Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 259 - Jennifer Fraser

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

Jennifer earned her PhD from University of Toronto in Comparative Literature and is the Founder of The Bullied Brain. Her third book Teaching Bullies takes lived experience with an abuse crisis and puts it into the context of psychology, psychiatry, education, law, and neuroscience. What's being discovered in neuroscientific labs across the world has the power to change how we understand our brains and lives. This empowering research infuses her latest book The Bullied Brain: Heal Your Scars and Restore Your Health. Neuroscientist Dr. Michael Merzenich says it is "scientifically the most thorough treatment of the subject on planet earth."

Good morning, everybody. We're back again. This episode, as always, is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee. I said it last week. I'm going to say it again. The holidays are just around the corner. There are some cool and unique things that you can get for somebody if they enjoy coffee, whether that's a coffee subscription. Black Rifle now does a merchandise subscription. You could get them a cool way to make their coffee. My personal recommendation is a pour over. It is delightful, and some would say even life-changing. I don't know who would say. that, but some probably would. And if you go to black rifle.com, you're going to see everything you could possibly want. They actually have a really cool section in just accessories as well, or actually I'm looking at it right now. It comes under gear. But they got some really cool shit. And it's a brand that was founded by really cool people. And I couldn't be more proud to be a part of it. I'm really looking forward to the Black Rifle Coffee outpost that's going to be opening up here in Calispo than the next few months. Yeah, I feel really fortunate to have been involved with them. And And I'm really fortunate that I can fly the flag for them and that they are willing to sponsor this podcast.

So get all your holiday shopping needs done at blackwifle coffee.com. That's it. My guest today is Dr. Jennifer Frazier. She reached out and it was originally about her most recent book. Actually, it was specifically about her most recent book called The Bullied Brain. How you can heal your scars and restore your health. And one of the first questions she actually asked me when we started the recording. was, you know, why would you be interested in having somebody like me on your podcast? And the answer is simple. I have seen the impacts of bullying in my own life. And it's something that I think needs to be talked about, not just from the perspective of, hey, it's bad and we shouldn't do that. But from the perspective, what's like the psychological and physiological impact that it actually has? And so I was very fortunate that she reached out. We recorded this episode a little while ago. And there was some issues with the audio.

Occasionally things like this happened with the podcast. It actually got me to buy another piece of gear. So now we have three redundant feedbacks when it comes to the audio in and of itself. But I did the best that I could to clean the audio up to the best of my ability. It's not as good as traditional podcast audio that you can expect on the channel, but it's good enough. And by that I mean the content we are going to talk about and the importance of what we're talking about. Just deal with it and do the best that you can. So I'm going to shut up and let Jennifer speak for herself and talk about who she is and what she does.

So away we go. Hope you enjoy it. Where would you like to begin? I would like to know why you would want me to be on your podcast. Good question. And actually, it was a super easy one. I have three kids, almost 19, as in almost 19 on Tuesday of next week. middle boy

and then another boy who just turned 17 and my daughter who's 14 and Michael and I were talking about this before you came up I don't remember anybody killing themselves at my kids age

I when I went to what is it before high school was it middle school before high school when I was in middle school there was somebody who killed themselves I didn't know the child are, and to be honest with you, I mean, at this point, it's almost so far back in my life that I remember my parents telling me about it. I don't really remember the impact,

but it had an impact on me because they took me out of public school and they put me into a private school for high school, which for parents out there, if you're going to do that, maybe find a high school her way to integrate your kids with the high school they're going to get ready to go to because I went totally cold from a private school to a high school, hard enough as it is. But in the last two years, the number of children that have killed themselves in my oldest son is a senior and my daughter is a freshman there was a period of time where I would pick them up from school and it may not have been every week but it felt like almost every week and I can't figure out what is causing that and Michael

and I were talking about is it social media is it the inescapability of it but bullying is I mean It's a real thing. I've seen it with my daughter. I've seen my kids doing it. We had a little chat about that. But I think it's something that is, you know, as to why I would want you to come on the podcast. I don't know if it's talked about enough. I think the damage from it can absolutely be real. I've talked very openly about not, I don't understand how somebody can arrive at a place where they think that ending their life is the only reasonable solution. I have total empathy for that, but I don't understand it. Yeah, so that's a long-winded answer to why I thought would be important, not only interesting, but just important to come and sit down and talk with you. It's, I mean, when you say all of that, I have so many things to say. So a statistic that should really sober people up very quickly is from 2000 to 2018 in the U.S., youth suicide, that's 10-year-olds to 24-year-olds, increased 57%. that's insane. That's insane. And you're seeing that with your own kids.

I mean, it's actually a reality in your children's lives, in your life. And it's hard for me to have a conversation with them about it because I, there's so many things. And I'm sure every parent in every generation goes through this. There's so many things that is different in my kids' life right now, to include what they're being taught in school. I think in about fifth grade for them, I was completely useless in helping them with their homework because I learned that two plus two is. written out this way equals four. And then the way they were show math, I'm like, well, I'm useless. And there are so many things that are different.

I had no experience with that when I was at their age. I mean, they're talking about assemblies where they, you know, I guess it would be a memorial. I don't know the correct word for it, but gatherings and then another gathering. And then I just, I don't know what to say. It's challenging to say the least from a parenting perspective. Yeah. What I found in the research was, I mean, yeah, our kids are learning more and more complex math. I was out at grade four, just if that makes you feel better. I was like fractions. Hmm. And then it just gets ridiculous after that. But I feel like they changed the way they do it, too. I feel like the complexity is the same. But somewhere along the line, they said, this is a better way to do it. And then they never, I mean, full disclosure, I use the calculator on my phone when I need to. But I never was updated on the new data on how they do stuff. So they're doing new things in math, but I mean, we have a stack of brain science, an absolute stack of it. And it backs up psychology for years and years.

It backs up, you know, psychiatry and education even. And it's not at all being talked about. It's like it's a taboo subject. We can't let kids know what's going on in their brains, which is really strange because their mental health is off the rails. Yeah. you know, they're very, very ill. They're so ill that they're committing suicide as just, get me out of this head, I can't stand it.

But they don't know anything about adolescent brain development. And this is where I started to say, how come we don't, I mean, when you say we don't talk enough about bullying, no, we don't. We also don't talk enough about what does bullying do to the brain? And in fact, why don't we talk about the brain ever at all? We know a huge amount about it now. And it's like this subject that's kept hidden from teachers

and it's kept hidden from coaches. and in the workplace it's not talked about, and certainly our kids don't know anything. Yeah, I wonder if there, is there any way to track the level of bullying, if you will, historically over time? Because, I mean, I wonder if, I've talked about this before, too.

That was socially awkward, maybe a good term for when I was in high school. I just, I was, I've never had large social circle of friends. I never really wanted to either, which to me seemed totally, in a world, but to other people, and maybe I'm an outlier because they wanted to have a large group, but I wasn't interested in that, but I look back at

what I can remember, and if you wanted to go fuck with somebody and talk shit to them, you had to go find them, and like, be in a class where you could, like, call them on a telephone, a rotary telephone. Have you ever watched the YouTube videos of where they have people, like, teenagers now? The millennials, trying to

use a phone. Dial a number of this rotary phone, and it literally just whips their ass. I love it. But, so I could, I guess I could call, and talk shit to somebody on the phone, but then they might hand it off to like their mom or dad, and then I'd have to hang up. I could see him at school.

I guess I could write them a note at school, or I could snail mail him a letter. But those were my options. Almost all of those, it was me directly interfacing, and most of the time it was me in person. And I do, I'd be curious to hear what your actual definition of bullying is,

because it seems like when it's guys, there's a socially acceptable level of shenanigans, if you will, that can become very, very pointed and edgy. And a lot of the times people can pile on. And then there's a different standard that people will tolerate when it comes to, say, a boy talking to a girl or a man talking to a woman. And then there's the adult spectrum.

I'm curious, what's the actual textbook definition of bullying? Well, it changes wherever you look. It's a different definition. Really it is. It's like almost legally. Like you go to try and say, this is breaking policy and procedures like based on what and all of the definitions are different. So in my use of the word, I'm using it kind of, I was going to say playfully, not playfully,

but I'm using it to say we ignore our own brains. Like ignoring somebody is one of the worst things you can do to them. You know, you ask me a question, you send me an email or something like that and I just don't reply. That's, that's, the brain doesn't interpret that well. It goes, oh, I'm being, I'm an outlier. That I'm not being seen as worthy. This is not healthy. But when I look at it, I start with that idea. Like, why aren't we talking about our brains?

Why do we bully our own inner selves in this way? Like the key organ in our body. How come we ignore it? What's going on? But then when I use bullying throughout the book, I'm really talking about everything from a microaggression. You know, the person that makes you feel embarrassed in a meeting at work all the time.

or you speak and sort of behind your back, they roll their eyes so your colleagues can see it and you can't, just dumb stuff like that. They love people, they do those things. I look at kids very briefly, but I'm quite disinterested in them, not disinterested in kids, but I just think trying to figure out a problem

by looking at child populations, it's going to get us nowhere. It's like saying, oh, let's fix global warming, and I think we'll look at what the kids are doing. And once we figure that out, then we can fix global warming. It's not going to happen. So I laser in on adults. What are adults doing that create the conditions that kids are bullying one another to death in some cases? Why is that happening? And so I go all

away from the microaggressions. I just described a few up to like full on violation, a person. And I think the spectrum is interesting because what they find in the research is if you are in a place that allows a lot of microaggressions, it works as a really effective cover up for far nastier stuff. going on. It allows you not quite to see it because you get confused. Kind of resets the baseline a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I worry about my kids. I worry about the inescapable nature and how easy it is for them to say something, not even actually say something, but to write something down that could be so incredibly impactful in somebody else's life

but feel so meaningless when your thumbs are moving on a screen. And like, I I try to get, one, I try to do this myself. Like, there is a point in time of the night where the phone gets put away and it goes on silent. But, I mean, I'll hear my kid's phones going off 24-7. And it disrupts their sleep. And let's just assume all the messages were positive. People check in, hey, I'm thinking about you because we're pen pals in Singapore, whatever. I don't know why.

I just use that example. But, because it's on the other side of the clock, I guess. But, and I've seen it specifically with probably my daughter the most, if there's a notification, there's the desire to at least look at what it is and maybe get back. And, you know, if it was only positive reinforcing things, that would be one thing. But if it's negative and you can't get away from it and it just keeps coming and coming and coming, again, I don't understand suicide, but that can't be helpful at all, that constant accessibility. Yeah, you sort of named it perfectly. It's the perception of inescapability.

That's the term that they use in the research. So the perception of inescapability comes from a series of pretty horrendous animal testing that was done that we won't talk about because it's that awful. But basically what they found was a creature will get to the point where we're very human creatures. There's not all that much difference. We like to think we're super superior, but we're not from this point of view. The creatures will hit a point where you open the cage door for them. After what they've been through, though, they won't leave. They cannot move.

They're paralyzed. with fear and anxiety and all these things. And that's what the perception of inescapability is. And I mean, with kids, I think what we have to do is say to them, you know, your phone, you've got to put it away, it's got to go on silent. It doesn't control you. It doesn't control your brain. You control it.

So I spend a lot of time if I'm working with young people or designing a course for young people. My whole thing is teaching them that they have to put their mind in the driver's seat. It's great to have your brain. your brain is pretty remarkable, especially up to the age of 24, 25, but never let it ever take the driver's seat. The mind always makes the decision. So your mind is mature relatively, and you are saying... Opinions may vary on that.

You can ask Michael. He might have... Shaking his head. He's shaking his head. We'll just leave it. Opinions may vary. But, you know, at least you have a prefrontal cortex that was mature 24, 25. So the young people don't. So adults have to be the prefrontal cortex for them. They don't like it, of course, but when you say to them, you know what, you are four times more likely to die than children and then adults. And why is that? It's because you're undergoing massive adolescent brain development. So when you go back to like, why do they kill themselves? Well, they have incredible impulsivity. They are ruled by emotions. Their entire world, and this is all pushed by evolution. Evolution pushes the young brain to live.

leave the family cave, venture out into the serengeti, and find a mate. That requires having hypersensitivity to other groups, your peers, what they think of you, because you have to recreate new social standing, not with the family cave. So your brain is literally pushing you to be a risk taker, a reward seeker, you're hugely emotionally unstable, basically, and you are, all you can see are your peers. You kind of forget your family because you're so pushed by evolution to get out there. And what happens to them is you put them into a car. Evolution never planned for a vehicle.

Didn't know about it. Doesn't understand it now. And it's a recipe for, you know, car accidents are the leading cause of death in our youth populations. Suicides the second. And those are both preventable deaths based on. We should be teaching our kids everything about adolescent brain development and neuroscience. You know, the one thing I would add to that to what I would say that people that age struggle with. And this, I do remember from being at that age.

My perspective of time was very skewed. It was like, well, today, it's today. Maybe it was next week. Maybe I could think a year ahead. My perspective on time now is way different. And my tolerance for, I guess, certain behaviors or discomfort. I mean, it's, you have, I tell my kids this all the time. I'm not smarter than you by any stretch.

