Takin A Walk/Episode Fifteen in New Hampshire with Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, hi. I’m Tom Asacker. I’m with Buzz Knight and we’re in beautiful New Hampshire, taking a walk in the woods.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Takin’ a Walk, an excursion to converse, connect, and catch up at a cool location with some of the most interesting people you can find. Here’s Buzz Knight.

Buzz Knight:

Well, Tom, it’s so nice to officially meet you. I mean, we’ve spoken before and obviously I don’t think each of us are meeting a lot of people during all this thing we won’t name that’s happened for the last two years. So, it’s nice to actually meet you.

Tom Asacker:

Yes, it is. It’s strange wonderful just to be in the presence of another human being, isn’t it?

Buzz Knight:

It is. It is. Well, thanks for taking a walk. So, how do you use taking a walk for something to spur on your creativity or unleash you at a moment that you need to be unleashed? I mean, how do you use the act of taking a walk?

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. I’ve never really thought about it, Buzz, and probably like me, we grew up, at least I did as a child, all we did was walk. We just left the house and we walked and we walked to school and we walked to the playground and we walked in the woods and we… At least, I was told, that when you see those street lights come on, you better be home for dinner. But beyond that, we felt like we were just walking. And so, I spent my whole life reflecting and walking, and it’s just seems natural to me.

Buzz Knight:

Well, what’s so cool about it first of all, is going to a place here, Tower Hill Pond outside of Nashua, New Hampshire that I haven’t been. So, that’s one cool aspect of it. But the other fun part here, certainly for me in this, is either meeting someone in person I’ve never met before or reacquainting with someone and having a great conversation. So, I think it’s so cool to be able to take a walk and I’m grateful for it.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, I am too. Look, I always get new insights when I leave whatever comfortable world my head happens to be in. If it’s a at my desk, if it’s working on something, that attention is just usually laser focus. So, this is the way. Yeah, I don’t even know what it is. Maybe it’s this bird that I hear in this tree right now. It just will give me, stimulate some kind of new thought, new thinking, and it’s invaluable.

Tom Asacker:

I, more than anything, enjoy the company and the dance with other people.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah. Me as well. So, what I find interesting about you is, I don’t know how to put you in a box of any type, which I think as I was thinking about it, I said, “That is quite a goal you achieved,” because I think you live in the business world of transformation. You live in the personal transformation world you’re creating. So, how do you describe what the heck you do?

Tom Asacker:

It’s interesting, Buzz, because you pointed out in a paradoxical way how I do what I do when you said that… You mentioned the word goal. You said, “How did you achieve this goal?” And it’s because I don’t have a goal that I seem to be able to just shift and move in whatever direction something’s pulling me.

Tom Asacker:

I think the goal creates the box. So, if you have some goal to be something, to become someone, to achieve, to accumulate; you’re now in this box of, “How do I do that?” And it creates a focus. And a lot of your curiosity now is diminished because look, you got to compete against others. You have to really put your head down and focus.

Tom Asacker:

I’ve never looked at life like that. I will just do things, and if they don’t work for me at some point… And usually I mean if I don’t want to do it anymore, I’ll just figure out a way to stop and just shift. I’m still here. So, I guess it’s working so far.

Buzz Knight:

Well, so which shaped you this way though? Was it particular mentors at a younger age? Did you hit your head?

Tom Asacker:

No, listen that. You think that’s funny? I have a friend who believes, I told him that when I was in, I think it was third or fourth grade, that a kid kicked me off the monkey bar and I landed on my back of my head, and I got knocked unconscious and had to get stitches in my head. He said he thinks that that did it, that that silenced whatever that voice was that everybody else has telling them, “You can’t do that. You shouldn’t do that. Focus here.” He thinks that somehow knocked that thing out of me.

Tom Asacker:

But honestly, I think it’s because I grew up… I was born in Louisiana, and my maternal grandparents lived on a little farm. And I mean, a tiny little shack of a house, and they had, I don’t know, eight or nine children? So, I had a whole bunch of aunts and uncle and cousins down in Louisiana in this strange part of the world to me. And I was raised in a large immigrant family outside of Boston.

Tom Asacker:

And I would go back and forth between these places, and I would see all of these different people; dirt farmers, rich people, mechanics, school teachers, musicians. And I saw that there really wasn’t any particular path that I had to focus on and choose to get what I wanted, which was an exciting, happy, peaceful life. So, I just shifted. I just kept shifting, looking for the experiences that brought me alive, and I never looked back. I never thought about it. I never said…

Tom Asacker:

Now it has, in some cases, diminished my standing with people who live in particular boxes. So if I’m like a branding expert, and then all of a sudden I’m working on personal development books and seminars, it confuses them. Like, “Wait a minute, I thought you were the branding guy.” So, people like putting other people in boxes so that they can define them. It makes them comfortable. And that’s one of the downsides of jumping around to whatever turns you on.

Buzz Knight:

But you love it.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. It doesn’t bother me. Obviously it doesn’t bother me at all.

Buzz Knight:

Do you ever take it and have certain regrets about certain moves you made?

