Latest / Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann / Psychology Series 7: Tim Wienecke / Masculinity, Anxiety, US AirForce

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Psychology Series 7: Tim Wienecke / Masculinity, Anxiety, US AirForce · Come Together with Ephraim Herschmann

• 0:01
  Welcome to another episode of Come Together
• 0:15
  and we are live with Tim Winnick.
• 0:18
  Winnick, Winnicky. Winnicky. close.
• 0:21
  OK, well, it wasn't too easy I guess, but thank you so much for
• 0:24
  making the time. I'm so happy to have you here.
• 0:26
  Welcome. Thank you.
• 0:27
  Thank you, man. Good to see you again.
• 0:29
  Of course, good to see you too. I, I, we had that initial phone
• 0:31
  call other day and I got really excited because I was like, you
• 0:34
  know what, this sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun.
• 0:37
  One of the things that immediately jumped out, we're
• 0:40
  going to kind of go through, I guess, a little bit of life
• 0:42
  story and a little bit of, you know, your thoughts and, and
• 0:45
  your, your expertise specifically in the, I guess,
• 0:48
  therapy and psychology areas. But one thing that jumped out
• 0:54
  immediately was your emphasis in your profiles and online
• 0:58
  presence on masculinity, because I feel like masculinity has
• 1:01
  become a little bit of a dangerous word to be just
• 1:04
  throwing around and to really, you know, particularly identify
• 1:07
  yourself with, you know, and so it either.
• 1:11
  And so it must be extremely intentional, I'm sure.
• 1:14
  And so I kind of would love to start by just diving into what
• 1:18
  how you got started, you know, fully embracing that kind of
• 1:20
  term and what it means to you and what it means for, you know,
• 1:24
  for men around the country and around the world today.
• 1:28
  So nothing broad or big, not much, right?
• 1:32
  I let you. I let you run with that however
• 1:34
  you want to. That's great man.
• 1:37
  So I my background was I worked on interpersonal violence and
• 1:40
  sexual assault prevention for about 6 years before I got into
• 1:44
  doing my clinical work. And so that put me on the front
• 1:48
  end of me too. Right when me Too started, I was
• 1:50
  already working in survivor services and the like and it was
• 1:53
  really excited when me too kicked off.
• 1:55
  A lot of guys doing a lot of bad things.
• 1:57
  The numbers tend to be misleading when they when we
• 1:59
  think of men, right? So we know that one in three
• 2:01
  women survive some kind of sexual misconduct, one in four
• 2:04
  men survive some kind of sexual misconduct.
• 2:08
  And we know that men are primarily the perpetrators.
• 2:10
  There are female perpetrators. That's certainly a story and we
• 2:13
  need to be aware of that. And the vast majority of the
• 2:16
  time when someone's hurting somebody in that way, it's a
• 2:17
  man. And so as me too progressed, it
• 2:22
  started to kind of weigh on me a little bit in how we were
• 2:25
  framing things. And yeah, if somebody sexual
• 2:29
  assaults somebody, if somebody abuses somebody, we absolutely
• 2:31
  need to address that. We absolutely need to do things
• 2:33
  about that. There needs to be better
• 2:34
  accountability. And these things need to stop
• 2:36
  happening to women and men across the board.
• 2:39
  But the numbers are really misleading.
• 2:40
  That one in three and one in four number almost makes you
• 2:43
  feel like one in three of the guys you meet are perpetrated.
• 2:48
  And that's not true. It takes about 10 people coming
• 2:52
  forward for one perpetrator to have any consequence for what
• 2:55
  they do because it's an incredibly difficult and
• 2:59
  unaligned crime to the way our justice system works.
• 3:02
  We have the beauty of innocence and innocent until proven
• 3:05
  guilty, which leaves us in this place where all the things that
• 3:09
  you want to do after something like that happens, gets rid of
• 3:11
  evidence, makes it hard to prosecute.
• 3:15
  And so as me too progress as we started really seeing people get
• 3:17
  treated and ostracized like they were an assaulter, like somebody
• 3:22
  who'd done these horrible things.
• 3:24
  And there needs to be a range of consequence, right?
• 3:28
  Like a 17 year old boy who's acting kind of creepy because
• 3:31
  he's first noticing somebody for the first time his life, he
• 3:34
  needs some guidance. He needs some correction, right.
• 3:37
  But maybe don't treat him like somebody who grabbed a girl on a
• 3:40
  bus. Yeah, right.
• 3:42
  Yeah, yeah. And So what I noticed is the
• 3:46
  guys that were talking about this stuff before that we're
• 3:49
  getting any kind of traction in the public, I tended to be men's
• 3:51
  rights guys. They were guys that were blaming
• 3:53
  women for the problems that were saying that the ways that men
• 3:56
  needs to be men are ways that tend to hurt people or tend to
• 4:00
  make people smaller. And we've just started in the
• 4:02
  last few years seen people move away from that, where now we're
• 4:06
  talking about, yes, there's a lot of problems in the world.
• 4:09
  Yes, we have a problem with sexual assault and violence and
• 4:12
  men are struggling as well. And we need to figure out how to
• 4:14
  integrate these struggles into a more cohesive whole so that we
• 4:18
  all can get better. It's not a matter of
• 4:19
  competition. It's not a matter of women need
• 4:22
  this and men needs this, it's that if we want these things as
• 4:25
  a society, these are the things we need to be doing and that's
• 4:28
  been really exciting the last few years.
• 4:31
  Right. I guess the, I guess what I
• 4:34
  think the issue that maybe a lot of people felt is that the
• 4:37
  association that people felt that they had, you know, with
• 4:40
  manlyhood or masculinity equals domination in some kind of form
• 4:44
  or the other. And like the more power, the
• 4:47
  more dominating you are. It's an expression of, of how
• 4:49
  great quote UN quote great you are and that and you know, and
• 4:55
  you know, I could understand, I can't even understand how people
• 4:58
  get from point A to point B. If someone's going to be a
• 5:00
  caretaker, if someone's going to be a protector, it's a very,
• 5:03
  very slippery slope to go from the protector to the dominator.
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  I feel like, especially if you're not, even if you're not
• 5:08
  particularly self aware. And you know, the other curse, I
• 5:12
  guess that until the last 1520 years, if not more, has been
• 5:17
  that we're not usually very self-conscious of our actions,
• 5:19
  you know, and we don't tend to delve into our behavior and, and
• 5:24
  consider it and then consider the roots of it.
• 5:25
  So I, I can imagine that that's probably the premise of where a
• 5:30
  lot of the where some of the issues at least start popping
• 5:32
  up. Yeah, I think so.
• 5:34
  The the book I'm working on, I'm trying to figure out how to talk
• 5:38
  about these things from a generational perspective.
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  But the, I think the main way that it all started to go kind
• 5:44
  of badly is when we moved men away from the dad role into the
• 5:49
  provider role and put women out of a provider role entirely into
• 5:55
  a caretaking role where we kind of siloed by gender the
• 5:58
  different ways that we're supposed to be in the world.
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  And that's had some really unfortunate consequences because
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  we now know and all the data consistently backs up, you need
• 6:08
  kind of two parents or two people doing two different
• 6:11
  things, right? And one parent can do it all.
• 6:13
  Like this is not a dig at single parents, right?
• 6:15
  It's just harder. But the feminine is the
• 6:18
  nurturing aspect, right? Like, I love you, be safe.
• 6:21
  You're always safe here. And then the masculine is, hey,
• 6:25
  the world can be dangerous. Show me how high you can climb.
• 6:27
  Show me how you can be safe in the world.
• 6:28
  Show me what you can do. And kids need both, right?
• 6:31
  They need the safety and the push to go explore.
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  And one person has a really hard time doing that.
• 6:39
  And by undervaluing the masculine, we've really set it
• 6:42
  up where guys only had to be a provider, which is why we got so
• 6:48
  far away from our social impact, right?
• 6:49
  Hey, if I'm making money and we've got a house and groceries
• 6:52
  you don't like, that's all I need to do.
• 6:54
  Yeah. And there's two really sad
• 6:57
  things about that. It gets rid of dad, right?
• 7:01
  And dads are awesome. Yeah.
• 7:03
  They're they're needed. It's a wonderful thing to have,
• 7:06
  yeah. And it means that as a guy's
• 7:08
  life progresses, at some point he's not going to be producing
• 7:10
  anymore. It also means that women that.
• 7:14
  Want to go and be? Producing that aren't
• 7:17
  necessarily as interested in nurturing are going to have a
• 7:20
  hard time finding a guy to fill any other role, right?
• 7:23
  Like the dream of feminism that we all get to choose, right?
• 7:25
  We all get to choose some way that we want to be and build our
• 7:28
  families. And if you want to choose super
• 7:29
  traditional, that's fine. If you want to choose the other
• 7:31
  end, that's totally fine. But by undervaluing that, dad,
• 7:35
  we really kind of hamstrung men's emotional development
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  because then what happens is you've got a little bunch of
• 7:41
  little boys being taught how they experience emotion by
• 7:44
  women, and it's a little different, right?
• 7:49
  Yeah. The way the guys process is a
• 7:50
  little different. If you hear, like, let's say
• 7:53
  that you're talking to a friend and it's a woman and she goes
• 7:56
  through a breakup, she's going to say, I felt so betrayed.
• 7:59
  I felt so abandoned. And she's going to name a bunch
• 8:01
  of feelings and really have like, a process down.
• 8:04
  A guy is going to say, she ripped out my heart.
• 8:07
  Both of those are correct ways to describe it.
• 8:10
  Right. Right.
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  We just tend to undervalue the masculine way of describing it
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  instead of treating it as a valid and additional way that
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  maybe we need some nuance to get to.
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  It's the, it's the beauty of having like a group of people
• 8:26
  and the different nuances and the clarity of a situation.
• 8:28
  By having the multiple ways to talk about it.
• 8:30
  I think we're starting to get back to guys being able to kind
• 8:33
  of speak to what they experience, yeah, while being
• 8:37
  able to translate it. Right.
• 8:39
  Yeah, I was going to, I was going to actually say, I bet
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  part of a big part of your job is learning how to, is helping
• 8:46
  people put words to experiences or emotions.
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  Because until they have a way to describe it or words describe
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  it, it kind of just bounces around inside and, you know,
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  it's that's one of the beauties of storytelling, in my opinion.
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  General when it comes to music or books or movies is like you,
• 9:07
  they tend to be archetypes for, you know, very primitive and
• 9:11
  human examples. But things that rage in us that,
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  you know, that we put we, we assigned an enormous amount of
• 9:17
  value to. So, you know, heartbreak or, you
• 9:19
  know, feeling of our dreams aren't going to be able to be
• 9:22
  accomplished or feeling of, you know, despair.
• 9:25
  And you have a very raw description of that, that you
• 9:29
  know, by, by a poet or by a musician or by an, by, by a
• 9:33
  filmmaker. And you watch and you're like,
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  that's me in there. And, and whoa, I relate.
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  And I get that. And then all of a sudden it
• 9:41
  helps us. And then and then it helps us
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  learn to fully experience those feelings with the actual words
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  and images and, and, and put it in a way that we can actual and
• 9:53
  actually process and and build with and actually hopefully do
• 9:56
  something about. Absolutely.
• 9:59
  We've been thinking in stories since we could draw on walls as
• 10:03
  a species, right? The I had a colleague on and we
• 10:08
  were talking about kind of the communication of emotion and
• 10:11
  empathy. And one of the ways that's being
• 10:13
  kind of pushed out now, which I think is beautiful, is rather
• 10:16
  than saying I feel this or it felt like this, it's you know
• 10:20
  that feeling when you know that, You know that feeling when you
• 10:25
  get that first cup of coffee in the morning and you feel ready
• 10:28
  for the day. It's an invitation.
• 10:30
  Right. Well, and it's something we can
• 10:32
  all relate to and that that experience might be different
• 10:34
  for you. You might describe in a
• 10:35
  different emotional language, but we both get how nice like a
• 10:39
  good morning is. Yeah, right.
• 10:41
  Yeah. And so the, the storytelling is
• 10:45
  a really powerful way to help people heal, right?
