The Dan Hentschel Podcast Episode 6 TRANSCRIPT

Here is the text transcript of the latest episode of my podcast. Some of the transcription may be incorrect as I am not God and I'm not an infallible deity incapable of making mistakes. If you can't accept that, the unsubscribe button is right there.

Hello everyone, welcome to the Dan Hendra podcast. This is episode ten. I decided I'm just going to stop apologizing for the delays in releasing content because to be honest with you, I'm kind of trying to get out of the habit of saying I'm sorry so much. I really have nothing to apologize for and I'm not some neutered a wimp who has to run around begging everybody to give me a crumb of respect.

I should be respected inherently and I'm going to start acting like it. I got a cameo request yesterday from somebody whose friend was volunteering as a nurse in Ukraine, and I was like, Who gives a shit? They wanted me to send them something inspiring and applaud them for their courageousness. And I was like, Give me a break.

Yeah. Real courageous of you to spend your summer in one of the most beautiful tropical paradise as in the entire world. Thanks for volunteering to sip daiquiris by the pool all day out of a coconut. When's my turn to go to Ukraine? I can't remember the last time I went on vacation. It's been years at least. Anyway, it's been an interesting couple of weeks over here in Dan Land.

I am not dead. Contrary to popular belief. A lot of you, I think, kind of misunderstood what I meant by that. So I wanted to take some time to clear it up. I guess the story really starts the day before because I had just gotten back from vacation. I spent the weekend on beautiful Catalina Island. It was horrible.

It was so crowded. The streets were covered in human parts, and the only way to get on and off the island was by ferry. You can't bring a car. So you would think in theory that would keep out some of the riff raff. But here's what I don't get. Catalina Island is right off the coast of Los Angeles, and there's a city there called Avalon.

And you can tell they're kind of trying really hard to be European, you know, Mediterranean. So they do not allow you to have a car. But then they just give everybody a golf cart. And, you know, it's just it's kind of sad almost, because Americans really can't go 2 minutes without being personally logged around by a horse drawn carriage to get 20 hamburgers.

The entire city is maybe ten blocks total. God forbid anybody has to walk anywhere. These are the same people. They get winded because they went up a flight of stairs. And before I get canceled for the 40th time, I'm not being able as I'm not being fat phobic. I didn't even say that. So let's just get that out of the way because my tear sticks almost out and I cannot afford to waste any more fake tears on phony apologies.

Anyway, sorry. I feel like I'm kind of coming off a little strong today. The reason I bring any of this up is because after I got back from vacation, a friend of mine gave me a very strong hallucinogenic sedative, which I will not name on the show because I don't want to give them free advertising. But the morning after I got back, I started work.

You know, I have an office job. I work from home starting around 9 a.m. Pacific Time. And I typed in maybe one word of an email and I was like, I do not feel like doing this. I shouldn't have to do this. You know, somebody as talented as I am wasting their time on a dead end job actually ends up costing society more money because to me, it's depriving the world of any cultural contributions I could have otherwise made which would stimulate the economy way more than any made up task I pretended to do at my office job that didn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

So that's why I never feel bad taking the time during my office job to work on my other creative endeavors, because in my mind, my employer is essentially a patron of the arts and much like all of you are doing by subscribing to this Patreon, you are investing in my contributions to culture through the art that I can create because of your financial support.

So that being said, about 5 minutes after I was technically spurs this hour working, I took two fat rips of ketamine and blasted off to loopy land. And I don't know if any of you are familiar with the concept of ego death, but it's essentially when you ascend past your conscious understanding of yourself and become kind of free to roam about the ether, untethered to your sense of self.

And this can happen for many reasons. Monks oftentimes describe spending their entire lives to get to this point, which is funny because I can pretty much do it with no effort at all for about 25 bucks. And that's exactly what happened to me that morning. I completely forgot everything about who I was, everything that I had accomplished. And I remember literally crying my eyes out because, you know, I was no longer aware of all the incredible things I've done and what a great person I am.

And that was devastating. Imagine what that must have been like for me. You know, you all have never experienced what it's like to accomplish all the things that I have. So you don't really know any different. But because I've been that high, I could feel how low I fell and it was horrible. Then gradually it all started to come back piece by piece, and it turned into tears of euphoric joy because it was like discovering myself for the very first time, imagining you suddenly got to become me, how happy you would be.

