The Binge Cases: Denise Didn't Come Home - I Am Rama | 4. Spiritual Contract

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

Will Arntz is a man of many talents, from filmmaker to laser physicist. In this episode, Will relives the time he spent studying with Rama and how it changed his life.  A Neon Hum Media and Sony Music Entertainment production. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch. It was called Candyman. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi.

Hey, how are you? How are you? A few months ago, my producer Kate and I took a trip to Montecito, a secluded community on the hillside above Santa Barbara, kind of away from it all. Yeah, there's a horse crossing sign here, so we got to go slow. Yeah, there's literally a pedestrian walkway for the horses. We were there for an interview, but it was hard not to take a second just to look around and to ask Will Arnst, the Rama student we were there to talk to, for a quick tour.

Well, here we are. Here was a covered patio at the bottom of a staircase, tucked behind Will's secluded Montecito mansion. There was a five-foot-tall rose-colored crystal at the bottom of the stairs. Behind it, the still waters of a swimming pool and vistas for miles. We're about a thousand feet in elevation, with a straight shot looking at the Pacific, and then there's the Channel Islands there. Montecito, the rich seaside community with sprawling mansions, private roads,

with the house numbers etched in stone at the foot of the street. It's a really nice neighborhood. So it's become now an enclave for very wealthy people. So it's very quiet. There's no streetlights. I love it. I joked with Will about how this looked like the place where the Royals

recently filmed an interview with Oprah Winfrey. I mean, good Lord, the Royals just moved here to Montecito. And they live a couple miles away. Well, I guess that settles that. It's easily the nicest residence I've ever encountered in my life. There's a warm breeze from the ocean. There's an avocado orchard,

fruit trees, and a koi pond. Okay, everyone, smile for the microphone. And see, they know this is food time, so here they come. I never thought the story of Rama would have taken me to a place like this. And truth be told, Will never thought he'd end up in a place like this. On our way up to his office, this separate casita at the foot of the driveway, he showed me around his collection of sports cars in the garage.

A teal-blue mint-conditioned 60s Corvette, says he's never put the top down, a V8 Jag. That James Bond Aston Martin. And all of this success? Well, by now you can probably guess what he attributes it to. You know, I can truthfully say two things. One, if it wasn't for Rama, I'd never be here. And two, I almost wasn't here because of Rama.

Meeting Rama would catapult Will to highs and lows he never could have imagined. He would find in Rama a friend, an adversary, and most of all, a teacher. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. From Neon Hum and Smokescreen, this is I Am Rama. Chapter 4. The Spiritual Contract. I should say here that for much of this episode, the facts come from Will Arnst during this interview and other conversations, and I was not able to independently verify all of them.

It's not a stretch to say that Rama was something of a Renaissance man, professor, athlete, author, frontman. But while Rama was more of an impressive dabbler, Will Arnst is a proper virtuoso. I was a research laser physicist, computer programmer, then entrepreneur, filmmaker. He made this documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know? Kind of a cult classic that merged quantum physics and spirituality. Will is successful. And if you go back to almost any part of his life,

you'll find that Will was kind of always impressive. I did very well in college, so I got offered this job to work on high-energy lasers. Lasers. His right-out-of-college coffee shop job required secret clearance. He got an assignment to write a program using wave optics to predict how high-energy lasers would behave. I don't even know what that means.

It was for the nascent strategic defense technology that Ronald Reagan would later call Star Wars. Pretty intense stuff. The assignment was supposed to take about two and a half years. Will did it in weeks. And it was a big hub-hub. They started calling me Einstein. They offered Will the world. Instead, Will wanted to be a hippie.

70s era hippie. Nomad pretty well describes it. Will spent the second half of the 70s bouncing around the country, doing odd jobs, substitute teaching, even dabbling as a filmmaker. He wound up in San Francisco in the early 80s and started working as a consultant for a medical lab, settling down again, a little. And that's where he saw a poster. I remember there was one I saw in a bank window. And I thought, how did they ever get the meditation thing in a bank window?

And then I looked down and there was a pile of these little newspapers printed up. And on the newspaper is this guy, Rama, sitting cross-legged in front of a Porsche, meditating. I'm like, oh, you got to be kidding me. Right. I pick it up. I flick on the back. And there's the thing of his resume of past lives. And I was like, oh. So I said, I'm going to take this home to get some good laughs. Will started reading it, reading stories from students about those trips to the desert. And then experiencing this phenomena. It wasn't at all what I expected.

