Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 328: Nicole Panter

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

Nicole Panter, actor, writer, and legendary manager of The Germs joins the DTFH! This episode is supported by [OZY Confidential](https://www.ozy.com/true-story/ozy-confidential-stories-from-the-edge/90802), a new series with some of the most chaotic and raw interviews in podcasting! This episode is also brought to you by [BLUECHEW](https://www.bluechew.com/) (use offer code: DUNCAN at checkout and get your first shipment FREE with just $5 shipping). [LA FAMILY - Check out David Nichtern and Duncan's upcoming meditation workshop at Samarasa.](https://www.samarasacenter.com/creativity-spontaneity-meditation/)

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I'm on down to the standard this weekend, and I'll explain everything. Use offer good family hour to get 10% off your first champagne. Again, I banged your husband at the Equinox, and I want to explain. I'm Paul French. Much thanks to Paul French for supporting this episode of the DTFH, and remember, use offer good family hour

to get 10% off your first champagne at the standard. This is a cover of a John Denver song called Spring is Here. Spring is here, the birds they are are flying, but if I told you I felt good, then I would be a lion. This winter was rough, I buried my dad, and one of my friends killed themselves, so I don't have a real positive spring message. I'll give it a shot, though.

Here's another truth, don't feel completely sad, cause when my baby laughs at me, reminds me of my dad, and I know what you're thinking. My God, this song is stinking, but fuck you, I'm John Denver, and I'm gonna live forever. Fuck you, I'm John Denver, and I'm gonna live forever. Life and death are roommates, life and death are roommates. Flowers grow from dead things, and spring is here.

That's a cover of a track from a very difficult to find John Denver album, it's actually his last album, it's called Fuck You, I'm John Denver. This, of course, was a response to Kat Stevens' dis album. I'm gonna kill you, John Denver. Man, we've got a great podcast for you today. Nicole Panter is here with us. We're gonna jump right into that,

but first, some quick business. This episode of the DTFH has been supported by Ozzie Confidential. The new podcast from the Ozzie tells all. What does punk rock have to do with steroid abuse? How does a soap company save a suicide? Host Eugene S. Robinson, journalist, actor, stuntman, frontman, creator of Sex with Eugene.

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You could probably wardrobe yourself completely for the incoming spring over at dunkintrussell.com. Also, and this is very important, my lovely friends, if you are interested in hanging out with me and the brilliant David Nick Tern this weekend, we are gonna be doing a, I don't know what you call it, what do you call it, a workshop, I guess, at Samarasah in Echo Park.

So you can go to Samarasah's website or you can go to dunkintrussell.com and the link will be in the comments section of this episode. P.S., I'm not a creativity teacher. I mean, I don't know if anyone ever even thought that. It's not like I ever said that, but I love hanging out with Nick Tern

and I have noticed that there seems to be some connection between meditation and inspiration. Also, Pete Holmes is gonna be there on Saturday. And if anybody has a grasp on this, the weird world of figuring out a way to make a living from your art is Pete Holmes. He's had 9,000 TV shows, 7 million seasons of his HBO show, 8,000 stand-up specials, and he's a sweetheart.

So come hang out with us this weekend. Samarasah, the link will be at dunkintrussell.com. Now, without further ado, today's guest was the manager of a famous punk band, The Germs. Also, she was one of the original members of the Pee Wee Herman cast. Not only that, she's a famous teacher.

Not only that, she's a doctor. She's also somebody who just experienced a tragedy that would incapacitate many of us for years. But she's here with us today. We're gonna jump right into this, but first, some quick business. This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by Blue Choo. It brings you the first chewable

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Just pay $5 for shipping. That's bluechoo.com promo code Duncan to try it for free. Bluechoo is the better, cheaper, faster choice. And we thank them for sponsoring this podcast. And now without further ado, here's Nicole Panter. NICOLA PANTER Nicole, thank you so much for coming here.

I screwed up my schedule and I didn't get, I didn't do my homework and I'm really sorry because in the amount of time I had, as I began researching you, I realized that it would probably take me a long time to sweep through all the amazing things that you've done. So my apologies if this is off a little bit. Okay. My first question for you though is because you have, you're such an icon in the universe of punk rock and it's one of these things that I feel a little embarrassed about because punk rock is clearly cool and it's something that cool people should like, but it occurs

to me. I don't even understand what it is and I was wondering if you could tell me what is punk? What does that mean? Well the punk that I helped form, I was in the earliest iteration of it in Los Angeles, kind of sprung up along with several other versions. Punk rock sprung up kind of simultaneously in several locations around the world and I happen to be in Los Angeles among the group of, I think there were 25 of us in 1977, basement

dwelling children, somebody called us. It was composed of a bunch of kids who came together to hear music that nobody wanted to hear played by people who had no experience playing any kind of music whatsoever. And in the earliest iteration of punk rock there was an Adams family sensibility about it. Edic under toe, a gallows humor, mordant humor that was pervasive throughout. We dressed in black. Our songs were about scary things.

They were short and they were brutal and a lot of what informed us was a political worldview even here in Los Angeles. It was in 1977, I believe there were several world crises going on. There was an energy crisis, an energy crisis going on. It was the beginning of being conscious that there was an ecological crisis, don't you know? Right. 1974 I believe was the first Earth Day.

I may be wrong on that, but it was within a few years proximity of the dawning of punk. I've always thought that, well, many of us, if not all of us, came from families that were disintegrated, dysfunctional, brutal, violent. A lot of people had left home. This is your experience. This is my experience. With your father, your stepfather. Who I was told was my father.

You were raised in a lie. You were raised in a lie. I was raised in a total lie. My father slash stepfather was Pat, the Philadelphia Cheese Stake King. Yes. Wait. Yes. He invented the Philadelphia Cheese Stake.

Whoa. Yeah. When I was a little kid, there was no other cheese steak. There was no other steak sandwich, and he was much older than my mother. Was he proud of it? Oh, yeah. He was the king. He was puffed up.

His wedding ring was a crown. Holy shit. Yeah. Pat's is still there in Philadelphia. Okay. The restaurant he started, it's a multi-million dollar business. He started it during the Depression. He was much, much older than my mother.

My mother was a teenager when he married her. My team was 40 years older. He was nearly 60. We thought his fourth or fifth wife, but I went back to Philadelphia in 2013 for the first time ever in my adult life and found out that my mother, in fact, was his eighth or ninth wife. Oh, my God. There were kids that were old enough to be my mother's grandparents that he had had.

It was a house of lies. But it was just you. You didn't have any siblings? I have two younger half sisters who I was told were my sisters. Whoa. Yeah. It was a super feral situation. And he was physically abusive to you?

Physically abusive to me and to my mother to a lesser degree, but in some weird 50s kind of grossness, that to her was love. She once said to me, your father loved me. He was very possessive of me. That's so fucked up. It is so fucked up. I remember she could not go to the grocery store when I was a child without saying exactly when she would be back.

And if she was not back, there was hell to pay. That game that people play is so weird. On one side, if you believe that someone's possessiveness equals love, then you're going to try to amplify the possessiveness because you want more love. Yeah. And so you're going to maybe going to do things or seem certain ways. It's kind of check-ins. Like, do you love me?

You haven't been jealous in a couple of days. Oh, he was jealous 24-7. Oh, God. Yeah. It was really intense. I mean, I remember one particular family dinner. You know, and we had big houses. There were people who worked for us.

