Ep 46_Hayden Hillier-Smith: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Kevin Hines:
My name is Kevin Hines. I jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge. I believe that I had to die, but I lived. Today, I travel the world with my lovely wife, Margaret, sharing stories of people who have triumphed over incredible adversity. Now, we help people be here tomorrow. Welcome to the HINESIGHTS podcast.
Kevin Hines:
Oh, what is cracking, everybody, what's going down? Good morning, good morning. All right, so check this out, we had an opportunity to meet some amazing folks, a lot of them were Logan Paul's team. One of them was Hayden Hillier-Smith. Logan Paul's vlog editor. And he told us some amazing stories, some filled with pain, others filled with beauty, hope, love, and light. And he even told us about the experiences they had in Japan, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And he shared with us some insight into the man, the myth, and the legend, and some insight into his own personal pain. Check out this interview, it speaks for itself, it's powerful, it's filled with hope.
Hayden Hillier-Smith:
I'm talking to you, yeah, right to you, Ok? My name is Hayden Hillier-Smith, Hillier-Smith will be there too long, but I use my second name. Watching my own mother die, seven years old, still had zero concept of death, and so when I watched her die, I didn't quite fully understood and understand what was happening. While growing up and finally realizing what had actually happened until when I was in my early teenage years. And so it was kind of the fact that the worst thing happened was me constantly reliving that moment, understanding what happened there day-by-day. She got depressed, she became unwell and stopped looking after herself, her diet became poor, she didn't exercise anymore, and she gained a lot of weight very fast, and she just, she got the flu, and that then progressed into more diseases where, I think it was pneumonia. And she just, she couldn't breathe, she couldn't survive without machines, and so they turned off the machines because her body wasn't strong enough, wasn't going to recover, and so they had to, had to let her go. I feel like I've kind of blocked it out in a way. I don't seem to remember that much because it's like as if a kind of put up a bit of a block on it. Like I said, my emotions are there and I feel those emotions. But the reason why is because I've moved on and I'm trying to keep constantly moving on. So it's become a tool of, I can put that away, I've come to terms with it and I've accepted it, and I don't want it to still affect me to what I'm trying to do today. It's an old saying, but if you looked at mum in a dictionary, you would see a picture of my mother. I started digitizing some old videotapes that we found, and I just went in without considering that I was going to hear my mum for the first time in 15 years and happened to be her saying my name. Hayden, can you come? Can you come to dinner, please? Everything that I had worked to from seven to today, 20, 23 years old, all of that, just waves of emotion of just all of those years of trauma and working through it and standing up to all again, just wave over me just from that experience and I was obsessed with remembering my mum and just seeing how much an amazing mum, she was caring for us, she wouldn't let us go, it was like we'd be running around the garden and she was just like, she just wanted to hug us, hold us, she wanted to love us, and we had a massive garden, so we tied her out of her chasing us around the garden constantly and me watching all of those videos for pretty much the first time in my life, I learned more about my mother now than I remember of her when I was young, because I seem to have blocked away a lot of my childhood. So when I was experiencing my mother's passing and it developed a lot of anger problems when I came to terms what death was, and from those anger problems I was privileged enough to get support and therapy to learn and understand what anger is, and I realized how dangerous anger is, and it's taught me to understand why people behave like that, why do they get angry? Why do they get passionate about something like that in such a negative way? And because of that, whenever someone is angry, I always look from their perspective in their shoes, and I think people need to do that more. Have a better understanding as to why someone is reacting that passionately in a negative way. And that's probably my biggest moral is: stop, reflect. Why are they angry? Why are they upset? And what can you do to be better for them? Since I experienced such emotional trauma at such a young age, I mean, the best way of putting it is there's a very bitter privilege of the fact I experienced such emotional trauma at a young age because it meant that I could learn what that is since I've experienced a lot of emotion, it's made me very much in touch with emotion, it's right, made me very much understanding what emotions are, and it means I can identify the best actions when emotions happen, and I wouldn't have any of those skills or abilities or understanding if it wasn't for my emotional trauma when I was young. So I would say that's the biggest change my emotional intelligence. It's bitter, but there is an odd privilege of the fact that I had such emotional trauma when I was young because