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The Current Transcript for July 27, 2016

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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I really believed by the end of Tuesday, like if we wake up at first light and we've got 50 per cent of our homes left, and we've only killed a few thousand people we'll have done well. That's how bad I felt.

LAURA LYNCH: They call Fire Chief Darby Allen a hero. But when wildfires started tearing through Fort McMurray in May, he didn't feel like one. And this morning he shares what was really going through his mind, his fear that many many would die in the flames. And then...

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[crowd murmuring]

TOM CRUISE: You are here for me to enlighten you, to edify you, to send you off into the now not so unknown future. So, come along with me, how to fake like you are nice and caring.

LL: Faking it. That's what the Tom Cruise character in the 1999 film Magnolia said was the key to picking up women. Well the character may have been fiction,, but there was a real life guru who shared the secrets of how to win over a woman. Neil Strauss literally wrote the book on it but now Strauss has changed his ways and his advice. That's coming up in our second half hour. I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

Fort McMurray fire: Three men in charge recall the fight they will never forget

Guests: Marion Warnica

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VOICE 1: Oh my God [unintelligible].

[woman crying]

VOICE 2: Well, it’s been called the largest wildfire evacuation in Alberta history. We can say this morning that we know hundreds of homes have burned.

VOICE 3: We’d have [unintelligible] so late. That people were stuck in traffic and people were calling the radio stations saying we’re [unintelligible] and the fire is coming for us, and we’re bumper to bumper and we can’t move. Come and save us, get the police to direct traffic. We’re trapped, we’re sitting ducks.

VOICE 4: It's been the worst day of my career. And this is going to go on, this is going to take us a while to come back from.

LL: Haunting words and memories from a Canadian catastrophe. The Fort McMurray wildfire made headlines around the world when it tore through that northern Alberta town on May 3. About 90,000 people fled while walls of fire towered above them. Two people were killed in a car crash while escaping the fire, but no one died in the flames. The people in charge of that evacuation were widely hailed as heroes but some of them are still haunted by that day, and the decisions they made. CBC reporter Marion Warnica was in Fort McMurray when the evacuation call went out. She saw chaos break out that day. Now she's gone back to talk to three of the men in charge of the firefight and evacuation about what went right, and what went wrong. Marion Warnica joins us from Edmonton. Hello.

MARION WARNICA: Hello.

LL: Listen, where exactly were you that day when the evacuation order came?

MARION WARNICA: I was actually in a hotel room. There had been a press conference earlier that morning downtown, and I went back to the hotel to file a story on that. And I'd been there for just about an hour when I looked out of the window. I started getting some emails, phone calls, and I had a look at the Abasand neighborhood and Beacon Hill, which sort of overlooks the downtown area, and I could clearly see the fire was here. Things started developing very quickly, and it soon became quite clear that no one really knew exactly what was happening. And that struck me for a couple of reasons. Mainly because it was tough to be in it, but also I started thinking about the people in charge because they were dealing with the same kind of uncertainty. But the decisions that they made would have an effect on the lives of the people in that town. They would either save them or they wouldn't.

LL: And some of those people who were in charge did agree to tell you their stories, who are they?

MARION WARNICA: Well, these are people who were a big part of the team who took over when Fort McMurray’s regional municipality declared a local state of emergency. So when that happened mayor and council stepped aside, and a team of emergency responders took over. So I interviewed them about the first 24 hours when the fire hit town and the days leading up to it. Because that's when they were basically operating on their own. That was before the provincial government of Alberta declared a province wide state of emergency. Before hundreds more firefighters came in to help. And what they told me about those 24 hours really surprised me.

LL: How so?

MARION WARNICA: Well one of them described the fire coming into town on the day of the mass evacuation, Tuesday May 3, as a complete surprise. His name was Jody Butz. He was the person in charge of operations, so basically the boss of the firefighters during that local state of emergency. And they actually watched that fire for a couple of days. So it was discovered on the Sunday it was burning outside of the boundary of town. That fire was actually under the jurisdiction of the province's forestry department. So what Jody Butz told me was he was relying on that department's information, and he really thought that they had that fire under control right up until the last minute.

SOUNDCLIP

JODY BUTZ: We were starting to receive reports not from forestry, but from citizens on social media that they could see flame from the Shell station in Beacon Hill. So I look over at forestry, and they couldn't tell me how far away the fire was. So I told the Fire Hall 5 crew to go to Beacon Hill and get eyes on the ground. They no sooner get there and phone me and say the fire is right here, starting houses on fire and Beacon Hill.

MARION WARNICA: At that point you had thought the fire was quite a ways away.

