You are What You Est

What you will get out of this Article

This article will tell you what it's like to take the est training and to hang out with Werner Erhard, the founder of est. Reading about my experience is as good as having done it yourself, plus which you will have saved yourself a lot of pain, boredom and $250.

Now, if you buy that last statement, then perhaps you will also buy it if I told you that last night I met Catherine Deneuve at a party, she invited me back to her suite at the Sherry Netherland, where she proceeded to take off all my clothes and cover me from head to toe with Reddi-Wip, and then slowly licked off every bit of it, and that my description of this experience would be as satisfying to you as if you had had it yourself.

How I got involved with Est

How I got involved with est is that one night nearly two years ago--February 21, 1975, to be precise--I allowed myself to be dragged to hear some guy named Werner Erhard speak at the Commodore Hotel in New York. I had no idea who Werner Erhard was or what est was, but I agreed because I figured it would be only an hour or so and then we'd go out to dinner, and that would be fun. I figured Werner Erhard was some old German geezer.

My friend Dory and I arrived at (continued on page 210)You are what you EST(continued from page 110) the Commodore and found that about 2000 other people wanted to hear this old German geezer, too, and that everybody had to wear a name tag with his or her first name on it, which pissed me off. I allowed an est volunteer to slap a pressure-sensitive name tag with dan lettered on it on my sweater and I went inside. I knew that when I pulled off the name tag, it would take some of the nap from my sweater and that pissed me off even more, and then I went into the ballroom, where this guy Erhard had already started to speak, and I couldn't find the friends I was supposed to meet there or even an empty chair to sit on and I was so pissed off I didn't hear what Erhard said for the first ten minutes I was there.

Werner Erhard turned out to be neither old nor German, and when I finally started listening to him, I thought that what he was saying was sort of funny, and sort of outrageous, and not a little perverse, which is generally enough to get me to listen awhile. Erhard was doing his by-now-famous shtick about the rat in the laboratory maze, locating a tunnel that contained cheese. If the cheese is withdrawn, Erhard was saying, the rat eventually gets the idea and abandons the tunnel it was in. The difference between rats and people, he said, is that people would rather stay in the cheeseless tunnel, just to prove that they were right to be there.

I was pretty sure that, no matter how good he sounded. Erhard didn't know anything I didn't know after 70 or 80 years of therapy.

"If you're listening to me, you're listening to the wrong person in here," Erhard happened to be saying at that point. "I came here to get you to listen to yourself, not to me. I don't think I know something that if you knew you'd be better off. I think you know something that if you knew you knew you might be a little better off."

Lots of zealous applause and knowing laughter. I happen to hate zealous applause and knowing laughter. I kind of liked what the guy was saying, but not all the zealous agreement he was getting from most of the 2000 people in the audience. I was pretty much turned off by the whole thing.

During the intermission--I now knew that this event was going to run at least three hours--a disagreeable, pushy young man with a close-cropped black beard approached me and Dory and tried very hard to get us to sign up for the est training. Dory was a little more willing to consider it than I was, but when we learned that the training occupied two complete weekends and that we couldn't even get into it till June, we were even more put off. I have a house in East Hampton and, starting in May, I try to get up there every weekend.

Nonetheless, for some inexplainable reason, and either because of or in spite of the persistent nagging of the objectionable young person with the beard, both Dory and I finally decided to give up $250 apiece and two probably sensational weekends in June at the beach and we signed up for the est training.

I don't know what Dory's rationale was. Mine was that I could always write about the damned thing if it didn't turn out well, and that weekends in East Hampton in June were usually rainy.

The Pretraining Seminar

A couple of days before we were to begin our first est weekend, we attended a pretraining seminar at another hotel. Before we went inside, we had to fill out a questionnaire (we were supposed to have done this at home and mailed it in, but I always save things like that for the last minute) and pay the balance of the $250. I stood in line and had my first contact with the est staff. A middle-aged lady of unspectacular intelligence looked over my filled-out questionnaire and stopped at the place where I hadn't written what I expected to get out of the training. She asked why I was taking the training. It seemed pointless to say I thought Erhard had said some perverse things and that a pushy person with a beard had prodded me. or that it probably rains most weekends in East Hampton in June. I said I didn't know. It was clearly not OK with her that I didn't know.

"Look," she said, "you want to improve your life and do better and be happier, don't you?" That seemed safe enough to commit to. I said sure. "Then write that in the space," she said. I did, put on another name tag and was then allowed into the seminar.

Two hundred and 50 chairs were arranged facing the stage, upon which stood a youngish man named David Norris, who soon revealed himself to be almost as droll and as perverse as Erhard. He told us a little bit about est, how it had graduated 43,000 people--the figure is now over 92,000--in 13 cities in its four-year existence. He outlined the ground rules of the training--how we were to agree to be in the room from the start to the end of each training day for the four days of the training, not to sit near anyone we knew, not to take a watch into the room, not to take notes or tape-record the training, to abstain from all liquor, pot, uppers, downers or medications not prescribed by a doctor from the start of the first session till the end of the fourth. There would be two breaks each day to go to the bathroom and one to get some food.

"How long is the food break?" someone asked.

"As long as it takes to eat," Norris replied.

"If we aren't allowed to wear watches, how will we know when to come back?"

"You won't," said Norris pleasantly. "So I suggest you return from your break immediately."

"Will the training room be air-conditioned?" asked somebody else.

"Yes," he replied. "Unless it isn't."

Everything he said he restated and repeated a number of times. I didn't understand why he was being so redundant till I heard people keep asking questions he had already answered several times.

"If I have a headache during the training," said someone who knew better, "can I take an aspirin?"

"If you have a headache during the training, you do not get to take aspirin," said Norris, "you get to have a headache."

"Why do you have that rule?"

"We never explain the rules. Just follow the instructions and take what you get. That's the est koan--follow the instructions and take what you get."

We were told that we would have an opportunity in the training to turn our lives around, to make our lives work, to take responsibility for our lives, to rehabilitate our ability to experience life. Many people stood up to ask pointless, repetitious or abusive questions. To these, Norris merely answered a cheerful "Thank you for your question."

I had already decided to write about the training, thus, typically, putting myself slightly at a distance from the experience. I had also decided, along with probably most of the people in the room, that I wasn't necessarily committing myself to following the rules. Oh, I might follow them if it wasn't too inconvenient or uncomfortable, but, well, rules were made to be broken, right?

There was a short intermission and, during it, I walked up to the stage and asked Norris if, since I was writing a piece on est for Playboy, the no-note-taking rule applied to me. I knew he'd say it applied to me before I asked it, but I asked it anyway. He said it applied to me. At the end of the break, I was interested to see that not only did I start taking notes quite openly but I also moved up to one of the front rows, so that Norris could see it, too--my hostility to authority was so great that it wasn't enough merely to break the rules, I also had to let the authority who represented the rules know I was breaking them. Interesting.

Norris said we'd encounter three selves within us in the training: The first is the one we pretend we are, the second is the one we fear we are and the third is the one we really are. He also said that by the end of the training, we'd know the answer to the Zen koan "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"

I wasn't sure I needed to meet my three selves, but I'd always wanted to know the sound of one hand clapping.

