The Skinny Confidential Him & Her Podcast - 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 t...he 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
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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 along 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 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, in 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 to 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 Recovering 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. Oro. You did it. I can say it. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. I can
say it, Michael. I have problems sometimes saying certain words. Yeah, no shit. This introduction
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 Iroh Recovery House.
Oro. Oro Recovery. O-R-O. Once again, we're starting over.
Oro.
Oro.
Oro Recovery.
Oro.
He is the co-founder of the Oro... He is the co-founder of the Oro House.
Oro Recovery.
O-R-O.
He is the co-founder of the Oro 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 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,
you know, 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 was in Canada growing up. I lived with her on
the weekends. I lived with my dad during the week and I lived 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.
Like, so I was sitting out waiting for my parents
to come pick me up, my stepmom 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 ride home,
got out of the car, went into the house.
And my dad said, your mom is dead.
It was devastating.
And so I think it was like the next day I was calling like my like goth friends,
like my, you know, rocker friends.
Like I just, I changed overnight.
I'm sorry, 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 LA.
And I was out at Cinespace. I remember on a Tuesday night, this was 15, 16 years ago now. Steve Aoki's DJ there
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 LA County jail. Yeah. So did they book you for DUI?
They booked me on a felony DUI because I, 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, who 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 him, I'm like, I think I might have a problem. It
never occurred 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, it's 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 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 remember I was so nervous the first morning. over here on Robertson it's called the log cabin
I remember 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 there's some celebrities there and I'm like putting away
chairs after with Anthony Kiedis and you know he's obviously publicly sober guy and I thought
this is cool I'm gonna try this I'm gonna see if I can become like comfortable in 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 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 you know 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,
that kind of cafeteria smell and very institutional. And it wasn't cool. It wasn't
fun. I mean, she felt safe there. But so, do you want to know an interesting story? I was driving to work just a few, two months ago.
And I remembered her psychiatrist name, Michael Myers.
Because, you know, it's like the...
That was her psychiatrist?
That was her psychiatrist name.
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.
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 that it's safe to call him.
And so 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 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 public setting and I'll kind of be careful about it. 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 said no.
I finally reached out to her sister.
And I asked her, 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. It
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, yes, and we carry that stuff with us. If not genetic, it's intergenerational.
So I'm carrying this shame and this darkness with me. And it was, it was liberating. It
explained everything. Because at our treatment center. 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,
you know, 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, 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 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 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 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 Oro House 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. 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 now 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 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.
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 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 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 a lecture 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 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?
But then as-
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 what 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 lauren
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 is there's a perception and a contextual issue where
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
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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 there there's a shutting down there's 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 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 who's 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 had a real human emotion. I mean, I can be, I can be pretty cold.
I am not, I don't know if cold's the right word. I can be, um, 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. It was just sliced and I
was detached. So the suicide, I think it definitely did harden me and 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 in 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,
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? 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 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.
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 people.
I always say Michael has, this is so weird,
but 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 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 meeting where I met Alexis,
where I met all my friends, where really Aurohouse kind of came out of it.
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.
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 have used 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 we don't realize what AA was that it was, well, I could get into the
whole history and you'll have to read the Bob and my book coming out. But AA started, they were very
mystical. It was really like almost a branch of the new thought movement, you know, the mind cure. They were into Carl Jung and the I Ching
and they were into seances and spiritualism.
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 the 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 it.
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'd been Christian groups that all failed.
This was supposed to be something new and different.
I mean, if anything, they were probably into Thoreau,
and they were probably into Emerson,
and 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 cost 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 nurses.
But the actual belladonna 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, datura, which basically witches have been using for thousands of years.
It's considered Shiva, the god Shiva's favorite drug.
And in fact, in India, it's called in Sanskrit, the crown of Shiva.
The Chumash 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's considered a deliriant.
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 LA named Sidney Cohen at the VA hospital who got a lot of famous people high in LSD, but he did
all these LSD experiments. Bill Wilson did that for 11 years. It got him out of a major depression,
20 years sober. He wrote another book to go along with the first book and it 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 it's not the christian god it's a shame people associate 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 I guess in my experience
and people I know that have been through AA,
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?
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.
But 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.
AA 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 sitting there and I'm like,
I got the one eye on me, can I eat the fucking turkey?
You know, it's just fucking weird.
I don't do that yet.
You know, listen, I'm not going to be invited over anymore.
But you know, I just have'm not going to be invited to a movie 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 just kind of played
just with the book.
I have 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 asking if that's a necessary component
all the time.
Without giving up
what you're not allowed to give up
because I know it's
Alcoholics Anonymous
for a reason,
what is an AA meeting like?
You can talk about that.
Okay.
And many of the sort of
little traditions
like the hand-holding
and stuff started here
in LA, in California. 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 that he had to help other people. That was part
of his revelation. Like, I got it that this works because I help other people. He's at the Mayflower
Hotel in Akron, Ohio on business. And 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 it'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 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.
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I want to go back just real quick
because I'm going to be curious if I don't ask you.
When your mom was sent to these psych wards, what were the episodes that led to that?
Because this is during a time, obviously, where they even know what really was going on.
Or was it just like, oh, something's going wrong.
We got to put her somewhere.
And then as you go to these places, what is that doing to you as a child?
I imagine 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 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.
Who's making the decision?
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 the 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.
It 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.
Or just something changed.
She's got all the waxy.
These drugs, these 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,
metrazole convulsive therapy, which would also create like a seizure.
Brutal things.
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 asked, 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 this?
And then you go further out, like what, 50 and 100.
And if you look at it from that perspective,
again, 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 can continue 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, in the past and continue 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,
a hundred, 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,
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 America. 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 metrazole convulsive therapy, the lobotomy, the electroconvulsive shock therapy,
each time there was a new breakthrough,
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 is 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 culture that we've kind of run through a lot of the kind of
medical cures and medicine.
