with the mask and they all freaked out, started running and, you know, that's good fun, though, because you realize after a second, oh, it's a little kid that's like a fucking two foot six, three-year old fucking, I don't know if I was three. Maybe I was like, I don't know how old I was at this point. Maybe not, not. Not in school yet, but maybe, maybe in school? Not, definitely. Maybe the year before school. Something like that. It's probably like five. I don't know. Memory is fallible. And that's one of those things, too, where that can be a fear and you don't realize it where fear ends up, like I said a second ago, when you don't face a fear, it ends up dictating your life. And if you're afraid of, you know, fre forgetting something or you're afraid of having an infallible memory or just like a normal human memory, you're going to make it so you forget things more often. So you face that fear more often until you realize, oh, fear is just nothing. I just forget things. People forget things. It's normal. It happens all the time. It's nothing to be afraid of. But the more that you stay afraid of it, the more you're going to freak out each time you forget something. You're going to be like, oh no, I forgot to put on deodorant. Oh my God, I can't believe it. I forget things. I'm forgetting things. I'm so stupid. I'm so forgetful. And then you start dogging on yourself because you forgot to put on deodorant. It's like, dog, you a't even going to fucking sweat that much, run into the fucking air conditioned store from your air conditioned car, you know, 10 minutes in the store and back. Nobody's going to fucking even notice. Even still, what's wrong with your natural mind musk? You know? A lot of these deodorant and fragrance companies sell you musk back to you. I'm not even going to say like they have this big old fucking conspiracy to cover up the human smell so we stop being attractive. Nah, man, these motherfuckers sell shit called musk, so you smell more attractive. So why, you know, why you even just cover up all of your smells all the time? Wouldn't it be a cool experiment to run to the store and see if you smell better to other people while you're just freshly showered, you know? Because we all know that when you don't shower for a couple days, you smell. That's not a fucking experiment you need to run, okay? Be afraid that you're gonna smell if you didn't shower for two days, bro. You're going to stank, okay? Two days upper fucking limit. I pushed it to three once and I was like, no, no, never doing this again. Sometimes, and I shower every fucking day, bro. I don't know how some of these people are like, I ain't shower for a week. What? What? Maybe that's my own fear. My own fear is smelling stinky. Maybe I'm being a hypocrite now because I'm telling people to be your own smelly self, see if your musk smells, and I'm like, you going three days without it shower. You know, people throughout all the history went really long times without showers or regular bathing, and they were all right. They must have stayed real bad bad, but they were okay because now I'm here today. Ha ha, funny little rhyme. stinkin' ain't bad. It's just unpleasurable. It's nothing to be afraid of. It's nothing to be paranoid about. But, you know, that's kind of the point where fear and morality. Morals, ethics. Now, morals is more ethics. That's the point where fear and morals kind of collide. You know, they mix together or maybe they, you know, don't. And sometimes, like, you can develop fears based off of like moralistic value. And that goes back to last week with the Salem Witch trials. They were so concerned about their morals of being pure that they developed a, you know, hysterical fear towards witchcraft in devilry to the point where they were willing to commit devilry and kill people in the name of trying to stop devilry. You know, they themselves became devils because they were so afraid of the devil. That's how fear can end up dictating your life if you don't like actively confront it in the right ways. And it's actually a little bit funny to me right now that as I'm like actively confronting the fear and the experience of fear and like trying to intellectualize it into a topic and something to talk about, I'm actually unlocking like these 20 year old memories about how I first learned how to confront and cope with fear and how I developed and based my own like personality kind of around these tenets that I didn't even realize. We're there until I go back and I look and I confront that fear again. It's like it's a lesson that's always there and it helped me develop my personality. But the way that the lesson is structured is that I forget about it and it gets shrouded by fear inside of my mind. And then I'm afraid to confront it and I'm afraid to look at it and it's shrouded by fear, but then once I really dig into it and I go, fuck it, I'm running into the dark again. I'm confronting it. I'm running into this dark room that has a floating Freddy Cougar mask. I'm realizing, oh shit, dude, this is stuff that I have like based my core personality around that I just forgot about.. But in order to remember it, I had to perform the action that my core personality performed in order to get to that conclusion in the first place. It's like I have to keep taking the same path each time in my brain in order to get through the fear and realize what fear itself is. But, you know, you get we live in this world where you can put space between you and the scary things. So you can live a really long time avoiding watching scary movies and things like that.. But what you're doing is apparently just forgetting all the work that you did to be able to endure those scary movies. So now when you go to watch a scary movie, you can't endure it anymore. It's just too much because all of the tricks and the tactics that they use, like sound frequencies and certain, you know, colorations and certain frames and angles that they use to terrify you, they terrify you again because you forgot about all the different tricks that they were using to terrify you. You can't actively combat something that you don't know what's happening. So if they're using a tone, like infra sound that you can't audibly hear, but still affects your mood and the state of you watching that film, you don't know to like actively combat it or that it even could be a possibility of something that you can't hear that's affecting your mood. It gets wacky once you really start to realize that fear is a primal response that can be induced by outside variables that people who can then manipulate to then once they realize that, oh, okay, this thing gives him fear, that thing gives him him fear and that gives him fear. They can then build a fear algorithm, basically. And once you get all of those kinds of things, you can, oh my God, build an AI to make the cool thing would be the scariest movie you could ever watch. personally mean for you. And the worst thing would be like, oh my God, this person's going to have a terrifying life because they're going to start using all these tactics that are designed to scare this person because of their genetics and their bringing up and their psychology and all of these different factors that, you know, you can derive from your online profile. Isn't that terrifying? Doesn't that induce you with fear? Because it is, it's like a button. It's the fear button. But like I said, a second ago, the more you press that fear button, the more you start to realize, like, oh shit, it's just the fear button.