It felt like I had woken up from a horrible nightmare that I really thought was real. And, you know, you have that moment where you're just so happy that your life is actually the way that it is. And so when I posted that I had died, that was kind of more what I meant, that I had died a spiritual death and I wanted to share it with the world.

So I made a little In Memoriam slideshow for the person I once was, and I made a crowdsourcing fundraiser so that people could donate to me because again, I was grieving. I was grieving my spiritual death. And that was very emotionally taxing for me. And that meant that I couldn't produce content at the same level because of the turbulence I was experiencing, which as a content creator is money out of my pocket and money out of your pocket because that's your entertainment you're being deprived of.

So you really can't put a price on that. It's worth way more than money. So any amount of money, no matter how high, wouldn't even begin to cover that loss. So that's kind of what the fundraiser was supposed to be about, of course, because this is the Internet, people are completely allergic to nuance. And they thought that I had actually physically died and they were very upset.

So once again, the limits of my followers, intelligence was weighing me down like somebody had tied an anchor to my leg and threw me in the middle of the ocean. And because of the false meaning that everybody else was imbuing onto it, they took down the fundraiser, they refunded every single donation. And I had no say in that decision at all.

All because the lowest of us are too stupid to understand what's going on in the world around them accurately. So I was like, Fine, whatever. I'll move on with my life. The good thing about me is that I don't really get too upset if one thing I do in particular doesn't work because I know I've got 10,000 more ideas where that one came from.

So I completely forgot about it and I went about my day. Then I got an email from the platform on which I had hosted the fundraiser, which you might have noticed I haven't name specifically yet, and I'm doing that very purposefully. They sent me an email and they said, You know, we have a couple of questions about your fundraiser.

We just need to know kind of what's going on and if you have any proof that it's legitimate. So I was like, Fantastic. Now I'm tangled up in corporate bureaucracy. I said to myself, Dan, don't even try to explain the truth. These people are never going to get it. I hate to even go here, but it kind of reminded me of somebody like a Jesus Christ and how he was persecuted because people misunderstood his message.

I know how that makes me sound, and I kind of hesitate to even compare myself to him at all because I think that he did do a lot of things wrong. And I've improved a bit on the whole way that he kind of went about everything, but it was at least in the forefront of my mind as a cautionary tale.

So I lied. I sent them back an email and I made up a lie that I thought would be easy to believe and kind of stopped this whole thing in its tracks before it got to hand, which was that I had made up a fake fundraiser to try and scam people out of money. Now, that isn't true, of course, but I figured that be the best way to get these people to just leave me alone and drop the whole thing.

Next thing I know, I'm getting a call from my entertainment lawyer, and I pick it up right away because I'm in the middle of trying to sell a TV show. Since everybody's on strike, I figured this would be the best time for me to take advantage of it and kind of slide right in there. So I picked up this call right away because I was expecting to hear the good news that we had sold it.

Instead, he gets on the phone and he sounds like he was just in a car accident and he's like, Dan, what the hell did you do? And I'm like, What are you talking about? He says, Why am I getting contacted by this unnamed organization telling me they're cooperating with law enforcement to investigate? You for wire fraud? And when I tell you my mouth hit the floor, I was like, I don't even know what you're talking about.

I don't even know what wire fraud is. And he said, you admitted in an email that you were scamming people with a fake fundraiser. And I said, No, I didn't. That was a lie that I made up because the truth would have been too irritating to explain. And he said, Well, you shouldn't have done that because now you have a problem.

This is going to be a big problem for you. And I said, No, it's not. It's going to be a big problem for you. Newsflash, you're my lawyer. Figure it out. And I hung up and that's when I posted my public apology explaining what had happened. So that's the last I heard regarding that situation. I'm really hoping that everybody just kind of forgets about it, because this would be the second time in a month that I have to haul my ass over to the police station and do their job for them.

So that's the last I heard regarding that situation. I'm really kind of hoping that everybody just forgets about it because this will be the second time I'd have to go over to the police station and do their job for them. So as you can imagine, I was very stressed at this point and I kind of said, okay, I think that it's time to take a little break.

It's time to focus on me. My current partner and I have sort of an open relationship situation going on. I haven't told them that that's what I'm doing, but to be honest, I don't really feel like I should have to. That's one of those things where it's a boundary that I have and my boundaries are my boundaries and they have to respect that.

Some things are off limits for me. What I choose to do with my time away from them is none of their business. I'm my own person. I don't owe them anything. So during my time off, I decided to kind of rekindle an old relationship that I'd had many years ago. Me and this person got to texting, And what I love about this person is I feel totally and completely comfortable to be myself with them.

