The Bossticks - Evan Haines On Recovery, Open Marriages, Addiction, Psychiatric Care, & Childhood Trauma

Episode Date: December 13, 2021

#417: On today's show we are joined by Evan Haines. Evan is an author, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is a recovered addict who also co-founded the Oro Recovery Center. Evan joins us today to discuss the road to recovery, open marriages, psychiatric care, and how our childhood traumas shape us.  To connect with Evan Haines click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) Check Out Lauryn's NEW BOOK, Get The Fuck Out Of The Sun HERE This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential  The Hot Mess Ice Roller is here to help you contour, tighten, and de-puff your facial skin and It's paired alongside the Ice Queen Facial Oil which is packed with anti-oxidants that penetrates quickly to help hydrate, firm, and reduce the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles, leaving skin soft and supple. To check them out visit www.shopskinnyconfidential.com now.  This episode is brought to you by No Days Wasted Their hero product is called DHM Detox, which is the vitamin for people who like to enjoy their drinks. It's designed to help you bounce back the next day. Get 20% off your order and free shipping in the US. Just head over to www.NoDaysWasted.CO/SKINNY and use promo code "SKINNY" at checkout This episode is brought to you by Bite Toothpaste Bite is reinventing personal care by making products that are good for you and the planet. Bite's hero product is their dry tooth paste tablets that come in a reusable glass jar and the refills come in home compostable pouches. You just pop one in your mouth, bite down and brush, it will foam up just like regular toothpaste but with no plastic tube or messy paste. Bite is offering 20% off your first subscription order. Go to www.trybite.com/skinny or use code SKINNY at checkout to claim this deal.  This episode is brought to you by BEV Bev is a female-first canned wine brand that was founded to change not only the way a product is consumed, but the way an industry and culture have operated for generations. Their wines are dry, crisp, and a lil' fizzy, super refreshing and delicious. They have ZERO sugar and only 3 carbs and 100 calories per serving. We've worked out an exclusive deal. Receive 20% off your first purchase plush free shipping on all orders. Go to www.drinkbev.com/skinny or use code SKINNY at checkout to claim this deal.  This episode is brought to you by ARRAE Arrae was created to help women feel the best so they can be their best, through targeted products which are 100% natural, filler-free, organic, and formulated by a Naturopathic Doctor. For 10% off, go to arrae.com and use code 'tsc' at checkout. Produced by Dear Media 

The following podcast is a dear media production. She's a lifestyle blogger extraordinaire. Fantastic. And he's a serial entrepreneur. A very smart cookie. And now Lauren Everts and Michael Bostic are bringing you alone for the ride. Get ready for some major realness. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her.

My mom wasn't ready for this world. And, you know, hence the medications, the hospitalizations and the therapy that was all meant to, make her normal. It was like years later and I was drinking with some a friend. She said this thing that stuck with me ever since and it changed my whole perception forever, which was that your mom might have just been really sensitive to what is kind of an ugly world, kind of a mean, cold, hard world that could be so much more beautiful that it wasn't really that there was anything wrong with her. It was in that moment and slowly out of that moment, I guess, evolved this idea that It isn't that she wasn't ready for this world, but this world wasn't ready for her.

It became my goal in life and my own small way to help improve the world and to make it a better place for people like her. Welcome back to the Skinny Confidential Him and Her Show. That clip is from our guest of the show today. Evan Haynes. I am doing the introduction right now and listening Evan's bio because for whatever reason, Lauren cannot say Oro. It's impossible for her to say. She kept saying Oreo, Oreo, Oreo. It's literally Oro House, Lauren.

He is the co-founder of Oro House, specializing in recovery. He's a former addict himself, now fully sober. He is also the husband of Alexis Haynes. Many of you may be familiar with him from her platform. She has a show on Dear Media called Recovery from Reality. He is also an author. And on this episode, we dive everything that's going on in his life.

Recovery, open relationships, an assortment of things. It is a wild story. He's got a really crazy upbringing. And we dive deep into it with him. I wish Lauren was able to say Oro House because we literally went through this 18 times to get through this introduction because she could not say Oro. Lauren say Oro. Oro. You did it. Holy fucking shit. She did it. Holy fucking shit. I can say it, Michael. I have problems sometimes saying certain words. Yeah, no shit. We, this could have taken four minutes. We have been here. I'm looking at my timer now for 15 minutes and 14 seconds because Lauren could not say Oro, but I fucking can. Previously on the Walking Dead. Co-founder of the IRO Recovery House.

Oro. Oro recovery. ORO. Once again, we're starting over now to the Oro. Oro. Oro recovery. Oro. He is the co-founder of the Oro.

He is the co-founder of the Oro House. ORO. He is the co-founder of the O-I-R-house. No. You can go back to language school or something, man. So here we go, Evan. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her show. This is the skinny confidential, him and her.

Evan is in the studio. I am so excited for this episode. We're going to go all over the place. But first, I would love for you to talk about your childhood and then your struggle and journey with addiction. Right, right. And I think so with addicted people commonly, it doesn't sort of occur out of nowhere, if ever.

and so in my family there was mental health problems and addiction problems. My mom had mental health problems. So growing up, she was committed to the psych ward. It seemed like every year, every summer, and I would go visit her there. Why is this? This was in Vancouver. This is in Canada growing up. I lived with her on the weekends.

I live with my dad during the week, and I live with her on the weekends. I mean, and she was an amazing person. She was magical. She was this artist and so talented and intelligent and funny. and she had severe mental health problems, bipolar, clinical depression, borderline personality disorder, all these diagnoses you hear about. When I was 14, she committed suicide. So I remember being at a friend's birthday party.

It was like a pool party, pizza, like wholesome. I remember I, in fact, called my dad to see if I could stay one more night, like a sleepover. He says, you need to come home. And I was like, whoa, I could just tell something was wrong. You were talking about energy before Lauren. So I was sitting out waiting for my parents to come pick me up. I said, mom and my dad. And I thought to myself, oh, my God, my mom's dead.

I just knew it. Yeah, they came, picked me up silent in the car right home, got out of the car, went into the house, and my dad said, your mom is dead. It was, it was devastating. And so I think it was like the next day. I was calling my like goth friends, like my, you know, rocker friends. Like I just, I changed overnight. I'm trying cigarettes. I'm smoking weed.

I'm drinking beer. And it just kind of went on like that from like age 14 to age 30 kind of progressively. And it wasn't always all bad. I went to school. I even earned a couple of degrees. And I was living down here in L.A. And I was out at Cinespace. I remember on a Tuesday night.

This was 15, 16 years ago now. Steve Ioki, DJ, it was awesome. I dragged too much again and ended up in my car and in a blackout smashed into a car with a person in it. And ended up going to L.A. County Jail. No. So did they book you for DUI? They booked me on a felony DUI because, well, frankly, I could have killed somebody. But I could have injured someone.

The person, thank God, was okay. and they were discharged out of the hospital and they dropped it to a misdemeanor. But it was a shock. It was a shocker. I remember telling my cellmate, it was the sort of like street kid from Venice, who'd been arrested for disorderly conduct in a Starbucks or something the night before. And I remember telling, I'm like, I think I might have a problem. It didn't ever occur to me. I think I might have a problem and I need to switch to beer.

And so I spent like four days in jail, got out first night, had some beer. some friends, second night beer. Third night, I think we were back at Cinespace again, and I was having a beer, and then I'm at the bar, and I take a shot. And, you know, fast forward. It's a bit of a blur, but, you know, I'm trying to fight people. I'm at Mel's diner. I clear an entire table of food onto the floor, which, if you've never done, actually, is pretty fun. I mean, it sounds therapeutic. Yeah, it really was. You know, but I'm in bare feet, and I'm jumping into bushes and all this. And I remember waking up the next morning,

it was about like 11 in the morning, and I felt fine. But my friend walks in, he goes, you're an alcoholic. I was like, what? And he starts listing all these things, which are like kind of coming back to me. And I said, oh, my God, I am. And so I was going to AA meetings just right over here on Robertson. It's called the log cabin. I was so nervous the first morning.

