Finally Friday with John & Melissa

Your little black window is all our heads are going to appear there.

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And the moment it appears in the it says connecting streaming software to go live.

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It's in the process of doing that, and it's coming up now.

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And as soon as it comes up, there we go. Hit your go live button. You should be up now.

No. Nope. Nope. Okay, so it's connected, but it's not going. It's there's no there's no like indicator on on Instagram that's going live. So I don't know.

We're on now. We're live now. S A Hampson and Wayne Roger Beck have joined us. On Instagram, we're live on YouTube, and so it's not live on your end. Hey world! Hey, listen, this is our mate Sam, and so we don't know what we're doing, so just hang on a tick.

Hello Instagram, welcome to Finally Friday. Happy Friday.

Keep doing your thing, mate. It's disappeared off there. Oh no, this will be over here. So hey everybody, we're gonna— we're on with Sam. Sam's just working out his Instagram.

I'm unsuccessful, doing terrible at it.

Hey, did you get the right key? Did you take the bottom one or not the top one?

The bottom one, yeah, for sure.

Okay.

I don't know.

Janine's on YouTube. G'day Janine, good to see you.

Here, let me see if I can— they won't be able to hear you, that's the thing. I wish you could simulcast it.

Hello, Instagram. Hello, Twitter. We're just here with Sam. Sam's getting organized. I don't blame him.

I'm trying.

It's not his fault.

No, I have ADHD.

He's not thinking about one thing at a time over here.

No, I'm— oh, I'm online. Okay, so I'm gonna go live on my own live because it's not working.

Okay, do that, mate.

I have no idea. I don't know how the can opener works, let alone how to use it.

I'll tell you what, we'll get to the end of this and then we'll, we'll take 5 minutes at the end and we'll do it all again and we'll have you back on in a couple of weeks. All right, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

Hey everybody, welcome to Finally Friday.

Yay!

We made it. Cheers, beverage of choice. We've got our mate Sam here. She's got what? Well, she's got a mason jar, a blue one of water. Of water. So, um, here we have it.

Yes.

Hey Janine, do you have Sam at your place?

Oh yeah, she's got that.

She's got all that. Janine's got all the ADHDs. So good to have you here. Finally Friday, we get together with friends and we talk about life, creativity, and what drives us. And Sam is an exceptional human being with a great podcast called The Fearless Now. The Fearless Now. He and I had a chat that lasted for about 2 and a half days.

Yes, we, we, we, um, we could have called Guinness. I mean, it was a pretty long—

it was a long podcast.

It was a long podcast, but it was heartfelt. We went somewhere and it just went by so quickly. And I think it's because of the fact that both John and I, we, we know how to go to that place. Not to, not to, you know, stroke your ego anymore, John, that I know you have such a big one, but like, and you just— We just went somewhere, and that's a good indicator of 2 people that really are wanting to share some truth with the world and share some, um, and to, to be a, a beacon for those that need it.

And Sam's that guy, and I'm going to encourage you, and we'll— there'll be a— I'm going to drop something in, um, in the chat here, which is his links to his Instagram and to his podcast. And I want to encourage you all to get that. That's in the chats now. And so, hey, listen, we want to, we want to tell you a little bit. Mel's been painting goats. lately, Sam. Oh, she's got some goats she wants to show to the world.

Yes, yes, please.

All right, so this week creatively, guys, it's goats.

It's all goats. Oh wow, that's Gerald the Goat.

That's Gerald.

Hey Gerald, I love the colors.

It is just great.

And this is Marvin.

Hi Marvin the Goat.

Marvin, Marvin.

So Gerald and Marvin are both available on melryanking.com. Uh, we, we've had a great time this week painting goats.

And pass me that book, the green one. And I just finished another book. I'm going to do a Brilliant to Bollocks review on this. This is, um, William Gibson's book. There's a series coming out on Apple in a little bit, um, which would be great because I have no idea what this is about. Um, I read the whole thing. It was phenomenal and really confusing. It's the sort of book— I love AI, and what I do with AI is I get it to summarize the book for me. Because then I don't have to sit around wondering about what the hell is this guy talking about. So that was fantastic.

You just described the, the cheat sheet for every ADHDer. We had— back when we were— when I was in high school back in the, you know, in the 1900s, um, we had, we had Cliff's Notes, which— yeah, I don't know if you had that in Australia, but yeah, I didn't. Remember Cliff's Notes?

Yeah, we had something like that.

Yeah, I never read the— you know, we had to read The Odyssey Well, we didn't have that movie. Yeah, Christopher Nolan, CliffsNotes.

Yeah, I know. So you— so I got that. So that's why I do the Brilliance to Bollocks, um, reviews. Yeah, so that I can prove to myself I actually understood what I was talking about. So I love it. And we've got— where's Deal With It? And also we're doing a rewrite on Deal With It, Deal With It: Life After Trauma, and I'd love your input on I'm thinking of calling it Deal With It: Turning Shit into Fertilizer is what my new title wants. And the wife and I are having a bit of a contest about this at the moment. She's—

I, I don't want people to think it's a book about composting.

Yeah, you got to be careful with that. People get confused.

Oh, I could put a poop emoji in a little wheelbarrow in a tree. So, so hey, Anna on YouTube, good to see you. Folks on Instagram, if you've got suggestions for the title, I won't take any notice. But look, feel free to go ahead and you get a participation trophy. Maybe you win a goat for the— you win a goat if you come up with the best title, subtitle, subtitle. You'll win a goat. You can have either one of your goats. Which goat? No, we're gonna offer them again.

I love it, my Marvin. I, I kind of like your, your, um, your, your brother over there. No, your sister.

That's—

who is that?

Gerald.

Gerald.

I like your brother Marvin better. I love the color.