Tom Asacker:

Well, I think everyone looks at their life and they look for this thing and they say to themselves, “If I had only just put my head down and focused, I could have been a great…” So, that runs through my head. I could have been a great painter. I went to school to be a painter. That’s what I wanted to be, like Van Gogh but with both ears. I stopped. I still dabble.

Tom Asacker:

I was a practicing magician. And I thought to myself, “I could have been David Blaine. I could have been in… If I had just spent 30 years working on these tricks,” and then I thought about it and I said, “Well, I’ve got to be Van Gogh and David Blaine, and I got to do all of it.” So, the idea that I have to be someone compared to others, that left me a long time of go. So, I don’t ever think the fights out anymore. I don’t even ruminate on it. It just doesn’t seem to add value to think about life like that.

Buzz Knight:

So, what’s a typical day for you?

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. I wish I had typical days. Typical day… Well, since COVID hit…

Buzz Knight:

Oh, we weren’t going to mention that.

Tom Asacker:

Oh, shoot.

Buzz Knight:

We were going to call it “that thing.”

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, since that thing.

Buzz Knight:

Yeah, whatever that thing is.

Tom Asacker:

Since that thing hit, I have I’ve stopped going to the gym. So, I’ve got a little makeshift place in the basement. I’ll say to my wife, “Yeah, I’m going down to the basement.” And she says, “It’s the gym.” I said, “No, it’s the basement.” So, I go to the basement maybe three or four times a week and work out in the morning. And then I usually head into my office. It’s these phone calls with clients, writing. I’m working on a new program to try to help people escape their limiting stories. What direction you think we should go here?

Buzz Knight:

We’ll go to this way.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. I let other people’s schedules influence me. So, I’ll ask people, “What’s a good time for you?” And if they say, “Yeah, it’s good to meet at one,” I’ll do a meeting at one, and then I’ll schedule my writing, reading, research around all of those little schedules, because I don’t have a particular place I need to be.

Buzz Knight:

Do you allow enough time to just think and just give yourself a little freedom and ability to sky write?

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. I do a lot of reading. A lot, probably too much reading, and pretty much mostly real books. I don’t know what it is about reading on a device or online, I have a hard time doing it. I like to have a pencil and scribble in the book, in the margins and underline.

Buzz Knight:

Or the red line, right?

Tom Asacker:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

Some people I know redline, yeah.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, I do a lot of reading.

Buzz Knight:

What are you reading?

Tom Asacker:

Oh, God. Right now I’m reading a book on mindfulness, a new book on mindfulness. I can’t remember the name of it.

Tom Asacker:

I’ve asked for, I think, three or four books as Christmas gifts. There’s one called How to be an Animal. So, it sounded interesting to me.

Buzz Knight:

We could circle back this way.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. I said, “Let me figure out this book, How to be an Animal, because we’re animals. So, let see if I’m doing it right.” God, everything. Everything, from Laotse to brain science. I’m just fascinated by, I guess, what many people call the human condition, and I really see it more as human conditioning, and I’m trying to understand it. I really want to know why people are getting further and further lost and hypnotized in these stories that they create. Especially since the internet.

Tom Asacker:

I really believe that this is doing something to young people’s minds, where they’re all of a sudden the center of some really serious story and they think people are watching them all the time, and they’re always looking at themselves through the lens of an audience trying to perform. So, I’m intrigued by that, I’m fascinated by it, and I want to see if I can do something to try to help what I think is really a bad friend.

Buzz Knight:

Boy, I’m so glad that you brought that up. You were reading my mind, because I just heard another one of those studies out talking about the dangers of screen time and what it’s doing to the youth of tomorrow. And this is nothing brand new obviously, we’ve seen this happening. I think we could all follow the trend lines further, but it’s alarming.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, it is. It is. And I don’t think it’s fully understood the world of psychology, psychiatry, brain science. I don’t think they fully understand what is happening to people’s brains. I’m getting closer and closer to what I believe is happening, and a lot of it has to do with the fact that our minds have this unbelievable ability that animals don’t have to simulate the world. We can project the future, what something’s going to feel like if we do something in the future. We can look at the past and project that in our minds, like a movie to try to discover insights and meaning and feelings.

Tom Asacker:

But if we do that all the time… If while we are walking, we think we are simulating the world instead of experiencing the world, that’s when it becomes really dangerous. Really dangerous. I mean, I’ve had people tell me that they can’t really be in the present moment because their mind is thinking about how the present moment should arise, how it should look when they take a picture, things like that.

Tom Asacker:

And that’s alarming to me because I’ve never felt that. And I think it has to do with how we… At least how I grew up. So, I don’t know. I agree with you, it’s alarming.

Buzz Knight:

So, what are some of the things you’ve been creating over the last few years of this thing that’s been going on?

Tom Asacker:

The thing, yeah. Well, so when the thing dried up what I was primarily doing for a living, which was speaking. So, I was traveling all over the world, country and the world, giving keynote speeches at events. So, that obviously stopped for most of us to do that work.