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  The, there's an entire therapeutic approach called
• 10:49
  narrative therapy, which I do because it tends to work really
• 10:53
  well with men. It's one of the more data-driven
• 10:54
  modalities for guys. Can you essentially?
• 10:58
  Yeah, so essentially you come in and it's predicated on like the
• 11:02
  hero's journey, right? Like you were talking about when
• 11:06
  I when guys call and they're looking at therapy, I kind of
• 11:08
  describe it. So what was your favorite action
• 11:10
  movie as a kid? Right.
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  Like how? How old are you?
• 11:14
  I am almost 30. Almost 30, yeah.
• 11:17
  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna guess like Fast and Furious movies
• 11:19
  where maybe. The thing when?
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  You like what was the action movies?
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  A little bit more into the Iron Man Marvel world.
• 11:25
  Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. So so the.
• 11:28
  Heroes journey around. Action movies are very similar
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  and there's a reason why the formula works so well for boys.
• 11:33
  It's guy goes out, guy gets his teeth kicked in by something and
• 11:37
  lose. Yeah.
• 11:39
  Guy goes on some kind of training montage, hopefully with
• 11:41
  some little old man yelling at him.
• 11:43
  Rocky. Sure.
• 11:44
  Right, Yoda. Right.
• 11:47
  Yeah, Yoda, of course. Harry Potter, Tony Tony Stark's
• 11:51
  AI, Right. Like, whatever it is.
• 11:52
  Yeah. And then they come back and they
• 11:54
  beat the initial challenge. Yeah.
• 11:56
  Yeah. And So what narrative therapy
• 11:58
  aims to do is to help you make your story make sense.
• 12:01
  Awesome. Right.
• 12:02
  What did you learn from what you've been through?
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  Where do you want to go and what do you need to do to be ready
• 12:06
  for it when it comes back around?
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  Because our lives tend to have a very cyclical set of challenges,
• 12:12
  right? Like the the same kind of ways
• 12:14
  we struggle, we've struggled with since we were 5.
• 12:18
  And so by naming the struggle, naming what you've learned and
• 12:21
  naming who's helping you, right? Who you're supporting, people
• 12:24
  who, who are guiding you through this process, who's backing you
• 12:26
  up? Who's on your Avengers?
• 12:30
  It's a really wonderful way to reframe pain into some kind of
• 12:34
  purpose. The the quote I most like is
• 12:36
  pain without purpose is just suffering.
• 12:39
  Wow, it's a great line. Yeah, and anything you learn has
• 12:43
  some pain to it, right? You like you.
• 12:44
  You don't learn without failure. You don't learn without some
• 12:46
  struggle. Anything worth doing in life has
• 12:49
  some struggle between you and it.
• 12:51
  Otherwise it doesn't feel very worthwhile.
• 12:52
  Like if I just walk on and didn't have to try, I don't
• 12:55
  value it as much whatever it is. Yeah.
• 12:59
  I think that's actually, that's actually a it's leading to a
• 13:03
  huge issue in today's world. I think because I know from
• 13:09
  let's say my own experience that we kind of, we obviously assign
• 13:15
  value to productivity, right? And it's become a lot easier
• 13:19
  today to accomplish a lot with a lot less effort than it's ever
• 13:23
  been required. You know, And whether that be
• 13:27
  because of AI, whether that be because of just the convenience
• 13:30
  of like at the end of the day, we are an incredibly wealthy and
• 13:33
  fortunate country that just like the the problems we have are,
• 13:37
  you know, thank God, you know, they, you know, I mean,
• 13:40
  compared, relatively speaking, you know, like we have, we have,
• 13:43
  we have great issues as a country relative to, you know,
• 13:46
  lots of other places that we could be living right now.
• 13:48
  And you know, and one and one of the issues is that because
• 13:51
  people, I think or myself speaking, you know, I say, oh,
• 13:55
  well, I want to be XY and Z productive this week.
• 13:58
  And then I accomplished that. But it doesn't require an
• 14:00
  enormous amount of work for me. I almost find myself figuring
• 14:04
  out what to do with myself, you know, and, and, and you go
• 14:07
  through swings where you find vices or, or, you know, you
• 14:11
  could either be healthy and productive, or you could say,
• 14:13
  OK, well, I got an hour now I could have a beer and I could
• 14:16
  sit outside and smoke a Jay. Or you say I could go for a jog
• 14:20
  and I could, you know, read a book for half an hour and, you
• 14:23
  know, I could really do something.
• 14:24
  That's, that's, that's, that's, that's challenging.
• 14:26
  Or think of, you know, try to build something or create
• 14:29
  something and you have this time.
• 14:32
  So the productivity is there and then you kind of have this
• 14:34
  challenge like, but I'm not actually challenging myself.
• 14:37
  I'm not doing that work. And like, I think what you said,
• 14:39
  like anything that's really worth doing has to have hardness
• 14:42
  involved in it. And I think it's really easy to
• 14:44
  go through day-to-day life for a lot of people without actually
• 14:47
  having any kind of challenges at all.
• 14:51
  A lot of times, you know, and, but, or to, to even not even
• 14:55
  realize the kind of challenges were happening, you know, like,
• 14:58
  you know, and then I guess, and I'm sure you got a lot of this.
• 15:00
  We could talk a lot about this, I'm sure, with doom scrolling or
• 15:03
  social media presence as opposed to, as opposed to, you know,
• 15:06
  finding something long term that, you know, we, I, I, I
• 15:09
  mentioned that junk food versus healthy food, you know, in terms
• 15:13
  of everything that we consume. So what do you?
• 15:15
  What do you? What are similar thoughts on
• 15:16
  that? Well, so it's a few things.
• 15:20
  We work about the same amount, if maybe even a little less than
• 15:25
  we did in the 70s, right? And the 70s was kind of the last
• 15:29
  decade before technology really started to come into our lives
• 15:33
  and make it so that entertainment was passive,
• 15:37
  right? Right.
• 15:37
  So before, like television, before radio, if you wanted to
• 15:41
  have some kind of entertainment, it was generally you were kind
• 15:43
  of engaged in something. You were talking to people, you
• 15:45
  were playing a game, you were doing a hobby.
• 15:47
  And so before, it wasn't so much that your hobbies had to be
• 15:50
  productive, right? It was that they had to be
• 15:53
  engaged. Now a lot of our hobbies and
• 15:58
  entertainment are you sit there and sit back and the the world
• 16:01
  does for you. You don't have to engage.
• 16:04
  And so the. Only thing exactly.
• 16:07
  And so the the main difference in why we feel so lonely is
• 16:12
  we're scrolling. We're spending about two hours
• 16:14
  more on average in front of screens than we did in the 90s.
• 16:19
  And then people are exhausted. They are feeling isolated.
• 16:24
  But then when a buddy calls or texts and says, hey, man, you
• 16:26
  wanna go? You wanna go do something?
• 16:28
  No, man, I'm tired. It's been a long week at work.
• 16:30
  Yeah, what is? That no, it's that your your
• 16:34
  dopamine is getting crushed by your phone.
• 16:37
  That what it is. Yeah.
• 16:39
  So the whole thing with screens is and I I really want to be
• 16:42
  careful here. Like we we're not going to put
• 16:44
  the genie back in the box, right?
• 16:45
  Like technology is wonderful. You and I are able to connect
• 16:47
  from Florida to Colorado because of technology.
• 16:49
  This is wonderful, right? We would have never met without
• 16:52
  technology, right? And if you're just on your phone
• 16:56
  scrolling TikTok, you're burning energy to do so.
• 17:00
  You're burning mental capacity. And so then after doing that for
• 17:03
  an hour and somebody calls, you really don't have it in you to
• 17:06
  connect in a way that you want to.
• 17:07
  You are tired, but it feels soothing because it it's
• 17:10
  basically making your mind feel like it is doing something to
• 17:14
  entertain itself. And so when that happens, it
• 17:17
  really starts to limit our ability to connect.
• 17:19
  And we all kind of are there now.
• 17:22
  You know, we're all very living, very contained lives.
• 17:24
  We're all at home in front of the screen or on at home in
• 17:27
  front of something. Whereas before you'd be home,
• 17:29
  but if you wanted to go do something, you had to go out and
• 17:31
  do it. You had to be around people.
• 17:33
  You had to have social friction to make things happen.
• 17:36
  Yeah. And and so the way that I try to
• 17:39
  frame it for people is technology is great, use it to
• 17:42
  connect, right? If you're, if you're going to
• 17:45
  get on Tic Tac, that's great. What are you learning?
• 17:48
  Like who are you watching? Who are you having a
• 17:49
  relationship with? And I think that's the other
• 17:52
  hard part is these parasocial relationships, right?
• 17:54
  Like you and I are building, right?
• 17:55
  We both have podcast. There are people that when they
• 17:57
  hear our voice, they feel a little bit like they've got a
• 18:00
  friend, right? But but they don't, we don't.
• 18:05
  It's not a back and forth right It.
• 18:06
  It's lovely. It's lovely to hear people have
• 18:08
  a conversation, but it's not having a conversation.
• 18:11
  Correct. And you feel like you are
• 18:13
  though, you feel and I, I feel like, but that that goes even
• 18:17
  before podcasts, how many people thought the cast of Cheers or
• 18:21
  Friends or Frasier or Seinfeld were their best friends in the
• 18:24
  entire world? Because you feel like you're
• 18:26
  just dropping in on their, on their lives all the time, you
• 18:29
  know? Yeah, fill some gaps, so.
• 18:34
  I think one of the big things that we're we're doing wrong is
• 18:39
  we've made productivity too much of A focus to the point where
• 18:42
  it's broken our productivity. I can't remember what study it
• 18:46
  was, but it it really resonated where five years ago Americans
• 18:51
  worked more than medieval peasants.
• 18:53
  Wow. Yeah, like the the whole system
• 18:57
  of farming is, it's farming is very hard for a month or two, a
• 19:02
  year. Yeah.
• 19:05
  And then it's anxiety provoking because you're out of control,
• 19:08
  right? Like once things are in the
• 19:08
  ground and you're waiting on the weather to see what happens,
• 19:11
  there's some actions you can take along the way.
• 19:12
  But otherwise, you're just kind of like, please don't have a
• 19:15
  drought. Right, right.
• 19:17
  Yeah. And then you get to go and spend
• 19:19
  the rest of your life connecting.
• 19:20
  You get to be in the other things that make for building a
• 19:23
  life. And it was usually around like
• 19:25
  shared labor. Right.
• 19:27
  Right. For us to have a home, we had to
• 19:29
  have other people that were willing to work on the home.
• 19:33
  It's part of why I. Have the happiest kids are the
• 19:35
  ones that do chores. Yeah, and I believe it as
• 19:40
  someone that does a lot of. Right.
• 19:41
  If you don't, If you don't. Feel like you're.
• 19:43
  Right. Well, if you're, if you're not
• 19:45
  contributing to your house, it doesn't feel like a home.
• 19:48
  It feels like something of service to you.
• 19:50
  Correct, correct, correct this by, by, by me, by me
• 19:53
  participating in it, I'm sharing with it and creating a bond and
• 19:58
  an investment and kind of create making it an extension of
• 20:01
  myself. By the amount of effort that I
• 20:03
  put into it, actually, I tell a lot of my friends that that are
• 20:05
  having hard times in general. I'm like some of the best things
• 20:08
  that you can do. Just my opinion.
• 20:10
  Like I found just to get myself out of a slump, set the bed,
• 20:13
  clean the room up, you know, wash a couple of dishes and go
• 20:15
  for a little walk. And like, all of a sudden you
• 20:17
  just feel like a different human being.
• 20:18
  And like, you meant even like you could be mumbling to
• 20:21
  yourself and rumbling and grumbling and saying, you know,
• 20:23
  that you want to be in a bad mood and you savor it.
• 20:25
  And like, but like, if you want to like really like, kind of
• 20:27
  just snap yourself out. Participating in the world
• 20:30
  around you is is such a way to just get you right back into
• 20:34
  things, I feel like. Yeah, our mind is really good at
• 20:38
  spinning itself, right. And so it anxiety and depression
• 20:44
  are we, we've kind of misappropriated them a little
• 20:47
  bit. Like those are clinical terms.
• 20:48
  There are, there's a list of symptoms that you need to meet
• 20:52
  to and then severity criteria, right?
