A Man of My Word, Episode 5: How Hitting Rock Bottom Woke Me Up

Hey everyone, this is Derek Brose with the Conscious Resistance Network. And welcome to episode number five of the A Man of My Word podcast. A special six part limited series podcast where I'm breaking down the pieces of my book, A Man of My Word, how I overcame addiction, depression and mental and physical prisons. If you're new here, I'll go ahead and let you know. You can find the book at A man of my word.com amanofmyword.com that'll give you everything you need to know on the background of the book. You can find all the locations you can buy it and check out the chapters, the table of contents, etc. And over the last four weeks now, we've been going through different pieces of this puzzle of my history and my, my struggles with addiction, with depression, with, with the prison system, with the criminal justice system, with all these different pieces of the puzzle which are, you know, things that I explore in my book. We're coming now to the the end of this limited series podcast. As I said, it's only six episodes and this is the fifth episode and today is going to be focused on really the conclusion of the book. You could say on my waking up story, how I went from being addicted to drugs and being, you know, felon, fresh out of prison, trying to navigate that world and find my way to then waking up, getting into activism and then eventually getting to journalism and now doing everything I've been doing today for the last 16 years. So it's kind of the path that all of you know me for. And this is going to be more of the background story. Again, if you want to actually read the whole book, which I highly, highly encourage you to because I've been getting some great reviews. In fact, let me go ahead and read one of them them to you in a moment. A man ofmyword.com. that's the best place to go. Amen of my word dot com. So let me go ahead and share just a message I got. I get these kind of messages periodically. Here's one of them. I just saw your appearance on the Kim Iverson show and I wanted to reach out and share my story. I've been aware of your work for years, first introduced through James Corbett, but I hadn't been aware of your book. I don't know if I heard you talking to James about your past or if I could just tell you were a fellow traveler, but something made me log in my brain that you were a former addict, that thank you for your work. You are bringing light and hope into a dark world. I've never met you, but I see you are one of the real ones. And for that I love you. And I love you for that. Thank you for sending me that message. There was more to it, but I'm just sharing pieces of it and I got another one as well. Let me go ahead and just pull it up real quick. This is from my other buddy who will remain nameless, but a good friend in the independent media who said. I said I want to. I want to really let you know that I resonate with the video about forgiving your father. You and me have a lot in common in that regard. Both growing up and really, really toxic, dysfunctional environments, dealing with abuse, having battles with addiction. I was an alcoholic until about six years ago and having really rough relationship with our dads. I held a lot of hate for my father for most of my life, both for the awful things that he did when he was around and for his not being there when he finally decided to leave. I was only just a couple years ago when I finally was able to find it in myself to forgive him and let him let it go. I think discussing that subject and putting out your videos and memoirs is a really powerful thing to do. It's not only helped me throughout my healing journey, but I know it will help plenty of others as well. So. So I'm always grateful when I get those kind of comments. It means, it really, truly does mean a lot. And yeah, so that's why I'm doing this. As I've been saying to you guys since the beginning, I wrote the book, I released it, and now doing this podcast to try to raise more awareness of it. And if you've been listening or following my work recently, you've seen, I've done some interviews, I went on Kim Iverson's talking about this. I've been on the Mel K. Show, Shannon Joy, a bunch of other podcasts. I'm going to be going on James Corbett show very soon to talk about it. And I'm doing my best to boost this message out there of rethinking how we handle addiction and, you know, depression and mental health issues without reinforcing or supporting those same old systems that I think we, you know, as I covered in this, this series that are not really about trying to heal and help people, but are really just about reinforcing these same, these same problems. So it feels good for me to be making that effort and then not only that, to have my friends in the independent media say, hey Derek, I do want talk to you about that because I expected some people would be like, okay, you wrote your personal memoir. That's not Jeffrey Epstein. That's not Technocracy. But no, people have been very receptive and largely in part to the fact, due in part to the fact that a lot of people in the independent media, people who I just mentioned, they've had, they've shared with me that they've had family members, brothers, sisters, parents who, children who've been addicted to drugs. So this is something that touches on all sorts of people's lives and I'm very grateful to each of you who've been reading the book. If you use Amazon, please go leave a review. If you, wherever you buy books, leave a review there, please. That would help, you know, just get it out there. If you want to go to your local library and encourage them to have a copy, that would be