Okay, well then, Sam, you got to come up with a good title, mate. So, so Deal With It, we're going to call it Deal With It, and it's going to—

Diamonds Covered in Shit Layered in Lipstick, because I don't know where diamonds— and we spend a lot of our life being covered within the, the noise of our, um, making shit up machine, our, our thought and thinking system. Um, that is, um, innocently being co-created by the noise up in our head.

Yeah, that's the truth.

And the habits of thought that we've innocently taken on. And that's the underneath— the shit in the lipstick is, is, is this diamond underneath it, our essential nature, which is— Deal with it.

Lipstick on a pig.

Yeah, lipstick on a pig.

So hey, mate, listen, fill folks in a little bit because you and I had a great conversation And I know one of the things I got coming away from our time was you've spent years. I don't know if fixing is the right term, but coming to understand it or coming to terms with you, at peace with you, because you don't fix autism. Got it. Tick the box. PTSD. Got it. Tick the box. ADHD. We've got it.

You can't fix gay either.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's because it's who we are. It's it's. It's our neural machinery. Yeah, it wasn't about a fix. It was about a— it's an understanding. It's, it's understanding how mind works, whether you're neurotypical or neurodiverse. It's understanding that our essential nature is not found in noise, which is the— our thoughts.

Talk about that. Talk about that, because you said that a couple of times. So what do you mean by noise?

The noise is, is, is, you know, it's, it's the The Chatty Cathy, um, wow and flutter of our mind's thought and thinking system that's constantly co-creating, making shit up. It's the making shit up machine. It's our habits of thought. It's the mixtape between your ears. It's the AI program between our ears that's making it all up. It's never true, ever, ever true. You know, we don't—

Excellent.

Common sense intuition wasn't what pointed you to meeting your amazing partner. Mel, don't get a small head, Mel. Um, or, or writing your book or reading the texts. It's that common sense space where we just know how to do life. It's, it's, it's what all the great sages have been pointing us to, including Jesus. Um, trusting your inner wisdom, which does not come from the, the, the algorithm of our personal mind or intellect that is doing its best, like If you ever try speaking to someone who doesn't speak the same language as you and using Google Translate, it's gonna garble it up. It doesn't translate correct. The same thing with our intellect. It loves us, but the job of the brain is to keep us alive, and it does a lot of silly things to keep us alive. And ego, which is made up, is part of that thought and thinking that AI— that AI program. That, um, wants to keep us alive, but it's not the truth. You know, the, the, the ego and the intellect and our limbic system, our amygdala, it's there to keep us alive and also when we're in danger to, to know what to do next. You know, but, but since, since, since caveman times, that system has not evolved. And then we have our neurochemistry that hasn't really evolved that much either. Um, you know, ADHDers were the original hunter-gatherers. But in 2026, how do you apply that to our, our current civilization?

And I think that's a, that's a great question to ask. So we've got a lot of people, you know, it goes out to streams out to about a quarter of a million. There's bound to be people here that, um, what if they feel broken and they feel disconnected? What's a starting point for people like that? Um, because you talk a lot about music for yourself.

Yeah, so I were— yeah, I have a great, you know, ADHDers having a great imagination. Um, and that's why some of the greatest writers have ADHD or artists, right? Painters. Um, Pollock was a total, you know, silly lunatic of an ADHDer who was probably on the spectrum. Um, one of my favorites. I love Pollock. Pollock was one of my favorites, but he had He had a lot of demons because he, he sometimes got caught up in the noise, very innocent, like we all do. So what was your question again? I'm sorry, John.

So, so what would you tell someone? What would you tell someone that, um, they're at home, they feel broken? How do they, how do they deal with that and cope with it and get to a new stage in all that?

Yeah, so you don't need to do any of that. Um, in fact, I, I always point my clients back to that— I call it the cookout space. So when I was a little kid, like, I grew up, um, most of my life, adult life's been California, but I also spent— I was born in New England, in southern New England, Connecticut. When I was a little kid, we would have cookouts.

Yep.

And that feeling of just being present under the stars, or being— the smell of the grill on my, on my dad's deck, um, I wasn't up in my, my personal mind. I wasn't up in the ADHD house of horrors. I was present to what is, even with problems, even with worrying about school the next day. So like we drop in and out of that space every day.

So in and out of presence is what I'm hearing you say, right?

Like, like, for example, I have a friend that had a lot, has had a lot of life issues, tragedy. He's homeless right now. But he's still happy. How do you explain that?

Yeah. Always.

Yeah. I mean, like, I can keep going. My great uncle had leukemia. He passed away a couple years ago. My great— I'm sorry, my uncle through marriage. And, um, but he was still cracking jokes. He still had— how do you explain that? Like, when we're in that space of presence of, of the now, as you hear my voice, even with all our external problems, the more we spend time in that space, our life, um, just opens up. And we know what to do next. Yeah, whether it is, um, whatever that, that shows up. And you'll just— we don't trust that space enough. That's the unknown, the, uh, the unknown zone, I call it.

You know, we talk about that a little bit and deal with it, um, is, uh, to sort of drop me into that being present thing. If John and I had a hard day, uh, I would, at the end of the day, I would say, you know what, There was that 15 minutes that I'm really thankful for, and I would name whatever it was happened in that 15 minutes. And what I found myself doing as we were thankful for things, um, I found myself looking for the next 15 minutes and looking for the next 15 minutes. Yeah, and it made me more present.

The other thing she taught me— and hey, just got a mate of mine, um, Tyler Spiller, on. Good to see you, mate. It's been a while. So one thing that Mel taught me, because I think some of us when we go through these things, we have a moment in a day and in our head we're saying we've ruined the whole day. What Melissa taught me—

Right.

