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Jun 5
  • Written By Scott Drochelman

    • #187 – Tait Fletcher

    #187 - Tait Fletcher

    Life Lessons And Recovering From A Traumatic Brain Injury

    Tait Fletcher is an actor, stuntman and former MMA Fighter, known for his roles in Breaking Bad, Westworld, John Wick, and The Mandalorian.

    Tait grew up in Michigan where he dealt with childhood trauma by engaging in whatever thrill seeking activity he could get his hands on. Early on he found drinking and fighting as a means to meet his brain’s desire for chaos. 

    As he got older he continued to follow his desire for a high intensity life by becoming a professional MMA fighter. Tait eventually found sobriety around the time his professional fighting career was coming to a close, which actually opened the doors to a career as a hollywood stuntman and eventually work as an actor in movies and tv shows. He was suddenly living a life he couldn’t dream of. 

    Then in 2021, while filming the movie Free Guy, Tait was struck with a motorcycle while filming a stunt sequence. The accident left him with a significant Traumatic Brain Injury which resulted in endless therapies to try to repair the injuries to his brain. 

    Today, Tait is continuing to work in movies and is an inspiration to all those who’ve had to endure so much, but refuse to give up.

    Episode Resources

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    Episode Transcript

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Coming up on this episode of The Courage to Change, sponsored by Lionrock.life.

    Tait Fletcher:

    You get to a place of self-hatred in such a way where you’re in inaction for a long time, and my whole life doesn’t reflect of who I was, of this discipline, this consistency, this thing that I built. Now, I’m this do-nothing motherfucker that sits and complain all day. Because if you ask me how I’m doing, it’s like this. It’s the verge of suicide and decay all the time, and then you hate yourself for that because you’re not even a reflection of who you’re and yourself that you know has slipped away and has been replaced with something else you don’t recognize, and you got to go. That, I think, is the overview of the story of suicide and brain injury is that you become something you don’t recognize, and you don’t think that you’ll ever be recognizable to yourself again. Without help, I think it’s like that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Hello, beautiful people. Welcome to The Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. My name is Ashley Loeb Blassingame, and I am your host.

    Today, we have Tait Fletcher. Tait is an actor, stuntman, and former MMA fighter known for his roles in Breaking Bad, Westworld, John Wick, and the Mandalorian. Tait grew up in Michigan, where he dealt with childhood trauma by engaging in whatever thrill-seeking activity he could get his hands on. Early on, he found drinking and fighting as a means to meet his brain’s desire for chaos. As he got older, he continued to follow his desire for a high intensity life by becoming a professional MMA fighter.

    Tait eventually found sobriety around the time his professional fighting career was coming to a close, which actually opened the doors to a career as a Hollywood stuntman and eventually worked as an actor in movies and TV shows. Then in 2021, while filming the movie, Free Guy, Tait was struck with a motorcycle while filming a stunt sequence. The accident left him with a significant traumatic brain injury, which resulted in endless therapies to try to repair the injuries to his brain.

    Today, Tait is continuing to work in movies and is an inspiration to all those who’ve had to endure so much but refuse to give up. I am so impressed and inspired by Tait. He defies every judgment you might have about an MMA fighter or a stuntman or the way that he presents himself. He’s always shown as these bad scary guys in his roles as an actor, and he is such a gentle, kind human. His journey is really, really incredible and beautiful, and one of overcoming so much. I was very, very impressed with the work that he’s done around his traumatic brain injury and the cumulative injuries he sustained over his fighting career.

    Tait’s unwillingness to give up is so inspiring, and I hope that you are moved by it as well. Without further ado, I give you Tait Fletcher. Let’s do this.

    You are listening to the Courage to Change: A Recovery Podcast. We are a community of recovering people who have overcome the odds and found the courage to change. Each week we share stories of recovery from substance abuse, eating disorders, grief and loss, childhood trauma, and other life-changing experiences. Come join us no matter where you are on your recovery journey.

    Tait, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

    Tait Fletcher:

    I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I’m glad we’re finally able to make it work.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, yes, absolutely.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Been a few obstacles here and there, but I’m glad we’re here.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Here we are. Here we are. Well, awesome.

    We just recorded, and the listeners just heard your amazing bio. That’s how the IMDB and the Internet kind of describes what Tait’s life has been. I want to get how you think about your life. What does it feel like and look like from your perspective?

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s a difficult thing. I remember one time, I was in this setting, like a group setting, and this guy says, “I’d like you to imagine what it’s like before you enter a room that there’s people in.” I thought I can’t know that. He says, “It’s good to think about how you change a room when you enter it.” It’s one of the first times I ever had a guy challenged me and talk about, look into yourself and be provocative about what maybe you find, and get an open mind other than what you think is happening. So, it’s tough when you’re inside it.

    Well, I grew up in Michigan. I grew up in a small town on the shore of Lake Huron, and lived in Lansing and different spots in southern Michigan for a while before I moved to New Mexico at 21 years old. I just felt like I needed to get out and challenge myself, and see who I was without the reflection of my history and really trying to shift my life. That stuff took me to St. John’s College here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where I stayed for a year, and then life just tumbled, and a whole different course of my life opened up at that time.

    What it’s been? It’s been a searching since then, searching for purpose, for connection, for community without knowing what those things were. It felt like a lack for a long time, and I was looking for what that connection might feel like. When I get quiet with it, all that would come was that you need to curate joy, you need to curate a happiness of some kind because I come from a real depressed background. I think that that’s the first reflection I had into what recovery might look like from life even. You look at all different kinds of obstacles that come up and what recovery is, and, environmentally, what are the confines of my old ideas? There’s nobody here that is a professional athlete or that wrote a book or that does that limit the space of what I can see?

    I don’t know, I grew up pre-Internet too. There wasn’t YouTube where there’s just volumes of experience of people that are doing things and you go, “God, that’s possible for me too?” I missed that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    You described the first 21 years in Michigan, you didn’t have YouTube, it was a darker, at times, period of time. What did that look like for you? Was it a happy childhood?

    Tait Fletcher:

    Well, yeah. I had a great family, and everybody trying to make it work and all that. With perspective of decades, you had a lot more allowance that I view that through, right? I’d had fractures with my father, with different parts of my family where we went for years without speaking. I’d been a terrorist to him and his name. I was living my life trying to survive. I started drinking and using drugs really young, and I just fell into that lifestyle of things really young, and that had consequences for me and those around me. I didn’t know that. I thought it was just a life. I didn’t know that really. Perspective is crazy.

