Anthony Blood on Foreskin Restoration, Social Media Activism, and Healing (#38)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
You got to start a podcast called The Restoring
Bros And I got to raise $10million.
Pretty much That's our.
So we've learned from thisconversation.
We've just discovered podcastcold.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
That would be hilarious.
You're listening to the Brendan.

Speaker 1 (00:15):
Murata show.
In this episode, i talked toAnthony Blood, a social media
influencer who is spreading thegood news about foreskin
restoration.
Now, if you don't know whatthat is, you can watch my
feature link, documentaryAmerican Circumcision, or
continue listening to thisepisode, because we're going to
talk about that and a wholerange of topics, including how

(00:35):
to build a platform on socialmedia using short form video.
We're going to talk aboutforeskin restoration versus
regeneration, which is right foryou, which you should either
wait for or do now, and we'regoing to talk about the healing
process, especially how men healdifferently, and I'll talk a
bit about the completion process, something that has helped me
in my own healing journey.

(00:55):
Plus, as you probably guessedfrom the intro, we joke around a
bit and have some fun.
So, without further ado, hereis Anthony.
For those of my audience whoare unfamiliar with you, how
would you introduce yourself orwhat would you say that you do?

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Well, i just say I'm a pretty ordinary guy who just
discovered something that isordinary at least in this
culture, which is that I wasgenerally mutilated at, aka
circumcised, to use theeuphemism that we all know.
And I discovered that very latein life, 25 years old, a couple
of years ago now, and I hadnever identified as a

(01:35):
circumcised male.
I had only known of that wordas that you know four syllable
word.
I knew that I had to do withgenitalia and that I guess it
happened to me.
I don't think I ever reallythought about it.
But once I discovered we can gointo that the story of that,
the truth of it and what itreally was, i had that obsessive

(01:59):
epiphany.
I decided, as someone who isvery introverted, never really
used social media, didn't evenpost on, say, my Facebook wall,
even just with text I tookimmediately to the most popular
at the time social platform,which I found to be TikTok, and

(02:23):
started recording long, longform videos you know minute,
sort of long form minute, threeminutes for that platform,
usually three minutes and justrambling about what I was
learning And it did strike achord, relatively speaking.
And within six months I hadabout 10, 12,000 people
following me And you know that'sthat's pretty much what I've

(02:44):
done.
But I did it because for tworeasons, and then I'll you know
you can respond, but two reasonsI knew virtually nobody knew
this information and that it waspertinent to absolutely
everyone.

Speaker 1 (03:02):
And you mentioned how for what.
How is it you discovered thisissue?
Okay, so I discovered, idiscovered this issue.

Speaker 2 (03:11):
I discovered it randomly.
Just I can't even rememberspecifically how I found it,
what I was looking for onYouTube, But for some reason the
KUFO campaign, the HumanForeskin Campaign by Foragen.

(03:32):
You're familiar with that video, Enzo Benchenzo Aiello, the
president and founder of Foragen.
He had this video where hedepicted his KUFO sculpture,
which is just a silicone mold ofa lifelike sculpture of the

(03:54):
human male foreskin, And I sawthe vasculature, I saw the
specialized tissue, I saw thestructures and I I just
immediately knew, without yournaked of anything, that he was
saying, which of course is veryvaluable.
But naked of all of that, I knewimmediately and intuitively
this was a very specializedtissue, designed by no man, with

(04:17):
tremendous function andtremendous value and purpose,
and that it was somethingvaluable that was lost.
And so, like I said before thattime, before I, I I saw that
video.
I didn't associate circumcisionwith really anything Because of
course, the foreskin is, isomitted from nearly all
discourse and all, even medicaltextbooks in our culture.

(04:39):
So so it was, it was, it wasquite jarring to to see what it
actually looked like and andthat there was obviously value,
obviously function.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
It sounds like you reached for TikTok because you
needed to share this informationin some way, but was there also
a desire to find others orcommunity who was aware of it?

Speaker 2 (05:08):
Certainly I would say so.
I mean one.
The whole reason that Idiscovered the concept of
foreskin restoration was becauseI was searching on on Reddit
for any Reddit communitiessurrounding foragen And there
there is one on Reddit.
There's only a few thousandpeople in there, but just by.

(05:31):
I guess more than happenstance,because the algorithm will be
like okay, you follow foragen,some other, some other people in
that community follow or orslash foreskin restoration, the
the restoration subreddit, and Idid find a tremendous amount of
community in there and thereare still dozens of people I
talked to pretty regularly fromthat community.

(05:51):
So I wouldn't say it wasnecessarily a conscious
motivation of mine, but it mayhave been a very strong
subconscious one.

Speaker 1 (06:01):
And one of the things I've noticed is that
intactivist communities kind oftend to live on certain
platforms.
So the the older activists areall on Facebook and they kind of
live there And I don't thinkpeople realize how segregated
certain communities are byplatform.
So I noticed that there's avery different flavor to the

(06:22):
intactivism that exists onReddit And there's a whole
community on TikTok that I don'tthink many of the older
activists are even aware of.
So I would be curious to knowfrom you what you perceive as
the people you've interactedwith on TikTok.
What are they like, what's theenergy like there, what are the
interactions like there And howis that different?

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Well, it depends on if you're you're asking about it
sounds like you're asking aboutthe, the fellow creators in
that environment And I would say, in TikTok, it's the best.
I mean the people that arewilling to show their face and
give their personal experienceand and even if not doing that,
just just advocating forsomething that is traumatic to

(07:07):
many Americans, just to hear,just to hear the word
circumcision, It takes a prettygrounded person and integrity
And that's usually very positive.
So I've had many greatrelationships from from just
communicating with fellowcreators on TikTok to advocate
for this issue And of course, ifyou're talking about the

(07:29):
consumer on TikTok, it's a very,very different answer there.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
I'm interested in both, so so tell me about the
audience in the general publictoo, right?

Speaker 2 (07:40):
I mean it's, it's, it's a.
It goes from zero to 100.
I mean it could be, it could bethem telling you that you know
it's a.
It's a wonderful thing thatthey, they almost males in our
country a significant level ofour sensation ablated and
destroyed at birth because menare the primary, the primary

(08:03):
perpetrators of sexual assault,sexual violence And and they say
that in a lot less, i guess alot more Kirk terms than I just
put you know very aggressive andit does often get that bad.
I mean it isn't, that's not ararity by any, by any means.

(08:23):
And of course I think if youthink about it a little bit,
it's.
It's easy to understand whythat is because maybe they did
it to their child, maybe they,their partner, had it done,
maybe maybe it was done to them.
So it's quite obvious thatthat's kind of a defense
mechanism, but it could be verypositive.
I mean there are a lot ofpeople, especially in other

(08:44):
cultures, that see this contentand support it wholeheartedly,
and they'll even support youwholeheartedly.
They'll get direct messagesfrom them expressing, you know,
just how courageous it is whatyou're doing, and the level of
emotional support you can getfrom people who see what you're
doing is tremendously valuableand even, frankly, an ethical

(09:06):
and moral necessity in this, inthis culture.
So it really does rangedrastically.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Hearing you describe it, it sounds a lot closer to
street activism than socialmedia activism, because you're
putting your face out there andtalking to people And it's the
interactions you're describingsound a lot closer to the
interactions I've heard ofactivists having when they go
into a protest and they're justtalking to people in the street,
because TikTok will go acrossthe feed of everyone and it gets

(09:41):
pushed to people who interactwith it and the people who
interact are either going to besupportive or emotionally
reactive to the content in someway.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Yeah, i would definitely say that there's
something missing when you'readvocating online, in the sense
that the person's physicalenergy is absent from the
situation, as is yours.
I've I've protested with theblood same man a couple of times
and it is quite different You,but you very seldom get people

(10:09):
really coming up to you andsaying something.
I think in both of those timesthat I I did protest with them
in person.
I'm not sure I ever really hada conversation with anyone, so
for me it was more just a matterof accessibility.
And in the beginning stages andeven up until now, most of what

(10:30):
I do in terms of the form of myvideo is just reply to comments
.
So it's kind of like you'rehaving a mini conversation with
people and you'll often go backand forth and reply to each
other's comments and it's likeyou're speaking directly to one
person while everyone elselistens, kind of like this, but
in a much more chopped upversion.
But I still think that there'ssomething that's that's naked
from that or absent from thatsituation where they're, they're

(10:54):
entered because it's a lot moredifficult to talk about this
face to face with somebody.
It just is.
It might seem like kind ofineffable, but there's an energy
that's absent when you're notphysically in front of a person.
I guess it could just be, if wewant to talk about it, like
evolutionarily.
There's no threat of violence.
You know there's no threat.
Threat of direct violence.

Speaker 1 (11:13):
Yeah, it also sounds like, for because I'm an
introvert as well.
there's an advantage therewhere you don't get the
emotional drain that sometimescomes from intense social
interaction, but you still getto put your energy out there in
an emotional, connected way.

Speaker 2 (11:30):
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely For sure, and I think
that, again, i wasn't, i wasn'tvery comfortable doing it.
I just I felt it had to be done.
Even as introverted as I am, ithad to be done and I didn't
think I didn't expect anyone tobe doing it, and I was
pleasantly surprised when I sawa dozen or so creators at the

(11:51):
time that I connected withpretty quickly in a matter of
days or weeks.
So that was.
That was wonderful to see.
And one thing I will talk aboutor will mention with regards to
activism on TikTok, activism ofany kind.
I didn't know this going in.
I just knew that offhand.

(12:12):
You know TikTok was a verypopular app at the time, a
couple of years ago now, and Ibut what I recently, what I
discovered very quickly aftermaking my first two videos, was
this concept of the for you page, where most of your content,
like a good 95 to 99% of it, isseen by people who aren't

(12:33):
searching for that topic to hearyou specifically or that topic
in general, and which is crucialfor a human rights issue like
this, where people don't evensee it as a human rights issue.
It doesn't, it doesn't come uplike, for instance, someone like
myself, who cares deeply aboutit now, was never introduced to
it for the first 25 years of hislife, and so it's very

(12:58):
important for unknown humanrights issues or ones that are
don't have a tremendous amountof awareness, or very little.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
I need to get on that more.
I know that the short formvideo that TikTok popularized is
now what's on every platform.
That's Instagram, that'sYouTube And I've.
I did a podcast in part becauseI knew I could break it into
shorter videos and I wasoriginally thinking of doing
that for YouTube, but I justhaven't put the time in yet to
breaking this down into thingsfor TikTok and all those

(13:33):
platforms.
So eventually it's going tocome.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
I think that would be .
I almost want to say that'smore important if you're trying
to acquire followers, Because-.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
Oh, i know it is.
I know it is, i know it'ssomething I need to do.
In the past, i've either had todo it myself or I have to pay
someone to do it, and so youknow-.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
It doesn't take much because when I started I was
doing four or five videos a day,which might sound like a lot,
but I wasn't.
it wasn't professional, It wasjust Yeah, one.

Speaker 1 (14:09):
It doesn't have to be .

Speaker 2 (14:11):
You know it wasn't professional at all.
I didn't script anything And itjust didn't.
it took maybe 20 minutes a dayif I was going kind of hard at
it, and yeah, and several monthsI had thousands of followers,
which again isn't a lot, butit's not necessarily-.
I think that in a year someonewho is taking it pretty

(14:33):
seriously and by seriously Imean just posting as frequently
as possible could get to 50K ina year even for this subject,
and that's not a joke anymore.
I don't think.
But it's tough at that pointbecause then you have to deal
with, specifically on TikTok,people reporting you constantly

(14:56):
breaking what would they call it, the community guidelines.
You know being tempered andbeing permanently banned.
I've been permanently banned AndI recovered my account because
I had discovered that there wasa feedback link on TikTok's
website And I just wrote up asemi-formal but terse email

(15:20):
saying I talk about a humanrights issue, none of my content
infringed upon the communityguidelines.
Thank you, it's pretty much it,and I spammed them, you know,
both times a day, just sendingthe same thing, until three days
later they gave it back.
I'm amazed that worked, but I'mglad it did I know, and it's
worked several times, but that'sespecially once you get to.

(15:41):
It could just be because I onlyhave 12,000 followers or
whatever I have now.
So but, and I think it's partof the reason, i haven't really
been focused on trying to growso much, because I wonder what
would happen if I made it to sixfigures.
But at that point, you know you, actually you have a tremendous
amount of influence, i feellike, at least relatively so,

(16:03):
certainly with respect to thisissue.
I mean, i don't, i'm not surethere are any, any people who
have a six, six figure audiencewho are talking solely about
genital mutilation of infants.
I mean, that's I don't thinkanyone has.
That.
I'd love to be proved wrong.
But but once you do, of course,the, the, the disproportionate
amount of people reporting youto tick talk for infringement

(16:27):
upon community guidelines isgoing to be pretty astronomical.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
And they're just doing that because you're
talking about things thatpertain to human sexuality and
that's going to get bumped inwith all the stuff that's just
showing human sexuality.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
Yeah, sure, and I mean I think that that's the the
sexuality part's kind of thescapegoat of it, the real
motivation of trauma.
I mean the fact that, likeagain, i can't, i couldn't
imagine what it'd be like to tohave a child and elect for this
for them, even mistakenly, youknow, being lied to and being
completely ignorant of thesituation, but recognizing that

(17:03):
you know your signature causedthis to happen to your kids,
like that's so apparent to methat that's where those reports
are coming from primarily.