I get there and there's all these, like, cool young people and tattoos and pretty girls. And then there's some celebrities there. And I'm like putting away chairs after with Anthony Keatis. And, you know, he's obviously publicly sober guy. And I thought, this is cool. I'm going to try this. I'm going to see if I can become like comfortable in social situations and I'll give it a shot for a year or something like that and that was 16 years ago. What was it like when you were a little visiting your mom in a psych ward? Did you think that that was normal? Was it scary? Because when I hear the word psych ward, I think like American horror. Like can you maybe dispel some of maybe like rumors or things that people. would think about a psych ward? Frankly, it's a little bit like that. I mean, she was in there with a

whole variety of people from young girls with eating disorders to, I remember there was like a veteran World War II vet who would just howl, have some kind of terror every 15 minutes, like, you know, on the clock. Schizophrenics kind of muttering to themselves. It had a smell to it, you know, that kind of cafeteria smell and very institutional. It wasn't cool. It wasn't fun. I mean, she felt safe there, but so, you want to know an interesting story. I was driving to work just a few, two months ago, and I'd remembered her psychiatrist's name, Michael Myers, because, you know, it's like the... That was her psychiatrist. That was her psychiatrist.

Oh, Jesus. He was a nice guy from what I remembered. But I googled his name, and he's got a website. He's old, and I think he was very young when he started seeing her. And I reached out to him on his contact form on his website. Mike. And literally, I'm on the phone with him 25 minutes later when I got to work. And he says, let's do a Zoom call tomorrow. I have your mom's chart. Normally, I would keep something like that for seven years, but I specialize in cases of suicide. And so if one of my patients committed suicide,

I keep the file, her chart. And he was saying it was interesting because he teaches, he lives in New York, and he teaches, I forget where NYU or something. And he just, when he got my email he had just finished teaching a class on like malpractice or something and so he's reading this like and i'd written it carefully to not give this impression he goes i don't think he's trying to sue me and you know that it's safe to call him and so he he took the risk and reached out and we had a great 90-minute zoom session the next day so she first came in i think about six months after i was born and she complained of the baby blues as she put it so postpartum depression he noticed she She was like a little hypomanic, so like a little kind of elevated, she had an elevated mood.

And for him and for a lot of psychiatrists, that's kind of all they need to see that, you know, so she has this possible, you know, bipolar or they called it manic depression and diagnosis, and she probably needed to be medicated, you know, on what are powerful antipsychotics. In some ways, I feel like that's when her problems really started in some ways. I mean, that's when they certainly got worse. And I haven't shared this in a in a public setting and I'll kind of be careful. about, of course, these things don't come out of nowhere, like I'd said. And so I'd wondered, you know, about childhood trauma and things like that. And so I asked the doctor, had she ever

been abused as a child? He said, not to my knowledge. My dad asked, said now, I finally reached out to her sister. And I asked and she goes, oh my gosh, so strange, you would ask that. Our oldest sister, who's like 85 years old now, she goes, let me talk to her because she'd mentioned something. She showed me the reply. And I'm only sharing this because I think it's important because I think it's unfortunately more common than people realize. And there's always, in severe cases like this, there's something going on. There's something happened. And her sister, my aunt, wrote back and said, you know, it was your grandma. It was my dad's mom who my mom apparently confided in the only person who then called my aunt to say, what do we do with this information?

And my aunt says, I just didn't know what to think. I couldn't imagine our dad doing that. There was some abuse from her father. There was some abuse. There was some incest. And so, you know, that explained everything. And explained why, you know, the other two sisters are all right and why my mom wasn't. That probably subconsciously set you free in a way because sometimes I think when you hear about suicide and you hear that the person experienced postpartum and that's where it initiated.

I'm putting that in quotes because that's usually not where it initiated. It could maybe make the child feel like they had something to do with it. Well, and we care, yes, and we carry that stuff with us. It's, you know, if not genetic, it's intergenerational. So I'm carrying this, you know, the shame and this darkness with me. And it was, it was liberating. It was, it explained everything, you know, because at our treatment center with our patients, like, first of all, there isn't one who wasn't physically emotionally or sexually abused.

There just isn't a single patient. Drug addiction is not a genetic thing. It's, you know, it's environmental, it's nurturing, it's some form of abuse or it's some attachment problem where the mother or the father, the parents couldn't be there for their kid in the way that the kid needed them to be there. And of course, it doesn't have to be perfect. There was a psychoanalyst Winnicott called it Good Enough mothering. And, you know, that's all you need.

But you need some kind of safety and stability. And for a lot of us, we didn't have that. Suicide is also, and I think this isn't talked about enough, there's so much guilt that you harbor with a suicide. And I think you're so lucky that you were able to go to the psychiatrist and pick up missing pieces and not solve, but help put together the pieces. I mean, a lot of people, you, you,

you know, my mom committed suicide too. You're sort of like left figuring stuff out. There's no like black and white. And that's really hard. Did you feel like that too? Oh, yeah. And for years, I thought for sure I'm going to be schizophrenic or I'm going to be in some kind of psychosis.

It didn't help. One of my very first drugs of choice was LSD, so I was voluntarily putting myself into a psychosis every weekend for a number of years. But I was certain, you know, that suicide was always kind of looming there and that it could happen to me. So, yeah, and then just that unfinished business that there's these pieces

and that we're left to kind of pick them up and put them together and make some sense out of it. And I remember a big moment for me and kind of why Orohouse is what it is and why my views on addiction are what they are and I think why we get along with our friend Bob Forrest so well is because for years I thought, and I think this is kind of the traditional orthodox

view is like my mom wasn't ready for this world and that you know we needed to fix her and make her more normal like us and you know to help her adjust to this world she was not adjusted well and you know hence the medications the hospitalizations and the therapy that was all meant to make her normal it was like years later and I was drinking with some a friend after working out your name was memory and she was this very special woman and she was this very special woman and she She said this thing that stuck with me ever since, and it changed my whole perception forever, which was that your mom might have just been really sensitive

to what is kind of an ugly world, kind of a mean, cold, hard world that could be so much more beautiful, that it wasn't really that there was anything wrong with her. And, of course, even with this new information out, that makes, in fact, perfect sense. But it was in that moment, and slowly out of that moment, I guess, evolved this idea that it isn't that she wasn't ready

for this world, but this world wasn't ready for her. And so it became my goal in life, in my own small way to help improve the world and to make it a better place for people like her, for young women, for children, for, you know, so many people who have these really difficult experiences. I recently worked with an energy healer and she said, you need to imagine your mom as a little girl and the struggles that she went through as a little girl. You're imagining her as an adult. And so you're like, you're not imagining all the struggles that she had when she was little and what her mom struggled with and what my great, great grandma struggled with. She's like, you have to imagine these people as human and little and all the struggles that they went through because committing suicide, like you said, just doesn't happen overnight. There were things that happened that I don't know about.

And picturing her as a little girl has really helped. Yeah, because we also, I mean, it took me years in recovery to realize how angry I was. I mean, you talked about was this normal. I mean, no, and that was the problem. Like, I was robbed by her, by these forces, dark forces of a normal childhood. I couldn't relate. I all of a sudden was marked. And, I mean, sure enough, to this day, I mean, I will never be the same.

Now, the question is, would I want to be the same? this has kind of given me my whole mission, but, you know, I did not have a normal childhood. It was very difficult. It was very stressful. And then, you know, the kind of grief that we have, well, that I didn't even know how to have. I think, I remember we had just started the treatment center. I was sitting outside at the smoking table with a friend who actually just texted me earlier today, but she has cuts on her wrist. She had attempted suicide a few times. One time it was very close, and someone found her, and she was saved. And I wouldn't. wanted to tell her how important I thought that that was, that she could help so many people.

