Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Hey, Dream listeners, if you like this podcast, you're gonna
Speaker 2: love the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I wrote a book. It's called Selling the Dream and
Speaker 2: it's coming out March twelfth, twenty twenty four, on Atria.
Speaker 2: It's about all of your favorite characters from MLMs and
Speaker 2: some that you've never even heard of. I hope check
Speaker 2: it out previously on the Dream. So can I ask
Speaker 2: about your style of coaching? I've watched a lot of
Speaker 2: your videos and I feel like your style is I
Speaker 2: don't want to say agro, but you're very boisterous. You're
Speaker 2: very You're kind of tough. Was that a choice or
Speaker 2: is that just like how you naturally are?
Speaker 1: Can I ask you a question?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Do you pay for my coaching?
Speaker 2: Do I pay for your coaching?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Like, are you in accelerator program?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: My coaching's not boisterous?
Speaker 4: Oh it isn't.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, not funny.
Speaker 2: Do you tell people that when they sign up it's
Speaker 2: like you're not going to get the same thing that
Speaker 2: you see on online?
Speaker 1: No, that wouldn't be accurate either. I think that it's
Speaker 1: important to realize that what you see on social media
Speaker 1: tend to be a snippet of somebody's personality or like
Speaker 1: a little glimpse into their life. But inside of my coaching,
Speaker 1: it is very tactical. It is super super kind, loving, open,
Speaker 1: empathetic listening. It is responsive into what people need, especially
Speaker 1: in my platinum coaching. It's super conversational. But I think
Speaker 1: I'm really different than people assume I am. From the internet. Anyhow, So.
Speaker 2: Two months after the conversation you just heard, and days
Speaker 2: after this season launched, jesse Lee died. There are very
Speaker 2: few details I heard the same way. I heard that
Speaker 2: she was broadcasting our chat through texts from former friends
Speaker 2: like Aaron Bees, who we spoke to in episode one.
Speaker 2: I guess it was only maybe six weeks after or
Speaker 2: when when did she pass?
Speaker 5: September sixteenth?
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, it was about then. Six weeks after I
Speaker 2: spoke to her. She was gone. Yeah, and I found
Speaker 2: out from you first that she wasn't doing well. Why
Speaker 2: don't you talk me through that?
Speaker 5: Yeah? So, actually I didn't. I didn't realize how quickly
Speaker 5: the decline would be. On my YouTube channel, I have
Speaker 5: members that we have a discord, and we talk pretty
Speaker 5: candidly in there.
Speaker 2: I don't think my audit discord is just kind of
Speaker 2: like a.
Speaker 5: Like a chat. There's different channels, different companies, topics that
Speaker 5: we talk about within multi level marketing. There's an empathy chat,
Speaker 5: and there's just different areas where we discuss specific things
Speaker 5: within multi level marketing. I feel like a lot of
Speaker 5: her followers are experiencing a form of cognitive dissonance. And
Speaker 5: when I heard that she passed, I immediately obviously thought
Speaker 5: of her family and the people closest to her and
Speaker 5: how this has to be such a shock for them,
Speaker 5: but also for jesse Lee's audience. You know, these people
Speaker 5: that have followed her for many, many years, and now
Speaker 5: all of a sudden, she's just gone. And the only
Speaker 5: thing that they can see is the last live that
Speaker 5: she did where she told them that the cancer was
Speaker 5: regressing and that her lymphotes were going back to normal.
Speaker 1: Well, hello, hello everybody, what's going on? It's jesse Lee.
Speaker 1: You can call me Boss Lee if you'd like to.
Speaker 1: How or the people's mentor I haven't done it live
Speaker 1: like in a minute, so well, that's not really true.
Speaker 1: I did a coffee and on the floor two days ago. Okay,
Speaker 1: I did just get a phone call. I guess it's
Speaker 1: been like four or five hours now. I've tried to
Speaker 1: make the rounds of people that I'm super close with,
Speaker 1: And if I look like I'm exhausted, if you're like,
Speaker 1: she looks really tired, like I don't know that is
Speaker 1: because first of all, I am okay, I have not
Speaker 1: been sleeping well, which has been freaking me out, if
Speaker 1: we're being very honest with each other, because I can't sleep.