• 20:54
  There's like mild, moderate and severe.
• 20:57
  And we've started to mistake like sadness or tired as
• 21:02
  depression, like, oh, I'm depressed.
• 21:04
  No, you're tired. You worked all day.
• 21:05
  It's OK that like things slow down for you.
• 21:06
  This isn't, you don't have to, you're tired or for anxiety.
• 21:11
  We've misappropriated stress, but stress is a great thing.
• 21:15
  Stress is why you and I were on time for the podcast.
• 21:17
  It's why I got up and showered this morning.
• 21:19
  It's why I'm doing some prep for my first patient that I'm
• 21:22
  working on this morning after our interview, right?
• 21:25
  That's all stress. They did a, they did a big study
• 21:29
  back in the early odds where they figured out that they'd
• 21:33
  been killing guys. So the cardiologist in the 70s
• 21:36
  and 80s, when we started to figure out heart disease, we
• 21:41
  would look at it and go, hey, man, your heart's struggling,
• 21:45
  you're too stressed at work, you need to not stress or you're
• 21:47
  going to die. And so they made all these guys
• 21:50
  stop working. Imagine this back in the 70s,
• 21:53
  when a guy's entire social support, entire social life was
• 21:57
  at work. Yeah.
• 21:58
  Right. Most of those guys died within
• 22:01
  two years of retirement. I bet.
• 22:04
  And it was because they were made afraid of stress.
• 22:08
  So when they did longevity studies with a bunch of 90 year
• 22:10
  olds and asked those 90 year olds, hey, what does stress mean
• 22:12
  to you? They're like, oh, it's great.
• 22:14
  It means I got something to do today.
• 22:15
  Like, yeah, it's just I got, I got to get out of the house.
• 22:17
  I got to do these things. And So what happens is by making
• 22:20
  us afraid of stress, we turn stress into anxiety.
• 22:23
  Because when you're afraid, everything tenses up.
• 22:24
  Your blood vessels tighten, you kind of freeze in a moment.
• 22:27
  You're waiting for the danger to end.
• 22:29
  Whereas when you're stressed and you're like, I got stuff to do,
• 22:32
  everything opens up. You feel ready, you feel like
• 22:33
  you're going to go. And so by misappropriating these
• 22:38
  things into these clinical terms like, oh, I'm anxious.
• 22:41
  No, like you're, you're stressed.
• 22:43
  That's OK, I'm anxious. No, you're worried.
• 22:45
  Worried's a really healthy emotion.
• 22:47
  Are you planning and does your plan reduce your worry?
• 22:52
  That's a healthy response. That's how we built this house,
• 22:54
  right? We have this because we were
• 22:55
  worried about the rain, right? It works out.
• 23:00
  And so you're, you're absolutely right in that by getting stuck
• 23:04
  in our own head around our problems instead of either being
• 23:08
  able to sit in them comfortably or have action that makes us
• 23:13
  feel like we're positively impacting our life, we convince
• 23:16
  ourselves that we are ill. And so then we become I'll.
• 23:20
  I think in addition to that, which I think is for sure the
• 23:23
  case, I also, I, I, I can't help but also think again, back to we
• 23:27
  said earlier that the words that we choose to use to describe
• 23:33
  our, ourselves, our state of mind is also very important.
• 23:36
  You know, it might, you know, my wife will be like, you know,
• 23:38
  there'll be times where my wife will come home and she's like,
• 23:41
  you look stressed. Do you look anxious?
• 23:44
  Like I had, I had a long day, you know, I had a couple of
• 23:47
  sales calls that are, you're still up in the air.
• 23:48
  I got to, I got to work out, but like, I'm fine, you know, like,
• 23:51
  you know, I'm good. And, and to to kind of replace
• 23:54
  those words with other, you know, with words that give me a
• 23:58
  little bit more autonomy and give me a little bit more put,
• 24:01
  put power into my own hands to kind of decide what to how to
• 24:04
  respond to whatever is going on around me.
• 24:08
  I think makes a big difference. And I think that, you know,
• 24:11
  having used words before, you know, but I'm so burned out, I'm
• 24:16
  so burned out. I, I find myself, you know,
• 24:18
  being burned out as opposed to, I need a 10 minute break and
• 24:22
  I'll get right back to it, you know, and just, and, and they
• 24:24
  mean the same thing. And they could be the exact same
• 24:26
  issue, you know, but by telling myself I need, I need a rest as
• 24:31
  opposed to I'm burnt out. It, it fundamentally changes the
• 24:34
  way that I perceive the rest of my day going or the rest of my
• 24:38
  week even, you know, and it even gives me excuses to go ahead
• 24:42
  and, you know, give my, you know, give myself a break.
• 24:45
  I don't know if I necessarily want or deserve yet.
• 24:47
  You know, just by using certain terminology and certain.
• 24:50
  Deserve Let's talk about that. So help me understand what it
• 24:53
  means to deserve a break. Like I, I think this is where
• 24:58
  that provider role hits, right? You were raised to be a
• 25:01
  provider. So if you're not producing, you
• 25:03
  don't deserve a break, right? If I'm not making the most of my
• 25:12
  time and potential that I do not deserve a break yet.
• 25:15
  Yes, but that could mean a lot of things, right?
• 25:18
  And I, I try to be very balanced about it.
• 25:20
  So, you know, you know, for example, I, I like to, I, I, I
• 25:24
  really work very hard to look at money as a means to an end.
• 25:28
  I look at like a car, you know, money is only as good as a
• 25:31
  destination that I have to get to, but to accumulate it for no
• 25:34
  reason is, you know, generally tends to compromise other
• 25:38
  aspects of my life, like my marriage or like my ability to
• 25:42
  raise my kids or my ability to even be self expressive and to
• 25:45
  be creative and to practice my, you know, my hobbies and the
• 25:48
  things that I love. And so, you know, I'll, I'll
• 25:52
  have a minimal, I said minimum sales mark, I try to hit every
• 25:54
  week and then minimum podcast round of work I try to do every
• 25:58
  week. And I try to give myself, I try
• 25:59
  to be fair to myself, but to try to be as balanced as possible.
• 26:03
  And then you have the extracurriculars that are me, I
• 26:07
  guess, are more laid back and a little bit more geared towards
• 26:10
  recharging. But you know, you don't recharge
• 26:13
  your battery every time it goes down to 80%.
• 26:15
  You know, you go, you can charge your battery.
• 26:16
  Sometimes it hits 20, sometimes it hits 15.
• 26:18
  So it depends on the week, I guess.
• 26:20
  But that's typically the way I look at things.
• 26:24
  Yeah, I mean, you're a really energetic guy that's doing a lot
• 26:27
  right. So you my read on it is you're a
• 26:31
  little anxious most of the time. Sure.
• 26:34
  Like the the stress of it trying to get done, There's like, and
• 26:37
  it's because things are complicated.
• 26:38
  We've built this world where things are immensely
• 26:40
  complicated, where we're designed for a very simple
• 26:43
  world, right? We're bio socially designed to
• 26:46
  run around in groups of 20 people looking for food and
• 26:49
  shelter and otherwise hanging out and having a good time.
• 26:51
  And don't get me wrong, I love my house.
• 26:54
  I love all this. But now all of a sudden,
• 26:58
  everything about us is tied to things that are a little bit out
• 27:00
  of our control. So money is more important than
• 27:03
  your house and your livelihood. It's why you could afford that
• 27:05
  shirt. It's why you and my's beards
• 27:08
  look really nice, right? We're trying to present a
• 27:10
  certain status because that's important in our culture and
• 27:14
  money is tied to that. Right.
• 27:17
  So there's not a right or a wrong way that the, the way that
• 27:21
  I like to look at it is imagine that you're like on a whitewater
• 27:23
  raft, right? And you're going down this river
• 27:26
  and in the middle of the river, the water is nice and deep.
• 27:29
  It's a very smooth ride. But if you go to either side,
• 27:33
  there's rocks and the water gets shallow and the boat starts to
• 27:35
  get knocked around. And so on one side you've got
• 27:38
  productivity, things that need to get done, the, the hustle,
• 27:42
  the push. And on the other side, you have
• 27:46
  the connection, the rest, the relaxation.
• 27:50
  You kind of need to be, you know, in the middle, right?
• 27:52
  Like I do a little bit. I do a little bit of each.
• 27:54
  My day was good. But whenever you start like, oh
• 27:57
  man, I need to grind. Like this month, we need more
• 27:59
  money because we want to do XYZ. I'm going to pull 80 hour weeks
• 28:03
  to get everything done. I need to get done.
• 28:06
  Yeah, at the end of that month, you're probably going to be
• 28:08
  burnt out, right? That's too much.
• 28:11
  And then let's say that you hit that and the boat gets knocked
• 28:13
  around and you're like, Oh my God, I need to go all the way to
• 28:15
  the other end. I'm like, oh man, look that that
• 28:16
  last month was really hard. I need a break.
• 28:19
  I'm going to take two weeks off and then I'm going to, I'm going
• 28:21
  to go to a 20 hour work week because that's all we need,
• 28:24
  right? And then all of a sudden you're,
• 28:26
  you're a little more, you're a little like listless and you
• 28:29
  don't have things bracing you and it's too little for you,
• 28:32
  right? And then that becomes normal
• 28:35
  where you're like, Oh, well, I guess I'm just sitting here and
• 28:37
  I don't feel good while I'm sitting here.
• 28:40
  And so it's about finding out your individual balance and
• 28:43
  reassessing it as you go. Like, I'm sure you can relate to
• 28:46
  this, right? There's years where I'm super
• 28:47
  pumped up about what I'm doing. And so like a 50 to 60 hour a
• 28:51
  week more often than not doesn't hurt me, right?
• 28:55
  I'm like, yeah, this is a push. I'm going to like when I was in
• 28:57
  grad school, right? Like, let's go read 2000 pages
• 29:00
  of academic writing a week. This is interesting.
• 29:04
  But then by the end of that graduate program, I'm like, I
• 29:07
  don't want to read anything. I'm just going to watch Trailer
• 29:10
  Park Boys or something equally stupid because my mind needs a
• 29:12
  rest, right? Definitely, yeah.
• 29:18
  It it goes better when we find out, when we find our balances
• 29:20
  and we accept that there's needs a push, right?
• 29:22
  There's these pushes and it feels good when the push comes
• 29:24
  and gets traction and we achieve the things.
• 29:27
  But then we also need the period of consolidation.
• 29:30
  Yeah, we need that period where we like, we take what we've
• 29:32
  learned, we take what we've earned and we reconnect with our
• 29:35
  people and we go, this is wonderful.
• 29:36
  Let's let's feel the accomplishment of this and how
• 29:38
  it impacts our lives. Let's see where our lives are.
• 29:42
  And now let's look for the next push after we've consolidated,
• 29:44
  after we've reconnected. It's OK that it kind of comes
• 29:47
  and goes like that. I think the grind culture is
• 29:50
  where it hurts because the people that are most successful
• 29:53
  in our culture, I would say are manic, right?
• 29:56
  So if you look at. Like.
• 29:58
  Dwayne Johnson or Kevin Hart, right?
• 30:00
  Those guys are awesome and I like how they talk about things.
• 30:04
  I like how they talk about in our personal lives, but they
• 30:06
  also both wake up at 4:00 in the morning.
• 30:08
  And. They're both in the gym for an
• 30:10
  hour and a half every day and their life is incredibly
• 30:14
  regimented. And that's why they have the
• 30:18
  empires they have, right? And they do they have vampires.
• 30:20
  They're they're multi millionaires.
• 30:21
  They're doing a lot of really great things.
• 30:23
  But for most people, that's a pretty miserable life.
• 30:27
  Wake up at 4:00 in the morning being a grind every day.
• 30:30
  Yeah, that's not what we want. But those are who we look to as
• 30:35
  men to see like, oh, what do I, what do I want to live like?
• 30:39
  I want to be like them. Like they have things, they have
• 30:42
  respect, they have acclaim and they have competency.
• 30:45
  I want that in my life. And yeah, to be at the top end
• 30:48
  of something, that's what you have to be.
• 30:50
  Because that's what some of us can do.
• 30:52
  But most of us are not those guys.
• 30:54
  Most of us aren't going to be those guys.
