Steve Cuden: On today’s StoryBeat:

Jimi Fritz: So I was in a bit of a rut, around 40, you know, midlife crisis, been there, done that. And then, I did some MDMA and went to a rave, and everything changed. It was fantastic. It was a great experience. It’s great for creativity because it makes your brain work in different ways. You know, I think a lot of people get stuck in ruts with the way they think. I think that’s what anxiety and depression is. You just get stuck in this mode of thinking, and you can’t break out of it. That’s why psychedelics are now being used for depression and anxiety, because they really do break you out of that. They change your mind.

Announcer: This is StoryBeat with Steve Cuden, a podcast for the creative mind. StoryBeat explores how masters of creativity develop and produce brilliant works that people everywhere love and admire. So join us as we discover how talented creators find success, success in the worlds of imagination and Entertainment. here now is your host, Steve Cuden

Steve Cuden: Thanks for joining us on StoryBeat. We’re coming to you from the Steel City, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My guest today, Jimi Fritz, is a filmmaker, musician, writer, entrepreneur, raconteur, and roustabout. He’s written two feature length screenplays, numerous articles, and a non fiction book about rave culture. He’s also made numerous films and music videos. His latest book, the end of an ironic black comedy, is about an older man simply named Fritz, who spends his days in a psychiatric institution, plotting his own suicide while contending with the extraordinary insanity all around him. I’ve read the end of everything and can tell you this is one of the most unique stories I’ve ever had the pleasure to peruse. Deeply intellectual, smartly psychological, and wildly hilarious, the end of everything had me turning pages and wanting neither the story nor Fritz to end. If you like darkly comic storytelling, I highly urge you to read it. Previously, Jimi published Confessions of an ethical drug dealer, which is a psychedelic travelogue and memoir. Jimi takes his readers on a journey both geographical and philosophical, while sharing a half century of adventures in buying, selling, and consuming psychedelic drugs. Along the way, we learn the difference between smart drugs and dumb drugs, the truth about religion, and how to make a perfect cup of tea. Jimi Fritz professes to be a heterodoxical polemicist, a skeptical polymath, an iconoclastic antitheist, and an aficionado of stoicism. So for all those reasons and many more, it’s my great honor and privilege to welcome the truly brilliant creative force known as Jimi Fritz to StoryBeat. Today. Jimi welcome to the show.

Jimi Fritz: Thanks very much. That’s a hell of an intro. Thank you.

Steve Cuden: It is. That last bit there was a little hard to get out. It’s like a lot of words, big words.

Jimi Fritz: I know, I know a lot of people have had trouble with that. Another podcast I did, there’s a woman pronounced almost every single word wrong.

Steve Cuden: Did I get them right?

Jimi Fritz: It was hilarious. You got them right. Yeah. But, yeah, it was funny.

Steve Cuden: I win today’s bingo.

Jimi Fritz: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Okay. So how old were you when you began all this creativity?

Jimi Fritz: I think I’ve always been creative. You know, like, as a teenager, I wrote poems, and then I picked up the guitar at 17 with writing songs and, so, you know, I’ve always had something, and I’ve always kind of, been cross platform, kind of creative. I’ve done music and film and theater and, writing, of course, photography, you know, lots of different, lots of different areas. I like to switch it up a bit.

Steve Cuden: Why do you like to switch it up? What does that do for you?

Jimi Fritz: It just puts you in a different mode so you don’t just get interrupt, you know, with a medium. I think if you’re, I think if you’re an artist, you can create with any medium, and if you’re a musician, you can create something with any, any musical instrument.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s probably accurate. Some people, of course, devote an entire lifetime to one discipline or another. You’re multidisciplinarian.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And it’s because I assume you like them all. You enjoy doing them.

Jimi Fritz: Exactly. And they all sort of have a different, you know, use a different part of your brain and have different rewards. So it’s nice to switch things up. And also some, like, filmmaking, for instance, is very expensive. So I was making films for a while and then kind, of gave it up for a while because it’s too, it’s too much. It’s too expensive.

Steve Cuden: Oh, it is expensive.

Jimi Fritz: It’s too time consuming. You need a hundred people. so it’s, writing a book is. It was a breath of fresh air after that, because you just sit down and it’s just you and the page. You can do anything you want.

Steve Cuden: It’s about the least expensive creative act you can do.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, exactly. And there’s really nothing you can’t, no place you can’t go, nobody you can’t meet, nobody thinks you can’t do. So, it’s just wide open. I found a lot of freedom in writing for that reason.

Steve Cuden: Is there any part of what you do that isn’t, in some way, shape or form storytelling?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, I think it’s all storytelling.

Steve Cuden: It’s all storytelling.

Jimi Fritz: It’s all communicating. Anyway, I think that’s the. For me, that’s the number one impetus, is you have to have something to say. I don’t want to write songs about nothing. I don’t want to write pop songs. And, I don’t want to write books that are just stories about characters. I want to have something to say. So if I have something to say, then I find it fairly easy to just, pursue that and to just keep going until it’s done.

Steve Cuden: Do you think of yourself primarily as one of those disciplines or another, as a writer or a musician or something? Or do you just think it’s one. One ball of wax?

Jimi Fritz: It’s all one thing to me. Yeah, more or less. I mean, right now I’ve just spent 4 hours editing a, 28 minutes art film, which goes along with my 28 minutes piece of music that I just finished a couple of weeks ago. So right now I’m a musician and filmmaker, so whatever. Whatever I’m doing is what I am.

Steve Cuden: I guess at the same time, you’re still being. And telling stories. You’re being a storyteller.

Jimi Fritz: Exactly. And, you know, writing a song or writing a poem or writing a book or something. It’s all. It’s all just working with language. And so you have to have a love of language and, an aptitude for it. And then, like I say, you gotta have something to say. You got something that you want to communicate, whether it’s song or whatever the form is.

Steve Cuden: And even music, pure music with no words to it, even. That’s a language of a kind.

Jimi Fritz: It is, yeah, very much so. And editing is a language too. Sure.