I have a few more laps around the sun than you do, which gives me a little bit more context and understanding. And I realize that things that suck now, they're not going to suck forever. But I also understand the other side of that coin. Things that are awesome now may not be awesome forever, and I did not have that at that age. So, I mean, I think that probably ties into it for some way.

But is there, so what was the year where the jump began, the 57% increase in suicides? It was from 2000 to 2018. So is there anything else? I was going to ask, is there anything else in society that occurred during that time period that they associate that with? Well, I have a personal theory,

but before I tell my personal theory, I just want to go back to what you said about time because what you just described was the prefrontal cortex. It's the part of the brain, and you're not supposed to separate the brain out into parts, but for us to be able to talk about it, it's just for that sake. It works as a vast network.

Now we've said that, okay, let's talk about the prefrontal cortex, because it's the part of the brain that's involved in understanding consequences. So you right now can say, if I do X right now, like leave my phone on all night because I'm worried about what someone thinks about me, and it pings all night long. I'm going to have a terrible sleep, lousy day,

tomorrow and I might mess up a work thing. That's the prefrontal cortex. The adolescent brain doesn't have it. It is caught way more in the part of the brain that's not quite connected yet to it. So my theory, going back to like, why does, why has suicide increase this way? I think it has to do also with bullying is a compound. It's like compounding interest. And because we never deal with it and because we don't have the courage to look at the real

truth of it, which is pretty awful, we just keep. turning it around and around, it gets worse and worse and worse. So you look at even the political climate right now. I mean, we just threw ourselves back to World War II. I mean, that's unbelievable. I, you know, I grew up in the 80s with the whole, you know, it was all Russia and the mushroom cloud, and you had that sense of doom all the time as a teenager.

Here I am a little-aged woman, and I'm like, oh my God, he's threatening to use nuclear power again. Is this possible? He's an, oh, I shouldn't, never mind, I won't get into that. But point... What are you talking about here? Putin. Did you...

Michael, did you see this today? Steven Segal sent Putin a birthday message? Which was? No, he like did us... I'm going to get completely off topic here and I'm going to bully Steven Seagull. Because he's a walking cuck.

But he... He did this fucking video message where I just realized, guys, that today is Putin's birthday and he is an amazing leader. And I hope that he can... Who said this? Steven Seagall.

Why would he say that? Was he joking? He wasn't joking. I have some very choice words that I'm not going to use, other than to say he's a ferocious piece of shit. And, yeah, one of these days I hope the hot dog doesn't go down as well, and he has to go seek medical treatment for it. But he has ties to rush, I think, from a business perspective.

Yeah, Putin's a little bit wild. But look at, you can take it even farther. So that's like the external political environment. The internal, I mean, in my country, at least, I'm catching a little bit of a Canadian accent from you there. You're going to have to describe your own political environment up there because I'm not tracking it at all. But fuck, if we didn't have Putin to fight,

the Democrats and Republicans would be fighting each other. Absolutely tooth-and-nail. And you want to talk about, again, depending on your definition of bullying, holy shit. The language that they use, the tactics that they use against each other, or even inside of... Because if they weren't fighting each other,

I feel like they'd be fighting inside of their own party. They're not left enough or right enough. It's insane. So that's what I mean. Exactly that. The adults are out of control bullying. They bully one another relentlessly.

They bully one another publicly. They turn to kids and go, don't bully each other. It's really hurtful. You can't do it. Actually, we're making more and more stringent laws. Our laws are so harsh on you. Young children who haven't had the laps around the sun,

we're going to make... We're going to just doom you for bullying, but the adults can do it. Are there laws against bullying? Oh, more and more stringent. You wouldn't believe it. Are we talking U.S. or Canada at this? U.S., U.S. What kind of laws are out there?

Like in New Jersey, you know. Like the fact that they expel kids, suspend kids, and they're starting to have actual, like, really serious legal consequences for kids that bully as well. And are they limiting that to verbal or does it have to cross a physical threshold as well? I think the verbal is getting in there in terms of, you know, There's been some cases where the girlfriend is texting her boyfriend that he should commit suicide and he does. Stuff like that. Yeah.

Yeah, I did read a little bit about that. That's a rough one. Well, I mean, words, and what's interesting for me in the research is, the brain is as susceptible to words as it is to physical. So you could beat me up right now, and I would heal in six weeks, let's give it, maybe eight, depending on how bad it was. If you called me a slew of, you know, you're this, you're that, you publicly humiliated me on your podcast. You said, you're useless. You'll go nowhere. I hated your book.

It's like a waste of time. And you were also, let's, we have to add this in, you were in a position of power over me. You were my boss, let's say. That is doing as much damage to me as a physical blow. Is that across the board? Or do some people have more tolerance to that than others? Well, that's a great question. The research is showing that some people may have more genetic capacity to be resilient to those kinds of attacks.

They actually, they talk about young people who they suffered like really bad stuff, like being raped as a kid by their parent repeatedly, blah, blah, blah. Horrendous upbringings. And they are a happy mom of three. Like it happens, right? You can have another person who is more just more sensitized to, finds it more unbearable, doesn't cope as well. I mean, look at veterans. A veteran will come home and reintegrate and find joy or new purpose, totally connect with family.

Another will come home and find it unbearable and want to disappear. Yeah, it's a really mixed bag, actually. Yeah. So, I mean, same thing I think in responsibly. Like, one of the things I found so interesting is that our brains are as unique as our fingerprints. So when someone goes to do surgery like a neurosurgeon is going to open up a brain and do something, they literally have to spend eight or nine hours mapping the brain first because they're all different. It's like a new landscape every single time.

And they can't make the risk of going, oh, it's the this part, and thus I can do this. How do they map it? They keep the person awake. Sorry to report. Hopefully none of us will ever have this. They keep you awake. They open your skull up. And then they use all kinds of electrodes.

They're like, where do you feel this in your body? Where do you feel that? What is the sensation? Are you serious? So your brain's just out and the dude's up there. playing that game where it goes, if you touch the side? Yeah.

Oh, that's not acceptable. Oh, my God. Sometimes I really like to think that science and medicine has advanced a long way, and then, yeah, that seems far less advanced than I would have thought. I would have hoped there was a machine that could just like, and then you're good to go. No, no, but I'm glad you brought up machines and that kind of a reading of the brain,

because we do have those kinds of machines. Now, they're not going to help you with surgery, but why aren't we looking at everyone's brain is another one of my big questions. I mean, these are the things that keep me up at night. You know, our kids, we test their eyes, we test their ears. If there's any problem with their heart, we get them, you know, heart monitor to check. We get their teeth done at least once or twice a year. And it's very preventative.

It's really watching before something gets wrong, wrong, and wrecks their life like they can't see at school and learn, or their teeth cause, you know, illness. We do something about it. Why aren't we doing that with the brain? We can do an EEG right now of every grade 6 in the USA. We can look at their brain and say, okay, they're about to enter into adolescence. That's the time when there's an onslaught of mental health crises that affect them.

And some can be so serious. But you know what? We can see it coming. And we can actually use a program to ensure that we strengthen those specific areas of the brain to make sure that they don't go down the path to bipolar. And they avoid that. They're looking like they're on the path to schizophrenia. But we could head them off that, let alone anxiety and depression, suicidal ideation, et cetera.

But we don't teach kids that they have the power within them, just like going to the gym and working out. They could be going to the brain gym every day and working out and having stronger brains. And it's not expensive. I don't think I've ever heard anything like that ever mentioned to my kids. Managing the and imaging the brains, it's when I was getting out of the military. I have a retained metal in my body so I can't get an MRI or I forget what it was exactly that they were using to look at

MRI. I think scar tissue in the brain. One of the big issues was, you know, you get somebody at the tail end of the career and they have, I believe it was showing as white spots or something like that in the brain damage. But it could show places that were damaged, but it couldn't tell you what. It's like, oh, you played high school football and then you did 20 years.

There's some damage here. We can't tell you which. it would be hugely beneficial, and I hope that they have changed this, that now they are sending a baseline when people come into the community so they can manage them maybe even midway or when they leave as well. Because otherwise, I mean, what do you do with that information? Okay, get rid of exit military service, we're going to image your brain. You've got white spots everywhere, but you play ballistic contact sports growing up, and then you were in this community.

So, yeah, you know, your brain's damaged. What do you do with that information? Well, I mean, what they should be saying right after that is, hey, your brain is being harmed. not damaged, it's being harmed. And we actually have this brain training program that has been shown by 100 independent studies that you can actually repair that. There's a lot of things you can do to get your brain way healthier. And same thing like going back to bullying, not only can you repair like physical harm like that and bullying and abuse in all forms, like just the emotional,

verbal, the cyberbullying, it does damage to the brain. It can be seen on a brain scan. They know that, they've known it for a long time. They can see it. Extensive studies. But what they don't follow up with ever is, and that can be repaired. Why aren't we doing that? Why? I mean, what I want to see happen is the fitness revolution of the 1980s. I want to see that happen with brains, where kids all of a sudden are taught and adults get really excited, and we suddenly start putting in half an hour a day, not just to like bad 80s music and dancing around,

and everyone can do it and be more fit. We're actually putting in half an hour a day to strengthen our brains. and we're getting very wary of people, despite the birthday wishes, people who have obvious signs of extreme mental illness. You know, Putin has made it very clear he lives in a fabricated land. He lives in fantasy land of his own making. And this happens to autocratic dictators. He's in a bubble for sure. He's an absolute bubble.

He believes his own lies, which is, you know, one of the definitions of psychopathy, right? And yet he's allowed to run a country. he's allowed to have access to nuclear power? I don't, and I've got, if you compared my brain to his, I've got a healthy brain. His is off the charts so ill, but we allow him. If he had a physical illness that was completely debilitating, you probably wouldn't be allowed to be doing what he's doing. Yeah, yeah, I'm interested into the retraining and recovery aspect,

but before that, how did you get interested in this topic? Well, that was kind of a convergence. my eight-year-old went through a battery of tests for a learning, it's a suspected learning disability. So what he was doing is he's this, like he'd never heard anybody verbally in your life, no more stuff, just crazy knowledge.

But when he would go to write a test, and he could read out loud perfectly as well. But then when he'd go to write the test on, you know, the grade three book, he would make up all the answers. It was like he'd never read it. So the grade three teacher. But he'd still answer it and make them up?

Yeah, he would just make stuff up. Oh, I like this kid. whole new answers yeah so he like as if it was his own story yeah so he um so we took him in we educational psychologist did a full assessment and you know i was teaching at the time i knew the educational psychologist i've dealt with lots of kids that have learned i don't like to say disability learning exceptionalities and they've gotten the accommodations they need and their family he'll sleep great bright great kids anyway she she pulled me aside and said you know this is really bad like we rarely see anything like this.

She said he's off the charts genius for verbal, and he's less than 1% chance to retain any visual information. What a weird combination. Well, learning disabilities, you have to have the weird combination. You can't be just like a kind of borderline not great at everything, or that's just like, well, it's who you are. It's okay. But for learning disability designation,

you have to show that kind of discrepancy. Like dysgraphia, I'll give you as another example. my other son has that. And with dysgraphia, you just have this amazing brain full of information, but you can't translate it into language on the page. So you need a computer and you need extra time and usually non-distraction and then you can show your stuff. And that would be an accommodation. But with Angus, it was so bad. So it just so happened. There was this new school and the woman was using neuroscientific principles. And they weren't teaching school. So it wasn't like, oh, do a post- or with gorillas on it and learn about the forest.

It wasn't that kind of school. It was, you're going to sit in a chair all day and do cognitive rewiring. So we've never seen anything like this. So one of the exercises that's really well known is they have a series on the clock of computers. And the computers start with two hands. And so it has to do with like navigational,

spatial, relational type of aspect of the brain. And then it increases up to six hands. And you can't succeed. Like it's not like the teacher gives you an A or a B. It's been timed by the computer. So you can't advance until you strengthen your brain to the particular, you know, height of what you're expected to do. So it's very, very different from what school is like. How did your children take to that?

Do they enjoy that? Well, just Angus went. Montgomery was fine. Okay. through and actually, you know, strengthen the neural network. And about three months in, he turned to me, you know, we're in the mom's minivan. And he said, yeah, I just don't know why you had me in that other school. I couldn't learn anything.

I was like, hmm. So he went for four years. He came out. He was tested by the same educational psychologist. She said, yeah, he doesn't have a learning disability anymore. I've never seen anything like this. So he actually rewired, reprogrammed his brain, whatever phraseology would be correct. Both are perfect.

completely rewired is usually the I mean that's what I'm trying to argue in my book we can do as a society we can rewire our brains so that we haven't created the conditions so that our kids want to kill themselves we can do that we can rewire brains so that when veterans come back they all choose the path of reintegration and and refinding their purpose we can do that we just aren't right now so yeah the brain it's the most amazing thing it has neuroplasticity it has brain plasticity that means from the moment you're born until the moment you die, you can change your brain. And it's a matter of your environment and what you practice. So if you practice autocracy where you believe in your own lives, where you kill people and they disagree with you, you're going to find that your brain

actually becomes a bit of a, it's just, as you say, a bubble. It's not going to be a healthy, interacting, socially, emotionally engaged brain that makes wise decisions and things beyond selfhood and ego and narcissism, right? It's going to be just a mess. And you'll be able to see that on a brain scan. But what we want, the rest of us in society, is to try and have the strongest brains, the most high performing brains.

