Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCfvZ0l2z1g
[Music] oh you're a real professional you're a one year one ear open one ear on type of person that's funny i did that accidentally you did you i'm sure it's habit yeah i bet it is yeah like a lot of radio professionals will do that really they almost want like a little bit of ambient yeah i like to hear the sound of the room still the real noise yeah who does that jim norton does that yeah yeah it's odd but i get it i do it in this vocal booth oh that makes sense yeah right you want us to hear the actual sound not like the digitally enhanced and the coming through speakers and you want to hear yeah everybody hears sound differently in pitch particularly i hear pitch as it sounds like waves to me so like if i'm tuning my guitar i hear one one one or one one it's like a little vibrato sort of so when i'm when you push sound through air it's pushing air and it'll make those little waves but if you have just this on it takes all the air out of it and so i don't hear pitches well when i'm singing and so i'll always have one earphone off so i can hear those little waves that i cause if i can match my wave to that to the wave i'm hearing i know i'm in tune that makes the most sense for singers right as opposed to any other kind of musician because you're you're modulating air that's part of what you're doing yeah it's all breath control singing is just about it's because it's basically like a garden hose so all you have is like constriction dilation and then tone comes through where you're pushing your air like where you're going to put that if you're going to put it in your face mask white on your cheek bones or narrow it to here and that's how you sing i would imagine the way you hear things is different too like like i don't i'm not a i love wine but i can't tell you what it is you know but a somalian can drink wine and sift it around and they have this educated palate i would imagine like sound to you is like you have like a different depth
of understanding of sound particularly vocal sound right do you feel that yeah definitely like you definitely cultivate your ear but what i love about music is uneducated people can tell whether you're being sincere or authentic or not like it's kind of fascinating but something does get communicated in a voice that tells you a lot about their heart and how they're feeling and so much information gets communicated beyond pure tone that i've always found that's so interesting about music yeah in regular conversation that's true as well right it's with everything really and some folks don't see that and they're the ones who send money to televangelists yeah right right exactly or cult members that join a cult or those guys are probably great at you know tricking a lie detector test too like they're just good at presenting a really specific thing that a lot of people can't see through there's a place that i was gonna buy out here um for a comedy club and i was in the middle of this process and it wound up falling apart because there was like some environmental issue but the place it turned out was owned at one point in time by a cult and there's a documentary about the cult and it's called holy hell and it's on amazon prime and i watched it but i didn't watch it until i was in contract with the building i was like holy [ __ ] holy hell yeah holy hell it was so sad it was so sad there's this crazy guy who built this theater that i was gonna buy just so he can dance in front of his followers and these poor people they started with him in west hollywood and then they made it out here to austin and they built this structure specifically so that he could perform in front of his followers and this was a place i was going to buy and convert to a comedy club and i hadn't watched the doc i should have watched documentary first did you buy it no it went up falling apart because there was an issue that i don't think i'm allowed to talk about i think i have an nda but it wasn't good there was an issue that needed to be resolved it's resolvable but it wasn't resolved right um but the documentary like you see these people who
are not good at seeing sincerity and they they don't know what's real and what's not real and they wanted this alternative path of life that was just you know they had a community together they grew their own food and it was all about love and but ultimately it was run by this crazy guy who uh [ __ ] all of his followers and the men followers the women followers i mean i think he was [ __ ] everybody and he was seems like the reason to have a cult it's like some people learn to play lead guitar to do that and other people have to become cult leaders or they do both like david koresh the waco guy didn't he do both he did both yeah a little bit of music manson both yeah there's a great manson book i don't know if you ever heard of it it's called chaos by a guy named tom o'neill who's been on the podcast before it explained it he worked on this it's a crazy story and unfortunately for people that have heard this before i'm going to just give jewel a little quick breakdown this guy was writing an article and he was my my very good friend greg fitzsimmons he was his neighbor for 20 years and this guy got an article he got a consignment to write this article and in the process of writing this article about the manson murders he starts uncovering all this crazy [ __ ] about the real root of what had happened and it turned out 20 years later what it was really all about was the cia and the cia had been doing these mind control experiments with hippies in lsd and they did a lot of it in prison and had gone to prison to visit charles manson had given him an acid in prison as a part of these studies prior to yes prior to his release and then during his whole rampage like the whole manson family supplying them with acid getting him out of jail every time yes yes yes getting him out of jail every time he was arrested and they ran a clinic in san francisco the haight ashbury free clinic which my wife's mom went my wife's mom was a hippie in haiti ashbury in the 70s went there in the 60s went there for treatment like she lived there and went there and it was a front for the cia
they were they were doing drug experiments on people they also did a thing called operation climax midnight climax operation midnight climax they would take over brothels and they would have two-way mirrors and they would give the prostitutes drugs to give to the johns so these guys would come in to try to have sex and they would give them a drink and they would take a drink and they would get lsd and so then they would study them so they would inadvertently trip when they went to these places and they'd be studied by the cia and they ran these for years holy [ __ ] yeah oh that makes me sad there's this great book called traumatic narcissism that talks about the psychology that often leads to co-eaters it's a clinical book but i found it really really fascinating about the type of person that can has that need that drive to cause other people to submit to help support their own image of themselves well the crazy thing is how prevalent it is throughout history right because it's we're looking at it in terms of non-sanctioned versions of this like the holy hell guy or manson but the catholic church yeah or many different churches like you're dealing with the same exact scenario you're just doing it in a sanctioned form where you have cardinals and bishops in the pope and it's all going down but at the end of the day when that person is running that parish unless they are like as true to the word of jesus as is humanly possible to the point where they're selfless and they really dedicate themselves to like i was having a conversation with a good friend of mine today about that where he was telling me about this guy who works with the homeless in austin that literally bought this chunk of land built housing on it has people come out there he and his wife live with these people and works to rehabilitate them like the guy literally does like the work of the lord like he's trying to like help these people's lives but he's he's really doing it like they're like he's the real deal like
how many of those are there it just takes so much personal self reflection and work and that saying of absolute power corrupts absolutely it it's really true and not many people you know where you start separating people from god and saying no you can't talk to god i can talk to god for you like you just set yourself up in obviously a really powerful position that's going to put everybody else at a disadvantage and you have to be so morally intact to be able to handle that kind of power and i don't know why you would want it anyway yeah you wouldn't want it if you're that morally intact yeah but it's like that's the idea about presidents right anybody who would want to be president shouldn't be president it's true it's so sad it is sad there just doesn't pay good enough you're not gonna get somebody to do the job have you ever listened to uh hardcore history the the podcast there's a guy named dan carlin who's amazing and he's uh he says he's not a historian because you know he's not like technically accredited as a historian but he really is a historian he's just more of an amateur historian but he's incredible at breaking down historical events and he did this one about martin luther and about how martin luther was the you know the beginning of lutheranism lutheranism how do you say it lutheranism sure sounds right in the i guess the 1400s or 15 yeah i know exactly anyway what he did was translated the bible into a phonetic language that is accessible to everyone so instead of it just being in latin where these folks who were you know religious had to go and have it given to them by the priests instead they were able to read it themselves and they were also he he did another thing that made him a heretic where he said you you should be able to interpret the bible and into your own you know thoughts like you should be able to interpret god's word you shouldn't allow anybody else to interpret it for you this is what century we're talking 1400s i think it was i think it was the 16th century i think
it was the 1500s or maybe it was the 1400s but it was uh yeah i hadn't heard of them it's pretty interesting because they tried to kill that [ __ ] i don't doubt it i bet they got it done i mean is anybody i don't know but they're like hey man you're [ __ ] up our gig exactly because he came along and made the bible accessible what what year was uh fifteen hundreds yeah wow what is your 1507 yeah i think what people don't realize and not that i mean i don't know if you know much of what happened with my mom and i but like something i don't think people realize is like that lobster in the pot thing of yeah oh god it's like a whole thing it took me a whole book to figure out even how to describe what happened with my mom but to give you like a starting point when i was so my mom left when i was eight i my dad took over raising us we lived on a homestead in alaska i found out about that through watching that show that's my dad i know that's crazy alaska the last frontier when i watched that show i was like wow these people are cool and then someone goes you know that's where jewel came from i was like shut the [ __ ] up no way then i looked at everybody there i'm like oh my god they look like her that's true the big nose the cheekbones [Laughter] they have nicer teeth but what are you gonna do [Music] yeah it's funny on that show my little brother texted me he's like i'm about to sign a tv contract and he doesn't have a tv so i thought he was like an electronic store trying to buy a tv and they were making them sign a contract or something and i was like why are you signing a contract to buy a television he's like no like a reality tv show contract and i was like don't sign it like tell who are you talking to what do you mean you know i was trying to get the details through this text and he's like i don't really know who's doing it it might be discovery i'm like discovery network like you're about to
sign a contract i was like please have them call me nobody calls me i'm like trying to figure out what's going on so i had caa cold call discovery and just say hey if you're looking at the kilcher family we represent them and then they call the discovery calls the producers and like how do a bunch of hillbillies and alaska have caa calling us like in two hours they had no idea it was my family like it was completely just discovered them on their own wow yeah pretty funny it's a great show yeah i enjoyed it i love the idea of living like that i really do when i came up and when i first got discovered the press had no idea they were like jewel grew up on a hippie comment i was like i did not grow up on a hippie commune like that's not how it's not what a homestead is or jewel was raised on a ranch and i'm like that's closer but it's not what a homestead is but they just couldn't understand and would of course really make fun of like i was raised with an outhouse and i grew up only eating what we killed or canned or harvested but it was such a foreign thing but it's been nice homestead homesteading is basically when the government gave you free land to settle a wild territory so my grandmother and grandfather were born in switzerland living in germany my grandfather was going to university i think in geneva maybe and he came up with this theory because he was taking a history class on the fall of civilizations and he had this theory that if a population hits a certain critical mass that it collapses and so he started looking at the population of europe and he felt like europe was going to collapse this was in the late 20s early 30s and so he convinced all these people philosophers painters just a big random group of people that europe was going to fail that sounds like what i'm trying to do about america you would have liked my granddad if he was right you're just off by a hundred years no i think he was right because world war ii happened yeah right anyway he was sent ahead to us as a scout
to go to alaska because they were giving away free land it was still a territory it wasn't a state yet took him two years it's like a crazy story hiking over harding glacial ice field with a ladder on his back and he'd lay the ladder across crevices in the ice and then walk across the ladder you know wow i have old like footage of him um on a raft of logs he made himself standing up paddling with huge chunks of icebergs all around like gnarly [ __ ] like my granddad was really gnarly and he didn't grow up doing that no it was like raised in switzerland you know people were just so hardcore yeah and my granddad was like he was just heart not hard guy so anyway the war starts to break out like hitler starts to become an actual problem and now nobody can get visas in this group except my grandmother whose father had come to america during world war one and went back to switzerland so anyway she can get a visa nobody else can so she decides to leave everybody her boyfriend her family everybody because she didn't want to be in europe while this war started gearing up so she got on the very last civilian ship that left right before the war she shows up in alaska my granddad's like where is everyone she's like nobody could come it's just me and he's like where's your boyfriend and she's like i broke up with him and he's like do you want to get married and her mother was a seamstress really poor but had given my grandmother all of her cash and just said this is so you don't ever have to rely on a man which is to me so sweet so my grandmother had this huge wad of cash in her pocket probably more than anybody in that area had and she felt it in her pocket and then she looked at my granddad but she really believed in his vision and she was like sure why not they got married and then they walked 200 miles across the wilderness to get to homer they walked how long did that take there's no roads there was no like horse and wagon trails there wasn't [ __ ] you're just talking about wild land
and then once they got no this is like what's when did the war break out we're talking about 36. i'm terrible anyway 30s um so it was right around then so they got to homer they knew they liked homer um which is on this place called hatchimac bay and then they walked up and down there trying to find a place they found a place and then they just carved a living out of like legit raw wilderness no grocery stores no nothing you know wow and it was just that my dad's childhood photos look like the 1800s it's a horse and wagon with wheel uh wooden wheels and when the tides were out they could take the wagon down to the beach and then they could go into where there was a town and they could get some basic supplies like flour you know but that's all they bought was like maybe flour salt and sugar and that's how my dad was raised like my dad's childhood was gangster how did he know how to do everything so everybody in the group decided to learn a skill before they came and so my grandfather learned how to build cabins you know other people were supposed to learn different things but nobody came and so they just figured it out nobody came no it was just my granddad and my grandma so all the plans that all these other people have they couldn't come because of the war nobody could get visas it was dunsville so it was just my granddad and my grandmother and they had eight kids in the wilderness wow yeah i mean you need some workforce you know i know but then those kids it's like how do they find people how do they find people to hang out with my dad's childhood is nar it was amazing but homer turned into a city you know it turned into a little town so there was a school eventually they were originally homeschooled but eventually there was a town and i mean just amazing stories like stories from my dad's childhood were just gangster i'll tell you one story this sounds really bad i hope my dad won't mind the story now mind you my dad never told me this story for years and years so the story didn't really register as an interesting story to my dad but i found it really fascinating so
getting cheese was really really hard up there and so somehow my grandma got a huge block of cheese and there was no electricity obviously so it's out in an ice box you know in the back of the house in the shade my grandfather was gone a lot he was often exploring he also became a senator and so he was kind of into politics and was gone a lot so my grandmother was running that ranch with eight kids by herself with you know nothing so she goes out in the back she'll get the cheese and the door is open the cheese is gone and she looks on the ground and there's a cat that's very fat at this point with little crumbs of cheese everywhere and so my grandmother takes the cat chops its head off cuts it open grabs the cheese out cooks the cat and serves it with the cheese sauce and it wasn't she wasn't i mean she's probably pissed at the cat but that was just food you know what i mean it was just like holy [ __ ] that's yeah it was a gangster childhood holy [ __ ] she ate the cat with cheese the kids did everybody did like it was just there wasn't a lot of food out there you know they'd have one chicken for 10 people like it's just wow people don't realize what's like to really live off the land like you you don't waste a thing you know what i mean you just don't like where we butcher cattle like we had a few cattle we only hunted like we only had what we raised vegetables and stuff but we eat everything you know we gathered the blood and we made blood sausage and we ate everything it's just how it was well that's what you do when you need to actually make use of a full resource because it's finite yeah we're accustomed to just being able to go to a store and people are so disconnected from the idea where food comes from yeah there's one of the things that happened during the pandemic when things started getting weird and food started missing from shelves like i had a buddy of mine who sent me a photo of his uh he was in north carolina at the time he sent me a photo of his store and that there was nothing on the shelf in the meat section he and he just sends me a
text dude i gotta learn how to hunt yeah and that thought process went through a lot of people's minds like i'm just assuming that this supply chain is always going to be in place and they're always going to be delivering chickens and all this stuff is going to be there for me to buy but if it's not it rewires our perception of what food is it rewires our perception of what what it means to survive like what when you have to cook the cat yep what the [ __ ] does a cat taste like that's you know well enough cheese sauce you know you can only value what you have a relationship with right if you don't have a relationship with something you can't value it right and so i think that as we moved out of villages where we relied on nature we had a strong relationship with nature we valued it we valued our food it was sacred it wasn't just hunting hoo-ha-ha it was like holy [ __ ] i need this animal and it's a relationship yeah and relationships change you right so if you're in a relationship you are required you will as a byproduct evolve as a human right if you're in a relationship with a wife you're going to evolve because of that relationship when you quit evolving you quit having a relationship you quit growing together so i feel like when we went from a village and started to urbanize we stopped having a relationship in a lot of ways i think it kind of caused us to be schizophrenic as a humanity we went from this cohesive environment where there was a healer and food and everything was in this really cohesive environment that we had a personal relationship with and then all of a sudden we no longer had a relationship with our food somebody else would bring it somebody else would bring the milk and someone bring the vegetables and it started being parceled in and then you look at like healthcare turned into this building over there and they took care of our bodies and then mental health care didn't even come up till really recently but we kind of caused ourselves to be schizophrenic and out of relationship out of harmony with what makes us human actually and so
people don't know i mean the reason the planet to me is in the shape it's in is we just don't have a relationship with it we have no idea where our food comes from we have no idea the value of water people don't even know how heavy water is when you're carrying it i grew up carrying it you know and i grew up watering the garden with buckets that you bring up from the stream and it's like boy you didn't waste a drop and i was in a relationship with that i value it and that to me is one of the saddest things is when you're saying people don't know where their food comes you're saying they don't have a relationship with it anymore but they do have the the there's like an advantage to be able to go to a doctor who can fix a broken leg there's an advantage to someone you know running an mri on you and finding out exactly what's wrong and not having any guesswork so that there are advantages to modern medicine there's advantages to technology you know you can share ideas instantaneously because the internet like there's good and bad but i think what's happened is it's happened so quickly and we've adapted to it so quickly that our our bodies are not designed for this they didn't evolve in this sort of a world they didn't evolve for fluorescent lighting and cubicles and traffic and all the things the woes of modern society that credit debt stress all the things that we take for granted that are just a normal part of life one of the reasons why we're so [ __ ] up is because we're we're literally a square peg that's been forced into a round hole so our edges get sheared off we get stuffed into this thing we have all this open space because we don't totally fit in and now we're trying to navigate this world that we've created ourselves with no forethought it's just happened right the society that we've created it's not like it was like this will be the best for people and when we take into account people's psychology and the needs and our human reward systems and all the different things that are in
play because of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution this is probably the best way to make it smooth no that's not not what happened it just happened and one of the things that is so weird about our our society is that it's so technologically dependent and that's the thing that evolves and changes the quickest yeah out of all the things around us so we become dependent on it we can become attached to it it evolves so quickly that it's constantly rapidly changing and forming and our biology has no chance to keep up with it and then you have all this crazy anxiety and all this weirdness and these dopamine rushes that people get from staring at screens all day and they can't help themselves and screen addiction and all this weirdness that's a part of modern life in 2021 is it's really just because we've invented some really cool [ __ ] yeah that has some purposes right particularly but it's like we are the most advanced civilization in the history of humankind but we're the unhappiest you know suicide rates between 2006 and 2018 went up 70 across almost every demographic those were pre-covered numbers that's because of facebook i blame that i think it's all of it you know i think it's like distraction and i was raised around a lot of american natives i was adopted by these uncles when i was like 15 i moved out at 15 and these uncles like boy they taught me a lot but it's really interesting because like my uncle's taught me certain definitions of like power has a definition an act of power is something that serves you and your community and it becomes a circular action and so it has a momentum and becomes self-sustaining whereas you know in general that was not that's not in modern day standards considered an act of power an act of power is just something that's self-serving and you get as much as you can but it becomes hierarchical which cause it to implode it just falls apart it implodes in on itself because it's not circular and i really think that we just threw out we were so eager to call traditional wisdom we were just calling indian savages when they