Speaker 1 (17:14):
Give me one second.
I have one thing I need to fixin the background.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (17:55):
I know what that is now.
Sorry, i was having a technicalthing because I'm using a new
platform.

Speaker 2 (18:01):
Wait.
I want to say I feel like ifyou posted three to five times a
day on TikTok for a year, iwould be flabbergasted if you
didn't have 25,000 followers atthe end of the year.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Interesting.
You're pushing me in thedirection a little bit.
I would consider.
Here's what I'd really like.
There are some people who'vegotten big on TikTok not by
posting themselves, but byhaving their interview clips
thrown across multiple channels.
I know that you know and rotatehis strategy, if you will, was

(18:36):
he just got like 50 accounts allposting interview clips of him.
In the algorithm, if you liked,one of them would blast you
with 50 more accounts that werejust him talking.
He didn't post himself onTikTok.
He was paying people to do itfor him.
I'm putting that out therebecause there's a lot of clips

(18:57):
of me speaking on the internet.
There's a lot of episodes ofthis podcast.
You have my permission to goand post them all over the
internet.
If you want to build yourself a50,000 person account on the
back of my content, i'm finewith it, as long as you're
posting the good clips.
Part of the reason I'm creatinga long tail of content is so

(19:17):
that I can do that.
It's also the reason that Ihave guests on multiple issues,
not just because I'm interestedin multiple issues, but I figure
that someone who's interestedin the history of human rights
or the school system or thesubjects like natural birth.
They're going to be interestedin this too.

(19:37):
It's one of those things whereI it's also like I don't know if
I want to put in the time foran audience that I don't own.
That's always been the otherdebate for me is I like having
an email list because I own itand TikTok is?
there's that algorithm which Iknow is powerful.
I know it brings you to thepeople who wouldn't otherwise

(19:57):
see you.

Speaker 2 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah.
It's really, i think, a laborof love at the end of the day,
which is why I've kind of reallyfallen back on how many videos
I've posted in the past severalmonths.
It's really like you said, youdon't own it, it's really just
trying to get it out there.
The message and it is becauseit could be taken away from you
in an instant, like you said,like you alluded to, that email

(20:20):
list is yours.
Nobody can take that from you.
And, to that end, the way AndrewTate decided to grow his
presence online and become themost Googled man on the planet
for some months was and perhapseven now, i'm not sure, but was

(20:43):
just a pragmatic decision ofjust I want to save as much time
as I possibly can.
Let's have other people do itfor me, and of course, he had
the resources to achieve that.
But it's not necessary.
It's not that much time.
If you want, if you don't wantto be the most Googled man on
the planet, if you just want acouple dozen thousand followers

(21:04):
or maybe a hundred thousand,that doesn't take that much time
, especially with a setup asprofessional as yours.
I think that you'll get peoplethat that would listen to you,
especially if they're going tolisten to me over and over again
.
I think they're listening toyou over and over again on this
subject in particular.
So I think it's, i think it'sprobably worth it, but I it's

(21:26):
hard to say once again, becauseyou just don't own it.
You just don't own it.

Speaker 1 (21:32):
Well, i might.
I might have to start puttingmy.
The other thing that's made methink I should start doing it is
there's some AI tools forbreaking podcast clips down into
short form video, and if I canget the robots to do it for me,
then then I'll be more likely todo it.
Yeah, it's, they're not quitethere yet.
I tried one of them and it wasa little.
It was kind of janky.

(21:52):
Okay, we'll see.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
Yeah, it doesn't got to be perfect Once it is, you
know you know, over perfection.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
I agree And you're you're showing.
One of the things I'verepeatedly told people is that
if you make content of some kind, you really can just do it for
a little bit of time each day,like the articles that I'm
putting out on substack areabout a half hour of work each,
and, you know, an hour a weekand you've got an ongoing place

(22:23):
to publish basically.
So it sounds like you're doingthe same principle on TikTok of
just, you know, 20 minutes a dayposting a few videos answering
people's questions, and that'swhat I've seen from people on
TikTok.
Creating, you know, contentaround.
This is that they're reachingand having conversations with an
audience that wouldn't normallyhear this, and so I would be

(22:45):
curious to hear more, too, aboutwhat sort of responses you've
gotten.
Are there any people who've hada shift of some kind as a
result of hearing your contenton there, or who thought about
this issue, who wouldn'totherwise think about it?

Speaker 2 (22:59):
Yeah, i would say that it's out of the norm when
that does happen, just by virtueof the nature of people and how
they hold opinions and theychange them.
I had this conversation withBrother K and he confirmed it.
I would say roughly 10% of thetime.
I told Brother K that you wouldget someone who actually

(23:19):
changes their mind And it mightbe less than that He's give or
take, but it's certainly lessthan half.
I mean well, less than half.
Most of the time when peoplecome to an argument or
discussion where opinions differ, especially about something so
intimately related and relatedto your kids, related to

(23:44):
sexuality, it's just thatpercentage is going to dwindle
and dwindle, but it does happen.
It does happen.
I mean, sometimes it could be.
You know, i'm honest, i'm honestand open, kirk Frank, with a
person that I'm not here tochange your mind.
You know, i understand thatthese one to three minute clips
are not going to be necessarilysufficient, especially for a

(24:05):
scientific person, because it'sjust me talking.
You know, what evidence do Ihave?
I don't have, you know, enzo'smodel.
I don't have a foreskin, ican't tell you the experience of
that empirically, but I have,you know, many hours reading
books and watching thesedocumentaries, listening to

(24:25):
lectures at Ivy League schools.
Here's a resource.
Go check it out.
And then, when they come back ifthey ever do which I could
probably count on one hand howmany times that's happened
they're like holy crap, i wasvery wrong And this could have
been, and sometimes was someonewho is very aggressive
beforehand, but for some reason,you know, their intuition was
maybe I should go watch this.

(24:45):
It just doesn't happen thatoften, but there are people who
are, who are already at a levelof consciousness where they were
open to being wrong right offthe bat And your content did it.
You know your content was justoh man, i didn't know any of
this stuff, and just a simpleGoogle search checks out.
You know it checks out what youwere saying.
You know those facts were trueAnd and there you are, i changed

(25:09):
my mind and I'll protect mykids.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
So even if 10%, you said, change their mind, you've
got 10,000 followers.
10% of that would be 1000people, and I think that that is
something that gets lost whentalking about reaching people
through media is oh, like, mostpeople don't change their mind,

(25:35):
but if only a small percentchange their mind and the
content has a large enough reach, those are big numbers.

Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, and that's just the followers I mean, that's
not people who decided not tofollow me and just went on with
their day And which is probablymost of the people whose minds
have been changed, people whodidn't want to continue
listening to the guy sayingdon't cut baby day to be to be
kind of, you know, joe Rogan,and comical about it.
But, yeah, be careful of theframe.

Speaker 1 (26:06):
You're losing your eyes sometimes.
Here we go.
You can adjust it up if youwant to lean forward, but just
you know we'll make sure we getwe get a good job.

Speaker 2 (26:13):
I think this is as good as it gets right here All
right.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
So what else?
So you've been reaching peoplethrough TikTok, what else?
What else have you been doingor discovered on your own
journey with this issue?

Speaker 2 (26:30):
I mean, the only other place I've been
extraordinarily active would bemaybe extraordinarily, but been
active in a community is therestoring.
I mean particularly on Reddit.
Like you said, there tends tobe some segregation with respect
to certain avenues in theinteractivist community And
Discord is pretty big, althoughI don't like that platform too

(26:52):
much, so I don't know a lotabout about that.
Just the user experience for meisn't.
I don't fancy it, but Reddithas been a place I've been
active And then just in mypersonal life, i talk about this
issue with a lot of people anda lot of.
I meet a lot of people becauseI've done ride sharing quite a
lot.
I've given like a thousandrides in the past.

(27:13):
I don't know how much time, butI've spoken with most of those
people on this issue.
It only recently got me introuble, but I just don't really
have much of a filter.
I know everybody needs to knowthis And there's no good place
to bring it up.
There's no good placewhatsoever.
So, and most people have beenamenable to having that

(27:35):
discussion, all but one who didreport me and I was banned for
like a day, but but I'm fine now.

Speaker 1 (27:44):
Do you have bumper stickers on your car?
when someone's Uber arrives, doyou roll up?

Speaker 2 (27:49):
or whatever ride sharing platform.
It's funny you out, because Ido, i have your whole baby
sticker on my bumper, but that'spretty subtle.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
That's true.
I've seen some intacto carsthat are not subtle.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
That was when I started the ride sharing.
I had a four skin is not aburst effect, but I took that
one off before I started givingthe rides.
You know, it's funny becausethe instance where I did
actually get reported, i usedthicker kid gloves than I ever
did And in the report they saidthat I explicitly referred to my
own personal genitalia.

(28:32):
But what I actually said was Ihad an unconcential surgery that
most males have in America AndI, honest to God, left it at
that and talked a little bitabout human rights, never
referred to genitalia, or letalone my own, and they knew what
I was talking about.
I'm 90% sure they had a son ormultiple sons and that's why

(28:54):
they consequently reported me.
But most of the time you're notgoing to get that.
It was once again kind ofsurprising to me how many people
were willing to discuss it,perhaps out of being overly
agreeable, maybe much of thetime, but still a lot more
people know, and that's all thatmatters to me.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
It's funny, sometimes the conversations that most
offend people have nothing to dowith what you said to them, but
their level of capacity to beoffended I'll put it that way or
their preexisting triggers.
I found that sometimes, whenI'm publishing something,
they're saying something that'svery gentle.

(29:39):
From my perspective, whatdetermines whether how it's
received often has nothing to dowith me and it has to more to
do with the other person, andit's also that it sounds like a
lot of the time you're speakingto people, you're coming from a
place where it's okay for youAnd that energy of this is a
normal thing to talk abouttransfers to them, and so they

(30:01):
fall into that frame.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
Well, that happens so frequently.
I'm glad you said that And I'vehad people explicitly note that
to me that this is something Idon't ever talk about with
people my own family, my ownmale friends We never talk about
this, but for some reason withyou I'm comfortable talking
about it.
I've had dozens of men after Ido a TikTok live, which has been

(30:24):
very successful for me in termsof how many people see it, how
many followers I can acquirefrom it, but also been very
successful at getting banned.
I've never been more reportedthan when I do these lives,
because sometimes you have25,000 people that saw it over
the course of an hour And youget a lot of eyeballs on it.

(30:45):
But after that I'll sometimesmention my telegram or my
Snapchat or something for men tocome and inquire about
respiration or just to chatabout the issue and learn more.
And I remember sometimes aftera live I'd have a dozen people
that added me on telegram orsomething and then we'll talk

(31:06):
about it And they'll remark onthat.
They'll say I don't have anyoneelse that I can talk about this
with, but it could have justbeen that phenomenon that you
mentioned of just when you havea comfortability with the
subject that translates andtransposes into their own
attitude.

Speaker 1 (31:25):
I'm curious what percentage of men that you speak
with are interested inrestoration or things like that,
because you mentioned asignificant portion becoming
interested in that or reachingout to you and wanting to be
involved in conversation aroundthat or communities around that
after speaking with them.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
Nearly all of them.

Speaker 1 (31:49):
Interesting.
So once someone becomes awareof the issue, their next
question is okay, well, what canI do about it?
How can I solve?

Speaker 2 (31:55):
this for myself, absolutely Nearly all of them
And in part because they justdon't know that that restoration
isn't, because they strike meas kind of gung-ho about it.
What can I do about it?
But they don't know thespecific anatomical features of
the foreskin, just howspecialized it is and just how

(32:17):
incomplete the ancientstructured technique of foreskin
restoration actually is.
That's not to say you shouldn'tdo it.
There's tremendous benefit toit relative to being circumcised
.
But it is still incomplete andit is as I've heard before and I
kind of liked this.
And this again doesn't mean youshouldn't do it.
But it is kind of the wild westof body modification, which is

(32:39):
also kind of ironic becausewe're just restoring something
that we were born with, thatevery male is born with and has
been born with for tens ofmillions of years if we extend
back to our mammalian ancestors.
So it's, even though it is kindof the wild west of body
modification, it's just becauseit's such a sensitive part of
our anatomy.
It's something that hasn't beenscientifically discovered, it's

(32:59):
not popular, it's not quotenormal by any means in most
people's eyes.
But ironically, we're nottrying to augment ourselves,
we're trying to put backsomething that was lost, which
of course we can't actually do.

Speaker 1 (33:18):
I mean, is it the wild west, though?
Because at this point, therehave been tens of thousands of
people who've done it, there'sorganizations dedicated to it,
there's a subreddit.
It's certainly more establishedthan various other body
modifications that people areinterested in.