And I remember I read this letter that a family doctor, a different doctor, had written about my mom and me, and when she used to come into the office when I was a little kid, and how much she looked forward to seeing us, and that she cared so much about me. And I'm reading this, and I'm like, I think I'm about to cry. So I was like 35 years old. This was 20 years later. And for the first time, in 20 years, I bawled. And what's so interesting is the second time was only last, was a Valentine's Day. Alexis and I went to the four seasons near our house,

and you can ask her about this, but we watched one of my favorite movies, which I've watched half a dozen times called Paris, Texas, by Vim Vendors. It's basically the story of a father who's trying to reunite his small son with the son's mother, which happens at the very end of the movie.

I've seen this ending half a dozen times. it's happening and you can ask Alexis, she probably heard me and looked over and it happened again. And I'm bawling. Just bawling. Why then at that, you know, after watching it so many times? I don't know. I think in the last couple of years, I mean, obviously in the last however long that first time was, but especially in the last couple of years, something's changed to me. I'm opening up a bit. That's so interesting that you say that because I think when suicide happens and maybe you have a similar experience, it sounds like it hardens you.

Like you start to think nothing's a big deal. People are complaining. You're like, get over it. Like, Michael always says this about me. Like, I'm always like, who cares? What I say about you is that sometimes people, like listeners of the show and people that are maybe critics of us, they want Lauren. There's that quote where it's like, the news wants every problem to be your problem. Same thing in social.

Like every problem that's out there, people want to be that, you know, they want you to take it as seriously as they take it. But I think having the experience that you and Lorne have had when a big deal to certain people is not nearly as big a deal as your mother taking the life. And so what happens is like there's a perception and a contextual issue where like something that's a big deal to somebody else is just not registering to both of you because you've experienced some of the worst things that humans can experience. And people get frustrated about that because they can't they can't see the world from your perspective or what you've been through. The holiday seasons are coming up. And family time can be hard. So I have you covered. Michael has you covered. And that is with no days wasted. So there's nothing worse than drinking during the holidays. And then you wake up the next morning with fatigue and you just feel like you need a little help. You have some brain fog, maybe some nausea. No days wasted is here for you. They have this thing

called D-HM detox. And it's the vitamin for when you drink. I personally am a fan of this because it's an herbal supplement. And what I do is I'll take my first drink and then I'll pop two and then it goes to work. And it's packed with antioxidants, anti-inflammatory ingredients, and it's plant-based. And I wanted to look into this more and find out the research behind it and found out the D-HM detox uses science to help boost your body's natural response to alcohol. I can tell you that this makes the mornings a lot less tough. And I can really tell you, especially after hosting Thanksgiving, that it's a real lifesaver, especially when you have people over. This is also a great holiday gift for all of your friends who drink. And of course, we have a special for you. We have a special 25%

sent off your order and free shipping in the United States for the holidays. You are going to head over to no dayswasted.co slash skinny 25 and use promo code Skinny 25 at checkout. That is no dayswasted.com slash skinny 25 and you get 25% off your order. Cheers. Yes. And I mean, I've joked to people, I'm a little bit sociopathic and maybe I am. I've stayed away from psychiatrists.

So any diagnoses that they might want to give me as well. but there's a shutting down, there's an imperviousness because you have to shut yourself down emotionally. That's kind of now who I am. I'm not the most kind of warm person, but I've come to at least accept that about myself. I know where it came from. And at the same time, it's like a paradox because it deepens your compassion so much for anyone who suffers. And I think in this case, especially children, but anyone is suffering from mental health problems. It's hard sometimes. It's hard to tap into it sometimes, but it has the ability to deepen the capacity for compassion. It probably brings up all of those familiar feelings that you've personally experienced, right? And you can see that pain manifesting in someone else. Right. And you can understand that pain where someone that hasn't had the experiences that you guys have had can't begin to grasp it. Well, exactly. And it's a challenge sometimes too. I don't know if you have it, Lauren, but it's like I'll joke with people too.

like, oh, I, you know, I had a real human emotion. I mean, people... I can be, I can be pretty cold. I'm not, I don't know if cold's the right word. I can be, I can very easily detach from my emotions very quickly. Like, I remember when I would break up with a guy, like, it was like, it was like a butcher slicing a piece of meat. Like, it was just sliced and I was detached. So what the suicide, I think it definitely did harden me. And it, it made me detach quicker. but I also think that that can be used to your advantage in many circumstances. Maybe people don't want to hear that because they're going to say detaching from your emotions isn't good, but it has worked in my favor in a lot of ways.

And I think when you go through something like this, it is important to see what has actually ended up working for you. Yeah, and becoming that kind of cold calculating operator for me has been crucial and kind of creating what we've created. I mean, I have the idea. I know what we want to do. but it is it's very intellectual for me so my challenge is to feel things more but that intellectual capacity which was one of my sort of coping mechanisms has taken me pretty pretty far well i think

i don't even know that the word's not unlock i would be sensitive here but i think there's two there's two directions both of you could have gone right and i think the far majority of people when they suffer something like you've both suffered they kind of go the other way right like it's a rare case where someone takes a tragedy like you've both been through and says okay like i'm you're going to kind of go the other way and become a success story, right? And I'm sure you've seen that in what you do. A hundred percent. I think it's like sometimes it's just the quantity of these adverse experiences and there can be a tipping point and someone goes over that line and it's very hard to come back. And so for me, I think I know if I hadn't had my grandma who was just so nurturing to me that that was

kind of, if there were all these sort of deficits or negatives, that was such a positive. and with that kind of sense of strength or comfort that that gave me, I was able to stay just on the sort of plus side of the ledger in my life. I mean, I do things more slowly and I make lots of mistakes and it's a little bit sloppy or reckless at times, but I got everything done. And if I hadn't had that benefit, I could easily have gone the way. And that's why, you know, when we treat our clients and somebody just seems like a mess and they're hopeless, like, that could easily have been me, easily. You know, if I'd gotten into needles or whatever things like that.

I think similar to you, Lauren, like, you're probably your dad and your grandmother were like North stars for you to move forward. Yeah, definitely. I think the feminine energy, you can find in other places. My dad has feminine energy. You know, I think that it's not, sometimes it's not what society says, like mom and a dad, and you have to find that energy in other places. people. I always say Michael has, this is so weird, but I did, I did mushrooms and had this epiphany that I almost married my mother in a man. And people will think that's weird, but like he has a very feminine nurturing energy. Like he's, you are very motherly. And I mean that in the nicest way. I'm going to take it as a compliment. I can't. I want to go back to when you said that you were in AA, you're moving chairs. And you said, I'm going to do this for a year. Did that last.

the whole year. Did it last longer? Have you been sober since that day? What did that journey look like? So it basically lasted. I remember, you know, it was a cool place. People weren't that friendly. There was kind of cliquey. And it took me over the years, kind of moving around to different meetings and really kind of finding, I didn't sort of find my people in the, and the meeting where I met, where I met Alexis, where I met all my friends where really Oro House kind of came out of it. It was, in fact, they call it kind of the coffee after the meeting, or the meeting after the meeting, rather. And we would all go for coffee. It was this outdoor meeting in Malibu. It was beautiful. I don't know how I ended up there, just weird luck.