were actually healing complex things and no they didn't have a shot at chickenpox and all the crappy [ __ ] that we expose them to but there's so much wisdom in that tradition and in many indigenous traditions that when you look at like how our technology has outpaced our philosophy we really we're struggling as a humanity we're depressed we're distracted and you can't keep yourself safe if you're not here you know so the problem with distraction is it takes you it's like trying to keep a house safe from burglars by leaving your house to go find burglars anxiety is like that you know what i mean like the present moment means staying in your house and it's not comfortable it might not feel good in your skin but that's the only way you're actually going to figure out how to advocate and make good decisions and then that's not even just to mention like are you going to make decisions strictly from your head or is your heart involved at all we just don't live in a society that values heartful decisions but i don't see how you have anything sustainable and i love capitalism i love all that but you still have to make a decision from your heart if it's going to have sustainability which to me is just if you're selfish that's a great idea yeah no it's great for everybody but obviously you seem to have worked through it through you understand that there are these pitfalls and you avoid them and you recognize them and you can speak so eloquently about all the things that are wrong with our modern society and the way we view stuff so it's not insurmountable and technology exists and that's how we found each other we found each other through yeah yeah that's that's how i mean it does work that way yeah like there's there's not neces it's not necessarily all bad it's like saying guns are bad guns aren't bad right it's just an inanimate object you know it's people with guns it's the person can be bad people with guns are bad bad people with guns are bad and what we have like if to me like i like elegant solutions so i love complex problems and i like going why do we have pollution
and me too and gun violence and opioid addiction at higher suicide rates and is there a common denominator to me there is a common denominator and it comes down to mental health for lack of a better word but we're not doing well and when we're ill when we're emotionally ill we'll leverage a vulnerable human or we'll get addicted to porn or we'll take painkillers or i'll feel disconnected and i'll just trash my environment but it's all side effects of the same cause and bureaucracy government just society we've lost in a matter of a few short generations what do we do with pain people don't know how to transmute pain we're built for it you know like we are built to handle adversity we're built to be resilient but monocultured is the opposite of resilience resilience means having multiple skill sets to handle something right so you have like 15 tools to try and get a job done depending on what the job is we've lost resiliency because we've lost a lot of emotional intelligence and to me that's where i've focused all of my life's energy life energy because i knew when i moved out at 15 then i was really [ __ ] like i knew that the odds were against me and i didn't want to be a statistic and i looked at nature versus nurture and i was like if i received bad nurture am i done am i ever going to get to know my real nature and it was depressing at 15 to think your life's done like you're pre-programmed and so my life's purpose was to try and re-nurture myself to get out my real nature and see if that was possible well you're also i mean coming from a homestead that's uniquely qualifies you to have this diversity of skills right because like kind of that's how everybody got by that's the only way right i mean if you're going to build your own house and hunt your own food and grow your own vegetables and can them and like there's a lot of things you have to learn how to do you can't call someone to fix the plumbing yeah you can't call you don't even have plumbing did you guys have a well no we had streams just streams you just went and gathered water you didn't think of like hooking a pipe up to those things and bringing it to there it was just everywhere no we never did but when we got older we had a hose
that ran from a stream up through a hole in the sink nice but then like the worms and the springs oh would get into this the hole so you'd like they'd take my i mean i was the only girl on an all guy like ranch and so take my little pink pretty scarf and tie it around the hose to catch all the worms i was like there goes my cute scarf did you guys ever get giardia or anything from the water no never that's uh what is that it's if there's gophers and stuff and things together i think anything but i i think me and my family kind of grew an immunity i do think you can kind of grow oh yeah tolerance to what's in the water around you well that's how folks like down in mexico don't have the same problems with water that you know when american tourists go down there and get montezuma's revenge how come they don't get it because they have a different gut biome yeah exactly but but with i do think like with homesteading it gave me a tremendous amount of advantages as far as i was raised in an environment where it was like figure it out like i know you don't know what you're doing but you're gonna be expected to figure it out so that's really good and then i wasn't raised with a male female system where the women do this job and the men do that job i was raised where you just everybody does everything and so i was expected to do all the work and i know i wasn't as strong but i know i was as smart or as capable and i was still expected to find a way to do it not to mention like the eight kids that were originally born my dad's siblings were six girls and two boys so it was very female heavy in the women train you know logged fill their own trees skinned to their own trees built their own homes like that's just how i was raised which was a huge advantage and i think it's why i was willing to move out at 15 when my dad wasn't nice i was like i'll go on my own when i was homeless i was like i'll be by myself i don't have to be by the other homeless kids so i think that independent spirit helped me but the type of resilience i'm actually talking about is more of like an emotional toolkit emotional resilience and you know when i moved out at 15 i realized i had this genetic inheritance but i also had an emotional one and it
was that emotional one that was causing systemic abuse and it was getting handed generation to generation my grandfather beat his kids she was also great you know like also a great person but also be the kids and then my dad didn't want to be that way when he grew up my dad's childhood was so traumatic that when he went to vietnam he was relaxed it was like the first time his nervous system was like like an exhale oh my god that's crazy that's gnarly and so then my dad you know leaves vietnam marries my mom has three kids and my mom leaves and all of a sudden he's just trauma triggering nobody knows what that we didn't know those words you know so he starts drinking to try and help that and he ends up repeating the cycle much less than his dad mind you but started getting hit at that age and so that's why when i moved out at 15 i just knew like statistically i'm going to end up in an abusive relationship on drugs drinking some version of all of that and i didn't want to be like to me like the only counterculture thing to do the only truly rebellious thing i could do was like how do i get happy and if happiness isn't taught in my home is it a learnable skill is it a teachable skill and that was the impetus for everything still to this day where do you think you had this this insight to to break this mold where do you think the how do you think you had the wisdom like where do you think it came from do you think it came like part of it might have come from what's required of you when you're living on a homestead that you had to develop this sort of you had to overcome adversity you had to develop character you had to do things that were very difficult to know that you're capable of doing those things like what was it that allowed you to have the kind of confidence that most 15 year olds are not they're just gonna tolerate whatever [ __ ] their environment throws at them because it also provides warmth and a roof over their head i think part of it was you know that i was raised on a homestead and i was raised around really strong people male and female that i was
willing but to me it was kind of logical too it's like i can either live in a cabin with an a-hole or i can just go live in a cabin it was like that just seemed a lot nicer to me and i'd been working since i was young and i just i hate being unhappy i know everybody does but i really hate it i really dislike it and i hated being hit and i hated being held at and so i was willing to pay the price and figure out how to pay rent and figure out how to get jobs so that i didn't have to be around that were you allowed to work at 15 i mean it's a small town so you find stuff to do i was giving horse rides to tourists for a cowboy in town and i was cleaning buildings you know i'd make money that way but i think also like i i was lucky i had a teacher that exposed me to like greek philosophy and that's how i knew the idea of nature versus nurture and that idea got me thinking like wait a minute what is my nurture and then i was like wait a minute it's horrible and then it sounds stupid but we had this bunny named caramel and caramel was raised in the chicken coop because it was the only safe place because bunnies in alaska don't do very well and it thought it was a chicken like it would peck at its food and it kind of waddled funny it didn't like do a normal hop but it kind of waddled like a chicken and it would lay on the nests and hatch eggs for the hens and it was so cute growing up until i moved out because then i was like what if i'm a bunny that thinks it's a chicken and how will i ever know what i am if what i was raised around is what i think i am and that [ __ ] with me like that thought just i had to i it like it it really did my head in for a little while and i was like i have to find a way to know what my nature is irrelative of the systems that i've been given around me and so how do you start to distinguish between self and other and that kind of stuff just turned me on i thought that was really interesting and
i liked that kind of thing so did you get these ideas from specific books like what were you reading something did you have a mentor did you have people that you look to to have conversations about life no there was none of that around it wasn't like that not to say reading the symposium or you know the allegory of the caves or something isn't mind altering because it is you know and that kind of stuff i think really helped me think in different terms but i learned about like the dialectic right socratarian soccer is that how you say it anyway the dialectic yeah two people have a conversation a third thing gets known that was really cool to me it was empowering to me and i think it was in eighth grade or something and then i realized if i asked myself a question i could often hear an answer so i could have a dialectic with myself i could sit and get quiet and ask myself a question and i was like i kind of know an answer or i'd feel like i knew a direction and then i think between that which was starting to cultivate cultivate like an inner awareness i call it your greater sense of intelligence you know there's your brain which can only know what you're programmed to know but then there's like this other thing you can tap into and i think a lot of artists that's what we do we're supposed to tap into something a little bit outside of our brain a little outside of you know i call it i don't know what else it's called my greater sense of intelligence and when i did that i noticed patterns i didn't realize i noticed so if i sat and wrote while i was doing that i was kind of just going inward i would see patterns and i could ask myself questions like why does my dad hit me and i would see an answer that i didn't know i knew before and that was really interesting and i found it fascinating and it made me love it and then the other thing was not watching nature i really think nature taught me how to be a human i was raised around such big beautiful nature that you know if i'd sit on the bluff and watch the tide go in and out i was really sad this one day and the tide takes a long time to go out there
and a long time to come back in and for some reason it just hit me like nothing's permanent nothing so i'm sitting here really depressed thinking the rest of my life is going to be depressing but i'm not so special that i'm the only thing in all of the universe that will not change so all i had to do was sit it out and that one thing changed my life it kept me from killing myself multiple times because i just knew all i had to do was wait for the tide to come back in and i would just sit there and i'd rock because i was having panic attacks once i moved out by 16 i was having like bad panic attacks and i would just sit there and be like the tight the tide's just out but it has to change because nothing's permanent and that helped me so lots of things watching nature i could name so many things that i learned from nature it's it's so easy for us to get stuck in us and not take into account the grand scale of everything that's around us and i think it's one of the reasons why people that live on beachfront areas are more relaxed because i think you look at the ocean you go i'm not [ __ ] like whatever my problems are it's like in the face of the magnitude of water in the face of a mountain in the face of nature the face of the stars there's nothing more humbling than looking up at the milky way and just trying to imagine that this goes on forever and that there's hundreds of billions of these same kind of galaxies that are out there you can't imagine but then you're worried about your electrical bill or whatever whatever it is that's [ __ ] with you you're worried about your relationship and but in the moment those things seem like everything they seem like the only thing yeah but over time they seem silly like relationships right like i remember my girlfriend broke up me when i was 18 and i thought my life was over i can't couldn't believe it how can i go on this uh this kind of pain is unstoppable like
this is uh unsustainable you can't imagine living your life with this heartbreak and then like a month later i was like who gives a [ __ ] wow thank god i didn't like marry her or something or yeah have children with her or something but in the moment it's so hard to see yeah so hard to see outside of it and then it's probably i mean all of that is probably these human reward systems that are designed to keep us alive you know the the ego and the jealousy and all these different things that are in place they probably serve some sort of evolutionary purpose at some point in time but they're not serving us a purpose in our lives not without intention you know it's like when i was homeless you know i never drank i never did drugs so i was like i have to avoid that if i'm going to figure my life out but when i was homeless i was stealing a lot like a lot it started with food and then it just turned into anything and so i was doing it for a rush i think it was like a coping mechanism it made me feel in control it also made me feel like i was taking care of myself it was really nurturing and it was also just a great distraction you know it's an intense thing to engage in that makes you not think about what you're scared about and so i sat down and i was like it actually i was i was trying to steal a dress i was in this dressing room and i had this dress and i was shoving it down my pants and i saw my reflection in the mirror and i looked like a statistic you know so like that noble thing i set out on three years earlier to not be a statistic came screeching to a halt and i see my reflection in a mirror and i'm shoving this dress down my pants and i'm a homeless kid stealing and i'm gonna end up in jail or dead and it just hit me like a ton of bricks and i just remember thinking i thought a lot of things that was like one of the most like transformative
moments in my life the first thing i remembered was this quote that was attributed to buddha that said happiness doesn't depend on who you are or what you have it depends on what you think and i didn't have anything left and so i was just like i have to double down on figuring out this what am i thinking thing but the other thing i mean it just led to so many like insights it was like i don't even know where to begin because it's like so many things start coming to my head but i couldn't tell what i was thinking because i had so much anxiety and i was just disassociating a lot i was getting agoraphobic at that time and so i decided like your hands are the servants of your thought if you want to know what you're thinking watch what your hands are doing because it's like thought cooled down into action because your hands are just obeying thoughts right so i decided for two weeks i would just write down everything that my hands did and it was some dumb life plan but i literally did it like and i couldn't stop stealing right away you know so i'd write down when i stole write down when i washed my hands or if i wouldn't shake somebody's hand whatever the hell it is i wrote what my hands did for two weeks i don't know what i was looking for you know at the end of the two weeks i look at my little journal and it looks like a bunch of weird [ __ ] i'm like well i quit believing in myself but the much more interesting thing is is my panic attacks went away in that two weeks and i didn't even realize it until i sat down and what i stumbled on was presence right i stumbled on being so absorbed in the moment that i couldn't fixate on things that i was afraid of and this idea of like fear is this thief that takes your past it projects it into a future that hasn't happened and it robs me of the only chance i have to be safe which was my main concern was safety which was right now and if i couldn't even show up right now to advocate for myself or to make a good decision i was [ __ ] and no wonder i'm anxious that should make you anxious you know that's a bad idea to leave your
house to go look for burglars and so that was sort of what started to really create it was an incredibly like fertile period in my life of a lot of insights and the reason i was going there was because when you talk about like the biological reason for like why do we have jealousy why do we have these things there must be some kind of evolutionary purpose i was looking at that with addiction because addiction was huge in my family i was now addicted to shoplifting and i just sort of was like there must be a reason our brains are capable of addiction right i don't think like god's looking down going haha mistake or whatever so why can we get addicted and maybe it's just that you can get addicted it just can be to good things or bad things and that really comes down to your intention and how purposeful you can be and a lot of us are so hurt and have so much pain that we're not conscious enough of and that we can actually be intentional and get ourselves off sort of the merry-go-round of our programming and set ourselves on a new course and that was my goal i wanted to get off of my programming and into how do i take this car off of autopilot and how do i start taking this car where i want to go my car being me yeah and so with addiction i realized there was like it looked like a triangle to me but it was a before a during and after and i could tell that the before was clearly before i wanted to steal the during was when i was stealing and the after was after and so i started to get really curious about what's happening during each of those three phases which takes a lot of awareness right i had to learn how to get pretty present to even notice those three things so what i realized was like i would get scared i would react by stealing and i felt a reward i felt powerful i felt calm i felt in control which was great when you feel scared and out of control in your life and so i realized i couldn't affect the first part being homeless was just really triggering and really scary but i could control i could affect the middle
right where i was stealing and to replace it with a behavior so i started to replace it with writing because i was writing a lot in my journal and it felt awful like i just literally had to force myself um but again it takes cultivation um like sometimes i wouldn't even wake up till after i stole you know then sometimes i'd kind of wake up while i was stealing but i didn't want to quit and then sometimes i'd notice the urge to steal but i really wanted to steal and i would anyway and then finally like after months i started to notice i want to steal and i'm going to make myself write so you know anybody listening i just don't want to think this was like overnight aha like it took months for me to get to this point and then writing just sucked it felt sucky it didn't feel exciting or fun i was miserable it made me realize how miserable i was like it didn't feel really rewarding and then that got me onto this really cool thing of noticing our body only has two states like we only have two basic states of being dilated and contracted and that's it and every single thought feeling or action is gonna lead you to one of those two states and so i started to keep track every time i noticed i was tight you know i noticed from my body language like i was sitting like this i rock a lot when i get anxious i kind of don't breathe as much so if i could notice that i'd write it down i'd get out my little notebook and i'd go to my contracted section and i had three sections in there thinking feeling doing and i would just write down what was i just thinking feeling or doing and i wouldn't i would just write it down and i'd go on with my day and this is all did you learn how to do this from anyone did you figure this out on your own how to write these things out and that like to develop these categories no it was just like my curiosity like i wanted out i didn't want to die homeless yeah i just wanted out i wanted to do better and so that was just my motivation and i would just get really curious and go
inside myself to try and go what the hell is going on why am i doing this why is my behavior like this and so when i was relaxed i would notice and then i'd write down thinking feeling doing and then i looked at it after like two months and it was a really easy pattern to see the things that dilated me were joy observation gratitude curiosity the actions were helping other people like volunteering reading sleeping exercising being outside on my contracted side it was certain thought cycles definitely got me like i don't know what i'm doing that thing could just that one sentence for some reason would do my head in because i didn't know what i was doing and it was so scary i was so scared because i was in so many bad situations um but jealousy greed fear um worry not sleeping not connecting to humans not exercising so then one day so my panic attacks were still really a big problem and i started to get to where i could feel a panic attack coming on and i was like wait a minute your body can't be in two states at one time like it just can't you can only be in one at a time and so i was like i wonder if i could hack my way out of a contracted state by forcing myself to participate in something off of my list that dilated me and so i looked at gratitude and i was like i'm going to try that one and so like my anxiety is building up i'm doing my rocking thing where i'm about to head into my panic attack and i'm like what am i going to be grateful for and i'm homeless and i'm feeling pretty sorry for myself that day and i can't think of anything and so one of the best like hacks to get present is curiosity and observation because you you can't like observe this and not be really present because you have to be present to observe it so i used that to look around me and i saw the sunlight filtering through this palm tree and it was made this like lacy pattern on me and it reminded me being a kid in alaska laying in the meadows and watching the tree you know through the
leaves and i don't know why but it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks that like i was alive and i was here and i hadn't killed myself and i was so grateful and the gratitude of that which was so unexpected but it just erupted and moved me to tears that like what an act of defiance to not have killed myself and have been there and just trying to figure it out and i was suddenly grateful for myself which was weird because you know i had a lot of self-loathing and all kinds of things at the time and the next thing i knew a half hour had passed and i didn't have a panic attack you know and that to me was like eureka like i'm figuring it out like i'm gonna figure this out i'm gonna turn my life around you know wow so this the desire to kill yourself was this just from the sheer pain of the anxiety and the the depression and just the hating the position that you're in life that you just can't take it you just want out yeah that permanence you know i guarantee you like whatever had me sitting on the bluff that day watching the tide saved my life because whenever the idea of this is too painful life is too long to go on this way it's just too painful to feel this way for 60 years that thought will get you to kill yourself but because i saw that tied i was like i just have to i'd call it buckling myself in i would just have to sit there and wait it out and breathe and wait it out and then plans helped me like you know if you want a different outcome you have to do something different so i was very action oriented because having a philosophy doesn't change your life actions change your life and so that's why i was very into like if i got an idea i tried to figure out how to make it practicable like an actionable step a behavioral step and then i could see a result and if the result wasn't good i would have to go back to the drawing board