And I'm like, huh, well, looky, looky. And there's, he's coming to town. So Will decided to check it out and saw a line around the block. And he was kind of taken with Rama's teachings. Now, I should say he's not one of the many people I talked to who saw this famous golden light. But Will was still left with a lot to contemplate. A lot of it was basically, how does one live and work in the world if you're spiritual and you're on your path to enlightenment, but you're still in the world?

Rama's thing, it felt different than other teachers Will knew of. Pragmatic, progressive. This felt like a spiritual path Will could take without giving everything else up and maybe picking up a few new tricks along the way. I remember when I was in San Francisco, he said, well, it's time for everyone to go to word processing school. And I was, word processing school? What? I mean, these are like, you know, we're all granola hippies, mostly. Granola hippies. Or worse, back then in the early 80s, it wasn't a huge leap for someone to hear spiritual

teacher and think dangerous cult. He said in the West, you tell people you meditate, especially back then, people are going to think you're crazy. They're going to say, oh, Jim Jones, you got some Kool-Aid? He's talking about the Jonestown Massacre, where over 900 people died in a mass murder-suicide in a jungle commune in Guyana. They all died by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. That's where that expression comes from. And Rama understood that if you roll up broke, wearing robes, saying you want to meditate, people will judge you. If you can stop your mind for 10 minutes, no one cares. But if you pull up in a new Mercedes, they'll respect you. In short, find a career that gives you a little cover to practice your spirituality

and lead with that. Will was on board and jumped headfirst into the computer programming world. He was a kind of ideal student, already comfortable around computers, already a scientist. And by now, he'd already stepped away from his hippie nomad phase. He was only working a few days a week. It allowed him enough money to live well, but enough time to study with Rama, hike in the woods, a foot in both worlds. Things went on like this until 1984,

when Rama initiated a string of sudden moves. First, he was shutting down the SF Center and moving everyone to Southern California, to Laguna Beach. Then, a few months later, to Boston. And right after everyone was settled in Boston, another move, some to Colorado, others back to LA. These sudden moves weren't as hard on Will as they were on other people, in large part because, well, he could

afford to move. One of the joke was, you have furniture? Because, you know, if you're moving, you don't accumulate that much. You're probably just going to stick everything in your car and drive off. But I had furniture and I had the wherewithal to move it. So I was very fortunate. A lot of students were just scraping by, trying to keep up, both financially and geographically. While some of the other students were getting their first programming jobs, Will was always a few steps ahead of the curve. I was making money. I was making, I don't know, $80 an hour, quite a bit. I'll save you the Google. $80 an hour working full-time back in the mid-80s, it ends up being almost $400,000 a year in 2021 money. Enough to allow him not only to accumulate furniture, but to ship it across the country with him.

Meanwhile, students were still owing Rama tuition. What kind of commitments did you have to make financially to Rama at this time? Well, that was always a moving target. Yeah. And the target was only going one direction. A lot of people couldn't swing it. They just peel off, stop showing up. On the one hand, it's like, you know, you're in the pool and the water's rising and you got to keep swimming to stay up. And it's like a lot of effort, but because you're swimming to stay up, you're getting stronger and you're learning more and you're becoming more confident in what you can do.

It's the kind of thing you associate with Wall Street or fancy consulting firms, these hyper-professional settings, big money jobs. Whenever money comes up in religious groups, there are questions. Many people saw Rama's fees as a sign that he was profiting off his students. And to an extent, he was. But it was more complex than that. Rama wasn't just trying to pad his bank account. His fees served as a sort of litmus test and nudged the least committed students out. I mean, that's one of the things.

When you look at the list of the things that make a cult a cult, one of the things is they make it hard to leave. Rama made it hard to stay. Hard to stay. On the surface, this mentality might seem like nothing more than a power dynamic. But Will says, for the right person, this dynamic worked.

And again, the thing that he would do from time to time is he would open a door, but you had to walk through. In the years that followed, Will walked all the way through that door. That's next. By the early 1990s, Rama was sophisticating his operation to keep up with the exploding tech industry. He said, look, what's going to happen is every company, every business is going to have a computer system. And you go into your doctor's office, he's going to have a computer system.

