Hey, it's podcast episode number 200 on the anxious truth 200. I'm amazed So today, we're gonna do something a little bit different. Please indulge me. You see there's no intro music. There's no slick opening I'm not gonna talk about my books and that sort of stuff I just want to take 10 or 12 minutes and chat with you sort of informally and reflect a little bit about where the podcast has been Since its inception in 2014 where it is now and kind of where we're going I don't want to talk to you about how you can participate in setting that direction and determining where we go from episode 201 and Onward so grab a coffee or tea or whatever beverage you want and pull up a chair get comfortable And let's just chat a little bit and I promise next week. We'll be back to our regular programming So when I started this podcast in 2014 the podcast was originally entitled that anxiety guy So if you're sort of new and you're listening to old episodes and you hear that name Same podcast just with a different name and the funny story about that is when I did not know what to name the podcast And I really had no plans for the podcast at all I wanted to do something to pay forward some of the help that I had gotten online when I needed it I thought a podcast might be a good idea. I'm pretty comfortable speaking. So I said, alright I'm gonna do a podcast. I had no idea what podcasts were. Nobody cared back then So I fired up my little $4 podcast app on my crappy iPhone whatever iPhone it was in 2014 And I started talking and I know I needed a name I didn't know what to name the podcast and one night I saw a promo on TV for that 70 show Which interestingly enough I have never seen I've never even seen a minute of that 70 show But of course I knew about it because it was an incredibly popular TV show at the time And I thought oh, I'm gonna name the podcast that anxiety guy and it sort of stuck But I never really liked it like I just never really liked the name It was a default name And I kind of didn't care because I I really had no plans for this this thing this podcast I recorded my first 15 or 20 episodes. Those are sort of the foundational episodes I kind of went dark and I would talk about stuff when I kind of felt like it but Two things happened and that is I met Holly So you guys have seen Holly in some of the earlier episodes She is one of the admins in my Facebook group and Holly and I met when we were both admins in the panic disorder Facebook group and we decided to do a series of episodes where we went through and sort of Guided people through the Claire Weeks book Hope and help for your nerves and we did nine of those and those were proved to be very popular both as podcast episodes and YouTube videos And then right around that time also my friend Billy Cross and Billy runs anxiety United in the UK You guys might know Billy too Billy and I he was one of my very first recovery friends that I met back in like 2007 or 2008 and We've been working together on various things some mental health related some not ever since then I'm proud to say I'm still Billy's friend. We still talk So Billy and I decided that we would take an article that I had written Probably back in 2006 or 2007 Somewhere in that neighborhood and we would turn that into a series of podcast episodes and we would call anxiety 101 because this article that I wrote which is actually on my website and I'll put that in the show notes if you want to check it out That article kind of laid out the foundation of the recovery process And so we broke it down and we made maybe 10 or 12 episodes out of that and that Extended because people were liking it and we did I think 20 or 22 episodes of anxiety 101 and so those two series the one with Holly and the one with Billy were actually quite popular but then when those Ended again, it sort of died out because the podcast was just something I sort of did when I thought of it I had no plan. I was not consistent with it. It wasn't a priority It just when I thought I had something to say I would fire up the mic and put it on an episode Okay, but at the same time the social media community, especially the Facebook group was growing So it was growing and growing and getting more vibrant and engaged And that's spurred a lot of discussions and brought up a bunch of topics to the point where around 2018 I decided to get involved again I had things that I felt like I wanted to say and I think there had been a year since the last episode And when I fired up the podcast to go and start again I was completely taken aback to find out how many reviews like beautiful lovely glowing reviews There were and and how highly rated the podcast was I had never considered that for a million I had no idea whether anybody was listening or watching or anything. It's just it wasn't a thing for me But when I saw how engaged the audience was I got interested again So I just started podcasting regularly. So for the past three and a half now almost four years I have put out I guess about three and a half years. I put out an episode every week almost religiously Really mostly over the last say two years two and a half years But I got back into it in 2018 or so and started becoming more consistent And it has just grown since then and the podcast in 2019 was renamed from that anxiety guy to the anxious truth And if my friend Mike rando is listening Mike, I don't know if you are but thank you because he was the guy that came up With that name Mike's a good dude and I asked a bunch of people in my Facebook group Hey, I got to rename the podcast which would we call it and he came up with the anxious truth So I renamed the podcast in 2019. That's why today It's the anxious truth and in the past it was