And to achieve that, you also need brains that are very empathic, like socially, emotionally connected. That's how humans survive. Yeah. Is there, what about if you sustain injury to the brain? Does that interrupt the ability of this neuroplasticity? And I'm specifically asking that.

I'm thinking more from the ballistic athlete perspective, football, head-to-head, you know, concussive strikes or overseas. You know, proximity to explosive blast waves, the TBI types. I mean, it's legitimately doing damage inside of the brain. Does that impact its ability to rewire it? It probably makes it challenging. I mean, it's not in, nothing with the brain, just like with the body, it's not an easy fix. So you have to think rehabilitation. and it takes a lot of time

and it takes a lot of effort and you have to be able to push through the really bad days when you feel like if you've had a stroke you'll never speak again it's like that. You have to have that belief in self and belief in the methodology to get to that place and it's really really hard but we know people who've had strokes

and their brain is visibly very very damaged they can walk again, they can talk again they can speak again I know a professional hockey player who went into the boards and it broke his neck and he was told that he would never, he was a quadriplegic, and he's now skating. So it's really very much up to what we choose to do, and I don't want to say that sounding like, oh, if you can't do it, then it's on you. I don't mean that, because brains are unique.

Some people can repair their brain, and God knows it's worth a dry, some people can't, perhaps. But I asked Michael Mersenek, the neuroscientists, a brilliant neuroscientist who wrote the forward to my book, and I was asking him specifically about concussions and he said that what he thinks and what his colleagues think and he's involved with a great international community he said what happens is and this okay I'm going to go back to something else really important after this just remind me he said what happens in a concussion

they're thinking now is that there's a breach between the blood brain barrier in a particular like where the blow occurs and the blood flows into the brain and it shouldn't be there And the brain all of a sudden goes, okay, they've got an intruder, shut down everything. So let's find out what this is. This is a crisis. And so it takes all of its power, and it goes straight to that spot. So you can imagine a football player on the field, you go over to him, well, memories offline.

You get him up and balances offline. He doesn't know what time it is. That's offline. And Michael argues it's because the brain has been invaded and it's trying to figure that out. and that's its priority. And the brain does this a lot. It does it with bullying. So if your three kids are in school

and they are targeted by bullies or they themselves are bullying, then they're not able to be as creative. They're not able to problem solve. Their memory is not working very well because they're putting all their resources and energy into this destructive behavior. And that's very much in the part of the brain

that's involved with kind of trauma. It's really your stress response part of your brain. And it's not the, part of the brain that's, and again this is artificial, but it's not the part of the brain that's really engaged in learning and remembering and reading a book and feeling empathic connection to what you're reading. All that stuff is, you know, it's getting to push to the side while the energy is going into this stress response, high cortisol, adrenaline pumping, like super destructive for brain and body long term.

You said you're going to go back to something super important. Yeah, I wanted to talk about how, when you listen to Michael talk about suicide. It can be quite similar, like suicidal ideation as we began with. It can be quite similar to this, the brain's reaction to concussion. So he said, like, I asked him because I have a personal reason, I was like, what's going on in the suicidal brain? And how come they're not doing an EEG? When you're getting the signs that someone's, there's something wrong with their brain, why don't they look at it? And why don't they talk to the person from that level, you know? And he said, well, what's happening with the suicidal brain is,

it can't answer the question. And the brain is, your heart is to pump blood through your body. Your lungs are for the breathing in and out. Your brain is a meaning maker. That's what it does. It makes meaning of reality on one level. I mean, the brain does lots of things,

but it's big job. I mean, the heart does lots of things, and so do the lungs. But the big job of the brain is to make meaning of reality and manage our body budget. So the brain has somehow come up against such a terrible impasse that it can't answer the question. And I actually wanted to ask you about that. Like give me an example from your world, veteran comes back home.

What are the questions that the veteran cannot answer that makes it start to, its brain start to react, his or her brain start to react in such terrible ways? God, I wish I could give you an answer. But the only person that could give you an answer would be somebody who has strogan with that. But what I will say, and this is totally anecdotally through my own experience, I have no doubt to support it, but if the friends that I do know are the people that I do know peripherally from that world who made the choice to end their life, whether it be after their death and they studied their brain, if there was brain left, depending on the mechanism they

choose to or chose to end their life, or in conversations that others have with them leading up to it, I would say that there is a link between the dance. to the brain itself and that decision, but I don't know what it is and I don't know at what level it is. And I don't know what questions they may be balancing up against. Because it's truly, that's the only way you get an answer for that is if you could talk to somebody that was battling with it. I've never personally had suicidal ideations or bounced up against a question like that. I've had people that I've never thought in a million years would make that choice and did. Okay, that will give me a really good example. That's perfect. That person who is acting as if they're full of joy and is laughing and is fun and is engaged and is totally connected to you, not only his friends but also his family and loves his work, that is the person that should worry you because oftentimes the question is they divide it. And the question they can't answer is, who am I?

Am I this persona that I'm using out in the world because my community tells me this is how to behave that I should be thankful and I should be loving and I should be connected. I should be so glad that I'm still alive and to squander that life. And there's all kinds of heavy duty social cultural apparatus to I shouldn't even show weakness, let alone take my own life, right? I got to be tough. I can't. It's a stigma.

It's going to show that I'm crazy or worst of all weak. I don't want to be weak. So I'm not going to even tell anyone. But then there's this persona, and this persona doesn't come up out of the blue. This person is as constructed, usually, as this one. So it's a divided self. I ask the question of the person, who are you? They can't answer.

I don't know. Am I this guy who would rather die than be here? And I, even though I love my family and I am thankful and all these things and I love my friends, but I don't want to be here. I can't stand it. The agony in my brain is such, whether it's from physical injury or the PTSD type injury of what I've seen, what I've done. I can't integrate that with this,

and that means I can't answer the question of who I am. And that would be an example. I hear that oftentimes with some substance abuse issues. It gets off the rails pretty fast. I've always said, too, I'm less worried about the person or the people that I have known who have reached out, or at least have, it's not even actually a matter of calling somebody and say, hey, I need help.

It was a matter in the times that I've been around it where it was just a comment, And it was oftentimes offhanded, like, fuck, I'm struggling. You know, like in the middle of a conversation versus the person who, I guess, appeared to be normal. Those are the ones that, the people that say something or verbalize or request for help or talk about that they're struggling. I'm far less concerned than the person who is, I guess, trying to answer that question in their head, but has all the errors as if nothing is wrong. Yeah, because that's a constructed self, which is very, very risky. when you can't talk to your family.

You know, you can't talk to your close friends. What's really interesting to me is that, you know, you picked up on that. There's a lot of people that hear, hey, I'm struggling, offhand comment, and they miss it. Or they don't actually feel that they have the capacity to hear it. So they almost pretend to themselves they didn't hear it. And they just keep moving on or clap on the shoulder, you'll be fine, man, don't worry about it, whatever. But the fact that you stopped, heard it, and then perhaps responded in some way to say, Let's talk about it.

That can save somebody. But what's really interesting to me is when I read about abuse or was researching abuse, I found that kids will come home, and this is something all parents should know. I wish someone had taught me. Parents will come home and, I mean, kids will come home and say, yeah, I hate those guys. Yeah. Or those guys are freaks. Or I'm the subject of relentless criticism.

And if you don't pick up on what's really being said, really your kid is coming home and saying, I'm being abused. But we don't teach our kids, just like we don't teach them about the brain, we don't teach them any vocabulary to understand and give an emotion concept to grooming or given a motion concept to adult bullying in whatever form it's coming at them or being bullied by peers. We don't teach them how to narrate it properly or understand it. And so their brain can't. So what they do is they try out kind of stalk phrases and then the adults, some adults, you might not have missed it. I missed it because my son came home and took my older son, Montgomery, he came home and said those things. I've had experience with my kids as well.

And what I bump up against is my, I don't know about you. I, you know, people like, oh, parenting is not that hard. It's like, first off, fuck you. I wish there was a book that laid out how you're supposed to parent because I have reached the knowledge and limitations of what I think is possible many, many times. And for people who think that your kids are young now when it's really hard, yes, it is really hard. Wait until they're teenagers and they're driving and they have social circles and they get introduced to sex and alcohol and drugs. And you're going to be limited by your understanding and ability to communicate. Like I've reached those, I've had these conversations with my kids.

I can, you know, my daughter would be a good example. I think there's been some times where she's definitely been on the receiving end. And again, nobody's an angel. I'm sure there's been plenty of times where she was on the giving end of, you know, this type of treatment. But absent telling, like, you know, be very careful to people you spend your time around with, always be your best advocate, always step up, you know, stick up for your friends, stand up for what you believe in. You don't need anybody else to provide value in your life. You know, the value that you feel of yourself as a person does need to be validated by others. Beyond that, absent going and kicking the shit out of a little kid, which I'm totally fine with doing.

doing for Claire. I don't know what that says about me. Like I'm out of tools. My toolbox as a parent is not super deep when it comes to that particular issue. Did you ever tell your kids to be careful about adult abuse? Wow, good question. I think I've always, I don't know if I've ever made a delineation when it comes to adult or child when it comes to like behavior. It doesn't, like, if it's somebody who's 50, or 35, if they're saying something that makes you uneasy or doing something that makes you uneasy, I mean, I talk to them about this often, listen to your gut. And I don't care if it's a kid or an

adult. Adults actually might be able to hide the behavior a little bit better, but you have to listen to that. So I think I've just talked about it more in broad terms, instead of just saying, kids, you do it this way and adults, you do it this way. It's always just been broader. Yeah, that's probably smart. Smart way to do it. Adults are way more manipulative. Way more. They have a whole talk about the textbook. They have a deeper toolbox when it comes to that. Yeah, they do. And they know how to play all of these different cards.

So one of the things they do, for example, that's really shocking to people is they will groom not only the victim. And this can be with emotional abuse or sexual abuse or physical, I guess, too. Physical and emotional are often mixed up. They will groom not only the target. And they're patient. It takes forever. Like, it drives me crazy. when I hear people talk about, oh, you know, sex abuse from an adult to a child is some sort of

impulsive thing. It's like, are you kidding? These guys are the most patient calculating individuals on the planet. There's no sexual impulse at all. It has nothing really to do about sex. But anyways, it's power. It's got to be power. It's, I think it's so similar to emotional and physical abuse that it has to be more of a, I mean, when you read about these pedophiles, and you interview them, they talk about how it's a competition. So when you go back to, power, it's like, yeah, they want to win. And even in a recent case, um, the girl was crying, this young girl, teenager saying, please don't, don't, please don't, please don't, please don't rape me essentially. And, uh, he said to her, are you kidding? I always win. So it's this kind of

desire to, to take someone else's worth their identity. And you know, that's what bullies do, right? A bully, I've been writing about this for psychology today and people think I'm just way out there, but if you think about it, your kids go to school and they're pretty whole and happy, right? They come from a whole thing so. Yeah, they have worth, right? They're interested in learning. They're really interested in their peer group. They want to have a career one day. They're trying to figure out of who they are. They're not getting out of the car in the morning and looking for a target. If a bully arrives at school and that's what's on their mind, that's not a happy kid. That's a kid that's coming from lack. They're coming from something that's left them empty and they need someone to

bolster whoever they are back to themselves. So, you know, and that's documented in research. Kids who bully are not coming from happy, stable places. In fact, I always use this statistic to kind of hit home for people. In the California prison system, so 70%, which is a huge system, 70% of inmates, that's 70, we're in foster care. Really? Yeah.

So it makes you go again. You know, the bully that comes to school that's getting into trouble, and those people do go down the path of criminal justice, right? They're troubled souls, right, from such an early age, and they're not getting the help they need. Hurt people, hurt people. Exactly. I say exactly that, but I say hurt brains, hurt.

Yeah. They hurt inside. They hurt other people, and they do damage, a lot of damage. But, yeah, I mean, with kids who are going to school as whole beings, they don't have that same trauma and drive. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me. When did you start researching bullying? Because you have your PhD.

You're deeply into this, obviously, at this point. When did it become something that you realize you really wanted to pursue? I never wanted to pursue it. It got thrown at me, really. Ballin doesn't really interest me, but I have done such a deep dive into it now. I honestly feel a major responsibility because of the things I've said already today.

Like, we're not moving forward. We're moving in a really negative direction. So what happened was I was teaching at a school. I'd been teaching there for seven years, eight years. What were you teaching? I taught English literature, and I ran the theater program. I directed youth theater, and I actually even ended up writing plays for them. What was your favorite play to direct?