You know, I just feel like everybody I talk to, I don't know if you guys ever feel this way, but it's like each person individually is only getting one slice of me or some kind of filtered version that there is going to make me most acceptable to whichever person I'm with at the time. But with this person, I don't have any walls up at all.

I feel totally free to express myself and say and do basically whatever I want, and that's something I value so, so much because I feel like it's so rare to find that in a person. Unfortunately, I guess I got a little too open with them and I told them that I had just gotten a brand deal, so I was checking my phone, waiting for little Miss Piggy to come along and drop a deuce right on my checking account.

And this person is very nice, but they’re almost a kind of more of a piece of furniture to me or an accessory of sorts. They haven't really done anything that would compel me to consider them a person who's on the same level as me. And I always feel bad for them because of that, because I just think that must be such a sad existence.

My only hope is that they're not smart enough to even be aware of the fact that their life sucks as much as I can see that it does. And I was explaining this to them, but I guess it was kind of one of those situation where it's almost like you're trying to explain to an anthill what a Wendy's is.

It just did not go well. And long story short, they decided to go with their all of our old conversations to try to find something they could leverage in the court of public opinion over me so that they could get their grubby little mitts all over my achievements. So they leaked several screenshots attempting to paint me in kind of a negative light.

And I don't necessarily want to get into the specifics of what they're alleging because to be honest, I don't even think I should give them the time of day. But if you want more information about that, take a look at my video I posted on Tuesday where I kind of try to clear the whole thing up. So for the next segment of the podcast, I want to try to get into some current events and the big talk of the town this week has been Barb and Heimer.

I saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer on the same day and of course, since it's L.A., everybody was all dressed up in their pink outfits and taking pictures and I would have laughed if it wasn't so horrifyingly pathetic. Imagine having a life so empty that all you have to look forward to are a couple dumb movies. What a sad life that would be every day.

I'm grateful to be the person that I am and not one of these random losers I see walking around our streets like stray dogs. Anyway, I saw both Barbie and Oppenheimer opening night, and to be honest with you, they both kind of sucks. I didn't really like either of them. I saw Barbie first, I think around 515, and I didn't really expect to like it very much because of all the man hate-y stuff that I had heard about it.

But that really wasn't that bad. The biggest thing was just that. First of all, it was literally 3 hours long and it had this completely incomprehensible subplot about World War Two and atomic bombs. And some of it was kind of interesting. But I kept being like, how the hell are they going to tie this into Barbie? And then it was over.

I don't think they mentioned Barbie wants the entire movie, and by then it was like 10:00 at night and I still had to go over to see Oppenheimer, which I really didn't want to do. But thankfully, that one ended up being a lot shorter. Funny enough, they ended up talking about Barbie way more often in Oppenheimer than they did in the movie Barbie.

I it made me think like they should have called this one Barbie and the other one. Oppenheimer It almost made me feel like they had that. I had mixed the two theaters off, and I know that I did. And it's just that's how it made me feel because it was very jarring. So I didn't really like that they both had elements that I did like.

But overall, I just wish that they had been marketed more accurately to what they actually were. I don't really like deceptive, false advertising, and that kind of ruined both of them for me, unfortunately. So that was super disappointing. And that was just kind of the latest in a series of events that made me go like, you know what?

I hate my life. I hate every single thing about my bullshit life. Something has got to change. And that kind of led me down a path of like, am I even doing the right thing anymore? I feel like a failure. And so long story short, I decided that I'm no longer going to be a therapist. And it really breaks my heart to say that I know that's kind of big news, but I got to tell you, I was just miserable.

I mean, it had gotten to the point where during all of my sessions, I was just sitting there seething with rage, staring at the person talk and thinking, You stupid asshole. I had to literally physically hold myself back from getting up and punching whoever it was as hard as I could in the face. It just feels like such a one sided job, you know what I mean?

Like, I'll be in a session and I'll realize 10 minutes have gone by since I even said anything, let alone talked about myself at all. Nobody ever would ask me like, How're you doing today, Dan? And they might sometimes as a formality, but it was so clear that they didn't actually care. They just couldn't wait to start talking about themselves in one other relationship.

Is that ever acceptable? So one day mid-session I just left. I walked out. I said, You're acting like I'm not even here. So this shouldn't make too much of a difference. Anyway, enjoy your peace and quiet, because clearly it doesn't make a difference for you whether I'm here or not. So just talk to the wall. And that was the best decision I ever made in my life.

