Life Through Poetry with IN-Q

We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their

good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is in q, a National Poetry Slam champion, award winning poet, and multi platinum songwriter. He's been named as one of the world's most influential thought leaders on oprah's Super Soul one d list and as the first spoken word artist ever to perform with Shirk to Solea in Q rights to entertain, inspire, and challenge his audiences to look deeper into the human experience and ask questions about themselves,

their environment, and the world at large. Today, in Q and Eric discuss his book in Choir Within. Hi and que, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Man, it's a pleasure to have you on. We are going to talk about your one, a full book of poetry called Inquire Within, but before we do that, we'll start with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of

us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He said, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Okay, I personally think they're

the same wolf. Okay, and yet maybe there you know two parts of the same wolf. Yeah, and uh, Once you know that, then I think you have to integrate both of them into who you are. I don't think that you can ignore fear or anger, or jealousy or sadness or any of the shadow emotions. I think you have to accept them, integrate them, and alchemize them. I think it's a lot easier to hate than it is to create, but creating is a lot more satisfying. So

that's what I try to do within myself. I don't ignore the wolf, that is the negative wolf and quotation marks, right right, Um, I just try to make friends with them. Yeah, and then I try to play as much as I can with the positive wolf and quotation marks. So for you, I'm assuming that poetry is one of the ways that you alchemize those shadow emotions into the other side. Yes, definitely, that's um my alchemy outlet of choice. Yeah, I've I've heard you use that poetry for you is either purging

or praying or both. Yeah. Absolutely, I love that idea. A lot of people when they think about doing something like poetry, they look at the craft aspect of it and they go I cheez. I don't know that I can do it that well. I don't know that I can do it at that level, and so that stops them from doing it. But I'm assuming you believe that the benefits of doing that sort of thing. It's not about the end products, about the process of going through

it that really matters, as far as the alchemy piece. Yeah, And you know you could say that about anything. Man. You know, if you look at anything in the entire world and you think I have to do it at a certain level, how will you ever start? That's right? And so poetry is no different. We're all storytellers. Every single day, we are telling stories to ourselves and to other people, and uh, we're always actually like integrating the stories that are reflected back to us from everyone else.

So I mean, what is poetry if not storytelling? Right? And you know, you just have to choose to explore it like anything else in life, and you might be surprised at the benefits. I've become a big advocate as I've gotten older at doing things even when and often especially when I don't think I'm going to be good at them, Like I recently took up wood carving, and

I can. I can tell you I am terrible. I carved a bird and it looks like you can tell it's a bird, but it's like a bird that has serious birth defects, right, Like, it doesn't look quite right. But I I picked it up and I was like, I know, I'm not going to be good at it, but that's not the point. Well, what have you learned so far from your emerging wood carving career. I've learned how to protect my fingers. I've still got all ten

of them. That's a It's a positive thing, yeah, in and of itself, to learn to be aware, Yeah, in the thing that you're doing, to make sure that you're not hurting yourself or anyone else around you. Yeah. I've learned how to clean up my messes. I've learned a couple of different type of knife strokes. I've learned how to sharpen my knives. I've learned some things about how to start the carving so that I don't get myself asymmetrical right out of the beginning. But you know, the

main thing is I just enjoy doing it. You know. I just really felt like I was like, I need to do something with my hands. Yeah, I play guitar, and that's that's that is one thing. But I felt like I still I found myself wishing I had more dishes to do, and I was like, all right, that's a problem. Like but but I liked it because it was tangible. Look at either everything is a spiritual practice or nothing is a spiritual practice. Amen. And it's something

that I'm constantly reminding myself of. Nobody likes the feeling of not being good at something. I mean, it fucking sucks to be a student at anything in life. But how are you ever going to grow unless you get out side of your comfort zone and all of this motivational you know, self help stuff. I mean, you hear this over and over and over again, and yet often even the people who are saying it need to be

doing it. You know. It's like we teach what we need to learn so um, you know, or even think about kids, man like, kids are always outside of their comfort zone. And that's partly why they grow so much, is because they're not really in control of their environment and they're constantly doing things for the first time. And I think that that really allows people to evolve at

