Brian Woody #11 | 4th Street Live - 4th Street Live Podcast

Episode Transcript
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(00:11):
There's only one place in town Itake my Harley-Davidson
motorcycle too and that is Slab Sides Motorcycle Shop on
Glendale Ave. in Reno. If you're looking for a tune up,
customizing your motorcycle, bars, exhaust, they've got
everything you need and one of the best hourly rates in town.
For any of your motorcycle repair stuff, go check out Slab
Sides Motorcycle Shop. This is Jacob, the host of the

(00:33):
4th St. Live podcast in my new book, The
Rail Runner, inspired by my lifeon the railroad and being a
railroad contractor, is now for sale on Amazon and Barnes and
Noble. Please go check out my new story
if you're looking to escape reality for a few hours.
It's a great read. Support a local Reno author.
Thanks so much. I spent a lot of time on 4th St.

(00:54):
Yeah. Coming up, doing things, doing
some stuff, you know what I mean?
And so it's just, it's cool for it to all kind of come full
circle and just have a spot here.
And that's why I called it 4th St.
Life, you know what I mean? I want it to be something,
something different, you know what I mean?
And I don't know, it worked out,but yeah, it I got to tell you,

(01:16):
reading your book, I thought I was writing well, I thought I
could write, man, you can write.I'm you know, it makes me aspire
to be a lot more like you meant.So I'm really, I'm really glad
that you decided to come on and and and talk with us.
You know what I mean? I appreciate.
That yeah, I will tell you, whenI was reading your book, the

(01:36):
descriptions you gave, you got away with words.
Thank you. When we're talking about my
book, it feels a little disingenuous because I don't
feel like I can claim ownership to this book.
I get what you mean the way. It came out.
I mean, it all happened in 10 days.
I wrote the whole thing and I goback and I read it, you know, I,

(01:56):
I read it like 30 times for proofreading it.
I listen to the audio book multiple times to proof listen
that. And I was like who?
I just there's certain parts that I didn't remember writing.
It was weird, right? And I've talked to a lot of
artists. I was on another podcast for

(02:16):
Nevada Fine Arts, the store downtown, awesome store, right?
And they do a podcast and we're talking about the creative
process and they also the same thing.
Like that's how it feels. That's how it feels, you know,
like something you're channelingsomething.
And I think when we I talk aboutpassions at the end of the book
and how you should always tap into your passion because that's
given to you by your higher power.

(02:37):
Yeah, yeah, I think. Yeah, I think.
What do they call it? The Jackson Pollock method?
I think when my mind goes blank,I do so much better.
And when I'm trying to create itand I'm consciously trying to
create, I do so much worse, bro.You know what I mean?
It's it never in that book that I wrote did it feel forced.

(02:59):
And when it felt forced, I just stopped and I just didn't try,
you know what I mean? I just if it felt like I was
sitting down because I felt likeI had to write or be creative or
come up with this story in my head.
It just felt if it's I struggledwith it.
So I just stopped and I was likekind of let it come more
naturally. Try to talk to my higher power a

(03:21):
little bit and see if that wouldhelp.
And it did. It's also easier because it's
fiction, you know what I mean? And we talked about that and
it's like you, it's, is it you didn't, you don't read a lot of
fiction, you know what I mean? And and, and I and I get that,
you know, and it, it definitely made the process easier than
writing. Oh, you're right, man.

(03:45):
And, and we're going to get, we're going to get, we're going
to get into that. But first, you were a you were a
college professor at UNR. For how long?
How did how did that even happen?
Oh, man, that was weird. Yeah.
I was just, you know, growing up.
I grew up in an industrial town right in the border, Illinois
and Wisconsin, Blake, Wisconsin.And, you know, there was a lot

(04:05):
of bad elements. And I started to get involved in
in some of those elements. And I didn't really do much in
high school academically. And I had to get out because my
friends were starting to do things that I knew I was going
to go down that road and starting to scare me.
So I joined the Army and that was an amazing experience
because I learned that if I apply myself and just do what I

(04:30):
was told, follow the leader kindof thing, and eventually became
a leader, I would get all these amazing things, you know.
And so then I left there and went to went to a Community
College because they said sit down and do this work.
And I'm like, sit down. I hadn't sat down in years, you
know, And so I took to it like aduck in water and ended up

(04:51):
transferring to the University of Wisconsin, which was like
unbelievable to me for some of you just got by in high school.
And it was there that I fell in love with math.
And I had to start by adding, learning how to add fractions.
You know, I had to take a whole semester of algebra before they
let me take an algebra class that I could get credit for.

(05:11):
So there was a lot of remedial stuff going.
So I learned it like I was 21 years old when I started
learning mathematics and I just fell in love with it.
And I just kept going in school and, and eventually got a
teaching position at Colorado State, Stayed there for a bit,
left, came up here and started the AP Calculus program up at
Squabble Academy at the time. Now it's Olympic Valley schools.

(05:33):
And then from there, once that was all set up and complete, I
went to UNR and I was there for 13 years.
Yeah, that's my my family's all from Wisconsin.
Really. Yeah.
They're all Badgers whereabouts.Madison.
No shit. Yeah.
Yeah. So that's why Harley Davidson's
important to us. You know what I mean?
Wisconsin's an important town for in my family.

(05:54):
But yeah, my whole mom's side ofthe family is Madison, WI.
That is rad. Huge Badgers fan I think.
It's a great place to be from. Yeah, do you eat a?
Lot of transplants here. Do you have cheese heads at home
and stuff? You know?
Gotcha, gotcha. So you're a package fan too, you
know. Yeah.
Yeah, well, that's cool, man. Well, I want to touch into this

(06:17):
really unique concept you have on your book.
First and foremost, like you said, you wrote the book in 10
days, which to me is an absolutesign that it was supposed to be
written by something bigger thanyou.
You know what I mean? There's no other way to spin
that in my brain. When I when you first told me
that I was like, that's a meant to be type shit.

(06:38):
You know what I mean? Where did where did the initial
spark and inspiration come from to start down, start writing,
start typing? Well, I started writing about
these ideas a while ago and it was a summer before I wrote this
that I must have wrote like man,100,000 words and nothing made
sense. It just wasn't.

(06:59):
It didn't feel right, you know, I was just writing.
I was forcing it. And then the next summer I just
kind of stopped, you know, and said, I'll, I'll do it.
I'll do it at some point, you know, when I'm ready.
And Kelsey and I went and hiked the Kahlua Trail in Mount in
Kauai. And that shit is incredible.
Like it's, it wasn't what I thought it was going to be.
First of all, I decided I was going to have a really heavy

(07:21):
pack because when I was in the Army I had a really heavy pack.
Well, that was over 30 years ago.
So the legal, yeah. I'm a different, I have a
different body now, you know, and so the, and the trail was
like that wide in places and sheer cliffs.
You know, it's a very, very dangerous trail.
So you have to be present. You have to focus on what you're
doing because you sprained your ankle.
I don't know how you're getting out of there.

(07:41):
So I'm like, this is United States, this is crazy, you know,
this trail. And so we're out there and we're
in the jungle and we stayed out there for, I think it was 5
days. And I had a guy that I was
working with in a spiritual capacity and he was sick with
cancer. Well, we thought he was on the
up and up when I left and I cameback, I got off the trail, had

(08:06):
my first connection with, with Wi-Fi or with, you know, cell.
And I got all these text messages, you know, all these,
all these text messages flood inafter six days in the jungle.
And one of them was that he was in Hospice and I was blown away.
I'm like, what is going on here?You know, And so I got on the
phone, found out that it was super aggressive.

(08:26):
It was in his muscles. So we were there for like
another six days because we wentstraight to the, we went to the
Hyatt man, you know, after beingout there and it was, I couldn't
accept it. Like the whole time he was sick.
I was like, dude, don't talk like that.
You're going to get better, you know, and I was, and so, you

(08:47):
know, you, you want to hope somebody gets better and you
want to tell them, you know, focus on healing and all this
kind of stuff. But you have to accept when
someone's terminal that their terminal when it gets to that
degree. And I was in a place of non
acceptance. And I've heard this story over
and over again about radical acceptance and how when you have

(09:08):
radical acceptance, it's life changing.
It is, man. So I get home, on the way home,
I get COVID and he's on his deathbed and I can't go visit
him because I have COVID for thefirst time.
And I am going into this place of resistance and not
acceptance. And I'm watching Netflix, I'm
binging Netflix, you know, and it just in this unhealthy place,
I guess, you know, and he passedand I snapped out of it.

(09:33):
I don't know what happened firstif I snapped out of it and then
he passed or, or what, but I decided to and I just got up and
went in my room and started writing.
It was, it was, that's how it happened, you know, and it all
came like a flood and I had thisperfect time off, you know, it
was like that window I had when you and I were talking about the
screenplay and everything. I just window get shit done and

(09:56):
it just happened. Yeah, to back up a little bit,
you've been sober for a long time at this point.
Yeah, so it was my seventh year sobriety.
Yeah, something that I've, I find a lot about myself the
longer I'm sober is I'm still discovering a lot of things

(10:18):
about myself, man. I still find new character
flaws. Some of them I didn't get until
I got sober, man. It's a little crazy.
One of the things you talk aboutin your book is being free of
ego, which I'll tell you is one of the things I struggle a lot
with. And there's a lot of impactful

(10:41):
things in your book, but that was one of the most impactful
things for me is when you touch on ego, you know, can you dive
into a little bit about what youwere talking about in your book
and kind of elaborate on that part and about being free of ego
and the tools that you were kindof spelling out in your story?
Sure, I started studying A Course in Miracles a few years

(11:03):
ago, and that's what it's all about, right?
You have, you have the ego and you have the spirit, right?
And the ego is my identity. It doesn't have to be good or
bad. You know, It's just who I think
I am outside of this thing, you know, this what the, the Dao,
right? What, what they call the Dao in

(11:25):
Zen, which is like this inner peace, this Interstate that we
all share, you know, I mean, we're all just different
expressions of the same universal energy, just in
different avatars. And there's no separation.
So that first axiom of no separation, there's no
separation. It's an illusion, right?