The first day of Training

The training is held in a ballroom of the Statler Hilton Hotel. On the first day, Saturday, June 21, 1975, it starts promptly at 8:30 a.m. I have a few things going on with me about all this. First, I hate getting up at seven a.m. any day, particularly a Saturday. Second, the night before was my 39th birthday, and not only am I not sure whether I want to be 39, I am positive I didn't want to go to bed early, not drink and do all the other swell things that est suggested.

Dory and I pick up our name tags, put them on and enter the ballroom. Inside, most of our 250-member group are already seated on chairs facing the stage. Precisely at 8:30, a young man with short black hair, slacks, sports coat and sport shirt with the collar out ascends to the stage. The young man's name is Michael. He moves like a robot. He has a disquieting gleam in his eye. I fear he is our trainer and that I will have to look at him all weekend.

Michael addresses us in cold, humorless tones, repeats each of the ground rules endlessly and invites those of us who are unwilling to keep them to get the hell out. After at least an hour of such appealing stuff, Michael exchanges places with a tall, similarly dressed guy named Landon Carter, who, it turns out, is to be our trainer.

I want to get very clear about something, as they say in est, right now: I am a practicing hetero. I have sex exclusively with ladies and I am not turned on by the idea of doing it with any guy. But Landon Carter is so good-looking it is almost offensive. He looks like Keir Dullea, except that next to Landon, Keir Dullea would look like Marty Feldman.

What's worse, Landon is smart, funny and handles himself brilliantly onstage for 15 to 18 consecutive hours with boundless energy while people in the audience can barely remain sitting upright. OK, now that we have that out of the way, we can go on.

Landon continues Michael's harangue about the ground rules. Landon calls us assholes. Several people stand and say they object to being called assholes. Unfortunately, every one of them demonstrates himself to be exactly that. Landon says that, although we are assholes, the training is asshole-proof and that we cannot fail to get the result of the training.

The training breaks down into three types of activities. One, the data: The trainer presents an interminable amount of philosophical, semantic and epistemological material--what Erhard calls "dog-shit metaphysics"--frequently outlining it on two large blackboards on the stage. Two, the processes: We close our eyes, "go into our space" and are guided by the trainer through a number of meditative exercises designed to get us in touch with our senses and our experience. Three, the sharing: We are encouraged to ask questions or share our experiences with the group by raising a hand and speaking into a portable microphone; whenever anyone shares, the rest of us are required to acknowledge him with applause. "Either applaud or throw money" is the lame joke that accompanies this instruction.

I, personally, do not find that going four or five hours at a time without peeing is terribly hard, nor do I fall in a swoon from not being able to eat between 8:30 a.m. and the only meal break some 12 to 14 hours later. No, my trouble is headaches. The kind that shatter your skull any time anyone speaks above a whisper. Although there has never been any question of whether I am philosophically willing to break the ground rules and take anything for my headache--I'd sneaked a watch into the training room in my pocket, after all--I do manage to hold out for nearly eight hours before slipping into a broom closet on our second pee break and popping two gorgeous Excedrins into my throat.

Landon shows us a process for getting rid of headaches--of any pain, in fact--wherein we describe the pain precisely, locate its boundaries, decide how much water it could hold if it could hold water, say what color it is, and so on. If you let it, it works. I don't let it. After the meal break, most of us have trouble staying awake, so Landon shows us a process for getting rid of tiredness by precisely describing its symptoms. I don't let this work for me, either.

The first day's training ends at 2:40 a.m. I am half frozen from the excessive air conditioning, my buttocks ache from 18 hours of sitting and I have a jet-black 40-gallon killer of a pain in my head.

The second day

By the second day, we are all old hands. We know that Michael will begin each segment of the day by asking if any of us is wearing a watch or sitting next to somebody we know, and so on. We know he will preface each break with the time and with the precise location of the rest rooms, in case any of them moved. We have gotten to know our group's main characters: a young man with a beard named Frank, who is brown-nosedly enthusiastic over everything Landon says; a funny, fat, middle-aged Jewish lady named Pearl, who is befuddled by everything Landon says; a young woman of average attractiveness named Susan, who keeps saying how beautiful she is and how many celebrities she knows and how European men and European skiing are superior to domestic varieties; a middle-aged Latin named Arch, who blames all his troubles on his bad back and other ailments, a classic victim; a man in his 60s named Marty, who keeps saying his life is perfect and that he has no problems.

On the second day, we learn how we jam things and people into our belief systems instead of experiencing them as they really are, that we do this to prove ourselves Right and others Wrong and that we are so committed to proving ourselves Right and others Wrong that we're willing to sacrifice our lives to do so.

The processes on the second day can be done in places other than our chairs. For the first one, most of us lie down on the floor, close our eyes and try to get in touch with some chronic pain or other physical symptom of ours and whatever ancient memories of fear or anger or whatever it dredges up for us. A few minutes into this process, I begin to hear moans and whimpering on all sides of me, then crying, laughing, screaming, shrieking and sounds of people puking their guts out. It is very surreal, very frightening, like suddenly finding yourself in the middle of an insane asylum. What is going on around me makes it impossible for me to continue doing the process. My sole concern is for my personal safety. I soon realize that I am strong enough to take care of myself whatever happens, and the worst that might occur is that I could get a little puked on.

After what seems like hours, Landon terminates the process, tells us to readjust ourselves to the reality of the room, to open our eyes and sit up. Suddenly, a voice from the middle of the floor screams, "I can't move!"

We are all seated on the floor and it is impossible to tell who is yelling or what is going on. It develops that who is yelling is old bearded, brownnosing Frank, who is convinced he is paralyzed. Holy Christ, I think to myself, am I glad I'm not the trainer here. What the hell happens now?

"I can't move!" screams Frank at Landon.

"Great," says Landon with imperturbable calm. "I got that you can't move."

"You goddamned bastard!" Frank screams. "I'm paralyzed! Don't you care that I might be paralyzed for the rest of my life, you fucking son of a bitch?"

"No," says Landon, "because I'm clear that you will only be paralyzed for as long as you want to be paralyzed. So don't run your fucking paralyzed racket on me and expect sympathy, because you won't get any."

Frank yells more obscenities at Landon, but it is clear that Landon is willing for Frank to be paralyzed for the rest of his life, if that is what Frank wants to do to himself, so pretty soon Frank gets unparalyzed. It is a striking illustration to me of what we can do to ourselves to try to make others Wrong--Frank was clearly willing to consider being paralyzed for the rest of his life just to prove Landon Wrong.

We break for dinner at nine p.m. When we come back, we do a process in which we all have a chance to stand on the stage, a few at a time, and do nothing, while everyone else simply stares at us and while a handful of specially selected robotlike est graduates strolls by us, stopping at random to stare at selected trainees. When my group is up on stage, I have the honor of Landon himself walking up to me and spending several minutes or hours--I'm not sure which--trying to stare me down. A lot of people find that this process makes them burst into either tears or vomiting. I myself find it oddly easy.