JODY BUTZ: I did not realize the fire was that close to the city. All that it would take is you've got a cold line here. One spark starts a fire, and man it's all that you have done is just completely undone and now it's a brand new fire. 300-foot flames traveling at 40 feet per second. How long does that take to cover four kilometres? How long does that take to cover two kilometres? Marion, it turned into a battleground.

LL: But some of the evacuation orders actually went out two days earlier on Sunday, so that suggests it couldn't have been a complete shock.

MARION WARNICA: No exactly, it wasn't. I mean, the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo which does include Fort McMurray, did declare a local state of emergency on the Sunday. That's when these three men that I spoke with were called in, and the wind on that night on the Sunday when the fire was discovered was actually blowing this bushfire toward the town. So they actually ordered 4,500 people out of their homes that night from two neighborhoods closest to the fire's edge. Now Dale Benfeld was the second in command during this fire. He's a former soldier, an RCMP officer, who served in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Have a listen to what he had to say.

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DALE BENFELD: We now have a fire that is moving towards us. And now we had nothing between the fire and Highway 63 or the city. We can't go in after it. We don't have the capability. It’s not our task. We only have what we call asphalt firefighting. It stops there.

LL: So what changed then between Sunday and Tuesday, which was the day when the mass evacuation was called?

MARION WARNICA: Yeah, because it's sort of a dissonance right how can they be surprised. And so on the Sunday you heard there Dale Benfeld describing that sense of urgency on Monday. Though the next morning they all woke up, and the winds had changed. They were blowing away from the town, so even though it was close it just within a couple of kilometres. They thought the situation was getting better and Jody Butz told me he thought they were in good shape. Here's what he told his wife that night before the mass evacuation.

SOUNDCLIP

JODY BUTZ: I said yeah, the fire went away. It's growing, it's getting bigger, but I never once told her to be worried and everyone's told her to have your bags packed. It’s a good point, it’s a good measure on what I felt like. I didn't I tell my own family to be worried and run and get ready to go.

MARION WARNICA: He's the boss of the firefighters and he's assuring his own family the fire went away. And that was the feeling that was shared by the rest of his team. They actually had discussions, and decided to downgrade the evacuation order from Sunday on Monday night. And they actually allowed a couple of neighborhoods that were under a mandatory evacuation to come back home, but not everyone was feeling that sense of calm on Monday night. Darby Allen for example, you might be familiar with his name, he's the fire chief who oversaw this whole operation. His title at that time was the director of emergency management. And looking back now, Darby Allen says he doesn't actually remember giving that order, or okaying that order to downgrade the evacuation. But he does say all he can remember from that night is a deep sense of dread.

SOUNDCLIP

DARBY ALLEN: In my mind it hadn’t calmed down, because I knew that it was going to go this way. Whether the wind was going to help it or not, it was going to go this way.

LL: And then we get to the day of the mass evacuation.

MARION WARNICA: That's right. And that day felt totally different. At dawn, the sky was bright, it was clear, there was very little smoke in the sky. We now know that that's because low temperatures overnight had sucked the smoke clouds down near the ground. It didn't look that bad though. But when I spoke with the head of the provincial forestry department, I definitely got a sense that things were changing quickly. He told me that morning that the fire had doubled in size overnight. It had jumped the Athabasca River, which is four times the size of your average manmade firebreak, and it was now about one kilometre from town and the winds that day were forecasted to be blowing toward Fort McMurray. So at this point, Darby Allen and his team had scheduled a news conference for 11:00am a couple of hours after I had talked to the head of forestry with that sort of dire list. This is Tuesday May 3. More news crews had started to arrive. And most people hearing about those conditions that morning were expecting not necessarily a call for a mass evacuation order — although that seemed like a possibility — but at least an expanded evacuation. And that is not exactly what happened. Here, have a listen to part of that news conference.

SOUNDCLIP

People, wherever they are living within this wonderful town should bear in mind that we're in a serious situation. So get your kids ready. Bear in mind if you get short notice what you may do and what you may not do. We are a long ways off from that, but that's something for people to bear in mind.

MARION WARNICA: So, no expanded evacuation order. You hear a bit of a warning there, but it's pretty vague. I did ask him at that news conference to explain exactly what he meant by that warning, and to sort of pin down more what people should be worried about and how they should be preparing.

SOUNDCLIP

That fire’s sitting there and it's just resting up and it's going to come back. I think people need to have a little plan in mind. If you were told that you have to leave the house in two days, what would you take with you and where do you think you might go?

LL: So he's really minimizing it, he wasn't suggesting that people leave town right away.

MARION WARNICA: No, he wasn't. And you heard him say there if you had to leave your home in the next couple of days. So here's someone who thought that they had time, but then it was really just about an hour later from that news conference that the fire roared right into town.