(11:45):
And so when you really get into that idea, you can't have an
ego. I can't have something separate
from something, some somebody else.
I'm different from you. No, I'm not.
No, I'm not. I've had different experiences,
you know, which really don't mean anything.
But I don't believe there's any difference between Mother
Teresa, Joseph Stalin. They just had different
experiences. And nobody is beyond grace.

(12:07):
And so that's basically the axiom that I start with.
So mathematics is all about axioms, right?
So I start with one axiom and I can build.
That's what Euclid did when he wrote the Elements, which is
like the foundation of geometry.And he had four axioms and then
the parallel postulate and theseaxioms built all of mathematics.
And so we start with that axiom that nothing is separate, we are

(12:27):
all one. And that fear in in the Course
of Miracles, it says fear and love are opposites, but that
which is all-encompassing can have no opposite.
So love is all-encompassing. And if it's all-encompassing it,
there's no opposite, right? If it includes everything.
So I, I write in the book about set theory a little bit and it's
kind of hard to follow, especially in the audio book.
But if I have a set of let's say123, and then I take the subset

(12:51):
1-2 and I take the subset three,OK, the complement of 1/2 in
that set is 3 and the complementof three and that set is 1/2,
right? But if love is all-encompassing,
it's 123 and the complement of that, the opposite of that does
not exist. It's the empty set, right?
So if I think about it like that, where when I'm in fear and

(13:12):
when I'm an ego, I'm actually not in reality, right?
I've made something up. I'm telling myself a story.
I do this all the time. I tell myself stories about why
I'm right or maybe why I'm wrong, whatever.
The ego needs to feel separate. That's what it's going to take,
right? And I believe that's what Jesus
talked about. The true devil is the ego, you
know? And I believe that he was a man

(13:34):
who was just more in touch with his spirit, right?
His true self is divine self, His I am this right?
Because that's what God said to Moses, right?
And and that's not to say that, you know, I was really raised in
that religion, but I have my ownhigher power.
And, and I, it's very difficult to write about these things and
to be all inclusive because it is divisive to talk about

(13:57):
religion. But when you realize they're all
trying to say the same thing at its heart, before man took it
and used it as a tool to create separateness.
Yeah, I definitely found myself reading.
I've read, I've read the Bible. I didn't read the Bible till
Friday. It did not come up in religion.
But I read the Bible, man. And I do draw a lot of I do draw

(14:18):
a lot of symbolism and some of it just truth of how I feel like
I genuinely like it spoke to me like I should read live my life
this way in a lot of ways. But I also have read parts of
the Quran and I've also read parts of the Book of Mormon,
man, you know what I mean? I've read parts of a lot of

(14:42):
people's books that that I do generally relate to man, you
know what I mean? I really, really love how you
blend mathematics and spirituality so seamlessly.
You did a very good job because it doesn't feel like there's a,
it feels like it flows really well and it, it just makes me

(15:03):
want to talk to you more. You know what I mean?
Where did you come up with this concept of blending those two
parts together? Because to us those seem like 2
totally different things, right?You got math and you got
spirituality. How did you come up with the
idea to start trying to blend those things together is because
you're a mathematician and also a spiritual man.

(15:23):
Where did you come up with this?I think we all try to explain
things from our perspective, youknow, and I do math all day
long. It's all I do professionally,
you know, I thought that may that could be my vehicle for
explanation. And somebody asked me and I've
been asked many times, like why I love mathematics so much.
And it is a construct, but it's what I know and it's in that

(15:49):
construct everything is true or not true.
And I love that. But then again, this is very
black and white, you know, But it is a search for truth, you
know, like all physics and all of these things that we try to
explain and understand are done to the language of mathematics.
It's a universal language. I mean, when we do end up

(16:09):
talking to extra dimensional beings or beings,
extraterrestrial beings or whatever, I think it will be in
the language of mathematics because it's something we can
all understand. I love that I I literally knew
you were coming on so I got my Rachel Nevada hat today.
Rachel, Nevada is where Area 51 is, but I just, I don't know why
I feel so connected to that. And, and then in a new story I'm

(16:33):
writing, I'm having to dive intoa lot of these mathematical
theories just to make my, my newfictional story sound more
convincing. And it's crazy, man.
And we briefly talk touched on, we briefly touched on that.
We briefly talked about string theory.
We talked about these kind of things and I was just curious

(16:55):
kind of what we were talking about before, if you could once
again give us that same take that you were saying about
string theory and about if you believe that's if that's the
most accurate representation of what we have going on or not
just in your in your perspective.
Yeah, I kind of did lose touch with string theory a little bit
right over the years, but when Ifirst heard of it, I really took

(17:18):
to it. Yeah.
So if if in your research for your book, you might want to
check out this channel on YouTube called 3 Blue One Brown.
OK, thank. You and they have a chaos
series, chaos mathematics serieswhere they start with calculus
and they go through chaos. It's 12 chapters and I think
each video is like 9 to 12 minutes long and it's
brilliantly done. The explanations and one of the

(17:40):
explanations I'm about to give came from that.
And it's something they use in physics a lot.
So if we're locked in this, our perception is locked in this 3
dimensional space, 1 dimensionaltime, 4 dimensional system.
But we have shown in mathematicsthat there is at least 11
spatial dimensions in 2 dimensions in time, and they
think they might have discovereda new dimension which is the

(18:02):
present moment. I think what they'll find is
that there is no time is just exists.
If I am in this dimension, things might pop in and out
which can be observed from my limited perspective in a certain
way. So if we're thinking about a
higher dimension, like the 4th dimension, and you think of a

(18:23):
billiards table, if I rack up the balls and.
And you know, and what do you call it when you break?
Break. That's it.
Yeah. Yeah.
Simple word. Yeah, yeah.
When I break the balls, they scatter all over the table.
If I'm just looking at a thin slit, right, I'm going to see
blinking of different colors. That's all I'm going to see.
I'm not going to see the motion and everything like that.

(18:44):
So what we're really trying to do is look at this little slit
and guess what's happening out here.
And we can do that using probability, which is not my
favorite subject in mathematics,but that's what quantum
mechanics does. Quantum mechanics is a
statistical guess at what's really happening, right?
And with string theory, the ideais that we have these strings

(19:06):
that are vibrating in and out ofour dimension from higher
dimensions, and we're getting little blips.
So when you're looking at particle physics, right, When
you're looking at particles, yousee these blips and you try to
guess where the electrons going to be, right.
And I'm not a physicist, so my knowledge of that is very
limited, but we can look at the probabilities of where these

(19:27):
things are going to be and have a pretty good guess.
And they usually follow those guesses, right?
So string theory is, is the theory that all energy is these
higher dimensional strings that are vibrating.
And I can see their I can see their their footprints in this
dimension, just like the slit billiards ball.
Yeah. So I'm just getting a very, I

(19:49):
have a very limited perspective.But I think we are on the verge
perhaps of seeing in higher dimensions.
I mean, we used to only be able to see two colors.
Now we can see three because we evolved that way.
So how are we evolving now? Are we evolving to have the
ability of see a higher dimension?
Michiokaku says it best. He's a physicist.
He's awesome. And he says that we don't have

(20:10):
any predators in higher dimensions.
That's why we can't see in higher dimensions.
Whoa. Tigers do not leap from the 4th
dimension is what he says. Whoa, yeah.
So what? So 1/4 dimensional being would
move, would perceive and move through time differently than
how we perceive and move throughtime.
Do I have that right? Yeah.
So what would a fifth dimensional being?

(20:32):
Is that also time or what is theThere was something I was
reading. It was a just I'm asking you for
my book. So what is the, what would, what
would the fifth element of that because we move front, backside
to side, up, down, right. And then we have time in a
linear pattern. And then so based on this, the
4th 1/4 dimensional being would be somebody that moves in

(20:54):
through time in a different way than us.
Well, the time dimension is different according to Einstein.
OK, right. So it's but, but space and time
are interconnected, so it is a dimension, but it's just kind of
like it's not a spatial dimension, it's time dimension.
OK, so yeah, I think the best way to think about the spatial
dimensions being to extrapolate from those because our mind

(21:15):
can't see it, is the 0 dimensionis a dot, and A dot is
infinitely thin or infinitely small.
I can never really narrow it down, right?
If I keep going into it, it's going to keep getting smaller
and smaller and smaller. Well, if I take an infinite
number of infinitely small dots and 0 dimension and string them
up, I get a line. Now I'm in one dimension, so I
just stringed up an infinite number of infinitely small dots.

(21:37):
Now if I take that line, lines are infinitely thin rectangles,
aren't they? And if I string those lines up
and I'll get a plane right? Now, if I string those planes
up, I get a solid. Now when I string those solids
up, I get a hyper solid. What does that look like?
Well, there's you can look up the tesseract and that's a four
dimensional cube. But it's, it's just too

(21:58):
difficult for our minds to really perceive.
But you can think about it in projections, right?
So like I can draw what looks like a cube on a piece of paper.
So I'm taking a 4D cube and projecting it on a 2D piece of
paper. That's an illusion.
So we can think about these things in projections, which is
what gravity, quantum gravity research down in Southern

(22:19):
California. They're, they're like this think
tank. And this is what they do.
They do higher dimensional mathematics and they think
consciousness actually exists inthe 8th dimension.
E8 And they have a lot of evidence for it.
Right. And that gravity actually exists
at the quantum level, the really, really small level.
It's not about big mass, big bodies, right?
Like the Earth is a big body, soit has gravitation.

