Rory Van Grol and Greg Benoit are back after a brief hiatus! This episode of Common Thread features an in-depth conversation with Greg Bennick, the vocalist of the legendary Seattle hardcore band @trialseattle. Greg Bennick is also an accomplished speaker, author, and filmmaker.

The interview kicks off with a conversation about Bennick’s book, “Reclaim the Moment - Seven Strategies to Build a Better Now,” which is a book about how to use authenticity and human connection to facilitate personal growth “Reclaim the Moment “ serves two audiences, people who want to retrain their mind to be more focused on possibilities and mentally present in the moment, and people who want to improve their workplace dynamics and community leadership skills."

The conversation shifts to discuss the two Gregs mutual interest in the life and works of Ernest Becker. Becker is an anthropologist who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Denial of Death,” a book that proposes that all individual and collective actions, including the entirety of human civilization, are a defense mechanism against our awareness of our own mortality. The two Gregs discuss how Becker’s ideas have influenced their life choices, and their personal “immortality projects.”

Rory and Greg also discuss Bennick’s nonprofit work with @onehundredforhaiti and the @portlandmutualaid, Bennick’s work producing documentary films like “Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality” and the Bane documentary @holding_these_moments, and a biography on Ernest Becker that he is currently writing.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Foreign.

Before we get started, I'm just gonna be vulnerable and honest.

A little nervous about this interview because I don't know that I actually have the mental acuity to keep up with our guests intellect tonight.

And I'm going to do my very best, but I might make a fool of myself.

So if I do, I hope it's at least a noble effort.

And if it's not, I hope that it's so bad it's hilarious to you, the listener.

So without further ado, I'm very excited to introduce someone whose lyrics have influenced my worldview and my politics since the time I was a teenager and whose work is, is.

Is one or you know, who's whose life's work.

You know, I make some effort to kind of emulate in, in the things that I do when I'm out in the community trying to help improve people's lives.

So I'm very excited to have on our podcast tonight here with Rory Van Grohl and I, Mr. Greg Bennett, who is the vocalist for the legendary Seattle hardcore band Trial, but is also involved in various non public speaking.

He's an author, he's produced documentaries and is a general all around renaissance man of the hardcore punk scene.

Greg, welcome to the the Common Thread podcast.

Thank you.

I'm blown away and I have to say when you started saying you didn't think you could keep up with the mental acuity of your guest, I was like, wow, jokes on me.

I couldn't wait to see who you had on as a guest tonight who was going to join us on this call.

I couldn't wait.

I was like, wow, this is going to be fascinating.

Whoever they got is going to be awesome.

Yeah.

So Greg, thanks for being on.

Rory, I just want to check in with you because we have not been on the mic on the podcast for a couple weeks since our episode with Oil Cleveland dropped.

How was your Thanksgiving?

And now venturing into the holiday season.

Ben, you know, it's.

Been wild.

Small business life is just ramps up to a whole nother capacity.

But you know, spending time with family was awesome.

We have an annual game of world domination, AKA we all play Risk for those who choose to do that.

And my 10 year old decided to go alone this year and so he stepped up and played his own campaign which was awesome.

It was a lot of fun.

Nice.

I have never played a Risk.

I have never once in my life played and I've had so many options to play but it seems like it consumes people and potentially ends families and like ruins People's relationships and gets them completely out of their minds.

Love to play sometime.

It's great.

I mean, yes.

And so, like, I think my family's been doing it for so long at this point that that's part of it.

It makes us stick with something for a couple hours where we have no choice but to talk through something if we disagree.

So, you know, those feelings come up where.

You get frustrated or whatever, but you have to work through it in some capacity.

So I love it.

It's fun.

It's like.

It's like playing backgammon with somebody.

If you ever played backgammon.

I mean, the easiest.

I have a little bit, but yeah, totally.

Like.

You'Re just committed to it.

And my family has always been a gaming family in a weird sense.

There's this game called the Dark Tower, which is.

The first electronic board game.

So it's like this.

There's four players and there's this tower in the middle.

I remember it.

Oh, right on.

So I don't have to explain it too much, but that was a family game, like, grew up playing that, you know, So I had cousins and uncles and aunts, and we would all play that growing up.

And the wild story about that game was that Milton Bradley got sued because the inventors that made it never gave them the rights to it.

So they sued them for a cease and desist and they had to stop making it.

So.

So that's why it never got crazy big or multiplied in the way it had.

No idea.

I had no idea.

So that's pretty cool story about that.

But.

So, yeah, that was Thanksgiving was cool, and holiday season, you know, Small Business Saturday and all that stuff happens right after that.

So we're just in the thick of that life.

How about you, Greg?

How was family and hanging out for you guys?

Oh.

Oh, man, it's.

It's been a wild ride also for us, you know, we had some.

A little bit of a medical scare with my dad, who was in the hospital for a while, but he's doing okay now, you know, and I'm.

I'm learning a lot from going through that about what I need to do now so that when I age, you know, I might be able to be in a little bit better position than he presently is.

So it's been.

It's been challenging at times, but I'm.

I'm grateful that, you know, I have my family, you know, supporting us through this and supporting him.