You're going to go into a dentist. You know, he went down the list. By this point, after a few moves, Rama and about 250 of his students were living in Westchester County, which is this affluent community just outside of the New York metro area. Move to Westchester was to get in that energy of IBM that's in our month. It's to give access to Wall Street far enough outside of the New York metro area. So you didn't get that the onslaught of 10 million people. Will was one of his students. So, you know, let's pack it all up once more and off to Westchester. He'd gotten a job consulting in Manhattan

with long hours. He'd get up, meditate for 45 minutes, take the train for two hours to New York City, work a full day, and then turn around and do it again. So by nine o'clock in the morning, you were like, wow, I've put in a whole day already. Will's daily life was making him tired, burnt out by the commute, constant hustle, the challenge to find more time in the day. But the grind had its upsides,

affording Will the means to buy something he really wanted, a Ferrari. Now, I know I've been telling you about how Rama's group wasn't like the other spiritual groups, that you didn't need to become a monk, you didn't have to give it all up to find enlightenment when Rama was your teacher. Sure, sometimes they couldn't afford the nicer stuff, what with Rama's tuition and all, but for students who could afford other things, it's my sense that they still looked to Rama for guidance as a role model. They bought things that Rama liked, tried to mimic him, or at least take his advice. Rama liked nice cars and had a few himself. Will knew, though,

that Rama wouldn't appreciate one of his students appearing to show him up. Because Rama had this thing, he had to be number one. He had to have the best clothes, the this, the that, the this, the that. And he was into cars, and he liked his Porsches and whatnot. One night, Will decided to risk it. He decided he would take the Ferrari to one of Rama's lectures in Tarrytown. So he and his roommate, that's right, Will, somehow both had a Ferrari and a roommate. Kind of a funny combo.

They headed to the lecture and looked for a place to park that wouldn't be too showy. You know, we kind of kept it to ourselves. But we really didn't want Rama to know. They parked and attended the lecture without incident, and at the end tried to sneak out of the side of the building to get back to the Ferrari. The door flies open, and there's Rama, and he looks right at it. My roommate dives underneath the dashboard. He doesn't want to be seen in the car.

And I'm like... I mean, it was kind of everyone kind of knew. Rama was not going to like this, but Will grinned at his teacher. He knew he was in trouble. He was like, oh, shit. You know, now, and I'm trying to be quiet and you can't hear this thing. So I pull out and he's like, oh man, I'm going to get into trouble. At one of the next set of meetings, Will ran into Rama outside. So he goes, nice car. I said, yeah, you know, I've always liked the Italian cars. I had it for a while and yeah, I just really, you know, I've always liked the Italian cars. I had it for a while.

And yeah, I just really, you know, enjoy them. He goes, yeah, that's really quite the car. Sell it. And he turns and walks off. It was not a suggestion. I mean, it's sort of an ongoing thing where that notion that your teacher is this perfected being, you know, over the years I had seen

things, I'm like, well, that's, I think that's ego there. I don't think that's enlightenment. I think that's ego. He didn't sell his Ferrari. Will was starting to get this feeling within him. He was done. He'd been studying for about a decade with Rama, meditating, learning, but he felt like he wasn't advancing the way he wanted. He wasn't really having a lot of fun. It was like, well, I'm just kind of, I kind of want my life back. But he couldn't just duck out. He wanted to do it the right way.

So he showed up at his last meeting. And afterwards, he's backstage. I go up there and I say, hi Rama. You know, I've decided I'm going to leave the study. And I didn't want to just leave. I wanted to thank you for amazing stuff you've learned and everything. But I just feel it's time for me to try something different.

He listens to me and nods his head a couple of times. And then he goes, well, you know why you're leaving, don't you? You didn't sell it. Will didn't sell the Ferrari, and Rama knew it. In the days and weeks after that moment, not a lot changed for Will, besides, of course, the big change of leaving Rama's study. He stayed in Westchester, kept commuting to his job in Manhattan day after day. And after about four months or so, I'm starting to miss it.

