But, you know, I respect Oddvar. I think he’s a smart guy, and he knows me really well, and, like, unlike the fucking publishers, I believe that he’s actually coming from a place of what would be best for me and best for the book, so I’ll give it a shot.

I guess the first way I connected with Bob—like, the first little tidbit of his teachings that worked its way into my life—had to do with art and the creation of art and what it means to be an artist. I mean, you know, if you’ve made it this far in the book, you know that I think about that shit all the time, but Bob had this really interesting take on it, and talking to him about it, or like, reading his books about it made me think about what I was doing for the first time as like, not just this thing that was about me and my ambition and like, trying to kill it and get ahead in the game, but actually as this other thing, this more human thing that could actually serve some purpose in the world.

Honestly, one of the things that I really appreciated about Bob when we first had that dinner at the Cuban place is that he never once said the word “responsibility.” He never once told me I had a responsibility to my fans or that, like, I had to be a role model for them. And I would always hear people say shit like that, and it would always kind of piss me off, because it was like: What do they even mean, you know? Before I met Bob, like, when I was just starting out, I would say that shit all the time, because I felt like I HAD to—it felt like if you didn’t say that shit, people were going to think you were shallow or ungrateful or entitled or an asshole—but the whole time I was saying it, like, any time I found myself in an interview saying that I wanted to set a good example for my fans, I would just always leave the room kind of hating myself, because I could tell that I didn’t mean it. It was just like this little bit of taxes I had to pay. “Gratefulness taxes.” And then Bob came along, and what he taught me was that it’s not about responsibility or being a role model or giving back. It’s not about paying back some debt that you owe the world for putting you in the position you’re in. It’s about expanding people’s minds, demonstrating for people what freedom really looks like in a human form.

According to Bob, the world is organized to make us all feel unfree. That’s the point of basically every structure we’ve built as a society—whether it’s the government or the economy or our families or whatever—it’s all working against us all the time to make us feel like we don’t even own our own lives, like we’re all slaves to some project that we didn’t even sign up for. And the only people who get to feel differently, like, the only people who get to live like none of that even matters, are people like me. Not just wealthy people, you know—because there are plenty of wealthy people who buy into the bullshit just as much as anybody else, maybe even more—but basically anybody whose life doesn’t fit into the given mold, anyone who has to live in a way that’s completely separate from the world that’s been laid out for everybody else.