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The Princess Bride, Part 1: Life Is Pain | What to Accept and What to Fight · The Voyage Cast: Real Talk on Marriage, Mental Health, & Emotional Growth

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, welcome back to the RadioCast.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: I am Eddie, your host as always, and we're gonna do something a little bit different uh today.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna go into the next six episodes and stay with one movie the whole time, and that movie is The Princess Bride.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Rob Reiner directed it uh back in 1987.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Uh William Goldman uh wrote it, and I know a lot of you have basically memorized, at least if you're of my generation, some of some of this movie, and you definitely know some of these quotes and probably have said them uh even still today.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if you haven't seen the movie, that's fine, but you are missing out and something might be wrong with you, so you should probably check out the movie.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, it's a fairy tale with sword fights and a giant and R O U S, rodents of unusual size, and underneath all of that, it's a kind of movie about what love costs people and who helps them pay for it, which is a lot of what we talk about on this show, anyways.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to take one scene per episode and see kind of what's in it and see if we can expound upon it to help you.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: Now, again, if you haven't seen this movie or it's been a while, I'd encourage you to watch it.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And if you need a reason to watch it beyond me asking, there is a sword fight at the top of a cliff early in the movie that is one of the best sword fights critically in all of cinema.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Mandy Patinkin and Carrie Elwis, uh the two actors who had basically no fencing experience before they got cast for the movie, trained for months, both right and left-handed.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what you're watching on that scene is the two of them fighting it out.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and Petinkin said that the only stunt man used in that whole scene uh was for a couple of the flips that they that they did.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The guys who taught them uh the sword fighting were the same guys who also choreographed the lightsaber fights in the original Star Wars movies.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so you'll get more out of these episodes with the movie fresh in your head, and you also get a sword fight either way.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so check out the movie.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So this is what I've been thinking about as it relates to this movie, and these are thoughts that probably a lot of you have day to day, or at least in seasons of your life, hard seasons of your life, and it's a thought I commonly hear, and it goes something like this This shouldn't be happening.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage shouldn't be this hard.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't sign up for this.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: I did everything right and it still went wrong, etc., etc., etc.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what I've noticed, and I could be wrong about this, is that the thought itself does a certain amount of damage on its own, kind of separate from whatever the actual problem is.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in that place right now where things are hard and you think uh they shouldn't be so hard, I think this episode could actually be really helpful for you.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna do it, strangely, through the lens of the Princess Bride.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a particular line that gets quoted a ton, maybe more than most in this movie.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but to properly understand it, I need to set the scene for you.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: So stay with me.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you've heard this before, fine.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: If you haven't, watch the movie because it's gonna do way better justice than my reading of the movie and what's going on.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, but stay with me so we can set the scene.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: So Buttercup is a farm girl who falls in love with the farmhand, a guy named Wesley.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: He goes off to sea to make money so they can get married.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Word comes back to her though that his ship was taken by the dread pirate Roberts, who leaves nobody alive.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was his his lore.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: So she believes he's dead.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Five years go by, she ends up engaged to Prince Humperdink, quite a name, uh, which she does not want.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't want this uh this engagement, uh, and there's hilarious scenes about her terror and horror about the whole thing.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And on top of all of that, she gets kidnapped by three hired men.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: A short Sicilian named Vicini, who thinks he's the smartest man alive, a Spanish swordsman named Enigo, uh, and a giant named Fezik.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: As the movie goes on, there's a man in black.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: He's chasing the three men who have kidnapped Buttercup.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: On the top of those cliffs, as I mentioned, the sword fight, he bests the swordsman, Inigo.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: He eventually gets to the giant, beats the giant, and then finally with a Sicilian, he outthinks the Sicilian.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And each of those scenes are fantastic for their own reasons.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely watch it.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: And now he has Buttercup.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: He's captured Buttercup.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he's up in the hills, it's just the two of them.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: The prince and his soldiers are in hot pursuit.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: Buttercup has no idea who this man is, the man in black.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: And she works it out though that he is the dread pirate Roberts.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So as far as she knows, she's standing next to the man who killed Wesley, and instead of any kind of remorse, he comes at her.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: He's heard about the engagement.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: He says that she must have gotten over the farm boy pretty fast, that she was probably promised to the prince within the hour of him leaving.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Now she responds directly this way, and I'm quoting some of the scenes, but they're a little bit chopped up, so stay with me.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm just trying to make it short and sweet.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, she says, I have loved more deeply than a killer like yourself could ever dream.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then he goes, a few lines go, he says, Uh, who was this love of yours?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: Another prince like this one, ugly, rich, and scabby?