I'm like, you know, I miss this crazy thing I've been doing. But he knew that if he came back, he couldn't do so without giving up something specific. I know enough about etiquette now that after he said you didn't sell it, for me to show back up and still have the car is just plain insulting. It's just wrong. And I'm like, okay, I got to sell it. Okay, I'm going to sell it. So he sells the Ferrari. And I've told my colleagues and friends about what Will did next, and most find it hard to believe, to understand. Will stuffs $30,000 in proceeds from the sale in an envelope,

shows up to a Rama meeting, and gives the envelope to Rama's assistant. Just give it to him and just say, he sold it. He goes, huh? Believe me, he'll know what it means. He opens it up, his eyes get big as saucers. He goes, oh, he'll be happy with this. And that was it. Will was back in. It was good for me that I had had that time off to sort of like, okay, yes, I really want to be doing this.

I was out. It was fine. I'm back and it's finer. Although they took some of the profits from that sale and bought a high-end Lamborghini. Some things never change. Before all this, meetings took place at universities and lecture halls, but now they were renting space at Tappan Hill, Mark Twain's palatial estate north of Manhattan. At the same time, Rama began encouraging many of his students who were already independent consultants to start their own company, which is what Will did. many of his students who were already independent consultants to start their own company, which

is what Will did. If you have a consulting company, then you hire people and then you're making more because they're working for you. Rama was moving the goalposts, sure. But as always, Will was up to the task. He won a large consulting contract to work on a database for enormous companies like Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. Will told Rama about it one night at Tappan Hill.

I got a contract for my consulting company. He goes, great. He said, you know, how big a contract? I said, a million. And he does this like double take and his eyes get real big. He goes, whoa, very good. He goes, keep it quiet, keep it quiet. I'm like,. He goes, keep it quiet.

Keep it quiet. I'm like, okay, we'll keep it quiet. Quiet because these students were human. They were bound to be jealous of their peer rising the ranks while they struggled to make it in the industry. And jealousy meant bad energy. It's best to avoid. So, quietly as he could, Will hired a few people and started working on Wall Street.

His big contract was a big success. And around the time it wrapped up, Rama had a suggestion. Now the task is to develop software. You're going to then create a company. You're going to build it up. And you're going to make a lot of money because you don't now have to go and work. Once you have your product, you just start making copies of it and sending them out, and the money comes in. Rama, a spiritual teacher by name, was becoming, at least for students like Will, a business consultant too. And Rama memorialized this new dynamic for a few students by having them sign contracts.

Rama tells us all that he is going to be a partner in all of our companies and that what he will do is he will supply, quote unquote, a sales force form of fellow students and will energize people, give them the energy. And for that partnership, he gets 50%. And this isn't 50% of profits. It's 50% of revenues. 50% off the top. According to Will, he signed a contract to that effect. I should say, I haven't seen a copy of it.

By this point, Will knew quite a bit about what companies on Wall Street needed from their computer systems and knew how they could improve. I need to write, it's an automation system for large networks of computers to co-operate the tasks, the starting and stopping of tasks and triggering conditions and all this other kind of stuff. I'm like, oh my God, that's it. And this company that I'm working for needs it. He hustled and, true to Will's style, built the whole thing in about four and a half months. I'm not a computer person, but sounds incredibly fast to me. He called it Autosys. Will was still kind of a novice when it came to business, didn't have any venture money or anything to get going. In order to keep myself afloat, I sold the Lamborghini. Off it goes. That was part of the money that I used that I used to basically support myself. Cause it's a,

it's a company of me, myself, and I, and I'm writing all the code and it's just, I mean, fly by the seat of your pants. At one point, someone was very interested. Okay. They say, well, we're, we're interested. Why don't you, uh, send us a copy of the manual, your manual, operating manual. I said, oh, sorry. You know, it's at the printers right now. So it'll be done next week. Can I send it to you then? There was no manual.

Will was working 100-hour weeks, seven days a week. And he's beginning to get exhausted. And all this time, he's honoring that contract. And we got on the phone and I said, Rama, this 50% thing is crazy. It just, no one can work, can exist 50% profit margin. And it's not like, I don't have any, you know, we don't have any startup money. It, it just can't work. And he's basically said, well, yes, it can work, make it work. You sign the contract, it's 50%, you know, figure it out. Figure it out. And how did you feel when you heard that? Uh, I was pissed off. Will tried to push back. There was no startup money.