    I grew up playing hockey. I grew up fighting a lot. I was always into scrapes. I looked for adrenaline stuff. I didn’t even know that that’s what I was doing. I was trying to get my neurochemicals fired and smashed. And how do you do that? Well, you do it when you’re doing something crazy that’s under severe consequence of danger. You can imagine what kind of life that is.

    By the time I left Michigan, I’d first gotten an inkling that I maybe could live a different way. So, I was trying to turn that boat into something else. It was an old idea that I didn’t think I could have, but I thought, well, I can try. All I’d known by that time is that I was resilient, that, for whatever reason, I couldn’t end it, and wouldn’t die, and so here I am, let’s try. And let’s try as hard we can. Let’s try to kill ourselves, and try.

    I started looking towards health in those ways as soon as I got sober, when I was able to put distractions away, because I feel like that’s what a lot of the obstacles are of trying to fill up what is my purpose, what ought I be doing? I try to fill that up with a thousand different things. Now, I go, “God, anybody that asks for help or whatever, I hope you get all those things in spades so that you can find out quickly that that’s not what you lack,” and where is my grounding, my footing, and my confidence that comes out of my history instead of what maybe I perceive because my perception about myself is a nasty filter sometimes.

    Early life was like that. I lost myself in books when I was really young. I got deep into mythology, into early American writers, like Theroux, that type of thing, common sense, and all those things. I was a deep-diver into things that interested me. When the thing came about what’s your purpose to be, well, you ought to do what interests you, you ought to do what you find your joy.

    What I started learn was that folks were happy. If you got up and you went to work nine to five, you’re square, man. I can’t do that. Good luck. But I’d see people happy, and I thought it was just my brain was different. I had no idea people curated that. I had no idea that that was a thing that you look towards. A friend of mine said recently, “I’m so crazy still that I think sometimes that if I got everything I wanted, I’d be happy as if that’s not chaos or to give a child anything they want, me as a six year old right now, as a grown man, I’ve got a six year old that’ll run the show, sometimes, that’s not a good path. It’s not the way.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    We all see what that… I have two six-year-old boys, and I see what that looks like when they get what they want. The worst days for their behavior are the days where they get what they want all day long. They saw this thing on YouTube, and they’re called a Yes Day, apparently, where the parents have to say yes all day long. My kids have begged me for this Yes Day. I’m like, “That is literally a recipe for disaster.” I think of what you’re describing and what we’re describing is this yes life where we think that if we get what we want the entire time that that’s the thing that’s going to feel so great, but the reality is that it’s much different than that. Curating this life, this recovery life involves days of really hard work and really pushing and challenging, which creates so much more satisfaction than just getting it, which I didn’t know that.

    When you’re describing your childhood, one of the things that I’m wondering if you relate to because it sounds similar to how I was is this feeling of terror of being bored. Your childhood, you’re describing this chaos, this adrenaline looking for those neurochemicals. I feel like, as I’ve gotten older and the longer I’m sober, I realize that some of that is this fear of boredom, and that the curation of this happy life requires me to be able to withstand boredom, to not create every scenario where those neurochemicals are happening, and that joy and deep satisfaction are different than the crazy adrenaline. You’re a stunt man, so it’s a really interesting dichotomy of like, “I’ve had to learn to create this deep satisfaction and joy, but also I’ve figured out a way to address this need for excitement,” and what a perfect curation that at least sounds like to me.

    Tait Fletcher:

    When you start looking at all the things that happen in life and you’re like, “Oh, I couldn’t have maybe been different,” right? You’re like, “I was programmed?” It’s almost embarrassing, right? You’re like, “This is played out.” But, yeah, it’s exactly that.

    My friend has a book called Going Right, Logan Gelbrich. He makes a point, he makes an argument that’s irrefutable about going towards your joy, about going towards passions. If you deny that and you let fear overpower that, here’s what happen. There’s consequence on either side, and it’s all hard. So, you might as well do the hard thing that’s beneficial because high fructose corn syrup all day and saying yes is also hard in its own way, but you almost don’t know until the damage has occurred.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When you got sober, what did that feel like at first for you going from this persona and these fighting and all these things? Did you feel like you lost something important to you when you got sober?

    Tait Fletcher:

    Sure. A lot of things were like, you have a lifestyle, and you’re like, “How do you check a lifestyle?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Tait Fletcher:

    “Oh, this is what I’m worth. This is what I can do. This is my place in the world.” Now, all that’s on its head. That thing you said about curating the moments and boredom, I find, in those times, it’s the biggest thing.

    If there’s ill mind, a sick mind, my mind, whatever, it has this obsessive quality to think about itself. I’m going to outthink the problems or I’m going to get the desires or whatever the thing is. That’s madness that we reflect on and we call it thinking. I’m just ruminating on things. It goes into disaster or whatever the thing is. What it doesn’t do is it doesn’t bust a grape. It doesn’t get you down the road at all. There is zero action involved. Now, I’m habitually training myself to be in inaction and to be in fear, kind of.

    A lot of people, they have had a life of chaos of whatever kind, whether internally, externally, whatever. That ability to not curate your life with chaos so that you can understand your place is a step you have to take. It’s an old idea that you’re like, “Could I live in peace?” It’s like growing up and going to have to defend myself against the world. Eventually, you have to ask yourself question, is there anything to defend from or am I whole in myself and under my structure of the universe that I’m supported? That’s a different kind of consciousness to walk with. I think those are the things, these perspective shifts that we talk about that can bring about real lasting, nourishing change.

    The reflection of all those things is where the growth is for me, but I don’t know that until I’m past it. The rear-view mirror is a lot bigger than the windshield even though it’s real tiny, and I certainly can’t live there. I got to live in the windshield. But if I don’t attend to this stuff, it gets so noisy that it’ll topple my car.

    I never asked myself what do I like until I was in my mid-20s. As far as like, “What would you like to do with yourself, your life?” I had no idea, and I didn’t think I had a lot of options. So, I just did the next thing in front of me that was fun. I started fighting with a group called The Dog Brothers, which was a stick fighting group, which led me into jujitsu, which I fell in love with grappling, and toured the world doing that. Then I go, “Oh, God, this mixed martial arts is coming up,” and I was like, “I’d like to do that.” So, I started fighting on Indian reservations is where the only place it was legal to have.