You know, so it's always been this uneven thing for me. And what that made me realize is there is no one way to do it, like, when you do the steps or how you do the steps. And, you know, I've had sponsors, and they've come and they've gone. And some of you use drugs. and, you know, you just kind of stick around. I don't go to meetings so much anymore. I mean, I think since having the family and the business, and, you know, people will tell you,

well, if you don't go to meetings, you're going to die. And, you know, it's been quite a while, and I'm still here. I'm actually doing great. Now, I would love to go to meetings just to be able to welcome new people to hopefully let them know that they don't have to, you know,

listen to those, you know, kind of doomsayers because I think, I think we don't realize what a, was that it was well I could get into the whole history and you'll have to read the the bob and my book coming up but A.A. started they were very mystical that it was really like a almost a branch of the new thought movement you know the mind cure they were into Carl Jung and the e Ching and they they were into seances and spiritualism they were they were sort of this odd group during this time in America where people were really hungry for something

different. Can I ask you a question real quick about spiritual? I find a lot of people that go through AA, there's like this emphasis on God and spiritual. And not to say that there's anything wrong with that, but if you're not a religious person, it's almost like you're transferring. Like, say I went into AA. Like I don't think it's, I mean, I could be wrong. It's a hard sell for me because I'm not religious. And if that's like a pillar of it, I feel like I would struggle. It is one of the biggest problems with A. And they tried to deal with it right in the beginning. they were like, God, as you understand God. I mean, these were not kind of Christian people.

There had been Christian groups that all failed. This was supposed to be something new and different. I mean, if anything, they were probably into, they were probably into Thoreau, and they were probably into Emerson, and they were probably into, like, Vedantic Hinduism and the Brahman and the Godhead and all this weird stuff. For sure, they were. So Bill Wilson himself got sober at a place called Towns Hospital, which was overlooking Central.

park, this beautiful place. It was high end. It would have costed at least $10,000 a month in today's money. You had your own private chef. You had a florist if you wanted one and you had nurses. But the actual belladonic cure that they would give their patients was this concoction that they would administer every hour for 50 hours. And it was made up of all these tropane alkaloids, Henbane, Dutura, which basically witches have been using for thousands of years. It's considered Shiva, the god Shiva's favorite drug. In fact, in India, it's called in Sanskrit the crown of Shiva. The Shumash Indians around here used it. Ethiopia, they use it to open you up. Is it a shot or is it a tincture? It was some kind of tincture. And it would have, it's considered a delirient. It would have been

this major ordeal, but that's when he had his famous white light experience. And in fact, he even says at one point, ah, this is the god of the preachers. He was having a full on visionary experience. Now, people in AA kind of downplay that. Of course, he went on years later, I think in 56, he tried LSD and did it regularly with actually a doctor here in L.A. named Sidney Cohen at the VA hospital who got a lot of famous people high in LSD, but he did, you know, all these LSD experiments. Bill Wilson did that for 11 years. It got him out of a major depression, you know, 20 years sober. He wrote another book to go along with the first book, and it re-inspired him. to kind of get down into this material that was what he says gets you sober,

which is basically a spiritual experience. So it's not the Christian God. It's a shame people associated with that. It's a shame people let it be associated with that and put all this kind of Christian spin on it because it's not that. Well, because I guess in my experience and people I know that have been through AA, right, even people that prior were not spiritual at all, I won't say any names, but all of a sudden they become so into this like Jesus, God. Again, I'm not passing judgment.

I'm just curious. It's like, it's almost a transfer. I haven't had that experience with everyone. I've had that experience with a lot. It's there. It is? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And it's almost like in a way, it's like they're transferring a fixation, right? It's like, okay, this is the thing now that I have to latch on to. It's healthier. Sure. No, it's healthier, yes. But I just wonder, like, for people that have that mental block and can't get to that spiritual place. Like you say, it's a hard sell for young people.

Young people are into that. And we're there holding hands saying the Lord's prayer. A.A. is going to just disappear. Yeah, I'm not going to lie. Like, I go over to Thanksgiving. And like, I don't want to hold hands with the brother-in-law and everybody around the table. I'm sorry, I just don't want to do it. Why are you saying? I'm sorry. Like, I'm doing that. Because it happens. And it's weird. And I'm like, I'm like, I got the one eye on and can I eat the fucking turkey.

You know, I don't do that. You know, listen, I'm not going to be invited to him anymore. But, you know, I just have a hard time with all of that stuff because, you know, it's just not, it's personally, it's not for me. But there's a lot of great messages, I think, in AA. They're like, I've, I've just kind of played just with the book. I've not read the full thing, but I've just opened it up and read certain things. And there's a lot of really great information in there. There really is.

And I think the more we know about that history and that they were weird and it's so much in line with manifestation or whatever people are into nowadays. It's exactly that. And to be clear, I would take that trade off of spirituality over a needle or drugs or alcohol if it helps someone in any day. I'm just a question, I'm just asking, you know, if that is, if that's a necessary component all the time. No. Without giving up what you're not allowed to give up because I know it's alcoholic anonymous for a reason. What is, what is an AA meeting like? Yeah, you can talk about that.

Okay. And many of the sort of little traditions like the handholding and stuff started here in L.A., in California, in the beginning it was, in the beginning it was an encounter between Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith. Bill Wilson had had his white light experience and he knew as well as well that he had to help other people. That was part of his revelation. Like, I got to, that this works because I help other people. He's at the Mayflower Hotel in Akron, Ohio, on business, and he's, he's looking at the bar, and he's thinking, I'm going to have a drink. I need to help someone. He jumps on a phone. He gets a list of 10 people. The last number he calls is this guy named

Bob Smith, Dr. Bob, whose wife answers, and he's like, yes, yes, yes, you can come see him tomorrow. So he's like, great. And Dr. Bob is like, I'll give him 15 minutes. Like, that's a It's it. Bill Wilson comes over the next day. And rather than lecturing him or talking down to him or preaching at him, he just told his story. Dr. Bob told his story and they related. And they ended up hanging out for hours. And that was the moment. And that's what an AA meeting really is. It might be with a room of people, but that's what they're doing. There's no leaders. It's basically anarchical. It's really cool. It sounds like how people are healing is through listening. Listening and sharing and realizing their commonalities and relating and being compassionate and empathetic and not judging.

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When your mom was sent to these psych words, like what were the episodes that led to that? Because this is during a time, obviously, they even know what really was going on? Or was it just like, oh, someone's like, something's going wrong. We've got to put her somewhere. And then as you go to these places, like what is that doing to you as a child? I imagine like you're having extreme anxiety. A lot of anxiety. And so they still don't know what it is.

Like addiction, there's no gene for it. There's no gene for schizophrenia. They don't know. They still don't know what it is. It's this great mystery. It seems like an event happens that switches something that's dormant in the brain. Yeah, or it's just a break. I mean, the psyche just can't handle this world so they go to another world.

But who makes a decision at the time saying, okay, someone's got to be checked in here? Well, she might have gone voluntarily sometimes. So she would always, or someone had her committed, she would stay voluntarily. She felt safe. And actually her sister backing up a little bit when I talked to her, said that first time she went and visited her she felt safe she was so sweet she was like mending the bras of the other you know female patients by the 10th time she couldn't get up out of bed she'd put on weight you know her hair was kind of dry she'd changed her just something changed

she's got the waxy these drugs these had powerful antipsychotics which they've been using the first one was brought to market in May of 1954, Thorazine. Everything changed. Before that, they'd been doing lobotomies, electroconvulsive shock therapy, metrazol convulsive therapy, which would also create like a seizure. Brutal things. And then the other one was a coma. They would put you in a diabetic coma, basically. And so when they invented thorazine, it was a way to quiet the wards. That was all they wanted to do was quiet the wards in these hospitals because they were so difficult to manage these people. That's what Thorazine did. And so the new antipsychotics, they're basically the same thing. They basically still use these drugs. I mean, she was on those drugs that they'd been using since

1954. I mean, they didn't work. She was on all the drugs. And she still took her life. So that, I have problems. I'm not anti-psychiatry, but I, and because you ask, well, who decides? I mean, doctors are deciding what mental health problems are, what addiction problems are. Whereas there's a good chance that there's something, they are something so much bigger and weirder and something that kind of involves all of us in a way. Here's the problem. I try to look at, I always try to zoom out in the lens and use like, like you're looking at the immediate scope of what's going on in the world, right? So you see what's happening currently? And then if you zoom that out and say, okay, like 10 years ago, what was the sudden? And then you go further out like about 50 and 100. And if you look at it from that perspective, again, you start to, you start to realize, okay, even people in positions of authority or people with an expertise or people with a degree or people

with these have been wrong in the past and have continued to be wrong, not to say that a lot of the time they're not right, right? But if you look at it from that lens of like 50, 100, 25, whatever it is, you're like, okay, they're not always correct, which means when people want you to just say, trust the authorities or trust the science or trust all these things, like it's not like it's always, correct every time. Like we have been in a learning process for thousands and thousands of years as a human species and you'd be remiss to not question it sometimes. You would and you need that humility. There's a really good book by a man named Robert Whitaker called Mad in American.