Steve Cuden: Of course.

Jimi Fritz: Editing is very much. I just saw an interview with Ron Frick, the guy that did Pau Anisatsuki and Koyanasatsuki, that trilogy. He was interesting because he was talking about a visual language that he invented for those films. And I’m coincidentally, I just watched an interview with him, and I’m sort of doing the same thing right now because I’ve got this 28 minutes collage or pastiche of black and white and different tinted, images, which are all kind of layering on top of each other. And I’m just kind of creating this kind of language for each section. So I really related to that.

Steve Cuden: Is it got a story in it? Is it easy to tell? Or is it something you have to absorb?

Jimi Fritz: Well, there’s lyrics. So there’s lots of sections. It’s basically me looking back on my life. It’s called no regrets. So it’s me looking back and reflecting and paying homage to my influences and heroes, talking, about the absurdity of Life and, you know, some philosophical concepts.

Steve Cuden: Who are your heroes? Who did inspire you?

Jimi Fritz: I just made, I just made a huge list. I don’t have it with me, but, I don’t know writers. I really like, dust. I like the classics. I’m into 19th century literature. So this last book I wrote, which is called the end of everything, it was kind, of an homage to 19th century russian literature, you know, because they’re all, they’re all like deeply psychological characters. They all have layers and layers of going on, which is, you know, the author. Right. So when you read Dostoevsky, you’re inside Dostoevsky’s head, and you know what he thinks. If you read Vonnegut, you know exactly what Vonnegut thinks. If you read Bukowski, you know exactly what Bukowski thinks, because you have that vicarious experience of their life. And that’s why I say that writing is about the writing. It’s not really about the stories or the characters. It’s about the language. And when you get a direct, connection with that language, you have a direct connection with the authority.

Steve Cuden: You have got to be a voracious reader and learner. Am I right?

Jimi Fritz: I have read a lot. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: I mean, when you read the end of everything, it’s clearly evident that whoever wrote this, that this person is a deep reader. You’ve read a lot.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s how I learned to write.

Steve Cuden: You didn’t go to school for it?

Jimi Fritz: No, I’m a grade nine dropout.

Steve Cuden: A grade nine dropout.

Jimi Fritz: Well, maybe last year I didn’t go much.

Steve Cuden: So everything that you’ve done in your Life creatively has been just by doing it?

Jimi Fritz: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Absorbing what others have done and then doing your own thing with that information.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. I mean, I learned to make films by watching films. I learned to write books by reading books. I learned to write songs by listening to songs and how they’re constructed.

Steve Cuden: And you’re also a musician. Did you learn to play instruments without any training? Yeah, just by playing.

Jimi Fritz: Just by watching people.

Steve Cuden: That’s fascinating.

Jimi Fritz: Just go to coffee houses, you know, in the, in the late, early seventies, late sixties, and just watch people play and watch what they were doing and memorized it, and then when omen did it.

Steve Cuden: So you’ve said a couple of times now that, you know, you have to have something to say. What I read in the end of everything is that you are a seeker of truth.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Is that true?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. I’m a valuer of truth. I value the truth. It’s more important to me than, a lot of things, for sure.

Steve Cuden: And so, going back to your very beginning, and then we’ll move off of this. But I’m just still curious. Back to your very beginning. Did you know early on in Life that the truth was going to be important to you, that you were going to value it back then, or did you learn that for yourself much later?

Jimi Fritz: I don’t remember it being a kind of a decision or, you know, a direction that I chose to go in. It was just. I was inspired. I mean, I think it was when I first started reading literature, first started reading, you know, Hermann Hess and, Heinrich Bohl, and the existentialists. And. And then I was just inspired by that stuff. And that’s what set me on my path.

Steve Cuden: And you tend to gravitate toward deep thinking books. Not fluffy stuff?

Jimi Fritz: No, no. Zero fluffy stuff. Nope. No fluff? No. No romance novels? No pop music? I detest pop music. Not just because, I mean, if people want to listen to pop music, fine. You know, if you want to read a harlequin romance, go ahead, I don’t care. But the problem is it affects, the market, if you want, people think that that’s the real thing, right? People don’t know what art is anymore. They don’t know what art is in a painting. You put any splashes of paint on a canvas and put it on the wall, and people think it’s art. It’s not.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that at one time people did know that?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, I think they were much more savvy in, late 18 hundreds and into the 19, into the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. I think people were far more savvy as to what art was, because there was only real art. There was only real painters and real musicians and real writers and real poets. And now, now it’s all imitation stuff. People are just making stuff that’s like that. And so you look at it, and if you don’t know the difference, because you don’t understand that art is a process and not a product, then you miss that completely. And I think we’ve got a whole generation to last two generations. I don’t think they know what art is. I don’t think they’ve ever really figured it out.

Steve Cuden: What do you think caused us to go there. What do you think happened?

Jimi Fritz: The market just got swamped with, Pablo. It just got swamped with stuff that people were trying to make money with, or stuff that they thought they were trying to reproduce an end product, something that they thought would be marketable or something.

Steve Cuden: So it’s about money then, ultimately, I.

Jimi Fritz: Guess, in some ways. Although I don’t know if there’s much money in books anymore, but.

Steve Cuden: Well, there isn’t much money in books anymore, but there’s still money in other forms. There’s still money in commercial filmmaking, and that’s why people go to Hollywood still, right? And tv and so on. books, not so much anymore. It’s really hard to make any kind of a living there unless you are one of a tiny handful of huge names, mostly writing fluff, that you don’t read.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, exactly. All the most popular authors I probably would never read, you know, the Dan Browns and the Michael Crichtons, and, you know, all the most successful Steven King, all the most successful writers, they have no interest whatsoever.

Steve Cuden: Have you ever read any of them?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, I’ve read enough to know that, you know, I’ve listened to enough pop music to know that I don’t like it.

Steve Cuden: Got it.