And I'm, you know, eager to turn this into a learning experience instead of just an Experience where, you know, I feel grief and powerlessness because that's, you know, kind of the.

The name of the game, at least with.

With how I've been living the last few years, you know, self.

And radical self improvement, radical self acceptance.

But other than that, you know, it's.

It's been pretty good over at the library.

You know, this is our slow season, so we can start, you know, doing some background projects that, you know, we can deploy when we get a little bit bigger or a little bit busier, you know, when the busy season rolls around again.

We just had a really cool renovation to our children's library to create a performance space.

So if you're in the Rochester area and you got little kids, come on over to the Coit Library.

We have a couple new reading nooks that your kids can get stuck in.

It's a fun time and a lot of effort went into it, and I just want to bring it back to Risk for a second.

I swear, one of my fondest memories was being 19 years old and.

And witness playing Risk in Buffalo and Eric's reportedly haunted apartment.

Staying up all night when we should have been sleeping to get energized for the next day recording.

Yeah, a lot of fond memories playing Risk with family and friends.

So.

Hasn't destroyed any.

Any relationships for me, but I definitely see its potential to do that.

I've got to get it.

That's why.

That's why I mentioned backgammon.

I mean, the easiest way if you want to break up with somebody is just play blackgammon with them.

One person will inevitably be furious with the other at some point during the backgammon sessions.

But I think that I need to get into Risk.

Clearly.

Clearly.

My advice is if you can get Australia and then just centralize all your forces in Australia, there's only one way in and one way out.

So, you know, you can kind of pull Spartans at Thermopylae strategy and deplete your enemy's forces when they only have one place to attack.

I love it.

And geopolitically said, no one ever centralize all your forces in Australia.

The Australians are cringing at the idea of that, even as we see.

Easily.

Easily makes me more qualified to be one of the president's foreign policy advisors than any of the people who are currently giving him advice.

It's just Risk.

You have my vote.

Yeah.

Okay, good.

So we've got a lot of topics that we want to talk to Greg about.

You know, as I've indicated, he's had a hand at a lot of different cool creative projects.

But one of your more recent creative projects that has been very visible on social media is your book, Reclaim the Moment.

And as a librarian and an aging punk rocker, I love the intersection of literature and punk rock and how you can take some of the radical ideas that you find in the hardcore punk community and maybe bring them to the broader community so that folks who either don't like distorted guitars or, you know, never got to encounter punk in their youth can benefit from some of the cool ideas that have been percolating around our music scene for, you know, the last 40 or so years.

So I'm going to kick it over to Rory because Rory really knocked it out of the park with some of our questions for.

For Reclaim the Moment.

But just before we get started, for the folks who aren't familiar with the book, can you kind of give us a back of the dust jacket elevator pitch of what people can expect when they pick this.

When they pick this book up?

Totally.

It's a book that is written with the idea in mind that we can reclaim our focus from a world which throws us off track and bring us back, bring ourselves and the people around us back to center when we've been thrown off track by the world.

You know, the whole book was written as basically a reminder to myself of those ideas.

Like, there's seven strategies in there, right?

It's really popular to word your book title that way.

Five strategies to this, 16 attempts to do this and whatnot.

But the reason I structured it as seven strategies is these are the things that I try to remind myself of when I am thrown off track by the world.

So it's really what it's about.

It's a book that was when.

When Wiley asked me to write the book.

They wanted a business development book.

And I quite honestly didn't want to write a business development book.

In fact, that didn't interest me, really at all.

I wanted to write a personal development book masquerading as a business book so that somebody could take it to their boss and say, hey, we should all read this.

They could also read it.

And as a friend of mine recently said to me, like, I loved all the stories in this.

I wanted that kind of response, too.

So it's a.

It's a book of personal stories and reflections that are reminders to myself to keep my head together when the world would have me be otherwise.

I think that is a perfect synopsis because I read the book.

Awesome.

I really engaged with it, enjoyed it, you know, like, soaked up a lot of the things that you were talking about.

And one thing that really hit me, and this is like early on, you know, to quote you, you know, the book is for those who want to build better systems, better businesses, better mindsets and better selves.

And that sounds, you know, just.

If you could pull that out of any of these like kind of tropey books.

Right.

But the way you do it is in a way that connects these like incremental dots of self reflection and not in a way that takes oneself out of the equation.

So like, like you said, like it's your personal stories and your, you're making that so much more attainable and relatable.

And when you, when you did, you realize that you yourself were connecting these dots in these stories.

And then I saw myself in that too.

And you make these steps that are so for someone like myself too, I could connect to those moments.

I can connect to that spirit of like, hey, I'm failing at this.

It's okay to do that.

And that's how we can learn from this experience and grow from this experience.

You go through that in a lot of these strategies that you talk about.

The purpose that I want to hit on is that it wasn't businessy good.

It was, it was a personal narrative.

That's how I felt it.

And.

But it's applicable to business and to life and to personal, your personal story.

And like, that's.

I really love that experience of reading the book and I enjoyed it and like, you know, you can apply these things to business.

And I think business for me is personal.