It basically traces the whole history of how we've treated mental health problems in the West. And he asks that very question because with each of those things, the metrosol convulsive therapy, the lobotomy, the electroconvulsive shock therapy, each time there was a new breakthrough, we were then Thorazine. We were like, oh, I can't believe we used to do that stuff. Now we're so much better. And he's wondering, what are we doing now that we're going to look back on and wonder, oh my God, I can't believe we used to do that. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I think like, this is where people need to be careful because we all, you know, get on our high horse and be like, I can't believe they used to do it that way 20 years ago or 15 years ago.

That same thing's going to happen to us now. And so you have to constantly question. It's not to say that practices right now are not correct. But I just think it's the, It's the culture that we've kind of run through a lot of the kind of medical cures and medicine. I mean, we would be in huge trouble without medicine, especially when it comes to infections and treating cancer, things like that, diabetes. But when it comes to mental health, I think it's something so much bigger and weirder and that it has almost everything to do with our culture because they did some studies, for example, with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia sufferers in America heard voices that were often hostile. violent, threatening. And in other cultures, same diagnosis, voices were friendly, sort of, they were like a friend or a family member or like some kind of spirit. And even in the West,

if you go back to ancient Greece, it was called Divine Mania. And it meant you were possessed. It could be difficult. It could be a difficult experience, probably like a psilocybin experience. But you were basically engodded. It was enthusiasm. So the world, you were, you were, you were. word enthusiasm comes from this word that meant we were basically engodded with some kind of divine spirit in us and that we might have messages messages for people like even the oracles at Delphi or various prophets would have had these experiences of what we would call madness and actually would have had something really important to tell us so i believe that everyone who's been kind of locked out and excluded and pathologized might actually have something really important to tell us

all about ourselves. But we've been doing that for 500 years. We've been locking them up. And it was actually the leprosaria and there was about 19,000 of them across Europe where leprosy was this obviously huge problem, though that kind of went away. It went away and around the middle of the 1400s. And it took about 100 or 150 years. But by the middle of the 1500s, they started using these old leprosaria as asylums. That was the birth of the asylum. And they were treating all kinds of people, they were treating, you know, people with madness. They were treating veterans, returning veterans from the Crusades. Literally, Bedlam was short for, like, something, something Bethlehem Hospital because they were fighting a holy war in Bethlehem. So the returning veterans would be treated in

Bedlam. You know, old people, poor people, and eventually criminals. So there was no, like, prison, mental hospital, poor house in England, they had all the poor laws beginning around in the 1500s where vagrancy became this crime. And there was all this displacement at this time. There was wars, there was famines, there was, you know, kind of empire building, there was land clearances. So all these people were kind of diseases. They were newly displaced and had nowhere to go. And so in France, for example, I think around the maybe early 1500s, they had the archers. So every city had a gate. And usually the leprosary was just outside the gate. They kept them again, just, just outside. And the archers would basically chase out all the poor people out into the countryside.

But when they opened what was called the General Hospital in Paris, now they were called the Archers of the Poor, 50 years later, and they were going out into the countryside with their bows and arrows and bringing back vagrants and putting them in the hospital, the general hospital. So that's our history. So we can't look at prisons in America and we can't look at the way we treat people with mental health problems and those hospitals I used to visit without kind of being aware of this history. Like what was going on with us? Like what are we doing? What is the history? I'm like you. I'm a story. Let me ask you a question here. And it's actually kind of followed up by a statement slash compliment. I was reading your bio before this. You're very

well educated. Listening to you here, you're very well spoken. And it sounds like you're very well read because it's rare to meet people that can go that quickly back into the mind and decide history. I mean this as a compliment, but I wonder as you were going through your childhood and going through your struggle with addiction, were you constantly learning and reading and looking at these things? Or did this happen after? And like, how did you, because I think there's a lot of people sitting here and looking at your story and everything you've been through and be like, okay, how does this polished version, well-educated, successful, all these things happen in between all of the chaos? So I think there's maybe an unlock there for people.

Yeah. And you said such an interesting word, chaos, because I believe we're afraid of chaos. And that might be the answer to my question. I just asked, why are we locking up and why are we so afraid of these people? They represented chaos. They represented the chaos of kind of the shadow of civilization. Well, chaos is also like the source of all creativity and life itself comes out of these chaotic forces. So we need to rather than lock it up, become friends with it. So I became just kind of intuitively, I guess, to answer your question, became friends with chaos.

I, like I mentioned, was doing a lot of LSD at the time. and I don't know why me or why this happened, but we would have done acid, a friend of mine and I, and looked down at the ground and realized by talking that we were seeing the same thing. I remember this one particular time, and it was like weird Aztec calendars. I'm like, you're seeing that?

He's like, you're seeing that too? Like we were hallucinating the exact same thing. So maybe unlike most people, I don't know, but the next day I went to the library. That was just, I don't know why I'm built like that. And so I went to the library. Eventually I wanted to go to school. I wanted, and I've been following this same thread through kind of thick and thin the whole

time. And it's really like led me to this very moment. I think there's a real, Lauren and I were having breakfast this morning when we were talking about like both of us try to escape things to go and read. I think reading is so important. And I know some people are like, I'm not a reader. I don't care over the head. But I think even just for mental clarity and stability and like feeling like the world's

bigger than just you and opening up your perspective and all of these things, like, I feel like it's such an unlock and I've never really met an extremely high performer that hasn't had some kind of interest in either history or reading or like looking, which is why I asked because there's probably a lot of people out there that are looking for unlocks and it's like this has been written before. There's books. There's resources. There are places to start and do these things. Because of what you do, I would love to know maybe an anonymous story of someone who was so, so deep in addiction that overcame it. And I don't know if overcame is the right word, but if you could tell us a story where like normal people would look at someone and be like,

oh my God, they're done. But you saw like this rise from the Phoenix sort of situation. Yeah. And it does happen. And there's no accounting for it almost. I'd like to say it's because of all of our amazing work that we do. And I know that the way we do what we do, that it doesn't hurt people, first of all, and that it creates kind of fertile ground for people to kind of find their own path.

you know, and that's simply treating them kindly and being extremely patient. But as far as the research tells us, I mean, it takes on average like nine years for someone from the first time they try to get sober to achieve long-term recovery. And so, you know, talking to, if I was to talk to families, I mean, I used to do the admissions, so I would answer the phone. And I would tell people, look, I'm not going to guarantee that your loved one's never going to do drugs again. I can't do that.

And in fact, it could take on average nine years. But what I would say is we'll give them the most kind of positive, empowering experience that we can. And basically the most positive experience of recovery. So hopefully they associate recovery with something that's positive as opposed to negative. And I've seen it happen. But it doesn't just happen at our center. It can happen at a kind of a brutal county facility. It can happen in jail.