and do something different but if you want tomorrow to be different you have to do something different today and then you have to take notes on it and you have to see if it works and if it doesn't work you have to try something different and then you just have to not give up and you have to keep doing it but what's so impressive is that you develop this structure and you figure the these steps out on your own like even the step of having communication with yourself to try to come up with a different result to sit down and think about the different states that you're in and what are these acts or what are the different activities that lead you the different thought processes that lead you to the good states the bad states like what is it and that you were you were looking at like you're a scientist studying yourself yeah yeah that's amazing it's pretty incredible that you were a kid and you were that insightful but i guess that's the thing about horrible situations like horrible situations will force a person to find some kind of a solution that they didn't think was available before some they'll find a way or not or not yeah you'll dig deeper or you'll fold up yeah one of those two things are going to happen but that's i don't want to say this but i want to say it anyway like you don't get to make a u without that which is so [ __ ] it's like you're a really interesting person like how do you get to be a really interesting person you gotta have a [ __ ] up life it's unfortunately true you know i don't know anybody that's interesting that had it easy yeah i mean i know a lot of nice people that had it easy they're lovely they're wonderful yeah but they're not you know like there's something about the emotional depth of your music in your lyrics that probably wouldn't be possible if you grew up in the suburbs with a happy mom and happy dad and i mean i don't want to say wouldn't be possible because everybody's got their own trials and tribulations and life and
just the just the existential angst of being a living finite organism and spinning around on a planet hurling through infinity all those things [ __ ] with you but i don't think they [ __ ] with you as much as being a 15 year old homeless kid in alaska you know i think that's with an abusive family that's a that's a whopper that's a heavy load to carry and either it breaks your back or you develop some [ __ ] intense quads you know it's true because you can't carry it around it i wasn't homeless in homer by the way i had a cabin and i paid rent you know where were your homes in san diego oh it was later it was when i was 18. i wouldn't have sex with a boss and he wouldn't give me my paycheck and oh boy so i was like fine the story got worse it's the story of my life wait till we keep going let's keep going why not look here's the thing the the thing that is very valuable about these conversations is that most people have been in a moment of darkness and despair in their life and when they see someone like you who's loved and successful and they go how how did she get out how did she do it and that these conversations like this these descriptions this your own personal experiences that you're relaying in this very honest way is fuel for people it's so valuable for someone right now that's in a bad place and i guarantee you there's probably a lot of people listening this right now that this is resonating with them and they're they get something out of this is not available through any other source you can you can get things you can get information from books and you can get you can get inspired by film and art but to hear a person an actual person that you know has actually made it through the fire and come out on the other end and has some wisdom and it's like hey here's a map of the territory yeah this is this is what i went through and your you're traveling through the woods might be different than mine but i'm telling you if you can get there's a clearing
outside of this you can get there yeah it's true like what i what i was so interested in is like you know for a kid like me there wasn't a safety net right i didn't have the family safety net i didn't have money i didn't have access to therapists and i didn't want to think again that my life was over because i was in that situation like does that mean there didn't get to be happiness for me because i just wasn't born in the right situation and that's what you know one of the things that really inspired me to keep going and then once i you know got discovered i wanted to see if this was teachable to other people because i was very concerned about the people that again didn't have those safety nets didn't have access to therapy and god forbid what if therapy doesn't work for you you know like what if you go to your therapist and you just don't feel better and your life doesn't change those people often want to really kill themselves because they think it must be me like the expert can't fix me i must be truly broken which is not the right takeaway it's just the wrong therapist it's just the wrong thing or it's not practicable enough and so i started taking these exercises and really thinking about them of like all right what exactly did i do like how did i make these really practical and then can i teach them to other people and so i formed a youth foundation about 18 years ago with a friend and we just give these types we have these types of conversations with them and you know you go look you have this pain but this pain can get transmuted and transformed into rocket fuel for an incredible life if you don't tank with anger and bitterness and go down that road you have to transmute it and it is like it's medicine it's poison it's being bitten by the snake and having to transmute it and turn it into medicine and being able to teach kids how to do it without therapist and i'm not anti-therapist at all it's just that i think we should be taught skills to be
able to do this for ourselves it is in us you know and these kids are going to find their own unique ways to do it for themselves and it works you know like our we take complex ptsd self-harming eating disorders suicidal ideation and these kids turn around in radical fashion and they're happy and you can see what it looks like on the other side of suicide ideation you know what is the name of this organization it's called inspiring children and is there a website yeah inspiringchildren.something.org probably probably yeah so take me through this process so you're you're 15 you're living in alaska how do you get to san diego when i was cleaning buildings in homer alaska for rent a dance teacher came from out of state and he was doing a two-week dance workshop and i wanted to take it and so i asked him if i cleaned his studio in exchange would he let me take a dance class turns out i was a really crappy dancer but he found that i sang i was gigging in town with my dad um and so he came to see me sing and he was a teacher at a fine arts boarding school in michigan called interlochen and he was like you're really talented you should apply to this boarding school like so he helped me get an application and i filled it out and i got a 5 000 scholarship but i still needed to raise 10 grand in very little time like a month and three women in alaska they were like you can do this like you can do a fundraiser i'm like what's a fundraiser and they're like so they kind of they're like can you do anything to raise money i was like i can sing because i've been singing with my dad since i was five and then in bars since i was eight but i only sang backup i sang harmony i didn't sing my own songs certainly and so i loved cole porter i loved coldport because there was a gay man and me dying to get out apparently and i loved the entire gold porter songbook and so a local piano player
like learned the piano parts and so i sang these cole porter songs and the the town and my aunts taught me you know how to make flyers and how to pass them out and then how to go to businesses and ask for donations and then how to auction them off during the show and so these three women just like really hooked me up and i earned ten thousand dollars that night the whole town basically like came together to send me off which was really neat and so off i go to school i i'm a feral animal at this point like i'm not very house broke you know like i'm not a real cultivated i was scrappy for sure so i had enough money to get a plane ticket to detroit but i had to hitchhike from detroit up to traverse city which is so dumb but that's what i did i don't know how far it is but traverse city where the school is pretty far in the upper peninsula in michigan so i show up and i um i'm walking through like the main street of the campus and i'm looking around and um people are like pointing at me and i don't know why they're pointing at me and then a teacher rushes out to get me and she goes you need to go to the dean's office and i'm like what have i i mean i haven't even figured out what dorm i'm in or anything and so i go into the dean's office he goes where are you from and i was like homer alaska he's like why do you have a knife on your belt i was like what and i looked down and like i had a really large skinny knife on my belt but that was really normal where i'm from it wasn't like an aggressive thing so i almost got expelled my very first day because i showed up no you shouldn't have the skinny knife with you everywhere i didn't know that did you keep it with you for self-defense or did you keep it with you to skin things well it was a habit like you always had a knife in alaska i always had a knife i mean it's just i mean if you guys carry knives you just get used to having a knife on you it's handy
and then yeah hitchhiking i hitchhiked a lot because like when i first moved out i was hitchhiking into town so it was good to have a knife on you yeah for sure so it was both but i didn't think it was like some aggressive horrible thing or that it would get me expelled my first second on campus did they understand when you said you were from the last year yeah he and i i when i was in a you know like i had a i mean i clearly wasn't trying to be i was i was an easy read um and so he was just like give me your knife he like shook his head he was like oh my god he's like where are your parents i'm like about that yeah i'm here on my own and he goes do you have money for books i was like what do you mean i'm at school like right you give me the books you give me the books and he was like he shook his head again he remember him looking at me like who is this kid and he's like do you have food i was like i'm at a boarding school like i thought they'd have food yeah but apparently had to pay for it and i just didn't know that and so now i was like in this position where i didn't have money for books i didn't have money for food and i was like do you have a job like that you could give me and he goes let me get back to you and so he gave me a job like as a model for the art class fully clothed you're like a leotard but it wasn't my ideal job like wearing a leotard like i didn't like my belly i didn't like what was all happening down here so i was like i wasn't too thrilled with like standing in front of a classic like my little belly like made into sculptures it was such a bummer [Laughter] that is what i did wow and so you're 18 at this time how old are you then 16 16. you're 16. yeah so and then you go from there first of all before that i want to back up your dad sang and he brought you with him to bars yes so my mom and dad had a show at the
captain cook in anchorage alaska and they did shows for dinner tourists and it was like an alaskan show there was like a lot of footage of my family that was homesteading and my dad wrote original songs and me and my two brothers would get up and be part of the act i yodelled so i started yodeling with him yeah since i was little and then when my mom left my dad and i became a duet and it just turned into bars so i was bar singing from a really young age and like you know i would have guys put dimes in my hand and they would fold my fingers around the time and they'd go call me when you're 16. you're going to be great to [ __ ] when you're older oh jesus and so you just i just said that's eight yeah nine nine ten right underneath they waited till you're not yeah it was nice it was awful you know i could have i'd come out of a bathroom and i remember this guy like measuring my esophagus it was really aggressive a little scary like i mean he did it lightly but it was a scary thing right and he looked at me and he measured his fingers like the disc on his fingers have you been cheating on me i'm still not sure what that means maybe it's like a [ __ ] joke like i don't quite know but i just knew it was sexual and it was aggressive and like it was scary you know it was just so that's just what i was raised around but i learned so much too like i learned everybody was in pain everybody was in pain you learned this from bars yeah that's the thing about being a child and being exposed to bars right you get to see adults in this like very exposed and vulnerable way you see them drunk yep yeah they can't hide it yeah and so i just realized everybody's trying to deal with pain by like drugs or drinking or sex or rage you know you just it's so much raw life you're watching and so i was just like and i knew i was in pain because that's like right after the divorce and my dad just started drinking and i was like note to self like so your dad didn't
drink it all before the divorce there were more men i think i had an idyllic little mormon childhood pre how do the mormons get to them oh moms are everywhere that's the great thing about missionaries like religious is like it knows how to do it yeah um i mean there was every little religion there was like you know a little church homer was like church bar church bar church bar wow yeah and so your it seems like your dad has always had this sort of show biz thing like if he wanted to if he was doing that show up there where he was doing like an alaska show for dinner theater and then moving to bars like he always had this desire for an exorbitant amount of attention right my grandmother had been an aspiring opera singer and poetess in europe that was like her dream but she gave up that dream to come to america and have kids in a free country but she taught all of her kids to sing and to draw and sculpt and my aunts and uncles and all of my cousins i have a wildly talented family they're all just very charismatic they're great storytellers and you didn't have a tv right up there so they were just writing songs to entertain themselves and it wasn't because they thought they'd be famous it was just it was entertainment they didn't have a radio and so they would draw and they'd paint and they they my whole family is really talented my dad definitely was the one that seemed like he would pick up where his mom left off and maybe carry on that torch he definitely had dreams of going to nashville and making records he actually did when i was young make a record in nashville and he'd sell that at the shows in anchorage but then when my mom left it was like he gave up those dreams of trying to be known on a bigger scale and we just made a living bar singing that was the family living was that yeah and we did like five hour sets you know
in bars and i was like i just had to promise myself that i would try to handle my pain as it came like like that's when i promised i would never drink or do drugs it was just like i had to find a way to handle the pain that i was in so i didn't end up on that road because it was like there was this kernel of pain and these people just kept burying it with like alcohol and drugs and whatever and it turned into this mountain and they either would kill themselves or just die but they never just all they had to do was deal with this first pain you know what i mean and so that just seemed illogical to me and i know it's hard like when your pain adds up like mine got aggregate but i just still kept trying to find a way to deal with it as it was which for me was writing you know what's fascinating is that most people don't figure it out that's what's fascinating it's like when you're on the outside you're a small child and you're looking at this and you're going oh i see what's happening here these people are all in pain and they're covering this pain up with substance abuse and gambling or whatever it is but how many people figure it out it's so small the numbers so tiny like if you looked at all the people that have various addictions and various like self-destructive patterns of behavior in their life how many of them come out of it on the other end for the better it's probably 10 or something you know it's most people they go down unless they have some really good help or they figure it out because they hit rock bottom and they come to an epiphany most people don't no i mean i hate to be like the percentage guy i don't know what the i don't know if 10 is logical or fair but it's a number and i've i've met a lot of people that have addiction problems and very few of them ever come out on the other end it's it's fascinating because it is the ultimate puzzle for your life to solve like most people who you know if you're if you're a healthy
person and you're in a job you if as long as things don't don't go terribly wrong with your health in terms of like your physical health you move forward and you kind of progress and you eventually get to a better place you go to school you get a degree you get a graduate degree and hopefully you get a job but there's this progression that takes place that's tangible and it's trackable but not when people have addictions it's like that puzzle seems to be insurmountable because it's a puzzle that involves your emotions and evolves it it involves whatever it means to whatever your identity is whatever it is that's keeping you in this this prison of your own control and that it's it's amazing how few people get out of that one yeah it might be our biggest problem as humans it is but to me again it comes down to somewhere along the line we forgot as a species what to do with pain we forgot how to transmute pain into something that's useful and becomes nourishing and you know one of the things it'll be in my next book it's not in my last one but this idea of like when you tolerate the intolerable you become ill you become emotionally ill and so if you're raised in an abusive environment and you're tolerating something that's intolerable abuse yeah you start to become emotionally ill right you become neurotic or you become maybe let's call it an eating disorder or you'd be start to become emotionally ill if you keep having to ingest poison so i'll just call the intolerable a poison it's an emotional poison it's an experiential poison and so then you have to figure out how to get a simple and that was like a lot of what i've had to do is like how do i get it back to the most root like the top domino because if you keep treating the pain further down the domino line it doesn't matter because you haven't gotten to this route of like how do i stop tolerating the intolerable you know so for people that were raised
in really abusive environments or whatever it is whatever your pain is it's you have to start gaining skills for what do i do with pain without reverting to my bag or negative coping mechanisms and then it's also like how do i stop tolerating the intolerable so i stop getting ill and those just aren't things people are helping us talk about or think about yeah it's it's not something that comes up very often and it's it's also it's it's not something that's taught to many people in terms of like how do you cope like what what if you feel bad what do you what's a healthy thing to do exercise you know meditate uh have conversations with people you love and trust if you don't have those people you know seek out help try to do something like this is not like standard knowledge that we give to kids it isn't and that sucks you know i really was angry about the fact that everything i needed to learn like when i moved out i knew i needed a new emotional language i inherited this emotional language it's like a five billion data points right for your brain our brains just pattern match and so emotional you know i mean just think of how many data points that is an emotional language is immense and i learned one from my family right and i knew where to go to learn spanish but i didn't have anywhere to go to learn a new emotional language and that was like how am i going to solve for that you know i started by just looking at other people and when they had a skill i liked i would just sort of study them or i'd even interview them and just talk to them but with time like what i've learned to do is like you really do have to to neurologically rewire yourself you have to have these behaviors and you have to teach yourself this new emotional language and we've lost that like our culture has just lost it and we should be being taught it in school i actually just took this tool kit that i developed and put it into a language arts program for public schools so it's english class that meets all your core standards but it also starts to put in a lot of
these like little exercises i've talked to you about today because english class is a great place for it because it's all writing assignments and reading assignments um but just trying to think of ways of like how can i help infuse these human skills like we're taught dental hygiene but we're not taught are you wondering why one's long and one's short yeah i didn't mean to interrupt no it's okay i just saw you talking it it is yeah that's okay i just noticed it because you're moving your hands around like hey how crazy is she this is my coke hand this is my so you developed a tool kit yeah because in the last 18 years i've been like really just refining like how do i help these other kids that don't have traditional support systems and then how could i like scale these skills that help us be happier through systems that already exist so like through public school systems you know like english class can i figure out how to back in these skills into an english curriculum so that every kid who comes through that english class gets exposed to these ideas and then i'm also creating like a culture company i did it with tony shea originally from zappos but he passed away uh but now i'm doing it with the hudson bay company where i'm creating a culture program for companies because i really believe if we can figure out how to invest in humans in a more meaningful way they're going to show up with more bandwidth at work i think it'd be smart for employers to invest in their humans understand what are your pain points that i can help you solve whether it's relationship fitness or parenting fitness or anxiety and emotional health fitness give them training and education and that i think people are going to show up at work with a lot more bandwidth creativity resiliency and all those things should pay off dividends oh for sure because we need to be being taught these things yeah i mean some you know some corporations provide a fitness center at
their gym make a gym for their employees so they can have a place to exercise because it's better for them you make healthier more resilient employees but to have something like that for mental health yeah i mean as important if not more because the mental health would actually facilitate you doing something about your physical health because you'd be healthier you'd think about it better you'd have a better perspective yeah and so many i mean i forget i have all the stats somewhere but you know billions of dollars are lost annually for employers because of mental health days like employees taking sick days for mental health reasons like i do just think it's just going to be better for everybody if we can figure out i call it like putting the village back into you know the city like we got to find ways of helping humans where humans are feel better yeah and i think we kind of have an obligation to do that and if we can scale it through pre-existing systems why not i think part of the problem is work itself you and i have different jobs you know and i mean i mean different from most people you know we both do what we actually want to do that's very different than most people i think there's a certain amount of pain that just comes from the grind of doing something you don't really want to do every day over and over again and you're doing it for benefits and you're doing it for you know raises and futures and yeah vacations and all the things that you're planning and one day i'll have a retirement plan i've got a 401k and i've got this and i go to that but it's not what people want it's just not it's not natural it's not normal it's unhealthy but what you do is creative and creative you know oftentimes a lot of people that are very creative and very powerful in their ability to express themselves a lot of times it comes from this emotional instability or this comes from this sort of
core of of of pain and or at least of sensitivity right there's like this bubbling inside of them but at least you're doing something you love there's a lot of people out there and i don't know what the number is but i i would imagine it's in the high 60 but what's with me in person it's a lot of people are not doing what they want to do yeah you know it's like that thoreau quote that i always i always love this quote that most men leave lives of quiet desperation and i think the final part of that is and they go to the grave with the song still in them that's beautiful it's a great quote yeah he had a lot of them he did but that is the reality of most people's existence and i think our modern day education system that funnels people into occupations and tells them that what you do or what i do is almost impossible it's almost impossible i mean they would tell you like good luck you're going to oh you're going to be a singer get in line you know how many of them are out there yeah but my thought when i was starting out as a comedian when people say that to me i'm like but there are them they're a real thing like there's one it's not santa claus right like wait a minute can it be done and they would say you're never going to make it it's too hard to make it i'm like okay but someone's making it yeah like if i'm watching richard pryor on a movie and he's doing stand-up if i'm watching live at the sunset strip like clearly this took place so this man is a real person that got to this point but people will tell you that that path is almost impossible and how many people were discouraged off of that path that wanted to be a singer i wanted to be a comedian and i wanted to be whatever whatever it is that seems hard that's an untraditional path or a path that's not it's not as well lit as your standard