Probably. Don't fucking say Peter Pan. No. The real Inspector Hound, which is a British play. You wouldn't know it. I guarantee Michael hasn't heard of it, but he's reaching over there to Google right now. That's exactly. He's some of a bitch.

It's an incredibly funny play, British funny play. And the kids loved it. It was just hysterically funny. Anyway, we had lots of fun doing theater. But, yeah, so I'm working away, and it's April and, or March, it would have been March. I get a call from a parent, and she, She says, I'm hearing, I'm getting text from my son. He says he can't take it anymore.

They're calling this, you know, fucking pussies and fucking embarrassments and fucking pathetic. And he's just had it. And I'm like, oh, wow, because they were away, the kids on a school thing. And she said, yeah, it's not the students, it's the teachers. What? Yeah. My colleagues. I mean, I have a typical response to that.

It's like, I'd like to have a parent-teacher conference where I kick the shit out of you. Yeah. My husband and I have had a lot of conversations where he says, yeah, I just need my hockey stick or a baseball bat, and I'm like, Tom, that's not going to solve anything. We can't do that.

That's not true. There's no data to show that it doesn't solve anything. Well, don't tell Tom that. I'm sure. I'm sure. The violence isn't the solution sometimes. Well, he certainly would have chosen that route if he could have.

Yeah. But unfortunately, I was a teacher at the school, so I was in a double bind. So the headmaster ultimately, there was a parent who was also a lawyer. Turns out she'd written a year ahead, like a year back, saying this is what's going on in these programs. Abuse is occurring. It has to be stopped. Was this a lot of teachers?

Are we talking about? No, no. The vast majority of teachers at this school are fantastic, as they are in most schools. Yeah. But it's always just a small number. number. That's what is at all? I mean, the same thing. That's why, you know, the doctors out there truly just, you know, religion, fill in the blank. There's outliers in every community for sure. Yeah. And it was absolutely outliers. This is a fantastic school. I loved teaching there. Absolutely

loved it. I loved the teachers. I love the students. It was an amazing place. Were they just being super negative to the kids? Well, I mean, now that I've researched it, because I'm trying to figure out, like, what is the answer to that question, it goes back to what we just said about the guys in the prison system, they come from unhappy homes is what the research would say. Now, you can't make that as a blanket statement. I mean, maybe one of them is a sociopath. But in general, when you become a narcissist, when you become a Machiavellian, when you become a psychopath, even, if you take a look at how you grew up, it gives a lot of answers as to why you feel so hollow, so tormented, so compulsive that you have to daily, day and day out put people down. Like, you look at,

it's really fascinating if you look at someone like Larry Sandusky, or no, Jeremy. Sandsky, Larry Nassar. Did you follow any of those stories? Harvey Weinstein? The big hashtag Me Too. Harvey Weinstein, yes, Larry Nassar. That one sounds familiar. I don't remember the... Gymnastics. Gymnastics is a doctor. Oh, yes, the athlete A. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So when I study those guys, so when I took a look at what they were doing, it's like a broken record. Harvey Weinstein is like he's in his own play. It's like what I was saying about Putin. He puts on the same bathroom. He probably puts on the same music. He invites the young actor. She comes to the same hotel. He's in his bathrobe, he asked her if she can give him a massage. I mean, it's like, Harvey, change it up a bit. Like, do you always have to do this for 30 years? The same thing. It's indicative of mental illness, right?

The person is in, it's like they're trapped in a script and they can't get out. It's obsessive, compulsive behaviors. They know they're going to destroy their family. They know ultimately they're going to wreck their career, but they cannot stop themselves. They're mentally ill. They're really mentally ill, but we don't get them the help they need. It should have been like, the first time Harvey does this, 21, 22, because he did it for 30 years. First time he does it, Harvey, come into my office. You're talented guy. You could go places. You're amazing. Off. You're off for six weeks. You're going to rehab. You cannot talk to people or treat women that way. Ever again. You're going to be monitored. And then you nip it in the bud. You fix his brain. Why don't we do that?

He was reported multiple times for those 30 years. And this is what I did. I reported ultimately. And so I learned what happens when you report. Everything they tell you is a lie. That's why I would never tell a kid to be an upstander. I think that's the dumbest thing you can tell a kid. What's an upstander? We say to children, oh, you should be an upstander. If you see bullying, go tell the teacher.

No kid is dumb enough to do that. That's why they don't do it. Exactly. I tell my kids, well, one, if you see somebody being bullied and you don't do anything about it, and I don't mean go see the teacher, I mean immediately address it right there. It's not a matter of me, upset but I have more of an issue with that first off I would never tolerate my kids bullying anybody but I would almost be more upset if they sat there in the

presence of it and didn't take action that's rare that's rare kids are told to go tell the teacher right teachers are not I mean they're not the end-all meal no they're not and so what happens in the adult world is similar to what happens in the kid world so here I am the teacher now and I the headmaster says to me, well, look, I need to hear directly from the students. I can't just, you know, the teachers were writing him email saying, oh, we're so sorry, we did this, we didn't

mean it, we're going to change. And then he said, the next email he sent me was like, oh, no, they deserve to be innocent until proven guilty. I need to hear directly from students that this is what happened. It can't be through a parent that received a text. So can you take testimonies? I'm like, oh,

okay. So the other... How old are these kids? 15, 16. Some of them are younger. 14, 15, 16, basically. It's putting them in a very tight spot. I know. So I said to them, you know, you can tell me what happened, if you want. The parents were alerted.

The other parent took testimonies as well. I took eight testimonies. Four from boys, four from girls. And then I said to them at the end, they talked for like two hours. They actually wanted so badly to talk about it. And I said to them, the headmaster has said that he's changing these teachers. So you can speak freely because they were teachers coaching basketball. And these kids are passionate athletes and they didn't want to lose their sport because they reported on them.

Reprecussions. Exactly. But the headmaster has said they're going to be replaced. You're free to speak. So they would talk for like two hours. Sometimes the parent was there, sometimes mostly not. And I would write it all down, type it up, send it someone an email and say, look, it's up to you now. You got the therapy of speaking about this, getting the truth out there.

You don't have to do anything with it. It belongs to you. but if you want to help that make positive change you could I could you allow me to send it to the headmaster well they all said

all eight of the ones I did said yes sent it off to the headmaster and then one key thing happened though during this time I interviewed four boys and they were describing really

they were describing a particular situation that happened over and over where one of the coaches would say to one of the boys he was always targeted, come over and stand, he would stop the play, come stand in front of me. So the kid would, everything would stop, all the boys had to watch, the kid would come over, and the coach would start screaming in his face, basically, saying, you know, what are you doing here? Do you even deserve to play?

Like, do you even like basketball? Basically rhetorical questions. And the boys described it as vicious. They said they wanted to stop it, but they couldn't because it was the teacher. And then the boy would ultimately, trying like back away, try and get away from the yelling in his face, and the teacher would grab him and hold him in for more. Finally, I'm writing this all down. I said, who was that? And then the kid goes, Monty's my son. Your son was the one on the receiving end? Oh, I'd have a real hard time receiving that information.

I had a really hard time receiving that information. A really hard time. Yeah. Yeah, so you want to know why I'm working on this? Had your son said anything to you about it? I hate those guys. They're freaks. I'm the subject of relentless criticism. And his father and I, we said, you're so lucky. Those guys know that you're talented. They know you're going to play college.

They wrote on your report card. You're the best player they've ever seen. They wrote and said that you're the top player they've seen in 100 years at that school. And that school is where Steve Nash randomly went for a year, but he went on to be Steve Nash. So what I want you to notice in that, and our son is talented. everybody knows that. But what they do is they groom the parents. They try to play on the parents

and make the parents think that they're looking out for their kid, that they've got an eye on the fact that the kid's a talented athlete, that they are 100% supporting that child's ability to ultimately play college, which was all a lie. They were trying to destroy him. Wow. How did that situation resolve itself? Well, you know, when you've got teachers calling kids fucking retards and fucking pussies, you know,

You figure that that's kind of like, he can't really keep working. You can't think that's probably a line that perhaps they have a foot across? Yeah. Yeah. But what actually happened is much more true to what I have found happens everywhere. So I've looked into this scenario and what happens all over the place, no matter where it is. It could be veterans. It can be in medical school.

It can be in the arts program or sports wherever. What happens is the whole system goes 180 degrees and you become the problem. Hmm. Yeah. So have you followed anything with hockey Canada recently? Of all the things on planet Earth that I know anything about, hockey is not one of them. Which is a really long-winded answer to say no. Okay.

It's just a great example. Why would you know about hockey Canada? But it's a great example because the whole national organization is blowing up right now. Okay, well, let's go a little closer to... Blowing up, like imploding? Imploding. They're imploding. Or like, they're super popular right now.

No, they're not, no. Okay. It's on the vernacular. Sorry. Because my daughter would be like, oh, it's blowing up. Like it's exploded. No, dad, it's super popular. Yeah, okay, no.

It's like, when the kids are like, that's sick. And you're like, oh, no, really? No, like, no, that means good. Yeah, it's good. Do you ever have to, like, sit down and Google things that your kids say after they... All the time. Yeah. I'll sit down and be like, ha, ha, ha, fuck.

They write that down and they know it's my phone. Me too. I have no idea what they're talking about. It's worse when you're a teacher. I taught teenagers forever, and they just used to laugh at how ignorant I was. But I'll give you an example closer to home. Do you know of someone in your political world where as soon as it's kind of exposed that they've done something really, really horrendous, they turn it around 180 degrees. They're like, this is a witch hunt.

I'm being attacked. I'm being victimized here. I need to protect myself. Where are my lawyers? This is heinous. How dare you? I think that's like the political playbook 101. It's true.

Everywhere. So in the school, same thing. So ultimately, the private school, because they'd been informed a year earlier, this is my guess anyways, they couldn't afford to hold the teachers too accountable because that meant they were negligent. Yeah. They allowed kids for an entire year, including my son, to be exposed to relentless, physical and emotional abuse. Like, when we heard all that from the kids, we went to the police. And we said, this is what has been happening to our son over and over and over again. what is that? Because we know it's assault. And the police officer went to Crown Council,

which is how you have to do it in Canada. And he said, he came back to us and he said, yeah, you know what they said? They said, if this was happening like in the workplace, you know, from a boss who had a lot of power to an employee or if it was happening in a bar where the person was, you know, yelling in their face and then grabbing and detaining, that's assault. But not when it's a teacher to a student. That's motivation. We were like, what? That's an interesting all day. Yeah, here's another one for you. if you saw, let's go back to your kids. If your kids witnessed two 14-year-old boys grab a kindergarten kid,

pull him down to the ground, and then a third one, hold him, and the third one beat his legs black and blue until he couldn't walk and had to go to hospital. Would your kids understand, and would you understand as a parent that that was bullying? Yes. Okay. Imagine this scenario, and what would you do if your kids saw it? This is a precedent-setting case from the 1970s in the U.S. Two teachers grabbed a 14-year-old boy, and two of them held him, and the third one beat him with a paddle until his legs were black and blue and he couldn't walk. Went to hospital, his parents sued.

And the judge ruled, and this is the precedent-setting case that allows 19 states in the U.S. to allow teachers and administrators to beat children with paddles still today. And independent schools, private schools, they can do whatever they want. They're not bound by any rules to do with corporal punishment. and 30% of kids in the U.S. go to hospital with injuries from this. So the judge ruled that the teachers had not done anything cruel and unusual, that there was a rule, in fact, there was a law in the books that said that two prison guards couldn't do that while a third prison guard beat the inmate, but it didn't apply to schoolchildren. It was discipline.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around that. Yeah. That's why I haven't stopped working on this because I feel like we have to press reset. And the only way I can get people to listen to me is by talking about neuroscience. If you talk about brain science, people pay attention. And they start to say, okay, there maybe is a different way. If we knew more about our brains, if we understood that all forms of bullying and abuse hurt our brains, we could maybe change. Did the teachers end up getting fired at some point?

No, absolutely not. Do you have a teacher's union in Canada? this is a private school I had an issue with one of I'll keep it broad one of my kids teachers and it was very interesting to watch how the school district managed the issue female teacher which I think a lot of people wouldn't suspect oh it's a it's a female like what could they possibly do that would be damaging to the kids but imagine a situation where a teacher wants to read to the kids So she relaxes in a reclining chair while she has children massage her while she's reading for in-school dollars.

And this is reported by another teacher, and they pull the teacher out of the classroom for a short period of time and do not notify the parents. And then they try to put the teacher back into the classroom. And at this point, the teacher gets notified. And I hear about this. And it became an issue rapidly. Like I was standing talking in front of the news, going to a kid. council meetings where they were trying to tell me I had a certain amount of time a lot and I'm like yeah that's a funny story I let you go fuck yourself I'm going to sit here and

talk to you as long as I want to um the power of the teachers union was unbelievable and they tried to handle it very very quietly without notifying the parents I was shocked at what it was a very eye-opening experience yeah and that's why I asked if they had a teacher's unit or because I think what happened first is they moved the teacher before she lied to But I do believe that in the end, I forget what exactly it is. Her certificate or qualification, whatever. I do believe that she was eventually terminated, but it took a long time. Yeah, that's my experience, too.

