everybody. Welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. I am so excited because I kind of have a surprise guess. This was not planned, but I think the universe always works in mysterious ways. I've got Tommy Scoville from the Lifeboat. Before we get into it, Tommy, let me just go ahead and real quickly show my friends watching right now your channel. I love your channel. We're going to get into why I love your channel in a minute here. But guys, go ahead and make sure go ahead and subscribe to Tommy because he is an incredible wealth of information. How are you doing today, Tommy? I'm doing great. I really am. I'm doing fantastic. I'm happy to be here. And I meant to tell you beforehand, before you started recording, Tommy, I'm very laid back. So if you got to drop some F-bombs, if you need to get a drink, do whatever you got to do, we're very laid back on this channel. Perfect. So if I need to censor any words in the editing process, because Big Brother YouTube, I'll do that. We'll catch it up. Perfect. But for this, we're not live. So for this conversation, just get as comfortable as you want. Now guys, as you may remember last week, I did an episode with Doug from Days But Not Confused, who is an ex Scientologist. He is coming back on the channel next week. And we spoke about an episode that Tommy did with Aaron Smith Levin from Growing Up in Scientology about L. Ron Hubbard's potential drug abuse.  And that's how I discovered you through his channel.  Sure. That's awesome. And I love that because, sadly, anytime I go on anything like this, I end up talking about bank robbery and I end up talking about the mob and bad people and things that I've done. And truthfully, the part of this that keeps me coming back every day isn't the bank robberies, right?  And I'm just one of those blessed people. So I robbed a bunch of banks and I did a lot of other things and it was solely for one reason.  In the real world, people rob banks because they need heroin, right? Or they have a drug problem that's so bad. No one's robbing banks to pay bills. They're buying drugs. And I robbed a lot of them. And I ended up getting caught and going to prison and married my defense attorney. It's kind of an odd situation, right? So I married my defense attorney and came home to that, right? Came home from prison to being a defense attorney's husband. And it was a kind of a strange situation. And I fell right back into crime and ended up going back to prison again. And when I went back the second time, third time in prison, second time in the federal system, right? I went back for gun running because I caught a new case while I was out. But I met a black guy in federal prison, right? Which white guys don't do. That's not really how it goes down. It's very segregated. It's very racist. And the higher the custody level, the more segregated and the more racist it is. That's feeling like 1950. It's really, really horrendous. And I just don't buy into a whole lot of that. So when I met this guy, he had just the most incredible intellect, super intelligent guy. And after knowing him for a while, he said, you know what? I get people sober.  And he said, well, I'm doing life in prison. And he said, and I realized at a really early age that I had no shot of ever seeing the street again. And I'm not convinced of that, by the way. I'm working really hard on getting him out. But so what he does is he picks people he thinks that he can keep from coming back. And his success rate was ridiculous. He really spends time with people. And he showed me concepts about addiction that I had absolutely never heard of.  And all of the things that society puts on that, you know, I'm weak. I'm, my moral character is just jacked, right? You have no moral fiber. And all of the things that addiction kind of comes with that stigma. And all of a sudden, all that was gone. And the concept of a malfunctioning reward center in the brain was finally explained to me.  And I had so many concussions that as this started to be explained to me with doctors and everything else, and I started to realize that a lot of what was going on with me was just that I took too many shots to the head. And a lot of the terrible decisions and all of these things. And it just really got me kind of focused on the concept of maybe trying to make something of myself other than a bank robber, right? I mean, I came from good stock, but once I started on opiates, it was over. And I started out taking pills. I was a guy that had, you know, 30 something orthoscopic surgeries, you know, skiing, freestyle skiing and doing it professionally. It was just it was one injury after another. I broke my neck a couple of times. I mean, there was just a lot of injuries. It's part of what you do. I had eight shoulder surgeries, 13 knee surgeries, compound fracture of the wrist, compound fracture of the ankle. I just went through it all and then and as dumb as it sounds, I had no clue that what I was taking was the exact same thing as heroin. Like that never occurred to me as a as a dumb athlete that the stuff I was eating, like at the end of the season, I would get sick and I wouldn't even realize that it was from withdrawal. I did it at the end of every season. I just seemed to always get sick then. But once I understood I was an addict.  I think like, you know, when we're growing up, we see like pharmaceutical drugs as being, you know, okay, but then we have these street drugs. And I don't think many people make the correlation that they're kind of the same. You know, just when you get from the doctor, it's done in moderation. Whereas, you know, on the street, it's a free it's a free for all. And one is illegal and one is not, you know, and so I don't think you were a dumb athlete for that. It's interesting when you were saying that, Tommy, because I keep thinking about a lot of football players have this issue when they finish because they get hit in the head so many times. Oh, yeah. That actually changes their neurological behavior sometimes. 100%. When I die, they will say that I had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, right? They can't diagnose you with that alive. They have to cut your brain into really thin slices and do all that. But that's what I have, right? I have what every other football player and everybody else had and I'm fortunate as hell and that the damage that was done, I'm losing it.  I had a really ridiculous memory at one time that I'm losing it. It's just kind of going away and it's something that's been diagnosed and I'm working with doctors and we're doing stuff with medication, but it didn't mess with communication. You know, you see a lot of these guys, even guys I skied with that took too many shots to the head and they can't get what's in their head out. That would be so much worse of a torture for me. I forget some things, but I still have the ability to communicate. When I got out of prison, I paid it forward. That was what the guy that helped me get sober asked me to do and the concept of YouTube and all of the things that I'm doing are not something that he understands because it was not... He's never even been on a cell phone, but he wanted me to pay it forward. He said, you have the ability to communicate and you're persuasive. I had done public speaking. When skiing was over, I became a public speaker and I made a fortune, but if I made $600,000 in a year, I did $625,000 worth of drugs. If I made $700,000, I did $710,000 worth of drugs. I made between house payments, car payments and everything else. I never had anything. It was just how I lived. Eventually, I got caught right before going on stage, actually working for a charity, but I got caught literally putting a needle behind my knee and it's a small industry. There's like three major companies and a couple of agents. I was just black belt. I couldn't get a job anywhere. At that point, I had a home. I had four cars. I had a boat. I had all of these things that I had built up during this lifestyle that came out to about in the ballpark of 30 grand a month that I had to pay before I ate anything. I started to liquidate stuff. I also started to rob banks. I started to go down that road and I got fairly good at it. I never got caught robbing the bank. I got ratted out years later. I hadn't robbed a bank in like 16 months when I got caught. I had been out of it for a long time. I was trying to get back into the life, which was a joke because until I learned, until I really understood the addiction thing, I'm at eight years sober now. Congratulations. Thank you. I appreciate that. I don't fear it. I have no fear whatsoever of it. I did. It used to terrify me more than anything, but once I realized I wasn't broken, once I realized that I was not a defective human being, that there was just, this is a disease like diabetes is a disease. Nobody shits on anybody for taking insulin. But if somebody says I need help with addiction, we treat them different. And the purpose of what I've been doing is always to just give people a place where they can come and no one's going to say something's wrong with you. No one's going to ever make them feel like they don't belong or that there's something wrong with them.  There's literally just an open forum. And the price of admission is the fact that all of us have a malfunctioning reward center in our brain. I think that's probably a lot of people, though. I like that malfunctioning reward system. That's a really good way to sum it up. It's not, and it makes it not so dirty when you say it that way, you know? Right. And when you think about it at the base level, it's terrifying. So picture, a doctor comes in or a nurse comes in and hands a newborn to the mother, right? There's a reason that there's a bond that instantly is formed right there that mother will kill, that mother will jump in front of a bus. And all of that happens at that moment, right? And all of this is a cocktail in the brain of chemicals. The addict gets the exact same brain chemicals the first time they push the plunger down on a shot of heroin, right? The difference between the person who does the drug and the person who is an addict waiting to do the drug is when they get that first one, the brain says to them, that's just as important as that baby.   