Ep 41: Ryan Rason - Medicine Circus

Okay, we're recording now. Okay, fantastic. Oh, hello. I checked, checked, checked, checked.

Sound check. Is everyone doing it? You want to do the intro part? I did.

You already did. I'm Brian. How did I end up in Pi? Oh, God, what a secure question.

It's been a long journey, obviously a lot of weird shit. The kind of a bridged version is that I came to Pi four years ago after a really bad breakup, a friend of mine back home. I knew what I was going through, but he happened to be out here in Pi. His mom was trying to retire here.

And he said, hey, man, this is just a beautiful place. And there's a lot of healing going on. I know what you're going through. Just take a vacation, just take a trip.

How long ago is this? This was four years ago, actually almost four years of the day. November 4th was my anniversary for it. And it was on a whim.

I'd already done a fair amount of traveling prior to this, as a buster, as a magician. I'd already lived in a van for a couple years and traveled around the American Southwest. I've been on a lot of lecture tours with my dad, and pops is also a magician. So I've been on the Europe, a little bit of Canada, a little bit of Mexico, all American Southwest.

So it kind of wasn't exactly untethered, though. I was still sort of attached to the idea of the kind of Western world, like I've got to be anywhere that I go. I've got to be making money. So comedy-tiling was definitely a stretch, but I was at the end of my rope.

I was in a really, really painful place in a tiny town. The scene of the crime, as my dad called it. And when you go through a breakup in a small town, everything fucking reminds you of everything. It's just all the trickers.

You can't heal where you were roping. You can't. You just can't. And I was trying to.

So it was six months of agony. All of us do. Oh my God, I'm going to dig my heels in. I'll be just fine.

No, you won't. You can fuck out of there. Exactly. So I got off the phone.

Immediately looked up tickets. I bought a ticket for a Friday, and I bought it on that Monday, four days away, like a $250 ticket. I couldn't believe how cheap it was. This is it.

But I didn't make any planning up. I'm buying this ticket. This is four days away. I'm going to pack my shit.

I've got to lose sense of time. That's when you're like, like, cycling with you, put down on your belongings, so you travel across the world now. You can't own the ship that you own. Absolutely.

Is that the moment you did that? I mean, it was all pretty much in a band. A lot of what I owned, my physical possessions was a lot of camping gear because I was living out of the band. Magic show stuff.

I was relatively minimalistic at that point already. I'm very compact. I went to Burning Man for seven years solid. In a row.

It became a huge part of my life. The burn shifts in my life. It's totally appreciated. Burning Man changed my life.

But it really did. The first year that I went there, I didn't know anything. I was, in fact, 24 at the time. My dad had been a magician my entire life.

I'd always been watching phenomenal entertainers. But I was kind of with my dad as a clown. It makes people laugh. He's kind of goofy.

That's the sort of silly. He does card tricks. It was just like, Dad, you're just a schmuck. But then I went to Burning Man.

Because I saw all of this art and performance and just beautiful displays of people just giving what they were good at. They had to take out art sculptures that people were literally good at wheels. They're either on wheels or they're filled with napalm ready to get burned away. It was such a system of giving that I was like, I want to have something to give.

So I went home from that first year and I asked my dad, hey, could you teach me some tricks? I just want to have something to give. It took him the next year. I practiced him a bunch.

And enough people said, hey, you're good at this. You should really try this. I've been watching my dad for so long. I got so much knowledge of performance.

Just through us. Moses, just through watching him. I started performing and I put my job in his busking. It happened in a weirdly natural way.

I mean, the burn chain, I like to give me a reason to believe that performance wasn't give. It wasn't a thing to give. It wasn't just my dad being a fucking goofball. He had his Peter pants in front of the max.

He was absolutely definition. You could do this seven years since I gave up Burning Man before you stepped in a pie. Wow. So you've definitely been in the full community before you started the medicine service.

Weirdly. Weirdly. You know, all those years, obviously there's shit tons of fire dancers. But there was always this weird barrier.

I was always a thing that I felt, especially as a magician, what I do is so small by comparison to these massive beautiful shapes that we're doing. I felt like this barrier of entry, this kind of wall between me and those performance. Oh, that's just for fire dancers. I could never do that.

I could hardly do that. I'm not that graceful. I barely know how to operate this fucking meatjack. So I was around it and I was very much exposed to it.

I never even so much as touched it. But as a performer, I was learning to get up in front of crowds and talk to people and be charismatic. And so it was seven years of that. Totally changed my life.

And then I went to, I broke up in my girlfriend, but we both still went to the fire. We'd gone a couple of years before that together. And it was a very painful burn. Because she was present, but she was on the other side of the city.

We knew we were there and we had a couple of party moments and it was lovely. It was so heavy. It was heavy being in a festival setting with a broken party. Everybody else is broken here, man.