The last process of the night finds most of us lying on the floor again, trying to imagine, first, that the people on all sides of us are terrifying to us, then realizing that we are terrifying to them. If the process before dinner was notable for insane screaming, crying and hysterical laughter, this one makes the other look like nursery school. I wonder what mass murders the innocent guests at the Statler Hilton that night think are going on inside our closed ballroom.

The last thing Landon tells us before we complete our first weekend of training at only one a.m. is that, as frightened as we are of the man on the street, be he cop, mugger or what not, he is just as frightened of us. Landon jokingly suggests that during the next week, we try staring down someone walking toward us on the street and, when we are almost upon him, to suddenly yell "Boo!" The training day ends on an incredible high, with people flinging themselves out into the street, yelling "Boo!" at hapless passers-by.

The Mid-Training Seminar

In the week between the first and second training weekends, we have a Mid-Training Seminar, led by David Norris. Trainees stand and share that they are having the highest highs of their lives, the lowest lows, that they gave up their jobs or got new ones, that they broke up with their mates or found new wonders in their relationships, that they yelled "Boo!" and scared the shit out of lots of mean-looking people.

During this week, I have occasion to phone the est office a number of times, a less than satisfying experience. First, I find it sets my teeth ever so slightly on edge when est staffers answer the phone by saying, "This is So-and-so; how may I assist you?" I have had explained to me the difference between help and assistance, how help implies that the helper is OK and the helpee not OK, whereas assistance has no such emotional charge, but still it sets my teeth on edge. I also find it sets my teeth on edge to be put on hold and disconnected several times in succession, and this seems to be a spécialité de la maison.

During this week, I also get a call from a lady named Suzanne Wexler in the Public Information Office of est headquarters in San Francisco. I don't yell "Boo!" at her, but I do decide to be a smartass.

"This is Dan," I say. "How may I assist you?"

Suzanne says that she has heard I am writing an article about est for Playboy. I say this is true. She says that at least three other people have told the est office they are writing articles about est for Playboy. The old me instantly would have gone on the defensive, said, "Well, you could check my editor," and so on and so on. But all I say now is, "That's interesting." Perfect. How like a landon-carter. Suzanne says that est isn't particularly interested in having an article done on it. I say that that is interesting, too. She says that at one time, the est Public Information Office had wanted Werner to be interviewed for the Playboy Interview but that Playboy had replied that Werner was neither famous nor infamous enough and that Playboy wasn't interested. She asks whether I want to interview Werner for my article. I say sure. She says that Werner might not want to be interviewed by Playboy now. "Well," I say, more landonlike than ever, "either he will or he won't." That seems to throw her.

My God, I think, not only does this est stuff work, it even works on the est staff. Perhaps it even works on Werner himself!

The Second Weekend

Our trainer for the second weekend is not Landon Carter but a man named Hal Isen. Hal is attractive, slim, dressed in a sports coat with sport-shirt collar outside the coat, and he also talks and moves a good deal like Werner. I decide that all est trainers are little copies of Werner and should have Werner as a title: Werner-Landon, Werner-Hal, Werner-David, and so on, and that the head man should be called Werner-Werner.

Even though Hal is not Landon, which I hold against him for a while, I soon grudgingly realize that I like Hal not only as much as Landon but more so. He seems to have more of a sense of humor. He seems to be more human. Maybe those are not good qualities in an est trainer, but I respond to them.

The data that Hal gives us is from Werner's training manual, of course, so it's a continuation of what Landon had given us the week before. There are new metaphors: Hal likens the way we conduct our lives to driving a car by steering with the rearview mirror instead of the steering wheel and continually wondering why we have so many accidents. There is the metaphor of the silver box: We treasure our best sex experience inside a figurative silver box and every time we have another sex experience, we take out the one in the silver box to see if it was as good. If not, we judge it worthless and discard it. If it was better, we judge the old one worthless, discard it and put the new one in the silver box.

There is a demonstration of how we make decisions and choices based on our considerations and prejudices rather than on the here and now: "Chocolate or vanilla, which do you choose?" "Vanilla." "Why vanilla?" "Because I'm allergic to chocolate." "Then your consideration of being allergic to chocolate is what chose vanilla, not you. Chocolate or vanilla, which do you choose?" "Chocolate." "Why chocolate?" "Because I like chocolate." "Then your consideration of liking chocolate chose it, not you. Chocolate or vanilla, which do you choose?" "Chocolate." "Why chocolate?" "Because that's what I chose." "Ah, perfect--you chose chocolate because you chose chocolate. And now, everybody, what is the sound of one hand clapping?" Two hundred and 50 voices respond as one: "The sound of one hand clapping is the sound of one hand clapping." Funny how we hadn't seen that before. Plain as the nose on your face. Plainer.

"The answers they give in the training are like Chinese food," observes a trainee named Betsy. "At first they fill you up, but an hour later you're empty again. That's probably because so much of est is based on Oriental philosophy."

Onstage, Hal is waxing very philosophical. "What would you call a piece of chalk that expands infinitely in all directions?" he asks.

"I'd call it Sir," murmurs a young man on my right.

The sharing now either is more interesting than the first weekend or else we are putting up less resistance to what our fellow trainees are saying. Fat Pearl shares that she's come to the realization she is overeating to punish her husband, who likes skinny ladies. A fat lady named Connie shares that she accidentally called the Statler Hilton the Staten Hitler.

At some point midway into the fourth day. Hal begins speaking about the mind and how it functions. The syntax could be chattier--e.g., "The mind is a linear arrangement of multisensory total records of successive moments of Now"--but the sense of it I find brilliant.

"The purpose of the mind." says Hal, "is survival--the survival of the being or of anything that the being considers itself to be." The mind, he says, sees things as either Right or Wrong, Win or Lose, Self-Justification or Invalidation. The mind equates one end of the spectrum with survival, the other end with death. In other words, to be wrong or to lose is the same as death. The mind records early experiences of shocking pain or loss--whether near fatal or merely seemingly near fatal--not as threats to survival but as means to survival.

In other words, if, as a baby, you fell down a flight of stairs and nearly died but somehow survived, this experience got filed in your baby brain under "Ways to Escape Dying," not under "Klutzy and Painful Ways to Spend an Afternoon." Or, to put it another way, if, as a baby, you nearly drowned in a bathtub, then that got filed in your memory bank as a survival experience, and you probably have a history of near drownings.

Or--and as Hal says this, all my deep relationships with women in the past flash before my eyes--if someone left you and you survived, then you think the way you survive is to have someone leave you. That ring any bells with any of you out there? It sure as hell does with me.

Now, then. What happens when anything in your present environment is in any way similar to any of these stored, painful, so-called survival experiences is that the entire stack of them floods in on you and has total command over you. This explains why you often see actual grownups acting like two-year-olds and accounts for such phenomena as, for example, the General Behavior of People in New York.

Hal goes on to emphasize that when such a stack of experiences takes you over, it literally runs you and you have nothing to say about it, because you are nothing but a machine--you have no choice but to react like an automaton: you are totally at the effect of whatever stimuli are pushing your mechanical buttons.