a really quick pace. But then we grow up. We become good at something, we choose a career, you know, we're making a living, and then we get validated for that thing, and we just stay there because we're scared to be students again. We're scared to look foolish. But you know, if I never look foolish, then I'll never be brilliant. Absolutely, let's move into a poem of yours before we get too far in here, so that people

can get a sense of you and your work. And so I thought i'd ask you to read the title of your book, which is inquired Within. You want me to read the inquiry within poem, is what you're saying. Yeah, okay, I thought you were saying. You just wanted me to say enquire within. No, actually, let's do the poem. You're like, just read the title of the book that will be and then we're done. Well, this is called enquire with him. I used to look up when I prayed. I would

raise my head to the skies. If God lived in a penthouse made of clouds. As a kid, I thought he could hear my prayers better when I was on a plane, after all, I was closer to him. I would ride elevators to the top floor to us to whisper my secret desires. I've never told anyone that as an adolescent I stopped praying alltogether. I didn't believe in belief. It seemed to me that people had created God to control themselves and others. It was the long con self delusion.

As a form of therapy, I convinced myself I was stronger than that I wasn't. As a young man, I explored spirituality, I wanted answers. I devoured every self help book I could get my hands on. I watched The Secret two times in a row, and still somehow managed to misunderstand the law of attraction. It was quite comical, really. They say the difference between intelligence and wisdom is experience. But you can have experience without having wisdom or intelligence.

So what the fund did I know? Recently I started praying again. I couldn't specifically tell you why, but if pressed, I'd say it had to do with a sudden and unexpected need to surrender. I felt the urge to bow in the service of something greater than myself, but I didn't want religion to get in the way. So one night, as the overwhelming silence of the city filled my empty room. I knelt at the foot of my bed and I prayed. It was oddly familiar, except this time. Instead of looking

up to God, I looked inside. Thank you, thank you. So we referenced earlier that poetry for you is either purging or praying or both. You reference prayer in that poem there, What does that word mean to you? Prayer? Well, it's constantly changing, you know. I don't think that there's one fixed definition that would be satisfactory. Probably at this point it means manifestation, huh me connecting to uh the energy, you know, the universal energy, and trying to create something

inside of myself outside of myself. It's a pretty good definition. I find prayer an interesting thing for people who tend to not necessarily believe that they're praying to a being that's going to answer that prayer, and so I pray off and but I don't actually believe in necessarily a god out there who's going, oh, thanks for registering your desires, Eric, or thanks for you know, like for me, it's kind of your point about inquire within. I think for me,

prayer is an intention sett in vehicle. It's a way of aligning myself internally as to what's important again, like you that is ever evolving. Yeah, I mean, look, spirituality is logical for me. It's not this esoteric thing that I have to wrap my mind and my heart around. It's very logical. The whole entire world is basically just moving energy. You know, if you focused in on any of the things that are around us, this table, the chair that I'm sitting in, I mean, there's more space

inside of it than anything else. You know, it's very very small percentages that they're actually solid. And then if you zoomed out in the universe, it's the same thing. You know, go to space and it's just empty for the most part. And so even us, we're just vibrating energy. So I I look at the world like we're in a sea of consciousness, and uh, we're separate from it, and we're also at one with it and where the experiencer and we're the observer of that experience. You know.

I was thinking about gratitude the other day because gratitude, I've always known intellectually that it's an important practice, and I've always explored it in my work, but I've had a hard time being consistent with it and I had a breakthrough that I'll share with you. And the breakthrough is how I was looking at the practice of gratitude. You know. Oftentimes, like I would get something and I'd

immediately be like, oh, this is awesome. It's not exactly what I wanted, but you know, thanks, and then I'd start to think about what else I wanted, you know, like, for example, I got nominated today for a Billboard Award um for the Best Soundtrack Album. Okay, that's not exactly what I wanted. I wrote three songs on a Disney movie last year, and now I've just been nominated for something that wasn't what I was manifesting. But I got

a gift. And imagine if you gave a gift to someone okay, and they got it and they literally were like this is cool, Like thanks, It's not really what I wanted, but I appreciate you giving it to me. And you know, what I really want is that thing out there. Well I might not think the person is an asshole, but I definitely wouldn't give them another gift. I would just give it to someone else. And why

is the universe any different? If everything is vibrating energy and the universe gives you a gift, no matter if it's huge or if it's small, and you don't match up to the frequency of that vibration and give it gratitude for the present that you received the universal just go give it to someone else. So you know, that's been a real breakthrough for me. And now I find myself being intensely grateful throughout my day, and you know at the end of my meditations, and the more grateful