I'm crying. I'm like, I'm crying. And you can't just like not be there. If you're there, it's emotional.

You're there. And you've got to feel it. Of course everybody there's really feel it, really embrace it. I kind of want to burn my damn down.

This is not an appropriate feeling for celebration. So it was rough. But it was actually, it was the week after I got back when I was just so fucking painful that everybody called me from pie and said, buy a ticket, fucking get the fuck out of here. So peeled up and came to pie, barely on a shoestring, immediately fell in love with the place.

I knew that like the minute that I got the pie, it was something really special going on here. It was beautiful. It stayed a month here, met a lot of beautiful people. It was just affected in really deep ways.

I had to get a visa extension because I knew I wanted to stay a little bit longer. So I had to haul ass down the chain line, went into the other visa extension, went into a little coffee shop that a friend up here recommended to me. That coffee shop was having an open mic. The owner saw me doing some cartridges like, hey, if you've got to come back for an open mic, it's fucking great.

And it was absolutely beautiful. It was the most redefined open mic to me. It was really open-hearted people telling stories about things that had happened to them or even poetry that was really touching. It wasn't just like, I learned that five gallons song.

It was really vulnerable and it was really beautiful and heartfelt. So I did a magic show. And during that show, off in the corner, was this tall leggy redhead that was smiling here to hear the whole time she left. Every joke she collected all the right moments.

Her name is Gemma. Immediately fell in love with her. We came to the twenty-half years. I fell heavily into the chain line community.

It was very similar to what's going on up here. It seemed sort of like a lot of ex-pats, a lot of lost kids. Trying to just have better relationships. Be more conscious and communicate better.

Learning to get along, make things. In fact, one time we decided to throw a big party that turned into the giant festival, which is now one of the 50 years. Which is really quite, we were really ambitious kids in ways that we were trying to find out what was the right way to be ambitious. Much to my chagrin, as this two-shell pass, everything sort of comes to a close.

When Gemma and I drifted apart, it was kind of a violent tearing. And I removed myself from the chain line community. I came back up to Pye again with a broken heart. Totally fucking shattered.

And I stumbled into Paradise, where it just so happened that the people that were running the fire show at the time were moving on to Cambodia, Joe offered me the job. And it was such a sign from the universe. I had nothing. I had no community.

I had no possessions. I lost all of my possessions. I came up here with nothing, but a backpack with a couple of t-shirts and pair of pants. That's crazy.

Nothing. It was terrible. This particular time is 15 months, so just under two years. I came to Pye just a broken man.

I had everything in my life, my community. They just kind of fell apart around me. I'm not going to go into the details of this story. It was ugly and a lot of it was my fault.

I kind of put myself there. But Joe offered me this job was such a sign from the universe. I was like, okay, you got nothing. Here's something.

What are you going to do with it? So you've heard into the rest of the service. There's some sort of service from me. No.

See, this is the thing. When I showed up, the fire show, and for those of you listening, I'm doing finger quotes there. The fire show was maybe two or three dancers. A lot of the time it was just me and Joe playing to five people over the pool table.

Nothing. My whole job was to just put out a bucket of kerosene and make sure the toys didn't get set up. That was it. There was nothing.

There was really no reputation. It was the tail end of off season of rainy season. But the population was tremendously low and it really wasn't an intention for it. And fire show typically in kind of Southeast Asian and Falon culture is this sort of just like, everybody just kind of lights up.

Whoever wants to watch watches, this is fine. And I did that for a couple of months until we had enough friends around. Granted, I had picked up four months before I got the job. First fucking time.

Nothing, essentially. I was clueless, motherfucker. But it didn't take me long into it for that kind of magician, showman mentality to kind of click in and be like, hey, wait a minute. There's something here.

I remembered what it was like and the way that it felt to turn a series of tricks into a show. I mean, when I first started magic, here's this trick. Did you like that? Here's another trick.

Did you like that? Slowly building it into, they all link into each other and they reference back to one another and building a show that an audience fucking loves and that they want to pay for it. And it clicked relatively quickly. It was like, hey, wait a minute.

If we kind of just hear this in just a slightly different direction. A little bit more organization. A little bit at a time. And it happened so organically.

The crew of people that were here at the time and some of them still are. We came to the decision very naturally because essentially what we were doing were fire jams. They weren't fire shows really. They were fire jams.

We have small audiences. We were all performing with enough frequency that we all kind of got bored of the same shit at about the same time. For example, we're kind of tired of just twelve of us standing out there, spinning different toys at different times. What if we put all of the same toys together?

Oh, that's really cool. What if we actually like picked a song? Oh, that was really cool. And like all the little teeny decisions that slowly and very democratically over time started to build into shit.