awesome. If you want to go to your local bookstore and tell them that you would love it if they would stock it in store, all of those things are valuable. In addition to sharing this podcast so more people can, can hear this message and we can continue this dialogue about addiction and about healing, about mental health issues, about self harm and of course, the solutions behind it. So over the last weeks we've covered everything from my personal addiction story, my mental health story of cutting self worth, sociopathy, depression, my experience in the prison system, the drug war, racism and everything around that. And then last week talking about the power of forgiveness. This is going to focus on, as I said, how I, I woke up, basically where the book ended and how I don't know if I would have woken up without getting addicted to drugs and going to prison. And I hate to say that because maybe in some other timeline or in all timelines, Derek Bros is going to wake up no matter what. But it sure seemed like in this timeline I was destined, you could say faded, to go down this hard road in order to get to where I am today. It just seems to be how the cards were dealt for me in this, in this life. Now that doesn't mean, as I've said numerous times, that I don't, that I believe the prison system saved me or that going to jail saved me. No, it was the fact that I had forced isolation in one hand by the prison system. But as I talk about in my book later years, pushing myself into isolation by traveling by bicycle and volunteering on farms, traveling around the United States and getting deep, deep healing, I used that time, both chosen and forced on me to do the inner work, to start to uncover And. And, you know, pull apart my trauma and my deep issues so that I could get to the point where I could actually, you know, become who I think I was destined to be and who I was meant to be. But I guess I had to have that dark night of the soul. I had to go through that struggle in order to get to that point, as some of us do. So the book ends towards the last couple chapters with me going and saying, I forgive you to my father, as we talked about last week. And after that, really, that was. That was kind of a couple years into my activism. That was 2013. So I had already started activism in 2010. I basically. In 2009, as I was getting off parole, I started to just little different things from one. I was at a music festival in Houston, I think it was 2009, 2010, called the Westheimer Block Party. And somebody was going around handing out 911s inside job stickers. And they just handed me one. And I. I didn't really understand what it meant. I just thought was like, okay, that sounds cool. That sounds edgy. And I took it home and I put it on my keyboard, which I still have right here in this room with me, which is kind of trippy. And I didn't look at it for months. And then eventually later in 2009, I looked at it and I noticed it said infowars.com at the bottom of it. And I looked it up. Of course, I discovered Alex Jones, and he was a part of my beginning journey. There were things like that. There was also a time where I was. I was taking buses all over the city because I didn't have a card. You know, I was a felon, and I was just getting out of prison and struggling to get my life back together. So I spent a lot of time riding the metro around Houston, riding buses. And I remember one time I was riding from one side of Houston to the other, and I look outside the window, and I just see this whole crowd of people that are, like, wearing what I now known as Guy Fawkes masks. But these weren't even, like, the, you know, ones you can buy at the store now. This was literally just Guy Fawkes masks. Like, paper cut out and, you know, wrapped around their heads. Some of them were also wearing Tom Cruise masks. And I just thought, like, what the hell's going on here? And I. It just piqued my interest. So I got off the bus. I just decided randomly to get off this stop and asked, hey, what are you guys here for? And they Explained to me that there was a Scientology building across the street and that they were protesting Scientology. And I later learned that this was one of the first ever Anonymous protests. You know, Anonymous, the online hacking group, which I think has been co opted over the years, but that was in the very beginning of those days. They had an operation against Scientology. Some of you may remember this. It was making the news and stuff like that. And so there was a local protest in Houston and I, again, I didn't really understand it. It was just like, okay, these people are holding signs, they're wearing Tom Cruise masks and, and, you know, Anonymous masks. And I kind of hung out there for a second. They were giving out free food, giving out water bottles. So I just kind of soaked up the scene and sat down. I remember just sitting down on the sidewalk or whatever and listening to some of the people talk and what they were saying. And it was just all so new and so curious to me. But I loved it. I was just like, wow, this is really cool. Like, this is, you know, maybe this is the kind of thing I want to be involved in. And looking back, I can see how that little moment really did influence me to start to just become more open to protesting things. So that's 2000, end of 2009. Going into 2010, I start, you know, as I said, after I found that sticker, I start discovering Infowars. I have this experience at this Anonymous protest. I was living in downtown Houston and there was a Barnes and Noble bookstore. And I was there with my girlfriend at the time. And we went and we were just shopping. And in the DVD section, which still existed in 2009, 2010, but