And you are instantly bonded to that drug and that chemical in the same way that a mother is to a child. And if the world understood that, if it literally that's what's happening, the reward center is doing oxytocin and it's doing, you know, this whole cocktail of drugs that even have love in it, right? So that that bag of dope. And if you talk to someone who's an alcoholic, you talk to someone who's a drug addict, especially someone who has a physical dependency like alcohol or heroin or one of those, the person takes that sip, right? And the booze touches their lips. And in one second, they're good. The shakes go away, everything. Now that booze hasn't done anything to their body. It's going to take 15 to 25 minutes for that to get in the system, seep through the stomach, do all the stuff it does, right? But the second they taste that, the brain goes, here's that chemicals you did good, relax, everything's going to be all right, we're good. You know, as a, as a, I say junkie, I know people hate that term, but that's what I was, right? And I would be in the car like this, right? Vomiting. And the dope guy shows up and hands you the bag and I'd get it in my hands and everything would stop. And I'd look at the guy and be like, yeah, drive home. We're all right. You know, you got a 10 minute drive home. I don't need to fix that. Just get me home. Because as soon as that crap got in my hand, and I remember saying them at the time, what is that bizarre or what? Like he instantly just feel better holding this stuff. But having somebody explain it to me. Yeah.  I mean, honestly, I don't judge at all for people.  So I don't, I really, I understand suffering is suffering. But since it's explained it that way with them, with the chemical in the brain, again, that mother seeing that baby just knowing it's there, it's your brain releasing. Every single time. That is unbelievable. And that just shows you the power of the human mind as well. That's absolutely it does. And the proof is in the pudding because medicine is now catching up with this as a concept, right? So a drug that is used to knock opioids off of a receptor. So if someone's overdosing, you give them an arcane, which is naltrexan. If you give that same drug to someone who has alcohol use disorder, right, abuse disorder, like alcoholism, you give it to someone who's an alcoholic. It doesn't stop the booze from working on them, right? They can get drunk exactly the same way you could. I could anybody could, but it turns off that feel good part of the brain.  We've already taken care of that. And what naltrexan does, it's amazing because I work with people every day that take this and they say, it's not fun anymore. Right? This, this no longer is fun and they walk away from it. It's pretty incredible when that, when the brain chemistry gets normal. And that makes sense. So as you're saying this, I'll have to be kind of vague about this for the audience, but I have some connections to some people in Hollywood, some one that has died allegedly died of an overdose. And from what I know, his friends knew he was an addict because he could do drugs with his friends, but then go like months without it and be totally fine and not care. And in fact, when he was working, he'd be totally sober. And it's so interesting you brought that because it's, it is like the alcohol too. Like, like, like for myself, like, I'm not an alcoholic. I know that about myself, I can go out and have a couple of drinks, get a little tipsy, have fun and then not think about it for three months. And I'm probably not going to drink by myself. It's probably going to be with friends and family. I'm probably just not going to do it by myself, you know? And so I know, and that's, but making that correlation between the brain chemistry is just different. It's just, it's just insane. It's no different. Yeah. It's no different than having any other disease.    And the, and the difference is, you know, one, the, is just the brain chemistry. I have guys that come to me that say, I've been on pain pills for six months after a surgery. I take them every single day. I'm trying to get off this stuff. And they're dependent, right? But they're not drug addicts. And we go like this.  Thanks. Appreciate you talking to them. Yeah, they didn't see the detox. Their body just chemically needs a detox. All they need to do is get it out of there. Yeah. There's nothing, there's nothing pulling them back. Right. That is so interesting. So there's all these different kind of like categories and sub categories depending on the person. Now yours, you said started potentially when you started getting injured through sports. Now it's like, so if somebody is now for addiction, is this a gene too that you carry? Or is this something? Absolutely. Absolutely. There is, there is a genetic compound to this disease and they're, they're understanding it more year after year after year. They're getting better at it. And they're trying to isolate exactly where that gene is that's getting passed down. But it is absolutely hereditary. And I have a, I have a daughter. My first wife was addicted to heroin. She was a genetic engineer, super intelligent woman, but married to make out addicted to heroin and also had a drinking problem. So her mom is an alcoholic and a heroin addict and her dad was addicted to everything on the planet, Rob Banks, right? So that's this girl's genetic blueprint. Now my daughter's articulate and really intelligent and from a really young age we've been having this conversation, right? So my daughter's not going to go down that road. Does that mean that she's, as far as I'm concerned, it means it's a drug addict that's never done heroin, right? My daughter's a heroin act of wedding to happen. You get it within a couple of inches of her and that brain is going to go, yes, there you go. Boy, have we been waiting on this, right? Well, I was going to ask you that too. So is there, because I know like when I was a kid growing up, I know that alcoholism does run in my family. I have a couple of extended family members who have died of alcohol poisoning of overdoing, never, I've never heard of any drug abuse, but alcohols for sure. But again, for me, I was, and I always kind of thought about that, but it's obviously I'm 40 years old, it's never been an issue. But with that being said, could there potentially be someone born with the gene and it just never gets triggered, even if they are drinking? Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Or they don't find the particular substance, right? There are people for whom, like for instance, my daughter, right, mom and dad are both addicted to heroin and that might be her button, right? She might try Coke, nothing will happen. She might do a little speed, no big deal, right?  They come in, they get high for a while, they put it down, no big deal because they don't have that dependence.  I've got friends that do drugs that aren't drug addicts and they've been doing drugs for years, but that's just the lifestyle at that point that they've chosen. For me, the second day that heroin was in my life, the choice was over, that it was all gone, right? And it was going to be 31 years later before somebody made me understand this to a point where I could finally stay sober for more than, you know, four months, three months, which was usually about a record for me. This is so fascinating, Tommy. Thank you for like explaining this because from such a kind of scientific, and I hope if anybody's watching has struggled with this or knows somebody that this is like enlightening to you to understand like, and you're right, that feeling of, I think too, like psychologically as human beings, when we go start going down a road, we start to then think less of our own selves because question and it just makes it even worse. Instead of knowing that you are, in my opinion, a fractal of God, you do have a light inside of you and this struggle, you have a choice with what you do with this struggle and it's not, it's called a struggle for a reason, right? It's not, you know, it's not a Hollywood movie where, you know, all of a sudden you win at the end, there's going to be ups and downs, there's going to be a, did you ever have a time, Tommy, where you just had like an emotional breakdown and rediscovering yourself where you kind of had that like, Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. So I married my attorney and she was a really, really beautiful girl and I'm leaving visiting. She would visit me in prison and I'm leaving one day and the cop whose job it is to take my clothing off, make sure I'm not carrying anything into the prison. It's a fun gig anyway, right?  I said, thank you, man. I appreciate that. It's a nice thing to say. I said, she's a, he goes, she's an attorney. I said, she is and he asked me, we're part of the country and then said some of the most vile things that anyone would ever say to a guy about his wife, right? Things he'd like to do to her. All just really foul stuff. And I didn't swing on him. I put up with this. I filed paperwork. I did everything by the rules until I didn't, right? They did nothing about it. And then one day he said something else. It was foul and I knocked him unconscious, right? And this starts a very bad process because I just punched a corrections officer. This is the worst thing that you can do in the world. And I did it really successfully, sadly, right? This punch was a really good one.  