"I'm a Sagittarian who's done DMT and I can't hide it anymore."

Some reasons why one person believed the things they did.

Est. Read Time: 45 minutes. Yes, it’s a long one, but I’ve split it into 3 manageable 15-minute chunks so you can take your time! Read Time brought to you once again by the Ashburton Energy + Hair Logistics Group, in association with the Bradley Hills Bureau of Corrections, with additional consultation from the Squadron Line Manageability Optimization Team.

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Hello Sternal Journalists!

I genuinely don’t know how to begin this week, so I’ll use a crutch—a cold open:

L: Looking back, I don't think I was being a terrible person and I think sometimes people want that from the story. I can't look back and be like, “Well, I was just a piece of shit."

I had wild ideas and a lot of people found them harmful. But I left and I found other people to surround myself with who had those same ideas. So I didn't feel like I was hurting anybody.

I think what also complicates it is I have involved a lot of other people in that story who I don't look back on fondly. And how do I tell the story of me really losing track of what was important in life, and not throwing all of those people under the bus?

I have a friend. She prefers to remain anonymous. It may be clear why soon. We’ll refer to her as Liv.

Liv is someone I know from the LA comedy scene. We met when she and her friend completely ruined an otherwise decent set I was having at the Hollywood Improv mic by laughing at what I felt were all the wrong places. Months later, she introduced herself and said that she and her friend had written a screenplay and they wanted me to star in it. I was happy to at least find out that that’s why they were laughing, even if they totally ruined my killer set.

They took me out to drinks where they both played (actually saying things like “We’re gonna put you in our pic-sha, see!”) and cosplayed (having picked their blazeriest blazers) as the most stereotypical Hollywood producers they could be. They handed me a script that was absolutely not written in any format that remotely resembled what a screenplay has ever looked like in history before.

I said I would happily be in their movie. They never made it. But even better than a movie, a friendship was produced. Liv was always a friendly face to see around the scene, and I always enjoyed our conversations.

Then the pandemic hit, and Liv became a full-blown anti-vaxxer.

But—and hang on. Okay, hang on, let’s not get worked up—other things happened. She traveled around the Northern California/Southern Oregon proposed secessionist State of Jefferson. She moved to Humboldt County. She lived on farms. She got closer to her family. She was distanced from friends. She got lost. She came back.

I had no interest in doing the bullshit “humanizing a controversial position” version of this interview. And I wasn’t convinced it would be a good or compelling idea until Liv and I caught up for the first time after the pandemic. She was back in LA, but also back from being an anti-vaxxer—she’d gotten the jab.

And the conversation we had reminded me part of the reason we’re friends: she always says a bunch of astounding shit. There are real-world specifics like being raised alt-right in Hawaii, or having to plan a two-year-old’s birthday party with an untreated broken leg in a hard drug-addled group house. And then there’s the more abstract: her preference to fully embody a belief in order to see if she agrees with it; her deep dives into both the conspiracy and spirituality worlds, and their intersecting plane she introduced me to: “conspirituality.”

I was convinced, and we put a date on the calendar to sit at Pan Pacific Park and talk about her story. And for all the twists, jaw-drops, and head-scratches that made their way into it, the part of this conversation most compelling to me is really that we were able to nail down a thorough—if anecdotal—explanation of the path that one person took to a very specific set of beliefs, as well as the path back.

Enjoy our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

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Part 1: “Pursue novelty, prioritize amusement.”

JS: What do you think is important in life?

L: The baseline is taking care of the people around you.

If you've let people into your life and they've led you into theirs and you've made whatever emotional contract exists when you care about someone—that you're gonna look out for them—standing by that and honoring that and not thinking that there's really anything more than that. Which was definitely what I got wrapped up in.

JS: That makes me think about: a few weeks ago, I was hanging out with a couple friends. Somebody said, “I saw this news broadcast a couple weeks ago where they were interviewing people getting vaccinated. And one guy was like, ‘Yeah, I don't really care about getting vaccinated, but I hear that it helps the people around me. And so I did it.’”

And my friend who was recounting this said, "It's just that easy. I don't get why people are so selfish.”

So I said, “Well, I think maybe there are some people who are like, ‘I believe the science and I don't give a fuck,’ But a lot of the people who are truly anti-vaxx think that they're helping people.”

And my friends were like, “I never realized that the people on the other side actually thought that they were doing the right thing for everybody also. That actually helps me understand.”

And I was like, “You're welcome. But also fucking duh.”

What does that all make you think about? Do you feel like that's True?

L: 100%. The people in my life who were anti-vaxx and the person I was when I was anti-vaxx… you don't think that you're walking around causing harm to people. It's not like, “I believe the science and fuck this.” It comes from a deep place of distrust. And I don't think that distrust is unfounded.

JS: Distrust of...

L: The government. Historically, there’s a lot of reasons not to trust the government.

JS: Sure.

L: But you’re trusting something else. I, at this point have released a lot of the conspiracy stuff, but it's not like I look to my government with any massive degree of fondness.

Still, if you decide that the government is an elite, satanic, pedophile cult, you're putting your trust in something else unstable. You're just putting your trust in different untrustworthy people.

JS: When do you feel like you got into this? You grew up pretty conservative.

L: Very conservative.

JS: In Hawaii.

L: Which was unusual.

JS: Classic conservative bastion.

L: [Laughs]. I actually went to the same school as Obama and my dad was a Birther. I was in eighth grade when Obama was elected president and I tried to write a paper on how he couldn't be president because he wasn't born in America.

JS: And how did your class feel about that?

L: Not well. I got a lot of essay topics turned down as a young teenager.

So I was raised very conservative, but it wasn't really classically conservative. It was a little further than that. When the term alt-right came out, I do recall my dad being like, “Oh, good. There's a word for what I am. Conservative, but a little further.”

JS: So he didn't see it as the pejorative?

L: Not at all.

JS: Do you feel like you ever had a shot to have other ideas when you were growing up? Because now you sort of have come away from that stuff.

