🧠 Head Games by Steve Lyons | Doctor Who Analysis & Reality Warped Explained

0:00Welcome back to The Deep Dive. I want to start today with a question that it sounds simple, but I think it's something that if you really think about it, it can keep you up at night. Okay. Why do we love stories so much? I mean, why do we retreat into books or binge watch shows or get totally obsessed with the love of a universe? It's escapism, isn't it? But it's more than that. It has to be. Is it just entertainment? Or is it because deep down we just, we want the world to make sense? I think that's it. It's the appeal of structure. Real life is, well, it's messy. It's chaotic. It's often unfair. And frankly, a lot of the time, it's just boring. Yeah. Fiction is the antidote to all of that. It's a place where the rules are clear. There's a shape to it. Exactly. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. You want the good guys to win and the bad guys to lose. But today, we are going to explore a scenario where that desire for structure that need for a nice, clean narrative goes horribly, terribly wrong. We're diving into a story where the barrier between fiction

1:01and reality doesn't just get blurry. It shatters. And it's not, you know, a whimsical fun kind of magic. It's a psychological nightmare. We are talking about the Doctor Who novel, Head Games by Steve Lyons. And you are absolutely right to frame it as a nightmare. This is, I would argue, one of the most meta-textual and genuinely disturbing examinations of fandom and escapism ever written for the franchise. The premise is just, it's so delicious, but it's terrifying at the same time. Imagine this. You're a fan, you love a hero, you love their stories. But your own life, it's just bleak. Cold boring. The pain is peeling off the windows and you're just stuck. And then you sit down at your typewriter, you type it once upon a time. And boom, the hero appears right in front of you. But he's not quite right, is he? Not at all. He's the hero exactly as you imagine him. He's been stripped of all the messy, complicated, real bits. And that is the absolute core friction of this deep dive. We're looking at what happens when this young man, Jason, through a kind of cosmic accident involving something called the land of fiction,

2:03gets the power to literally rewrite the universe. Well, what's the first thing he does? He uses that power to create a distorted mirror of the doctor's life. Yeah. We have a lot of source material here. It's a really dense text. It details multiple planets, fractured timelines, and a lot of psychological trauma for the doctor's companions. So our mission for this deep dive is to really unpack this narrative. We need to get to the bottom of how Jason's imagination creates this doctor who is arguably more dangerous than any of the villains, the real doctor normally fights. And to do that, we have to start with a story starts, which, as you said before, isn't on a starship. It's not in the Tartus. Yeah. It starts in a squalid bed set on Earth. The years of it fuzzy, maybe 1995, maybe 2001, because of all the time manipulation. But the setting is so visceral. Oh, the source material describes it so vividly it says a dim light bulb flickered. There's cold air sneaking in around a rotting window frame. Right. And the curtains are flapping like leathern wings.

3:04That's such a great lie. It immediately gives you the sense of total isolation, doesn't it? It really does. And in the middle of all this decay, we find Jason. And he's frustrated. He's literally throwing crumpled up balls of paper at a deaf leopard poster on his wall. Let's just pause on that image for a second. The deaf leopard poster, the peeling wallpaper. This tells you so much about him. It does. It establishes that Jason isn't some evil mastermind. He's a victim of stagnation. He's just profoundly bored. And boredom in this story turns out to be one of the most dangerous forces in the universe. It is. He doesn't want his life. He wants to be a space-aged superhero. He wants to visit other planets and fight monsters. That desire is so key, isn't it? He isn't typing a story to entertain other people. He's typing it to escape his own reality. Yeah, he wants to write wrongs and fight monsters. But his whole idea what that means is so juvenile. It's so simplistic. He wants all the glory without any of the grit. And because of this cosmic accident,

4:06he's become a conduit for what the book calls fictional energy. His typewriter is now a reality engine. So he just types at the Tartus appears. And it does. It just materializes right there in his depressing little room. But the Tartus that appears. And more importantly, the man who steps out of it. They're not real. They're simulation. They're constructs of his mind. Exactly. And this is where the book gets so clever with its critique of fandom. The man who steps out isn't the doctor that we know. He is Doctor Who. Let's talk about his look for a second. Because if you were just a casual observer, you might glance over and say, oh, yeah, that's the doctor. But if you look closer, it's like a cosplay that's gone slightly wrong. Or maybe too right in a weird way. It is a caricature. That's the perfect word for it. The text describes him wearing baggy check trousers, a paisley scarf, a chocolate brown jacket. Okay. All sounds vaguely familiar so far. And this is the real telepullover absolutely covered in question marks. It's a question mark pullover. Wow. I mean, that is a little on the nose, isn't it?