He was expected to run at a loss for the first few years. That's the norm in a lot of these situations, even when there's millions of dollars coming in. And with the money Will was sending to Rama, he could have hired employees, gotten some help. Meanwhile, though, the product was a wild success. It started catching on and, you know, going to Fannie Mae and starting, you know, and I had the connections with the Wall Street firms and they all needed the product. So now we're starting to talk to Goldman Sachs and that sort of thing. The pressure was pretty intense because what the software did, it basically automated their nighttime processing. A day of trading goes on, trading bell, ding, ding, ding, it's over.

Now you've got all this data that you've got to start updating. The pressure was relentless. One of my early customers, First Boston, said, look, your shit had better work because if it doesn't, we're in trouble. I said, what do you mean? He said, if we can't trade at 9 a.m. when the bell goes off, it's costing us $100,000 every minute that we can't trade. And if we can't trade because your stuff doesn't run, after 15 minutes, we have to start borrowing money. So your stuff had better run. The bell rang, and Will's product worked. The system would allow these companies to update their portfolios overnight,

a big deal on Wall Street, a competitive edge that everyone needed all of a sudden. Now, it's pretty funny. My memory gets hazy around this time. Because remember, I'm working 100 hours a week. I'm stressed out. I'm going out at tooth and nail with my teacher, who was not one to be trifled with, you could say. Will went to go see Rama in Chicago, where he was teaching at the time. He pleaded with Rama, settle for 40%, 30%. Rama wouldn't budge, and Will was barely keeping it together. And I remember I had a moment.

We were up in some high- rise thing, and I remember looking out the window and thinking, I could just jump. I just remember it was so, the pressure was so much and it was so unsettling and you know, still it was going well, but it could crash at any minute. I just remember thinking, I don't know, what the hell am I doing? Right. And I was pretty, but it was a high rise and you couldn't open the windows. So I went to my hotel room that night and slept.

Will couldn't just walk away. Too much depended on him. And when it came to paying Ramos 50%, Will had some options. The other thing, I had already figured out with my lawyer that the contract he had assigned for 50% was invalid. There was a bunch of reasons why, but it would have been easy to blow it up in court. I mean, it just wouldn't hold.

It was about their relationship. For me, I was realizing there was a certain dance, a certain etiquette is the word he would use, that you do with the spiritual teacher. And, you know,

and I had seen a lot of good things happen. So I'm not inclined to just go like, oh, you're full of it, I'm out of here. I mean, I could have done that. But I hung in there.

Rama finally allowed Will to get the deal down to 30%. Not great, but better. This wasn't a new contract, though. It was a handshake. One that would be tested before long. Will was making a lot of money. His company was doing better than he could have ever imagined. But he was working himself to the bone, under more stress than he had ever known.

And he knew he couldn't do it much longer. He had to get out. He went out to San Francisco to meet with an investment banking firm his uncle set him up with. And on the drive, he started blacking out while he was behind the wheel. Next thing I know, I'd be waking up and heading for the guardrail. And I was like, oh shit, I got to sell this company.

I don't care what I have to sell it for because it's game's over. I mean, I can't, I'm blacking out. Despite his desperation to get out, the sale didn't work out with the investment bank. But Will was determined. And I go back to Boulder. I'm like, man, okay, I just got to sell it.

I just got to sell it. So I sort of put the word out, okay, I want to sell. And eventually Will got two offers. So I call Rama. I'm like, Rama, I got it offers. So I call Rama. I'm like, Rama, I got it sold. He's like, wow, that's incredible. And I tell him what the deal is, and, you know, it's eight figures.

We're in the tens of millions. Tens of millions. SEC records show Illinois-based Platinum Technology International bought three companies, including Will's, for close to $25 million total that year. I wasn't able to verify the exact amount that Will's company, Autosys, was sold for. And when I asked him, Will says he's never made that public. Subsequent articles in Wired Magazine and on Salon.com put the sale at, quote, more than $14 million. When I asked Will to comment, he wrote back that they got that right.

The sale was for more than $14 million. He called that number decent. So Will told Rama how much. He says, well, congratulations, congratulations. That's just incredible. That's incredible. I said, thank you. He goes, well, what do you want to do? What did he want to do? Congratulations. Congratulations. That's just incredible. That's incredible. I said, thank you.