L: Yeah. It’s funny because I give a ton of credit to my dad.

He thought the education system was just telling you things to believe without questioning it. So, even though he was also telling us things to believe without question, he really tried to train us to question things. And if we picked up a point of view, he would really make us fight for it.

When I was in middle school, I came out in support of gay marriage because it was being put to the vote in Hawaii. And he really made us fight for that for years.

We'd have pretty vicious fight about it and he would really try and make me prove it. And eventually one day, he was like,”You know what? You've showed me. I agree with you. I think that's a good point.”

And he told me later, “I actually have never had an issue with gay marriage. You just came home from school one day saying it should be legal. And it freaked me out. I didn't like that people told you something was right, so you started believing it. I wanted you to think harder than that.”

That being said, he told me that immigration was wrong and just wanted me to believe that [Laughs]. So there were mixed signals, but the desire to teach his children how to think was there. And then I was actually pretty happy to leave the conservative house when I went to college.

JS: Do you mean not be a conservative?

L: Yeah, I was kind of looking forward to not being a political freak anymore. I mean, you're really an oddball being alt-right in Hawaii in the aughts.

But I went to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the political stuff there was very extreme in the different direction. And I still do find—and at the time found—a lot of that to just be as ridiculous as what I've been raised with.

So I ended up becoming a registered libertarian living in a socialist cooperative house [Laughs]. I learned a lot living in that house and I'm really glad I did it. I learned a lot about both sides.

Up until moving back from Humboldt County, a lot of my life was about being pushed in one direction and being pushed back in another and trying to reconcile two parts of myself that felt really, really disparate.

JS: I’m thinking about how all humans are fallible And I think all parents bring their own shortcomings to any family. But I think good parenting is when a parent sees that an ideal is important and they're like, “Whether or not this is something that I'm able to fully take on in my life. I'm going to try to instill this in my kids.”

And some people could see your dad as a bad parent just for being alt-right. Especially in Hawaii. But I think it's really cool that he made such a point of not just taking on whatever ideas were given to you.

But then on the other hand, I wonder if you just get snapped around ideologically because you were trained not take on any ideas without really questioning them.

So, whereas some people might say, “I'm in college, I'm gonna get into social justice even if I don't totally know what it is yet,” you felt like, “I'm not going to get into anything until I can fully defend it.” And so you just ping-ponged around because nothing could get its hooks in you.

L: I think that's very accurate. I think it would surprise people the degree to which I'm sort of able to be passive. I'm a very big personality. But I am pretty good, in my own way, at sitting back and blending in.

There's a Tom Wolfe interview excerpt where he was talking about how, his first time going on the road as a journalist, he went to a NASCAR rally in South Carolina or something.

And coming down from New York City, he was like, “What does one wear to a NASCAR rally? Well, one would wear something casual.” So he put on his most casual outfit, which I think was a three-piece hunter green tweed suit.

And he said it was the most unproductive journalistic expedition of his life because he was trying to fit in but so clearly didn’t. People didn't trust him. And then he decided just to completely be himself. And he ended up going on the road with the Hell's Angels wearing a six-piece white tuxedo.

He said that when you are just completely a man from Mars—you don't fit in and you're not trying to—people trust you a lot more to just ride along as an observer.

And I've always identified with that. I am this big personality; I've never really tried to blend in with a different group. As a result, I've kind of gotten to be a part of a lot of different ones.

And I appreciate you seeing the really good parenting in my dad because a lot of people hear “raised alt-right,” and they're like, “Well, you must hate him.”

And I don’t. I love him a lot. He he's very resolute in his ideas and he's extremely intelligent.

And he had a lot of really shocking opinions that, in hindsight, I’m appalled by.

But at the same time, he was deeply involved in the world of marathons and road races. So we'd have guests from Kenya staying with us all winter. And the way he treated people was always really admirable.

I think I was introduced to that disparity at a really young age: that someone's beliefs and their actions might not always be lined up, and you have to decide by which one you're gonna judge someone.

He's first generation from Jewish immigrants. I think his father was born in the Ukraine

¹

. So my dad's either first or second generation, but my paternal grandfather is one of 10 children in an immigrant family. And all 10 of those children I think grew up to be psychologists or doctors in some capacity.

JS: Oh yeah. Also your dad is a doctor.

L: My dad's a doctor. My dad is a medical doctor. Um. [Laughs]

JS: Sternal Journalists, we'll be getting to some more exciting bits later.

L: Key set and setting for this story [Laughs]

So my dad grew up in Jewish middle class, Detroit. He was born in fifty two and went to Ann Arbor for college. He actually lost his mom to cancer when he was in his mid twenties and went back to live in Detroit, during kind of the post-fall-of-Detroit.

And he went through this horrible trauma of losing his mother in conjunction with the trauma of losing his city. I think it created an amount of fear in him about outsiders, about different kinds of people.

I think he feels like if something changes, it's gonna fall apart entirely and he'll lose it forever. And I think that makes things like changing demographics more difficult for somebody.

JS: Does he like the United States?

L: Yeah. But it's funny that he moved to Hawaii, isn't it?

JS: Yeah. Why did he? And when?

L: I think he felt a need to be different. He moved to Hawaii in the early seventies. After he finished medical school, he did his medical residency there. His dream was to move to Los Angeles and be a screenwriter, but he felt like he followed the path of least resistance staying in the world of medicine, which he—really up until very, very recently—always regretted.

JS: So you left college, ping-ponged around ideologically.

L: I made a decision maybe around 20—when I was trying to reconcile my extremely conservative upbringing with the extremely liberal worlds I kept finding myself in—to just believe what was most fun. Pursue novelty and prioritize amusement and humor above all else.

And I kind of fell into being a light conspiracy theorist, but it wasn't like, "Oh, the government's trying to kill us.” I was just like, “Maybe the Earth is hollow. There's no way of knowing.” Just taking on things that were funny and hilarious to me and making that my system of beliefs.