that anxiety guy same put same podcast Just same guy different name And here we are and here we are doing episode number 200 now when I recorded that very first episode in a million years I would have never expected it to be where it is now Like I would never have expected it to be where it is now The podcast has been downloaded well over two million times. I don't even know I don't watch anymore My podcast host tells me that we are now going over a hundred and twenty five thousand Lessons every month now across the whole catalog of episodes, which is a mind-boggling number to me I'm I'm I can't even fathom that number now clearly. I'm not Joe Rogan There are podcasts that get millions and millions of listens probably every week But 125,000 listens every every month here. It's it's something else I can't even imagine and the social media community around the podcast has grown and grown and grown and gotten more Vibrant and engaged and it's been amazing Frankly, it's been amazing. It has spawned three books and now we have the morning newsletter. That's out at the anxious morning It's been great. It's been great. This podcast to be totally honest with you Has really been driven by you guys by the audience So when I saw you interested and talking about different things it sparked my interest and then that just snowballs Because the more I listen to you talk the more I have to say and the more I have to say the more you talk back to me And I just love it like this podcast is 100% powered by you There's no doubt in my mind if we stop talking and I just start talking at you instead of with you We're done So the one of the great privileges has been the ability to talk not only to you but with you Especially over the last three years or so when things have started to snowball and it has led to where it is now Astounding this podcast driven by you has really changed my life If you had asked me three years ago, I would have told you I'm a technology guy that has this podcast that I sometimes do and Next week literally seven days from today is my first day as a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling We're at the end of this program I will be able to be licensed as a Licensed psychotherapist mental health counselor here in the state of New York and whatever other states in the US I decide to get licensed in which is astounding to me I cannot imagine that I am here, but here I am and really this podcast has been the catalyst that That has moved me in this direction a direction that I clearly belong in There was no doubt in my mind so now I am a mental health educator and guide and content creator and podcaster and author and Graduate student headed toward working therapist that also happens to own some technology companies So it is amazing how things have changed I could not be happier about this even though I resisted it for a while because I didn't think that it was a real thing But clearly it's a real thing and I'm incredibly happy to be in this position And I have all of you to thank for that like you guys this podcast Driven by you has changed my life in this way And I'm never going to be able to say thank you enough So I will just continue as we go forward here After episode 200 to try to pay you back as best I can because again I cannot thank you enough for for this for all of this and where I am now It's I say that from the bottom of my heart. I mean, it's sincerely So where does that leave us? Well, it puts me in a different place over the past couple of months I've really had to kind of rework my life and really examine my schedule and look at where I'm spending my time and What I'm doing because full-time graduate school is no joke I don't have the time available to me that I used to have need to make sure that I can put my energy into that thing And get to the end and get to where I want to be and get to where I continue to help So I am producing a podcast every week that comes out every Wednesday. You're listening to one now I produce a Morning email newsletter three to five hundred words shows up in everybody's email every weekday morning And it's a little three-minute podcast that goes with that we do that I've written my three books. There are more books in the works some of which are collaborative some of which are my own There's grad school. There's the the social media community continues to grow and be more vibrant as we go and I'm gonna ask for your input like where do we go from here? What topics have I missed? What do you want me to talk about a little more? Who do you want me to interview on the podcast? Who have I missed? I'm gonna continue to work with the usual suspects people that I admire. I love these are my friends These are smart people lovely people, you know them the Joe Ryan's the Kim Quinlan's the Josh Fletcher's the Bridget Cooper's They'll still be here But who else can I work with if you have somebody you want me to talk to let me know if you have a topic You want me to address let me know if you think I missed something let me know So you guys know all the ways you can comment on my Instagram post You can get me in the Facebook group you can get me on my Facebook page, you know, you know, you know where to go YouTube comments so just shout them out of you know if you got topics you got guests you got things you want me to talk About let's hear it because I want you guys to continue to steer this For the most part. I'm sort of just the steward here You know you guys really really steer this ship I just make sure it stays in calm waters and then you know and going the direction you need it to go That's my job here So help me steer tell me what you want to see more of or what you want to see less of that's that's