    UFC was dark in the early 2000s. They came out with the Ultimate Fighter show, and some of my teammates went on and I went on. Jujitsu and combat sports are the lens I looked through for what my greatest discipline has been really. Inside of that has been a worldview that comes out. That’s [inaudible 00:14:34]. That’s what I tell people, whatever you’re interested in, it doesn’t matter. If you deep dive into the thing, you’ll become so good at the thing that you’ll understand other things that are hard.

    That’s the other thing too about recovery is I’ve got to curate an open mind. A lot of the things about whether you’re a drug addict or whether you’ve got brain injuries or whether you’ve had a heart attack, and you’ve got to come back or whatever the injuries are, whatever the thing is, you got to curate an open mind that you can heal. If you’re not on your own side to heal, it’s much harder.

    My friend, Pat, was telling me, she says, “Bodies have a tendency towards healing.” I really like that because, if you are really hurt, sometimes, you can’t get on your own side, but it’s nice to know that there’s forces that are aligned for you regardless of you. I know that that’s true. I have experience with it. I didn’t believe in it. I had nowhere else to turn. I threw my hands up, I go, “I’ll walk this way and maybe it’ll work.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    So, you go from fighting, then you’re training, then you go into movie work. As I’m sure lots of your friends joke, my husband and I literally have this joke like, “Tait’s got to be in this one. It’s going to be… yep, there he is.”

    Tait Fletcher:

    And then they’ll start a stopwatch how long did he last.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, there’s that too. There’s that. The only one I was like, “Okay,” was the Westworld where they bash your-

    Tait Fletcher:

    Oh, yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    … I was like, “Okay, nah.” That’s okay.

    Tait Fletcher:

    That was incredible. I got to work with this guy, Christien Tinsley, who was a great special effects makeup guy and all that. They made four different incarnations of my head in different ways of smashing. It was wild. It was a wild thing to watch that process work, and how that all happened and [inaudible 00:16:02]-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Did everybody who really loves and cares about you hate that scene?

    Tait Fletcher:

    Oh, my mom cried. She wept. She was mad that I showed it to her. She wasn’t into that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah.

    Tait Fletcher:

    I just died recently again on the Mandalorian. I play this hero character that ends in the end. My mom was like, “I didn’t like that at all.” I was like, “But it’s what it is.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s funny. I think it’s Jurassic Park. We’re watching Jurassic Park-

    Tait Fletcher:

    Jurassic World, yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    … Jurassic World, and I’m with the kids. It’s one second of a scene, you just shoot something, and then it… I was dying. It reminds me of Danny Trejo where he’s got this look and this thing. If that is the typecast, you can bet your ass it’s going to be there.

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s usually me or six or eight other guys that you see in the audition room, and it’s like, “Hello again.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, exactly. What has that experience of being more public and having this outside admiration felt like to you? This Hollywood has a tendency to be a struggle for people around ego, and you have this counterbalance of fighting and of sobriety, but did that affect any of that spiritually?

    Tait Fletcher:

    All of it. It’s all interwoven. If you’re trying to bite off hard things or new things or whatever that are uncomfortable, you get in to question yourself. You don’t have confidence in that arena. You have to learn the language. You have to learn how the water moves. That’s new and fresh all the time. Do you have tools with which to navigate that? That’s the thing that paying attention and being lucid is helpful with because, then, you go, and you show up, and you do the good work, you take small bites, and don’t get overwhelmed. But how do you curate all that?

    Also, in my business particularly… I’m in the stunt business is how I got in and it’s my background, and I really loved. From the action of fights to go into action of films is fantastic. Then I just have to grow myself as an actor for the last 15 years since then because I played these character parts. So then that grows and all that.

    I was at a comic-con a couple of weeks ago. They’re looking at the encyclopedia of my work and pictures on the table, and they go, “What a great career. How did you get this career?” I just started laughing. I was, “I just always trying to get the next job. Now, you look at it, and it’s a career, which gives me a new perspective.” It’s like, “Oh, there’s solid work here,” because I don’t know if it’s going to take off or not, but I like doing it. It was like fighting in that way.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right.

    Tait Fletcher:

    I’d see guys coming to the gym. They want to be George St. Pierre under the lights. They see, “Oh, God,” and they don’t know that, we’re in there, you’re fighting whether you got the flu or allergies or broken toes or all the things. You’re in and you’re moving in the gym every day. That’s a consistent, disciplined regimen of your life as a fighter because that’s what it’s. Your diet, everything follows that. Those guys don’t want to do that.

    So then I ask the question of, “Do you like combat sports as an athlete or do you just want to be called a fighter?” These are different things. Every young person goes through it. You’re 12 years old, fuck, you ought to karate, Spanish, ballroom dancing, and all that. If you don’t, you’re just going to have to posture like you do or you’re going to have to get after it for an interminable amount of time that doesn’t seem like you’ll ever… it’s like the first time you have to get faith in and go, “Okay, I’ll try.” I think that’s the same way that I had to transfer into acting is you’re going to go into auditions and you’re going to get told 150 times no. They won’t even tell you no. They’ll say, “Thanks for coming,” and then you’ll know if somebody else is playing that part later that you didn’t get that part or whatever.

    Do you getting told no or do you like the auditions? Do you like the opportunity to do the work? I like the opportunity to present the work, and then I put my mind there because, if anything else, I get caught up in the outcome, I destroy my presence to be able to deliver work.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right. That actually brings us to the TBI conversation. A bunch of things that you said about showing up, doing the work… your career has been concussive, right? So, then, you get job by job, which turns into this cool career. You’re sober a long time, and talk to me about when you started to realize that maybe you had done some brain damage.

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s an awful trick. I laughed at the folly of it. When I knew I was hurt at the time was in a stick fight. I got just a big overhand right over the top of my head, and it dropped me to my knees. I was flashed out. This is the crazy part is that all I thought was all these people are watching me right now. I was able to dive, double leg the guy, and I was able to beat him. After that, for a month, I would lay on the mats to train, and I would just spin like crazy. I couldn’t be in certain positions. It lasted two months, and it went away. I just lived my life. I didn’t know anything about concussion. I had no idea.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How long ago was that?

    Tait Fletcher:

    I probably 27 years old or something like that. Now, I’m 51, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Okay.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Now is the first time that I remembered that I knew I was hurt. I’ve been concussed before, but it got lost in the wash of the chaos. That was the first time. I never thought about it again really after that, much in the way we don’t think about little kids when they bump into each other in the hockey rink or whatever, and then they’re dizzy, we’re like, “Ah, look, he’s got the spins,” or whatever. We don’t really see that that damages brain; he’ll forever be changed. I’m not saying it’ll be horrible, but that’s changed.