And she would say, no, we had a tough 15 minutes or we had a tough hour. And what that did was give me permission to reclaim whole days, in fact reclaim whole weeks, because I might have 5 bad moments in 5 bad days. And there was a time where I would have written off the whole week and said, you're a loser, you're a failure, you're never going to make it, this thing's going to beat you. And then I reduced it to, okay, well, look, I had probably an hour over 5 days. That's pretty good.

Over time, I think doing those things consistently over time, you sort of rewire some things as to how you look at your day, how present you are.

You know, yeah, life— and see, life unfolds. It doesn't just like— like, when we see life is unfolding— and listen, I'm not trying to be pithy and sanctimonious, and I'm not trying to quote Eckhart Tolle, you know, like, but obviously he, he's pointing in the right direction. But like, if I, if I said this to you, I said, John, I have cancer, or John, I have— I was diagnosed with cancer.

Yeah, there's a different energy.

Yeah. The one that— the one that's the, the, the, the, you know, the, the emotive hysterics is being up in my personal mind and in my, in my, in my intellect, scared. Because the brain doesn't know. See, the brain— the brain's a stimulus-response machine. That's it. That's all it is. But there's something— there's something underneath that that's really, um, guiding us along the river of life.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's something— I mean, again, all the great sages, whether you're a Christian or a Jew or a Buddhist or whatever, Hindi, whatever you are, all roads lead to Rome when it comes to this.

Um, yeah.

I mean, I mean, like, you know, you talk to people that, um, if I followed a homeless guy around on Skid Row here in LA, I guarantee there are moments when he's just free and clear of how scared he is to be homeless.

Mm-hmm.

And he's just present to what is. I mean, now, you know, someone with a mind that works differently, like an ADHDer or someone who's on the spectrum, our mind works differently and it goes really fast. And we've created a lot of habits of thought around our outside experience. And most of it, 99.9% of it is made up and wrong and fake. Um, but the AI tech between our ears is so damn good. Yeah, that like it— we all get caught up in the— I call it the ADHD House of Horrors. Caught up in your personal mind, caught up in, in the Upside Down. I call, you know, like from Stranger Things. I mean, there's so many great metaphors, but that's— we all do it.

Um, what would you say to someone— we have a friend of ours watching on YouTube and she's typing questions. What would you say to someone in their 60s who's just now learning to trust that inner wisdom? Is it a matter of Making those small, consistent, um—

Or is it a big thing? Or is it—

what, how would they—

so talk, so talk to them. You're talking to a friend of ours, Janine.

Yes. So, so like Janine, like, so that space that I'm pointing to where thinking slows down, it's the space between when our thoughts melt away and when new thinking is coming on. It's that liminal space. Where it's just this— and it's not a dopaminergic or serotonergic feeling. There's no GABA there. There's no neurochemicals. That's all personal mind neuromachinery crap. It's just unknowing and a sense— a feel-good feeling, but it's not like dopamine. It's just, yeah, I just feel expansive. It's, it's what some, some people call it the flow state, where time speeds up or slows down.

Mm-hmm.

It's where John wrote his book. It's where Mel paints.

Yes.

It's where Sam, you know, Sam works with clients. You just go there. And that's— I called, you know, they call it Christ consciousness, it's the God space. Um, it's, it's that liminal space. And especially when people are going through hard times, right? If you're grieving something, it's that space between grieving and healing. Like, some of the greatest music ever written Was when someone had something horrible happen to them. Look at Van Gogh, Jesus! I mean, what is the what? I mean, the guy, you know, Beethoven lost his hearing. Was it Beethoven who lost? He lost his hearing.

Yeah, he wrote his greatest symphonies when he was deaf.

Zibit B, right?

I've been reading a lot about Marcus Aurelius lately, Stoic philosopher. Oh yes, and I love the guy, and people. they hear his name and they read his stuff and they think, man, that's out of touch. And it's some of the most down-to-earth stuff I, I could imagine.

Yeah.

Um, that, like, his approach to life, and it's so obtainable to people. And I think that's one of the mysteries when we get caught up in the ever-increasing dopamine world of the instant fixes, right? We move away from these, these great masters that, that have stood the test of time. Like, he's been around for thousands and thousands of years. He's writing just like the scriptures. And it's like, okay, there's truth in here. And the reason that they're still present and powerful is because of the truth, right? And Aurelius talks of the same sort of thing— being present, aware of nature. And doesn't matter what your station is in life, we've all got the same issues. And I think that's very important for people to understand, is that whatever issue you have isn't a limiter. It either refines you or defines you. And your ability to be able to move forward, um, a lot like you're saying, is understanding that flow state and, and how can you tap into those, those positive things that are present and want to manifest.

I love that, John. And I think what's important the audience also understands, we need the contrast.

It's like, okay, unpack that, unpack that a little bit.

You're— what?

Unpack that. What do you mean by contrast?

So, so imagine if we didn't have, have difficult things happen to us. Imagine if we didn't have anxiety or depression or any of those, you know, those experiences. Excellent. How would we know what, what presence is? How would we know what joy is? How would we know what a holy moment looks like? How would we know what expansive— we wouldn't know. It's like, you know, we need to, we need to see that like the AI program is there to show us what is always true and what is never true.

Hmm.

The AI program is never true. Now the AI program is great if you're a mechanical engineer, you know, it's like put slot A into slot B, or like if you're in, like, it's great analytically for some stuff. We need it. It's also the bridge between the world of the form and the formless, but it's so perfectly imper— it's so imperfect. Again, the Google Translate metaphor, that, that if we lean on it all the time for our wisdom, we're going to fall on our— fall on our faces because that's not where our common sense is. That's not where we do our best work. And it's certainly not where we create our next Pulitzer Prize-winning book or our next Grammy Award-winning piece of music. I could go on and on and on. And I think that's where people get stuck is like, You know, for see, for example, I wrote a book. I never thought I could write 35,000 words and be able to sit still and write a book like an 80, right? But I did.