I was raised by a lady who worked for us. Thank God. You had a nanny. Well, she wasn't ever called a nanny, though. She was a beautiful, gracious, southern black woman who taught me to love art and books because I certainly didn't get that from my family, which thought it was a deficiency. But I remember a family dinner where my mother had been late coming home from the hairdresser or something, and my stepfather held a gun to her head in front of the three little girls

and made her write out by hand a confession of affairs he'd imagined she had. Yeah. It was super abusive. How did this, how is this allowed to continue? How did your mom, did you ever talk to your mom, or did you ever? I dragged my mother to therapy with me once as an adult, and before I stopped talking to her completely, I didn't talk to her for the last 30 years of her life. She actually died when I was on the Ram Dass retreat in December.

What? Yeah. How did you? Oh, my God. Yeah. How did this impact you? I had about 10 seconds of, are my knees weak? Am I going to cry?

And then I thought, wait a minute, you mourned this relationship and you mourned that you never had a mother 30 years ago when you looked at her and said, this can't continue. Our relationship is destructive to me if you want to come to therapy with me. I am willing to work on this, but if not, I can't continue. Right. And she refused. Right. Wow.

Yeah. You're strong. You have this real intense strength that I find a little intimidating, but also inspiring. Well, thank you. I think, I had to take care of myself from an early age. I had to survive my stepfather who was, I mean, I don't want to say a wolf because it's insulting to wolves, but I pretty much had to raise myself. And at a very early age, I kind of realized it was, I had a choice.

I could become my mother or I could refuse to become my mother and I refused to become my mother. So I never, I didn't continue that cycle of abuse. I was not an abused spouse, nor was I an abusive spouse. I just like was like, this doesn't have, I don't know how, I mean, maybe it's like the epigenetic of being half ghetto Jew surviving, you know, the Nazis and where my grandparents are great grandparents surviving, whatever the Russians actually, not the Nazis, because they came over like fleeing the Russian.

What were they called? Oh, shit. Oh my God. I like, I love the horse people. I know you're talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah, Bolsheviks, Bolsheviks, yes, yes, yes. So, you know, when your ancestors were fleeing or fighting whatever enemies, that chemistry that happens in the body during fight or flight creates a slight change in the genetic structure. It's called epigenetics.

Yeah, sure. So I think I have some motherfucking strong epigenetic resilience genes on my side. Yeah. It sounds like it. I mean, this is, I can't, I'm really, it's a, it's, I don't want to spend too much time talking about it, but it's one of the sort of scientific approximations of reincarnation. Yes. That's a really amazing way of framing that.

Yeah. It's cool. But it's so beautiful because, you know, I'm sure you, you know the study they did with those, the mice and cherry blossoms, and this is, I've talked about in the podcast, I'm sorry if this is a repeat guys, but synopsis, expose mice to the smell of cherry blossoms while giving them a shock. They have children, they have babies. And the children are adverse to cherry blossoms.

They have a stress reaction. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Right. And then, and, and, and the sort of the, uh, how, how the data stored within the DNA. Within the body. The body remembers.

Yeah. But whatever that is. Yeah. Must be, we just haven't quite figured out what that is, but also the implication is you could decode epigenetics if like this is a thing that our bodies are translating into something so specific as cherry blossoms or whatever they're discovering now, then this means theoretically you could decode someone's DNA and start not just understanding where they came from, but what your ancestors.

You can know their story in full. Yeah. Yeah. Now that's pretty cool. That's pretty amazing. I know. And wherever that goes or whatever happens with that, who knows what it's just the fantasy is being able to take your DNA and put it in some super computer and realizing like,

oh. Yeah. Wow. That explains everything. Yeah. Because half of my family has been attacked by bears or something. I don't know. You know?

Yeah. But, um, I think it's deeper than that, but then that's just my own feeling. I think it's the, you know, the epigenetics are part of it for sure, but maybe something more. You know what? Maybe. Yeah. I mean, in my case, I think I just had really strong survival instincts.

So I have to say, because of Mary, the woman who really raised me, her input encouraging me to read, like this, I had this idea that there was a wider world out there that was accessible to me. And I grew up in Palm Springs. It was a very small town at the time. Rock and roll was non-existent. I got hold of a cream magazine and it talked about like Andy Warhol and the factory. And I thought, oh my God, there is more than out here than this.

Oh, yeah. And I want to be part of it. That, now that's a beautiful thing. That's like the call of the sea or something, but, and what happened to you is so amazing and so it's such crazy synchronicity, but there's something in the Hanuman Chalisa. There's something in the Bhagavad Gita and the Bhagavad Gita, the verse goes something like Arjuna is talking to Krishna, you know, the representation of, I don't know, the higher self, whatever you want to put it, and says, what happens if you stop practicing?

What happens if you stop practicing? Will you drift like a driven cloud or something, you know? Well, you're, what happens if I just give up on yoga or meditation or whatever? And the answer is there is neither, there's never any loss or diminution on this path. And if you fall away from it, then I will give you birth in a conscious family, essentially. And for folks like us, sometimes I think, well, I don't know that you would say, certainly, I don't think anybody's going to say the Philadelphia Cheesecake King. Steak.

Cheese Steak, forgive me. Cheesecake, it might have been a different story. I know, sweeter. The Cheesecake King, sweet. Yes. The Cheese Steak, forget it, but I don't think you're always going to say that this man that you're describing is an awakened being, in fact, quite the opposite. And yet, you had this wonderful mentor who began to introduce you to the thing that was

at least partially responsible for helping you escape that miserable situation. And I always think of like, oh, yeah, there's like, you know, that copy of Be Here Now lying around that I kind of picked up, or the tapes my mom, my mom played, those little seeds. And so you were reading, you were focused, you knew this was wrong. And then you ended up sitting in front of a bar smoking a cigarette. And talking to Darby Crash about how all he needed was a good manager like me to help his band something, something, something, get gigs. They couldn't get gigs.

Yeah. And he had asked me, because I said, well, you should change your name, but not change your name of your band. And then the club owners won't know that it's the germs and blah, blah, blah. And he said, why don't you manage us? And I said, okay. So then I did. And this, and this was, this seems like for you, this was like one of the big monumental

updraft moments, right? Yes. Suddenly you're sucked into. Yes. Into doing it. But not just that. You were responsible for the updraft in some ways. You were managing the germs.

Yes. And there are things that I did, decisions I made that are the reason my students at Cal Arts, who are 18 years old in 2019, know who I am and what I did and who the germs were and what they did. The record that I orchestrated is still issued every year. There are not many punk rock records from the Stone Age that are still being issued every year without fail. So yeah.

This must be weird though. It feels like it's kind of paradoxical. It's like you're teaching screenwriting. You have students, you're like, I remember one of my professors saying, just drop out. Because this isn't the way to do it. You guys need to leave. This is, your life is going by too fast to be here. What are you doing here?

Go to India. He would just say, go to India. What did he teach? Introduction to Southeast Asia. And his whole thing was just drop out of school and go to India and then figure it out from there. And I remember he, I'll never forget it, you know, this is such a great teacher. I didn't listen to him.

I stayed in school. But I can remember like, but he meant it. He wasn't bullshitting. He meant it. He was like, just get out of here. And he didn't mean it. And I desponded it. This isn't it.

Here. This is school. Go do something else. But he said, you know, when you're accelerating down the highway and you're looking at telephone poles and they start going by faster and faster and faster, that's what's going to happen to your years. And it's true. Yeah.

And just know that. And then just go, go to India. And I remember that was like, what, who would say such a thing? A professor of Southeast Asian matters. Yes, that's right. That's right. But, you know, my experience was I went to college and it was great. I got a degree in psychology, took a bunch of acid, had lots of fun, met some great

friends, but then came here and didn't become a psychologist. I put my hand on the comedy store, on the wall of the comedy store and I thought, oh, I should work there. That'd be a cool place to work. Yeah. I ended up working for Mitzi, becoming the talent coordinator and none of it had anything to do with school. It had to do with just weird blundering and raw, whatever, and some kind of look.