Jimi Fritz: For instance, Taylor Swift is a huge sensation. You know, I thought, okay, I’ll give her a listen. She must have something going on, right? Because she’s so incredibly popular. Billionaire now. And, so I downloaded the aris tour and, I watched it, and I thought it was the same vacuous, pointless pop songs that have been written for the last 40 years and really had no redeeming feature whatsoever. I was shocked that somebody with, you know, so little, so, so derivative a talent could be so popular. But I guess it’s because all the millennials and these young girls that buy our records, you know, there was 13 to 13 to 18 year old girls, basically as a market, and they really don’t understand anything about art or music or culture at all.

Steve Cuden: I think it’s very challenging for anyone under the age of 20 today because of cell phones and computers and so on. I think it’s very, very challenging for any of them to understand what else is out there in the world. Except, as you say, TikTok.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. No, it’s a disaster. Social media is a disaster for teenagers right now, and it’s a disaster for art and culture. What I’m seeing now is the death of art and culture. Everywhere I look, everywhere you look, it’s getting warded down, diluted, and just subjugated at every turn.

Steve Cuden: Do you have a thought as to where this is going to take us and where we’re going to wind up.

Jimi Fritz: To hell in a hand basket. Without the hand basket.

Steve Cuden: I guess I’ll meet you there.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. No, I don’t see it turning around. I don’t see there being a new renaissance of, true, creative, artistic integrity flourishing in the world. I don’t see that. I mean, there always be underground pockets and stuff, and I guess that would always be. But they won’t have any, any, avenues. They won’t be able to, get this stuff out. I mean, you put something on the Internet now and it’s, you know, there’s a billion other things. Just like, it’s like getting noticed on the Internet is virtually impossible now.

Steve Cuden: Well, that’s it. It has become just a great big giant sea of everything. And it’s very hard to discern what it is that you should spend any time on. And more importantly, it’s really pretty challenging for someone to actually rise above that. And when they do, like you say, a Taylor swift or someone like that, how does that person rise above all that other flotsam and jetsam that’s out there? How do they do that?

Jimi Fritz: They get a billion teenagers to, click on their subscribe and like. And that makes huge connections and they go viral and they’re the biggest thing in the world. But that’s not because of the work, it’s not because of the talent.

Steve Cuden: So all these different disciplines that you have, do you do all of them regularly or do you spend time on one kind of thing at a time? Do you spend time just as a filmmaker, just as a writer, just as an artist, just as a musician? Or do you try to do all of them regularly?

Jimi Fritz: No, I kind of switched backwards and forwards. So, like, earlier this year, I started writing this piece, of music, which was this 28 minutes piece. And that was, you know, that was full time. It was just doing that. So I was writing pieces in between recording and then recording some more and then writing some more. Just kept going like that until the music was finished. And then when the music was finished, I said, okay, I’m going to make a film with this. So then I started shooting and collecting footage and started, working on that. And I’ve been doing that every week for the last couple of months.

Steve Cuden: What kind of camera are you shooting on?

Jimi Fritz: I shoot on anything and everything. Like, I have a guy that I, hired for the main shoot, and we went out and we got a lot of the footage. And he uses a super high end digital camera. It’s not. It’s not fill. It’s, you know, it’s. It’s a good image. But the thing is, it doesn’t matter how I capture an image because I mess it up anyways. And I can turn the contrast up to 110, and then I fill it full of film noise, and then I put film filters over it. You can barely tell what’s going on. So really, the original capture of the image is. Is less important. I mean, if you’re making something, you know, like a featured film or something, it’s. It’s a different thing. But, this is more like a, this is more like a painting.

Steve Cuden: So this is not a narrative film then?

Jimi Fritz: The, songs are somewhat narrative, so they do fall and the images are cut to the music.

Steve Cuden: Got it. You’re making impressions then?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: Of one kind or another.

Jimi Fritz: That’s right.

Steve Cuden: And you’re doing it both sonically and visually.

Jimi Fritz: Yes.

Steve Cuden: Do you employ actors or is it just random stuff on the street, or how do you do it?

Jimi Fritz: I have done, I’ve, on my website, Jimmyfritz, ca. I have, 24 music videos that I made of my original songs, and those are more or less live recordings at different locations. So, yeah, I get a couple of camera people. We have up to five or seven cameras going. And, then we just perform the song three times to use the best take and then cut it together. This new project is a little bit different. I’m using clips of my other videos in. It slowed down and messed up and played backwards and God knows what. But, it’s a different kind of project.

Steve Cuden: Well, you clearly are working with technology, and so where did you. You just learned this technology by just playing around with it?

Jimi Fritz: Well, when I edit, I work with an editor. I mean, I know how the editing works. I started off making films on, like, super eight, so I was cutting the film physically with razor blade.

Steve Cuden: Yes.

Jimi Fritz: Then I moved to 16 mil, and then I moved into video because I worked with a. A tv station for a while. And, we were shooting three quarter inch pneumatic video, these giant cassettes, you know, like a small suitcase sized cassette that. This giant machine that’s 40 pounds hanging off your shoulder. And then you’ve got your battery pack and a battery belt, and it’s like, ridiculous amount of equipment, and it gives you a really shitty image. So that was an early video. Right. And then, we’re shooting Betacam, and then it went Betacam sp. And then beta cam, digital, and now it all pretty much digital. But like I say, that’s just the image capture. I never use an image exactly as it’s captured. I always mess with it, and I turn up the noise and the gain and the contrast and color it and tint it and, turn it inside out, and I just mess with everything.

Steve Cuden: So you take whatever product you get in its raw form and play with that. It doesn’t matter what that raw form is.

Jimi Fritz: Doesn’t matter? No, not really. I mean, some of this stuff, I shot an iPhone, you know, I’d have an idea for shots. You could go with my iPhone and set it up in a tripod and then do a walkthrough or do something with it, and then that’s, all in the video, too. But you’d never, you never know what was shot with an iPhone and what was shot with a 4K digital camera. You’d never be able to tell the difference.

Steve Cuden: So I’m curious, where’s your market for this? Who would you want to see this?