I am, the more present summer siving. I want to ask you a question about that worldview because I occasionally struggle with it, and I'll tell you in what way. Because the logical extension of that can be that people whose lives are terrible brought that on themselves. Why is that the logical extension of it. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I want to know what you mean before I respond. My view of it is saying that like, if I am grateful for things, I'll get more good things.

But that sort of says, at least taking a logic and reversing it would say if I don't have good things, then that's somehow a lack of gratitude. No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying specifically, Yeah, you could be grateful for anything if you actually chose to start looking at the world from the standpoint of like, wow, this is all a miracle, right, You could be grateful

for everything that's right now. There's there's stuff that happens that is unimaginable, there's no way to make sense out of it. But you don't have to make sense out of things in order to accept them and find gratitude because they made you who you are. Right So for me, that's a larger spiritual lesson. But like every day, I'm not going to get nominated for some award. Just having

a moment with you. I don't know you. You're across the country and we're having a conversation and we're sharing time together, the most valuable thing that both of us have. We're choosing to share this moment together, or a meal or a smile or the way the breeze hits you. I'm not saying this because I've mastered it. I'm a fucking student. I'm figuring it out on a moment to moment basis. But I'm certainly not saying that if people have bad stuff happening to them they deserve it because

of their lack of gratitude. Yeah, I'm just saying that as a rule for myself, the more that I focus on what I'm grateful for and match up with that frequency of the universe, the more either I discover that I'm grateful for that I wouldn't have seen before, or the more that actually gets created. And I can't answer that, but I'm gonna keep trying. It does seem absolutely true. It's something that you do very well in your work, which is that you hold paradox really well and you

explore paradox. What I'm doing is I'm saying, let me apply logic to something that's spiritual, and there's a paradox to a lot of spirituality I have found for myself. It's paradoxical. You're you're holding these different ideas at once. Like we talked about, you're the experiencer and you're the observer,

and that's the paradox. You're separate and you're one yes, and you have to be able to hold two truths in the same space at the same time to get the cosmic joke, you know, Like in that poem that I read Enquired Within, I remember being at home alone, high as ship, you know, just so stoned watching the Secret And what I said in the poem is true. I misunderstood the law of attraction. I thought it meant that you just have to go around and be positive

all the time. I'm just gonna be positive all the time. First of all, that's stupid, it's unrealistic. That's not the way the world is set up. It's set up as we're talking about in dichotomys. It's good wolf and the bad wolf, and that's why they're separate, but the same, yes, yes as the great zen Masters. Zuki used to say not to but not one. And I love that because it captures that, you know, yeah, you and I are not one, but we're also not really too. You know,

that's so well said. I love the simplicity of that. So yeah, I just think once I realized that I had made a mistake, you know, that year that I had spent walking around forcing myself into positivity, it just seems so silly. I'm not talking about gratitude, like forcing myself into positivity all the time. I get upset, like everybody does. I get stressed out, I get annoyed, I get nervous, every single feeling you could ever possibly have,

I have had, I will have. But I can also choose how I respond to those feelings, what actions I take, and what I am choosing to focus on. Yeah, I think this is a good segue to another poem of yours, if you would be kind enough to read it for us. It's a very short one, but it's called problems. Yes, how do we talk about the problems without feeding them? If we ignore them, we most likely keep repeating them. If we explore them, we run the risk of reinforcing them.