And that was about the time that I started calling meetings and I was like, hey, we actually need to talk about this. We're doing this frequently enough. We also had two gigs at a place called Mad Monkey. We were performing together four times a week, just farting around.

But we were kind of slowly starting to fine tune what it was like to work together. Not just the large group of individual fire performers, but hey, we do this together a bunch. It's like I can only imagine it's how a band forms. You know, like we've been playing music together for long, what if we meet a name?

Exactly. So over time, there came more people to find something. Because you said that in the very beginning it was only your joke. It even formed about four times a week together.

And it was like five people watching every time? Roughly. And then, you know, six months ahead, you know, the repetition starts going. The words are going around.

There's this fight. Thing and pie. And then they started trying to spark spinners. Yeah.

How did that happen? Like, when were the first people coming from outside that were not in pie like one of the circus? Because I imagine there's both people that came in that already knew about fire spinning. People that hadn't know fucking close about fire spinning at all.

That's probably a whole one there, you know. Well, that ties in very much with the story because it wasn't even really exactly six months. I got the job August 1st. I would say about late September, early October, with the coming of the kind of upturn of the high season, people started coming in again.

You're totally right. There's some people that were already fire spinners. Pie has always had kind of a healthy flow community between the circus school, which has unfortunately gone through its own changes over the last couple of years. But there's always been sort of a presence of hippies and flow arts go really well together.

It's meditation. It's a beautiful craft. So it was within a few months, just to preface this, we hadn't even developed the name at this point. What happened was I was just running the fire shows at Paradise and slowly but surely, you know, people would come in and they kind of hear through the grapevine.

There's a bunch of fire spinners and pie. Oh, you're into flow arts. You should totally go up there and meet up with them. And this was the slow accumulation of, you know, of Olive and Mackenzie and Leela and Faith and all these people that were, some people that were picking up toys for the first time and we were all learning them together.

Some people that had more experience that we really looked up to and like, oh my God, these are wonderful. And it was only, I don't even think we're on the anniversary yet of even developing the name. I think it was late November, early December, that again, it was that very organic process that we were performing together long enough and frequently enough. They were like, what if we had a name?

We should make a troop name, you know? Let's do a thing, you know? The team name, whether flying blue jays or whatever. We went through a bunch of different, it was really me that kind of called for it.

Because again, I really, I had this sort of calling. I'm like, we're doing this thing and I'm kind of, even at the time I was sort of at the head of it because I was in charge of the fire department here at Paradise. I was in charge of the toys. It was in charge of the characters.

The characters thing that already had this sort of sense of responsibility. So I also felt this sort of sense of like, oh, I gotta push this. I gotta be the one pushing. I gotta be the one pushing.

I want to develop a name. And me and my buddy, Dave, we've banded about all sorts of shit. We're the fire hobos. We're the scene drifter.

We're the pyro maniacs. A bunch of fucking different names can do. And we'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT.

We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT.

We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT. We'll do ADOT.

fun I thought that I was useless." And she said, oh, so like a medicine circus. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Say that again. That's the word.

It just, it fell out. Yeah, it changed organically. All the bangerignor names, it didn't mean shit. It just fell out of her.

And it instantly reverberated. And not only does it have a beautiful ring to it just the sound of the words together, as a medicine circus. Oh, it's very symphonic. Yeah.

But it was so indicative know so many things. It's medicine. It's medicine for wounds that we don't even fucking know about. The psychological for physical for, it's therapy.

physical for its therapy on so many levels, doing something together, is huge, it's a learning of boundaries and communication skills and learning how to be human beings with one of the performing in front of people being vulnerable. Those first couple of months, I had so many performances in which I literally cried in front of audiences because I just couldn't even hold it back. It's just where I was and I was sad and I missed my ex and I missed my community and I didn't know where the fuck I was. But being able to do that in front of people and with people was, it was powerful and so it became medicine and of course I latched on to the name and being sort of the spearhead of the situation.

I latched on and I made a logo and it really it rolled very organically because it was something for me to pour my everything into it. I didn't know it. All those years of everything that I'd ever done led up to me being capable of doing this. Several years of helping to put together Jitep talk to me management and organization skills, 10 years of being a traveling magician taught me how to put together a show.

I still barely even had the skills with the actual props themselves but I got to learn alongside people that were just always playing with toys, standing around the sun hanging out and a bunch of lost kids. It formed very organically and there was medicine for all of us. And then there was all these people, you know, obviously it was quite sure the growth had been quicker than six months as I mentioned. There was more and more people coming in and then over time, you know, this ship was continuing to sail, right?

So then this just became bigger and bigger. You know, now it was 10 people watching, now there's 20 people watching, now there's 50 people watching and then suddenly you got over 100 people, right? Yeah. So and this happened during a year.