5:06Even for the 80s, that's that's a lot. It is the ultimate branding. This isn't a person. It's a logo. And he introduces himself that way. He calls himself Doctor Who. Not the doctor. No, Doctor Who. Yeah. It's the brand name made flesh. And he speaks in these absurd cliches. The first thing he asks is, any monsters here, any roe androids despicable villains. He's looking for a quest. He is. He's looking for a binary conflict. Good versus evil. He craves what he calls nefarious wrongdoings. It's exactly like he's an NPC in a video game, you know? And he's just waiting for the player character, Jason, to give him a mission. That is a perfect analogy. He doesn't have an internal life. He just has a function. Find monster, defeat monster. And the whole conflict of the story comes from the fact that the real doctor, the time lord we know and follow is complex. He has doubts. He makes these incredibly difficult choices where people sometimes get hurt or even die. He tries to understand the villains, even talk to them. Exactly. But this Doctor Who,

6:07he sees all of that complexity as a moral failing. He looks at the real doctor and sees a criminal because the real doctor's adventures are messy. He wants to sanitize narrative. A story where the hero wins, the villain dies, and everybody lives happily ever after. Unless, of course, you're a henchman. Right. If you're a henchman, you don't matter. You're just cannon fodder. And we see this power dynamic establish itself immediately. Jason is the architect. He's the conduit for all this fictional energy. Yeah. He can reshape reality on a whim. Like later in the story, he turns an entire cityscape into a field of grass just because he thinks it looks nicer. And he creates dinosaurs out of thin air. And Doctor Who is his enabler. He's constantly encouraging Jason to unmake anything that displeases him. Such a toxic feedback loop. It is. Jason wants a simple adventure. And Doctor Who provides the moral justification for using godlike powers to get it. They hijack the real tardis. And that's where the genuine horror begins for the doctor's actual companions. Because Jason and Doctor Who don't just want to go on an adventure,

7:09they want to fix the story. And for them, fixing the story means getting the real complicated companions out of the way. So they get scattered. They're thrown into these fractured realities that operate on narrative logic, not physics. And this is where the book, I think, really starts to shine. Each companion gets trapped in a genre that sort of reflects their own personality or maybe they're worst fears. Let's start with Bernice Summerfield. Benny, she ends up in a place called Metro City. Metro City is fascinating. It is this scathing satire of comic books, specifically like Silver Age, four color comics, where everything is bright and allowed and incredibly simplistic. So it's a futuristic dystopian city that runs on comic book logic. Precisely. And Benny finds herself chasing a villain called The Quiz. The Quiz, that sounds like a Batman villain from the 60s TV show who just didn't make the final cut. That's exactly the vibe. The source describes The Quiz hanging from an airbus doing triple summer salts and then leaving these terrible riddles in the sky, like what's big and red and each rocks?

8:11Oh no, don't tell me. A big red rock eater. Wow. That is, that is intentionally pathetic. It is. But for Benny, it's terrifying because she's trapped in this absurdity. She's on a sky bike, getting battered by these giant letters floating in the sky. But the twist, and this is where head games gets really psychological, is who The Quiz actually is. Right, because she eventually catches him, she has this fight with him in a joke shop waiting through plastic balls and those wind up chattering teeth. Which sounds like a nightmare I've definitely had. Me too, and she finally unmasks him. And it's, it's her. It's herself. It's a fictional projection of her own repressed emotions and desires. It's literally Benny fighting Benny. So the narrative is telling us that Benny, who is usually so composed and cynical and academic, has this chaotic, pun-loving, ridiculous side that she keeps bottled up. And in the land of fiction, that side gets a costume and a villain name. It's her own internal chaos made external. And just when she's trying to process the absurdity of it all, she gets rescued.

9:13By a superhero, of course. A guy called the White Knight, whose real name is Norman Power. Norman Power. Oh, that's good. And he speaks entirely in these heroic platitudes. He calls her a damsel in distress. And he's got a kid sidekick named Sparky. And Benny must have absolutely hated that. She despises it. And that's how she realizes, for sure, that she's in a fiction. The logic is purely narrative. She survives this fall from a skyscraper that should have killed her, because the White Knight just happens to swoop in and catch her at the very last second. It's just one trope after another. Exactly. The world is forcing her into a role she rejects. So why does Jason put her there? Is it just a way to get rid of her? I think it's a containment strategy. The fictional universe tries to neutralize real people by absorbing them into stories that fit. Benny's ascetic. She's a pragmatist. She would have poked holes in Jason's fantasy in about five seconds. So you put her in a world where cynicism is always defeated by four color heroism. You put her in a world where she has to be the damsel.