So how then do we get down to the source of them? I love that In some ways, I almost would say that question has been at the heart of this podcast from the beginning. It's been this how do you do these two things? And I was just right up against this. Very recently, I had a two week vacation coming up, and I've never taken two weeks off in my life, so I was so excited. I had

been planning and it was this big deal. And the night we went on vacation, my partner's mother went into the hospital, and we hopped in the car and drove to Atlanta, and all of a sudden everything on vacation was whacked out, and so I'm in the midst of that moment, going okay, let me think here, let me

let me work through. So on one hand, I'm feeling intensely disappointed and frustrated, and yet on the other hand, I also recognized, like I'm talking about vacation and her mom's going into the hospital, and you know, let me

keep some perspective on all these things. And so I'm balancing both those things, you know, like and for me, I'm kind of you know, hold the two extremes and a middleway kind of guy, right, that often leads to the middle way, and you know, the middle way was like, all right, well, how do I allow myself to feel what I feel and yet keep some perspective? And that's why when I read that poem of yours, I was like, that says it so poetically. How do I do these

two things? And again, I think we've been exploring that question on this show a thousand different ways. Yeah, I mean, imagine if you just were so angry at yourself for feeling that way, Wow, you shouldn't feel that way, or oh, you're such a bad person, how does that do anything but exacerbate those negative feelings. Right, you have to accept them. Whatever comes up, you have to accept it, and then

you choose what you're gonna do with it. Yeah. Um, I actually have a new poem that I think really represents this. Would you like to hear that? I would love that. Okay, great, I like this kind of like on the fly thing that we're doing. There's noises in the background, alarms are going off, my emails are coming in breaking loose. Now, it's all good. I just have to find it real quick. Okay, here we go. I wrote this after I came back from India and I was at the end of last year. This year feels

like a lifetime. I mean, it's very hard to make sense out of time. I'm in love with the part of me that hates myself. I accept the part of me that rejects myself. I don't judge myself. Whenever I am judging myself, I respect the part of me that disrespects myself. I have confidence whenever I am being insecure, I am happy for my sadness. Both are welcomed through my door. I can laugh at being angry, I can cry and celebration. I don't worry why I'm in the

process of a transformation. There's nothing to release. Alchemy is integration. I'll never overcome it. I've become my expectation. I'll never outrun it. I am from my destination at the summit, looking up before my first step was taken. I've awakened in the dream. I am patient in the race. I am naked in belief. I am wearing every face I create by manifesting everything in empty space. I myself am empty space. I am boundless energy. I am God inside

a case. I am physical reality, the canvas and the paints. I am spiritual reality. I swallow what I taste. I am only here because I've learned that I can be erased. I've already been erased. I will never be erased. I've buried every treasure that I've carried in my hate. Now I measure what is infinite with what can be replaced. I can weather any weather. I'm a storm inside of base, taking form for pain or pleasure. I can form to any shape. I know that time doesn't exist, although I

oh there's none to waste. That's why I'm sitting still, and yet I feel the sun upon my face. I am faster than I've ever been. I'll never keep this pace. I've come to end where I begin making everything but haste on a wheel that doesn't spin. Go within for inner space. I'm embracing every sin, finding home in every place. I'm at peace with every piece. I embody what I've chased. I'm in love with the part of me that hates myself. I accept the part of me that rejects myself. I

don't judge myself. Whenever I am judging myself, I respect the part of me that disrespects myself. I have confidence whenever I am being insecure, I am happy for my sadness. Both are welcomed through my door. I can laugh at being angry, I can cry and celebration. I don't worry Why why alchemies, integration, I love it. You're right. It is right on, right on target, with so much of what we are talking about and about embracing these paradoxes.

I'm a pretty serious Zen student. I don't know if you've gone very far into that particular tradition, but boy, it would be right up your alley. Not far enough. I need to go farther. Zen is the tradition that has you do things like coons and a coon It is like what is the sound of one hand clapping? Right? Some people say this is an oversimplification, but it's basically trying to break our relying on the logical brain. You know, it gets you to this deeper point of integration of

realizing opposites at the same time. And your poem has a lot of things that could come right out of a Zen co on for sure. Well, you know, when you're solving the riddle, you have a moment of confusion, and in that moment of confusion, enlightenment can sneak. That's right, there's a there's a Zen phrase. I won't get it exactly right, but uh, it's basically great doubt, great enlightenment.