And this seems like what happened to you. Yeah. You know? And isn't this kind of a recurring phenomena in the life of many, many artists is that there wasn't a way to prepare for it. It just happened. Well, it just happened. I mean, during punk rock, I went to UCLA.

I graduated from UCLA with a C-minus average, which I didn't know until I went back to grad school about seven years ago. Yeah. I mean, I got a C-minus in Native American history, which is one of my favorite subjects. How did that happen? But, yeah, I ended up writing a bunch of stories. I managed the germs, Darby killed himself, which was a really, I married Gary Panter. Darby killed himself in 1980 after I'd stopped managing the band, and that sort of knocked

me off my trolley for a while. How long it had been since you'd seen him? He came to my house the week before. He showed up the week before, and it just seemed like business as usual. He was on his rounds, kind of, and he didn't seem depressed. But there's a lot that I didn't know about his personal life. I had no idea that he was gay. I had no idea that he was a heroin addict.

That wasn't our relationship. I didn't do heroin. I assumed that the girls he hung around with were girlfriends. I didn't question that. I've never been nosy that way. So it was shocking to me that it happened, and I kind of didn't leave my house for about a year after that. Did you feel responsible in some way?

I didn't. I would say that I did not feel responsible for that at all. Darby was very much his own person, and I've always had a sense that, I mean, maybe it's because I'm depressive myself, that there's rarely anything anyone can say to you when you are in the depths of depression that really makes a dent. It's a really profoundly dark state. As a psychologist now and a therapist, I know there are things that you can do to offset depression, physical exercise, but the gulf between that first step and laying in bed

all day is huge. It's the Grand Canyon. This is, to me, people, when they think about death, they have a fantasy about how death goes down, and the fantasy is you keep your mind up until the moment you breathe your last breath, and this is just not the case. Most people, when they're dying, they're so sick, and they lose their mind somewhere along the way, and there isn't any more chance to say, you're sorry, or say, I love you, or do all that shit you see in the movies because you're gone.

You're sliding through time, you're having many strokes. Who knows, right? So, similarly with depression, it's like at some point, the gloomy day that you've been having for the last six months gets a little darker, and then somewhere along there, you're not thinking clearly anymore. Well, for me, when I've, the few times I've experienced the most profound depressions, and I'm a Russian extraction, my people are a very depressed people, it is, it becomes a physical pain, right?

It becomes a physical pain that you can't say, oh, my knee hurts, but it's this pervasive, deep, unshakable physical pain, and at a certain point, if it keeps going, you think, I will do anything to make this stop. Your vision doesn't go beyond making the pain stop to like, well, if I do that, I'm not going to be here. Someone said something to me once that did make a definite impression, and I have tried to remember it during my dark moments, which is remember depression is finite. It's not infinite.

Right. The unsaid thing is death is infinite, but it's hard when you're suffering that kind of pain to remember that this pain you're feeling has another end to it. You will come out of this if you kill yourself, you won't. Oh, that's right. Yeah. But it's, I mean, my experience with it has just been I'm all gummed up, and it's like, I don't care anymore about your fucking tweet.

I don't care. Oh, really call someone? Yeah. Okay. Maybe, I don't know, because you're laying there thinking like, what is it like when you hit the concrete? Is it like, maybe it's like a lake. I mean, maybe you don't really feel it.

Maybe it's more like jumping into some lake and you just go to sleep forever. Maybe it's like that. Also, you probably stink. You haven't been taking showers. It's like so wretched. So this is why, you know, for me, I have some safeguards, you know, if I start noticing my bed is being, is unmade in the morning. If I start noticing there's a mess happening.

If I start noticing like there's signs that I feel deeply superstitious of now because it's like, oh shit, oh shit, I know where this goes. So but that being said, since, you know, we recently lost Brody Stevens and he was a friend of mine and a friend of a few of ours. Lots of us are feeling guilt because there's this sense of like, damn it. He was so open about his mental illness. He was so open about his medications. He was periscoping about how much pain he was in, you know, and so there's this sense

that a lot of people have right now of like, damn it. Well, this is the sort of unknowable thing about this. You know, I read this thing this morning that was, you know, served to remind me and it's kind of like a version of what Ramda said, we're all just walking each other home, right? That yes, that being that is one thing, but, you know, when you hear from someone over and over again, I'm in pain, I have this mental illness, it's their compassion fatigue is a thing. You think, oh, that's their deal.

He'll be okay. He's been okay in the past. It's hard. It's hard to know. Compassion fatigue. Yeah. Wow. And you do feel like, yes, I know what you mean.

Am I being like, this is, I just, I think it's just better to just imagine there's nothing we could have done because what's the point beating yourself up about? There is nothing. If the instinct to self-extinct is so strong that it's something one acts on really short of restraining someone physically what can be done, right? Because on the other hand, if that's competing with the drive to live, which is the strongest instinct we have, right? Can you imagine like what a tidal wave of darkness that other thing is?

And we're just people. We may say the right thing. We may not say the right thing. It's really hard when my partner was hit and killed by a car a little over a year ago. It was horrible. And I noticed that there were some people who would reach out and were very self-conscious about what they were saying and they would apologize for it. And in the end, my takeaway was, it doesn't matter what anybody says.

What matters is the open heart behind it and you can feel as the recipient of these sentiments, I could feel the open heart behind the clumsy things, the dumb things, the, oh God, did I really say that thing? And I never made those judgments on people like, oh my God, I can't believe so and so said that completely inappropriate thing. It was like, oh my God, this person is really trying to express this thing that is so hard to express. So oftentimes people don't speak up when someone's suffering.

Right. Out of fear? Out of fear. Out of fear of being intrusive. Or even probably less noble, out of fear of being rejected. Rejected saying the wrong thing, saying a dumb thing. But again, if the urge to self-annihilation is so strong that somebody actually acts on it, can you imagine what a powerful anti-instinct is at work there since the will to live is

so strong? I mean, I think about this a lot. Punk rock was a very high mortality subculture. A lot of my compatriots and fellow travelers died young. Many have suicide, some slow suicide of drinking themselves to death or heroin addiction. Others came up with a lot of really bad habit-related cancers. And I'm not judging when I say, but liver cancer from hepatitis C, from shooting drugs and stuff like that.

So at a certain point, you kind of, after seeing this and thinking about it, kind of realized that there's only so much you can do for people. That's right. Yeah, I know. I know. I mean, I just don't know sometimes in my dark moments. You know, I think one way that I feel connected to you is that we both have had loss in our life.

And I don't want to get into a loss competition because I think that's ridiculous. But I think- Loss is relative. That's right. But still, the specifics that you've shared with me about what happened are so mind-blowing and just it's so sudden, you know, when my parents passed, there was at least some time and there was a, you know, but still, at some point, there seems to be two universes happening. There's the universe of people who have yet to experience this reality, which is that it's

just what you hear over and over again, but you kind of like, who gives a shit about that? I don't have time to think about that dark shit. I'm just going to go to work and do my thing. I'm doing my thing right now. I used to think I'd live forever. I used to think I, you know, really, there could be a possibility. Maybe it's in my genes or they have a medicine that's going to make me live forever. I will not be one of those who gets sick.

Yeah. But then it all happens. And to me, sometimes I do feel a little bit like I have seen the backdrop of reality. And there is a feeling of like, like when sometimes when you and I talk, I feel a little bit like Gazelle being like, you know, lions keep eating us, right? You know, when you want to like, I want to be committed to this reality and this life. I don't want to disassociate or detach or sort of like. It's really hard because we don't know.