10:14It's the only role available. And she eventually has to use this thing called a waking tablet to break out, which is a very literal pill-popping metaphor for escaping a delusion. Meanwhile, poor Mel Busch. I mean, she really gets the short end of the stick here. She really does. She isn't thrown into a comic book. She's thrown into a tragedy. Or maybe a really grim, police procedural. Yeah, the source says she's stranded on a planet called Abelone. It's a rundown resort planet past its prime. And she's been there for months. She's desperate. She's trying to get in touch with Sabelum Glitz, who, let's be honest, is a rogue and a thief himself. But he's your only hope. He is. And she's been reduced to hacking into banking computers just to try and get his attention, which means the authorities are after her. So she's packing a bag ready to run when a tardis finally shows up. And she sees the checked trousers, the question mark pull over. And she just thinks, I'm saved. It's the doctor. Thank goodness. That moment is so heartbreaking. You can feel her relief. It is.

11:15She runs to him. She's so happy. But this isn't her doctor. This is Dr. Who. He does rescue her from a security robot, but then he immediately arrests her. He arrests her, his own companion. Yes, he throws her into the tardis break or a cell in this galactic prison. He's imagined. He claims she's an accomplice to the real doctor's crimes. Not crimes. That's a thing. He specifically mentioned something called the Althosian system. And what's the Althosian system? Mel has no idea. She's never heard of it. And the real doctor confirms later that it's an event in his own future or a potential future. So wait, Dr. Who is judging her for crime? She hasn't even committed yet. Exactly. He's judging her based on his rigid, black and white view of the doctor's timeline. To Dr. Who, anyone associated with the real messy doctor is a criminal by default. Because the real doctor allows people to die sometime. It's that sanitized hero complex again. If you aren't saving every single person perfectly every single time, then you're the villain.

12:15It's a puritanical view of heroism. It's completely absolute. If the hero isn't perfect, he's bad. And if you hang out with an imperfect hero, well, then you're bad too. It totally ignores context or intent or the reality of a situation. And then we've got Ross Forster. She's the third piece of this puzzle. She's a tough, no-nonsense adjudicator from the future. Basically a space cop. Right. And she gets trapped on the real tartis while Jason and Dr. Who are hijacking it. And she's the one who sees the masks slip first, isn't she? She is. Ross is used to dealing with physical threats, with criminals you can fight. But she realizes very quickly that she can't fight these two with brute force. What does she see? She watches Jason changes clothes instantly. The air just sort of ripples around him and he goes from wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a cool boy outfit. But the detail that always gets me is the cat. Oh, Woolsey. The doctor's cat. Right. Woolsey is normally just a cat. He eats, he sleeps, he waters around the console room. But because he's now in Jason's sphere of influence,

13:17he briefly transforms into power plus. Power plus, you're kidding. I am not. He wears a little cape and a mask. It sounds funny and it is. But if you think about it from Ross's perspective, it's absolutely horrifying. Because it means that biology, reality, the fundamental nature of a living thing. None of it matters. Jason could just rewrite a cat into a superhero sidekick because he thinks it's cute. So Ross realizes that if she tries to pull a gun on them, the gun might turn into a banana. Or she might just cease to exist. They control the very reality of the ship she's on. Exactly. She's completely powerless in a physical sense. So with the companions neutralized, Benny fighting herself, Mel and prison and Ross and hiding, Jason and Doctor who are free to go on their adventure. And this is where we get to the moral center of the deep dive. This is where things get really dark. Detreos. Detreos, this is absolutely where the fun and game stop and the horror really begins. So what is detreos? It's a planet that lost its sun. The human population has been forced to live underground.