LL: Yeah, everything changed very quickly from there. What happened?

MARION WARNICA: As Jody Butz mentioned earlier, they started hearing about the fire being in the city through social media reports. And they said at that time, things were shifting so quickly it was really hard to know what was happening when or what was exaggerated. So they just started sending out their own people. One of those was Dale Bedfield, the second in command. And here's how he described the first time he saw the flames right around that time.

SOUNDCLIP

DALE BEDFIELD: Clearly when I was driving here I could see the fire was no longer in one particular area, it was covering a whole horizon now. So that changed my mindset. I realized holy s--t, this thing is getting big.

LL: Yeah, I bet he had a reaction like that. So what were those hours like for those who were in charge, and when did they finally make that call to evacuate?

MARION WARNICA: Well we sort of giggle about that--

LL: Expletive? [laughs]

MARION WARNICA: Swear in there, yeah. But there were many moments like that for them. In fact, those hours they describe almost like one big holy sh moment. And these are people who are used to fighting or dealing with stressful situations right? I mean, Darby Allen has been a firefighter since 1983. Dale Benfeld led troops and was a senior officer in Afghanistan. But they describe the situation as a blur. Things were coming in fast. They weren't taking notes, there just wasn't time. And just to give you an idea of how quickly things changed, the first reports of the flames coming into Beacon Hill came at around 12:30. The first report of their official Twitter account giving a new evacuation order that day for some of those neighborhoods is listed at 1:55. So just over an hour later. And then it wasn't until around supper time that they told everyone in the entire city to leave. And don't forget here, I mean they're dealing with all this information coming in fast and people in jeopardy. They're also dealing with worries about their own families. Because these are people who live in this community. So, Jody Butz actually told me about a text message that he got from his 15-year-old son Wesley around that time.

SOUNDCLIP

JODY BUTZ: He said that he was more worried about me [pause] than anything so. [crying] Sorry. Um, that's what hit me. I think I still have the text, but it was very short, very simple, very sweet, but it was pretty powerful. I don't usually say that stuff to my kids like that.

MARION WARNICA: What stuff?

JODY BUTZ: Just you know, I didn't have time to explain everything to him. I just said be brave. My wife, I said you’ve got to be strong for everyone around you. Trust me in saying that you're safe.Although maybe I should have been more on their safety, but I knew that they were safe there. I knew that our car guys were being overwhelmed and my attention had to be given to my crew.

LL: Wow. So beyond the obvious concern for families, what else were they thinking about during that time?

MARION WARNICA: Well, you can hear in his voice there his concern about his crews being overwhelmed. I mean that's code for injuries or even fatalities. Several of the people I spoke with said they really did think people had died that day. Here's Jody Butz again.

SOUNDCLIP

JODY BUTZ: It felt like we were losing all over. You just had to assume that there was going to be casualties. I couldn't imagine it not being.

MARION WARNICA: What did that feel like?

JODY BUTZ: It was overwhelming. But again, in order to stay focused, as heartless as it sounds, that's another problem. But is there something you can do about that? No. What you can do is put out the fire. That's the best you can do. You can evacuate the people, protect the property. That's the best we can do, and that's what we were doing there the most.

LL: So these guys did assume then that there were going to be a lot of casualties.

MARION WARNICA: Yes. And as the person in charge, Darby Allen really carried how he felt was the most enormous burden.

SOUNDCLIP

DARBY ALLEN: I really believed by the end to Tuesday, like if we wake up at first light and we've got 50 per cent of our homes left and we've only killed a few thousand people, we’ll have done well. That's how bad I felt. You know statistically the chances of getting that many people out and no one got left behind. No one was asleep in a basement. No one got stuck behind someone else in traffic. Statistically, the chance of that happening, I don't know how you fathom that out, but there wasn't much chance of it happening.

LL: And of course we know now how that story did end for the residents. Although two people did die on Highway 881 as they tried to leave Fort McMurray, no one actually died in the flames.

MARION WARNICA: Yes. And you can hear in what Darby Allen said at a news conference the next morning after that evacuation on May 4. That he couldn't believe actually that that was true.

SOUNDCLIP

DARBY ALLEN: We successfully evacuated 88,000 people. [voice trembling] No one is hurt and no one has passed away right now. I really hope that we get to the end of this and we can still say that.