We don't know. We do not know what happens after this. You know, and I've had, I am someone who's always thought that after this, there's nothing. There's just, you're gone, but there have been a lot of, there was a couple of weeks ago. I mean, there's been this, I have pages written of these synchronicities that have happened since Bill died. Bill answers to questions I've asked specific word for word.

Five minutes after asking the question, going and randomly picking up one of the hundreds of notebooks Bill kept, opening it up. And there is literally the answer to my question. Not just like magic eight ball style, yes or no, but Jimmy Webb, highwaymen, Hawaiian version of somewhere over the rainbow. And this was the answer to a question that my filmmaker asked me when we were cutting the film of Bill's memorial, like, well, I have these songs, I really like them. Bill didn't even know them.

Highwaymen would be great to start the film with and somewhere over the rainbow, great to end it with, but Bill didn't know those, so we're not going to do that. And then I walk into Bill's office after hanging up the phone, pick up this notebook and there are those two songs in his handwriting that I had no idea he knew, but, and there have been that kind of thing, so our house, the place that we love most in the desert, we have this little house up in this very secluded, beautiful area, there was a mud slide and I went into the house and there's like silt everywhere, there's Bill's dirty clothes hamper, which I had just written on Facebook two days before.

I can't even bear, this is like a year after Bill has died. I can't even bear to empty this hamper and I go in and the hamper is like absorbed all of this mud, so I'm going to have to do something about it. I take a picture for insurance purposes. I post it on Facebook and someone says, look in the mud, it says I love you in it. I'll show you the picture. And sure enough, I look in the mud and it says I, L-O-V-E, and the letter U, like what the fucking fuck.

Yeah, right. So stuff like that gives me complete pause to go like, oh, oh, oh, I think this is kind of the other weirdness of being born in the specific culture that we're born in is because for us, that kind of stuff is astounding, whereas I was just watching this documentary on the day of the dead. Once a year, you sit around your ancestors grave and eat dinner and they're there. It's like you're eating dinner with them. You sing to them.

You sort of like, I don't want to say summon because it sounds weird, but you sort of, there's a song that you sing to bring them into the table and then you eat with them. And over, you know, in the West, you watch something like that and you're like, ah, primitive. It's not real. No, sir. No way. And yet, this is the other thing that happens when you start seeing the, I don't know, the backstage is because suddenly you have to start dealing with things that you can't talk

about that much because people are either going to be like, well, like us, like, oh, yeah, I could tell you some story or they're going to be like, I know, I know, and I guess he's right there. Isn't he? Yeah. Yeah. And they're like poor thing. Yeah.

Experiences because you know that can't happen. Right. And so that's the other element to it is that suddenly you begin to see some, I don't know, hidden structures in the universe that you've heard about. Now this is great, but it's still not my mom and it's still not my dad and it's still not my friends. Yeah. And so still in all, I don't feel bitter about it.

It's just not even a bitterness. It's more of like a, wow, this is just a dream. Yeah. It's fading away. Yeah. Now, how do you, in the midst of this, it's only been a year. Yeah. How are you doing, keeping up the life that you have in the marketplace, being a psychologist,

being a teacher? Let me say a little bit about the teaching, because we kind of, I forgot and got off on a tangent. You asked me about how I came to teach, sort of. You asked me. Well, the question was, the question was with your students, I mean, it's just sort of like, I get it though. I mean, writing screenplays.

I'm not, it's like, you don't tell people the way you write screenplays is sit in front of a barn, smoke cigarettes, that's certainly not going to help when you're writing screenplay. Yeah. And the reason that I don't say like your Southeast Asian professor, drop out of school and go do something else. After graduation, I tell them, go live some life somewhere. Join AmeriCorps, do something where you're out in the world, or you want anything to write about.

I realized a few years, okay, so I wrote a couple of books that I put out myself and then somebody else put out one of them. And I got this sort of underground reputation. I was reading from my books all over the place. I was on fresh air. I had my 15 minutes of NPR fame. And I was invited to teach at Cal Arts temporarily because someone had had a nervous breakdown and they needed to fill in and the Dean had heard me on fresh air two days before.

I was in information back when you could call the operator and get phone numbers. Wow. Yeah. And I said, yeah, I would like to teach and I threw up before the first class and I continued to throw up before the first class out of every semester for like four or five years and then it stopped. I was like, oh no, I'm kind of good at this. That is shocking.

It is really shocking. So you are feeling like nerves. Oh, totally scared. Like who am I to do this? I'd never taught. I had a complete fear of speaking in front of crowds. I was 38 when I started doing this. I was still coming off of the like I have nothing worthwhile to say.

And I realized over the years that what when you're 18 to 35, my students started out being 18 to what 22 is undergraduate and then I started also teaching graduate students. People that age are struggling to make sense of who they are in the world and every story they tell has to do with who they are. And the minute I realized that, I was like the person who was helping. Robinhood is an investing app that lets you buy and sell stocks, ETFs, options and cryptos all commission free. While other brokerages charge up to 10 bucks for every trade, Robinhood doesn't charge

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Discover new stocks, track your favorite companies and get custom notifications for price movements so you never miss the right moment to invest. So my job I realized was to be a midwife for them in a manner of speaking. It wasn't to impose my aesthetic on them. It wasn't to impose, except very sort of cursorily, this screenplay format on things. But my job is to help them articulate these stories that they want to tell and at this point in their life, they're their stories because that's their experience. So I became everybody's favorite teacher and that led me into psychology.

In 2013, I decided to go back to school to get a master's and then I got a doctorate and I've been practicing for a few years. You know, and it's really interesting. I also realized, like most people do, that I partially went back to school to figure myself out. I'd been in therapy for a number of years successfully with a really good therapist, but at a certain point, it's sort of then the burden is on you to move further and push further through it and you need to go behind that curtain we were talking about to figure

things out. My takeaway has been, especially after the doctorate, which ended up going down the road of brain science oddly enough. I've never been scientific, but that's where it led me, is that our brain chemistry leads us to do a lot of things. Isn't that simultaneously comforting and terrifying? Yes. Yes.

God, it's like, you know, this is the, when you just realize, man, we have got like a soggy hard drive in our head and these stories you hear in abnormal psychology of people who get banged up and their whole personality changes permanently. All of Dr. Saxe's work is about that. Dr. Oliver Saxe's work is about the weird glitchy shit that can happen with your brain. For me, I realized that as a little kid living in a volatile environment, my sense of self didn't form in a normal way. Because your brain forms two-thirds of your frontal lobe forms from the ages of birth to

three. If things are weird in your environment, that dictates how your brain grows. Oh, man. I know, right? This is scary. Yes, it's really. New baby in the house. New baby in the house.

I'm thinking this because I, you know, I'm thinking like this is like the most advanced, like, you know, by the way, I'm not going to try it. I'm not materially turning my son and just, and then what I'm about to say sounds like I think my child is like electronics, which I don't, but, you know, knowing like more neurons in the brain than any other time in his life, every single thing, he's vacuuming up every single moment. And it's terrifying. And then also you can't get too caught up in that.

You know, Ramnath talks about this saying you really aren't going to be able to not impact them in some way or another. It's just, but you could try, right? Well, we know what not to do, which I don't know, you're a lot younger than me, but my parents' generation didn't give a shit. You know, there was no inward like, how do what I, how does what I do form my child's worldview? There was none of that.

We were chattel. We were extensions of, we were owned by our parents. You were just something that you, a thing that was like running around, that was in trouble. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you were living in a, um, a war.

Yeah. A war zone for sure. And screaming was normal. Yeah. And, you know, and you, I remember getting off on it kind of like, you know, when the screaming is happening and get away with shit and then like you learn, anyway, I don't remember a lot of that when I was, cause I was too young, but, um, regardless, the human brain is, uh, really, um, I think a lot, there's a lot more going on there.