He goes, well, what do you want to do? What did he want to do? After all that back and forth, Will was completely taken off guard. Rama wanted to know what Will was going to do with the proceeds. Felt like a trick question. So I was sort of stumbling at that point. And he goes, look, you worked incredibly hard on this. I know what you put in.

I know what it took to pull this off. You worked incredibly hard. You basically did the whole thing. So whatever you want to do is fine with me. If you want to take the whole thing, you have it with my blessings. You can, whatever you want to do, I'm happy with. So just, you know, just let me know and congratulations. Well, it's very hard to describe that moment. You know, the leading up to it, I mean, that is the last thing I ever thought I would hear.

And I suddenly, it was like, holy shit. And I just had this intuition of my life going off on two paths. Will could keep all the money. What was I going to do? And it was a decision that I just had never even contemplated. He had been prepared to fight for his fair share, but he wasn't prepared for Rama to put the ball completely in his court. And now that he was right in front of him, Will

had a bit of a reckoning. And then I thought, well, I've been traipsed around the country with this guy for 12, 13 years. He's my teacher. How are you going to end it? It wasn't just Rama that occurred to me in that moment. It was the spiritual practice. It was the path to enlightenment. He was just the local representative of the spirit. And it was a bigger deal than just me and Rama and millions of dollars. So I said, well, Rama, we said 50%, 50, 50,

we split the profit and we shook on it. I said, so I consider that binding. So I want to send you half of the proceeds from the sale. So they said, well, are you sure? I said, yes. I said, wow, that's very, very generous of you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. I said, you're welcome. I should say here, Will didn't tell me exactly what Rama's cut was. Wired Magazine approximated it as one third of, quote, more than $14 million.

Will told me that because of two partners and some closing costs, Rama's overall take was more like 40% in the end. When I asked Will for some kind of record of the transaction, he told me he didn't have it because the sale was over 26 years ago, or as Will put it, five computers ago. He also told me that his accountant from back then passed away about a decade ago, and that the same was true for Rama's accountant. According to Liz Lewinson, Rama put the money he received from Will back into what she calls the system, into things like office space, computers, network equipment, that sort of thing, and salaries. He also hired students to work on some of his businesses. Anyways, back to Will on the phone with Rama. And that was it. Hung up. And that's how that whole drama ended.

So much of that drama was the result of the various deals he and Rama struck. From what students have told me, it seems that Rama entered into contracts with about a dozen of his students over those years. And he typically only did so with students who were a little farther along in their careers. Students like Will, who had independent consulting contracts. Students with a proven track record and experience. Rama pushed those students to start companies, develop new software, and struck deals with them for partial ownership of their companies. One student I emailed with started his company in 1989 and agreed to give Rama a 49.9% stake in it. He wrote that the more of the business Rama owned,

quote, the more energy and consciousness, end quote, he was putting into it. The student wanted Rama to own a higher percent for the good of the company. I've shared Will's story with a few people. When they hear that Rama got millions of dollars in the end, some see it as a toxic situation, Rama extorting money from one of his most successful students. I asked Will about that. How do you explain that to people who haven't maybe had the experiences

that you've had with Rama and other teachers? How do you reconcile what I think on the surface looks to a lot of people like, and I'm not saying, I'm not characterizing this way. I'm just saying like, I know the world and I know how people will respond to that, who might see that as toxic. Yes. Well, that is the fundamental problem with trying to figure out what a spiritual teacher does. And if you look in the history of spiritual teachers in the past, the things they did, oh my God, it makes Rama look mild. So it's cleaning up the karmas, it's tearing down the ego.

So from the outside, it looks horrible. I mean, if you look at an Olympic coach, probably some of the stuff they do to get their people studying with them to the Olympics, you'd go like, oh my God, that is torture. But to get to excellence, you really, really have to push the person beyond. After that, Will was pretty much out. By 1995, he stopped studying with Rama, took a year off from everything, just reading, sleeping, recovering.

He would go on to start another company and sell that too. He made that documentary, What the Bleep Do We Know? Will would go on to have a pretty great life. Today, looking back, Will has some complicated thoughts about his years with Rama. He never saw the golden light, never found enlightenment. But he says he got a lot from him. You stand next to the man and it was different. There was an energy, a thing about him.