Jimi Fritz: There is no market for this. I’d like the whole world to see it. But, you know, people sitting through a 28 minutes music video, and I know that they’re not, probably not going to do it. So, you know, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I create now for myself. I mean, I always have, you know, I’ve always done it to satisfy myself. And if I can satisfy myself and I’m pleased with it, then it’s all, for me, it’s all about the process of doing it once I finished it, you know, if you want to sit through it, great. And if you don’t, I don’t care.

Steve Cuden: Do you then leave your work from the past behind. You never look at it again?

Jimi Fritz: Very rarely, yeah, very rarely. I haven’t read any of my books since I finished them. I thought I might read the end of everything, or maybe confessions at some point, you know? But, yeah, no, I don’t, I don’t go back and look at stuff because it’s done.

Steve Cuden: The listeners who know nothing about your books or your work, let’s tell them a little about the end of everything. Pitch the story so that the listeners know what the book is about.

Jimi Fritz: So, it’s about a character called Fritz, who’s, in a mental asylum, in a non specific time and place. And, he’s plotting his own suicide. He’s decided that he’s never going to get out of the institution. He battles with a psychiatrist and there’s some other wacky characters in there that he has dueling with. And, it’s basically a book written because I wanted to. I, wanted to rant about stuff. I wanted to rant about education and the death of art and culture and politics and all these things, and I wanted a vehicle to do that. So I said, okay, there’s a guy sitting at a typewriter, and he’s banging away in the mental asylum, and that’s me. But it’s, you know, it’s the character, and he’s just ranting about it. Just gave me full freedom to, just rant about all the things that I rant about.

Steve Cuden: anyways, have you ever been in an institution?

Jimi Fritz: No.

Steve Cuden: So this is completely out of your imagination.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Yeah. The situation is, for sure.

Steve Cuden: When you say it, you’re absolutely right. It’s loosely based on classic literature.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. The style of writing is sort of with that in mind, anyway. It’s kind of updated and modernized and personalized, but it’s, Yeah, it’s an homage to that.

Steve Cuden: I think Fritz may be the single, I’ll use this word carefully, smartest, highest intelligence, highest IQ character I may have ever read.

Jimi Fritz: Really great.

Steve Cuden: He’s super brilliant and very much in his own head. I mean, the whole book is told in the first person, and it’s all in his head.

Jimi Fritz: Right.

Steve Cuden: And so, frankly, you don’t know as you’re going along whether he’s imagining what he’s telling us or whether it’s real. So it’s like a dream within a dream within a dream.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And yet you present it in a very realistic way so it doesn’t feel dreamlike, but yet, at the same time, it feels dreamlike.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. And I guess, and the thing for the reader is you got to figure out, is he really as smart as he thinks he is? Is he really as sick as he thinks he is? Is he really as, as crazy as he thinks he is? And so those are the questions that can keep coming up.

Steve Cuden: You ask yourself as you’re reading it, is he actually in an institution? Is he maybe just imagining all this sitting in his house somewhere out in the middle of nowhere? It’s very hard to tell, but yet it’s so compelling that it’s like popcorn. You just. Now, there’s. There’s a fluff reference, but yet it is. You just keep wanting to read more and more and more. It’s compelling. It’s really compelling. And you also, then, at the same time, give us all this massive amount of information about drugs, about the world, about. And it’s all very detailed. you had to have done a lot of your own research on all this.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, well, it’s called living a life. My whole life has been researched for this.

Steve Cuden: Well, it’s all there. So he is than a reflection of you, in a way?

Jimi Fritz: Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think everything that an artist does is if it’s honest and authentic, and, then it’s got to be autobiographical, right? I think all art, all real art is autobiographical. It’s always about the artist. It’s always about the mind of the writer and the mind of the filmmaker.

Steve Cuden: I think that’s true.

Jimi Fritz: That’s what makes it unique and authentic, because we are all unique and authentic. If you reflect that through your art, then that’s what you get.

Steve Cuden: It’s a little tricky when you get into a highly collaborative form of art, like movie making, like plays, etcetera, where there might be a writer, a, director, actors, etcetera. And there are many collaborators with their hands in the pie.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Some areas are more collaborative than others. I mean, I’ve always, everything I’ve ever made, I’ve been the producer, director and writer. So I call the shots. It’s, you know, it’s always my show. Right. I’m not interested in really, I’m not actually not very interested in collaboration with other, with other artists because I just know what I like and I know what I want and I’d have to work around what they like and what they want. And to me, that’s not an advantage.

Steve Cuden: Same thing as a musician with groups of people that you may play with.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Well, that again, you know, it’s my song, right? I’ve written a song, I play the song and they play along with me. They follow, follow behind. If they say no, I want to change this verse, they’re not going to be able to do that. Because I like that verse. Because I wrote that verse. Yeah. I haven’t done a lot of collaborating for that reason, because I just kind of know what I want and know what I like. And, I’m doing it. I’m doing these things because I want to do what I want to do.

Steve Cuden: So you have to work with people who are willing to subjugate their ego into yours during that process.

Jimi Fritz: Absolutely, yes. And if you pay somebody, like, I mean, I use an editor, right. Sort of sitting with this guy today for 4 hours, and he’s brilliant on this machine, right. He’s just like, bang, bang, bang, like I say, okay, do this and flip it, mirror image, flush, it yellow, and then make this other image, sepia, and superimpose it. And by the time I finish saying it, ah, he’s done it.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Jimi Fritz: It’s incredible. So for me to learn that, that level of technique would, take years and years and years, and I’m, you know, that’s not my area of expertise. You know, I don’t want to come up with the ideas and visualizations and then have somebody. It’s like when I’m recording, I’m not doing all the recording and eqing and compressing everything and all that. I have a recording engineer and, you know, he knows what I like. And we’ve worked together a lot in the past, and so, it’s a great, you know, it’s a great working relationship.