And we're just figuring it out now because are you excited about the psychedelic therapy that's happening right now? I'm really excited. And I am, you had asked me about, um, Bill's death and how I was coping with that. And all the answer is, I thought I was coping with it. Okay. Um, I was in shock because of the way it happened. He was hit by a car.

I'd seen him 40 minutes earlier. The last thing I said to him was, please be careful crossing the street. It was, I remember being jazzed because I found a great parking place at work that morning at the clinic. I went to the free clinic where I was seeing clients and I got a call from a social worker and I thought it was about a case that I'd had and, um, she said, no, are you related? And I knew, I knew that he was dead and my world changed that minute. Um, and I was in shock for a number of months and I was sort of people kept saying, I can,

you're dealing with this so wonderfully. And I had a lot of, I had two full-time jobs, the clinic and teaching. And I went back to teaching immediately, um, well immediately was three weeks because Bill was killed in the eve of winter break and I went back to work. And thank God I did because my students were just fantastic. I mean, um, I walked into three separate classrooms and there were flowers and letters from them. And when I would stop to cry, they just wouldn't freak out. They would just like kind of, I put my head down on that, um, table and somebody often

is not would touch my shoulder and when I was finished crying and continue. So that was really helpful, but, and then Bill had two businesses that I had to keep running because there were workers who were depending on their paychecks. So I had to, that survival me, the, the all about business me kind of really took over and pushed the grief way down. And I've been depressed as a result. I've been putting one foot in front of the other, but I've been really, really depressed and realized that there are days when I don't leave the house unless I have to teach.

And so I looked around and my own personal history with SSRIs has not been good. So I knew that I couldn't do that as, as some kind of, and I've been in therapy, of course, like twice a week since then. And my area of study was for the doctorate was SSRIs versus psychedelics for the treatment of PTSD anxiety and, um, oh my God, I'm totally drawing a blank PTSD anxiety and depression. So one of the things that I didn't do a close examination of, but have heard a lot about was ketamine therapy. And ketamine is an anesthetic, but it's also a short acting psychedelic and there's a,

a protocol that where an MD is present along with a therapist and you as the subject are injected intramuscularly with the ketamine and it's an hour, 45 minutes to an hour long session. And this particular protocol is twice a week for four weeks. Wow. And that's what I'm doing. I had my first treatment on Friday and it was profound. I don't know if it was like good, profound or bad.

All I know is that the grief that I had put away came roaring out and it was as if Bill had just, I had just gotten the news. Oh my God. When I did it, what happened to me was I was back at the doctor's office getting my cancer diagnosis, photographic memory. Just like I was that, like in a virtual reality, I was there. That was, that's to me, like to me, psychedelic therapy. This is why it's so potent, but also something, and I know you know this, but for people listening,

this is done with a doctor and a psychologist in the room, in the room, the entire time on you. It's really important, ketamine especially was an animal tranquilizer. And I think a friend of mine who worked for a vet said it's also used to put animals down. So you really have to be careful about how you use this and you should not do it yourself. This is not the kind of thing that, you know, you go out to the desert and quote unquote shaman helps you with. So this, it seems, this is a similarity we have in the sense that what it did is that,

and I've noticed this with other psychedelics is like whatever the thing is you've been putting energy into ignoring, it seems to somehow or another show that to you. And this is the other aspect to what I think is interesting and maybe worth talking about a little bit is when people describe these experiences, they say it showed me. It's like it's a thing or something. It's like there's a personality behind it or some kind of, I don't know, spirit within it. Yeah.

So here you are back at the grief again this, and then what? Well, I have, after we finish here, I have another appointment my second trip. Wow. Yeah. And I was kind of scared to do it. You know, there are various different accounts of what happens, and none of those really seemed to bear much resemblance to what I saw. I never felt out of control or endangered, but I was deeply connected to the profound

sadness and regret I have about Bill's death. Well, I mean, this is the, I love what Chogyeom Trumpar Rinpoche says about ignorance, because you know, ignorance is an insult. If you call someone ignorant, it's like an, so it's an easy thing to get confused about the word. But ignoring, you know, is not an insult, and we all kind of understand ignoring. It's hard. Like if there's a dog barking next to your house and you want to fall asleep, it's difficult

to sleep. If a baby's crying, ignoring requires energy. And so that's how Chogyeom Trumpar Rinpoche described ignorance as the active quality of ignoring. It's like you're having to push this thing away and the energy drain required to compartmentalize your existence and to actually, I mean, to try to like build a wall between you and this event that just happened, which is a cataclysm. Yeah.

And in my life, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. It's, that's a really good point. It's funny. He was, Trumpka was such an interesting, complicated person. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

Yeah. He was. And, and, and certainly, you know, that aspect of him is, is something that has perplexed me sometimes until, but I focus on, right, mostly, uh, and just because of my personality, there's something about his, his madness that I really like to some degree, not all of it. But yeah, this, uh, man, how are you not going to get depressed if you have to, if you're spending God knows how much cognitive energy we're already filtering out stuff that just we have to filter out.

The cognitive load of having to filter out this event that you experienced is, I mean, how much processing power does a human brain have? Not enough. I mean, these events are so much bigger than us or our understanding of them. That's part of what's also frustrating about it. We only had three years together. We were crazy happy with each other. We'd found each other late in life.

We were very aware of that. And then boom, one day it was all gone. I remember the night before I was at a work party because it was the night before winter break at Cal Arts and I said, does someone said, well, you look really happy these days. And I said, yeah, I have the most beautiful life. And then boom, 10 hours later, it was gone. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So the other thing that came up during the ketamine that I kept repeating apparently was I need to make meaning of this. I need to make this count for something. I don't know what that means. I mean, that's what this trip is about. That's what sitting with Ram Dass is about is trying to A, be okay with it, trying to make meaning of it.

And also trying to prepare for my own death, which is closer than ever. Every minute is a minute closer to that. I mean, sometimes I think it's already happened. Well, there is that school of thought. Already broken. There's a saying, I can't remember how it goes, which is it's already broken. But this idea, the second part that came to you, this is alchemy, of course. And it's like, here is this, as of right now in your life, a thing that is not processed

yet. No. It's something that seems in fact impossible to process. And then I don't know, I don't, the problem, I don't, I don't know. I wish, I want to, like, if there's a part of me that wants to be like, oh, you'll find. So that's our, as humans, that's walking each other home. That's our sort of impulse to fix, to reassure. But I don't know, the dark version would say there is no reassurance.

And I think we have to be okay with that. That's the, these days, more where I land is just, because it's like, this thing we do, which is like every single rotten fucking thing that happens to us, we have to find some, like, you know, thing that, oh, and from this, I learned this. This is, and from this, it was one of my teachers, oh, it's a teaching experience. And all of that is a weird form of commodification. It's like, not only did this shitty fucking thing happen to me, and by the way, I'm sorry, if this seems like I'm finger, I'm thinking of my own.

We all only, we all think of our own. But, you know, I've thought about this before, and I was thinking about this during the AIDS crisis, that everybody kind of thought, well, it'll be okay, because in the third act, everything is okay. And I hold for this, you know, have to learn a lesson thing. I hold the Hayes Code responsible. Do you know what the Hayes Code was? It was the 1930s, the movie industry was told to police itself.