(22:41):
The sun is a bigger body and we're stuck in this
gravitational orbit, right? But it really all starts with
the small, right? the Super, super small.
But you can project. So to get back to my point, you
can create these things called lattices, right?
So like to go back to the cube on A2 dimensional surface that
creates A lattice. It's, it's an illusion, right,

(23:01):
That I've created. So I've projected A42A3D cube
onto I, I think I said 4D cube before 3D cube onto a 2D
surface. Now I can do that with the 8th
dimension I can project it onto better yet, you know, something
in space like a model, right? But still you're going to lose a
lot of information. But mathematically we can figure

(23:23):
it out. Yeah, something else I want to
talk about real quick. I've never heard the term a
casual synchronicity. Is that something you came up
with? No, that's something that Carl
Jung came up with. And it's basically he's talking
about miracles, right? Yeah, a causal synchronicity.
Synchronicity that just happenedseemingly for no reason, and he

(23:46):
really believed in their significance.
Yeah, he has a lot of crazy stories about a causal
synchronicity. Dude here, this is for you bro.
Oh, thanks man. Can you?
Can you? Explaining like in only McQueen
high school graduates terms. What would you mean by a casual

(24:06):
synchronicities? It's the synchronicities that
that happened that seem to have no 'cause like a causal.
So no 'cause got you. But I think when we're in the
right place, we're always in theright place.
It's up for us to notice and we we expand our awareness, we
start to see these things. So there's something called set
perception. I talk about in the book where

(24:28):
and I was just talking to a student yesterday about this.
She learned in psychology one O 1 the story of when Columbus
ship wrecked on Hispaniola and the the natives, the Tayanos
couldn't see the ships until thethe chief came out and said look
ships and then they all could see the ships.
It's a bullshit story because the Tainos of Hispaniola had

(24:50):
been trading by boat with the Cubans for like 100 years or
more, you know, So like, it's not a true story, but it does.
It's a good it's a. Shift in perception.
Because we miss about 98% of what's happening around us, we
just don't see. So the best example I have is
Kelsey and I went on this like educational nature hike.
She always finds these things, right?

(25:12):
Well, Kelsey. We go.
We. Go out on this hike and there's
a bird watcher there and she's like pointing out, I don't know
what I wrote in the book, but itwas something like an hour, 2
hours. She pours out like 40 species of
birds and I didn't even see any birds.
They were part of her set perception.
There's there's something that she studies and this is what I
use as, as my technique teach privately now.

(25:33):
And part of my technique is taking these equations and
putting them into their perceptual set so that they,
when they see them, they recognize what they are.
Another example would be, and this just happened to my friend
Jenna. I was, it happened to her when
she was on Hawaii, same story. Basically, I was walking down
the street and I saw a car accident.
And for a second there I was like, what did I just see?

(25:56):
My brain wasn't recognizing whatit saw because it hadn't worked
out those patterns yet. It hadn't seen it before, right.
So once I see it now, I'm going to see it all the time.
That's the batter Meinhof phenomena.
I want to go buy, you know, a new car.
And when I decide to buy that new car, I'd start driving
around. I see it everywhere.
Oh my God, these cars are everywhere.
No, they're not. I'm just seeing them now.

(26:17):
Yeah, you're just right. Recognizing them.
Wow, that is what is that phenomenon called?
Say it. Again the batter Meinhof
phenomena, Frequency illusion. Got it.
Right. And so when I want to see the
good, I'm going to see the good everywhere.
When I want to see the bad, I'm going to see the bad everywhere.
When I want to see synchronicities and goodness and
connection, I'm going to see connection everywhere because
we're all connected. The illusion is that we're not

(26:39):
connected. Yes, right.
That is real man. Did you have a personal
experience with that kind of with a casual synchronicities
and because that to me it kind of sounds like how you are
describing how you even started writing.
You know what I mean? Would that be kind of that
experience that you had? I see them a lot.

(27:01):
I see, I, I know I'm in a good place when I'm in a good place.
I see synchronicities all the time.
I see the connections all the time, you know, when I'm not
and, and who knows if they have any meaning, but it's up to me.
This life is up to me. If I want to be happy, I'm going
to choose to be happy. And if I want to see these
synchronicities, I'm going to see these synchronicities.

(27:22):
And they can be very, very subtle and silly, maybe
sounding, but I think when you look for them and you see them,
they abound. I have a I'm ready reading from
my notes right here, Brian, in your book, I wrote these down
because I need to sound like I'mthat I'm supposed to be up here
talking to you, my friend. In your book, you emphasize how

(27:43):
compassion and connection help transcend the ego.
Could you talk about a moment inyour own life that maybe you had
to transcend your own ego? And it's something that I
thought we, I think we've talkedabout it a couple of times and I
think you've touched on and share a little bit about
yourself. Oh.
Man, so many times. Because you're a bad
motherfucker. Handle yourself really humble,

(28:04):
but you're a bad motherfucker and you don't.
And you sell yourself a little short, but you're a bad
motherfucker. And we all know that.
You know what I mean. But you do not walk around with
that mentality. You do walk around with a lot of
peace, which is why I'm so drawnto you.
I'm drawn to people who have a softness on their shoulders, who
have a good program. Those are the people I I want to

(28:28):
be like. The ones that look like they
wake up in the morning and they didn't just lie all night long,
you know what I mean? That's what I, and that's what I
generally look look for and people that I look up to, you
know what I mean? And that's one of the biggest
things I look up to you, my friend.
But yeah, I'm just curious if you could touch on part of that
from your journey as far as trying to transcend that.

(28:51):
I appreciate you saying that too, because I think I think
that's a reason a lot of people are attracted to you.
You have no problem telling me you love me, right?
You know and. You're.
A tough biker, you know what I mean?
I don't want to fight you. I'm.
Secure bro. And so that's what it is.
You know, it's that softening. It's that softening because
that's all it really matters. You know, what doesn't matter is

(29:11):
who I think I am. You know, this ego that I have,
that I project, this Brian Woodycharacter that I play.
And you know, Jim Carrey talks about it a lot because he's he's
a student of Eckhart Tolle, he'sa student of the Course in
Miracles. And he understands these things.
And that's how he's able to get in these characters too, is
because he he turns that on and he becomes that character

(29:34):
because he understands that the character he's playing in real
life is just a character. It all is.
We're all just connected. We're all the same.
We're all the same. We just have these identities.
And I think we become identifiedwith our egos and they become
identified with these identities.
That's where we get into trouble, right?
Because what am I going to do? I'm going to look at somebody
else who has the same character defects I have.

(29:55):
And I'm going to judge you. I'm going to shame you, and I'm
going to have a lot of bad thoughts about you and how
you're wrong. And all the sudden I'm separate.
I'm not paying attention to myself.
And that's when I crash. So I was texting not too long
ago and I look up and I'm like, oh shit.
And I'm like, oh man, I can't text anymore.
I can't text anymore. I pull up to an intersection.
There's this lady next to me andshe's texting on her phone and

(30:17):
it's time to go green. And I'm looking at her going,
you're not paying attention, lady.
And I'm now not paying attention, right?
Because I'm judging her for something that I just did.
And it's the same thing, you know, like, and it's amazing how
some of these people I judge in the beginning end up being great
friends once you get past the judgement, you know, because all

(30:37):
I'm doing is projecting my insecurities on you.
I'm projecting my character defects on you instead of paying
attention to my own character defects, right?
So I think when we overcome that, there's so much to be had,
these connections we can make with other people just doing
simple things. You're not supposed to talk
about it when you do something nice, but I'm going to do it

(30:57):
anyways. I don't give a shit.
I'm coming out of Raley's and I see this little old lady and
she's trying to put the groceries in her car and I'm
driving and I got places to be and shit to do.
I stopped my car and I'm like, fuck it.
I get out of the car and I'm like, let me help you with that.
And you should have seen the look on this lady's face, man.
She was like, I was her hero. And I'm like, wow, that's it.
And it took me literally 20 seconds to put her groceries in

(31:21):
her trunk and say goodbye. That was it.
I tell a story in the book abouta lady.
I call her Anna as an anonymous right because I couldn't find
her. She worked at Raley's when I had
this experience, and I would come in every Sunday night and
this is when I had no time for chit chat.
I didn't want to be there. I'd plug into my ear earbuds and

(31:41):
just do my shopping, get the fuck out.
And yeah, she was always so cheery and bubbly and kind.
And here she is on Sunday night working at Raley's, bringing
joy. And I noticed this and I'm like,
huh? And so I'm waiting.
The line over here is short. This line for Lindsay is long at

(32:02):
the checkout. And they're like, come on over
here. And I'm like, no, no, no, I'm
going to wait for Lindsay, right?
And I get up there and I tell her how I felt about her.
I said, Lindsay, I come in here on Sunday nights.
I'm not really stoked about tomorrow being Monday.
I'm not in a good mood. And you're always happy.
You're always smiling. You're always bringing joy.
And that means so much to me. She starts crying and she starts

(32:22):
telling me about how her life isnot going well.
Her husband has stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
She lives in a weekly, a weekly hotel.
She has three kids that they live with, maybe 4, I don't
remember. And her life just was difficult.
And for me to say that to her that, hey, look, man, you're
bringing joy. And the lady behind me and this

(32:45):
lady behind me starts tearing uptoo.
And she's like, my gosh. And everybody in line had an
experience and it felt so amazing for everybody there.
It's like that's what we need todo.
Instead of get out of my way, I got things to do, let's go.
And I do that a lot, right? I try to stop now when I'm doing
that and go take a few consciousdeep breaths and say how do I

(33:05):
bring joy to the situation rather than robbing joy from the
situation? The other one of the other
concepts in your book that I really liked, which I, I, I
don't, I'm of course, I draw everything in my life from the
program that that we're in. But it's about fear.
Oh, yeah. And letting go of the present or

(33:26):
I'm sorry and living in the present.
And I know what that looks like in the pro program.
But you kind of have a nice, a fresh, a different twist, a
different method. Can we talk a little bit about
that and know kind of how you talk about fear and living in
the present in your story? Yeah.
I think you touched a little bitabout Buddhism in that part as

(33:49):
well. Correct.
Yeah. Yeah, probably.
I mean, can you give me an example or fears ever helped you
maybe in the moment? Like I hear people talk about
how they're scared, they have fear over the next drink and I
don't think that's sustainable. I think when you have fear about
something, then that makes it more likely it's going to

(34:11):
happen, right? I think there you should have an
awareness that if you do drink, you're going to have to suffer
the consequences. For me, if I drink, I'll be dead
in a month. You know, that's just the way I
do. So quick.
Yeah. So quick.
Yeah. You pick up where?
Right where you left off. And it probably.
Yeah. So.
And knowing what I know now, man, man, man, I burned the town

(34:31):
down, burned the. Town down.
Yeah, Yeah. And you think about a life
threatening situation. I always think about this guy
out in Fort Collins, Co, who choked out a Mountain Lion.
Fuck. Yeah.
Yeah, This Mountain Lion attacked him and he killed a
Mountain Lion. I'm like, I've always dreamed of

(34:52):
doing that. I don't want to kill animals,
but I would like to fight a Mountain Lion.
Well, I'd like to walk away fromit.
I don't want to actually fight aMountain Lion, but I would like,
if I could do it and drag, that'd be even better.
You hear about this guy? Yeah.
He. Did he did it in drag?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fuck yeah.
OK, so this. Guy had the presence of mind
when this It was a juvenile Mountain Lion.
So it wasn't full size, which still it's a big Kitty cat

(35:14):
there. There was just a picture of one
in South Reno walking past. I saw it this morning.
There is a somebody took a photoof a Mountain Lion walking past
the store. They caught it on security man.
But he had the presence of mind to remember that he had when he
had just gotten this kitten he had to hold was a rescue or
something and he had to give it medicine.