It's how you show up for the people that work for you or that work alongside you.

And that's what I got out of it.

And I really love that sentiment and reflecting on the book now.

Do you hear that from other folks?

Do you hear that that's what folks are getting out of the book?

Absolutely.

And I love what you said because at the end of the day, I don't care about business.

I really don't.

I care about the way people intersect with their business or the business they're a part of.

I care about the way that business affects people or how it works with people to create an effect, an outcome.

You know, if we're talking about selling a product, whatever that might be, I care about the people side of it.

But I don't ever wake up in the morning and say to myself, my gosh, I hope my day includes lots of business.

I really never say that.

Why would I say that?

Why would you say that, you know, I, I care about the way that people interface with business.

So I love that you said that because that's what I care about is the people side of things.

I remember, you know, in the 90s when, you know, animal rights kicked off so much in punk rock and hardcore and whatnot.

You know, I've been vegan for 30, 35 years or whatever.

I mean, yay.

I mean that, that like being straight edge, you know, for listeners who are maybe not inclined to the punk and hardcore things.

Straight edge being a philosophy, an approach to life that doesn't accept, embrace, or include drugs, alcohol, etc.

You know, I've always thought that being vegan and or straight edge gets you to zero.

That's like the starting point for human beings.

From there, what do we do?

That's the interesting question.

Not, you know, it's that thing straight edge or veganism that is the substance of our lives, but rather that gets to zero.

Now what happens, the point is, is that when, when I think about, you know, the book now, I think about, okay, like, let's.

What.

What do we do with the time that we have?

What do we do with the one life that we have?

How do we interact with other people?

That's.

That's the base starting question that we need to be asking every single day in our business, in our life, so on and so forth.

Like, I want clarity as I move forward into the world and the clarity that focus brings or the CL that these strategies bring, that's that hopefully will get me to a starting point from which I can then live.

And I do hear from people that they appreciate the stories in the book.

They appreciate the human connection in the book.

No one has said to me, you know what?

Because of this book, we increased our bottom line by 13.75% and our gross annual percentage ratio of blah, blah, blah, blah.

I don't hear that.

Thank God.

I don't hear that.

That would be the exact opposite of what I want.

I want people to go, wow, I read this book and now I'm at a great starting point.

Cool.

Now what happens next?

I even say that, you know, spoiler alert, at the end of the book, I'm like, tell me what you did with all this information.

Write to me.

Tell me what happens next.

That's what I'm more interested about at the end of the day.

And those are the kinds of responses I've been getting, which is great.

I love that because I mean.

It harkens back to me.

It's like being in Those rooms in those spaces that, and I say spaces is like basements or venues or halls that we've been a part of, that we've been on a stage or a floor, had a microphone, shared this music, shared these ideas that we have.

And it's just elevating it to another level.

It's taking it to somewhere else that is tangible for others to not have a connection to that world, but to have a sustainable.

Like, oh, yeah, as a child, my brother, like, goofed on me too.

And I, you know, I can relate to that.

Or, you know, I was in this, I was traveling and this happened and it really opened my eyes to experience this and I navigated something in a certain way.

So, you know, you took those ethos from those rooms and you put it in a way that didn't have to have those rooms involved in it.

So someone like me, I get it, I see it.

But at the same time, like, folks, anyone can.

You can, any businessy person can pull that book off the shelf and be like, this is valuable to me.

And it's at the heart and soul of it.

It's a book based on people and connection.

I love it.

My gosh, I want to tattoo that somewhere on me.

It's a book of heart and soul and people in connection.

That's fantastic.

And that's exactly what I wanted.

Exactly what I wanted.

And I mean, the fact that it was put out by the, you know, the business trades division at Wiley is not lost on me.

I mean, like, you know, either were happy or, or displeased with the result.

No one said anything specific.

They said that they liked it, which is great, but no one has spoken to the fact yet that it isn't a business development book.

It simply is not that.

I mean, the world has enough of that.

Why would I add my voice to that when for the last 30 years, you know, I've been doing something else?

And the reason I brought up animal rights before in the 90s, just to put a bow on that, is because throughout the 90s, when, when animal rights in hardcore and whatnot and veganism, you know, kicked off and whatnot, I was always interested in the human rights side of things, right?

So I was more, you know, doing stuff with the Western Shoshone nation and, you know, not to pat myself on the back because it's certainly not that.

It was just.

I just went in a different direction, right?

I was always interested in human beings.

What do human beings do and why do they do what they do?

Why do I do what I do.

Why do I mess up in the ways that I mess up?

Why do I feel triumphant in the ways that.

All these questions were always interesting to me.

Like if human beings are bringing so much joy and destruction into the world world, then it should start with human beings, at least in my mind.

And yes, also let's all be vegan and you know, pursue the rights of animals too.

Of course, you know that, that kind of approach, right.

Not to belittle that at all, but the reason I brought it up before is because, you know, that was my approach was always human, just human consciousness, human beings, humans, human ways of thinking, human understanding, human behavior.

Why do we do the things we do?

And that's what this book really explores too.

And that's why I selected the stories I did and framed them in the way that I did.

So.

