Damien Echols
Appearances
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, like if they the guards, the administration, whatever, are doing something to you, even if I don't like you, I'm going to try to do something about it, because if they're doing something to you, they'll do the same thing to me. And you don't really have that in the rest of the prison. So it was like in a lot of ways, I was really fortunate in getting the death penalty.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I don't think there's anywhere in prison you can call safe. I mean, I think I had been there for, I think, maybe three months the first time I ever saw someone get stabbed to death. So you still have stuff like that going on. You're not, by any stretch of the imagination, in a safe place there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
But it's still like a completely different vibe from, you know, general population, say, where you're dealing with, you know, 2000 people that are there for everything from meth to stealing cars to killing old women, you know, whatever it is.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Huh. Honestly, I would have to say no, just because there was nobody that was like super hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn't like a deliberate hilarious. It's it's, you know, people that are so fucked up that you can't, you know, like I think I wrote about this, but there was a guy that had like one tooth and he wouldn't drink coffee because he said it would stain his tooth. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
He's not trying to be funny like he's dead serious. But if you have, you know, even average intelligence, you're going to find that funny.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
But at the same time, looking back on that stuff now, you know, it really is like that was another person, you know, the person that did. in there, the person that survived that stuff died the day I walked out of prison. So it almost feels like when I try to remember these things now, it's almost like, you know, trying to remember someone else's memories or even a past life or something.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Yeah. Yeah, that's that's a really good way of looking at it. That's what it felt like. It's like you get used to living in hell. You get so used to living in hell that you get up and you don't even think about it in the day. And then when you get out, suddenly you're having a nervous breakdown because you've never used a debit card before and you're having to figure out how to do that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
All these little things that people out here take for granted that they grow up knowing how to do, it was like I had to figure all of that stuff out, like figure out a lifetime's worth of things. operating in the world in days. And it completely and absolutely destroyed me. I have almost no memory of the first two years that I was out of prison because it mentally crippled me so bad.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It really did something to me. I didn't realize what it was at the time, but in hindsight, I realize now what was happening was I was having a nervous breakdown. Yeah, I just like I would try to tell Laurie something is wrong. Something is wrong. And she would say, what? And I would say, I don't know. I just know something is wrong.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And it would manifest itself in ways like, you know, when I was in prison, I would read like nonstop. Like sometimes I would read like five books a week. What else are you going to do? You read, you work out. Yeah, yeah. And the day that I walked out, I couldn't read anymore. Like I would read the same page of a book over and over and over.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And I could not retain what I had read when I got to the bottom of the page. I knew something was wrong with me. Like I wasn't thinking right. I couldn't, you know, I would go to dinner with someone and then reintroduce myself to them the next day because I could not even remember it. So I knew something was going wrong there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And I knew I was absolutely miserable, but I could not figure out what it was until years later. Looking back, what fixed it?
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I think it was two things really. One was kind of going back to the satanic panic thing for a minute. When I was in prison, one of the things that allowed me to survive in there was the fact that I didn't even think about being in prison for days at a time. And the reason for that was because I built a life for myself inside there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I had stuff that I was doing, like immersing myself in to the point where I didn't even think about the fact that I was in prison. And one of those things was Western hermeticism or ceremonial magic. You know, and it was when I was born. Practicing this, by the time I walked out, I was doing it for like eight hours a day sometimes.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And it feels like you're on this adventure where you're constantly having all these experiences and learning stuff. And it's like being on the quest for the Holy Grail to the point where I was content even when I was on death row. Not saying I didn't want out, didn't want my name cleared, didn't want to go home, but I was content even while I was there.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
When I walked out of prison, that was one of the things, in addition to reading and losing my short-term memory, it was like I could not do the ritual work that I had been doing for hours a day that had held me together. Suddenly, I could not do it at all. And that was another big contributing factor to the disintegration that I went through.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
What really started to stitch me back together was whenever I could slowly start returning to the ritual work and Pulling my attention away from the world on trying to figure out how to operate in the world, bringing my attention just back to doing the ritual work and doing that for hours a day. That was one of the things that started stitching me together.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
The other thing was martial arts, karate. Karate and boxing were two huge steps in returning to any state of being normal.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I don't think it's a one-time thing. I think it, you know, you know that you're in serious shit whenever they arrest you. But you still keep thinking, you know, surely somebody is going to realize something's going wrong here and fix this. At any minute, somebody is going to step in and set this right.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, someone with an IQ of more than 15 is going to intervene in this situation and write it. And you keep waiting on that to happen. For years, you wait on that to happen. And for some men in there, I don't think it ever fully sits in. They go all the way up to the point of being strapped to that execution table thinking, okay, at any minute now, this is going to stop.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
At any minute, something's going to change. So, I mean, I don't think there is ever one moment that you can pinpoint. I think it's a gradual process. And for me also...