fair, too I'm all ears I'm open and I just wanted this work that I do To be as useful as I can be as it can be all the time. So that's why I'm gonna ask for your participation here And that's it. That's where I that's where we've been. It's where we are I think it's where we're going we're gonna continue to produce this podcast We're gonna continue to produce the morning newsletter I'm gonna continue to write and release the books as they are Relevant and needed and useful not just for the sake of it And I'm gonna continue to interact with you guys as much as I possibly can now as my time gets more limited Some of that's going to start to change the way it looks So the anxious truth community Which is something that I have been working on with some very smart people and very dedicated people for the last six or eight months is coming soon and that will be a place that we can gather to have actual meaningful worthwhile productive Conversations about this topic and this content that is not governed by ridiculous Social media algorithms that will only reward me and want me to do nothing more than hook your attention and Hold on to it like hot death by any means necessary and I'm just sort of done with that so folks like me who are swimming in that social media algorithm can get very frustrated and When my time becomes Limited it's really hard for me to try to have these discussions in a meaningful way When the only thing Facebook and Instagram wants me to do is keep your attention any way I can and keep you in that app and I don't want to be in that business And I don't want to drag you through that for their benefit So we're gonna find a new way to interact that I think everybody's gonna like a whole lot better So I will announce that at some point very soon. I know I've been kind of teasing it here and there But it's been a while coming and I'm be happy to continue to produce this content and to have meaningful interaction with as many of you as possible In that environment where we can actually make a difference without lining the pockets of Facebook meta Instagram Google whoever they happen to be and There you go. That's where we are. That's where we're going. I want you to participate again This podcast and you as a listener have changed my life and I'm never gonna be able to say thank you enough times So I just want to pay it back as much as I can and I'm gonna keep going and doing that So for those of you who have ever, you know rated the podcast Five stars or wrote a nice review or bought my books or reviewed those on Amazon It said very nice things or just followed me on social media and contributed your voice to the discussion Thank you, I I'm never gonna be able to repay you for that and I will try but I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it But I'm happy to keep trying so Make your voice known. Let me know what you want to see more of which want to see less of I will do my best to incorporate all of your suggestions into what we do going forward and Thank you. So here we go next week episode 201. I'm not exactly sure what it's gonna be Like I say every week. I'm gonna be here Thanks again guys, and I appreciate you letting me just like blab at you this week. See you next week


So, the post-apocalyptic genre is obviously pretty huge, like it's huge to the point where it's not even really a genre anymore, so much as just a thing that often happens in all sorts of stories. Humans have been imagining end-of-the-world scenarios basically forever.  And the reason for this is probably because there's been so many big disasters for as long as humans have been around. At some point, a comet hit the earth and killed all of humanity, except for 10,000 people. Or at other points there have been massive floods and earthquakes and storms and droughts and just things that made people think that the gods were angry with them for whatever reason and so they just told stories about it. And that's been going on forever and it's been popularized and refined in the modern day and I don't know, I kind of just wanted to talk about it, so here's all the different types of apocalypses. This is the introduction song. It's not very good but it's not too long. Now when I say apocalypse here, I mean just the end of civilization. I don't necessarily mean like the end of planet earth or the end of all of humanity. I just mean the end of human civilization as we know it and the death of a whole bunch of people. And so it brings us back to a more primitive state, let's say. And this sort of thing has happened in real life. After the plague wiped out most of the American Indians, they were left kind of like that.  The bronze age collapse, another pretty good example, they did eventually get back on their feet but everything fell apart for a couple hundred years. The fall of the western Roman Empire, these sorts of things have happened before. So when I say apocalypse, that's basically what I'm talking about. Only in stories it's usually most of the world, if not the entire world, falls into disrepair like that. So you can broadly split these into three categories. Category one is natural. Some sort of natural cause to the apocalypse. And basically that just means humans didn't cause it and in many cases humans may try to stop it but they're unable to do anything about it. So there's a couple different types of this. A pretty popular one for a while was asteroids. You know like we had Deep Impact and Armageddon were both movies about astronauts trying to redirect a big asteroid before it hit the earth and killed most everybody. And then Remnants is a book series about people leaving the earth to go colonize somewhere else before the asteroid comes and kills