So at the end of the day it's, it's a book for people, about people.

And that's first and foremost.

I want to chime in just a little bit about your interest in people because I think that is, is something that's made me an effective leader in, in a public library environment, you know, kind of quasi non profit type arrangement where you know, you have a staff that's paid and then a volunteer board that oversees and the policies.

But for me as a leader of the staff, there's always a part of me and I don't usually go there because of my professionalism, but there's a part of me that always wonders when I'm managing people or I'm assisting my, you know, my co workers or subordinates in a project, you know, what is causing you, the person before me, the most suffering right now?

What problems do you have that you are resigned to believing are unsolvable?

I think once I know these things about another person at an enables me to connect with them on a deeper level and it helps me understand their interpersonal boundaries and their communication preferences because I'm very, you know, I'm not conflict averse, but I really want to save it for when it's truly unavoidable.

And knowing how a person suffers, knowing what's actually going on in the background, you know, in a person's life, kind of helps me have the most amount of compassion that I can have in the moment.

And I don't, I'm not a spiritual guru.

I, I don't succeed every time and I probably fail more often than I'm willing to even admit now.

One of the things that helped me get there was, you know, I used to have a more judgmental mindset.

And I became interested in Eastern philosophies and you know, Buddhism.

I would say I'm like a secular Buddhist.

And one of those, one of the kind of aphorisms that's thrown around in those circles is be curious, not judgmental.

And one thing that I had that unlocked, that I discovered, that unlocked, you know, a kind of a new level of interaction with the people I work with was I, I try my best to not determine who's right or who's wrong in a given circumstance or conflict or who's more right and who's more wrong.

Rather, I view my role not as to judge people, but to figure out how to have as much compassion for everyone involved as possible on non judgmental terms.

And I've noticed in Reclaim the Moment there's a lot of vocabulary and themes that kind of remind me of some of the things I've picked up from Eastern philosophies on.

Mindfulness and staying focused on the present.

Is that something that has influenced you?

Do you have any interest in, in kind of Eastern philosophies?

And also, if so, do you have like a mindfulness practice?

Do you like meditate or do anything kind of as, as a ritual or a practice to help you stay grounded and present in the moment?

Okay, there's, there's a bunch in there and I'm going to try to hit all of it and hopefully this won't be a jumbled mess, but.

Okay.

So, yes, I'm at my best when my meditation app is first and foremost on my mind.

When I open my eyes in the morning.

And not Instagram, right?

Scrolling through Instagram, I have a meditation app and if I sit for 10 minutes, my day is transformed.

And I was doing that for a while.

And I say my life is at my best because I haven't been doing it recently.

Even talking about it right now, I'm like, oh my gosh, why haven't I been doing that?

I'm gonna start again tomorrow morning.

Like my life is best when I do that rather than find out what everyone else in the world is doing right off the bat and start the component comparison game.

So I'm going to say yes, even though that's kind of a tenuous connection to Eastern philosophy, that's just me grounding myself.

But the idea of meditating or, or being centered.

Right.

I think is, is really important and, and then to kind of kick it back to the book a little bit is, you know, the reason that you're seeing that throughout the book and.

And ideas of.

Of human centeredness or understanding how people suffer and the relationship to how we can approach our day and those other people is because for many years now, I've studied the work of a cultural anthropologist named Ernest Becker.

And Becker's work is all around our fear of our mortality and the impact.

And I've already misspoken in a way.

Becker explored in his work fear of our mortality and the way that our mortality impacts our behavior.

How do my reactions to my inevitable demise influence the way that I talk with you, for example, or the way that I interface with somebody with whom I have conflict?

We can get into that for sure.

But the reason I bring up Becker here is because Becker was more interested in his work about why do people behave the way they do?

Why.

Why are people the way they are?

And Becker started his career exploring Eastern philosophy.

And he didn't explore it from the way that you and I are speaking right now in terms of, oh, if I meditate, maybe I'll be more grounded and I won't fear death as much.

He is first one.

One of his first works was a book called Zen A Rational Critique, where he was critiquing Zen and he was critiquing the idea that a guru would lead us down a path towards any type of enlightenment or, you know, salvation of any kind.

And he was kind of calling us back into ourselves.

But in order to do that, we need to understand what it is we're rallying against.

Right.

So he was rooted in that too, and he had an awareness of.

Of Zen, which of course, at the time he was writing in the 60s was very popular.

Point being, I think that those influences Zen and.

Or meditation and.

Or Becker certainly filtered the way into the book and the way that I interact with people all the time now, I would hope, because there's so many opportunities for us to mess up in this world and get off track and be cruel and do terrible things and say terrible things.

And we all do it.

And not surprisingly at all, given the amount of psychological turmoil we've all been in, not just with current politics, but, oh, there was a pandemic that killed a million people that we haven't even begun to touch yet.

Psychologically, all of these things put us in a position where, as death fearing mortality, worrying creatures, we are more than likely to lash out at each other in every second.

It's a miracle we're having a grounded conversation for this long without attacking each other and belittling one another, you know, so amidst that, a sense of Being centered and grounded and remembering like, it's okay, I'm in this and it's going to hurt and it's going to be confusing and it's going to be overwhelming.