Well done.

Thank you. And it's called Beyond ADHD.

But like, and where can people get your book?

Oh, Amazon. Sorry, Amazon. And it's doing really well. And I this is the thing.

I'll put it in the comments.

If I listen to the to the you know narrow angle judgments and criticisms of my thought and thinking making stuff up machine of my My personal mind, my intellect, my neural machinery. There's no way that buck would have been done.

Right?

Like right.

So so once we see like there's something beyond there that our personal mind is innocently chiming in too much, it's kind of like my partner she got a new brand new car and it's all these like safety nannies. Like you know it's like the lane. It's like the You know, like the lane avoidance system where like, yeah, they'll let you know, and sometimes it'll go off for no reason. It'll just be like, and like, oh my God, it's so like that's not helping. Make me more anxious. Or like the crash avoidance system, like this causes a crash. It causes a crash. Like what? And then sometimes it's a false alarm, and then it'll apply the brakes. I remember I was on the freeway, and I'm like nowhere near. I'm like, this is a car. Maybe it's like in the distance. You can't. You know, you can see the back of it, but it's nowhere near a problem. It's plenty safe following. The system hit the brakes and went beep beep beep. I'm like, oh my God, it's gonna kill me. But that's what our that's what our personal mind does. It innocently contaminates our present moment experience. But you know, our brain loves us so much. It's like a codependent relationship, and it's like, you know, it's like a you know, like a puppy dog doesn't know better. It's sometimes gonna be on the couch.

Hey, talk to us about music. I found— oh yeah, EDM has been just such a great discovery for me. Here I am, I'm 63, and it's the— it's my go-to tune for the gym. Anything with that thump and that beat. And, you know, like, I think it's an— I, I've come to really appreciate autism. I just wear things out. I don't need a new playlist. I've got one playlist.

You're preaching to the choir.

I've got one playlist. I've got one diet. I've got being a bodybuilder with autism.

I eat the same thing every day.

I've got 3 things I eat. I've got 3 things I listen to. Yeah, I've got 3 places. Totally. You know, if you want to suggest something new, it's like, why? Why would I?

Yeah, she goes, I'm really boring. I'm just so bored.

She said, wait, what do you want to eat? I said, well, what's wrong with what we had like for the last 6 months.

Yeah, I, I, I do exactly the same thing. Um, you know, I, I think it, it just with, with music. So, you know, music is a God frequency too, right? Different frequencies. They know that, you know, you can listen to the Solfeggio frequencies and something might happen, or like—

Go ahead.

So let's, let's— like, I find some music is not positive and I find other music is positive. And I think it is a frequency thing. I find some things amp me up in the wrong way, and I don't need those. Some music, I need that sort of music. And it's not a going-to-bed thing. It's like, even, you know, like, I don't know, do you find the same thing? Do you use music as a tool to help you manage and navigate situations or your life?

For me, it's without music, I'm not— it's my oxygen.

Really?

Oh, yeah. And I think that for a lot of, especially folks that are neurodiverse, it fills in the gaps when we need to, when we're just kind of— you have to understand, with ADHD, ADHD specifically, our mind's going really fast. It's exhausting. It's exhausting, because we have— you have to understand what's going on between the ears for within ADHD, or we have an executive functioning part of the brain that's supposed to filter out and organize all the incoming data. The filter doesn't work the same way as a neurotypical. So we we experience the world all at once, right? We experience we there's no filter, and that's what why a lot of ADHDers are incredibly intuitive and empathic because we we sometimes hyperfocus on the wrong stuff. But those details help get us back on task. But we didn't forget the detail that that most people don't even see.

In, in a—

and just in a regular conversation, we can pick up on nuance, you know, uh, um, emotive stuff, and also energy very, very—

Yeah.

Because we hyperfocus on it so intensely. That's exhausting, okay? Our mind going really fast trying to make sense of all the sensory information and then having to mask it because everyone else is like, you know, like we're like a bunch of blinded blinded automatons, like, where the Energizer— like, if you, if you watch an office— like, you go to New York or go to Dallas or go to any big city and you, like, follow someone who's, say, going to the office every day and has his job in a cubicle, which I couldn't do. I tried.

No good, man.

Um, that's, that's like my personal attitude.

Death by a thousand cuts, man.

Oh my God, yeah, paper cuts, very thin ones, you know, slow paper. You're like, oh, we won't go there. Anyways, like, so like you follow that person, um, to, to the office. It's like that, you know, it's just— No, I, I tried, I couldn't do it. But anyways, um, what, what comes to me though is that with music In some ADHDs— listen, you put 5 ADHDers in a room and you'll get 5 different experiences.

It's all— it's the same with everything.

Like, it's a Venn diagram but of the same thing, right? Exactly. But, but for a lot of us, it's, it's very soothing. And also the noise, especially EDM. And a lot of ADHDers love EDM. I grew up with EDM since the '90s, um, you know, listening to old, you know, old school stuff. Yeah, like Sasha and Digweed, Paul O'Connell. They can go on, like, way, way—

Swedish Mafia, all the fun stuff.

Yes. Oh my God, Chemical Brothers.

Yeah, come on now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I can, I can keep Avanti, all the good stuff.

Oh yeah, oh yeah. Um, so like for a lot of us, that noise, which is not even noise, it's music, um, helps us be present, helps us kind of hyperfocus on what we need to.

Yeah.

And for some ADHDers, it's annoying, but for a lot of us, it's, it's really our oxygen because it really helps us Um, see beyond the, the, the wow and flutter of our very busy, very noisy, very loud thought and thinking system that's constantly going. And a lot of ADHDers, you know, suffer from adrenal fatigue because we're constantly trying to manage on a second-by-second basis, you know, the parts of the brain that don't work the same in a neurotypical person.

