Maxwell's Kitchen

Brandon LaPier describes a lifetime of experiences involving UFOs, extraterrestrial beings, psychic abilities, telepathy, shared dreams, healing, past lives, and parallel realities.

The conversation begins with strange lights Brandon says he saw near Mount Adams as a child, along with ghosts, shadow beings, and other paranormal experiences. From there, he tells me about encounters with gray aliens, memories he later explored through hypnotic regression, and experiences he believes involved being taken aboard extraterrestrial craft.

Brandon also talks about serving in the Marines, working in Iraq, developing what he describes as telepathic communication with his mother, and later connecting some of his experiences with theories about military-abduction programs.

As the episode continues, the conversation expands well beyond UFOs.

We get into shared dreams, psychic intuition, energy healing, near-death experiences, reincarnation, karma, astral projection, and Brandon’s belief that consciousness may extend far beyond one physical lifetime.

He describes experiences in which he says he encountered other versions of himself in parallel realities and talks about how those events shaped the way he thinks about time, consciousness, and human potential.

We also spend a substantial part of the conversation on ayahuasca. Brandon explains an intense ceremony involving his late father, feelings of connection and heightened awareness, healing experiences with other people in the room, and events afterward that he connected back to what happened during the ceremony.

By the end, the episode becomes a much larger conversation about consciousness, intuition, spirituality, reality, and what human beings may still have to learn about themselves.

Useful Links

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Michelle Harris joins me to talk about prison education, restorative justice, reentry, and what happens after someone leaves incarceration and tries to rebuild a life.

Michelle was studying Conflict Resolution at Portland State University with a focus on restorative justice and restorative practices. She was also involved with Freed Minds, PSU Rebound, and Portland State’s Higher Education in Prison program, helping students affected by incarceration navigate college, financial aid, support systems, and reentry.

We talk about mandatory minimum sentences, prison labor, plea deals, public defenders, parole requirements, and the ways one conviction can continue affecting someone long after the sentence itself is over.

A big part of the episode focuses on education. Michelle explains why higher education can be such an important tool for people returning from incarceration and how difficult it can be to enroll, find funding, keep a job, support a family, and satisfy supervision requirements at the same time.

We also get into the cost of college, student debt, trade programs, restorative justice in schools, income inequality, and why support systems matter so much when someone is trying to make a different life.

Toward the end of the conversation, Michelle talks about a simple idea one of her professors emphasized: make eye contact with people. See the person in front of you as a human being rather than a label.

That idea runs through the entire episode.

Accountability matters. Consequences matter. But if most people who enter the justice system are eventually coming back into our communities, what happens next matters too.

Useful Links

Portland State University Higher Education in Prison
https://www.pdx.edu/liberal-arts-sciences/higher-education-prison

Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/OuW7do1R61A

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Happy Gnome started as three teenagers from The Dalles, Oregon, trying to figure out how to write songs, play shows, record music, and keep a band together with whatever equipment, money, transportation, and questionable judgment they had available.

Kasey McCabe, Brandon McBride, and Cody Pando join me to remember how the band came together in high school, where the Happy Gnome name came from, and what it was like growing up inside the small music scene around The Dalles and the Columbia Gorge.

We talk about practicing in garages, bedrooms, basements, and one especially questionable commercial space that became part rehearsal room, part clubhouse, and occasionally somebody’s home. There was barely any plumbing, exposed wiring, old athletic mats, a trampoline, a homemade recording room, and enough bad ideas to keep everyone entertained for years.

The guys also remember putting on their own shows at The Dalles Civic Auditorium, finding local sponsors, playing with other Gorge bands, making their first demo, selling CDs, playing Portland, and slowly getting better at writing songs together.

Eventually the band made an ill-advised trip to Wenatchee in an old bus for an out-of-town show that almost nobody attended. Financially, it made very little sense. As a memory, it worked out pretty well.

We also get into the music-business opportunity they were probably lucky not to sign, later recording sessions, lineup changes, why Happy Gnome gradually stopped playing, and what happened when they got back together years later for a reunion show.

What surprised all three of them was how quickly the music came back. Even after years apart, the stops, changes, riffs, and little cues between them were still there.

More than anything, this is a conversation about being young enough to build your life around a band, getting older, and realizing that the music was only part of what lasted.

Kasey McCabe: vocals, lead guitar
Brandon McBride: bass, vocals
Cody Pando: drums, vocals

Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/dvPgQ4KYNKY

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Dr. Johnson is a retired neuropsychologist with 40 years of experience. He has paired his clinical training with spiritual studies. He continues challenging himself with training in self awareness.  He has been married for 48 years and has three adult children. He is soon to become a grandpa.