My experience is, in fact, I'm working with a group right now. We have a big media event coming up near the end of October. And it's to try and get the government to change the rules on teachers that are doing stuff like that, because there's a lot of it. And it's unbelievably hard to fight the unions. So, yeah, I was an abuse victim myself. And this is one of the things that amazes me. So I was an abuse victim in the 1980s, and nothing's changed since that time.

Not a single thing. So think of the internet. Think of what has changed in our world since 1980, except for the fact that we're dealing with nuclear power threats from Russia again. Other than that, everything's changed, but not child protection and not laws. Like my dream is to have an institutional complicity law. Union, you want to move that teacher and something happens like this again? It's up to you now.

You defend yourself. You've got criminal charges. The private school where I was teaching, you want to cover this stuff up. You covered it up for a year and didn't inform parents that their kids were going to be decimated by these teachers. And you can just walk away. The best part of the whole experience for me was I took the school headmaster and chaplain and these figures. They are duty bound by law to run. report that teachers are behaving this way and exactly what discipline was meted out to them.

But it's even bigger than that. These teachers have to go to the teacher regulation branch in British Columbia and be openly dealt with. And I phoned them at the beginning. I said, look, I'm a teacher. I don't think these guys are going to report. Does that mean I have to report? And they said, yes, you do, but you can give the administrators time to deal with the discipline. So they were acting, think about the split personality again, they were acting up front. And with me and the other parents, there was like 30, 40 parents by now, they were acting as if they were going to protect the kids, do the right thing, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And of course they weren't. So they set the whole thing up so that the kids ended up having to go back to school. My son in grade 12, basically with the headmaster had breached confidentiality, said that my son was one of the boys that came forward, and then basically published a document, just a piece of garbage, really. It can't even call it a document. It was a piece of garbage that tried to assert,

that the kids had been telling nasty lies, which was a quote from another student. So they had to go back to school kind of with the headmaster's office saying they were liars, on top of everything. Yes, it's a terrible precedent. So I at that point then had to report to the teacher regulation branch because they didn't report. And I had legal duty. So I wasn't going to sacrifice my own teacher's certificate. So I sent all the material in.

And then I watched them do this unbelievable, like the whole thing was fixed, manipulated. it was incredible. They have very stringent rules. You are not allowed to behave that way as a teacher at all, ever. There's no circumstance for a single time for that to happen, let alone for relentless. We had, there was a second year university student down to grade 10 saying, yeah, exactly what they had experienced. So, um, the, ultimately we got the report from the teacher regulation after about, it was about two years. He decided to report on this. And his report said that it was the student's fault for listening to the teacher's obscenities. They shouldn't have listened. I was like, how does that work? Like, are you not supposed to listen to the teacher? Like, do you not listen when he calls you a fucking pussy? But you're supposed to listen when he's teaching you. That would make a three-pointer?

Yeah. How does that work? And then the other thing he said was it was the fault of the students because they're too sensitive. Was it a very successful basketball team? It could have been. They were... I'm just curious because I've noticed that results on the field sometimes that outlies or overweighs.

some of that stuff. Yeah, I had an interesting experience with a baseball coach. Yes, in high school too. So, yeah. No, you know, this, these guys didn't want to win at all. In fact, my my husband was watching them in a tournament. They were playing in the provincial tournament. And he phoned me and he just sounded sick. And I was like, what? And he said, they don't want to win. I'm like, what, what do you mean? How can they not want to win? He goes, they're not playing to win. And what they would do is bench their best players because it was all about humiliating the other boys. One, the coach's son, just to give you a snap. of what it was like to play on this team. The coach's son was crying and he kept him out for 15

minutes in front of 500 spectators because he couldn't hit a basket, couldn't score, couldn't do anything, absolutely humiliating beyond belief. And he's outright crying. The other team is going, get that kid off the court, but his own father is keeping him out. It was just, honestly, just it was, as parents said, it was a mind fuck. Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah, terrible. So when did you shift and start looking at adults when it comes to bullying? That's the only thing I ever looked at. I don't, I've never looked at kids. It doesn't, I just don't think we can get anywhere with it. I looked at adults because these were adults, who I personally knew, who were mistreating kids in this way, and you wouldn't have guessed

in a million years. Every time you saw them, they were happy, funny, nice, they're smart, they've got their own families. They're the perfect teachers. It's just that behind closed doors, they have a different persona. And that's what I was talking about when you can't answer the question, you start to behave in very degraded ways. Your brain is not functioning well. You are obsessively compulsively hurting kids saying the same words year after year after year. You've got this whole system where you put some kids up on a pedestal, the beneficiaries, and they'll defend you to the ends of the earth when you get reported on and then you've got your targets and you try to destroy them. And that's really what you're doing. You're not even coaching. You're not teaching. You're

not being yourself. It's awful. I feel sorry for them. I mean, it's a vicious cycle that lasts for a really long time. Yeah. Yeah, the Jackal and Hyatt, the public face with the private persona being totally different, especially with what you said, the beneficiaries, when you have, like, NASA would be a good example. I think he's probably the only one who didn't have a beneficiary. I think of just about every single person, probably because he had abused so many women came out against him. But yeah, publicly, right, he was the face of medicine for USA Gymnastics.

Cool. And he talked about so many reports. He was completely propped up. That was super fucked up. He was propped up by all of those administrators. And that's typical. So my administrators that propped up these guys, that's textbook. You know, and if you want to think about politics

and about how people don't call people out on behaviors that are appalling, those are your beneficiaries. They're not going to ruin their chances to be in the limelight and have the power, right? Yeah. That's human nature. So where did you start when you were? Did you ever have an aspiration to read a book when you were younger or this basically kind of fell into your lap and you felt like you had to? No, I've always been a writer.

My first book was my dissertation. I ultimately rewrote it into a book and that was about, I was looking at what makes the difference between a person who just becomes a reader of culture and just does what the culture tells them versus someone who becomes a writer of culture who thinks differently, who sort of steps outside of the box and asks, could there be something different? So in a weird way, that book leads to this, but it was very literary, very academic, like, very boring, not for the general reader. And then my next book, I was looking at war, actually, and I was looking at how I was trying to figure out the correlation or the connection between raising children. Like, how did you raise children to become the canon fodder of World War I? Like, how did that dynamic happen that, you know, families were proud to send their boys off to war, and they were just cannon fodder, many of them? And how did World War I erupt in the way that it did? I was really fascinated by that.

But I was looking again at the writers. What were the writers saying? And what I found out was the word infantry in Latin, so is infari, meaning non-speaker. And it's the same word that they used to use for children in the nursery. So there was, yeah, the infari, the non-speakers. Is that where infirmary comes from? I don't know what firm... What do they call it where the kids are?

Isn't that the infirmary? They call it in... infantry back in the day. Yeah, I mean, at the hospital. Infirmary is the hospital, but it's not nursery. You're thinking nursery. Yeah. And in England, they did talk a lot about the nursery, too, but they also called it the

infantry. And what I did find was, yes, indeed. The way children were raised was correlated with how war could ever happen like that on that scale in the first place. It was, it hinged on how children were treated. And so that was really interesting. That lends itself to this book as well. And then my next book I wrote all about what happened at the school.

it's called teaching bullies. And I tried to figure out, like, if we put what I was being told into the context of law, education, psychology, psychiatry, et cetera, neuroscience, what would, how would things change? So that book was about to be published, and then the publisher pulled and said, we're going to get sued. We can't do it. So we just created a press and published it ourselves. We never got sued. I have so much evidence. They really are not going to sue me.

I'm not worried. And then this book happened because. I went to another private school. I resigned in protest, went to another private school, and just put my head down, wanted to do my work, teach. I was learning a new program. Kids were fabulous, same thing as before. Colleagues were fabulous, same thing as before.

And I just wanted to walk away. Like, I was exhausted and done and had had it. And a national news story came out about what happened at this school and the government cover-up. And that was in national news on TV, investigative reporter show, and then front page at the Toronto Star. And so the kids were kind of at the new school saying, wow, we can't believe you did that. That was, it was amazing that you spoke up for kids and defended them and that they have rights and so on.

And one girl in particular really was like, thank you for doing that. That means a lot. I was like, oh, okay. So I was teaching that girl in grade 11. So then in my third year at the school, that same girl came up to me. It was October 1st, 2015. And she said, I really need to talk to you. I was like, I was just going to say, there's a very thing.

reasons she made that comment to you years before yeah so she said I really need to talk to you and you can tell with kids you know you'd know this with your own kids you can tell when there's something wrong yeah or when they need to tell you so I know I'm about to be in trouble I'm going to choose the most creative language to land this that will net me with the lightest punishment but yeah there's there's a huge difference between like hey dad can I have 20 bucks and like so hey what are you doing do you have a few minutes a talk yeah what's up It was sadly one of those. So I walked her show outside, so it was private.

Before you tell me this, did you, when she made that first comment to you, did it hit your radar at all in the years before? Did there was something wrong? Just the way that she phrased it. Because the way, when you described, in my own life, I've never done anything like you have done when it comes to exposing something like that. but as soon as you describe the impact that it had on her, the first thing I thought on my head was

there's obviously a reason why it meant so much, but that's another one of those things where it's easy. You can hear them say it, but you may not necessarily, it's much like somebody who passively in a conversation, it's like, fuck, I'm not doing that well. That's why I was just curious. I didn't mean you interrupted you.

I was just curious if it hits your radar at all, that first comment. You know, this is, I would argue, this is the difference between someone who has your background and experience and regular people, civilians, because you can't afford not to miss things like that. It's life and death, whereas the rest of us are kind of lazy. We are not at that heightened state.

You take it for granted because that's how you work. But we don't. We don't have to have that. You know, I must say, listen, because I listened to some, I wanted to listen specifically to some of your podcast before coming on and get a feel for the guests. And I was really... This one did you pick.

I listened to Sarah Wilkinson. Yeah. And it really made a huge impression. on me. On the one hand, one of the things I found fascinating was how you could tell how much she was still in love with her husband. She's just illuminated by that love. Like the look on her face when she talked about him really made it like it just was gut-wrenching for me. And then I looked at all the ways and the ways we civilians miss things. Like this and she could go back, you know, hindsight's 20-20. You can always see it when you look back when you're a civilian. But you're, but you're,

You can't afford to miss it when your life is on the line. So I think you have a heightened sense for that. I'm ashamed to say, I did not pick up on that. I didn't. I missed it. The command that he was working at and his coworkers missed it, though, too. Oh, all. So you know what I'm saying?

I don't know if we necessarily have an attuned radar to it. I have the friends I have who have killed himself, I didn't see it coming either. You know, who picked up on it with him was with Chad Wilkinson with his kids. Yes. And you know what's fascinating about what he was doing. and he couldn't even know it himself or say it. It's that thing that Mersenik talks about when the brain can't answer the question

that starts to degrade all systems. So you start to do odd things. So he's on the landing. And he's looking up. And you said, that's weird. Why would you be on the landing? Yeah, it's just abnormal behavior. Yeah, so one of those things we need to do

with suicide is start watching for abnormal behavior because the person themselves can't even answer the question. So we have to recognize that that's the state they're in. You know, there's something wrong. And she said to him at one point, where are you, she either said, where are you going or what are you doing? And he said, I don't know. That's not being able to answer the question again. So I don't know.

I want to put something together on this where, you know, people get educated that the brain is falling apart. And I said to Merzeneck, I said, is it accurate to say that the brain that's suicidal is like a sped up Alzheimer's? I thought he was going to say, don't, you're crazy. He said, absolutely. And people with Alzheimer's do weird things. They will take the toaster and put it in the fridge. Right? Their brain is degrading. Is that abnormal?

That's currently what my toast is. I'm sorry to hear that. Michael is yours. Yeah. I mean, I've put a toaster in some weird spots because I wasn't thinking about it. I'm like, oh, dishwasher and toaster don't mix. I'd take that out of there.

I once put the electric kettle onto the gas burning stove and turn it on, sorry to say, and wrecked the stove and the kettle. That's a boss move. for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because you didn't just wreck one, you wrecked them both. I can deeply appreciate that. I just wasn't thinking, right? And accelerated Alzheimer's. You know what's fascinating to me is that in the year 22, how little we actually know about the brain. We know a ton. We know a ton, but we don't know. Yeah. Okay, let's put it this way. The neuroscientists know so much about the brain, it's not even funny. It's not reaching us.