(35:34):
And the trick was to hold his legs down.
If you can hold his legs down, you can control it.
And so he remembered that and heheld his legs down and just
choked it to that. And I'm like, see, that's
awareness. That's not fear.
Fear makes you do stupid shit, right?
Awareness. I use the example of I-80.
You know, I, I, I know that if Iwalk out on the I-80, it's not

(35:55):
going to be safe. But do I sit around having fear
about it? No, I have an awareness not to
do that. Right.
And I think 1 is a healthy, healthy thing.
They, they talk about healthy fear a lot in the program.
You hear people talk about I have a healthy fear of drinking,
and I don't think it's a healthyfear.
I think you should have awareness that if you do it,
you're going to have to suffer the consequences.
If I fear something, it's just not.

(36:17):
I'm giving into the illusion, right?
I'm giving into the illusion of fear.
And now I am separating myself from love.
And I'm in my mind. I'm doing this right.
Yeah. Can't be a good place.
Oh, that is a that is some real shit.
But we still do it, you know, I mean, there's a sympathetic
nervous response where if I see a lion, a Mountain Lion or
something like that, all the blood flows from my brain and

(36:39):
my, it goes down to my legs and I just run, right.
So when I tell my students, whenyou see somebody next to you and
their legs bouncing up and down during a test, they're having a
sympathetic nervous response. You can see the veins.
I've watched 200 young people ata time take a test and I can
point out the ones having some, it's most of them, right?
And their legs are going up and down and their mouth breathing
and their veins are pumping out their neck and they're, they're

(37:00):
sweating even though it's like cold in the room.
You know, when we have that kindof response, we're not able to
think clearly. And your test performance goes
way down. Now I tell my students to go in
and find your spot, find your space, right?
15 minutes early to the test, close your eyes and take like 5
conscious breaths in and out through your nose.

(37:21):
Because when you breathe throughthe nose, that keeps you in the
parasympathetic nervous state. And then get on a piece of paper
and just start writing down vigorously all the things in
your life you're grateful for, big or small.
And that tricks the brain into going parasympathetic.
And, you know, even consciously you're like, you know what?
If I fail this test, my family still loves me.
I still have all my arms and legs.
I'm still right breathing, all that good stuff.

(37:44):
Yeah, right. So fear is the enemy.
It really is. It's crazy because I lived in
such a when I was out, when I was out there in my disease,
man, I lived in such a fight or flight mode in my life.
That man, I don't know if it's just, I got numb a little bit.
I, I think it's probably improving my conscious contact.

(38:07):
I, I fear a lot less, but I do like how you worded things and I
like how you drew connections from multiple places.
What's there was you talked about Buddhism, you talked about
something else in your book, andI can't I, is it, is it Chinese?
It's a. Oh, Zen, like the Dow.
Got you, Right, Right, right. Yeah.
And I, at first, I really struggled with the concept of a

(38:33):
higher power like we all do. I think you know what I mean?
Oh, yeah. The way I was able to make it
all make sense up here was simplifying it.
It's like super simplifying it. And one of the first things I
was reading was, I think, a pamphlet at the Buddhist church
down there where we did the eye opener.
We were doing the eye opener. My Home group.

(38:54):
Is that your Home group? Get out of here, man.
Yeah, Like that. It was like I was struggling,
waking up first thing in the morning and feeling antsy.
So I would be hitting that eye opener and I remember get
grabbing a pamphlet off just because I needed to keep my mind
busy. That was my first experience
with trying to understand what Ifelt, and I think that pamphlet

(39:17):
simplifies it, simplified it in the way that I could.
I could generally understand it.So I do love a lot of what
Buddhism has to teach. You know what?
I. Mean so many great things.
And Taoism. Sufism is one of my favorite
too, if you've ever heard of Rumi.
Haven't Rumi is the philosopher right?
Yeah, well, he was a 13th century Sufi poet.

(39:40):
OK. I think it was 13th.
I don't know, but he was. So Sufism is Islamic mysticism.
And like, I'm a big fan of Christian mysticism, like Emmet
Fox. He was a big influence on Bill W
and his contemporaries like James Allen and Neville Goddard.
You want to blow your hair back,man, Listen to some Neville
Goddard a guy talks about. You got to assume the feeling of

(40:03):
the wist fulfilled if you want to manifest things in your life.
And so you come into the program, you can't imagine
yourself sober. You just can't.
And I think that's one of the first things you have to do is
you have to see yourself in a sober life.
You have to imagine it. You have to assume that feeling
of how you would feel. And if you can feel that, well,
look. Aren't you sober right now?
You know, and for me, I was in and out and in and out and, you

(40:26):
know, a little over 7 years ago,I, it was a bad place, right?
And I remember and that's when Iwould, that's when I quit for
good. Well, for this time, right?
Yeah, today. But that was a good stretch and.
Yeah, that's, and that's where I'm going with this because I'd
like to get into your story if you're comfortable with it.

(40:50):
Yeah, just kind of just like you're chairing a meeting.
You know what I mean? OK.
Yeah, it's something that I yourstory, here's the reason why
your story has an impact on my life is because it's so
different than mine. You know what I mean?
And it took a lot different of asituation to get you sober than

(41:11):
it did to get me sober. But we share share the same
disease. And there's going to be somebody
that hears you that is similar to what you have to say that is
going to have the same experiences as you.
And that's truly what our what our goal is when we have sober
people on is for you to be able to share your experience to

(41:32):
somebody that would have never heard it otherwise.
You know what I mean? So I'd love it if you touched on
your story because it's one I truly love, man.
Well, we both it. Both took the threat of death.
You know. Yeah, yeah.
And that it's amazing to me because nobody knows what's
really going to trigger you to go out.
I mean, except for weak program,right, Right.

(41:54):
But never like, what is it that triggers you to go into the
program? You know what, Everybody has a
different bottom and I've heard all these different stories.
My, the first time I came into the program was because I drunk
dialed my dad at 10:00 in the morning and I talked the phone
said 90 minutes and I don't remember it.
And my mom called me the next day and said, your dad's really

(42:16):
worried about you. And I'd never felt that kind of
incomprehensible demoralization before, you know, And that like
people hear that and they're like, shit, man.
I killed a bunch of people with drunk driving.
Like your bottom is weak. But I could have done that too.
So that was my first stretch. And then I went out when I was
in Sweden. I'm like, I'm in Sweden,

(42:37):
nobody's going to know. And obviously I had a weak
program, you know, I hadn't thoroughly worked the steps and
that turned into an absolute shit show and I came home early.
Was there a specific step that you were hung up on?
Oh, the four step. God, me too.
Yeah. Everybody gets hung.
Up took me a year, you know? Yeah, it took my sponsor here,

(42:58):
you know, right. We don't want to admit these
things. Yeah.
All you got to do is point your finger at a bunch of people.
Yeah. And say This is why I hate you,
you know? But then you realize at the end
you got to put your finger back at yourself.
Right. It's really comfortable living
in your shit, man. You know what I mean?
It's really comfortable being the victim, Yeah.
And not having a part. It was great when I learned I
had a victim mentality that broke me.

(43:19):
I was like. It it turned me into a man.
Yeah, it turned me into a. Fucking man, that day when I
realized I was responsible for most of it.
You know what I mean? You.
Claim 100% responsibility for your own suffering.
I can put my suffering on all these different kinds of people
and stay sick. People, places, things, ideas.
This president, that president. I can blame whoever I want for

(43:39):
everything, but I have to take responsibility for my suffering.
And when I do that, all of a sudden the world starts looking
differently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so you get back from Sweden and you're in your disease
again. Yeah, but I was hiding it.
I didn't tell anybody because, see, I thought nobody's going to

(44:00):
know. But I knew.
And that was the biggest thing for me was honesty.
And you couldn't, you couldn't tell me that.
You know, it's just a disease ofself diagnosis.
You can have a million people tell you, diagnose you.
That's only going to make it worse.
You know, you got to diagnose yourself.
And so I had a problem with honesty.
And, you know, I came back and Iwent out again and it was the

(44:27):
people knew, right? People, people had seen it.
I couldn't hide it. So then I went back.
So I was in Sweden over the summer and I came back, did some
stuff, came back in October and said October 1st was my date.
But then when I went down to I just written this math book and
I was really, really full of myself.

(44:48):
Yeah, love it. And I went like a school book.
Yeah, like a text. Got it.
It was. It was shit.
I wrote it. My ego wrote that book. 100% my
ego. Didn't write this book.
It did not. No, I can tell.
And I got to be really careful, you know, because when people
say, oh, I love your book, you know, I've had people tell me
it's the best book they've ever read.
And I'm like, it bounces off youdifferently or you absorb it or

(45:11):
whatever differently. It affects you differently
because I'm, I'm not like, look at me, look how great I am
because I don't believe I wrote the book.
You feel like a funnel. I feel like a funnel.
Yeah. I'm like, yeah, I got to see
that. I got to be.
I got to witness that creation where it's.
That feels cool. But as far as like what I did.

(45:32):
So I came back in. Oh yeah.
I went down to I went down to Tennessee and my whole family
was there. Everybody was there.
I surprised my mom. She didn't know I was coming.
My brother was living there at the time.
And I was so full of myself. And I was like, I remember I
was, yeah. I was like dating two different
girls at the same or three different girls at the same
time. I don't know.