    I’ve been knocked out, I guess, twice in competition, never thought about it. I get back in the gym right away. Everybody I knew did. That’s just what our culture was. You lose on Saturday night, you’re back there on Monday because you’ve got to beat the shame off. You need to get better. “Goddammit, I got to work. I didn’t work hard enough, maybe. I don’t know.” Maybe somebody will come up, coach or something, “Hey, maybe take a few days off or whatever.” Maybe you can even be thankful for them caring, but you can never do that. You’re back in on the day. There’s never time to heal. We bring up imaginary times to heal in the fight world. We’ll take 90-day suspension. It’s insane. There’s no way to test it. There’s no way to even know if you’re the athlete.

    Then I got hurt again, just to get everybody caught up, I guess. There’s a movie called Free Guy in 2019. I was knocked unconscious for five minutes. Motorcycle was coming down some stairs and hits me. I go backwards and down the steps. I just went straight back, straight to my head, like 12 feet back and down. That night, I was able to go to dinner; the next day, got increasingly more confused. I didn’t know how to pack my bag. A girlfriend started looking for carer for me, and found hyperbaric chambers were helpful. Joe Namath wrote a big protocol about it because he was told he had early onset Alzheimer’s at 50 years old. He disagreed. He thought, “If I could get oxygen in blood and the deeper recesses of the damaged tissue, maybe I could help myself.” And he did. He found he did, and it was helpful to me.

    That was the first thing that I started looking towards… but I had neurogenic tremors. I was stuttering. I just knew I’d be homeless because that’s what I see the guys on the street doing, didn’t know if I’d ever take a job again, didn’t know I could get better. I sobbed every day deep, just nurturing big tears for hours, every day for couple years, couldn’t go to the grocery store for a while. When we drive to the hyperbaric place, I’d have to have a hoodie on, glasses, and I’d be looking at the floorboards. Even if we’re going five, 10 miles an hour, it’s so weird to explain, if I look up, there’s too much information coming, a tree, car, a fire hydrant, and I would crash. I’d never been in such a vulnerable state. That lasted for, like I said, years.

    You get to a place of self-hatred in such a way where you’re in inaction for a long time, and my whole life doesn’t reflect of who I was, of this discipline, this consistency, this thing that I built. Now, I’m this do-nothing motherfucker that sits and complain all day. Because if you ask me how I’m doing, it’s like this. It’s the verge of suicide and decay all the time, and then you hate yourself for that because you’re not even a reflection of who you’re and yourself that you know has slipped away and has been replaced with something else you don’t recognize, and you got to go. That, I think, is the overview of the story of suicide and brain injury is that you become something you don’t recognize, and you don’t think that you’ll ever be recognizable to yourself again. Without help, I think it’s like that.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How long do you think you lived that building and how did you manage not in those moments to not take your life?

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s a hard thing. I had suicidal ideations at nine years old, so it’s not a new story. But this was different in a different kind of hopelessness, I guess, because I’d had so much hope for so long. It was a real crash. It’s an evil trick of, here’s all this taken away, you can’t hold space anymore.

    I was talking to a friend of mine. I don’t talk to a whole lot, but we’re close. My friends that are my friends, I’m honest. He goes, “So, what’s up? What are you doing?” I go, “Oh, just nothing. Yesterday, I just drove around in the truck a little bit with Hank, my dog, and looking for courage to shoot myself in the chest.” And then I go, “And then I’m getting something to eat and watch Netflix. What are you up to?” We hang up, and I don’t really remember what happens in the conversation. But then 10 minutes later, I get a text from my friend, Lisa, that says, “You got to contact, Shane,” her husband who’s at a treatment center right now. I go, “Okay. That’s weird. I couldn’t put together they’re best friends.

    I got scheduled to go the next day of this brain treatment center called braintreatmentcenter.com. They do MeRT therapy. An MeRT is they do EEG your head and they measure the wavelengths, and see what are in collusion and what are in obstacles of one another. They try to get those in more alignment. They do that by shooting magnets in your head at a certain frequency. It’s just you sitting in front of this machine that shoots magnets in your head for a half hour a day for a few weeks, and that’s the thing.

    Before I go, I get off the phone, I’ve scheduled it, my mom comes over to say goodbye and all that. She says, “I’m so glad that you got her, Tait.” And I’m at the end. I go, “You got to tell me more mom.” She says, “I’ve just seen you darken for the last 10 years little by little. I can’t put my finger on it.” I go, “Mom, that felt like a dark cloud coming for years behind me.”

    I just think of that as brain injury. But the thing is, when you’re hurt, it skews your perception of the world because your mind is how you see the world. If your mind is tilted, you don’t know it’s tilted, but my mom could see. And I had an eerie foreboding.

    About the third day of these treatments, my depression was lifted like a cloak that I’d worn for my whole life, and I go, “God, that’s weird that that’s ebbed.” I was in the shower when I noticed. I was just smiling. I was like, “How crazy?” And then I go, “Just get it together, motherfucker. Clean up, let’s go. You got a date.” You know what I mean?

    The other thing is that you don’t want to put too much stock in it because your hopes get up. It’s like the wave goes out. I went there three times in the last three years, three weeks at a time, usually, and is real helpful. And it’s part of the deal. For me, lifestyle habits are the big part of the deal, just like any other kind of recovery. I have to schedule my days so there’s not bored time to where I can rely on my head.

    During that recovery the last few years, I would just weep because it became apparent to me just how long I’d been hurt and what I’d been carrying. I just didn’t have any idea. It’s been all that. Like I say, I’m grateful for every knock. I’m grateful for all of it because, without it, I wouldn’t have perspective that I have now. I’m grateful that I was able to get some help.

    There’s no help at all in western medicine. I’ve got good insurance. There’s not better insurance I could have, and there’s zero help. They say, “Take fish oil for eight months and, if you’re not better, come back and we’ll give you Alzheimer’s medicine.” I go, “You’re telling me to kill myself. What about hyperbarics?” They go, “We don’t do any of that.”

    It becomes cost prohibitive because you’re out of pocket to do whatever you can. I’m glad I had a couple nickels, but then I felt a tremendous guilt because I knew guys that were hurt that had nothing, and you’re alone in that. You’re already alone even if you’re around people you love because there’s not an acknowledgement of what’s happening. Nobody understand that really.