What percentage do you think they know? Huge. 50% about the human brain? A lot. I'm going to say they know, mind you, I have a deep background of medicine here. So this is probably very accurate. I think they know 11% about the brain. They would probably agree with you. You know, one of the things that I try to get my reader to pay attention to, especially if they're getting, like especially if they're a kid and they're getting attacked, never forget, your brain has 86 billion neurons. That's 86 billion brain cells. And the only thing that neuroscientists can come up to create an analogy for that is the galaxy. That's how big your brain. brain is it's galaxy size. So I think when you say 11% you're probably right, but they do know

so much that we could be using. But anyway, my student comes up to me, I got to talk to you, I go outside, she says to me, I'm being sexually harassed by a teacher. And honestly, I lived with her and I thought, well, don't tell me, because I don't want to know. I don't want to have any part of it. I know what the system is going to do. It's going to chew you up and spit you out. It's corrupt. Don't go to the teacher regulation branch. I don't trust them. They would ruin someone like you, you're vulnerable, you've got mental health issues, you're from another country, she's an international student from China. I'm like, you are the perfect victim for them. I will not send you there. I will have nothing to do with it. And so she had been in the home state

program with the director of the school, so principal of the school and his wife, and they had adult children that had grown up, I moved away, and there was another boy that had stayed there as well. And she was living with her dad who would come from China for the final year. The director of the school had told us at the end of the last year, she's, you know, her mental health is not stable. We cannot keep her in our home. She's going to, if she's going to stay at the school, her dad has to come. So her dad came. So she's living with her dad. So I said to her, and this, this, the principal is my champion. He's the person that hired me when I'm a whistleblower. He's just a wonderful person. Any trouble I had, he treated my son, Angus so well at school. I just knew he was safe. So I said,

look, let's go, you know, and talk to the principal. He'll know what to do. We can. We can. We trust him because she was freaking out. She was going, I can't tell. I don't want him to get in trouble. I just want this to be over. I can't hack it anymore. I send me all these texts and I won't, I can't get him to stop. And she goes, you can't tell anyone, you can't tell anyone. I said, okay, let's just go and talk to the principal. It is the principal. I was just going to say that. See, that's the difference between you and me. As soon as you said that the principal came out and was saying she can't stay in the house anymore because she has mental health issues, it's laying the foundation to put things back on her.

And what, that's, he's just an accomplished predator. There's all it is. He's laying that he is the perfect public facade. As soon as you said that, I'm like, it's the fucking principal. Well, you know, the whole thing's been covered up. Still? Yeah. The ministry, so the TRB ultimately, um, they, they said that they were not notified by the

school. The police say that's a lie. Um, they, they say they were never informed and that it was my fault that I should have directly informed them. But I had reported everything to the ombudsperson's office that they were completely corrupt and said, I'm not going to... I said to the ombus person's office, like, you guys got to get your job done, because I'm not sending this girl into that place. It's dangerous. It's like sending a prisoner into a jail where they're going to get beaten. I'm like, I'm not doing it. And so they put me under investigation.

But they've covered up the principal, who had a full police investigation. Whatever he did, all covered up. Whatever he did, he was fired. The school said to everyone publicly, he was retired. early and you know stress leave sick leave all kinds of stuff like that and they they celebrated him right in front of her at graduation and then the she went off to university and I thought she was safe there too because I don't pick up on these things like you do she went off to school and I'm like now huge she's on the main land she's safe she's at university she's on the synchronized swim team she's

a brilliant scientist she's going to just never look back at this this horrible experience but he pursued her at university Really? I call the police. I'm like, how the hell does he have access to her? How come there's no restrictions on him? How come there's no restrictions on his teaching certificate? Did they do anything about him?

The police said, we can't do anything about it. They wouldn't let us charge him. They wanted to do restorative justice. Well, one, I feel like it's not his first victim. Probably not. It would be my first. Yes. It's never the first victim. Forget this stat.

God, was it Paul Sharp who was telling me this? It might have been. For the sake of this, we'll say, it's my buddy Paul Sharp. It was worked in law enforcement for a long time. But I think the stat was when it comes to specifically these type of predators, it's usually like the 10th or 11th victim that they actually get caught on. And it's whether because they develop like there's kind of like laissez-faire attitude about what they're doing or they just, they've been doing this for so long.

But it's generally, obviously speaking broadly, generally not the first victim that comes forward. Well, that's the same with the other teachers. When you're a social predator, you do the same thing year after year after year. So you can get a kid in second year university going, yeah, that's exactly what it was like. And then a kid in grade 10 going, yeah, same thing's happening, right? They don't stop. They never get healthy unless they actually go off to rehab and are properly, they could be rehabilitated,

especially if you caught them the first time. Do you think that everybody can be rehabilitated? No. I was going to say there's some crazy fuckers out there. Yeah, no, they can't. I always use Jeffrey Delmer. an example. I think he, yeah. I also just watch the neck folks show on him, which I actually

really don't recommend. He liked to kill one, eat people. There you go, I've done, that's the documentary people. It's actually not a documentary. It's what do they call it where somebody, an actor is portraying it and they're hitting kind of like the highlights. Docu-dram. He killed an eight people.

Did he come from abuse? Did they go into his childhood? Like, was he an abuse victim, or he just was crazy? Man, and this is one where it's hard to say in that type of program because it wasn't a strict documentary. You know, I don't know what they put in there and what they and what they chose to leave out. I don't remember it being, depending on what people's threshold of abuse may be, I think probably perhaps, but also, I also think there's some cracked eggs red out of the cartons sometimes.

Yeah. And if you're going to, like, kill and eat people, I think you might be a crack egg. Yeah. No, definitely. One of the things I found so interesting was, like, when you use brain scans to look at these kinds of people, so if you and I saw a picture of a kid getting punched in the face by an adult, let's say, or another kid, it would activate an emotional response, right? It would activate empathy.

We would relate to what it would feel like to be punched in the face. We'd feel horrible. We'd have an impulse to act, be compassionate, whatever. Stop the situation, save both kids, or whatever. whatever. If you are a sociopath, no, sorry, not sociopath, if you are a psychopath, and that could be narcissist Machiavellian depending on all the different things, and you've got a brain scan on, your brain doesn't even go to the emotional part of the brain. You have no emotions. Just this flat line? No, it goes to cognitive linguistic.

The fuck does that mean? It means the part of the brain that's really good at covering up, that really is really good at putting the Dr. Jekyll forward to cover up. That's how I interpreted it. I mean, that's not what the neuroscientist said, but that's what I went. I went, course. Because you are thinking all the time about how are you going to manipulate? How are you going to get what you need out of the situation? Whatever type of abuse you're doing, you're covering it up. It's until those doors close and the massage chair comes out and the teacher reclines, it's all kept hidden. You're never doing it in front of other people. That's why when the teacher said about what they were doing the kids at my son's school, they were like, oh, we didn't know what was hurting them. I was like, we're really. really, then why didn't you do it ever in front of adults? Why were their parents not allowed to be at practices?

Why did you tell parents not to stay in the same hotel as you when you were traveling? What? Yeah. I'm sorry, they didn't realize that was a red flag right there or that parents can't come to practice. Hello, that's like, those are red flags. I know. But you know what? When you're in a school.

Flags don't make that noise, by the way. Those are red flags. They're going. Flags don't go, pshsh, yeah, no, exactly. No, when you're in the cults, you normalize everything. And you want so badly to belong to the cults. and everybody else acts as if it's normal. You don't want to be the one going, hey, I think this is weird.

What do you guys think? It really gets weird. I prefer to be that person raging. Like, if I heard from any of my kids, you know, practice is off limits to the parents. I'm like, no, I need a meeting with the coach right now. It's just weird. Gymnastics Canada, this is just blowing up right now. The fact that parents are not allowed to get, and it's described as a cultural cruelty.

These little girls. And what they do with them is so sick, they can't have any parents around. yeah it's blowing up or is that the way imploding imploding I know what you mean now you say blowing up so good think old school yeah we have the foundational vernacular laid out god yeah oh I just wish I could get my hands on some of these people but I don't know what that says about me um okay back to the book so when did you realize

that you were going to write this well my student when I found out about the fact that the teacher was still like principal was messing with her brain I was really, really upset because I was receiving email after email from her talking about how mentally ill she was, how suicidal she was, how she couldn't stop crying, she was so full of self-loathing, she was so guilty for ruining his life, she hated

herself. She was hell guilty for ruining his life. Absolutely. By the time the system was done with her, of course she, this is the question she couldn't answer. By the time they were done with her, it was like, am I the perpetrator or am I the victim? A lot of that comes from him working on her though, too. That's a lot of conditioning.

Absolutely. And, well, he would say to don't let anyone see my tax or I'll lose my job, which of course is what he did. The special victim's police officer involved in all this, she stepped down after this. Done, done, done. It's just the system in where I live is so broken. Anyway, so she, I kept trying, I wrote to the police, I said, look, this is how I'm answering her. I'm not a therapist. I'm just trying to help this kid. I don't really have the qualifications. Is this okay what I'm saying? Police wrote back and said, you have to keep writing, what you're saying is perfect.

Like she needs the support. So it was summertime. I go off for summer. She writes me, can you have tea? I'm like, no, I'm away for summer. I'm sorry. And then I didn't hear anything. And always when I didn't hear from her, it was good.

It meant she was happy at school. When she needed me, she needed kind of mom figure. She'd write me. So it's quiet. I'm like, great. She's finally, you know, second year university. It's all good. And I get a letter from another student of mine who's close to her,

who knows how much I tried to help her, just saying, our, I won't say her name publicly, took her life. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. That's rough. So that's when I started writing the book. After I got over the, I wrote this book for my son. I wrote this book for all the students that were bullied at that school.

I wrote it for her. I wrote it for all kids who don't have the vocabulary. They don't know what's being done to them. They have no idea that their brain is being systemically damaged. Their parents don't know. The teachers, maybe even doing it, don't know. know, the coaches don't know, whatever. It's getting hurt and it needs to be fixed. I feel like deep down, and again, this is based my robust experience in the medical field.

I'm also a psychiatrist in my off time, but I feel like people who are hurting others at some level, they know it. I don't think you can hurt people and be truly oblivious to it. You maybe choose not to pay attention or you could like push that away, but I just feel like a, like a coach treating a kid like that, which is what they are. Like, can you possibly lay in bed at night and think back? Like, fuck yeah, I nailed that. Did really good job. Really mentoring and just bringing up the next generation here.

I don't think you can. I don't think in the quiet moments with yourself, you can really sit there and feel like you're doing the right thing. Now, that may not stop you from continuing to do the wrong thing, but I feel like they know it somewhere. So go back to the brain and what happens to the brain that has lost its capacity to feel empathy. And it's starting to process its reality through language and cognition. It's not actually staying up at night feeling anything.

It's not feeling anything. It's lost empathy. And it even loses empathy with its own child. So imagine this scenario. I'm studying the British school system, which has been just like everywhere else in the world, the most elite British schools are so rife with abuse that it's just sickening to read.

We're talking about current or historically? Or both? I don't know. They're really trying to clean up. Very, very clear historically. Like same time in 70s, 80s kind of thing. And all those victims have come forward now. Well, not all of them, but 300, 400,

there's so many victims, it's unbelievable. So they're trying rapidly to change their system. But what I found fascinating was, in reading about this, parents would know that a school has a known pedophile and all kinds of emotional and physical abuse and cover up of all that's going on. But it was the school they went to, let's say they went to Eaton, they would send their own kid into that same school. How could you do that? Because they don't have any more, they've lost their empathy. They don't feel empathy for their kid. They're the parent that thinks their kid should represent their own ego. You know those parents where the kid needs to do

X, Y, and Z to make the parent look good. And it's not really, about, you know, you can't relate to that because you love your kids for who they are, but that's because you still have empathy in your brain. Someone who's had their empathy or eroded is a mess. How do you have it eroded? That is from bullying and abuse. Okay.

So that's my whole thing is, you know, if we got these people rehab, rather than just letting their brains go to hell in a handbasket, we could save them. What does the rehab look like? Like you say somebody who has lost their empathy, being on the receiving end of bullying and abuse, what's the path back for them?

So the first thing is don't cover up for what they're doing because you're just empowering them to do worse and more. Don't cover up for the person who has lost the empathy. Yeah. Don't cover up for the abuser. Like, they have to be held radically accountable from the moment it's discovered. Like completely accountable, full consequences. Like skinned with a potato pillor? Pretty much.

Pretty much, yeah. Metaphorically or literally? Because I know people. No. Let's say metaphorically. Okay. Then you get to say to them, okay. And I have a little thing that I believe to.

If you self-identify, then you don't have to have the radical consequences. You get to go into the rehab program. But if you... You come forward as an abuser? Yeah, and you say, I'm mentally struggling. I'm doing terrible things. I need help. Then you get to sideline the radical accountability consequences piece,

and you can start to get rehab. Not that you would necessarily be allowed to be around victims again or whatever. You'd have to be monitored. But... People might use that as an out. And by that, I mean, they'd realize that the noose is taxed. tightening around their neck and then they would self-identify before somebody reported. Yeah, that's a good point.