it meant that I was able to have those experiences and I was able to have the right people tell me what these emotions are, and it's meant that as of today, I can clearly identify what emotions I'm having and have a good understanding of what actions I should do to control an emotion to make sure it doesn't get to an elevated point of losing control. I prefer to have my mum, but I'm happy that I've been able to have a good scale of emotional intelligence. When you say definition of a true friend, I do think about my friend Logan, because that was the biggest moment for me to really discover what a true friend is because I had to step up for him when he was in one of the weakest, most vulnerable time of his life. I was so close to walking away and I realized, no, I am his friend and he needs me. And so even on the other side of the world, I was literally looking in his eyes and saying, I'm here for you for as long as you need, and a true friend, is that loyalty and the passion that you give in your loyalty. So I told my boss at the time who I didn't get along with, and I didn't agree with the content that we were making, so I told him to go fuck himself. So because I didn't, morally, didn't agree with the content we were making, and so I made a point about it, so he fired me. Word went round, Logan heard about it and it was like, that's the guy I want, which is great because I tell Logan to go fuck himself every week, and like he gets, he's got good emotional intelligence, he can, he can take it and he's like, fair, yeah, you have every right to tell me to go fuck myself. I call it the diss track month where he made a song against his brother, which it got heated for them, but for me creatively to be involved in something that fast, that quick and to that quality that we wanted to achieve, stars aligned and just the energy that we had, we, on either side of the world and the energy that we had creatively was insane. And just what we were able to achieve and how much in our side of the internet exploded of what we did, blew everyone away and everyone was so impressed with it. And I think that was one of the greatest and best moments that ever happened to Logan, it was just, everything was perfect in creativity, and that's where I thrive, nothing else mattered, and that was perfect. The worst moment I did have with Logan was his time in Japan. From our high of success, we lost a lot of our own humanity when we came across a situation that we had no right to talk, to talk about, we had no right to tell the story, we had no right to even mention that experience and to see everything that we had built pretty much crumbled down to the ground and rightfully so, I would say that would be, it has been the most difficult time. The results of that experience was, for me personally, astronomical. A lot of my friends, well, people that I thought were my friends, cut me out, straight away, out, without a chance for me to talk publicly about, about it. And that was the next big stab in the back. But the most biggest stab at the back was how I betrayed myself, what a fuck that I think that was a good idea, it put some serious, serious problems in my relationship with someone who is like the most important girl in my life. She saw my reaction and realization, what I did, and the mental breakdown I had, and for her to witness it, no one should ever really witness someone's mental breakdown because in the end, it damages them more than it probably does to you. I thought I had ended my career, I had lost 90 percent of my friends, ruined my relationship, and I blamed a lot of it on Logan when I had every right to blame as well, it was the lowest point in my life because I looked to the future and it was bleak and dark and uncertain, and I was very worried that I didn't have the strength for that, to face that. The lowest moment during all of that was the fact that I had the uncensored footage of that man in the forest and I looked to what he did for inspiration, I was suicidal, and I was very close to taking my own life. It's the biggest word that made me not take my life was future. Why would I let this one moment take away the rest of my future when there's so much more I can still do? So I mean, face the mistake, challenge it and tell all of these feelings you will not best me today. So when I heard when, I heard Kevin Hines' story, it taught me, during my time of need something incredibly important, expressing your vulnerability. He was able to look at someone who had, in the public's perception, made fun of suicide, and he was able to gladly open up emotionally and express himself and really put into perspective the feelings they had. And that taught me so much because initially when everything kicked off, I was standoffish, I put up a wall and I wasn't let anyone pass that wall, and when I had, saw Kevin Hines' story and I saw the progress that you can make when you open up and you talk about your vulnerability and you open up that wall and show everyone the door to come in and to love you, that was the biggest thing Kevin Hines did for me.
Kevin Hines:
Margaret and I love sharing stories of people who have triumphed over incredible adversity. For more content and inspiration, go to KevinHinesStory.com or visit us on all social media at KevinHinesStory or on youtube.com/KevinHines.
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