it was already pretty small, there was a documentary called End Game, which was one of Alex Jones's documentaries, which definitely woke me up in a big way. Now looking back, I think it's definitely filled with fear, porn and doom. And it's not that it's not factual in some ways. There's also speculation. It's more just, you know, again, it's like End Game, the blueprint for global enslavement. Not the kind of documentaries that I try to make these days. The exact opposite of what the Pyramid of Power is. In fact, when I think of making the Pyramid of Power, I think of, like, what would, younger me have benefited from? What type of documentary? And sure, Endgame woke me up because it was freaky and scary, but I think there's, you know, better ways to go about it. Nevertheless, I bought it, I took it home, and I'm just, you know, reading on infowars and from infowars I get into activist post. I get Into Architects engineers for 911 Truth. My girlfriend and I at the time we start volunteering at the architects engineers for 911 truth local chapter. Obviously we weren't architects or engineers, but we were just young, passionate, early 20 somethings who were waking up and they were holding local documentary screenings like Fabled Enemies from Jason Burmas and some of the other 911 documentaries. So we were starting to go to those events and just trying to network and meet more people who cared about these things and were thinking about them and talking about them and. And then By May or April 2010 I saw, I started a blog, an online blog called the Houston Free Thinkers. And it was just my little attempt of like, how can I start to express myself? Because I had been Posting by late 2009, my. My old Facebook account I started posting. The first thing I ever posted was like November 2009, October 2009. And it was just like New World order, trilateral commission, 911 false flags. It's all so much, ah, I can't handle it. Like I was just starting to wake up and kind of having that freak out moment. And I quickly though realized like I want to do something about this. Like if I'm. I'm reading about, you know, InfoWars and reading all these websites and seeing things like early Luke Rakowski back in the day and we are change confronting politicians. And I was also on the local level. I was hanging out in a lot of radical anarchist spaces, maybe more left leaning kind of anarchist spaces. And I didn't agree with everything I was hearing, but it was definitely like anti establishment, anti authority. And so that was another strain. It was like this strain of waking up to conspiracies, of getting involved on the local level with like grassroots activism, anarchist activism. Starting my own Houston Freethinkers blog. And then by May of that year 2010 I decided, okay, blogging is not enough, we need to do more than that. And I decided that I wanted the Houston Freethinkers to actually be a real world group. So me and my girlfriend, we just started promoting the idea, putting up flyers around And I think August 2010 was the first time we held a meeting. We continue to network with other groups. We went to the local Houston and the Fed chapter. You know, you went to the architecture engineers working on, you know, the, all these other groups, like just networking with the anarchist and was really just starting to kind of get my feet wet in terms of activism and really Build my foundation. And, and all of this, as I said, it kind of came from what I've discussed in previous episodes where I get out of prison and I'm now a felon. I'm at the library and I'm starting to question things. I read a book called Cannabis A History that tells me this whole history about how the. The oil industry was trying to push out the hemp industry and how the first drug laws in the United States, the Harrison act of 1914, were all based around the oil industry or racism. Trying to blame everything on black jazz musicians or Chinese migrant workers or Mexican migrant workers. And that was very new to me. So I was kind of coming out of that light bulb moment of like, wow, okay, this is stuff I'd never been told. Then Fast forward in 2009, my mind is just opening and I'm. I'm, you know, sober. I'm not depressed anymore. I'm like waking up spiritually at the same time because I continued my meditation practices, I continued to go to the Zen center, continue to, you know, just open up spiritually. And then all of these political things start to happen. In 2010, I also discover Ron Paul's book, Revolution of Manifesto. I read Rule by Secrecy by Jim Mars. So it was kind of those things again. I'm getting the conspiracy with Jim Mars and Alex Jones and that whole thing. I'm getting the left wing, anarchist, sort of grassroots mutual aid community stuff. And then I'm getting this libertarian voluntarist thing through Ron Paul. And then of course, I was also. I've always been a punk and metalhead, so I was listening to a lot of bands at the time that were political. You know, I grew up listening to Rage and Fear Factory and other bands, but these bands were even more bold, like Molotov Solution. I found them in 2010. I went to one of their shows, and they're like Death Corps, Death Metal, you know, growling about the Federal Reserve and about the New World Order. And all of these things were just kind of converging on my mind and my heart at once. Like 2009, watching protests, getting involved in groups. 