JS: I do remember you doing like Flat Earther stuff.

L: Never been a Flat Earther. I was a Hollow Earther [Laughs]. Very different.

JS: [Laughs] Thank you genuinely for the correction. I want to hear the difference. Are you still a Hollow Earther?

L: I’m not. I honestly never really was. But Flat Earth, you can really easily disprove.

Hollow Earth is so ridiculous and baseless. It’s like Kanye West telling people that Pete Davidson has AIDS. Once you accuse someone of something, they look guilty trying to deny it even if it's completely off base.

So Hollow Earth is just like, “We don't know. We've never been that far beneath the surface of the Earth. How can you say that there isn't a Limurian society in there with a city called Shamballa?”

This is what people believe. And what I thought was so funny and loved about it so much was, you can't disprove it. but what a leap!

JS: You seem to make the choice to explore the ridiculousness of a belief by fully actually embodying the belief.

L: As myself. Yeah.

JS: That's such an interesting choice. Does it go back to you having to fight for beliefs? That when you see a belief, you've been trained to be like, “I have to actually try believing it and seeing what it feels like?”

L: My God, I’ve never thought of it that way. I've always attributed to having B-Character Syndrome. I'm a Kramer type. I'm always off on my side plot.

To be frank, I think it's always been a defense mechanism. I don't think I realized that until somewhat recently—that embracing being a ridiculous person was the best way to cope with not feeling like I had the choice of being a normal person.

But I think I've come out of that. I think I needed to experience the darkness of what it can actually look like when commit more, when you surround yourself with weird people, when you surround yourself with dark people.

I’d always been such a dabbler. And once I found myself fully entrenched in extremely fringy groups of people, I realized how bad your life can be if you let yourself be overtaken by, you know, ridiculousness.

JS: Let's dive all the way in. Beginning of the pandemic.

L: February, March of 2020, I was doing standup. I was working as a private cook with one of my best friends. I was working in the world of health food. I was waitressing. I was very, very, very busy and I was not sleeping pretty much ever, but it also felt like everything that I wanted was coming together for me. I had just turned 25. I was like, “This is pedal to the metal time. This will all pay off.”

And then one day I woke up and it was completely gone. I was just a single person living in a Craigslist house with some people I didn't know that well. And it was very hard to reconcile.

I was living in my own world, I was self-absorbed, I was creating a future for myself, it felt like the right thing to be doing. And then the pandemic hit and I was just extremely lonely.

All these things that I was working for were gone. All of a sudden, there was no more stand up, no more working private cooking events. The things that I'd been building had not been a firm community of people to support you in tough times. What I'd been building was a successful professional life that disappeared.

I didn't wanna move back home, but I had to turn to my family because I hadn't created another family. I didn't have a partner. I didn't have my own thing.

So I went straight back to the weirdness in which I was raised, which I had spent the last five years getting away from by deciding I'm just gonna believe what's fun and not take things too seriously. Make being funny and being around funny people and being this absurd person sort of the basis of my life.

But I had to turn back to my family as a support system. It was all I had. I was leaning on my dad a lot. We’d actually had a falling out and we reconnected during the pandemic because I felt like I needed answers. I just felt so lost and so isolated.

And my dad had answers because he thought that COVID was just a scheme to get Trump out of office. And he had told me my entire life, “The liberals will get us all killed.” And he was like, “This is it. COVID's not real.”

JS: Reminding everyone: medical doctor.

L: [Laughs]. It was a confusing time. Everyone was really looking to people like Fauci to tell them what was going on. And I found a different figure than that in my father. We were adding fuel to each other's fire. He was my Fauci.

And I went from feeling like, "You just believe the thing that's most fun” to finding the thing that finally got me to actually believe in something.

For the first time in my life, I really, really, really felt strongly that something was true. I felt that COVID a scam. It was about creating a communist society of totalitarian lockdowns and forced vaccinations that would sterilize people.

For the first time in my life, I was like, “I have to start making choices about this instead of just about my own life. There is something larger than myself happening here. And it's so nefarious and it's so sickening and it's so horrible that not everyone is seeing it.”

JS: Was it perhaps a blind spot because the person who had taught you how to question things was the one who was telling it to you? Or did you not question it and you really got yourself to believe it through the method you were taught?

L: A combination. I think it comes back to a point I brought up earlier with my dad's radicalization coming a lot from loss, from the loss of his city, from the loss of his mother. We collectively dealt with so much loss during COVID.

We went from having a great economy and things thriving to all of a sudden everyone was stuck in their homes and things were falling apart and people were losing so much. And I think that times of loss and grief are bad times to make decisions. Those are bad times to pick up an ideology.

Because I think the personal loss that felt so massive to me? I needed selfishly to make it about something bigger than myself. In reality, I probably could've been sitting in my room and working on hobbies, but I just couldn’t. I needed justification.

There’s another addition to the story, which is complicated. But I really don't think that my pandemic story exists without my dad's story. And also I don't think it exists without this: when I was in college, I became very obsessed with a period of Hawaiian history: the leper quarantines of the 19th century.

It’s not taught in Hawaiian history classes when you grow up on the islands. But ultimately people were declared to have leprosy, declared legally dead. They were sent to this horrible isolated peninsula on an outer island, and it was really done by these shady fake governments that were set up by second generation missionaries.

It was about controlling the Native Hawaiian vote and the Native Hawaiian land; getting rid of the monarchy and turning Hawaii into a U.S. territory. A cash cow for the U.S. via the sugar economy and tourism.

This peninsula is full of graves of people who were horribly and wrongfully sent to their deaths and some forcibly sterilized. And this is a real history and a true history. So I had this rare and intense knowledge of a quarantine that was done by the government with ulterior motives. And I went hard into that.

I thought I was being a good person by having this particular view and wanting to bring it into the open. So to have it then occur again in my own life, it felt so clear.

