The Punk, the Parsley & the Prophet

all right thank you thank you all right good is it morning good morning everyone I've just returned from a trip to Europe and so my body is here but I feel like I'm still in Italy as far as my sleep schedule goes so great to be here and yes I mentioned yesterday I am sometimes referred to as having been a punk rocker but I'm gonna explain to you today why I am still a punk rocker and just to sort of emphasize that I purposefully left my shirt untucked right this is a very punk-rock move I am I am jettisoning social norms today and I'm standing up in front of you with a shirt untucked now I have been given quite a fascinating title and I'm looking forward to it title today is the punk the parsley and the Prophet right now remember the first time that Julian sent me this title and I was like man that's a really audacious title let's see what I can do with that the punk the parsley and the Prophet well the punk is the easiest one here because that is me right so I'm going to talk to you today about what it means that I was a punk rocker and what it means to some degree that I am still a punk rocker I want to start by going back to sort of the beginning of my life and this is a picture of my family right I'm there in the tan suit that's my younger brother Robert in the blue suit but as you look at this picture you're going to notice probably that there is something missing what's missing from this picture yeah there's not a father figure there is there what you see is my mom and me and my brother and then really what was my father figure and that was my granddad Charles Oakley Atkins and then my grandmother Rita two of the best human beings I ever had the privilege to know and some people ask me if I feel a lot of pain and have this sort of fatherless wound and the answer is in a way yes in a way known for many of us that grow up in an age which in which absentee father ISM our absenteeism with fathers is common yes it certainly is a major problem a societal problem but in my particular case I also had a really supportive set of grandparents who raised me and sort of occupied that fatherly role right and so for me this just feels normal right my wife was just over there somewhere she has two brothers and two sisters just as I have but in her case her two brothers and two sisters including her so all five of the family members come from the same parents and they all look exactly the same and to me that's the weirdest thing I'm like look at your family you all have the same mom and dad that's so weird right right it's not a very modern family it's more of a traditional family and my family is very modern we have five of us and we've got different moms and different dads and we're all just sort of stuck together but that feels normal for me right that's my normal well not a few years after my mom was married not just the first time but also a second time the second time my mom married the best thing that came out of that marriage was my younger brother who you just saw in the picture a moment ago so already there's just two boys one mom two dads right and then my mom met this man here a man by the name of Richard Lane asterik and Richard Lane asterik that's the last name that I bear today some women of course have numerous last names if they're married they have their if they're you know born they have their maiden name and then they marry and they get their married name and like my mom if you're married several times and you have several last names most men don't have this privilege they don't get the luxury of having numerous last names I've had three last names I was born David Cross I was adopted David Dorman II and then I was adopted again as David asuric right so I've had three last names and this man here Richard asterik became my dad my adoptive father by my own choice and by my younger brother's own choice when we were in our just about our teen years about 11 12 years old and he was the first real dad that I ever had my first dad left and I was three weeks old the second dad that came on the scene was around for about eight years but even though I bought his last name David Dorman II he wasn't my dad in any significant sense and when he left both my brother and I whose last name at that point was Dorman II we were so impressed with this guy frankly we were not in the beginning we were sort of turned off by this guy he was the dad on the scene and we had a lot of things against him but he was just such a kind wonderful man he just treated us like we were his own children and I remember one day I walked down the hallway to go to my brother's room this is after Richard had been in our lives for about a year and a half and I was going down the hallway to tell my younger brother that I had made the decision to be adopted and to take on Richards last name and no longer call him Richard but to start calling him dad and when I opened up the door to talk to Robert about this he said hey I've been thinking about being adopted and I think I want to take on the last name a Schwerin and we both made the choice at the same time it was really quite remarkable and so I got to I like to say that I chose my dad right I chose that Richard would be my dad and it's a real honor to bear his name he has treated my they've been married now for since that time so I was about 12 years old and 45 minutes for 33 years they've been married and he is my dad he's my father he's an amazing father my younger brother these two then adopted a younger sister younger sister for us and a daughter for them so that's what I mean when I say our family's complicated super complicated he also brought two of his own into the marriage and they didn't even have the same parents so if I could write a novel on this right but to me it's just the most normal thing in the world well one of the things that really endeared me to this man Richard asterik who spent more than 30 years in the American Air Force he was truly an officer and a gentleman and somebody who's still alive today and who I just look up to us again one of the best human beings I ever had the privilege to know and one of the things that he did really smart really wise in order to endear himself to this new family that he'd you know come into he married my