14:19They're described as pale and weak, but there's a miracle in the sky. A giant crystal. A giant crystal that provides them with light and oxygen. And spoiler alert, the miracle is actually a huge chunk of this fictional energy that's bleeding through from the rift Jason created. It's a false sun. But the people believe in it and their belief shapes its function. But let's get to the conflict on the ground. You have the ruling family who are these humans with obsidian black skin. The aristocracy. Right. And then you have the lizards. The indigenous reptilian species of the planet. And in Jason's Doctor Who narrative, the equation is very simple. Lizards equal monsters. And monsters must be destroyed. This is the part of the source text that genuinely shocked me when I first read it. We are so conditioned as viewers and readers of this franchise for the doctor to find a peaceful solution. Yeah, he brokers a peace treaty. He makes people talk to each other. He finds the third option. Always. But Jason and Doctor Who arrive,

15:20they hear one side of the story. The lizards are attacking us. And they just, they just decide to wipe them out. No investigation. They don't ask why the lizards might be attacking. No context. No questions asked. They just build a weapon. And the weapon itself is part of the critique. Okay, what is it? They build a device. The text describes it as a jack in the box with a large red plunger take to it. A plunger? Yes. And it has ACME littered monster eradication device written on the side in felt tip pin. Oh my God. It's a joke. It's a cartoon prop. It's something Wily Coyote would order from a catalog. To Jason, it is a joke. It's a toy. Yeah. But when he pushes that plunger, the source material describes a brutal, horrific massacre. The lizards on the planet. Hundreds of them sentient beings just melt. Melt. They turn into green slime and evaporate. It is a full-scale genocide committed with the cartoon prop. That juxtaposition is a felt tip pen and the melting flesh. That's nauseated. It's supposed to be. It's designed to highlight the absolute dissonance

16:21between Jason's childish fantasy and the horrific reality he is inflicting on the universe. And what's Jason's reaction to this? That's maybe the worst part. He is grinning. He turns to the local politician, a man named Darnak, as it's cheer up, we won. We won. He thinks he saved the day. Because to him, the lizards weren't people. They were NPCs, non-player characters, and his big adventure. This is the darkest indictment of escapism in the whole story, isn't it? When you strip reality of its complexity, you strip people of their humanity. He didn't see Ascension Species with a history and a legitimate grievance. He saw monsters that needed eradicating. And Doctor Who, his moral enabler, just stands by and says, good job. And caught right in the middle of all of this is Chris Quedge, the doctor's other companion. Poor Chris. He's a big, strong guy and ex-cop, but he's also very trusting. He has a truly traumatic arc here. He gets tricked by Doctor Who into helping set the saw up, doesn't he? He does. He thinks he's helping the real doctor

17:22defend the human settlement from mindless monsters. He has no idea what he's actually participating in. And when he realizes what's happened, that he was an accessory to genocide, he's just shattered. Utterly. Many gets captured by the detoury and security forces who are, you know, not in the ruling family side, and they drug him with a truth serum. So he just admits everything. He admits he was tricked. But while he's in this cell, he starts to bond with a rebel leader named Katlana. Katlana, she's crucial here, isn't she? She is. She's described as having graphite color skin. She's bald, very striking. She is the face of the lizards that Jason just tried to wipe out. And she's not a monster. She's a freedom fighter. And they talk. They do. They discuss the deep corruption of the ruling family and this false god that they worship, a figure called Enros. Enros the undying. He sounds like a piece of work. He is a fantastic villain for this particular story because he represents the decay of reality. The source describes him as a decomposing corpse that's just held together by cybernetics and money.

18:23Wow. He demands constant worship. He is the complete opposite of the sanitized clean fiction that Jason wants. But he is the grim reality of what happens when power goes unchecked for too long. And Chris's trauma just gets worse and worse. It culminates when Enros orders Katlana's execution, right? Right. And Chris is helpless. He's drugged. He's in a cell. And he's forced to watch the woman he's just bonded with get dragged away to be killed. It creates this horrible split screen effect in the narrative. It really does. On one side of the screen, you have Jason laughing and playing with his ACME extermination box. And on the other, you have Chris screaming in a dungeon while his new friend is murdered. It forces you, as the listener and the characters, to confront the fact that these stories aren't harmless when you force them on to real living people. Not at all. So while all this horror is unfolding on day trios, where is the real doctor? What's happening to him? The real doctor has been in prison this whole time in Jason's Galactic Prison, which is described

19:24as this gray, featureless, incredibly boring construct of Jason's mind. And Jason surrounded it with a mesozoic mask. Mesozoic mask, a forest filled with T-rexes and triceratops that are acting as guards. Of course, dinosaurs. Because if you're a kid, make up a cool story. You add dinosaurs. It's like rule number one. It is the rule of cool. Exactly. And this brings us to what I think of as section four, the clash of doctrines. We're about to get a face off between the real doctor and the fake doctor who. But first, the doctor has to escape. And the way he escapes is the ultimate proof of his identity, isn't it? It really is. He doesn't use a magic ray gun or some superpower. He just remembered he had. He uses junk. Yes. The source says he builds a force field device out of yo-yo's, apple cores, and paper clips. It is the quintessential Magyver aspect of the doctor. He uses his intellect and his ability to improvise. He figures out that the prison is maintained by Jason's focus, by his memory. So if he can distract Jason, the walls get weaker.