It can happen on your friend's couch. there's just that moment. And in fact, many, many people do recover spontaneously without having ever gone to treatment. So I know I'm kind of like the like reverse salesperson. Like there's nothing we're going to do that's going to cure you or fix you. And the very best we can do is kind of create this space for someone to hopefully find just that inner transformation. Like the Greeks had a word chiros. It's like, this is the moment. And, and, and, There's a term with Chiros who is like in Greek myth. Chiros is a god who is accompanied by a goddess named Metanoia.

And metanoia basically means like a conversion or like a change of mind. And these two things go together. There's this window. There's this moment. And there's a conversion and there's a change of mind. I'm someone who happens to believe that the unconscious is all around us, within us. and it has kind of a self-organizing power that has a self kind of correcting or I don't know how to describe it, but it's basically it's talking to us and it's guiding us through dreams or

ideas or synchronicities. Things are presented into our life and it's, you know, it's almost like there's a guardian angel who's keeping us safe and who's kind of maybe telling us what to say at any given moment. And again, it comes from that idea like of chaos and where creativity itself comes from. And it comes from this very kind of strange, otherworldly, indescribable, irrational place. And so, again, in our culture, I think the problem with our understanding of mental health and addiction problems is we're so interested in ordering and rationalizing and that everything has to have a purpose. Like, I'm much more interested in purposelessness, in failing. Like, anything that our culture is so dead set on, I'm interested.

in the exact opposite. Well, that sets me up for my next question. Thanks, Evan. That was a nice transition. Look at that. I don't mean to brag, but I have my PhD in bloat. I run perpetually bloated. Like my face gets bloated in the morning, my stomach gets bloated. And I feel like I have all the tools in my bloat toolbox. And one of those tools, and this is like the hammer of it all, is a ray. I first found out about a ray through Melissa Woodhouse. She raved about it. And then I started trying it and testing it and absolutely fell in love with it. What they wanted to do in their mission, and this is cool because we got to interview the founder and she told us this, is that they want to help women feel their best so they can be their best. And all of their

products are 100% natural, filler-free, organic and formulated by a naturopathic doctor. I love this about them. So they use really solid ingredients, ones that target bloat, like lemon balm, peppermint, bromeline, which I might be. pronouncing wrong, but I did talk to a bunch of doctors about this ingredient, and this is an ingredient that they recommend to their patients post-surgery. It's actually found in pineapple, and it's one of the strongest ingredients when it comes to fighting inflammation. The bloat capsules specifically were designed to give people food freedom, so you can enjoy the foods you love without any discomfort. It was so crazy because the other day, Michael and Mimi ordered Shake Shack. I could kill them,

and I took my bloat capsules afterwards, and normally I would bloat up, and I did not blowed up. That was a real test, okay? Perfect for the holidays when you're having all different kinds of foods and alcohols. You're going to go to array.com. That's A-R-R-A-E dot com and use code skinny a checkout for 10% off of a one-time purchase, or you can do 25% off your first month on subscription. Definitely try these out, ice roll while you're taking your bloat capsules and you're good to go. You and your wife, who I love, Alexis Haynes, she has a podcast on Dear Media called Recovering from Reality, are doing something that's against, and I put in quotes, society standards. I find it to be very interesting. And what I actually sent her a voice note the other day, I said, if people are coming at you very aggressively,

I'm sure that they're jealous and interested in what you're doing. Because if you're an open-minded person, And like my vibe. Or not just jealous and interested, or it's a, anytime people see something counter to their beliefs, it rattles something from again, right? That's a good point. Thank you, Michael Lossack. It's also like maybe, you know, doing some self-assessment there. Yes.

So, but I think that it's very cool that you guys are speaking out about your open marriage. And I would love for you to talk about how that came into fruition, like what was going on before, how it actually, the conversation happened and where you guys. are now. Yeah, and thank you. Well, the first thing I would say is before, it was like perfectly normal. It was a happy marriage. I mean, we'll have been married for 10 years in April. I mean, we're like beating all the odds already. So even if we were to, you know, finish it off today, I think we'd have done better than 99% of people. And we are happy, have been happy the whole time see ourselves as partners for life on this crazy adventure and there's no one i'm closer to or who's

shared in the in the highs and lows of of you know a particularly important and interesting part of my life these last 10 years and and to be able to have watched her and continue to unfold and develop it's it's incredible so it wasn't that there was anything wrong with our marriage it's that i think for everyone. There's different layers to who we are. There's our persona. There's our ego. There's our resume. This is who we are. This is what we do. And, you know,

kind of below that is our family and some of the intergenerational stuff we were talking about. Then there's our kin groups or the country, the culture we live in. And you start getting deeper and deeper. And there's kind of ancient history. And you go deeper than that. And, you know, there's kind of primitive man.

You go deeper than that. And we're animals. We're literally primates. We're literally primates, you know, and of course you go deeper than that, and eventually we're just stardust. But we seem to like to be with other people sexually. And so I guess we started talking about it a couple of years ago, and I know for her, I knew she was interested in men and women. And I think you might not even believe me, but initially the sort of impetus of this all was that would be sad if she could like never be with a woman, that's what she likes to do. And I kind of searching my own soul about it.

I thought that wouldn't bother me one bit. And then kind of building on that, I thought, you know what? It wouldn't even bother me if she was with a guy. Like, you know, we were talking earlier. I mean, she was quite young when we got married. And I was older. I'd been with plenty of people. I thought I could make it to the finish line.

But if she's going to have to wait for me to die, I mean, gosh, she might be 60 years old. It might be too late and the pool boy and all that stuff. And just for context, she was 21 when you got married. That's very young. Very young. So it sounds like you started to feel empathy for her situation. Mm-hmm. And so was the conversation one conversation or was it multiple conversation?

Multiple, multiple. So we talked about it for probably like a year and a half before we pulled the trigger. And then eventually, yeah, you do pull the trigger. And I think we were like at our daughter's dance competition in Orange County. And I think she got on to Bumble or something first and started swiping. And it was fun and it was interesting. And, you know, I think for both of us, there's maybe little feelings of jealousy here and there.

But I think there's a term in the sort of poly, polyamorous world, which is compersion, which is taking pleasure or experiencing some kind of joy in the pleasure of someone else. And that's kind of what it was. Like she was just having so much fun. And I think even for both of us, it kind of like woke something up us and this kind of aspect of ourselves that, I mean, you have to admit when you're married kind of takes a back seat or it's not even there. It can't be. I mean, you know, you have the

wandering eye and all that, but you don't, you know, you don't act on it. And so being able to act on it and she's enjoying it and she's, she's, she's having fun and it was great. And then I think I waited a little while. You know, I'm busy. I mean, I have a family and a business. And I I had forgotten. Dating does take a lot of time and energy. You know, so it's kind of always one of those things where the grass is greener.

Let me ask you this, because there's, this is the, we've talked about this subject before we've had people on the show. My whole thing is, I can understand how two people in a marriage and a great relationship

can get to this place. You add a third or a fourth person in, how do you deal with that dynamic? Because you and Alexis are so solid, right? Like you're a family unit, 10 years, ton of shared history. like you're like in it right like that's easy to understand and to grasp how you guys could be on the same page third person coming in that's a that's a new dynamic and how do you like

how do you kind of account for that yeah and and and there's going to be i think i don't know if different standards there's there's there's there's rules like we have kind of guidelines and they're being constantly negotiated and renegotiated and so for her her girlfriend who's who's more of like kind of a serious girlfriend she comes over and she stays And we're friends and we've gone out to movies together and had dinner together and things like that. For me, myself, I probably wouldn't bring like a girl that I was dating home. I'm like a little less interested in kind of settling down with one person. So do you tell that person that you're like, say you personally are dating someone, you're like, hey, this is my already situation.

