TrueLife - Ben “Doc” Askins - The Anti-Hero’s Journey

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Doc is no one. He is Banksy's erudite elder brother, a Deadpool wannabe, and the Shadow of the world's most interesting man.When artificial intelligence has a fever dream, it dreams of being Doc. He is a son, brother, husband, father, veteran, psycho, therapist, and friend. He is the grinning embodiment of the Duchenne marker, all of his lies are true, and he writes his books with tears in his eyes for you and only you.Ben Askins has an eclectic background with degrees in Outdoor Education, Intercultural Studies, Physician Assistant Studies, and Divinity. He has nearly two decades of experience practicing and teaching wilderness, tactical, and expeditionary medicine in the military. In civilian life, he is a Psychiatric Physician Assistant with an evidence-focused and integrative approach to mental health that includes extensive experience providing ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, medicine management, and spiritual direction. He is certified with the Multidisciplinary Association on Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Ben is a member of the Wilderness Medical Society, a National Outdoor Leadership school alum, a veteran of the Global War on Terrorism, and has completed postgraduate training in Neuropsychiatry and Genomics.https://www.antiherosjourney.com/http://linkedin.com/in/doc-askins-8b80bb27a One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. furious through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. I've read a bunch of cool notes in here too. Oh, you took notes. Uh-oh. I should have done my homework. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to True Life podcast. So if everybody's having a beautiful day, I hope that everybody's making friends with hummingbirds. I hope that everybody, I hope the sun is shining.

I hope the birds are singing. And I have an incredible author here today. And the favorite authors that seem to be in my world are authors who have lived experience. You know, I love reading science fiction. I love fiction too. But there's something to be said about people who are writing a semi autobiographical, philosophical novel that has to do with psychedelics. And I think that honorary doctor, Ben Doc Askins over here, has written an incredible book.

And this is what it looks like for those or watching. It's the anti-heroes journey. And I know what you're thinking. You're like, George, how dare he destroy the hero's journey with this anti-hero stuff? But Ben, how's it going, my friend? Thanks for being here today. We're going to get into this book. How are you feeling today, my friend?

That's my pleasure. I'm glad to be here. I'm super excited. You and I, you know, we were just praying together for all of the people out in Maui. And now we're going to fuck some shit up. Yeah, that's exactly what we're going to do. You know, I feel like that's what the book does. It kind of fuck some shit up in there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I tell you a story? Are you kidding me? I'd be offended if you didn't start off with the story. I'm the, that's the byline on all my bullshit is the psychedelic science war storyteller, right? So I wore my favorite Hawaiian shirt for you because I know you're in Hawaii, right? And it's, uh, for those that can't see the video or whatever that are listening on, uh, audio only, it's a, a sloth riding on the back of a Tyrannosaurus rex with laser beams coming out of its eyes. And it's an EDM shirt, electronic dance music shirt in the style of a Hawaiian shirt.

And so they're out in space and there's space behind them, right? And that's all a metaphor. Everything's a metaphor, right? So like it's, it's actually a metaphor for your central nervous system. Your cerebral cortex is, you know, thinking slow. And the, you know, Tyrannosaurus rex is thinking fast to speak in terms of like Daniel Connman's book, thinking fast and slow, right? And I think that that's a, it's a beautiful picture.

It's a ton of fun, but it's a metaphor for like being human. You have this sloth brain up top that does all these executive functions. And you got this dinosaur brain down below that's keeping you alive. and would fight with laser beams and tooth and nail and claw if it had to. And then being human is just kind of the dynamic dance between the sloth and the dinosaur in between, right? So I loved the shirt and I had to buy it just because I knew that it was a metaphor for how brains work and how it is to be human. And I knew that it would be good to wear for your show because you're in Hawaii. And I bought the shirt to wear to the pool when I was stationed at Fort Campbell with my.

family when I was in physician assistant school. And the reason that I got it was twofold. One was it embarrasses the shit out of my wife whenever I wear it in public. And she has this smile that she makes when I embarrass her in public that I would do anything to see. Like I love her smile. It's unfortunate that it's an embarrassed smile for her, but it is a beautiful smile. So I bought the shirt to embarrass my wife at one level. And then the other one was to keep my kids safe, which is maybe confusing at first. But, you know, they were young and we're at the pool and it's busy and people are running all over the place. And, you know, you lose your kids.

And you've read the book. I struggled for a few years with hypervigilance in public places where there's women and children running around and loud noises and all of that sort of stuff. And it was the shirt was a way of trying to reduce my own like helicopter parenting. and make sure my kids were safe, right? So when you're a 235-pound no-neck dude in a ridiculous Hawaiian shirt walking around at the pool, all of the moms are keeping one eye on that guy over there, right? Like, what's that thing going to do?

Look at the T-Rex with the laser beams coming out of its eyes over there, right? So it got attention without doing anything other than, you know, being myself. And then if my kids got lost or got separated from me or I didn't know where they were, I had told them, hey, if you get lost, go find a mom of little kids and say, I'm lost. Can you help me find my daddy? And then they'd always ask what's he look like. And everybody at the pool would know how to find the big ugly guy with the ridiculous shirt on. Right. And, you know, I was. kind of working the evolutionary biology that it developed around like mama bears protecting their kids and the chances of you know picking out a mom with a young kid that's going to harm my kids are almost zero right so it was a way that I didn't have to be as hyper vigilant in that setting and that I knew my kids could push the easy button on finding me anytime that they needed to so that's that's why I bought the shirt in the first place do you want to finish the story of course

So you kidding me? So I had to deploy to Europe last year. I went to Kosovo, not the Ukraine, just to be clear. And that was traumatic for my family, for my kids, for me to have to go away for about eight months total. And any time that I put on the uniform, you know, my youngest kid would have the hardest time, you know, but they were all kind of struggling. So we got them these daddy dolls, they call them, right?

And anytime I'd put on the uniform, they'd get kind of anxious and get kind of sad. So we made the daddy doll with me wearing their favorite shirt on it. Oh, that's so awesome. You know, I love you, Lydia. And that was what they'd go to sleep with every night while I was gone for those eight months was the daddy doll with the sloth riding a T-Rex shirt. So it's become kind of an icon in our family at this point. I figured I'd share that story with you and all of your viewers. and maybe that'd be a good time to get rolling.

It's a great story. And I think it sets the tone for the way in which the book was written. And the tone with which the way the book was written leads me to this question of, have you always been five steps ahead of everybody? Like, how do you think that way? Like, Jesus, run. You're like five levels ahead. Like, I did this for these seven reasons.

You're very kind. You're very kind. I see it. I see it in the book. I know because I read the book and I can understand your style and it's fun. It's really fun, especially for someone who's like, oh, that's a great point. Oh, I see what he's doing. It's really engaging in a way.

But in hearing you tell that story and the metaphor behind the Hawaiian shirt, I'm very intrigued. Is this something that was brought up into you that was a defense mechanism? Is he born like this? or what is this? Yeah, and I really appreciate the question. One, it's, you know, flattering to think that I might be five steps ahead of anybody is, you know, maybe four, maybe seven. I don't know.

Yeah, I feel like I'm zero steps ahead all of the time, right? But it's nice that you think that about me for what it's worth. And I think a lot of writing the book in the first place for me was doing some of my own integration work, just kind of integrating my, life story. Like I wrote the book in two weeks of insomnia. Like I would go to bed and I would have these ideas about my story, my life, right? And I had to get them out of my head so I could go to sleep. And it started out as just like, I got to get like word vomit this stuff out and, uh, and just get it out of my head. And then I'd be tired and I'd go to sleep. And it just kept happening like every night for like 13,

or 14 nights straight, right? And I'd puke out all these ideas and I'd go to sleep and I'd get up the next day. And I work, you know, see patience and take care of people and do my job. And then I get done and I'd go back and be like, oh, yeah, let me read that crap that I threw up last night. And this isn't terrible. This is okay. Like, I kind of like, this is making sense.

I think this might be a book. I'm not really sure, you know, and I just started putting the pieces together and typing it out and whatnot. At the end of it, you know, like it only, it only took two. weeks at one level. It only took 42 years at another level, right? Well said. For me, if you're a fan of like the, uh, the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, have you, have you seen the movie? That's the answer. My friend. Right. That's the answer. The answer is 42. And this whole year, I get to say, I am 42, you know, like, which is just fun. And then I wrote a book in that year. So like,

whatever, you know, whatever that means. Uh, I put the book out there to try to integrate my own story and I felt like it might be a story that people could connect with and but I don't know right like I threw it out there in May and I'm still waiting to hear back from reviewers and readers and you know I appreciate that you have enjoyed it and connected with it invited me on here but I do think a ton of like you to answer your question coming back around to like whether or not I'm five steps ahead of everybody yeah growing up in the household that I grew up in required me to develop a particular set of skills. And my dad was a survival, escape, resistance, and evasion instructor during the Vietnam

war era, right? He was a hard man in some ways. And he had some hard lessons that he wanted to teach me. And then there were some lessons that I think he would teach a different way if he had to do it over again. But I still caught the point, even if it was a little. pointier maybe than either of us would have liked in retrospect. It was a very loving house to be clear, but it was occasionally violent, if that makes sense. And I kind of figured out my way of navigating

through that with a mix of humor and arguing and survival, escape, resistance, and evasion tactics that I had to develop on my own that have at times been extremely, beneficial in my life since then. And at other times have I think, you know, not optimized relationships or situations, but I've learned a lot of lessons along the way from just

trying to be fully me. Yeah, it makes sense to hear that angle. My dad was recon in the Marines. And so, like, I get the idea of mental toughness and the idea of, look, you should think three, my dad would say stuff like, listen,

George, most people don't even think about what they're going to do in the future. Someone who's really smart will think two moves ahead. I want you to think three. You know, and like it's, it was just drilled into me. Like, okay, then what? Then what? Then what? You know, and in some level, after you get so sick of doing that, like, it just starts flowing out of you. Okay, that, that, that, that. You know, and then you apply it to your life. Yeah. When I, when I began reading the book, the anti-heroes journey, it became really apparent to me, like how much you've read, how many different philosophical text that you have researched, but not only research made your own opinion about.

A lot of the times you know people quote things, but it's very refreshing to me to get to hear people, you know, throw some random reference out to like grand priest and then talk about, you know, like, yeah, this is a weird concept and then move into like a ham sandwich. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's master's, like, retune kicks butt, right? Like, that's the quote from Heartbreak Ridge, right? Right. It's really funny.

Classic, you know. Yeah, yeah. So, like, it seems to me that the, the exploration of those philosophical ideas comes from very difficult times because some of the stuff you're referencing in there is pretty deep. Like, and, you know, I, I know that later in the story, you get to, like, the Virgin Mary story, but what were some of the, like, after you grew up and you left the household, like, maybe you could fill people in a little bit about the life after you left your household in that backstory. Yeah, yeah. Wow. But that feels like six or seven lifetimes ago already. I'm only 42. It's a good foundation. Yeah, yeah. I, uh, which story to start with. I, my dad, you know, Vietnam vet, he was in Air Commando, Air Force, Special Forces or whatever they called it at that time. And he just never talked about that shit. Like every once in a while, some story would come out sideways. And the whole. all of us would just, oh my God, what? Like, is this a true story?