In this episode, James and Maxwell discuss brain trauma, changes in psychology over time, evidence based treatment, political correctness, ethics, trauma triggers, safety, being passionate about helping people, helping people find resources in their brain, repressed memories, physical trust, reading body language, understanding facial emotion, developing rapport, stuck pathology, personality disorders, borderline personality disorder, bipolar disorder, hypnosis, traveling through your internal defense system, and mind chatter.

All production by Cody Maxwell.

Artwork by Cody Maxwell.

Opening graphic assets by UlyanaStudio and Grandphic.

sharkfyn.com/maxwells-kitchen-podcast

When a homeless camp gets swept, where do the people living there go?

Bryan Kim and Zave Forster of the People’s Housing Project join me to talk about homelessness in Portland, Oregon, and their work building emergency shelters, organizing camp cleanups, and supporting people living outside.

I ask some fairly blunt questions. Why can’t someone just get a job? Would one enormous shelter help? What would they do if money and resources weren’t an obstacle? Their answers bring us back to things that are easy to overlook when you’re driving past a camp: identification, showers, somewhere to keep belongings, and whether accepting a shelter bed means leaving behind someone you trust.

Bryan and Zave describe people they’ve met through their work, including someone who lost housing after being displaced from an apartment, someone who aged out of foster care, and people struggling with addiction or mental health issues. They explain why those different circumstances need different kinds of support, and why they advocate housing alongside continuing care.

We also talk about the communities within camps and what mutual aid looks like beyond the phrase itself. There are shelter builds, recurring donations, and volunteers returning to pick up trash every week. Bryan tells me their cleanup photos eventually started looking less impressive because there was less trash left to collect. That seems like a pretty good problem to have.

The conversation gets into capitalism, nonprofit funding, Portland government, policing, and public safety. We don’t agree on everything. I ask whether better training and recruitment could improve policing, while Bryan and Zave challenge the assumptions behind relying on those institutions in the first place.

If you’ve looked around Portland and wondered what would actually help, there’s plenty here to consider. Listen, make up your own mind, and share it with someone you’d like to keep talking about it with.

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xLMxvlNlXA

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Jaime Mathis’s mother helped send her to college in England to keep her in an Adventist school. Jaime went because England was a very long way from home. What happened afterward probably wasn’t what her mother had in mind.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, I talk with Jaime about leaving the strict Seventh-day Adventist environment she describes as a religious cult, surviving childhood cancer, and figuring out what she believed for herself.

England brought new friendships, travel around Europe, and opportunities to question the rules she had grown up following. After graduating, she headed to Thailand with a plan to get certified to teach English and keep seeing the world. About 24 hours after arriving in Bangkok, a panic attack changed those plans.

Jaime describes returning to Portland and trying to understand what had happened. She had stopped believing in God, but still carried the fear that surviving cancer as a child meant she owed him something extraordinary. Convinced she might not live past 30, she made a bucket list at 23 and started working through it.

That led to professional singing, acting, writing books, working in a bookstore, and becoming a barista because coffee had been forbidden growing up. There was also a Renaissance sword fighter and a shoplifting arrest involving six area rugs. I had several questions about that one.

We talk about chemotherapy, losing her hair, family relationships, inherited prejudice, motherhood, and finding her way into political communications. The conversation also wanders into yoga philosophy, identity, local government, and whether planning your life is better than seeing what happens.

Jaime tells these stories with humor and a willingness to include the uncomfortable parts. She’s still making sense of some of them, which makes the conversation much more interesting than pretending everything happened according to a plan.

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S45--FVr5u4

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Sasha Firpo can fall in love without feeling sexual attraction. They can feel feminine, masculine, or neither. I came into this conversation with plenty of questions, and Sasha was willing to work through them with me.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, I talk with the Portland artist and Pacific Northwest College of Art graduate about gender fluidity, pronouns, asexuality, relationships, and finding language for experiences they hadn’t known how to explain.

Sasha describes hearing classmates talk about their identities and recognizing something familiar. They explain why appearance doesn’t tell you everything about someone’s gender, how they became comfortable with different pronouns, and the distinction between making an honest mistake and repeatedly ignoring someone’s request.

We also talk about wanting love and companionship without experiencing sexual attraction. Sasha shares the difficulty of explaining that to a partner, hearing that they just haven’t met the right person, and working through the feeling that what they offer isn’t enough. Their experience also helps us explore the difference between asexuality and aromanticism.

There are plenty of detours. I suggest the metaverse could change how people experience identity. Sasha points out that people have been creating characters and socializing in online games for years. My idea of paying to experience someone else’s brain doesn’t get a much warmer reception.

The conversation moves into drawing, writing, creative frustration, food-service jobs, and feeling stuck in an office. Sasha wants meaningful work, but they also question why every hobby needs to become another income stream.