Speaker 1: I'm really bloated from just this extra liquid that's in
Speaker 1: my abdomen. I feel like I am I'm scared all
Speaker 1: the time because the lymph nodes in the net, like
Speaker 1: it is the biggest mind f ever. And I have
Speaker 1: the strongest mindset of anybody I've ever met, and I
Speaker 1: still am over here on a daily basis, like it hurts,
Speaker 1: it hurts, it hurts my my kid, theesus and my kid,
Speaker 1: theseus about liver anyway, that the cough scary scary? Why
Speaker 1: am I coughing up? Okay, so so excuse me. I
Speaker 1: got a call today and mostly my stomach turnover even
Speaker 1: thinking about it, And as soon as I saw my
Speaker 1: oncologist's number flash on the screen, I had like a
Speaker 1: little minor panic attack, like do I let it go
Speaker 1: to voicemail or do I not? Uh? So I was nervous.
Speaker 1: And then my doctor called today and and he said,
Speaker 1: and he read my my pet scan from last Monday,
Speaker 1: and it's very good news. So for those of you
Speaker 1: who don't know, it's very good news. Not a drop
Speaker 1: of chemo and not a blast of radiation, not anything
Speaker 1: from a single traditional on college except for to read
Speaker 1: my scans. And he said that the cancer is decreasing
Speaker 1: in my body. Many of my limph notes have gone
Speaker 1: back to normal. There's a few hot spots that were
Speaker 1: always there, nothing has increased. And he said, he said, oh,
Speaker 1: he's like, just get another scan in six months and
Speaker 1: we'll see how it's going. And for those of you
Speaker 1: who don't know, when I was diagnosed in and went
Speaker 1: to and do you understand in March they told me
Speaker 1: I wouldn't live to see November. And now they're asking
Speaker 1: me to not get scanned for another six months because
Speaker 1: the disease is regressing so dramatically. So thank you for
Speaker 1: all your prayers. Thank you for you guys who have
Speaker 1: sent really encouraging messages. I know I've had weird pains
Speaker 1: and my kidney's hurt or my liver or something hurts.
Speaker 1: I don't know what hurts, but wow, I love y'all
Speaker 1: so much. I appreciate you so much. Keep the prayers coming.
Speaker 1: We got a long road to go. Pray for this
Speaker 1: back pain to go away, the stomach pains go away
Speaker 1: because and keep praying for the cancer to go away,
Speaker 1: because your prayers are definitely working. So God bless all y'all.
Speaker 1: Thank you for being on this journey with me, and
Speaker 1: let's keep this thing going. God bless y'all.
Speaker 5: And so how do you go from September fifth saying Hey,
Speaker 5: I don't have to get another pet scan for six months.
Speaker 5: You know, essentially the oncology from the sounds from her video,
Speaker 5: essentially it sounded like the oncologist was giving her a
Speaker 5: thumbs up, and it's kind of like then on the
Speaker 5: sixteenth she's passed. And I feel like that was such
Speaker 5: a shock to her followers. And that's why I say,
Speaker 5: I feel like they're experiencing cognitive dissonance because they know
Speaker 5: she's gone, but it doesn't make sense. They don't understand
Speaker 5: because of that narrative that she created around her cancer journey.
Speaker 5: The way that I found out was from a post
Speaker 5: by Eric Worry, who's a multi level marketing quote unquote coach.
Speaker 5: So he was one of jesse Lee's mentors and he
Speaker 5: posted I think it was on Instagram and I believe
Speaker 5: on Facebook somewhere around late February where she was going
Speaker 5: in for surgery to have part of her colon removed,
Speaker 5: and he at that point said that she had been
Speaker 5: diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. So that was how
Speaker 5: the world found out about this. It wasn't from jesse Lee,
Speaker 5: it wasn't from anybody in her inner circle. It was
Speaker 5: from Eric Worry, which is interesting to me because that's
Speaker 5: how the world found out that jesse Lee her health
Speaker 5: was declining, was because he also posted on Facebook and
Speaker 5: Instagram and everywhere, which I find really odd. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 5: is that his place? I don't think so.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So maybe she asked him.
Speaker 5: I don't know, I don't I don't know. I just
Speaker 5: it's uncomfortable that he did that, you know, because at
Speaker 5: the end of the day, this is her story, and
Speaker 5: I may not agree with the painting of the narrative
Speaker 5: and the lack of truthfulness and the straight up misinformation,
Speaker 5: but it was still her story to tell, right, you know. Right,
Speaker 5: So that was February, and I saw her kind of
Speaker 5: go back and forth based on what she was putting
Speaker 5: out on social media and whether she was going to
Speaker 5: do chemo or not, and there was speculation, not even speculation.