It was all bad. But this started a process where by the end of that day, I was in what looked like a phone booth, but it was made of bars. And I had my hands like this above the top of the bars handcuffed like this. And they left me there for just under four hours with my hands above my heads like this. And about once every 30 or 40 minutes, somebody would come in and literally use me as a heavy bag.  And this went on for until basically there was just nothing left like I couldn't, I was done. I was just hanging there by my arms. And in the middle of that process, I swear to God, in the middle of that process, I'm thinking to myself, like one guy in particular, I was pointing all of this at for reasons I won't get into. There was one guy that was particularly heinous. And I wanted this man dead more than anything I had ever wanted in my life. And like I literally could feel my upper lip disappearing. Like I was getting to a point where it was, you felt like an animal. And I had been reading a book was the one I told you about. And I thought to myself, there's nothing that I can do right now in this world. There's nothing I can do. I can't hurt this guy. Can't get anywhere near this guy. And there was just this epiphany that you know what the only thing I have any control over right now is that these guys can make me angry or they can not make me angry, right? And that was literally all I had. And there was just this moment, it's kind of like an endorphin dump. There was a point at which like the pain stopped. I was still getting ahead, but there was a point at which like everything stopped. And it was just sort of that, oh, moment. And I stopped caring. You saw the light of God. Yeah, I did. I kind of hung there. Yeah, I kind of hung there.  Like I'm not going to let that go down. And that day, that was a massive and I was still a loser for a good eight or nine more months because I had no idea what to do with this newfound desire to be something better. I didn't have any tools. I had the desire. I was looking all over the place for someone to help me.  It would have made it a lot easier anyway. But the, but he wasn't. And he was the greatest human I ever met. I don't believe in gurus. I don't believe in any of that. But if I did, this, this dude's about as close to a guru as you're ever going to meet.   And, and everybody just sort of looks at him like, how is that even possible? Like, how does nobody not just take a swing at you? You know, that's a fight. You don't have to do anything back, but no one's ever attacked him. Nothing. And it's just because, honestly, it's the reason I ended up talking to the guy. He was one of those people that from 25 feet away just had an energy that, and I have met famous people and done cool stuff. I met Muhammad Ali. I met a lot of really cool people in my life through the public speaking thing, but this cat was different than anybody I had ever met. He just had a piece that you could not make him angry. And I remember seeing him in this, a situation that should have gone all bad. It was just a prison situation that was getting ready to go all bad. And I was just getting to a safe distance because once things go bad in prison, they don't come back. And he just walked right into the middle of this mess of shit between two different races and everybody just started talking. And three minutes later, everybody walked away and no one had thrown a punch and I just sat there looking at my cellmate.  He's like, never seen somebody had used the P word.  That's a fist fight. There's no way to undo it, right? Oh, wow.  If you use either of those words, it's on site, right? And I guess you need that. I don't know why, but they need that for some reason to have a couple of words that if I say that to you and you do not swing at me, they'll get you off the yard.  This is not down the road or anything else. But to see two guys call each other that and then to for it to defuse in 13 years, I never saw it happen. And he just, he was like, I'm not having this happen on my watch. I'll just walk in and fix this. And it's two different races, which makes it a whole other thing if you just walked in and talked, everybody walked away and everything was cool. I mean, who is this dude?  But he was a guy that the ecosystem is just so different. And it would be, right? Because where is it? There's no word. I was about to say maybe ashrams aren't so so different. But yeah, because people can leave if they want. You know, that's that's right. They can leave if they want. They don't, you know, you're volunteering to do this. And that's just, I mean, I, I, you know, we have this saying in the Eastern philosophy that when the student is ready, the teacher appears teacher appears. And then the next part of that is when the student is really ready, the teacher disappears. You know, and so for people, and I told you beforehand, Tommy, and for my shadow group, that's watching the support group that they're working through their stuff. Like this is, this is an extreme story of the of your suffering and your friction and what you go through and what you do with it, but that you're the man, your teacher will call me your teacher that was in there. He had obviously metamorphosed his own struggles too, to become, he couldn't be there for the rest of his life.   Absolutely.  And you know, what, you know, but instead he decided to use his hardship, again, that match lighting that that friction to create that light inside of him. And once somebody has that presence, they can stop fights because there's such an overwhelming like love rating, radiating, radiating from them. It's not like a cheesy like Hallmark movie love, but like that human, just that human love for real. For real. I, so I, I get this plant in my head. I'm going to get this guy to, to help me and I'm working all of this and I'm, I'm spinning plates and I'm doing all the stuff behind the scenes so I can make this stuff happen. And a year into working with them, I've been sober a year. I've lost 80 pounds. Like my life has changed. I'm a completely different dude. I got, I got abs, like things were different, right? And, and I'm talking to a friend who had become a mutual friend. It was a black guy.  I said, I watched Q. And then I said, I started hunting to do down.  And he goes, yeah, when did that happen? And I said, I would have been around February. I said, because it was right after, you know, I had hit the yard and we were talking and he goes, because he told me in January that you were the next student. And I just sat there and I remember my jaw dropping open. I'm like, I said, I hadn't met him in January. And he's like, yeah, I didn't say you met him. I just said to you that in January, he said to me, that's the next dude I'm working with. And had no point that he come up. He didn't, there was nothing. It was me. And, and then as these things, I would look back in hindsight and just think to myself, like this was a dude that was, he was living life in a way that I never met anybody else that did. And he was not bummed out about where he was. He was acutely aware of the fact that his life could do a whole lot more if he was on the other side of the gate, like he wasn't stupid. But this is where he was planted. And this is where he was going to grow kind of a thing. And the saddest thing is that he was 17 years old when the crime took place. No. Yeah. Well, I don't, I don't, I don't know how much you want to say about him or his identity, Tommy, but I know you said you're working on trying to help him. If I have people who are watching, I have some pretty cool people who watch if there's, if there's an email at the end, we used to send me like an email if they can reach out and help you in any way, whether it's fundraiser, you know, absolutely.  And again, it's, I think it's that feeling. I've never been to prison knock on what I've never been in that situation.  I think everybody watching if we're honest with ourselves, we've all been in those situations. And to be in that, to have that feelings magnified in a situation like prison, it's probably tend to, I mean, I hate to say this to me, but how many, how many people on a life themselves in prison? Oh my Lord. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. I never went through a Christmas that somebody didn't 13 years. I saw 13, I saw 13 of them in my unit. So one every year at a minimum, one year, we had three, but so out of 180 guys have, you know, one a year every Christmas from between the, you know, the end of Thanksgiving all the way through to new years, we always lost one minimum. That makes me like really, that's really sad. Yeah, that makes me it's awful. And you know, I know people at karma cause an effect. You've got it. You've got to pay, you know, it's the laws of society, but for someone to be in that place mentally where they remove themselves, because we know that they've got people out on the other side that do love them. But even just regarding the other people just themselves to not, to be at that place. And I never fault anybody. Like if you're a suffering man, like I, you know, I'm not going to, but just to know that some of the, be at that place, like that just breaks my heart. And I guess. You know, one of the things that I found when I got to prison is there, there are people that need to be there.   You know what I mean? Like there are just, there are people that I had to go through a medical facility at one point and met Drew Peterson, the cop that unalived a couple of wives and that he ended up getting placed into the fed system. And we were in a medical unit together. He was my roommate. I lived with the cop for almost nine months. And that's the dude that needs to be on that side of the wall. Like that's not a good human being. Sadly it's not. And you know, people who say that there isn't, there isn't evil. I got, I got some cats. Oh, there is. There is. There are definitely. Oh yeah. But there is. Yeah.  