Yeah, obviously, it was only 15 months ago. There's only 15 months of that. This is since the rebirth of Ryan since the birth of the medicine circuits, it's only been 15 months and it's fluctuated dramatically because Pi is just so fucking transient. The peak seasons and the low seasons are dramatically noticeable.

Our peak season, I came here in August, our peak season is between late October to the beginning of February. So that's, you know, four or five months. And then after that, there's drops to fuck off again. But we were developing enough of a reputation, not only within locals in town, but also just kind of, you know, there's not a whole lot of activities for entertainment going on.

So it definitely built and there would be kind of be more and more people that would come to this. It's really actually only in the last few months that it's turned into what it is now because we've been doing the reputation. Anything that you do for over a year starts to really get traction. And it went through these dips and dives.

That first high season, there was about 20 to 25 of us on the team that were voraciously performing together. But at the time, and I think this is what really helped to form it in such a healthy fashion. It wasn't really about the audiences. It was about what we were doing together.

And it was so exciting that we loved it so much that that gravitational pull, whenever you love anything enough, I'm just going to do this myself. It doesn't matter what I get. Oh, and shit, literally fucking people that are here to watch us be a part of our family. And I got this feedback repeatedly throughout that first high season, was that what people would come to watch just as much as the fighters being, which is compelling itself, was to watch us interact and just be a family and play with each other and cooperate backstage.

And the way that we would work together was just as compelling as the craft itself. So those first couple of months were really powerful. They kind of culminated with our first gala show, which was in January 2019. It was the first time that we really tried to push ourselves to do some kind of big presentation acts of really any type, a lot of previous to that.

It was just farting around. There was no choreography at all. Choreography or coordination was just farting around. Put it on fire.

Go talk around. Go do your thing. Which is beautiful. And it's a few parts of it.

But there's levels to it. And we didn't discover that until later on. And it was a series of different people that we influenced us. I met Erika and Syon on the street, Erika, right about the time that we were planning on doing something bigger.

I was like, you know what, we really need choreography. We need somebody that knows what choreography is. We've got all the dancers. We've got all the skills.

We need somebody that knows about putting on a show. Standing outside on the street, a restaurant downtown. Lady walks up. She's a circus choreographer.

Oh fuck. This town is full of standards. This town came and completely revolutionized what we were doing. They introduced a lot of systems of structure.

And not in the western world, bad world, like a cage. It was more of just like, we're just hurting cats. Just fucking it's just people everywhere and everybody's in the way constantly. And we had no idea how fuck we were doing.

This thing was growing around us to the extent way faster than we'd make it to the extent where it was disorganized fucking chaos, where it was a lot harder to manage with the time he was a bit of structure and organization. This shit becomes a lot simpler. But we were just clumped together in the group and there's toys coming out and safety. What's that?

Oh my god. All these little things that Erika and Syon were able to come in with a fresh perspective and an outside view. And they've been a part of several circuses back in Portland. So they just came in and saw all of the little things that like, hey, you can find two of this, this, this, and this.

And everything would run around. Some of them were fucking right. And they completely changed not only what we do, but also my advice completely. They gave a sense of like, you can organize this.

A lot of what I felt was really my job in the beginning days was to really cater to a lot of people's feelings. By nature, performers, people that like to perform are exuberant, expressive, talented, beautiful, dramatic people. By nature, this is not a, I'm not saying drama like, I don't know what I'm saying, but like actors and shit, we're dramatic. We're freaking out.

Fuck people. So a lot of those first months was really kind of like catering to everybody's feelings and really just kind of a lot of drama among hippies. What my job sort of turned into from there was sort of a facilitation. Eric and Sian taught me how to just like allow a little bit of structure to it, enough that it would make it easier on everybody.

You're going to get their cover step on a lot less. People would feel like they got the spotlight when they really wanted it. And structure is hard when those people come and go out of the way as they do here. It's almost nightmarish, the way of introducing new things to new people.

So all of this few months, and this has been in a collaboration on exactly that statement, so all of these months have built up and we really built something. We really feel like we thought we were made it together. We came up with a name. We were performing together.

It was medicine circus. There was a manifestation of the childhood dream. It was fucking beautiful. Everybody loved to do it.

At January, beginning of February, we started migrating into our festival season in Thailand. Chai-Tep was first. It's the very first weekend in February. Surely after that is Shimala, which is a nine-day, just beautiful, just chill out festival.

It's amazing. Immediately after that, everybody came back, pack the bags, fucking left, because it's milky season, and it's harsh and it's oppressive. Over the course of about a week, I said goodbye to every single person that I have fallen in love with. And the next meeting after that, all right, guys, what we're going to cover today is coral you people.