everybody. You know that's something that maybe hasn't happened in like recent memory, in recent history. But the possibility is there. Like every few years there's some sensationalist news story about how, oh there's a big asteroid that NASA just found and it might come and hit the earth at some point. Who knows? Like that happens every couple of years. So I guess it's just a thing that people default to when they don't really know a better cause for the apocalypse. Volcanoes is another one which is less common unfortunately because I think it introduces some interesting possibilities but you know it's not very common. And it's almost always the Yellowstone Supervolcano too. This would be stuff like Ashfall which I did a review of the first book of a long time ago or Supervolcano which I also did a review of the first book in that series a long time ago. And yeah this one also is just a thing that is in the back of a lot of people's minds but you don't see it used very often.  I really like that movie a lot of people don't. That one is about a blight that is killing off most of the world's plant life particularly the crops that people eat you know. So soon enough humanity will not only starve to death but the blight is also apparently sucking the oxygen out of the air and so there will be none left for people to breathe they'll all suffocate.  Like a lot of these ones are about preventing the apocalypse or at least escaping the apocalypse maybe but very few of them take place afterwards. I'm not sure why that is but you know that's that's just what they're like.  Sometimes if you want to be more cartoony with it then you might have like mutated animals and stuff as well which are also a threat after the bombs dropped but not always. But then there's other types of war that are sometimes used as well which is why I lump them together like occasionally you'll see biological war which is where something goes out and like you know chemicals or whatever just poisons the earth makes it so that plants and animals can't live and then the humans usually die out not long after. So stuff that does this would be like the fallout games Metro 2033 or the Blade Runner series both the book and the movies which are fairly different from one another and then there is a plague you know just some sort of plague comes out usually a super flu for whatever reason and it just spreads around and it kills the vast majority of the human population before anyone can really figure out what to do with it and usually usually in this one there are people who survive but it's because they're immune you know it never shows people who survive because they hold themselves up on an island and didn't let the infection through it never shows people who survive because someone managed to make a vaccine before everything fell apart but they were only able to distribute it to a certain number of people beforehand like that never happens for whatever reason it's always just a small number of people won the lottery I'm not I'm not sure why but you know examples of this would be stuff like the Stan 12 monkeys or the last man and when I say the last man I mean the Mary Shelley story the last man I'm not talking about the comic series why the last man now the plague can be natural but it pretty much never is like usually it's a man-made virus which gets out and you know it's always a virus to it's never like bacteria or anything for whatever reason but yeah that it's pretty much always man-made and it gets out and kills everybody somehow and honestly I'm really interested to see how this one will change in the coming years because obviously we're kind of in the midst of a giant pandemic at the moment which has killed millions of people and even beyond that has left a bunch of other people with like damage to their lungs and such and I don't know that's a separate discussion but I am interested in seeing how this will change in the future because I mean now we've seen how people will react to this sort of thing so there's probably going to have to be in future stories about this there's going to have to be a large group of people who will just actively do the stupidest shit they possibly can and I don't know I'm just I'm curious to see how this will change because I don't have any great ideas for where to take this after you know people have already lived through it and they might not find the fictional version interesting but I don't know I'm I'm curious then of course there's zombies don't think I need to explain this one in the slightest you know something causes humans to become mindless undead killing machines which just want to go out and eat other humans or sometimes specifically just eat their brains and if you get bitten or sometimes there's other ways of transmitting the infection as well you become one of them so this would be stuff like rotten ruin the last of us 28 days later the walking dead dead rising there's a lot of zombie stuff okay and this one has some variety and depending on how a patreon poll goes I might do a video just about all the different types of zombies and how that works so I'm not going to go into too much detail here but you know there's fast zombies and slow zombies there's the undead ones where you have to get them in the head versus the technically alive ones where you don't have to get them in the head there you know you can shoot them in the heart and they'll still die there's the virus which is the most common way of spreading it but in other cases like the last of us it's a fungus or back for blood which I haven't played but I believe in that one it's a parasite like you know there's there's some variety here and this one is very very similar to the plague in that