That's very good, mate. So for those of us who just joined, Sam Led, great mate. Got a great podcast. Got a great book. He's on Instagram. In the comments, I've put it. Also, we've got a bit of a giveaway or an opportunity for you. Two goats.

Two goats.

Two goats.

Two goats.

All right. Mel's latest. Love it.

Love it. Love it.

That's my favorite.

And what we're trying to do here is we're retitling. We're re-releasing Deal with It. Um, and this one's Deal With It: Living Well After Trauma. But the reality is Deal With It is a book about overcoming the things in life that turn up and just beat the crap out of you. It's about, you know, allowing your life to be refined, not defined by your past. Well, maybe that's the byline. I want to call it Deal With It: Turning Shit into Fertilizer. Sam wants to call it something about pigs, lipsticks, and diamonds. I don't know, he's got ADHD. We're never too sure what he's talking about, but we love the guy. So thank you. If you come up with a better title than Lips, Pigs, and Diamonds, or Turning Shit into Fertilizer, you get to choose a goat.

A Diamond Covered in Shit Layered in Lipstick.

Great. It's a little bit— take up most of the COVID would probably be on the back as well. So thank you for your input, Fred. So if, if you can beat Sam— at the moment Sam's winning just for the hell of it, um, but if you can come up with a title for Deal With It Send us— I'll drop an email in the, um, in the contacts, in the chats, or whatever the hell it's called, and send us an email with your idea. And if you win, we're going to send you a picture of a goat. All right, so—

Or direct message us on Instagram or reach out on YouTube, any—

anywhere like that at all.

Anywhere like that. DM us your, your ideas for titles.

I just noticed, by the way, we have an extension of the same bookcase.

I know, reclaimed timber that was sitting out in a lumberyard and they didn't want it and I did. And that and some, um, like, I think it's 3/4-inch metal pipe.

Love it.

So yeah, so this is, this is theology, then we've got leadership, then we've got science fiction and fantasy, then noir and, um, Thriller stuff up the back. Then down the bottom we've got knives and gun cases, and because it's Texas, y'all. And then we've got a humidor full of cigars and pipe tobacco.

We wouldn't have that in California.

No, no, sorry about that. And if you do, you've got to keep your magazines at your mother's place or something like that.

Yeah, it's a different world out here. Don't get me started.

Slow down, I've got to get something. I've got to go to mum's place to get the ammo, then I'll be back and we can have a conversation about why you're stealing my shit.

That's a whole other conversation, another episode. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

So what if you, if you come, if you get a new client?

Yeah.

And they come in. Just first, what is your hope for that person? So if you had someone who came in and they've got picketism, what, what is your— what is your hope in your heart For that person.

That's a great question. To see truth, like that's all I'm doing.

Unpack that. Talk to us about that.

So, so like you know, like this is the thing, John. If you came into my my office, we did a Zoom. It was a discovery call. I'd hear all your problems and what's going on with your life and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. What part of that you think is true?

Probably very little.

Very little.

I would say in the first— in having done the therapy, the first, like, and it was a, it was an extended session, it was all bullshit until I got to a point where I had to make the decision that I was going to tell the truth and trust someone.

Yes. So, so this is the thing. We have—I always say that our personal mind, our brain between our ears—is the greatest screenwriter, director, and writer in the history of civil history of the world, right? I think we have like Scorsese, Shanghai Shek, the Dalai Lama, and like Vladimir Putin up here, all co-creating and writing our our our our second by second narrative. Yeah, that's good, man. You're walking around like you're like we don't need to watch TV. because we have a TV anchor up here, like, you know, like making shit up. Yeah, making stuff up, if I could swear, but I'm not sure. But making stuff up in the, in the millisecond. Like, things on the outside world happen.

Yep.

But then we create— but then there's, then there's Tom Brokaw, or I don't know if you know who Tom Brokaw is.

Yeah.

Because you're from Australia. Then there's Tom Brokaw, like, saying, you know, making up his own version of what happened.

Yeah.

Like, I got in a car accident. But, but, but if it was just a car accident, which is terrible, and no one's saying no one likes car accidents, what about the drama, the judgments, the, the pointing fingers at the other person? I can't believe what they did. I cannot believe that other driver, what they did. I can't— they cut me off and this is their fault. I'm gonna sue the pants. And then our blood pressure is going up, right? Yeah. How dare they? Who the hell is it? You know, I can go— do you see what I'm doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, so I help my clients retell their story Without the story.

Okay, so say that again.

I point people on the— I point people in the direction of their own.

So say that again. I help people retell their story, their story without without the story.

Very good. So so you know in ADHD years we are probably the most creative and we have the probably the loudest making stuff up machine between our ears. You know I call it the you know the ADHD Netflix movie.

Because you're so much faster than everybody else, so you've got so much more time to weave the story.

Well, on that, but, but when you think about our— the executive functioning part of our prefrontal cortex, there's no filter. So we're receiving, we're experiencing all that, all that stuff, all that sensory stimuli, all what's happened on the outside all at once. And then our brain's gonna— doesn't filter it out the way someone like y'all would do it. And then, then our brain's got to figure out, okay, how do I, how do I judge this? How do I figure out what's going on? And it, and it's overwhelmed. That's why a lot of ADHDers have, you know, suffer terribly with anxiety and depression and overwhelm, because the brain is trying to say, hey, Sam, you're in a timeout right now. I'm gonna give you some depression. See, that's the beautiful health of our system, of the brain system. Anxiety—

Interesting.

We make anxiety bad, and no one likes anxiety, including me, and I suffer just like everybody else. But it's the natural health of the, of the brain's operating system.

That's a great way to look at it. That's a great reframing, Sam, of both depression and anxiety.