Speaker 5: She said that she was considering doing chemo in May,
Speaker 5: and she went to an acupuncturist, and that acupuncturist said,
Speaker 5: I don't think you need chemo. You need to go
Speaker 5: plant based, and so that was when she switched to
Speaker 5: vegetables and all of that stuff. And I watched her
Speaker 5: go back and forth between going to I think she
Speaker 5: was in Germany and she was seeing a biohacking doctor overseas,
Speaker 5: and then she was going to different treatments, which from
Speaker 5: what she has said, some of those treatments included ozone
Speaker 5: both intravenously and also rectly, and coffee enemas and high
Speaker 5: vitamin seed drips and all kinds of other holistic type treatments.
Speaker 5: I don't even know if I want to call them treatments,
Speaker 5: to be honest. And I feel like we all just
Speaker 5: watched her decline on social media while she was smiling
Speaker 5: and telling everybody you know, no, I'm beating cancer, and
Speaker 5: it created cognitive dissonance within her community and her followers
Speaker 5: because they're like, oh, yeah, she's saying she's great, but
Speaker 5: you look at her and you're like, but your eye
Speaker 5: sockets look like they're you know, drawn in or whatnot.
Speaker 5: And you could see a weight loss, a lot of
Speaker 5: weight loss. That temporal wasting look was really alarming to me,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, how can you say that you're getting
Speaker 5: better when when you are, you're physically you are starting
Speaker 5: to change because of the weight loss. And it didn't
Speaker 5: make sense to me. So I can't imagine how her
Speaker 5: followers must have been.
Speaker 2: Well, she was selling a weight loss product.
Speaker 5: Right, yeah, yeah, even though they say it's not weight loss,
Speaker 5: but all of them do before and after pictures, right.
Speaker 5: So then I found out she was in the hospital
Speaker 5: the September eleventh, I want to say, or twelfth, somewhere
Speaker 5: in there. And you know, the next thing we know,
Speaker 5: I'm hearing all this chatter about jesse Lea's has passed.
Speaker 5: And then people started to post and to speculate, because again,
Speaker 5: I feel like people didn't understand what was really going
Speaker 5: on because they believed what she was telling them.
Speaker 2: After I, you know, I had interviewed her, I was
Speaker 2: following along a little bit more closely. The symptoms she
Speaker 2: was experiencing during that time are end stage cancer symptoms, right, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: the fluid in her abdomen from liver failure, the difficulty breathing,
Speaker 2: the back pain even in that yeah, the cough in
Speaker 2: that final video she can't fully catch her breath, and
Speaker 2: again the continued weight loss. Yeah, all of those things
Speaker 2: are very in line with like multi organ failailure. Absolutely
Speaker 2: a metastasized cancer, which she did acknowledge that it had metastasized,
Speaker 2: right she did.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: In one of her videos that she did sometime this
Speaker 5: past summer, early summer, she was talking about how she
Speaker 5: mentioned that it was in her esophagus. She mentioned it
Speaker 5: was in I believe twenty six lymph nodes or something
Speaker 5: like that, of the thirty that they removed during her surgery.
Speaker 5: She mentioned areas being lit up on a scan, you know,
Speaker 5: And this was all after she had had the surgery,
Speaker 5: so she was very aware that it had metastasized.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know when she started saying this, but she
Speaker 2: would introduce herself on almost every video as welcome to
Speaker 2: jesse Lee beats Cancer. Holistically. Is that yep. Okay, yep.
Speaker 2: So it was kind of a branded experience sort of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I do think that there's a place for
Speaker 5: holistic type treatments, but I think that we also have
Speaker 5: to depend on, you know, what we know works best
Speaker 5: against the scenario that people are facing, and you know
Speaker 5: that would be for cancer, it's it's chemotherapy. And I
Speaker 5: also but.
Speaker 2: You do all of that and then you go, Okay,
Speaker 2: maybe I'll just like pound the turmeric juice or whatever.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but or things that can help with the symptoms
Speaker 5: from you know, traditional treatments, things that can help with
Speaker 5: nausea and you know, different things like that. So I
Speaker 5: do think that there's a place for that.
Speaker 2: So she had had she been anti chemo those kinds
Speaker 2: of things prior to this, I think, do you know,
Speaker 2: I know, I saw one video where she was telling
Speaker 2: people not to get mammograms.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she was definitely telling people not to get mammograms.