Speaker 2 (33:36):
For sure.
I mean, i think.
I mean I just think about howmany people probably have gauges
.
It's probably millions.
I think Ron Lau, who I knowyou've, i think you probably
interviewed for Americans.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
He's in the documentary.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Yeah, i think he quoted, i think he said
something like a quarter of amillion men worldwide.
he assumes.
Now, let's say, even if it wasdouble, that, even if it was a
half a million, there's a lotmore people getting piercings
and gauges and probably breastaugmentation and all that sort
of.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
It's still more than the various transhumanist things
people are interested in.
So it's still more than peoplewho've had, like, a computer
chip implanted, or interested inneurolink or are wanting to do
various other like gene therapy.
It's more than that.
I mean, these are things thatpeople are talking about just as

(34:29):
possibilities now, and Iremember when I was growing up I
read a book by someone who'dgotten a computer chip attached
to their nervous system thatallowed them to interface with
certain things, and this waslike a brand new thing that
people were talking about.
So that is what I wouldconsider the wild wild west.

(34:51):
Or there's a documentary I sawwhere someone injected something
that was supposed to altertheir DNA.
Like that's something wherepeople are doing stuff and no, i
agree with you.

Speaker 2 (35:00):
I agree with you in actuality, like in reality.
You're right, that is the wildwest, because God only knows
what's going to happen.
We know what's going to happen.
If you cover your glands, it'smost likely going to
dechlorinize and become mucosalagain.
You won't have the same kind ofsensation you otherwise should
have had.
And we can talk a little bitabout how much you may or may

(35:22):
not have, because I feel like Ihave a pretty good concept of
that, although it's certainly byno means objective or
scientific, it just studied.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
You know.
what I think you're getting at,though, with the Wild West
comment is that it's not yetcommercialized or publicized.
I would might use the wordunderground in the sense that
something like breast implantsis commercialized.
There are people who make theirliving doing that.
You can see billboards for itin LA and Las Vegas and places

(35:59):
like that.
It's a known thing that peopledo.
that's a part of the culture,to the point where people will
make jokes about it, whereasthis is a thing that exists,
that not everyone is awareexists, and so, even though it's
known how to do it, there aresome people who are running

(36:21):
businesses that sell products tohelp people do it.
It's not established in themainstream.
the same way, i might use theword underground, but the
process by which you do it iskind of established at this
point.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah, absolutely, but I think you're right, certainly
it's.
I think that it's sort of theWild West because of that
underground nature, but it'salso because it's your most
sensitive anatomy and youranatomy that, specifically for
young men, you care very muchabout And you are doing
something that is permanentlyaltering it and it has not been

(37:00):
studied.
Perhaps most importantly, whatyou're going to feel and just
how normal it's going to feelrelative to being intact and
feel and function.
It's not assured for you.
You just have what other menhave done it and say.
So that's really what kind of,in my mind, makes it the Wild

(37:24):
West.
You just don't know what theoutcome is going to be.

Speaker 1 (37:28):
I wonder how much of that is socially constructed,
though.
On the other issues, so I meanthere's things with breast
implants where those go wrong orlike they burst inside a
woman's body or something thatthey used in the implant that
was toxic.
And it seems to me that those,because they involve a larger
industry, there's this veneer ofsafety.

(37:49):
That's while a doctor is doingit, so it must be safe, right,
whereas I don't know if plasticsurgery is actually that safe.
And if you look at the outcomesof plastic surgery especially,
you know photos of before andafter people like doesn't always
look that good.
And there's someone I knew at agym who had gauges in his ears
and he stretched them to thepoint where they would move

(38:11):
around too much when he ran Andso he would wear headphones when
he ran because like it wasactually uncomfortable otherwise
he had to have headphones tohold them in place.
And that's something where Ilook at that and like I don't
know if that's a bodymodification that he necessarily
wanted to turn out that way.
You know someone who had a lotof tattoos and I think that was
probably something he did as apart of a punk phase or an

(38:34):
interest in that subculture, andI wonder how much the safety of
those other things is likesocially constructed and maybe
it isn't.
Whereas you know this, i guessthe safety risk is something
that might be perceived as moreserious because of the part of
the body it involves, but Idon't know that the safety

(38:56):
difference is actually thatdifferent between it and other
body modifications.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
I want to say it's safer.
I haven't heard of that manyanecdotes of people injuring
themselves and more often thannot it's going to be with, i
would imagine with device use,because it's not just in it's.
This is an assumption.
I don't have data for this oreven just very powerful

(39:22):
anecdotes that I can rattle offthe top of my head, but I just
imagine if you're usingsomething other than your own
hands or for a tensioning systemto the force that you're
putting on, you're exerting uponthe tissue that you want to
expand through mitosis, youdon't have that direct feedback
from your own body, you're notthe one doing it, and so I'd

(39:43):
imagine most injuries can justbe avoided by foregoing devices
and doing it the way that mendid it thousands of years ago,
by using they used to use Iforget the phrase, but it was
like leather twine, because theydidn't have that much to grow
back right, because thecircumcision of old was
drastically different than thecontemporary one And much of the

(40:07):
glands was still covered, muchof the head of the penis was
still covered and it was mucosal.
So all they had to do was justtie a little bit of leather
string or something and keep itthere and eventually, over
months or years, it wouldstretch back to where it should
have been, and so I kind ofthink that that is the way to go

(40:28):
keep it as simple as possiblefor those reasons, apart from
for risk mitigation, but forother reasons as well, which of
course we can discuss if youwish.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
Well, i'm curious what sort of decision making
process people go through aroundthat, because restoration is a
multi-year process based oneveryone I've spoken to about it
.
Some people are able to do itquicker if they commit and

(41:00):
they're young and healthy.
There's also the possibility ofsome future technology allowing
for a more completeregeneration, so there's talk of
things like stem cells or gene.
I mean, i've seen a lot ofheadlines too that say, oh, if
you can make it another 30 years, then you'll live to 150, but

(41:26):
the future is unknown.
So I'm hopeful for that.
but who knows?
I'm curious what sort ofdecision making process people
go through around this when youtalk to them, because it's a
decision that involves a lotmore than just reason.
It brings the whole of a personand all of their emotions and

(41:46):
feelings and subconscious mindinto it.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
Right.
Well, i can share my experience, first, because I'm not sure
that's a question of necessarilyasked many people and they all
seem to be very motivated andit's just because they recognize
it's something they should havehad.
So there's not a lot of.
Once they realize that itshould be on their body, they

(42:12):
want to get it back and they'revery passionate to do that,
especially when it pertains totheir sexual fulfillment
Interesting.
They're a young man.
they want to get that back.
It's obvious.
let me do something.
Okay, this is all I can do.
all right, i'll do that.
And so I don't think there'sthat much beyond that, there's
certainly men who start torestore and never finish, and it

(42:33):
could be because it was justtaking too long or too difficult
or because, like you alluded to, there is potentially promise
of something that is moreregeneratively complete.
And I would say for myself, itwas kind of unique for me to
discover this issue through oneof those avenues that was

(42:55):
addressing how to solve thisproblem for men.
I discovered the issue ofcircumcision, the reality of it,
through FORAGEN, which is, ofcourse, a regenerative medicine
company that you're familiarwith.
You did a podcast with the chiefscience officer and former
chief operating officer of thatcompany, which I'd absolutely

(43:17):
recommend to anybody listeningto learn more about that company
.
but we won't belabor the point,but that's how I discovered it,
and so for about a month Ididn't know about restoration.
So I was just constantly askingmyself how can we get more
eyeballs on this company?
How can we let people know thisis an issue that needs to be

(43:41):
heard and needs to be supported?
And about a month later I wason Reddit and discovered the
restoration forum and it took meabout 24 hours to realize that,
at least at the time,restoration was absolutely the
way to go.
And still sometimes I wonder ifthat's absolutely true because,

(44:01):
again, we just don't know howit's going to impact a future
surgery.
But the consensus seems to bewhen you ask, even I gotta be
careful about what I say here,because I've talked with some of
the people in Foragen whoprobably wanted to keep some of

(44:23):
this information.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
I can edit stuff out if that's the problem.

Speaker 2 (44:32):
I just know that they don't want to make any promises
that they can't keep, but whatI will say is that people I've
talked to have been veryconfident that there shouldn't
be any issue, although thosesame people are not scientists.

Speaker 1 (44:53):
This is true of every startup that anyone who starts
a company or is trying to dosomething is doing that because
they believe it's possible.
Yet they are trying to dosomething that's never been done
, and anytime you do that, thereare unforeseen challenges.
So, without even talking aboutany inside information, i've

(45:17):
looked at their public stuffabout how they plan to do it.
It looks possible to me, andyet anytime you do something new
, what is possible on papermight be completely different in
practice.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Yes, so they're very confident that achieving their
mission is possible.
I think it was Eleanor Bondioli, one of the chief scientists on
the biologists on the team hadsaid was absolutely it's
possible.
When Enzo asked if it waspossible.
But what I meant was whetherit's possible to man who's

(45:53):
already been restored.
They don't like that questionbecause they don't want to be
sued if it's not possible.

Speaker 1 (46:03):
Yeah, oh, and it's like it's.
We don't know what the impactwould be on someone who's
already what's and whatsoever.
I also think it's possible usingtechnologies that already exist
now, and even in ways thatforging isn't looking into.
So I've seen stuff where peopleuse sonic waves to regrow teeth

(46:27):
that someone has lost.
I've seen research around usinggene therapies to do
regenerative medicine, soinjecting the DNA of an animal
that already regrossed its bodylike a salamander.
I've seen the there's themethod that for Jen wants to use
, which involves building ascaffolding out of stem cells.

(46:50):
I actually think there'sprobably a dozen different ways
to do it, and some of whichalready are possible with the
technology we have now.
You just need a pile of money todo, and so I'm one of the
things I've dreamt of doing isgetting you know like $10
million together and doing whatElon Musk did with SpaceX and

(47:12):
saying this is you know, insteadof the X prize, we're gonna
have the D prize.
First person to do this withyou know these requirements you
have to have the nerve endings,and the nerve endings have to
work, and whatever else you putin there, first person to do
this gets the pile of money, andthen you just have teams
compete.
I feel like that would be agreat way to do it.
You know which you know youhave to get a pile of money, but

(47:34):
piles of money exist in theworld.

Speaker 2 (47:37):
It's possible.
That's a fantastic ideaactually, And I do the D prize.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Who will be the first to get the D?
That's a great idea for sure,the memes write themselves.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
No, I think you're absolutely right.
I mean, if this is possible,which I think we both assume
that it is, it's not like fourgens working on the only
possible way to do that.
They're just the farthest alongand, frankly, the only that are
working on it.
And so, in the mind of someonelike just the average person who

(48:15):
sees either of our you knowcontent your professional formal
documentary or a three minuteclip from me just in my bedroom
on TikTok just what can I do toget this back?
Because this really sucks forme?
It's like, yeah, my kid's goingto be protected, but what the
hell am I supposed to do?
They see, just stretching thiswith this ancient stretching

(48:39):
technique, or, you know, waitfor it, Wait for four.
Jen.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
You know, what it strikes me is that the choice
between those two has a lot todo with the availability and
agency of the person.
So if you want to dorestoration as it exists now,
you can take action on thatimmediately.
If you want full regeneration,for most people that's beyond

(49:14):
their agency.
They can't start a company andgo into regenerative medicine.
So there there's apowerlessness there of that.
What you want is outside yourcontrol, and it sounds like for
a lot of people, what they'rewanting from this process is to
take something that was outsideof their control and bring it

(49:36):
back into their controlAbsolutely, whereas I'm insane
enough and high agency enoughthat I look at a multimillion
dollar price tag and go, oh, i'mgoing to go for that.
I think I could pull it off.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
No, i mean you might be right.
I mean I hope to God you do itOr someone else does.
Someone else gets tipped offfrom your podcast and says
that's a fucking brilliant idea.
I'm going to do it.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
Well, i like.
I like the prize idea becauseyou just have to put the pile of
money in escrow.
You don't have to actuallyspend it.
So if you're someone for whommoney is is no object or that's
not a significant amount ofmoney, but maybe you want to
have that experience just put itin the bank for a little while

(50:25):
and let others do the work.
That's my pitch for it.
I don't use any Saudi oilsheiks, russian billionaires,
people high up in governmentsaround the world sitting on
large sums of money, rich WallStreet Bankers.
If you're watching this podcast, send me your money.
I will hold it in escrow andreturn later with technology

(50:49):
that allows you to have strongerorgasms and a larger piece.
Oh man, that's funny, I thinkyou're, you wouldn't trust $10
million to a picture.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
I think you're absolutely right When you you,
when you mentioned that, theagency and the how did you put
it?
the agency and the power of theindividual, or of the individual
, so like how much money youhave.
I also think it comes down tohow emotionally okay you are

(51:22):
with your, your circumstance atpresent time, the degree that
you have done the work to healthe trauma and let go of that
being part of your everydayfulfillment, or every week or
every month fulfillment, andjust recognize, okay, i'm okay
the way I am, and I may diewithout ever having this

(51:42):
experience.
I may die without ever havingthis.
You know, biologically naturaland naturally intended
experience that I was supposedto have to even remotely the the
way it should be, at least interms of sensation, maybe not in
terms of emotional fulfillmentI mean, perhaps that's that can

(52:04):
still be achieved to beidentical as to what it should
have been if you were intact butbut certainly in terms of
functionally and mechanicallyand sensationally.
It's not, it's night and day,and so people who haven't
overcome that and this is partof the reason I wanted to
discuss this with you, becauseit seems as though, at least

(52:25):
outside, looking in, that you'vedone a great deal of that work.