Yeah, I think it's a hot— it's like overheating hairdryer. You ever like burn out? You ever blow the fuse? Like, you've ever been in a hotel and you just, you use a hairdryer and you blow the fuse? It's like an overheating hairdryer. It's that, that's the metaphor for it. But we make anxiety bad. Who said that? That's made up too. No one likes to feel overwhelmed. No one likes to feel panic.

Very interesting, Mike. Very interesting.

But, but the, this narrative around the anxiety, what if I took the narrative out? You just feel uncomfortable for a little while. But that, you know, the honest truth is, once we see beyond the illusory nature of our making stuff up machine, and the narrative around the anxiety, we don't care about it anymore. Like I stopped, I used to care when I was anxious. I don't care. I just, I'm just anxious. And then I get over it and I drop into presence. I, you know, I still get overwhelmed. I still have my, you know, my moments, you know, and I still, um, I still get up in the ADHD house of horrors, but I don't spend as much time there anymore because I know what's true and what's not, what can never be true. Um, you know, it's kind of like, you know, if you watch salmon swimming upstream, that takes a lot of energy. A lot of those salmon don't make it. Like, I choose not to do that, and I choose to see, like, Oh, I'm Sam. You're swimming upstream right now. Like, why are you doing that? Like, who said that's true? It's very good, Sam. You know, I didn't.

I would imagine that leading your your clients, your people that you're coaching, leading them to that self-awareness is the first. The first.

I just asked a lot of questions. Like, why do you think? Why? Who said that? Did you say that? Who said that was true?

Because eventually they get those questions in their own mind now. Yeah, they got you sort of living in their head. And they're like, oh, why? That's scary.

That's very scary right now.

I think I, I'm feeling anxious. I need to stop and be present. Or, you know, like, well, yeah, come to that awareness.

Because let me, you know, I always say, well, tell me when you're not anxious. What's that like?

Yeah, that's good. That's very interesting.

Because, because the only difference between anxiety and being present and free and clear of it is that we have an— we have a built-in operating system, right, that always is looking for a calmer thought and thinking altitude, right? So anxiety is like turbulence in a plane. I mean, can you imagine if turbulence was constant? I mean, back in the '50s and '60s when they were flying at a lower altitude, a lot of people didn't fly because it was just— you get knocked around.

Yeah.

Horrible. But now we fly in the stratosphere. Right at twenty thousand, thirty four, twenty or thirty thousand feet or above, it's calmer. But still there's clear air turbulence. Yeah, that's good. Still weather. That's good. But it always settles because I and I always say like if it didn't settle, none of us would be in a white God forbid in a white padded room with some very nice people serving us Jello. And that's where when we take our thinking and identify with our chaotic, overwhelmed, anxious, loud thinking. Yeah, too much. What happens? We have a nervous breakdown. We get, you know, we we get committed to a psychiatric facility. You know, like, but once you see like our essential nature, our blue dot, I call it. A lot of people call it. Our blue dot is mental well-being. That's our essential nature, not ADHD. ADHD and it we made that up. Like, do you think the hunter and gatherers that were the original ADHDers, the ones that survived? and were able to provide for their family and, and protect their family were like, yeah, I think I was, uh, you know, the DSM-5 told me I have ADHD. Like, I'm not doing a good job protecting, right? It's like, who said that?

I like to think of like my body as, um, like this brilliant sort of machine that's always looking for balance. And so if I wake up feeling anxious, I, I take that, I don't condemn myself for it, and I don't panic. I used to, but now I think, okay, I'm out of balance somewhere. How can I help myself? How can I help my system?

And that speaks to that whole— it's a warning, it's a resetting, it's your brain. That's what Sam was talking about. Yeah. Hey, can I ask you something, mate? You're obviously— you've talked about a passion for music. We've got a whole lot of people, um, that are creative types that join us every Friday. So what do you do on a personal level to fuel your creativity? What do you do? What does Sam do?

That's a great question. Um, to fuel it, I listen to wisdom. Um, and I know that space because it's the place I want to be all the time, but obviously none of us can because we get kind of glimpses of that, that liminal space that I spoke about earlier. Um, You know, what do I do to fuel it? Um, I, I do podcasting.

Uh, do you find that a creative process for you? That's a creative—

Absolutely. Doing this right now is a creative process because I don't know what I'm going to say next. How cool is that? But something is— life, life is living us right now. We're not living life. Life is living us. Life is interesting. I don't know what I'm going to say next, but, but I just know that the next word may be smart or maybe stupid. But I don't know. It's like that unknown. We take either one here on Finally Fridays. But that's the beauty of living in the space of like we are all present right now. Yep. There's still a narrative going on between our ears. But you know the greatest gift to understanding what is true and what is not true?

We're all you.

I'm the theme of Jeopardy. Not going. Our physiology is letting us. Our physiology is the greatest gift to the. to humankind. It's the greatest piece of technology.

I agree, that's fair.

It's the greatest— it's the greatest app. Because if, if I'm feeling anxious and I have a lot of narrative, a lot of thinking attached to it that my, my, my brain is blaming on something outside of me, I know it can never be true because my physiology is ramping up saying, hey Sam, pump the brakes, what you're thinking up right now is not true. It's like the greater the drama in between my ears, the greater the illusion. And that for me was a game changer because a lot of ADHDers, we get so swept up in, in the drama, the, the, and our physiology, that what do we do? We either fawn, which means that we, we don't participate in life, we'll like, you know, disappear.

Yep, yep.

Right? Um, or, or we'll mask. And a lot of ADHDers mask because they're They're afraid that, that people will figure them out and learn who they really are and not want to be around them. And I find that the biggest travesty with, with ADHD. I mean, the biggest travesty is calling it a disorder because it's not a disorder once we learn how to use mind to work for us.

Yeah, that's good.