you know i'm going to be a dentist you know and then you're going to follow this groove and this is how you do it and there's so many people out there that just they got hood winked yeah they got hoodwinked by the system and they never figured out how to develop the kind of horsepower that you need to pull yourself out of a ditch yep and change is hard you know like people love to look at my life and you know it's hard change is hard i don't know if they'll look at your life after what you've said today oh that [ __ ] had it easy or they'll think who isn't a homeless suicidal 15 year old get the [ __ ] out of here with this we haven't even got to mom yet oh let's get to mom but change is hard and the reason a lot of people don't change is because it isn't a guarantee and so it's a lot safer to go to a path that is much more linear and safe with probably a known outcome yeah because taking the risk you took taking the risk i took where there is no guarantee it isn't handed to you and it isn't a promise that's going to happen that's a risk and a lot of people are just very risk adverse because you don't the fear of the unknown and we want to go back to the familiar it's why even if you're miserable you kind of just keep going back to familiar emotional habits because it's familiar or even if you're on a good path a lot of times people will fall back into a bad path because it's more familiar yeah that happens to a lot of folks that lose weight they lose weight they get really healthy and then some part of them sabotages this new journey yeah and then they or drinking you know they go back to drinking or gambling yeah because that's also like again like back to addiction the the habit isn't the problem you had an emotional stimulus that caused you to drink yeah that's just a byproduct the drinking is a byproduct of a root source yeah and if you're not getting at that root source you're really in a bad pinch right because you're just going to want to go back to something because that kind of pain is intolerable you're just
holding your breath yeah eventually you're going to have to breathe again it's like my dad he did not want to be abusive as a dad he did not my dad's a good guy he did not want to be abusive but you can't exist in a vacuum we have to have behavior and that's why if a therapist or anybody you're working with isn't giving you a new tool right resiliency is just a new tool you're going to keep hitting with the hammer you have and so my dad just didn't know and he even went to psychology school like he was a social worker he went to college and studied this stuff and that wasn't even in depth enough to help him get to a pain point where he's triggered he had a different thing to reach for that stuff's hard it's just not being taught i don't know why it makes me crazy yeah i don't think most people have enough personal sovereignty to teach it like how do you you have to be you have to really understand who you are to explain how another person can be themselves and how another person can be a better version of themselves because i'm not going to listen to most people yeah most people when they give you advice you're like but look at you you're a [ __ ] mess don't give me advice it takes an incredible person yeah to say something you that really resonates like oh she knows the [ __ ] she's talking about like for most most people like that's why the idea of therapy to me i mean sounds it's great if you get a great therapist but therapists are basically like every other type of person every other occupation there's people that are really good at it and there's people that are uninspired and they're shitty and they're arrogant they don't really want to do what they're doing or maybe they don't like you or whatever it is it's like and then you're [ __ ] and that's such a difficult painful job that you know the amount of therapists that are drinking and are addicts are pretty high actually you'd be really surprised i wouldn't be surprised because their self-care is really important so if they're not practicing their own
what they're preaching they're going to just become incredibly compromised and then they start phoning in and work and again like it has to i'm just a big fan of like it has to be behavioral like you need to see your life change you need to see your life get better and if it's not you need to fire your therapist you need to go find a different one and you need to think about metrics and like well how will i know if i am doing better what would that look like what does doing better look like yeah and try and get a little more nitty-gritty about it so that you can find a path to that when i was uh younger and i was competing in martial arts i studied psychology and when i was trying to think about what my eventual path in life would be i thought because i was very fascinated by the way the human mind worked i thought maybe i should be a psychologist and but the more i studied psychology and the more i started talking to people about it the more i realized you're only going to be talking to [ __ ] up people like that's not healthy i mean it's great if you have this calling in life to help people get out of their their rut but i recognized as a 16 year old boy i was looking at this going like this path is gonna leave me to be like if you work in a chemical factory you're breathing in fumes right that [ __ ] ain't good for you it's not good if you work with sick people all the time emotionally sick people you the energy that you're taking in on a regular basis is of that of people that are destroyed people that are just depressed and sad and angry and confused and i don't think it's nourishing like for a human being i mean i think some people they have a calling and it's amazing that they help people in that way but that wasn't me like i was like i'm too [ __ ] up for this already i gotta figure out i can figure out a way to be happy and i can't be happy just dealing with other people like and i was and i also realized like i'm only interested in psychology because i'm trying to figure out why i'm so scared yeah like i'm like what what can i do to empower my mindset so i can compete and
not worry that was what i was doing but the idea of like dealing with people and their suicidal tendencies and problems and angst and anger and all the other things we've already talked about i'm just like i just don't think i could do it yeah you have to have such a trust a strategy in place if you're going to do that type of right because it is like being exposed to chernobyl every day yeah it's gonna it's the intolerable it will make you ill for sure yeah it's probably a job you should do one day a week yeah you know and then there's a great experience [Laughter] just do something to [ __ ] get out of that there's a therapeutic institute in tennessee called onsite and i really like them because they fly therapists in from all over the world and they rotate them so you're just not there all the time as a therapist you get to come and go and have exposure to normal life and not just so much pathology i thought that was pretty good that's that is smart that is smart but as you were saying i i would imagine that those people that that are exposed on a regular basis to other people's pain it's like if you're exposed to happy people all the time like people imitate their atmosphere you you get nourished by the kind of environment that you surround yourself in and if you're constantly around pain yeah it's got to be very hard to just be just happy what you consume changes you whether it's food whether it's what you're listening to whether it's your experience that's why i gotta stop watching squid game i'm on episode four i gotta i think i'm gonna shut it off right now that's why i don't watch the news it's why like i have to be careful what i'm consuming and it's just sex a lot of us are trained to consume toxicity poison yeah poison relationships you know i call it emotional dyslexia it's like what i was taught the word love meant was really poisonous yeah and so i just had this dyslexia of like i thought icky experiences that was this close that was called love in my head so retraining
that type of emotional dyslexia is really hard but you basically it just starts with saying writing down on a piece of paper what things nourish me what am i consuming in my environment that i'm confusing for nourishment that isn't that one simple question if people will answer those two little questions can change your life those just those two things i also think some people just shitty at love the same way some people are shitty at being a plumber you know what i mean like maybe their version of love is they really don't want you to die you know like they really care but they they don't care about you enough to consider the way they're behaving to you but i wouldn't say they're just i would say they are shitty at love but again i would say that's a symptom of you know poor nurture sure they don't want to change and and bad patterns i mean yeah there's so much of that in abusive like when you hear about people that come from physically abusive relationships like so many children of physically abusive people wind up being physically abusive to their own children or people that see their mom and dad beat the [ __ ] out of each other they wind up doing that to their own children yeah or to their own spouse or yeah that was that nature versus nurture thing like that's an emotional language that was a billion data points of interaction that those children have during the day and at night they're tucked in and they might be told i love you good night yeah you know they're taught that's what love is and that's that emotional language and that's what retraining that nobody's really figured out how to create a system out of it but it's what i'm interested in i just think that's the most interesting thing it is interesting yeah the the mind is so fascinating in the the amount of variability it varies so much like some people can encounter a situation and be like well that sucks and start laughing and some people will follow their knees and and scream and lash out at people and run through red lights and you're like two very different reactions to the same
scenario yeah it's like what causes someone to be so calm and so smooth and i remember when i was a child and i would watch people who reacted well to things i'd always be like god i wish i was that guy hmm i wish i was it was so nice yeah this person's so nice i wish i could be so nice yeah i wish i was like that yeah but that's that funny mixture of again that nature versus nurture like your nurture might always be a higher rev or sorry your nature might always be a higher rev nature you know or a more yeah tendency to be really creative worry is just a misuse of creative creativity so usually creative people if it's not properly channeled they just worry really badly and that's going to be their thing to bear you know they're either going to have to learn how to discipline that into a healthy creative thing instead of just worrying and then the other part of it is that nurture you know and that's for everybody to figure out like are you happy and if you're not what are you willing to do about it can you you know descartes said i think therefore i am i think it's i perceive what i think therefore i am you know you're not your thoughts you're the observer of them and so if you can observe you're sad you're something other than sad you're the observer of it that's really interesting because that means your your nature is in there you know your observer is your nature and so i just started to realize like this idea of self and other was like this little thing that that would help me like when i was anxious what i was thinking probably wasn't my nature it was probably an acquired like or it wasn't nature at the time and you didn't like it and you wanted to improve i mean i think you are your thoughts and you also are your perceptions are your thoughts you're a sea of possibilities you're you're so many of possibilities but i don't think you are your thoughts because if you can observe them you're something other than them yeah it's just you thinking it i know but it doesn't mean it's true it just means it's a data point that came into your head well i'm not saying it's true yeah but i'm saying and those thoughts are real they are
real but everything's real it's just do you want to consume it or not no and do you want to be changed by it or not right and so then i personally think like something that radically helped my anxiety was when i realized i made it a f ally instead of an enemy trending of how to explain it so if i eat bad fish and i get food poisoning and i throw up something's not wrong with me something's right with me i had an appropriate reaction to something that was had food poisoning so anxiety is the same way it means i was consuming something in my environment that my body isn't agreeing with and my body's only way of telling me that is anxiety it's like having a car alarm you know if someone tries to break into the car the car alarm goes off you shouldn't be mad at the car alarm you should be thank you car alarm somebody was trying to break in so i stopped looking at my anxiety as my enemy that i was trying to disassociate from and push away and keep at bay and i started treating my anxiety like a friend and i would sit down and i would take deep breaths and i would get really calm and i would ask my anxiety to come closer and i would have a conversation with it which sounds really silly but it i was always consuming something that made me anxious and i was real i was like oh it's when i talked to sally and i don't sally's mean to me and i get anxious every time i'm around sally now what am i willing to do about it right will i stop talking to sally or what was i just thinking it goes back to that little exercise of what was i thinking feeling or doing my anxiety is a gift your anxiety is a gift your body is trying to talk to you to say hey idiot stop consuming that but a lot of times we just don't want to stop consuming it because it might be radical you might have to quit your job you might have to stop get a divorce you know it can be really radical but that's also the gift like are you willing to do it because your life will get better if you stop consuming the things that make you anxious you know this change is so
hard for people yeah especially radical change like getting a divorce like quitting your job like moving out of state like doing whatever it takes to just shift yep and figure out what what it is that's causing you so much pain and so much frustration and so much fear like what is it yeah and yeah you're right it is most likely your body is sending you a message that the pattern that you're on right now the pattern that you're following is not good yeah it's not good and you better switch it up or you're going to have to just numb yourself every night yeah and that's that's what scares the [ __ ] out of me is that that solution of numbing yourself every night is the most common mm-hmm because people just aren't taught this type of like emotional courage it takes emotional courage it is a muscle you build and the longer you avoid it the bigger the problems get right it really could be you need a divorce it really could be you have to quit your job and do drastic hail mary moves but if we can teach people at younger and younger ages you know like with our kids that's one of the fun things is their age is like when they don't sleep they feel like crap and you see the result right away they see the result right away and also it's kind of like when i looked in the mirror that day when i was homeless i was like nobody's coming for me nobody owes me [ __ ] i just need to give up on that whole thought because stealing was just a very entitled thing and i was like i deserve this and i was like i don't nobody owes me anything you know and i'm like i remember looking in the mirror like and being like i owe myself what am i willing to do you know i'm coming for me what am i willing to do and that's a very provocative question because sometimes the answer is like nothing but i wanted to try and i wanted to try and come for me i wanted to try and be my own hero i guess as dumb as that sounds that doesn't sound dumb at all it's that insight is just so it's so unusual that someone not not only has that insight but then structures a sort of plan of attack to mitigate all these
factors that are [ __ ] your life up and try to strengthen your resolve to to improve and get out of there it's crazy now it must be crazy for you but it's crazy for me to hear it like imagining you as a little girl as a 15 year old girl addressing this and trying to figure out what's the path out of that and then seeing it is like you being in a maze somewhere stuck and like there if you had an overhead view you could see there is a way out but when you're in that maze like [ __ ] left nope there's a wall yep okay back up try it again start from scratch write down what went wrong like it's you wouldn't want to do it again right but aren't you glad you did it i mean it's kind of it sucks that you went through that but look at who you are like i don't think you would have the same impact on people if you didn't have that [ __ ] up life i just don't i think lived experiences is important and i really do feel like i was it's an honor to be able to help anyone not have pain you know it's just and i think that's my favorite thing like the brokest most poor people i know we're always the most generous i was always amazed by how stingy rich people are they got to be so stingy when it's like all my broke neighbors would be like they're just because they know what it means to need that five bucks or that 20 bucks or you know they just know how life changing it is they're so helpful and i think it's that way with pain i think it makes you empathetic like it makes i want to serve people i want to help people like that's always obsessed my music you know what i've been building in my business outside of music because you just know how much it means to people what do you think it is that makes rich people so stingy i think disconnection you know uh i don't think they maybe know the value of it i think rich people are often used to getting used to that's a certainly a big factor um but they're not part of a community money buys you a type of fake
autonomy and real autonomy too but you don't feel part of a community you know and so i just i think it detaches you from your fellow person in a way because you can't relate or they can't relate to you like what is it i think both it has to be complex right it has to be that you can't relate it's easy for you to judge other people they're lazy like me being homeless i was shocked i ended up homeless i didn't see that on my programming list you know it was just one thing led to another like that boss wouldn't have i wouldn't have sex with him and he wouldn't give me my paycheck and then my landlord was like you can't stay like you've been late too often is that guy still alive i saw him after my first record came out whoa yeah i thanked him in my liner notes yeah did you yeah wow yeah because it ended up being active power you know you saw him like physically he came into a show of mine at a coffee shop yeah and he just was like hey man i'm really sorry about that wow did he give you the money no well he wasn't that [ __ ] sorry i'm sure it wasn't very much couple hundred whatever should be interest on that [ __ ] right but i think when you invest in your character it's gonna pay dividends you can't expect like let's just say i was it would have been easy to say oh my god i knew i'd get kicked out my landlord had said i can't be late again and my mom was sick at the time i was living with my mom was taking care of my sick long being rent for and that boss propositions me it would have been really easy and don't think i didn't think about it of like i could sleep with them i could probably maybe get more money out of it i won't get kicked out like you definitely run through like yeah all the options because not doing it looked really bad and i knew it but i didn't want to do it like i was like i have to believe that doing the right thing will pay off for me but then it just kept getting worse it was like
living in my car was fine i grew up on a saddle barn in alaska like no problem living in my car then my car got stolen and that sucked but then i was like i wasn't in it like that was pretty lucky i could have been turned into sex trafficking very easily if i was just in that car at the wrong time you know that's like a really real thing and then i had bad kidneys and i didn't have medicine you had bad kidneys yeah i had bad kidneys i would get kidney infections didn't know why but i didn't have insurance and i couldn't afford a doctor and so i would try to heal my own kidneys by researching food as medicine didn't always work what did you try to do like what how do you heal your kidneys well supposedly like with like urinary tract infections and kidneys there were things like watermelon was good uh cranberry uh buchu and herb so i would try those things i'd shoplift them all but you know it was like i was shoplifting healthy [ __ ] and if you think stealing a watermelon is easy you have another thing coming how do you steal a watermelon i did it it was really yeah i'd just be pregnant it was all good is that what you did yeah oh my god it's hilarious but you had to kind of stuff around it so it didn't just look like you know you had to sell it well anyway i'm not proud of it but i did it but anyway i um ended up this is when i'm 18 bad panic attacks getting really agoraphobic and kidney problems i let an infection go too long i was really sick i drove myself to the emergency room and they wouldn't see me because i didn't have insurance oh god and i was really sick so it is all like a feverish weird memory but i remember going in and getting in the passenger seat of my car a little teeny like datsun hatchback 510 and i was too sick to go anywhere else like i was done like that was it i was like losing my will at that point and i was throwing up like all over myself
and i hear a little tap on the window and a doctor had seen me get turned away and he came out to check on me in the parking lot and i remember like he kind of opened my door and it was not my finest mom like i was just covered in vomit and he's i was clearly really sick and he says i'm going to give you some antibiotics and i want you to take them and i want you to stay in this parking lot you know overnight oh my god and so i did and i took them and my fever cleared it turns out i had sepsis like i had blood poisoning my my kidneys were shutting down so you were ready to die i was ready to die i was going to die that night and that man saved my life and he didn't ask he didn't leverage me like he didn't try and sleep with me he didn't like and he saw me for free that whole year i was homeless um but like i said like this homeless thing just took on a life of its own and people treat you like you're a dog and you developed a sort of working relationship with this guy like he would you'd come to see him more than once wow and he would take care of you he took care of me the whole time did you stay in touch with him yeah wow dr bowden stabbed shout out [Laughter] that's amazing yeah that's amazing and so people are like why don't homeless people get a job you know like going back to that rich person thing of like it's hard like surviving getting food water and safety was a big thing that took all my time it took all my day to do that and then i would try and go get a job at 7-eleven but you start to look homeless it just was hard wore me down about a year and i definitely could have gone back to alaska i'm sure but i just i don't know i wanted to figure it out and once i started like getting a grip on my panic attacks and figuring out like that dilated and contracted things it was like i could feel a momentum i was like i'm gonna get this like i'm gonna figure this out like i'm gonna die or figure this out and i'm figuring it out and then by the end of that year it got really exciting you know it got it
turned into a really empowering time but again that goes back to like you have an excuse all the time to do the wrong thing you have an excuse all the time to go back to the familiar you have an excuse all the time why to say the whole world is against you and be right but so what now what now what are you going to do about it how happy do you want to be your life will rise to the level you settle for and just to keep pushing what did you do how did you get out of it like how did you what was the first job that you got when i was homeless yeah [Music] uh i started because i grew up singing i was like maybe i could get a gig somewhere and start singing because i made money singing you know like for my whole life since i was little like 100 bucks 200 bucks but whatever so i'd go around the coffee shops um in the area but san diego started to be a hotbed for signing activity you know grunge there was like kind of a grunge scene in san diego and so i'd go in there and they they charged you to sing there i was like this is not ideal like they wanted me to pay them two hundred dollars i was like yeah i was like this is the one gig yeah and it was the idea that you would sell tickets they thought it was no they thought it was like a signing you would get signed oh god you know what i mean because it became like so many record labels i guess were coming down at the time i remember this one lady like my friend let me sit in on his gig so i go sing with them i'm starting to write my own songs oh i forgot to tell you how i started writing songs back at school but i'll tell you later i remember that so i started writing songs and singing my own stuff i get on my friend's gig he's packed the place out i don't clearly but he has it crowded there's like a door charge so i go to settle out while he's taking his gear down and this woman coffee shop owner was like you guys don't get the door money and i was like what are you talking about like he brought all these people in she's like no she goes you get the tip jar