Doubt is considered a key element in Zen. Great faith, great doubt, great determination, beautiful those three things, you know, and like you said, that moment of confusion, it can be a beautiful moment that not knowing, well, we don't know anything at any time period. Yeah, let's go there, because that's another really interesting part of your work. Because a lot of your work has a political viewpoint. It has a viewpoint on the way we are, say, perhaps

treating the world. It has some clear viewpoints, and yet I think you do a really good job of honoring the fact that multiple viewpoints are valid and that people who don't believe the same thing as us are very often very much like us. And I'm curious how you do both those things, because again there is a viewpoint. You clearly do have views, opinions, and strong feelings about certain things, and yet there's a real honoring of people who believe differently. How do you get there? Because I

think that's a real big question for our world right now. Yeah, I don't mean to repeat the same stuff, but it goes back to the thing we said at the beginning, which is one wolf, you know, two wolves? You know what was the thing that you said, I really want to not to not one exactly, not to not one. I mean, it's just so well said, that's poetry. Yeah, I mean, I have very strong opinions about the world and where I think we should be headed in comparison

to where we are. But I don't think that I'm necessarily right, because there's been many times in my life when I thought I was right, and then later I realized that I was wrong. Because of new experiences. And I don't think that you can invite anyone into having a difference of opinion unless you lead by example and then give them space. Otherwise we're just at war with each other, which means we're war with ourselves. And yet I don't think that being silent is an option either,

So we're just going back to these dichotomies. It's like, you know, you don't want to be a part of the noise, you don't want to just be making noise, but you also have a responsibility to not be silent, especially during these uncertain and important times. Yeah, and I'm finding that dichotomy harder to hold. I feel very strongly about this, I feel like I have a responsibility to speak about this, and yet, like you, I distrust certainty

in all its forms. You know, if you act really certain about something, even if I believe exactly what you believe, I'm almost inclined to argue with you. I distrust certainty. So on one hand, I feel very strongly and have opinions like you, and yet I'm trying to hold this space for for other people. And boy, I'm feeling the rub of that dichotomy a lot. How does that show up in reality for you in your life. I don't know what it is. I don't know. If it's the

polarization of the moment, I don't know. I feel like in the past, for me, I was better able to separate somebody's political beliefs from their underlying goodness. And I'm having a harder time. I mean I I can definitely relate to that. You know, a lot of what we're exploring is you know, my as I said, purging or praying. You know, that's myself. Yeah. You know a lot of times the poems that I'm writing, I write them into existence for me, right. You know, sometimes I don't catch

up for years. I mean, I'm not joking. I mean it's funny, but I've things that took me ten years to be able to have them, like in a cellular way. It wasn't like you know, see song back and forth. You know. I'll tell you, did you watch this social media documentary? I haven't seen it yet. It's really really great. I'll just give you and everyone a synopsis because you

know what it's about anyway. So I'm watching it, and uh, you know, it's all these people who created all of these platforms, these tech platforms, social media platforms, basically saying that we created them to addict you, right, and in

addicting you, we addicted us. And maybe they started out with good intentions, but ultimately they have been co opted to the point where there is the degradation of democracy going on all over the world, and no one believes in acts, no one believes in science, no one believes in truth. And if you can't have truth, you can't even have an argument because you don't know what the funk you're arguing about if you don't have like truth

to look at. And so these people are basically saying it is an existential crisis to humanity what it has become, this monster that it has become, and they're very regretful, and now they're spending their time trying to do the opposite often and they're saying, in the end of this thing, they're like, the biggest consequences could be literally like the end of democracy, you know, civil war, countries and political factions being overthrown, dictatorship, authoritarian regimes. Well like just all

these crazy things. And I finish it and I'm like, oh my god, And then I checked my Instagram yeah, and you realize you're watching it on Netflix's right. And then and then yesterday I saw that the guy who did the documentary, the main dude, has a fucking page and I just was scratching my head. I was like, you know, I can't make sense of all this either. I'm just trying to put it into my art and I'm trying to be good to myself and good to

the people around me. You know. I did this project for North Will Health recently, and uh, there're a hospital system in uh, you know, on the East Coast basically, and so it was a tribute to the nurses and the doctors who are the real superheroes right now. And they animated to one of my pieces. And there was an agency that was like working the middle part of