Yeah, I agree. That's what I love about your messaging. I was checking out your website, of course, in preparation for the podcast. But I love the fact that you say that You know, people aren't broken. We just— and I believe, as an artist, of course I believe this, but I believe that every human being has something unique that they bring to the planet that only they can bring.

Yes.

And so the more that we know ourselves and come to unfold, you know, like you're saying, life unfolds, the more we find out about ourselves, then the more that we can bring our uniqueness You know, whatever that is, whether you're an artist or a writer or whatever it is, you know, the more we can bring that to the table. And so yeah, I'm a big believer that people are not broken, and we just have to learn, learn about ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, I love that, and I love what you're saying because it's it's but see, this is the thing: a lot of ADHDers especially. We, you know, we get so caught up in our habits of thought, in our rituals, in our— like, like, for a lot of us, we eat the same food. We were talking about this earlier, you know, we have the same kind of routines because it's comfortable and we hyperfocus on them. But like, if you remember when you first started painting, or when, John, when you started writing your first book, it's scary.

Yeah.

It's anxiety-provoking. It's like, what did I get myself into? I mean, this is ridiculous. I can't insist, you know, like, and then the insecurities come, and then we get caught in insecure thought, and we think that's true, but we know it's not true because our physiology is creating a lot of anxiety around our insecure thought. Like, oh, that's not true. It can't be true because my body's screaming at my feeling system saying, Sam, that's not true. Stop it. Because if you continue to do that, I'm going to put you in a timeout. And that's anxiety, depression, panic disorder, all the other stuff that we made up about our physiology. Like, it's the perfect design of the system. But like, this is the thing, like, Imagine if there were no fighter pilots, like we had no one protecting our skies, or like no one, no ship captains, no battle destroyer captains. And, and I mean this, and I'm not trying to be political or anything. If we didn't have people learning how to fly fighter jets, or like— and what I'm going to get to the point here— we'd all be speaking German right now. I mean, I'm not to, you know, think about that for a second.

Yeah.

You, you get it, like the same thing, like But they had to go to fighter pilot training school. You had to go to basic training to learn how to use the technology called a fighter jet. Or back then it was a— I don't know, it was a— what do you call it? Mustang.

Yeah.

You know, propeller planes or whatever. Same thing. Like, you need to learn to use— learn how to fly the plane and learn the science of flight and learn about the controls and everything and about combat before you can become a fighter pilot. Well, why don't we do the same thing with our brains, especially with ADHDers whose minds work differently? There's no formal education.

Yeah, that's good.

Like, and why aren't we teaching our kids how to use a mind that works differently to work for them by teaching them about, you know, like, um, emotional intelligence, about discernment? I mean, and then once we understand how mind works, do you know how amazing, how easy it is to hyperfocus on our creative gifts? A lot of ADHDers are so damn creative and so brilliant, whether they're writers, artists, but they get so, um, distracted by the noise of our babbling thought system up here that none of— some of them go to prison. A lot of ADHDers are in, you know, hooked on drugs or in the prison system.

Drinking.

Drinking, you name it, because they're paying attention to what we were never intended to pay attention to, which is the noise up here. Versus presence. Yeah. And what's possible, we take our hand off our thinking and we let the babbling thought system fade in the periphery, which is— how do we do that? It's called noticing. The louder— again, the louder the drama between our ears, the noise, the greater the illusion. It's a, it's, it's a Netflix movie up here, but it's, it's really a really very convincing movie.

That's what, um, Janine was saying in the comments, the first thing that she does when she notices that everything's running a little fast, and she's feeling anxious, and all the thoughts and all the things is she regulates her breathing. So can you— do you work with your clients on breathing and, and how that affects, you know, being in the present moment and all of that?

This is the thing, the more techniques you try to apply. So Think about what's around breathing, just like any other behavior or, you know, respiratory thought. There's a whole pattern of thought or narrative around breathing. So the noticing the fact that our breathing is getting shallow— And I'm— again, I'm— whatever's going on, whatever nuance of, you know, whether it's your hyperventilating or whatever, you noticing that and the physiology responding to that Versus me trying to regulate my breathing. Like, that's why meditation never worked for me. And this is just my experience and why I don't think it's effective. Some people love meditation, great. You want to sit in a dark room, listen to Solfeggio frequencies or binaural beats, awesome. Go with God. I'm not saying whatever works for you. I, I never say like this is a prescription. I, I always say, you know what, follow your own wisdom. Don't listen to me, follow your own wisdom. But from my experience Why would I add more thought as a lever? Think of it as a switch. More switches on top of an operating system that works perfectly when we see and we we take a we get our way, we get out of it. We get out of the way of our of our operating system. So if I know my breathing is getting, I'm getting you know I'm starting to get really anxious. I get I drop my thinking. I drop it like it's hot. I pivot to press, like, I just stop it. And I naturally— and then I'm noticing that my breathing is slowing down as a result. Now, then, the thinking, the noticing. Okay. There's always a thought around a breath.

I think, I think that's one of the things I love about your approach is that you don't have an approach.

You don't need one.

I think that's the key, isn't it? So whatever works for you, if you're out there and you're listening to us, Don't hear what Sam's not saying. Sam's not saying that what you do to regulate yourself is not appropriate. He's saying it is appropriate because it works for you, and whatever works for you is what works for you. And I think that's the key, and that's the maturity. You know, many rules make small men. The more you try and bind yourself up with rules and regulations, techniques, switches, like switches, things and bits and pieces, You, you actually diminish yourself because you've got this checklist of things you've got to do. Now, sometimes a checklist is good. I'm a pilot, I love a checklist. I've got, you know, I— when I go to the gym, I've got a checklist of things to do. But beyond that, I'm just going to the gym. Like, right, whatever it is that you need to do to line your ducks up, line them up. But then the ducks, the bloody things fly off anyway. So just don't sweat the flying ducks, you know.