• 30:57
  So I would love to actually pick you now that we're talking about
• 31:00
  this, pick your mind on this. And then I want to talk a little
• 31:03
  just about your background. But first I want to pick your
• 31:06
  mind on this because it's been on the forefront of my mind for
• 31:07
  a little while. I'm going to take advantage of
• 31:11
  talking to a very thought, some of the teams to be very
• 31:14
  thoughtful while I read. So this would be great.
• 31:16
  I, I've recently come to the realization that I am more than
• 31:22
  a little afraid of success and that and the, and the demands of
• 31:29
  what that would mean, you know, the, the repercussions of
• 31:34
  success, you know, and you know this, you know, I mean, and, and
• 31:39
  this is kind of always been in my mind.
• 31:40
  It's been in my mind for a while.
• 31:44
  I think I've realized that a lot of my behaviour is rooted in
• 31:49
  fear. So I spent, I've spent a lot of
• 31:51
  time in the last couple of years, I said, confronting the
• 31:56
  different aspects of fears, different variations of it at
• 32:00
  different points in my life. So, you know, I was afraid to be
• 32:02
  in a relationship, you know, confront that afraid to be a
• 32:06
  dad, confront that afraid to buy a house, confront that afraid,
• 32:10
  you know, and start and whatever it is now it feels like the fear
• 32:15
  is of success. And I'm sure it kind of stems
• 32:18
  from a place of not being sure that I'll be able to handle with
• 32:21
  what that success means. And so like, my, my, my, my
• 32:25
  concern and my hesitancy is that will I be able to handle what
• 32:30
  comes with this new world that I'm not familiar with?
• 32:35
  You know what? And yeah, and I don't think this
• 32:40
  is exclusive to me. I think that there's, I think
• 32:41
  there's a lot of people that hold themselves back on purpose.
• 32:45
  What do you? What are your thoughts on that?
• 32:51
  So it's. Again, broad.
• 32:53
  I'm going broad. I'm telling you to pack whatever
• 32:55
  you want. No, you're good, man.
• 32:58
  It Yeah. It's so I think where people get
• 33:03
  really afraid of their success is when their success is
• 33:05
  misaligned with their values and our values change, right.
• 33:11
  The way that we come at the World at 20 needs to be
• 33:14
  different than the way we come at the world at 30 needs to be
• 33:16
  different at the way we come at the world at 4050.
• 33:18
  Sixty, right, And it's not that the things we value are
• 33:21
  different, but the ways that we want to be in service of them
• 33:23
  might be different, right? So family could be a value of
• 33:26
  yours. I imagine it is.
• 33:27
  You're talking about being a father.
• 33:28
  You're talking about being a husband, right?
• 33:31
  What's a 20 year old's commitment to family?
• 33:35
  It's not a husband or a father yet, right?
• 33:38
  It's learning how to get things and do things to eventually
• 33:41
  become those, right? OK, so once you've become them,
• 33:46
  what does family? Mean.
• 33:48
  Being a father means a lot. There's this little nugget that
• 33:51
  dies if you aren't paying attention and providing for it.
• 33:55
  So all the sudden family skyrockets, right?
• 33:57
  It's not so much of A like a learning journey anymore.
• 33:59
  It's a doing journey now, right? Right.
• 34:02
  When people are afraid of success, it's usually one of
• 34:06
  three things. They're either afraid of what
• 34:11
  life in the success will be, right?
• 34:13
  So let's say that your version of success is you want to be a
• 34:16
  multimillionaire, you want to run a podcast and you want to
• 34:19
  sell things to the extent that you're making that much money,
• 34:23
  right? And you're looking at what
• 34:24
  you're doing now to do these things.
• 34:27
  But to be a multimillionaire, you're like, oh, so I need to do
• 34:29
  like 3 times what I'm doing now for that goal.
• 34:32
  Like that's what it's going to take.
• 34:33
  That's the grind it's going to take.
• 34:35
  And there's a party that's like, we don't want to grind like
• 34:37
  that. That sounds awful.
• 34:40
  Yeah. So that's one, right?
• 34:43
  I don't want the life required to get the thing I think I want.
• 34:46
  Sure. Two, it's, well, what if it gets
• 34:49
  easy, right? Like, once you're a
• 34:53
  multimillionaire, it's pretty easy to keep making money,
• 34:56
  right? Once you hit a certain threshold
• 34:58
  of money, all the sudden money starts to make itself.
• 35:01
  Yeah. And you're used to spending
• 35:02
  50-60 hours a week on your work. And you're like, well what do I
• 35:07
  do if I only need 30? Right.
• 35:09
  What? What happens then?
• 35:11
  What's my day filled with? Who am I without my labor?
• 35:15
  Yeah, that's not what bothers me so much.
• 35:17
  And then the third one is that's good.
• 35:21
  I mean, every, it's funny. Everybody says that until they
• 35:23
  pick it apart. Like you.
• 35:25
  You strike me as a guy who doesn't sit well, very well.
• 35:28
  I don't still very well I should.
• 35:29
  Say, but I have a lot, but I have a lot that I want to do,
• 35:33
  you know, so if I didn't have to worry about the money, then I
• 35:35
  would still find plenty of things to keep myself busy with.
• 35:40
  Right. And yeah, you're an energetic
• 35:42
  guy, right? And I think there's, that's the
• 35:44
  distinction, right? A lot of energetic guys get
• 35:45
  overtaken with anxiety instead of just like I like doing
• 35:48
  things. Being a guy who likes doing
• 35:50
  things is great. Being a guy who's anxious when
• 35:53
  you're not doing things is not so great.
• 35:55
  Yeah. And so the last one is, what if
• 35:58
  you can't do it? The last fear around getting
• 36:01
  success is like, what if I try and I fail?
• 36:05
  What does that mean about me then?
• 36:08
  I think guys in particular were very good at telling ourselves
• 36:12
  the story of what we could. Be my my favorite example of
• 36:16
  this is Ronda Rousey, right? Do you remember her?
• 36:18
  The female UFC fighter. Sure.
• 36:21
  Yeah, Ronda Rousey's awesome. Yeah. 70% of guys thought they
• 36:25
  could take her in a fight, 70% of men in the.
• 36:29
  Country were like if I trained, you know, and I got in shape, I
• 36:32
  could take her, I could take her.
• 36:35
  There you can. She was undefeated for how long
• 36:38
  there There's no, there's no like 95% of men at least at
• 36:43
  least 95% of men absolutely could not take Ronda Rousey.
• 36:47
  That's the dumbest like rational thing.
• 36:49
  It's just irrational, right? But we love the story about what
• 36:52
  we could be, right? I, I could, you know what, if,
• 36:56
  if high school had gone different, I could have been, I
• 36:58
  could have been a like a pro player.
• 37:00
  Like if I'd have just, you know, focused in and really leaned in,
• 37:03
  I could have been a pro player, right?
• 37:04
  We love that story. And it might even be.
• 37:07
  True, but it's not what's happening now.
• 37:12
  Yeah, and there's only people that live that lot their lives.
• 37:15
  And so that that anxiety comes back.
• 37:20
  Well, and then the the. Fear of if I acknowledge that,
• 37:24
  who am I right? If I'm not an athlete, if I'm
• 37:26
  not an entrepreneur, if I'm not this, who am I?
• 37:29
  And that existential dread is is crippling.
• 37:32
  So for you, which of those three most resonate?
• 37:39
  I think maybe the last one most because the risk that I'm taking
• 37:44
  a little bit more creative. And so the consequences would be
• 37:49
  that the things that I care most about, which is supporting my
• 37:52
  family, that would ultimately be the hardest.
• 37:57
  So, you know, let's say hypothetically pursuing building
• 38:00
  a podcast as opposed to building a sales, you know, book, you
• 38:04
  know, a book of just great customers and clients.
• 38:06
  The risk is that in 10 years from now, you'll have a bigger
• 38:09
  family that I will be able to support them, you know, and then
• 38:13
  I won't really have much of the transferable skills either.
• 38:16
  You know, I mean, what I this is, this is fun, this is great.
• 38:19
  This is a very particular set of skills that doesn't necessarily
• 38:23
  align to anything or much, you know?
• 38:25
  And so I guess that would be it. But I think, I think I really
• 38:35
  think it comes down, at least for me, in just my confidence in
• 38:38
  being able to maneuver my way through the unknown.
• 38:42
  I'm very comfortable with. I'm very good and comfortable
• 38:44
  with what I'm familiar with. And I'm a lot less comfortable
• 38:47
  with what I'm not familiar with. And I have to actually remind
• 38:50
  myself that I'm better at the unfamiliar than I even give
• 38:53
  myself credit for. I just don't feel that way and
• 38:56
  so I have to kind of realign that.
• 39:01
  So failure really hurts. You, yeah, not, not living up to
• 39:09
  myself or the people around me for sure, but mostly myself, I
• 39:13
  think at this point. Yeah, and that's going to make
• 39:16
  it hard to do new things, right? So if I if I've never done
• 39:20
  podcasting before, right? Yeah.
• 39:22
  And I listen to Diary of ACEO, right?
• 39:24
  Yeah. He's got a team of, what, 10
• 39:25
  guys? He's super polished, he's super
• 39:27
  smart, and he comes in amazingly prepared.
• 39:30
  And I look at that and I compare it to my third episode I've
• 39:33
  recorded, and I hold it to the same standard.
• 39:37
  I feel like crap. Sure.
• 39:39
  He's been doing it for years. He's got a team, he's really
• 39:42
  good at it, right? Yeah.
• 39:43
  And if that's the standard, I'm failing.
• 39:46
  So for you, right, you're like, you're getting into podcasting.
• 39:49
  How long have you been doing it now?
• 39:50
  A year and a month or two? Just over a year.
• 39:53
  Mm Hmm. Yeah, so you're really like
• 39:57
  finding your legs with it, right?
• 39:58
  You're really good at this. Now you've got your recording
• 39:59
  strategy set up. You know how to find the right
• 40:01
  guest. You know how to talk to people.
• 40:03
  When you look at our episode today, how's it gonna compare to
• 40:06
  your first one? Oh man, it kills me that my
• 40:11
  first one is one of my most listen to episodes.
• 40:13
  And I'm like you, you have to start the opposite way.
• 40:16
  You have to start latest first. Not, not, not first.
• 40:19
  Not first for, you know, chronological because it was, it
• 40:22
  was a mess, you know, when I got started.
• 40:26
  But people still like it and download it.
• 40:28
  Yeah, they do. Yeah, it's almost like you're a
• 40:32
  charming guy who's going to talking to people.
• 40:34
  It's almost like being in the sales role and connecting with
• 40:36
  people transferred over and people feel that from you,
• 40:39
  right? So defining what success is and
• 40:45
  accepting that you do not get success or skill building.
• 40:47
  Unless you're failing, if you're not failing at something, you're
• 40:51
  not pushing anything, you're not getting better at anything.
• 40:54
  If you're just doing things in your lane of comfort where
• 40:57
  there's no challenge to them, there's no growth, right?
• 41:01
  And but as a society, especially with social media, people don't
• 41:06
  show you their failures. You don't see them, right?
• 41:10
  Well, you say, of course not. But that's not how it used to be
• 41:14
  before we had social media and when we were living in groups of
• 41:16
  people. You watched people develop
• 41:18
  skills. If somebody wanted to be the
• 41:19
  best singer in the village, you heard them practicing, right?
• 41:24
  You heard them in the field as they developed out their range
• 41:26
  of voice. When someone wanted to get
• 41:28
  better at woodworking, you saw them like in the front yard,
• 41:31
  whittling away on something and then getting frustrated and
• 41:33
  throwing it away to grab another piece of wood.
• 41:35
  Right. It's so interesting.
• 41:36
  And it wasn't until like 10 or 20 years where they're like, no,
• 41:39
  no, here's this awesome horse I made in an hour.
• 41:41
  Right. Right.
• 41:43
  But we don't see that anymore. We don't see the Steven from
• 41:47
  Diary of a CEO and what his first few podcast looked like.
• 41:50
  We see what he looks like now, and we see the accomplished
• 41:52
  professional he's become, not the guy that it took to get
• 41:55
  there. Yeah.
