**EP267: Body and Soul with Al Horscroft Part 3** **Dr. Auric Bishop:** Welcome, my name is Dr. Auric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist, an author, and a keynote speaker. I'm the CEO of the Healthy Heart Network. I'm all about trying to help people live as well as possible for as long as possible. Heart disease is huge in Australia. Every 20 minutes, someone suffers a heart attack. Most of these could probably have been avoided if only we knew what to do. This podcast is all about helping you understand blood pressure, weight, and cholesterol for better health. If you enjoy this podcast, I would be honoured for a five-star review. You can share it with your family and friends. It may well save someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warwick Bishop, and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Thank you for tuning in. Today, I've got part three with Alistair Horscroft, who is the CEO of the Mind Academy, known also as the street philosopher. Alistair works in the space of the mind, habits, helping people change habits, and coaching people to their best outcomes. If you've missed the first two podcasts, I encourage you to go back and have a listen because there's some fascinating stuff about Alistair's background. He really did have a checkered childhood and certainly had brushes with the school of hard knocks, which has informed his current self. We also had the chance to talk about habits and how people can potentially change habits and the way to think about that. We even dove into the brain and started to understand a bit around how the brain forms associations and meaning with particular behaviors. At the end of our last podcast, Alistair quite recently reiterated that when people need to change or look to change, number one is priority. If they don't want to do it, it will never happen. Number two is understanding the habit and how that habit interplays with the brain, either through association or meaning for that individual. And number three, recognizing the pain or the replacement of pleasure that the habit change may bring. So there's a whole lot there. **Alistair Horscroft:** Thanks again for joining me. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Thanks, Al. I think we talked about such a lot of stuff, but I'd like to just finish up a little bit on that change and tie it in with something we spoke about before, which was happiness, for want of a better word. Change will occur in people's lives as illness arrives. As we discussed off air, my own experiences, I'll see people with very similar medical issues, but very different emotional journeys. Some people will be put to the wayside; some people will still function. So this concept of change tying into happiness, I'd love you to speak to that as a starting point for this podcast, if you're comfortable. **Alistair Horscroft:** Yeah, of course. I think there are different models, you know, in philosophy called kind of wills. There's kind of will to power, will to meaning, will to pleasure, you know. And if you look at psychology, it's basically what we would determine as a will to pleasure. You know, like I said, the human mammal tries to find ways of improving its roof over its head, food in its belly, and its mating scenario, you know. And it does that through, "Is this going to be better than my current way of doing it?" You know, the will to pleasure. You've got maybe a more philosophical, maybe the philosopher like Nietzsche, that's will to power, you know? And that's basically, he believes that the internal drive is to have power, not power over others, but power from within, yeah? And you become power by exerting control and will over oneself and life, yeah? By knowing more, really. Then you have someone like Viktor Frankl, or the oldest school of psychotherapy, which is the will to meaning. And they basically famously, you know, Viktor Frankl was, you know, the meaning of life is the meaning you give it. So if we look at what you just said in regards to happiness, well, happiness is a byproduct of, you know, living a life a certain way. You know, we find unequivocally that people who try and pursue happiness rarely achieve it. But people who pursue a life of meaning, yes, or a life of power often have more and more experiences of it. If you look at, for example, you know, the famous psychiatrist, psychologist, Abraham Maslow, who's obviously famous for Maslow's hierarchy. But he was attempting in the 70s to create a new psychology that modeled out the successful behaviors, thought processes, and mindsets of people who were living what he called, what did he refer them to? Peak human experiences. And a peak human experience is basically on a day-to-day basis, you have an increasing number of experiences where you feel on track with yourself and life. So someone who is maybe having a very hard time in life or their life is chaotic or they're in disease or discomfort or poverty, whatever, they don't have a lot of peak experiences because they don't feel on track with themselves and life. The more actualized we become, the more we feel on track with ourselves and life, yeah? So you could say that happiness would be a byproduct of that. Now, I'm in a slightly different mindset at this stage in my life, and I would say I have a will to consciousness, but not the new age or the spiritual consciousness. You