And 100 years from know, I'm maybe laying in a box or I'm just part and parcel ashes sprinkled in an ocean somewhere.

Not an exciting and fun thought, but given that, let's do our best to be good to one another and good to ourselves amidst that entire experience, I think that's where we need to be.

So, yes, that's my answer.

Yeah.

So I'm glad that you mentioned Ernest Becker.

That's, you know, someone who I've been interested in for a little bit.

And truth be told, the first time I became aware of Ernest Becker and his, his award winning, Pulitzer Prize winning book, Denial of Death was actually through the documentary that you were involved with Flight from Death.

A friend of mine was like, hey, this guy from Trial has a documentary.

And I'm like, okay, all right, I'm a huge Trial fan, so I'm going to check this out.

Went in knowing nothing about it and then, you know, so I was interested in it on kind of a superficial level.

You know, I was, I don't know how old I was.

It was probably 20 around the time it came out.

Out.

And then later on in life, I re encountered Becker and Denial of Death through this podcast, which is one of my favorites to listen to, called stuff to blow your mind, where he comes up quite a bit and they discuss, you know, Becker, his, his works, some of the kind of subsidiary ideas that are derivative of his works.

Would you say?

Because Rory and I were having a conversation and sharing some notes.

You know, you've mentioned veganism and Straight Edge.

Edge is, is Becker's works one of those kind of foundational philosophies that, that rises to the level of veganism and Straight Edge for you?

Oh, absolutely.

And it's, it's the sea in which all the other things rise, float and, or sink, as the case may be.

Right.

It's, you know, Becker's ideas are powerful.

And Becker is cringing in his grave somewhere right now, as I start to say this, this way.

Becker never wanted to be the center of any cult of personality.

He.

He missed out on opportunities by not presenting himself at the center of his ideas more while his contemporaries did.

So I say this with a degree of respect to him, but his ideas were powerful.

And it wasn't just the ideas around death and mortality and how we as humans, frail humans, react to that inevitable truth of our own death.

But his ideas were powerful also around just the ideas of self esteem and how do we pursue self esteem?

What gives me a sense of meaning, you know, why do I get a boost when you compliment Trial so much in the, in the beginning of this podcast?

Why do I get a sense that I have transcended something?

That's a very good question.

And it's probably worth at least a thousand bucks of therapy time at some point for me to explore, you know what I mean?

Like to sit on somebody's couch and talk about it.

Why do I get a boost?

What is that boost?

And Becker would suggest.

I was gonna say I would suggest, but I'm just a second rate interpreter of Becker's first rate ideas.

Becker would suggest that having been in a band and having been the one with the microphone makes me feel as though I have transcended, for lack of a better word, something, you know, that, that I might be remembered after I shuffle off this mortal coil.

And therefore a small degree of me has absorbed myself in the illusion that I have become beaten.

Beaten death.

You see what I'm getting at?

These ideas are fascinating to me.

And again, it's not what Becker was fully about.

It's what he's known for because he won the Pulitzer Prize for the Denial of Death.

But it's certainly not all that he wrote.

And his, his influences were not from people in history who were exploring death, but rather people who were exploring religion and at times early on, anthropology, but later.

People who were exploring aesthetics.

Why is it that we like the way that Earth crisis sounds?

Why is it that we enjoy.

The guitar chord that we hear?

What is it about the guitar chord's resonance that is appealing to us?

Those are the types of things that Becker probably would have enjoyed talking about.

But yeah, huge, hugely influential on me.

I was in the back of the van, the trial touring van, when I finished reading the Denial of Death for the first time.

We were laying down like sardines in the back of this van.

We were in north Northern California.

I'd been reading all night long by flashlight.

The sun was coming up as I finished the book for the first time.

And I basically closed the book and thought to myself, holy, now what?

Because I had no idea what to do with myself.

I had no idea what to do with myself.

Because if it's true that my interactions with other human beings are influenced by my subconscious fear of my own mortality, well then where does that, where does that leave me?

Like why?

What?

Like where does now what I mean, they've, it starts to begin to explain aggression and, or sadness or sympathy, empathy, pathos, you know, worry, anxiety.

I was like, now what do I do with this?

And then there's a whole lifetime that developed from there, you know, the, you know, just lifetime of thinking.

So that's a long winded, hopefully concise at the same time answer of, yeah, this is huge stuff and it influences everything for me.

Me.

Are there particular.

Passages or chapters in Reclaim the Moment that are more influenced by, by Becker?

Or is it just kind of all throughout their, you know, throughout the entire thing in a more like even kind of keeled way that maybe you can't pick out one thing, but it's all there beneath the surface.

Well, I'll, I'll, I'll hit this as an answer like kind of almost like rapid fire style.

Like if you think about the chapter titles like Believe in the Possibility of Kindness to Escape the Trap of Pessimism.

Well, it'd be very easy to slip into pessimism if the three of us sat around and thought, you know, someday we're going to be food for worms.

What's the point of doing anything?

Well, okay, well then let's, let's lash out at each other and get what's ours.