you know it kills off most of the population and there may or may not be a small number of people who are immune but you know it kills most everybody and then everything breaks down from there but the main difference is that you get to be a badass you know when when a plague victim dies it that's just kind of sad and you have to bury their body or something but when a zombie victim dies they will come and try to kill you so you have to kill them and so obviously the only people who are survived would be the crazy badasses who can fight real good I mean that's not how it would work in real life but that's how it's treated a lot of the time and you don't even have to feel bad about killing them because again they're undead machines you know they don't feel pain or anything and if you don't put them down then they're gonna kill some people then there's climate change this is gonna be controversial so this is stuff like the day after tomorrow brink or to an extent 2012 which is a an underrated movie I'm not gonna get into detail but I think it's underrated and this one is basically you know the world humans pump too much CO2 into the atmosphere it gets hotter on average but then that also causes like the occasional cold snap in some areas it causes storms to get much bigger it causes drought starvation wildfires you know just crazy things like that and eventually that leads to the breakdown of civilization and this one I think this one is starting to become much more common just because even though we've been getting warned for decades that this sort of thing will happen it's starting its effects are becoming much more visible now so yeah I don't have much else to add there but that is a type now unlike with natural apocalypses which I think are just the ones people throw in when they feel like having an apocalypse story and don't want to think about it too much man-made ones seem to become more or less popular based on the fears of the time you know like back in the 50s and 60s people were super afraid of nuclear war and it's taken several generations of living with that sort of Damocles over our heads before we just decided eh maybe I'll burn a nuclear fire tomorrow I don't know it's yeah whatever like we just don't care anymore and then the plague and climate change stuff are what people are worried about now which is why those are becoming a bit more common than they used to and I think again climate change is going to pick up a lot in the coming years I mean stories about the climate change apocalypse when I say that is going to pick up a lot in the coming years and hell maybe as people become more afraid of being replaced by automation we might start getting more like robot uprising stories you know like the Terminator or something it maybe that'll become more popular as more people lose their jobs I I don't know we'll see and the final category of apocalypse is supernatural apocalypse and I'm defining this as basically just the world is ended by anything that is just not real so you know we have aliens is a big one so this would be stuff like falling skies independence day battlefield earth you know and that's pretty simple a race from another planet usually another planet occasionally they'll do something weird like another dimension but whatever the case another race comes in way more technologically advanced than humanity and kills everyone now this one is rarely done as an apocalypse it's pretty much always done as an invasion story like again independence day and falling skies it's just the aliens come in and they start killing people but it's about how awesome the humans are for fighting back as opposed to something like battlefield earth which is a terrible book you can watch me talk about it if you want but that that one at least was more realistic in that everyone fucking died except for a very small number of humans and their civilization was just gone and well see what you will about that book it is it has an interesting setup then you know that's at least an apocalypse about aliens then we have an apocalypse caused by God or multiple gods this would be stuff like Angel Fall the South Park movie just pretty much every old myth like I was saying at the beginning like a bunch of old myths were about the world getting destroyed and it was pretty much always by God or gods you know like the biblical flood or Ragnarok just things like that it was pretty much always people saying well God hates us it's it's our own fault I guess and this one this one's not as common anymore I think it's just because the modern world is a lot less religious than it used to be and even for people who are somewhat religious they tend to live in countries with secular institutions so I don't know it's just not that common anymore but it does exist you know sometimes you will have stories about like the legions of hell marching out onto earth and taking everything over which now that I'm thinking about it I don't see that very often it is it is interesting occasionally you'll just have magic in the world you know like met something will happen which either brings magic into the world or brings it back into the world and then everything falls apart or is turned on its head like shadow run I know is more about it being turned on its head then the world ending in an apocalypse but either way it's about magic coming out and destroying a bunch of stuff and then the Shinora Chronicles I believe is also like that like magic just came and I guess that ended the world I don't know I I never read the books I I did see the TV show which okay it's not a great show but it did have this scene so that's wherever custom to jump into bed with every guy you meet honestly it's not just