29. Corey Drayton: "Cancer Was the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me"

Before he reached 40, Corey was told he had a 27% chance of surviving stage 4 prostate cancer. Up until this point, he had been pushing through grueling 15-hour days in the film industry, despite his body’s painful attempts to alert him that something was wrong. Corey’s cancer crisis finally forced him to face deeply ingrained habits of people-pleasing, overwork, and self-neglect that he attributes to factors dating back to childhood. 

Corey followed Winston Churchill’s timeless wisdom: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” He learned to get through three years of misery, 15 minutes at a time. Through the process, he transformed his “emotional source code,” learned to say no, prioritized his wellbeing for the first time in his life, and came home to his body. 

Corey also discovered a revolutionary new treatment called Stellate Ganglion Block (SGB), invented by Dr. Eugene Lipov, said to reset the nervous system after periods of "high allostatic (stress) load.” He felt that the SGB treatment helped him recover from the PTSD symptoms induced by his battle with cancer.

Now cancer-free, Corey is back in action as a writer and cinematographer. He re-entered the world with a newfound commitment to being authentic, and soon discovered that the behavior of “woke progressives” in his community felt anything but, sparking a new phase of his creative career in which he speaks openly and honestly about the hypocrisy he sees in so-called socially progressive communities, such as Portland, Oregon, where we both reside. 

This episode includes verbal details of medical suffering, and may not be suitable for all listeners.

Corey Drayton is a British-American fine artist, writer, producer and cinematographer, with 23 years in motion pictures across four continents, including work for Rolling Stone, WELT and The Times of London. He was notable crew on Academy Award Winner The Cove, The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg and the upcoming The Invisible Machine. Corey featured opposite Peter Boghossian in the independent docuseries The Woke Reformation. In it he leveled his fusion of Perecian observation and Gonzo-style immersive critique — learned from longtime friend Hunter S. Thompson — at the problem of wokeness in the film industry. He is a frequent guest on TNT Radio, a contributor to Alternate Current Radio and a regular in The Boiler Room.

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