Speaker 5: She was telling people they didn't need ultrasounds. She was
Speaker 5: telling people, you know, just trust your body and know
Speaker 5: your body, and you can know your body and know
Speaker 5: how you typically feel and miss a life altering thing
Speaker 5: diagnosis or whatnot. I don't know how I want to
Speaker 5: word that, and that's why they do a lot of
Speaker 5: screening things. So if anything out of all of this,
Speaker 5: I really hope that people get screened when they have
Speaker 5: risk factors for anything like this. Just go to the
Speaker 5: doctor and get those things checked out, get the screening done,
Speaker 5: and just you know, I guess, be vigilant about that.
Speaker 5: I hope that that's the message out of all of this.
Speaker 5: At the end of the day, jesse LEAs she was
Speaker 5: still a human being, and to think about her being
Speaker 5: in as much pain as she was, knowing that there
Speaker 5: could have been you know, palliative care to prevent some
Speaker 5: of this, to slow down her body's response to the
Speaker 5: pain and the spreading of the cancer. I didn't know
Speaker 5: that that was a thing. I didn't know that. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 5: nobody should be in that kind of pain, you know,
Speaker 5: and we don't want other humans to experience that. But
Speaker 5: to understand, like the physiological aspect of what happens when
Speaker 5: somebody is in late stage cancer and then they're in
Speaker 5: pain and they have a fever and their blood pressure
Speaker 5: is up and how that just basically accelerates them passing
Speaker 5: is heartbreaking to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that you can't catch your breath essentially, and yeah,
Speaker 2: it must have been brutal.
Speaker 5: I think that the spreading of misinformation in these last
Speaker 5: six and a half seven months that she has has
Speaker 5: given on her platform is extremely alarming. I know how
Speaker 5: commercial cults operate, and how they look at their leader
Speaker 5: and believe everything that their leader is saying. And unfortunately,
Speaker 5: you know, there's probably people out there that are going
Speaker 5: to listen to her advice, you know, because we could
Speaker 5: get into a whole conversation about well, if I am
Speaker 5: only going to be given nine months, or if I
Speaker 5: do chemotherapy, I'm going to be given ten months. There
Speaker 5: is a very distinct difference in someone saying I'm choosing
Speaker 5: to live my life the way that I want to
Speaker 5: live for these next nine months or however many months
Speaker 5: i'm given. That's not what she was doing. Her whole
Speaker 5: brand was, in my opinion, villainizing the medical community, villainizing
Speaker 5: the oncologists. At one point she was calling them chemo pimps.
Speaker 5: And you know, I understand that that is probably a
Speaker 5: very personal journey for people, a very personal decision on
Speaker 5: whether they want to fight this with chemotherapy and all
Speaker 5: of the symptoms that may come with that or whether
Speaker 5: they want to live their life on their terms for
Speaker 5: however many months they have. But what she was doing
Speaker 5: was in my opinion, medical fear mongering. And she was
Speaker 5: telling people prior to this, you don't need to have ultrasounds,
Speaker 5: you don't need to you know, get MRIs and these
Speaker 5: are all very much what she was doing to monitor
Speaker 5: her cancer journey. We have medicine for a reason. And
Speaker 5: if she had the way that she had presented herself,
Speaker 5: would have been like, I'm choosing to do what I
Speaker 5: want with the rest of the time that I have here.
Speaker 5: I don't think any of the creators in the anti
Speaker 5: EMLM movement would have said a word. I think they
Speaker 5: would have sent her well wishes and we would have
Speaker 5: continued to cover MLM leaders and companies. But because she
Speaker 5: was doing it in a way where she was spreading
Speaker 5: misinformation and doing what I feel like I call it
Speaker 5: shock marketing, where she says or said things that were
Speaker 5: really offensive and then right after she would pitch her coaching,
Speaker 5: or she would pitch Keytones, or she would be packing
Speaker 5: up keytnes at the same time, which is representing the
Speaker 5: MLM company at the same time that she's saying these
Speaker 5: really atrocious things, and the fact that some of her
Speaker 5: followers might listen to her advice even though she passed
Speaker 5: from it, and then seeing some of them saying, oh,
Speaker 5: she cured cancer. She didn't cure cancer.
Speaker 2: She had saying she cured it.
Speaker 5: People are saying that she didn't pass from cancer, that
Speaker 5: she passed from some sort of a from sepsis. They're
Speaker 5: saying she had a kidney infection, and this and that,
Speaker 5: and and maybe she had some underlying things going on.