might redefine it as the will to knowledge. So for me personally, I'm interested in how knowledgeable I can become, how conscious I become. So what does that mean? It means how much of myself, others, and life can I map in this lifetime? Yeah. How big a map of life and experience can I, you know, engage with? And so my mission, what makes me particularly happy or have experiences of feeling on track with myself and life is when I'm more successfully mapping myself, others, and life. Does that make sense? I'm driven by knowledge acquisition, even more so than meaning, to be honest. So we all have different drivers, what I'm trying to get at, that will give us happiness. Some people are truly driven by just the will to pleasure. And as long as they are comfortable, eating good food, satiating themselves, having a grand old time partying, then they're good. That's their life. Other people, that's not enough. It's a will to power. So the more they exert control over themselves and their life and the more it's in order and the more it's running on rails, that's how they get their happiness. So I guess what you're articulating is that the people listening to this and the patients I see and the clients and patients you see will have a different path to their own happiness, which may be pleasure, power, knowledge, meaning, or consciousness. And I guess individuals will have to sort that out themselves to a degree, and they may be able to seek external input to understand that better. But how about talking about when something like a heart attack comes along or open-heart surgery comes along and just knocks people off their rails, regardless of their underlying regular structure to happiness? How do people rebuild that? How do they start to ask the important questions to move back into a realm of happiness? Because some people seem to do it differently. That's what we were talking about before. I don't think there's good guidance for people to do that. And so some people tend to flounder. And I often see patients and will say to them, "Look, we can fix the car," which is their heart normally or their body, "but we often fail or don't do as well on fixing the driver." And some of that is, you know, between your ears and up to you. So what would be your guidance to individuals, regardless of their path to happiness, to start to understand where they are and where they need to go? **Alistair Horscroft:** Yeah, again, sorry to be pedantic, and I know I probably went into a little bit more detail, but those four wills are key. Let me give you an example. So three years ago, I snapped my Achilles. I was in Bali, and on my first day there, I had a full snap of my Achilles tendon, so a full ruptured Achilles tendon, two and a half centimeters. I hobbled around for a little while, realized I needed to get back to Australia. I got back to Australia. They put me in a boot. I was having incredible pain in my calf. I knew something was up. I called, you know, the professionals. They said it's probably just the atrophying of the calf. I was like, I'm not so sure. I waited another few days. I hobbled into accident emergency. To cut a long story short, they completely freaked out. I had a double pulmonary embolism or a saddle embolism, which I'm sure you're well aware of. So that's clots running through the heart into the lungs. They gave me the... and two doctors came up, sat next to me, and said, "I'm sorry to tell you this, but you might only have two hours to live." And I was like, "Okay, how does that work?" And they were like, "Well, you've got a bloody big clot about to go through your heart, and you're going to go into cardiac arrest." And I said, "What happened there?" They said, "We don't know. You might come out. You might not come out. Only part of you might come out." You know, it was quite a confronting experience. So I've got two hours potentially to live. So what do you do? Well, in my case, and this is what I'm saying by, you can't have it all in life. You've got to decide in life which way you're going to go. Human beings, we are extraordinary, and we have the capacity to exert meaning, you know, or at any given moment in time. Like Viktor Frankl said, when everything is taken away from you, the last of the human freedoms is the attitude we choose. Yeah, that's it. You know, we can always choose an attitude that helps us or doesn't help us. Yeah. That's why I'm there. It can be two hours. So I wrote a few messages, wrote to my brother saying, "I love you, mate. Don't be too shitty if I die. I've had an amazing life. It's been chaotic, but I've given it my best." Sent the same to a few friends and went, "You know, don't fuck about or have a miserable funeral. Party for me. I love you all." And then I said, "Okay, everyone leave me alone." And I am highly skilled at hypnosis and other approaches. And so I asked the doctors, "If I'm not going to have a cardiac arrest, what would I need to do?" And they laughed and went, "Well, that's insane." They said, "Well, your vital would have to stabilize. This clot would somehow have to not affect your heart or go through it without causing a cardiac arrest." And I'm like, "Sure." So I put myself into what people would know as hypnosis, and I stabilized all my vitals, and I did various other things, maybe call it pretending or whatever it was to let my body know that it was going