I'm always trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but especially with this type of person, that's probably true. Okay, so radical consequences and accountability. And then rehab would look like going to the gym every day and working out, but you're working out your brain. So you probably are working with a mental health professional, but you're also doing daily brain training. And I talk all about that in the book where you, and this is, it's designed by neuroscientists,

It's online. It's gamified. It's inexpensive. Our kids should all be doing it. Our people moving towards Alzheimer's should be doing it. And especially our people whose brains are scrambled, either from concussion or other injury or from, you know, they've got a traumatized brain from mental health, you know, being exposed to abuse. Give me some examples of the exercises that they do. Fascinated here, like this rewiring. Okay. So to give you an example of someone who uses it and how they use it to their advantage, it was originally designed. this program by Michael Mersenik and his team of neuroscientists to help people not get Alzheimer's. So the body, we keep the body going. We live to 80 or even 90, but the brain is gone because we don't exercise our brains. So the exercises have to do with things like working memory. And I do the exercises and I can assure you they're painful. You don't want to do them. It's as much as you might, not you probably, but normal people want to skip their workout because we're kind

lazy? I am exceptionally normal. Okay. You know that feeling where you really don't feel like going to the gym, but you go anyway because you have to. It's like that. Now here's my motto. When things get tough, consider giving up. Yeah. It's a good bumper sticker. Like this is hard. Maybe I should quit. Yes, exactly. I leave Jocko to do the other stuff like discipline in 4.30 a.m. It's like 10 o'clock and like 6040? Yeah. I mean. No, it's true. Yeah. So if... I mean for sustainability. Well, and that's what it feels like with the brain training. It feels the same. You don't want to do it. Because you're not good at it. And you have to work really hard at it. Your brain has to work hard. For how long per day? Only half them. Okay. So it's game of five. That's manageable. That's manageable.

It's manageable. Um, and so yeah, working memory exercise. You would do an exercise where you read people's faces and try and identify their emotional, like what, and it's hard, like really hard. Is it surprise? Are they angry? Is it grief or are they feeling down? Like, it's very precise. things like peripheral vision. Did you see a bird over? What quadrant did you see the bird in? Was there also a car? Was the car in the sedan or was it the truck? You would not believe how hard it is to do. It is for me anyways. But I don't, oh, the hardest one for me is navigation. It's got subway lines going this way. Subway lines going this way. You have to figure out which is going east, west, north, south, and which train and which came first and which came, I'm terrible at it. I mean, I think the online personal trainer girl just kind of goes, okay, let's skip that one.

It's so bad. Anyway, those are the types of things you do. So, the neuroscientists are in the gym. They're working in the gym. They're in the lab. They're working away. They're doing all this stuff, Alzheimer's patients. They get a telephone call, and it's Alex Guerrero, Tom Brady's trainer.

And he's like, hey, just want to let you guys know. You do know that Tom uses your brain training every day. Really? And they're like, what? They didn't know. So they went down to his gym to see what he was using it for and what he was doing and so on and so forth. And he wrote about it all in his, or wrote about it in his book, TB12, I think he calls it. And it's his method for being who he is.

And think about it. Think of it from Alzheimer's. Well, he's 45 and he's competing with 22-year-old brains and outperforming them. And he, you know, if you're a quarterback, you have to have incredible peripheral vision. You have to have empathy. You've got to read the team and the coach and the opposing team and what they're going to do. You have to be anticipating what they're thinking, what they're feeling, and what they're intending. That's going to make you a superstar, right?

And he, what are some of the other thing? Working memory, you've got to remember hundreds of thousands maybe of plays. So, yeah, so he uses it. And it just goes to show you like a high performing brain can also use the brain training to such an advantage that it takes them to the next level. Yeah, people who are, if you go neck down, peak physical condition, they don't get to the top of the pyramid and just stop. You know, they continue to work and work and work and work, even when they're on the physiological downslope at their life. They're still in there trying to extend it as long as possible. Yeah.

So you mentioned before organizations and the culture there, whether it's an environment that would allow bullying and adults. What would you, for anybody out there who is listening or watching that is in a leadership position? Personally, for me, I think culture starts at the top of an organization. so I'll use, you know, if you're in a leadership position, hopefully you're near, somehow associated with the apex of the organization, warning signs that you would recommend people look out for. Well, you're the one who's really good on warning signs. You have to have that.

Well, you gave me two examples, and I think it was more in the way that you were telling it. I'm like, okay, she's obviously bringing this up for a reason, and maybe I made a logical guess forward. Well, it's a really good question because the leader has to be somebody who pays attention to red flags. And, you know, pedophiles and social predators, they go by a textbook. They really do. What they do when you look back on it is so obvious. And yet we do tend to miss what they're doing. So I think the first thing that I would say to leaders is watch out for the employee or the manager that's grooming you.

because a social predator, one of the first things they do or a sexual predator, is they groom the higher-ups. So when the report comes in, the higher-up has been having dinner with the predator and his partner for years or her partner for that that can't be true. Yeah, they already have an alliance to a degree. Absolutely. That's one of the things that happens. Another thing that I think happens is the predator is very good at getting complicity happening with the higher-ups. So the social predators at the school where I was working, they had obviously gotten the headmaster and the chaplain and the board to be informed that they were being highly abusive and thus complicit in not dealing with it properly.

So, you know, you think of all the Larry Nassar reports that were received at Michigan University at USA Gymnastics. All those people must have been protecting themselves when they didn't go forward and do anything. Same thing with Harvey Weinstein. Would you want to be the guy that takes down the Hollywood superstar? are. You know, so these guys, they have a, like what you were saying about, they know, they have a plan. They know what they're doing is certainly destructive and potentially illegal. They can't

stop themselves from doing it, so they create this elaborate system. And, you know, when you groom kids, like, my son was definitely groomed by the junior coach. In grade 10, you know, he would be having all these one-on-one sessions with him, and it was all about how talented he was. And he was super fun to be with like the nicest guy in the world. And then within, when he actually was on the team, and there's the other abusive coach who normalized a lot of this behavior just by being present and not stopping it, he, Montgomery said, yeah, he said, God, we'd be like in our second practice of the year.

And I was joking around with so-and-so, we were fooling around a bit. And he started to scream, stop fucking touching each other. And he said, I was like, what? Like what just happened to, you know, this teacher? Like they went from being fun and laid back and to this basically psychopath. And that's, again, that's behind closed doors. There's no witnesses. But he was lured into dropping his guard completely to being in this situation.

I mean, if he had reported to us in grade 10 that this guy was crazy, we could have gotten him out of the school and not destroyed his basketball. Because that in our province, if you change schools in grade 11, Can't play. You can't play. The whole time or just for a year? For the year. You can't play till grade 12.

I think that's actually a rule in the U.S. as well. Oh, maybe. I think you have to have a, I could also be completely wrong. But I think you, because otherwise you have a lot of people hopping around. Yeah. To, you know, whatever. This team this year is going to be good, so we'll hop over. I think there is.

You get poaching. You know, where one high school coach is trying to take star players from another one. I can understand it. Yeah. But when I call the guys, it's a government agency, you know, sport BC. I'm like, look, we have to move our son. being abused, they wouldn't do it. God, that's so hard to tolerate.

It was tough for me with the situation with the teachers union in the school. I mean, there's no, I mean, what would be the polite thing to say would be, or the way to describe it was really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, going with the innocent until proven guilty approach. The less polite way to be, that they just, it's almost didn't want to deal with

it, because they even didn't want to deal with the blowback or the teacher's union or the combination of the two. And it took media getting involved and people standing up and talking about in a public forum what had actually happened. And then they pulled the teacher out of the classroom again because they had tried to re-insert her without saying shit. Oh, we conducted an investigation. Did you notice of other parents that there was an investigation of any kind of their children's teacher? Nope.

Yeah. And, you know, after researching this book, that's the norm. the most normal thing in the world is for an organization to do a sham investigation. The most normal thing in the world is for an organization to set out to single-handedly destroy the whistleblower, who came forward and either said there's huge financial corruption happening or there's major abuse going down, and you end up being the target. I mean, I lived it personally. I was the one that got put under investigation in the teacher regulation branch, not the teachers.

How did that investigation play out for you? Oh, I just hired a lawyer and he shut them down. I mean, what are you going to do? You know? Yeah. God, that's rough. Yeah. What would you say to, I mean, I know the book is about more about adults.

What would you say to parents of kids, though, things to look out for? Well, these are the things that I missed. Like, in grade 10, my someone's coming home. And there's really no excuse for missing this, and I'll tell you why. but he would come home from basketball practice, and he would just go into his room and close the door. And so I said to myself, you know, oh, he's just been a moody teenager.

But that's not normal behavior. And I should have picked up on it, because the year before that in grade 9, he was playing with these other coaches, but one of the coaches that he ended up with the abusive coaches would come and sometimes sub in or be there and yell. And my son told me one time, he said, yeah, I'm not going to go to that game.

I don't want to go to the game if he's going to be there. And that's amazing because basketball was his life. And I said, what? I said, why? And he said, he's so full of disgust. You know, and I just, again, I'm telling you all the things I missed. So if I was a parent

going back, first of all, I'd have a huge conversation with my kids and I'd supply them with the correct vocabulary. If a teacher or a coach or another parent or a doctor or the school facilities manager, anybody, if they do these, behaviors and I'd have my list for emotional verbal sometimes mixed with

physical abuse what does that look like what are the words we use sexual abuse and grooming child learning what is what are the behaviors that pedophile is gonna use because you know it's like the best analogy for and for kids and for parents really is what the pedophile what the social predator does is they and this is what happened to me I was in the school I was in the cult so I couldn't see it anymore for what it was I was a teacher maybe before I was being a mom, and that's on me. But, you know, it's the analogy is, or the parable, where they fill the pot with nice, cool water,

and they bring in the frog, and the frog swims, and it's lovely, and it's nice and warm, but then there's just a little teeny bit of heat, like a little, like, ooh, what was that? You know, gut instinct like you were seen before. That doesn't feel quite right. That's a bit weird. But then they warm it up and warm it up and warm it up, and warm it up. And by the time that you know that it's going to kill you, you don't have the energy. to jump out anymore.

And that's what happens to sex abuse victims. They get so drawn in, such into the complicity of it, that they, like, as happened to my student, perhaps. I mean, she never said she was complicit in any way, except she was a lonely kid from parents on the other side of the country, and he was so kind to me. But, you know, it's, I think vocabulary and knowing, and kids knowing that it hurts their brains,

it's actually really, really serious, whether it's coming from an adult or a peer and getting their school to start having that kind of a conversation. Not, oh, it's old boys coaching or sweeping it under the rug. Uh-uh. It's really, really serious. Yeah, I've always, and I'm sure a lot of parents are in the same boat, but I struggle with the, or I don't struggle.

One of the challenges, and I try to reinforce this, even if just for their own protection later in life, you know, assume anything that you write on the internet exists forever, and that it could be pulled out in a job interview. five years from now. And I say it in that perspective to hopefully try to shock them a little bit. Like, oh, like longer perspective of time.

But, and then try to reinforce, you know, the things that you say to people or write to them, although they may be trivial to you or that you could potentially write to them, they may be trivial to you, but they could have an immense real-world impact on somebody else to the point that you may not even recognize it, you know,

be very cautious of just piling on for the for the sake of piling on it's and there all these things that are so much easier said than done because almost all of this i've experienced with my kids occurs on this fucking device yeah that it's just like you type away and it's it's like you don't even realize and it's and it's off and it's sent uh it's a challenge for sure do you how do your kids now 22 and 27 all right so you're there past that phase of you know the teen years growing up with devices and social media, what would you recommend to parents navigating that storm? Because I'll tell you how it started for me,

how the kids all ended up with a device. There's a conversation initiated generally by them. All that my friends are communicating in this way, and if I'm not able to communicate in this way, then I'm going to be left out or I feel ostracized from the group. And at some point, maybe later in the teens, I'm not saying get somebody a cell phone at nine, but at some point they're going to get a device of some kind

what would you recommend for adults with their kids when it comes to making sure that they're acting in a manner that you would want to see them act on those devices or not being the recipient this bombardment of you know negativity coming their way yeah it's um first of all in the research which is really really sweet and i think parents need to know this when i did i did a bunch of work on looking at the addictability of the adolescent brain. They're very, very susceptible to alcohol and marijuana and prescription drugs even, as we know, and then obviously illicit drugs. And for them, it's a slippery slope, and they don't manage it well. And one of the key things that stands between kids that go down that path and kids that don't is the kids that have really close

relationships with their parents and they want their respect. So I think parents can take that knowledge to the device and say, look, super open conversation. I mean, teenagers are reward-seeking. If parents are showering them with lots of positivity and encouragement and never pointing out all the wrongs, but seeing all the good and making the effort to make an acknowledgement of it, that's going to be the best thing for keeping their kids safe. Because and keeping that door open that you can talk to me about anything no matter how bad it is, I've got your back, we'll navigate it together. I am always here. If you feel things like you say that that gut feeling that there's something off or wrong, let's put that on the table and like shine a spotlight on it and work it

out together because adults get manipulated too. I'm here for you. Let's figure this out. And then also, you know, kind of code of conduct conversations like you have with your kids. Like if you saw someone being bullied and didn't intervene, I would be really disappointed. Those kinds of messages. Like, if you were watching a kid be hurt through cyber bullying and didn't participate but didn't try and shut it down and be that person that says, you know, lay off, back off unacceptable. Because we know in the research that can save a kid. You know, I just think parents, it's hard. Like all of us are expected to, you know, everybody has to have a job now. Everybody has financial pressure.