Speaker 5: But when you have asitis, which is the fluids, there's
Speaker 5: organs involved, that's a late stage cancer sign. The pain
Speaker 5: was a late stage cancer sign, meaning that it was
Speaker 5: spreading m hm. So they just because of what she
Speaker 5: said and how she presented this cancer journey and the
Speaker 5: things that she said about modern medicine and screening and
Speaker 5: different things like that, these people cannot fathom that she
Speaker 5: actually passed from cancer.
Speaker 2: I am talking to my friend Megan Carmichael, who is
Speaker 2: a death Dola who I've interviewed for the show before,
Speaker 2: but she hasn't made it on. We've been internet friends
Speaker 2: for ten years.
Speaker 5: Oh that's amazing.
Speaker 2: I interviewed her for the first season, but we didn't
Speaker 2: use it, but it was about she got tricked into
Speaker 2: going to a DOTA meeting. Oh my god, because the
Speaker 2: person was like, end of life and essential oils can
Speaker 2: be very helpful, and she was like that sounds great, yeah,
Speaker 2: like anything to make your environment a little more comfy.
Speaker 2: And then she gets there and it's like a Dota pitch.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 2: But she emailed me the minute she found out and said,
Speaker 2: you know, I'm thinking about all of you and how
Speaker 2: this must feel really weird, and I'm here to talk.
Speaker 2: So I'm going to talk to her also for this episode.
Speaker 5: Well that's going to be I can't wait for that.
Speaker 5: I would love to hear what she has to say,
Speaker 5: just about all of it.
Speaker 2: She's a wonderful, wonderful person and I'm excited to talk
Speaker 2: to her.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 3: My name is Megan Carmichael. I live in Vermont, but
Speaker 3: I'm originally from California and my mom died about six
Speaker 3: and a half years ago when I was five weeks
Speaker 3: out from my second child, and so I was really
Speaker 3: thrown into the world of what it means to die,
Speaker 3: especially in our society today, and so since then, I
Speaker 3: quit my banking job and have really poured myself into
Speaker 3: this full time. I've had some work in hospice and
Speaker 3: with families that are preparing for a death. I've worked
Speaker 3: with individuals that are training to become death doulas and
Speaker 3: all sorts of things along the spectrum.
Speaker 2: So that's kind of what I do. Do you get
Speaker 2: this question a lot, like do you have like a
Speaker 2: morbid fascination or what is the vibe? Like what draws
Speaker 2: you to this work?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I would never have called myself morbid. I'm irish.
Speaker 3: So I've always had sort of a healthy relationship with
Speaker 3: death through my family. It's not something that we've shied
Speaker 3: away from, and our wakes have always been the funnest
Speaker 3: parties that we ever threw. So growing up I just
Speaker 3: sort of had that take on death. But then seeing
Speaker 3: it up close firsthand, and being in such a vulnerable place,
Speaker 3: just you know, with a newborn and a toddler, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it was gnarly and it really made me realize that
Speaker 3: I'm not the only one that's about to face this.
Speaker 3: I kind of looked around at all of my friends
Speaker 3: and was like, oh my god, this is going to
Speaker 3: happen to all of them. And so the fascination is
Speaker 3: as much social and economic as it is about the
Speaker 3: spiritual or the kind of woo woo.
Speaker 2: Yeah, can you tell me a little bit about your
Speaker 2: mom's passing. I just like, yeah, because I would imagine
Speaker 2: a lot of people, especially if you are in that
Speaker 2: vulnerable space of like having a newborn and a toddler
Speaker 2: and you're super stressed out and then your mom is dying.
Speaker 2: It's I don't imagine a lot of people would come
Speaker 2: out of that experience saying I'll do that again for
Speaker 2: a job, you know, So tell me about eight Yeah.
Speaker 3: Let me take that on for fun, you know. So
Speaker 3: my mom had been diagnosed right when I was about
Speaker 3: three months pregnant, like right through the first trimester, and
Speaker 3: we pretty much knew it was pretty bad right from
Speaker 3: the get go. My daughter was one and a half
Speaker 3: at the time, and you know, not everybody's a parent,
Speaker 3: so I hesitate to use baby analogies, but if you
Speaker 3: know what it's like when you have a newborn, you
Speaker 3: just do what you have to do. And I just
Speaker 3: had three times as much going on. But there was
Speaker 3: sort of a sense of clarity around it all, Like
Speaker 3: the short term decisions about what should happen were so
Speaker 3: much clearer and easier than they were before. This truth
Speaker 3: was sitting on the table in front of us. Do
Speaker 3: you know, do we go to some other kid's second
Speaker 3: birthday party? Or do we go down to my folks
Speaker 3: house and hang out for the weekend?