Tom Asacker:

And I had an idea which I had been leaning on, but never really had done anything with for three or four years. So I said, this whole idea of podcasting and how powerful it is as a medium. It was about, I think three or four years ago, I was doing a podcast with Mark Ramsey.

Buzz Knight:

Right.

Tom Asacker:

And I talked to him and I said, “You know what’s interesting to me is you got a lot of people, employees of large companies that listen to these podcasts in their downtime. They’ll do it when they’re biking, when they’re washing dishes, at the gym, whatever. Why aren’t organizations creating their own valuable content as a podcast and bringing in guests that can give different perspectives, and bringing on executives that can give insights?” And we started looking around and our assumption, this was in the hypothesis that I think proved out, was that one, they hadn’t been introduced to it. But two, if they were introduced to it, what would happen is they would want that those podcasts to be secure.

Tom Asacker:

So, they wouldn’t want them going out to the world because they’re for their employees only. And at that time, about two or three years ago, there were not any secure podcasting platforms. But since podcasting has pretty much exploded and people are charging now for a podcast, they had to create secure platforms.

Tom Asacker:

So I said, “Okay, the secure platforms exist. Let me go to these corporations and see if I can work with them strategically to create these internal core corporate podcasts.” And so, that’s what I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.

Tom Asacker:

I got one major client and I’ve got a potentially another one coming on, and it’s like I said…

Speaker 4:

Hello.

Buzz Knight:

Hello.

Tom Asacker:

Hi.

Speaker 4:

Hi.

Buzz Knight:

Enjoy your walk.

Speaker 4:

You too.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah. So, that’s what I’ve been working on. And the other thing I’ve been working on, and this is… I think I’m into year five of working on this is, is I’m working on getting a movie made. And I can’t wait to tell this story once it happens, because this is the craziest thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. And I mean, I’ve done some interesting, complicated things like developing medical devices and bringing those to market. But this is something else. So, I’m hoping that we get this thing going in 2022, but we’ll see.

Tom Asacker:

Again, it’s one of those things. I don’t really pin my hopes on anything. I just keep doing it and see what happens.

Buzz Knight:

And the book too, which you gave me before we started our walk as well. Is that during this period, or was that before this period?

Tom Asacker:

No. I wrote that during this period of this thing, and primarily was because of what you said about how scary it is; what the internet, social media, just all of it is doing to people’s brains.

Tom Asacker:

So, I wrote this book with a title that most people won’t be turned on by because they don’t want it, and it’s called Your Brain on Story: The Destructive Seduction of the Hero’s Journey. And the book is basically a conversation with me and a friend. It’s hypothetical, but it’s all true. Everything in there people have said to me… to try to unwind why people are walking around thinking that they’re the central character in some kind of movie all about them. And hopefully at the end, if people read it, it will liberate them to let that illusion go, and to you go out and experience life with all this worry and regret and everything else that’s driving people nuts. So, that’s what that was all about.

Tom Asacker:

I don’t think I’m taking enough walks, because look at me, I’m huffing and puffing here.

Buzz Knight:

It’s a beautiful day.

Tom Asacker:

It is gorgeous.

Buzz Knight:

Beautiful New England day. So what are you most hopeful, in closing, that 2022 will bring, besides obviously project related work that you talked about bringing it to market? What do you hope for 2022?

Tom Asacker:

Look, I’m not an optimist at all, and I’m really not big on hope, but I am a firm believer in possibility. I have seen people create things. I have seen groups come together when others would say, “That’s impossible. That can’t be done.” So, I’m a big believer that this generation that we are turning over the reigns to are really going to create something amazing, an amazing world.

Tom Asacker:

And what we’re going through right now is a tension. We’re going through the tension of the old and the new. It happens every time. I don’t care if it’s an organization, a family, a government, a society; every time you transition from the old to the new, you go through this struggle.

Tom Asacker:

So, I think it’s going to be a really booming time and place over the next five or 10 years, and I think it’s going to make us all proud. I’m looking forward to just this thing going away if we’re good. And if it doesn’t go away for good, which it may never go away for good, big deal. It’ll just be like the seasonal flu when we’ll get a shot of something. So, off we go. Onward and upward and…

Buzz Knight:

Yes, optimism.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah.

Buzz Knight:

A conversation with somebody that’s optimistic. Oh, my God. Who the heck are you, Tom Asacker?

Tom Asacker:

Possibility, possibility. Anybody that tells me something can’t be done, I like to disprove that. That’s what gets my jollies, is doing that. And I believe that it’s all right in our fingertips. We can do all of that, we can. But we have to come together, stop all the crazy, ridiculous things that we’re doing and just get focused. Focus with our hearts, use our God given gifts, our minds, our intellect, and make these things happen that we want to see in life.

Buzz Knight:

Tom, thanks for taking a walk. This has been great.

Tom Asacker:

Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I think I got to have to go take a nap now.

Buzz Knight:

Thank you.

Tom Asacker:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Takin’ A Walk with Buzz Knight is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Buzz Knight is an established media executive with a long history of content creation and multi-platform distribution.

After a successful career as a Radio Executive, he formed Buzz Knight Media which focuses on strategic guidance and the development of new original content.