20:25Exactly. But in a classic narrative trope, the force field he builds fails at the very last second. Of course it does. And the dinosaurs he was trying to hold back, attack the local primitives living in the forest instead. It's another moment of messy, unintended consequences. But the real key confrontation happens when Doctor Who shows up and lectures the real doctor. It's like a debate club from hell. It is. Doctor Who stands there, all self-righteous, and says things like, you cause too much death. You are morally compromised. And the irony is just, it's palpable. It's overwhelming. Doctor Who and Jason have just wiped out an entire species of sentient lizards without even the linking. They casually killed guards and henchmen throughout the story. Why? Because to them, those lives don't count. They're just baddies. They're obstacles in the plot. Exactly. The real doctor values every life, even the lives of his enemies. That's what makes his life so hard. It's why he carries so much guilt. Doctor Who has no guilt, because he has no empathy. He just sees the universe as a series of plot points

21:28that need to be resolved as efficiently as possible. There's a moment that sums up Jason's immaturity so perfectly. He tries to talk to one of the local primitives using a universal translator, another one of his imagined clunky devices. Yes, and he expects it to work like it doesn't start track. You know, you hold up the box, and the alien suddenly speaks perfect, articulate English. But that's not what happens. No. The machine translates the primitive's grant as total nonsense. Something like, Agtree, not us. And Jason's reaction is to throw a tantrum. He smashes the device. He does. He gets angry and bored, because the NPC isn't advancing the plot correctly. It's not giving him the information he wants. It's the behavior of a child playing with toys, but the toys are living breathing beings. If the toy doesn't say the right line, you break it and move on. Precisely. And this sort of childish petulence leads us to the most surreal detour in the entire deep dive. Section five, the cafe sequence. This part feels like a side quest that completely glitches out. We're suddenly in a cafe and gleeve in Sydney in 1994.

22:31It's very jarring. And it involves ace, the doctor's former companion. But this isn't the teenage girl with the baseball bat and the bomber jacket anymore. She's older here, she's hardened, she's wearing a trench coat. She's dealing with a time-rift of her own. And Jason and Doctor Who just show up to arrest her. Yep, because in their black and white worldview, she's a criminal. Her methods using explosives, fighting dirty are wrong. And the fight that follows, it plays out like a video game. Completely, Jason pulls out something he calls a sonic-powered weapon destruction device. Ates just uses martial arts. But there's a weird mechanic to it, right? The source describes a security tape that's watching the fight and it keeps jumping in time. It does. Ace has a device called a hopper on her back that lets her jump through time by a few minutes or hours. She is essentially save scumming the fight. She's respawning. That's amazing. So she punches Jason. He goes flying across the room. He gets angry and tries to unmake her with a fireball. But she just hops time and escapes it. She's literally editing the timeline faster

23:33than he can rewrite it. She's fighting his reality warping with time warping. And what's Jason's reaction to this, someone who can actually fight back on his own terms? He doesn't double down. He doesn't try to learn or adapt. He just says, I'm sick of this story. It's not ending, right? And he leaves. He acquits. He rage quits the fight. He does. Because Ace is too real. She's too competent. She refuses to fit into his simple arrest the villain script. So like a board author, he just writes her out of the plot and moves on to something easier. It just reinforces that Jason is not seeking a challenge. He's seeking validation for his power fantasy. Exactly. So he abandons the whole Ace plot line and goes back to day trios to finish the main quest. Which brings us to section six, the climax. This is where reality finally starts to strike back. The real doctor, Mel, Benny, and Roz. They finally reunite. They do. They manage to escape the galactic prison, mostly because Jason has stopped concentrating on it. So it's starting to literally fade in and out of existence.