Speaker 4: Done?
Speaker 3: Easy decision. I've always been a kind of person that
Speaker 3: can lean into whatever is easy in the situation. Obviously
Speaker 3: it was like gut wrenching and heartbreaking, but it was
Speaker 3: easy to know that nothing I did or didn't do
Speaker 3: was going to change things. That was easy. It was
Speaker 3: easy to know what my priorities were on a minute
Speaker 3: by minute level. That was easy.
Speaker 2: What's a What is a death doula? And are you
Speaker 2: a death doula?
Speaker 3: I'm not a death doula, and it's mostly because I
Speaker 3: don't have the bedside manner needed for the job. Quite frankly,
Speaker 3: so I would never take on that role with families.
Speaker 3: But I have worked to train death doulas with a
Speaker 3: very good friend of mine named Jill Shock, who's based
Speaker 3: in Los Angeles. She's death doula la. What they really
Speaker 3: do is very similar to what a birth doula does
Speaker 3: in the sense that they are going to meet you
Speaker 3: at a certain point in your journey, and you're going
Speaker 3: to come together and make an agreement about what appropriate
Speaker 3: support looks like and what appropriate payment looks like, and
Speaker 3: they are going to walk with you and assist you
Speaker 3: within those within that framework up through a certain point
Speaker 3: in your journey, and then they go away. I've always
Speaker 3: struggled with what to like call my job or whatever,
Speaker 3: or what role I play and community death educator has
Speaker 3: kind of been one that I've toied around with. But
Speaker 3: after listening to this uh this season, I was like, fuck, dude,
Speaker 3: I'm death coach.
Speaker 2: I was thinking of you when I wrote that death coach. No,
Speaker 2: when I wrote that line, I was thinking Megan in
Speaker 2: my head. I was like, yeah, that's right, like you,
Speaker 2: there's dead coaches who can help you have the best totally.
Speaker 3: And like you know, a couple months ago, somebody called
Speaker 3: and said, hey, I am in a specific location helping
Speaker 3: a friend and we need to find a speci type
Speaker 3: of burial solution. Can you help? And I do the
Speaker 3: leg work right. I call around, I make the calls,
Speaker 3: and most importantly what I do in that case is
Speaker 3: I say, hey, you did the right thing by asking
Speaker 3: for help. I'm really proud of you, and hey, this
Speaker 3: is a person who I have vetted and they're going
Speaker 3: to take good care of you. You know, I heard
Speaker 3: about jesse Lee's passing and I actually hadn't caught through
Speaker 3: to the very last episode, so it was a complete
Speaker 3: shock to me. I hadn't been aware of her cancer
Speaker 3: journey at all, and I just saw this thing flip
Speaker 3: through my fyp on TikTok, and I reached out to
Speaker 3: you because I knew that you had profiled her. And
Speaker 3: in grief theory, there's this concept of ambiguous loss, which
Speaker 3: is sort of like when something leaves your life, not
Speaker 3: as clear cut as like the loss of a friend
Speaker 3: or the loss of a coworker, right, but like something
Speaker 3: kind of confusing leaves your life. And I know that
Speaker 3: that can just draw things up and it's a weird feeling.
Speaker 3: And we as a society, we walked through so much
Speaker 3: grief blindly. And I think I just sent like one
Speaker 3: or two sentences that just said, Hey, I'm thinking about
Speaker 3: you and your team. That's got to be weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, I really appreciated the note, and I'm so
Speaker 2: glad we're getting to talk now because it came at
Speaker 2: a time where I was I was speaking to Aaron Bees,
Speaker 2: who was on the first episode, who used to be
Speaker 2: best friends with jesse Lee. We were kind of She
Speaker 2: had told me a couple of days before jesse Lee
Speaker 2: passed that it was coming, and we'd been discussing what
Speaker 2: to do, like, you know, regarding the show, because it
Speaker 2: was the show had just come out, like it was
Speaker 2: three days old or something, and so there really wasn't
Speaker 2: any turning back on the first episode. But I knew
Speaker 2: what was coming in episode nine, and it really helped
Speaker 2: to hear from you and to hear from her and
Speaker 2: help me feel like, Okay, you know, I don't have
Speaker 2: to make any quick decisions here, and I don't have
Speaker 2: to throw I don't have to trash it. But I
Speaker 2: was feeling very conflicted about the whole thing.