Speaker 1 (52:31):
Yeah, i think that when I first started working on
my film, that was a big part ofthe action I was taking, and it
sounds like if someone needschange from the state that
they're in, they might need itnow and not later, and if

(52:51):
they're emotionally okay withwhere they are, then they can
have a longer time horizon.
And so it sounds like a lot ofthe people coming to you or
talking about restoration withyou just found out about this
issue.
They haven't done any emotionalintegration around it yet.

(53:12):
It's very raw for them And thisis part of their process for
that.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Yeah, and it's not necessarily going to achieve
that result.
I don't think You're not goingto find full peace by restoring
through stretching your remnantforeskin.
Now, i know that's kind of ageneral statement, but I think

(53:38):
it to be generally true, becauseit's not going to recover
everything and someday you'regonna discover that, more likely
than not.
And so there will still be somekind of, you know, victimhood
or gripe to attach yourself toemotionally or mentally that you
still need to do some kind ofemotional or psychological work
to overcome and let go of.

(53:59):
And so certainly it just comesdown to fundamentally,
restoration as a physicalsolution to potentially a
psychological problem, in thissense of we're trying to find
some kind of power through doingthis and overcoming a problem
that we were at one point intime powerless over happening to

(54:22):
us, and the answer is actuallya psychological solution.
Even in the event of origin orsome other surgery, it's still
not necessarily going to healthe psychological trauma,
because it's much more than justthe loss of function and
sensation, although that is amajor fear that humans have.

(54:43):
The thing that we fear the most, i think, is the loss of the
capacity to experience.
Of course, in absolute form,that's death itself.
But, you know, the next closestthing might be the loss of
capacity to experience sexualpleasure And so or intimacy, or
love connection with anotherperson physically, and so it

(55:08):
does prey upon our deepest fear.
But there's something extra tobeing thought upon.
When you first enter the world,you're a fresh human being and
you're supposed to be bondingwith your mother and instead
you're strapped to a board, andthere's something extra there,
psychologically, that's beyondjust losing the structure that I

(55:28):
do think needs to be healed,whether or not we get it back
instantaneously.

Speaker 1 (55:33):
You just dropped one of the most interesting
psychological, philosophicalinsights I've ever heard, which
is the loss of experience isdeath.
but death is when you can'texperience new things, and so
losing the ability to experiencesome things is a little bit of
death.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Oh, it is a death.
It is certainly a death, andI'm not saying that experience
doesn't end there.
It certainly does, for our ideaof ourselves.
You know, anthony's not goingto be here after his thoughts,
you know, and so, but it is amini death.
I mean, it's for sure a minideath when a part dies.

(56:12):
I mean if, in the sense that,like, you lose a leg, or maybe
you lose some part of your bodythat is no longer functional,
it's a death of that functionand of that experience.

Speaker 1 (56:23):
But that's a really transformative philosophical
insight.
It explains why when a childdies it's so much more tragic
than when an old person dies,because the child has more
capacity for new experiences Andit means that if someone is
closing themselves off to newexperiences, there's a way in

(56:44):
which they're saying no to life,like there's so many
interesting other things thatyou can get from that one
insight, and so removing thecapacity for someone to
experience something is in a way, removed, like it's just like a
small death.
And what it strikes me is thatit also means that if you can

(57:06):
have a healing of some kind,you're actually having even more
life because you've had theexperience of loss and you've
had the experience of theopposite perspective Exactly.
And I mean I think you knowphilosophically like that's part
of the reason that people on aspiritual level opt to
experience negative experiencesis so that they can have both

(57:26):
experiences, have multipleperspectives.

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Yeah, i think Alan Watts talked about that a lot
The English-American philosopherthat you wouldn't know soft if
you didn't know hard.
You know just to make it asbasic as possible.
And on that end you know peoplethat are, and men that are
intact, that have had theirforeskin from birth and added
through sexual maturity.
They often take it for grantedNot all of them, of course, but

(57:51):
they often do And meanwhile youknow, once there's the first man
who's regenerated, who livedhis entire life sexually
diminished and dysfunctional,will will be eternally grateful
for it.
And so it's just, it's just amatter of perspective.
But I think that the fear of theloss of the capacity to

(58:14):
experience it I focus in largepart on the fear there That's
why there's there's so much, somuch trauma around this issue,
whether so much denial, anger.
You know there's the stages ofgrief because you're grieving.
You're grieving something thatis is kind of a death, that is a

(58:34):
loss, and often for anotherperson, not yourself, you know.
Even if it happened to you,it's kind of a loss for your
partner as well.
It's in, and if it was yourparent, it's a loss for your
child.
You know.
God forbid.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
By the way, i'm curious have you done any
emotional healing work aroundthis issue in some way?

Speaker 2 (58:55):
I wouldn't say specifically I've definitely.
I think the one thing I'vetried to do is just
psychologically try to surrenderto whatever I'm feeling and not
and not try to push it away.
I wouldn't say I'm evenremotely perfect in that.

(59:18):
I would say it's a mustard seedof faith I have when I try to
do that.
So you know, maybe 10%, 5% ofthe time I'm doing that, but I
think that's kind of just.
It's really the only thing I'vebeen doing, apart from just
trying to be of service as muchas I can, which I know you
criticized actually in yourpodcast with Jordan Rell, that

(59:43):
intactivism in and of itselfisn't remotely therapy, it isn't
remotely your own traumahealing or shadow work or
whatever you want to call it.
But yeah, i wouldn't say I'vedone a tremendous amount of work
on it.
I just, at this point, i try tonot push away any of the

(01:00:05):
negative emotion that I feelaround it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
I want to update that criticism a little bit, because
I feel like there is a way thatpeople do activism as a way to
push the feeling away.
In other words, if I canconvince everyone else to have a
different perspective on thisissue, then I don't have to be
with the feeling that comesright, being around people who
are advocating for this awfulthing, right.

(01:00:31):
And there is also a way ofdoing activism where you really
are being with someone else'sdifferent perspective and it.
What strikes me about whatyou're doing, especially with
the stuff on tiktok, is that youare very present with people
who maybe don't want to bepresent with you.

Speaker 2 (01:00:49):
Yeah, or what you're doing is certainly by no means
am I perfect with that.
I've had some aggressive.
No one has.
I would put that statement in,but you did say something just
now that struck a chord with meand it's also kind of insane
that we believe this, that wecan change the opinion of
everybody and then we can becomfortable and relax and, okay,

(01:01:11):
everyone agrees with me andthey're not.
There's no evil nor no, that'snever gonna happen, and so you
have to, to focus on being okaywith that reality, which is
another death, yet again, justthe death of the idea that
everyone's gonna be on the samepage, but relation which happens
, it's not achievable, it's notrational.

Speaker 1 (01:01:33):
That's interesting that you're letting go of the
idea that you might experiencethis person changing their mind
and being present with the mindthat's in front of you which is
unchanging Right yeah, and it's.

Speaker 2 (01:01:55):
It isn't furiating.
Though.
It isn't furiating when peoplecan't see the so obvious back.
It's just so obvious.
I don't the only way tounderstand.

Speaker 1 (01:02:04):
Well, there's a way which they're saying no to a new
experience too.
They're saying no to theexperience of having their mind
changed or learning newinformation of like I'm good
where I am right here, don't tryto move me.
Yeah, it's just, i don't wantto grow.

Speaker 2 (01:02:20):
It's saying no to chaos.

Speaker 1 (01:02:25):
Well, hold on.
why the word chaos?

Speaker 2 (01:02:26):
I think it was.
I mean, i'm I'm borrowing fromJBP, from Dr Peterson, when he
said that most people say no tosomething new that they could
learn because they don't believethat they could accept the or
tolerate the chaos.
They don't believe they couldeven really survive the chaos of
learning that new ugly truth,and I put that dreadfully when I

(01:02:50):
paraphrase that's.
I think I got the point for us.

Speaker 1 (01:02:54):
I like that, i I love chaos.
I'm trying to invite a littlebit more chaos into the world.

Speaker 2 (01:03:00):
Well, maybe you can, if you're on up that ten million
dollars.

Speaker 1 (01:03:04):
Think of the chaos I could cause with more money.
That would be beautifulMotivation.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
I hope you get a ton.

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
Well, it exists.
I think this is podcasts, isthe.
I've had the idea for a whileand shared it privately with
some people.
I like it because you know somepeople have said that we, maybe
you, could start our ownversion of fortune and that
would sort of put you incompetition with them, whereas
with this you're just creating abounty for them, like if
they're the ones, the first onesto get it, then they can have

(01:03:37):
more money right and they canroll that into whatever they're
going to do to promote it.
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
No, that's a really good.
It's a really good point A andalso B the competition is good.
I mean, it just means that eachparty is gonna have to step it
up.
Step it up.
Maybe we'll ask.

Speaker 1 (01:03:54):
Please, can we have more competition for making the
world a better place?
What a wonderful thing thatright, right, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:04:02):
But no, i do think that is a brilliant idea.
I'm not I'm not necessarily aperson whose whose opinion in
terms of business to value it'snot predicated on any of my
experience but I think that itsounds to me like a wonderful
idea because you're not reallyrisking much and you have far

(01:04:22):
more parties ideally working onthe solution, at least more than
you'd imagine.
So, yeah, i think it sounds agreat idea, but, of course, the
issue comes in funding.
And if clopper wasn't able topitch to to men, to because I
don't know if you've seen hisworld world stem cell summit

(01:04:45):
monologues, but my god, theywere impressive.
I mean, i've never seen someonetalk about this issue with such
a thorough nature and meanwhile, understanding how people's
minds are going to work whenthey hear each fact, and in such
a short time frame you know,for instance, that is 2015 or
2016 World Stem Cell Summitpitch you did it in like 15

(01:05:08):
minutes.
It was shocking.
And I was even more shocked tohear that there wasn't a
millionaire in the audience whosaid, yeah, here's a check, but
anyway, not to discourage, butif you can't do it, it's gonna
be a tough, a tough thing toacquire that kind of funding.

Speaker 1 (01:05:29):
Maybe you know something like that I don't.
I don't know what the audiencewould be like for that, so you
can give the greatest pitch inthe world, but if you're
speaking to an audience thatisn't like, i'm not expecting

(01:05:50):
you know 10 million to show upbecause of this podcast, because
I don't think that my averagepodcast listener has access to
that kind of money nor theinclination to invest it.
Based on what they heard on onepodcast, my guess is that
someone who had that kind ofmoney, even if they were
intrigued by the idea, wouldwant to have a conversation with
me and want a legal contract inplace for exactly what we're

(01:06:13):
doing here and what theyprobably more conversation, you
know, ongoing, yeah yeah, be awhole

Speaker 2 (01:06:19):
thing, absolutely so nevertheless, it's a brilliant
idea.
And now my mind's just like howcan you?
how can you get it done?
but that's the, that's thething in us that just want to
experience that for the averageguy that learns this, at least
at the outset we just want toexperience it.
We just, we just want I'll moveback.
We just want to experience thatbefore we die.

(01:06:40):
And it's once again that fear,and so I think that have one
question I want to ask you ishave you done any further
podcast addressing the drama ofthis issue and how you
specifically went about healingit and addressing it?
and and also, i don't know ifyou're willing to share your
experience within restoration orregeneration, where you're at

(01:07:04):
with it now and how you've cometo you know process being okay
with the with the issue or not,the degree that you are what you
said about just being presentwith the feeling is the first
step of every healing methodI've ever seen.

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Okay, yeah, so, and in fact I became interested in
this issue through an experienceI had during Zen meditation,
and Zen meditation involves justsitting with whatever comes up
into your mind, and you're noteven meditating on a particular
topic or feeling, you're justsitting with whatever wants to

(01:07:48):
come up in that moment.
So I really appreciated yousaying that, because that's the
first step of every healingmethod I've ever studied.
First, you're present withwhat's there, and in meditation
that's the only step.
We just are present with what'sthere.
I spent a really long time justdoing Zen meditation and that

(01:08:10):
got a lot of things for me,because I think the body and the
mind want to heal and so ifyou're present with what's there
, sometimes they'll work it outon their own without you trying
to do anything.
In other words, if you're justpresent with the feeling, it'll

(01:08:32):
go through the stages of what itneeds to go through in order to
integrate, if it knows how todo that already, and a lot of
the time, trauma has to do withfeelings or things in the body
that are stuck in some way.
In other words, there might bea part of you that is stuck in a

(01:08:57):
moment from when you were a kidand doesn't know that you're an
adult now and the situation haschanged.
There's that story about anelephant that's tied to a post
when it's very little and thenit doesn't know, as it's gotten
older, that that little piece ofstring is not as strong as it
was for a baby elephant.

(01:09:18):
And I've had a similarexperience where there's a lot
of things where I can't do that.
Well, why can't I do that?
oh, because I was in asituation growing up where
people wouldn't let me do that.
Okay, well, i'm not in thatsituation anymore and like once,
once I'm present with thatunconscious belief and notice it
like I don't need to do a fullprocess of any kind.
It just kind of evaporates onits own.