and i was like oh i was like you know what then why don't we get all your coffee and food money you could just give us that instead and she was like you don't get the food beverage money you get the tip jar and i was so upset i needed the money so badly like i didn't have food you know like i was i was really wanting some money from that gig and i remember i put my little finger in her face and i was like i am cursing you whoa you are i know it sounds so heavy i was like you are stealing from the people that are giving you a living you're stealing from this guy and i was like you are you will go out of business i was like nobody can stay in business doing this to humans i was so upset at her and i did he have a understanding with her or was he just getting wrong i didn't care he just didn't care i was [ __ ] hippie blown away i was like he was just wanted to be easy going and didn't want to make her mad and wanted to get another gig there and i was just so upset and so i found this place i liked this little when i was living in my car there was a little tree that was flowering tree and i like to park next to it so like that was my home and i noticed there was this coffee shop right there that was going out of business and it was really off the beaten path and so i went in there and i talked to the lady who owned it her name was nancy and i was like do you think you could stay open for two more months and she's like why i'm like if i bring people in can i keep the door money you can keep all the coffee and food and like we'll try and make it together and she said yes and so i started going down on like the beach front in san diego and i'd sing like street sing and i'd tell people i'm singing at the interchange coffee shop on thursday night at six o'clock and two people came like it was two surfers that thought i was hot i think and i did a five-hour show because bar singing you do five-hour shows and i just thought i had to do a five-hour show so i started writing a ton of material plus i was using writing not to
steal and i was a prolific thief so i had to become a prolific writer and so i did this five hour show to these two guys i'm bleeding my heart out because i was so lonely and i realized i never tell the truth like nobody knows the truth i'm scared to death i'm not a great person i'm stealing and i'm lonely and i was like maybe if i tell the truth i won't feel so lonely so i made a promise that i would write really honest songs so these poor two servers were subjected to five hours of like bleeding out my like vocal cords it was amazing i made ten dollars and uh the next night and i would go seeing all throughout town street corner and say hey thursday night they knew where to see me and it just grew it went from two people to four people to eight people to 40 to 80 to capacity to people standing outside watching me sing through the window and i got discovered wow yeah it was nuts wow yeah that's a great story wow what was that like what was it what was it feeling like when it was at capacity and you recognize that these people were that something was changing in your life these people were coming out to see you perform the coolest thing and why i'm smiling is because i was changing it moves me to tears right now even before the people came i felt the momentum shifting you know i just felt i was getting better i was getting healthier i was getting happier my panic attacks like i found out how not to have them like it just made me feel good and then when these people came i just bore my soul and i just didn't pull a punch and they they liked me and i know that sounds superficial but it wasn't because it was so authentically me i wasn't pretending to be better or more talented it was so raw and people would cry and i would cry and it was just such a real connection like for the first time in my life i had a real
meaningful human connection and it wasn't scary it felt good and they would give me books to read and they would give me food and i didn't think it would lead to a record deal it just felt like being fed for the first time in your life you know not hiding and not being fake and just being really authentic so it felt really good and then when more people came it just took on a momentum that was like holy [ __ ] how much time is passed from the two people to people standing outside you know i don't know but six months maybe ish something like that that's a lot of change in six months yeah maybe a little more eight months but couldn't have been more than that because i don't think i was homeless more than a year what was that that change had to feel crazy it was wild it was cool and you know from like being on stage but like i wouldn't make a set list and i would just feel the audience and like i talked i did a lot of i tell a lot of stories and like kind of like stand up i would just tell like just stories and jokes and just shoot [ __ ] with people in the audience and they were just these really live electric like kind of wild shows and make them dead quiet and i would just take little breaks so people could use the bathroom and and when people started standing outside and they couldn't hear but they were just watching me through the window and the look on their face like to this day it like gives me chills like they looked at me with like a certain look and it was like holy [ __ ] like this is different and they would stand out in the rain like we put little speakers out there so they could hear and people would stand in the rain and just listen to me singing through the window with little speakers and it was just like it was very humbling like very very humbling wow yeah so then what happens how do you get discovered there was a radio dj programmer excuse me he ran 91x which is a really big radio station in the country they might
have been number two in the country at the time heavy alternative station somebody told him about this girl singing in a coffee shop and that he should come and he came in i could recognize new faces when they come in because it was this wasn't a big place by the way i mean this might have been 70 people that could fit inside that's a tiny costume so you had developed a crowd like you were accustomed to seeing familiar foot faces yeah it was a loyal die hard die hard fan base like tiny don't get me wrong but i knew them you know what i mean it was it was like a little family in a way and so this guy came in he had a goatee his final shirt on he looked kind of hard and he was sitting in the back and i remember singing the song a thousand miles away and he was just weeping like quietly but just tears were streaming down his face and he came up to me afterwards he's like hey i'm at the radio station and like why don't you come in like sing a song one night or something and i was like okay so i go in there i'm still living in i'm oh i got another car so i had a car to live in um i'd saved up enough door money to buy a car cheap car like a couple hundred dollar car um so i get down to the radio station and i sing a song for him and we talk a little bit and um i guess he went ahead him and this guy named lou niles put it uh on the radio and it got requested um by fans so it's back when you could still request songs and they'd listen to it and it got somehow into the top 20. you know of this station which is a big deal like top 20 on that station was like you know labels pay a lot of money to promote their artists to try and get them into the top 20 and this was like an acoustic guitar demo in the middle of like all this grunge music and so record labels were like how that what is this song that's showing up on this playlist and they would call him and he's like it's this chick down at this coffee shop and so all of a sudden there would be like these limousines pulling up and they would give sweet little nancy you know that was just she was having a
banging business now which felt so good and they would be like she'd be like jewel sony records is here tonight all right i was so passe about the whole thing it was very funny um and then they'd take me out to tacos and talk to me about record deals and and then there was a bidding war it was every label came down every label they'd flown from new york they'd bring in bigger executives then they'd fly in they'd come again they'd you know all these limousines showing up and i would start to get flown around to talk to different record labels and how does this process take i don't know i am i'm kind of bad with time that way i don't know a couple months something like that and you don't have a manager you don't have anybody speaking for you no but i went to the library and i found this book called [Laughter] how to manage yourself by for dummies [Laughter] it was don passenheim i think called everything you need to know about the music business oh boy that sounded good so i read it and i just learned about mechanicals and royalties and back-ends and advances oh so you did your homework i did my homework and there ended up being a huge bidding war over me um all the labels just started like competing by this time i kind of found like a de facto manager um i maybe got a lawyer here at some point you know and this might now have taken more time but i realized because of reading that book that an advance is alone you don't get to keep the money you pay it back through record sales and so i did the math to see how many records i'd have to sell to pay back a million dollars and it was a lot of records and so it was like having a bounty on my head as an artist i almost didn't sign my record deal because i had just figured out how to be happy like genuinely i was really starting to figure it out and i knew it like inside myself i was doing so much better and god forbid you take somebody with my
emotional background and they ever get famous i'm the recipe for every movie you've seen about every musician like right and again i didn't want to be a statistic and i fought so hard for my happiness up to this point that i was like i don't think i could trust myself to have a record deal and figure out how to do that career without self-imploding so i almost didn't sign it i remember being on the beach one day and i was like i wanted to do it but i was terrified of doing it so i made myself a promise that my number one job would still be to figure out how to be happy and my number two job would be to be a musician and then under the musician category that i wanted to be an artist more than i wanted to be famous and so knowing those was like having my north star and i felt like i could navigate and make decisions based on those things and so i went ahead and signed the record deal i turned down the advance i turned down a million dollar bonus holy [ __ ] as a homeless kid oh my god oh my god that is so crazy and i took the biggest do that that's i would have taken that money for sure a hundred percent i've been like i'll figure it out in the future taking this money i'm getting a [ __ ] fat apartment overlooking the water this is not what i did as a homeless kid you'd pass on a million bucks i did wow but i took the biggest back end anybody had ever been awarded and so if i sold records i was going to make a [ __ ] ton so because like under the artist category i wanted to be an artist more than i wanted to be famous and it meant i had to put myself in an environment and in a position to win as a singer-songwriter and as a folk singer no less at the height of grunge the odds of that working i knew were really slim and i felt like the bidding wore over me was just much more of like a dick contest between all the labels i didn't think it necessarily had to do with my talent i thought i was talented but i thought the odds were still really really against me
and i had to put myself in a position to be able to weather the fact that my first album may not be successful but if you have a million dollar signing bonus you have to have your first let record be successful or else you'll get dropped because you cost so much the label and so i was just doing it to put myself in a position to make my art first and to not leverage my art unduly you know it's like saying you have to grow a pear but you don't even have a tree yet like i had to grow a tree like the pear was a long way away and so i just tried to look at it kind of agriculturally or in a natural system of like i have to grow i have to plant a seed i have to like grow a tree you know amazing insight for a person who is trying to make it in show business because that is always like the the dangling carrot is always like one day i'm not gonna have to starve right yeah because you're starving starving starving then you're rich like this is the thing the dangly carrot you want to get rich right now you're like i want to be rich yeah most people take that [ __ ] carrot yeah for you to have the the courage and the confidence and the ability to see the future like to see what's how this plays out if you do it the wrong way that's fascinating that's an amazing insight and i wonder how much of that has to do with your ability to work your way through suicidal thoughts and depression and the the anxiety and there's this way that you've sort of it's almost like it's all was preparing you for it like you structured your mindset you structured the way you view reality in a way that could survive the ultimate test that's the [ __ ] ultimate test of an artist like you want to sell out i don't know how about for a million dollars like like the record skips that's the scene in the movie where you know like wait you say a million dollars and you're a homeless kid playing in a [ __ ] coffee shop and
you're like nah player [Laughter] i read a book i went to the library and got schooled let's talk backhand what is this is this you at the coffee shop oh [ __ ] this is you wow [Music] oh [Music] 1994. what does that feel like watching that how old were you in there probably 18. little child mm-hmm singing and singing on stage 1994. what is that like watching that i make a lot of faces oh my god am i having a seizure am i singing what's happening over there [Laughter] that's crazy i just yeah it was a but the fact that you had the insight to say no to a million dollars so like how are you gonna make money you're just gonna keep working at the coffee shop until you got gigs and until you started selling records like like no i did ask for um i forget how much it was a month but it was like two thousand dollars a month i asked for something to live on wow um then i got you know i paid rent and i moved my little brother in with me and my mom and with me and i got a used car i got a used volvo and i bought her a used volvo um how long was it before things started getting crazy the best thing i did was turn that advance down like for sure like looking back on my career my records sold i think 2 000 records which were all my little teeny coffee shop fans and it probably only sold 2000 records for over a year and you got to realize that's what i was doing at the height of nirvana and soundgarden you know it it just was really hard it was the height of that movement it's funny saying that because you know we know what happened to those guys like they're insanely talented people and it went the wrong way yeah
you know yeah yeah i felt like one of the reasons i felt like i could bet on myself well there's a lot of reasons but one was i had to live up to my thing right if you make a decision you have to make a plan for it so my goal was to be an artist and i had to put myself in a position to not leverage my art to give my art a chance so i bet on myself and created that record deal for that right to structure it that way so i wouldn't get dropped but another reason i didn't mind betting on myself is like i looked where culture was and you know the great thing about nirvana is it just ripped the scab off of like culture that was like we're a material world and we're material girls right you know nirvana's like we're not happy we're not happy and they just said it so plainly and it was like this relief to an entire generation going yeah we feel [ __ ] up we're not happy we're a lot of angst and we're unhappy and we're angry and we're disillusioned which is so good for a generation to like say that out loud but you can only be in pain so long until you kill yourself so at some point you have to decide am i going to kill myself or now what i just happened to be a little bit ahead of the trend on that entire thought system of i don't want to kill myself so now what so what i was writing my songs about were the now what what do i do with this what do i do with pain what do i do with feelings so even though culture like and all the radio gatekeepers were like no grunge is everything from singing live for people and i was opening for the ramones catherine wheel belly punk bands by myself like getting [ __ ] thrown at me but i saw in the audience that people responded to heart to a lot of heart and i had heart i know i knew i did and that i was i was now what and so if people could just hang on long enough to say i'm in pain all right now i've been in pain long enough now what my music would be like a medicine to that yeah and it just had to i just had to stick around long enough to see if that whole thing could take
take off get traction but i was laughed out of radio stations they wouldn't even let me in radio stations djs would be like hey welcome back to kyzyz you may have heard me describe my next guest as a large breasted woman from alaska jewel how are you and i'd be like you must be that small penis man i've heard so much about from south carolina click off air they would escort me out of the building i got kicked out of so many radio stations they'd be like how do you give a blow drop with those because it was like howard stern was everything then and so all these little wannabe howard sterns were trying to be shocking so like how do you give a blow job with those teeth i'm like i'm could fix my teeth if i wanted but you're never gonna fix being stupid kicked out of another radio station i was kicked out of so many radio stations my label was begging me like jewel just bite your tongue and i was like i did not survive my life turn down the guy and end up homeless so i could take [ __ ] from this little prick on the microphone not happening so it just took a long time so true he's saying about the radio guys that were like mocking or mimicking howard stern but they didn't have his intelligence or his talent no so they just tried to be mean you know god i can't imagine that that that whole thing about truth that you were saying earlier well you were saying that there's something about singing that there's there's a authenticity that comes through in music in in singing and that that awesome that authenticity was really what killed hair bands right when when nirvana came along that was the death of hairbands because nobody could listen to that anymore you heard nirvana you heard nevermind and you're like oh god and then you go back to that other [ __ ] and you'd be like listen take your [ __ ] makeup off i don't know what you're doing with your hair but this is great you're just nonsense it's true and it was over it was like literally over because of one band yeah it was the
comet that killed like all the dinosaurs one foul song like one song a friend of mine was in a hair band and was on his way to europe was in the airport saw nevermind on mtv called his manager and said we're going to go home no joke that was real he knew it he saw the comment he's like we're done we're a bunch of [ __ ] oh my god that is hilarious but it was so real yeah like when he's singing rape me you're like what the [ __ ] is this song like and you're watching him and screaming and you're like oh my god yeah like this is and it wasn't a joke it wasn't an act it wasn't that was the feelings that he had inside of me ultimately led to his suicide right but this this this authenticity which was completely non-existent in the hair band world the hairband world was all about like wigs and just platform shoes and whatever the [ __ ] they were wearing and just like this frivolous rock and roll life it's very marketing yeah it was very yeah a lot of it was marketed right a lot of it was like a modern-day version of the monkeys yeah right they found these people and put them together in a superband and they would play personas the singers weren't even you know they would play a persona yeah but it was funny is like when grunge took off of course the system just wants to emulate and replicate it and they don't do it through authenticity because there's not many kirk cobains right and so all of a sudden they were just signing like nirvana 0.2 you know and there was just all these bands that were okay but they were just trying to whatever jump on that bandwagon and then it's funny how same thing like if britney spears is big they find all these little things in the category of yeah but they never see outliers our business is really bad at seeing like outliers and that was definitely like me at that time like i was just they were like i mean i can't tell you how many like programs like she's never going to make it like you guys got to get up up and my own
label like it went on so long i failed for so many for so long how long did you fail for over a year for sure they would have moved on absolutely if i was left a million bucks and they would have probably dropped me if i took the million bucks you know because it was just like cut the losses tell you what else i did i didn't have a tour bus i didn't have a tour manager i drove myself around on a rental car i was so affordable like i was the bargain folk singer on the roster and you know there's 600 acts on the label all competing for money right for marketing resources and then there's only so many employees that are labeled to the com that can champion a band and so i had to find a way of making sure i stayed a priority after a hot signing like that when i wasn't selling and so i was like writing thank you letters to every secretary from the road to the different heads of different departments how much it meant to me it was sincere it was like it really i really it meant a lot to me and then i just made sure i was affordable so that when board meetings happened and they looked at the roster like acts were getting dropped and i finally had like one champion and a label and i was like yeah she cost 12 this month like just let the poor thing stay out there you know like and i was doing five shows a day i was doing two cities a day sometimes three cities a day i was doing over a thousand shows a year very easily and you were traveling solo or solo me like i had my friend from san diego helping me drive wow and i was again opening for ramon and bauhaus and like these really hard act why would they schedule you with the ramones that is like the ultimate ridiculous pairing i know right yeah rock rock rock rock rock and roll high school it's like you yeah singing that and then yeah it doesn't fit yeah i remember that gig it was only ones that i opened for them and it was like the shed and of course was on during daylight really early and so there were people
out on the lawn but not up in the seats and so i was like i wanted everybody to come closer i was like come up forward and they're like we can't security guards won't let us i was like f them jump up over it so they all jumped the barrier and came rushing the stage and i did my show and it felt really good and the ramones were like that was punk rock i felt pretty good about that [ __ ] so when did things really catch on um two things really come to mind one i did give up on my first album and i went back into the studio and started making a second record and i started writing stuff that sounded grungier i was like is that what i gotta do i can do that and bob dylan was on tour on the east coast and wanted me to open for him and i really wanted to open for bob dylan so i quit making that record i just put a pause on it like i'll be back in two weeks guys and i went on the road with dylan and you know his manager was like nice to meet you bob does not bob will not meet you you know he won't be seeing your shows you're not going to hang out with him and he's like i just want you to know he's like i got it i'm here to do my job so i do my job but i really hate people talking when i sing it really really bothers me and so people were there and it was a theater you know but they still it wasn't containing people and so i was just like hey if you guys aren't here to see me i get it but if you want to go in the lobby you know go out in the lobby like whoever stays please be quiet and then it didn't that didn't work and so like i called to ask the spotlight guy to put a spotlight on somebody in the audience and i was like you talking please talk outside like i'm alone up here this is this is all i got and i kicked them out and i said the security guard will hold your place for you and i kicked them out of the show and i guess bob heard that i had done that and for some reason he really loved
that i kicked somebody out of his own show and so his manager was like mr dylan is requesting your presence in his dressing room oh boy and i had had a dream when i was 16 that i got to open for bob dylan oh 15. 16. i was not writing songs yet and and in my dream he came on to me and it was really gross and so here i am like i think i'm 20 or something now i'm opening for bob dylan he wants to see me in his dresser i'm like oh my god my whole dream's gonna come true like i'm freaking out so i go down like in my turtleneck and i go to meet him and he does not hit on me he was just very very nice but he really really believed in my songs like every night after the show he would bring me this dressing room and he'd go over my lyrics with me and be like hey what what made you write that one what what what's that line mean is that uh so-called social security it's a hag line right and it was i got that line from royal haggard influenced by it um and he he just really believed in me he really thought he liked what i was doing and he was he would give me books to read and music to listen to and he was like nah you just gotta keep going like [Laughter] no it's just you and your guitar like give it just you and your guitar and it gave me the courage to keep going so he's why i stuck with that record and so i told the label i was like i'm not making the second album i'm going back out on the road and then neil young took me out and then that started to really shift things for me i was like okay this is i was playing for these really big crowds and i was starting to like get them and then conan o'brien put me on tv and that was it like thing that was like a definite tide shift where like for some reason seeing me on tv really helped and then i mean it took time still like i remember doing interviews and people being like what's it like to be famous and i'm in a [ __ ] terrible you know hotel room going is this it is this fame did it happen um