mom the story that he tells my mom confirms the story is that when she walked into a little place there in Cheyenne Wyoming called the hitching post my father to be Richard turned to his friend for the first time he's seeing my mom and he says I will marry that woman and six weeks later they were married now following in the footsteps of my dad when I met my wife Violeta I asked her to marry me six weeks later it's a true story and they've been happily married for over 30 years at Violetta and I have been happily married for 18 years really a great sir I like to say it this way when you know you know right and one of the things that Richard did really endear himself to me and to my younger brother Robert is he bought us skateboards and my mother was not at all pleased because she could see broken arms broken limbs she was a nurse and a single mom just an absolute hero of a human being and so when he bought us skateboards she was like what are you doing my children are gonna be covered in scars and wounds and she was right we did end up being covered in scabs and lots of broken bones but from about the age of 11 to 12 years old I became super passionate about two things in life number one was skateboarding and the second thing that goes along with skateboarding was punk rock music right really loud really aggressive really fast music at the age of about 12 I started skateboarding at the age of 18 I moved to Southern California to try my hand as a professional skateboarder and just throw myself into this burgeoning new sport extreme sport is some called it skateboarding here's a couple pictures of me when I was young and in addition to the sort of skateboarding lifestyle there was also the punk rock lifestyle and punk rock music was very aggressive it was very fast-paced and I got involved in punk rock bands and punk rock music at a young age Here I am singing in one of the bands that I was in called via and I think I'm probably 21 years old in this picture super passionate about two things in life punk rock music and skateboarding here's another band that I was in that's me in the upper left hand corner these are my band mates here playing at a large show in Detroit Michigan and you might be sitting there thinking all that music bad music bad influence sex drugs and rock and roll but that was not the case in the music that we played that we listen to I'm not suggesting that any of you here would like the music particularly but the message of the music was actually really really positive in fact it was because of bands like this band called minor threat and the gentleman that's sitting there on the front step is a fella by the name of Ian MacKaye he was the lead singer and the the frontman of the band Minor Threat you can see there on the album cover probably one of their best-known albums out of step right you have all of these sheets that are going in one direction and then there's this chief it's out of step well what Ian MacKaye and minor threat meant when they said out of step is they were out of step with the way the world was going and in one particular way something that Ian MacKaye sort of founded and made popular with something called straight edge I wonder by a raising of hands here does anybody know what that means when you talk about being a straight edged punk rocker not a single okay maybe my wife knows okay great one hand okay straight edge was the song that Ian MacKaye wrote that Minor Threat performed it basically said I don't smoke and I don't drink it was the idea that you wanted to take care of your body and he wanted to live in a healthy and responsible way right and this was a message that became really a part of my ethos a part of what made David asterik tick at about the age of 17 well the launching of this straight-edged movement launched a whole bunch of other bands bands like youth of today and it was young a bunch of young people super aggressive in terms of the music but really positive in terms of the message right staying away from drugs trying to live a healthy life a responsible life staying away from alcohol and cigarettes and trying to be a positive influence in fact one of the sort of languages that one of the sayings that we use the language that we used in the day was PPP positive peer pressure right if using our peer pressure on our friends to turn away from drugs to turn away from cigarettes to turn away from alcohol and what we would do as you can see on the t-shirt here on the right is we would put X's on our hands right some of my friends took this so seriously they even got the X's tattooed on their hands right so this was really part of the punk rock ethos lots of tattoos lots of fast aggressive music but really helpful socially conscious and positive living well a really remarkable thing happened this guy here that's in the picture on the left is a fella by the name of Ray capo if you look carefully you can see he's got a giant X on his right hand and a remarkable thing happened with ray capo who ate in my house who I spent time with who's somebody that was really a punk rock icon in the 80s and the 90s and the hardcore punk rock scene he converted to religion and became a Hari Krishna by a raising of hands how many people know what a Hari Krishna is okay there's sort of like Hindus and we've got quite a large Krishna community where I live near where I live in more woolum bah and their vegetarian they're also really into healthful living and ray capo transition out of that band youth of today and he started a band called shelter these are two of the album's that they release and I want you to notice the language that's used on these albums the one on the right here says a quest for certainty the one on the Left says in defense of reality what had happened for ray capo and an increasing number of straightedge punk rockers is that we were saying yes we want to live positively we want to have a positive impact on the world but why and this began to turn the minds of many of them slowly to religion and the religion that was sort of popular at the time was the religion of Hari Krishna Hari Krishna's sort of a version of Hinduism and built around a book called the bhagavad-gita as it is and really advocated vegetarianism animal rights and healthful living well this van