(01:09:39):
But other things it can behelpful to do a full process
around.
The other phrase I've used forhealing processes is that
they're kind of like permissionslips, in the sense that if
we're healing somethingpsychologically, we could just
believe something different andhave it change because it's

(01:10:00):
psychological.
But sometimes there's a part ofyour mind that needs something
to happen to show you thatthings have changed.
In other words, if I, you know,psychologically, say, well, i
can do this, your mind wantsproof, not promises like show me

(01:10:21):
, like, can you do that?
I don't you know, whereas ifyou get reference experiences of
the opposite, that's helpful.
So I've heard the other thing,that healing is having the
opposite experience.
So if you were powerless andyou have an experience of being
empowered, that's been healed,right.
And so I think that's thereason that many people are

(01:10:42):
focused on physical regeneration, because it's a very obvious
opposite experience that wouldbe undeniable to your brain.
So, like, if you look down andit's there again, clearly
something has changed in anundeniable physical way, and
whatever parts of you might notbelieve that you're healed,

(01:11:03):
can't deny that anymore, right?
so that's sort of an overviewof healing.
I could go into specificprocesses.
Completion process is somethingthat's worked really well for
me, but that's not gearedtowards this issue.
That's geared towards a feeling.
So you have a feeling and youare present with that feeling

(01:11:24):
and then you go towards thefeeling.
That's the first step, and thenthe other thing that's helped
is somatic processes, so thingswhere someone's work, you're
working with the body in someway and just having opposite
experiences.
So I have a family, i have achild who's intact, like there's

(01:11:49):
.
There's something that has sortof psychologically quieted for
me by bringing a child throughthe process of childhood in a
way where they're safe in waysthat I was not safe growing up

(01:12:09):
and it's it's very interestingto do that.
I feel like I'm seeing oh, thisis who I would have been if I
hadn't had any trauma, which isa really strange experience.

Speaker 2 (01:12:23):
I could only imagine he's great.

Speaker 1 (01:12:27):
I love him.

Speaker 2 (01:12:28):
He's the best, does that you know, does that then
give you permission slips to dosimilar things like, or
recognize that you maybe hadmore, maybe even have that power
now.
And it was just you were thatelephant with the string.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
It kind of relate to that at all, but I feel like the
biggest change has beennormally don't curse on the
podcast, but the only way I canexpress this is cursing.
I give a lot less of a, in thesense that there's a small

(01:13:07):
number of things that I careabout.
I care that my wife is happyand safe.
I care that my child is happyand safe.
I do not care about anyoneelse's opinion or what they
think of me, and to the degreethat others actions impact the
things I care about, i care alittle bit, but even then I

(01:13:30):
don't care a lot.
And so if someone is mad at meon the internet or doesn't like
what I'm doing or has adifferent opinion, i kind of
have an attitude of like, well,what are you gonna do about it?
like I, my, my needs aredependent on those people being

(01:13:50):
safe and having enough that Ican stay alive, and beyond that
I really don't care.
And so when someone goes off, imean even large problems, even
things like larger conflicts inthe world.

(01:14:12):
I really don't care because,like the volume when all that's
turned down, there have been oneor two moments where I was
worried about my, my son, beingsafe, and there wasn't any
danger at all, it was just I wasworried, and those were moments

(01:14:34):
that, you know, i was like verypresent and very aware and like
we have to make sure he's okay.
And then he was okay and thenthat's it.
So I think that's the biggestchange.
But, having gone through theexperiences I did around this
issue, it's kind of like whatare you gonna do?

(01:14:56):
you gonna hold me down and rippart of my body off, like that's
already happened.
So you know, fuck you, i'll dowhat I want, right?
like like what are you gonna doto me?
that hasn't already happened?

Speaker 2 (01:15:08):
I'm, i'm free you should post that.
You should post that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:12):
On takedown first street how would I phrase that?
I'll just post this clip.
I've already said it no man.
That'd be great but yeah, i feellike once you're present with
the pain or the wound, i think alot of people are afraid to

(01:15:37):
have the feeling of thathappening and they don't realize
that once you're with thefeeling, you felt it and it's
done like that's it, it's over.
You know, like I, whateverfeelings I was gonna have around
this issue, i've had them andthe only ones that remain are

(01:15:57):
the ones that I haven't beenpresent with and you know, if I
become aware of them, then I'llbe present with them and I'll be
done with them.
That's pretty much it yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
So it seems like the one thing was really, in a
nutshell, meditate, you know, beas present as possible,
fundamentally, and work to thatend, and that's a very simple
thing to do.
I mean, it's a very simplething, difficult, but it is very
simple.
I've been on a couple ofmeditation retreat, silent
retreats, through the Buddhistcontext, although they did try

(01:16:28):
to make it as naked as possiblefrom that specific religion, but
it was for Posenha inmeditation, which Posenha is
very close to Zen.

Speaker 1 (01:16:39):
I mean, it really is the breath when I lived in LA,
there was a Zen group I sat withand there was a Vipassana group
I sat with, and basically theonly difference was the
Vipassana group sometimes sat inchairs yeah, and of course you
don't even need to do that.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
I mean you can be laying down.
There's any posture, as long asthey're with it, oh.

Speaker 1 (01:17:01):
Zen is strict about the post.
Oh, it's Zen.
Zen thinks those Vipassanapeople are, you know, a little
little weak because they have tosit in a chair okay, so are you
doing it, zen?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
are you close to Lotus as possible, or?

Speaker 1 (01:17:18):
yeah, i mean a lot of Americans, myself included, we
can't do the like.
The full Lotus posture?
oh yeah, you know, i have amodified version of that.
But Zen, i've heard itdescribed as like it's a yoga
position that you just hold for20 minutes, like and.

(01:17:41):
But you notice, if your mindstarts to wander that position,
people shift off that position.
So if you start leaning, thenit's a soft and assigned.

Speaker 2 (01:17:52):
Okay, you know no, i think that.
I think that's it's.
They're onto something therefor sure.

Speaker 1 (01:17:57):
That sounds about right but you can look up the
posture on the internet and findit and you know, start in five
minutes yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:18:07):
There's an app for that, many apps for that, i'm
sure at this point so you saidyou've done meditation before,
have you?

Speaker 1 (01:18:18):
what sort of experiences have you had from
that?

Speaker 2 (01:18:21):
I wouldn't say any that are that profound, other
than you know, after thoseretreats they were only about
seven days and from what I'veheard, you really is in order to
go deep you have to be therefor about three months and by
there the meditation center thatI was at was one in very

(01:18:43):
Massachusetts called the InsightMeditation Society and, yeah, i
guess a lot of people come from, even internationally, europe
and maybe Asia, but primarilythey come from it.

Speaker 1 (01:19:01):
Three months is a lot .
I've heard of people havingreally intense experiences on
like a week long retreat that'sinteresting, didn't happen to me
, i would say.

Speaker 2 (01:19:08):
I would say that you know you smell better, you, any
senses that are repressed arecertainly heightened post the
retreat, like immediately lessmental noise.
You know, just the ordinarythings you expect to happen
following your retreat, likethat.
But I wouldn't say anythingparticularly profound it could

(01:19:28):
have been because when I wasdoing those I was a work retreat
and so for, because I didn'thave very much money, i could
receive a huge discount on theretreats by doing, by signing up
to be someone who would, youknow, replenish the bathrooms,
you know, the paper towels andmaybe sweep here and there, do
the housekeeping stuff, likethat.

(01:19:50):
So maybe I was getting half ofthe experience, but it's still.
It's still had an impact forsure.
It's still had it, you mean,for you're still in silence,
you're not hearing, you're nottalking to anybody you were
chopping wooden, carrying potter.

Speaker 1 (01:20:03):
That counts.
So that's a famous phrase aboutme.
Really, yeah, chop wood, carrywater.
It's a saying that that you cando in work can be a meditation
and that also after you've donethe meditation and had a deep
spiritual experience, you shouldyou know, at the other scene
I've heard around this after theX to see the laundry, like your

(01:20:25):
daily tasks of life are stillimportant oh, yeah, yeah, right
for tour, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (01:20:32):
I'm sure it's hard for people to come back from
that when they have a kind ofecstatic experience and not just
stay there.
But I don't know, i wouldn'tknow, i've never well, this
stain.

Speaker 1 (01:20:44):
There is also a way of saying no to life, because
you're saying no to the newexperience of coming back down
to reality and having to clean atoilet right.

Speaker 2 (01:20:53):
Right, yes, it's.
I mean I can't speak frompersonal experience, of course,
having any, any experience likethat, but at least not sober,
but but I do imagine for mostpeople it must take a very long
time.
I mean I've had, i've heardfrom teachers at this, at this

(01:21:15):
place, that quote-unquoteteachers not to say they're not
not disrespect to them, but justthere's not much to teach.
You know, it's you kind ofyou're learning on your own by
just be confronted with withyour own, your own thought
process and your own feelingsand emotions and all of that.
But from from many of them thatit often takes several months

(01:21:37):
for for something like that tohappen.
And and I mean he was even SamHarris who said that before his
first retreat.
Of course he's a, he's a youyou're familiar with hopefully
your audience is as well but hewent on a kind of a hiatus for

(01:22:01):
the better part of a decade,meditating almost, almost
full-time, i think, for twoyears he was almost full-time
but many times throughout his20s And he said that before his
first retreat, which I think wasin Barry, massachusetts, he

(01:22:22):
meditated for an hour a day fora full year And he still said,
doing that and then going intomy first silent meditation
retreat.
It didn't really prepare me, inparticular for the 90-day
retreat.
You know, a week is fine butthere's levels to it and levels

(01:22:43):
that I'm not familiar with,certainly by experience, but at
least conceptually I canunderstand that if you want some
kind of profound clarity, orperhaps even healing regarding
your own general mutilation, itmight take a while.

Speaker 1 (01:22:57):
You know that's an interesting point that I think a
lot of the times people wanthealing because the feeling is
uncomfortable and they just wantit to go away.
And actually, if you give thefeeling time, it will do what it
needs to quicker than if youtry to rush it.
You know, is it saying, like,how long will this take?

(01:23:19):
Well, it will take 15 minutesif we take our time and an hour
if you try to make me rush.
right?
I think feelings are verysimilar in that if you don't
want to be with them, they'llstick around longer.
They're like cats If you don'twant them around, they come
towards you.

Speaker 2 (01:23:38):
Yeah, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost
, like if you want it to be goneand you're fighting for it to
leave, it's going to stickaround and instead it's the law
of reversed effort, which Ithink Alan Watts talked about in
The Wisdom of Insecurity.
I think that, yeah, that's theone I like the best out of his

(01:24:00):
texts and I think that is theone where he discussed the law
of reverse effort, and I won'tgo into it too much.
but for those who areinterested in what we're talking
about here, that's the book toread.
You might be able to speak toit.
You might know exactly what I'mtalking about.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
I am familiar with Alan Watts only through
hour-long lectures that I'velistened to online, but I
understand his books are mostlyjust compilations of those
lectures, so I think I've got apretty good feel for it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:32):
Yeah, i think one of the examples he used to explain
or describe the law of reversedeffort that when you try to
think, you float.
and imagine if you're in a bodyof water, if you just lay there
and you try to sink, you float.
And if you struggle and try tofloat, you sink.
And he uses a number of thosekind of anecdotes or examples to

(01:24:59):
describe how oftentimes, themore you want something, the
more you fight for something,the more you need something.
It ever alludes you, and viceversa the more you surrender,
the more you relax, the more youbecome present, the more what
you desire actually ends upcoming to fruition.

Speaker 1 (01:25:20):
I was introduced to that concept through the Taddei
Qing in a phrase in there calledWei-Wu-Wei, which means action
without action, the idea beingthat you put an intention out
into the universe and then letit come to you rather than
taking any action towards it.
In other words, you focus onthe intention, you just
completely forget about it anddon't focus on it.
And I first heard that conceptwhen I was 18 and I just

(01:25:44):
graduated high school.
No, excuse me, it was rightafter I graduated film school
And I didn't have anything linedup.
I had no job, i had broken upwith the person I was seeing,
i'd moved back in with my family, and so when I shared that with
me and I'd been trying tofigure out what I was going to
do, when I had kind of nothinggoing at the time, i thought,

(01:26:07):
okay, well, i'm just going tonot focus on the problem for
three days.
And no, it was a week, so I'mnot going to focus on it for a
week, and if after that weeknothing's happened, i'll go back
to worrying about stuffconstantly.
And that week I got a gig on afilm shoot, and so I was getting

(01:26:27):
paid.
I had a job, and then I got aninvite from someone who I'd
known from film school saying,hey, are you moving out to LA
because I need an editor, and Ithought, well, i am now.
And then you know, the trip outto LA, everything basically
lined up.
I had people to stay with thewhole way and it worked out, and

(01:26:49):
I've used that many times sinceof okay, if I've been focusing
on this problem a long time,i'll just take a break from it
and we'll go back to worryinglater, but it's still going to
be there in three days or itwon't, and I won't have to worry
anything to worry about anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:27:10):
Yeah, I mean, it just sounds like a very wise way to
go about one's life, And I do,of course, wonder what the
implications would be for thetopic at hand if you go through
life with that attitude And it'spart of it.
I wanted to talk with you aboutit because it seemed like you
were a man who I believe it wasyour wife who shared with me

(01:27:32):
that you did do some restorationearly on, But let that go
because you decided to go all inon the things that you found
would actually work and serveyou best, to come to a level of
peace with respect to the issue,And this is what the result was
.
It seems to me like kind ofessentially the most powerful

(01:27:53):
way to go about it, because ifyou take it to its extreme, of
course, maybe you will be theguy not you, but any person
doing this and going throughtheir life this way.
Maybe you'll be the one thatsomeone offers some money to put
your money in escrow and get itback.