Oh, yeah. Like that person can get attached, though, is what I'm saying. And so how do you manage that or it's just like, you know, this is the deal? Well, I have an extra special ability to kind of keep people in arm's reach. I think maybe because of my own history. And again, it might look like sociopathic, but I'm not. But I still have this skill set where I love people and I adore people and it's been amazing, meeting interesting, beautiful, lovely people. And I can kind of keep separations.

I have walls. I guess what I'm saying is, and this is the only example I can quite think of. I used to, in my younger days, I would date. And from the beginning, I would try to be very upfront and say, like, hey, this is just a casual thing. This is nothing serious. And it almost in a way made it worse. Because I think when you tell someone that it's like, well, no, I'm going to change this person. I'm going to convert them over to my camp or I'm going to actually get.

You never told me that. But I never told you that. You are annoying. And I wanted to sometimes be like, no, I promise you like, this is nothing, right? It's not, this is fun. This is this. And it denies that kind of sounds going to be cruel. But it's just trying to like level with someone from the beginning.

But I almost think in a way it makes it harder. It doesn't because I think there's a competition. You know, that men are competitive, women can be competitive and they want to tame you in that moment and domesticize you. I don't know. I mean, these are all sort of cultural stereotypes, but they want to get you and keep you. So it can be a little challenging for sure. What's the conversation with your kids? Alexis did like an Instagram story where she was asking Harper on Instagram story how she was feeling.

and Harper seemed like she was pretty well-versed in everything that's going on. She seemed pretty comfortable. Kids are so resilient. It goes back to that kind of like good enough mothering. And kids can adapt. I mean, we know, sadly, they can adapt to war. They can adapt to some of the most harsh conditions known to man. And certainly they can adapt to loving, stable caregivers.

And I don't think it matters who those caregivers are, how many they. there are. And as long as they understand that they're safe, they're cared for, no one's going anywhere, they're fine. I mean, so I haven't talked to our kids about my dating. Again, I might go out once, maybe twice a week. You know, it's usually after they've gone to bed. So there's, we haven't broached the subjects yet. I think that it's cool that you guys are talking about this because there are so many couples that are doing this what you're talking about and they're not talking about it and they're not being honest. So I guess the more

I voiced noted her, I was saying I just find it refreshing that she's opening up about it. It takes a lot of courage, especially online. And I wish people, there's a story. One time, Lauren and I, tangent, maybe you cut this out, but you actually keep it. We went to this, we got invited to this hotel

a while back. I'm not going to say where the place was like eyes wide shut or something? Well, we got there and it was like, I'll skip to the end so that people get it. It ended up being a full swinger's hotel where couples go and do this. But we didn't realize that. We just thought we were getting taking a nice vacation. And I got there and they kept saying, hey, everyone will be down by the fire. And I was like, why the fuck I don't care? Like, I'm not going and joining all the hotel

guys. And they kept looking at us strange the whole time. And we'd go to breakfast and like we'd kind to be off to our side and everyone would be, I'm like, man, these people like, this hotel is very friendly. It wasn't until the end that I realized we're at a hotel like this. I'm like, if people would have just talked about this and brought it to the light, I could have understood it was going. And you could have prepared yourself mentally. Did you think you were going to get your cock grabbed at the the pay bar? This could have been a whole. This could have been a whole. different trip for us if I would have realized. I was actually getting irritated and fresh. I'm like, I don't care that everyone's going to the fire. If I'm on vacation, I don't need to like do a group

activity and like go glad hand down by the fire. No, but it is important to have open conversations about what you're going through like this because then maybe it normalizes it a little more and people are more inclined to talk about it. Yeah. And and I think whatever aspect of the culture we're talking about like why we do anything the way we do it. I mean, these are habits. Sometimes they've been like this. We've been doing this for hundreds of years or maybe thousands of years. And habits are really hard to break.

And people will become disturbed when you start doing something differently. So this is our little contribution, I think, for now, to the conversation. But the same thing might be around like the nature of work. Like, why do we work the way we do? Why do we work 40 hours a week? We have all this technology and automation. And shouldn't that help free us to enjoy? Our time and how do we structure that time?

This is another fascination of mine work, like, and just our ideas around it. And how do we structure that time? Well, I got to be doing something. Well, do I? Like, can I maybe just do nothing? And that's very frowned upon. You're not allowed to do nothing.

So all of these things, all of these ideas we have, I like to just wonder. And you were talking about it before, like history and philosophy, if there's one thing that's really missing, and if there was one thing that might, you know, help us save, ourselves from ourselves, it would be just a little more awe and wonder. Like, I wonder why we do this

and awe, like, isn't this amazing that we're here? All right. So the skinny confidential started as a resource, and I have the hack of a lifetime for you. And that is brought to you by Bight. Bight has this hero product that I cannot stop telling my friends about over Happy Hour. It is a dry toothpaste. You guys, everyone is going to freak out. because not only is it a dry toothpaste, it's a dry toothpaste tablet. They come in this reusable glass jar and they have refills too. So it's very, very sustainable and it's a way to reduce plastic. And I found when researching this brand that there's over one billion plastic toothpaste tubes that are thrown out every single year that end up in oceans. That is 50 Empire State Buildings

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stock the site, but you have to pick up those dry toothpaste tablets. I want people to question some of the constraints and restrictions that they put that they put themselves in, right? If you think about like even the idea of a marriage, right, like for the years like if this was pushed, this was a religious agenda. It's between a man and a woman. It can only be this one thing. It has to be monogamous. It's a control mechanism, right?

And I'm not, again, I'm not disparaging religion. But I'm saying if you go back further and you go back to primal times, like men and women had multiple partners for years, that's how you built a tribe or a clan or a group. You know, like that's what you had to, right? Over time, this has become more restricted, more restrained. And it's, I think, interesting in a time where information is so accessible that people don't question that a little bit more. not to say that it's wrong.

Like it might be the right system, but it's not the only system that works, right? And that can be applied to an assortment of different things. So where are you and Alexis at now, like in your life? So her girlfriend is allowed to come over the house. You said that you don't bring girlfriends over. What is it like in your home now? What are the conversations?

Is it still like evolving what you guys have now? Or are you good with what you have now? I think we're pretty good with what we have now. I mean, I won't speak for her, but I mean, I'm busy. I just started, I went back to school. I'm going to get my PhD in psychology. Wow. Yeah.

So I just started, thank you. I just started that. We're family. I mean, it's honestly a miracle that I even have a day or a day and a half here and there. And I wouldn't change that for the world. I mean, and I also like, I think Alexis looks at things like very immediately. Like, we don't spend enough time together. Of course, I need to work on that.

So we go to movies or we go to date nights. So that's like my responsibility. I'm like more like the sort of long-term guy. I'm like, we're going to be together. I'm going to be alive for at least another 40 years. No, I'm like, Alexis. I'm like, what are you doing today? Right in space?

I like to keep it extra creepy. She's like, we went to the formula or me and some buddies went to the Formula One in Austin. Like, what was that last week? Two weeks ago. And I told her for months of hours, I'm going to have some friends. I'll be home at night. But in the day, I'm going to this race. She's like, you're leaving me all weekend.

I can't believe you're going. No, because I want help with the baby. That's a different story. No, no, no, no. No, that's a different story. That's a different story. She's so dramatic. That's a different story.

I'm doing this new thing where I'm not going on the ride with you today. I want to know how your friends and family and grandparents are taking this development in your relationship. I mean, we haven't got too much. There was a little sort of bumps in the road. I won't say who, but there was a family member. What's a bump in the road? Like, just in terms of like little resistance. Sure, sure.