shelter came to my town when I was about 18 years old and cooked food for everybody vegetarian food I was not a vegetarian at the time and sort of advocated you know thinking about something other than just yourself what about the animals what about what about the planet what and they were sort of broaden my mind away from just the straightedge scene and the skateboarding scene to sort of taking a wider bigger view on the nature of reality and the nature of factory farming and animals and all of that thing which did not go over very well with my grandfather that I showed you in the first picture my grandfather was a rancher and he he just could never get his mind around the idea I mean to the day I died he just even though I was certainly his favorite grandson he would tell you that he just could not get his mind around the idea that I wasn't eating meat he's like listen man if you have you if it wasn't for me you wouldn't have food to eat you and he was he just could not get his mind around it he loved the fact that I wasn't smoking wasn't drinking wasn't doing drugs but at every opportunity he would put bacon or beef or something in front of me and I say you know granddad I'm not gonna eat that was it just was this like source of really kind of funny and humorous tension in our family well just at about this time at the age of 19 I became exposed to this man and I'd be really surprised if anybody in here knew who he was raising of hands anybody know who this guy is okay only my son knows well his name is John Robbins and he is the son of one of the founding of one of the founders of baskin-robbins ice cream how many people know what baskin-robbins ice cream is okay every hand goes up okay now here's the thing about Baskin Robbins ice cream it's the number one it's the largest specialty ice cream store in the world right it's worth millions and millions of dollars franchises all over the world all over the United States and John Robbins was the heir apparent to the Baskin Robbins Empire he's the son he's going to take on Baskin Robbins all of this milk and all of this cream and all of these sweeteners and all of this sugar and to everyone's astonishment certainly his father's he turned his back on it and he began to say is this really healthy is it healthy to eat these high sugar low high fat low fiber diet and he turned his back on it and he wrote a book called diet for a new America this book was like the Bible for David a Shrek for about the age of sort of 1819 I read this book again and again just digested it diet for a new America how your food choices affect your health your happiness and the future of life on Earth now what you what you can begin to see is a number of things are coalescing in my young sort of teenage early xx mind right I'm a straight edge person that means I don't smoke I don't drink I don't do drugs I'm staying away from those things I'm trying to live positively I'm trying to live in a socially conscious way and now I'm becoming increasingly interested in animal welfare and vegetarianism healthful living in terms of what I put in my body and also environmental responsibility John Robbins would write things like this your life does matter right he would say this and this was speaking into my mind I was not a religious person by any means right not by any means I was sort of tossed to and fro as I mentioned in my family situation at a young age and religion was never a major part of my life for my family's life so here what's happening is is that religious ideas are coming in in a fairly circuitous way and it was through for me the writings of John Robbins and music from bands like shelter it says your life does matter it always matters whether you reach out in friendship or lash out in anger it always matters whether you live with compassion and awareness or whether you succumb to distractions and trivia it always matters how you treat other people how you treat animals how you treat yourself it always matters what you do it always matters what you say and it always matters what you eat and so if you would summarize David asterix punk rock values they would look like this at the age of about 18 19 years old I was socially conscious I wanted to build my life around loving others I was really passionate about issues like non-violence equality and positivity I was a straightedge a witch as I've mentioned was no drugs no cigarettes no alcohol I wanted to live a healthy lifestyle I was interested in animal welfare and really passionate about being aware that factory farming was something that was increasingly environmentally unsustainable which is the next one their environmental responsibility and I was also learning to question authority to question tradition and to question social norms right so this is my the punk rock ethos that sort of was creating the person that david asscherick is well in my little town there in right in the middle of the United States of America called Rapid City South Dakota a vegetarian restaurant opened up called unimaginative Lee enough veggies right veggies and veggies was owned by these really weird people called seventh-day adventists and the thing that I remember most about them is that they dressed like the Amish number one and number two they called everybody brother or sister and so shortly after they learned my name and maybe on the second or third visit I would come in oh it's brother David and they had this kind of wholesome you know a little house on the prairie feel about it and it was I thought they were the weirdest people on the earth now I was a straightedge punk rocker with tattoos and earrings and purple hair blue hair yellow hair no hair dreadlocked hair I mean I I thought they were weird what would they have thought about me so here I am in my punk-rock stage I'm there on the left this is with the drummer and my band Dan Lockridge and you can see I'm actually standing in the restaurant veggies and I have a shirt on that says straightedge can't beat the feeling I was really passionate about straightedge but I was becoming increasingly interested in these weird seventh-day Adventist people these Christian people and the thing that probably no not not probably certainly sort of endear me to them is that they were like me they were straightedge