(45:53):
I was just like, so dishonest about everything.
And I could not see it. I'm like, well, they know about
each other, you know? And it's, I don't know, it was
just bad. And I'm going to the airport and
I decided I have to try Tennessee Whiskey on the way
home. That checks out because.
You can't try Tennessee whiskey here.
Come on, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was just stupid. I sat down, I had a couple of

(46:14):
drinks, got on the plane, drank on the plane, got to the other
airport at a transfer in like Phoenix, almost missed the plane
because I was in the bar not paying attention.
They started calling my name. I took my headphones off and I
heard my name and I'm like, oh shit.
And I ran into the plane, got home, made an ass out of myself
with the Uber driver, and then, you know, continue to drink for
like a week because that's what I do.

(46:36):
Cleaned up, went back to the program, didn't tell anybody,
didn't tell anybody. I maintained if anybody asked,
my date was October 1st and thenand then I did it a couple more
times and then it started to getreal dark, real dark.
I would go on like a two week venture because I was still at
the university and I still had time off where I could do these

(46:58):
things. And so like that whole time
during winter break, I locked myself in my house.
Well, you can't do that during the school year and I never did
till this time. Then I started going on binges
and calling in sick and finally,you know, and I was doing
something at the university I didn't want to be doing.
And they knew that. And, yeah, so I came back in and

(47:20):
for a good amount of time, I maintained, I said, this is it,
I'm done. I said the prayer and I woke up
the next day. I was on a binge, said the
prayer, woke up the next day. And.
And it was a different day. And I remember getting an e-mail
from the chair of the departmentof university saying, yeah, I

(47:40):
think, I think it's time to turnyour keys.
And I was like, right on. I told him the previous week I'd
lost my voice from vomiting. So horrible.
The second time I'd lost my voice in like a month from
vomiting. And I'm talking to him on the
phone and I'm telling him, I just don't want to do this
anymore. I don't want to do this anymore.

(48:01):
And I wasn't just talking about the university.
I was talking about everything, everything.
And, you know, it got so bad that where I couldn't, I was so
deep in it that I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep.
I was drinking to just keep off the shakes.
It was just absolute hell, hell trapped in this little
apartment. And I, I just said, God, just

(48:26):
take this from me. I can't do this anymore.
And I heard about people saying that prayer, you know, but this
time was different. This time I was saying it not
like bargaining with my higher power.
I was in bargaining with my higher power.
I just, I just quit. I just gave up and threw up my
arms and like I'm sick of tryingto figure everything out on my
own. So I woke up the next day and it

(48:46):
was a whole new day and I said I'm going to the eye opener.
I went to the eye opener and I've been sober ever since.
And that was late February. I say my, my sobriety day is
March 1st because I maintained that October 1st sobriety day
for a while. I kept lying.
I kept lying and kept lying. And I, you know, I had a couple
different sponsors and finally Imet up with Pete and I'm like,

(49:10):
here's a guy I can't lie to. I cannot look that guy in the
eye and lie to him. And we did the steps thoroughly
and I told him everything. Yeah, he'd know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And.
It was on the 6th step that I called him up crying.
And I'm like, I actually he goes, just set your clock back,
man. What's the big deal?
October 1st, March 1st, you lostfive months.
Who the fuck cares? And I'm like, Oh, yeah.

(49:33):
And it felt so good. It was like the best feeling I
ever had. And from then on, it's just been
amazing. Amazing.
And all I had to do is get honest.
And that was my biggest character defect.
I still have a problem with it from time to time, but I catch
myself, you know, I've been in situations with people where
I've lied straight to their faceand then went, wait, no, I'm
sorry. That's completely wrong.
And they're like, what? But that's what I have to do,

(49:56):
you know? And and the times between
dishonesty is longer now and they're far and few between.
But when it happens I catch myself and it's wonderful.
I don't have the memory of a liar anymore.
I can't remember the things I say and what not so I don't have
to worry about shit. And I remember the feeling when
I I realized I never have to drink again.

(50:17):
That was a profound feeling. And I remember the feeling when
I never have to lie again. I don't ever have to lie again.
My dates March 1st, 2018 and I can walk into I, I did e-mail my
professor or my chair at the department a few times and said,
you know, I'd like to talk to you and never responded back.
And I, I don't fault him for that, but I would love to go in

(50:38):
there and just say, hey man, I lied to you.
If there's anything I can do to make it better, you know, please
let me know. But it worked because of what
you got going on now, which I'd like to talk about school.
Yeah. Can can you briefly explain what
your business is? What school is SK0 0L?
That's an offshoot that I just started actually.

(50:59):
OK, So what I do when I left theuniversity, I'm like, I'm going
to consult because I've been doing some consulting gigs.
They pay pretty well and but always miss teaching when I'm
not teaching. I love sharing my passion for
mathematics with young people and the university gave me that
opportunity. But at the same time, it fed my
ego, didn't feed my bank account, but it fed my ego and

(51:20):
that's all I needed. You don't make a lot of money
being a professor. No, you don't.
If you climb to the ranks, you could, you know, add.
But I was not climbing to the ranks.
I was recognized as a great teacher, but I wasn't doing the
other things. You know, I have two unfinished
pH DS. I never finished the PhD work,
you know, and you really need that if you want to, you know,

(51:40):
make money as a professor. You have two degrees, don't you?
I have a master's in pure mathematics and a master's in
applied mathematics. And then I did all my course,
course work for PhD in atmospheric physics and APHD in
mathematics. Got you.
But the hard part right, is writing that paper.
And that's the point, the dissertation where I was like,
I'm not going to pay somebody else to write a book.

(52:00):
So but it worked out. It worked out.
I graduated high school. Hey hey man, I barely graduated
high school. Yeah, no, I get you.
I get it. I'm sure if it was something I
felt wasn't working on the fucking railroad, I might
revisit. But man, it's something I found
myself doing a lot before the program was I felt that people

(52:23):
who were intelligent made me feel inferior.
And now I truly in aspire to intelligence in the most humble
way, knowing right what I am andwho I am and what I have.
You know what I mean? But we're most looking at people
that are smarter than me. Makes me feel like I'm doing

(52:44):
something positive with my life man, you know what I mean?
It's it's all relative. It's all relative.
Most of the people, you mean academics are insecure about
their intelligence and that's why they're there.
I had, the more school I get, the more school I get.
You know, I was just trying to wash the White's trash off me,
you know what I mean? The entire time, you know, if I
get a good education, I'm not white trash anymore, OK.
You know, And the Army just led me in that direction because

(53:06):
they paid for my undergraduate degree, paid for everything.
I lived high off the hog when I was in the Army from the GI
Bill. It was great.
I don't have to work at all. I did, but I didn't have to.
Yeah. I mean, it's, it blows me away
sometimes that I do math for a living.
So I, when I was consulting, I started taking on more students

(53:27):
just doing like private tutoringbasically for calculus 2
students at the university and they would come to my office
down on Marsh and you know, at awhite board and we talked about
problems and stuff. But then, you know, the
consulting contracts got less and the students got more, you
know, and then COVID hit in my office building shut down and I
couldn't go back there. And my mom's like, why don't you

(53:48):
go online and just teach online?And that's when Woody calculus
was born. So I meet with students who are
doing everything from calculus to all the way through, up
through PhD level mathematics. We meet on Zoom.
I have, it's amazing. I have the best students.
I'm so blessed, like everybody Iwork with this, It's just
amazing, you know? And it wasn't like that in the

(54:10):
beginning. My attitude changed and
everybody else changed. It was unbelievable.
And I remember being at the Eye Opener and IGT kept offering me
jobs and they kept offering me more money and everything like
that. And I said, they finally called
me one day and I was sitting in the parking lot of the Eye
Opener Buddhist Center. And like this last time, if you

(54:32):
turn this down again, we're not calling you back.
And I was like, I had two students at the time and then no
consulting contracts. And I was like, you know what, I
got to go for it because this ismy job.
Being sober is my job. Going to this meeting every day
is my job. And I'm still going every
morning, you know, and that's, Ithink a big key to my success is
that I that's how I start off myday, you know, and, and I built

(54:57):
something now where I, I mean, my setup is badass, you know,
and I fill up before the semester.
I contract all my hours out before the semester even begins.
That's when I started school SKOOL that community where I
have two sites. One is for math, one is for the
book, a spiritual community, right.
But the math one, students can come on there.

(55:19):
It's like a $40 a month subscription.
And so if they can't afford my, my rates or I'm filled a full,
they can go on there. And I, I just go on every Friday
or on the weekends and I, I answer some questions and do
some problems and post some videos.
And I think it's very helpful. I mean, I've got like, I just
started this two weeks ago and I've uploaded almost every video

(55:39):
I've ever made privately on my own, not with a student on the
other end, right. And there's hundreds.
And I like the full calculus 2 courses on there.
You if you're taking Calculus 2 and you just go on there and you
follow my course, you're going to be money.
No shit if. You do exactly what I tell you
to do. And that's why math works so
well for me, because in the Army, I realized if I do exactly

(56:00):
what I'm told, exactly like Forrest Gump, man, Forrest Gump
crushed in the Army because he just did what he was told.
And that's how it was for me. And that's how it is for
mathematics. They tell you exactly what to
do. And then when you get up in the
upper level of mathematics, you write the theorem, you copy the
proof, you write the theorem, you copy the proof, you write
the theorem. And you do that over and over
and over until it becomes your language.

(56:20):
You know your in your perceptualset and they give you a problem.
And hey, I can answer this problem because I know this
whole theorem and proof up and down.
Yeah, and you got special shoes,right?
No, the other. Thing I wanted to do.
I love that movie. It's a wonderful movie.
Yeah, you know. A lot of good lessons there.
It's a lot of connection, right?Yeah, man.

(56:42):
So something we were talking about that I really would love
your take on and then I'm going to start having more guests on.
I love, I don't know if you've seen some of our much of our
content, but I really love aliens and UFOs in the and just
here's the thing. It's nostalgic to me because I

(57:03):
grew up as born in 92 and my momwould have X-Files on every
single night. So that was the thing I watched
before bed. So it's nostalgic and I just, I
just love that stuff. But also lit.
I also love Nevada. I love Nevada.
I love this place and I love thecasino themes and I love the mid

(57:23):
the central part of Nevada wherethere's a lot of what do you
call it? It's I think they call it like
60s and 50s noir. You know what I mean?
With atomic themes. I love that, you know what I
mean? I love and I, you know, I like
casino themes. I like, I just love this place
And part of that is because area51 is here in the state is why I
also just love it, you know whatI mean?