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Um, you know, this is going to sound weird in a way, but there are there's been a few times in my life when I've met a very small, very small number of people or been in a very small or handful of situations whenever I've been in a place or something, whenever I knew, you know, like a lot of times we don't realize in our lives that something is important until we look back at high in hindsight.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Oh, yeah, yeah. We don't realize while we're experiencing that this is going to be a pivotal moment in the trajectory of my existence. But one of those times was the very first letter that I got from Lori. Like the very first letter that I ever got from her, I knew to the core of my bones, this is not just another person. This is not just another letter.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And one of the ways that I knew that, it felt like something clicked into place. And I had this feeling of they can't kill me now. They can still hurt me. They can still fuck me up, but they cannot kill me. It was just like a certainty that went all the way to a soul level.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So that also kind of prevented me from, you know, giving into despair or, you know, experiencing that moment of complete loss of hope and all that kind of stuff, too. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Well, you know, a lot of people, whenever they think of magic, they have all these, like, woo-woo conceptions, like stuff they've seen in movies or whatever. They don't even realize what it really does to you and what it really is. So, for example, whenever you start, first off, the very basic
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
beginning levels you're working your way extensively through uh levels that correspond to the elements like earth air fire and water and then from there you move on to the planets and then uh you know astrological signs and fixed stars and things like this but whenever you're doing this like for example when you start working on the elements and you start invoking earth
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
For example, you know, one of the things you do is you start doing ritual work every single day repeatedly to invoke energies that correspond to the element of earth. Well, what starts happening is the aspects of yourself that correspond to that particular energy start to change.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So, for example, with earth, one of the things you find yourself doing is, you know, you're invoking this energy every day and you start to think, you know what? Maybe I really should start to exercise a little more or maybe smoking cigarettes isn't the greatest idea. I think I'm going to quit. And those are all things that I did in there. So those were aspects of myself that started to change.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And I saw that and I realized, holy shit, this isn't just make believe. bullshit. This is actually doing something to me. This is changing me in some way. And the same thing starts happening when you start invoking water every single day. The aspects of you that correspond to water start to change.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
That includes stuff like your emotions, your unconscious, your subconscious, and working through artistic mediums. So you're invoking water every day. The next thing you know, you just think, you know what? maybe I think I might like to start doing some painting. And I did that. I started buying, you know, I couldn't get paintbrushes or anything.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So I started using Q-tips and I bought paint from other inmates that were like smuggling it in to the prison. And I started doing paintings and even having art shows while I was in prison. So it's like when you're working on magic, it changes every aspect of yourself. You know, like when you're invoking air every day, air,
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
corresponds to like your intellect, you know, your ability to use logic and reason. And when I was doing that, that was when I woke up one day and I decided, you know what, I want to have the same frames of reference that everybody else has. So I'm going to start, you know, just, I read everything under the sun from Camus to Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Freud.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I started taking psychology classes, sociology classes, German classes. Yeah. you know, all of them.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, that's it's one of those things that to I think to most people, when they look at my life and they look at, you know, things like that, that look like blatantly, obviously horrific things. They they probably think that I had a shitty life, but. Honestly, if somebody told me, you know, I think a lot of people got it worse than I did.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, if they told me you can do 18 years in prison or you can work at McDonald's for 18 years, I'd be like, fuck, send me to prison. In a lot of ways, I think I really was fortunate in, you know, it took me out of a situation where, Nobody in my family has an education beyond the ninth grade. When I was born, my mom was 15, my dad was 16.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You're not going to find any college graduates, even high school educated diplomas or anything in my family. So looking at the trajectory of the lives of everyone around me, I didn't have anything to look forward to. You know, there was nothing that that looked like my fortune was going to be any different from, you know, the people in the environment that was around me.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And something happened where I was plucked out of that world and it saved me in a lot of ways. So, yes, I went through some horrible shit. But at the same time, I was really, really blessed in a lot of ways.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
That's not even an exaggeration. That's literal. Like I reached a point where I did not want to have to think about clothes anymore. So I got like five pairs of the exact same pants, 10 of the exact same shirts, about 10 of the exact same kind of underwear, socks, everything. So you just pick up the next one in line and don't have to expend any energy planning on what you're going to wear that day.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So he and his best friend, his best friend was a Zen Buddhist monk. who got into a gunfight with the cops and got two of his fingers shot off.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