Sasha is candid, sarcastic, and quick to challenge an assumption. I ask some clumsy questions, they give thoughtful answers, and we find plenty to laugh about along the way.

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO7i9B7XbDQ

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Sharon Kumara says she watched the aftermath of her own accident from outside her body. While her friends were panicking, she remembers thinking that dying was going to ruin their day.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, I talk with Sharon about near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, mediumship, and the events that changed how she understood life and death.

Sharon describes falling from a moving shuttle bus after a tubing trip in Texas in 2001. In her account, she encountered her late stepfather and a being she recognized as Jesus, whom she calls Yeshua. She recalls being told she needed to return, followed by an experience of another world that still makes her emotional to describe.

Her interest in consciousness had begun earlier. After her stepfather’s death, Sharon wanted to know he was okay. Episodes she describes as sleep paralysis led her to read about out-of-body experiences and try to experience them deliberately. We talk about lucid dreaming, setting intentions, binaural beats, Hemi-Sync, and what she remembers feeling when she looked back at her sleeping body.

The conversation also gets into childhood trauma, memories she says returned later, and experiences she interprets as encounters with extraterrestrials. Sharon explains her beliefs about past lives, forgiveness, and soul retrieval, while I ask how she makes sense of painful experiences within that framework.

She also describes how difficult it became to feel grounded afterward, the balance she needed to find, and her gradual move from accounting into work as a psychic medium and hypnotherapist.

We finish with spirit boards and her belief that she communicated with her parents after their deaths. I have plenty of questions, including whether using a Ouija board could turn into something resembling Jumanji. Sharon is considerably less worried about that than I am.

Sharon Kumara
https://www.sharonsananda.com/

Kumara Academy
https://www.kumaraacademy.com/

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zthNWwsfUQ

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Joaquin Tron used to play in a space-rock band and project Cosmos during shows. Now he doesn’t believe we live on a spinning globe. I wanted to understand what changed his mind.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, Joaquin explains his flat-earth beliefs, why he calls himself a globe skeptic, and the arguments he finds convincing.

I ask what happens at the edge, what lies underneath, and how day and night would work. We talk about his interpretation of Antarctica, the Sun’s movement, the seasons, eclipses, gravity, and observations he believes challenge Earth’s curvature.

Then there’s NASA. Joaquin explains why he distrusts photographs and footage from space, including Apollo imagery and the Blue Marble. I ask why anyone would conceal the shape of the Earth and what evidence would change his mind. He distinguishes questioning the globe from having every part of an alternative explanation figured out.

Some of the most interesting moments come when we leave the map behind and talk about family. Joaquin remembers sharing his excitement with his mother at a baseball game and discussing his beliefs with his brother until three in the morning. He describes why he became less willing to bring the subject up afterward.

The conversation expands into religion, UFO theories, online censorship, pandemic policy, political polarization, and government power. Those subjects connect through his broader distrust of institutions and the information they present.

I’m interested in hearing his case without pretending we reach the same conclusions. There are plenty of questions, a few strange detours, and almost two hours of trying to understand how someone who loved space documentaries came to question the whole picture.

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z2woWtX6HM

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Julia Kita called a strip club from her grandmother’s house a few weeks after turning 21. She arrived with no dance experience and no heels, nearly walked back out, and ended up borrowing a pair of shoes and getting hired. She was also studying engineering.

In this episode of Maxwell’s Kitchen, I talk with Julia about working as an exotic dancer, discovering pole dancing, and opening a pole dance studio in Portland, Oregon. When I ask whether money drew her to the job, she explains that connection and the chance to step outside her everyday life mattered more than I expected.

Julia takes me through her first shift, learning from other dancers, balancing weekend work with college, and dealing with customers. We discuss regulars, unpredictable earnings, boundaries, and a frightening experience being followed after leaving work. She also describes keeping the job secret from her boyfriend, how he found out, and why she stopped working at that club.

Performing was the part she wanted to keep. Despite being introverted, Julia felt more comfortable onstage than approaching strangers for conversation. Music gave her something to focus on, and learning new movements became a creative outlet she continued pursuing.

She explains static versus spinning poles, controlling momentum, and how watching other dancers helped her figure out new moves. I discover that the pole itself can spin, which clears up something I apparently never thought to investigate.

We also talk about teaching beginners, why she keeps classes small, and what brings students through the door. Julia describes people wanting to get stronger, feel more confident, or try exercise that looks fun. She sees room for different bodies and styles, without requiring everyone to chase the same tricks.

Alongside teaching, she is pursuing a second engineering degree. We discuss enjoying work that takes social energy, leaving room for unexpected opportunities, and learning a skill without knowing where it will lead.

Watch on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRoI2f_MlZE

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