    First guy that I met that understood it really, he just warmed my heart… I go, “Oh, God, maybe I could get help…” was guy named Dr. Dan Engle. He’d had a bunch of severe concussions, and he’d had recovery from that. He was putting the words to what my experience was. It’s one of the frustrating parts about things is like if you don’t have words to express it, it’s a whole another kind of prison cell inside you. Just the silent scream that you can’t get out, you feel like you’ll explode. That relieves the pressure where you can get around people that know, and there’s people that know. People that have been hurt are eager to help in conversation, in whatever way we can. I know I am.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s a testament. One of the things that I always say when I talk about recovery, any kind of recovery, because, on this podcast, we talk about all different types of recovery, is there are a couple of of things that are non-negotiables, and one of them is community. I don’t really give a shit who or how or what type or whatever, but the community that you build that can understand, and if you can find a community that puts words to your experience, that releases a pressure like you’re talking about, it’s so important to the healing process. It seems like, “Well how the hell is someone talking about it and someone knowing it going to be so healing for me? I’ve just had this horrific injury in accident,” but the reality is that there is healing in someone else describing something you’ve been unable to put words to.

    Tait Fletcher:

    The sadness is there, but you’re oftentimes not alone, and that’s valuable, and takes a long time to heal, and then know what’s my job to be inside of that. How can I create a space where that can occur because I can create a caustic chaotic community around me or a vibration around me, the space around me, the garden which nurtures me, I can make toxic or I cannot? I can look towards nourishing that. Am I creating the best space for that natural growth that I don’t have to do anything for, just hold the space for? Can I do that? And that becomes the job. I go, “God, let it unfold and let me be strong enough to be able to carry the weight of it, whatever that is.”

    Again, I’m either going towards my obstacles or I’m going away from my obstacles. I’m looking at comfort thinking that that’s salvation. What a folly to think comfort is salvation. It’s never where I found any growth or nothing that last, right? And I didn’t know that. Now that I know, I can do better. So much of it is just getting me out of the way of me to let magic happen.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, I do, I know. I have that same problem. One of the things I was thinking about too, as you’re describing your brain injury, is how a lot of trauma for people can actually show up on the brain as a brain injury. This is something that, as we do more and more brain scans when we look at trauma and people’s brains actually doing these PET scans and the research around it, we can see that trauma has a similar effect as a traumatic brain injury. There are some people where they can’t tell the difference between a car accident and trauma. How many people are living on this spectrum, some state of trauma where life is too much? They have the proverbial hood on over their eyes and the glasses and just trying to get through the day and it’s just crawling out of your skin and why? All the things you were talking about with none of that bravery training, with none of the sobriety training, with none of the tools like, “Hey, if you don’t find the answer here, keep looking.”

    I hope that if people are listening and they’ve had trauma and they haven’t had a brain injury, that they’re thinking about it in that perspective. Also, if you were using drugs and alcohol for a long time, the likelihood that you actually did have some sort of concussion or brain injury or hockey dizzy situation is very high, and that too can have effects on people’s depression even many years after they get sober. You build this life, you’re sober and then this deep depression starts coming in, and you don’t know what to do about it. You feel like, “Well, I’ve done all this work, maybe, I’m just broken.”

    Tait Fletcher:

    Yeah. A couple things come up for me when you say that is how many guys that are hurt, the first thing most people do when they’re… I’m so glad that I don’t drink because that was one of the first things they said is that drinking on a brain injury is another brain injury now. I know so many people that just curate their pain and their loneliness and all that through pills because that’s the answer that the medi-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Right, that’s what they gave them.

    Tait Fletcher:

    That’s what the culture gives.

    I went for a colonoscopy, which is a side topic. They’re going to jack my arm. I go, “What are you going to give me?” They go, “[inaudible 00:32:04].” I go, “What are you going to do to my… I’m going to be awake.” They go, “You’re not going to take anything?” I go, “No, I’m going to be awake.” It was nothing. I joked through the whole thing. We’re looking at my top five picks and all that. But I thought, here’s what we’re trying to, culturally. I have to be my own advocate against people that are trying to help me in the medical community. You’ve got to be your own doctor. You’ve got to be our own researcher. If you’re not your own advocate for your own health, and you’re believing somebody, you might be at grave risk.

    We need doctors. I’m not saying all that. I’m just saying there’s a perversion that’s happening that you need to be careful of.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I do a lot of case management work for various people who are looking to get into treatment or they’re going to do a series. I’ll talk to all of the physicians, all of the providers, everybody at all the treatment centers, all the different levels of care because I’ve worked in the industry a long time. It is terrifying to me that there are people going through the system without the advocacy, even our own treatment, whatever, even people who theoretically are taking care of mental health, even with all people who all have good intentions. I come across so many things every single time regardless of intentions where I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, explain to me why we’re doing that.” “Oh, well we just said, blah, blah bah blah.”

    Tait Fletcher:

    And they say, “That’s our protocol.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, “This is our standard of care.”

    Tait Fletcher:

    They blame it on the corporate upstream thing. “This is just how it is.” Well, not for me. I’m a person.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    This is our standard of care. But these are people who know about addiction, who treat addiction every day. Recently, I had a family member who I was helping who I’ve been case managing. They were like, “Well, we put him on benzodiazepines. He has all sorts of stuff. They put him on a benzodiazepine for anxiety, and I said, “Oh, okay. Can you explain to me, is that every day or is that as needed?” “Every day, three times a day.” I go, “Okay, this is a place where they deal with addiction and other things.” I said, “Can you explain it to me? What other things have you guys tried?” :Nothing.” They hadn’t tried any. Some people, that’s all they could do, find whatever. They tried everything out.

    Tait Fletcher:

    If you’re going to ask them even, “What else could you try?” they wouldn’t know anything. They’ve only been trained in this one lane. This is our answer. This is what we need to sell them. It’s insane. The thing you’re saying too about trauma, I don’t want to forget. I know about that, and that’s very encouraging about what you’re saying looking into that for me with what isn’t covered for me because, until I had this setback, I never looked at anything that I walked through in my life as sticky. I had no idea that the thing I walked through when I’m 15 or 22 or whatever affects every relationship I’ve ever had in my life since then. I have this huge blind spot about it that people might have been screaming at me about. I’m like, “What are you talking?” I’m not present to it at all. This self-obsession, quiet part of the mind that is a blind spot to me, but not you, and I start looking at traumas in a different way.

    What it also does when you said how many people are afflicted with this kind of thing, who is not? It’s like you look at what’s happening everywhere, so then I go, “How do I curate myself in this where there’s trauma abounding?” It gives me a hell of a lot more allowance for everybody around me because everybody’s carrying it.