They shot off two of his fingers, so everybody on death row used to call him Three Finger Woo. But he had a Zen teacher, a Zen master that would, you know, he was the head abbot of a 300-year-old temple in Japan and would come back and forth to teach him. And when you're executed, the only person that's allowed to be with you is your spiritual advisor, like no family, no friends, any of that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So this Zen master came over to be with the theosophist's best friend whenever he was executed. After he was executed... He was allowed to come back on death row and tell us, you know, what the guy's last words were and, you know, how he held up during the execution, all this kind of stuff. And we just started talking and then started corresponding with each other.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And his teacher became my teacher. And before I left prison, by the time he was executed, he had become an ordained priest in the Rinzai Zen tradition of Japanese Buddhism. And I followed the same route, trained for years while I was in there with the same teacher, got ordination while I was in there. But those two guys, the day that I walked in the door,
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Those two guys were the first people to approach me, and they gave me just this pack that had stuff in it that you need on your first day in prison. You know, like, for example, stamped envelopes so you can write to your family and let them know where you are. Yeah. But I'll borrow soap, you know, stuff like that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And one of the very first things that they said to me whenever I got in there is you can either turn yourself into a monastery and work on yourself or you can be like the rest of these guys and you can sit in here and go stark raving insane.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think what it was like, what part of what was so destructive to me about getting out of prison was getting away from that, you know, being introduced into this world where so much is happening. And there's you know, I went from solitary confinement like the last year. Nine years that I was in prison, I was in solitary confinement.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I went from solitary confinement to the streets of Manhattan literally overnight. It was like being bombarded with everything you can imagine. And I kind of wanted to make up for everything that I had missed and not experienced. I lived on the streets of New York for years when I first got out. I wanted to see everything, do everything.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I would go stand in drugstores and just look at all the ink pens and the chocolate bars and just the stuff that I hadn't seen in years and years. And it got me further and further away from having a consistent routine. Part of what started allowing me to heal was getting back
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
to the same things that it allowed me to find contentment and growth in prison, which is in a lot of ways shutting myself off from the world. Really, other than whatever I'm doing work-wise, whether it's being on Patreon and doing live streams on there or writing the occasional book and have to do a book tour or something, for the most part, I found that I...
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
am the most content when I am living a very monastic kind of life. You know, I get up every single day and I start practicing karate every single morning. And that's pretty much what my days are dedicated to now. And as long as I do that, I find that I am probably happier than 90 percent of the people that I come across in the world. I find that that is the key.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Yes, yes. You have to get to love it. Like, you have to realize that this discipline, you know, it might be hard. Like, it's a sacrifice. You sacrifice going on, you know, drunken benders or football games or, you know, whatever it is that people do. You sacrifice a lot of that socialness that people get lost in, but... It comes with, you know, a hell of a reward if you do.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It was, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, this this sounds kind of odd. I'm very, very, very appreciative to all those people more than I could ever say. You know, they've been everybody from Johnny Depp to Eddie Vedder to Henry Rollins, Margaret Cho, you know, so many people. Peter Jackson, you know, more people than I can even name. I would be dead if not for these people.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And I appreciate everything they did. But one thing I realized very quickly is I do not like being in those worlds, you know, Hollywood worlds or, you know, being caught up.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Kind of just because when I walked out of prison, you know, I didn't have a penny to my name. I didn't have a suit of clothes to change into. I had nowhere to go. I had absolutely nothing. So if it wasn't for like the generosity of, you know, a lot of these people helping us out and even like giving us a place to stay until, you know, crazy story. We ended up staying in an apartment in New York.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, Peter Jackson, he and his wife, Fran, they had this apartment in New York and they're like, you know, that's how we ended up in New York. They're like, why don't you go and stay there in our apartment, you know, until you figure out what you're going to do, you know, what what's your next step is going to be, all that kind of stuff.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And then now it's the apartment that Taylor Swift lives in. She bought the apartment. That's where she lives. So you do feel a sense of pressure in that, you know, you want to show your appreciation and make people happy and all this kind of stuff. But at the same time, It's just that's that's that's not my scene. That's not a thing that I enjoy. You know, I don't like parties.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I don't like fancy dinners. You know, one time we went to that concert that they had in New York after Hurricane Sandy. And I mean, everybody was there. I remember that. Kanye West, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Roger, like everybody's at this thing. Right. And we're sitting there and we've been there for probably 30 minutes. And I was thinking, you know what? I've got.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
part of a pizza in the fridge at home right now and we got up and left yeah man yeah yeah hey you enjoyed it that makes you a real new yorker though yeah now currently you you're working with the innocence project correct