MARION WARNICA: Now that was the closest I'd ever heard Darby Allen getting to crying during that time when I was covering that story. And I asked him about that moment, and he said it was really that he believed that by the end of that day they would have a body count. And it actually took him weeks to believe that no one had died. Weeks. Because they just had no idea yet that they had actually saved 85 per cent of Fort McMurray. Although they lost 2,400 buildings, and I think a lot of it was just the scale of this thing. I mean, in total the Fort McMurray wildfire burned an area of close to 600,000 hectares. That is the size of more than 365,000 soccer fields. And it took two months for crews to bring it under control. The fire’s still burning right now. Officials are telling us it's going to be likely a year until summer 2017 to completely put it out.

LL: Wow. I'm just wondering though, so you've been speaking to these men, what kind of response have you heard from the community about how the evacuation was handled?

MARION WARNICA: Well, on the one hand Darby Allen is really considered a hero. I mean, he was chosen to lead a parade, a big parade here in Edmonton just a few days ago. He's very beloved. What we've also heard, and these voices are a little less loud, but recently a couple of people have come forward questioning some of the decisions that were made that day, questioning the leadership. Recently, there was a story where two firefighters came forward to the CBC with concerns about how the evacuation was handled, and some people do think that it should have been called sooner.

LL: So what does Darby Allen say? Would he have done things differently looking back?

MARION WARNICA: The answer to that is sort of yes and no. I mean, he talked to me about the difficulties of hindsight, and you can actually really hear him struggling with some of the decisions he made in this next clip.

SOUNDCLIP

DARBY ALLEN: People have asked me that before. You know, in hindsight would you do anything different? Yeah. When I came back from lunch on that Sunday, I’d have said let's evacuate [Fort] McMurray. And what do you think people would have said to me? Are you crazy chief? What are you basing that on? Well I’m basing it on I’ve been to the future and I think that we should evacuate earlier. You know what, there will be reports coming out and people will second guess what we did and when we did it. That's fine. But if they ask me now am I happy with all the decisions we made and the timelines we did them in? Yes, I'm comfortable with that. I'm comfortable with all those big decisions. Would I like to have done them a little bit earlier now? Sure. But I can see what happened now. I didn't know that then.

MARION WARNICA: So I didn't know that then. You can hear him admitting to some soul searching. To wondering whether they did the right thing at all points. But he does say we did do the best we could and he welcomes reports on what happened. And there is actually going to be a formal report, a review that has been launched by the provincial government here in Alberta about the evacuation. They say it's fairly routine after a big disaster like this. And we did ask the province to be part of this story, including Bernie Schmidt, who was the head of the provincial forestry department in that area during the fire. But they declined our request and they said they can't be interviewed until the results of that review come out at the end of 2016.

LL: Marion, it's just so interesting to hear what these men have to say after the fact. Thanks for telling us the story, the backstory really, on the Fort McMurray fire.

MARION WARNICA: You're so welcome Laura.

LL: That was CBC reporter Marion Warnica in Edmonton. And we posted a link on our website to Marion's feature web story and photo slideshow on those who battled the Fort McMurray fire. It's really worth taking a look. While you're there you can also listen to The Current’s coverage of the Fort McMurray fire, including our special episode Alberta Under Fire. There you'll find stories of those who lost everything and those who stepped up to help their neighbors in crisis. Well, coming up next. Neil Strauss became rich and famous by writing a Bible for the pickup artist subculture. It was pretty much guaranteed to allow a guy to get the woman he wanted. Now it seems Strauss is experiencing some regret. And he says you can't lie and cheat your way to happiness. I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Ending theme]

ENCORE: 'Love wasn't safe': writer Neil Strauss rethinks his pickup artist past in The Truth

Guests: Neil Strauss

LAURA LYNCH: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch, and you're listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[crowd cheering]

TOM CRUISE: Tame it. Take it on head first with the skills that I will teach you at work and say no. You will not control me. No. You will not take my soul. No. You will not win this game. Because it is a game guys you want to think it's not. You want to think it's not, you go back to the schoolyard you have that crush on Mary Jane. [crowd cheering] You know I'm getting this thought, I’m the one who's in charge. I'm the one who says yes. No. Now. Here.

[crowd cheering]

LL: That is Frank TJ Mackey, a character brought to life by Tom Cruise in the 1999 movie Magnolia. He's a pickup artist, and the creator of the “seduce and destroy system”, which teaches men how to manipulate women into having sex with them. There was a time around a decade ago when Neil Strauss had a lot in common with that character. The writer and journalist went deep into the world of pickup artists, becoming one himself in order to produce the bestselling book The Game, a Bible for men looking for shortcuts to sex. The book also made Neil Strauss a very rich man, but in the intervening years Strauss says he's given up on playing the game, and he is a changed man. He's learned that the seducers art is based on male insecurity and fear of the opposite sex. His most recent book is called The Truth, an uncomfortable book about relationships. And he spoke with Anna-Maria Tremonti last November. Here is that conversation.