I wanted to get out of the city and I felt like I needed to learn how to live without the government because I just never thought any semblance of normal society was going to come back. I thought, “Well, I'll just start a different life so that they don't have that control over me.”

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Part 2: “I was looking for conspiritualists.”

JS: On an ideological level, I understand getting to the point where it's like, “The government is doing it again. I need to leave and learn to live on my own.” But on an emotional level, was it terrifying to actually to believe the things that you're talking about?

L: Yes. It was scary. It was terrifying to think that there was this massive conspiracy. That life would never and could never go back to the previous life I'd had, which I'd loved.

But what's funny is, once I left LA, I did tons of extremely dangerous things, exploring a very rural and lawless region on my own. For six months to the day, I effectively lived out of my car and traveled around a region north of San Francisco and south of Eugene, Oregon colloquially referred to, and sometimes officially referred to, as the state of Jefferson

It’s a libertarian proposed secession state, where people in rural California and people in rural Southern Oregon feel like they are not represented by their states, which primarily have the interests of Portland, Los Angeles and San Francisco at heart.

It’s a region with a small red voting population and very minimal police involvement. And I spent six months living and traveling around it.

And when I was still in Los Angeles during lockdown, I found other people who were anti-lockdown. But to be totally frank, I didn't like them that much. We had some fun times, but I felt like there was another level to it.

I felt like there was a spiritual component in wanting to seek the truth on this. And I felt that there were people who it wasn't just about saying, fuck the government, fuck lockdown. I found those people in LA. I wanted people who were really questioning why this was happening and what was really at stake.

JS: They were against the lockdown, but they just wanted to do comedy.

L: Yeah. They just didn't wanna lock down. I wanted to find people who were against what was happening on a spiritual level. And I really felt passionately about this. And that is something that, looking back on. I do find really ridiculous.

JS: This reminds me of a term you introduced me to: conspirituality.

L: Yes. I was looking for conspiritualists. I was looking for people who thought there was a satanic pedophilic cult running the world basically.

But I also was looking for people who were questioning the nature of reality and the nature of existence and why this was happening on a deeper level. And I found that in this region. I found what I was looking for, and those six months I spent traveling had a lot of highs and lows, but a lot of really amazing highs and frankly I'd relive it.

I found people who would unite around, “Okay, this is bullshit. This is just a ploy to get people to comply, yada, yada.” But then we get way more into talking about what the human experience is. Why we're here. God. The nature of reality. Where we come from, where we're going, what the point of this is.

And that was something that I don't regret exploring. And to me, the fact that those two worlds are really intertwined is funny.

JS: Which two worlds?

Conspiracy theories and spiritual questioning. And I do think it comes from being lost because, when you are pretty content in your life, you don't spend that much time grappling.

JS: What was the first moment where you were like, “Okay, I have found what I'm looking for in this region.”

I spent some time with these homesteaders in a place called Crescent City. It was a couple in their fifties. The man in the couple was kind of a normal liberal guy, but his wife who I became extremely close with was a conspiritualist.

She was also very kind and very funny and they were self-sufficient living off the land and we would have wonderful conversations—that, looking back on, I really value—about autonomy and control. Control over your own life and not allowing the government to control you and also about God and frequencies and why we're here.

We'd have such great conversations about that. And I was like, “This is kind of what I wanna be doing. I don't really wanna be at an open mic in a parking lot. I want to be hanging out by the third cleanest river in America, the Smith River, talking with this person about this stuff.

JS: Okay, you’re having that wonderful time on the Smith river, talking to that nice conspiritualist lady. At that point, were people even talking explicitly about being anti-vaxx?

L: Yeah. If you were in that world, you would've thought the vaccine had already been invented because we were all talking about how the vaccine was gonna come. And that was gonna be just an other level of compliance.

JS: And this is like June 2020.

L: Yeah. When everyone else was like, “Oh my God, we hope there's a vaccine on the way,” we were just like, “Yeah, they've got it already.” It was a broadly anti-lockdown region. Like you could go pretty much anywhere without a mask.

Another thing that I think allowed me to avoid a bit of moral reckoning is that I left the city and started living on farms largely with other people who were anti-lockdown. The idea that I was putting anyone in harm's way with my opinions was kind of unfathomable because a lot of people were seeing eye to eye with me.

And I was living this insanely outdoorsy, healthy life. I was living in a tent. I was never in enclosed spaces within six feet of people. It was just such a different life. I wasn't in the city being a super spreader.

JS: Before we talk about coming to believe in COVID, I think the thing that might be the toughest for people to grapple with is the spiritual component of it all.

It makes sense that you're like, “People who are lost look for spiritual things, people who are lost look for conspiracy theories,” but when you talk about being with that woman and having that moment of, "I love talking to this woman about these things," what is the content of those conversations?”

L: We would talk about basically simulation theory and who created the world. She had a theory that we were all notes on a song basically, and that our existence is a sound wave. And I didn't really feel that. [Laughs] But I enjoyed her take on it.

JS: Let the record show a wince of skepticism from Liv.

L: But I was really involved in those conversations. And I just loved thinking about those things.

And I had my own theories about the fact that the sky is this map that can be followed in terms of navigation. I'm from Hawaii and the Polynesians were the greatest navigators of all time and they used the sky.

And I also—hold onto your seats, everybody. I'm gonna surprise you. I'm into astrology [Laughs]. So in my opinion, you can also tell quite a lot about who you are from its coordinates under which you were born.

So the fact that it was this dual map, this strange blueprint that makes sense of the minute and the massive, I was just fascinated by that.

And that's what I was thinking about and talking about. Who created that? What is that? Where do we come from?

JS: And to engage that: the conspiracy of governmental control… you actually thought it was Satanic or Satanic is like a placeholder word?

L: No, I thought it was Satanic. I Thought it Satan worship. They're Worshiping Satan. They are eating children. They are doing horrible sacrifices.

JS: But you weren't QAnon.

L: No, I was not QANon.