Like, you were tortured? What? You know, like, this guy lives in my house. Anyway, and he just wouldn't talk about it, right? So I read, I just wanted to read about the Vietnam War. You know, I read Born on the Fourth of July, and I read, we were soldiers once in young. Like, I just spent summers in the library trying to figure out who the fuck my dad was, you know? Yeah.

And I really latched on. to Richard Marsenko's book, Rogue Warrior. I don't know if you've heard of that one, but he was the sort of the plank owner founding member of Seal Team 6. And he's got his own whole story and, you know, mythology surrounding him. But that particular guy instilled in me, I really just wanted to get into the military like my dad. I just wanted to be like my dad. But there was always this medical piece to it. Like I wanted to be a medic in some capacity. So my senior year of high school, I wanted to join the Air Force as a pararescue jumper, a PJ, was what I was going to try to be.

I thought being a seal was super cool. Like I research, you know, I'm a researcher. I read up on all sorts of different things. You know, like, Mark Devine had this website, Navy Seals.com. And I read like everything on that website, man, like, you know, just trying to figure out, like, what, what's it going to take to survive and be the coolest, coolest, cool, guy that I could possibly be in the military or whatever, right? And I mentioned it in the book, you know, like I had three Mohawks that I died fire engine red my senior year for football. Like I was a captain on the offensive and

defensive lines and just to fire up my teammates, I'd do crazy stunts and stuff like that. And then wrestling season rolled around and it was Christmas time and I died two of them green and kept one of them red for Christmas, right? So these red, green mohawks. And I went to MEPs. the military entrance processing station to raise my right hand and, you know, like do the physical and get through all that. And then I was going to try to ride the pipeline to be, they call it Superman School, to be a PJ,

and found out that I have a very slight red green color vision deficiency that I'd never noticed before because, like, they're my eyes. Everything looks the way that they look, right? But apparently everybody else can distinguish red from green much more effectively than I can. So I'm standing there with two green mohawks and one red mohawk being told, hey, you're genetically disqualified from chasing your dream. I'm like, green right here, red right here. Can we sign on the dotted line yet?

And they're like, no way, man, you can't do it. Like all my dreams were crushed and I was just lost. I didn't know who I was. I didn't know what I wanted to do. That was like that whole hero's journey thing. I wanted to be this superhero like my dad, like my grandfathers who had both served in World War II. Like that was what I was chasing from as far back as I can remember trying to chase something was to be that hero. And it just got taken away from me at 17.

And I was like, I don't know what to do. So I was just kind of a lost soul after that. And there you have the antecedents for the anti-heroes journey. You know, is that what is that? That sounds like of the very foundation right there. it's you know i didn't i didn't know it at the time right and that's how i tell the story now in retrospect to some degree like you're everybody's a bit selective in the way that they choose to tell their stories from the perspective they have now but yeah it does uh i didn't i didn't see it that

way at the time but i see it that way now and you know ask me again in 50 years and see if i'm still on this anti-heroes journey or if i found some new bullshit to chase or whatever but uh yeah i uh i I just kind of got lost in like trying to be a hero and got that taken away from me. And I tried to cobble together some way of, you know, pursuing the same interests outside of the military. Right. Transferred colleges six different times as an undergrad just trying to figure out like what, what am I for? What am I supposed to be? What am I doing here?

Where the hell am I going? Like I don't, I didn't know, man. And I was just chasing, you know, having a good time. And in my own way, like I did. party, I didn't do drugs, I didn't drink, I didn't, you know, I was raised very strict, religious, you know, Christian conservative background. You know, I was a virgin when I got married, but I loved mountain climbing. I loved adventure sports. I loved fist fights. I loved mixed martial arts. Like just, you know, pursuing a whole bunch of the, you know, pursuing it the hard way.

Like, everybody else was pursuing it the easy way. Like, they got a girlfriend or they did drugs or they whatever and I was like let's go jump off something really high and see if we die or not you know like it was a different level of pursuing those intense experiences but in this I don't know naturalistic way rather than yeah I don't I don't know what the hell I was thinking but that I still to some degree am that way inescapably so I you know I was I did a semester with the national outdoor leadership school out in the Rocky Mountains I I worked a lot of jobs like a lot of blue collar jobs starting young. My dad was real big on like you need to figure out how to you know make your way in the world. So you know like 12 I had a paper route and all the money

went to like paying for groceries. You know like I was pitching into the family right like it wasn't like my money until I got older. And 15 he started me on like my first construction job. He owned his own engineering small business and he worked with steel mills in other states and on summer breaks I would just go along with them and work in these steel mills all over the place. You know, just doing like roughneck sorts of jobs at 15, you know. I was a big kid, so I got away with it to where, you know, I could be useful in those contexts pretty quickly. So I, and I didn't have any vices.

Like I watched, I liked watching movies. I rented a lot of VHS tapes and watched movies with my friends. And that was, and, you know, climbed rocks and played a lot of sports, football, basketball, baseball, wrestling, track, box. joined a lot of clubs at school. Like I just kind of ADHD medicine wasn't a thing then. So I just kind of managed it with activity. And I saved all that money.

It was just paying for college out of pocket and transferring around and just trying to learn. Like what the hell am I doing? And I was a junior in college before I even picked a major. I was just taking classes that I liked and seeing if a major emerged for me or not. You know, like, yeah, that class seems. interesting, sure. Let's take that one and whatever. You know, just trying to stitch together a life and trying to stitch together an identity out of, you know, trying to make something out of nothing, like I like to say in the book.

And I had a lot of adventures. I had a lot of fun. Had a lot of heartbreak. Had a lot of pain. Had a lot of, you know, the sorts of things that I think most people accumulate in their 20s and 30s trying to swing for the fences. You strike out the first few of bats. It's not too often somebody hits a lead off home run, you know. Yeah, I think that that is a, I don't know anybody that's hit a leadoff home run.

I know people that were born on third base and told her to hit a triple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know who you're talking about. You're going to name names? I know exactly who you're talking about. Oh, we don't have to name names. They all know who they are, you know. But I love the vulnerability because I believe that, you know, you said something at the beginning of this,

at the topic of this conversation where we like to look back and tell the stories from a perspective where we are now. And I don't think that you can properly tell a story that is really meaningful until you've had all this lived experience. Like, we do it. We do it all day long. And we tell ourselves stories. We have this inner dialogue that we say to ourselves.

And we tell the people our friends, we're trying to impress or we're trying to meet a girl and show how the best we are. We're trying to impress our friends in front of these guys or make our parents proud at a younger age. we tell the stories from the perspective of a person without lived experience. And then when you get these lived experiences that usually come in the form of traumatic events that have no words to describe them, then the story begins to develop inside of you. You know, and I really get that from the book, man. And I get that from the conversation we're already having.

Like there's something to be said about things, about something that can only develop inside of you, whether it's through rock climbing or wrestling or figuring out who your father is. Or on some levels, like, wanting to fight my dad and be super pissed at him. You know what I mean? But knowing he'd whoop my ass and, like, just trying to figure out, like, how in the hell am I supposed to do this? It's impossible. Like, that, all of that, balled up under the knot is what gives a young man the ability to strike out.

And I mean that strike out like a hundred times and this took it to the plate. You know what I mean? Do you think that's accurate? Am I kind of birdwalk in there? What do you think? No, no. I'm tracking with you for sure. Yeah.

And there's a pattern that develops to the stories that we tell ourselves and then the stories that we tell other people. And a lot of that's context dependent, right? Like everybody will say, like you said, you're trying to impress a girl. And you present yourself a certain way in that context. And then you're trying to impress your buddies in the locker room. And you present yourself in a different way in that. context and you're trying to impress the sociology professor and you're a very different person in

that context right and you tell different stories and then you know you're at home alone and who's the man in the mirror and what's the real real real story about this person it's all fucking bullshit but there's patterns right you can pick up on the patterns to all of those stories and one of the famous patterns is the hero's journey cycle right And this is, you know, it's common in therapy. It's common in literature. It's common in media and culture and movies. Like this is in the water we drink and in the air we breathe at this point.

You know, Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the hero's journey, the hero with a thousand faces, this way of perceiving ourselves as human beings in the universe as on this hero's journey. And I got news for you. I've been around the world twice. And there really aren't any heroes out there. There's a lot of good people. There's a lot of bad people. And it just depends on what day of the week you're watching them, whether they'll appear to be a good person or a bad person.

It's not that people can't be heroic. They certainly can. It's that things are more complicated and complex than they appear initially. And I think the hero's journey is a beautiful children. story that we as a species are ready to outgrow. And we're ready to have an adult story, a different pattern, a different way of perceiving ourselves and a different way of telling all of our stories that I think has been there all along.

And, you know, like I try to describe it different ways in the book, right? Like the hero's journey is the story that's woven into all. of the other good stories, but the anti-heroes journey is the true story stamped on the bottom of all of those other stories. And if you just focused on what's woven into it, you might miss the zero with a thousand faces, the zero myth that is right there waiting for you to understand what it's like to grow up and to make room for complexity in your stories so that, you know, morning, you might look very heroic. And Tuesday morning, you might look very villainous. And Wednesday morning, you might look like an absolute bystander. And Thursday morning,

you might look like a victim. And then Friday morning, you might look like absolutely nobody. And what are you supposed to do with that week of your life? Just smash it all into some hero identity or just tell yourself that you're worthless. Now, I think you should integrate all of it. And that, Yeah, sure. If you like children's stories, enjoy them for as long as you need to. There's no judgment from me on the hero's journey because I've been on that thing for decades of my life. And I'm just now starting to peek my head out and maybe make some sense of what might be beyond that story. So if you need to go chase heroes journeys for a long time, I'm not going to make you feel ashamed for that in any I just think that when the time comes and when you're ready, maybe you put down the children's stories and you pick up an adult story. You put down the children's identities and you pick up the adult identities in a way that still integrates the children and the children's stories and doesn't despise those things and dismiss those things, but brings them along on the next stage of the journey. It's really well said. It makes me think that is it a, is it a letter O or the letter zero that's at the end of the word hero? Choose your own adventure, right?

You know what is a better story? First off, I love it. I do think that we are evolving past the idea of the hero's journey. It was a great myth. It's a beautiful myth. And I'm glad we have it. Absolutely. It's wonderful in so many ways, and it's done a beautiful job.

And in some ways, I think what we're seeing right now is the evolution of myth. And might I suggest as a framework for a new myth moving forward is Nietzsche's camel to the child, a much more robust, a much more grown-up version of complexity on some levels. But let's talk about myths for a minute. It almost seems like we've been away from mythology. Like we've been absence of myths and we've been running on like the Homeric verses like the last, you know, a thousand years. Like it is time for a new myth. Do you see what's happening today as the hallmarks of a new mythology being born? Yeah.

I mean, there's a bunch of different ways to try to articulate. Yeah. You know, the cultural moment or the global moment or, you know, those sorts of things, right? You know, Thomas Coon wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he talks about paradigm shifts. And when there's a paradigm shift, there's a lot of chaos and tumultuous things are happening because you're in this transition stage. And in a transition stage, there's a lot compressed down into one period of time taking place. And you can think of this, you know, in terms of developmental stages. right? Like it's an adolescent period.