(57:44):
And it's not, it's more just I just, I just, I think it's, I
think it's profoundly interesting.
I'd love to get your take on on your thoughts.
Is that something you believe isreal?
I'm all in. Yeah, me too, man, You know.
I want to I'm like molder though.
I want to believe you know what I mean?
And it's I've never had an experience, but it's something I

(58:05):
fucking I want to believe it in my heart, bro, You know what I
mean? I want to believe that stuff.
It's. Pretty arrogant for us to think
that we are the only. Yeah, you talked about.
Yeah, you talked about what was the, what was it the.
First contact. No, no, that too.
But you talked about when I was talking about the odds.
Oh, Drake equation. The Drake equation, right?

(58:27):
Yeah, that calculates the probability that we're not
alone. And the probability is 1, which
means 100% chance that we're not.
If you just look at all the starsystems and now they're finding
all the exoplanets that can support life and everything.
But you also have to consider the fact that our planet is 4.55
billion years old and our history on this planet is very

(58:47):
small. So intelligence, life,
intelligent life on this planet,it's just a blint, right?
And we're probably going to be gone soon too.
So are they having the same experience at the same time?
Like how is that working out? But I don't know.
I think it's very arrogant to think that we're, look at all
the lessons in history about contacting indigenous tribes and

(59:09):
things like that. You know, like, I don't believe
we're alone, right? Or I don't want to believe we're
alone. I that too.
Same as a higher power. I have a higher power because I
want to believe in a higher power.
That's true. It works for me and if I'm
living in fantasyland I don't give a fuck, I'm happy as hell.
I hear you. I just wanted a mathematician's
take on it. You know what I mean?
It's, it's so unlikely that the James Webb Space Telescope that

(59:34):
I talked about in my book, it's out there taking these pictures
and they're unbelievable. And there's one that's like
basically the spot in the sky. If you hold your thumb out, you
know, it's just like your thumbnail.
And it's got hundreds of galaxies in there.
And we've discovered that we have trillions of galaxies in
our universe, you know, and thenwe have how many star systems in

(59:55):
our just in our Galaxy? And how you get from here to
there, I don't know. Are they watching us?
I don't know. But there's a lot of things out
there that you can't explain, especially with the Navy coming
out and saying, yeah, we follow these Tic Tacs all the time.
You know, we see these things all the time.
And or David Fraber. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and there's a lot of good stuff out there.
And I'm I'm skeptical about a lot of the information I get.

(01:00:17):
Me too, man, right? Yeah, but I mean, 'cause we see
what we want to see, but there'sa lot of, do you know Steven
Greer? He talks about CE 5.
It's a close Encounters of the fifth kind.
OK. No, no.
Yeah, basically they go, they goout in these retreats to places
with a lot of activity and they meditate and they try to elevate

(01:00:42):
their consciousness. Yeah.
And they do have experiences andthey record these experiences.
And I think it's amazing, right,Because if we are talking about
an extra dimensional or extra traditional terrestrial species
that has the capacity to get here, first of all, I think
they'll be benign because if they were a warring species,
they would have gone extinct a long time ago, right?

(01:01:03):
They would have killed themselves, especially with that
kind of technology. You know, we're on the cusp
right now. We could blow up the planet.
1000 * / I talk about nuclear weapons in the book as well.
You know, it's atrocious, but weneed to, I think we're at a
point right now we're a breakingpoint in the consciousness is
always evolving, right? And that's, I believe that's

(01:01:24):
what our program is here, is to evolve consciousness through
form. And so if they are of a higher
consciousness, we have to lift our consciousness to a place to
meet them, right? Because I don't think they can
lower theirs. I don't know.
I don't know how it works, but Ithink we're still apes in a

(01:01:45):
sense, yeah. It wasn't that long ago that we
were just fucking. Just apes.
Just apes, man. You know, it's crazy to think I
it was that. It's a Neil deGrasse Tyson
documentary that I watched and he did The Calendar of the
Earth. Do you know what I'm talking?
About yeah, like it like if the earth was a year old, right, it
would be like. This much they were like the
last what is the last 10 secondsof December 31st?

(01:02:08):
You know what? I mean exactly.
That's I thought that was so that was like it makes you feel
small a little bit. You know, it's in perspective.
Yeah, for sure. The other thing you just touched
on is something that you had a unique, you had a unique take on
was there's a, there's a lot of division.
And what is your advice to people, especially people

(01:02:30):
reading your book about divisionin the in our current climate?
You know what I mean, and how tofeel more connected.
Connected, Yeah. I think it's important to try to
see things from other people's perspectives.
You know, I have some really close friends that helped me
when I was hurting and they havecompletely different political

(01:02:54):
views than I do. And it's principles over
personalities. And when I listen to them, truly
listen to them, and I can't, I can't, it seems really trivial
to have something like that get in the way of my relationship
with someone who saved my life, you know, And when you do try to
see it from their perspective, you're not.

(01:03:15):
When you butt heads and you get into this ego battle where it's
your two egos colliding with each other, triggering each
other, you're never going to getanywhere.
But if I can listen to you and empathize with you and try to
see it from your perspective, you might try to see it from
mine. But it's not going to work the
other way around. It's not going to work by
arguing. You know, we all are dug into
our mental fixed positions. And I always when I read the

(01:03:37):
news, I try to remember to always just be open minded and
remember that I'm probably wrong.
I've had many opinions in my lifetime and I was wrong about
many of them. I think that's important, man,
I've been learning that a lot inthe last couple years is that
I'm not, I'm not married to any idea or thought or belief that
I've belief different thought ideas.

(01:04:01):
I'm not married to everything that I feel all the time.
I'm, I'm, I have strong stances on a lot of things, but man,
it's, it's and it would be so hard for me to try and put my
ideas into a specific category of politics.
You know what I mean? That's.
Probably a good thing. Right, because it's just like it

(01:04:21):
is a good thing. It is good for me, man.
It's just like you said, man. I just I'm not married to my I'm
not married to my thoughts. And I hear and see things that
change my mind often, you know what I mean?
And and I think that's a gift ofthe program because that that
theme of their go I is in my brain a lot, you know what I

(01:04:44):
mean? And I find myself even judging
what's going on right out here on 4th St. you know what I mean?
And I think back to there was this one really bad day I had,
man, it was really sick and deepin my disease.
I hadn't been to sleep in three days.

(01:05:04):
And I think it was 20. No, I must have been 19.
I must have been 19 and I walkedup and down this this street and
I had nowhere to go and I had one of the worst feelings is
paranoia and I drug induced paranoia had rough.
And I thought that my mom and dad had put me on an episode of

(01:05:28):
intervention and that camera crews were following me around.
And it's so funny to talk about this but I didn't go home for
like 3 days because I thought ifI went home that the camera
crews were there and they were going to try and put me in this
show and intervention. So I walked home to my parents
house knocked on the door and I said can we just get this over

(01:05:50):
with? And my dad looked at me like
what the fuck are you talking man?
It was one of the craziest experiences I ever had.
And I remember the entire time Iwas talking to myself, I must
have looked fucking nuts as a 19year old kid with three day old
clothes, talking to myself the whole way because I know I was
talking to myself. And then I look out here, man,

(01:06:11):
and I'm just like, fuck, dude, all these goddamn bums outside,
you know what I mean? And I still find myself doing
it. It's like I have not been sober
long enough for me to forget that shit.
I was out here in that shit, doing that shit, being that
person, and all I got was a invitation to walk out of the
burning building. Yeah, and I'm lucky I, I find

(01:06:34):
myself changing my mind on a lotof things, especially just the
social climate, man, you know what I mean?
But I, I, I do like that perspective that you take in
this book, which is seeing it from the other foot.
It's important to me, man. That's an important part of your
story, this book that I enjoy, man, you know what I mean?

(01:06:56):
Is there is there situations in which that was something you
wanted to put in there or did that come from somewhere else or
was that a thought process that you would had that you had
learned? To try to see it from.
Yeah, but I mean just but but how you put feeling connected in
in, in a, in a, in a world whereit's fucking divided as as fuck.

(01:07:19):
Yeah, I mean, what can I do? You know, like, it's the
Serenity prayer, right? And So what can I do?
So in the Army, they would teachyou in case of a nuclear,
biological, chemical attack, youput on your mask before you help
your buddy, right? And in an airplane, they tell
you the same thing. Put on your mask before you try
to help your child. And if I'm not taking care of

(01:07:41):
myself and I'm just pointing my fingers at you, I'm going to
rot. And so I think it's really
important to maybe say, I'm gladI'm not doing that.
If somebody's behaving a certainway, thank God I don't behave
like that anymore. You know, and, and what we've
really missed out, I think in this country is a sense of
community. And that's what we get in the
program, a sense of community. We go, we meet, we listen, we

(01:08:04):
have a shared awareness, we havea shared consciousness.
It's very, very powerful thing. That's where I experienced my
higher powers in a meeting when I'm truly listening to somebody
else without judgement and connecting with them because we
say some messed up stuff in the rooms that other people on the
outside would be like, what are you, you're laughing at this?
I can't, but we're laughing because we're connecting in that

(01:08:25):
overwhelming joy of like I did that too.
Oh my gosh, you know, I thought I was the only one.
You know, again, that separation, you know, I, I think
first and foremost, we need to strengthen ourselves and then
take that out into the communityand be aware of that and
strengthen our communities because we're, I feel like we're

(01:08:46):
rotting from the inside. We don't talk to our neighbors.
If I have a neighbor that's got a Trump sign and I got another
neighbor that's got a Biden sign, and this one thinks the
other one's a Nazi and the otherone thinks the other one's a
communist, But these two people have never spoken to each other
before. And it's like, I think if people
just speak to each other, they'll learn they have way more
in common than they do. That separates us.
And I also think it's manufactured, you know, what is,

(01:09:09):
what are the news the big news agency is trying to do?
They're trying to get us to keepwatching.
And they're, they're paying billions of dollars to a company
to tell them how to keep us engaged.
And it's usually through fear and separation and division.
I'm going to keep watching because I don't want to miss out
on what's going to happen. And I'm I've caught myself

(01:09:30):
watching this stuff before wishing for bad things almost
because you want to be right. You know, we want that
confirmation bias feels good to us, you know, so I think if we
take care of ourselves, put our own mask on 1st, right, instead
of pointing my finger at these demons, you know, whoever they
are in, in politics. And I do it all the time.