they were vegetarian and they wanted to live their lives in a really socially conscious and positive way and so when I would go in I would start to ask questions and say well what about this and why do you do this and what do you think about this and we started having really cool dialogues and conversations and interactions and then one day the owner of the restaurant this woman here on your left my right name Mary burnt is her last name which isn't the best name for somebody that's opening a restaurant she is a phenomenal cook the second best cook in the world second to my wife Mary Burns and she said well I how about this how about if we offer you a job and so I started working in this restaurant and slowly but surely her principles and her values and especially her commitment to the Bible and to God and to Jesus began to seep into me I had already been somewhat inclined toward religious ideas when I'd been exposed to those Hari Krishna punk rockers about a year before the Hari Krishna thing I tried it out for about two or three months but it just didn't stick with me it just I couldn't make heads or tails out of it I read the holy book there the bhagavad-gita but it just it wasn't resonating with me and a really cool thing happened at about this time how many of you know who Woody Harrelson is Woody Harrelson famous Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson was shooting a film in in my town and he came into our vegetarian restaurant cuz he too is a vegan vegetarian so I sat down had a conversation with Woody Harrelson about straightedge about vegetarianism about marijuana in fact I wasn't a marijuana user but he was he was really passionate about it in fact and I was reading this book called the great controversy it's this book right here I was just beginning to read this book because Mary had given me this book and said look you've got a lot of questions about God about life about religion just read this book and see what you think about it well I was I don't know maybe halfway or a third of the way through the book and so I was like man I'm reading this book let me give you this book that's really powerful to me and I had the privilege of giving woody harrelson a great controversy giving him my testimony and saying I think you'd really enjoy this book based on this conversation that we're having well the straight edge punk rock ethic taught me a lot about the what but not enough about the why and it was this book the great conversate started to fill in the blanks not just once what we should we do and how should we live but the larger question that people like Ian MacKaye and Rhea capo and John Robbins were asking why why live in this way why behave in these socially responsible positive healthful environmentally sensitive ways and so I started reading the book the great controversy and the book the great controversy is an amazing book because basically it's just the history of the Christian Church the very stuff that Justin Lahman was just talking to you about a moment ago is the very stuff that's in this book and especially about the first three or four hundred pages it's just a retracing of the Protestant Reformation and as I began to learn about this book that was so valued by these religious people people like John Huss and Martin Luther and John Calvin and John Wesley and others and I began to learn about the many thousands and millions of martyrs that were dying because they were passionate about this book it dawned on me well wait a minute maybe there's something in that book worth reading and so this book the great controversy drove me to this next book I'm sure all of you have heard of called the Bible and I started reading the Bible and I became particularly interested in as I discussed yesterday some of the biblical prophecies right yesterday we talked about the third one there are dozens of Messianic prophecies what we call here the christmas prophecies and then down at the bottom here the great controversy by ellen white began to unpack really powerfully some of these biblical prophecies of daniel and revelation now i want to give you eight reasons today why you should take seriously not just the the the great controversy book but the book that the great controversy points to and that's the bible reason number one is that the story of jesus is utterly compelling that was a story that resonated with me I couldn't get my mind wrapped around the Hari Krishna story but the story of Jesus immediately appealed to me reason number two the story is experientially persuasive even though I had a real desire to live this healthful positive life I still failed in many regards I would sing about this in my punk rock bands and I had guilt and shame and I needed to get rid of that guilt in shame I I felt that I in some significant sense needed forgiveness and I found that the forgiveness that Jesus offered was exactly what I was looking for number three Jesus is the most influential person in human history for good reason as I discussed yesterday this is what I call the uninvent ability of Jesus no one could have invented that story reason number four the historical manuscripts of the Bible are reliable Lyell Southwell talk to us about that yesterday the prophecies of the Bible are amazing and they are accurate and I wish I had time to talk to you more about that reason number six these prophecies point not just to the end of the world in some you know cataclysmic sense but they point to Jesus Christ as the Messiah number seven the Bible's prophecies bring hope and confidence and number eight it all just made sense the idea of God's sending advance notice of what's going to happen make sense and shows God's fatherly care and so on June 6 1996 I made the decision to become a follower of Jesus not just to me but there was a whole group of us that from our punk-rock community there's Justin white ginger white david asscherick Violeta Ash McDaniel Mason Nathan Renard Becky Renner a whole group of us former punk rockers became followers of Jesus four out of four people in that picture were former punk rockers and four out of four people on that picture went on to become Christian pastors it's really quite an amazing story and if we weren't required to dress like that but we just did anyway and so I