Like your bones are growing so fast, so much faster than they ever have or ever will again, except when you were inside your mom, you know? That kind of developmental stage can be disruptive. And there's eruptions and outbreaks of acne and muscles and all kinds of crazy things happening in those stages, in those paradigm shift periods. You look at, you know, paleontocytes. And Stephen Jay Gould had a theory that he called punctuated equilibrium. Punk-Eak was his way of articulating how people, how evolution took place, that it wasn't this gradualism that Darwin proposed, but that there were these long periods where everything was the same.

And then there were these punctuated periods where a lot of crazy shit happened and it had to come back to equilibrium afterwards. So I think what's going on in the world to some extent is that there's a, a punctuated equilibrium, a paradigm shift, move from being an adolescent to being an adult, at a level of consciousness or awareness, if I can use those terms, I don't know what the best words are for them. And to some degree,

this sloth riding a T-Rex with, you know, these sparks and shits and shuffles that are coming out of the hole under my nose is a wholly inadequate tool for, trying to convey the meaning that I'm going for here, but I'm trying to hit a home run and trying not to strike out and see them where it takes us. And it's a fun conversation at the very least, right? It's beautiful. And I'm so fascinated by it. I recently reread parts of the fourth turning, which talks about the generational shifts that happened throughout time memorial,

or whatever. And it brought up the idea that there's like this giant class, like the baby boomers around the world have been so influential ever since they were born into the world. And if we just pan back and we look at humankind as one organism, a large portion of us is dying. And it seems to me like that has giant ramifications for the entire body. If we look at ourselves as one body, like if you think about all the sacrifices, all the unrealized dreams, all of the curiosity and the wants and the desires and the heartbreaks of a generation staring down death. And then you look at what's happening in the world.

You're like, oh, it kind of makes sense. Like there's this last dance, like this big crescendo that's happening. And the younger generation is like, this is crazy. Who cares about all that? That's dumb, but it's not dumb. Like this is like, it is a little bit, but this is the unrealized dreams of these. the people, man. So I see ourselves

as a bridge. The people that are in their 40s right now are sort of this bridge between the older generation that has some good ideas and this younger generation. Like, we're the last fair old children in a way. You know, it just seems like...

We're the last of us, right? We're always the last of us, right? No matter where you are. Yeah, I've heard it called the sandwich generation that we're like the ham in the middle of the sandwich. that we're taken care of the bread that is, you know, our parents' generation is in the, you know, death throws or there's a rattle taken place there. And we're, we're caring for them. And, you know,

there's, it's hard to characterize an entire generation, right? But we can try. Why the fuck? Of course. There's a book. I can't remember the title exactly, but it sort of builds an argument for the baby boomer generation. as the most narcissistic generation that ever existed, right? They had a whole lot of gifts given to them by the quote-unquote greatest generation. You know, the World War II veterans coming home that had seen awful things and decided to make beautiful things and all of the architecture and the industry and all of the energy that came home from Europe and the Pacific Theater built a great deal of things in America and around the world at that.

time, including families, right? There was a whole lot of desire to have, you have survived a whole bunch of trauma. And what great way to manage that? It's the welcome home from war, baby. And don't get me wrong, I've got a couple of those myself. So I understand, you know, the baby boom took play, right? After all of those guys came home and after all of those ladies had been doing all the good things they were doing to support industry, you know, Rosie the Riveter. Right. Right. Right. But I, like, that's, it's always going to be an oversimplification, right? To call the baby boomer generation, a generation of narcissists isn't remotely fair. There's some, there's some truth to it.

But it seems that then, you know, like turds float to the top. So there was a certain amount of narcissists that made it to influential positions among that generation, right? So, and how do I say this? So there's levels of meaning in my book. There's a, you can read it very literally like my life story if you want to. But there are metaphorical levels that I intended to place into many of those stories. I'm telling my story in a very selective way in an effort at also developing a metaphor for relating to that generation. from our generation. The way that I relate to my father in the way that I tell my story in the book

is what I think is a way that is pro-social and is healing as a way forward for our generation to relate to the baby boomer generation. Let me say it that way and plug my book and you can you can all just go read the book if you want to know what else I think about that if you're any good at reading metaphors. For the record, I stopped reading at page 26. Fair. It's fair. It's a bit of a skull drag.

Getting past chapter zero is a skull drag. But it gets worse before it gets better and it's worth, you know, dragging your skull through chapter zero. After that, the stories are fun. Okay, so I got to ask, like, there's a lot of layers in there. To be able to write it from, that perspective and metaphors and asking a generation to relate it on multi-dimensions,

that seems pretty good for being able to put it out in a few weeks, man. But there seems like a lot of thought that would go into that. Like, that's, that would, I could understand the sleepless nights then. If you're sitting there thinking like, if I say that, they're going to think this. If I say this, then they might get that volume. And they, you know what, fuck, I'm going to write it anyway. You know, I can see the process there. Like, they'll get it.

The people that'll get it will fucking get it. just stop overthinking it. Yeah, yeah. And the people that don't might just like the stories, right? Like, they're just stories. Enjoy the stories. If that's where you're at, that's great. I'm not trying to shit on you for not getting metaphor.

Like, if you went to public school like me, I can't blame you at all for not understanding metaphors. Like, I had to figure that shit out on my own in the library in the summertime or whatever, you know. So, you know, if you need help, I'll help. I've got sequels planned. I've got a whole bunch of stuff that I still want to do, you know. Inshallah, Munguaki Penda, Lord Willan in the Creek don't rise. I'll try to, you know, put some more stuff out to try to make some sense out of what I'm saying there. You know, there was one Amazon reviewer that I think got it.

You know, there's at least four levels to the book. There's like the literal level. And this is from the medieval quadriga was a way of reading the Bible. in the, you know, like 12th and 13th centuries that, you know, like Thomas Aquinas would have been a person that read the Bible this way and it had this fourfold meaning. You could read it at a literal level as like history if you wanted to. Whether that's what it was intended to be all of the time or not has been debated ever since it was discovered and probably will be for as long as people continue to read it. But there's also these metaphorical levels where something means something else. And there's a lot. And there's also these metaphorical levels. And there's, more going on there and there's, you know, like an ethical level, like how ought we to be in the world, if I can have, you know, the guts to even claim that I know anything about how anyone else ought to live in any way, shape, or form. But when you start to stack up enough metaphors, it starts to get confusing. Like you, just the amount of basic material information

that's coming at us all of the time has the potential to be overwhelming in the first place. that literal level is hard enough all by itself. You start to play with metaphors and it gets real dicey real quick, right? Like, does he mean this? Does it mean that? Like any symbol could mean anything based on the context being brought, you know, by the reader. And, you know, like the deconstructionists and the, you know, postmodern literature and philosophy and all of those folks, you know,

brought that into the light pretty clearly in the 19th and 20th century. So that like the book's alive and a whole bunch of people are going to read it. and take it in a whole bunch of different directions than what I intended, but, you know, fuck it. Let it ride. But you start stacking those metaphors up and you get to this like spiritual allegory level, right? And sometimes it's obvious when something's an allegory in, you know, holy texts from all over the world.

It's like, you know, pretty clear that we're not talking literally at this point when we're talking about, oh, I don't know, you know, the parables of Jesus or those sorts of things. like he says it real obviously, but they're these spiritual allegories. And there's like a basic way to read those too, right? Like this character is God and this character is the devil. And that's like a real literal way of reading allegories. And then you can read them in metaphorical ways. So it starts to get, you know, parsed out in a real complex way real quick.

And I'm, you know, my answer is going to be like, did you mean to say it that way? And I'm just going to grin. and nod my head every time. Whatever, you know, somebody brings my way, right? It's very insightful, very perceptive reader you are. Yes. Ah, yes. Oh, you caught that Easter egg?

Oh, wow. Yes, very good. Very good. I don't even remember what the question was now. I'm just kind of spinning a, spinning a yarn at this point. Were we talking about baby boomers? No, I think you were saying your book is better than the Bible. You were saying that, uh, it's the same thing, basically.

Almost got the spit take there, you know, I don't know about that. Your words, not mine. Well, but we'll let it right. If that's what you think, that's what you think. And I won't try to take it away. I caught the Easter egg. I know what you're talking about. I got it, Doc.

Come on. I, I a perceptive reader. You absolutely are. You might be the most perceptive. of my book so far. Knew it. Nailed it. Nice.

You know, it brings up this question. There's a really cool book that you would really love. It's called Metaphors in the Mind. I cannot think of the author's name to save my life. But it speaks to the idea that the metaphor is the way in which we bring new language into the world. the only way we can bring new ideas into the world is using a linguistic model like the metaphor to compare it to something else like that's pretty mind-blowing to think about right yeah uh i haven't read that book but i have read metaphors we live by have you heard of that one i've i've

heard of it but i i haven't read it essentially metaphors are inescapable like this is the way that uh again coming back to the sloth writing the t-rex this is the way the way that humans make make meaning in the world is through metaphor, right? Like an octagon that's painted red with white letters on it equals stepping on the pedal to the left in my car instead of the pedal to my right so that I make my car stop. That's a stop sign. But the sign symbolizes this action that I'm going to take to make this car stop in this particular location. And no matter how far down below, you know, try to get to the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of communication and meaning, it's still, it's going to be metaphors the whole way down. Like we talk about being hot and cold up and down, near and far. All of these things

are metaphorical, right? Like you can't escape. If you want to describe something, you're going to use symbols. You're going to push air through the vocal folds in your throat and they're going to vibrate at a certain frequency. And those are going to land on the tympanic membrane in your ear and vibrate at another frequency, which is going to carry information, information into your brain. And that's going to get consolidated into you hearing my voice right now. And somehow everything that I'm saying is making some level of sense one way or another to you. But all of that was encoded in a whole bunch of different ways to get there in the first place. And all of that encoding is symbols.

It's all metaphors, right? Like whether it's a belch or whether it's a song, it's the same instrument that you're playing to try to make sense out of the world around you. Whether that's in an emergency and it's just pointing and screaming a word, tourniquet! And somebody understands what I mean and magically a tourniquet is brought into my hand so that I can take care of business here or whether it's the kind of conversation you and I are having right now where we're trying to make sense of things that are way, above both of our pay grades if we're being honest with ourselves. Absolutely. Yeah, it's, it makes me think about communication and therapy and how we all get into trouble. You know, I know in my life, I've been ashamed of some things that I've done,

which have led me to some patterns in life that were pretty destructive. However, through like psilocybin or psychedelics, I was able to confront them. And I think it has to do a lot with what you're saying about symbols and understanding patterns in your life. And on some level, I think it speaks to the inability of language to accurately describe things. But I don't know. I guess I'm kind of getting out in the woods here. But it seems to me the art of therapy is making sense of things that words can't describe. You know, and I think so.

I think psychedelics do that. What is your take on that? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. It's got out there. No, no, no, I love this. This is fantastic. You are so perceptive and insightful. And you, like, you run through all these beautiful ideas.

And then you land the plane in a way that just lets me do whatever the fuck I want with whatever you just said. I love that. Like, you know, sometimes there's pointed questions. Like, people do an interview and they're like, and then, you know, you just kind of get put in a box. But you just, like, paint this beautiful picture. And then you go, what do you think, man? And that's the way to do it, man. Like do it that way forever, for sure.