Steve Cuden: You’re the artist with the ideas and the vision, and they are the people who help you interpret it technically.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. And that’s their forte, too. So, you know, some people are technicians, some people are artists, some people are both. It’s, it’s more rare. But I think, that the type of skills that you need for, you know, there’s these, this deep technology, you know, when you got a million menus and sub menus and blah, blah, blah and all these different things you can do. Can’t even keep track of it. Like, I can’t even see what. When he’s doing stuff on the screen, there’s so much stuff going on that I can’t barely even see it. I have reading glasses, like, I should be able to see 2020. He’s like, sitting back and he’s got a million things on the screen, I think. How can you even see that? So, yeah, so I do need, you know, people to. I guess that’s a collaboration.

Steve Cuden: Well, that is a collaboration. What do you think makes that work? It’s not just the fact that you’re paying him. What makes the collaboration work?

Jimi Fritz: Well, firstly, that I, you know, I know what I want and they know how to give it to me. So that works. And I take suggestions. I mean, I’m happy to, if somebody’s got a suggestion and it’s going to make something better, then I’m all for it. You know, I’m not going to say no because it’s not my idea. So, you know, there’s, there’s a certain, there’s a certain level of collaboration there, for sure.

Steve Cuden: All right, so I want to go back to Fritz for half a second because it’s, you’re making me think of Fritz as we’re talking, and, you know, he wants to commit suicide. Where did that idea come from? Why that?

Jimi Fritz: Well, because that’s, that’s my plan. I’ve always planned to take, you know, my own death into my own hands. I’ve always, I’ve always thought that that was. I’m not going to go, you know, do the deterioration at the end of life and suddenly, you know, get more and more decrepit and more and more pathetic and then have a slight, be a burden on everybody around me. I’m going to. I was intended to commit suicide at some point. Not you.

Steve Cuden: Not yet, not tonight, I hope.

Jimi Fritz: Not tonight, not soon, but, when the time comes, I’m prepared to do it. And so I researched that. I researched the right to die people, and I researched the way, you know, all the ways that people do it and the best ways to do it. And so I figured out my method. And, in fact, just a few, couple of months ago, I have a friend who’s 92, and, he decided that he was going to, you know, because we got made. Where, where are you?

Steve Cuden: You’re in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jimi Fritz: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’m in Vancouver, BC. We got made medical assistant dying. So he wanted to get made and get somebody to take him out. And I said, well, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go. I have this beautiful gazebo in my backyard, and it’s all lit up with fairy lights and stuff. I said, you know, whenever little part is there every Friday night. And so I said, what I’m going to do is I’m going to have a party. All my friends are going to come over. We’re going to have a great time. And then in the morning, you know, the doctor’s going to come over. I’m going to lay out on that bench right there, and, and the doctor’s going to shoot me up and I’ll be going. And he said, oh, that sounds like a good idea. I think I’d like to do that. So I said, okay. And then about a month later, he did it. And, we had a great party. The doctor came over in the morning and took him out, and then we had a good old irish wake, and we drank irish whiskey and partied with the body for a couple of hours.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Jimi Fritz: And then took them off, and that was that. It was a very positive experience.

Steve Cuden: You are the first person I’ve ever spoken to who is expressing it this way. I’ve never heard anyone say this before. I’ve read things about it, but I’ve never spoken to a human that’s said this.

Jimi Fritz: I think you’re going to hear a lot more about it in the near future.

Steve Cuden: Why?

Jimi Fritz: Well, just because it’s becoming more and more. I mean, the amount of people that. I mean, when I went to pick him up from the old people’s home for the last, you know, the last time he was coming over, there was a woman in the elevator. And we said, yeah, we’re just going, just going over. Peter is going to, commit suicide tonight. It’s got maid. She says, oh, yes, I’m going to do that. Said, oh, really? I was surprised.

Steve Cuden: Do you think that that’s a function of the true fact that humans, up until only very recently in our history, have basically died much younger than we are now dying. We’re living much longer than we used.

Jimi Fritz: To in our past, sometimes too long. You know, people are hanging on to the last minute, and they have horrible lives. I mean, we have another friend who was in a dementia home for a while. And, you know, these people are just sitting around in wheelchairs, staring into space. And sometimes they last for years like that. It’s just horrible, horrible existence. I don’t think anybody would choose that if they were given the choice. So now, in Canada, luckily, we have assisted suicide, and it’s legal and anybody can get it, and, I think it’s a great thing.

Steve Cuden: And Fritz goes around gathering medicine, drugs in order to do this act to commit his own suicide. And you then have spent a lot of time studying what those drugs would be. Yes.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Well, you can look around. There are certain organizations around the world. There’s dignitas in Switzerland, and there’s a. There’s some in, Amsterdam. The right to die people, in Canada have one method, and the right to die people in the states do another method. So all these things have been tried and worked out. And, there are foolproof methods, no doubt. And they’re actually not, you know, they’re not terrible. They’re not horrible. You know, there was a woman on Vancouver island who was one of the early pioneers of this, and she took out about 300 people before she got arrested. And she went to court and, she got off eventually. But, what she was doing was, ah, nitrous oxide. So you get a tank, you put the mask on, and then you just. She would set it up for them, and then she’d just sit on the other side of the room. So she wasn’t actively involved in the act, they would turn it on themselves. And she said she watched, almost 300 people die like that.

Steve Cuden: Wow.

Jimi Fritz: She said they died quickly, they died peacefully, and they died a lot of times with smile on their face because you, you know, it’s hypoxia. Hypoxia is the best way to go. You do some benzos and then hypoxia and a little bit of sodium chloride to stop the heart.

Steve Cuden: I love how you’ve short changed benzos.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Cuden: If I’m reading your bio right, you have spent a lot of time in various psychotropic drugs. Is that right?

Jimi Fritz: Yes. Yeah, that’s right. I tell that story in confessions of an ethical drug dealer by Jimi Fritz.

Steve Cuden: Right.

Jimi Fritz: And, it’s basically my experiences, traveling, because I’ve done a lot of traveling in a lot of different countries and also a lot of different psychedelic experiences. So it’s bringing those two things together and talking about my different, experiences in different places with different drugs.