to handle the clot through the heart and I was going to be okay. They all thought I was insane. They're like, "How are you doing this? We wouldn't know that you were ill in any way other than your low blood oxygen. All your vitals are perfect, and you have low blood oxygen. That's the only thing that we know." And I put myself into this state for about 13 to 17 hours, I think it was. So let's say about 15 hours. And I was meant to spend 11 days there in the cardiac ward. I was released in 48 hours. And they're like, "This is a freak. You're a freak." You know what I mean? And I was like, "Okay, so now I have to go home. I can hardly breathe. My body was so taxed by what I did in the hospital that I'm literally losing control of my urinary system and my bowels." Do you know what I mean? Because it's just so freaked out. I can't walk because I've got a bloody, you know, Achilles rupture. So I am screwed. I'm finding it hard to breathe. I can't walk. And I'm sat there just going, "Fuck, ow, ow, what the hell, man? What the hell?" But I did something while I was in the hospital. And I used Nietzsche's approach at that moment in time, which is called Amore Fatigue, which means love your fate. But what it really means is you have to fall in love with your past, however fucked up it was, and own it as yours because no one else had your history, only you had your history, yeah? And you have to make yourself the hero of the history that you've lived, however awful it was. You have to fall in love with the present moment and what's happening because this is your present moment. It's no one else's present moment; it's yours. So you've got to get into it. And then you've got to fall in love with whatever future could happen because it's your future. No one else's. So you've got to fall in love with it. So I fell in love with the two hours of life that I potentially had. And I decided that I'd make peace with it and then do my little mind checkings. Then when I got home, I furthered that. And I said, "All right, dude, you've got one choice. You either become a miserable, whatever." And I was in and out. I mean, it was pretty screwed. But I just simply said to myself, "Your only option, Al, you have one option and one option only. And that is to come back twice as healthy, twice as fit, twice as strong as when you entered into this problem. That's your only option. There is no other option." And so I went nuts. And I put myself into incredible health. I fixed my Achilles tendon without surgery. I have no complications with my pulmonary embolism. I lift heavy weights. I run. I sprint. I box. I skip. I surf. And I would say that that's what mindset is all about. People don't understand what mindset really means. Mindset means getting down and dirty. And because if I just meditate my way through it, it wouldn't have helped. I needed to embrace the struggle and go, "Let's get into it." And I, within days of the pulmonary embolism, I was on a bloody bike, do you know what I mean? Like a little stationary bike. And I remember like 30 seconds and I'd be like, "Whoa," but I know you're going to get on it the next day and the next day and the next day. And then COVID was happening at the time. So I couldn't, so I got bands. So I was doing rubber bands at home and building up my strength. So to answer your question, I think people have to have a passionate relationship yet to what you can achieve. If you just go, "I'm going all in, I'm going all in," to become twice the person, you know, twice the person I was before I entered into this shit show of the illness, the problem that I'm experiencing. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** I mean, this is an extraordinary journey. Did the doctors give you therapies and things to bust up the clot or did they do anything that supported your own efforts? **Alistair Horscroft:** They put a lot of Clexane into me. And then I was on Eliquis for six months. Yeah, but I wasn't enjoying Eliquis. I could feel the difference in my body. And so luckily one of my dear friends is a doctor, and I said, "Dude, I'm going to transition off six months to a more my version of how to handle it." And he was like, "Yeah, I think you're going to be okay." But it did require, you know, I contacted some. See, here's where you've got to think right. Okay, so with the Achilles, I could have had the surgery. If I had the surgery, I would have been dead because I had clots running through my leg and in my heart. So I would have been dead. You know what I mean? Because they wanted the surgery before I'd gone to the hospital. But during, as soon as I knew I had the injury, this is what my brain does. And this is very... This is taken from neuro-linguistic programming, which is what we call modeling out success, modeling out excellence. So what I did is I researched who successfully overcomes Achilles tendon ruptures, the fastest and the most complete. And do you know who it was? It was free runners. Do you know those people, those parkour guys who run and jump over buildings? Well, they often snap their Achilles because of the sheer pressure they put themselves on. And so I found a guy, three guys actually, who had all been parkour guys who'd stabbed their Achilles and healed it without surgery and just chatted with them and asked what their protocols were. I mean, why wouldn't I? I'm going to model that