Psychedelic assisted therapy is essentially kind of you're asking for my two cents on that. Yeah. And I, you know, like I'm still a member of the Department of Defense. I have extremely limited personal experience of psychedelic medicines. They have all been in clinical contexts with, you know, the proper means, you know, ketamine assisted psychotherapy is the extent of my experience in that regard. But I have read quite a bit about the subject and I've provided, you know, hundreds, if not thousands. I don't, who counts any of that stuff of hours of ketamine assisted psychotherapy for severely depressed, you know,

complex PTSD, acutely suicidal and chronically suicidal people. And I got a certificate, wee, from maps for MDMA assisted therapy, which was phenomenal training. I learned so much in such a short period of time from the folks that are running that and that were in my cohort. I, you know, I didn't go to any other cohorts and I'm glad because I loved the people in my cohort so much. It was just such a diverse group of people. And I learned more in that week than in, you know, like years of my life before that from just getting to hang out with some of these people. at meal time and stuff. You know, so I have some credentials, right, to base my, you know, answer to your question on,

but I don't have the experiences that you've had or that tons of other people out there have had phenomenologically or, you know, personally. You know, it's pretty limited. But I think Andrew Gallimore wrote a book called Reality Switch Technologies, where he articulates, It's his, you know, he's a neurochemist and a psychopharmacologist and a genius and, you know, probably like some kind of breaking bad meets Banksy character from what I can tell and, you know, like digging into him on the internet or whatever. Like he lives in Japan and he has, you know, like no profile or whatever. But the book is brilliant. I don't know if it was dropped down by aliens or what, but anybody that, you know, is interested in the question that you just asked should certainly read reality switch technologies.

And I'm going to do my best to try to explain that in a nutshell, which is really hard. So anything that I say that's stupid is my fault. And anything I say that's brilliant here is entirely attributable to Andrew Gallimore. So he talks about what he calls the consensus reality state. This is our way of perceiving the world. You combine all five senses. And the way that our brains were coming back to my shirt, again, you got a sloth riding a T-Rex. The sloth is this cerebral cortex. It's up top in your head. And the, you know, brain stem and the

motor cortex and all of the things that sit on top of it is where sensation gets consolidated in the brain, right? It decussates there on the brain stem. And, you know, sensation comes up from the body and, you know, through the tiny hole, the four-man magnum in the back of your skull. And models of reality come down from the cortex up above. The sloth says, based on everything we've received so far as this person, and also as having inherited a great deal of things genetically and epigenetically from generations beforehand. And then we've developed these models of reality that he calls consensus reality states.

So the model is coming down and the sensations are. coming up from the body. And the dance in between where things get consolidated is just error correction. Your, the sloth, the cortex, is expecting things to match the model. And the information that's coming up from down below is, it's limited what we're capable of consolidating and making sense of. So to some extent, all that gets ruled out in the space in between there, in the consensus reality is what matches the model. We got the model coming down and it extinguishes

things that don't match the model. This is where like biases of different kinds come in or, you know, like this the spot that's hard for you to see in your field of vision where your eyes cross, those sorts of things. You know, we study those and they're super interesting and what the heck's going on there. But, you know, like what's going on with somebody who's got visual and auditory hallucinations? What is, what is actually going on there. Is it an organic defect? Is it a different consensus reality state? Are they seeing things that none of the rest of us can see?

I don't know. But we're trying to figure some of those sorts of things out, right? So the model's coming down. The sensations are coming up. And the sensations that match the model, we accept and we call that reality, consensus reality, between the two things there. when something is a sufficient it sticks out sufficiently in our sensory field that's when the model gets adjusted but it's got to be something big enough right it's got to be like you've seen the videos where like they tell somebody to count something you know like I'm going to toss the basketball to you and you count how many times you catch it and behind them somebody in a gorilla suit rides a unicycle by and they're like how many guerrillas on a unicycle rode by behind me and everybody's like I

I didn't see any gorilla on a unicycle, right? And then they play the tape back. And you're so focused on catching the basketball and counting how many times it's coming at you, you wouldn't even, you know, see something that crazy in the background. It didn't match the model of what you were anticipating to see. So you didn't see it at all is what's taking place there. So what psychedelics do, and they each do them in different ways that Andrew goes through

and kind of parses out into these different switches is what he calls them, that loosen up the models so that sensory perception may slide some things through that you would normally perceive to be errors that you wouldn't have otherwise even allowed to be perceived. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. So the consensus reality state opens up a bit under the influence of what psychedelics do in the brain, so that then when you integrate the therapy that you were asking about, you start to make sense of the possibility that the mental models that you've developed and inherited over your lifetime

and all the lifetimes before you might be different in ways that. that can match up with your environment in a more whole and healthy way so that you're not creating friction everywhere based on a model that's out of sync with the universe around you. That is really well said and explained. I have a few thoughts on it. First off, it saddens me to know that at least it saddens me to know that there's people that take advantage of that damn gorilla on the unicycle going back and forth behind

because they know people are focused. They're like, we're going to get all these gorillas. They'll never see them. It's called advertising. I know, man. Yeah. And they're really, really, really good at it. And it's sad.

And they're, you know, there are heroes there and there are villains there. And they're about, you right? You know, no judgment on advertising. I can't help it, man. I'm just jealous because I didn't do it probably. That's probably what it is, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I love the idea how it takes a heightened state of awareness,

be it through breathwork or psychedelics, or a lot of the times tragedy that allows that model in our brain to change. And it makes, it goes a long way in explaining why people that have found themselves amidst the worst tragedies are able the people that have found themselves amongst the worst tragedies and then integrated it

have a better model and map for how to move throughout the world and identify the problem in other people I've never thought about it from that angle before but that's really well said and it's it really explains why there's so much healing that can be done please

and Andrew Gallimore's model model here for understanding psychedelics is just an advancement on like Aldous Hugsley's The Doors of Perception, right? And Huxley got that phrase from a William Blake poem, right? Like you can trace all of this stuff back as far as you want to to try to make sense of a bunch of these things. But the, you know, the doors of perception just suggesting that like everything that you perceive is a, you know, a window and it's narrowed down, right? And we understand that's how we made cameras. Like it's a tiny pinhole that you and I are seeing the whole background of each of the rooms that we're in through.

Like it all narrows down into that camera and then expands back out again. And there's this sort of contraction and expansion that takes place in, you know, in all of life, but especially in, you know, in psychedelic spaces from what I've been told. And then in psychedelic therapy as well, there's a lot of, you know, contracting and expanding, right? And you highlighted trauma in what you were saying there as being something that disrupts the models that you had, right? Like I thought my dad was an entirely safe person until the first time that he hit me, right?

And then I had to make sense of, well, there's a lot more going on here than I thought, right? Maybe it's not as safe as it was. you start developing a new model for how to relate to that thing over there, right? And, you know, trauma is a good example of, I have a friend that articulated it to me this way in the maps training that I went to is that a lot of therapy in general, but psychedelic therapy in particular, is contraction and expansion. And contraction usually means fear. you're afraid so you shrink down, you make yourself small, you be quiet, you stay out of the way, you are hyper vigilant and hyper aroused and startled and all of the things that meet the, you know, PTSD DSM-5 diagnostic criteria on the one end, right?

You make yourself small and then you swing all the way over to the other side of expansion whenever the threat gets too close and you become loud and bias. and outbursts and anger and all of those things make sense. And it's this inability to live in the space in between those extremes. It's integrating the two sides of apparently contradictory things. It's bringing together, you know, fear and love that is made possible by opening up these consensus reality states, opening up the mental models, right? So that's part of why MDMA assisted therapy.

works so well for post-traumatic stress disorder is because in terms of psychedelic experiences, it is contracting. It's an inward experience. It's small. It brings you into yourself and focuses you on your memories and your experiences. And they call it an inward journey. You're turning inward with an eye mask on and listening to appropriate music for the therapeutic journey that you're on. So you're contracting down. You're going into what would normally be a way of being

fearful, but MDMA turns off essentially, turns down fear circuitry in the brain. The amygdala is involved. And, you know, you can go listen to Andrew Huberman's podcast if you want to figure out exactly which part of the sloths is putting on which part of the T-Rex's back. He could map all that out for you. But you're turning down fear and you're turning up love and then you're contracting down into the scariest things that you've ever seen or ever experienced or ever had to deal with. And then opening up the possibility in the mental models that you're creating around those memories of looking at the worst days of your life from a place of strength, from a place of love rather than fear. So contracting down first therapeutically for folks who've been traumatized makes a great deal of sense.

There are other medicines that are expansive medicines, right? You talked about like you feel like you're living at a three and a half gram psilocybin level when we first started the conversation, right? Right. And from my, you know, go ahead. No, I said that's right. Yeah, yeah. It's my understanding that psilocybin is a very expansive medicine.

and people have cosmic journeys, whether you're in your own head or not, isn't even possible to be discerned at that point because you're expanding. You're figuring out bigger questions than just like, what happened to me when I was little or what is the purpose of my life? That's something that, as he explained it to me, that MDMA is excellent for, in my experience, ketamine is useful for. But you hear about bad trips, right? somebody, you know, gave so-and-so, you know, a ridiculous amount of mushrooms in high school and they had the worst day of their lives and they'll never do mushrooms again.

And the way he explained it to me was that's, if you have an expansive experience, but you're not prepared for it, it feels like you're being torn apart. And that's what a bad trip is, is there's a certain degree of inward work that needs to be done to build a platform from which you can try to launch a rocket ship. But if you try to launch a rocket ship from a rowboat, you're just going to flip that rowboat over and get real wet, right? Again with the metaphors. It's so well done. It's so well done. On some level, I have this idea that I've been reading a lot of Marshall McLuhan lately.

Yeah, the medium is the message. Oh, man. So fantastic, the medium is the message. Gutenberg Galaxy tends to be the one I'm leaning towards now. And in there, he talks about the idea of sense ratios and how typography, the printing press, gave us the ideas of exact repeatability. And in some ways, it fundamentally changed the way we model reality because now we have these people's, this is how it is. Boom, there you go. And on some level, in that book he talks about sense ratios and how typography changed our sense ratios.

And the medium is the message. They again talk about ideas like a digital feudalism and things of this nature. But it seems to me we are beginning to shift sense ratios again. And this ability to expand and contract, this ability to consume information through multi-modalities, whether it's sound, feel over the internet. Like we're changing the sense ratios. We talked early about a lot of moving parts. If you just change the way in which, if I use hearing more than sight,

it's going to change the way all my other senses work. And I had an interesting conversation with Chat GPT where I asked it, what would happen if humankind had a slight shift in their sense ratios? And what it said back to me was so psychedelic in nature. It said something along the lines of, it is possible that a small shift in sense ratios could lead to humankind having a different understanding of spirituality. Like it just listed all of these things. And I'm like it sounds like that's what's happening now.