    I was telling my friend yesterday, I was like, “You know what, as soon as I can understand that I’m the guy that’s not using his blinker and I’m the guy screaming at the guy not using his blinker… I’m all the guys. I’ve been capable of being all the guys. I can breathe little easier knock.” You know what I mean? Every dog that barks, you don’t have to scold and fight. It’s just this is what it is. We’re in this one room, schoolroom where there’s PhDs and kindergartners, everybody, and everybody’s grown and rubbing elbows against each other and trying to figure it out. When I can look at that and know that that’s the truth, instead of somebody’s doing something to me or this or that, I’m in this experience. When I put my life there, it’s like that’s the best place to be.

    All the other stuff, whatever the job is, it’s all wallpaper because that’s not the thing that curates my soul, my balance and myself so that I can go to sleep at night and wake up feeling like I’m a part of this as opposed to what a lot of the stuff that I’ve had to recover from is I’m isolated is all the stories I tell myself. I got to push the old ideas away.

    Am I willing to think that there’s a new idea that could come? If I’m not, I’m in danger.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It changes, which is also another piece of that. One of my sobriety mentors, he always says, “You have to update your recovery. The recovery you had 17 years ago, Ashley, might not be the recovery you need today.” I’ve had doses of this experience, and then I had kids. And, fuck, what a dose of your recovery now is going to look different. You have new work to do. You have new lessons to learn. You have new perspective shifts. You’re going to be a new person. You are physically, cellularly a new person. You are going to have new thoughts on the world and all this stuff. I got to tell you, I don’t know how other people do it but, with sobriety, I was able to move through that, But I didn’t know what was going on, who I was. It’s taken me six years to be like, “Okay, this person and this kind of feels joyful, and this is what I think I. Maybe I’m not going to judge everybody, and maybe I don’t care if the mommy cartel comes for me.” Like you said, your perspective is changing. My sobriety, at least, in order for me to continue to stay sober, I have to keep growing. I’m not done.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Of course. The thing too about taking on motherhood… so here’s this new mantle and title that you carry and then there’s like, “I don’t know how to do it,” and then there’s the imposter syndrome with, “It’s happening, it’s here.” There’s no avoiding. However, you’re being right now is not forever, that we are in this transient place of growth. If anything, I’m seeing a snapshot of who Ashley is right now. It’s certainly not the whole breadth of her life, right?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Definitely not.

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s all that stuff. There’s an openness in that. There’s that breadth of the spirit where you’re not separated. The only thing that I can do is I alienate myself. That’s the worse thing I can do as a person. It’s the worst thing that we do societally to people. You go to prison, and if they want to punish you when you’re in prison, when you’re with rapist, murderer, everybody is they put you alone in a room.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, because it’s torture.

    Tait Fletcher:

    I do that to myself. In that thing, I can’t do anything else. I go outside. I go and I smile and I say hello to some people, and it fucking changes me. It’s the last thing I want to do.

    There’s this big thing too. There’s all this talk about you can’t love anybody until you can love yourself and all that. There’s all these things that are paradoxes. Sure, I can see that that’s true. If I really love Tait, I’d be a much better partner. I would show up in a much more product- and I don’t. I’m not always a fan. You know what I mean? There’s all of that. In that, I don’t have to love me to love you. I learned that by being a service to people. I could show up with love and integrity for others regardless of how I felt about me, and that could give me a little bit of a boost of esteem to do the next thing. That becomes habitual if I have smart feet. I got to train my feet to be smart because if I let my head lead me, it doesn’t get me down the road very hard if I’m dealing with all these traumas and things like that. That becomes a whole nother conversation.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes. I just want to echo that, which is that it’s huge that I had no self-esteem when I got sober, even though I thought I did. I was like, “I think I’m pretty good-looking, funny, and smart.” That’s self-esteem. I didn’t know that wasn’t self-esteem. In order to build self-esteem, we do esteemable acts. In order to do esteemable acts, we have smart feet. They take us where we need to go regardless of how much our head is protesting. It is one of the most valuable tools I’ve had in my life that has changed every perspective I’ve ever held and created real self-esteem.

    Tait Fletcher:

    A big lot of my friends are these hard drivers, like go get him, and we’re going to start sanctuary resorts for people to go and have these workshops and all this stuff. There’s this big war cry of a, “Fuck yes!” and it’s a no.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, yeah.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Really? That’s true too. I get it. I understand the intention.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    There’s a place for that.

    Tait Fletcher:

    But that other side of it, I never say, “Fuck, yes,” to jumping in the ice bath. 40% of the time, I don’t say yes to going hit mix or to train or do anything that’s good for me. But I do that thing because it’s a non-negotiable. There’s all of that. It’s like where we have these hard line phrases that we tell people that maybe have two or three decades of experience or something like that, and they’re like, “Oh, well, fuck, yeah.” It’s like all these things, even if they’re 100% true, they’re still partial truths. It’s like when I look back over my life and I think I know something today. Well, how many times I’ve been wrong? Been wrong a lot. I got to consider that right now, today, I’m wrong. I got to have a loose mind to have the new idea next time for what serves me when I’m in that part of the group. I think that’s the best we can do.

    Then we have some allowance with that. We have these guiding ideals and principles and go, “Okay, I’m attached to my growth, to my health, and that of the community around me, and my relationship with this universe,” or something like that. You have whatever your guidelines are, and then we walk, and then we fuck up because that’s what walking is, and then we learn how to adjust while we’re on the path. But we got to have the path that we mark. We got to have the lighthouse that we look towards.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yep. We think about we give toddlers, we give people learning to walk so much space. They fall and we’re like, “Get up. You got this.” I never once said to my toddlers who were learning to walk, “What the fuck? You can’t walk?”

    Tait Fletcher:

    You’re not going to get this.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, like this is [inaudible 00:41:28].

    Tait Fletcher:

    What? Am I going to carry you forever?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah. It never occurred to me or someone maybe who’s relearning to walk. You’re pulling for him. That is a metaphor to how we can be in other spaces, like that ability to admit we were wrong and to embrace the lessons that come with that error of thinking.

    Before I forget, I want to jump back to one thing you said which was about isolation. Alcoholism, addiction breeds in isolation. Just a funny quip here which is that, at the black sites in Afghanistan, they had two forms of ways that they tortured people. I find this akin to motherhood. The first way was isolation. They put you in a box and whatever they’re waiting for you to confess to all the things you may or may not know. The second way was, swear to god, they turn on Baby Shark as loud as they could.