Everybody is expected to run the household. It's a hard time. And we're all caught in this bombardment of internet 24-7-2. We have to learn how to navigate it. So, yeah, I just think that never forget how much you mean to your kids. Even when they're lipping off or being hard to handle, that's natural teenage behavior. They actually are looking to you all the time for structure, for cues, for family holidays, for connection, for just hanging out, for not always making it about do this, do that, do this, do that. Just hang out with them.

They really need that. And also, remember, they're not grown-ups in the brain sense until 24-25. And I know that's hard. Parents are exhausted. But, you know, we tend to think he's 21 and he can't get a job and blah, blah. It's a tough, tough time right now. Economically, a terrible time for kids. Salaries are garbage.

You know, they're not what they used to be in the 70s and 80s. It's hard. So the more you have that kind of empathy and they're working with them as opposed to against them in their adolescent brain, you're going to have better outcomes. Yeah. Like I said, I wish there was a textbook for being a parent. Yeah. certainly not. No, we all make so many mistakes. What's your next book about? It's called Cloud of False Echoes. Tell me more. It's called Cloud of False Echoes Why the Truth Matters. And I'm

looking at the present political climate and the war on truth. And I'm looking at... U.S. political environment or Canadian political environment? U.S., Canadian and Russia. Okay. But I'm not doing a big thing with the politics. I'm just saying, look, this is what's happened here, the truth has gotten to be something that can be openly without consequences manipulated in our world, I think that's pretty serious. I don't even think people are capable or willing to agree on what the truth is anymore. Yeah, but you know, it's crazy. So I looked at, I looked at, and I write about this in the book, I'm like, what is the difference between an objective fact and an alternative fact? An objective fact, a.k.a. the truth,

can be verified. An alternative fact cannot. It exists in someone's imagination. And they might want it really, really badly. You know, Kellyanne Conway might want it so badly. But she can't have it. It's not the truth. She can call it. How much you want something? Yeah. Call it whatever you want, but it's not a fact. And you can't try and make it a fact by manipulating the language. I can't stand stuff like that. That's sophistry. That's rhetoric. That's like manipulating what's going on with words. And it's not okay. Also, we call that politics in the US. It's politics. They've got to stop.

They got to stop. So yeah, that's what I'm looking. I'm looking at the truth. Why does it matter? Why must, why do we have to fight for it? I think we're at the point where we got to stop, you know, allowing someone like a Putin to just disseminate all this propaganda. Like, it's ridiculous. And people are actually believing it is amazing to me.

It's like, no, we've got to fight for the truth. Got to fight for good journalism, really good media. Can't let that go. It should be properly funded. you know, the internet. It's going to be an uphill battle. I know. I mean, I, yeah, if we can't, if we don't have a foundation of what the truth actually is,

then we're like a spaceship adrift in the galaxy with no idea which direction that we are going. This is why. So get this. I'm a teacher. If I was teaching a class and I said to them, class never happened. It's a big exaggeration. I would be instantly fired. But I can be a politician with the most power and prestige.

a nation, I can openly lie and there's no consequences. I don't get fired. How does that work? I don't have an answer for that. That has to change. Yeah, let me just say I'm not looking forward to the next presidential election cycle here in the U.S. I, you know, a lot of people at the previous one where I think in the country was going to come apart and talk of civil war. And I don't think it actually got that close. I think, you know, democracy is a tenuous balance, probably at best, even when it's working perfectly. And I think we were definitely stressing it out a little bit. But I don't know if we can do a repeat of that in 2024.

There's just so many other things to be working on. You know, what made me really sad was we, the rest of the world, the Western world, we really depend on the U.S. The U.S. is everybody's kind of bright light, you know. And I would hope that's what it is. I think, well, it's tough. Well, fuck. It's the same as people talking about government.

The government's fucked. It's like, is the design of the government flawed? Or is it the people who are now working in the government? Have they molded it into becoming something that's now an occupation that you can become extraordinarily wealthy doing and then even more so afterwards? And they live in that system longer than it was ever designed to be. So is it the people that are in it are now in it for the wrong reasons?

or is the system flawed? I would love to think that the U.S. is still a beacon, but it's tough because a lot of people in the U.S. are now, American citizens are like, oh, we've never been a beacon. We were founded on fucked up principles and policies, and we should not be a beacon. And I don't know where to go from that. Because, yeah, so there's a lot of people who have fallen short of that,

and they've taken advantage of things, taken from people and done horrific things. That doesn't mean that the founding principles of the country are flawed. It means that the individuals that are the outliers did some really fucked up shit. But it's tough. That's how I see it. Let's put it this way. If you were in Europe and Russia was attacking and trying to destroy Ukraine, would you turn to Canada to save you or the U.S.?

Everybody turned, no matter what they say, no matter how imperfect the U.S. is, that is where everybody goes like this. When there's bad stuff happening, when it's the forces that are non-democratic that want to, you know, take their boots out and destroy. It is the U.S. flawed as it is. And so when the U.S. is in so much turmoil, it's not great for the rest of the world. Yeah, it's, you know, I truly don't give a shit where people fall in the political spectrum. A lot of people, you know, guarantee the far on the left and far on the right. I'm like, I, okay, whatever.

One of the things, so, you know, with Biden, it's funny that we're talking about neuroplasticity and brain function, but I'm not going to lie. like going on YouTube and watching him speak when his teleprompter fails or when he reads shit like, read quote, repeat quote, and you're like, motherfucker. It's hilarious, but it's also not

a great perspective for the rest of the world to see. I'm super worried about that aspect of it for that reason. Like, it's kind of funny to a degree and then also utterly terrifying. I don't know exactly how the control of the nuclear mechanism works. I was never

given the football nor the codes. And if I was tortured, I'd be like, and they asked me for it. I'd be like, one, two, three, four, five, six, seventy nine, or I'd make some shit up. But is he any safer to have access to launching nuclear weapons with a brain that, again, I'm not a doctor,

and I'm not an expert on cognitive function. I have my concerns, but is he less dangerous than somebody like poop? Well, I think who... Let's remove any of the politics from it. Somebody with what appears to be that cognitive function, are they safe to make decisions that could impact vast majority of

the population on planet Earth via nuclear weapons versus somebody who's just some evil cuck living over in Russia? Well, I can't remember who it was, but it was very funny. It was a woman reporter, commentator, and she said, God, Trump and Biden, they shouldn't even be allowed to have driver's licenses right now, let alone running the country. There's an argument for that for sure. I know. And it's like, yeah, I mean, I think with Putin, the difference for me would be, Biden is not going to ever be able to have just direct access and be completely crazy.

Never. There's all kinds of checks and balances going back to founding fathers and principles in the Constitution. Putin, on the other hand, is, you know, someone, a doctor raises the problem that's happening with COVID. Next thing you know, he falls out of a window. A lead military general says that actually he doesn't think that Putin is doing the right thing. will he and his family are all killed instantly? Absolutely. It happened. Yes.

Maybe Russia is a riskier place. I've been there. I tripped a little bit more than I normally did. It's hard to say. I mean, they're different. I also think I would have to believe that although Putin may live in a bubble, I certainly don't think that he would be like the actual person

flipping the switch on the nuclear weapons. I have to. I would hope. I have to believe, and I would hope that there would be a level of humanity if somebody else in that chain of command was told to do so that they would not. Well, I think that's... Because their bubble's different, though, because the bubble's not designed around that switch thrower. It's designed around, you know what I mean?

So there are layers away from it. I don't know. These are the things that I think about when I can't sleep. Yeah. No, it's a really, really hard one. I think the way the Russians have been behaving, considering the situation they are in and that they're trained to be in herd mentality, they're trained to be sheeple.

And once your brain gets indoctrinated that way, it's like, I was reading in my research about North Korea. And, I mean, they start teaching the children at the age of two. They start to separate them as much as possible from their parents. They only get to see their parents on weekends kind of thing. They don't want too much human family bonding. And they are taught in school. Their exercises revolve around hating the West and wanting to ruin the West and harm the West.

So they are indoctrinated people. And when neuroscientists look at the brains of these people, they find that they're completely rigid. So you think flip the switch, you think humanity, you think I would sacrifice myself not to get the switch flipped on nuclear power destroying the world. But if you've been indoctrinated, it's a good point. It's hard. Your brain doesn't function that way. That's a good point. You feel like you gave me anxiety now.

Sorry. Where can me find your book? And reduce their anxiety that you just gave me. No, the book is very hopeful. The book is very empowering. It's very empowering. It is available on Amazon and a ton of other places. The reason I'm focusing on Amazon is because my agent has told me that I have to get as many reviews as possible.

So if people... Bestseller list. Yeah. Best seller. This will never be a bestseller. People have said it's a page turner about neuroscience, but it's not exactly, you know, the kind of book that people just will die if they don't get. But if you do get it on Amazon, I would love a review. Fair.

Social media presence. How much of it do you have? Where can people find you? My website is bulliedbrain.com. And then I use that as my handle for everything. So it's Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. It's all at Bullied Brain. And I'm very happy to talk to people.

I do lots of one-on-one coaching and speaking engagements. And I just help people who need help all the time. So don't hesitate. They can email me or write me on my website. and do reach out, I'm happy to help. You need another website above that, like an umbrella one that has all the other books. I suspect you're going to be a serial book writer. Yeah, I can't stop writing, that's for sure.

Well, the problem's going to be is if you do your next social media handle, then the next one or the next one. You need to have like a collected land in place where people can see the volume of your work. It's true. I'm using bullied brain with that idea that, because it's something that I'm not happy about with myself. I feel that I've ignored my brain throughout my life. I never went out there and learned anything about it. I ignored it. did and I want to change that in my own life so I can use it as an umbrella. It's what I want to change. And I've been recently, while waiting for this book to be published,

I am working on Cloud of False Echoes, but I also thought, you know, maybe the way to get people to pay attention to their brain is through these really important international poetry contests. So I've written a few poems about the brain, too. There are international poem contests? Yes, there are. And you can find some of my award-winning poems, shortlisted poems. How about the brain? That is a classic look. I wish I could take a photograph of that look.

You look completely just disappointed and sad. I mean, I remember writing poems when I was in high school, and I got in trouble because they started with hickory, dickery dog, and then people can fill in the blank of words they're running with that. Michael's just shaking his head of me in disgust. I'm going to bully him later after you leave him for that look. Are you bullied me today? I usually pulled him today on the jikitsymots.

I let you pass my garden and you were doing some work until I got out. yes yeah I'm not going to let you bully me I'm the I'm the I'm the victim I'm the abuser you need to identify with me we've been out for a couple hours I will let you close that and thank you for making the travel up to montana as well we love coming here very thankful are you living in Canada right now how is the travels no issues I heard you guys actually dropped the uh vaccine requirement for travel back and forth for American citizens coming up into Canada we had to yeah we dropped it thank God like a few days ago but we had to show vaccine. To get here?

Yeah. To come in here, we had to show that we'd have been vaccinated with Alaska Air. And we had to sign a declaration saying we'd been vaccinated as well. That's probably for the Canadian government, not for here. So you said you did that at the airport when you landed or the airport in Canada? Airport in Canada. Yeah, I wonder if that's a Canadian requirement or an American requirement. I don't know. I hope all this stuff normalizes.

It just shows out a little bit. This is the first time we've left the country since COVID started. I mean, I can't have 60 miles from where we are right now. I know. And it's like, Fernie's got snowboarding up there. BAMF. It's amazing. I used to go hunting in Alberta, the opening of the every season.

It might as well be, well, it used to, might as well have been in the fucking Hembillais. Yeah. I could have driven up to the border and be like, hello, not going to come over there. I know. Yeah, so actually I'm looking forward to going back across. I mean, it's awesome. I've had nothing but great experiences up in Canada. Yeah.

Call you guys the top hat of America. Oh, that's very nice. Somebody was saying it was very funny. Again, a political commentator, and they were saying, I can't remember what had happened. It's one of the big scandals that's been kind of like to the point of amusing, but some huge scandal. And the person wrote something like, God,

Canada probably is just feeling a bit like they're the second floor neighbor of like a crack addict down below. And it was like, yeah. It's not a bad explanation. Yeah. What do you want to pose with? Get you back to your son. My closing thoughts.

all I want to say is my really big takeaway from the brain and all the research and everything doesn't matter what's being done to your brain, whether it's physical, whether it's trauma, whether it's illness, whether it's abuse. The brain is remarkable at healing. It is adept. It's being designed to repair and restore. So if you've got brain issues, do not give up. Make sure you get the professional help that you need.

Like get that check in, get an EEG. Start working. full the book is full of activation steps on ways evidence-based practices so grounded in neuroscience how to how to get it better but there's there's so much you can do and that's just the greatest thing for everyone perfect then thank you