I mean, with him, it wasn't this little like, oh, yeah, I feel kind of happy. It was, whoa, there's something. And it's hard to put words on it. If it wasn't for Rama, we wouldn't be here. Because I would have never done a software company. I would have never pushed myself even to do advanced consulting because I can live simply. I'm just happy to have the freedom and not do it. So on the one hand, it wouldn't be here if it hadn't been for that. But it almost wasn't because of Rama. And the almost wasn't was the 50%, 40%, 30%. So that almost killed it. And yet, in the end, here we are. After the sale, Will was out of the group, but he and Rama kept in contact.

You know, the two of us had kind of been through the fire together. In different respects, we had been through the fire together. So there was a camaraderie there. There was an understanding and there was a trust that had been built up between the two of us. They would have dinner in New York. Will visited Rama in New Mexico. And it was very pleasant, very healing for me in a lot of respects, because there was that respect that I had had for him.

And I think it was mutual at that point. And so it really developed. I mean, would you say we were friends in the normal sense? Well, no, but in some respects, we were friends and would spend time together. And really, after two years, all of that angst that I had over the whole process really just dissipated. And I had a new life. I bought a house. I didn't have to work. I had plenty of money. And I was really set on a new trajectory in my life that I fully well knew that I would have never gotten to on my own.

One day, in April 1998, Will checked his phone before he went into a retreat. He'd gotten a voicemail from Rama. It's very nice, just thanking me. And at the time, I was like, oh, that's nice. Gee. Gee. And I didn't really dwell on it, but I thought, oh, that was nice. And then I came out to the retreat and found out.

And I was like, wow. Rama had died on April 13, 1998. How did you make sense of the fact that he took his own life? You know, I don't know. Yeah. And I don't know because this gets back to what I was saying about why an advanced being does what they do. And I don't know. I mean, the way he went, I don't know. I mean, the way he went, I don't know.

I don't have a judgment on it because he always did unexpected things. Well, it's that time to think about the ways Rama changed his life. And being clear, Will represents one of the endpoints of the Rama effect, if you will. He did well, and he gives Rama a lot of credit for that. It was up to you to do the work, to study with him, to stay with him.

Rama wasn't going to do it for you. To me, this is one of the most powerful arguments against calling Rama a cult leader. Seems to me that students had a free ticket out the door whenever they liked. He may have upped the ante, demanded more of his students, but in some cases this resulted in quite a bit of success.

One student of Rama's suggested that he was a bit like a coach. You expect him to be tough on you and to push you to do your best. That person said he had no problem paying more money for more results. The teaching, in his mind, had a clear ROI. Will's story is an example of that line being blurred. Will was under a sort of contract with Rama, but even that, in the end, was kind of smokescreen. The real relationship, as Will sees it,

didn't happen inside the lines of his business deal with Rama. Will says he would never have pushed himself to start his companies, to become the version of himself who invented things that giant investment firms needed to be competitive, to make all that money. Being honest, the skeptical part of me hears Will's story and thinks, geez, this guy would have been successful no matter what. He's brilliant.

And when the chips are down, he'll work 100-hour weeks. And it's not like Rama made it easy on Will. He negotiated with Will until the very end, pushed him to his very edge in a way that there's no way to know for sure whether Rama was an obstacle to Will's inevitable meteoric rise, or perhaps an accelerant. Maybe he was the missing piece Will needed to get the life that he wanted.

In the end, I have to trust Will on this one. Without Rama, we probably would have never been in Will's beautiful villa overlooking the Pacific Ocean in one of the nicest, wealthiest enclaves in the country. I got pushed to the very edge. And once I was at the very edge, I got shoved over a few times. So, I mean, when you hit that bottom, you start finding out what you're really made of. But the sum total of Rama's approach didn't work out for everyone. It also cultivated a competitive nature among some students and despair in others, one that could make you feel really alone and lead you

to a very dark place. I think she always felt like she didn't really belong. I wonder if she was more isolated than even some of the rest of the group members. That's next time on I Am Rama. I Am Rama is a Neon Hum original podcast recorded and produced by Kate Mishkin and me, Jonathan Hirsch. Our editor is Vikram Patel. Catherine St. Louis is our executive editor. And I'm the executive producer of the show. Thank you. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Thanks for listening. And you can find more about this series and all the podcasts we produce at Neon Hum by visiting our website, neonhum.com. I'm Jonathan Hirsch. Thanks for listening.