JS: And we'll get to that but we have like seven different ideas that I wanna nail down. Who created, for that woman, the song; or for you, this sky map?

L: God. I believe In God.

JS: Is she talking about God?

L: She’s talking about God. But not God as in a man. God as in a force of energy. God as infinite love.

JS: Do you believe in Satan?

L: I do. I don't believe in a man in a white robe and a little wily devil fighting each other. I believe that there is infinite love that we are descended from. And that is God. It's not a person. It's an infinite source of energy. And I think that we're manifestations of that and that infinite energy is love. And I think that that is real and true.

And then I think that there is another true thing and that is fear. There's a finite amount of fear and it's used to manipulate. And I don't just mean that in terms of a government lockdown. I mean fear is what makes us make bad decisions and love is what makes us make good decisions. And fear of losing love can make us make terrible decisions.

But there are basically two forces in the world that are true: love and fear, and you can choose one or the other. And so in that sense, I believe in God and I believe in Satan. God is love and Satan is fear.

JS: Do you think this unlimited love has a physical manifestation or did have a physical manifestation before? Like is love the name we give to a power that actually exists in a physical way?

L: Mm. Okay. Hold onto your seats, everybody—I’ve also done a lot of hallucinogenic drugs. [Laughs]

JS: I don't know if the people can handle all these unexpected twists.

L: I'm a Sagittarian who's done DMT and I can't hide it anymore.

I don't think it's ever been a person. I think it's infinite, so it's without senses. And I think that the human experience is getting to actually experience infinite love within a container, and we get to make sense of it.

We have these different kinds of love: platonic, romantic, familial. They're all descended from the same thing. We just get this human-sized container by which to experience it. And it's a beautiful thing. And I think that when you die, you just kind of go back to that.

So I was interested in this and I was exploring it and I also fully understand why this sounds insane to people.

JS: Well, I think insanity is a tool of dismissal for most people, thought I guess I should state: COVID exists. I believe in COVID. But I think the problem on top of it—the culture war for lack of a better term—is because of dismissal. When I told those friends, “These people actually think that they're helping the most people by not getting vaccinated,” and they're like, “Oh, I never thought about it like that.”

That's because we were so dismissive of them.

That's what baffles me so much. I mean some people are psychopaths and actively wish harm, but the majority of people are trying their best.

JS: That's why I think it's important to engage it and try to feel the logic that you were feeling.

Yeah. I was concerned about not being a good person. I was concerned about having radical political views making me a worse person. I don't think that my spiritual beliefs made me a good person, but I was deeply concerned with not wanting to harm people. Even though my views made people who I care about deeply uncomfortable for a year—and I do feel bad at about that—I really, really, really just felt like they weren't seeing it.

And I felt bad for them too. There's a real spiritual superiority complex in the conspirituality world. And what it comes down to is:

“We’re questioning the lockdown and all these things because we can see it and we're tuned in and we're sensitive. And everyone else is just too callous. Their third eyes are closed. They can't see it. They're not on that vibration. They're not on that level.”

There's a massive superiority complex that exists in that world.

JS: So the Satan worshipers are worshiping this power of fear. Do they feel like—in this world, in this belief structure—does this Satanic cabal believe that they're doing it for right reasons? What do they get out of it?

Well, okay. Sorry to bring it back to my dad. My dad doesn't believe in the Satanic cabal. He thought they were just doing it to get Trump out of office and for the money. He was like, “They want the power, they want the money.”

And my thing was, “They already have all the power and they already have all the money. So there must be something more.”

And that's what happens when you start going down the rabbit hole. Once you start agreeing to believe in something that there isn't really evidence for, that doesn't exist, that doesn't make sense; then you've given yourself permission to extrapolate further without evidence.

So for me, it was unsatisfactory to say that the powers that be just wanted money; they already had it. It didn't make sense to me, but I had accepted it that far. So it became increasingly easy to say, “Well, they want more. What they're doing is a spiritual war.”

JS: And would their goal be then to somehow make the limitless love limited?

L: Yes.

JS: Was there anything beyond that more specific about how they were going to do it?

L: The vaccine.

JS: And how was that going to happen?

L: There was a video that was really popular at one point where  psychic was like, "One of my clients just got the jab and her connection with source was gone."

In hindsight, it is the most denigrating thing to God—to infinite power—that there is a vaccine [Lauhs] that could stop that. That is just wild to me. But it was that even if it wasn't a chemical in the vaccine that cut off your connection, you were doing something that was spiritually in opposition.

There was some contract with the Satanists that you were signing. Like a Faustian bargain. By doing that act of compliance that you were aligning with Satanists. Again, very wild to me in hindsight.

JS: Around that time, you were sharing some anti-vaxx memes. And I feel like some of it was more science-based. Talking about trials and things not actually being proven or that they might be scientifically dangerous versus “This is going to break your connection with God.”

Oh for sure. I think there was a lot of confusion in a genuine scientific way in all this time. And I still have friends who haven't gotten the vaccine and they have fair reasons for not wanting to do it.

One of my very dear friends, who's extremely kind refuses to get the vaccine because, while there aren't stem cells in the vaccine, there were stem cell trials during the vaccine development. She's very, pro-life and I guess a lot of people would already consider her to not actually be as good of a person as I've made her out to be because she's a pro-life Texan, but she's one of the kindest people I know. I won't say she doesn't judge, but she's not gonna stop anyone else from doing it.

But there is an aspect that is not at all woo-woo. It’s purely scientific history of this vaccine.

It's a quickly developed vaccine with vaccine technology that had never been used before. And I say that as someone fully vaccinated who is glad I'm vaccinated. It’s not the most effective vaccine in the world. People still get sick.

There's plenty to question on a purely scientific level about the vaccine, just as there has always been plenty to question on a purely scientific level about the efficacy of masks. I work at a restaurant. And people have to wear mask when they walk in and then they sit down at their table and they take their mask off off Immediately and they're sitting within two feet of other people.

