Gavin de Becker

But what he told me that was interesting is he said, ah, Aunt Charlene, you taught me to speak more quietly because you talk so fucking loud.

And he says, Uncle Carlo, you taught me to be more gentle because, man, you're rough in everything you do.

Throw the glasses around and the way you engage.

Dad, you taught me to listen to people because you never fucking listened to a thing I said, even today.

Isn't it a beautiful way of looking at it, basically?

These were the teachers in our lives.

For my mother...

A hundred percent.

I'm so far past forgiveness and so far into gratitude for the pieces that were wonderful.

And by the way, this is a suffering person.

This is a person that charities are for and social welfare is for.

A woman with three kids and no job and a heroin addict, for God's sake.

That's not an easy job.

And other drugs, too, by the way, which helped me as I grew up to be skeptical of pharma.

because some of the pills she took, one of them called Doradin, has now been taken off the market for causing what?

Psychosis, which explains a lot of her craziness.

And so all of this teaching that it depends what you do with it, meaning we all, nobody gets out of here alive.

Everybody's got a story to tell.

And I remember a case where I overvalued my own ability to predict human behavior, which I say in these books, you can predict human behavior.

To drive here today in traffic, I had to predict the behavior of thousands of people based on just the little movements of the big metal objects around them.