but somewhere around then it began to snowball and then it was i started selling a million albums every month for over a year holy [ __ ] it was crazy holy [ __ ] yeah holy [ __ ] that's back when people bought albums too like that's you you got in the last wave i did i was lucky that was literally the last wave yeah every month another million that is crazy yep that went on for a year over a year wow it was crazy pants wow that's bananas what what did that feel like how old were you 20. jesus christ 21 maybe that is so crazy yeah so i got discovered i was 18 and then i think it finally hit when i was 21. 21 selling a million albums a month that's [ __ ] bananas it got big it just took on like it was like you talk about momentum it was like it was unreal thank god you weren't doing drugs right yeah yeah because that would have been the time you'd be like this is a little too heavy yeah people don't get how traumatic that kind of fame is it's hard it's traumatic when you're 50. yeah it's when you're 20 and you don't even know who you are and you also are recovering from just getting over being homeless yeah and you're still dealing i mean we're talking about a girl who was suicidal in alaska five years ago like this is that's what's crazy yeah to go from you watching the tide come in and out and realize you don't have to kill yourself to five years later selling a million albums a month holy [ __ ] yeah wow so how'd you stay grounded how'd you keep your [ __ ] together well that promise i made myself on the beach of like my first job is to figure out how to be a happy person i had to create a whole plan around it you know like it's funny people make business plans that are really thoughtful what resources will i
allocate this new business you know yeah but we don't do it for our own happiness and i i tried to just even though i didn't have a lot of skills i tried to be really practical like jewel if you're saying happiness really is your number one job you have to make a plan around it and be accountable to it and so that was always like i thought about it every day like my my music was a side effect of that number one job that's why my music was always about like hands about my music was about this process for me and so it required different strategies at different times but the exercises i kind of developed while i was homeless i kept developing those types of things that helped me cope with fame helped me cope with you know anxiety because plenty of stuff was coming up you know and it's hard and a difficult job for sure and so i just kept coming up with plan strategies seeing how as i was doing how am i behaving do i like how i'm behaving am i happy if i'm not what am i going to do about it while i was also trying to create a real plan around my career to be successful at it and so i just treated it like a real job after my second album i quit like just fully quit i quit for two whole years because i was like i can't keep doing this like this isn't psychologically healthy for me i never thought i'd get to that level of fame and so i'd quit until i could figure out like i was like do i want to be a photographer would i rather do something else like how do i do this and then for me i kind of realized it's funny but what worked for me was being less famous it just got too much i think by that time i was on the cover of time magazine and i was the type of famous where you can't go pee without people following you in and cross the street without people following you and so i realized during that two years where i didn't do anything at the height of my fame like your profile really does go down like i got less famous and that felt really good it felt good for the type of person i was because you
know i'm not just a pop singer i'm a writer so to write you have to ingest a tremendous amount of information if you're going to have any kind of output but if you're touring all the time you're not ingesting enough information right and so i was like my fix was get less famous between records which made my label crazy and you know when whole save your soul was my first hit that was the very first song i wrote so it was like for who will save your soul is the very first song you wrote yeah yeah i wrote that when i was 16 at boarding school and i couldn't stay on campus for spring break i had no idea you couldn't stay on campus for the breaks i was like i'll just hunker down in my room while everyone goes away for christmas and so i hitchhiked across the hunt country and then hitchhiked through mexico for for spring break because i'm super smart and i started writing songs street singing to kind of earn my way across country and earn food money and so that first song about just watching improvised lyrics as people walked by and i just would keep improvising lyrics and that was will save your soul it turned into will save your soul wow so that became my first hit and it was weird because i didn't mean to write a hit i did never really you know when i was writing these songs never thought i'd be a famous musician it was just like a head trip because then you're supposed to have more hits and write more hits but i never meant to write a hit and so if i didn't know how i did it how would i do it again and then i realized hey idiot you have the biggest back end anybody's ever gotten you're loaded you don't ever have to have a hit again i never had to have a hit again ever i sold so many records i was like i won the lotto you didn't spend it you didn't go crazy it's kind of it had to be so hard to be that young and be that wealthy from going from being homeless to five years later being rich as [ __ ] i never cared i liked
being happy sounds so dumb but my metric was really different my metric got shifted so hard because i'd been so miserable and there's plenty of rich people that still kill themselves so that can't be the answer but having health insurance having medicine being able to get a plane ticket whenever i wanted like you talk about money helps it don't make you happy but it helps yeah it was really nice having a home you know what i mean but i was just never a real money hungry person it just wasn't the key to what turned me on personally other things turned me on more so but it's still amazing to have that kind of insight while you're recovering from being homeless and then you get insanely wealthy really quickly that kind of money like making that kind of money um selling a million records a month is [ __ ] insane yeah yeah to me again it goes back to that logical plan of like my north star be happy figure out how to be happy it's an active job and then be an artist that meant like i want to be one of the best singer-songwriters of all time that's ambitious doesn't mean i'll get it but that is my goal and that means it's a 60-year plan it's a long game so you know fame's gonna come and go nobody has this trajectory that goes upward infinitely so that mean the more money i had saved bought me creative freedom right having wealth in the bank meant that if i had a flop or i took a risk it didn't matter because i had the money to ride that wave out so to me it was just a really practical solution to my goal which was trying to be one of the best ever yeah well i mean having your eyes on the prize right like that is the must help certainly must help but still the just the temptation and just also the chaos of reality you like went through a membrane into an alternative dimension and you're dealing with this the the skills and the tools that you develop from
growing up on a homestead to being homeless to you know being a kid in a coffee shop getting discovered like that this is like the the structure and the framework is so rickety like jesus christ to survive reentry to pop through to this other dimension of now being super famous and not losing your [ __ ] mind and to have the insight to just chill for a couple years is pretty amazing yeah it was important like did you lay low like what did you do during those two years i think i met ty at the time my ex-husband and so i went on the ranch in texas stephenville texas and i just i don't know it was like a midlife crisis at 21 you know or 22. it was like all right i achieved this thing i didn't ever think i could achieve now that i'm here it doesn't feel really good what bothered you the most about the fame thing that you realized that you needed to have some sort of a break as a writer i was a voyer i like watching people um i like reading i like having quiet space and and stillness around me because that's how i always related to myself like that internal dialectic means i kind of need to be alone and be still and be quiet and fame just shattered all that it was a very noisy job emotionally noisy the fame the eyes on you all the time um being stared at everywhere not being able to go to eat without people and i'm empathic like i'm really sensitive and so you feel like the waiter about to freak out or the which is nice you know it's not that it's not nice it's just that when it's 24 hours a day or whatever unless you're sleeping it didn't feel good it was like seeing myself through fun house mirrors my perception of myself was getting warped and that seems really dangerous because my perception is my power like that's how i write it's how i relate to myself it's how i do my number one job of how am i doing and if all you can see is fun house mirrors you're gonna have a really [ __ ] up perception and i knew i was gonna get off course and that to me felt really dangerous like nothing was worth that feeling to me when you see someone like britney
spears today that seems to be really struggling um do you see that like that path and you see like what it was like for you as a young woman to experience that kind of very bizarre fame that i mean we can talk about this we could sort of try to explain to to people who have never experienced it what it's like but it's an it's an alien thing it's not normal no one is supposed to go places and everyone knows who you are it's not the way human beings evolved it's not the way we do you're supposed to know people who know you and that's it you're not supposed to go places and everyone knows you so to experience that at a young age and for someone like britney spears who you know she went for she was on the mount mickey mouse club right so she'd had no moments of normalcy you know and i've talked to quite a few uh child stars no one seems to get through it you know demi lovato miley cyrus there's just i know a few personally they don't get through it yeah it's like the way i've described it's like mixing concrete but you don't add enough water but you add some other stuff and then like you can't fix it once it's built like this is it this is the concrete like [ __ ] that's not concrete like you can't put a house on that like that's gonna fall apart this is crazy what did you do i made concrete like that's not [ __ ] good like all the ingredients but what you had was like a different kind of concrete but because being a [ __ ] 15 year old homeless kid and being suicidal and leaving your family and all that like man that that is con like you did figure out a way to form you figured out a way to form it so much that you recognized the pitfalls and you're like i'm going to get out of this whereas no one else can like everyone else is like they they chase it even after it's gone they wind up doing reality shows they try to find
some way to reignite the spark and it's sad it's sad to watch it's sad to see but when you see someone like britney spears you know and all this crazy [ __ ] that's going on with her i mean you don't watch the news but do you have you i'm totally aware of what's happening with her does it i mean kind of do you so does it feel awful for i mean you obviously you're to me it's like when i watch a comic fall apart if i watch a stand-up who's like going crazy and losing his mind it's i it hurts yeah it hurts in a way that doesn't hurt if i'm watching up you know a painter or someone that i don't have the same job as yeah it is hard you know every you know the same way when i moved out and i knew i was in a really dangerous position you know statistically kids who move out at 15 that have been abused it's a really predictable future i knew that me getting signed at 18 was a really predictable future and it was dangerous i know i was doing something really dangerous but i would love singing i love it so much i really loved it it was very compelling to me and i felt lucky to do something i loved but i also knew it was super super dangerous and so that plan like my number one job was to be a happy person that was my only way that i felt like i might be able to survive it and so i just had to be really serious about it and be willing to walk away at any time if i thought i wasn't living up to my number one job and that's where you have to create a lot of strategies like self-worth like i had a terrible sense of self-worth you know that when you're raised that way it heals so slowly and so you become performative right it's an illness of perfection it's an addiction to perfectionism everybody can relate to that i don't feel lovable i didn't get my needs met and so if i'm really perfect maybe i'll earn my way back into love worth so
you become very perfectionist and very performative and then if i perform well i get praised it's the story of pretty much every you know entertainer when people clap for me i feel like a good person you get an internal dopamine rush it's like your little internal pharmacy like a little drug store you just got a hit and when that goes away you go back to feeling like a bad person so i knew that was a real real real problem for me and so i knew i had to heal that one from the inside i had to figure out why i was valuable in a way that nobody could take away that it would be irrelevant of whether i had a hit or not it would be a relative irrelevant whether your relative i think it's a word but i think also not rel relative to you know do my dad and i get a relationship again or will my mom ever love me or am i famous or not famous like i had to figure out how to heal that thing from the inside otherwise i could be leveraged and manipulated really easily right yeah because i'd need that hit and i would even if it was a sucky hit i'd need that hit so bad i would just do it that's a leveraged position like that's a really bad position to put yourself in so for me it was just trying to find really meaningful solutions to kind of complex problems and make sure that they worked for me and so my whole career was problem solving this kind of thing because i had to keep my promise to myself and you know i didn't end up quitting music like after that two-year hiatus i was like i like music i really love this i love being a writer so i have to find a way that it isn't toxic or it doesn't kill me and for me that meant doing again whatever i wanted i was like i won the lotto i don't have to have a hit i get to do whatever i want creatively and so i just started doing whatever i wanted if i wanted to write a pop song i wrote a pop song if i wanted to make a country record i made a country record may not have been a good career decision didn't care because my goal was to figure out how to stay alive like over 60 years as an artist which means again and dylan
really taught me this was like you had neil young too like you have to do what you think is right yeah hell or high water but when i look at brittany you're just like i get it i mean that was a louisiana family with probably a lot of not a lot of emotional skills which i really relate to and fame is a [ __ ] show and it's hard and there wasn't anybody there to protect her and help her stop and help her take breaks and check on her mental health and the funny thing is everybody wants to be famous but if you look at our numbers we kill ourselves like flies like we're dropping like flies you know what i mean like celebrities don't have a great success rate of happiness certainly so it's funny everybody wants it but it isn't something very healthy like they like when you fall apart yeah they enjoy it when someone who's famous like completely goes mental yeah they really do yeah like more so than almost any other occupation yeah and someone loses their mind you can abandon all concerns about mental health just to take part in the mockery it was funny too like how taking years between records was perceived like i was supposed to feel really ashamed of it like the press would make it where it's like oh where's jewel been she dropped off poor thing she dropped off yeah and i was like wow you guys are a-holes like i'm sticking up for my like literal survival over here and you're making me feel like it's the worst decision it never even of course dawned on them that i was even doing it deliberately to make a lifestyle plan that worked for me but they shame you for it yeah you know they shame you like you talk about if you do struggle with self-worth the the media will pile on and make you feel like a terrible person because that last hit didn't quite go hmm you know well it's a juicy narrative yeah you know the juicy narrative is the one hit wonder yeah or the the person who was on top of the world and then now they've fallen off yeah people love that [ __ ] they especially love that [ __ ] when they're not doing well because they would probably see you
on the cover of time magazine and be like and now they see you know you know you've taken two years off yeah i wonder if she's suicidal yet yeah how's she doing [Laughter] so we've been teasing about your mom but you you know you never never got to it yeah i mean we're like three hours in are we close wow how much time we end jamie two hours and 40 minutes yeah so my mom left and i really missed her my teddy bear's name was my mom's name nedra so that i could hug my mom at night i was very sad when i have all daughters you're going to make me cry and we moved to homer i remember it was the last night of the show at the captain cook and uh we had our car packed my dad was taking us to homer we had a little bed made in the back of a station wagon and i remember my mom being at the street corner and just like waving goodbye and it was so surreal you know you're like where did she say she was going she was staying there we were leaving to homer didn't know why we went with my dad or not with my mom it just was what was happening you didn't have a conversation with her i was young you know i was eight um i do think they were i remember them asking like who would you guys rather live with and i was like that is the dumbest meanest question i have ever been asked in my life like why would you ask me that you know what i mean i will not answer i cannot answer it was a horrible question but it got decided and we're living with our dad and i really missed her and anchorage is probably 250 miles from homer and so i would try and call her we had a party line you know back then you couldn't always make calls and we couldn't really afford long distance calls so i wasn't in great touch with her but there's this thing in homer called a ride line and it's where you can get on the radio and say looking for a ride to anchorage will
split gas or things like that and then people you know you're like leave a message at the radio station and so you'd call the radio station say has anybody offered to give me a ride and so i would do that to get up to see my mom but i don't think i always told her about it i think i just often showed up like on her doorstep so i would like get a ride with a stranger 250 miles to go see my mom and you were a little kid yeah i was a little kid and my mom was amazing she was like really spiritual really calm like my dad was volatile drunk my dad and i are really good friends now by the way which deserves saying i can talk about him too but um she was just everything my dad was she was really creative she was an artist she was a visual artist um and just she was like heaven to me like i just felt like kevin it's your mom and so she would say things like you know your brain is really powerful like we barely use all of our brain in fact everything's related and we can affect things with our mind and if you look at that light bulb long enough and really focus you can get it to dim why don't you try that and i'll be back so i think i was babysat by a light bulb by a label oh my god oh my god he returned [ __ ] nine-year-old staring at a fire oh my god it actually was that you should be able to get it to go out and i felt like i failed when i didn't and she'd come back she's like that's okay you know you just are learning to focus and you can try harder which is already starting to set up this narrative of like it's my fault [Music] so my mom was interesting um i don't even know how to keep explaining i have a book called never broken where i really like
it's like the life of my it's my i wrote my own biography but it definitely like it took that long to really figure out how to explain my mom but my mom was really like i said really spiritual she's like there's there's stalkers and there's dreamers in the world you know there's people that dream up things to do and then there's the stalkers and they do it and she goes i'm a dreamer and you're you're a doer which again was starting to set up this narrative of like something wrong with you dreams things up yeah and i execute them right it starts to be this like strange narrative that i didn't see at all during the time i just thought that was really cool and really philosophical so i move out i remember too like one time driving in the car and i was sad because dad had hit me and she was like you'll never break she goes you're unbreakable there's a steel rod in you and it made me feel good and looking back i'm like who says that to a kid whose dad's hitting them like why not say i'll take you you'll never go back to him again right it's just so weird but instead i just felt so proud that she thought i had a metal rod in me and i wouldn't break so weird holy [ __ ] i think between the ages of like 8 and 18 i lived in 22 different places like i was a very transient kid my dad was moving around we weren't always on the homestead he'd go live with girlfriends he had like you know what do you call a serial girlfriends you know um and then i moved out so my mom had heart problems and was sick quite a lot and then when i graduated high school she was in san diego and so she was having heart problems and i went to take care of her that's how i ended up in san diego and so she got this really big house that was like way too big to afford it
was like really nice she liked nice things and i was trying to work jobs to like pay her in and she was too sick to work and then i got kicked i was living and she was like why don't we live in our cars and i was like that would be amazing because paying that rent was so stressful and then she ended up bailing and going back to alaska i stayed in my car and all that happened did she get take care of her heart issue i don't think there was ever a heart issue oh boy yeah anyway that was fake so she you i don't know i can't say that i don't want to get sued but [Laughter] your mom would sue you i just don't want to be sued that's all i'm saying okay i don't know that to be a fact okay let's just leave it at that thank you um so she went back to alaska i went through this crazy experience being homeless i got signed i called her one day from a pay phone i was like mom you're not gonna believe it like record labels are coming to see me and she was like i will be down to help you oh boy yeah that's the moment you wish you could take back in your life for sure but i was really flattered you know i was really i felt i also missed her oh my god i was so loved sick for her you know so love sick and she was just my hero like she was just so cool and creative and spiritual philosophical and like smart and like she was neat like super alternative and um when i was 16 backing up just a little bit like so i was away at boarding school she'd written me a letter and she said we were like having the same soul in two different bodies which felt like a huge compliment to me because it meant i don't know i felt owned you know like she wanted me it felt like like being claimed i guess so she started advising me i had my own
manager but then she started co-managing me and then she ended up pushing the other manager out and she came to me one day and was like hey your business manager stole five grand from you it's not a lot of money but why is someone else managing your money and i was like yeah [ __ ] him why the hell is someone else managing my money she goes we can just hire accountants like and like why would we pay someone to do that i was like hell yeah why would we and so cue the accountants um long story short i woke up at 34 and realized all the money was gone oh no and i was like 3 million in debt and it was really not good how much did she steal my accountants think that it was probably somewhere at least north of 100 million but i don't really know for sure yeah your mom stole well let's let's be careful with the word stone for lawsuits [Laughter] it's gone it's all like what did she do with it never could find it don't know just gone did she have an explanation things you know started seeming weird you know what's amazing is like that two-year like empowering break i took from the music industry to decide like do i really want to do this i was going broke during them because she was spending so much money and i had no idea and she never said anything so she just had access to your money yeah through these other people but i didn't know that she did she'd always wanted 50 of my income as a salary and i would just never give it to her i was like no 50 yeah but i was like no you're not having 50 so she just took it holy [ __ ] yeah there were shell companies there was all kinds of things oh my god yeah is she still alive i don't know