People in the chairs begin to grumble. Several of them stand up and object--they are not machines. Hal persists: We are all machines, we have no control over our lives, we are nothing but effect, effect, effect, effect, effect. And that, says Hal, grinning wickedly, is the message we have all come here to get. That is what we have each paid $250 to get. Do we get it?

I watch rage well up inside me and in many of those around me. "I got it!" shrieks brownnose Frank and he begins giggling hysterically. All the zealots and brownnosers begin to giggle and say they got it. All the professional cynics like me begin to grumble and swear. I can't believe it--this is the culmination of four days' data and processes? This is the hot-shit system that was going to transform our lives?

Hal asks all those who think they've gotten it to stand. They stand, grinning like the assholes I knew they were. "Great," says Hal. "Fabulous." Then he asks all those who know they haven't gotten it to stand. These, he says, couldn't be so certain they hadn't gotten it unless they had gotten it. Several people furiously try to leave the room. All but one are talked back inside, grumbling.

Now Hal asks all those who don't know if they've gotten it to stand. I get up with a raggle-taggle bunch of others and I engage Hal in a fairly drawn-out dialog that consists of my being furious and not being able to show it and of telling Hal that there is no way I can win the argument, since he can always defeat any point I make by defining certain terms to suit his own purposes, and that that is semantics and sophistry. Hal smiles and says I got it.

At length I sit down, not because I'm satisfied but because I figure I can put all this in my article and point out what a rip-off the est training is.

The last person to sit down is a truculent lady in one of the front rows on the left. The way Hal gets her to sit down is to whisper something in her ear. She giggles and sits down. A moment later, she raises her hand, stands up and says, "I've been deaf in one ear all my life. What you whispered to me I just realized was in my deaf ear. I heard it perfectly. I hear perfectly in my deaf ear now. I guess I got it, after all."

The zealots all whoop and cheer. I am even more furious than before. All the rules I have been breaking covertly I now begin breaking right out in the open: I pop Excedrins, take notes, flash my watch, you name it. Curiously, nobody seems to notice.

Being angry makes my head ache worse. I try not being angry. If you try not being angry when you're angry, Hal had told us earlier, you are lying and your anger will persist. If you acknowledge your anger, take responsibility for it, experience it, it will go away. I acknowledge my anger, take responsibility for it, experience it. My anger goes away. Which makes my headache go away. Which makes me angrier than ever. Which gets my headache back again. I am experiencing what est calls an upset.

On the next break, Fat Pearl is growling that she didn't need to spend $250 to learn that she is a machine and that she overeats because she overeats. Dory asks her if that is all she got for her $250. "No," says Fat Pearl, "I learned how to say fuck--fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. I'm going home and tell my husband not to fuck with me."

The fourth day is over close to five a.m. Near the end, old est graduates come out and, as we pass into another room for our graduation ceremony, they applaud us. If I weren't still so furious, I might have found the experience very moving.

Shortly after five, we are dismissed. The sky is already getting light. Dory and I go to my house, sit out on my roof, drink champagne and orange juice and watch the sun come up. Since there are no est staffers around, I am free to enjoy myself.

The Posttraining

A few days after our second weekend, we go to yet another hotel for our post-training seminar. Hal is the seminar leader and I am appalled to note how glad I am to see him and all the other members of my training group: Fat Pearl, who stands and shares that she's lost three pounds in the three days since the training ended, old stuck-on-herself Susan, even brownnosing old Frank.

Hal invites us to sign up for the first series of graduate seminars, titled "Be Here Now." There are ten seminars in each series and they cost three bucks a night. Est is not making an enormous profit on them. A lot of members of my training group sign up. I do not.

In the next few days, many friends call and ask me how I liked the training. I say it was soso--a lot of sophistry, a lot of semantics, a lot of boredom. The best parts of it, I tell them, are similar to things I am getting in group therapy, anyway, but that Dory seems to have gotten a lot out of the training. She's becoming more assertive, more willing to tell people what she wants from them. Dory really got a lot out of it, I tell them, but not me.

And then a curious thing happens. I hear somebody who hasn't taken the training put it down inaccurately and I hear myself at first correct him and then go on to say that the training was valuable. I actually hear myself say those words. And then, a few days later, it happens again--I actually hear myself defend est. By the time it happens a third time, I am forced to revise my position and, when asked about it, merely say that I thought the training had value.

That was in the beginning of July. In the beginning of August, I went off to East Hampton for six weeks, vowing not to return to New York for any reason till at least mid-September. The est office in San Francisco called and asked if I still wanted to interview Werner. I said I did. They said they still didn't know if Werner would talk to me but that he might be in New York in a few days, on August seventh, to do a special guest seminar at the Felt Forum and that, if he decided to see me, that might be a good opportunity. I said I wasn't going back to New York till at least mid-September under any circumstances. They said that Werner probably wouldn't see me, anyway.

A meeting with werner himself

On August seventh, regardless of all pronouncements to the contrary, I find myself at The Plaza Hotel in New York, shaking hands with Werner Erhard. Werner is good-looking and beautifully dressed in a tasteful and expensive-looking beige shirt with epaulets and tannish-gold slacks. He looks slightly shorter and pudgier than he seemed from a distance when I saw him at the Commodore.

I have brought along a tape recorder, a note pad and about two dozen questions. I needn't have bothered. Werner is politely defensive, evasive, distrustful of journalists and talks about what he wants to talk about for the hour he has granted me. I'd already done some research and learned that Werner Erhard was born in Philadelphia on September 5, 1935, and was baptized John Paul Rosenberg in the Episcopalian Church--his father, Joe, was a convert to Christianity around the time of Werner's birth.

Werner married his high school girlfriend, Pat, and subsequently had four children with her. In 1960, he left his wife and children and disappeared. On the day he disappeared, he changed his name from Jack Rosenberg to Werner Erhard. "I had a very determined mother and an uncle who was a captain in the police department," says Werner, "so I wanted a name as far from Jack Rosenberg as I could get." He got Werner Erhard from a combination of names--Werner Heisenberg and Ludwig Erhard--he found in an article on Germany in Esquire on the very plane that bore him out of Philadelphia.

Werner married his present wife, Ellen, on the West Coast and had three children with her. They live in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

As to his skipping out on his wife and children and all the rest of it, Werner says that he has communicated all this information to thousands of people, which is the first step in taking responsibility for something. The second step, he says, is to correct as much of the damage that you've created as can be corrected, and this he has done as well. He has renewed his relationships with his former wife and his kids, his parents and everyone else he skipped out on--they have all even taken the est training--and the next thing to do, he says, is just to let it be. He is writing a letter to the graduates to communicate where he's at about it, "and from that point on," he says, "I'm going to allow people to say whatever they have to say about my past and let it be. I'm sure I will be accused of everything from being the father of someone's illegitimate child to being a child molester, to being a tax evader, to being a CIA agent."

I ask Werner why he has finally agreed to see me.