I haven't even met you. There was a bunch of new people that was just everybody that had helped sort of build it, leaving a breeze. They just kind of floated off. So it was sort of this weird, um, it was a massive transition, because all of the sort of structure and rules and ideas that we established together as a team, now it was just me hoping about them.

Now it was just like, no, these are the rules, and a bunch of kids were just like, why the fuck is this asshole so loud? We'd determine this together as a team. None of these decisions came about from me being a tyrannical dictator. We all chose on these things together and democratically, but now I was introducing all of these ideas and concepts to people that didn't know about it.

And so it was resistance and of course it didn't mean kind of dealing with kind of the trauma of like, I got to survive all my friends, but I kept it going for two reasons. First, because I wanted to hold it together until my friends came back, because a lot of them said they were coming back for you, you know, the next year, which many of them have, and I've come in and out and they've totally seen a progress and it's wonderful. But the other reason that I held on was because I didn't know where else to go. This was the most defined and powerful thing that I've ever been a part of.

And I couldn't see a pumble. I couldn't just watch it just be a one season. This is just a chapter and like, fuck that. You know, this is just too big.

This is too, it's something significant. And if all it is really going to take is for me to just hear and hold space for it, I'm not going to watch it fall apart. I'm not going to watch it fall apart. I'm not going to watch it.

I'm going to keep working on it with the same voraciousness. And so I stuck around through the office, through the smoky season, and through the rainy season, and I established a wonderful relationship here in paradise with all the ownership and staff here and watch the waves of people coming and going. This place is so transient. It's watching an ocean of just these large groups of essentially strangers that become friends and then they go about their business.

And it's this hub of energetic forces of people coming in with their brand new ideas and their own feelings and their drummers. And there's a lot of young people and a lot of travelers and I will establish nobody comes to the side of the world that they ain't running from something. And I don't mean that in a cowardly way. I don't mean that they're cowards.

I mean that they are getting the fuck away from something. They cannot deal with it. And so it brings a lot of this element of people that are at once adventurous and beautiful and simultaneously terrified and avoid it. Which means that they're also sort of doing that within their communication with other people too.

I'm healthy and I'm a traveler and I love it but also you were covered in baggage and I can see it. And it's beautiful and it's totally fun. So it becomes this thing that people can go to now. This is so many people's homes now.

It's a small part of my home now. Absolutely. It's been part of my life. I feel like I want to come back here.

I feel like I can continue building this. It's not really been in. It's like you guys know that more than I do. And I'm one of the ones up there.

He was the one that held back on us. And I was waiting for it. But it is an open-door policy. And you're right.

It's a lot of people that keep going and coming back and going and keep coming back. Going out, you know, getting more wisdom knowledge. Getting more wisdom to working and maintaining and going back here. So it is this place of like, it's like you're kind of a little home person now.

How do you see it evolving in the future? Because you know, that can change from what's your one-year goal, what's your five-year goal, what's your 20-year goal, right? So the answer would change throughout that. So let's start with like, let's start with like a three-year goal.

Because in three years, a lot of things can happen. You know, you're thinking about leaders, you're thinking about, you know what I'm saying. Whatever you guys are thinking about. So where do you see them as a circus in three years?

And do you see it? You can also incorporate it. So you're going internationally. Well, I mean, that is definitely the help.

Because obviously anybody that's in circus starts for any extended period of time, the idea of a traveling circus is fucking beautiful. Now this is one of the sort of complicated parts. My very good friend, Talon, put it in a fascinating way. We are a traveling circus.

The circus stays in the same place. Every member is a traveler. It's just floating entity. Whenever they go, wherever they go, they can take the love of being a part of something because everybody wants to be a part of something and bring it anywhere.

Now the plan, this is why the outside influence is of people sort of like coming in from other parts of the world and being like, hey Ryan, there's a great big world out there. It's so incredibly important. My plan personally is such a short-term, you know, my biggest goal is to make sure that nobody sets themselves on fire on Thursday and that the playlist actually comes together on Sunday. Like I'm so immediately in this, because it's necessary.

Somebody's got to do it. Somebody has to be the facilitator and I just, I can't even let it go. That's the question that's not necessarily, you know, it's a hard question to chime in and answer. Because it goes in a lot of directions.

Exactly. You know, you don't really know. But what we do know is that it has been worked on on a week of basis and it has been worked on a week of basis for over a year now. Oh yeah.

And there's only a chance for the world. Now, that is possible. So let's say, you know, Jordan or me or Harry leaves, you know, has trouble with it. We part of it as a circus.

I want to start a community like saying a photo and go back to the, to the States. You know, I have a fire staff and, you know, I can say, you know, I'm part of it as a circus, right? Like Helen, what's that? Well, originated in Pine?