Absolutely, 100%. The only bad thing is that kind of leaves me with this void where I didn't really know what to do with myself. I mean, I've been a therapist my whole life. That was kind of what I devoted my that was like my vocation, my calling. And so I've kind of been like flirting with the idea of being a doctor just because I feel like that would be a really low stress kind of transitional job I don't have to commit very much to while I figure out what I actually want to do with my life.

I even considered joining the priesthood for a while. Just well, I'm looking for something that I can kind of do on the side. So I don't know where my life is headed at this point, but we'll see. So if you have any suggestions for me, please let me know. I know I'm kind of normally the advice guy, but, you know, sometimes the advice guy needs advice.

Speaking of advice, I figure for old time's sake, I don't want to completely give up therapy forever for the rest of my life. So I thought it would be fun to do one more advice segment because God knows my DMS are a dump truck for people asking for my advice. Absolutely helpless, pathetic people in there. So we'll start with a message from someone named Peeler Rola who writes, I'm moving to Colombia for the next six months.

I need some advice to make sure my boyfriend stays in love with me every day that I'm abroad. So I have the perfect suggestion to break up. I have absolutely no sympathy for people who try to be in long distance relationships. They're selfish, they're abusive. And if you really loved your partner, you wouldn't leave them to go do fuck all halfway across the world.

If you're the one who moves, you don't love them. It's that simple. There's no excuse in my mind. You can't have it both ways. And that goes for anybody trying to make a long distance relationship work. You're selfish, you're immature, and you're not ready for an adult relationship. I've been in four long distance relationships, and all of them were miserable failures because I was too stupid to realize that they just didn't love me.

But they were afraid of confrontation. And I'll never make that mistake again. So let's do another message. This one is kind of long, but I liked it because I felt like I could relate to it a lot given the place that I'm at in my life. It says. My dad passed away a week ago, the weeks before he shared his desire to be buried.

I always wonder if it's buried or buried, because I know that in Maryland, growing up, we all pretty much said buried. But then when I moved everybody, it was kind of like a potato potato situation and people started saying all sorts of different things. So I don't know. Anyway, he shared his desire to be buried slash buried in my mother's native city, which is abroad.

My boyfriend told me that he wants to come assist to his funeral and everything. So wrong grammar there, but I'm going to assume this person is and not a native English speaker. My mom paid for his plane ticket and visa. We stayed for a week. I obviously don't consider it to be a vacation week given the circumstances, and my boyfriend knows that we've been together for four years now.

It's his first time meeting my family here grandmother, aunts, cousins, etc. and he doesn't speak the language. Everything has been going fine so far. Now, excuse me. The thing that bothers me is that he is behaving as if he is on vacation. He goes out every evening with my cousin and my brother eats at the restaurant. I guess there's only one in the whole country, goes out for walks and eats ice cream and corn wants to play football.

Today is my birthday, the first one without my dad and he went to some hot springs with my brother and my cousin. He said that he's having a good time. He enjoys the food and being served by my family. He wishes we stayed more. But again, the purpose of us coming here was not to take some vacation. My brother is doing the same and nobody seems to see a problem with it.

So maybe it's just me who's making a big deal out of nothing. I don't know. I haven't shared my feelings about it with him yet. Should I tell him? Considering that we're going back home tomorrow, do you think I'm exaggerating a bit and he's allowed to enjoy his time here? So very interesting. And here's my advice for this person.

If you want to spend your entire life crying in the bathroom, please, for the love of God, just just don't drag anybody else in there with you. Keep your misery quarantined so it doesn't affect anybody else's life who's actually functional. I'm very sad to hear that your dad died, but one of the reasons why I wanted to read this is I lost someone too, very recently.

I lost my ex and I didn't shed a single tear over it. The days after they died were literally some of the happiest days I've ever had in my life. That doesn't mean I didn't care about them. It just means that the experience showed me how close death is to knocking on my door. And when it does, I'm not going to say, Oh, you know, I wish I had spent more time being upset.

Somebody else died. I'm going to say I left. That's all any of us should be trying to do. Okay. Well, I think that's going to do it for me today. But thank you all for listening. I really hope you enjoy today's episode. As always. Let me know what you would like to see in the future. My only request is please don't treat me like a hot dog stand and just bark demands at me.

I'm a person I deserve to be treated like it. So thanks again for your patronage and I'll see you next time.