• 41:57
  And that's why you're so afraid of it, is there's this
• 41:59
  misaligned story that we're just supposed to be good at.
• 42:02
  What? We pick up and that's kind of
• 42:06
  garbage, man. It doesn't feel good.
• 42:07
  Like I'm, I am. I'm very good at getting to like
• 42:11
  a 70% in most things. Like I get really excited.
• 42:15
  I pick something up and I can get like mildly competent at it.
• 42:18
  But then I'm like, look at the effort it takes to go from
• 42:20
  mildly competent to really good, and I'm like, I.
• 42:22
  Want to do all that? And so it takes a lot for me to
• 42:27
  lean in and get good at something.
• 42:29
  For you, if you pick up something, you seem like a guy
• 42:32
  that's not going to get comfortable at all with getting
• 42:34
  something to 70% that you don't want to be the guy that gets
• 42:38
  competent something. You want to be the guy that gets
• 42:40
  good at something. And if you can't get good at
• 42:42
  something, the competency doesn't feel good.
• 42:45
  Right. I struggle with that with
• 42:48
  guitar. I started playing guitar late.
• 42:49
  I started 25 or 6 almost, you know, and, and so it's been a
• 42:55
  couple of years and I had to actually retrain myself to not
• 42:59
  do this. You know, one of Jordan
• 43:02
  Peterson's great lines, I think of all his, of all his work is
• 43:06
  compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not who someone
• 43:08
  else is today, which is so, so it was so crucial for me.
• 43:13
  But, you know, I'd go to an open mic and and this guy would be
• 43:16
  playing for a fraction of the time that I was and play way
• 43:18
  better than me, you know, and I'll be like, screw this, I'm
• 43:21
  going home. Or, you know, I got into the
• 43:23
  Grateful Dead a couple of years ago and I'm listening to, you
• 43:26
  know, all the cover bands or Jerry Garcia play.
• 43:28
  And I'm like, what the heck am I supposed to do with this thing?
• 43:31
  I sound like, you know, you know, I'm just, I'm just sitting
• 43:33
  around. I'm, I'm clunky on mechanical.
• 43:35
  What am I doing with this? And I have to, I have to, you
• 43:38
  know, really it takes conscious work.
• 43:40
  It takes a lot of it, it, it takes a lot of, you know, system
• 43:45
  to really like intentional thinking to really kind of push
• 43:49
  myself to keep at, keep at these things.
• 43:51
  But then I, when I'm, while I'm at it, I'm like, I see what I'm
• 43:54
  doing. Like, I, I, I see how this is
• 43:56
  getting there. You know, it'll be, it'll be
• 44:00
  there. He'll get there.
• 44:03
  Well, it's the it's the hard thing, right?
• 44:04
  The way our mind is designed is it categorizes things very well
• 44:10
  and it if it is allowed to, it will blow by things and make
• 44:14
  broad sweeping generalizations to make it so that we can
• 44:16
  navigate a complex. World.
• 44:18
  So when most of us look out at we go outside.
• 44:22
  We think of those as trees. We're not thinking of their
• 44:25
  spruce palm, whatever they're like, oh, I know what a tree is.
• 44:28
  That's tree. And we keep going, right?
• 44:30
  Unless you're an arborist and then all of a sudden you're
• 44:33
  looking at it and all the different tree types and
• 44:34
  everything matter. So that's why the Dunning Kruger
• 44:37
  effect is the thing. Are you familiar?
• 44:39
  No. So the Dunning Kruger effect is
• 44:43
  the least you know, the more confident you are and what you
• 44:46
  know, right? And it's a main problem with the
• 44:50
  Internet and it's why, you know, doing your research.
• 44:53
  Hurts us so badly. Is we spend 30 minutes on
• 44:56
  researching something and all the sudden we think we can argue
• 44:58
  with a doctor, right? The doctor spent 20 years to get
• 45:03
  to what he knows, but we feel as confident as he does to argue
• 45:07
  that point. Right.
• 45:09
  Right. It's because our minds are
• 45:12
  designed to let us pick up something and move.
• 45:14
  Like we just need enough knowledge to move on.
• 45:16
  But so that's built in US, and now we're in an environment
• 45:19
  where we have more knowledge than we could ever assimilate,
• 45:23
  and we have it in the palm of our hand.
• 45:25
  Yeah. Right.
• 45:28
  And so that that's one end is that we're too easily accepting
• 45:33
  of we're supposed to be good and knowledgeable at something based
• 45:36
  on almost no effort or information.
• 45:39
  And we will argue with people who spent decades learning what
• 45:42
  they've learned. Like I have guys who have never
• 45:45
  studied what other men do argue with me about masculinity when
• 45:50
  I've spent 10 years studying it, diving into people's lives,
• 45:53
  reading thousands of pages of books on this, right, right.
• 45:56
  Because that's how we operate. That's how we want to function
• 45:58
  in the world. And then when it comes to skill
• 46:01
  acquisition, we do the same thing where we look around and
• 46:07
  like, you want to be a, you want to be a guitar player.
• 46:08
  And I'm sure, I'm sure you're a good one, right?
• 46:10
  You've put four years in, you go to open mics, you put yourself
• 46:13
  out there, but you're comparing yourself to a 30 year musician.
• 46:18
  Yeah, as though that is a reasonable comparison to have.
• 46:23
  And this is a hobby for you. This is a way for you to bring
• 46:25
  joy into your life. It's your way to share something
• 46:27
  that you do with people you care about.
• 46:29
  That's his job. He spends 3 to 4 hours a day,
• 46:34
  every day of his life playing that guitar.
• 46:38
  How much time do you spend on it?
• 46:42
  20-30 minutes a day if I'm lucky, if I'm in a good zone,
• 46:46
  you know, sometimes an hour a couple days a week.
• 46:48
  That's huge, man. That's a lot.
• 46:50
  That's a lot. That's a great hobby, man.
• 46:52
  That's a that's a huge amount of time out of your life to do
• 46:54
  something you enjoy. That's wonderful that you do
• 46:57
  that, right? Yeah, but the problem is
• 47:00
  different only on myself. It's relaxing you sometimes.
• 47:06
  Yeah, yeah, it's. So.
• 47:12
  It's that way our mind programs, right?
• 47:14
  And that's why it's so hard for us.
• 47:15
  It's not designed for the world we've built.
• 47:18
  It's really, really interesting. My, my favorite is, is it used
• 47:21
  to be a big deal if you were the best singer in your family,
• 47:23
  right? Like if you were the one who
• 47:24
  could like sing a hymn at the dinner table or on the holiday.
• 47:28
  You, you, your voice was the one that would kind of take the lead
• 47:30
  in the choir or whatever version of music was in your world and
• 47:35
  that gave you status people appreciated you for.
• 47:37
  That it. Felt very like accomplished.
• 47:39
  You had your thing, now you got to compare yourself to Beyoncé.
• 47:43
  You. Got to compare yourself to world
• 47:46
  class, like the best in the world.
• 47:49
  If you're not that, you're not a singer.
• 47:52
  That's a whole. Yeah, yeah, there's only going
• 47:55
  to be. Five of those folks.
• 47:56
  That are at that level of whatever it is.
• 47:59
  That's another. Billion of us.
• 48:01
  That's another issue with social media is that we use.
• 48:03
  We went from being small town to being global in a minute.
• 48:06
  You know, when you grow up and you could be the best soccer
• 48:08
  player in your grade, and that feels amazing.
• 48:11
  It gives you the confidence that, like, you can really
• 48:13
  pursue great things. Nowadays, if you're the best
• 48:16
  soccer player of 20 kids, yeah, who cares?
• 48:18
  You know? And like, look online.
• 48:19
  Look at this kid in, in, you know, in Saudi Arabia that's
• 48:23
  been playing, you know, soccer for, you know, his entire life.
• 48:26
  And, and all of a sudden he's 13 and he makes me look like a
• 48:29
  joke, you know, and you're like, well, how am I supposed to
• 48:31
  compare with that? You know?
• 48:32
  And that's why I think comparing is, is, is, you know, I mean,
• 48:36
  it's so interesting because we really obviously need it.
• 48:38
  We've obviously developed evolutionarily to require
• 48:40
  compare, you know, comparing ourselves.
• 48:42
  But it's also, I think, I mean, it's all, it's all a pendulum,
• 48:47
  you know, and I guess, and it's that way, I think with
• 48:49
  masculinity too. I think everything is just a
• 48:50
  pendulum that it just keeps on swinging back and forth.
• 48:53
  And hopefully we try to get where it's not swinging as far
• 48:58
  as it could one way or the other.
• 49:00
  And it just, it's a little bit more gentle as opposed, you
• 49:02
  know, a little bit more nuanced. But you know, I think it's a
• 49:05
  little more romantic hoping for me.
• 49:07
  Well, I think it's more a matter of accepting.
• 49:10
  Yeah, I think it's like that comparison game, right?
• 49:12
  So we need men in particular, right?
• 49:17
  We don't, if you look. Culturally around the world,
• 49:21
  right? When does a woman become a woman
• 49:25
  it's. Usually around her menstruation
• 49:26
  cycle, like the first time, there's traditions around it,
• 49:29
  like 1314 when a gal has her first period, there are
• 49:33
  welcoming from other women, there's a change in status and
• 49:37
  there's a mentorship that happens between women for that
• 49:41
  men. We don't have a hard line like
• 49:44
  that shared across cultures. And so the the tendency and the
• 49:48
  traditions are it's harder, like men have to overcome some kind
• 49:52
  of challenge to be considered a man.
• 49:54
  Right. And different cultures have
• 49:56
  different ways to facilitate that.
• 49:58
  We don't have that in America. There's nothing that everybody
• 50:02
  in America agrees on makes a man short of military service,
• 50:06
  right? And most of us can't serve,
• 50:08
  right? Fully half of men in America
• 50:11
  right now that are 18 to 23 are not eligible to serve.
• 50:16
  It's crazy. It's crazy.
• 50:19
  Is that physical? Which?
• 50:20
  Is a whole different problem to get into both.
• 50:25
  Yeah, both and not in the military.
• 50:28
  Yeah, I agree. I should probably look up the
• 50:33
  numbers. It was 50.
• 50:35
  I think it's worse now, but it it's in the last 10 to 15 years,
• 50:39
  it's become an issue for national security in that we
• 50:42
  don't have enough eligible men and they've had to change some
• 50:45
  things. I think some of it was that for
• 50:47
  a little while, if you had an ADD diagnosis that was
• 50:50
  disqualifying, which means they disqualified one in three guys.
• 50:55
  But also, wouldn't you want someone with?
• 50:57
  The guys that are AED. Are the ones that want a little
• 50:59
  bit, right? Yeah.
• 51:01
  Somebody with like a physicality to them.
• 51:02
  Yeah. So some of that's being
• 51:04
  modified, but it's also just the National Obesity epidemic.
• 51:07
  It's that most children are playing in front of a screen
• 51:10
  instead of outside and being physical.
• 51:12
  It's that we've undervalued physical aggression, right?
• 51:16
  Like, guys, aggression is part of our a lot of our masculinity.
• 51:21
  And when we're told like roughhousing is bad,
• 51:24
  roughhousing isn't bad for a 5 year old boy.
• 51:26
  That's him learning how to be in his body and how to integrate
• 51:29
  his body into a social world. It's important.
• 51:32
  And for some girls, right, there are plenty of girls that are
• 51:34
  super kinetic and super athletic.
• 51:35
  I think that's been the beauty of the push around how to
• 51:40
  rebalance out our discussions around gender is when you think
• 51:43
  of masculine and feminine, think of them as traits, right?
• 51:46
  So men tend to be more sexual, more physically aggressive, less
• 51:52
  reactive to physical threat. Like we're more physically brave
• 51:55
  than women. Women tend to be more morally
• 51:57
  brave than men, and men are more status driven.
• 52:01
  Right now I'm saying those things like I'm saying men tend
• 52:04
  to be taller than women, right? Yeah.
• 52:08
  If I, I'm a six foot one guy, if I walked into the WNBA, I'd feel
• 52:11
  very small, right? Right.
• 52:13
  There's a lot of tall ladies in that place, right?