And part of the Hayes Code was, your characters have to learn from what's happened to them. Okay. Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, okay. They have to learn a lesson. But, you know, but then, having said that, the reality of it is, all of the horror that in my life that I've experienced has actually, in some way or another, really taught me something. And in some way or another, at the very least, when I'm sitting and talking to someone who's

got a whole bone in their life, I feel like I can listen to them in a way I couldn't have before. And that's probably right. Not much, but it's something. Maybe more than you think. And sometimes, just that act of bearing witness to somebody else's pain, I was sent to Quaker School for the first six years of my schooling and the Quakers are really, that's their deal is, it's important to bear witness, whether it's to injustice or pain, that by

bearing witness, you're doing a service to the person that you're bearing witness for. Yeah. You're carrying some of that for them by taking it in, right? And not revising their history in the moment. No. It's like that, but this is an impulse that happens where people are like, and you taught me this, and I love it, because anytime these things happen, they happen to us, and they will happen, I don't mean to say it like I'm fucking holding a sign, the end is not, but

it's going to happen to all of you listening. And you know, people will come to you, and they will come to you with something that they have read on the, it feels like they read on the back of a cereal box, and there will be a sense where you want to say to them something really dark, and the fact that you taught me this compassion, like, okay, okay, they don't mean to, there's no intent here to hurt me. No. They're just trying to love, but bearing witness means, no, I see you now, and I can't

fix it, and I'm not going to try to fix it. There's no fix here. I see you, and I see the pain you're in. Yeah. I see the pain you're in. That's, that's really important. And if, when you, someone is doing that with you, and that is the, because it's like, God damn it, this shame thing in our society where it's like, oh, if, like, there's

something, I was thinking this this morning, it's okay for things to not be okay. Yeah. This is okay. Yeah. It's part of it. What are we expecting? That's the other thing. Why would you expect?

Look at this world. Jesus Christ. Look at the catacombs, man. All those bones down there. And you look at all those bones and you're like that. Every single one of those skeletons or skulls, someone wept over every single one of those, someone wept. They were all somebody's baby.

What? Yeah. And, and when this is like in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna's becomes the universal form and is showing Arjuna who he really was is, and he's like, Arjuna is describing like, I see all the great warriors marching into your fiery mouth, their skulls stuck in your teeth. And this is on one level. Mother fuck.

This is life and we got to get to work and we have to wear it, put on the clothes, we, and our masks and all those things on another level. We're being consumed by an infinite, never ending vortex of matter that is completely ambivalent or oblivious to our personal wants, needs, desires and how we think things should be. Yeah. It's going to kill us. And so, I mean, and when I say that, I don't mean it from a depressed

perspective, it's just how it is. How it is. I know, but then what do we do with that in this iteration of the dream? We're all just walking each other home, right? What did Bacowski said? It's how you walk through the fire, right? So in this eye blink of an existence, we're pitiful humans flailing about to do the best we possibly can in the most ill-equipped way imaginable.

Yes, that, that's compassion. And it's sad and it's weirdly beautiful. It is the most beautiful thing. But the thing you just said is so freeing because it's like, who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? Like you're going to like suddenly just know how to do this dance. Like you're going to do all the moves, right?

Like you're not going to freak out. Like you're not going to think about killing yourself. Like you're not going to contemplate from time to time. The, this whole thing is a big fucking scam. The hopelessness of it, the powerlessness of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Of course you are because if you're awake, if you're awake. Yeah. And a lot of people choose to not be awake and, and you can't hold judgment because it's so fierce and so terrible to contemplate the other. That thing that you think about, obviously I think about and many people we know think about, it's, it is a choice. It's a choice. And it's just a, and you know, the other thing is, it's like, what I've

learned is like, I can't do the whole, like I'm going to come up with who I am planned for the rest of my life. Like, well, this'll be my thing. Cause it's a moment to moment situation. But what I have learned from my friend Brody and what I'm, I, I was, I'm learning is this whole hero thing, let's give it up. Like this idea, like we're going to be the personal, like hero in our, in our lives, where there's been so much loss or whatever in the, in the, in the try

to fit into this weird role of being the person who like, in the, it's cause every dumb ass movie is like, in the midst of all the suffering, he rose, she rose and became a leader. This is the Hayes code. The Hayes code. Fuck it. Yeah. No, how about this?

Uh, in the midst of all his suffering, he got super depressed and he started drinking too much and he cried sometimes in the midst of all the suffering. He suffered. Yeah. And that's, to me, that's like the, you know, if you really want to like be a hero, stop being a hero, like just fall into it and let, that's what Trump is, at least I think, as I understand it, I'm probably misunderstanding. Yeah, you probably not.

I mean, experiencing the moment, it's be here now, be here. It all comes back to be here now. And we're all walking each other home. And we're all walking each other home. But sometimes no one's on the road. And I think it's important to realize that sometimes it's an empty road and it goes on for a long fucking time and it goes on longer than you would ever want it to times a lot longer than that.

And the sky is a scary color green. Hell yeah. That. Yeah. And I think anytime I, like, so anytime I fall into that and I know the difference between being like, oh my God, it's a longer than you are. It's a long versus like, no, this, okay, I'm on the road by myself right now. Yeah.

Okay, okay, we'll do it. We'll be on the road by myself. I'll do this now. Anytime I'm that feels something shifts a little bit. Yeah. Sometimes don't you think it's okay to say, I don't know. It's always okay to say that. I mean, because the alternative to that is sort of what bravado and bluster

and it's okay. I've got this handled, which is my deal, right? Mine too. Yeah. Okay. Everybody follow me out the exit. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. No. What a relief. Yeah. When you realize you don't have to actually, you don't have to tame the universe. Like you don't have to do the lion tamer act with the entire universe. In fact, you can just let the lion eat you.

Yeah. Fuck it. Yeah. Go ahead. I give up. I don't, I'm sorry. I tried to tame you. Yeah.

You're a lion. My ego told me I could tame you and look at you. You're five times my size and your teeth are as big as my fingers. Five are the size of the universe. Yeah. And then something happens right around there. And the problem is it's like suddenly, wait a minute. Now the lion is like rolled over and is letting you pet his stomach.

Yeah. Something happens, but it's just before that can happen. There's this, look, I don't know. I just love it because like I love, I love we're walking each other home and it is true and I love that. But I also love sometimes things just suck. Yeah. No antidote right now.

Just, this is it. Yeah. Oh, but as a therapist, sometimes the most profound thing I can do in session with a client who's suffering is acknowledge their suffering and how badly it sucks. How people, it's a rare thing to hear it. Yeah. And, and, and it's the most empowering thing. It's like giving someone back their suffering.

It's like, here I'm going to take your suffering. I'm going to give it a nice haircut. I'm going to put a cool little outfit on it. I'm going to, it's going to like dance for you. And it's going to sing this ridiculous song about how in the end everything works out because of the Hayes code. The Hayes code. Yeah.

It's something so wonderful about just like, well, yeah, that's right. Yeah. And then from there, suddenly you become part, I think of a network, a real network of, of people in the planet who are in various stages of climbing out of craters for like literally and figuratively and something in that becomes you, but you, you are there with them. And now you're like, okay, I might never meet you. But in this moment here, whatever it may be, I'm with you here.

I feel, I don't know. Maybe there is no real connection. Maybe there's no my silly old connection, but I'm here and it sucks. And it's okay. That's where we're at. Yeah. And one foot in front of the other walking each other home. I think, you know, that some of the, the, the two, those two amazing

things that Romdus has offered the two tools be here now, and we're all just walking each other home are kind of in a way, almost all the roadmap you need. Oh yeah. And I think that we've both been very lucky to be able to sit with that guy and feel that unconditional love ray he zaps you with. Yeah. And all, yeah. Yeah.

And that's, and, and, and to know that that is a possibility in Israel and how like all the, like in, in the moment, you know, that there is a thing here. And it's like, for me, in the moment, sit, like the first step is wait, okay, instead of like me fantasizing about some future me or thinking about the way things were, like sitting just here in this and feeling, feeling. He was, my friend went to see him and said that he was talking to him. And Romdus was talking to him and saying, my cat, my cat is dying. I love my cat.