it and they were fantastic. But we were on a call and one of the guys and he was just doing his job, he was like, you know, you end it with love, like the last word is love, and he goes, love is kind of soft to end on. He goes, is there any way we can end on like something that's like like harder, like you know than love? And I literally, you know, everybody's on the call, I'm like, dude, love is not soft to me, right, love fucking hard. Life is hard, and to love through life means you

have to love harder. So that's my message to people and myself is love your self harder, love your family, your colleagues, your friends, your community is harder, and then try to love the people that you don't love harder because they probably need it the most. I consider myself a realistic optimist, and I hope that what comes out of all of this is more compassion and empathy, because that's what the world needs most. I think love is

really hard. And you know there's another thing that I think what you just said there, did you say realistic optimist? I've been reflecting lately on that. I feel like hope has become almost a moral obligation right now. What do you mean, Well, despair just seems to be just knocking at everybody's door, and I feel like it takes a commitment to look for hope. Right now. I feel like

like the world needs love. I think it also needs hope, and I feel like the reason I say moral and the reason I say obligation is maybe that's not quite the right because I don't know if I believe in those, but I feel like it's the right thing to do, and it's the hard thing to do, you know, and I feel like we need it. I have to different definitions of hope. Hope can be despair and disguise. Yeah, not careful, you know. I hope. You can hope from a place of victimization. I hope, you know. So I

try not to do that. Yeah, But there's another part of hope that is really really beautiful when it's like practiced correctly. And I go through various degrees of success and failure with that. Um And I was reading Unbroken. I'm like actually looking at it right now. Do you know this book Unbroken? The guy who ends up in a raft in the ocean and a p of w cam. It just goes through crazy amounts of problems and remains unbroken. Yeah. So I'm reading it and I'm just thinking, like, ship

is really bad right now. It's really bad. I'm not gonna front I'm not gonna pretend it's all good. I understand the despair. I don't think that the coronavirus in general has created any problems. I think it's just brought them to light. The systemic racism, the inequality, the lack of leadership from our politicians, our health care system, all of it is just being brought to the surface. And

I'd rather be at the surface than underneath. And yeah, we might deal with skirmishes of real political ongoing civil violence after the election, you know, is over whatever that even means. Um So I'm not even pretending that it's going to get better immediately, but I think it's necessary. Number one, and number two, we're still a really far away from Nazi Germany. I'm reading this book, man, like, I'm like, there's a whole thing that they talked about

yesterday in terms of like, uh, the Japanese. At a certain point, it was like a massacre of like a hundred thousand Chinese people, and it was insane. The Germans killed six million Jews, but it was like twenty million Russians, not even saying anything about I'm sure you guys know all this, but I just it's just when people make the comparison of that, I think they're missing the reality of our lives. If this is the biggest crazy ship that's going on right now, to be able to quarantine

is a fucking luxury. It's a privilege. There's so many people who don't know where their next meal is coming from. They don't even have time to listen to a podcast or buy a poetry book. They're trying to put food on their kids take. You know, it's like, we have a lot to be ful for. We have to find ways to acknowledge that and try to be of service to the people around us. I could not agree with you more that I think that that's one of the benefits of of history. I think is seeing like, wow,

holy mackerel, you know, we've got things pretty good. I often think when people think the world is disintegrating, I often think that's very much a I don't know if I want to use this term, but I will use it sort of a more upper middle class white view of the world. You know, because if you look, if you look around the world at hundreds of different measures the world has it just gets better and gets better

and gets better and gets better. The number of people in poverty, the number of people that are illiterate, the number of child laborers, the number of people in slavery, the number I mean, all those numbers go in the right direction historically, And I'll piggyback what you're saying. I think it once again goes back to this dichotomy. A lot of times people will use that as an excuse to not pay attention to how bad the problems are now. And you have to be able to hold two truths

in the same space at the same time. Is getting better and ship is really fucked up? And things are true now? Absolutely, I could not agree more. Yes, I often say too, is this because the fact that the world is getting better doesn't do any good for the person who the world isn't better for now? Right right, there are still people suffering in ways that are unprecedented, I mean, or not unprecedented, but are terrible. So yeah,

that's why I say that. I feel like hope right now is so important because I feel like what we get is so much despair. We're sold it by the for profit media. And I'm not shipping on the media, by the way, I cust a lot. I apologize for anybody if there's kids, car Yeah, we're marking this one explicit um, but but really I am not, you know, just belittling the media just because it's the thing to do.