So there was a family member in the beginning, and I won't name any names, but I'll kind of paint a picture who was really worried about how like basically kids on the playground were going to react and that they could be really mean to our kids, which is probably there's certainly a probably a grain of truth to that. I would like to think we're raising kids who can kind of stand up for what they believe in and, you know, these kind of unorthodox situations and, you know, what if they had two dads or two moms? I mean, they could get grief for that too. But here we are in 2021 and hopefully that they're going to be able to kind of stand up for themselves and what they believe in.

So, it, it just, I just watched the movie, Jojo Rabbits. I don't know if you've seen that it's such a good movie. And basically the little boy in the movie is like a Hitler youth. And his mom is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic.

And he finds her, he finds out about this. And he's really grappling with himself. I mean, the kids, he's this little softy. He can't even kill a bunny. That's why they call him Jojo Rabbit.

Like, he wants to be a good Nazi but he can't be it just doesn't have it in him and he wants to turn in this girl so bad you know and he's he's so afraid of her but he's enthralled by her at the same time and and so when the family member was saying expressing these concerns about what these little eight-year-olds were going to do or say i picture this little Hitler youth and i'm like oh so we're taking marching orders from kids whose brains won't even be completely formed for like almost you know, 20 years who have only any idea of what's going on because we tell them and teach them. So, I mean, I won't organize my life around what an eight-year-old on the playground thinks about how I live

my life. I won't do it. How about I won't organize my life what anyone thinks about me? Even better. That's, for me, that's like, that's real liberate, like, that's making me feel liberated to just not care what anyone thinks. I said it before. Say it again. The coyote's hell and the caravan keeps moving.

Yeah. I have one random question that I just want to ask you on air. I was going to ask you off. But I guess I'll just end it on this. And you and Bob can come back on the podcast anytime you want together. I think that would be a great episode. We are at a point right now. I've noticed in recovery.

And I've had a lot of conversation about this with people who are in recovery about recovering addicts using psilocybin. and ayahuasca. And I would love to know not your, like, not your psychologist opinion. I would like to know what your opinion on that is because I feel like you've seen it all.

I've definitely seen some stuff. And so again, first thing I would do is point back to Bill Wilson. You know, and he's using basically which is called flying ointments, flying potions. And, I mean, that's where the brooms come from. They would apply it to themselves with brooms. But the same tropane. containing alcoholics, plus then the LSD.

I would look, I would point to, and I'm getting some of the psychology stuff out of the way before I really get into the answer, but, you know, you look at the research coming out of Johns Hopkins and Yale, and you look at the 400% improvements in outcomes over traditional antidepressants when not only psilocybin is used, but large doses of psilocybin, but by the equivalent of like five dried grams. and with even one experience, and where they're having these outcomes six months later, one year later, life-changing, permanently life-changing experiences that were a result of the occasion of this mystical experience. The mystical experience for Bill Wilson or for the participant in these studies or for someone who's doing this, growing their own mushrooms at home and trying them at home, is the thing. That is the, you know, Bill Wilson called the God of the preachers. look at these religions and I have nothing really against them either, but they're kind of like, I don't want to call them dead religions, but they're, they're kind of on autopilot. And someone

benefits, I think, from having those kind of profound experiences. You're seeing it's this cultural zeitheist right now. It's everywhere because I think we need it. Because what happens when someone has one of those experiences, not only does, again, like with the unconscious the way it is, not only just the unconscious and even the brain they've shown in terms of brain science seem to then reorganize itself into sort of healthier neuro pathways. Not only does the person personally then therefore feel better, but this is something I don't think people talk about enough. It seems to be the only medicine that someone will take

that will not only make them personally feel better, but will one of the first things they want to do is help make the world a better place. What other medicine does that? So when I talk about these medicines, what are you talking about? Because I'm talking about psilocybin and ayahuasca. Am I missing something? It sounds like you said LSD. Oh, I mean, maybe LSD.

The studies nowadays seem to be around ayahuasca and psilocybin, which I think is from what I know, my very amateur chemistry seem to be very closely related. They, it, I guess for people that aren't experienced, it's like, I think one of the simplest ways it breaks down the ego completely and makes you able to see that the world's not just about you. it's about all of this thing that we're connected to, right? And so it opens up everything because as soon as the focus is not just on just you personally and how you see everything and how you feel about everything.

And you see it's like all connected and it's about everybody else as well. Without an ego, you can start to kind of be like, oh, and get into that kind of healing process. When I think maybe those things that we talked about do help you realize that. I think too, when the pendulum is swinging, I think we have been so wrapped up in our phones and using mushrooms with alcohol or LSD with alcohol, I think it's swinging to where people want to get off their phones and use it more medicinally without alcohol, without that gnarly frequency.

Without going to like a festival, you want to be like in a dark room from what I've heard with maybe some music and set and setting with the right people. So it's something like we obviously don't do it at Oro House. We're still absent at base, but it's something I'm interested in. So when I become a licensed psychologist, my goal is to write my dissertation around.

this topic and then come back on the podcast. I would love to. Yes. Come back after you write your dissertation on that topic. You and Bob can come on. We can shoot the shit. Your new book is out. Pimp yourself out.

Tell us where to find you on Instagram. Also go listen to recovery. Recovering from reality. You were on Alexis's latest episode I listened. But tell us about your book. So the book is called Can America Recover Reimagining the drug problem? And so it's this parallel that I discovered between the addicted person and America itself, both of which, I mean, it's not an insult because,

as you've said, we've seen these kind of phoenixes being reborn out of the fire. Like this is an amazing thing. America is great. Addicted people are great. They're beautiful people who, when they were young, kind of got off to a rough start. And we can be transformed. We can solve all of our problems. we can become leaders, in fact.

And addicted people might be the people to kind of help us find our way or to show us how to turn that difficult stuff into beautiful, good stuff. So basically, Bob and I created a parallel between the addicted person and America itself. One thing I'll sort of say that's interesting, I think, is the Greek word for drug is pharmacon. It meant drug, it meant poison, it meant the antidote to the poison. The word pharmacose was the Greek word for scapegoat. Drug addicts have become the scapegoat in our culture. So pharmacose, the reason it's a similar word is because it meant basically purgative. It was, if there was something wrong in your community, you would find the scapegoat.

You would put all your problems onto the scapegoat and send it out into the desert. It's this ancient ritual of exclusion, basically. I mean, what have we done that? We've incarcerated more people than anyone on earth ever has. We lock up and medicate everyone who's slightly different. You know, we're homeless people are an annoyance, not a shock to ourselves, that we would let anyone in our community do that. We've therefore kind of voluntary excluded them because it helps us somehow feel okay. Well, it doesn't anymore.

I don't think this many people have one thing Bob likes to say is, you know, never have so, so many had so much and been so miserable. And that's kind of, I think, where we are as a culture. We're kind of in the tail end of this kind of industrial civilization that I think has kind of run its course that is ripe for this transformation. So addicts have become the scapegoat. Our culture itself is a drug. Our ideas about who we are and what we are and why we're here are, an intoxicating. drug that for a lot of people we can't let go of. And so the book for us was just a way to kind of shake up some of these ideas. No needs to come to the same conclusions we did. But to kind of start

a conversation and people can come to their own conclusions. But to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed, that's always kind of our goal. Is it on Amazon? Yes. And what's your Instagram handle? It's Evan Haynes. I'm like the worst self-promoter in the world. That's okay. We're going to link it all off. You're good at other things. It's Evan Haynes. Evan, come back soon. Listen to Alexis's podcast, you guys. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, man. Thanks for doing that. Thank you so much. That was awesome. That was fun. Before you go to win a copy of Evan's book and Alexis's book, we're going to include two books. All you have to do is tell us who you want to hear next on the skinny confidential, him and her podcast.

Head over to at Lauren Bostic. Let us know. We're keeping track. We're always listening to what you guys want. And with that, thank you so much for rating and reviewing the podcast.