And I’m like, well, this is just the stupidest thing on the planet, but I just can't go down that rabbit hole because I know it takes me too far. But there is still plenty of stuff that's very valid to question.

JS: But was the sharing of what you felt were valid, scientific quibbles, was that as important as breaking your connection with the God, or was it like “I'm using this because this is the language that some people are going to hear in my crusade to keep the love force alive?”

To me, it felt like if I got the vaccine, I was giving up a part of myself. I really thought that it could potentially kill people in like 10 years.

I really thought that there was potential population control, that it could sterilize people. I was devastated when people in my life started getting it.

I'm going to jump into my personal story again: after my time traveling, I wound up living in Humboldt County, my unemployment had gotten messed up and I needed to work again and I deeply missed being a cook.

So I started working as a cook at a restaurant in Humboldt and I found other people with my views. And I chose those people for that reason. And I just decided to build a new life for myself in which I was a part of society.

I had a job, but I was in a place for… Humboldt has a lot of natural resources. It's an incredibly beautiful part of the country. And also people up there can really hide. A lot of people up there are up there because they don't want to or cannot be a part of normal society. And if you are looking to have options in case society completely collapses and there's no more resources, that's great.

You are also around the kind of people who are not able to live normal lives. So I ended up living up there for about seven months and I was around other anti-vaxx people. I was living with other anti-vaxx people.

JS: The people you were working with?

No, my employers were not anti-vaxx.  But they respected my not wanting to get it. I was not being forced to.

At that time, I was preparing for the worst. I was feeling like this vaccine was just leading people to surefire destruction and that I needed to be preparing for something else, but it was getting to be half-hearted.

I'm gonna bring up QAnon for a second. I've never been QAnon and I've never liked QAnon.

QAnon thought that Trump was gonna save them. And I've never felt like there was something that was gonna come in and save anybody. I've always been a very independent person and self-sufficiency was an impetus for me leaving Los Angeles and moving up North.

At this point, when I was just living up there and working up there and trying to kind of build a life up there, I think self-sufficiency took on something else. I felt like people I loved were going to die because of this vaccine. So I needed to be really okay being alone. And I had people in my life. I had friends up there. But it was a lonely chapter in my life.

And with QAnon, there were always these dates: “On this day, Trump's gonna come back; on this day. Trump's gonna come back.” Then it wouldn't happen and they'd have egg on their face and they'd just create a new date.

If you really invest in that stuff, there's gonna be some part of you that's hopeful that things don't go back to normal because you can't be wrong. And I really wanted to be wrong.

But I was so deep in that I couldn't really see it or accept it because I'd surrounded myself. My entire adult life, I had chosen the people I'd been around based on who was funny and who was fun. And now I'd moved to this new place and I had chosen everybody in my life based on our shared ideology.

So I couldn't really see outside of it. I was in an echo chamber. There was no distinction. I didn't think that there was any possibility for a good life outside of that, even though my life within it was so mediocre.

JS: Because you didn't think there was going to be life outside of it?

L: Yeah. I thought that people were gonna die and that it was gonna disconnect people from truth. I thought that if I got it, I would be complying, and being weak in a way where I wouldn't be myself.

I needed my self-sufficiency. I needed that independence so much. Cause like, “I'm gonna need to be strong for what is to come."

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Part 3: “Strive for normalcy. You’ll still be Liv.”

JS: How did it become halfhearted?

L: Well, I stopped kind of doing survivalist shit. I was just working a lot. I was a person with a shitty job living in an isolated place with shitty people.

JS: So the survivalism became halfhearted, not your beliefs that the vaccine was bad.

L: Yeah, I guess so. Everything kind of took on a different tone and I spent a lot of time hanging out in nature and getting back to nature of reality stuff. Just really trying to spend time with something that felt larger than myself, because what felt like part of a human experience for me was starting to not feel so good.

JS: Then the questioning stuff felt like part of the human experience.

You know, I had sort of established the spiritual belief system that keeping me going. And I don't mean in like a conspiritualist keeping me on my conspiracy track way.

It was kind of what was keeping me going in my life. I thought my vaccinated family was gonna die. I thought the people I loved most who had gotten this vaccine, I thought they were surely gonna die. I was still mourning this life that I'd had before the pandemic.

And so it was like this connection with something greater than myself was all I really had. This ability to go out into nature and sit on these incredible beaches and just lie back and try and connect to the love of God. That felt really like only the good thing in my life.

And then I'd go home and everyone would be showing me these videos about how, if you get the vaccine, you're gonna lose that. So I think I was really invested in the idea that there was something nefarious here—“in five years, people are gonna be coming out as sterile because of this vaccine.” But in the micro, what I was truly afraid of was losing that connection

Because it kind of felt like all I had. This is really what I learned from that time of my life. If you choose people based on an ideology, you are going to overlook very important things in choosing the people you're around.

And I don't wanna say that these were all bad people. But I was with people who were not thinking of others. And I don't mean that in terms of lockdown or not lockdown. I mean that in terms of everything. I was around highly self-absorbed individuals, and I chose them because they validated a belief system for me. And when you do that, then your belief system becomes more important to you because it's the thing that's uniting you into the group. And it just pushes you further and further in.

And I think in its own way, it's kind of universal. I feel like I'd avoided it through comedy, through the defense mechanism of never letting myself fall too deep into something—just wanting to have fun, just wanting to be this charismatic big personality.

I lost that part of myself in committing so fully to something. And I think it is kind of common in your twenties to join a cult in some ways—to lose yourself, whether it's an abusive relationship, a theater troupe, a spirituality group.

I think that it is really, really, really common in your twenties to lose yourself deeply into something. Because you're trying to figure out who you are and you're lost. And yeah, what I experienced and how I went about about it is or was really zeitgeisty.

But I think it's really universal. And that's the reason why, even though it's controversial, I kind  of like talking about it and I like sharing it. I made the decision to commit fully to something and I had to back out of it.