• 52:17
  And if you look at them as traits and you accept that it's
• 52:19
  a bell curve, right? Most guys I talk to, when I,
• 52:21
  when I name those 4 trades, most guys really identify with two of
• 52:26
  them. They're like, yeah, yeah, that's
• 52:27
  part of my masculinity. Like that's, yeah, I'm status
• 52:29
  driven and I, I do, I'm not really physically afraid.
• 52:32
  I like doing active things. I like jumping off bridges or
• 52:34
  whatever. I like going fast in my car.
• 52:36
  It's fun. And then the third one, they'll
• 52:39
  be like, yeah, I could take or leave, you know, yeah, I could
• 52:43
  take your leave. I'm not super physically
• 52:44
  aggressive at people. That's not really part of my
• 52:46
  thing. And then the last one is like,
• 52:49
  yeah, you know, I guess I'm not the most sexual guy.
• 52:50
  Like, yeah, I like, I like sex. I like being with my partner,
• 52:53
  but it's not on my mind all day. Right.
• 52:57
  Most of us have that. And if we start thinking of as
• 53:00
  traits, then what? A woman has one of those traits
• 53:02
  instead of going, oh, that's she's not a woman.
• 53:03
  I'm like, no, she's she's a woman.
• 53:05
  She just also is very sexual or she's very status driven to war.
• 53:08
  She's not physically, she's not physically afraid or she's more
• 53:10
  morally, she's she's less morally brave than she is
• 53:14
  physically brave. As opposed to putting a value on
• 53:17
  it that you're not a man unless you have all four all the time.
• 53:22
  That's where we need to move away from.
• 53:24
  And by having this broader acceptance of like these are
• 53:27
  masculine traits and this is how I live in them, our masculinity
• 53:31
  becomes more secure. I don't have to be all of these
• 53:34
  all the time. This is the part of my
• 53:37
  masculinity. This is where my masculinity
• 53:38
  roars. And that's how I'm going to go
• 53:39
  be a man in the world, but then I'm going to go do something
• 53:41
  else. So for me, right, I'm a Air
• 53:43
  Force veteran, Yeah. I used to do a lot of MASH
• 53:46
  pitting, played a lot of physical sports.
• 53:49
  I talked to guys about their feelings all day.
• 53:51
  Yeah. I like musicals with pretty
• 53:54
  women singing funny things, Right?
• 53:57
  Yeah. I am not a monolith of
• 53:59
  masculinity or femininity. I've got both in me.
• 54:03
  Sure. And by accepting that all of a
• 54:05
  sudden it's a lot more fun to lean into my masculine and it's
• 54:08
  a lot more fun to lean into the feminine parts of me where I
• 54:10
  like, I know man, I'm nurturing guys.
• 54:12
  Like that's my job is I nurture guys.
• 54:14
  That's a very feminine quality. Right.
• 54:16
  But I'm good at it. Yeah.
• 54:18
  I'm sure you find meaning out of it.
• 54:20
  I'm sure it gives you a sense of.
• 54:20
  Fulfillment. Yeah.
• 54:21
  Yeah, I wouldn't. It took me till I was 35 to find
• 54:24
  out what I wanted to do when I grew up.
• 54:26
  And now I I really don't want to do anything else.
• 54:28
  I I love educating. I love being there with guys in
• 54:31
  the hard moments of their life and watching them get better.
• 54:35
  All right. And we're back.
• 54:36
  Sorry about that. So I'm sorry.
• 54:37
  So we left off with the question where we're talking about
• 54:42
  whether when you found what you were looking to do at 35, you
• 54:45
  know, and you're, and I feel like a lot of people, it takes
• 54:48
  them a long time to figure out, you know, where what they want
• 54:53
  to do and who they want to be. And you know, we have almost
• 54:57
  like what we have like our childhood passions are we try to
• 54:59
  find an adult way of fulfilling that childhood passion.
• 55:02
  Did you always like to help people and always want to?
• 55:05
  You know, is that something that was a passion or is that
• 55:07
  something you discovered over time?
• 55:08
  I was always people focused, right?
• 55:10
  So I I'd been in student government since I was in first
• 55:13
  grade or no, it was second grade.
• 55:14
  Sorry, I'm exaggerating. What does that mean?
• 55:17
  What does what mean? Being in student government in
• 55:19
  second grade? Yeah, not much, man.
• 55:22
  It's second graders, right? So they bring they're like every
• 55:24
  class has a representative and you go and a teacher guides you
• 55:28
  through Robert Rules of Order, but you're not really, you're a
• 55:30
  second grader, you're not making any.
• 55:31
  Calls. But that builds up, right?
• 55:34
  So by middle school, you're helping make sure there's dances
• 55:38
  you're going to administration to talk about concerns for the
• 55:40
  students. And then in high school, right,
• 55:42
  even more, they're giving you more and more efficacy.
• 55:44
  And then by the time you're in college student government, I
• 55:46
  was sitting on boards, right? I would I would be there with a
• 55:49
  chancellor talking about issues impacting the campus and what to
• 55:52
  do about that. Where'd you go to college?
• 55:55
  A few places. So I grew up outside of DC in
• 55:59
  College Park, and my school was really, really unsafe and not
• 56:02
  good. And so I didn't read a book.
• 56:05
  And by the time I got done with high school, I had connected
• 56:09
  with a family who was willing to put me up out in Denver.
• 56:12
  They were both PhDs from Cornell.
• 56:14
  And they're really like adopted parents now.
• 56:17
  And they're, they're who kind of really changed the trajectory of
• 56:21
  my life. And so I went, I had to go to
• 56:23
  Community College though, because I didn't know how to do
• 56:26
  anything academically. So I had to take a semester,
• 56:29
  semester and a half of non credit classes, right?
• 56:31
  Like how to do English, how to do basic math.
• 56:35
  Finished up at the Community College.
• 56:37
  And then I went down to Salt Lake to go to the University of
• 56:40
  Utah for a bachelor's in sociology.
• 56:42
  Terrible life decision. Why?
• 56:45
  Because sociology is not a degree to get a job with.
• 56:48
  Yeah, well, you're talking to someone with the creative
• 56:50
  writing literature degrees. So you get it, right?
• 56:52
  Like, hey, at least you know how to do something right.
• 56:54
  A bachelor's in sociology says, I understand that groups of
• 56:57
  people are things. It's not.
• 56:59
  It's not as not entirely useful. And so I was supposed to do
• 57:03
  government. That was my goal, as I wanted
• 57:05
  when I was in my 20s. I wanted to be a senator one
• 57:07
  day. Wow.
• 57:09
  And you? Always had an.
• 57:10
  Interest in politics. I always had an interest in
• 57:13
  helping people, and I thought politics was going to be my way
• 57:15
  to do that because I like talking to people.
• 57:18
  Politics is a lot more about systems and navigating them than
• 57:23
  they are about people. And once I figured that out and
• 57:27
  I figured out I wasn't as good at systems and that there were
• 57:29
  people that were better at it than me and that there were
• 57:31
  people that were more socially flexible than I was, I realized
• 57:35
  that if I had gone into politics, I wouldn't like who I
• 57:37
  became. And so I punted.
• 57:39
  I came back to Colorado and it was 2005.
• 57:44
  So I showed back up in Denver at a time when there were more
• 57:46
  college degrees per capita than any other city in the country
• 57:49
  with a mediocre degree with a mediocre GPA and no work
• 57:51
  experience. And so I did property management
• 57:55
  for a year, and then I did temp jobs after that because I
• 57:58
  couldn't find anything. And I found myself renting a
• 58:00
  room out in a friend's house, not being able to afford clothes
• 58:04
  right. There were holes in my shoes and
• 58:05
  I couldn't. I couldn't afford anything
• 58:06
  better. How?
• 58:07
  At this point you're in your early 20s I imagine.
• 58:10
  Mid 20s. It was 25 when I graduated
• 58:12
  college. And what did you I, I like that.
• 58:19
  I like, I like to think back where everything kind of felt
• 58:24
  like it was the biggest deal in the world.
• 58:25
  And looking back, you're like, that wasn't, did you feel like
• 58:28
  everything like like you had no idea what was going on with your
• 58:30
  life or you felt like, I'm fine, I'm just going to figure out my
• 58:32
  life? It was miserable.
• 58:34
  It was miserable. Yeah, I so because I was in
• 58:37
  student government, I was around a bunch of doers.
• 58:40
  A lot of my friends from college went on to do their career right
• 58:43
  afterwards. They went to law school, they
• 58:44
  went to medical school, they jumped into careers and we're
• 58:46
  doing very well. And I landed flat on my face and
• 58:51
  it was horribly depressing and there just wasn't a way forward.
• 58:55
  I actually feel really hard for the guys right now because more
• 58:59
  of them than ever are in that position where they get to their
• 59:02
  mid 20s, they've done whatever schooling they're going to do.
• 59:05
  Maybe they've failed out, maybe they've finished, but there's no
• 59:07
  work for them, there's no job for them, and no one's guiding
• 59:12
  them to any kind of productive labor or a way to contribute to
• 59:15
  their community because they're supposed to be a provider,
• 59:17
  right? The only way forward?
• 59:18
  Is and traits that we've been told that that are important,
• 59:20
  we're getting told they're no good anymore.
• 59:22
  And now we don't even know what traits to try to embody.
• 59:24
  Yeah, the unemployment rate for people with degrees and without
• 59:27
  degrees is the same for the first time in our country's
• 59:29
  history. And electricians and plumbers
• 59:32
  are making more reliable money faster than people with academic
• 59:36
  degrees. But we've spent our entire last
• 59:39
  20 years convincing everybody they need to go to college,
• 59:41
  which is crap. So I, I really do feel for young
• 59:45
  men right now and how hard that is.
• 59:47
  And in part it was because that was my experience.
• 59:49
  Everybody told me that if I went to college, that I would make
• 59:52
  something of myself. And I think the adults around
• 59:56
  me, when they told me that, honestly believed it.
• 59:59
  And because when they were young, that was the way forward.
• 1:00:02
  But a sociology degree doesn't prepare you for a job market.
• 1:00:06
  It doesn't give you a skill that's going to be useful as far
• 1:00:08
  as providing. The only way that that goes is
• 1:00:11
  if you want to do sociology, you've got to go up to a PhD
• 1:00:14
  level and be willing to work in education because that's the
• 1:00:16
  only thing that's going to happen with that degree for the
• 1:00:18
  most part, unless you're doing like organizational psychology.
• 1:00:21
  But then there's degrees specifically for the ways that
• 1:00:24
  sociology is used, right? So I think we really need to
• 1:00:29
  move away from this idea that I hate how colleges do this.
• 1:00:33
  Colleges advertise to kids, hey, you're going to give us $50,000
• 1:00:36
  of your future and you're going to be so much better off
• 1:00:39
  professionally for having done this.
• 1:00:41
  And then when the kids graduate, they're like, well, we promised
• 1:00:43
  you an education, not a job. Yeah.
• 1:00:47
  We we really set people up for failure and I certainly felt set
• 1:00:50
  up for failure that way. Luckily I was able to join the
• 1:00:54
  Air Force. I went into the Air Force very
• 1:00:55
  late. I was 27 when I joined, almost
• 1:00:58
  28, and the Air Force has a cut off of 28 before you need a
• 1:01:02
  waiver, so I got in just by the skin of my teeth.
• 1:01:05
  Why did you have to do Air Force or why did you have to enlist?
• 1:01:09
  Because I didn't have anything else to do.
• 1:01:11
  I didn't know what else to do with my life.
• 1:01:13
  I was lost. I was depressed.
• 1:01:15
  Do you do? You recommend that, Do you think
• 1:01:18
  that was a good, do you think it's a good choice for people
• 1:01:20
  that or for? I think it was a good choice for
• 1:01:22
  me, yeah. So the military is a viable
• 1:01:27
  choice for a lot of people. It is not a viable choice for
• 1:01:29
  everybody, and I think public service can be.
• 1:01:33
  I wish we had more ways for men and boys to be of public service
• 1:01:37
  outside of the military, but we don't.
• 1:01:41
  For me, the Air Force saved my life.
• 1:01:43
  And I know for a lot of people it does.
• 1:01:46
  And there's a lot of people it really hurts.
• 1:01:49
  I was very lucky in my service. And so service is complicated.