    Are you familiar with Baby Shark?

    Tait Fletcher:

    Is that a kid’s show?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    The kids’ song. It’s our version of Raffi. So, Baby Shark, they turn it on, and they play it 24/7 while you were in a room alone to the point where the makers of Baby Shark found out about it and wanted royalties for every… which is a whole other capitalism America specialty.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Amazing.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    But kids bring you to the most elementary yet most primary basic understanding of humanity, and it’s been such a great part of my recovery to come back to just the basics of what it is to be a human, to ask questions, to explain things, and not get so ahead of myself because when I get ahead of myself, I’m the least happy.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Did you ever see a book called Everything I Need to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Mm-hmm.

    Tait Fletcher:

    It’s like stuff like that. Here’s these basic things that are so pertinent to my very life. There’s the foundational stuff of happiness and purpose, really.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    It’s wonderful. Your story is amazing. I so appreciate your time. I know you’re busy and you curate all the joy in your life and I-

    Tait Fletcher:

    I’m trying. I’m making a comeback.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I love it. I love the comeback. I look forward to seeing you in lots more combat scenes, movies and stuff, and just to see what this next chapter looks like for you with your brain recovery. If there’s any way I can be useful or helpful in that-

    Tait Fletcher:

    Thank you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    … do not hesitate to let me know.

    Tait Fletcher:

    I’m able to participate more and feeling ambitious to do that, which is nice. I’m looking forward to doing more of these and restarting my own podcast. For a long time, you don’t want to talk because it is heartbreak, and you go, “Is what I’m doing hurting me or helping me? I don’t know. I just am at the end and I’ll try anything.” I feel like I have a better way to express that now, and I’m real grateful. Thanks for the opportunity to be here with you.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Absolutely. Absolutely. If you’re ever in LA, I would love to see you. Take care. Please let me know if I can ever be useful.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Thank you. Bye.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    All right. You take care.

    Tait Fletcher:

    Thanks. Bye-Bye.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Real talk. Do you agree that Baby Shark is a torture tactic to get state secrets?

    Scott Drochelman:

    If I was drawing up a really creepy place to be, it would be in the dark with lights flashing by myself in a cage, and they’re blasting Barney or Baby Shark at me, that would be… because there’s no escape. There’s no escape.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Was there escape when your child was playing it because there wasn’t-

    Scott Drochelman:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    … any escape when mine were?

    Scott Drochelman:

    I was literally thinking that the whole time because I had never really… the analogy of in prison, even the worst offenders of whatever, their punishment is to take them and put them in a room by themselves, and I was like, “Wow.” So, yeah, I was sleep-deprived, hearing Baby Shark-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Correct. That was the other piece.

    Scott Drochelman:

    … over and over again, and alone in it other than my wife, so, yeah. I went Kooky Pens for sure-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Kooky Pens, yeah.

    Scott Drochelman:

    … for real. I told you the story before, but I had a moment one night where my son was waking me up every 15 minutes for a whole night. I had given Cassie the night off. I think she had a rough night. So I got it, yeah, every 15 minutes, he woke me up, which was just enough time for me to fall back asleep, just barely, and then he would wake me up again. This was months in, and I was not okay. I just remember I was bouncing him and I just went, “Uh-oh, I’ve been compromised.” I put him down in his bed, I walked into my bathroom, and I just punched myself in the face as hard as I could. I was like, “Oh, aw, why did I do that?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, god.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Why did I do… Why?” like right in the eye socket too, just like, “Bing!”  I was like, “Oh, dude, why, why, why?”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Fully compromised.

    Scott Drochelman:

    You’re crazy. You’re just crazy.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    When I heard that they did that… because I knew about the sleep deprivation, and when I was being sleep-deprived, I was like, “I know why this is a torture method because I would tell you absolutely every secret I’ve ever known right now, if you were to tell me that you’d give me sleep. Hands down, don’t tell me anything. I will absolutely squeal if you sleep.”

    CIA if you’re listening, I’m sure you are going to recruit me but, now, you know better. Okay, so there’s that.

    Then there’s the isolation, right? You are very isolated in the beginning and this day and age. But then I heard also that they were doing kids’ songs, particularly Baby Shark and Barney, when that came out was that the companies wanted royalties for every time they played because they did the math.

    I swear to God, look it up. If you Google this, and you look at the YouTube videos, all of the parents who are newscasters are giggling because they’re like, “See, it is absolutely proven to be torture used by the military.” And now they want royalties. Then they did the math on how many times they had played the songs and how much money it would be, and just the sheer amount of times that they had played, you guys, that is absolutely, absolutely enhanced interrogation. I think I’d be like, “Please, waterboard me. Please, waterboard me. Fuck it. You know what? At least I believe the end was nigh.”

    When you compare all of these situations when you look at ways of torture, ways that the human mind is taken to the brink of wanting to destroy itself, you see isolation, you see addiction, you see repetition. You can’t get an idea out of your head. You can’t get a thought. You can’t get a behavior, whether it’s obsessive-compulsive when you want to stop a behavior, but you can’t, whether that’s touching the handle of the door or it’s drinking. When you are drinking or using in addiction, your world gets smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller because nobody wants to be around you, and you don’t want to be around anybody because you also know that you’re toxic at a certain point. Just the walls start closing in.

    Another piece of this too is that for family members, for parents and other family members, their worlds start closing in as well because people can’t relate to them. And that’s where going to these support groups comes in handy in terms of other parents who are dealing with it or listening to and relating, because you also feel like you’re losing your mind because your world is getting smaller and smaller.