24:34And they manage to steal a shuttle. Shuttle is a very generous word for it from the description. The source calls it a plastic toy. Red and white striped with a joystick for a control. It is a toy. But the doctor has this brilliant realization in a world that is governed by fictional energy, belief is fuel. He tells them, this ship works if we believe it works. And it does, so they fly this plastic toy shuttle into space to fight the Tartus. A space battle between a literal toy and the most advanced time machine in the universe. And Jason has, of course, weaponized the Tartus. That feels like such a sacrilege to fans of the show. It's the ultimate sacrilege. The Tartus is supposed to be a vehicle of exploration and escape, not of war. But Jason has bolted these giant laser cannons onto the exterior. He's trying to turn Doctor Who into Star Wars. He wants a big flashy dog fight. He does. He's trying to blast them out of the sky. But the doctor pulls off this incredibly brilliant move. He uses Jason's own narrative logic against him.

25:35How does he do that? Jason fires smart missiles at them. Now, in a simplistic narrative, a smart missile either always hits its target, or the hero tricks it into turning back on the sender. Exactly. It's a classic trope. So the doctor just maneuvers the little plastic shuttle. And the missiles, which are obeying the good guys always win trope that Jason himself is powering, they loop back around and destroy the Tartus' weapon add-ons. So physics would say the missile should just keep going. But narrative logic says the bad guy gets hoisted by his own petard. Precisely. The doctor defeats Jason, not with superior firepower, but by understanding the genre of story that Jason is trying to tell. He literally outrights him. And with the Tartus' weapons disabled, they can finally focus on the real source of the problem, the miracle. The giant crystal back on detreos. The doctor realizes it's the focal point for the fictional bleed. He plans to seal the rift. And once that rift is sealed, Jason's power source will be cut off. The story will be over. The ending of the story is, it's not a happy one, is it?

26:36I mean, they start Jason, they seal the rift. But the damage is already done. The physical damage is massive. The lizards are dead. The planet's political structure is in ruins. But the psychological damage is the real takeaway here. The deep dive ends with Chris Quas waking up back in the real Tartus. The dream is over. But he remembers everything. Everything. He remembers participating in the genocide. And he remembers Katlana being dragged away to be executed by Enros. And he feels betrayed by the doctor. Even though the doctor tells him, that wasn't me. That was a duplicate, a doppelganger. Chris remembers the face. He remembers the voice. It shatters the trust between the doctor and his companion. And Mel, she's shaken too. She saw a version of the doctor act as her jailer, as a tyrant. And even knowing it wasn't real, that image sticks with you. It taints the relationship. So let's try to wrap this all up. What are the big takeaways from our deep dive into head games? I think the number one takeaway is the inherent danger of simple solutions. Jason wanted a world of clear heroes and villains.

27:39He wanted to fix the universe. But in trying to do that, he created genocide, tyranny, and deep personal trauma. It's a warning, isn't it, that when we try to strip away complexity, we often end up stripping away humanity as well? I think so. And it's also this massive deconstruction of the doctor himself. You have the real doctor who uses his intellect, who accepts laws, who builds force fields out of apricors. And then you have the fiction doctor, the doctor who, who uses brute force, who moralizes from on high, and who just builds bigger guns. And the story argues very powerfully that the doctor's supposed weakness, his doubt, his hesitation, his refusal to just shoot the bad guy, is actually his greatest strength. It's what makes him moral. The doctor who version is efficient, sure, he kills the monsters. But in the process, he becomes a monster himself. And the lingering trauma for the companions, Chris Kuiz is left broken by this. It fundamentally changes the dynamic of the Tartus crew for a long time after. It's not a reset button kind of story.

28:40No, absolutely not. And that brings us to the final thought, I think. There's a line in the text that has always stuck with me. Fictional energy attracted to him by his experience at wielding it. And the thing is, we all wield fictional energy every day. We tell stories about ourselves, about our friends, about our enemies. We edit our own realities to make ourselves the heroes and other people the villains. We do. We simplify things constantly, just to make them easier to handle. We cut out the parts of the story that make us look bad or that complicate the narrative we want to believe. And headgames is asking us to be really careful with that power. Because if we lose touch with the messy, complex, uncouple reality, we might start treating real people like they're just NPCs in our story. And that is a very, very dangerous path to walk down. That is a lot to think about next time I sit down to write something or even just tell a friend a story about what happened at work. Am I calling a Jason right now? That's hope not. Thank you for listening to this deep dive into headgames. It's a wild, complicated ride.

29:41But one, I think is well worth taking. We'll see you next time.