AMT: Hello.

NEIL STRAUSS: Hey, thanks for having me on.

AMT: Does that Tom Cruise character from Magnolia seem a bit familiar to you?

NEIL STRAUSS: It seems familiar because I interviewed Tom Cruise for Rolling Stone, and he talked about playing that character and how when he played that character, the audience got so into it he had to tell him this is not a good thing.

AMT: He calls what he does a game, which of course is the title of your most famous book. Why is it a game?

NEIL STRAUSS: What the game was, was there was a sort of a quick back story. I was writing for as you said Rolling Stone and The New York Times, and an editor told me about this community of pickup artists who are turning as you said dating and seduction and attraction into this science. And I joined not just as a journalist, also as a lonely guy trying to figure out how to connect. And of course the issue was, it was very much connecting in an inauthentic way versus an authentic way.

AMT: So when people ask you about that book what do they usually ask you?

NEIL STRAUSS: What they ask me is totally different depending on who they are and where they're coming from, which is why doing interviews about it is so fascinating. Because to me if you ask me what the book was about when I wrote it, before it ever came out, I thought it was a book about male insecurity. I thought it was a book about here are men who are afraid of the opposite sex, and I thought it would get people sort of to understand that all the fear and doubts and vulnerability that men have, which was fascinating me. Maybe it was a naive thought, and for sure that was ten years ago and yet now as you talk about it and kind of play that clip, the sad thing to me is it’s become a reason to actually fear men which was certainly not the intention of the book. But I think it's different for people who’ve read it than people who have read about it.

AMT: Mmhm, because it became a bit of a cultural phenomenon right? And I didn't read The Game.

NEIL STRAUSS: Way beyond my control.

AMT: Yeah, yeah. But you talk about insecurity it was about, and you have described yourself as a guy who was insecure when you started writing that book.

NEIL STRAUSS: Oh yeah, of course absolutely. I mean that's really to me, and this is where the new book comes in. It comes from a feeling of not enough. I'm not enough, and will sex complete me? Will someone be naked with me make me feel OK about myself? Which is you know a flawed path to self-esteem.

AMT: OK. So before we talk about the new book, let's talk about what writing the other book did. Because the new book is about the journey you took, but the journey that you took became a journey that was difficult. In terms of how you saw yourself. And you end up in sex addiction therapy--

NEIL STRAUSS: Right.

AMT: After writing The Game.

NEIL STRAUSS: Right. Yes. I mean, it's fascinating, the game is such a monstrous thing that the game was more a symptom of underlying problems than the reason I ended up in sex addiction therapy. I think there is a convenient cultural narrative that is like OK game bad, the truth, the new book good. But the fact is millions of people want to date, they want to connect. There's nothing wrong with casual sex if it’s something both people want for reasons that are not pathological you know. And to me the game was about trying to figure that part out. And for sure in this kind of flawed world of flawed characters and the truth to me was for now the next part. Which is how do I commit? How do I have an intimate relationship? How did two people grow together instead of apart? So to me, I almost see the game as selling late adolescence and maybe the truth of late maturity.

AMT: So did The Game go from being a writing assignment to a way of life for you?

NEIL STRAUSS: Oh for sure. I definitely got caught up in it, wrapped up in that community. There was definitely a period where I was exactly the kind of person I'm describing is manipulative and unlikable and it's described in the book so this is not a news. And a real curtain came down for me between men and women. And it was really unhealthy.

AMT: And what were you getting psychologically from that?

NEIL STRAUSS: I mean psychologically was the things I never got growing up, right? For me a sense of belonging, a sense of being wanted, to be understood. In the end what happened is a friend of mine who I’ve known for a long time was telling me you got everything you wanted. You learned this skill, you're meeting women, this part of your life is solved. Why are you still so unhappy.

AMT: And what was the answer to that?

NEIL STRAUSS: The answer was as almost anybody when I'm interviewing an artist for Rolling Stone find that if you're questing after money or fame or sex or whatever it is to fill a hole inside, it's not going to fill it. It has to come from within, not from without obviously.

AMT: OK. So in the course of your journey, you end up being treated for sex addiction.

NEIL STRAUSS: Right.

AMT: What’s that like?