• 1:01:52
  There are literally millions of people who have served, all with
• 1:01:55
  drastically different experiences.
• 1:01:57
  Every branch is different. Every job within every branch is
• 1:01:59
  different. And you don't know what that's
• 1:02:01
  going to look like for you until you're in.
• 1:02:04
  I was lucky in that I had friends since I was since I was
• 1:02:07
  28. I had friends that joined out of
• 1:02:08
  high school that were getting out of the military and talked
• 1:02:11
  me through the process and were able to kind of give me some
• 1:02:13
  guidance on how to aim my career in the military to make sure I
• 1:02:17
  had the best chance possible for good outcomes.
• 1:02:20
  And it worked. I was really lucky.
• 1:02:22
  I did intelligence work. I got to live in Korea for a
• 1:02:25
  year. I got to live in England for two
• 1:02:26
  years. I got to learn a very marketable
• 1:02:29
  skill that I don't like doing. And the military offers a broad
• 1:02:36
  range of impact. You know, the, you're more than
• 1:02:39
  your job in the military. You are an airman, you are a
• 1:02:42
  soldier, you are a Marine. And so even if you don't like
• 1:02:44
  your job, but you like being a service member and things that
• 1:02:48
  you can do to lean into that role.
• 1:02:50
  And the military is also very good at every and making
• 1:02:53
  everyone who's touching something feel like they're part
• 1:02:56
  of a greater mission. Yeah.
• 1:02:59
  So the the kind of anecdote for it that I think best sums it up
• 1:03:02
  is there was a president touring an air Air Force or, sorry,
• 1:03:06
  there was a president touring an aircraft carrier, and he comes
• 1:03:10
  across the mail boy. And the mail boy is the lowest
• 1:03:13
  ranking person on the ship who's pushing a cart of mail.
• 1:03:16
  And so of course, the president stops and says, oh, young man,
• 1:03:18
  what do you do on the ship? He's like, my job is the most
• 1:03:19
  important job on the ship, Sir. OK, tell me about that.
• 1:03:23
  If I don't deliver this, we don't get potatoes for dinner.
• 1:03:25
  If I don't deliver this, the ship doesn't turn left.
• 1:03:27
  If I don't deliver this, we don't get munitions to do the
• 1:03:29
  mission. My job is the most important job
• 1:03:30
  on the ship, Sir. The military is very good at
• 1:03:35
  reminding people that the thing you're doing is contributing to
• 1:03:37
  an overall mission that's impacting big things.
• 1:03:41
  And we don't have that in a lot of other places.
• 1:03:43
  People working in a call center getting people's Internet hooked
• 1:03:46
  up have a hard time remembering that that Internet is making
• 1:03:49
  that person able to do telehealth appointments.
• 1:03:51
  It's making their life better. Instead, they're just answering
• 1:03:54
  calls and with people complaining about their bills,
• 1:03:56
  right? What I did find is that I wasn't
• 1:04:01
  going to do technical work. I was smart enough to do
• 1:04:04
  intelligence work. I was not smart enough to excel
• 1:04:08
  at intelligence work. What made me interesting with it
• 1:04:11
  is that I was very good at teaching it because I had a hard
• 1:04:13
  time learning it. And that's when I got into
• 1:04:15
  teaching. That's when I started learning
• 1:04:16
  my passion for teaching. And I also started doing work in
• 1:04:23
  advocacy and prevention for sexual assault and violence.
• 1:04:26
  And that's when I started to touch on the other person.
• 1:04:29
  So there was a, there was a training.
• 1:04:33
  So when I joined up, it was O 7. I got to Korea in O 8 and the
• 1:04:37
  Air Force was really the first branch that was really taken to
• 1:04:40
  task for sexual assault. And it goes.
• 1:04:43
  The same way with every organization, right?
• 1:04:45
  America has a problem with sexual assault.
• 1:04:47
  And so when an organization starts to recognize that this is
• 1:04:50
  a problem, training start to happen, Awareness starts to
• 1:04:52
  being built. There's usually a flood of
• 1:04:54
  reporting that once there is capacity for people to recognize
• 1:04:57
  a problem and there's a pathway to report a problem, there's
• 1:05:01
  this huge spike in reports and it scares everybody.
• 1:05:04
  And the Air Force wasn't any different.
• 1:05:05
  We had a huge scandal out of the Air Force Academy with assaults.
• 1:05:12
  We had a very public thing where 2 drill sergeants have been
• 1:05:16
  assaulting junior airmen as they came into the military and it
• 1:05:19
  made national news. And so the Air Force decided to
• 1:05:23
  do something about that, which was really good.
• 1:05:25
  But before all that happened, I was in a training, and a woman
• 1:05:30
  shows up and her job is to do sexual assault prevention.
• 1:05:33
  At the time, the training was really bad.
• 1:05:36
  It was basically someone standing in front of a
• 1:05:38
  PowerPoint going, hey, did you know that rape is bad, that you
• 1:05:42
  shouldn't do it, And if you do do it, you're going to get
• 1:05:44
  really punished. So don't be a rapist.
• 1:05:47
  That's a terrible way to talk about it.
• 1:05:52
  Who? Who thinks that's a good?
• 1:05:53
  Who thinks that's a good curriculum?
• 1:05:55
  People who are trying to do a curriculum for a million people.
• 1:05:59
  Right, I guess the. Military is very about
• 1:06:02
  consequence, right? Like the one of the things
• 1:06:04
  that's very nice about the military is hierarchical and
• 1:06:07
  authoritative. So punishments are clear, routes
• 1:06:11
  for reporting are clear. But what that ends up doing in
• 1:06:14
  most cases is convincing a room full of men that either
• 1:06:17
  everybody thinks every man is a rapist, or that this is so
• 1:06:20
  stupid it couldn't possibly be a problem.
• 1:06:23
  Right. And so I'm in the room and I'm a
• 1:06:26
  junior enlisted guy and it's my first duty station.
• 1:06:28
  And the way that works for the for the Air Force at least, is
• 1:06:31
  that you show up and you get a two week training on what it
• 1:06:33
  means now that you're out of training.
• 1:06:34
  Like here's the base, here's all the resources for you, Here's
• 1:06:37
  the different things that are going to be available to you.
• 1:06:39
  Here's how to be welcome to the Air Force.
• 1:06:41
  Now that you're able to do your job, welcome to being a real
• 1:06:43
  airman. And so we get this 20 minute
• 1:06:46
  briefing from this woman about how rape is bad.
• 1:06:49
  And one of the guys in the room is a police officer.
• 1:06:52
  And he puts his hand up and very flippantly said, ma'am, I get
• 1:06:56
  this briefing once a week. I'm a police officer.
• 1:06:58
  Is there any way we can have a different conversation about
• 1:07:00
  this? It's really rude.
• 1:07:02
  As a junior enlisted guy, you don't talk to a Sergeant that
• 1:07:04
  way. But the sentiment was very real,
• 1:07:07
  right? Like, hey, we, we've had this
• 1:07:08
  briefing a lot. Is there a different
• 1:07:09
  conversation we can have? And the woman lost her temper
• 1:07:14
  and she yelled at him and said sit down and shut up.
• 1:07:17
  If you'd stop effing raping people, I could stop giving this
• 1:07:21
  gosh darn. And that locked up the room.
• 1:07:26
  It was mostly men in the room. And she essentially just called
• 1:07:29
  every man in the room a rapist. And there was a palpable anger
• 1:07:34
  about how she talked about it. But we were all junior.
• 1:07:38
  And so we all had to sit there and shut up because that's how
• 1:07:40
  that works. And I was older, right?
• 1:07:42
  I was 29 by then, 28. And I got I was just as angry as
• 1:07:48
  every other guy in the room, I imagined in that moment.
• 1:07:50
  But then as like, she finished her slides, I started noticing
• 1:07:53
  things. I noticed how kind of haggard
• 1:07:55
  she looked. Her hair wasn't done well, which
• 1:07:59
  in the military is a big deal. Like not having a crisp
• 1:08:01
  appearance in the military is a big deal.
• 1:08:03
  I noticed the rings under her eyes.
• 1:08:05
  I noticed how tired she looked and how frustrated she was.
• 1:08:09
  And it got me curious as to what was happening with this woman
• 1:08:11
  that she just did that. And that's when I found out the
• 1:08:14
  base I was at at the time had the highest occurrence of sexual
• 1:08:17
  assault in the Air Force, and that the resources for it
• 1:08:20
  weren't weren't any different than any other base in the Air
• 1:08:23
  Force. It was one officer, one
• 1:08:26
  Sergeant, and as many volunteers as they could get to help to try
• 1:08:30
  to take on this problem. Yeah, she was absolutely
• 1:08:35
  inundated with horror. That was her whole job was to
• 1:08:39
  sit there and listen to people as they tell stories and see
• 1:08:43
  justice not generally get done. And so that's when I started
• 1:08:47
  volunteering. That's when I got involved.
• 1:08:48
  That's when I wanted to be of help.
• 1:08:51
  And that was great. I learned a lot.
• 1:08:53
  I got to learn how to sit with people in pain.
• 1:08:55
  I got to learn what resources there are and aren't for these
• 1:08:58
  things. And then when I got to England,
• 1:09:02
  the Air Force started up a new way to talk about these things.
• 1:09:05
  It's called like the bystander approach, right?
• 1:09:07
  60% of all crime is committed in front of people.
• 1:09:10
  So 60% of the time it's going to be somebody else stepping in
• 1:09:13
  that stops a crime. And sexual assault is one of
• 1:09:16
  them. And so I got trained on how to
• 1:09:19
  the, the joke is for a few years my job was convincing airman to
• 1:09:23
  punch rapist. It was a great job.
• 1:09:25
  It's my favorite job I've ever had.
• 1:09:28
  And so 15 to 20 guys at a time, I would do 90 minutes with them
• 1:09:33
  and I would convince them that sexual assault is a problem,
• 1:09:36
  it's a thing that happens and that they can step in and do
• 1:09:39
  something and should, and then give them the things to do that
• 1:09:42
  besides punching people, right? That's tends to be a bad way
• 1:09:44
  you're going to get arrested. Don't always just go punch
• 1:09:45
  people because you think something bad is happening.
• 1:09:48
  But I really like that work. And while I was being trained on
• 1:09:51
  how to do it, I was really lucky in that I was trained by the
• 1:09:53
  PhDs that developed out the program for the Air Force.
• 1:09:55
  They showed up. I was in Europe.
• 1:09:57
  I was one of like 2 trainers for England.
• 1:10:01
  And so I got to train a lot of people.
• 1:10:03
  And one of the trainers pulled me aside for lunch during the
• 1:10:06
  training. It was like, hey, Tim, let's,
• 1:10:07
  let's go. At that point, it was hey,
• 1:10:09
  Winicky, let's go get it, let's go get lunch, right?
• 1:10:11
  And she looked at me. She's like, hey, what do you do?
• 1:10:14
  And I'm like, oh, I do intelligence work, it's OK.
• 1:10:15
  And she's like, yeah, you're doing the wrong thing.
• 1:10:17
  You should be doing this. Not really.
• 1:10:20
  Yeah, and she was right. I think for Human Services work,
• 1:10:25
  most guys are never told that that's a viable option for them.
• 1:10:28
  I certainly didn't think of myself as counselor, but looking
• 1:10:31
  back, I've always been the person people tell things to.
• 1:10:34
  I'm the guy sitting on the plane that somebody tells about their
• 1:10:36
  affair, like perfect stranger. I've always been that person.
• 1:10:42
  And so that led me to looking at different ways to engage in
• 1:10:46
  Human Services. For a little while, I thought
• 1:10:48
  there would be a job for me doing the interpersonal violence
• 1:10:50
  training. But you cannot get a job doing
• 1:10:53
  that without being willing to continue to do the advocacy
• 1:10:56
  work. And by then, the advocacy work
• 1:10:58
  is kind of starting to burn me out.
• 1:11:01
  When you're working a crisis line or you're working as an
• 1:11:03
  advocate, you're talking to people on the worst day of their
• 1:11:05
  life, and you generally do not get to see them heal.