Speaker 3: When I find when I find myself facing complicated grief, right,
Speaker 3: like somebody that I didn't agree with or I wasn't
Speaker 3: in alignment with, whether that means they lose their job,
Speaker 3: right when your enemy at work gets fired, or when
Speaker 3: somebody who you're critical of passes away. Right, there's this
Speaker 3: idea of complicated grief, and it can be hard to
Speaker 3: sort your feelings out, and so what I always go
Speaker 3: to in those situations. It's called ring theory, and the
Speaker 3: idea is like, right at the center of this circle
Speaker 3: is the person who's immediately affected, so that would be
Speaker 3: jesse Lee. And then in the next circle around her
Speaker 3: are the people and I put pets there closest to her,
Speaker 3: and then beyond that it might be her colleagues, and
Speaker 3: then her doctors or her support staff. And then on
Speaker 3: the really outside of this concentric circle, I'm going to
Speaker 3: talk or think of the people that really admire her
Speaker 3: and who she has become really important to. And whenever
Speaker 3: I'm feeling complicated grief, I try to figure out who
Speaker 3: on that concentric ring circle can I can I connect
Speaker 3: with sort of with my heart, And I really am
Speaker 3: thinking a lot about her fans and her followers and
Speaker 3: the people that really upheld her in a really special way,
Speaker 3: and what this experience must be like for them. And
Speaker 3: then I'd almost put I'd almost put you and me
Speaker 3: and the rest of the Dream listeners in the circle
Speaker 3: outside of her fans and followers, right, because I think
Speaker 3: that all of us get affected in some way by
Speaker 3: the loss of an individual. And it's also really complicated
Speaker 3: when somebody is so public about their illness for the
Speaker 3: conversation to just drop off. It feels really gross. Right,
Speaker 3: We're so trained, and we're trained not only to not
Speaker 3: talk about people's medical privacy stuff, but also to not
Speaker 3: talk about the dead. Like, there's this idea that people
Speaker 3: get to choose how they die, and I will stand
Speaker 3: by that forever. Whether that means you want to go
Speaker 3: for the most aggressive treatments, if you want to get
Speaker 3: preventative treatment that is wildly aggressive, or if you want
Speaker 3: to forego everything or go holistic. You get to choose
Speaker 3: how you die. And most people die how they live.
Speaker 3: So if you live a life of not telling the truth,
Speaker 3: if you lived a life of manifesting, if you lived
Speaker 3: a life where you tried to speak things into truth,
Speaker 3: you will die that way. And I think that if
Speaker 3: we were to just stop our careful criticism of this
Speaker 3: type of behavior that she had in life, if we
Speaker 3: didn't continue that through, that would be inauthentic. And one
Speaker 3: thing that woman was was authentic. She was the same
Speaker 3: through her life and death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't want to take that away from her.
Speaker 2: I do think where she crossed a line is the
Speaker 2: instructing of her you know, fans to absolutely not take
Speaker 2: care of their own health in the same way that
Speaker 2: she wasn't, you know, like the don't get mammograms and
Speaker 2: chemo is always bad and you should know when you
Speaker 2: have cancer, just intuitively if you know your body. Those
Speaker 2: kinds of messages that were coming out over and over again,
Speaker 2: I think we're really dangerous. And so I'm glad we're
Speaker 2: talking about this because again, people aren't talking about her death,
Speaker 2: or if they are talking about it, there's a whole
Speaker 2: story that's been made up now about how she passed.
Speaker 3: I want to say it's dangerous to say that to people.
Speaker 3: It is also dangerous to tell people to put a
Speaker 3: seven hundred dollars starter kit on a credit card when
Speaker 3: you don't have money for your light bill.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It has been dangerous, right, right, So if we weren't critical,
Speaker 3: and we should be critical of the things that she
Speaker 3: said point by point and say not only was what
Speaker 3: she said dangerous the way she said it was dangerous,
Speaker 3: the the framing of the story, right, the framing of
Speaker 3: it's just my kidneys, the number of videos I saw
Speaker 3: where she was going through dramatic weight loss saying this
Speaker 3: is what health looks like, that's dangerous. We should talk
Speaker 3: about it, and we have to. And she never shied
Speaker 3: away from the quote unquote haters when she was alive.
Speaker 3: It would be inauthentic to not be having this conversation.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Another thing that it is really important when people are
Speaker 3: grieving or when somebody's dying is this concept of anticipatory loss.
Speaker 3: It's when you get a chance to sort of gree
Speaker 3: grieve and your brain starts to build the neural pathways
Speaker 3: almost to accept what's about to happen. And what I
Speaker 3: saw happening in this case, and I was always looking backwards, right.