And basically, what happened is: during that period of my life, I broke my leg. I kept on working as a cook at the restaurant with a broken leg and no one who I was around, all these people who were so spiritual, who were so much about protecting love and protecting God's love for you by not complying with mandates and things like that—were wildly unhelpful when I was seriously injured. I had a broken leg for two and a half weeks before I went to the urgent care. No one drove me to urgent care.

JS: Did you know it was broken?

It was black. And all these people who were like, “We are each other's soul family. When society falls apart, we're gonna have each other's back.” They couldn't get me a pack of ice. They couldn't help me at all. I was hobbling around. I helped put on a two-year-old’s birthday party. I was running a kitchen line. I was dragging my leg behind me. No one was looking out for me.

JS: What was their reasoning?

They were self-absorbed. I don't think that they're terrible people. I think they were all just in over their heads.

My employers were in over their heads running a restaurant during the pandemic. My friends were in over their heads living this weird fringy alternative lifestyle in this rural remote region, which is a hard way to live.

And I was always helping these people. This sounds very weird to say, and this is the thing that kind of haunts me: when I lived in LA, I was, everyone's quirky friend. In Humboldt, I was the linchpin of normalcy [Laughs] in the lives of some very troubled people.

And so I was useful to these people. And all of a sudden I was injured and I kind of wasn't so useful anymore. It was a one-sided relationship.

I realized it one day, doing mushrooms, honestly, sitting on this porch in Humboldt in this very beautiful twilight. And my two closest friends were there and they were being really horrible to me. They just kept on moving to different parts of the house to hang out, completely ignoring the fact that I couldn't walk. Just being so like casually nasty.

JS: So they weren't trying to get away from you.

They were annoyed that I couldn't follow along. Like, “Are not noticing that I'm severely injured?”

JS: Had you been to urgent care yet?

Not yet, but I couldn't walk. And I just was sitting out there and the father of that girl who I was close with came out and sat with me. I was coming up on mushrooms and I was just alone. Everyone kind of left me out there and had gone in to eat dinner or something.

And I was just stuck sitting on this porch, coming up on mushrooms. And I just started telling myself, "You have to be able to do this alone. You have to be able to do this alone." It's kind of this self-sufficiency mantra I developed for myself.

And he goes, "What are you talking about? We all love you. You're not alone." And I just started sobbing and I lost it. And I don't cry very often. And I was like, “I'm completely alone. I'm 100% alone.”

After that, I went back to LA to visit my brothers because I was just like, “I need to be reminded I have people in my life who I care about. I need to risk going back to this horrible city, which I'm sure is just this hell hole.” [Laugh] “To ground myself a little bit. And to see some people who may be care about me, I did this.

I went to urgent care a few days after that. I had a very broken leg. I told work I needed to take some time off, which they were not happy about.

I went down to LA and it was really normal down here. It was really normal. It wasn't what it had been before lockdown. It's more dangerous, it’s a little more dilapidated, there's more clear wealth disparity problems than ever, but it felt normal.

There were like slotted open mics again. Everywhere was open and people were about, and I remember sitting in this park where we're talking and just breaking down again and being like:

”I've been missing this life, this normal life that I had before the lockdown. And I've been feeling like it's been taken away from me by the government, but I'm the one who's taking it away from me right now. I could have it again. There's no reason I can't. It's just me. I'm the problem."

There was definitely a long time in which there wasn't really a normal life for anybody anywhere, but I overstayed my welcome in the world of imagining that there was no more normalcy.

Things had kind of returned to normal in LA and I'd been off imagining how awful things were. I came back, it was normal, and someone offered me a fake vaccine card. They were like, “you should move back.”

And I called my job. I told them I wasn't gonna come back after my injury. They were extremely upset. Then I called my housemates and I told them I was giving them my 30 days. They were extremely upset.

Fortunately, someone else moved in within the week. I went back up to Humboldt and I had zero interest in being up there anymore. I kind of had snapped out of it. And I packed up my stuff and I moved within five days. I had this fake vaccine card and it was like my ticket.

JS: When was this? Had everyone just gotten vaccinated or they had been vaccinated for a while?

This was in September. And I was like, “If the thing about the vaccine is that I'm truly afraid of is losing my connection to God, lying to everybody I know about being vaccinated is by far the worst thing to do. My family will know it, maybe a couple of friends, but I'm gonna really have to lie to everybody even just using a fake vaccine card to like get into a comedy club. That's lying to a lot of people.”

And I was like, “I think I'm not capable of sacrificing that part of myself. If I'm going to have to make the sacrifice to survive, to not be alone, I'm more willing to give up whatever part of me I have to give up to get vaccinated than I'm willing to give up whatever part of me I have to give up to lie.” And so I decided to get the vaccine.

I was sitting in the empty room in Humboldt the night before I moved back to LA. I had my vaccine scheduled for literally the day I got back to Los Angeles and I called a friend from my travels. He was a conspiritualist and just kind of lives alone in the mountains. He’s a dear person to me.

And I told him I was thinking of getting the vaccine. And he was like, “Well, that's fine. People are getting it. It's okay. I'm sure you'll be okay.” And I just started crying again.

I'm not a big cryer. I cried a lot. Because, to accept that you were deeply wrong about something for a long time is an emotional undertaking.

I started crying and I was like, “If I get this vaccine, can I still believe that the government is full of Satanic pedophiles? Can I still believe that the earth is hollow and full of aliens? Can I still believe that the moon landing was fake and that news media is all false?” I just brought up every theory.

He goes, “Of course, you'll still be Liv.” [Laughs]

[Laughs]

L: And that was kind of the end of that chapter for me. I got the vaccine and I was fine. I woke up.  I had to go on that odyssey. I think of people where I had been living, there was maybe one person who felt somewhat betrayed by me getting vaccinated.

But I think it was a manifestation of her feeling betrayed that I left and that I didn't wanna just be helping her with her problems anymore, and I wanted to go live a life that wasn't fucked up and surrounded by fringy people.