became really passionate about telling the message to others and my good friend Nathan Renner who was the first person I ever gave Bible studies to and he became a follower of Jesus today he's one of my best friends in the world and it travels all around the world just like I do in fact this became the subject of a book that was written by our good friend Jennifer Schwarz called twice upon a time the David Astrakhan Nathan Renner story that highlights the tremendous similarities between Nathan's story and David's story I want to close with this slide a moment ago I showed you my punk rock values let me show you now what my biblical values are social consciousness and love for others equality non-violence and positivity a straightedge and healthful lifestyle a passionate concern for animal welfare a passionate concern for environmental responsibility and a strong desire to question an authority tradition and norms did you notice that the values are exactly the same that's what I mean when I say I didn't used to be a punk rocker I'm still a punk rocker because now with Jesus I not only have the what I have the why of life and love I want to leave you with the very same slide that I left you with in the first talk that I gave if the son sets you free jesus said you will be free indeed so that's the story of the punk and the parsley and the Prophet all right do you know what a punk-rocker is now yeah little bit I've better idea yeah thank you for enlightening me we have a question for you David and that is what is the secret to the perfect tre flip and do you make your own slides because they are excellent I did okay so the first question is what's the secret to the perfect tre flip a tre flip otherwise known as a 360 flip is a skateboard maneuver and the so let me just give you a quick illustration here well I wish we had a skateboard we don't but a 360 flip oh oh my word what is it security bring it up bring it up what's with her feed you did you plant that no I did not plan that okay yeah so now let me just oh yeah we're fine okay so I'll just explain a couple things here this is this is not my skateboard by the way so typically you would have your own skateboarding to be able to you sort of know it but so in skateboarding the the most basic maneuver in skateboarding is what's called an ollie does anybody know what it all he is and all he is where you think I'm not attached to the board right the board is separate from me but it is covered on the top with grip tape and the most basic maneuver is to do an ollie which is you jump the board up and you do that by snapping the tail which causes the the board to come up you're right you have basic physics as you put motion down the equal and opposite motion is gonna bring the board up right so there's a bit of a trick here I'll see if I can do a quick ollie for you it's just a simple move right that's how you just jump your skateboard so once you've learned an ollie then skateboarder strike to start to say well wait what else can I do and you start to do 180 Ollie's 360 Ollie's frontside 180s backside 180s and then you start to do what are called shovels now a shove it is just what it sounds like it's where you take the board and you're gonna shove it around so that it's going the opposite way of where you started right so a shove it would look something like that right so that's a shovel that's what's called a backside 180 shove it so that's when you shove the board backside and 180 you can also do frontside 180 shove it's frontside 360 shove its backside 360 shuvit but the specific question that the questioner is asking is what's called a 360 kickflip or a tre flip now a tre flip is a not an easy trick by any means it's actually quite a fun trick and what happens with the tre flip is the board turns 360 on this axis but it also flips on this axis okay so we hey we have not heard this with workplace health and safety so please don't worry don't worry I probably what let me just say the story so so the question is how do you do the perfect tre flip and the mistake that a lot of people make and I know this is like everybody's dying to know that I know that many of you have been working on your truth many of you been working on your tre flip so let me just tell you how you do it okay the mistake that people make and I'm a goofy footer okay so that means that I put my right foot forward if I stood with my left foot forward I'd be called a regular footer right so I'm a goofy foot so if your regular foot just imagine that would be the other way so in in a tre flip the mistake that a lot of people make is they try to put their right foot too far back and too far to the side their front foot I should say and they think that the trick to doing a tre flip is in the front foot it's not it's actually in the back foot this I can't believe I'm giving this this is so fun I can't either okay so the trick is you want to take your back foot and hang it well over the edge of the tail right in a typical ollie you have your foot right middle of the tail back here but you want to hang that toe way over here and then I'll just sort of show you the motion it's actually easy to show it to you without the skateboard instead of putting your right foot forward like this that's actually not the way that's what you think when you see a tre flip it's actually taking the back foot and really kicking the board like that right the back foot has to really flick the board back and I'd be tempted to show it to you on this board but I can just tell right now that the trucks are too loose I don't ride my board quite like this so that is the trick it's in the back foot you hang the toe over and you really flick the back foot out the front foot will take care of itself hey let's give him a hand thank you David and that was amazing I don't know what it is about these New South Wales pastures the coolness factor is unbelievable you got David you got wrong you got Red Dog guys are amazing anyway David is coming back in a few minutes a little later this afternoon so yeah I'll be back this afternoon thanks guys thank him again [Applause] you

Channel: Prophetica

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Id: ugsTO6eegRA

Length: 30min 37sec (1837 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017