But what do you think about the idea of changing sense ratios? So imagine that every child born today and forever for the future for two million years, never felt fear. We would evolutionarily eliminate the fear circuitry. in the human brain. It would take that long, but you wouldn't even have a biological platform from which to feel fear anymore if everyone stopped being afraid from today until however long it takes through the generations to eliminate that. That's, I think, demonstrable. That's the way that we developed our brain in the first place. We needed that fear circuit. We could eliminate it

over time the exact same way that we grew it in the first place. Now, we say what? Wouldn't I apologize for stepping in right there, but I just, if we got rid of fear, wouldn't we all kill each other? See, that's, you know, the fear circuit in your brain doing the talking, right? Okay, okay. Okay, hurry on, thank you. You know, and that's just, I'm using that to kind of illustrate for you.

Like, I'm trying to loosen up what's possible. I'm trying to. to, you know, shake up your consensus reality state model coming down from the, you know, cerebral cortex for you with an idea, which is what I'm trying to do in the book over and over and over again, right? Because I don't think, you don't have to have psychedelics to open up your consensus reality state, but you, but it's not easy. It's a whole lot faster and a whole lot easier, right? And that's what we like at this point as a species is fast and easy. So you, you know, and if you don't, then a book is a great.

place to start instead of, you know, a hero's dose of mushrooms or something like that, right? But just like the mechanism there is sound. Scientifically, that's possible. And all I'm arguing for is that it's possible right to eliminate fear circuitry. We do it with, you know, laboratory specimens all the time. Like you can make these adjustments. Right. Now we've got CRISPR babies on the horizon and maybe we just decide.

to see what happens if we eliminate all of that. There's a whole bunch of sci-fi stuff that's coming into reality at this point that could make things happen a whole lot faster than two million years from now. I think maybe we should get our heads around some of those facts if possible and do it from a place where love overcomes fear. I'm not saying we should eliminate fear to answer your question, right? Like, I think fear is a gift, and I think we need to trust fear a great deal more than we ever have. But I would make a distinction, at least in this discussion, between fear and anxiety, right?

Anxiety is the fear circuitry in the brain being activated based on imagination and memory. You remember something shitty that happened, and then you imagine the possibility of something shitty happening in just a minute. And now you're afraid in the present moment, even though there's no actual threat, right? That's some of the shadow side of having fear circuitry in your brain in the first place. But Gavin DeBecker wrote an excellent book called The Gift of Fear. It was like on Oprah's book recommendation list forever. And it ought to be on there forever because it's an excellent book. And he wrote another one called Protecting the Gift, which is about how to raise children to trust

their instincts. And it was reading, protecting the gift that gave me to some degree the idea to buy the Hawaiian shirt to take to the pool to protect my kids and myself in a certain way. So if you pick those two books up, they're really good books. But trusting your actual fear rather than projecting out anxiety on the world is a way forward to integrate the fear circuitry that we have. And then if you're able to bring love into your imagination and into your memories so that what you're projecting onto the world is first and foremost loving and generous and abundant and giving and looking for how can I help this situation? That's a way of being in the world, knowing that you can fall back on actual fear, that fight, flight, response is going to be

automatic to some degree. You're not going to have a choice about it whenever you need it. It's in there. So just put it on the shelf and trust that it's there whenever you need it. Don't live out of what, you know, the fear circuitry all of the time. If you can, if you can get there. And, you know, like I'm making all of these recommendations like it's easy or like, you know, you can just just put it on the shelf, man. Like that's, you know, don't be afraid anymore or whatever. Like it's that friggin' simple like, why am I even listening to this asshole anymore? It makes everything sound so easy. Maybe it's easy for you, Doc, but like, you don't know where I've been and you don't know

what I've been through. And that's fair. That's absolutely true. I wouldn't, for a minute, diminish any of the experiences that anyone's had. And if you need to live out of the fear circuitry to survive, absolutely do that until you don't anymore. And, you know, if you need to figure out how to do that, I think we're on the cusp of being able to like legalize doing that in MDMA assisted therapy. And we can already do it in meaningful

ways in ketamine assisted psychotherapy. And we're on the cusp of expansive opportunities for, you know, psilocybin assisted therapy and all of the other, you know, the various molecules that are out there that can get you into that opening up of the consensus reality space that'll make it, it'll make what seems like an impossibility a whole lot more possible for people who can't even imagine being fearless. Like, what would that even mean? How could I ever be unafraid? I think that's some of the best of what psychedelic assistant psychotherapy could be for people would be so that, you know, the same, like I walk through the world now with the same hyper vigilance to some degree that I had whenever I was, you know, would meet the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, right?

Watching everybody's hands all of the time. The unit that I deployed to Iraq with did personal security detail stuff. And I wasn't one of the cool guys. No beards. No steroids. No. I was a medic. I was just support.

I was just helping out. But you, you know, you catch the ethos of the unit that you're a part of. And, you know, just threat assessment all the time. Like I'd be sitting in church watching the door.

Is there going to be an active shooter? Is it, am I going to be a hero? Like, I'm ready. Right? Same level of awareness. but now all I'm looking to do is help.

All I'm looking for is like, who's hurting? Who needs a hand? You know, like I'm not looking for threats because I'm not afraid. I trust fear. I know that it's in there. I know it won't be eliminated for me ever because I was born at this time and in this place. And if I need it, it'll help me. It has in the past lots of times.

And I trust my fear whenever it shows up, that it'll do the best possible thing with the scenario coming at us. As fast as fearful scenarios do, right? But I can kind of put it on the shelf and trust that it's there. And now I just watch the environment, not so much for threats, but more for needs. That's beautiful. Thanks. Thank you for that. I think it, you know, one of the brilliant points I got out of this book,

that I haven't got from any other book before. And I think is unique to your message in here is that the scaffolding around scarcity, when I read a lot of philosophical books or when I listen to a lot of people and my own mindset too is that, you know, scarcity is the state of mind that puts us in fear.

And your book says, yeah, scarcity is awesome because we're all starting at zero. So it's a, you know what I mean? It's like it's a way to surrender. Like I think that's fucking beautiful, man. I've never thought about it from that angle before, but I'm like, yeah, just just surrender. Yeah, yeah, zero, man, surrender. You know, it's so hard.

Yeah. You know, like you've got on the screen here, it says Doc Askins' PhD and you forgot like the honorary part there, right? I did. I was in a hurry. It's a fun little Easter egg to clarify for everybody on the cover of my book. I do have an honorary PhD, which is just a title. I don't have a terminal degree. People give out the honorary PhD.

And it's confusing, right? Like it says PhD, H-O-N, period, which seems like I graduated with honors or something from like some real difficult program. But what it actually is is somebody just gives you like a diploma because you gave them a lot of money and they own a college or something like that. Or like they really like your vibe. they want to be able to claim that you got a PhD from them.

So they just pass that bullshit out like a placemat at Denny's or whatever, you know. Totally. I don't have a terminal degree, but everybody calls me doc because I was a combat medic for a long time. And I don't, I'm not a doctor, right? Even though I practice medicine and have a medical license because I'm a physician assistant. So it's all just super confusing exactly who the hell I might be to anybody's perception. but I mentioned that because you were talking about the scarcity mindset, right? And going from, you know, like we start with nothing and we end with nothing.

I haven't earned a terminal degree, but I do have a terminal diagnosis, and it was that I was born human. I've got this chromosomal defect that's called humanity. Mortality rate's still 100%. Everybody born dies eventually. I'm sorry if I'm the bearer of bad news. Sorry, you know, gee, Doc, why you got to bring us all down like that? Bringing in the terminal diagnosis information, thanks a whole lot. But, you know, Stephen Covey has the seven habits of highly effective people,

and he says that one of those habits, is beginning with the end in mind. And I don't think he meant like the heat death of the universe or our solar system being swallowed by a black hole or starting with your own death in mind because maybe that at first blush doesn't seem highly effective, at least for the target audience that he had. But I think that it might be.

I think Memento Mori might be a useful place to start with a whole bunch of these sorts of conversations and with kind of crafting, your own identity or telling your own story or trying to make sense of your, you know, what's my way in the world? Start with the end in mind. Recognize that you only have as long as you have. So, you know, like one of my son's favorite bands lyrics, Wage War says, you know, like hate is a cancer,

we are the problem. Love is the answer. And that's where I start with a whole bunch of this stuff is just with love. whatever the hell that means. Oh, you know, God is love. Oh, just love your neighbor as yourself, right? And, you know, the devil's in the details of figuring out what the hell does that even look like. But that's what I come back to over and over and again.

When I'm the most afraid, when I'm the most confused, when I don't know what's going on. For whatever reason, you know, like the universe is a mystery. I don't know what's going on and nobody else does either. And if they're trying to tell you that they do, you should say, certainly be suspicious of it. But I more strongly than any other belief I have, I firmly believe everything is okay in the end. I believe that there's love that comes at the end of the whole thing, that it comes and finds you. I feel like it already came and found me to some extent. Not that I was looking. You know, it just came and found me. And now that's just kind of what I carry

with me everywhere I go is like my mission in life is to embody all of the paradoxes in a way that, that overcomes fear with love. I think a good example of that is your high school friend that you were, that, that you talked about in the book that, uh, reached out to you in the, in there and you're like, okay, this is it. Just here you go. Like I, I think that there's something that happens to us when we confront, when we're confronted with death, whether it's the death of a child, the death of a parent,

the death of a friend. And it saddens me a little bit to see the way, Western model has dealt with death. Like we take our older people and put them in these homes. Like we don't want to be around it. Like we're real uncomfortable with it. And we're kind of taking the dignity out of dying in some way.

There's some wisdom there. I was recently speaking with someone who was a death dula. Melanie Waterfall was her name. And she was killing me. I know. What a beautiful name. I know. You can't make this stuff up, right? Yeah. Yeah. Death dola.

Don't go chasing waterfalls. And so she said some of the most beautiful things that were like, you know, George, at the end of times, people aren't worried about buying a Tesla or going to Costco. You know, all the window dressing falls away. And I wish more younger people would sit at the sides of people who have terminal diseases and listen to them because I think you could, it helped me be like, okay, I'm going to stop chasing all this garbage.

I can't help chasing some of it, but I can make a conscious decision to try to live a better life because this person I know and I love that is on death's bed told me that they sure as hell wish they didn't work another 80 hours. They wish they would have spent more time with their kid. They wish they would have been a better husband. They wish they would have been a better father. When you can hear that from the lips of the dying, it has real impact on you as someone that's moving through their life, right? I want to be a conduit that helps bring that connection back because I think we've lost our respect for the dying and the wisdom that they have. Do you think we're missing that in the Western tradition?

Absolutely. You know, that was some of the first clinical trials that got approval for psychedelic-assisted therapy was, you know, Roland Griffiths doing hospice, palliative end-of-life care protocols with psilocybin for people about death anxiety. Like talk about an amazing clinical trial design, you know, to try to alleviate death anxiety is what we're going to do in this lab. So there's places. There's pockets where it's being addressed and it just hasn't had the opportunity to drip out into the rest of society yet. But there are ways to alleviate death anxiety ahead of time so that, you know, like you don't necessarily. have to wait until you have the official official terminal diagnosis to do those sorts of things so that maybe you're just ready.