If you surround yourself with dark people and dark behaviors and dark fringy beliefs, bad things are gonna happen. It's not good. It's not fun. You know, strive for normalcy is what I say. [Laughs] Because life is going to hand it to you anyways.

And you know, it is funny that they feel like I did this thing that disconnected me from God because my life since moving back to LA has once again been extremely great, sort of as it was when I first moved here. In many wonderful unexpected ways.

JS: I think out of all of the things that you've said, the most astounding thing to hear come out of your mouth is that your new guiding light is to strive for normalcy.

L: [Laughs]

JS: [Laughs] Because we're both—in our own ways and to different degrees—wacky people.

L: I would agree with that.

JS: And I think a lot of what you talked about is the difficulty of confusing wackiness and darkness. And that when you're going into the fun house of wackiness, you can't tell what's what's dark. What's harmful versus what's funny.

L: Yeah.

JS: If you hadn't broken your leg, do you think you'd still be out there?

L: I've thought out this a lot. I don't think I had it in me to get out without an impetus. I think I really needed something to show me that I wasn't living a sustainable life, that things were gonna get worse and worse.

There was also a two year old in the house. I really considered City Slicker-style kidnapping the child and bringing it back to Los Angeles to raise because that was a really sweet kid.

When I broke my leg, this little two-year-old would come bring bandaids and put it on my blackened leg. It was so sweet and her parents were such messed up individuals. And I was just like, “This kid was not born bad. And I don't know if this kid has a fucking chance.”

That's a harsh thing to say, but God, I really, think that was a good kid. And I was so lost in my own beliefs and my own fears that I needed something to snap me outta that. But yeah, I think if I hadn’t broken my leg, I would've stayed. And I think it would've had to have been the next trauma.

JS: How did you break it?

I tripped on my shoe lace, A year of trying to be a survivalist. And I tripped on my shoe lace in a Target parking lot. [Laughs] Severe fracture.

JS:[Laughs] It's it's not lost on me that you believe in this great war between love and fear and that you were worried that taking the vaccine would be fear winning. But as you just said, it was essentially the fear that was keeping you there.

Exactly. I was always so dismissive of liberals, yet it was so important for me to let my life be equally as driven by fear as the kind of person who stayed locked up in their apartment even after they got vaccinated and was so afraid and wore three masks. I was just as fear driven as that person.

Although I have to be grateful for the experiences I had. It was important for me to lose that sense of control because then when I got back to it—when I found myself again—it felt like I had a sense of security within myself, a standing on my own two feet. A true sense of self-sufficiency that I don't think I'd ever had before.

And part of that self-sufficiency came by me accepting, “Okay, I can be completely alone. I can grow my own food. I can be extremely lonely, but why the fuck should I?”

You need other people. You can't do it alone. There's no point. And that was a big part of me deciding to get the vaccine. “Okay, maybe I'm gonna die in 10 years because this is evil population control, but I'd rather die in 10 years after getting this vaccine and spend the 10 years with the people I love most in the world than… I don't wanna survive another fucking week with these losers.”

It was my Huck Finn moment. When I was younger. I always loved the adventures of Huck Finn. When he was deciding to be friends with Jim like, "Oh, I guess I'll just go to hell then.” I was like, “I'll die. And it'll be fine. And I'll have five really good years.”

JS: We didn't and won't talk about the fact that you're really into the harp, which I think is really interesting. We didn't and won't talk about the fact that your dad got into the vaccine before you did.

L: Yes. I do wanna put this out there: my dad does believe in COVID now. He ended up becoming effectively a very successful COVID doctor. He runs testing and vaccine clinics and he's very pro-testing and very pro-vaccinations.

JS: And pro making money off of ‘em.

L: He has made a lot of money [Laughs]. And for the first time in his life, he doesn't regret being a doctor [Laughs].

JS: [Laughs] Final question: when you were like going out into nature and feeling your connection to God while hanging out on the beach, and then you were worried that it was going to go away, did it look like something? That fear? Did you actually imagine what your life could be if you lost that connection?

L: No. Because I was so adamant that I wasn't going to. And I do still believe in God, and infinite power and infinite love. And I think that... It cannot be taken away from you.

And I think that even at my craziest, there was an understanding that no, that can't be taken away from you. That if anyone wants to tap into that and access that, it's available to them. Maybe at that point I just wasn't considering it because I thought I'd never be vaccinated, but I think at no point did I wonder what my life would be like if I didn't have that connection.

Although I was raised very atheist—

JS: [BIG LAUGH]

***

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Come on, Sternal Journalists. If I chased down every single astounding tangent, we were never gonna get out of here! So we’ll have to save hearing about how and why Liv’s ultra-conservative upbringing was also an atheist one for next time.

I hope you enjoyed the conversation and it gave you some thoughts to chew on for the week.

But now…

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Recommendations!

The Batman. Film. Finally watched it. I really enjoyed it, but so did plenty of other people. My only potentially useful thing to add is that, at 3 hours long, it splits pretty perfectly into two 90-minute chapters in case you wanna break it up like I had to.

Burn Down Hollywood. Song. Happened upon this artist Halo Boy playing at Harvard+Stone on Friday and he was pretty rockin’. Also cannot emphasize enough that this does not feel like an artist that should do well or sound good live, and he did both.

Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Season 10 Eps. 3-4. Television Spectacle. This is less of a recommendation and more of an acknowledgment that I watched these with my sister while she’s been visiting. So I’m available to discuss, but Sutton is my least favorite followed by Dorit.

Oh, and here’s a picture of that clean-ass Smith River. Beautiful!

Alrighty! Much love to all and thanks to Live for the conversation!

Julian

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P.S. I spend anywhere between two and twelve hours a week on the Sternal Journal. If you enjoy receiving it (and are RICH) consider becoming a paying subscriber. For just a few bucks a month, you can provide me with a bit more time to come up with fun topics, poems, and interviews; and you with probably fewer typos.

1. This conversation took place before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.