Steve Cuden: And you’ve never been incarcerated for any of those activities?

Jimi Fritz: No. No.

Steve Cuden: That’s pretty awesome.

Jimi Fritz: I’ve always kind of stayed under the, under the radar, because I always done it privately and, you know, with close friends and stuff. I’ve never been selling joints down at the school or anything.

Steve Cuden: What is it? I’ve never even come close to doing anything. That’s a psychotropic drug, so I don’t have that experience in my Life. What does that do for you on your day to day life? What does that do for you in your creative life?

Jimi Fritz: It’s great for creativity because it makes your brain work in different ways. You know, I think a lot of people get stuck, a lot of people get stuck in ruts with the way they think. I think that’s what anxiety and depression is. You just get stuck in this mode of thinking, and you can’t break out of it. That’s why psychedelics are now being used for depression and anxiety, because they really do break you out of that. They change your mind. And, so that’s a really valuable thing to do. Most people don’t know how to do that with a psychedelic. It gets you there in 40 minutes.

Steve Cuden: It gets you there in 40 minutes. And does it require smart usage so that you don’t hurt yourself in some way?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, exactly. You need to know the dosage. You need to know what the drug is and why you’re using it and, where you’re using it. You know, Leary, when Leary was famous for setting the frame of mind and your environment like, you don’t do two hits of acid and go see a horror movie. This is, this is irresponsible drug use.

Steve Cuden: And that’s what you mean by being an ethical drug dealer then?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. So I’ve always, you know, I’ve always sourced the highest quality psychedelics and sold them to close, friends and people that I trust and, just so that they can, everybody can have that, you know, that safety.

Steve Cuden: Have you tried to write or make movies or make music while you’re on a psychedelic drug?

Jimi Fritz: Not really, no, I’m not. It’s not really conducive to. It’s conducive to thinking and getting inspired and getting ideas, but actually, like playing an instrument, you know, and it depends on the dosage. Right. Like with LSD, if you do a quarter of a hit, you do 25 mics and it’s just like a nice, pleasant, pleasant feeling. And that can, you know, you can play, play music on that. But if you do anything over 100 mics, then you’re getting into, you know, you might not be able to play your instrument anymore. You got to think about it and get inspired. And then you bring that, you know, it’s like integrative therapy. That’s what the psychedelic therapy does. They give you the experience and then they do the therapy afterwards. So with, you know, creatively, you get, you do have the experience. You get inspired, you get your mind blown and then you come back the next day and, you know, pick up an instrument or pick up a pen.

Steve Cuden: So once you’ve gone through an experience, you still have good memory of it when you’re past it.

Jimi Fritz: Oh, yeah. It changes you for sure.

Steve Cuden: And. But you don’t forget. It doesn’t make you forget like people who, for instance, alcoholics will get to a point where they might black out and they don’t remember any of what’s going on.

Jimi Fritz: No, no, it’s the opposite with psychedelics. Makes you. Helps you to remember. It actually makes new neuro, connections, more neuro connections for the same experience. So it feels new and fresh and exciting and inspiring. It increases your cognition.

Steve Cuden: It increases your cognition.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah.

Steve Cuden: And you lay all this out in confessions of an ethical drug dealer?

Jimi Fritz: Yes. This is the one you’ll have to read next.

Steve Cuden: The Confessions of an ethical drug dealer by Jimi Fritz. Yes, indeed. It doesn’t have a character named Fritz in it, does it?

Jimi Fritz: It does not. Well, it’s an autobiography. It’s a psychedelic travelogue and memoir. So it’s, you know, it’s memoir.

Steve Cuden: Memoir.

Jimi Fritz: It’s me in the first person talking about my life. Everything in it is 100% factual and true.

Steve Cuden: You experienced it all.

Jimi Fritz: I didn’t make anything up.

Steve Cuden: You didn’t make anything up. Then what was the book rave culture about? Obviously raves, but explain it.

Jimi Fritz: That was the first book. Yeah, I got, I got swept up in rave culture when I was about 40, and a friend introduced me to a friend’s son, actually. He came around and he said, oh, there’s this thing called rave and this new drug called mDMA, and you should try it, blah, blah, blah. So I said, okay. So I did some, ah, MDMA and went to a rave, and it blew my mind. It changed my life. So I was in a bit of a rut around 40, you know, midlife crisis, been there, done that, blah, blah. And what am I going to do next, and what’s the point? And then, I did some MDMA and went to a rave, and everything changed.

Steve Cuden: How so?

Jimi Fritz: Came out in the morning, and I was like a new person. Was invigorating and inspired. It was fantastic. It was a great experience.

Steve Cuden: Are you able to explain how or why it does that?

Jimi Fritz: It gives you a big feeling of empathy, and not just empathy for other people, but empathy for yourself. And so, you just feel really good about yourself. You feel really good about other people. And that’s. That’s really the whole ballgame in terms of, you know, psychological, health. Right. Any psychologist will tell you that the most important thing for a human being is human connection and to feel like, you know, feel human connection with other people. So when you get that in a massive dose with yourself and with everybody around you, it’s a very powerful experience. It’s a real eye opener.

Steve Cuden: It’s different than LSD, then.

Jimi Fritz: MDMA is more of a kind of, an emotional centered drug. It’s more of an emotional experience. LSD is very much an intellectual type experience.

Steve Cuden: M so you’re feeling on MdMa, but you’re thinking on LSD.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. And you can do them together, too. It’s called, it’s called a candy flip. You do half LSD and half MDMa, then you get the best of both worlds.

Steve Cuden: It’s called a candy flip.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, candy flip. Acid and MDMA. Or there’s a hippie flip, which is mushrooms and MDMA.

Steve Cuden: Oh, my goodness.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. You got a lot of experimenting to do.

Steve Cuden: I’m not sure at this point in my life I’m heading down that road, but you never know.

Jimi Fritz: Well, that’s what I thought at 40 but, you know, surprise, surprise.

Steve Cuden: Does it actually then impact the art that you do in the days to come after?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s inspiring, you know, it’s inspiring and uplifting and that’s the best kind of attitude to create art in.