NEIL STRAUSS: It was very bizarre. In the sense that I went in because I cheated on my girlfriend and I just thought how could I do that? How could I hurt someone I care about. And not just hurt them, it's traumatizing you love someone and they cheat on you. It's traumatizing. Especially if you're someone coming from a history of that. Your father did that to your mother and so on. And how could I just ruin my chance of a happy future and all that. So I checked into sex addiction rehab and it's a bizarre world, because in there they said that you know anyone who masturbates is a sex addict. Anyone who watches pornography is a sex addict. There are certain groups such as sexaholicsanonymous, where they say that anybody who has premarital sex is a sex addict. So it's a broad brush, and probably 90 per cent of your listeners just realized they were sex addicts according to these definitions. So it was a bizarre place. Yet despite this sort of intense pathologicization of sex--

AMT: [laughing]

NEIL STRAUSS: [laughing] No help.

AMT: I'm not going to help you out. [laughing] Intense pathologicization, is that a word? OK, but keep going. [laughing]

NEIL STRAUSS: [laughing] We’ll go with that. This is why I write, I can really get that word right. What I found out like there was a moment where my life changed. I’ll never forget it, it put the entire game into kind of context for me. Where I was kind of with the therapist and with this group of other guys who are sex addicts who had all also cheated on their wives. And she looked through my kind of childhood experiences and saw hey. And after looking through them all, she said here's why you can't be in a relationship. And I go why? And she goes because your mom wants to be in a relationship with you. And this cold wind blew over me. It sounded so ridiculous. And then she said there’s a name for what you have, it's called emotional incest. And the word was just so shocking in my brain that I couldn’t even comprehend it, yet something recognized this truth in it despite that intense word I just used. And what I realized was and it was true of so many people in the game and so many people who write these kinds of books, is that they had a certain relationship. Basically I explain what that is briefly, which is that the idea is that a parent should take care of a child's needs. But what happens often is the child takes care of a parent's emotional needs. If you have a depressed parent and you want to cheer them up. Or over anxious parent and you want to sort of make them feel better or they're in my case besides both those things is your parent has a troubled marriage or divorce and they're using you to kind of confide that in. That will harm your relationship with that sex of person, especially when they get needy. And so I found a lot of people had their childhood swallowed up by that sex apparent that they were attracted to. And it was fascinating and shocking and really counter-intuitive, yet so many people that I find that are cheating and struggling with commitment and monogamy and all these other things, I'll ask them about that relationship, and it's almost always the case.

AMT: Isn’t that interesting, how much of our adulthood and our behavior we can trace to our childhood and our relationship or lack of same with our parents?

NEIL STRAUSS: And it really makes sense. Because first of all, it's your first template of love. And secondly, you're born. We’re so adaptable, but the architecture of your brain is being built around those first experiences and that's kind of how you become wired.

AMT: And it's a form of neglect really isn't it?

NEIL STRAUSS: Yeah. It's a form of neglect, but it's almost the opposite because here's why. Neglect is disempowering right? If you're neglected, you feel I'm worthless, I'm not enough. When your parent makes you their confident, you're trying to help your parent. It’s falsely empowering. So what’s so insidious about it is it feels good. Why your childhood is being robbed.

AMT: So very interesting. And so you come out of that with a clearer understanding of why you make the choices you make.

NEIL STRAUSS: Yes. Suddenly you realize you take responsibility for your own decisions, your own lives. It’s almost like your brain is software and you're realizing the bugs in the operating program that you never knew were there. And you're like OK, how can I remove these and actually truly become happy? It's fascinating.

AMT: OK, so help us just understand a little more then. Let's talk about the pathology, the pathologicization, what was the word you used? Of sex. What's the difference between wanting to have a lot of sex and being a sex addict?

NEIL STRAUSS: Sure. I'll tell you the way they would describe it, is that it's you know it's progressive in the sense that you keep wanting more and more and more. It's not enough you want more and more people they are kind of escalating. It's chronic, it's a regular thing that's kind of happening and you're doing. And that it has life damaging consequences. Which in my case, would be hurting maybe future and family. And so but the key thing is and I think it’s that subtlety that's not often explored is there's nothing wrong with having sex. There's nothing wrong with non-monogamy. And monogamy is not better. None of these things are better. It's not what you're doing, it’s why you're doing it.

AMT: Mmhmm, and how you're manipulating and what the consequences are. But it's about how you're treating other people and why.

NEIL STRAUSS: Also what’s your psychological motivation for it? Are you having sex because you just enjoy having sex and connecting with new people and experiences? Are you doing it because you don't feel like enough, you think this person’s going to somehow fix you. You're avoiding uncomfortable emotions. All those other decisions. So, someone being hurt whether it's you or them.

AMT: You confronted this but do you think such truths about relationships are too uncomfortable for most people to accept or confront?