2010, watching documentaries, reading these books, learning about things from these bands. And it just started to consume and consume and consume my entire life. And that's basically when the Houston Free Thinkers really started to take off and the activism really, really started to grow. And. And then in. At the end of 2010, I had basically that whole year. I moved into downtown Houston. I was working a restaurant. I was an assistant manager. My boss wanted Me to franchise it and, you know, turn it into a whole thing for him. And I really wasn't interested in that. So I decided that I was gonna quit everything and sell all my. And me and my girlfriend at the time were gonna travel cross country and I bought a touring bike. We bought touring bikes, packed up all our stuff. In January 3, 2011, we left Houston and. And I ended up spending three and a half months on the road. I write all about this in the book and how it's just this huge life changing experience, including ending with me witnessing a man die on the road right in front of me. And. Yeah, and. And that, you know, that was another big kind of spiritual journey. But after spending time on the road, which is a big part of my story, I'm not going to talk about today. It will be in, it'll be in the book if you want to go check that out. But when I came back from that trip, that was basically the beginning of me no longer talking to the irs, no longer living that mainstream life, just fully diving more into what I would learn was agrism and counter economics and opting out of the system. It just sort of became more normal for me. And so that was a big part of my journey. And then as I came back from that trip in March, April 2011, that's when I really dove into activism. So when I got back to Houston, I mean, I was just like, I think in the book, I call it the Fire Burns Bright, because that's how it literally felt. I just went and had this, you know, travel, spiritual experience. This guy dies in front of me, and I just, I just took it all as a sign, like, I can't waste any moment. I just, I went to prison. I've had this whole life changing experience. I need to do whatever I can to build the better life that I know I'm after. And so I just dove into my activism. This is 2011. This is when Houston Freethinkers, we were hosting documentary screenings, monthly barbecues and potlucks. We're just kicking butt. That whole spring and summer, people are starting to pay attention and know who we are. And it was just a beautiful time. And then later that year, September 2011 is when Occupy Wall street launched in New York City. A month Later, I think October 4th was when the individual local chapters launched all around the country. And the Houston Freethinkers, we were already around. And then the Occupy Houston movement launched. And so we go up there, we start showing up and kind of collaborating. And we were making the News. It was a lot of big reports in the news, local news, that the Houston Freethinkers and Occupy Wall street team up for this protest or this action and this sort of thing. And so we. We weren't necessarily completely aligned with all of the Occupy Wall street goals or concerns. Definitely their. I think their. Their concerns, not necessarily all their solutions, let's say. But we knew that this was an important moment, an important movement, and we wanted to go there and be involved in it in some way and at least try to peel off some people and say, hey, if you care about activism and you're also awake to conspiracies and, you know, you're asking these questions and you care about individual liberty, come check out what we're doing. We're the Houston Free thinkers. And so it was a big time as well, where we were making all the local media, we were making the television, and just, yeah, it was a great time. And then that led into September 2011, as I said, Occupy Wall street launches. That's a big moment. But then Also that year 911 came around. It was the 10th anniversary of 9 11, and I went to New York City. I had already gone to D.C. the year before in 2010. That was another big part of my experience, going to the Pentagon and stuff like that, as I was starting to question 911. But it wasn't until the next year, 2011, the 10th anniversary, where I went to New York City and there was thousands of activists in the streets. 911 truth now. 911 truth now. Oh, man. For my young activist, anarchist self, that was like, oh, my God, there's a movement. People from all over the world, from Denmark, Australia, the uk, Canada, of course the US I met so many amazing people, some of whom I'm still friends with to this day. And it really just, you know, it just lit up my activist spirit. I was on the ground passing out flyers, talking to people about 9 11, debating talking points, and just, yeah, just really getting out there. And that was such a beautiful, beautiful, powerful experience. And from 2011 till probably 2017, I went to New York every year for 9 11. I just haven't in years. I got busy doing other things, But I do want to go back there. Maybe this will be the year. And that was just another big part of the puzzle for me. As I said earlier, I threw Alex Jones and through architects and engineers, for now, 11 truth and just questioning the whole event in general. It was opening my mind up. And then, as I was realizing, first through Facebook, posting stuff on Facebook and Social media and connecting with other activists around the world and then going in person to events like 9 11. It was also Liberty Fest NYC happening at the same time in 911 as 911 in New York City. And I just was realizing, wow, I'm not alone. Like, I'm having my wake up experience and there's this whole world of other people who are paying attention to. It's not just me. And that was, as you guys probably know, it's such an important experience to have when you're a young activist and you're a young person just waking up, or even if you're an older person, whatever your age is, I