You know, that's how it all can be connected to the back here. It's the beautiful thing, right? So anyway, this is the petri dish when it comes right down to it. This is the place where we're able to experiment or where we're able to learn.

This is the place where it was born. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's where it's going to end up. I would love to eventually have it be a traveling establishment. But there's obviously the complications with any kind of traveling gig.

I remember this from being a magician, that being on the road, you got to get yourself a book, you got to get flight tickets, you got to make it around different places, what you're lodging, especially doing that for a large group of people. It's this sort of like entertainment is, it's the second oldest profession on the planet. And it does make money and it's a beautiful way of making a living. But what we have here is this beautiful theater and what Joe has provided and being able to slowly transform Joe's patch of concrete at a guest house into a theater.

We're slowly turning this place into a theater. So on one hand, I would love to travel. I would love to travel with it. On the other hand, I also recognize that Pi is growing rapidly.

Every single year, they're building new guest houses. Every single year, they have more and more people coming. They have all sorts of growth that is happening here. They just built an airport about five years ago, which is always the sign of things kind of growing.

And shit is about to pop in this fucking town and to be here. No, it's okay. We're doing all these fucking interviews. Looking at another pattern of archetype in my life, I grew up in a little town in Colorado just outside of Aspen, the ski town.

Very affluent place. My dad moved there in 1977 and at the time, it was just a hit and bird, dirt roads, swing and saloon doors. Hunter Thompson was running for sheriff. It was just this little hippie spot and it was a lot like Pi at the time because nobody really knew about it and it was just filled with hippies and it was just this free, beautiful mountain.

It's glorious. It's a place. And now, it's one of the most affluent places on the planet, Dolce Cabana stores, steep passes, with celebrities vacation there. What was the transition point?

It was this kind of slow process of getting steered towards marketing to a different subsection of people banking on the fact that it was growing. It was about the time from what my dad told me. He's lived in the valley in Colorado for 45 years now. And that it was the moment that they built an airport was when it started to grow up and it started to turn into something else.

Of course, Pi just built an airport. That is the sign. It is coming up. So there's this part of me that on one hand, of course, I want to keep traveling.

Of course, I want to see other parts of the world. But banking on the fact that this place could grow. There's two different attitudes about change. One of which, and I keep hearing this repeatedly about a variety of different places.

Oh, Pi has changed, so I don't go back there. Versus Pi is changing. I want to be here to help steer it in the right direction. It's passive versus active.

There's a lot of people, especially in our generation, that don't actually feel agency enough to be able to, oh, life is changing around me. That just upsets and sears me as opposed to it is changing. And I want to fucking be here for it. If I could possibly bank on the fact that there is very little entertainment here.

There's no bowling alley. There's no big theater. There's no jack ship going on in terms of entertainment. There's housing.

There's restaurants. There's beautiful attractions. There's a lot of things that bring tourists here. There's nothing going on.

Absolutely. And it's going to grow. So at any one point in time, there's sort of this push pull of, you know, do I want to take it on the road? Do I want to say here?

I've gotten to a point where most of my 20s were completely untethered. I was going to festivals and Burning Man and traveling around the van and the highest buck on drugs. And like, this is what a lot of people's points are, this sort of untethered seeking. And I'm in my 30s now, I'm getting a little bit older, at least just to be extent when I'm like, you know, I really want stability.

You know, my 20-year-old self would yell at me for saying that. But I think that it comes in everybody's life at a certain point in a healthy way. We never seek structure until we've been unstructured for so long that we're like, God damn, this is exhausting. I need a place to lie down.

Yeah, that's what I feel right now. Absolutely. And I look forward to it actually, because now it has been unstructured for like about six months. And I'm already like, no, I wish to go back to something that's unstructured.

Yeah. Human beings, I mean, really, any animal, any natural force, always goes to extremes for long enough before anything changes. And it's a very, it's a youthful mentality of sort of a rebellion. I'm not going to live the way that other people live.

I want to be free. I want to be a leaf in the breeze. But when you're a leaf in the breeze for long enough and you've bounced to a variety of different places and if this constant everything is changing, it's a very natural feeling to me at least. It came about very naturally that was like, I'm done looking.

I'm done seeking, I'm done trying to find the perfect thing. And I just want to find what's right. It ties back to that whole, the grass is not greener on the other side. The grass is greener where you water it.

And I really had to sort of snap myself out of that mentality of consistently trying to run to the chase, to seek to look and to simply pause long enough to be like, you know what, what I'm looking for, I think I actually have to make it. It's not pre-existing somewhere. It's not that I'm just going to stumble into it. I kind of did with what happened here in high.