"I felt that it was legitimate to spend some time with you, since you've been kind enough to take responsibility for taking the training and since the feedback we've gotten about your being in the training was that you participated as a participant rather than stood back as an observer. I felt that that was a contribution to communicating the truth on your part, so it was legitimate for me to make at least some contribution to what you're doing."

All very well, and yet I haven't really gotten anything out of this interview that I've come for, and my hour is now up. I feel frustrated. I tell Werner that the sort of journalism I do has a lot more to do with experience than reporting or interviewing. I tell him about the first piece of journalism I'd ever done, a story in Life about firemen. I'd gotten the assignment because I was terrified of fire and wanted to know more about it. To write the piece, I hung out with firemen for five months, riding on the fire trucks and racing into burning buildings with them. It turned out to be a good story, I say, because I was able to experience and communicate what it was like to be a fireman.

Werner looks at me like I have said the magic words. It is as if he were listening to me for the first time. I feel we have finally communicated--for only 30 seconds of the hour, but it is at least a beginning. I tell him I want to talk to him again when he comes back to New York. He says OK.

Werner at the felt forum

The Felt Forum that night is packed with thousands of est graduates. Werner is not nearly as impressive as he was the night I saw him at the Commodore and decided to take the training. He speaks for a while and introduces all seven of his children and has them come up to the stage. He also calls up his mom and dad, his uncle Al and his aunt Edith, and kisses them all on the mouth.

About the only thing he says that I consider notable is about my visit with him earlier that day: "A gentleman came up to see me today who is writing an article about me. Actually," says Werner, "he's writing an article about himself and I'm just a small part of it." (Actually, I had said those very words to Werner at the elevator.) "Actually," says Werner, over the hoots of laughter that greet this statement, "he was the one who said that, and I thought it was terrific."

How to be a Jewish Son

One belief I have always held, from the age of 17, when I first moved out of my folks' home in Chicago, until the summer of my 39th birthday, was that I was constitutionally incapable of spending more than three consecutive days in my parents' company. The first day of any visit was always exceedingly pleasant, the second was always pretty nice, too, and by the third I invariably found myself snapping out grouchy, sarcastic replies to their most innocent questions and, in general, behaving like a high school sophomore. I happen to be very fond of my parents, you understand--it's just that I have never been able to spend three consecutive days with them. I figured this was simply an immutable law of the universe, like E equaling mc2.

Shortly after completing the est training, I invited my parents out to my house in East Hampton for a vacation. I invited them for a week and a half, but what I figured I'd do was spend the first weekend with them and then, on the third day, while I was being transformed into a teenaged Mr. Hyde, I would babble something believable about story conferences in New York and then split.

And so my folks came out to East Hampton and we spent an exceedingly pleasant first day together and a pretty good second one, and then, right on schedule, on day number three, I grew fangs and excess body hair and wanted out. I made my planned excuses about business in New York, and then I did a curious thing. Instead of leaving, I went outside into the woods and did a little heavy thinking. I thought about the part in the est training where I learned that I was a machine and that all I could do was react, react, react, react, react. I wondered what would happen if, as the est trainers had suggested, I merely looked at what was happening and attempted to actually experience it through. I decided I had nothing to lose. I went back into the house.

The next thing that happened was that my mother and I had a serious discussion about some table knives. Mother suggested that I had a lot of knives in East Hampton and that I ought to take some of them to New York. I replied that I already had enough knives in New York and that, were I to take any of those in East Hampton there, I would then have too many knives in New York. The old feelings started to well up inside me, but I also saw that I was overreacting to the situation and I was able to get a grip on myself. The discussion about knives continued until finally I burst out laughing and said, "Mom, what do I have to do to get out of this discussion?" and my father said, also laughing, "Tell her you'll take the damned knives to New York," and Mom laughed, too, and that was the end of it.

The next incident that occurred had to do with the bizarre fact that, although my parents are so self-sufficient in their own home they are able even to do such traditionally un-Jewish things as basic carpentry and electrical repairs, the instant they come to my house, they are utterly baffled by such problems as How to Turn On the Overhead Light. I must tell you that a few incidents based on this phenomenon arose in East Hampton, that I again found myself prepared to snarl and bite necks, but that each time, before things got out of hand, I was able to stop and look at what was happening and experience it out, rather than react to it in the automatic way I had always reacted to such things in the past.

I didn't go back to New York that night, after all. I stayed for ten days and experienced out every single silly situation and sarcastic teenaged overreaction that came up. And, in our final and tenth consecutive evening together, my parents and I had a wonderful dinner together and drank a few glasses of wine and I was able to tell them for the first time in years that I loved them and was delighted they had come and even more delighted I had stayed, and that I guessed I wouldn't have to limit my visits with them to three days any longer.

I think my therapist, Mildred Newman, gets a lot of credit in the preceding, and so, I think, do I. And so, I'm afraid, does Werner fucking Erhard. Far out.

I get werner to experience me

On October second, I am granted another audience with Werner at The Plaza Hotel. I have made a point of telling the San Francisco office that seeing Werner for only an hour, as before, is of little or no value to me, but that is all they are willing to give me. I go to the Plaza with neither tape recorder nor note pad, and when I see Werner, I tell him why: An hour is too short for me to do the kind of interview I want, so perhaps we can use the time to get to know each other.

It is as if we have never met. Werner is more defensive about journalists and the press than he was the previous time. "Why should I let you interview me?" he says. "What do I get out of it? Every time I let somebody interview me, I get fucked. They misquote me, they get the most basic facts about me wrong--what assurance do I have that that won't happen with you?"

"None at all," I say. "But if it had been my purpose to fuck you in print, I already have all the input I need to do that. Look, I won't get paid any more if I interview you than if I don't--I won't get anything out of trying to spend time with you except, hopefully, a clearer picture of who you are and what you're about. In my training, we were told over and over again that we were assholes because we didn't experience people, we merely jammed them into our belief systems. And yet that's exactly what you're doing with me--you're not experiencing me, you're jamming me into your belief system of what a journalist is."

Werner nods his head. Once again I see the flash of communication pass between us. "OK," he says, "that sounds valid. Tell me something. Tell me your experience of the training."

I still have a lot of resentment about the training. I tell Werner I feel there were some fairly brilliant things in the training, but there was also a lot of sophistry and a lot of boredom.

"Boredom is a very high state," says Werner.

Werner's sort of side-kick-assistant. Jack Rafferty, comes in and tells him that he has to start dressing for his next appointment. As Werner continues to talk to me, he steps behind a high-backed upholstered chair for modesty's sake and changes from his safari suit to a pair of slacks and a blazer. As he's changing his pants, I think I see a dime falling out of Werner's loafer. I ask what the dime was doing there.

"That's Werner's emergency dime," says Jack.

"Werner's emergency dime?" I say.

"In case he has to make an emergency phone call," says Jack. "See, Werner doesn't carry any money. I take care of all that kind of stuff for him."