Maybe you're just ready to take that step when that step comes ahead of time would be how I would want to see things play out over time. I'd love to see a world where every time a soldier deploys before they come home, they do MDMA assisted therapy and their families doing that with them as part of their integration process for people for whom it makes sense, right? But I know that that's not something that's like maybe it is right around the corner like Dan Crenshaw and Andrea Ocasio-Cortez have been working on like sliding some info into one of those, you know, extremely porky bills that get passed in the defense spending in Washington or

whatever. Like so maybe it could happen. Maybe we'll start doing some of this stuff in the VA or maybe it's sooner than, then I think or you and I could anticipate, right? But I would love to see all of those sorts of things get addressed. And that's some, again, you know, like you mentioned the boomers and the, you know, the generation having their sort of death spasm at this point and like how well do we or don't we take care of those people.

And it's, you know, especially out on the fringes, out in the flyover states or whatever you want call it, right? That that that is missing massively and that, you know, people just, I think people in general deserve a lot better at the end of their days. Like the, like everybody just deserves to die surrounded by their loved ones and, you know, drop in the last piece of knowledge that they have to hand off. Like, I just want to, I just want to have absolutely nothing to apologize for on my deathbed whenever I get there. Like, I just want to live with that end in mind. And just just be, you know, be surrounded by love. And then I think that's all you get enveloped into on the other side anyway.

But, you know, I'm no expert on any of that. It's all actually a mystery and I haven't died yet. So take all of that that I'm saying with a grain of salt and think for yourself or not at all, George. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's scary to take, sometimes it can be difficult for. for you to take the reins and think for yourself. But if you don't do it, there's lots of people that are paid lots of money to think for you.

Nature abhors a vacuum. Something's going to fill that space if you don't in your own head. How many guerrillas do you see passing behind me? I've seen zero so far. Fantastic. It's working. So was there something that after you put the book out there, a lot of times I talk to authors and, you know, a lot of authors will tell you that high expectations make poor travel companions. And I'm curious if,

what was it like after putting the book out there? Did you have any expectations or were you, were you thankful to get the people in the comments from Amazon and like, what, what was it like after putting the book out there? Yeah, I had zero expectations, George. like you. Imagine that. threw me a softball there to plug my, you know, the zero with a thousand faces had zero expectations about his stupid book. You know, like you can look on my Instagram and me and some of my friends made like a video of like alternate uses for the anti-heroes journey.

It could be a coaster. It could be a doorstop. It could prop up a wobbly table leg. You can, you know, alternate toilet paper. You can recycle it. You can throw it away. Like, and I think that's fun. Like, I really don't expect right much to come of it.

I put it out, you know, like it was important to me to have written it more than anything else. I shared it with some people who I love and who I trust who told me they thought it was good enough to put out there. And I just put it out there. And now I'm still kind of just waiting to see what's going to happen. See what's going to what's going to come of it or whatever, you know. Not not that many people have read it yet. but I'd like to just have as many people as possible read it. That's seems like a really lame answer.

I just, I wrote a book. Would you please read it? What do I got to do to get you guys to read it? Like, pay attention to me. We ran this, I had a booth at psychedelic science, 2023 to just kind of rep the book a little bit out in Denver back in June. And I just gave copies away, man.

I didn't try to sell them. I gave away probably like 70 copies of this thing. And we just played this game, right? Where I put a number in the hat and it was a chapter number. And if you would sit down in the chair that I had there and you pulled the number out of the hat and you sat down and read whatever chapter you pulled out, you could have the book. Like you just, you know, I had this sign. It said journey instructions for the antiheroes journey. And, you know, instruction number zero was sit down.

instruction number zero was open the book instruction number zero was you know like it was just a fun little game to play right and uh you know give the author a high five i'll sign it blah blah blah you know like all the usual spiel yeah and uh i wound up having like some really meaningful valuable deep conversations with a lot of people along the way there's a you know there's a chapter in the book about suicide, about, and it's a, you know, to be clear, you know, it's an anti-suicidal chapter because the anti-heroes journey is entirely anti-suicidal. And people just kept pulling that number out of the hat, man. Like, I thought about taking it out of the hat after a certain number of people, uh, were weeping on my shoulder and wanting to talk to me about how they came to this conference looking for something, you know, and playing the game,

putting the numbers in the hat makes it seem like chance and anytime chance is involved and maybe god's involved or whatever right like it was supposed to be a game and then all of a sudden i'm doing a bunch of free therapy for a bunch of like simmering suicidal people right uh and that just you know it meant the world to me to be in that space at that time with those people and to give them a little bit of hope. And, you know, like, I'm not looking to, like, make a bunch of money on selling the book or anything ridiculous like that. Like, I just, it meant a lot to me to write it and it would mean a lot to me if other people would read it. And then I tricked a bunch of people into reading it. And it turned out that it meant something to almost all of them. And I had good conversations

with people and that's worthwhile to me. I heard a good quote one time that was. It might have been from a Hallmark card. It was something along the line. people don't care how much you know because they know how much you care. It's going to be hard to track that one back to like the origins of whatever that got quoted, right? Walmart, Christmas, 1997. I don't know.

I think there's probably like five or six John Maxwell leadership books that are based entirely on that or whatever, you know. That's so true, man. It's so funny. There is something beautiful about whatever event or tool or medium gets someone to talk about the tragedy in which they have, there's something sacred about that when people open up to you.

You know, and in some ways, I feel like a lot of people are constantly trying to open up to other people, but people just don't care. Like, is that maybe it's not they don't care? It's like they don't have time and they want to help. But like, dude, I got my kid crying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. know.

I don't know. Is that the epidemic of wellness that we're facing today or the epidemic of mental illness? Does that play a part in it? Ask me that question again, a different way. Yeah, I don't think I actually answered it.

I don't think I have put a question in it. I'm working on it, though. I'm working on my method. Help me help you. Thank you. Thank you. Let me try to reframe this for a minute.

It seems to me, according to a lot of the, the literature coming in, from different parts of the psychedelic community that we are faced with an epidemic of mental illness. There is a lot of PTSD out there, especially from people returning back from war, from abuse and from relationships where people have been abandoned. Do you think that the word epidemic is accurate? Is this something that's always been with us? Or is this something that is new to this time right now?

Wow. Yeah. That's a lot. a big question. I'm kind of sorry that I asked you to rephrase it now. They help me organize my thoughts, man. That's what I meant to say the first time. You know, the easy answer in terms of like the history is I don't know. I've only been here 42 years. I suspect from what I've read there, you know, that tribal populations did a much better job of taking care of each other than our present society. does. Now there's certainly periods of exceptions there where there's, you know, tribal warfare and all of those sorts of things. But it seems like, yes, we're, we're disintegrating as a society is a, I think, a noticeable trend for quite some time now. And I, there's a lot that goes into that

taking place in the first place. And my way of trying to simplify all of that down in my own head and then in the book is I talk about enlightenment, whatever that means, right? But I think there's this way of being in the world that's divisive that I think is characterized by the hero's journey. The hero's journey, if you're going to be a hero, requires a villain and a mission and a treasure or a princess or, you know, like there's got to be. There's a book, The Heroin's Journey, that flips it on its head.

Like, why, what's this Mario brother's princess bullshit or whatever? You know, like, sorry, Mario, your princess is in another castle. Go, me. And it's a great book. It, you know, it flips the whole concept on its head in terms of the imbalance historically between the genders. So that's valuable, but it still has that same pattern. You know, you're just replacing the hero with the heroin. And I think that whole thing is problematic.

I think, again, it's an oversimplification to be dualistic, to be individualistic, you know, that we look at things atomistically. And we're all just sort of on our own little hero's journeys. You talked about how, you know, somebody's asking for help and people walk by them, like the parable of the Good Samaritan, right? like each of the people that walks by this person in need, does that not because they're evil, not because they're villains, not because they're malicious. They're just on their way someplace else.

They're on their own hero's journey to whatever dinner party or fundraiser or job or whatever it is. They've got their head down. They're real focused on them. Anything more than six inches away from their own body is not even being perceived like a gorilla on a unicycle, because they've got this story running through their head about how they're going to go be this hero in this particular way.

Or maybe, you know, they're going to be a villain in a particular way. Or maybe they're going to be a nobody in a particular way or whatever, you know, a victim or a bystander. But it all parses things out and divides us. And at the end of the day, I think that that way of being divisive in the world has gone haywire at this point. point in society to where we're all so individualistic that we're so separated and divided out. And, you know, you just, you're, if you're not just exactly like me, then I have to separate

myself from you. I have to judge you and shame you and throw stones from red states to blue states and the, you know, center city to the outer city. And, you know, just everybody dividing and dividing and dividing from each other and figuring out all the ways that we're all different from everybody else and we're all in an individual unique snowflake and you know uh i think we should just scrap the whole thing in that regard i think we should just throw out being dualistic um and i think we should stop trying to be you know i'm shitting i'm shooting all over everybody here but wouldn't it be nice if we could stop all the hero's journeys and integrate everything that it is to be a person in your own story and as it's woven into the stories of every single thing that you perceive around you integrate it all and pay attention to it all and find meaning and purpose and value in it all and when I say all I fucking mean all that you see and perceive because there's still going to be so much more than

you're even capable of perceiving that it's time to go on the anti-heroes journey and that doesn't mean anti-like rep like uh opposed to like i'm the anti-christ and it's opposed to christ and it's opposed to christ at the end of the bible you know it's the literary character type of the anti-hero who like I said at the outset, doesn't look like a hero all the time, doesn't look like a villain all the time, looks a lot like if you spent a whole week monitoring George Monty on camera

or Ben Askins on camera, you'd see them being a whole lot more complex and complicated than just the hero's journey, the dualistic, divisive way of parsing out the world into friend and foe, good and bad, you know, whatever way you, you know, Democrat and Republican or, you know, local or foreigner, or, you know, all these ways to just divide everything out and divide everything out and divide everything out. I think we should scrap that. And I think we should move ahead to integrate all of

these different things in a way that, you know, takes us to level one, whatever level one means instead of level two. And I don't like the word levels. I don't like, uh, like, uh, like I think of So I think of this trajectory, the anti-heroes journey. I try to keep the math real simple for myself, right? It's just 2.10. I'm going to like some of these, you know, like these are some of the ideas for some of the sequels that I've got in my head. And I've already written one sequel.

It's ready to go. It's locked and cocked are ready to rock, George. I just, Nice. I need a big enough audience for the first one that it makes sense to publish the second one, right? Like the 11 and a half people that have read the first one, why would I dump something else on their heads at this point? Because they're all still feeling like they got traumatic brain injury from reading the first one in the first place.

Like I got to wait a little bit before I send those out. But here's like a sneak peek at some of what I would try to suggest is like, I call this moving from hero to zero. And it's just as easy as 210. Where you were born, your way of being taught how the world works, probably for most of us, is in a circle. The outer ring is two,

an inner ring is one, and the bullseye is zero. But there's no hierarchy. It's a wholearchy, if you're familiar with the difference. Hierarchies are synthetic and artificial, and we create them. They're part of the consensus reality space

that we have made for ourselves, but they're fragile. They stick up into the sky and they fall over all of the time. If you look at nature carefully enough, it's a whole archie. Everything's on the same level and everything's intertwined and related the way that like a bull's eye might be. There's no level above. You got to level up, bro.