(01:09:52):
And I'm not trying to say that Idon't do this.
I'm working on this and I, I would hope that we could all
work on this maybe together. And that's not pointing my
finger at him and saying you're doing this wrong.
You're doing that wrong and missing out of myself the whole
time, just getting sicker and sicker and sicker right.
So I, I believe in community building and that school
community that I built based around my book, I think starts

(01:10:14):
in Reno, right? So most everybody on there is
from Reno, but other people can come and watch, you know, and,
and there is a connection on there.
We talked about a Course in Miracles with anything you want
to talk about. It's open discussion.
And part of it is bringing it. If you're a Muslim, a Jew, if
you're a Buddhist, whatever, you're going to say something
that somebody else is going to be able to relate with if it's

(01:10:37):
true wisdom. Now dogma, I should put that in
the rules. Dogma is not allowed, you know,
because that's just like adhering to somebody else's
conception of a higher power or rules that they put into place
or whatnot. But I think when we focus on
ourselves and then let's focus on our community and then maybe
from our community, our county and our county and our state and
our state where we need to go from the inside out as opposed

(01:11:00):
to going from the outside in right now.
Because everybody thinks, well, if, if this guy was just gone,
if this president or congressmanwas just gone, all my problems
would be answered. And no, they wouldn't.
There's a reason we're here right now.
There's a reason we've evolved to this state where nobody can
talk to each other and there's this kind of division because
we're all spiritually sick, right?

(01:11:21):
But I, I have hope. I was talking to a prayer
counselor. She's a prayer counselor and
she's very, very wise. And she told me, if you think
you're looking at an addict withthe disease, you need to let
that addict hit rock bottom and diagnose themselves.
And if so, you can take that perspective and have that kind

(01:11:42):
of patience with the country right now.
If the country is doing that, allow it to hit rock bottom and
pray. I pray for people in in charge
right now that I don't agree with.
I try to pray for them every dayand it helps me.
And I just say, all I simply sayis I hope they get everything I

(01:12:03):
wanted of life and more. I learned that from Pete.
I hope they get everything I wanted of life and more.
Oh man, I hate that prayer. It's so hard to do.
It usually starts out with God Ihope that dude gets colon
cancer. Yeah, fuck, dude.
Yeah, he'll be. Gets Lou Gehrig's disease.
Yeah, no, I get you, man. I definitely.
That's another one I struggled with for a long time.
Was praying for other people man, Praying for people I
didn't. Like, but it works.
It does. It's so amazing how it works and

(01:12:24):
just. It's crazy how many less people.
Those people don't seem to bother me anymore.
You know what I mean? When I think about them, it's
real. Yeah, 'cause the problem's me.
It is right? I'm not accepting responsibility
for my own suffering. As soon as I stop doing that,
all bets are off. Yeah, yeah, that's my favorite
one. That's the one.
When I do it with another guy, II either see the light come on

(01:12:48):
or I don't, you know what I mean?
And if I don't, then it's like, maybe we need to redo this one,
you know what I mean? But when I see it and the light
comes on, I see the obsession gets lifted a lot of the time.
And that's a powerful moment to just be present for because I'm
not doing shit but reading a book.

(01:13:09):
But it's a really, it's, that's the thing that gets that gets me
another day, you know what I mean?
You said the obsession gets lifted and I think that's really
what it is. Prayer is just self talk.
But I'm, I'm talking to or maybefrom that I am place, that
existence place, that place that's common in both you and I.

(01:13:31):
If I can speak to and speak fromthat place, I'm interrupting
that place of form. You know, I'm interrupting those
obsessive thoughts, those stories.
I'm trying to tell myself. My ego is in full play when I'm
doing that. What if I can interrupt that ego
with my true self, right? That's where healing begins and
it works. And every time I do it, I'm

(01:13:53):
like, why didn't I do this before?
You know, Kelsey is a master of letting go.
And she's really good at it. And she's, she has a great life
because of it. And she's had some amazing
experiences as a result. And I would ask her, I'm like,
how do you just let stuff go like that?
And she just goes like that. She just go like that.
And I was like, you drove me nuts.

(01:14:14):
I'm like, what are you talking about?
And then Pete told me he's like,just ask your higher power to
take it from you and just keep asking your higher power to take
it from me. Now I'm interrupting that
thought. I'm getting in touch with my
divine self. And that's when healing begins.
And every time I do that, I might have to do it 20 times in
one day. I might have to do it 20 times a

(01:14:35):
day for 20 days. But eventually it's lifted.
And when I'm doing that, I'm notthinking about the other thing
either. And so it works, but I'm so
resistant to it. It's kind of like, I just want
to go. I don't want to, you know, like
a little kid, little brat. But when I do it, hey, and it
works, I'm like, holy shit, it was there the entire time.
Yeah, no. That's it.

(01:14:56):
That's some, that's the beautiful thing about this
thing, man is seeing that, seeing that change in a lot of
people, man, right? Realizing what we're talking
about. And we're the lucky ones.
We are, bro. We're the lucky ones.
And that's one of the reasons I was trying to write this book is
I had the newcomer in mind who was having trouble with the God
thing. Yeah, man, but also for everyone

(01:15:16):
else, for me, myself first. You know, one of my spiritual
advisors told me, write it for yourself 1st.
And it, it's been very healing for me.
And then you can share it with other people, right?
And not just people who suffer from addiction.
We all suffer from addiction, right?
But turning off the mind, you know what I mean?

(01:15:38):
Stop telling yourself these stories that you're right all
the time, because you're not. I shouldn't say you.
I should say me. I should stop telling.
Myself, I hear what you mean. Right, because I'm not always
right. And I get dug into these
positions and then I go spout myviews on Facebook.
And then a year later, I look back and go, I embarrassed
myself. I hear what you mean.
I wasn't right. Yeah, my wife seems to always be

(01:16:00):
right. Yeah.
Right, I ain't. That something.
She's never wrong, man. I don't know what.
I don't know how it happened, but.
Have you ever been right? Like it, it might be like once a
year, but you're right. You're like damn dude, I was
right. Yeah, I know, I know I do.
I I those I told you some moments are fleeting, but I

(01:16:23):
don't capitalize them on in on them anymore.
I. Think that's progress?
That's progress then. You know what I mean.
I still do. I don't.
I try. I don't feel the need to
capitalize on that. I told you shows anymore.
You know what I mean? Unless it's with my kids for
some reason, I really got to be the guy with my kids.
Like fucking you're no, you're wrong.
You know, I, that's what's funny.

(01:16:44):
Dude, I'm so sick. I argued with my 6 year old
about what were we talking about?
We were talking about alligatorsand that we're, I don't, we're
talking about crocodiles. Excuse me, we're talking about
crocodiles. And I was telling him how that's
like they were alive during the dinosaurs and I was sitting here
arguing with my fucking 6 year old kid about whether or not

(01:17:07):
crocodiles were alive. Do you know what I mean?
It's good not having to be rightall the time, you know what I
mean? It is good not have the answer
bro. You just let it go.
So do I want to be right or do Iwant to be happy?
Exactly what I was getting at right?
Do I want to be right or do I want to be happy?
That's straight out of A Course in Miracles.
Yeah, that's a treasure trove right there.
Are you writing anything else? No, just moved.

(01:17:30):
I know, I know, but I know that's keep your mind busy.
I'd say I sat back down to startwriting again and I think I got,
I don't know, 4 pages over the course of a few weeks and I was
like, it's divine timing is everything right?
And it's just, it's not time. I do have thoughts, you know, I
write them down and something isbrewing inside me.

(01:17:53):
But I think when I look back at this book and say, you know,
there's some things that I wasn't right about, maybe let's
maybe let's make it right or something like that.
I don't know, but when it feels right, I'll do it again.
And maybe this is my only book. I don't know.
Yeah, it's it remains to be seen.
I hear you on that. I do because I I literally feel

(01:18:15):
that way often. Like I've sat down to write.
What do you do when you're writing?
Because here's the other thing I'd like to talk about as
somebody who has a hyperactive alcoholic brain that doesn't
turn off a lot of the time. Writing has been a great tool to
keep my brain and hands busy andnot sit idle.

(01:18:36):
What do you do? I literally walk around while
I'm working on the railroad and dictate my thoughts into my
phone. What?
What are you do? You write notes down here and
there and kind of start piercingthose puzzles together at a
later time. Is that something you've played
with? I keep a journal.
Journal is great, too, man. Yeah.

(01:18:57):
Yeah. But.
Yeah, doing notes on your phone,that's a really good idea.
Yeah. Because I'll have these thoughts
and like, Oh my gosh, that was amazing.
I got to remember that. And then gone.
I've that's I I swear to God, I've had I would have had a best
selling book right now. If I would have if I would have
wrote more down man. So that's why I was like, Nope,

(01:19:17):
I'm pull the phone out. I'm going to dictate.
I'm going to write, I'm going todo whatever you.
Know are you still working on the agent thing?
Still working on the agent thing.
Yeah, I enjoyed the process so much that I don't care about the
result. I care more about that process
was a positive thing in my life and I'm not a well educated man

(01:19:45):
and being able to say that I'm apublished author gave me a lot
of it. It made me feel like I I
accomplished something positive,and that was an important thing.
Yeah. That's it.
And if that's all I got from it,that's OK.
And I know that a lot of people that have read it, that have
enjoyed it and they've gotten some escape reality for a little
while, and that's cool with me. That's.

(01:20:06):
And you got to learn about the railroad.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Or something, at least a little.Bit yeah, that was pretty
interesting and you got a lot ofrailroad buffs out there.
I have a friend that's really into trains and I, after I
finished reading it, I texted him like, you got to check this
book out, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's got the biker stuff. In there it does the biker.

(01:20:26):
The It's just. I just tried to make it was easy
to write because it was my life.Yeah, except for the murder.
So. I couldn't put it down.
I read it. I started reading it on the way
down to Peru, to Peru Man flightand I read slow and so it it
just made the flight go by faster.
And then I read the rest of it on the way back.