Werner comes out from behind his chair and he and I and Jack proceed toward the elevators and then on down to the street. As Jack is getting Werner a cab. I say I want to spend a substantial period of time with Werner the next time I see him. Werner says that the only place he can afford such a luxury is in San Francisco; I say I'll be glad to go to San Francisco but that I don't want to have to keep starting over from square one each time I see him. Werner says that perhaps I won't have to next time and steps into the cab and says he'll see me when he sees me. I can't help wondering, as Jack and I wave goodbye to Werner's departing cab, how, unless somebody is meeting him at his destination, he is going to pay his cab fare with his emergency dime.

"Be here now"

In mid-October, I enroll in the "Be Here Now" graduate seminar series. This series is led not by trainers--who all live near Werner in San Francisco--but by various members of the est staff in New York. Our most frequent group leader is a perverse and amusingly outrageous young man whose name is Marvin.

Marvin repeatedly badgers us about bringing guests to the seminars, so that the est staff can have a shot at enrolling them in the training. Most of us graduates bitterly resent being badgered about bringing guests and say so. Mostly, we are told that the resentment is our problem, not est's.

Much of the "Be Here Now" series is about handling upsets. The upset I use most frequently in the processes they give us is my irritation at est for badgering us to bring guests.

Nobody doesn't like Sara Lee

The "Be Here Now" seminars start promptly at 7:15 p.m. If you get there late, you have to go through a little ritual at the door that goes like this: The est volunteer at the door asks you if you're late. You say you are. The est volunteer asks if you have broken your agreement to be there on time. You say yes. The est volunteer asks you if you take responsibility for breaking your agreement. You say yes. The est volunteer asks you if you are willing to re-create your agreement to be on time. You say yes and the est volunteer opens the door and lets you in.

One night, I get to my "Be Here Now" seminar at 7:13 and find the door to the seminar room already closed, with a plastic est volunteer guarding the door, with a plastic smile on her face. If you think airline stewardesses are robots, you should see some of the beauties they have at est--they make airline stewardesses look like Sicilians at a wedding. The name tag on this particular robot's chest says she is Sara Lee.

"Are you late?" says Sara Lee. I say I'm not--my agreement was to be there at 7:15 and it's only 7:13. "Are you late?" says Sara Lee. I say no, I'm not late, but if she continues asking assholic questions, I will be late. "Are you late?" says Sara Lee. I feel tension building up in my forehead. I feel my heart begin pounding in my chest. And then a curious thing happens to me: I realize in a blinding flash of ineffable Zen clarity that I am perfectly willing to stand here the rest of the night, possibly work myself up to an ulcer or a heart attack, simply because I am Right and I have to stick to my position and prove that a mindless assholic robot named Sara Lee is Wrong. (And I sneered at brownnose Frank in the training for his willingness to be paralyzed in order to prove Landon Wrong?)

Clearly, if I am willing to drop the entire issue of who's Right and who's Wrong, even though I know I'm Right, then I can go inside the fucking seminar room and get on with my life. It isn't fair that I should have to say I am late when I'm not, but then, as they told us in the training, whoever said that life was fair?

"Are you late?" says Sara Lee.

"Fuck yes," I say, "I'm late."

San Francisco

At just about every est function I have ever attended, there was one trainer in the room and a whole lot of trainees or graduates. But this afternoon, I am in a room in San Francisco filled with all nine est trainers and seven trainer candidates and Werner himself, and the only nontrainer in the room is me. It's a curious feeling.

What we are doing is eating a lunch of cold chicken in aspic, and I can't get over how normal-looking and normal-sounding these est trainers are compared with the way I experienced them in my training. There's gorgeous old Landon and dynamic Hal and several others I've seen doing their supercharged est shtick, and here they all are, shoving cold chicken into their cheeks, just like regular people, and talking without theatrics in a normal tone of voice.

A cherished belief of most people--myself included--about the est trainers is that they are all carbon copies of Werner and that they all look alike. Looking at them in a group, this concept is tough to hang on to, since they don't really look alike at all, and one has a beard, and one is black, and three are women, and so on. Too bad. I really loved the concept of their all being little Werners.

The trainers and trainer candidates are a pretty high-powered group. Not only are they able to stand on a platform for 15 to 20 hours every Saturday and Sunday and put on an act that any entertainer would envy but most of them gave up fairly prestigious careers in academe or medicine or psychology to work for Werner. As a matter of fact, eight people on the est staff have doctorates, three have M.D.s (one of these is a psychiatrist) and six have doctor-of-jurisprudence degrees.

Suzanne Wexler, the nice PR lady I was mean to on the phone, shepherds me around during my San Francisco stay and introduces me to various members of the est staff, including est president Don Cox, who is a former Coca-Cola exec and Harvard Business School professor, and John Poppy, who is a former editor of Look and Saturday Review and a very sweet man, indeed. Most est staffers I see wear the ubiquitous est name tags. All est staffers are theoretically on call 24 hours a day and are sometimes awakened in the middle of the night by a seemingly never-sleeping Werner to clarify some vital issue that couldn't have waited till morning.

Most of est's staff had been working in the small cheery office building where I had lunch. But est has now leased a substantial portion of a gigantic old building that looks like the U. S. Treasury, and this building will become est Central, controlling est's national and international activities. The est Public Information Office has already moved into the new old building. Near the door of the Public Information Office, I note a Big Brotherly sign to the effect that all staff members must, upon signing out, leave word where they can be reached, or else "contribute" five dollars.

I find the slavish devotion of the staff to Werner and his apparent insistence upon same to be vaguely unsettling. And I do not at all understand est staffers' eagerness to volunteer so much of their time to work for Werner without further remuneration. Indeed, this eagerness readies such absurd proportions that I have heard rumors that staffers are fined $100 a day every time they work more than six days a week for est!

Such zealousness seems greatly at odds with the increased independence and heightened feelings of self-worth that most est graduates report as a result of the training. Commenting on this apparent dichotomy, former est trainer Stewart Emery wryly observed in the December 15, 1975, issue of the Boston East West Journal: "The purpose of est is to serve people. The purpose of the est staff is to serve Werner."

That night, I again find myself eating with Werner, this time not in the small bright office building on Union Street but in Werner's dark, tastefully restored Victorian mansion on Franklin Street. The fare is not cold chicken but chilled glasses of kir, endive stuffed with cucumber and dill, salmon in pastry, rice with mushrooms. The table is piled high with fresh ferns and flowers and the meal is served in the softly lit dining room by two est staff members dressed as a butler and a maid, both wearing name tags. Present at the table with me and Werner are Bob, Jim, Ernie and Bernie, who are all professors at Stanford.

After dinner, we adjourn to the living room to hear tapes of Richard Pryor, in the midst of which the staff member who serves as butler materializes to say: "Werner, it's ten o'clock. Your next appointment is ten-thirty." I don't remember ever being at someone's home for dinner when he excused himself for another appointment, but then, I've never been to Werner's for dinner before. Werner bids us farewell, tells me and the Stanford professors we're free to tarry as long as we like, and then moves on to his next appointment.

The following day, Werner has promised me a lunch with just the two of us, during which I'll be able to ask him all the questions I never finished asking him in New York.