Get on my level or get out or you know, this sort of stuff is just those are imaginary games. None of that stuff matches nature. Nature's a wholearchy. So you're stuck out here at level two or ring two or hole on two. That's just weird to say though. nobody knows what that means in this divided mindset where everything's either or this or that good or bad etc right and then you know like I outline in the book ways that I think oneness makes sense ways of integrating stitching back together the things that we've been taught are different bringing together and

unifying things that someone else has been pulling apart since we climbed down out of the trees And that we can do it. You can live this way. You can move from two to one at least, right? And then I've got zero in the bullseye there. And the issue with zero is that you cannot say anything about zero that is true of zero. It's the last words of the tractatist logico philosophicus that Ludwig Wittgenstein published. whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent and the tragedy of that statement is that he said it right

it's so referentially contradictory or at best paradoxical right but what comes after the period at the end of tlp is what he's trying to point you towards is towards going zero going from hero to zero which is terrifying. I'll be honest with you. I've visited zero. It's not an easy place to spend a whole lot of time. You know, like, what would it be like in a black hole, George? Seems horrifying. What's it like at the bottom of the staircase on the cover of my book there or whatever, right? What's at the center of the center of all of these things, I think is going zero, whatever that means. But don't be afraid. I've been there. You don't have to be afraid, kids. Just hang out at level one. Two's okay sometimes and it sucks other times. But if you can just make it from that outer ring to the inner

ring of oneness, and don't even worry about zero. We can talk about that at a later date. Let me handle all of the scary stuff in the meanwhile. You just crawl. from two to one if you can and the world will be infinitely better than it is right now. I love it. It's well said. I love the idea

of the wholearchy versus the hierarchy and you know it's one thing that I've noticed too after revisiting some parts of the book and pairing that

with like some youngian psychology and some some other ideas that I've read somewhere is that integration for me looks a lot like seeing my reflection of myself and other people. And it's really been helpful for me to notice people that I'm mad at. Like, I hate this person because they're weak. And then I go, oh, crap, I'm weak. I don't hate that person.

I hate that I'm weak. You know what I mean? And then you want to love that person. Hey, thanks for showing me how much I hated my. myself or being weak. You know, and I think that that is on some level allows us to be so much more forgiving of the people around us when we realize the things we dislike about other people, I think we dislike about ourselves. I guess that's a good. That goes a long way into that step from two to one, right? Exactly. Yeah, you're very perceptive, George, very, very perceptive.

The, you know, like you're talking about shadow work to some extent there. And projection, right? Like, you've got this stuff going on inside you that you don't like. what are you going to do with it? Well, I'll put it on that thing over there and then I'll smash that thing. Now it's destroyed. It's gone. Yay. My shadow is gone. Yay. Look, I shined a light on it. No, it just moved to the other side, man. Like, you just don't see it. Right. Yeah. And the way out of dealing with that is recognizing that you'll never escape your shadow. Right. Your shadow's a part of you. You have to integrate that part of you. I'm a big Dermit Kennedy fan. Are you familiar with Dermott Kennedy's music. I don't, but I will be. Oh, you got to check this stuff out. Okay. I took my kids to see

him in concert earlier this year. It was like their first live music concert, you know. He, he's on what he calls the Sonder Tour. Okay. Are you familiar with the words Sonder? Um, no, sache, but not Sonder. Yeah, so Sonder means the feeling when you recognize that every other person out there is having just as complex and experience as you are. And all of his songs are just ways of illustrating and telling stories about recognizing that every single person out there has reasons for being the way that they are right now when they're interacting with you that make perfect sense to them. Suicide bombers have reasons. Have reasons. for doing exactly what they're doing that makes sense to them at that time.

You know, like somebody out in the public eye is Nick Lavery, who's a Green Beret who has a prosthetic leg. He's about as big a real-life superhero as you could imagine. He's still an active duty warrant officer in the special forces with, you know, a full prosthesis. And, you know, they call him the machine. Nick the machine Lavery, right? Like, legendary. And he had a video that he put out on LinkedIn explaining, like, the level of compassion that he was able to arrive at when he found out what the sorts of circumstances are for the typical suicide bomber, that somebody takes your family hostage and says, hey, you can go do this thing and we'll take care of your family if you do it. or we're going to kill all of them right here in front of you.

So he was able to get to a place where he could essentially forgive the suicide bomber that had, you know, blown his leg off whenever he realized that had he been born someplace else in the world, his story would be incredibly different than the one that he gets to tell right now. And I think that's a level of enlightenment that I've never experienced, but I was excited to hear and to see him putting that out into the universe, you know, that that level of compassion where you can make sense of any terrible thing that you've seen people do or that you've experienced, that's what I'm talking about when I'm suggesting that we move from two to one, being able to see that I don't know.

It makes no sense to me why this person is being this way right now. now like why are they so angry in traffic why like why is this such a trigger for them but it makes perfect sense to them everybody all the time is just doing the thing that makes the most sense to them given all that they've experienced in the past in their memories and all that they're projecting out into the future in their imagination in this this big nothing of the present moment it all makes perfect sense to them. And when you can at least recognize and acknowledge that much, maybe you can do something in the present moment to help rather than to harm.

That's really well said. And it does leave the residue of patience. You know what I mean? Like if you can hold on to that thought the next time you find yourself in traffic or just let the person in, you know, like it makes it easier. do that. It does, right? When you think about it at that angle. Right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brian Regan's a stand-up comedian that does like a whole stick on that like merge, everybody merge while he's on the way to the emergency room, you know, like it's brilliant. Yeah, it's interesting the way

comedy finds its way into the most tragic parts of our lives. It's like the ultimate coping mechanism on some levels. Is that is that what you were going for? Were you weaving a tapestry of comedy into tragedy when you wrote part of this book? Is that, is that the way you look at life too? You, you get me, George. I like you. You and me are going to be friends. Yeah, absolutely. I think like this is the way. Humor. Humor is the way, right? I had a conversation with like an ultra mega super genius just yesterday around some of this. And he was saying, and this is going to seem like an overstatement. Like, you know, like my, I shared, it was an interview for my podcast and, um, I showed it to my wife and she was like, nah, like he's full of crap. And I was like,

okay. Like I thought it was cool, but you know, like I trust you. You, uh, are a big demographic in my life. So I got to pay attention to that part of the audience, right? Um, but he was saying that he thinks that laughter trauma proves you. If you can laugh at whatever situation you're in while you're in it, then you won't be traumatized by it. And maybe that's an overstatement, but I think at the very least, you won't be as traumatized as you would have been if you weren't laughing is something that's qualified enough

that most people would be able to accept it, right? I've been near death a handful of times along the way and found myself laughing at the irony of the situation, like seriously this is how I'm going out like what the fuck really this is how we die great and I just laughed and laughed and you know like climbing falls long climbing falls just decking out and making a mess somehow getting up and walking out of the woods and I'm just laughing the whole way down right and that's not because I'm a hero that's not because I'm you know some fearless wonderful whatever that's just some of like the evidence that suggests to me that there's love at the end, that there's joy at the end, that there's good

things at the end. But it's not everyone's experience. Everyone doesn't have that experience, right? I don't know what it's like to actually die. I don't know. I've been there when people have died well, and I've been there when people have died. And maybe if they had it to do over again, they would have made their last words a little bit different, if you know what I mean.

But my experience of it anyway is that if you can laugh at the absolute worst things, it requires you first to get enough perspective to find it funny. And it's getting that perspective, getting enough distance from whatever that horrifying, awful, genuinely tragic thing is. the moment that you're able to pick your head up enough to smirk at it is the moment that you're on the anti-heroes journey, the moment that you're beginning to integrate things enough that you can pick up more than just your head. You can get back up again and you can get back into the fight. You can get resilient instead of just being stressed, et cetera, et cetera.

There's all these ways to try to articulate it, right? but I do think that, you know, I talk about in the book the golden thread of irony being a way of sort of untelling all of your untrue stories so that you can get to zero ultimately. But that that irony should make you laugh along the way, right? Like I laughed till I cried writing the book and I cried until I laughed over and over again. I was writing it. And I think that's, that's the way, right? Like we fall off the horse on one side or the other a lot of the time. Like we just laugh and ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha to cover over a whole lot of pain and and stuff it into our shadow and not deal with it. Or we weep and weep and weep and weep relentlessly and cannot figure out how to get back to a place of happiness. And that's

What we want, though, is to be able somehow to get from the one to the other, to slide across the poles energetically or emotionally to where you laugh till you cry and you cry till you laugh and then you feel complete, right? You can rest. If you just cry forever, you'll never get any rest. If you're just laughing, even whenever it doesn't make sense to laugh, then you're not going to get any rest. but if you can laugh until you cry and then you're done, you can rest. If you can cry until you laugh and then you're done, you can rest.

I think you just described infinity. You know what I mean? I think you just described it, man. I don't know if you can see this, but this is my wedding ring. It's an infinity loop tattoo that my wife and I both have. It's beautiful, man. Yeah. I like infinity loops, especially with her.

I'm sure your kids like it too we have a lot of fun in this house yeah laugh until you cry and cry until you laugh and then you can rest like that that seems to be like what life is trying to show us like okay you like that boom hey like that tragedy

you laugh okay how about that you know yeah it'll throw some shit at you until you learn the simulation likes to fuck with us until we wake up and then it gets on our side to some degree Yeah, just for a minute It's okay, go out and show people now Get out of here

Right, right Figure it out, now I get the hell out of here Now I got some other shit to show you So it's time to die Oh, what though? Yep, yep I don't know, yeah I don't know anything, man

Me neither I heard a good metaphor too That like when I've been playing around with a little bit Is that like we live in this cosmic dojo And it doesn't matter if you're a truck driver Or if you're a PhD professor somewhere like there is a there is a the master is watching

and at any point in time regardless of who you are you can be promoted to the next level if you're ready to do the content you're ready to do the test and you just stand up and whatever it is you call the the master over by acknowledging this thing in the world that's bothering you

and you pick up the load and you try to conquer it and then the master comes over and you do it For me, it was like, I'm going to stand up and try to be stronger. And I started doing it. And then all of a sudden, I started doing it on a level that was really getting people's attention. And I started sticking up for other people. And then I found myself with all these executive managers around me.

And I'm standing up to them and telling them and pointing out, this is where I think you guys are wrong. These numbers are reflecting this thing. And it appears to me that this is not a bug. It's a feature. And as leaders, I don't think you can call yourself a leader when you're making conscious decision to do this. these things. And I was so proud of myself until I was recently fired for that. I was like, wait a minute. I'm the guy standing up, man. I presented an argument that was irrefutable to the highest person there. And then it was like, yeah, of course you're going to

get fired. You know, but that's the, that's the master coming over and say, okay, you graduated. Congratulations. You said that you could do it. You did it. Now I'm going to pull you out of this thing and start you over here on this brand new thing. It seems to me like that's how life works. Like as soon as you graduate from something, you're thrust into chaos again. Okay, you've figured it out. Now come over here, dummy.

You've figured that piece out. Now come over here. They have nothing left to teach you there. That's why you got fired. Agreed. Agreed. And so it's time to go back to zero. Hey, now you're, come over here.

Yeah, it's a paradigm shift or a punctuated equilibrium or it's chaos, you know? Like you're in a, you're in a, transition state, right? Why I just made that all up for my experience. What's next for you? It's a great question and thanks for asking. I think it's learning from other people. Nice.