NEIL STRAUSS: They absolutely are. They absolutely are. And it’s one of the fascinating things about this book, because it’s some people will read it and not see their own patterns. It's so easy, I mean, I decided to get a group of men who are in relationships to sit down and talk about in a really vulnerable way about what we experience. And so many people will sit there blaming their partner. And they will not look at themselves. The fact that they're with that partner, the fact they're kind of equally responsible. The fact that somehow the partner's imperfect and they're perfect. When it comes to relationships I just think it is so hard for people to see the truth. And like you said, it is it is uncomfortable. Yet, you're not going to be happy unless you can. Either going to be in denial or in conflict.

AMT: So once you were able to see that truth and you were able to accept it, then your ability to move forward was clear.

NEIL STRAUSS: But here's the funny thing, and you know the great thing about writing nonfiction is you can't make it up. So what happens was once I totally saw it and understood it, I then went ahead and completely sabotaged and destroyed my life even more. Because this is how stuck this stuff gets. Is I learned all the stuff we just talked about. Left rehab tried to hang in there with with my girlfriend then after a while I said hey, I don't think monogamy is natural. Nothing in science proves monogamy. I just need to go find the relationship that's right for me. I can't commit to being with someone romantically and sexually for the rest of my life. So I went and lived out my trauma. I entered that kind of polyamory scene and tried open relationships, swinging, all the different sort of alternatives there are to monogamy. And everyone crashed and burned. I mean this book took five or six years of experience to do, and it wasn’t until I realized that every relationship crashed and burned, to really say OK it's not relationships that are broken, there’s nothing with the partners, it's really all me. So the funny thing is even though I knew it intellectually, I had to go actually do the emotional healing.

AMT: You hadn't absorbed it on another level, yeah--

NEIL STRAUSS: Yeah, you were saying earlier, all that stuff comes in through your feelings, through your emotions, so you can understand intellectually and still yet go out and do the same thing.

AMT: So that explains all of those scenes with Sage, and all of the other people you met and all the discussions you had and all that. You’re quite graphic in your descriptions in that book. But that explains that big long period of experimentation through that book. Where in some ways you feel like you're back in a game.

NEIL STRAUSS: Yeah. It really did feel like that. Like I'm back in there, but I'm doing it within relationships. And running away from intimacy and if someone starts to love me too much, I get terrified and scared. It was the craziest thing, and once you become aware of it, it`s really interesting that maybe my girlfriend would sort of say she loved me and hug me really tight and my skin would just start to crawl, because love wasn't safe, it felt needy, I couldn`t understand that maybe--

AMT: Because that was the little boy in you sort of reacting again, right?

NEIL STRAUSS: Yes. That's exactly it and not to get to sort of too new agey on the show, but what I could eventually learn to do was to tell myself like if you think, hey little boy, it's OK it's not your mom, she's not trying to use you, she just really wants to connect with you, so I got this. And because the little boy and or the little girl on us will sometimes get in the driver's seat and destroy our lives. There's a Irving Yalom, I think his name is Y-A-L-O-M. A great author. Has a description for this, which he says you know our trauma those childhood issues, they're like like a city with a wall built around it to protect itself from invaders. And we do that as a defense mechanism in our childhood, but one day the invaders are gone, and yet the wall still stands. And so a lot of work is can we bring down these walls. And as adults we’re not vulnerable, we are safe, we can take care of ourselves, we're going to be OK.

AMT: Which is why you get to a point in your story where you can meet women. You're no longer sizing them up for sex. You can move on, you can appreciate someone but you don't have that instinct, because you figured out why it was there, and you’re able to move forward.

NEIL STRAUSS: Yes. Exactly. Which is an amazing, freeing experience and not just figure out why it's there, but go down to the root of it and almost exorcise it. Like a personal demon, to exorcise your personal demons. And a lot of it was fear. Fear of being smothered or controlled by the feminine. The fascinating thing is that when I was doing this, I kind alluded to it earlier when I talked to Robert Green, who wrote The Art of Seduction. You know Tucker Max who's seen as a famous cad and wrote these kind of fratire books and a bunch of other people. And everyone had you know a narcissistic or smothering mom. So I think the idea of maybe making these rules and codes and this power relationship in which to interact, was part of this kind of fear being vulnerable, which is fascinating. I was doing a seminar talking to people, I'd ask the guys how many people had the similar thing an emotionally absent dad, and a kind of overwhelming or depressed or some way kind of a mom who's caught up in her own stuff, instead of being there for you. And 80 per cent of the audience. And what I realized is you talked about the millions of copies it sold, often I think we're just talking to people who share our same wound.

AMT: Hmm. You know there are going to be people listening to this, who think you're blaming it on the women. You're blaming it on the moms.