Lunch is on an upper floor of the mansion. I am served Campari and Calistoga Water without having been asked what I wanted to drink, just as the previous night we had all been served glasses of kir without being asked. When the food comes, I begin my interview.

"Werner," I say, "why is the attitude of the trainers so tough, so militaristic?"

"It's not militaristic," says Werner.

"OK, then, tough. People say fascistic. People say Nazi."

"It's neither fascistic, militaristic, Nazi nor any of those things. It is ... very one-way. It's very what you might call unsympathetic. And the reason behind that is that we're trying to create a situation in which people can learn something from their own way of being. Now, if you do A, and I do B when you do A, if you switch to C and then I switch to D, you don't know where the fuck you're at. But if, no matter what you do, I'm doing A, you always know where you're at. It's always you, it's never me. That's why I tell people that my guru is gravity. Or the physical universe. See, you can't move the physical universe. It doesn't give a fuck. Now, is the physical universe fascistic? Is it militaristic? No. It's simply the way it is."

"Specifically," I say, "people make reference to why the trainers call the trainees assholes, why they yell at them, and so on. There is a very definite attitude taken."

"Now, that's a very different story," says Werner. "The purpose of that is to engage people. We don't want people to go through the training as observers, Dan. We don't want them to go through the training in their heads. We want them to go through the training experientially. And so it's important, then, to engage people. And the way you engage people is you tell them the truth. That always engages them. Particularly that thing which they've been trying to hide. And the one thing everybody's trying to avoid is being an asshole. I mean, people are actively trying to avoid that."

"So, by calling them assholes, you're forcing them to confront what they've been trying to hide?" I say.

"Mmmmm."

"There are a great many rumors about est and Nazi things," I say. "That est graduates greet one another with a Nazi salute, and so on. Where do you think such rumors come from?"

"There is actually a whole Nazi drama in people's heads. That Nazism didn't happen outside us, it happened inside us."

"How do you mean?"

"That it was a function of something we all carry around in us and----"

"Latent sadomasochism or what?" I say.

"That's a little too Freudian for me," says Werner.

"It's my own feeling that people are naturally suspicious and afraid," I say. "and also that nobody quite knows how to deal with the whole Nazi thing. And the combination of your name being Werner Erhard and the fact that the training is so tough, I think, conspires to bring out people's ambivalence about it: their fascination for it, the horror of it, the----"

"The whole drama of it. I agree totally," says Werner. "Yeah, if Outward Bound were headed by a guy whose name was Werner Erhard, they'd have the same concern, perhaps. By the way, Dan, the harshness in the training, if I can call it that, has a similar purpose to Outward Bound's purpose of putting you out in the wilderness."

"Which is what?" I say.

"Which is that you've got a stable thing against which to match yourself. And it's a thing that is tough enough so that you can't bullshit it. You know, it's very hard to bullshit a ten-mile hike. First off, it doesn't give a shit. No matter what you say to it, it doesn't care. So you have to listen to your own bullshit when you're talking to it."

"Could you tell me in very brief terms how you hope est could transform society?" I say. "In one sentence, if possible."

Werner laughs at the notion of trying to sum it all up in one sentence, then wonders if it might be possible. "By making it all right for people to tell the truth to themselves about themselves," he says at last.

"Do you think----"

"That wasn't bad, was it?" he says.

"No, it was very nice," I say. "Werner, has it occurred to you that in a couple years' time, there'll be so many est graduates they could constitute a political bloc? And, if so, what could be done about that? Could it be a political party, could it be an instrument for effecting social change ... ?"

"Yeah, it could be all those things. And, mostly, that would be a mistake. I expect est to have an enormous impact on politics, but not as a political thing."

"As an influence in telling the truth?" I say.

"Yes. Let me give you an example. There was a man in Honolulu who, at the time he took the training, was head of the social-welfare programs in the state of Hawaii: the prisons, the welfare program, whatever. And the program he had put together was presented to the legislature and it failed in the legislature in the week between the two weekends of the training. He made a public statement to the press that the program had failed in the legislature, not because the legislature was crappy but because he had not clone a good enough job in presenting it. The press was flabbergasted. They literally said they didn't know what to do if politicians were going to start telling the truth. That's the kind of political influence I'd like to see est have."

"Why is the training sold so hard?" I say. "Do the staff members get some kind of commission or cash incentive?"

"There is no incentive other than their own personal incentive to do any of this. They are definitely told if a person says he's not interested in taking the training to immediately terminate the thing."

An est staffer comes in and hands Werner a memo. Werner reads it and gets visibly agitated.

"Do you know what it just cost us for me to read this memo, Locke?" says Werner. "You could have had somebody else make the decision and do it wrong and it would've taken less of my time and cost less. You could have let the dog decide this--you could have given this decision to the dog."

Locke withdraws apologetically. As he leaves, Werner's dog, Rogue, having perhaps heard he was needed, trots into the room. But Locke doesn't ask Rogue to decide anything, and neither does Werner.

"There is a rumor about," I say, "that your lawyer, Harry Margolis, is sending money to a secret bank account in the Caribbean and that he's been indicted on tax evasion. I wonder if you'd set me straight on that."

"There's no secret bank account in the Caribbean," says Werner. "What happened was that the Justice Department, through the grand-jury system, indicted Harry for conspiracy to make false statements on tax returns."

"For the tax returns of his clients?" I say.

"Yes. And one of the clients mentioned was us. We were not mentioned as co-conspirators. We were mentioned in there merely because our tax return was one of the tax returns on which the Government alleges there was a conspiracy involving Harry and other people to make knowingly false statements. Now, the Government's indictment, when it finally came to be presented in court, was so inaccurate that the Government had to ask to withdraw it, which the court allowed it to do and allowed it to present another indictment."

"But was est ever found guilty of any improper procedures?" I say.

"Est wasn't even charged with any improper procedures, let alone found guilty," says Werner.

"The other rumor is that Jesse Kornbluth says that you threatened to kill someone."

"What actually happened was that I used to live in an apartment complex in Sausalito that was on the bay. What you did was to drive into the parking lot there, and in one place in the parking lot there was an elevator. One night, somebody drove me home. They pulled up in front of the elevator and we were sitting there talking until I got out to leave. The guy who guards the lot shined his spotlight in the windows of the car. I got out of the car and walked over to him and said, 'Look, I live here. I actually pay rent to park my car here and to drive up and get out and all that stuff, and I would appreciate it, if you want something from me, if you don't shine your light in my eyes but just come over and ask me whatever you want.' I said, 'Don't forget that.'

"A couple of weeks later, somebody drove me home again--it was Gonneke, who's been working for me since before est, you met her--and we were parked in front of the same place. She had her lights on, because I was about to get out of the car, and the guy shined his spotlight in our eyes again. So this time, I got out of the car and walked over to his car and said, 'Get out of the car.' He began to roll the window up. So I opened the car door, reached inside, put my hand around his arm like this, at which point he turned the red flashing light on top of his car on and began to lay on the horn. So I pulled him the rest of the way out of the car, and as I did, he stood up. I grabbed him by the lapels like this and picked him up off the ground a little bit, and I said, 'I told you the last time you did that never to do that again, that if you wanted to talk to me, you should come over to talk to me. Now, if you do it again, I'm going to throw you over the fucking embankment.' Which was about three stories down, by the way.