Speaker 1 (01:28:09):
Potentially, Well, i think going big for me was more
exciting than restoration.
So for me, restoration feltlike a compromise of OK well, i
can't get everything back, soI'll get some back.

(01:28:30):
And I am more excited by takingall my chips and putting them
on and seeing what happens Andthat's just more fun for me.
When or lose It's more fun thanmaking a safe bet.
But that's also with mypersonality.

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):
Fair enough.
Yeah, there's going to be somelevel of subjectivity to it and
everybody is so massivelyidiosyncratic Although I think
we are more similar than we aredifferent but in terms of our
skills and our personalities andwe're very different And the
way we're going to decidewhether or not to rely upon it,

(01:29:07):
i feel go ahead.

Speaker 1 (01:29:08):
I lost you there for a second.
What were you saying?

Speaker 2 (01:29:17):
No, i was just saying .
I think that the way thatpeople respond to whether or not
to restore or wait forregeneration, or perhaps just go
all into the trauma and healingthe trauma, becoming as present
as possible, letting thingshappen the way that they're
going to it, regardless of ourdesire for them to go a
different way, and maybe theidea that something and the good

(01:29:41):
will come out of it, somethinggood, is exactly what we wanted.
It's hard to conceptualize thatwith respect to this issue, of
course, because think of howmany men have lived and died
being circumcised over the welive in a very different time.
So there's that to take intoaccount, with advances in
regenerative medicine and andhealing modalities of probably

(01:30:03):
any kind advancing the way thatthey are, but there are a lot of
.
we wished for this and ended updying, not getting it for sure.

Speaker 1 (01:30:12):
Yeah, see, that makes it more exciting to me, like we
could be the first.
No one's done this before.

Speaker 2 (01:30:18):
Right right, That's way more exciting.
It's definitely one way to lookat it.

Speaker 1 (01:30:23):
Yeah, if you tell me it's impossible.
Like well, doesn't that make itmore interesting?
Isn't that a more newexperience?
Isn't that a bigger yes to lifethat you could do that to say
no one's had this experiencebefore and I'm going to be the
first?

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
Yeah, if you sign up for the trial right.

Speaker 1 (01:30:39):
Yeah, even if you don't, you're still, you know,
like one of the first you know,for a first point in history,
you can do this.
Yeah, you've, by the way,you've asked about the healing
more than once.
What, how could I be of mosthelp or use to you in terms of
those questions, because I coulddo a whole podcast just on.
You know any aspect of that,But I'm curious for you what the

(01:31:05):
interest is or what would bemost useful.

Speaker 2 (01:31:11):
I don't know.
I mean, i think I think that,however you could be of service
to me is probably how you couldbe of service to the average
person struggling with that And,and it seems to me, most people
just want to know what to do ona day to day, moment to moment
basis.
Just a pragmatic kind ofinstructional and what to do.
You know what.
What resource helped you themost?

(01:31:31):
I know you said that thecompletion process was one of
them.
Another one Meditation.
Okay, how do you do those X, y,you know, so really get
meditation.

Speaker 1 (01:31:44):
You can look up the posture for Zen meditation
online and start in like fiveminutes.
Meditation is the most boringthing in the world.
You sit and stare at a wall anddo nothing And you're present
with whatever's there.
That's.
That's basically a set of timerfor 15 minutes And once you
have done that set of timer fora half hour and then you can

(01:32:06):
work your way up or you can justgo all in on a meditation
retreat, whatever it all works.
I know there's a trend to detachmeditation from spiritual
traditions through things likemindfulness, but I think that a
lot of the things that exist inthose traditions are useful and
there for a reason.
So I find that people who wantto introduce meditation as

(01:32:28):
mindfulness don't know how tohandle someone having a really
big breakthrough or havingsomething traumatic come up in
meditation, Whereas existingspiritual traditions who've
dealt with that for a long timehave a way to handle that and
have some ideas to how torespond to that, Whereas someone

(01:32:50):
who's like doing mindfulness ina corporate setting doesn't
necessarily know.
So I think there is a lot ofuseful ideas in Buddhism and Zen
that would be good for someonedoing meditation.
I would also say that the stuffthat comes up around this issue
is not separate from the restof life.
So I think there's a tendencyin tact of a circle is to like,

(01:33:12):
compartmentalize and say likewell, this is a separate thing,
But actually everything thatexists on other issues, on
spirituality, on businessprinciples, on human nature,
like that all still exists here.
So the things that you woulduse to run a business are true.

(01:33:35):
Whether or not your business iscreating social change or
having a breakthrough aroundstem cell research or any normal
business, It's all still true.
All those principles of healingare still true.
Completion process has workedfor me because, as the name
suggests, it's about completingsomething.

(01:33:56):
So a lot of therapy.
You know you hear about someonegoing in to work on their
childhood and they're stillworking on the same thing five,
10 years later.
And it's like I don't, I wantto be done.
You know I, as we've talkedabout being present with it like
there's, like I know there's asort of paradox there of like
you have to be present with itAnd, at the same time, being

(01:34:17):
present with it is how itchanges.
So completion process you'represent with a feeling, You
validate it, You treat it asvalid And then you go into the
root cause, whatever that is.
And so when I've done that, I'mnot looking for anything
related to this issue.
It's just like I'm going to bepresent with this until I figure

(01:34:40):
out where it's coming from,like why, what is the reason for
this And sometimes a memorywill come, Sometimes a feeling
whatever's there is there, Andthen completion process.
There's a process by which youmeet the unmet need behind that
feeling through visualization.
So if you get the book, thecompletion process, there's a

(01:35:04):
step by step guide in the backof it that just walks through
the specific steps And then thewhole book is, you know,
teaching those in greater detail.
And before I ever took a courseon it, I read the book and just
did it from that And probablydid like 100 hours of that just
from what I'd learned from thebook.
So, yeah, I mean like you canget a $10 book and just go from

(01:35:31):
that.
There's another book calledFeeding Your Demons that uses a
process from Tibetan Buddhismthat I found really helpful, but
I don't do that as much now.
It's similar.
It's the idea that parts ofyourself that might feel, you
know, like the title suggests,demonic or evil or bad in some

(01:35:55):
way, things that are a personaldemon for you are just parts of
yourself that have an unmet needthat you need to meet that need
, and that's right, brownrealization.

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
I mean it's just it's digging deeper into the
motivation or the precursor ofwhatever you're feeling.
If there is one, you betterfind it, because whatever you're
feeling might just be thesurface of it.

Speaker 1 (01:36:18):
All right.
So you said you had somethingyou wanted to ask me before we
finished.

Speaker 2 (01:36:22):
Yeah, we said that you meant that you, once you
bought the $10 completionprocess book that you
independently spent about 100hours, you know, going through
the exercises or instructionsthat were therein, and I guess
I'm just wondering what did thatlook like, you know, was it you

(01:36:45):
sitting in a room, almost kindof in a meditative kind of
posture, and analyzing what wascoming up?
or were there actual practicesthat you had to perhaps journal
or you know?

Speaker 1 (01:36:59):
Oh I'm.
I was literally just sitting ina chair staring off into space
for a half hour And then I'mlike, okay, i got it.
So I would go.
Okay, what is?
sometimes it was verydeliberate about something I
wanted.
I would go.
What is the part of me that isnot a match to getting this

(01:37:22):
particular thing in my life thatI want?
So what part of me, whatfeeling, what belief isn't going
to get the thing that I want?
Because very often the reasonthat people do not have the
things that they want is becausesome part of them does not

(01:37:42):
actually want it or is going inthe opposite direction of that
thing.
So if you want a relationshipbut you have a belief that
people can't be trusted or thathaving a relationship is going
to take up all of your time, orthat relationships aren't safe

(01:38:03):
because people have hurt you inthe past or whatever, it is,
that belief, that aspect of you,is going to be pulling in the
opposite direction of the thingthat you want.
So it's easier to shift thatthan to try to bulldoze aspects

(01:38:25):
of yourself or beliefs that youhave that are going in the
opposite direction of what youwant.
And usually, if 100% of aperson's consciousness,
personality, who they are, isgoing for a thing, they usually
get it right.
If you're 100%, i am determinedto do this, usually it works

(01:38:48):
out.
So what I would do is I wouldjust sit and I'd go okay, what
part of me isn't a match to thething that I want or isn't going
the direction that I want it togo?
And I'm just going to bepresent with that and see what
it has to say, what the feelingis there, what the belief is
there and where did that comefrom and can I change that?

(01:39:11):
So, very deliberately, going atthose, one after the other, and
I went to an event that Tilswan, the creator of the completion
process, put on, where I learnedthis particular method from her
of just if you want something,the reason that you might not be

(01:39:35):
getting it if you haven'tgotten it already, is that there
might be aspects of yourpersonality, you know, pulling
in the opposite direction And Ihad wanted a particular kind of
relationship And so I did that.
I did that process for sixmonths very consistently, and

(01:39:57):
then met my wife.
After that And I, literally thenight that I met her around
four o'clock, i went into thepart of me that was not a match
to the kind of woman that I was.
I was kind of woman or sex thatI wanted And I went into that
around four o'clock and then Imet her at six o'clock.

(01:40:18):
So it was very quick, paid offvery quickly And after I met her
, all the parts of me that werescared of actually being in that
relationship came up.
And so when we would initiallytalk and get to know each other,
sometimes we trigger each otherand I go hold on, i am so upset

(01:40:43):
right now.
Give me a minute, i'm going tosit over here and then we'll
continue this conversation.
I would like sit down in thechair, i would do the process
and I would come back and Iwould be fine.
And what was previously a fightwas no longer a fight And she
saw that a couple of times waslike what's going on, what are
you doing?
And so I taught her the process.

(01:41:03):
And then she took to it andwent beyond me and she's a
practitioner right now and workswith clients and has learned a
whole bunch of other stuff tooon top of that.
That's also really useful andgood.
So that was what that lookedlike for me And I'm I use it in

(01:41:26):
two ways.
If something comes up, like, ifthere's a feeling or an incident
oh my God, like, whatever it isthat feeling that triggers me
or whatever it is, i'll go intothat.
If it's like sort of a suddenthing, a reaction.
What I mean by a trigger, bythe way, is when the reaction is

(01:41:50):
bigger than the situation callsfor.
So the sign of a trigger isthat you're not just reacting to
the situation, but the eventsin the past or beliefs you have
about the situation that are notactually present in that moment
.
So if something really badhappens, like and you have a

(01:42:10):
feeling about it, then it makessense.
You have a feeling about it,right?
It's when you have an everydayoccurrence and there's an
overreaction to it.
That's usually the sign of atrigger.
And then the other way that Iuse it is that if there is
something I am very consciouslyworking towards, I would go into
the part of me that isn't amatch to that.

(01:42:31):
So, like we were talkingearlier about, you know, raising
$10 million for a particularcause or initiative, i as I am
right now, am probably not amatch to $10 million.
That feels like more than I cando right now And I'm not sure

(01:42:53):
how I do it, and so if I wasreally seriously pursuing that
goal, if it wasn't just an ideawe were talking about, but
something I was actually goingto do, the first thing I do is I
would sit down and go okay,what part of me is not a match
to this?
I like, well, i have to get alawyer and I probably do much

(01:43:13):
contracts.
I don't know how to do that AndI might need a 501c3.
I'd probably have to have otherpeople on the board, and are
there other people I reallytrust on the board?
Oh, wow, all my trust issues ina relationship are coming up
right now.
And now I have to have multipleother people who I would trust
with $10 million.
Like that's a new relationship.

(01:43:35):
I have not had relationships inthe past where there was that
much at stake on them.
You know the I mean there's myrelationship to my wife, which
obviously involves reallysignificant things to me.
But you know, like all of thosethings, i got to go.
Okay, what is you know, do I,if I, if I meet someone who has
that kind of money, am I able toexpress myself to them

(01:44:02):
confidently?
I think I could, but you knowI'm going to go do a process and
check right.
So the other way that I use itis very consciously going
towards the things that I wantof okay, like, is there any part
of me that isn't going thatdirection?
And then, of course, once youdo that, then you take action

(01:44:22):
right.

Speaker 2 (01:44:24):
Right, and in this process, is you ever discover
that, oh, maybe you actuallydidn't want that thing?

Speaker 1 (01:44:30):
Yes, oh yes.
All the time You have to gointo it with the awareness that
maybe the part of you saying nois right Is an integrity, yeah.
Yeah, Oh, totally Like I havedone the process before,
thinking that I wanted one thingand going actually I wanted
that as a reaction to trauma.