success, yeah? And then I looked on all of the pulmonary embolism, and it was very obvious. There were two camps. There was one camp, because when you leave with a double embolism, the doctors say, "Listen, you're probably going to feel pretty funky for a long time. A lot of people get morbid thoughts, suicidal ideology. You know, we don't know why, but maybe it's a strain on the heart or the lungs." And so I saw a lot of people who brought into that belief on the forums, and their lives years later, 15, 20 years, they were still miserable, still having, you know, experiences. And then there were the other set, which were like, "Screw this. I'm going to hit the gym, become a CrossFit legend, run a marathon, you know, get back in." They had a desire to, like I said, be twice as good as going in. And they all pretty much had a complete resolve. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Yeah, fascinating. So 17 or 15 hours of self-hypnosis is probably beyond the skill set of the people listening to this. And it's beyond my skill set. But you said it's more than just hypnosis and it's more than just meditation. It's also a mindset and embracing. And in fact, I think you used the term leaning into or embracing struggle in our previous podcast. What are the sort of things that you would invite people to be focusing on when they're confronting these sorts of health issues? Not necessarily pulmonary embolism, but it doesn't matter. Whatever the challenge that's come up. What are the, what's the advice you'd give to the people listening to this in terms of starting to embrace and deal with the issue for the best possible outcome for them in the longer term? **Alistair Horscroft:** Well, you mentioned it right in our first conversation, Warwick, you know, where the mind and body are absolutely interlinked in one and the same. And they both feed back into each other. And I think you have to do enough work to fall back in love with what you can be. You know, you have to fall back in love with possibility. Yeah. You've got to ignore this. Unless you fall back in love with the possibility that you can always become more, better, kinder, more decent, more healthy, more resolved, a better partner, a better, you know what I mean? You've got to find something. You know what I mean? Like in that moment, I didn't just say I'm going to come back better physically. I wanted to come back better as a person. I wanted to be kinder. I wanted to be more self-honest. I wanted to be a better friend. I wanted to be, you know what I mean? Like I wanted to be a better person. And I think when these moments in life, you know, whether you call them dark nights of the soul or dark nights of the body or whatever, you know what I mean? All these very confronting experiences that happen. I do truly believe that they're a part of, remember we called the dialectic in number two, the friction of opposites that creates consciousness. I think they are undoubtedly an opportunity for us to become more evolved. You know, whether you want to call that spiritually, physically, emotionally, intellectually, however, whatever floats your boat. I don't care. That's up to you to decide, but you have to see them as an opportunity to become more, however that is for you. You know, a better father, better lover, better, you know, friend, better family member, better at work, better decent human being, kinder. And because these things light up your, they light up everything. You know what I mean? They help your immune system. They help your heart relax. They help you, your mindset get into things. You know, there's so many things that happen when you make that decision. It's extraordinary. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** And I completely echo your sentiment about being unable to separate the mind and the body. They really do interplay in such a complex way. And exactly as you're talking about means that we do have some opportunity to input and alter outcomes through that, which is just fascinating. We've covered an awful lot of stuff, Al. For my own curiosity, I just want to know why you get called the street philosopher. And then we may have to wrap up just in the interest of time. But it's been a fantastic journey of three podcasts. For those who have listened and followed this through, you cannot help but have been educated and informed by this series of conversations, which I found absolutely fascinating. So anyway, how come the street philosopher? **Alistair Horscroft:** I appreciate it, Warwick. In short, I've got an honest degree in philosophy, and then everyone knows I've got a foul mouth. You know what I mean? Like I've done very well for you because, you know, I wanted to be my best for you and I haven't sworn. Everyone knows I have. But the joke goes I've always been a bit of a fighter and a bit of a, yeah, one of those guys. I'm built, yeah, a little bit like a brick shithouse, and as they say, you know. And so, yeah, my mate was just like, "Mate, you're not your usual philosopher. You know, you've come from the street. You know what I mean? You can knock people out, and all you ever talk about is, you know, philosophy, spirituality, psychology. So you're the street philosopher, mate. Get out there." **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** That's nice. I'm just going to ask, and we touched on this before, what