Steve Cuden: It makes you want to do more work.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, yeah. You get a lot of ideas. You get a lot of inspiration.

Steve Cuden: Would you say some of your best work has come out of that?

Jimi Fritz: Well, I say my whole Life has come out of that. Really. You know, it’s colored, it’s colored everything I do, relationships and family and art.

Steve Cuden: do you do some form of, psychedelic drug almost every day or is it every week or how often do you do it?

Jimi Fritz: Right now I’m mostly just, I’ll do a little bit of e on Friday night maybe.

Steve Cuden: e. That would be ecstasy?

Jimi Fritz: Yes, ecstasy or MDMA. Same thing.

Steve Cuden: Okay. Is that also called Molly, am I correct?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, Molly, x roll. There’s a lot of different names.

Steve Cuden: I watch enough bad tv to know what some of those phrases are.

Jimi Fritz: Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, LSD for me now is kind of a special, special event. You know, go on a hike or something with some friends or go away for the weekend and we’ll do a little bit of LSD day on the Sunday. You know, just and, go walk in the woods. That’s always fun.

Steve Cuden: What happens? What happens? You start to see things very differently.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. You just experience the world much more, much more vibrantly, much more as a direct experience. Everything is heightened, everything is exaggerated. So it’s very, you know, it’s fun.

Steve Cuden: So I think some people would go through that and not have your capacity to then use it as an expression of art later that they wouldn’t have your intellectual capacity to do it. I assume that that informed you a good deal. And when you wrote the end of everything, that sort of experience is in there as well. Yes.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, yeah. No, I think, people, some people are not creative, you know, I mean, some people don’t have creative outlets, so it’s probably not going to inspire them very much to write a book if they’ve never done any writing.

Steve Cuden: You’re all creative outlet all the time.

Jimi Fritz: Well, I’m always thinking about something. I was thinking about doing something. It’s interesting. I’m just coming to the end of this, film and music project, and I’m starting to think I said I’m never going to write another book. And then I find myself thinking about writing a book for your films.

Steve Cuden: Do you write screenplays? For them or not.

Jimi Fritz: I’ve written two feature length screenplays. I tried to produce them, actually. One of them we got pretty close, and, the other one we tried to sell. And, again, we got some nibbles and some interest. But no, I don’t, There’s not much, very, very difficult to sell a screenplay. Yes, it is almost more difficult than to sell a book.

Steve Cuden: So I’ve only been in that business for 40 years.

Jimi Fritz: Exactly. So, you know, most films are made from existing stories or existing screenplays or they’re commissioned from outlines and treatments. And, you know, it’s very, very difficult to break in there.

Steve Cuden: It certainly is. Well, have you thought about taking the end of everything and adapting it into a screenplay of some kind?

Jimi Fritz: Well, if somebody wants to pay me to do it, sure. But that’s, not something that I’m not interested in doing. I think it would make a good, limited, series.

Steve Cuden: I agree. I think it would make an excellent.

Jimi Fritz: Limited series, like five 1 hour episodes. And it’s the continuing adventures of Fritz in the. This mental asylum with all the characters coming through because you could have a lot of, you know, different. Different people coming through, different actors.

Steve Cuden: Are you a people watcher? Do you observe people in their attitudes, in the way that they act?

Jimi Fritz: Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I think. I, think, Yeah, I think most writers are observers. You know, they watch people, watch human behaviors and listen to patterns of speech and stuff like that.

Steve Cuden: And that too gets heightened on psychedelics.

Jimi Fritz: Absolutely, yeah. Yeah. You’re much more perceptive. You know, you see more, you hear more, think more.

Steve Cuden: And I’m curious about the performance aspect of your Life. You also perform with what, your own band or do you record music? How do you. What do you do with the music world?

Jimi Fritz: I have, like, I started off playing guitar and, hitchhiking around Europe and, playing in. In the streets. I used to play in the cafes, you know, walk through the cafes with the guitar and the harmonica on a brace and play for everybody and then have somebody follow me behind me with a, ah, collecting money. And I made a living like that for a few years. so it was quite successful. Then when I came to North America, it was very hard to make a living playing in the street because nobody, gives you any money. So I quit that. And I was, sort of a professional musician for a couple of years in Ontario, doing pubs and restaurants and concerts and that, you know, for a while, I don’t have a love of performing. I prefer to create in a solitary environment.

Steve Cuden: What is it about performing you don’t like? Is it that it’s not creating.

Jimi Fritz: It’s because the. The, audience is distracted.

Steve Cuden: The audience is distracting.

Jimi Fritz: I’m just distracted by an audience. Like, if everybody’s completely quiet and listening, then I find that really distracting. It breaks my concentration because I’m so aware of all this attention, right. And if they’re not listening and they’re just drinking in the pub and blah, blah, blah, talking, then it’s really distracting because why am I there? Either way, it doesn’t work for me.

Steve Cuden: That’s so interesting, because most people who get into that kind of world or life are interested in having people look at them.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, that’s right. No, people. People that have done well as performers. And musicians are people that love to perform and people that love to, you know, get that attention. And then if they feed, it feeds them, you know, and they get high on it and then they play better. It’s the exact opposite for me. I play worse.

Steve Cuden: You play worse.

Jimi Fritz: People are listening. Yeah, I play best when I’m on my own.

Steve Cuden: Do you then make recordings when you’re on your own?

Jimi Fritz: Exactly. That’s why I record now. I don’t really. I don’t perform anymore. I haven’t performed in front of an audience for years.

Steve Cuden: Well, but you perform on a recording or does somebody else do it?

Jimi Fritz: Well, I’ve been in a recording studio.

Steve Cuden: And do you play instruments beyond just guitar?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, this new piece I’m working on, I play all the instruments except for there’s a friend of mine who plays some bass and another guy that plays some horns. And apart from that, I’m playing everything. Playing electric guitar, acoustic guitar, ukulele, and then a lot of stuff on the keyboard. So I’m playing string sections and, flute sections and, percussion, bit of bass.