Like this world is a better place if this dude's on that side of the gate. And I think that we need to get to a point and it's, I know it's a pipe dream, but we got to get to a point where we start getting a whole hell of a lot better because that one of the biggest resources that we waste in this country is humans. You know, we're 4% of the population of the planet here in the United States and we're 26% of the, the incarcerated population of the planet. Right. We make up 25% or 26% of all prisoners at 4% of the population. So that's not right. Right. We got some problems here in Atlanta. We have one of the, and I'm not familiar with like federal or state, all that kind of stuff, but we have rice street prison here in Atlanta and it is literally, that's where Trump turned himself into. And I told my, my channel wanted people, my channel, because I literally get there. It's right over the freeway. My, my channel members wanted me to go film it. And I was like, guys, I'm not going there. Like that's in the bluff. We call it the bluff. That's not its actual name. That is one of the, Oh, okay. I know what prison you're talking about. It is talking about now every block. Yeah. You wouldn't want to drive by it much less. No, cops won't even go in there. They don't have to. That's how rough it is. And that's, and that prison is one of the roughest in the world. And I don't get the Atlanta Journal Constitution, but sometimes I'll see, I'll see, uh, see a little pop up some of my, my browser and it's where it's daily. Somebody has died in there from something malfunctioning at the prison.  The cops in Atlanta say it's not even worth the paperwork. So they just let people go in and they're still sitting in prison and they're good people and they've been in there for selling pot. And they're there with like murder. That's treated the exact same way. Yeah. Treated the exact same way. An old hippie. I'm sorry. With marijuana, I've never seen anybody in marijuana hurt anybody else. Well, you know, I get this all the time. It's funny because the, uh, so when I started the channel, it was called the Tommy Scoville show, right? Cause I, I'm wildly creative and couldn't really think of anything to call it. And the, the, um, the people on the channel named the, uh, the, we did like a, you guys can pick the name kind of a thing and you vote on it. And, uh, and because I wouldn't, I don't know that I would have gone the life boat route, but we're all in the same boat, which was the concept. And these guys all came up with it. And it was, you know what, I would have done this for six people. I really would have, it was about, it was just about trying to pay it forward. And, and if I could have helped six people, I would have been cool and I would have bailed and that would have been great. I would have paid it forward. And it just, uh, it took off and, um, and I got, I've gotten addicted to people saying that they're getting clean. Like it's become a drug choice for me and, and all BS aside, I get high as hell off it. And it's no difference. It's brain chemistry.  So it's pretty damn cool. And, uh, now we're up around 11 or 12,000 or something. So subscribers guys, please go subscribe because it is amazing work that he is doing. And it takes a lot of guts to put yourself out there and to say, this is my story. This is what's happened to me. And that vulnerable and people resonate with truth, right?  People resonate and that vulnerability, that's what, you know, that's what attracts people to a good movie or a good song. Is it, is that right? That, that familiarity. And I, and you know, we were talking because again, I, I met you or I actually was so lucky. It's wild guys. We had tagged, I tagged Tommy's channel. Whenever I do a video with someone, we were reference somebody else's channel. I always try to tag it so people can go watch it for themselves and you saw it. And I just feel like that was just so awesome to be able to get you on. But that's, but going back to what I was saying with the Scientology stuff, I was never a Scientologist. And I know a lot of people who watch Doug and Aaron and Claire and that they were never Scientologists. But even, even if you take Scientology out of it, it's that human story that we can all relate to the abuse, the manipulation, and to know you're not alone, to know that you're not crazy, that you're not, you were just, you know, a human being that just is living the human experience.  And now I'm out. And this is my story. Let me help you not do it. Oh yeah, you know what, I was a drug addict. Let me help you understand why this is happening to you because it's not really your fault. It's just, it's just kind of what you're the experience that you're having and we got to work through it and understand it. Yeah, that's exactly right.  I can still talk. So people would have me on and say, we have some questions concerning prison. And I end up tending to be the sort of the go-to guy when it comes to, to finding out about something on the inside, because I can usually come on and explain it. And I don't join up with, I mean, I don't sort of get in with any of these groups. I'll go do it and then I kind of disappear and then I go on to the next one and I kind of do it. And people who have a drug problem tend to, to realize what I'm doing and follow us. And that's kind of how we built the channel. When I did the stuff with Aaron, I went out to the Danny Masterson sentencing and I was one of just a couple of people that got in other than press. We got really, really lucky. I mean, lucky I got there at like five a.m. or whatever, but we, we still got very fortunate to, to get in there.  When that comes out, there's a light that changes in everybody's eyes. And I'm not mad at them, right?  It's just one of those things. It's hard not to do. The only place I've ever been, I swear to God, we're not one person ever had that switch was among second gents and Scientology. I met probably 40 of them on the same day. And we all started talking and hanging out. And there's just nothing. And after about the fourth person, I'm like, you know, you're not clicking exactly to what's different, but you know, something is wildly different. And the guy I was with, I went up and said, I know what it is, like these people don't, I could have been saying, I worked at a daycare, right? So how did you earn it? You know, the fact that I robbed banks was not, it didn't matter. It meant nothing to these people. And that was such a strange thing to me that I, I fell in love with them. I really did all of them. Aaron and the whole crew, they're just a great group of people. They're amazing. Very non-judgmental. Yeah. I mean, we love, we have had Claire multiple times. Doug now has been coming on, like they are so open. And I think they're, and I said to Claire once at one of them, it was like, how does it feel for Scientology to be such a pop culture phenomenon? She was like, right? But it is that human. And that's the thing. And what you're saying, it kind of gave me chill bumps. I would do a show a lot with a woman. And they're a team, Aquarius Rising Africa. Shanti, my friend who runs it, we become friends because we've been filming together for like two years now. She's very kind of like, very spiritual. And she said something very fascinating once that I really like, you know, your story that I actually think is kind of cool that I know someone who robbed a bank to be honest with you. You know, that's kind of cool. I've never known anybody to do that. But she always says, you know, when she's working with people and trying to heal them, the story, what you did, the story, that's just the drama. That's just the drama. Let's look at what's real. What's real is, as you said, no one's robbing banks to buy a Ferrari. They're robbing banks to feed something because there's something that's not right, that's something that's broken and they're not broken. It's just something needs to be corrected. Correct. A little corrective therapy. Unless you're like a psychopathic serial killer murder, that's different.  Once the healing has happened, it's just that, as she says, it's just the drama, just the drama of it all. You know, it's the essence of why. Why did you do that? What, as L. Ron Hubbard would say the reactive mind, which guys like, we know he stole that from Eastern philosophy and then he took it and like totally inverted it. But yeah, that figuring out why you're doing that. When you come down to it for anybody, whatever they're doing, whether, you know, it's robbing banks, doing drugs, over shopping, over exercising.  It's symptoms of a greater problem and that greater problem can be healed if the person is willing to do the hard work because it is hard work, isn't it? It's rough work. Yeah, but it beats the best out of the alternative. Yeah. You know what I mean? It really does.  I've never worked harder on anything than I have on sobriety, but I get up every day and I fear nothing. And to me, that was, you know, the ultimate payout is not living in fear because when you're addicted to heroin, you know, you can have a pound of it in the house. There's still one section of your brain that is always reserved for what's going to happen when they get in there and find that pound, right?  So my emotions get turned on for the first time in 30 years, right after getting stabbed in prison in solitary confinement, right? That was the start of everything. And I was left in solitary for 30 days, what they call on paper, which means that what I was wearing was a pair of pants and a shirt that were literally made out of paper. And I had a mattress without a sheet and then one piece of paper that you put in, kind of looks like a sheet, but they don't want you to, the theory is you can't hang yourself with them. But it's just punishment. It's because I wouldn't tell them who stabbed me, right? So for 30 days, that's how I did my detox in paper, stuff. There was no assistance, no nothing.  