yeah and so how much in debt were you at 34 i think about 3 million jesus christ so i suddenly had to like my yeah i had to sell all my homes not all of them poor baby people hear that i know all your all my homes i had one home i was lived in rancho santa fe and my mom lived with me and then i had an office um that i sold and then my mom had bought a house on lopez island and mind you i'm driving a jeep cherokee you know what i mean so you never went crazy i never went crazy and i was saving this money for this really great strategy of being a 60-year artist you know what i mean taking risks creatively and i didn't have the money to take the risks and she was such a cool character like apparently like i went broke several times she never broke a sweat she just waited for me to come back around and decide i wanted to sing again which i did amazingly you didn't have any access to your bank accounts you didn't look at any of that i did how do i do this without like being i just don't want to get sued do you really think your mom would sue you after stealing hundred million dollars from you it's really possible it could be just i don't know there's people that can take care of that you know um i was seeing bank statements but they weren't real oh no yeah oh it gets worse oh my god yeah holy [ __ ] oh my god so she's just like a [ __ ] crazy person that's why i read that book traumatic narcissism because that was the closest thing i could ever figure out that explained she had a very enigmatic like brilliant personality to where all these employees around her just worshiped her where's she now i don't know i haven't seen her since 2003 but she's alive she's balling somewhere i don't know i
think i mean the irs is called looking for her and i'm like i'd love to tell you where she is i just don't know so we made a deal that so she never claimed anything as income right she just took it all and so [Music] she and you could get a sunset clause like so in a contract for anybody listening it does notice sunset clauses like if a manager helps make you famous they could have an argument even if you fire them as a manager for having a piece of your career forever it's kind of the sunset clause and so her and i didn't have a contract but she definitely was wanting you know like an argument for a piece of my career forever so in exchange for not having that we worked out this deal where she would claim income is tax you know taxable should have to pay taxes on that um and then she wanted a half a million dollars so uh i went to a manager named irving azoff and i borrowed money and i paid my mom off and it was the last time i ever saw her wait a minute she stole 100 million dollars and then you gave her a half a million dollars just to go away just to be done with it just to help with the tax situation that got caused by the whole thing it was a [ __ ] show but what did it feel like when you found out that all the money was gone and then you realized that your mom had ripped you off it took so long to figure it out so once i started pulling the thread to when i made the realization took quite a bit of time how much time at least a year i think probably what was her thought did she have an explanation no she just was like no nothing was ever clear nothing made sense and you know i would try to bring in the other people like what the hell how did this happen and then i brought in an outside auditor and that's when like i started figuring out like in this woman like i'll never forget i was at the hotel in la my mom was there her two you
know right hands were there this accountant and she was like you've gone broke several times in your career i was like come again like what like what started the first thread is my manager that got pushed out sued me for being pushed out i guess so she sued me for like i think it was maybe the sunset clause i can't remember very good and so we go through this whole lawsuit it's an intense lawsuit the judge finally brings me and this manager in the office and he's like just settle you two need to work this out this is gonna forever just settle we agreed on a price i agree to pay her we go outside i tell my mom like all right i just agreed to play here x dollars my mom goes we don't have it and i went come again this was a number i should have and so she told me in front of my lawyer and maybe her lawyer that there was no money and that's how i started to figure it out that woman went through this whole lawsuit without her telling me holy [ __ ] your mom sounds insane so she had your mom had staff oh boy yeah so she just took to that money like a duck to water yeah she loved money yeah i was not made as much my deal but she really liked it oh my god that is so insane i'm thinking about it now like so if you were in your 20s when you hit and then you're 34 when you realize you were broke 10 million bucks a year like a crazy person can spend 10 million bucks a year pretty [ __ ] easy yeah that's all she had to do and then you're gone 100 million dollars and you just trusted her yeah i did nobody else could have done it but her but i really really did trust her yeah oh my god the thing like and i put this in the book but like she had this house on lopez i needed her to sell it too because i needed to sell every asset you know to try and pay back to get this three million out of debt and she bought it with my money you know what i mean so it's technically my home ish but it was in her name and it was
she had the title and so she was like yes yes of course i'll give it to you she never did and so again it was the same hotel i was i was cutting a pop record which by the way was like you don't make pop records when you're a 90s credible singer songwriter it's not what you do like that was a huge risk for me and i knew it but i wanted to do it then i was broke taking a huge musical risk that i knew everybody would hate i knew the press would hate me making a pop record like again like i'll have to tell you a story about that but i knew it was a risky thing so now i'm like trying to make a record deal with the fact that my mom is not who i thought she was everything pretty much had been told about my life from her was not what i thought it was i'd have to go through my entire life emotionally and psychologically and figure out what was the truth and what was a lie from 35 years of my mom talking to me it was an awful awful awful thing the betrayal the hurt you can imagine the whole nine yards but i still was trying to just handle the money thing right and make this record because i really need to make this record and so she's in the hotel i was like you haven't sold this house like you have to sell this house you have to give me this money and it was like all the masks came off my mom has never spoken above a whisper she would always speak in this really calm voice she'd never get angry it's hard for me to describe like the look on her face but it was like seeing a mask ripped off and she's like i'll give you the [ __ ] house and i was like i could end up dead like she could kill you it worried me i i was like that hit a new level of like what i was dealing with and i made sure i changed my wheel instantly i made sure like i took care of all that level of stuff holy [ __ ] so now you're thinking your
mom might kill you whether it's justified or not i was like jewel this is how people end up on tv yeah yeah those true crime shows holy [ __ ] yeah oh my god i have such a hard time with this story how do you ever trust anybody after that i think that my life has been defined in what i would call true rebellion being truly rebellious when i moved out at 15 and figuring out how to be happy you know being truly rebellious meant when i was signed figure out how to be famous and happy and the only real [ __ ] you i could think of from my mom was figuring out how to be happy and it's funny i could cry saying that but i really mean it so funny i was not gonna let her make me bitter or damaged or and able to live in the world and know love and tenderness i wanted my life to make me more loving and more kind and more giving and more generous and you don't just get to do that you have to fight for it unless you're delusional and you just act like everything's fine and act like you're fine but you can't fake that you have to really heal you have to really figure out how to recover and thankfully my hit at the time became a hit it was intuition a huge left turn musically but thank god it was a hit and then i was about to do a huge tour it was going to make me a [ __ ] ton of money and i didn't do it i called my manager and i said i can't tour i'm gonna have a mental breakdown like i can't i can't figure out how to walk in life right now with everything oh sorry i'm getting so emotional i just didn't know how to do it and so i just stopped and i just didn't worry about the money and i didn't worry about anything and i just quit and i hid it on the ranch in stephenville and i was like okay this is like you're gonna have to do the best figuring out you've ever done and i didn't want to go to a therapist
because my brain had been so [ __ ] with i was so mind washed by my mom and so i kind of went back to the drawing boards of self and other what thoughts are mine what thoughts aren't mine what things make me anxious what things don't and something i don't know why really helped me was went to the bathroom was washing my hands i looked in the mirror in our my home and i remember this thing called it was like an allegory of the golden statue have you ever heard that no it might be actually a real historical story but warring village was coming to ambush a village and they heard about it and they had a really valuable statue made of solid gold they covered it in mud to hide its value the war happened the war left and people were so busy recovering they never uncovered the statue and so much time passed people actually forgot it was a gold statue and then one day a huge flood came or rain came and it started to chip away the mud and it was revealed to have gold so for some reason i'm washing my hands i'm looking in the mirror and i think of that story and i was like what if i'm approaching this whole thing wrong what if it's not that i'm broken and i have to fix myself because i felt very broken and i was like what if it's that like a soul or your nature whatever you want to call it isn't like a chair or a cup that can be broken what if it exists like perfectly at all times like it's a quantum thing you can't break it and so what if i just have to do like a really loving archaeological dig back to my true nature and so in a weird way it was like this full circle to this nature versus nurture thing and like fighting for my life for my soul for my happiness by getting rid of just the years of abuse and neglect and mud and blood and spit and
harm and everything and figure out how to wash that away which is easier it's easier to know i'm actually whole i just have to get rid of what's not me that started to be kind of like clear it's a little more binary that way it's just simpler to deal with but it just meant i had to be really really really diligent and it had to be my number one thing you know so i didn't make money i didn't do anything but figure out how to heal like that was it how long did you do that for quite a while yeah quite a while it was sad it's sad to feel like you bury a parent while they're still alive you know the grief of that and grieving that i never did have a mom so i had to grieve that and then i had to grieve the fact that i was tricked and the version of a mom i thought i had wasn't really either that was a double head trip oh your mom sounds like a total sociopath i mean imagining stealing from your child is it's not that like those the the ideas aren't even it's not even available like i can't find it like if i thought about myself stealing from one of my kids like i can't find that thought it's not there like it's it's like i just as likely eat them yeah you know what i mean it doesn't it's not possible it's not a real thought so stealing from your child is crazy but the fact that she steals and does it for all these years and then vanishes and then you pay her off like you have to give her money on top of it you have to give her a half a million dollars to tell her to [ __ ] off and then she still keeps that house and doesn't sell it yeah dude that's so s that's so insane the fact that you've come out of it like very friendly very like you're like really positive and happy it's like how the [ __ ] did you do that like that is almost more of an accomplishment or you
know what it is it's relatively equal to the accomplishment of getting over being a suicidal 15 year old homeless kid or 18 year old homeless kid it's like it's relatively equal because the despair and the the pain and almost almost more so right because that now you've become famous and wealthy and you've you've overcome at least on paper to realize but you haven't because you're still [ __ ] over by the thing that ruined you in the first place right how do you mean your mom like not having a mom there the thing that was [ __ ] you up when you were a child [ __ ] you up as a 34 year old yeah like god damn it but you pull through you pull through like you pulled through then you pull through again it's [ __ ] incredible it's incredible that you're not broken yeah you know like the metal rod maybe that [ __ ] was right as crazy as it sounds maybe she's like this is your final test young skywalker padawan you have made it i know it's like it's so crazy but that's like everyone's ultimate terrifying fear right yeah that's the ultimate fear the ultimate fear is the one you love the most when you trust the most is the one that [ __ ] you over yeah and the fact that you have this separation from her and you're you know as a child especially as an eight-year-old which is just the idea of you waving goodbye to her as an eight-year-old is horrific just emotionally devastating and then to get her back you know 12 years later and to think everything's going to be okay now yeah meanwhile your mom is just stealing all your money yeah it's wild and that she's still alive out there some people are just broken like there's something missing right that's what i think i definitely had thought about like would i persecute her at the time you know
but i didn't for two reasons one is like just that logical thing of like what's the quickest way to healing it's not a lawsuit and if it's gone it's gone but it might not be gone i think it was gone yeah i think she'd lived differently i think i would have heard of her living differently but whatever to me the quickest way to healing was cut your losses and move forward and that's been my motto a lot like because i talked to myself in my head i'm like kilter cut your losses move forward figure it out move forward call yourself by your last name yeah i'm like my own little coach culture pick yes up move forward wow um and i think that for a mom to do that you have to must have been in a lot of pain i don't know what happened to my mom but i think she felt entitled to it not really no um she felt entitled to it well there's a red flag when she's asking for 50 yeah yeah and she would say things like you're just the tip of the iceberg i'm everything underneath and it goes back to that dreamer versus doer thing you know like so there was tons of that like just lots of shaming and a lot it was just it was a [ __ ] show it was really really a [ __ ] show and it was a [ __ ] show to get out from under and recover from but i do feel like i have two talents i'm a very good musician and i'm very good at understanding the mechanics of change i understand it i understand that and it's really interesting because as i look at where culture is and where do i intersect just like when i was like 18 you know culture was in pain and i'm like now what that's where i had an authentic real intersection it's that way again the world's in more pain and over ever and i have things that i know help people and that's worth it you know it's not like i'd wish my life again but i've not just survived my life but i've thrived in it and i've figured out some really complicated important things
for myself and it really helps like the kids in our foundation and it's important stuff to know and so i'm happy to put that to use you know might as well it's that making that poison into medicine you know yeah i i see what you're saying like it's it's not just important stuff to know but it's a lot of people know some of the things that you're saying but they haven't experienced some of the loss that you've experienced and some of the pain that you've experienced and then come through it like you have a working relationship with this it's not it's not as simple as you know the concept you understand like when you hear like self-help people you know there's a lot of self-help people right particularly online now but then you go what the [ __ ] have you ever done man you know like what what have you done like there's a lot of self-help people that are just talking to you about going for it and trusting your instincts and yeah really making a plan and then would you be like but all you do is tell people how to do things like what have you done and how do you ha if you're doing things how the [ __ ] do you have so much time to tell people what to do you don't right so it doesn't work look at statements like trust your instincts so that's a nice thing to say but which instincts do you trust and how do you discern the difference between a fear and an instinct that takes a much more mechanical look at something that you know quick three-minute videos on instagram aren't going to help you with you know and it was really interesting you know i never thought what i did or how i did it was very interesting but a neuroscientist came to me and was like what are these exercises explain them and he was like these actually do neurologically rewire your brain and i was like so interesting like it's very interesting i never thought of it that way and so i really i mean if you're going to get something out of all this you might as well get something out of it and for me it was like i could write songs and i am one of the only people it's so weird to say i'm one of the only
people in the mental health field that has actually created practicable things that rewire you everybody else just talking about a philosophy i'm like that's really weird my little dumb country ass is one of the only people that's actually figured out practicable steps yeah but you can't make a map of the territory unless you've actually navigated it yeah there's a lot of people that understand the concepts that are involved in [Music] reshaping your perspective and re-mapping the way you see reality but have they actually navigated it have they gone through the despair of they had their mother steal 100 million [ __ ] dollars you know have they done all this have they i mean yeah there's a psychologist he was like i don't know how you know what you know like i don't know how you know it and i was like i just didn't get it from a book like i got it from my life and because i wanted to survive i didn't want to kill myself so now what yeah well that's a powerful motivating force right especially for a young person that sees so many examples of how to do things the wrong way around you all the time yeah and you realize i don't want to be like that mm-hmm for me when i was young i just watched a lot of people living their lives in a way that that wasn't fun they just hated it and they they were sick they were like sick with life like life made them sick but i never had to go through anything like you did no it's such an astute observation and like i mentioned you earlier but like i'm writing a book one of the things i'm putting it is like these four illnesses in these four addictions when you tolerate the intolerable you get sick yeah you know when you have to stop consuming it you have to and you don't have to but you don't get to complain if you choose not to change you have to stop complaining it's so hard for some people
too because the very things that placate them are the things that keep them imprisoned right like nice things having a nice car like i hate my job but i have a nice car yeah i hate my job but i have a nice apartment and then you can't leave because you're trapped by these things that you have and then god forbid if you have a family that's the ultimate anchor because then like you have an obligation that's far greater than your own life you have other people that are counting on you and so now that you have no so now you have to plan with very little time with little time that you have to get out and how do you do that yeah you know i think that's why like i mean i know it's kind of probably a buddhist thing right something about attachment to suffering or something but like it's really hard to leverage somebody that's willing to walk away from things yes you know that's why i always stayed away from like the million dollar signing bonus or the whatever because that made me leverageable but if you're willing to walk away you can't negotiate with a person like that that puts you in the power of in a powerful position but if you're so addicted to outside things you're gonna be leveraged and that's not a good position it's the worst position the worst position is be leveraged like the saddest thing is to see someone who seemingly has it all but yet is compromised by this fear of losing what they have i felt that way this would probably be really unpopular but i kind of felt that way about the metoo movement of like guys shouldn't be dicks in the workplace they shouldn't be especially raping you in those types of things obviously but being propositioned doesn't mean you have to do it you know what i mean like you can walk away you can say fine i'm gonna lose my job and it's not fun we shouldn't be in that position i shouldn't have been in that position that that boss put me in to live in my car but you also don't have to do it and something better will work out if you invest in yourself that way like i really it's so hard for people to
believe but i've never seen it not work out every time i made the hard choice it was like rainbow magical stuff happened that i never would have thought would have because i didn't compromise my humanity you can't compromise your humanity and expect good things are going to come out of it it just isn't but i think if you invest in your humanity magic happens i see it all the time i think there was a darkness in the movie industry in particular that existed that was literally interwoven into the structure of the business and you know tarantino talked about it on here where he was talking about a famous director i forget from the past who had a bedroom set up in his office where he would take all the young starlets into there yeah and they had to do it if you wanted to star in a film you had to do it and so when you hear about someone like harvey weinstein right harvey weinstein is the he's the poster boy for that movement first of all because he looks gross right he looks disgusting and then you hear about all these women and he would ruin their career if they didn't do it and he realized he had this power to do this and that this is but then you realize like oh no this is like how they did it forever like there was a woman maureen o'hara what was her name the actress yeah yeah is that her name there was a famous actress i might have the wrong one woman but she it's from the olden days and she wrote something about this this very thing about her career falling apart because she wasn't willing to sleep with the directors and she wasn't willing to sleep with the producers and that she realized that she was always going to have this limited availability this limited career and that this was you know before the internet before do you know who it is does it yeah
maureen o'hara was maureen howard she was calling out sexual harassment in hollywood more than 70 years ago so this is just how that system worked but if you think about it the the business is so different than anything any other business because it's not to discredit the the ability to act or the the craft of acting because it is a real thing but it's also a thing that a lot of people can do it is you know it's make-believe you're pretending right and then how many people are willing to pretend a lot how many people want to a lot you know and so you have people coming to the office come in have a seat tell me why i should pick you and then you have these people that have this ultimate power that are choosing yeah people and then you have these people that are the reason why they want this insane amount of attention in the first place they usually have this hole in their soul they're trying to fill up right and so they're willing to do anything to make it and they see other people making it and that this seeing the audition process firsthand you know when i first came to hollywood and i was doing auditions for tv shows and movies and stuff like this is like the worst way for people that are already damaged psychologically and mentally this is the worst way soul crushing for them to try to navigate through life yeah to go and hope people pick you and then when they don't you're like why and then you try again tomorrow and it's mostly rejection yeah so it's like 99 rejection and maybe one percent if you're lucky you get it you get a gig yeah holy [ __ ] and then you realize this that it's all these guys that are trying to [ __ ] these women that's why the me too movement was so important it was because this is not how it should be you know yeah you should definitely say no you know yeah you definitely should and you pay a big price and it sucks and we shouldn't have to you shouldn't have to you know you definitely shouldn't have but like your boss in san diego that forced you to become homeless and those you know people that have that kind of