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she responds with no, a farm boy poor, poor and perfect, with eyes like the sea after a storm.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: And she goes on to explain that on the high seas, your ship attacked, and the dread pirate Roberts never takes any prisoners.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: He responds with, I can't afford to make any exceptions.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Once the word leaks out that a pirate's gone soft, people begin to disobey you, and then it's nothing but work, work, work all the time.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: She says, You mock my pain, and he responds, and this is a key line here for what we're talking about today, life is pain, Highness.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who says differently is selling something.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: He then goes to say, Tell me truly, when you found out he was gone, going back to what I referenced, uh, did you get engaged to your prince that same hour?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or did you wait a whole week out of respect for the dead?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: She says, You mocked me once, never do it again.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: I died that day.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then she says, You can die too, for all I care.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: She shoves him down a cliff, and Wesley responds with, As you wish.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: Upon hearing those three words, she says, My sweet Wesley, what have I done?
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then comedically, she thrusts herself down the cliff, rolling after him.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now again, if you've never seen this movie, I keep saying this, I know, but it's it's one of my favorite movies.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: You might think me sappy, but it's a great movie.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: So as you wish, if you don't know, is the words that Wesley used to say to her on the farm.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: Every single time she asked for something, he would say as you wish.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: She realizes suddenly who's standing in front of him the whole time, the man in black, and throws herself after him.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the scene.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the line about pain gets passed around as the piece of tough wisdom, and it is true as far as it goes, but look at who's saying it and when.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: He's wearing a mask, he's been gone for five years, he believes wrongly that the woman in front of him got engaged to a prince about what, ten minutes after he left and heard he was dead.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: So he's hurt, and he's saying a true thing in order to hurt her back.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So one of the most quoted lines about pain in the whole movie is coming from a guy who is right about pain and completely wrong about the woman he loves.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I kind of want to take both of those today because I think the second one is where probably most of the where most of us actually live.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let me start with the part he gets right, which is the selling something line.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's a psychologist named Iris Mouse.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: She's at Berkeley now, and back in 2011, she ran a pair of studies on people who put a really high value on being happy.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And you'd think those people would be happier.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Well, guess what?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: They weren't.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: The more somebody valued happiness, the less happy they reported to be.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the interesting part is that it showed up when life was going just fine.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Low stress, decent circumstances, and still they were disappointed in their own feelings or state of life or whatever.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: In the second study, uh, they nudged a group of people to value happiness more and then put them through something uh designed to lift their mood.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: And that group got less out of it than the people who were just left alone.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now both samples were women uh for the study.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Neither sample was very big in the study, so you know, hold it with some grain of salt here.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it does fit what Wesley's saying.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been sold the idea that a life you're running well is supposed to feel good most of the time, then an ordinary bad day starts to read as something you're failing at.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I've had that day.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure you've had that day.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: We'll all have that day again coming soon.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And Goldman knew this, by the way, the guy who actually wrote the story.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: In the novel, he keeps stepping out of the story to talk to you directly.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And at one point, he tells you about the mother of a child, fr childhood friend uh of his, a woman named Edith Neisser, or Nisser, who wrote a book about raising kids, and she told him when he was a boy that life isn't fair, and that telling children it is fair is one of the worst things you can do to them.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: He comes back to that over and over again in the book, and this is a life lesson I think we all need to come to terms with.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I tell my kids all the time, they'll say it's not fair, and I'll say, Yep, that's right, life's not fair.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the part that I agree with, and the part that probably gets m misused, especially in my field, we teach a skill called radical acceptance.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, it comes from Marsha Lanahan, who built dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT, uh, for people living with severe long-running emotional pain.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's commonly used also for people who are diagnosed with BPD.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is actually a pretty straightforward idea.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: When something painful is true in your life and you can't change it, fighting the fact that it is true adds a second layer of suffering on top of the first one.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: A death, a diagnosis, something that's already been done to you, whatever it is, that's what Lanaham built this skill for so you can deal with those things.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: So where it goes sideways, however, in my experience is when somebody shortens uh it to accept your situation full stop, it hands a skill that's not going to work for a person in a situation that's not going to change.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there's a study that I think separates those two things in a useful way.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Brett Ford at the University of Toronto, working with Mouse and a couple of colleagues, published it in 2018.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they surveyed about a thousand people, they ran a lab stress test and another group, and they followed a third group with daily diaries and a check-in six months later.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And what they found was that people who habitually accepted their own negative thoughts and feelings, meaning they let them be there without grading themselves or uh for having those thoughts.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So they just had them and they accepted it for what it was, had actually better psychological health across the board.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: They had less depression, less anxiety, more satisfaction with their lives, etc.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason looks fairly simple.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: They had less negative emotion in response to ordinary stress because they weren't piling up a reaction on top of the feeling.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: So accept that it hurts, yes.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you accept the thing that's hurting you is a separate question.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer depends on whether that thing can change.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: And the movie actually does this.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: If you watch Wesley, he takes pain as a fact about being alive, right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Life is pain, as he says.