But all of these things, the beauty is that you were talking about shame earlier with addiction. If it's you and me and we're hanging out every day and we're going to college, we're doing the same things every single day and we get to the end and you say, I'm going to quit. I say, I'm going to quit and you can't, you will convince yourself, I promise you within two weeks that you're weak, right? I'm strong as hell, right? I'm great. You're weak and you will begin to compare yourself to every single person that can have one of these and set it down. And the worst part of the disease is it's the only disease known to man that makes people say, I don't have it, right?  There's a really good chance you have cancer and we're worried about this. And you are on the next car smoking, right? You're at the hospital before the phone call is done. A person says to you, Hey, we're 100% convinced you have a cocaine addiction and you need help. You go, I don't have a cocaine problem. I just know this shouldn't be because I don't tell you're talking about it. I don't have a problem with the step down anytime I want, right? There's no other disease known to man that makes you angrily deny the fact that you have it. You tell me I got lupus. I'll be like, All right, I got lupus, right? You got diabetes. Okay, I got diabetes.  No, I'm not. As you're saying that I was thinking too, because I deal with a lot of people who overeat and it's that sounds very similar to overeat overeaters more than people 100% we know starvation and overeating are two sides of the same issue. Emotionally, it's just depending on which way you go with it. So I'm not I'm not calling out people who are starving themselves. That's it. It's the same emotion, but a different response. I know so many people I deal with in my work outside of YouTube that hate themselves. Think they're disgusting because they can't they I've heard many stories and I'm I'll say this, I'm not going to say the many people who've told me this, but for people watching, I've heard many, many, many clients tell me that they will dig through the trash can when they're on a binge to find leftover food and they feel very ashamed of that. But it sounds very similar to to 100% the exact same thing.  I mean, I know men deal with it too.  I'm just I'm just a teacher of this philosophy to try to convince them that go to a trauma therapist. It sounds like there's something that you were and once you figured that out, you won't even have to sign up for Jenny crack because you will start to just figure it out. You won't need that anymore. And that's okay. There's something that you and my heart breaks. I always tell my students that I don't ever like to use the word that I don't see people as I see them as wounded. It's just a wound.  And we in a very vapid way, we can see that non violence is treating people with respect, being kind, not but what people fail to understand. It's also like you speak to yourself in ways that you would never speak to anybody else. Oh, God, yes.  Like, don't every day my life.    And we all have crosses to bear. Nobody gets my algebra teacher and that my 10th grade year used to say no one gets out of this world alive. None of us do. It's what you do with that friction and that grit that really evolves you as a soul that refined you as a soul. And I always because I am someone that does believe in past lives and we were talking about off camera and I always tell people, you know, we get so confused with our physical body and our soul, like the difference between the two. And I say, you know, when you're in an amusement park, right, and you're picking the rides, every ride is going to give you a different simulated experience. You as the person getting on the ride know what that is, right? And then you get on the ride and you experience it when your soul's here in life, you're in this experience that your soul wanted to grow from, wanted to refine itself from. And so it picks certain opportunities for you to take that grit and turn it into gold. And it's so very few people actually take that and actually do it. And they're the alchemists, right? You are the alchemists, you're turning the lead into gold. And, and it's just so amazing. When you find someone like Tommy, I mean, it's, it's, I was, what is the book that you were talking about, Tommy? What's the name of it? About the guy from Shatterin Shatterin is the name. It's amazing book changed my life.  It was, and the funniest part of it is it started a ritual that I had no idea was coming, right? Because the guy that gave this to me was getting shipped to another prison and he was packing everything out. And I learned later that it's about 55 bucks, right? It was one of the most expensive books that they had that you could order out of the prison catalog. And the reason is it's because everybody tries to order it, right? And it's a blind demand. But he said to me, he's like, look, man, I'm, I'm leaving this with you. I'm not taking this with me. And I said, damn. And he's like, yeah, you're going to do the same thing. And he said, that's how I got it. He said, this, this is going to be a book that changes your life. And I said, if I had a dollar for every time some inmate dropped the book off and told me it was going to change my life, I'd be rich, right?  But I read him because you got nothing else to do anyway. This book was life changing. This book was life changing. It really was. And it's the fascinating thing about it is two different completely, completely different worlds. I, I'm fascinated by anybody that's looking. You follow? Like I don't care what your, what your route is. I just dig the fact that you're looking. I dig that because there's just a very large segment of the, of the population that sadly will never be able to get off of what's happening today, so that the idea of spirituality or, or a past life or anything else, that's, that's some heavy duty stuff. If you're putting a needle in your eye, right? The most that you're going to get to in thought is I got to put $80 more in my arm in seven hours. Like, where's that coming from?  Like I, I had some, some intelligence that, that I came by honestly, right? From mom and dad, I did all right. But I couldn't, I couldn't get to the, to this kind of, of, you know, thought. It just was, and it's, and, but what occurred to me more than anything in the world is that nobody can, right? If I can help a guy and whether I use Suboxone or whether I get him into any kind of a medical assisted treatment or cold turkey or whatever, but if I can get him by that craving to the point where that craps out of his life, now you can start thinking about things like family and God, these are concepts that an addict can't think about. The addict thing knows one thing, right? I don't want to be sick. That's it.  So if I got to go steal or rob a bank or hurt somebody or do whatever I got to do to get, because my habit was like six or $700 a day. So every single day when the sun came up, right, that you're running, the process starts, and I was so strung out that it didn't matter what I did on Monday. If somehow I had a great Monday and I doubled up the amount of money that I needed, I was still going to do that dope by Tuesday morning. I mean, I was a drug addict. If you gave me $1,000 worth, I did a thousand, you gave me $5,000 worth. I would have done $5,000. I couldn't stop. That's the kind of addict that was put it on the table. I would do it until it was gone. And that was the, you know, that was a lifestyle that I really truthfully thought I was going to be trapped in forever. But that once you can get away from that enough, the concepts and the things that we're talking about, I think more, more people are searching now than ever have. We live in some frightening frigging times and I think it's shaking a few people around, which is good. Yeah. And stigma is going away too, which is a beautiful thing. Yeah. I think we, I think that is with every, you know, we live on if I follow, I'm a student of the law of one because that's what makes the most sense to me as far as like why we're here. So everyone just take this with a grain of salt because it's just my, you know, whatever you believe is what you believe. But a third density is what we're in and it's a very heavy density and it's polarized between darkness and light. It's because you have to make choices. You have to like learn and you can't without the opposing forces. You just can't. That's why you have darkness and light on this planet. But in some of the like other channels stuff I read, I always laugh at this. They always say planet earth is like the worst for darkness. Like we take our darkness to the extreme. Like we're, if we, if there are aliens out there, we're the planet where the aliens lock their doors. That's right. Roll them up. Roll them up. They now come by, he locks the door. And, but then when I make that the good point because we're polarized, when there's that much darkness, there also has to be that much light too. But we are one of the most horrific planets because that was also one of the most beautiful. It's like that Mr. Rogers quote when he said, my mother said, whenever tragedy happened, look for the helpers. There will always be helpers. And that's light and the darkness and that's doing its dance. It's yin and yang. It's tango. And I'm going to put a link to that book down in the description box below. That's an amazing book. I always, my friend Tamara from Australia, she laughs and said, we must have been real bored as souls to pick to come to earth during this time. Oh my God, right? May you live in interesting times. This is something. I mean, I just love it that the United States government actually did acknowledge that there's extra extra trust to your life and people are like, man, whatever. Exactly. It was the biggest non-burg. Everyone was like, yeah, we figured you were bullshitting us from Jump Street anyway, right? Tell us there's not. We knew there was like, like people are like, we don't even know of our histories right anymore, man. Like we don't care.   