power they've been using that forever yeah it's a weird it's a it's cr it it's a thing that only exists without exposure right like unless you can shine light on it yeah it's it's a natural thing where people when they don't have any but no one knows right and you're the boss and you have these people working under you or you're trying to get you know people are trying to get into films yeah there's no repercussion it all happens in the darkness yeah the film thing was the craziest one right because all the other folks knew about it that was yeah they all the little vampire helpers they all knew about it they were all like feeding virgins to the the demon yeah you know no the kind of culture is crazy yeah and they all also needed it they needed the demon to stay alive for their job right because like if you're working for the weinstein company and you're you're you know you're making millions of dollars we're making big films you're god you sacrifice the virgin to your god and probably as the lack of accountability like takes place the the demon demands more right because now they're crazier yeah right just like like like rock and roll stars trash and hotel rooms like you just want to be even more outrageous and more crazy and the more you get away with it you more realize i think get away with anything yeah and the next thing you know you get sicker and it goes back to that like you tolerate the intolerable yeah you get ill and then you get more and more ill and then it's also this biochemical you know you take a hit of heroin it gets you perfectly high the next time you do it it doesn't get you just as high so you have to do a little bit more because your threshold starts going up and that's how addiction works it's the same thing with emotional addictions sexual addictions you know that's why people who start getting sexual addictions have to do weirder and weirder and kinkier and kinkier [ __ ] to get the same biochemical payoff right it's the same with that kind of sexual predatory
behavior it starts here and then to get the same thrill it has to escalate to here and that's where it's just like how do you look at stuff like that how do you start healing and creating a space where there can be some kind of education or reform to help people that are sick you know what i mean yeah like you can't leverage your child when you are in your heart right you can't that's why you say i can't steal from my child because it's like it instantly hits your heart i think our whole world has just migrated from making heart-led decisions to brain-led decisions and our brains just aren't that smart like the world doesn't need smarter people we meet people with more heart there's lots of smart people out there but when you don't live in your heart when you can cut off your conscience entirely and do things that are strategic and smart you're gonna leverage vulnerable people you have no [ __ ] problem with it yeah same thing on the receiving end like if i wasn't in really in my heart when that guy propositioned me my brain would have talked me into sleeping with him trust me right because it made a lot of sense to do it right it was my heart that couldn't let me you know so to me and like the businesses that i'm creating there it's all just like how can i figure out how to help people stop worshiping at the altar of like sheer mentalness and get into their heart and realize it's a safe place to be because it's scary it doesn't seem safe to be loved in this world it doesn't seem safe to love much less to live in our hearts we've even kind of just forgot how to do it in general but those native american uncles i told you about earlier like they would teach you to walk this was called the good red road but the first step was hard very first step you would get taught as a kid isn't that funny that we just quit yeah that's no longer the very first step to being human is is living in your heart and we've suffered for it well i think they had a smaller number of variables to take into consideration and a much greater
library of knowledge about the variables that did exist right what were the variables that existed you had to have community you had to have the customs of the tribe you had to have the ability to provide you had to have the ability to protect your loved ones from intruders and you had to have respect for the land and for the animals and for what what provided you with life as we've expanded our variables we've abandoned all these core ideas about the value of all these different things like love and community and friendship because we thought that's important but you really want to make sure that you get a career you really want to make sure that you have your phd or you really want to make sure that you get ahead and you invest in the stock market and if you're not investing in crypto you're not investing in the future and and we want to like stat and then you're dealing with so many variables that the human mind which is designed for tribal life and you know small groups of 150 people trying to get through the world you're you're not set up for this you're not set up for it and so like britney spears you're making shitty concrete you know like most of us most of us make concrete with shitty ingredients and so the structure of what what you are it's not and very few people are going through like like purposely going through difficult uh trials and tribulations on purpose to try to figure out who you are forcing themselves pushing themselves digging into their consciousness trying to figure out okay what's what's wrong with the way i think how do i fix this how do i make it better how do i how do i how do i reinforce all the good things and how do i eliminate all the negative things yeah how do i look at it correctly how do i look at myself how do i do a real analysis of who i am and and try to figure out what patterns that i i feel like i should stop and what patterns i feel like i should enhance mm-hmm
yeah no one teaches you that no one teaches you teaching new facts and numbers yeah and and how to sit down and stay and if you little billy can't pay attention so we're gonna give him drugs you know and like little billy's bored out of his [ __ ] mind and little billy's built to move yeah he's built to be running around you tell him to sit down for five hours a day and an hour in each different class he's like ah like something's wrong with little billy now something's wrong with you [ __ ] yeah this class that you're teaching little billy sucks you're bored you don't want to be here either you've given up on your hopes and dreams you know and then the people that have given up on their hopes and dreams are teaching the children to give up on their hopes and dreams you're like oh my god and it's for a system that was built in the industrial age that doesn't even have to do with the fact that we're moving into a gig economy and so creativity the ability to pivot the ability to lean into the unknown are actually the skills our kids need and that's not what we're training for kids right now at all with our our foundation is a school like an alternative school so they do core like charter school curriculum for two days and then they're with with us the other days of the week but all we teach them is like entrepreneurial skills this type of mindfulness psychology and then we teach them tennis because it's such a psychological game they can really start to see like how they're doing yeah interesting why tennis because it's so psychological it's so competitive but you're really kind of competing against yourself and it's such an intense game that when you're off you see it right away you see in your like everything from your swing do you play uh no not really i'm not good at it but i know that about it and so i just thought it'd be good i kind of just picked it but what's cool is like right now we're the number two tennis academy in the country and number one and number three recruit tennis players and we just give ghetto kids rackets really yeah
wow it's really cool and 99 of our kids earn their own college scholarships and 90 or 70 of them this year were ivy league level wow and nobody else is getting those results like it works you know like and we flipped the model because usually there's this paradoxical reflux if you give somebody charity because that was on the receiving end you feel bad about yourself but you're grateful but you feel shitty i feel bitter and i hated that paradoxical kind of reflux and so with the kids we don't give them anything we just teach them how to do things all these internal things of like i'm going to help you figure out how to dissolve your bad concrete i'm going to help you build a new architecture of all your thoughts that you're going to make actions based on and it works and it works really really good it's fun that's amazing that's an incredible result yeah and that's the byproduct so i think most foundations they want to give a scholarship to somebody that's like giving somebody the pair without giving them a treat like i'm trying to help kids grow and then the byproduct is just magic like one of our girls cheryl when i met her she was 15 she had just tried her second suicide attempt she was in the hospital for quite a while and i just started teaching her those little paper exercises like what are the thoughts you're having are they true does it make you go tight or open and just starting to work her through that and i was like i know it's hard to believe you're gonna weep with joy one day and she's like it's impossible i was like i know it sounds impossible but i promise you one day you're going to come to me and be like i wept with joy and i remember the day she called me she's like i'm sitting here weeping with joy i can't believe how happy i am she applied to colleges got turned down she played to ten of them got turned down down by nine she never faltered she was like it'll i've been doing the right thing that's all i can do the rest is out of my control i know something will work
out maybe college isn't for me but i know something will work out like she didn't tank which was kind of amazing and then she got her last acceptance letter and she just went to stanford wow isn't that amazing that's amazing and she's going around campus handing out flyers that says do you want a wellness buddy it's like she's not the cutest so cute oh well so she has little flyers all over stanford campus saying like if you want a wellness buddy and so she's creating her own culture that's healthy around her it's so cool it's really fun that's amazing that you've helped her do that that you've given them this this motivation and this fuel you just need a little help it's like being taught geometry or trigonometry it's like we just need to be taught some of these skills i think they're much more valuable at the end of the day because what's the point of being famous if you're not happy like what's the point it's just crazy that those are this not the school that's not the the skills that schools are teaching it's like we we know this if you say it it's logical like everything you're saying is very logical yeah this is not like uh we need uh cold fusion like well that would be nice but we don't know how to do it yet no it's like this is all doable yeah this is all logical there's there's a real cause and effect you you see how you've managed to rethink your life and it's turned out amazing and it's doable and there's so many people that are in this pit of despair and don't feel like there's a way out of it well people have done what you've done they've gotten out they've figured it out they've they've managed to navigate the territory and now they want to show you a map yeah and let's let's look at what are the most important things well one of the most important things is how do you think about things yeah what meaning do you give things do do you give things this meeting do they have meaning or do you give them meaning because very often things don't have a meaning you assign them a meaning and you can assign them a positive
meaning or a negative meaning and you can decide that this is going to be a learning moment and that this is going to build adversity is going to build character you're going to get through this and you're going to come out on the other in a stronger person pressure builds diamonds and you're g to realize that and to have these incremental moments where you see success and then you build upon that and then you learn to trust the process you'll come out on the other end but they're not teaching you that [ __ ] in school they're teaching you to memorize things they're teaching you facts and they're teaching you how to do calculus and they're teaching you how to apply for schools families are teaching us you know like we've literally lost this skill you know so it really needs to be taught again thoughtfully and intentionally taught that's actually why i worked with the state of ohio it has the highest opioid death rate i think addiction rate and school shooting rate it's really sad ohio does yeah jamie what's going on in ohio yeah see if it's right keep me honest but anyway i worked with the montgomery county school services there to create like how can i take this curriculum that i know works for me i helped these kids for the last 18 18 years and how can i get into like an english class where it's not like you're going to the counselor's office for a separate thing or some other whatever outside school program or something it's not layered on like how can i legit bake these into english class and so that's what we did it's called cella like social emotional language arts but it's where i start to like introduce these ideas of you know i perceive what i think therefore i am how did you get this all put together like how did you how did how did you go from being a person who has overcome some mental health issues and overcome depression and suicidal thoughts to getting together and and putting how do you have the time to put the structure together how do you have the time to oversee it and look at it and how do you have the time when i got divorced i knew i couldn't just tour as a living as a single mom
and so i wanted to create a job that had a lot of purpose and meaning to me that wasn't just touring and so i wanted to build a business outside of music but i didn't know how and so i tried to look at that little curve of intersection the world's in pain now what and i realized oh my songs aren't actually just my living like what i know about pain is valuable and it's what i like to do it's how i like to help and so then i just was trying to figure out how do i scale wisdom basically that's what i'm trying to do is how do i just scale wisdom how do i scale information it's going to help people and so i tried to do an offering in every category so like i'm making a mindfulness cartoon mindfulness by the way just i hate that word because it's everywhere but it's like this weird word nobody knows what it means so i just want to define it for me so at least we know what i'm talking about i define mindfulness as conscious presence just means you're consciously present that's it it's nothing more magical than i am consciously here presently right now and what i said about leaving your house to go you know find burglars that isn't being present that's leaving the current moment to go keep yourself safe which is really not a great idea so meditation there's two halves to mindfulness meditation is like a bicep curl for building presence and they've actually known to show you can affect the shape of your brain and how your blood flow works you know just by meditating and you do as little as eight weeks i think they showed so that's the bicep curl of i can learn to be present for longer and longer periods of time you know i can if you learn a mantra or you learn to count breasts there's a million ways to meditate you might only be able to be present for one second that's okay and then you might learn to be present for two seconds and then build it out but it is like a bicep curl it isn't comfortable just like going to the gym people always tell me they can't meditate because
they sit there and they feel miserable that doesn't mean you're not it's not working it just means you're present and you don't feel good doesn't mean it's going to be unicorns and rainbows going off you know what i mean it just means you're going to be present for whatever is going on yeah and you have an actual neurological distraction addiction where you're neurologically used to being distracted that's how your brain says ooh check your text ooh check your emails and when you sit still and try to disengage you're gonna your body's gonna send you signals to be distracted which feels like quitting cigarettes like it's uncomfortable you're gonna feel like you're crawling in your skin but not for long you just have to gut it out for a couple whatever weeks or something so that's building the muscle of being consciously present so that's like taking your car off of autopilot and getting it in neutral that's really good but it won't change your life so just meditating won't change your life that's where now that you're present what are you going to do and that's where you need something to practice like a new behavior something you're really going to work on whether it's a gratitude practice or like i'm gonna look at when i'm dilated or contracted and see what i'm thinking feeling and doing and then you just start building one at a time on those skills so i was able to sort of and with kind of these neuroscientists are like yeah these are legit these really work i started figuring out how could i teach these concepts like to a five-year-old to public school children for me that was like creating this you know language arts program and then this culture company for adults and i've just found really good partners where i'm supplying the information that i know and then like this the great people in ohio and then a salesperson are helping sail it i haven't sold it yet by the way so don't look at me i'm not like a huge success over here but it's the right idea um i think we're about to maybe sell new york school district fingers crossed because this is the right idea like we have to
start helping our kids with trauma in school where kids are without giving them an extra job so and then the culture country company we just started with sax works it'll be our first project where we're actually trying to tinker with humans in the workplace and see how it goes and i think also just for kids is particularly kids with trauma you can give them an understanding and a sense that you care about them as an individual you can like they can go oh i'm not just a her part of the herd i'm actually a person and there's tools that they can help me use and i can get out of this whatever terrible feelings that i'm having right now many other people have had terrible feelings and they've overcome this to become very happy productive loving people yeah and it can be done and our teachers are overwhelmed and they're trauma-triggering too like we just have a fatigued system people are paid well they don't feel appreciated and they're dealing with covid and like it's just it's hard it's hard for people so like with the language arts program i did it also is for teachers like they have their own program because they need help like we all need help we all need emotional support like if kova taught us anything it's that we need some help like the way the world is working isn't helping us feel as connected as we could be that helps us feel more nourished we're at three hours and 40 minutes damn that crazy yeah time flies time flies when you're having a good conversation truth you brought your guitar you want to end with a song i mean yeah i can do you want to you don't have to no i just don't want to make i feel like we've been here forever the poor people are like no they're not listening they do whatever they want like some of them are listening some of them are done some of them yeah some of them are at the gym right now on the third session you know like people the way they digest podcasts is beyond me i don't understand it
i guess they just do it during commute times or exercise times or some people do it at work like some people have jobs where they you know have to perform tasks and they can listen to podcasts at work that makes sense what are you going to play i don't know you want to play your first song since it's your first hit we could do that because it's the first song you ever wrote now that we know that's crazy it's crazy that that was the big hit and that was the first song you ever wrote i have to tune here's another question how come you didn't let the other fingernails grow long my left hand has to be short so that i can play and push on the strings on these i couldn't get to them and then the with the right right hand so i can pluck the strings but dolly parton has long fingers on her left hand because she's a professional and where all rest of us are just amateurs amateurs man so she plays with long nails she figures out how to i've heard she even like retunes her guitar so that she can kind of play strings flat like that oh wow she's genius she's just does is there a person more universally loved than dolly parton like no one has anything bad to say about dolly dolly's great right like no literally no one has anything bad to say about dolly parton yeah how could you yeah it's interesting and it's unified across like liberals and democrats which i love yeah they don't even know what she is no one knows you know like no one knows their political ideas no that's too cool to save yourself let's do it so if i kind of put the mic in the middle here does that work yeah i added another one i'll try to mix it a little bit okay should i like come to the middle you can do that and then you could just move the microphone that that arm will swing towards you oh we did it we figured it out jamie will move the uh camera oh yes yes we're very versatile here i feel like very high tech
um you're the first person to sing in this studio really yeah yeah for sure right yeah no one is sung in this new studio we used to have one over there did anybody sing in that one i think you're the first person to sing in austin in the show where were you before l.a how long have you been here a year nice you liking it i love it good yeah i'm never going back yeah i only lived in la for just a minute it was never my jam hunter s thompson said it's a graveyard from the future that's a great one he was right [Music] so yeah this is my first little song i remember i uh i took a greyhound from traverse city down to detroit i slept that night in the detroit greyhound bus station which was very scary i had my knife back and then i had enough money to get on the train in detroit and make it to chicago and i got off the train and was like where's all the people and they said michigan avenue and so i carried my guitar case i didn't know how to play guitar yet i learned these chords actually a minor c g and d in that order i just didn't know how to go out of order yet because i just wasn't coordinated enough and i couldn't learn anyone else's songs because i didn't know enough chords and so growing up my dad would improvise a lot just to entertain us because drunks don't listen to you and so he'd make up stuff about the drunks not listening to us and it was funny and so my big plan was like just make up lyrics about people as they walk by see if i could get their attention and i would take my change to the amtrak station and say how far would this get me and they would give me a ticket to whatever the next city it took me probably two or three days to make it to san diego and then i crossed the border there and hitchhiked from tijuana down
to cabo and then i and it was i mean i don't know if did you ever go to mexico in those days like it was dirt roads it was like not very civilized down there there's like a lot of like bumpy bumpy dirt roads i'm getting water and so then i uh oh thank you so then i sang on the docks for tourists and i gave foot rubs to tourists trying to earn this is so gross idle assignment said reflexology because i thought that was like made me look legit so that i'd they'd choose me over the other foot rubbers there's a lot of foot rubbers that's the funny thing like what did i think i'd have competition like i literally thought there might be other foot rubbers and i needed the edge it's so dumb and so i got ferry money and went across the sea of cortez to the mainland side then hop trains through uh the copper canyons back to cabo then hitchhiked back up to tijuana and i just kept singing and singing restaurants for burritos and i just the song would get longer and longer and longer got a ride in a semi from cabo back up to tijuana and it had been carrying pinto beans and so there was just spilled pinto beans all through the back of this tractor bed trailer and so the guys slept up at the front of the cab they didn't speak english i didn't speak spanish and i hope the back doors of the semi were open i was sleeping in my sleeping bag on this bed of pinto beans looking at the stars and wow i remember like working on this song that night and i just and then i made it back to school and had my first song and loved songwriting i didn't think it'd be a job but i just it bit me for sure i really loved doing it that might be the greatest what did you do on spring break story ever [Music] people living their lives for you on tv they say they're better jesus hold my goals from behind those cool brick horses come here boy there ain't nothing for free
another bug or another hot dog surprise you wishing away i hope your health don't go to hell well another doctor's bill of lawyers build another cute cheap thrill you know you love them if you put them in your will but who is save your soul when it comes [Music] who is [Music] we try to hustle and try to bustle them try to cuss them and the cops want someone to bust down on orleans avenue another day and then the dollar run and the war another tower went up where the homeless happy homes so we pray to as many different gods as there are flowers but we call religion our friend we are so worried about sitting in our souls i pray that god will take his tool that we forget to begin by who will save your soul when [Music] [Music] who save your soul if you won't save your room [Music] now some are walking some are talking some are stalking their kill you got so-called social security but that don't pay your bills cause there's addictions to feed and their mouths to pay see bargain with the devil say you're okay for the day say that you love them take their money and run say it's best one of those things those flings those strings those flings those strings those flings those strings the sling those strings don't play those two and thumbs in the frames nothing the fancy thing the fancier things the things the things you got to catch [Music] when it comes to the memories [Music] [Music] saved [Applause] [Music]
save your own [Music] that's great went into podcast julie you're awesome thanks for having me my pleasure i really really enjoyed it that was that was one of the best podcasts ever it was really really good that makes me very happy it was intense thank you so much thank you i'm glad we did it we'll do it again yeah 100 thank you thank you very much bye everybody [Music] [Applause] you