I don't want that.

I don't want that in life, business, personal, relationships or anything.

I want us to be kind.

And when we don't feel as though we can be, or when we haven't been in the past kind, we can always be, be better and do better and build a better now.

Right?

So even just believing the possibility of kindness is influenced there, and then, you know, the next chapter, you know, or not even the next one, but like, you know, leap into the dark to embrace the possibility of success.

You know, it's a, it's a chapter about fear of success rather than fear of failure.

You know, Becker is, is, is intimately intertwined there.

And that, you know, when we.

When we run the risk of succeeding, we also run the risk of placing ourselves in an unknown place, in an unknown position.

If all of a sudden this podcast goes great and you get a million followers and you get a million requests to do a million different things, what's your life going to be like?

Wouldn't it be easier if we all just sat around and talked about how Al Brown is awesome?

Yeah, it would be.

You know what I mean?

That would be easy and well deserve it.

But at the same time, what happens if we do more than just what we know how to do?

And talk about things we don't understand, and all of a sudden we succeed and place ourselves in a position where we haven't been before.

That sounds scary.

And it's a whole chapter about what happens when we, you know, when we actually succeed.

Are we willing to succeed, you know, in a life where we, you know, don't know where the end comes and a life that is finite?

What.

What happens when we step into the unknown even more in an already unsure reality?

Yeah, there you go.

That's kind of my response to you.

It's all throughout the book.

Without a doubt.

I could go on.

So.

So one of the ideas that Becker presents in Denial of Death is this concept of an immortality project, which is essentially something that maybe we use to occupy our minds to take, you know, our thoughts off of death and the inevitability of it all.

But it's a, you know, usually some kind of large, meaningful, personal project that one, on some level believes will perpetuate their will or enable them in some metaphorical way to transcend death and still have an influence, you know, beyond, you know, our lifespan.

I, you know, view my involvement in hardcore as sort of a quasi immortality project.

Much of what I have in life, I have either directly or indirectly through hardcore.

If I never got into punk, never went to hardcore shows, never would have met my wife, never would have had my kids, never probably would have read Henry Rollins writing about how much lifting weights influenced his life and started lifting weights, wouldn't have had the self confidence to put myself out there for a leadership role at work.

Work.

So.

And like a lot of folks, you know, I dipped in and out of hardcore.

You know, as I got older, I felt, you know, weird about being the old guy.

It seems like there's a lot more old guys at shows now, which is pretty cool.

I'm not, you know, the oldest one there, you know, anymore, or in most cases.

So I would say in some way, I want to use my life and my enthusiasm for hardcore to perpetuate that music and the community.

Community into the future in a way that when I'm gone, I will have had some very small, probably insignificant role in carrying it forward.

And I've said this on the podcast before, but I like to point to this because I think it illustrates the bigger picture.

You know, Agnostic Front has basically been.

Been a band for 40 years.

I know they had hiatuses in there, but they've been a band for 40 years, maybe even a little bit more.

I've lost track of when they got.

When they Found it.

And that tells me that there are bands now that are just forming that might be around in 40 more years.

And if I'm being honest, I'm going to be really lucky if I'm alive in 40 more years.

There could conceivably be some young band opening for agnostic front that 40 years from now they'll be old guys too.

And hey, we opened for Agnostic front and there's 80 years of hardcore.

This, that's, that's four generations of human life that have, you know, been involved in that.

But I want to perpetuate this community into the future because it's been so influential and, you know, so for me it takes on almost the role of a religion, which I think in Becker's book Denial of Death, that is kind of like the original human immortality project, if I understand it correctly, and I may not.

So I'm open to, to, to, to criticism and feedback.

So that's one of them.

You know, I think for a lot of people, their children is a big immortality project, you know, raising someone up and imbuing them with values that will enable them to succeed and survive and thrive.

For you, I'm curious to know what is, you know, your immortality project, if you don't mind sharing.

You are a person who seems very well organized in their thoughts and doesn't have a lot of wasted moments, maybe where you're daydreaming or navel gazing.

And so I'm curious to know what brings meaning into your life.

How do you distract yourself from kind of that nagging, ever present awareness that, you know, this is not going to last forever.

This is great.

Okay, so, so the immortality project idea is powerful and I'm excited to answer your question.

I'll say that I'm glad you mentioned what you did, that all the things you mentioned are immortality projects in the way, in a way, having kids, you know, the position at your job, you know, getting married, doing this podcast.

Right.

Let's, let's think about an immortality project as something that us feel as though we are going, that a piece of us will last even after the physical self disappears.

Right?

Even after I'm gone, somebody's going to find this podcast somewhere.

It's going to be 110 years from now.

They're going to be like, oh my gosh, I can't even believe I can make out what they're saying.

And it's going to inspire them.

That idea is great because 50 years from now we might not be around.

Right?

I hope that we are.

I Hope that we're old and withered and excited to talk about all these things still.

So, you know, I think that what's the most important thing?

And then I'll dive into the personal side of it is.

And Becker would agree.

What happens when immortality projects collide?

And can mine exist in the same world as Rory's and Greg's?

Can they all exist at the same time?

