In this monologue, organizational psychologist Tom Guarriello reflects on the dispute between Perry Urban (Renetto) and Paul surrounding the E‑Nation project, using his background in clinical and couples therapy to illustrate how human memory is deeply motivated and changes over time. He outlines factual points—such as both Perry and Paul being in England during early project discussions and the existence of oral histories—while emphasizing the divergent recollections and motives each party attributes to the other. Guarriello explains that memory distortion is common, not necessarily deceit, and that differing motivations shape each participant’s narrative. He references other figures (Ephraim, Casey, Helion Exciter, Greg Solomon) and notes how Perry’s and Paul’s public videos portray conflicting motives. Concluding, he calls for a dignified resolution that preserves both individuals’ dignity, acknowledging the emotional residue of the failed project.
Chapters
Oe, hey guys, it's Tom Guarriello. You know, you watch my videos, you know that even though I'm now an organizational consultant doing organizational psychology, my training was as a clinical psychologist, and I spent about the first 18 or so years of my career doing psychotherapy, and a lot of that psychotherapy was with couples doing marriage counseling and family therapy. And, um, excuse me, the reason I bring that up is that the recent video exchange between Perry Urban and Renetto brought back some of my experiences of doing that work early on in my career. Now, why did it remind me of that? It reminded me of that because one of the things that I learned as a very young clinician was that memory is— human memory is not imprecise, but deeply motivated. That means that memory is affected by many, many things. And, uh, for example, if you ask someone today to tell you their earliest recollections of their childhood, they will tell you things And if you ask them 10 years from today to tell you the, their earliest recollections of their childhood, very often, if not most often, they will remember entirely different things. How is that? How is it possible that our earliest recollections change over time? Well, theories about this almost all focus on the fact that our memory of the past is very much affected by our current situation and even our image of the future, the way we project ourselves into the future. Now, Perry mentioned in the first part of his video that I was very much a part of this e-nation a conversation that went on back in, back last winter. And I know that Paul was very much involved with Ephraim in the early stages of this project because we all saw, those of us who watched Renato's videos, saw him there in England, and what we later learned, that Paul was there to talk about this project. Now, those are facts, right? I mean, we all have, even though what we have is an oral history of those times, and oral histories, by the way, are very subjective by definition. They are people's recollections of what happened. Now, so even though we have only oral histories of those times, we do have some facts that we know, uh, that events took place. And we do know that Paul was there in England, and we do know that Perry was there with him on at least one day, and so on. Now, subsequent to that, we now have a good deal of divergence in, um, recollections. Apparently— I'm saying apparently because we haven't yet heard Paul's version of the events that Perry has described, at least about those, uh, those days and those moments, about commitments that were made or perhaps not made, depending on Paul's recollections of what he remembers committing to. But we know that there were some events that took place around that. Now, those events had a significant impact on a lot of us. I was part of that group that was involved in those conversations. And this was not a group that was talking about— well, I'll take that back. But there's oral history again, this time my own version. My version is that what we were talking about was not seceding from YouTube so much, my version of it, but that there was a way to enhance what was going on on YouTube and to make it a bigger movement, to connect people in a different kind of way around a different set of objectives than were necessarily, um, going to be completely fulfilled through YouTube. Others had completely different kinds of ideas about what was going to happen. And if you go back and research the documents that I think still exist in the comment strings that still exist on the Ning site, and maybe even the eNation site that predated that one, you'll find all sorts of of brainstorming and ideas being kicked around about what we were talking about. Paul was not a part of any of those discussions, and it was pretty clear that Paul was not going to be a part of any of those discussions. To me, it was pretty clear that Paul was not going to be a part of any of those discussions. His name only came up a few times in the sense of, well, you know, if we had Paul, then we would have a popular figure that could be used as the leader, as Perry put it, as the leader, in a certain way, the leader of this movement, the face of the movement, if you will. Well, now, I don't know what happened between Perry and Paul. In those days. And I don't know what happened between Perry and Paul after those days. None of us do. None of us do. All we know is that there is now, that there are now, different versions of what happened. And some of us believe Paul's version of what he intimated in his video, and some of us believe Perry's version of what he says happened in his video. Now, None of us know which of those versions, what happened. We don't have a record of their conversations. We don't know what happened. We might get their divergent reports of what happened. And by virtue of my experience of having done those years of therapy and marriage counseling and family therapy that I told you about earlier, don't expect those versions to ever coincide. The point is that we are— that one or the other of these people, we're going to— some people are going to say that somebody is lying about what happened. I don't believe that— well, let me take this— let me put it this way. It is possible that someone will lie about what was said. Most often, people do not lie in the sense that they say, "No, I didn't I didn't say that. What they will say is something like, no, you misunderstood me. I meant this and you thought it was that. But no, you said this. Yes, I did, but I also remember said that. And we all know this from our own experience because we have all been in this situation of having our recollections of something, our honest, complete, we would swear we would do whatever was necessary to certify that this recollection of what we are saying absolutely happened, it's gospel truth, and someone else will make the same, um, uh, statement and say, yes, absolutely, this is the truth. And those two versions will not coincide, they will be different. So, um, now Perry said some other things as well about the nature of Paul's presence here on YouTube and his desire to create controversy, whether it's with, you know, Casey or with Helion Exciter, whether it was with Greg Solomon, or whether it was by virtue of this latest dream video, which unfortunately I didn't see, or whether it was by virtue of the revealing family difficulties that he was doing, that all of that was artifice, that it was all a way of creating a character. And Paul, in his lengthy video about the gay men video, says, yes, I sometimes do things in a way— I sometimes— I think the way he put it was, I sometimes try to make points in controversial ways because they seem to get more attention that way than when I make them in a more, you know, sort of like this, you know, just expository way, just kind of saying things in a vlog kind of context. So there we have Perry talking about not just what Ranetto does, but his motives for what he does. And I'm sure we're going to hear Paul say something about how his motives are different than the ones that have been attributed to him by Perry. Now, I don't know what Paul's motives are. I don't know Paul. I've never met Paul. I don't know Perry. I've never met Perry. I've spent a lot more time in conversation Never actually spoken to Perry on the phone, but I've spent a lot more time with Perry in conversations of all kinds and video responses to one another of all kinds. I feel like I know Perry better than I know Paul, but that doesn't mean that I think that Perry's version of the events that happened, nor his interpretation of Paul's motives, are any more accurate than Paul's versions are going to be. So the point I wanted to make with my video is that the fact that these two people have very different recollections and very different points of view on factual events is deeply human in the way that it is unfolding. This is what happens. We disagree about events past, present, and future because we are differently motivated than one another. Perry was, by his own description there, and I think it was very obvious, was deeply affected by the E-Nation project not working. Perry made a song— Perry wrote a song about me during that period, which hurt me a good deal. In terms of the way he characterized me in that song. And, um, so I know he was hurt. Many of us were affected by the way that project ended up, um, coming apart. But it did. And, um, so now what we have is the residue of that disappointment, and that's not irrelevant. To what's going on here and now, and I don't think it's going to be irrelevant to whatever happens from this point going forward. So, um, that's my perspective on what's happening here, and I would like to see this, uh, resolved in a way that can enable both of these two people to retain their dignity and to not have it degenerate into what it could, which would be, in my view, unfortunate. So take care. I'll see you all again soon. Bye-bye.