mean, young in the sense that, like, you're new to the game, to the movement. It's always helpful to realize, oh, I'm not alone. There are other people who care about these things and I can, you know, I can actually do something about it and be empowered. And so that's all. 2011. Coming back home from the bike tour, diving into local Houston activism, getting really involved that summer with art events and music events and, and then Occupy and then 9 11. And then at the end of, at the end of 2011, going to 2012, we started hosting this big music and arts and activism festival called for the community. And that ended up becoming a big thing. The first time we had it, hundreds of people showed up, the cops showed up, they arrested me claiming that, you know, there was a noise complaint and the cop pulled a shotgun on 100 unarmed people. That made the news, went viral everywhere. That led to my first interview on the Alex Jones Infowars show. And yeah, I mean, I was just like, I was diving in deep and quick in my activism. 2010, 2011, it was, it was already becoming part of my daily life. Now Fast forward to 2012 and would have been August, I think, 2012. So at 2011, going into 2012, the activism continues. The Houston Free Thinkers has become a force now in the, in the city of Houston. We're having monthly meetings, monthly protests. We're doing info jamming, passing out flyers, passing out DVDs, we're hosting teach ins, we're doing marches and protests, tests when necessary. And we eventually get a, a house we called the Free Thinker House, where me and another activist buddy lived. And that's where we started to have our meetings, we started to have our, our concerts and our fundraisers and all this kind of stuff. And I was already, you know, an anarchist, a voluntarist at the time, because a lot of the people I was learning from Adam Kokesh, back in the day, John Bush and others, they were coming out of that Libertarian school again, coming out of the Ron Paul school. But we're already like, look, politics isn't going to save the day. So I, I kind of already knew that politics wasn't the answer. But if there was any little bit of hope inside of my young self, and this would have been 13 years ago, so I would have been in my 26, 27, if there was any little bit of hope of me, that act that politics was going to help in any way, it died in August 2012 at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. I was there, myself and two other members of the Houston Freethinkers. We did a crowdfunding campaign, the first ever crowdfunding I'd ever did, and said, we want to go to Florida and document what's happening. We want to show you guys the protests, the marches, the rallies. We want to show you what's happening with Ron Paul if you. And we're going to make a documentary out of it. And we did. And so help us raise some money so we can rent a car and drive and pay for all of our costs and do these sort of things. And we did just that. And it was a, it was a fun time, especially again, for like a burgeoning activist. And I remember being there in Tampa and we're witnessing the whole chaos of the RNC and the protests. We actually got detained by the Department of Homeland Security briefly, and it was all live streamed. And this is what led to my second appearance on the Alex Jones Show. And then, yeah, one other thing, before I get to this even, actually let me take a step back before the RNC. In April of that year, 2012, the TSA, with the Department of Homeland Security, they announced that they were launching this program called Bus Safe, where they were going to start putting TSA officers, you know, people who grope you at the airport. They were going to put them on the Metro line, all the buses, which, as I mentioned earlier, I was a bus rider. And so this was something that was going to affect me. A lot of people, they didn't ride the bus, so it wasn't going to affect them directly, but they still thought it was a bad idea to take the freaking TSA from the airport and start having them randomly searching and bothering people on the buses just because they choose to, to ride a bus. And so we quickly rallied together. We went to the Houston Metro board meeting and, you know, gave all these fiery speeches and basically within two or three Weeks, we got the entire program shut down. They went from saying they're going to have TSA officers searching people. They did one day of searching, which made the news, where they caught a prostitute and some people with small amounts of drugs or something. Definitely not keeping us safe from terrorists, as they claimed. And then the Houston Freethinkers and a local group of lawyers and other activists, we just showed up at these board meetings, took it over pretty much. Then they organized another meeting. Two weeks later, we came there with more people, and by the end of that meeting, they announced they were going to shut down the program and it wasn't going to happen. And it's been 13 years now, and they haven't brought the program back. And that was another time that the Houston Free Thinkers made the news. And it felt like a real victory. Like, holy crap. Our activism actually shut down some potential tyranny in our community. That was another time. I was on the Alex Jones Show. And then fast Forward again to August 2012. We go to Florida for the Tampa for the RNC. We're there. We're documenting things. We get detained by the Department of Homeland Security. We also have friends who are delegates for Ron Paul who are inside the convention and who are feeding us information. And we're like, reporting on this live streaming. Okay? We're getting word from inside that the. The lights have been turned off