And what happens when people who have differences of opinion about the way the world works, can their immortality projects and ours coexist?

And can we talk about them from the standpoint of, hi, I'm terrified on some levels that I might never understand about the limitations of my physical self and the fact that I can daydream eternally and that's all going to shut off like a light switch someday.

I'm terrified to the point of goosebumps over that.

I know you are, too.

I'm pursuing the therapeutic immortality project of my existence this way.

You're doing it that way.

They don't seem to jive, but at the core, the reason behind them is the same.

What do we do now?

Without kicking each other in the teeth, what do we do now?

That's the operative question.

That's the operative question.

It's very easy for us to think about, you know, shared ideas about what brings us that sense of immortality when we are.

Are reasonably similar as humans.

And I'm not just talking about skin color or the fact that we're male, but we come from a cultural background.

You know, I joked mentioning Al Brown a few moments ago, but, you know, for those listeners who don't know, and I know that you interviewed Al on your podcast, and he probably talked about this.

You know, Al lifts weights, works out, has a gym, is intellectually a monster.

Fantastic.

I wouldn't want to say a negative word like monster.

Intellectually a hero.

He's really fantastic.

His brain is fantastic.

And then he had knee surgery and started, like, walking and running right away.

And, like, when you're supposed to be recuperating, he started running marathons and, like, you know, and, like, ran across the country or whatever he did.

He did something majestic with his healing and his body and transcending his physical self.

And I was watching this happen on social media, and I'm like, wow, I ate pasta today.

Like, this is like, you know, this guy's amazing.

You know what I mean?

Okay.

The point is, because his.

His projects, yours, mine, ours, how can they coexist?

So the ones that I delve into myself, I get.

I get some sense Of Satisfaction, as I mentioned it before, about obviously being the person with a microphone in his hand.

I get something out of that.

If I didn't, I wouldn't have been doing it since I was 13 years old.

Right.

In addition, playing music and communicating about these ideas in ways that lead other people to go, oh, yeah, yeah, I get that is something that is meaningful to me.

Trial certainly was that Between Earth and Sky is my current and other band, which has been around for 20 years.

No band moves glacially slower than Between Earth and Sky.

We've played maybe 20 shows in all the years we've been together, and we have six completed songs for an LP that will be out next year on Refuse Records.

We have one more song to work through lyrics and, and music, and then one to write lyrics and music, and then we're going to record a record.

Why am I going to go on tour every day for the rest of my life?

No.

Am I expecting that Metallica rolls through and plays here on their two night mega tour next year and asks me to open with Between?

No.

You know, but there's something in it, right?

There's something about communicating and having other people go, I read your lyrics.

Awesome.

Okay, I get it.

I get it.

I totally get it.

That gives me a sense of like, oh, my existence mattered.

It counted for something.

So I think that the writing that I do, whether that's articles on, you know, I'm a coin collector and researcher and writer, that's a whole 15 podcasts worth of material right there for, for a rapidly diminishing audience who would not be as interested as, as I am, certainly.

The point is, I do all that probably because I like the idea of leaving something behind after I'm gone.

So all those things, the writing and the bands and the, the performance and the speaking and the podcast interviews, all of it speaks to, hey, everybody, don't, don't, don't forget, don't forget me.

And it's not from an ego standpoint, right?

It's like it's not from an ego standpoint.

I hope that you don't call this episode Greg.

Yeah, it's more like psychological.

It's like we all want to matter.

And that's, you know, quite honestly, we don't have to go down this rabbit hole.

We can.

But, you know, my keynotes when I'm speaking to groups are about reminding people that they matter and that the work they do is meaningful.

And it's like a team building keynote.

And the reason I do that is because we all want to matter.

We all want to feel as though the work that we did at the library is meaningful, that we were good parents to our kids, that we were a good partner, that we supported one another, that we were willing to listen.

And all the things that we oftentimes mess up doing, we hope we're doing them right.

So we leave that behind as a legacy.

So I love that, the sentiment of it all, because it is very real intangible in the book and even before the book came out.

I'm going to quote you with Trial lyrics right now because I think it encompasses all of what we're talking about in the song War by Other Means.

You say now those enemies of the hour are the focus of this moment.

For as long as we are here, every voice remains alive.

Because you can't kill an idea, you know, I will not be ruled.

Because you can't kill an idea, we will not be ruled by fear.

And, you know, I think that's just so relatable to this all encompassing belief of the honesty of being able to communicate this and saying, you know, I like having a microphone.

I like having.

Communicating my ideas.

I like that.

Where I think in this world a lot of folks will be like, oh, that's so much ego.

That person likes doing that.

But we're all, we all have a gift.

There's a reason why we're drawn to do certain things or to relay certain things or to be the filter of those ideas or somebody else.

And I think a lot of it comes back to people and connection and just like how Greg was talking about with people that he works with and how to allow them to express their.

Thoughts and feelings about a situation and not take it personally.

We can communicate our wants and needs without having it be so personal to us.

But elevating the aspects of others who are so excited about that, be excited for those others and connect those threads.

Not to be the common thread connection thing, but, like, have that have those threads, like overlap and connect and raise each other up and walk together.