Yeah, right? It's this. It's having conversations that help me see the world in a way that is beautiful. It's on some level trying to be the change I want to see in society, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Subvert the dominant paradigm, become the change you want to see in the world. Yeah, there was some guy in India that wore a dress to talk about that back in the day, I guess.

Yeah, I've heard, I've heard tell tales. It's about salt. This guy. Yeah, some of salt. Surgeons. I've heard. I don't know. I don't know.

Ben, I love this book. And I think people that are listening to this podcast would love this book. I think you should buy it. And I think you should take notes. And I think you should stop at page 26. And you pick it up again. Yeah. Like, that's how I like to, you know, like spin the thing or whatever, right?

Like lots of people wrote a book about psychedelics. This book is a psychedelic. It is. If your vision gets a little bit blurry, if you start feeling some confusion or overwhelming emotions, just put it down. Walk away. No other psychedelic is going to give you the opportunity to just collect yourself and come back to it whenever you feel ready for it.

you get any other psychedelic and you bought your ticket and you're going to ride the ride until it's done with you. But you can decide how much of the anti-heroes journey you could even tolerate in the first place. And I'm completely comfortable with that. If you want to use it to prop up a wobbly table leg at Waffle House, I think that's an ideal use for the book. I just hope you find some use for it. I think people will. I think it's a uniquely written. And I, how do I get a signed advance copy of the next one?

Maybe that's something. I love it. I really think that you've really, I don't know how to do that. If anybody out there knows how to do that and could teach me, like we could figure it out. But yeah. Sign,

I'll just sign the digital version and then everybody can download assigned, assigned PDF. I bet you could do it like in an NFT. I bet you could have like assigned NFT. Talk about, yeah, talk about imaginary. numbers. Right. It's abstract, man. Why not? Why not? You could have like its own like perfect image on there. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. You know, like I got a brand. It's got a logo. It exists as much as anything does. There you go, right? Yeah. I don't know. I like the book. But more than the book,

I like the message behind it. And I like the originality in which it's written. It's, it's a third person meets biography meets, you know, talking directly to the person. And that's a unique structure that I think people can resonate with. And it spoke to me. And I was taken back by even though it can come off in the literal, people can look at it in the literal way and read it quickly. You are really, really well read. And you reference so many different philosophers and so many different people on

there. Like that's one of the things that I really am. enjoyed about it. I didn't even know who Grand Priest was until I started reading your book and I was like, that is amazing. And there were multiple jump off points where I set it down. I'm like, I need to research this thing.

Yeah, yeah. That to me is the hallmark of a great book. So I, and I'm saying this because I want other people to pick it up and find the different things that I found in there or even different things that I didn't find in there. And I really, from the bottom of my heart, I'm thinking of what you put it out there because I think it's helpful,

it's fun, and it's unique and it's original. So thank you for that. Well, I appreciate that a lot. That means the world to me, George. Thank you. Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a beautiful thing. Before I let you go, but where can I know you have things coming up, man. What do you have on the horizon here? Like, you're excited about and and hopeful about it. Yeah, yeah. I have, you know, I have a lot of dreams. You know, like I put it on my social media today. I want to make friends with a hummingbird that's in my backyard. That's one of my

one of my dreams. I want to just have it eat out of my hand. We'll see if I can accomplish that or not. Yeah, like I've got, you know, I think I've got maybe a dozen or so books in my head at this point. I just like to write a lot more. That'd be one thing that I'd like to do. I have this podcast that's launching next week. September 4th, Labor Day will be when the first episode drops.

And I'm just doing, you know, a lot of interviews with people around the questions that I like to get answered by different people. So I got a lot of really cool people. So keep an eye out for that on like Apple podcasts and Spotify and all of the places that all of the cool people have their podcasts. I'm just, you know, doing my song and dance there too. Yeah, if you want to try to keep up with me, like just follow on, you know, Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube or threads or the artist formerly known as Twitter now called X. I'm on there. I don't, you know, like I don't know if I'm doing anything cool, but you could follow it there. And then there's my website, antiheroesjourney.com, where you can get the audiobook or the download the digital copy and PDF, Mobee and ePUB formats, or buy a coaster from Amazon if you want to.

All the options are there. And I'll put out, you know, more updates as new projects come along because I've got a lot going on in that. I've got a lot of things that I'd like to do in that regard. and we'll see if, you know, if that happens. And then, you know, on the, that's my non-clinical anti-heroes journey brand. And then clinically, you know, like I have mental health practices that I participate in at one level or another. So, and there's info on the website about all of those as well. So, you know, I'm excited to just be what I want, I guess the way to summarize all of it maybe is that I just want to help people and have a lot of fun doing it.

It's a great summary. And I think that you're well on your way to achieve. achieving that. You know, it brings up another question. Do you have another minute to talk? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. For you, George, I'll give you two. It brings up this idea. Do you think that, you know, after writing this book and you said you have other books in your mind that you're, that you've kind of written in your mind. Do you think that the process of writing changes the way you can model? reality? Absolutely. Yeah. So that's, again, a whole field of study called hermeneutics,

right, where you learn all of the ways to be a good reader. And a good place to start is reading the book, How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler. It's an old book, but it's still good today. And it seems kind of, you know, self-referential there, right? It's a book about how to read a book, but it'll give you the tools to start, right? And the way that you interpret written texts corresponds closely with how you interpret everything else because we use words to try to make meaning of all of those things, right? So you're asking a hermeneutical question.

Becoming a good reader of texts and of signs and of symbols is a way to become a good reader of situations and environments. and people and relationships and all of the things that get more and more complex as we expand out from there. But I think being a good reader of texts is a really good place to start. And then when you get to the place where you can try to write, that's a whole different game, because you're still doing reading as you're creating the words that you're putting out there, right? So it's a bit of a dance. and the, you know, the idea is to be able to do that, you know, not just in the, Tom did X at Y in, you know, along with Z basic grammar stuff, but to do it in a way that's also logical so that it follows a structure that people can follow.

And then that breaks some of those rules along the way so that it's poetic is my way of trying to do both the interpretation, hermeneutically of all of the texts and the types around me, and then to turn around and write my own story, right? Just the book is me writing my own story to some extent, but everything that I'm doing, everything that you're doing is writing history right now. We're deciding to spend our time this way instead of another way and making good decisions about how you write your future,

how you are in the world involves being able to engage with memory in those ways that make meaning and then projecting them out through imagination into the future in a way that makes the present what you want it to be okay so that brings up another question see what you're doing here yeah it's an infinite conversation right it really is and it's it's super fun for me. Sometimes I think that poetry may be the best form of communication because the style in which it's written and the structure that it has allows me to present you with words that you can feel.

And so might it be possible if we use, once we begin writing and become familiar with that form of language, I think it opens up an avenue for us to see. see poetry in other people or at least see that form. Would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's well, and it's it's just integrating everything, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's integrating grammar. It's integrating logic. It's integrating poetry. And then it's doing something even more than that. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts as we parse all of that stuff out. Pull it apart to understand it. Sure. Dualism. Put it back together after you pulled it apart. oneness, unity. And that's where you get to do scientific art or artistic science because you can

pull it apart and understand it and you can put it back together again. And whatever domain of life you're talking about, whatever the context might be, I think that's the way. That's like you said, poetry is doing something more than just what the words on the page mean. There's the cadence to your speech. There's the volume at which you're reading the poem if you're doing it out loud. There's the emotion in your voice. There's all these ways that we either become synchronized with each other or we become disintegrated from each other.

We pull apart from each other based on whether those things resonate or not with us. And that's what we're trying to get to is like some level of resonating with one another and that poetry is one of a potentially infinite number of ways to try to resonate with the people around you, right? Laughter is another one. Laughter is contagious, right? And laughter is a way of just synchronizing a room. If you can get everybody in the room to laugh along with you at whatever's going on, you're putting everybody in sync with each other. If you can get everybody to cry in the room with you about whatever it is that you're talking about, then you can, orient all of that resonance towards making something beautiful or selling someone some bullshit.

Yes, yes. I guess we shouldn't be too upset with how people learn the technique as long as they learn the technique. Right. The flowers of rhetoric or the, there is a name for the. for logic, grammar, and, gosh, the trivium. Thank you so much for that. Thank you. Do they, they never taught the trivia in the public school that I went to.

No, I mean, either. But I could have a classical education, right? It was based on like a medieval model. There was the trivium was like middle school and the quadrivium was like high school. And, you know, it was just a way of pedagogy, a way of, you know, structuring education for people then. I think it's worth exploring again. Like on some level,

I could see how it could be problematic, but gosh, it really makes sense. It really gives you some tools to help navigate the world we live in. And if you had those tools as a younger kid, grammar, logic, you can really begin to make sense of like,

here, there's a lot going on. It's almost like the book, The Island, where people, where the kids go at the age, 12 and climb the mountain and sit in the church and have this experience, this right of passage with a mentor. And they realize, hey, there's a lot more going on than this race between the hospital and the moratorium in the cemetery.

You know, I, I guess this is a long winded way of me asking one of my crazy questions. Like, and the question is, can you speak to the absence of rights of passage in the Western world? That wasn't what I was expecting. I like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jesus. Can you, can you, can you, can you talk to me about why'd we stop circumcising teenagers, Doc? What?

Oh, it's so beautiful, man. I don't know. But I'm glad that we did. Well, I'm, I'm upset. that we still do it, to be honest with you. I don't see there's a great if on the idea of circumcision debate there's an incredible

there is an incredible let's just end this thing on a dick joke that'll be great yeah. Why not right? There's a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Jared Kushner's dad and Christopher Hitchens just eviscerates

uh is that Harold Cushner? Jared Cushner was his dad's name, the rabbi? Was it Harold? I think it was. Yeah, why do bad things happen to good people? Harold Cushner. Right.

Obviously, it's just, it's an amazing piece of back and forth sword play between two people who have a command of the English language that's definitely worth watching. And Christopher Hitchens puts on a show. I was like, oh, it looks like, oh, it looks. like Mike Tyson coming from the ground with that upper hook. I was like, oh, it's so beautiful. He's so beautiful. He's quite the rhetorician for sure. He was. He's so great. Ben, I love talking to you, man. It's been a pleasure. This is really, really fun, man. I'm really thankful for the book.

I want to show the people what it looks like again. And go out and check it out. It's really a beautiful read. And I appreciate you sticking with me for as long as you have, man. It's really fun. Thank you for having me. I appreciate your hospitality. The pleasure is all. mine. Is there, and I know we gave the name of the website and we gave what you got coming up. Is there anything else that we didn't cover that you want to talk about? Nothing. Zero. Perfect ending, right? It's almost like we planned that. Okay, well, hang on for one second. I'm going to hang up with the people, but I wanted to talk to you briefly afterwards. So, okay, you got it. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending time with us today.

I hope that you got to see the Ben, Doc Askins, in a way that the, book didn't show you. I hope you got to see the person behind the book. And I truly mean from the bottom of my heart, get the book. It'll blow your mind. It's really fun and you'll learn a lot of stuff. So check him out. He's a cool person. He's got a lot of stuff coming up. That's all we got for today. Aloha.