when the delegates are supposed to vote for Ron Paul. The buses were sent to the wrong places. For those of you who are around, you know what I'm talking about, or if you live through the Bernie Sanders thing, and if Bernie Sanders was more your guy and you watched how the DNC screwed him over in 2016, it was the same thing with Ron Paul in 2012. And I remember just sitting outside and we're literally getting phone calls of people like, yeah, they sent the Ron Paul delegates who were on a bus to the wrong location, they turned off the lights during the vote, and in the end, they literally just changed the rules so that Ron Paul's delegates couldn't use their strategy. They were going to try to. To. To, you know, get Ron Paul to be the nominee. And, you know, Ron Paul had such support, though, that the RNC couldn't completely ignore him. So they tried to get him to endorse Mitt Romney and offered him a speech at the rnc. He declined. But next door was kind of cool, was there was an entire festival dedicated to him, just called Paul Fest. And it was just all kinds of people. Conservatives, Republicans, you know, libertarians, and kind of more radical, politically homeless people like me coming together to celebrate his ideas and to, you know, kind of champion him. But by the end of it, Ron Paul got screwed. We went home from Florida and I was a committed voluntarist anarchist as I have been since then. And so that, all of that, though, that what I just described here, that's kind of like the foundation of my activism. And then from there, in 2013, I started to get into writing and started to get paid for doing independent blogging and eventually taking it serious as a journalist. All of that, though, comes from my. My prison experience or my getting locked up. I truly believe again, that I wouldn't have been in that position if I hadn't gone through these other experiences. So, yeah, that's how getting addicted to drugs, hitting my rock bottom woke me up. I had to hit my. My rock bottom, my mental health rock bottom, my addiction rock bottom, my spiritual rock bottom. And I was locked up behind bars. But I was also had been locked up in my mind. And when I finally got to that position where I realized I needed to use that time and space to do some healing, to start uncovering the source of my trauma, I was able to start finding my real power. Then when I got out, I found my purpose and I found like, my calling. I cared about injustice. I care about what's going on in the world and I want to try to make it a better place. And that's what I've been committed to ever since then, guys. So, yeah, that is all in the book. There's much more. I encourage you guys to pick it up. The book again, the website is A Man of My Word dot com. A Man of My word dot com. If you want to pick it up and. And learn more, I would really love that. I'm so excited though, to just continue sharing this book for more with more and more of you. I'm going to be going on a US tour later this year in 2026, probably in late May, June. Miriam and I are going to be traveling to 10 or 15 US cities and, and just talking about my book, talking about addiction, but also talking about exit and build and the bigger picture and where it all goes. And I really know that I wouldn't be in this position to be as authentic and as honest and as passionate as I am had I not gone through that dark night of the soul. I don't think it's necessary for everybody. You know, kudos and hats off to you if you're able to find your purpose without hitting a rock bottom. My soul's journey, my soul's destiny was to hit rock bottom and then to find out who I really was. So that's what I've been doing. That's the path I've been on. That's what you guys all know me for. That was the. What I just shared was the foundation of my activism. And most of you didn't start hearing about me till 20, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 20, 20, or even after that. And it's been a beautiful journey. But every now and then, I get a message from one of you where I have friends in Houston who've been following me from the very beginning, who were there from the beginning, who are like, wow, I can't believe what you're doing now. And I'm seeing you on these big podcasts or I'm seeing you, you know, on TV or, you know, running for mayor or whatever, different schemes and kind of projects I've had or a documentary or a book or whatever. And it's. It's been a beautiful journey, guys. That's all I can really say is that it's. It's an epic journey. I'm thankful to be on it. I'm thankful to be sharing it with you guys. And I hope that by me sharing my struggles and what I've been through and now where I'm at and where I'm headed, that you can take some inspiration from that. So thank you guys for listening to this. This has been the fifth episode of A Man of My Word, a pod limited series podcast focused on my book A Man of My Word, How I overcame Addiction, depression, and mental and physical prisons. Stay tuned next week for the final episode of this limited series podcast, guys. Until then, remember, you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are free. Peace. Since 2012, the conscious resistance Network has been an independent media organization focused on empowering individuals through education, philosophy, health and community organizing. We work to create a world where corporate and state power do not rule over the lives of free human beings. Our motto is leading by example and helping others in their pursuit of freedom. Visit theconsciousresistance.com to find our articles, documentaries, interviews, podcasts, books, and more. Remember, you are powerful, you are beautiful, and you are free.