guys so that's what Ophelia has been up to ever since her dad killed her okay that that makes sense now okay but the point is sometimes magic just ends the world and those are usually more of when people want to do a post-apocalyptic story but they also want it to be a fantasy story and they decided to combine the two for whatever reason I'm not I'm it seems a little weird now that I'm thinking about it but whatever I have no issues with it and finally there's just the unexplained apocalypse you know like something happened which destroyed everything wrecked civilization and we never really find out what it was or we never really find out the cause of it so this would be stuff like why the last man you know we never find out exactly what killed all the men but it's that's what happened then that's what changed the world around there's the Hunger Games which they give some vague hints about like there was some sort of warfare and there's climate change and stuff but at the end of the day we just never learned that much about what happened all we know is that the world ended and this is the remnants of it and this civilization sucks now and then there's like the road which is where nature basically just died like all of it and we have no idea why or what happened all we know is that humanity is probably going to go extinct soon the thing about apocalypse stories is that they're too broad you know I can't really draw any sort of overall message from them maybe someone else can but I'm not going to I don't really feel like it none of them really seem to be about the apocalypse though like a lot of them are about stopping it you know like oh we have to stop the villain from launching the missile otherwise other missiles are gonna launch and then the whole world ends like that sort of thing or they're about like the world adapting to it you know the walking dead ends with society adapting to zombies you know like that's basically how the comic ends is zombies are still around and they're still a danger but for the most part humans have learned how to deal with them and they're starting to rebuild you know they're building cities and infrastructure settlements all that sort of stuff the day after tomorrow ends with like okay well the climate is changed now and a bunch of people died in the first like real outbreak of this weird storm which doesn't make any sense because Roland Emmerich is a fucking hack but let's let's not let's not get into that it a bunch of people died in that but a lot of people are still left and it's like okay what now like the world has changed how are we gonna work with this moving forward and then this is also partially why so many apocalypse stories happen like generations or centuries after the events themselves you know it's more about the way society changed and the new civilizations that emerged after this one died and that's what it's about which is kind of fascinating to think about I'll admit like you know Rome collapsed I brought that up earlier and it brought up medieval Western Europe which was its own unique society and pretty interesting in its own right so when our civilization collapses who knows what'll come out of it but you know it is interesting to think about and speculate I will say though that apocalyptic stuff post apocalyptic stuff it's a it is pretty wish fulfillment II wish fulfillment II that's a that's a term now I'm just making that up it we we all kind of wonder what we would do if the government collapsed and if civilization was gone like we pretty much all wondered that sometimes you know and in fact some people specifically think that they're being held back by society and that they would actually get to be the winners and they get to rule everything if it weren't for whatever the hell we have now which is stupid but you know a lot of us have wondered like okay if a zombie outbreak happened in my city how would I survive like hell that's why the zombie survival guide was a best selling book because one it was funny and two people just want to think about that sort of thing and they want to fantasize about it or what if I was in the stand and I was one of the few immune people left like how would I deal with that would I just try and strike it out of my own when I try and start a community like you know people want to think about this people want to fantasize about it and pretty much always they're going to fantasize about being one of the good ones you know one of the good survivors who is not only a decent person but is also successful and at the end of the day you just you never really know how you'd react and I don't think I have anything else to add to that I like I said I didn't want to draw any major big conclusions about this genre genre I don't know if you could really call it that but I didn't want to draw any major big conclusions about it I kind of just want it to talk about it and talk about the different types so that's all I'll see you later a huge thanks to everyone who bothered to watch this far for whatever reason I don't know who would want to listen to me talk for half an hour but especially a huge thanks to all my patrons whose names are on here including the $10 and up patrons oppo Savilainen Olivia Ray and brother Santotis Buffy Valentine Carolina Clay Christopher Quinton Dan and Celio Vitch Echo Joel Carcat Kitsune Liza Rudikova Lord Tiebreaker Madison Lewis Bennett Marilyn Roxy microphone sad martigan tobacco crow Tom beanie and of course as always they victims y'all are the best really let me let me tell you that like if you were here I I'd kiss you I wouldn't actually kiss you but you know you're you're all pretty cool anyways so just don't don't take my just um okay yeah goodbye