(01:20:47):
I was like, this is good when you when it just flows when
you're reading it and it flows it, it feels good, right?
You're like, this is a good story.
Yeah, it's, I haven't read a lot, but Cormac McCarthy is my
favorite author. Cannot be copied or emulated,
but he's my favorite author. And I I tried to follow the way

(01:21:09):
that that guy told stories like No Country for Old Men and like
All the Pretty Horses. I just like how that guy tells
stories, man. Yeah.
So that that was my really only way I felt like how to structure
a story. You know what I mean?
You all want. Somebody has to do what they do
right, Right. Exactly.
Hunters Thompson would do that. He used to rewrite used to
retype The Catcher in the Rye over and over and over.

(01:21:30):
I didn't know that. That's what we do in
mathematics. That's why I train my students.
I say, take this problem, it's aperfect problem.
It's beautiful. Rewrite it a whole bunch of
times. Get the feeling, Make it yours.
You know what I mean? Adopt it.
You know, you can adopt somebody's style and then you
create your own art from that. You know, yeah.
Yeah, I did. Yeah, exactly.

(01:21:50):
I like Hunter S Thompson too. He's good.
He's a big. Biker.
You know what I mean? I.
Got into when you said, you know, do you read much fiction?
And I, I got a debate with a girl once that fiction.
Oh, Hunter S Thompson. Well, I mean, of course, like
you're loathing in those ones, you know what I mean?
But. It will he.
What's he called it? Gonzo.
Gonzo journalism. Gonzo journalism.
Yeah. Well, he was talking about the

(01:22:11):
time that he heard a rumor in his book.
He wrote there was a rumor goingaround that Muskie in in
Milwaukee when he was going through Wisconsin was high on
EBO game. And he said he was the one that
started the rumor. But I remember that.
Factual. Yeah.
That's beautiful. That is.
Funny, but when I got in this debate with this girl one time

(01:22:32):
about like how I was like fiction, this was when I was in
college. I'm like fiction is dumb, blah
blah blah. And she's like here read this.
And she gave me John Steinbeck'sEast of Eden and I was like, I
must have read it 6 times. And that's when I fell in love
with fiction. But I don't get a chance to read
it that much. I listen to a lot of audio
books. It's like Lay's potato chips,
right? Yeah, it's good.
It's good and it's it's good. And especially when it's really

(01:22:54):
good, you know what I mean? Where can people find you on
social media, Brian? Face by every.
Everything's pretty much Woody calculus.
You type in Woody calculus into Google, you're going to see all
my socials, my Facebook, Yeah. I will put your links below on
the video. One of the last things that
we've been saying was what's oneof the most important books that
you've read that has changed your life?

(01:23:15):
Something that somebody should read.
There is a book by Eckhart Tollecalled A New Earth.
I was I was listening. Well, not a new Earth, one with
all life. And it's the spiritual excerpts
from a new Earth that he put an audio book form.
It's like 3 hours long. And if you just listen to that
on repeat, you know you're goingto get it.

(01:23:36):
I was talking to a girl the other day and she's new into her
spiritual journey. And she's like, I feel like,
like I'm almost there. Like there's some understanding
that I'm trying to figure out. And I'm like, I have totally
been there. And I think what it really is,
the realization, the true realization that separation is
an illusion. We can understand truly that

(01:23:58):
axiom that separation is an illusion.
Everything else kind of follows,right?
Because where does my ego come from?
My ego comes from the belief in the illusion of separation, you
know, where does my need to be, right?
All these things that cause problems in my life, my
suffering, you know, when I realized that I'm not separate,
I got the whole universe of my back.
I am the universe, you know? And it sounds arrogant to say,

(01:24:19):
but there's nothing more humble than believing that we're all
the same. They know those people out on
4th St. I drove in from the 395 side and
I forgot about this side of townand there's people lined up.
I don't know if it's a soup kitchen, but there's all these
people lined up and I'm like, wow, this is a part of Reno that
I've completely forgot. I love this town.

(01:24:39):
I love this culture. My new neighborhood is amazing,
you know, and my old neighborhood was amazing.
My neighborhood before that was amazing.
Absolutely love this town. Like with all my heart.
And you come down and you, you forget about this part of town
and people that I know that are working with these communities.
There's some of the best people I know who give, who've

(01:25:00):
committed their lives to workingwith the less fortunate in Reno.
And there are a few out there inReno that are much less
fortunate than we are. Yeah, no, that's real.
Any advice to somebody struggling with addiction right
now? Again, it's the illusion of

(01:25:21):
separation. When I walked in my first
meeting from my perspective because there was nothing
genuine in my life at all, that these people were disingenuous,
that they weren't real. They're faking it because that
was my perspective. I see.
We see through our own eyes, right?
And through our own experiences.And when you go in and you look
for the similarities instead of the differences and you truly
listen, turn off that voice inside your head.

(01:25:43):
Take conscious breaths during a meeting and just open your ears.
I remember when I first started listening in meetings and I'm
like, I don't think I've been listening to anything my entire
life. How did I get through school?
I would have been so much more effective at everything in my
life if I would have just listened.
But we don't want to listen whenwe're in a disease because we
know it all. We think we know it all, and

(01:26:05):
there is a way out. And I think also to Neville
Goddard, who's a contemporary ofBill W, he used to like to say
that you, if you want something,you have to imagine, you have to
assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled.
You have to assume that feeling.So if you were sober right now
and you're worried about tomorrow, just focus on that
feeling you have right now. And I remember it was about a

(01:26:27):
week after, you know, I said that prayer and I was sober and
I was committed. I was making my bed in the
evening. I just got in my bedding out of
the, you know, it's still warm. And I was laying my bedding out
and I could just feel like I sawit.
I saw that like I saw my sober life, you know what I mean?

(01:26:51):
I, I saw that I was available for anything limitless and I was
at peace and these people were partying like crazy next door.
I could have gone over and had afew drinks, made a fool out of
myself probably or something like that.
But this piece that I felt in that, that one moment, it was
absolutely incredible. And I've had many, many moments

(01:27:13):
since then. And, and it's not about the
experience and holding on to those moments, but when you feel
it and you see what could be, you know that I could have this
feeling of gratitude and onenessand love and compassion.
And that's what you want. And that is where you want to
stay. And you'll work to get there and
you'll do anything you can to stay there.

(01:27:35):
And it's so much easier than I got to go to this store today
because I just bought alcohol from that store yesterday and
managing my entire life based onthis one addiction.
Maybe it's food, maybe it's drugs, maybe it's alcohol, maybe
it's self pity. No matter what you're suffering
from, when you take responsibility for that
suffering, 100% responsibility for that suffering and decide

(01:27:57):
you're going to do something about it, right?
That's that first step. And you have to imagine what it
feels like. They put yourself in that place,
put yourself in that place whereyou're imagining sobriety and
what your life is going to be like sober, you know, and that
feeling of connection. And I think that's what really,
really helps us. We do this program, we stay

(01:28:18):
sober. I can't do this on my own.
If I was on a desert island, I'dfigure out a way to drink.
I'd figure it out, man. I'd be fermenting coconut juice
or some shit, you know? But when we got each other,
that's all we need, right? And I'm here to help you.
You're here to help me. I got my phone is filled with
numbers. Or if I needed anything right

(01:28:38):
now, anyone else, people would help me and I'd help them.
Oh. You're right.
Unless you call me in the middleof the night, I'm like, yeah,
but you know what? When I do it, I'm going to feel
real good. Yeah, if you call me and you are
struggling, I'm going to help you.
You know what I mean? That's just.
Somebody help me? Somebody help me and that's why
and that's why I will. And it feels even better, like

(01:28:59):
when I help somebody who's struggling, it feels even better
than when somebody helped me, you know?
And that's what I'm addicted to now.
Man, Ryan, I love you my friend.Thank you so much for being
here. Dude.
Thank you for also coaching me with the, you know, with, with
my book writing process and how I think and, and it's been
helpful. And oh also, where can everybody

(01:29:21):
get your books? It's on Amazon.
And we've got three books. I'm sorry, we have two books.
We have I am a loving awareness.What was the first book that you
had wrote? This one here.
Oh, that's, that's a Spanish edition.
Oh. OK, so same book, yeah.
In Spanish and then I've got a new.
Cover and I've been asking what is this?
That's a. That's a Fibonacci spiral.

(01:29:42):
This is geometry stuff, yeah. OK, everything grows at at the
Fibonacci, Yeah. Ratio so I'm going to tell on
you bro Brian's books are available for free in prisons.
This is a beautiful, profound thing that that I I would aspire
to man. Oh yeah, yeah, it's available to
1.5 million prisoners. They have these little iPads for

(01:30:03):
free, 1.5 million in English andSpanish audiobook, e-book.
So the people that buy my book, let's say on Amazon or Google or
wherever that you purchase the book from, those funds go
directly towards supporting these kind of programs and the
school program. If you go to SKOOL and then you
just just go to Google and type I am loving awareness, you're
going to find my book. I am loving awareness school

(01:30:26):
SKOOL. You can join that community for
free and you can listen to the e-book on that website.
You can listen to the audio book, you can read the e-book in
English and Spanish. You can talk to other people
about ideas in the book or any. There's Reno community events on
there. I've got yoga, meditation for
recovery, reps for recovery. That's how I started doing

(01:30:48):
CrossFit. That's awesome.
That's an awesome community. You work out with guys that are
just coming out of prison, things like that, These
community events that bring us closer because it's not just
about community and sobriety. It's about having a sober
community. You know, like having a
community in Reno that you mightnot be struggling with addiction
or anything like that. Maybe you know, some of that is,
but all are welcome to this group.
It doesn't matter what religiousfaith you come from.

(01:31:11):
You know, we're there to supportand help and strengthen each
other and strengthen our community in Reno.
So it's just I am loving awareness on the platform,
SKOOL. Tons of free shit are coming
there too. Like I've I'm talking to other
authors who are putting their books on there for free.
That self help books work. They're considering it.
Let's see what happens. I can't promise anything but.
That ass. Yeah.

(01:31:31):
Brian, I love you, my friend. Thank you so much for being
here. Catch you guys next time.
Thanks so much.

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Brian Woody #11 | 4th Street Live

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