And I've heard a lot of people struggled during the lockdown. I get that. I think we all did. There was a sense of like panic. We didn't know it was coming, but somebody made a point that it was almost like a spiritual lot that people had to start facing their own mortality and facing, you know, the bigger sides. And I think that's why a lot of this humanity, this humanness is coming out and people are more open to really, really talking about these things and just being open and honest with, with, uh, with each other about their struggles. And I, you know, as you're saying that too, Tommy, have you ever read any of Ram Dass' books by chance? Yes. Yes. He was a drug addict that went to India and got like, he was like, and his story is wild because he did it as a controlled experiment at Harvard, like Harvard approved. Yes, he did. And it got out of hand. And he ended up, I'll never forget, polishing the mirror and sitting and talking about being, and I cannot imagine being high in India because it's already trippy when you're there because it's so loud and bright and it's such a ultra shock anyway. And to be that strung out in India and to have to be like drug to this neem curly Baba like on and then getting rid of it with, and I couldn't imagine just that. And he ended up, of course, he was the same as you. And he didn't go to prison, but he took that and kind of turned it into what the legacy he left behind. Um, and this, this guy was an Aussie too. This guy was an Aussie and a bank robber who manages to escape from prison. And this is a legit story that's really happened in the real world. And this is his story, but he managed to escape and he went to India. I don't know. Someone told me, someone said to me just recently, you know, they made a movie of this, that may be the case. I just read now. Because of the brain damage thing, I don't watch anything that's filmed with one more than one camera. So, but, uh, the, for me, so the guy was a bank robber, right? That's what he's in prison for. So like everything was lining up in this book as I started to read it. But he, when he got there, he had to hide and he realized that the safest place in the world to hide in India was the slums. And, uh, it just completely changed who he was.  He builds something through, um, getting donations and things that ends up becoming a hospital within the, uh, the slums.  It's just one of those things. And he's written a couple of other books. I've read all of them, but that's the one that I literally read the part of him where he was getting the day before I got the crap kicked out of me. Like it worked perfectly. That is, I mean, that's, that's a God wink. I'm actually looking right now. It looks like Charlie Hunnam. There might have been, I'll have to do a little bit more research, but I'll put everything up, um, in the description box. Uh, uh, okay. Yeah. Cause it looks like they call us, but I'll do some research guys, but yeah, I'm, the books are always better anyway. No offense to the actors. The books are always better because you're allowed to put your own perspective and into the story. And you know, that's interesting. I started a foundation. I, one night ended up in the slums. I don't think it was, it was by accident, but I don't think it was by accident. It was, I ended up bringing some, I had food I didn't want. I, I was too spicy and I never forget them coming out. Um, it was really late at night and the family came out and they were just so grateful for this leftover Chinese food.  Cause here I am coming from America. Here's the, what are my problems compared to their problems. And I ended up going back to the slums every day after class. I'd go hang out in the slums with the women and the children. We just ended up starting a foundation. Um, and we go there every time we there, we go and we raise money and we bring them, um, we bring them rice, we bring them whatever.  Like that to me is, so I went the first day and it's, if you're an American or any Western country in India, you're wealthy, right? So I bought out a whole pharmacy and just brought it to them. And that kind of felt so the slums changed you. The slums absolutely changed you as a Westerner because you just, I always tell people, watch slum dog millionaire. It's, it's, that's the truth. That's literally what it's like.  Do you have a little bit of extra time or do you got to run? Yeah. No, I got a little bit extra time, but, and I will say this, this is important to me because I, I don't get to say this one often enough. You know how you say they will, they will change you. They will change you. This is something that I have learned.   And for some of them it's because, and this is hugely important to me and it's, it's hard to convey sometimes.  That you're not concentrating on God, family and all the important things. But if we're, you're a little out of kilter is the fact that maybe you work too hard at your job as a broker, right? It's so easy to go through your entire life just as out of kilter is the guy sticking a needle in his arm and you just don't realize you are, but you're not dealing with God, you're not dealing with family and you're not dealing with any of the things that are those bigger thoughts. So those, those people walk by and see the same things and they don't see it. And prison was amazing for me in that I, I used to go in and years I had done time, right? I had done a lot of time before I decided that this was going to be it and I was going to get sober. And it was like the movie where everything I saw instantly changed. Like I walked out of that cell after the conversation with Q and I looked out and I knew those are the guys doing dope. I knew those guys always money and what they were over there trying to do. And it was like the whole everything just sort of, as I looked around, everything changed. And I got real uncomfortable walking by people that were, that were hurting.  I'll be really honest with you. I did not want to have anything to do with helping people. I was not my get down. It's not what I wanted to do. I still am really uncomfortable with it. I don't like if I could do without comments. If I could do without, I don't, I really don't like all of the nice things that people say if that's the sense. So I appreciate the hell out of it. I really do, but it, but you spent 13 years being called convict and scumbag and bank robber. And then, and I went right from that to this, like I, it was instant.  And it was, I did this one for a long time on the bright side. Listen, if you, she's right, get help, talk to professionals. This is, I should have done this from day one on the life book because I accidentally got people who believed that it's in us and them kind of a mentality, like, you know, Tommy's a convict and he's been the president of that school. And we can trust him, but the medical people, look, I go to three a week, people. I see three professionals every single week, and I will for the rest of eternity. I've gotten so much out of, out of once, that was another paradigm shift. Once I realized that saying I need help is a, is a brave thing instead of the opposite, right? It takes courage and encourages is doing something despite the fact you're afraid. And I, I mean, I think everyone is therapy. I think the whole world needs, I mean, I love my therapy. I love, I love when I was in therapy. I didn't want to leave. I was like, this is fabulous. You know, and I, and you do, it gives you a different, because your thoughts become so real that you don't, one of my favorite mantras is don't believe everything you think. Now, it took me going through therapy to realize that your perception is just your perception. And let's, and I learned about catastrophe thinking, I learned about all, kind of like you did with learning, you learn about these side effects that happen through whatever goes on in your life. And when you realize that that's not actually reality, it's a side effect of, of a trauma. It's a side effect of, of the fighter, fighter, the freeze, or the font response. You start to go, you start to have more mercy on yourself. And now I can catch myself and go, oh, that's catastrophe thinking. That's, that's not really me. That's not really my personality. That's CPTSD or that's, and you start to realize you're not these things. You're not these things. These are just side effects of what's happened to you. You are something completely different. That is so valuable and so precious to this world. And if anybody, regardless of what you're struggling with, whether it be drugs, food, sex, shopping, whatever, you are not, that is just something you are experiencing right now. You are something far greater than all of that. And that, there's no us versus them. Us versus them is derangement thinking. We're, as Ron says, we're all just walking each other home. We might not know where home is. We might still be a little lost on the coordinates there, but we're all in this together. And there are people who will, and I will say this with therapy too, because people have asked me this, when you're looking for a therapist, you don't have to settle for the first one. Oh my God, please don't. Yeah.  