    People are like, “Well, you should just take away the car,” or “You should just stop whatever,” or “You should…” Everybody’s whatever it is. Then when you get into a room with a bunch of parents or spouses or whoever it is who’ve actually experienced what it’s like to have a loved one circle the drain with their addiction, and they say things that really explain how you’re feeling now, you feel a little less alone, even though they haven’t immediately solved the problem at hand. There’s just so much value and healing to that that people underestimate.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I’m just really thankful that Tait was able to find that community piece because I can’t imagine to feel that disconnected from the real world and from your abilities and from all those sorts of things, that feels like you’re sort of trapped in your own head. Aside from not wanting to do things because of all the vertigo kinds of things that are happening for him and whatever, of course, you don’t want to go out and experience that, but then to just have so many faculties and things sort of taken from you, and especially I have to imagine for somebody who has inherent power in the world, they’ve been able to walk through the world in a particular way for so long to be sort of trapped in your own mind, in your own house, and feeling like you’re the only one in this experience, and that there’s nobody who has anything for you, it’s unbelievable to me. Again, I’m a broken record, I’m blown away by every story we tell. I really am because I always just go, “I don’t think I got that. I don’t think I have the gene,” but, man, I was just so impressed because I can’t imagine what it would feel like to undo that, how you find your way out of that situation.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    How many people are going through the world having the experience of going… I know for me, and this is different but the same, which is that I remember people talking about back pain. “Oh, back pain. Oh, back pain.” This was before I was 27, where when my back went out for the first time. Now, when people talk about back pain, just my heart breaks for them. But I didn’t know. When people would be like, “Oh, my back, my back. Oh, that back injury,” I just really didn’t know what that meant. Tait’s entire persona, his personality, presence, whatever, it all is one of, and of course in this moment, I’m sure he has his moments as we all do, but it is a very humble human being then forced himself to regrow and to keep going, and to tell the suicidal thoughts and ideations and the isolation and all the things that, “Not today, Satan.” I have just so much respect for that because I’ve been in moments of that. It’s really a lot harder to do that than it is to just give in to the perspectives.

    A lot of the time when I’m dipping into the perspectives, the consequences, I’m just really scared. I don’t kill myself. It’s just a daily consequence. I’m just scared. Everybody around me is affected by my shitty mood. It’s not life or death. It’s just wasted time. Here’s an example to me when he’s describing, basically, is the fear helping? Have you ever grown from the safe? What did he say, a lot of toxicity can grow in comfort?

    Scott Drochelman:

    Oh, man, yes.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I was like, “Eh, why did you say that? I needed to hear it today, and I didn’t want to.” I was like, “Yeah, fuck, yeah.” I am constantly striving to be comfortable, and I grow in comfort. Do you grow in comfort?

    Scott Drochelman:

    Yeah, exclusively.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Exclusively.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Yeah. Well, it’s a bed room. It sounds like a bedroom, but it’s a bed room. It’s a room full of beds.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Beds? Yeah.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I don’t want any hard edges or discomfort. It’s nice sheets on all the beds, all the walls, all the ceiling covered. I have people-

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, it’s a padded room.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Well, you can say that if you want. I am in a restraint of sorts, but I have somebody who brings me all my meals. I mentioned it to him off-air, but you could tell there’s just so much wisdom that he has and I have to imagine a lot of that was sort of hard fought wisdom and things that he had to discover along a really challenging road. But man, the stuff that he’s brought back from such a dark place was… I was jotting down things like a mad man. I was just like, “Oh, my god, I got to remember that.” There was so many little things that I was like, “Oh, yeah, man, he’s so right.” I have been in that lately, haven’t I? The thing about the soil, and you can make the soil toxic for the other people, oh, god.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Oh, yeah. That was good too. It’s not just my toxic soup I’ve got to share. It’s like a big swimming pool. This is how it is, right? It’s like a big swimming pool, and I’m like, well, if I take a shit in this pool, it’s my pool, and I’m the only one… it’s the shit right next to me and whatever, but I don’t realize I share a pool with the whole house, and I just took a shit in the pool every day, and now we all have diarrhea. That’s how that analogy was retired.

    Scott Drochelman:

    I guess the only thing that we do want to apologize for this episode though is that, now, when you watch any movie with him in it, you’re going to feel empathy maybe for a character that you weren’t supposed to.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, 100% percent.

    Scott Drochelman:

    That’s a hard thing because he’s in a lot, he is talented, but you are not going to feel the same.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    He’s always the bad guy.

    Scott Drochelman:

    They’re going to go, “Oh, god, but Tait… Oh, he seems like such a great guy.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    In the Equalizer, he tries to kill Denzel.

    Did you know that Denzel’s name is Denzel?

    Scott Drochelman:

    No.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    That’s how he says it, Denzel.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Do you know Oprah spelled Orpah, her real name?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    No.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I’m like, I don’t think that’s true. I’m spelling it in my head.

    Scott Drochelman:

    O-R-P-A-H is the way it’s really spelled, Orpah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Really?

    Scott Drochelman:

    Yeah.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Why did she drop the R?

    Scott Drochelman:

    It’s there. It switched places.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Or why did she move the R?

    Scott Drochelman:

    I don’t know. Just sounded better.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Great. I like it. Orpah, Denzel. He’s in Sicario. It really is a thing where Dac and I watch movies. And if there’s a bad menacing character or like a military group or SWAT team, we’re like, “10, nine, eight, seven…” It’s really funny. It’s great to see people. I really do appreciate seeing people who… it’s fun to see people who do well and also are really good people. It’s hard to admire people who are shitty. Even if they’re good at something, and you’re like, “That guy’s kind of an asshole.”

    Scott Drochelman:

    We can confirm even off-air, great guy, solid. That’s all we can say. Fantastic human.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yep. Now, I need to go get in a nice bath and perspective shift myself, and not shoot for the comfortable.

    Scott Drochelman:

    Literally, when he was like, “I don’t want to do these things 40% of the time,” I was like, “Oh, man, and you still do them.”

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    I’m like, “I’m at 60. Does that count?”

    Scott Drochelman:

    My number is much higher, much higher.

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Asking for a friend, if you’re at 60, are we still working with same recipe?

    Scott Drochelman:

    I never want to do it. Okay? How about that?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yeah, never. Does that mean I can stop? Okay.

    Scott Drochelman:

    No. Okay, great.

    Well, we are rooting for you this week as we always are. I hope you hear the sincerity in my voice. I really do mean it. We hope, if you’re listening, and you’re having a hard time, that there’s something in here that will be valuable for you.

    Ashley, anything you want to leave the people with today?

    Ashley Loeb Blassingame:

    Yes, I would love to. I haven’t done this one in a while. I am requesting that if you listen to this podcast and you get something out of it, if you would take three minutes, go to Apple Podcasts, rate and review at the bottom, and give us a rating and a written review that is podcast currency. We are so, so grateful for your help.

    Thank you. Thank you so much. We appreciate you listening every week. Thank you.

    This podcast is sponsored by Lionrock.life. Lionrock.life is a diverse and supportive recovery community, offering weekly over 70 online peer support meetings, useful recovery information, and entertaining content. Whether you’re newly sober, have many years in recovery or you’re recovering from something other than drugs and alcohol, we have space for you.

    Visit www.lionrock.life today and enter promo code COURAGE for one month of unlimited peer support meetings free. Find the joy in recovery at Lionrock.life.

    Scott Drochelman

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