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 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 it was enthusiasm so the 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 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 in around the middle of the 1400s, and it took about 100 or 150 years. But 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 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, with their bows and arrows and bringing back vagrants and putting them
in the hospital, the general hospital. So that's our history. So when, you know, 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 historian.
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 their mind and recite 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-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,
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
and 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,
oh, 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 a 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
admission. 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 reverse salesperson.
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, kairos.
It's like, this is the moment.
And there's a term with kairos who was like in Greek myth, kairos is a god who's 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 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.
Again, it comes from that idea 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 in our culture i think the problem with our understanding of mental health and addiction
problems is we're so inter 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.
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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,
like my vibe-
Or not just jealous and interested,
or anytime people see something counter to their beliefs,
it rattles something from within, right?
That's a good point.
Thank you, Michael Bostic.
It's also like maybe doing some self-assessment there.
Yes.
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 finish it off today, I think we'd have done better than 99% of people.
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 highs and
lows of a particularly important and interesting part of my life these last 10 years. And to be
able to have watched her and continue to unfold and develop,
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 a kind of our persona.
There's our ego.
There's our resume.
This is who we are.
This is what we do.
And kind of below that is our family and some of the intergenerational stuff we were talking about. Then there's our, you know, 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
if that's what she likes to do.
And 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 and i was older i'd been with plenty
of people i thought i could make it to to the finish line but if she's gonna 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.
And so was the conversation one conversation or was it multiple conversations?
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 onto Bumble daughter's dance competition in Orange County. And I think
she got onto 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, 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. She was just having so much fun.
And I think even for both of us, it kind of like woke something up in 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 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 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 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 new dynamic.
And how do you kind of account for that?
Yeah.
And there's going to be, I think,
I don't know if different standards,
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 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 if you're,
like say you personally are dating someone,
you're like, hey, this is my already situation.
And 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 at an arm's reach.
I think maybe because of my own history.
And again, you know, it might look like I'm 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- You never told me that.
But I never told you that. You are annoying.
But you get what I'm saying. And I wanted to sometimes be like, no, I promise you,
this is nothing, right? It's not, this is fun, this is this.
And it kind of sounds a bit cruel,
but it's just trying to level with someone from the beginning.
But I almost think in a way it makes it harder.
It does.
And 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 in that moment and domesticize you or 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 like well-versed in everything that's
going on. She seemed pretty comfortable. Kids are so resilient. You know, 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 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. It's usually after
they've gone to bed. So we haven't broached the subject yet. I think that it's cool that you guys
are talking about this because there's 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 voice 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
we got invited to this hotel a while back
I'm not going to say where the place was
was it 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 swingers hotel
where couples go and do this.
But we didn't realize that.
We just thought we were 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.
I'm not going and joining all the hotel guys.
And they kept looking at us strange the whole time.
And we would go to breakfast
and we'd kind of be off to our side
and everyone would be,
I'm like, man, these people,
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 what was going on.
And you could have prepared yourself mentally.
Did you think you were going to get your cock grabbed?
I was like, this could have been a whole different trip
for us if I would have realized.
I was like, I was actually getting irritated and frustrated.
I'm like, I don't care that everyone's going to the fire.
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 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, 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?
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toothpaste tablets. I want people to question some of the constraints and restrictions that
they've put themselves in, right? If you think about even the idea of a marriage, right? For
the years, this was pushed. This was a religious agenda. It's between a man and a woman. It could only be this one thing. It has to be monogamous. It's a control mechanism, right? Like for the years, like if this was pushed, this was a religious agenda. It's between a man and a woman. It could only be this one thing. It has to be monogamous. It's like
a, it's a control, it's a control mechanism, right? Like, 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. 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 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?
Like she, 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?
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.
Congratulations.
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.
And I also like, I think Alexis looks at things like very immediately.
Like we don't spend enough time together.
And 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 not.
I'm like Alexis.
I wake up.
I'm like, what are you doing today?
Right, Miss Ace?
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 about it.
I was like, 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.
Where are you?
I can't believe you're gone.
No, because I want help with the baby.
That's a different story.
Oh, no, no, no.
No, that's a different story. That's a, I could get off on that baby. That's a different story. Oh, no, no, no. No, that's a different story.
I could get off on that story.
That's a different story.
I've been doing this new thing
where I'm like,
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.
Yeah.
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 probably a grain of truth to that. I would like to think we're going to react and that they could be really mean to our kids, which is probably, there's certainly 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 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 and he finds out about this
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's he wants
to be a good Nazi but he can't be just doesn't have it in him and he wants to
turn in this girl so bad you know and 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 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, I said 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 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.
And he's using basically what 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 um 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.
You 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 kind of on autopilot.
And someone benefits, I think, from having those kind of profound experiences.
You're seeing it's this cultural zeitgeist 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 does the unconscious and even the brain,
they've shown in terms of brain science,
seem to then reorganize itself
into sort of healthier neuropathways.
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 like 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 seemed to be very closely related.
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 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 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 Aurohouse.
We're still abstinent based,
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
Recovering From Reality.
You were on Alexis'
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 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 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 pharmakon. It meant drug, it meant poison, it meant the antidote to the poison.
The word pharmakos was the Greek word for scapegoat. Drug addicts have become the scapegoat
in our culture. So pharmakos, the reason it's a similar word is because it meant basically
purgative. 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 filled,
we've incarcerated more people than anyone on earth ever has?
We lock up and medicate everyone who's slightly different. 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 voluntarily 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 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 one 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 up.
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 this.
Thank you so much.
That was awesome.
That was fun.
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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.
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