Speaker 3: It really didn't dive into this until after she had died.
Speaker 3: But what I saw was the amount of false hope
Speaker 3: that she was giving to herself and to her followers
Speaker 3: really didn't allow any anticipatory grief at all. There was
Speaker 3: one video that she did where she talked about making
Speaker 3: a will, and that was pretty powerful, I thought, because
Speaker 3: it seems like there was a little crack into the real.
Speaker 2: What could happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But then at the same time, death is a cognitive dissonance, right.
Speaker 3: We are wired as humans to survive. That's why suicide
Speaker 3: and suicidal ideation are so fucking scary because our brain
Speaker 3: is not working the way it's like supposed to work
Speaker 3: to keep us alive.
Speaker 2: Well, when I got hospitalized during the making of Season one,
Speaker 2: was it season one or two? It was two? Actually, sorry,
Speaker 2: it was right before the pandemic. I took a medication
Speaker 2: that gave me this thing called Stevens Johnson syndrome, which
Speaker 2: can kill you. It's like an autoimmune reaction to certain
Speaker 2: medications and it makes your skin fall off essentially. But
Speaker 2: when I got admitted to the hospital, I was in
Speaker 2: the hospital for like three days, four days. They were
Speaker 2: we were having a measles outbreak in LA and it
Speaker 2: looks exactly the same, so they were I had to
Speaker 2: go into like one of those isolation wards at the hospital,
Speaker 2: and I remember thinking the first night I was in there,
Speaker 2: because I still felt like horrible, like my body was
Speaker 2: on fire and I had rated this crazy rash all
Speaker 2: over and I was They were really worried, you know,
Speaker 2: and I had IVS and everything, and I remember like
Speaker 2: just sitting there watching TV and in my room all
Speaker 2: by myself and thinking I had a good run. And
Speaker 2: I couldn't believe that I had that thought, like me
Speaker 2: the one he's so scared of death. I just I
Speaker 2: just flashed into my head like, hey, my daughter's awesome.
Speaker 2: I had a cool career, Okay, And then I was like,
Speaker 2: what am I thinking? I didn't die? But I had
Speaker 2: that graceful feeling about it.
Speaker 3: That's your future self coming to you to be like, hey,
Speaker 3: just so you know, like you're really afraid of this.
Speaker 3: This is the closest you've ever been to believing it
Speaker 3: might happen. Just so you know, this is the feeling
Speaker 3: you have.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, Well I'll look forward to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, dude, I wish you could have been there for
Speaker 3: the last six weeks of my dad's life. It was
Speaker 3: the fucking funnest party I have ever been to. It
Speaker 3: was it was a ben. We went on a bender.
Speaker 3: It was ordering every kind of food that he wanted,
Speaker 3: even though he could only take a few bites. He
Speaker 3: was like getting out in the sun every day. He
Speaker 3: had this home health aid that helped him set up
Speaker 3: his full speaker system, Like he pulled every speaker out
Speaker 3: of the garage. He goes, what the fuck do I
Speaker 3: care what the neighbors think? Yeah, I'm dying. Yeah, I
Speaker 3: don't care about volumeting. I'm not trying to be polite anymore.
Speaker 3: I mean it was an absolute joy. It was hard
Speaker 3: after he died because it felt like the that fun
Speaker 3: was actually over. I have seen a lot of people die.
Speaker 3: I have been present while people were in the dying
Speaker 3: process and while people actually took their last breaths, and
Speaker 3: I have seen literally more dead bodies that are just
Speaker 3: like fresh right, very recent.
Speaker 4: And it's not scary.
Speaker 3: There's nothing to be afraid of when you see it,
Speaker 3: and you see it on the people's faces and you
Speaker 3: see it in the room. The thing I'm afraid of
Speaker 3: is how everybody else. The scary thing is the relationships
Speaker 3: and how they're affected. Right. The scary thing is what
Speaker 3: happens to everybody who's still alive. But I've seen their faces,
Speaker 3: I've been there. They're not scared.
Speaker 4: You should not be scared, Okay.
Speaker 2: The Dream is written, hosted, and executive produced by me
Speaker 2: Jane Marie. Our producer is Mike Richter, with help from
Speaker 2: Nancy Golumbiski and Joy Sandford. Our editor is Peter Clowney.
Speaker 4: The Dream is a
Speaker 2: Co production of Little Everywhere in Pushkin Industries.