(01:44:50):
So if you're feeling unsafe,there was one around, you know.
I was like I need control ofthis situation And it's like I
want to control because I didn'tfeel safe And once I felt safe
I could be present in it and Ididn't need to control
everything, right.
So there's stuff like that allthe time And it changes when you

(01:45:12):
do the process and you have totrust that, like, maybe the part
of you that is saying somethingdifferent than your conscious
mind is correct and is the partyou should listen to.
So every part of the philosophyof the practice is like all
parts of you are trying to dowhat they think is best.
You know there's, there's nopart of you that is ever

(01:45:38):
actually doing something that itdoesn't think is good.
It's just that, like in thereal world, like in the external
world, different people havedifferent ideas of what is
actually good.
So the same, you know the inZen, people meditate with their
eyes open.
A lot of meditations.

(01:45:59):
You close your eyes and thenthey meditate with their eyes
open, and part of the reason forthat is the idea that the
external world and the internalworld are not different, that
whatever exists out in the worldis within you in some way.

Speaker 2 (01:46:12):
And certainly not as connected.

Speaker 1 (01:46:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:46:20):
No, yeah, one thing I did want to, because it sounds
to me like a lot of people thatend up restoring are restoring
out of the fundamental, thefundamental response to, you
know, trauma that you justalluded to.
I forget exactly how you put itinto words, but it struck me as
that seems like that's what alot of people are doing when

(01:46:42):
they decide to stretch What.
I'm not saying that that's abad thing, i'm not trying to it
Oh it's, it's a really goodresponse for most people, oh,
yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And and most men, anecdotally,says the best thing they've ever
done for themselves.
And some, who, who maybe did itimproperly, say it didn't
really do much for them and it'slike well, i understand why you

(01:47:05):
grew one half of your foreskin,not the other, you didn't grow
the cosa.
And there are objective, youknow, at least in terms of
experience, measurablesensations, you will recover.
but it is, of course, acompromise.
And, and again, what, whetheror not it's valuable, is kind of
irrelevant.

(01:47:26):
Of course it's valuable, you'regoing to have something there,
and Usually things that are hardto achieve have some merit,
which this of course does.
But, staying on the top oftrauma, it seems like a lot of
us are really seeking that outbecause I need to do something
to fix this now, and it's goingto be a physical thing, because
I know how to do that, whereasthis, these processes like Zen,

(01:47:49):
meditation or more, perhaps moreappropriately, because it seems
like a more complicated thingto do the completion process are
more Ambiguous on how to startand keep going.
And if am I doing it properly?
It's not like oh, you justpinch here, you stretch, you put
this device on and and in somemonths you're going to see

(01:48:11):
results but I actually thinkthat's really legitimate.

Speaker 1 (01:48:15):
There's a book Called swallowing the snake, which is
about the way that men healdifferently in the masculine
form of healing, and one of thethings that really recommends is
that Men often want to dosomething.
They.
The physical process isactually really good, and talk
therapy is often less effectivefor men because men heal

(01:48:38):
differently and.
So the process that bookrecommends and talks about and
says that many men naturally dois Is that they create a
physical, sacred or safe spaceof some kind and then they do
something in that space thatallows them to Move the energy
of what they're feeling.

(01:48:59):
And So I know that my dad didthis very naturally When his mom
, my grandfather or, excuse me,my grandmother died, so he would
Go to the gravesite where shewas buried and he would just
spend time there and initially,right after she died, it was a

(01:49:21):
significant amount of time andas time went on It was less, but
that was his grieving processis he had a sacred space of some
kind, which literally thegravesite, and he would be there
and That was what allowed himto Feel what he needed to around

(01:49:43):
that.
And so It sounds to me like fora lot of men, force can.
Restoration is a similarProcess where there's obviously
a sacred space.
It's a part of their body thatis sacred, but it's also a Space
in their life and they're doingsomething physically that moves
the energy over time.

(01:50:03):
Hmm, and I think a lot of peopletry to get the same result
through activism, and thechallenge of that is that The
space in which activism occursis often not safe or sacred.
A lot of times, activisminvolves going into spaces that
aren't safe, that need to becomesafer in some way.
But I Mean that's there's somany different masculine healing

(01:50:28):
methods that revolve aroundthat have created, i think, the
space.
Creating that element of it,too, is that Men often have to
create space for others, and thegeneral Everyday life is not a
safe space for that.
So it's very hard to go througha grieving process.
Well, so you know, taking careof the family and going to work

(01:50:50):
and getting everything done thatyou need to get done.
So you have to kind of create aspace that's separate from that
, where it's like, okay, if Iemotionally Fall apart or
experience something reallyintense, it's okay to do that
here, because I'm not lettinganyone down by doing that here
and no one is counting on me inthis space.
Like this is a space where it'sokay for me to, you know, feel

(01:51:11):
whatever I need to feel.

Speaker 2 (01:51:13):
Yeah, I would say that resonates for myself and I
did.
I think I recall you mentioningthat in the podcast She did
with Jordan and rel.

Speaker 1 (01:51:22):
I'm gonna have to repost it on the main feed now,
since you've brought it up acouple times.

Speaker 2 (01:51:25):
It was from a while ago valuable you did mention it,
thank you the differencebetween That's the the genders,
and how we we tend to want toheal and Men want to do
something about it physically,and it would explain why so many
men take to restoration thecofish and water, and I Think it

(01:51:46):
just comes down to whether ornot you're doing it with the
proper intention.
You know, perhaps perhapsHaving some kind of marriage
between your attitude whenyou're practicing Zen or
practicing The completionprocess, going into With that

(01:52:07):
same attitude, into yourstretching technique or regiment
or what have you, your regiment, and.
But I definitely think there'sthere's something.
However, however much themasculine Does heal that way I
mean it's no accident that thatyou did a lot of the other

(01:52:29):
internal stuff as well I don'tthink that there's.
I think there's something extrathere that you can't necessarily
get By by doing somethingphysical, but then again it's
not that physical like creatinga safe space for yourself, like
you said your father had done to, to grieve properly.
That's a very emotional thing.
I mean, you're sitting there,you're dealing with your

(01:52:52):
thoughts and your emotions andProcessing them how you will,
even though that is it kind of aphysical seclusion.
Maybe that's the aspect of it,that's masculine and whereas if
you're restoring, it's a verydirect, explicitly physical
thing that you're doing.
A physical Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:53:09):
I think the purpose of the physical is to move the
energetic.
So It just sort of depends onhow much you Feel like you need
to move that.
So I think for my dad, you know, being at the physical site of
a gravestone, i don't know thatyou need to do a lot, much more

(01:53:32):
than that, mmm-hmm, it justdepends on what the person needs
.
I mean, there is somethingphysical, though, about going to
a particular location andstanding there and being outside
, and it's in nature and youknow.

Speaker 2 (01:53:50):
Certainly certainly.

Speaker 1 (01:53:52):
So I have a question for you before we finish.
Sure I Should have twoquestions, um one is there
anything that we didn't talkabout, that you would like to
make sure we talk about, oranything I forgot to ask you or
didn't we didn't get to, thatyou want to make sure we get to?

Speaker 2 (01:54:11):
I mean, i definitely had in my mind the the Desire to
share an experience I had ofwith one young man who was
circumcised when he was 20 yearsold in Spain, and in Spain,
when they circumcised formedical reasons in adulthood
they take as little as possible,or at least most of them do.

(01:54:32):
He was unlucky in that he founda physician that Wanted to also
take his frenulum, so he had afrenylectomy and he also had his
Frenar band removed, which puthim in an interesting position
for people Who, like myself, fora restoring Or and in the sense
that he's kind of at a placewhere it's it's sort of

(01:54:54):
achievable.
I mean, he was born with thisforeskin.
But for men who have a remnantleft, likely have a damaged
Frenulum, have no trace of aFrenar band, if they incur
mitosis and generate Replicateskin cells from their inner
mucosa that's remaining andtheir outer skin that's
remaining, you're kind of gonnaend up where he was, so it was

(01:55:16):
you.
It was unique in that he, he,he could kind of Have a very
Because it was a quickturnaround, right like he's
circumcised, he keeps his glandsexposed because there's no
Frenar band and Frenulumtethering it.
Even though he can cover most ofhis glands.
He keeps it exposed and threemonths later, once it's done

(01:55:39):
healing, he has intercourse forthe first time and And That's
when the trauma kicked in andwhen he was suicidally depressed
because he's like I had 20% ofmy sensation left and For the
next eight months, after hefound my content, i told him
okay, maybe tether it, you know,at the the forefront of your

(01:56:03):
glands with some kind of o-ringor string or something.
And he did that.
In eight months later It wasmuch better.
It became these glands, becameyour coastal again.
Of course it wasn't as dry asas either of ours would be,
because it was, you know,decades compared to several
months.
But he anecdotally said he's atabout 60 to 70% of the his

(01:56:27):
original sensation.
And, of course, one thing Ilearned in just having
conversations with this youngman Who did end up healing his
trauma Psychologically.
Of course you may have you know,he doesn't have to deal with
the trauma being cut on andbetrayed, and he consented to
this and all of that, but it wasstill a very traumatic thing
for him to go through.
He wondered whether or not hewanted to continue living.
But but One thing I realizedwas that we're not necessarily

(01:56:52):
chasing sensation.
We're chasing sexualfulfillment and The joy that
that would bring, and they'renot necessarily like a linear
kind of exchange, although thesensation is there for reasons,
certainly has a function and and.
But anyway, he told me any onething I want to say, just

(01:57:16):
because I want to reassureanybody who is, who's restoring,
who may be struggled with a lotof the same mental blocks that
I had in in Beginning thatprocess of just, it won't be the
same, it's not gonna.
If that's something you reallywant to do and maybe you went
through the completion processthat that Brendan so eloquently
described here earlier in thepodcast And you've just, you've

(01:57:40):
definitively discovered thatthis is what you want to do, you
want to restore, but you'restruggling with these negative
beliefs that it won't be thesame The most important thing,
according to this young man, ishaving your glands being mucosal
.
You know, that is kind of the,the, the, i think an analogy he

(01:58:01):
used was like having a mucosalglands is like Having is like
being well fed.
It's like the, it's like themeal of sex.
It's kind of like the meal,like the dinner of sex, whereas
Having the freenar band and thefrengulum is kind of like the
dessert.
You know, it's a very differenttype of sensation.
It is a fine, very fine touchsensation that will be missing

(01:58:23):
if you restore.
It will be missing.
The closest thing would be Yourscar line at the tip of your
nascent foreskin, which is isnot nothing.
It will mimic that a little bit.
It certainly won't be the same,but overall I do think it's.
It's hard to it's hard to denythat Foreskin restoration is a
pretty powerful modality Forrecovering sexual fulfillment

(01:58:46):
and certainly the one that wehave the most of Is the most
effective today.
Now maybe you'll be likeBrendan and and you'll go all in
on the trauma and be like ah,i'm okay, i'll relax for however
long it takes to.

Speaker 1 (01:58:59):
To Looks like you want to say something here, but
well, i was realizing that forme, my motivation is not sexual
fulfillment, it's actually power.
Oh, okay, i feel like There isa way in which I want power over
my own reality and physicalbody.

(01:59:21):
that Full regeneration wouldallow more, and so, because I
have that motivation, thatchanges the equation for me.
So it's like well, you can getmore pleasure back if you did
this, it's like, but I alreadyhave the power to do that.
I'm kind of interested in the,the more power that I don't have

(01:59:44):
yet.

Speaker 2 (01:59:45):
I think they're necessarily divorceable, i mean.

Speaker 1 (01:59:50):
What's that line from house of cards?
everything is about sex, exceptfor sex, which is about power.

Speaker 2 (01:59:58):
No, i don't.
I there's, he's on to somethingthere, like there's a power and
being able to actually fulfillthis or not, like there
definitely is.
No, that's an interestingrealization.
I feel like this for a lot ofguys they just want the function
back, you know, they just wantthe sensation.
But to, to have the power ofyour own, it does strike me as a

(02:00:20):
bit more conscious, to right,of being able to restore your
human right.
Is that what you kind of meanby power?

Speaker 1 (02:00:29):
No, by power I mean power, human right, human right,
i don't know.
I want power.
Okay this, by the way, is theother thing that happens.
If you do a lot of internalwork is, i think, for a lot of
people, admitting That they wantpower is something in their
shadow.
Well, i've like no, that's notnot supposed to want.

(02:00:50):
They're like no.

Speaker 2 (02:00:52):
Power is positive for Yeah, force is negative.
A lot of people sayderogatorily they use the word
power.
There's nothing negative aboutpower.
Power is bone, Yeah, or isn'tit?
they really mean force.
I.

Speaker 1 (02:01:06):
Appreciate that distinction, that's.
that's very true.

Speaker 2 (02:01:08):
Yeah, it's not one that I made, it's one that dr
David R Hawkins.

Speaker 1 (02:01:12):
So people check out that oh, oh, getting some check
out very esoteric teachings thatmay or may not be on the shelf
behind me into this conversation.
Yeah, okay, so this is thesecond question that I wanted to
ask, which is that I I wasdebating whether or not to talk

(02:01:32):
about Completion process on thispodcast and, and to the degree
that I did in our conversation,because I feel like there's two
reasons.
One, i feel like it's kind of asecret weapon that I have and I
Don't know if I want to give itaway and to.