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Yeah. At least... You know, there were there were at least two that were just straight out flat up innocent, you know, that had nothing to do with anything they were charged with at all. But there were other really weird cases.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, for example, there was a guy that was on death row because his brother had committed a murder and he was taking the fall for his brother because his brother was at home taking care of their mom. And he's the whole thing. So, yeah, stuff like that. You also have people that are going to get out. One of them got out. One of them, I believe, was executed after I got out. Wow. Yeah.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I don't know. Well, I take that back. I think it's you've always had elements of society that want to keep people under their thumb, you know, that that don't want you to be fully conscious, you know, that that basically want you to remain in slavery for your entire life.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And they demonize things so that you don't look in places where you'll find something that's going to bring you out of that, that's going to wake you up from that. But that's exactly what magic is. I think one of the best descriptions I've ever heard of what you're doing whenever you are practicing this work was by Beethoven. And I'll mangle this.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I won't get it exactly right, but it was something along the lines of he said that the greatest thing that we could possibly hope to do is approach divinity as closely as we can, gather its rays, and disseminate them out to mankind. And different people are going to do that in different ways. You know, Beethoven obviously did it through his music. Other people may do it through writing.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Other people may do it through visual art. Other people may do it through podcasts. Whatever it is, it's a way—
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
But that's what you're doing when you're practicing magic. And you're doing the exact same thing that all the prophets in the Old Testament talk about in like this veiled language, you know, like in the book of Enoch and the prophet Ezekiel, you know, where they're talking about like, approaching the throne of God and all this sort of Jacob's ladder.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, that's what when you're talking about these these the levels of magic where you start off with the elements and then you move up through the planets and then the astrological work and the fixed stars, all of that, what you're doing is step by step ascending. In the Bible, they use the metaphor of Jacob's ladder. You know, Jacob goes to sleep and he sees this ladder that ascends from
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
earth to heaven and and there's these angels that are constantly coming up and going down ascending and descending like that's like a metaphor for this work climbing one rung at a time from each element to each planet to each astrological sign to each fixed star until you reach like the throne of of god and and bathe in that divine energy have you gotten there What's that like?
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Those are things that I used to talk about a lot, and I stopped doing it. I won't say any names, but I did a podcast one time where I was talking, and this was a huge podcast, and it's supposed to be about spirituality and all this kind of stuff. And the guy asked me pretty much something along the same lines of what you just asked.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I started talking about some things and I could tell by looking at his face, like he was like, this guy is fucked up. That podcast never aired. He completely scaled it. Oh, we're putting this out.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
All you can do is stop worrying about what other people are doing and find something to pour yourself into heart and soul that is going to make you a better person. And by better person, I mean like more physically fit. smarter, a little more emotionally mature.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
If you just pour your energy into something that you love, whatever it is, whether it's yoga, martial arts, ceremonial magic, hiking, whatever the hell it is, if you pour yourself into it,
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
and strive to the best of your ability to get, you know, 1% better at it every single day, then you're going to find that you don't fall into those angsty traps that swallow most people up nearly as much as, you know, most other people do. That's one of the things about, like, you know, ceremonial magic, the things you realize, like one day you think,
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Wow, I don't get pissed off nearly as much as I used to. And if I do, it passes a lot quicker. Or you know what? I don't fall into those random bouts of angsty depression that I used to when I was a teenager in my early 20s. It just stopped. You realize... Looking back in hindsight, you know, you don't always realize the changes that are occurring in yourself when you're going through them.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
But when you look back in hindsight, you realize, you know, wow, something was really happening there. That's the only thing that I tell people is usually people who I'm very wary of people who want to save the world. Usually those are people who aren't doing a lot of internal work.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
What I usually advise for people who are just miserable, you know, due to external situations, circumstances, whatever it is, is find something that you love and pour yourself into it with everything you have. And you'll find that the world gets like 90 percent better.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It's how you do things. Yes, exactly. You know, that's that's the thing about like martial arts. And one of the things that I love so much about karate is like when you're when you're practicing, you are building like a kind of discipline that theoretically and hopefully will eventually start to leak over into every other aspect of your life. Like you will approach doing your laundry like.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
with the same level of clarity and commitment and dedication as you do whenever you go into class to practice. It's time to kick Staines' ass.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Well, that was one of the reasons I wanted Lori to do this is because I, here's the thing, I pay very, very little attention to my case at all.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Like, I can tell you almost nothing that's going on at any given period of time just because I found that the more I paid attention to that stuff and the more that I focused on the details of what was happening and what could be happening next and when is this going to happen and when's the timeframe for that, the more I paid attention to that,
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It's what, 30 years now? But keep in mind also, this is one of those things like, you know, even when the DNA testing does come back, like say it comes back in February, you know, people that haven't spent most of their lives tangled up in the legal system don't realize like how slowly this all moves. I mean, keep in mind that when the first round of DNA testing was done,
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
back the the testing that got us out of prison you know they found out that the dna at the crime scene did not match me jason or jesse i sat in prison for another three years after you knew that so that that's kind of how slowly this stuff moves well especially to for them to tell themselves they're wrong because i don't think the government doesn't
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
This was one of the things that my lawyer even said, like, you know, I asked him before we came on, like, is there anything I can't talk about? And he's like, don't go on saying, you know, who you think.