Steve Cuden: Do you play drums as well?

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, well, I play percussion. More than drums? More than a kit. I mean, I can keep a beat on a kit, but I haven’t had a lot of experience with a kit. It.

Steve Cuden: So percussion being what? Bongos or anything.

Jimi Fritz: Anything you can hit and make sound?

Steve Cuden: Well, you could do that with a human. You could hit a human and they’ll make a sound.

Jimi Fritz: Exactly. You cannot hit itself in the mouth, and you can turn your head into an amplifier.

Steve Cuden: I don’t think I’ve ever met a performer who didn’t want to perform in front of people.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, I don’t know how common that is, but it’s my experience anyway. And, yeah, I have no real, no. No love and no interest in performing. But I do like to share my music, so I do like to record. I like the recording process because you listen to it and you fine tune it and you rehearse it and you play it back, and, you know, that whole process of making the, recording, I really enjoy it. And then you’ve got something, and I’m happy to give that to anybody to listen to. So that, to me, is, payoff.

Steve Cuden: You don’t mind people listening to a recording of you doing things? It’s the live performance that gets you.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah, because it’s. Because it throws me off. Throws me out. I find. I find find audiences annoying.

Steve Cuden: Are you a Good concentrator? Are you able to concentrate when you’re actually at work in your own quiet place?

Jimi Fritz: Oh, yeah, I have no problem concentrating. But like I say, with an audience, it’s harder to concentrate.

Steve Cuden: Then you’re distracted.

Jimi Fritz: It’s distracting.

Steve Cuden: Well, I am having absolutely one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve had in some time with the raconteur, the great creative person, the force that he is, Jimi Fritz. And we’re going to slowly wind the show down. We’re almost an hour in at this point. And in all of these great, very interesting, compelling experiences you’ve had, are you able to share with us a story that’s either weird, quirky, offbeat, strange, or just plain funny beyond the ones you’ve already told us?

Jimi Fritz: Well, that’s. That’s what confessions of an ethical drug dealer is about. It’s about every weird and wonderful thing that ever happened to me, more or less. I mean, one of the problems with writing that book was what, what to leave out because there was a nice whole countries and years of left out because you can’t put everything in. It ends up being just a. A list of things. So I had to pick and choose the things that, you know, like my first LSD trip and closed, brushes with the law and stuff like that. Gets pretty exciting.

Steve Cuden: I have a friend of mine who used to say, you could fall through a barrel of corkscrews and not get scratched. That’s what it sounds like.

Jimi Fritz: Well, I think I’ve always been very lucky. I’ve always been very lucky because I’ve been in a lot of sticky situations, too, and I’ve always just kind of sailed through, and I’ve always had the attitude that everything is going to work out, and it always did. And so the more it worked out, the more I believed it was going to work out. And so the more it worked out.

Steve Cuden: How important to your success do you think having that attitude has been? Is it everything?

Jimi Fritz: I think it’s pretty important, yeah. I think looking back now, it’s, I think it’s critical. I think your attitude is everything. You know, you can defeat yourself in any pursuit with a negative attitude, and you can, play the odds. You can get the odds a little bit more in your favor if you have a positive attitude, but if you think things are going to work out, and I always did, I always just thought everything’s going to work out, everything’s going to be fine, and it always was.

Steve Cuden: That’s a really good attitude to have and also a wonderful tip. But let me ask you one more and last question for you today, Jimi Do you have a solid piece of. Piece of advice or a tip beyond all those that you’ve given us so far that would be good or valuable for someone who’s starting out in the creative life? Or maybe they’re in it and trying to get to the next place in that life?

Jimi Fritz: I think the whole trick is to, figure out who you are and then accept who you are and then be who you are and then express who you are, through your creative endeavors. If you do that, you’ll always be happy with what you do, and you’ll always be satisfied, and it’ll always mean something to you.

Steve Cuden: And how important do you think that is to a creative life that it satisfies you?

Jimi Fritz: Well, for me, it’s the only thing that you know, because I really don’t care what anybody else thinks about my books or my films or my music. It’s irrelevant to me. It’s irrelevant if they say, oh, I don’t like that, or I do like that, whatever, you know, it’s like you can think anything you want. But for me, the only thing that matters is that I like it, and I think it has value. It has value to me, and that’s the whole game.

Steve Cuden: How often have you created something and didn’t like it?

Jimi Fritz: Well, I just keep working at it until I do like it. So very few sort of failures. I mean, I’ve written three books. Those are the only three books I’ve started to write, and they’re the three books I finished writing. I haven’t had any, you know, projects that didn’t really come to fruition. I just keep going, until they’re done.

Steve Cuden: You have stick to itiveness, and you just keep banging away until you get it to where you want it. Yes, yeah.

Jimi Fritz: Yeah. And that is the whole game. It’s not about getting the finished product. It’s about. It’s about involving yourself and getting immersed.

Steve Cuden: In the process until you’re satisfied.

Jimi Fritz: Yes.

Steve Cuden: You’re the initial audience. If you’re going to have an audience.

Jimi Fritz: That’s right. I’m an audience of one.

Steve Cuden: An audience of one.

Jimi Fritz: That’s all I need.

Steve Cuden: You applaud yourself at the end of the day.

Jimi Fritz: Oh, absolutely. Pat myself from the back.

Steve Cuden: Jimi Fritz, this has been a lot of fun for me, and I can’t thank you, really, enough for your wisdom and your energy and your very compelling and interesting life. I thank you for being on StoryBeat today.

Jimi Fritz: Okay, nice to talk to you. Yeah, cheers.

Steve Cuden: and so we’ve come to the end of today’s StoryBeat If you like this episode, won’t you please take a moment to give us a comment, rating, or review on whatever app or platform you’re listening to? Your support helps us bring more great StoryBeat episodes to you. StoryBeat is available on all major podcast apps and platforms, including Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, iHeartRadio, tunein, and many others. Until next time, I’m Steve Kewden, and may all your stories be unforgettable.