I happened to thank God. Thank you universe for putting me in a place where my series of life skills really fit in a beautiful way. But he's still kind of needed to jam my square peg into the round hole just a little bit. There was a lot of wonderful serendipities and pieces of parts that came together that really made me feel like, oh my God, this is a place that I could fit.

But there was still a lot of resistance and a lot of areas of like, hey guys, like I want something stable, I want something bigger. Oh no, I just want to play and fuck around and give me some more of that kerosene. I want something. So the structure that you've created with the message so far, is that enough?

Or are you looking for like a, because I imagine, personally for you, that's what you're talking about when you come to structure like you want more. Like I said, you didn't come to imagine, but I just said, you have any life. Like, yeah, is that something that you already have? Or is that something that you still working on?

I definitely, I see where it is now as sort of a growth point maximum, at least in relation to what we're doing here at Paradise Gym Pie. But very much in the sense of talent brought this idea to my attention. He said, you know, it's reached its growth point maximum. But much in the sense of like, when you're growing a plant inside of a grow box, if you just plant the seed and let it go nuts inside of that box, eventually it is filled the whole bucket thing up.

But you haven't trimmed off the dead leaves. You haven't trimmed off the hermaphrodite branches and the little spawning things. If you just trim and prune it a little bit, it has room to grow put in a much more directed way. And so at this point the growth is not quite so just wild uncontrolled growth.

Let's control the growth a little bit so that it can kind of put energy into the right branches. When you prune the tree, the whole idea of pruning the tree is not to just cut off the parts that you don't like. It's also to allow it to put energy into the parts of it that are growing really well. When a plant, a dead leaf that's coming off the plant is putting almost all of its energy into trying to keep that fucking thing alive.

But it doesn't need to. You just pop that thing off and you've essentially just told the plant, don't put energy into that thing that is clearly fucking dying. Put it into the parts that are beautiful. So at this point it gets sort of a continual fine tuning, a shaving.

My dad puts it this way with his magic hat that he's now been doing for 45 years and fully immense, but it's not even done yet. It's not completed. An act is never done. A routine is never finished.

There's always lines to be added. There's polishing to be done. He uses the visual image of a block of marble, a perfectly cubed block of marble, that with every time that you do it, you shave off just the tiniest bits from the outside, eventually ending you up with a beautiful sphere that you have polished down. Every time that you perform, every time that you do this thing, you're just shaving off just a little bit.

You're just polishing it just a little bit. And it's the cleanest little steps. And at this point, I do really feel like I'm far more stable as an entertainer than I ever really was in the western world. There was always chasing the sun and running after tourists, but they all come here.

And I've reached a level of financial stability that is good enough for me. I don't, I mean, it's high currency. It's a bot. So it's nothing to write home about.

I still punch it into a currency translator. I still weep a little bit knowing how much I have. No, boy, I have about 85 cents. But here, that's enough.

All I really want is stability. And that's a wonderful thing to have sort of been snapped out of the western view of and even more. There needs to be more. You know, coming to Thailand, there was always this feeling of like, if I didn't have enough, I don't, there's none.

And I'm like, Dad, what is enough? When is it enough? You have anything in your fucking bank account, make it work. And at this point, you know, I'm making my living, but it's enough.

Because all I really need is just stability. And so what we have here is stability and a project that I can continually work on. This is a gigantic art project that is completely collaborative. And it can only branch and grow and be added pieces to it.

You're at Paradise. You know, you can do so many things. It's almost silly to leave a project now in my opinion. It's just something that I've mentioned about.

How old is Paradise? Because there was a resort, right? And then you know, I don't bother, I don't want to switch away. How long is that?

How long ago started? Now we're going to call it Paradise. It's not going to be a resort. It's a hustlin said, do you know that?

I know at least the general lineage. I haven't been able to get the total details from Joe. But I know that a little over five years ago, he was still Pytara resort. And Pytara resort was only the four bungalows, the ones that we live in.

Those were the original rooms. And this big, beautiful open space. About five years ago, Joe changed his living from he was a tourist police prior to this. And then he invested in this place.

All of the rooms are less than five years old. All of this really sprouted in a very short period of time. For a little while, it was what the fuck bar? It was relatively unstructured.

And I would say it was maybe two to three years ago that they changed their name to Paradise. And I got a lot of this lineage, a lot of this understanding actually through people that have come back to be on a circus. It was this very bizarre sort of hand-me-down element to my job. I think it was about two and a half years ago, Dylan, a good friend Dylan, a policeman in the circus.

He had my same job. He came here in a very similar position, no fucking money, and no idea what the fuck to do with himself. Started helping Joe run fire shows. It's a very com-activity in Southeast Asian, so it's just something to bring guests into a guest house.

At the time that Dylan got here, it was only Thai staff, even at the time, Joe barely spoke in English. So Dylan was one of two of the very first foreigner volunteers. Joe had never even considered bringing on volunteers at that point. He only had Thai workers.