My cat's dying in the other room right now. And I love my cat. And he got real sad. And then he's like, but, but wait, like here, here it is. Here it is again. This, this moment, this as it is this. Wow. Here it is.

I'm here again now in that, but that for Romdus, at least in that moment, didn't mean ignoring the fact the cat was dying. Yeah. It meant being brokenhearted about it. Yeah. And that's what's when you're with him. That's what you're feeling is like he is fully brokenhearted. Yeah.

And still radiating this just beautiful, it's real, real love. Yeah. Not like. And unconditional, non-judgmental. Yeah. That's what I felt when those big blue eyes were looking at me was just like, I'm loved and I'm not judged. Yeah.

It's pretty super great. It's the, yeah. Well, I hope that, you know, at this other thing, I don't mean to keep going on, unless you have time, it is here, uh, or running over. Do you have a little, it's 255. I have, my appointment's not till six. The, um, because I think people build up an idea of like some kind of domesticated Jesus figure.

And I, you know what I mean? Like domesticated Jesus, like Jesus loves you conditionally, according to your um, if you've been, you know, running the, the relay race in the right way or something like that. But if you imagine like a divinity, just as a form of mental exercise or a kind of like sort of embodiment of compassion and love that isn't domesticated. In other words, a Jesus that you're sitting across from, who's your best friend, not some kind of like daddy or some kind of like whatever thing.

I don't, I'm sorry to bring up Jesus. It's just quite often an example used to embody love. That's a real brokenhearted thing. And I really like that a lot because the Jesus, whenever I imagine the Jesus, he's loving me based on like, you know, the way your best friends, like the way you're like the, it's not, it's like he's, he's vulnerable to, yeah. He's the suffering of the whole world. He's the thing that's like, I don't know that this is going to work out.

Yeah. I don't know if this is going to work out. This really might not work out. Yeah. That two people together. Except being like, actually, this is probably not going to work out. This ship's sinking. Oh, yeah.

Now that's love to me. That's the real deal. What do we do? What's your plan? Well, my, the lesson I've learned, my haze code lesson is that you can't plan. Right. That, that invisible hand may come down and pluck you up at any moment. There might be an 80 year old woman driving a Mercedes who has your name on

her forehead. You don't know. Yeah. You cannot know. Yeah. And, you know, that's the thing. Do you know about terror management theory? No.

Okay. Terror management theory is it really? It really extremes psychological theory. We're all going to die. And as human beings, we are doing everything in our power to ignore that fact. That's the terror management portion of it. So, you know, when you become conscious that you're engaging in terror management, what do you do?

How can you, if this giant underground river of anxiety is 10 feet under your feet, what do you do? Had, how do you make sure that it's not all about terror management? Yeah. And I think this is what all of the Eastern be here now because part of being here now is being conscious of that subtext of horror. Yeah. It's in, and that's a, uh, being conscious in the sense of it's like, no,

really con, I mean, it's like, we're talking about really, really, really. Cause it's, there's a real renovate. Like it's like this, it's like, okay, what we have to do here is start knocking out walls in this house that we've built. And we built some pretty great walls, spent a lot of time building the walls. Armoring, as it's called. So you have to start knocking the walls down. Now it seems like that you, if you knock the walls down, you're going to,

you are going to die as this is that, you know, this is the, when you realize that your entire identity is actually just a callous that is built up around something like you've, I didn't manage the terror. Yeah. It's then now we have death, like, cause if that's the case, like if your whole identity is made up of managing terror, that's your, that's who you are. Yeah. And then, yeah, you, there is a, a seeming existential threat.

If you're going to start, um, knocking those walls down, let the, if your whole, if your whole life is being a lion tamer and now you're going to just let the lion eat you and it, but this is not, this is to me, what I've learned is this isn't, when you hear, I mean, I'm sent, when you say things like this, it sounds like, oh, but you know, and then it's okay. It's, it's, it's, it's not, it's in the sense that. And yet it has to be okay because we have no control over it one way or another. So we have to be okay with it.

Not that it's okay. Yes. We have to come to a peace with the fact that this is, it is what it is. Yeah. Dick Cheney said. Well, it's kind of like it is not different from us. And that's the problem is that with this, this wall building and boundary building is essentially cut us off from our true identity, which in this sort

of continuum, this is where one of the things Trump has always blown my mind is confusion is a condition of enlightenment. So you have to have confusion to have realization, but in fact, confusion isn't like separate from enlightenment. It's actually on the continuum of enlightenment. And well, yeah. So that, so that within the confusion is in fact woven within it is the realization simultaneously, because the moment you have this awareness

of confusion, what's aware of the confusion? What is that? Yeah. Well, that's the other side, so to speak. That's what. Well, and, and the building of these walls walls us away from our, our mystical selves. Oh, yeah, I think so. You know, and, and our mystical selves are the ones that are inextricably tied

in with nature and the natural world, the spiritual world. And those are such an important part of like real life. Yeah. Yeah. And, and yet we do this thing where we divorce ourselves from that. And, you know, I am looking forward to the day when I leave Los Angeles and go somewhere smaller, less man-built. I've spent many years out in the desert living in a very isolated place.

Um, and I have to say I felt more in touch with quote unquote, the universe. Maybe that was a delusion. Why? I don't know. Because why are so many people doing this here? Yeah. Oh, well, I mean, terror management, terror management, greed. Yeah.

Lots of different reasons people come to live in the cities. Oh, but greed is just a diversion from the terror of death. Well, I mean, this is a thing I just read. I don't mean to ruin everyone's trip here, but the happiness is just another flavor of suffering. That in, in, in that, you know, the, the, um, uh, the, uh, what came to mind as we were chatting just now is the story of Ramdas and the woman who called him on the acid freaking out, you know, that story, he gets, you know, I don't know

how people had his number back then. I guess back then I, every hippie had his number on their fridge or something. Yeah, maybe they looked it up and she was tripping and freaking out. And so she called him and said, uh, you know, Ramdas, I've gone completely mad. I'm on LSD. I've lost my mind completely. And he said, okay, well, can you put the person on the line who knew to call me and could dial the phone and pick it up?

Cause whoever you are, yeah, you've completely lost it, but she's fine. Well, yeah. And so it's like, cause this is the, this is, this is where the paradox is, is like, here is, well, my friend has a saying, your face is two in the tomato, so to speak. And it's like, here is the grief, here is the heart, here is the thing. Here is the moment that I'm like, man, your gyros are off. So the gyro is still off.

The mental, whatever the habituation, the thing, whatever it is, the imbalance, the wobble, right? Yeah. But there is that other aspect of the self that is aware of the wobble. Yeah. That is holding the wobble in that however limited that field of awareness might be. Yeah. This is the paradox.

Cause then you start realizing, wait, I'm addicted to the fucking wobble, man. I'm like, the moment I start realizing that, hold on, who's the part of me that knows that this isn't all I am. And then what, then now some weird spaciousness starts opening up. I don't know. Yeah. With one thing they said to me before the first ketamine shot was, you will always be able to remind yourself that you're in a safe place.

But if you see a door, go through it. Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, my theories on ketamine go way beyond any kind of neurological anything. I don't know what it is. Uh-huh. I'm wetting your thoughts.

I'm curious. Well, I don't want to in any way flavor your experience or, or like, I don't know, putting plant any kind of like thing inside of your mind about what, what it may be, you know what I mean? I would, I don't know. I don't want to spoil it or put my own trip on it, which could, I don't know that that's possible, really. You know, suggestion.