No the media, I mean journalists, I have the highest respect for every single thing that they put into their jobs and trying to bring the truth to the world, which the vast majority of them are. But we're in a system that basically sells suffering and fear and anxiety in order to get you high on that. So you keep coming back to it over and over again. And so you know, that's why I hope is so hard

to find, because the loudest voices are fear. And by the way, the media is not as bad as Trump is, because you look at the Republican National Convention and it was all fear. Everything that was being sold was year in order to get people to go, oh no, well, you're the only answer to this, and you know so, I think it's just these systems that have been created to keep people consuming, to keep people scared, and to

keep people in line. I agree, I agree, And that's the hope I'm speaking of, not the sort of meek I hope. One of my favorite stories of all time and is about and maybe you've heard of it. It's called the Stockdale Paradox, and it's uh a general I think he was a general. Stockdale is the highest ranking prisoner of war in Vietnam, and those guys went through hell, right,

I mean, starved, tortured, all kinds of stuff. And so somebody was interviewing him and they said, well, you know, so I assume it was you know, the optimists that got through, and he went, no, no, no, the optimists they all died. They thought I'll be out by Thanksgiving, I'll be out there Christmas, I'll be out by Easter. And they've died of a broken heart. And they're like, oh, so it was the pessimist. You no, the pessimists. They didn't do so I didn't do so well either, right, Like,

they just gave up. They just gave up. And then well, who who who got through? He said, Well, the people that got through were the people who are able to to see the reality of their situation in all of its brutal truthfulness, but also never lost faith in their ability to get through it. And I love that because I think that's what you and I are talking about here, is you've got to see the reality, to sugarcoat it, to pretend it's not there. You've got to have that.

But that seems to be most of all we get. Here's here's the brutal reality here's your big steaming pile of crap, you know. But it's that second piece that

that I feel like is so important. That's what I love in the work that you do and the thing that I try and bring to the show and I can, is that second piece that says, hey, we've got to keep some belief that there's another side to this, because if you don't have that belief, you you can't advocate for change, you can't keep the energy to keep going. You've got to believe that there's some way that things

get better. Yeah. When I see a car crash coming when I'm on the freeway, I forced myself not to look at it. I forced myself. It's a conscious decision, not because I don't want to create more traffic, although that's a byproduct of it. Um, I forced myself not to look at it because it's the same thing. Your eyes are always going to be drawn to the destruction. I just want to make a point to myself to keep my eyes on where I'm going, where I want to be, you know. I mean, if I can help,

I want to help. I don't want to pretend that things aren't bad over there, But I don't want to be a lucky lou. I don't think I've ever said that before. Looking look, Lou, well, where did that come from? In my mind? It's a it's a nice it's a nice one. Maybe you'll use it in a poem soon. It'sn't it really style. It's not real your style, but it's not a real hard hitting word. You know. The thing I often ask myself when I'm thinking about what I want to pay attention to, is is it going

to influence what I actually do? You know, is paying more attention to the news, to this issue, to this thing. Is it going to change what I do? Or is it just gonna perpetuate, you know, malaise, you know in me and in others. All right, well, you and I have run out of time, but you're gonna join me briefly in the post show conversation. We're going to explore a couple more of your wonderful poems and your wonderful style. So thank you so much for taking the time to

come on. I think this has been a really good and pretty frank conversation and I and I really appreciate you engaging in it. Amazing And let me just say to anyone who's listening. The book Enquire Within is out. You can get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. You can get the audio book and then I'll be reading all my poems to you. And it's really something I'm very proud of. It came out during the height of the fear and anxiety around on the pandemic. It

was like March one. Oh, yeah, it's a tough time to launch a book. Yeah, but it's done so well. I don't think that we went maybe as wide, but we went a lot deeper and so we're still, you know, getting it out to as many people as possible because it was medicine for me to write, and I hope it's medicine for people to read. Yeah, and there's absolutely a link in the show notes. You click on that link and you can purchase the book. Lots of Love. Thanks.

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