(02:01:53):
I've had some people get reallyupset about the fact that I use
completion process to the pointwhere one wrote a hit piece
just on that with all sorts offalse and stupid things in it.
Which man there's?
there's a lot I could say aboutthat.
It's one of those things where,you know, in a movement where

(02:02:17):
the previous leader, jonathanConti, committed suicide, i
think it should raise huge redflags.
If someone writes a hit pieceon someone else's healing method
Or the way that they're like,am I healing my trauma wrong?
You know, is essentially thethe Argument that I I saw in
this piece Like that shouldraise red flags, and the fact

(02:02:40):
that it didn't raise is more redflags for me And it's also I
think people need healing aroundthis and if something you know
this has worked for me, i'venever Really said that like it
should be a part of the movementin any way or anything like
that.
It's just like I did this andit helped and you know, maybe it
helped you too.
That's the sort of the extentof it.

(02:03:04):
But I have a debate of like also.
I don't know if I want to putpearls before swine.
So like this is so effectivefor me And I know there's gonna
be some people who are likewe'll prove it or like you know
It doesn't.
Like I don't care.
Like there's an element thereof like I don't want you to know
how to use this.
Like you don't deserve thegains I've got from this.

(02:03:26):
So I Notice that came up in ourconversation to the point where
I was thinking like should Iedit that out?
Should I not include that?
I would be curious to hear yourperspective on this internal
debate that I'm having.

Speaker 2 (02:03:37):
I Don't know.
I mean, i kind of feel like youcould go with.
I've certainly had some of thatjust in producing any of the
short form videos I've done onTiktok.
But you never know who's.
If you get even one person I'lluse this analogy.
I've often said in doing thevideos that I've done on Tiktok

(02:03:57):
and recording them and andposting them, if I just get one,
if I just get one child to bespared, and by that, by that
logic, like if you just get oneperson maybe to try this and and
find that process very valuableto them, and maybe it'll do
even what it did for you or them, it was worth it to share it.

(02:04:19):
And the rest of the noise, whocares whether they deserve it or
not?
who cares whether they use itor not?
That's my attitude toward it.
I mean, and if it's a secretweapon, if you're scared of
someone actually using finding avaluable, i think that might be
Something within yourself.
Don't tell me like co-opt.

Speaker 1 (02:04:39):
Yeah, i mean, i know to get the amount Out of it that
I've gotten out of it, theywould have to put that much into
it.
So it's a bit like a workout inthe sense that if you were to
post your workout routine, Right, i understand now.
Maybe that's your secret weapon, but like someone's still got
to go in the gym and lift them,maybe you're worried that people

(02:04:59):
will find it not valuable orineffective.

Speaker 2 (02:05:03):
It looks poorly on your image image publicly.

Speaker 1 (02:05:07):
You know what you might, that might be closer.
It's like I don't want to put asecret weapon out there or
something that's that good andthen have someone Not get it or
like oh, i tried it and I didn'twork right.
Did you Like it's?
it's, it's sort Yeah, it's sortof like when someone's like oh,

(02:05:28):
i tried CrossFit, i went to oneworkout and I'm not in shape
yet, and it's like But did youtry it though?
Is that what?
trying it means or I meditatedonce in it and just my head hurt
.
It's like good, stay with it.

Speaker 2 (02:05:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:05:46):
Yeah, i guess I think that that's it that I don't
want to give.
Oh, it's, it would be.
It feels to me like it might bepainful to To see the, the
foolishness In response tosomething that good.
And it's it's.
Also.
I have the impulse that youknow occult teachers have had

(02:06:07):
throughout the Ages of like Igot to put this behind a wall of
some kind and makes him when gothrough an initiation Before
I'll show this to them.
We got to hide this and got tohide this in some encoded
grimoire.

Speaker 2 (02:06:21):
It sounds like you have special love for that
particular modality.
That it seems kind of distinctfrom even Zen.

Speaker 1 (02:06:33):
It's worked for me, but I think it's there's a
complexity to it that Zendoesn't have.
So You sit and you meditate andand that's it, and Completion
process has a lot more steps.

(02:06:54):
So the first step is you sitand you meditate with the
feeling you're just present withit, but then there's some stuff
you do after that and so, yeah,it's, it's the feeling.
It's the feeling you get if yousaw someone playing your

(02:07:15):
favorite instrument badly orDoing a martial art poorly, if,
like, i Like this, but you're,you got to work on that.
And it's also the the feelingof rejection that might come
from, like someone not evengiving something a chance, like
not even actually Hearing it out, which maybe this is something

(02:07:40):
you know a feeling to go Yeah,for my my next session.

Speaker 2 (02:07:43):
Yeah, I said I'm mentally valuable to tell people
what's worked for you andhowever they respond is however
they respond and you're gonnaget every possible.

Speaker 1 (02:07:56):
All right, i found the next thing I'm going into.
I wrote a town.
This is also, by the way, why Ifind the process valuable.
Is that, like in a conversationwith you?
I have a feeling come up andI'm like, oh, i don't like that.
You know this is.
And I'm like, oh, no, like nowI see the next thing That I'm
gonna shift in.
Just doesn't that, and it'syeah, and that's gonna be so

(02:08:16):
valuable of you.
Know, now I'll be able to puteven bigger Pearls out to my
audience, you things that areeven more personal to me, and I
will be Totally impervious to it, whatever reaction I get.
And if some people don't get it, that's like that's the next
thing, but I'm gonna do thatbefore I release the episode.
So, if you're watching this, ifyou see this, i'm even stronger

(02:08:41):
than before.

Speaker 2 (02:08:44):
All right.

Speaker 1 (02:08:46):
Anyway, all right, i found the thing there.
I found the thing there.
I'm looking, i'm writing itdown, i'm gonna go into it later
.
This, by the way, is also Howhow my relationship works, is
that?
One of the things I found in myrelationship with Christina and

(02:09:10):
my wife is that wheneverthere's a conflict between us,
we both We both have Somethingto go into, because our, our
minds and our trauma are verysimilar, but our coping
mechanisms are often opposite.
So in a particular situationgrowing up, her reaction was to

(02:09:34):
retreat, mine was to toaggressively advance, and so,
like, those coping mechanismsdon't work with each other,
because she retreats and Iadvance, and it's like why?
you know, like that just that'sno good.
But then we go into it and Nowwe're both, that all that goes
away, right, but it's, you know,having someone who will do the

(02:09:57):
work with you is really good,because then, instead of having
the same fight over and overagain, you just deal with it and
then it's over.

Speaker 2 (02:10:06):
Yeah, that makes sense.
I mean, i think that.

Speaker 1 (02:10:08):
I lost what's that?
Yeah, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (02:10:11):
Your audio cut out for your audio cut out for a
second Yeah, I've been gettingcalls several times since we
started this.
I don't know it doesn't end uphappening, but it's happened now
.
Why don't?

Speaker 1 (02:10:20):
people want to connect with you when you're
connecting with me.

Speaker 2 (02:10:26):
But, anyway, I don't remember, um, no, just that you
said yeah, that makes no,there's a power.
I mean it's kind of like how,if you, if you have restoring
buddies, i mean it's a.
It's different when it's youractual life partner.
Yeah, that's you, it's, it'sprobably that times a million, i
mean.

Speaker 1 (02:10:44):
Sorry the phrase restoring buddies It's boring
buddy Uh Is Hilarious and alittle bit, i know, i and.

Speaker 2 (02:10:51):
I get it, i get it.
No, it's.
It's of course What, uh, whatpeople might think, but that's
exactly what they are their zoommeetings even within the reddit
.

Speaker 1 (02:11:02):
Um, okay, hold on if you start a podcast called the
restoring bros That's just abunch of dudes in a discord chat
talking about this.

Speaker 2 (02:11:12):
That would be hilarious.

Speaker 1 (02:11:13):
Oh my god, i think you should do it.
We've we've just discoveredpodcast gold here.

Speaker 2 (02:11:18):
That would be hilarious And you might get a
lot of.
You would certainly get a lotof people who would want to
watch that, just to laugh.

Speaker 1 (02:11:25):
If you start each podcast with everyone
introducing themselves and howmuch coverage they have so far,
like what up?
I'm john.
I'm at c4 right now, like Done,it's happening.

Speaker 2 (02:11:38):
That'd be hilarious.
No, that would be.
They could take.

Speaker 1 (02:11:42):
They could take live callers.
Oh my goodness.

Speaker 2 (02:11:45):
Oh, that would get ugly.
That would get very ugly veryquickly.
We would all have to be doingWhy would it be completion
process and It'd be a lot ofangry.
Why would it be ugly?
There would be a lot of angrypeople.

Speaker 1 (02:11:57):
They called into your show, though, like what do they
have to be mad about?
Yeah, well hang up.

Speaker 2 (02:12:03):
I saw a post recently that um That shared an anecdote
of a mother who, uh, left herson intact And somehow someway
his friend who was circumciseddiscovered that it is foreskin.
So the circumcised male went tothe mother and Said why does he
have that?
and then, long story short, shestarted trying to sell The

(02:12:27):
other mother on circumcision.
Why did she do that?
She did that because she wantedto avoid having That
conversation brought up with herchild.
So naturally there would be alot of people who would be upset
if we had a podcast where menwere actively restoring Their
son could then hear That theymaybe did so, the elephant would
be out of the bag.

(02:12:47):
You're naturally always goingto get people very pissed off
with you Whenever you're talkingabout this issue.

Speaker 1 (02:12:52):
But I rate callers are great for radio, are you
kidding?

Speaker 2 (02:12:56):
It's true.

Speaker 1 (02:12:57):
It is true, Yeah, if you once they call in their
entertainment you just got toget some catchphrases and memes
to dunk on this.

Speaker 2 (02:13:02):
If you can, if you can be there with them, be
present, be uh um, undisturbed,or you know just that piece with
them.
Yeah, absolutely, i put newremorse you.
Drama is an excellententertainment.

Speaker 1 (02:13:17):
All right.
So I think the big takeawaysfrom this conversation are
action points.
So that I got to start Gettingmy clips on tech talk and short
form video.
Uh, you got to start a podcastcalled the restoring bros and I
got a raise 10 million dollars.
Pretty much, that's our uh.
That's what we've learned fromthis conversation.
Our next action steps prettyclear.

Speaker 2 (02:13:41):
Yeah, and it sounds like it.

Speaker 1 (02:13:44):
All right, anthis or anything else you want to talk
about before we finish up.

Speaker 2 (02:13:47):
No, i think, that's pretty much it.
I think I think, uh, there'llbe a lot for people to do with
this information, who have justlearned this, this reality, and
and don't know what to do, anduh, here's some things you can
do.

Speaker 1 (02:14:02):
One last question Where can people find you?
Where should they go and followyou?

Speaker 2 (02:14:07):
Tech talks really deeply.
Um, i mean I still what's theapp there now?
Oh, it's ad bloodstained man.
So it's not the thing I didn'trealize you had the that label,
i'm the one.
Yeah, no, no, i okayed it with.
Uh, i think I did.
At least they know about it andthey don't care.
You know other case, fine withit.
Um, but my last name is blood.

(02:14:29):
So I just thought, you know,kind of worked.
This is all I talk about.
On that, i haven't.
I haven't, you know, since Idiscovered it I haven't cared to
.
I have many other interests butNothing I care to talk about
publicly.
This is the one thing where I'mvery sure that You know
generally, my attitude toward itis correct, at least maybe not

(02:14:49):
my attitude, but generally theYeah, this statements I'm going
to make regarding this issue I'mconfident to put out there
publicly.
So that's all I talk about,hence the name.
But on all the on all otherplatforms, i have some version
of blood statement ever wasavailable.
So but if you want to reach out, you know direct message me
there.
That's pretty much how to do it.

Speaker 1 (02:15:11):
Cool, well, send me the links for that.
I'll put them in the show notesand there's anything else you
want to add before we finish up?

Speaker 2 (02:15:17):
None whatsoever other other than Other, than I admire
the way that you handled this.
I think very, very few peopleThat discovered this you're
certainly very few that I've metUh, i've handled the grief of
it the way that you haven't donesomething to actually Change
that within themselves, mentallyand emotionally, and if we all

(02:15:39):
did that, god only knows How howgood this world would be.
So that's it.

Speaker 1 (02:15:44):
I appreciate that it's Like you've said it I I
have had time, so The beginningit's different than where I am
now, and probably 10 years fromnow I don't even know where I'll
be.

Speaker 2 (02:15:57):
so Right, you'll have 10 think Going, throw at the.

Speaker 1 (02:16:03):
Yeah, we'll see No promises there, all right.
Well, anthony, thank you somuch for coming on.
Uh, i really appreciate it.
It's been a good, goodconversation.

Speaker 2 (02:16:12):
Yeah, thanks for having me, brendon, it's a
pleasure, thank you forlistening to the brendon morata
show.

Speaker 1 (02:16:18):
If you liked this episode, please leave a positive
review on whatever platform youlisten to podcasts on.
If you really liked thisepisode, please support the show
and become a paying subscriber,giving you access to special
bonus material only available tosupporters of the show.
I want to thank you forlistening to this show and I

(02:16:42):
will talk to you all later.

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Anthony Blood on Foreskin Restoration, Social Media Activism, and Healing (#38)

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