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: He does not accept, however, the kidnapping of Buttercup.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: He does not accept the wedding that she is gonna be a part of if he doesn't stop it.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: And he spends the whole rest of the film fighting b both of those issues that she's gonna be, she's betrothed to this idiot prince.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, one more thing on on this before I move on.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: If the person telling you, and this is this is serious, if the person telling you to accept your situation is the person who also benefits from you, uh benefits from you accepting it, uh, be really careful.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: That advice is awfully convenient for them, and it's not really what Lanahan meant.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so the part that Wesley gets wrong.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wesley has a real injury here.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was gone five years and he came home to find her engaged.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's real.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: But on top of that injury, he's built a story.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the story is that she never really loved him and moved on the minute she could.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that story is false.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: He built it in his head, he manufactured it.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: So she was told he'd been killed by pirates, she's been grieving the whole time, and the engagement is something that was done to her, not something that she actually consented to.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: So he doesn't know and he doesn't know any of that.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Uh he and he hasn't been asking either, by the way.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: And look at what the true line is doing for him in that scene.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's an armor.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: If pain is just how life is, and if what she called love was never really real in the first place, then there's really nothing left for anybody to take from him.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So he he falls into like a cynicism.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: And so cynicism does that job for a lot of people, and to be fair, forced cheerfulness does the same job from the other side.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Either way, you don't get disappointed ever again, right?
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because you're living in sort of a controlled or protected environment.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: Now we're going to spend a whole episode on being certain and wrong about your partner when we get to Vicini, which is also another hilarious scene.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Uh what I want you to see today though, however, is uh the two things that sit on top of each other.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: The pain was real, and the story he built on it was something he made up.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: And from where he was standing, he couldn't tell which was which.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I want you to try this week because maybe it's applicable to you and it's small, it's easy.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, the next time you catch yourself thinking this shouldn't be happening, stop and say two sentences and say them maybe out loud.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: The first one is about feel about the feeling.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: Something like this hurts, and it makes sense that it hurts, and then leave it alone.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Don't argue with it, don't grade yourself for having it.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Just learn to accept that life sometimes is pain.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Things just happen.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: The second one is a question about the situation.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: Can the situation change?
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: And is any of it mine to change?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: If the answer is no, you're in Lanahan's territory and the work is acceptance.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So if you can't do anything about it, then you learn to accept life on its own terms.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you like it, whether you don't like it, it doesn't matter.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Life is what it is.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: If the answer is yes, and you're in Wesley's situation, then get to work.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: Go storm the castle.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Go to Miracle Max, make some changes.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: But you need to be willing to also step into the fray.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: I've heard, kind of as an aside, I've heard many people complain about the political realm to me time and time again, and I'll ask them, like, you know, your complaints fair enough, but uh, are you gonna run for office?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Are you actually gonna go do anything with these complaints?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're not, you're just wasting your mental energy and you're getting emotionally riled up for something you have zero control over because you're choosing not to do anything about it.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if there's another person involved in this, which there usually is somebody else involved in your life, right?
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Add one more question here.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: What am I telling myself about why they did this?
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like what are their motivations?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: What am I believing?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: What's the story?
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: And do I actually know if that's true or not?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or did I invent it?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And if I believe it's true, if I believe that their motivations were what I think they are, then you might have an amazingly rare condition of mind reading.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do have that, please hit me up so I can learn from you, because that would be amazing.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Wesley did this.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: He he built a story in his head, he and he was wrong about the woman he loved.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he only found out that he was wrong about the woman he loved on the way down the hill.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So he was rolling down the hill.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: He found out that.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: Think about what she heard on that hill.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't say I love you, he didn't say I'm alive, he said three words that sound like a servant talking to his boss.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: And she understood him instantly.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So next episode is about why these those three words get through when the line about pain didn't and what that has to do with how you answer your spouse uh when they ask you to pass the salt or do anything in the house or do the dishes or vacuum or clean up or help out or whatever.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, thank you for joining me on another episode of the Voyage Cast.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you join me for the next episode, especially in this Princess Pride series.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think this will be a lot of fun, and it's a great movie, like I said.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget to share this episode with your friends, your family, whoever, and especially those that maybe like the movie, maybe they can enjoy this exploration process of the Princess Pride and psychology and family and relationships and all these things.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, share it, like it, subscribe.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Remember the algorithm overlords need it so they can pass on this lovely information to everybody else.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe we can all make a difference together.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's maybe the community project here is that as you guys like, subscribe, we actually get to make a difference in other people's lives, and that's a simple thing.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: So pay it forward, pass it on, like and subscribe.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: We'll see you next time.