NEIL STRAUSS: Right. Oh yeah, it's interesting. I know they will definitely be thinking that, and my question is to look at how you're protecting your own parents. Because for sure there's no blame. I mean, I also will give them credit for everything that's right with me. You can't just blame. But it's really understanding yourself. I understand that, I actually talked to geneticists and I talked to the person who found the gene for monogamy, the gene coding. It’s a gene coding for a long vasopressin receptor. And I said to him, am I just doomed the right or am I just born this way? And he explained exactly what we're saying, and said things in your early environment switch things on, and they switch things. Nothing behavioral he said is purely genetic. These things happen with their environments. And he talked about all these studies and their message was you get to change things but you only get to change them if you live in truth around your childhood. And again my parents and hopefully most parents did the best they could given who they were. And if you can do it without blame but just understanding, like you're watching a movie. You get to know yourself and be free. But if you're protecting them from blame, then you're not letting them be human, which is imperfect people. It's funny though. But I hear you're saying, a lot of people had parents who had to be God. Because they had to be always right. And control the family and some people are still living worshipping that.

AMT: Where's your mom today?

NEIL STRAUSS: She's living in Chicago.

AMT: And would she agree with this assessment? Have you talked to her about it?

NEIL STRAUSS: Well a fascinating thing happened. It’s not fascinating, it’s kind of sad. But one of my things that I had to do was draw boundaries with my mom. So for example from two until I started learning this, she would call me all the time to complain about my father, or to tell me his latest transgression, to talk about how miserable he was and how horrible dad was, and she would bring me into this and of course that really doesn't make you want to get married or have a committed relationship. And I would notice after these phone calls, I'd be really agitated within my relationship. So I just drew a boundary with her, saying hey I can’t have these discussions. I can’t keep these secrets and once I drew that boundary, she was no longer interested in talking to me.

AMT: It’s interesting because you write a book after The Game, called The Truth. And it's really about finding the truth for you, but the truth actually goes deeper right? The people who have to look at the truth, that's your point. We have to look at our early relationships, and we have to think about who we are individually as children, but also as parents. Like, there's a lot of truth we have to look at here.

NEIL STRAUSS: Yes. And as a parent of eight-month-old boy now, learning this stuff has really helped me think of how can I be there for his needs. And if I'm in an emotional extreme of anxiety, just not to be around him, because he's like a sponge absorbing that. And I've actually been keeping a sort of diary of everything I'm doing as a parent. All the decisions I’m making, anything that I think may be good or bad, just so he knows what his emotional DNA is.

AMT: He can go back to a certain day and say OK dad.

NEIL STRAUSS: What happened here? And--

AMT: Go ahead, go ahead.

NEIL STRAUSS: I even wrote him a letter before he was born, saying your mom and I love each other very much and we want to you know that you were wanted and born out of love. And I sent him this letter to him at our address for when he's older, just so you know a lot of people don't have that. I definitely didn't have that, of knowing you're kind of born on a platform of love, and that's the soil you're growing from.

AMT: Is there something you could say to those who are afraid to confront what you had to confront? How would you help them try to take that journey?

NEIL STRAUSS: Sure. I mean, probably the most important thing for me to take this journey was a quality that surprised me, which was complete and total humility. It was to recognize that whatever way I'm leading my life or doing things was not working. And there's no way I was going to think myself out of it. And I had to just really really get humble and submit, and admit that and recognize that I knew nothing. And from there I could have a change.

AMT: And that's the truth.

NEIL STRAUSS: Exactly. The truth is, that we know nothing.

AMT: OK well Neil Strauss nice to talk to you.

NEIL STRAUSS: Thank you, great conversation.

LL: Neil Strauss is the author of The Truth, an uncomfortable book about relationships. And he spoke with Anna-Maria Tremonti last November. That is today's edition of The Current. Well as you heard earlier, the Fort McMurray fire took its toll on the people of the town. American journalist Sebastian Junger has written about disasters, and next week we will be replaying our interview with him about his new book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. And here is Sebastian Junger, on how historically catastrophe brings communities together. I'm Laura Lynch sitting in for Anna-Maria Tremonti, and thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I found one account of an earthquake in Italy in the early 1900s, in Avezzano, Italy. And the earthquake killed 90 per cent of the population of this area, something like that. It was catastrophic. And the survivors were isolated for days. And one of these survivors wrote, he said that all class distinction disappeared. Rich poor didn't matter. The survivors sort of huddled together and helped each other. And for a while it was this sort of social utopia. And he said that the earthquake produced what the law promises but cannot infact deliver. Which is the equality of all men. And you know I think what you see in Canada, what you guys are seeing is a little bit of that. I mean everyone's helping each other in that area and it’s a very moving thing to experience.

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