I did want to finish off just very quickly to allow you to share a little bit more about the Mind Academy is potentially when people are looking at these changes, looking at having a greater awareness, looking at change, we talked about the investment that people need, and that investment can be time, it can be money, it can be support. A couple of words around that because I think often the initial starting point or the initial hurdle for people to prioritize change will be an uncertainty about what they have to put into it. And I think that causes apprehension. Do you want to speak to that? I mean, are these changes a big undertaking? Obviously, the skill set to meditate for 15 hours, that doesn't happen in a couple of weeks. But you were alluding to in previous podcasts that you could help people within half an hour to several hours and even enlarge on that and polish that up over the course of a couple of weeks. So talk about the investment that people would need to think about. **Alistair Horscroft:** Okay, I'm going to sum it up with one word, and that is inevitability. If you want to change, like we talked about in the second podcast, there's going to be irritation, agitation, and frustration. And that's inevitable. If you want to change, there's likely going to be struggle and work required and uncertainty. And they're inevitable. I had a pulmonary embolism. And when I got out of the hospital and I reflected, I was like, statistically, someone has to have pulmonary embolisms. Statistically, someone's going to snap their Achilles. It's inevitable. And I'm just that percentile person. It happened to me. So I never took it too personally. I just saw it as an inevitable consequence of life. And it was just my turn to take that one for the team, as it were. And so I think that if you start embracing most of the things that people resist as inevitable, even from relationships, I've had a lot of beautiful and amazing relationships. And I've had a couple of incredibly challenging relationships where I suffered immeasurably. But without that suffering, I wouldn't have learned what I needed to do to have successful relationships going forward. So it's inevitable. Do you get what I'm saying? Like I think in today's society, we need to start embracing the inevitability of struggle, of problems happening, of the effort it requires to become more aware and conscious. You know, and sometimes if we are, like you said, you're dealing with people who are really at that pointy end, you know, with cardiac failure and heart attack. Well, once again, we can use the word inevitable. If you're going to keep on eating a shitty diet, it's probable, if not inevitable, you're going to get an outcome. If you keep on allowing yourself to remain in stressful dynamics and interrelationships, it's probable, most likely inevitable, that you're going to have certain consequences. And so I think if people can embrace inevitability in all the amazing contexts that that word works, you know, because it really works. There's an inevitability to most things. And if you embrace that, then a lot of the resistance and suffering disappears. The struggle maintains, but it's a struggle that makes you come alive, yeah? If you want to power a dynamo, you've got to pedal that little bike quickly to get that light to shine, yeah? And it's going to take effort. So effort and struggle are inevitable if you want your light to shine. There's no two ways about it. So break the loop of suffering, embrace suffering, and just start seeing the inevitability of things, you know? And I think that would be my advice. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Yeah, that's beautiful. We'll wrap up there. What I'd like you to do, Al, is just share your web address for anyone listening. You can say it twice, nice and slowly, so that they catch it. But just share your web address. I've looked at your website. You've obviously got resources there. So if anyone's looking to dive a bit deeper or even reach out to you. So could you share your website, web address for me? **Alistair Horscroft:** Yeah, sure. So my personal website is alisterhorscroft.com. So just AlistairHorscroft.com. And then my academy website is TheMindAcademy.com.au. So TheMindAcademy.com.au. And then you'll start seeing me appear on socials a lot very soon, just under the hashtag TheStreetPhilosopher. **Dr. Warwick Bishop:** Fantastic. Al, it's been an absolute pleasure to share with you. I really... I get the sense we resonate on so many things from slightly different angles because we still sit the other side of the desk of people who are going through these journeys, but we're looking at them with slightly different skill sets. But I'm astounded at how much I feel like we have in common as we talk about these things. And I'm also delighted how much I've learned through this. So thank you once more for taking the time to share. For those listening, I'm sure you got as much out of this as I have. I am going to wish you the very best. Till next time, please live as well as possible for as long as possible. Take care and bye for now. Ever wonder what your risk of heart attack is? After all, it is the single biggest killer in the Western world. It accounts for 9 million deaths globally. And the scary thing is it seems to be able to affect anyone. 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