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Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I've always had a really I've had a sneaking suspicion about someone that was very, very shady and that I don't think anyone else has ever looked at this person before.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I think they're still alive.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
But that's what I mean about how I found that The thing that kept me from going insane was building a world for myself where I was focusing on something, you know, like other than the case, because, you know, like I said, I sat there for three years after the first round of DNA testing showed that it didn't match us.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, if I would have been focused every day on, OK, the DNA wasn't mine, they're going to let me go home now. Right. Like I would have lost my mind in that three years if I would have focused on that.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I think it's more that I think it's more the latter, like just being connected, you know, keep in mind that I didn't even like when we were in prison, they didn't even let us see each other. So, you know, you're talking about someone like when I was a teenager and Jason Baldwin was my best friend, but I didn't even see him for 20 years while I was 18 years and 76 days.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It wasn't like we were hanging out and having conversations. He was 16 years old when he went to prison. When he came out, he was an adult. He's not the same person that he was. I always think if you're friends with the same people that you were friends with when you're 16... that you are when you're 50, which is what I'm about to be, something's probably went wrong in your life.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
probably not a lot of growth happening there or something uh but you know for the most part it's like we're probably just connected by the case like i don't even know where jesse is now honestly you know he just i didn't know if you guys all got together and played pool or but then i feel like why would you want to review why would you want to go back kicking about the good old days yeah
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Thank you guys so much for having us. This has been a pleasure. It's been fun.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I do live streams, and honestly, I do a little bit. Mostly what I try to do is help people focus on things that are going to make them happier, feel better, and a huge part of that is ceremonial magic. I try to help. There's been people on there that have been with me for years that we talk about their practices. I only do live streams on there because I like interacting with people.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
You know, I don't just like doing videos. I like, you know, the back and forth, the conversation. So it's everything from martial arts to ceremonial magic to philosophy. You know, anything that's going to make you a better, wiser, stronger person.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
I don't think anybody wants to see my feet.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
somebody told me one time that my feet look like the the halfway transition point in that movie the howling whenever they're transformed yeah i'm so turned on right now
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
If you're interested in the prison stuff, my life story in general, the first one was called Life After Death. Then there was another one that is just a book of mine and Lori's correspondence, like our letters, while I was in prison. And it's called Yours for Eternity.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
We've moved on to texting each other memes for the most part. True love. That's what marriage is. The magic books would be High Magic, Angels and Archangels, A Magician's Guide, and Ritual.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Thank you guys so much for everything.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It's hard to say. I mean, if if it does, it won't look like the last one looked, you know, the same thing might happen. You might have like groups of people that are persecuted for various reasons. But I don't think it's going to look exactly like it did back then. You know, back then it was like.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
People today, if you look back at the way the satanic panic looked back then, most people today would think that just looks fucking cheesy. You know, you had all the people like accusing, you know, Ozzy Osbourne of making people commit suicide by putting backwards lyrics in his music and all this kind of stuff. Nobody would take anything like that seriously now.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
So I think if something like that does happen, it's going to look completely different.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
That's when the cannibalism started.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Yeah. I think it kind of trickled down in things like you had. I don't even know where these guys came from, but you had people going into these small towns and doing like seminars for the cops on how they could recognize like satanic activity in their neighborhood. So it was coming like trickling down is a really good way to describe it because it was coming down from somewhere else.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
And, you know, being put in basically like put into people's heads, put into the cops heads, even if the cops had never even thought about it. They had these people coming in and saying, look, this is going on and this is what you need to be on the watch for. And they're like, oh, OK, well, you must know more than we do. So we're going to do what you say.
Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
It was a different situation for me because I was on death row and death row is not like the rest of the prison. You know, there's there's almost a sense of like not exactly camaraderie on death row that you don't have in the rest of the prison, but a sense of unity in that we all have a common enemy. You know, we have someone trying to kill all of us and we are all trying to stay alive.