Back the year of 1979, picture me as a backpacking granny glasses, long brown hair. It was kind of like

Darth Vader, you know, it was kind of like, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, toad likes you. And I said, I like Toad likes

you. And I said, I like Toad. Everybody else roared with laughter. I think it took that deep medicine experience to really open up and kind of blow open a part of me that was able to let go of my purely male identity and see the world in a different way. If other people were securely in their minds

and they weren't happy and didn't think it was possible to be happy, maybe being a little

out of your mind could be pretty useful. Should you write a memoir or why should you write a memoir?

Gaye just finished writing his memoir, which is coming out very soon. It's called

Loving Life, Tales of My Wondrous Journey. And what we're doing in this episode is we're talking

about four of Gay's biggest chapters, at least the ones that we decided were going to be super

interesting. One of them is his secret birthday wish, adventures in non-ordinary consciousness,

which, yes, involves some psychedelics, thrown off the bus at the border, and celebrating my

big brother. So, Gay, what do you think the biggest takeaway or reason why people should

pay attention this episode is,

aside from just understanding why to write a memoir in the first place?

Well, I think the stories are interesting that I read because they're interesting adventures,

but there are also things that make you think.

And so I'm hoping to inspire not just people reading it for the adventure, but also reading it to learn more about themselves.

I think the main value of writing a memoir or reading a memoir is if you read a memoir, you're seeing life from another person's perspective.

And you say, wow, how is that like me or how is that different from me?

That's an incredibly valuable thing because, you know, it's true that the unexamined life

is not worth living, you know, unless you begin to ask yourselves the big questions of life,

unless, you know, it wasn't until I started wondering about the bigger aspects of myself in life that I really developed something that I now call happiness.

Because unless we have that self-knowledge of ourselves, there's no possibility I don't think of being happy because you don't know yourself well enough

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