This was only one and a half years ago. But Dylan, just by proxy of he's a very sweet human, he came here and was just helping clean up after party nights. And he just hung out and spun fire. And eventually, because he was so sweet, Joe actually a potion.

It was like, how can we get you to stay here? You're doing really kind things. So he got volunteer housing and beautiful things. But it sort of planted the seed in Joe's mind that, like, oh, foreigners could actually really help this.

Because we have within us an understanding of the way that Western tourists think and what we want out of a trip and how to facilitate things, how to communicate a little bit better. The Thai way of being is very passive, very quiet, very, you know, survivor. They keep to themselves, not a whole lot of communication. So that element of sort of hospitality.

Hey, how do you want to enjoy your time? This is not really a tiny thing. It just doesn't happen. They just sort of set the space and are like, what?

You like it? So he kind of clicked for Joe what foreigners could do for this place, which would bring new ideas, new elements, diversity, new ideas, and also just sort of friendlyness. So Dylan had the job. He left shortly after that.

There was another couple, a circus couple that was running the fire shows. Then the job got handed to Talon. Talon was here for a couple months again, running fire shows, which at the time was just putting out a bucket of kerosene and fucking around. He handed the job off to Kayla and Rafa, Kayla, who was my neighbor in Chiang Mai for two and a half years.

And again, you know, just putting out a bucket of kerosene, playing flippy-dippy. And then of course, Kayla knew what was going on with me when I came up to Pai and she was like, hey, I'm leaving town, you know, talk to Joe. You might be able to pick up the job. So there was this odd lineage of people, you know, sort of handing down the job, of course, until it got planted with somebody that actually really wanted to do something.

That was wonderful. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and it's this wonderful combination, not only of the skill sets, but also my perfect level of desperation. Everybody else that had the job of running the fire shows, here it is, had other places to go, had other things to do. When they kind of got bored of it, they didn't get traction.

Dylan even said it in a beautiful way. He said, they're coming back to it and seeing the circus form. There was this mild sense of jealousy of like, and I tried putting this, the other tried putting the other fire shows. I don't know why it never happened.

But when it started to become sort of hard work, it was like, nah, you know what, I'm gonna bite you back again, I'm gonna bite you back around. Talon did the same thing. You just, you know, oh, we're gonna try, but, ah, it's a little bit tough. Ah, but I just got invited in.

Ah, I'm gonna go fucking, you know, I'm gonna fly around. Everybody else had different options. I was at that perfect level of broken hardness and desperation and didn't know where else the fucking go. That knows in reality.

I had everywhere to go, but in my emotionally broken mind, I got nowhere to go. So it meant so much more to me that I stuck around to really make sure that it can save me than that it built. But it took somebody that like was so desperately clinging to it, you know, I don't need romantic relationships. I'd be able to, you know, yeah, right, because it's like, and now it has become a show, you know, there's over a hundred people attending at least twice a week, right, and we have one fire jam, which is at least more than 50 people now watching every single week.

So there's no reason to stop growing. There's no reason to think, because I, you know, I've talked to five the 10 travelers, new travelers, three every single day for the past five months now. And I ask everybody, it's genuinely interesting to me, how do you feel about pie? How do you define paradise?

It's not a single person that says, you know, I found it on Instagram or, you know, it's social media, or, you know, maybe they read an article in which, you know, they can get something here and that's why they're here. But most people actually heard about it through word of mouth, which is a powerful way to market. That means that somebody has been here, experienced it, had fun, spoken about it, and now there's more people doing it, right? So we're talking about the airport.

We're talking about how this place is going to grow. We're talking about the potential of this place to improve, like we've already seen just yesterday, a bunch of Israelis, you know, just put up something to do to go down there and see. We want to have a party. Yeah, I'm going to go down there.

It's quite all day today. So yeah, it's a simple thing, but you know, it can be built upon, you know, so this is a place that is only going to grow. So that's something that's exciting for me, because I want to come back here, and it's like for anybody who likes to fire. It's going to be so much different by the time you arrive, because what P.

Joe has given us, and I've seen this from the very beginning, is such a beautiful gift, because it's a gift of creativity. Here's a blank palette, and a shit ton of paints. What would you do with this? What would you do to make this place more beautiful?

He's fully admitted to the fact of like he's really good at management. He's a business mind. He's a lovely human. He's incredibly giving, but I don't know even what to do with all this.

It's a huge campus. There's like, what should we bring on a climbing wall? I don't know. What kind of activity should we have here?

Make it. What a beautiful gift to be able to give to, especially kids that are sort of a little bit lost, is that feeling of what would you do without any judgment. This is not your job. This is not your requirement.