"And he reached down like this, and I assumed he had a gun. I said, 'And if you pull that gun out, I'm going to shove it down your throat.' By that time, Gonneke had pulled off to the side and parked the car, so I put the guy down and that was the end of that. I told Gonneke to go home.

"I went down to the apartment. A knock came at the door and there were two policemen with this guy. They said, 'He wants to make a citizen's arrest for assault and battery.' So I got dressed and we drove down to the Sausalito Police Department. They talked to the man and told him he might be subject to a suit for false arrest if he pressed this assault-and-battery thing and maybe he should reduce it to battery. So he did. I went and got fingerprinted, and so on, and by that time, the bail bondsman posted bail for me and we left. I hired an attorney, and the attorney talked to the district attorney, and they agreed that if I was willing to plead guilty to disturbing the peace, that would suffice for them, they wouldn't have a trial and all that shit. In my naïveté, I agreed to that."

"Why do you say in your naïveté?" I ask.

"Well, because the thing was a definite overreaction, Dan, and it never would've stood up in trial. First, I didn't hit the guy and----"

"Did he have a gun?" I ask.

"I don't know. He had something he was reaching for."

"It might have been a mint to freshen his breath," I say.

"Whatever it was, he decided not to reach for it, because he didn't want it shoved down his throat," says Werner. "I have mentioned that incident in public, by the way. Jesse didn't discover that incident. As a matter of fact, there's nothing that has been in the press so far that I haven't mentioned in public--in front of hundreds of people in some cases and thousands of people in other cases. And I've spoken about that incident a couple of times. It never occurred to me that there was anything to report about it. Now I'm a little wiser, so I know that if my shorts are striped, that's a matter to be reported on."

Jesse's Article

An article by Jesse Kornbluth appeared in the March 19, 1976, issue of New Times. There were a lot of disturbing things in it, such as an explanation of est's tax-shelter setup, which involved Werner's selling the est data to a foreign company, which then licensed it to Erhard Seminars Training in a complicated manner; such as the matters of the fight with the security guard and of Harry Margolis' indictment, which I'd already discussed with Werner; such as the assertion that est hired a private detective to pose as a reporter and reinterview one of the sources of the article; and such as various accounts of Werner's seemingly dictatorial control of the professional and personal lives of those who work for him.

Even though I expected the Kornbluth piece to be a kill piece, even though I knew it had been written as a deliberate hatchet job, it still succeeded in shaking me up. If all Kornbluth said was true, then maybe I was a sucker for finding value in est, for finding Werner himself personally likable. If Kornbluth was right, I had been badly conned.

On Thursday, March 18, I was asked by a TV program in New York called Midday Live to appear opposite Jesse Kornbluth. Kornbluth was, of course, taking the anti-est position. I was being asked to take the pro-est position. I resented being placed in the role of est's public defender when I had so many reservations about est myself. I would have preferred to kid it instead--est is easy to kid. But I felt that, despite my own reservations and Kornbluth's allegations, I had gotten definite value out of the est training, and I felt that it was necessary for me to point it out whenever I felt est was being criticized unfairly.

It was a strange debate. Kornbluth, the anti-est person, acknowledged on-camera that he had really found the est training itself valuable. I, the pro-est person, acknowledged all my reservations about the organization. As I say, a strange debate.

The following night, Friday, March 19. est invited all est graduates who were in the media to a special seminar in New York that would give us an opportunity to talk to Werner about any number of things, including the Kornbluth article.

The Media Seminar

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, nearly all questions put to Werner by the more than 200 est graduates at the media seminar had to do with charges raised in the Kornbluth article. Questioned about est's financial structure, Werner painstakingly described est's legal status as an ultimately tax-exempt charitable trust based in the British Isles. To snide comments about this being an elaborate form of tax evasion, Werner replied that est pays the taxes appropriate to its income and further observed: "I dare say that there is not a person in this room--there might be one or two exceptions--who does not pay as little taxes as he can possibly pay."

When pressed by a persistent questioner who implied Werner was guilty of improper conduct because of the Margolis indictment, Werner temporarily blew his cool: "How dare you attack my integrity with guilt by association?" he replied. "Look, if you're trying to make me Wrong, I know how to make me Wrong much better than you could ever hope to do it. And I'm totally willing to do it: I have done evil things. Leaving a wife and four children is one hell of a lot more evil than any of the bullshit that comes up in any of the articles. There is not one fact that is in any way generally considered by people to be evil that I have not shared publicly. Not one.

"Look," said Werner wearily, "it's perfectly all right for people to be suspicious of me and for people to be suspicious of est. If I couldn't stand the heat, I wouldn't be in the kitchen, kids.

"The problem is, people think I pretend that I'm doing this out of a love of mankind and that I'm really doing it out of a love of money. If I said, 'Look, what I mainly wanted was your $250'--it just so happens I'm smart enough to give you that much in return--you'd love it. You sure would. And it would be a lie. I'm sorry. Because I don't think you happen to work for money, either.

"You think if someone gave you all the money in the world, you'd go to a desert island or you'd get two broads and go to Florida. You would like hell. You'd go back to work. And if you really got your shit together and you had no fears about anything and were totally secure, what you'd do is find a way to contribute to people's lives. Now, I know that's impossible to believe. I know it. And I know that the things Jesse said make you crazy. Look, I'm aware of all that--goddamn it, I'm the guy who put that training together, don't you remember?"

A final note

It is now nearly two years since I first heard Werner Erhard speak at the Commodore Hotel. Werner's hair is shorter now and he has taken to dropping in on trainings and seminars unannounced and saying things like est will go on, even if it's called something else and even if it's without him.

Two friends of mine took the training recently and were surprised to hear their trainer, Randy McNamara, say that up till a short time ago, est was an evil organization because it was dedicated to its own survival. That has changed, said McNamara, and now, unlike most organizations, est is solely dedicated to serving people. Werner has issued a four-hour taped message to est staffers on this theme, and I have already seen some of the repercussions. At an excellent graduate series called "About Sex," which I attended, the pitch to bring guests was softened almost to a whisper. The frequent calls that est graduates used to get from the office, asking if one would like to assist at est functions or in the office, have almost stopped.

Fear of Werner and of est continues to run high among people I know who have not taken the training, however. And when they ask me how I can possibly have anything good to say about either est or Werner, I tell them, as dopey as it sounds, that all I know is my own experience, and that my experience of the est training was that it was valuable, and that my experience of Werner is of a likable man who seems to believe in what he has created. By the time this appears in print, it may be revealed that Werner buys his underwear from Frederick's of Hollywood or that he has romantic interludes with Lhaso Apsos, but, even if it is, that still won't retroactively make the training I took invalid. And that is absolutely all I have to say about est and Werner Erhard.

Now, then. Let me tell you about that session with Reddi-Wip and Catherine Deneuve.