I was so lucky. My therapist and I just hit it off. She had studied all this. That's awesome. Two and she was really find somebody because I get so many people like, oh, I tried therapy. I didn't feel comfortable. Well, then find the next therapist. Go to the next one. They're people too. So it's going to be you mashing with their, their person. I got, I got one right now. I need to replace. I got one right now. I need to replace, but see, I moved. I came here. I, I'm selling my house in Nevada and I bought a house down here at Tucson. And when I moved down here, I had to get new counselors. One is cool because I do, she and I have been together forever and she's a woman I work with online and we've been together forever. So, but I had to get one down here and they're great. Same thing. Instantly, like I just fell right in third one, not so much. And they're not bad people. We just don't gel. So next week I'm trying someone else and I'm going to keep doing that. And then when I get to, we're all three of them are good. Then I'm bulletproof. Yeah. So don't feel like you were, you were obligated to, to think of it as dating, right? Like you go on a first day with, they're not bad people. You just don't dive. You know, they, they get that they, they're fine with it. You just find when you dive with. Now, Tommy, to end this episode, I kind of have like a funny question that actually my boyfriend wanted me to ask you because we debated this. So, you know how Trump was indicted here at Fulton County at Rice Street. And this is not about politics. We're not getting to politics guys. This is a kind of a comical question because, you know, every ex-president gets a secret service. They get an entourage of security that's with them for the rest of their lives. They all got them. Obama, the Bushes, every nut, you get, you get it. That's like your, your pals until you die, right? So when a president has to check in at the, at the prison and go through booking, A, do, do you think they, because this is one of the roughest prisons in the world. Did they move? And that's no joke. It really is. This is a rugged prison. Did they move all the prisoners out to do this for security purposes? And did the whole secret service had to go through everything with him? So here's the, here's the way this goes down and trust me on this one. I happen to have been Ron Blagojevic, who was not, right? Ron, Ron and I were in prison at the same time and he came through Oklahoma and the way he was treated. And he, the secret service would say, FU, he's not going anywhere near a cell. FU, he's not going anywhere near there. And they're at the top of the food chain. If they say he's not going in there, he's not going in there. And that's how that works. So what would happen is they probably brought him into one room, which was nowhere near anything else. They took a picture. They got him into one other room that had a thumb machine, you know, print machine, but he was never in GP. He was never near anybody. No, they, no, but yeah, really quickly, they get, they get a game plan to, to move him through, you know, the, the, the secret service, I guess has the ultimate, yeah, a friend of mine who was an attorney, my friend of the ex-wife who I still talk to, we were talking about it. And he said, not forget it. He said, the secret service. And he had a friend down there who's, and they said that secret service said, nope, he's not doing this. Nope. Well, we have to bring him here. Nope. That's not happening. Nope. That's not happening because they're jealous to make sure that nothing happens to the guy. And he's not a popular guy. There's a lot of people. What's that? Laughing hysterically that like this haunturage of men in black suits. Yeah. Yeah. And SUVs and the $5 million for like five minutes worth of effort to get everybody in there. It's just so unbelievable. And what's funny is you should be able to phone it. You should be able to phone in anyway. So I've been arrested before where I knew I was under investigation and, you know, and I said to him, look, if you get enough evidence, you think you can actually take a run at me, call me and I'll go turn myself in. You know what I mean? I won't make you go through the process of, I mean, I've been down for eight interrogations so far. Obviously, I'm not looking to run, right? So just call me. And very often they'll allow that to actually happen. And I'm a bum. I'm not the, the ex-president of the United States. But yeah, he wasn't going anywhere near anything that.  Like, we're, it's full. Yeah. People are dying every day. Toilets are backing up ships all over the floor. Like this. I actually watched, they had that TV show 60 days in and season one was somewhere in the Midwest season two was rice street here in Atlanta. I watched season one. It was like this small little kind of cute prison, you know, season two. I only could watch a couple episodes because it made me so sick to my stomach because it was so rough that I could not. I just could not watch it. So, and that you actually answered another question too, because everybody in Atlanta noticed that the background of his mugshot and everybody else's mugshot was different than normally see. And you just answered that question. It's, yeah, there's no way he was getting anywhere even, even near that. And I'll tell you what's even funnier, right? So I was talking to my attorney and I said, so what happens if they convict this guy? He goes, they can't send him to prison. He's got that secret service for the rest of eternity. And as far as law enforcement goes, there's nobody that supersedes them. So if they say we're not putting the dude in prison, they'll find a place to stick and they'll probably be down a mirror logo with bars on the house or something like that. But, but they're not going to, they're not going to have them. And the job is to protect them. You can't protect anybody in prison. I promise you, you can't, right? It's impossible to protect anybody in prison. So you can try doing this. This was a very, because I know people it takes, especially when it takes a while to go through like you get arrested and you're going to be in there for a few hours to say the least probably overnight or you're released. And so even if you post bail instantly. Yeah, I know he was in and out maybe like 20 minutes and he was back in the SUV, which yeah. So, so, and yeah, guys, that's the reason why I didn't go down there because that's a very dangerous neighborhood. I knew they were going to close roads off and I didn't want to get. There's two prisons there. Do you know that there's two prisons there? Women and a man? No, I don't know. Well, they've got a fed, they have a fed system. They have a fed prison. The fed the line of fed prisons downtown. And it's also in ski just in a real tough neighborhood. I've been through that one.  Right. And I was trying to sleep. I just gotten off con air. And when I woke up, there was a rat with my bag pulling it across the floor. I kid you not right now.  Like I'm not what I'm going to mess with the rat. No, that's you, Doug. Knock yourself out. Enjoy that part of trying to get that back. I got pumped. I got pumped by a rat that I was cool with it. I was going to be there overnight. I figured that doesn't surprise me. I know that people in the city of Atlanta have tried really hard to get a reform at that prison because it is y'all like that is not if you're going to get arrested. It looks like the Midwest has from the TV show. I saw has the better ones, but do not get arrested.  Like that is we're talking. I mean, Atlanta still struggles, but we have a lot of gang activity here. We have you think about like that we've a huge and I'm not saying this about the rap community, but you think about the rap community, not the rappers, but it can attract. You know, that's kind of the basis of music, right? In Big Meach from Atlanta. I don't know. I'm not a huge rapper. He's they're going to they're going to get a kick out of there. If you got the Atlanta people here, they'll get a kick. Big Meach is I did three prisons with the guys gangster. He's a real like no joke gangster, but I did. I followed him to three consecutive prisons. We did the special management.  We just sort of followed each other. Good dude. Really a nice guy, but he's doing a lot of time from Atlanta. Yeah. Yeah. That's a rugged. That's that's a tough city. It's a tough city. It's a very tough city when it comes to that. So so if you're doing crimes, don't don't do them in Atlanta because it's not going to turn out good for you. So so rough prisons to be sure. It's so fun. And I would be so happy to tell my boyfriend the scoop on what actually happened. I mean, that we just we were just thinking it'd be just so funny to have the whole Secret Service going through in their suits. Like I'm telling you, yeah, going to the team for an ex-president, the team's like 45 guys or something is a lot of people.  I would have loved to be working there that day to see that. I probably asked for an autograph. I'd be like, it's a famous person. I'm just glad.  Like I lived with the head of the Colombo crime family in the first day in there. I was like, I said, Hey, will you sign something if I ask you to?  He's like, what do you want me to sign? I was like your ID. And he's like my ID. I'm like, yeah, I want to mail your ID to the street sign. He's like, I'm not giving you my ID. He's like, I'd have to buy another one. I'm like, yeah, but I could sell yours for like two grand, right? Then we'll get you another one. We did it twice. We did it twice. And then the prison was like, you're not getting any more IDs. That's scrappy. That is scrappy. That's to be that. That's smart.  