Yeah.

And sometimes people will say to me, okay, what about people who share a diametrically opposed political opinion to my own?

How do I interface and come to common ground with those people?

My, like, good question.

Let's figure that out before we literally destroy ourselves and the entire planet.

Let's figure that out, shall we?

Let's.

Let's really get to the root of it.

And, and you know, you mentioned religion before, Greg.

You know, it ties in there too, right?

He's going to come back around someday, and that by eating his body and drinking his blood, that it's going to lead to some sort of eternal connection for me, me with something greater than myself.

Right.

And.

And, and you believe that sitting quietly with your hands in your lap for 10 minutes every morning is.

Is the way that, you know, a better life?

How are we gonna.

How are we gonna come together?

What happens if I tell you that.

Yeah, every year around this time of year, my.

My family lights eight candles in a row because some oil lasted, you know, an eternity ago for a bunch of people sitting in the dark, like, where.

Where's their common ground there?

And I could easily get exasperated.

I could easily give up, or we gotta figure it out somehow.

And back to Becker.

Like, Becker was asking, like, what do we do?

And remember, he's writing.

And getting a sense.

And historically, we don't.

We don't think this way.

We just think, oh, there was a war.

We watched it on cnn, but we didn't.

People were getting a sense more and more and more that Vietnam was becoming more and more and more of a thing.

And he's writing at the time and realizing that people are just signing up for war and they're turning into cogs in this human machine, this meat grinder, and they're just wiping themselves off the face of the earth in the midst of that, how do we.

How do we center ourselves?

How do we get.

How do we not do that thing?

How do we not support that and instead support some grounded dialogue on a human level about what really is happening inside of each of us and collectively amongst all of us.

That's really the question.

And it's the harder work.

It's just the harder work.

And it's.

It's.

We don't often want to do the harder work.

I joke that I ate pasta today.

I literally did.

I didn't go to the gym.

You know what Al Brown did today?

He went to the gym.

He did twice.

Twice in the time we've been talking.

And he went earlier today, too.

The point is that.

Is that.

Sorry, Al, I don't know why I'm fixating on your brilliance tonight.

The point is, is that it's hard to make harder choices.

That sounds so routine.

And basic, but it really is, it's hard to make difficult choices.

Like, let's figure out what we have in common.

Let's figure out how we can move forward together.

Let's get off the couch and actually go to the gym.

It's actually kind of a perfect metaphor for the work that needs to be done psychologically.

And it's often slower work too.

It's that, that instant gratification, that dopamine hit of opening Instagram in the morning rather than sitting with yourself for 10 minutes.

You know, those are the.

We recognize that too when we're, we break those routines.

We get out of those moments, we get out of those, you know, sidesteps and we make excuses for ourselves, you know, but those are moments for growth too, right?

Like, oh, I recognize that, that now I just have to get back.

Yeah, we're curious creatures that way.

I mean, like, we can convince ourselves of anything and it makes perfect sense because we can all imagine eternity.

Right?

I mean, that's, that's the, that's the kind of opposition that, you know, I think inspired Becker along the way too, was the fact that we are finite temporary creatures which ironically each have names.

Like, that's like, that's unreal.

Like, why is that?

Like, I'm a finite creature and yet the universe, universe has, you know, in the world.

And my parents have given me the name Greg.

Like I'm Greg Bennick.

That means I'm an, I'm a unique creature amongst a vast sea of humanity, all of whom are going to die, all of whom are basically the same.

Why am I unique?

Why am I different?

And then this unique, not so unique creature has the capacity, the intellectual capacity, unfortunately for me, to be able to imagine a future that doesn't yet exist.

That doesn't mean Greg is smart, this Greg, me.

It means that we all have that capacity to imagine a future that doesn't yet exist.

Exist.

That's mind boggling.

That means I can sit here and think to myself, wow, maybe someday I'm going to own a 20 room house in Malibu.

Or I can think to myself, wow, someday I'm going to be dead in a ditch.

And those are each going to lead me down a different path.

And there's a million different ways to think about the future.

What does that do?

It puts us in an impossible position where I have to take agency over my own life and make decisions that lead to an outcome which is hopefully one that I want instead of one that is inevitable.

I'm dead in the ground.

Like, how does.

How does a human being deal with that?

And that's just me talking about me.

What about you?

What about the two of you?

What about all your listeners?

What about all of us?

Our nation, our world?

How are we ever expected to.

To.

To.

To come together, right?

To come together and actually work together?

Well, that's the question.

And I say that with a laugh.

That's.

That's the.

That's the damn question.

That's what we need to be figuring out rather than defaulting to.

Again, back to the joke.

I ate pasta today and giving up.

We have to be engaged.

We have to be engaging.

And, you know, that's what the book's about.

And I would.

I would say Becker now is, you know, not spinning in his grave, you know, as we created the little cult around him before, but rather going, yeah, Yep, okay.

Yep.

I relate.

That's cool.

And I hope listeners relate to, too.

Common Thread is co hosted by Greg Benoit and Rory Van Grohl with creative support from Rob Antonucci.

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