I mean, there's always going to be a part of me that got, I'm not bragging either. It's just a bachelor's degree. There's always going to be a part of me that got that degree in psychology and there's always going to be a part of me that's like, yeah, it's probably not that. But, and I, and similarly, I don't want to, but, you know, John Lilly's work. The bill was really, really good friends with John Lilly. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and, and he, John Lilly was a devotee of ketamine. He took too much too often was my understanding. That's what they say. Yeah. Uh, and the, um, but he encountered alien beings. That's right. And I have encountered alien beings and I've, um, certainly have experienced

things that are, um, remarkable and completely unexpected and completely outside of my, um, paradigm or whatever. Yeah. And, uh, and I don't, I wouldn't, I don't know what it is, but I know that whatever it is, it's way different than any other psychedelic I've ever done. Wow. And, um, that experience has been monumentally transformative for me in the positive. And it, uh,

Well, that's reassuring to me because I still, you know, I had one session. It was pretty profoundly what the fuck. And I look forward to the next seven. Well, I mean, yeah, I, I look, I would be looking forward to it too, but I had to, but I wouldn't have initially, when I walked away from the session that I had, there wasn't a feeling of like, whoa, I want to do that again. It was just more of like, I just died. I was just annihilated.

I was just destroyed and, uh, I'm been afraid of death. I've been doing terror management. I didn't have the name for it back then, but that is exactly what it showed me was you're confusing your, your, your fear of death is actually your love of life. Yeah. And your love of life, love of life, love is life. And you think you're going to die? Yeah.

It doesn't, it wasn't showing me all this like, oh, you're, you're not going to, it doesn't work like that. Yeah. But it doesn't work the way you thought it does either. It's just a very, you know, our personalities are, I love what Ram Dass says, uh, uh, dying is completely safe. It's like taking off a shoe that's too tight. Yeah.

Yeah. I think one of the things I remember saying over and over again during that ketamine session was love is the only thing that matters. Nothing else matters. Love is the only thing that matters. Yeah. That. Yeah.

And that's, you know, you're, you're saying that and maybe there's a part of your consciousness that hasn't fully absorbed that, but there's something. Sure. But it's like when my friend died recently, I was talking to my wife and saying, you know, I'm fine. It's sad. It's sad. And then we're just sitting eating.

We're not to eat. And I just started weeping out of the blue because my body knew. Yeah. But my mind hadn't quite grasped it. Now that doesn't just work with grief. That thing that you're saying, which is just a distillation of the, what would you call it, the perennial wisdom, the thing that you hear over and God is love, the very, the very eight variants of it.

You can write it in a sentence. It's the equals MC squared of metaphysics, essentially. And, uh, but the fact that it's coming out of you is very encouraging. And whatever came out of me during this were things that were profoundly being realized in my body. That's why they were surfacing through my, why I was giving voice to them. That's in you. Yeah.

Is you. Yeah. Yeah. But whoa, whoa. But then, I mean, I don't, I, wow, the things I've seen in there. Hmm. Pretty, pretty wild, pretty wild. And, and, you know, one, I won't keep going on and on about it.

But I did have, I've had many, many experiences in there. One of them was the real alien contact I had. Well, and, and that was the thing that, um, Dr. Lilly apparently spoke about a lot. Yeah. Yeah. This was a being that, but it was another, like it's, you know, this seems to be like some kind of multiverse sort of thing.

I don't, like it's an alternate dimension or whatever it is. It was some form of sentience. It was completely in a, it's very difficult for me to describe it other than it was like a beautiful plasma like warping place with some kind of grid and the being was playing in the grid. It was like playing in the spaciousness of it. And it was aware of me. And it was like, you know, I was human.

Wow. And it was sort of conveying this, like, well, you guys really take it seriously. You're, it was almost the sense of like, why do you play that game? That, not the game of your wife or your ego, but literally like, why are you doing the human thing, man? That is heavy there. By the way, I didn't say man. It didn't talk like it was like a dead show, but it was the sense of like, that

was what it was transmitting is like, whoa, that decision. That was the other thing is like, wow, that's a heavy decision to do that one. You know, whereas this thing was disembodied and just sort of some kind of energy that still had some self, but it was light and enjoying just whatever this was, which I didn't understand. It seemed like a game it was playing, but I don't know. And was your sense that we had the choice to be that? That was it's that.

Well, it seemed to think it was that easy. Like whatever it was, it's sense was definitely playful and not like making fun of me just more along the lines of like, all right, that's your thing. I did. Yeah. It was that sense of like, okay. Well, that's totally something to look forward to. Well, it was, it's the other thing.

Well, then, then there's the other ones too. But they're all beautiful. Like what I found eventually with it is like there is a there is even in the annihilatory places that it can take you, which is like cremation ash frozen ground, just becoming pure frozen ground or becoming some kind of like magmatic flow or some sort of like primordial just base matter with just, I don't know, just fractal some kind of, I don't know, some sort of absorption in a fractal state. It's very easy to react to that with fear because what do you do?

How does this, this is terrifying. But the other aspect I've noticed with it, and this is again, anecdotal, but then other people who've experienced with me have described the same thing. There's like a viewfinder effect in the sense that these are like scenes that you're being shown and eventually the scene changes. And here's another one and another thing. And it's showing you these sort of, I don't know, landscapes or potentialities or variants of experience.

And I have no idea what that is, but I do know that having shared the experience with people coming out of it, one of them would say, the field of flowers. It was so beautiful. Did you see the, and it's like, yes, I saw that. What is that? Some kind of, or another aspect of doing it communally is someone starts talking. Wow. And you don't know if you're the one talking or if they're talking.

A voice emerges and you're not sure who said it. That sounds amazing. I don't know that I will have an opportunity to do this communally since it's in a therapeutic. Well, look, I don't mean to fly in the face of what I just said before about, we must do it with therapists. You know, I've been my old age. I feel like I'm just warning people all the time these days.

But regardless, there is a difference between what you're doing and that other way of doing it, I think. And what you're doing is a more focused, healing way. I'm very excited to hear about your journey through this. And sure, I really can't wait to hear how it progresses. Yes. And I hope you'll you got to let me know. I will.

I will, of course, happy to come back and talk about it. I feel like we just scratched the surface here. And I think there's a lot for us to talk about any time I get to be around you. I feel and I don't know if maybe this is like, I don't mean to say the sounds seem so negative, but it feels like one of the things you give people is this incredible solidity and strength and a sense of like, you know, every time I've hung out with you, I've had this feeling of like, OK, I think I can navigate my life a little bit more now.

You bring something out of me that makes me feel like, OK, OK, I think I can do this. But then simultaneously, you, who's giving this to you? You know, I like how do I don't know. I could see how there could be some a sense of isolation in that. Well, there is, but it's. It's kind of always been a condition of, I mean, I'm a weirdo. And I'm not everybody's cup of Joe.

And I've always, since it was really young, been aware of that. But the ones that hear the way I speak and what I'm saying really hear it. So, you know, and in the meantime, I have two great dogs. Bill, Bill spoke my language, which was what was so amazing and beautiful about that relationship. So now the haze code is telling me I have to learn from that, right? So, hmm, ignite the haze code. Yeah, exactly. We should do some haze code burning ritual or crucifixion.

We should crucify the haze code. Exactly. Thank you so much. Sure. Thank you for asking. Much thanks to Nicole for appearing on this episode of the DTFH and much thanks to our glorious sponsors, who I hope you'll support as they support us. And of course, much thanks to you for listening. If you enjoy the DTFH, why don't you give us a nice rating on iTunes, subscribe and subscribe to the part of the universe that is blasting you with love at every second. I'll see you next time. Hare Krishna.

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