You know, it seemed like a really good idea. We did. We did a couple of men a week. It seemed like a real good idea at the time. But that is hysterical. I'm sure. And Tommy, are you have you considered writing a book? You know, something so just real briefly, you know, we peel the onion to find out why we do drugs, right? I have a half on my brain that works really beautifully. It really does. I, you know, I can, I can put on a shirt and it's high and I can pretend with anybody. I was the president of a publicly traded company once. The other half of my brain does nothing. I'm not even being funny. Like I have some serious, serious damage and I could never organize one. I'm really good doing this. I would never be able to organize it, which is sad. But I would, yeah, it's a pretty crazy story too. I think you guys, and let us know in the comment section below because I think you would have a really killer book. And I think you could probably find a ghost writer that can help you because I know a lot of people do that. Well, actually, you just talk to them and they help you kind of do it, do the hard growth. So yeah, that I could probably do. If you know of that, because I think you would have a life changing book. All right. Well, Tommy, I want you to send me your, I think I have your email address, don't I? Is that the email address for your friend that you're trying to help? Yeah. You can do, you can also do, sober is also easy, right? Anybody can hit me up with that. It's sober at myyahoo. All right, sober at myyahoo.com. Do you want to help out there that you think you can help in any way with his project, with his, we'll call him his teacher, that's still, that's still in the, the ashram we'll say, the ashram. That's right. To get him out, then definitely you guys make sure you're subscribed to Tommy's channel. I'm going to put some of Aaron Smith Levin's episodes with Tommy, especially the Elrond Hubbard one because I was like, yeah, because I mean, I lived in LA for a while. I'm familiar. I'm familiar with this stuff. And when people are, yeah, when people are doing cocaine or any type of, there's certain, especially when they're really like tweaked out, there's certain, you can tell and, and going back to Elrond Hubbard's videos, like that's not, that's not a normal. That's not right. And I just, I love Janice Gilbrady. I think she's adorable, but she was a child. Like, and if someone, she wasn't happy with me.  Doug and I talked about that. I know Hubbard's psychopaths. So is Miscavige. They're different breeds of psychopath, but there's this weird thing that happens. And I get it.  It's still kind of like this, this, and so to admit even more, you know, but as you say, the fact that he did drugs, isn't the problem. That's not the problem, right? No, it's not. That's the problem, right? It was the other stuff he did that could have been done sober too, right? That the fair gaming, you know, so, yeah, but I was like, Oh yeah, I was like, I was like, yeah, he totally tweaked it. Totally. That's exactly what I was saying. This dude hasn't slept in three months. You know, if you do the math on how many things he wrote and how long he was alive, like, you know, he couldn't have slept anyway. He did the math. He literally, he spent, he was on a lot of runners. And if you read his science fiction, you can tell. Yeah. So all right, Tommy, well, we're gonna have everything. This was fun. This was fun. And I'm hoping you'll come back.  And I love, I think Janice is adorable, but that's just the child's perspective of, and, and it's okay. It's easy to hide. It comes in a tiny bag. You can stick it in a shoe.  Like I'm not even being funny. Like that became a really standard thing.  So yeah, this was an honor and it was fun. I definitely do this. Awesome. Please check out, make sure you contact Tommy. If there's any aid that you can give, we're, as Ramda says, we're all just walking each other home. We're all human beings. We're all on this weird floating rock trying to go somewhere. We don't know where we're going, but we're trying to get there. So all right. Wonderful. We're airing this on Monday, even though we're recording this on Friday. We are airing this on Monday. So I hope you guys have a wonderful start to your week and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.


I talked about the benefits of calorie restriction. Well, the greatest caloric restriction is no calories at all. Fasting has been branded the next big weight loss fad, but has a long history throughout various spiritual traditions practiced by Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha. In 1732, a noted physician wrote, he that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well. Today, about 1 in 7 American adults report taking that advice using some sort of fasting as a means to control body weight. Case reports of the treatment of obesity through fasting date back more than a century in the medical literature.  Their success led them to conclude that, quote, moderate periods of starvation constitute a perfectly safe, harmless, and effective method for reducing the weight of those suffering from obesity, unquote. The longest recorders fast, published in 1973, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. To reach as an ideal body weight, a 27-year-old man fasted for 382 days straight, losing 276 pounds and managed to keep nearly all of it off. He was given vitamin and mineral supplements, so he wouldn't die, but no calories for more than a year. In their acknowledgments, the researchers thanked him for his cheerful cooperation and steadfast application to the task of achieving a normal physique. A U.S. Air Force study of about 20 individuals, at least 100 pounds overweight, most unable to lose weight on previous diets, were fasted for as long as 84 days. Nine dropped out of the study, but the 16 who remained were unequivocally successful at losing between 40 and 100 pounds. In the first few days, subjects were noted losing as much as 4 pounds a day, and that was mostly water weight as the body starts to adapt. But after a few weeks, they were steadily losing about a pound of mostly straight fat a day. The investigator described their starvation program as a dramatic and exciting treatment for obesity. Of course, the single most successful diet for weight loss, namely no diet at all, is also the single least sustainable. What other diet can cure morbid obesity in a matter of months, but practically be guaranteed to kill you within a year if you stick with it? The reason diets don't work almost by definition is that people go on them and then they go off of them. Permanent weight loss is only achieved through permanent lifestyle change. So what's the point of fasting if you're just going to go back to your regular diet and gain it all right back? Fasting proponents cite the psychological benefit of realigning people's perceptions and motivation. Some individuals have resigned themselves to the belief that weight loss for them is somehow impossible. They may think they're just made differently in some way, and no matter what they do, the pounds don't come off. But the rapid, unequivocal weight loss during fasting demonstrates to them that with a large enough change in eating habits, it's not just possible, but inevitable. This morale boost may then embolden them to make better food choices once they resume eating. The break from food may allow some an opportunity to pause and reflect on the role food is playing in their lives, not only the power it has over them, but the power they have over it. In a fasting study entitled Correction and Control of Intractable Obesity, a person's personality was described as changing from one of desperation with abandonment of hope to that of an eager extrovert full of plans for a promising future. She realized that her weight was within her own power to control. They concluded this highly intellectual social worker has been returned to a full degree of exceptional usefulness. After a fast, new found commitments to more healthful eating may be facilitated by reduction in overall appetite reported post-fast, compared to pre-fast, at least temporarily. Even during a fast, hunger may start to dissipate within 36 hours. So challenging people's delusions about their exceptionality to the laws of physics with a period of total fasting may seem barbaric, but in reality this method of weight reduction is remarkably well tolerated by obese patients. That seems to be a recurring theme in these published series of cases. In this influential paper, Treatment of Obesity by Total Fasting, for up to 249 days, the researchers remarked that the most surprising aspect of the study was the ease with which the prolonged fast was tolerated. All their patients evidently spontaneously commented on their increased sense of well-being throughout the process, even in some cases frank euphoria. Though it's essential that fasting should only be prescribed under close medical supervision, they concluded that they were convinced that it is the treatment of choice certainly in cases of gross obesity. Fasting for a day can make people irritable, moody, and distracted, but a few days in, many report feeling clear, elated, and alert, even euphoric. This may be in part due to the significant rise in endorphins that accompany fasting. Mood enhancement during fastings thought to perhaps represent an adaptive survival mechanism to motivate the search for food. This positive outlook towards the future may then facilitate the behavioral change necessary to lock in some of the weight loss benefits. But is that what happens? Is it actually effective over the long term? And I'm sure you saw titles like this flash by. Is it even safe? We'll find out next.


The gospel to which all those who have come to believe in Jesus Christ through his word are separated to Concerns verse 2 or verse 3 God's promise concerning his son Jesus Christ our Lord in other words The gospel has to do with who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ has done What is the gospel the gospel the good news is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ The gospel is the person and work of Jesus Christ So listen if we're going to understand the gospel if we're going to apprehend the gospel We must know who Jesus Christ is and what Jesus Christ has done If you don't know who he is and you don't understand what he's done, then you don't know the gospel


Something magical is coming to the British Library. Harry Potter, a history of magic, a spell-binding new exhibition. Encounter magical creatures within the pages of books and manuscripts from throughout history. Gaze at the night skies and read the stars using an ancient celestial glove. Learn how to make a philosopher's stone with the gargantuan 16th century Ripley scroll. Discover the traditions of folklore and magic at the heart of the Harry Potter stories. Book your tickets to Harry Potter, a history of magic at the British Library.