Here, let me give you another example. Like, and this is why I don't use techniques or tools, because you're overcomplicating a system with more thought.

Yeah, that's good.

Do you talk to your— do you talk to your pancreas and say, you better do a good job today, I'm gonna be modern? I mean, let's see.

Yeah, the bloody thing, man. I'm telling you, that pancreas, it just runs off, mate. Run! Mind of its own.

Or your kidneys. I mean, you can massage your kidneys. It's— there's some extra techniques to massage your kidneys. Do you talk to your, you know, do you talk to your gallbladder? I mean, I know. I mean, you can if you'd like to. I mean, there are there are techniques. There are way. I've met with somatic practitioners that talk to their gallbladder. I mean, whatever floats your boat. I know the gallbladder. See, this is the thing. I I think that's another drawing. That's another drawing from Mel. Listen, listen. We there is a perfect intelligence and unique design with within our our system. Yeah. We are brilliantly built. We are. I don't know why people why don't we Why do we need apps? We're one. Our brain is one big app. Think about that. Like, I don't need to think about moving my eye to the left if I want to look at the painting across from me. I could just— I don't even think about it. I just do it.

Yeah.

How cool is that? We are just gorgeously built. A sunflower doesn't need to think about tilting to the sun. You ever— I've watched this. Like, you can do like a time lapse. There's thousands of sunflowers in a field. They tilt to the sun.

Yeah, it's great, Mike.

That's the intelligence of the system.

That's right.

Who made that up, dude? Who made that up?

The Creator made us, and we're beautifully and wonderfully made. It's glorious.

Why don't we trust that? That's the thing. When we stop trusting it, when we stop trusting it, we give ourselves— or in physiology, it tells us to chill out through anxiety. I mean, you want to feel uncomfortable? You know, stop trusting yourself.

We're coming up on the hour and we got— we've got to talk about Mel's goats one more time. But before we do that, and we'll end with the goats in the book, I want to— I want to— want to give you a chance, mate, to talk about final thoughts. Where can people connect with you? Yeah, where can they get your book? Um, again, I'm going to put it all in the comments, so you do that. I'll post this in the comments so people can connect.

Yeah. Uh, I just want to— again, I want to thank all of you, uh, for, for listening. Those of you showed up here live, um, it's an honor to be here. Um, just a fantastic program. Um, you can find me on my Instagram, which is samled.adhdcoach. If you're really interested in my work, we can hop on a discovery call. Um, the first one's on me. You can go to my website, it's samledconsulting.com. I'm also on TikTok, which is kind of scary place, especially as a Gen Xers. It's Sam Led 1111 on TikTok, YouTube Sam Led Consulting. I have a whole bunch of educational content on there, and I'd love to point all of you—you, you, and you over there in those bleed seats—to the truth of who you really are, which is not this. Yes, that's correct. It's underneath noise. Yeah, thank you. And also the podcast. Sorry, I mean, podcast. The podcast is called The Fearless Now. We just hit episode 200.

Oh, congratulations!

Thank you. 6 years, uh, being a podcast. It's doing really well. I'm shocked because I don't know, there's no bells and whistles with my podcast. It's just analog, no razzle-dazzle.

Um, we don't do razzle-dazzle around here either.

No, just have a chat. So the big, the big perturbation we've got at the moment is we're re-releasing Deal With It. It's sold very well. It's done very, very well. We helped thousands of thousands of people. So hashtag deal with it is the name, but we need a new byline. Sam thinks lipstick on a diamond on a pig. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Say it again, Sam.

Close. Oh my God, it's the diamond covered in shit layered in lipstick. There you go. Diamond. Yeah, because our we are diamonds. Underneath the noise, we're perfect.

Yeah, with lipstick and covered in shit, apparently. So I think I want to call it a deal with it turning shit into fertilizer. Mel and I are having a, like, a marital moment about all of this. But if you drop a title in the comment, DM us, send us an email. So we've got 2 goats. Latest— Mel's latest creations.

Gerald.

Gerald the Goat. Love it, Marvin.

And Marvin, the guy Marvin. So do that. These are your prizes. These are your prizes. Yeah, they are. There are surprising surprises. Hey, so we're here every Friday, 4 p.m. ish. Why is it 4 p.m.? Is because sometimes we just couldn't be bothered. Like it just is. It just is 4 p.m. ish. So on Fridays, we'd love you here. We have a whole bunch of friends on here. Sometimes we do, sometimes, and we never know. Who's going to turn up and who's going to pop on, and we love it. And Sam was inspiring when I did a podcast with him. I encourage you to go back and have a look at his podcast, The Fearless Now. I'm following him.

Our episode's amazing, by the way. I relist to it all the time.

Well, thank you, brother. And it was—it really was just a great conversation between a couple of strangers that turns into mates, and that's how life happens. And so I want to encourage you to do that, and we'll see you next week. Next week we've got— oh, we've got Gina Patera. She's a literary agent. She's my agent. She's helping get my books out there. And we've got this guy who's written this book on like UFOs, Loch Ness Monsters, and Bigfoot. I mean, totally random. You never know. And these people just click, pick a date, and go, yeah, I want to be on that show. Okay, so it's going to be fantastic. So we've got no idea what we're doing, um, which is great. It's a way to live life. And we've got no idea who's coming on. So it's going to be a great show because they all are. We had a great show. If you haven't got last week's, Tony Mantor was on there. Tony's bro. Tony was a Nashville podcaster, started, just hit 25 million downloads, and he was going to give up. He talks about how he was going to give up, how he just persevered and kept going. And so, you know, just very, very encouraging time. So yeah, so thank you very much everybody for cheering, uh, cheering in and cheering on and getting hold of Sam and get his stuff because he's awesome. So I'll say goodbye to all them and I'll come back to you, mate. Cheers, you lot.