• 1:11:09
  You hear them in the crisis, you help them through the crisis,
• 1:11:11
  and then you do the next one. And so because of that, it took
• 1:11:15
  about six months after I got out of the military to figure out
• 1:11:17
  what I wanted to do next. And I realized counseling was a
• 1:11:19
  viable option where, yeah, you're with people on the bad
• 1:11:22
  day of their life, but you also get to see them heal.
• 1:11:24
  You get to help them heal. You get to the end of the story.
• 1:11:27
  And so it's not just pain all the time.
• 1:11:30
  Right, right. Can I ask real quickly before I
• 1:11:33
  just have you noticed, did you kind of anecdotally kind of pick
• 1:11:37
  up any kind of patterns or common commonality between
• 1:11:44
  people that tend to be aggressive or people that tend
• 1:11:46
  to be tend to assault or like is there, is this something you've
• 1:11:52
  noticed over the course of the year you're doing that?
• 1:11:54
  So let me see if I'm if I'm getting your question correct.
• 1:11:58
  Are there things that we can notice and predict whether
• 1:12:01
  somebody will be an abuser? Or behavior patterns to look
• 1:12:04
  for, yeah. Of course there are.
• 1:12:07
  OK, of course. What?
• 1:12:08
  What are some of them? So, so one, it's not about
• 1:12:13
  aggression. Abuse is about control, sexual
• 1:12:18
  assault is about control. It's not about whether
• 1:12:20
  somebody's attractive or not. It's about somebody needing to
• 1:12:22
  feel control over somebody else to feel whole.
• 1:12:26
  And so there's kind of two tacks that I see.
• 1:12:30
  You have your habitual abusers who are the guys that have 10
• 1:12:34
  people that report on them before they're caught.
• 1:12:37
  Those aren't the norm. So the best way to I can see to
• 1:12:42
  articulate this and the best way for guys to hear this, to maybe
• 1:12:45
  recognize what they do might contribute to a problem,
• 1:12:48
  something called the continuum of harm.
• 1:12:50
  So I want you to imagine that there's a line with an arrow,
• 1:12:53
  and the arrow is pointing to the right, and on the right side is
• 1:12:57
  someone who sexually assaults someone.
• 1:13:00
  OK? Not everyone who tells a sexist
• 1:13:05
  joke is a rapist. Not everyone who does an
• 1:13:10
  inappropriate work search and watches pornography at work is a
• 1:13:14
  rapist. Not everyone who inappropriately
• 1:13:17
  touches a stranger is a rapist. A rapist does all of these
• 1:13:22
  things right. And So what happens is no one
• 1:13:26
  looks at themselves like the villain.
• 1:13:27
  No one's like twisting A mustache going I'm a horrible
• 1:13:30
  person and I'm going to do horrible things.
• 1:13:32
  They have a story about why it's OK.
• 1:13:33
  They're doing what they're doing right.
• 1:13:35
  And so for guys we like, oh, it's just a joke, right?
• 1:13:39
  We're in a group of guys. We tell, we tell a joke, a lewd
• 1:13:41
  joke about a woman walking by and we don't think anything of
• 1:13:44
  it. We're like, oh, we're just being
• 1:13:45
  funny. Of course, no one's going to do
• 1:13:46
  anything like that. One of the guys in that group is
• 1:13:50
  and when he hears you making that joke, he thinks you agree
• 1:13:53
  with what he does. When a guy sends you an off
• 1:13:58
  color video at work, he's not thinking like I'm encouraging A
• 1:14:02
  rapist. He's thinking, isn't this funny?
• 1:14:05
  He is encouraging rapist. And so there's no, you don't
• 1:14:11
  want to get to the point where you're not a professional
• 1:14:13
  assessing whether somebody's doing horrible things, right?
• 1:14:15
  That's not your job as an individual.
• 1:14:17
  But what you can do is you can stop these behaviors socially
• 1:14:22
  because what slowly starts to happen is these guys go wait,
• 1:14:25
  that's there's something wrong with what I'm doing.
• 1:14:27
  The other men in my life are saying that this isn't OK, This
• 1:14:31
  is weird. That's not what's been going on,
• 1:14:33
  Right. We used to joke like this.
• 1:14:34
  We used to do these things. They used to laugh when I would
• 1:14:36
  do this thing at the nightclub instead of, hey, man, like,
• 1:14:41
  don't do that. Yeah, there's nothing good
• 1:14:43
  happening there. Yeah.
• 1:14:45
  Instead, let's, you know, let's make jokes about baseball or
• 1:14:47
  about how about how you have bed haircut instead of what her rear
• 1:14:50
  end looks like. And so it's complicated.
• 1:14:54
  The big thing, though, to remember is about it's about
• 1:14:56
  control. People who feel out of control
• 1:14:59
  in their life will try to feel control in their life by taking
• 1:15:02
  control of somebody else's, and that's where abuse and sexual
• 1:15:06
  assault comes in as it's a drive to control because they feel
• 1:15:10
  insecure in the world. It's fascinating.
• 1:15:13
  So I guess people and I guess that's why I don't know whether
• 1:15:17
  it's, I don't know statistically whether it's more common or not,
• 1:15:19
  but I feel like you hear more stories of people that are in
• 1:15:21
  power abusing other people because.
• 1:15:24
  There's something. About power, that's just so.
• 1:15:27
  Power and control. It's not something about power,
• 1:15:29
  it's that you cannot be abusive without some lever of power.
• 1:15:33
  You have to have power to take control from somebody, whether
• 1:15:36
  that's physically, emotionally, financially.
• 1:15:40
  Back in 2007 when I got started, the stat was is 95% of all
• 1:15:45
  violent crime was committed by men.
• 1:15:47
  Now the stat is 78% of all violent crime is committed by
• 1:15:50
  men. I think a major contributing
• 1:15:52
  factor to that change is because women have more power.
• 1:15:56
  When you have power, it's easier to fall into those roles.
• 1:16:02
  And that's a 15 year, it's over a 15 year span.
• 1:16:07
  It's changed, and some of it's also just because we've changed
• 1:16:09
  how we do reporting. People are more willing to see
• 1:16:12
  women be violent. The range of what is considered
• 1:16:15
  abusive has broadened out. So now financial abuse is a
• 1:16:19
  thing. Emotional abuse is a thing.
• 1:16:21
  It used to not be considered abuse to block somebody's access
• 1:16:25
  from leaving a room. So let's say, let's say that
• 1:16:28
  I'm. I'm a big guy, right?
• 1:16:29
  Let's say I'm 61. I'm 200 lbs.
• 1:16:31
  Yeah. Let's say that I am intimate
• 1:16:33
  with a woman who is 5 foot and 90 lbs.
• 1:16:36
  And she has decided that our argument is not over until she
• 1:16:40
  says it over and she stands in a doorway and doesn't let me leave
• 1:16:44
  that room. Right.
• 1:16:46
  And then she says, if you move me, I'm calling the cops, you're
• 1:16:50
  going to stay here and you're going to listen to what I have
• 1:16:52
  to say and you're going to do what I want.
• 1:16:54
  And I'm not leaving this doorway until that happens because she
• 1:16:57
  wants to control the situation. She wants to feel like she has
• 1:16:59
  control. And if I move her to leave the
• 1:17:02
  room, she'll call the cops and they'll see a six foot one guy
• 1:17:05
  and. You'll have to.
• 1:17:07
  Show up and say potentially that's physical abuse.
• 1:17:13
  I'm working my access from leaving.
• 1:17:15
  Yes, that wasn't listed as something that was abusive until
• 1:17:20
  5 or 10 years ago. What would you say we we'd call
• 1:17:23
  that manipulation blackmail. I mean, there's, there's,
• 1:17:28
  there's a million different things that I guess you could
• 1:17:29
  call it, no. She's controlling my physical
• 1:17:31
  space. That's physical abuse.
• 1:17:34
  Fascinating. So that's what physical abuse
• 1:17:35
  would fall under your it would limit your physical autonomy and
• 1:17:39
  your ability to do what you want to do.
• 1:17:41
  Yes. Wow.
• 1:17:45
  Yeah, I guess that is a broad, a much broader definition.
• 1:17:48
  You know, I think that people are just used to hearing, well,
• 1:17:50
  did he, did he lay a hand on you?
• 1:17:52
  Did you know, did she, did she, did she do anything to you?
• 1:17:54
  Did like, wait, what? What happened?
• 1:17:55
  There and that's the problem, right?
• 1:17:56
  It's it's the we we think of it as like the perfect victim,
• 1:17:59
  right So if we look at sexual assault, why people don't
• 1:18:02
  believe women have been assaulted as they always start
• 1:18:04
  asking questions about what she was doing instead of what
• 1:18:06
  happened, right? Oh, did you fight back?
• 1:18:09
  What were you wearing? Where were you at?
• 1:18:11
  Why were you there? None of that matters.
• 1:18:14
  What matters is somebody raped her, right?
• 1:18:18
  What was he doing? Why was he there?
• 1:18:20
  Why was this happening? Why did he thought he, why did
• 1:18:22
  he think he could do that? What was going on for him that
• 1:18:24
  that occurred, Right. And so when we change the frame
• 1:18:28
  to what the perpetrator is doing, we get a much clearer
• 1:18:32
  picture of whether something happens or not.
• 1:18:35
  Right, right. And so abuse is about control
• 1:18:41
  and control only comes through power.
• 1:18:44
  And there's different leverage points for power.
• 1:18:47
  Financial abuse, right? If you're an adult on an
• 1:18:50
  allowance, that's a dangerous place to be.
• 1:18:55
  If one partner has complete and utter control of the financial
• 1:18:59
  decisions and you're not allowed to contribute to those
• 1:19:03
  decisions, that's financial abuse.
• 1:19:04
  That's scary. That's a.
• 1:19:05
  That's a power dynamic that is unhealthy.
• 1:19:09
  Yeah, I'm, I'm so, so, so skeptical of power and control
• 1:19:15
  in that kind of way. And, and I know it's, and one of
• 1:19:17
  the reasons why is because I know I'm not above it.
• 1:19:19
  That's part of why, you know, it's a human thing, you know?
• 1:19:22
  Yeah. And you know, whether it's ways
• 1:19:25
  that I've behaved that I'm not proud of, you know, as a kid or
• 1:19:28
  whether it's even like now I teach high school part time and
• 1:19:31
  I've talked about this before, but like a student will ask me
• 1:19:33
  can I do an assignment a certain way?
• 1:19:35
  And I'll immediately respond no. And I'm like, wait, why am I
• 1:19:38
  saying no? I'm saying no because he didn't
• 1:19:40
  think that he wants to do it the way that I asked him to.
• 1:19:43
  Or is he, am I saying no, you know, because he's not really
• 1:19:46
  doesn't want to do the work and like he just being an immature
• 1:19:48
  kid. And a lot more often, it's more
• 1:19:51
  the first than the second case and a lot more, it's more about
• 1:19:53
  just me wanting him to do what I want him to do as opposed to him
• 1:19:57
  learning something, you know, And that's that scares me, you
• 1:20:00
  know, and it scares me about myself and it scares me that I
• 1:20:02
  could potentially, you know, be like that.
• 1:20:04
  So I'm very, very sensitive about it.
• 1:20:06
  I, I, I really, it's something that really weighs on.
• 1:20:08
  Me so well, and this is the hard part about these conversations.
• 1:20:13
  Everyone. Everyone has capacity to reach
• 1:20:16
  for control. Sure.
• 1:20:18
  When we're scared, we reach for control.
• 1:20:19
  When we're nervous, we reach for control.
• 1:20:21
  When we feel overwhelmed, we reach for control.
• 1:20:24
  So as a teacher, right? This kid comes and he says I'd
• 1:20:26
  like to do this assignment differently.
• 1:20:29
  The reality is that means you're going to have to grade it
• 1:20:31
  differently, and that means that you're going to have to think
• 1:20:34
  harder. You're going to have to come up
• 1:20:35
  with a special set of circumstances for this person.
• 1:20:37
  And as a professor, I very much relate to the entire weekend
• 1:20:42
  grading the big assignment and how annoying and awful that is,
• 1:20:44
  reading the same damn thing over and over and over.
• 1:20:48
  But by having it be the same damn thing, I can get through
• 1:20:52
  that in six hours for my class of 30.
• 1:20:55
  I can get, I can go through and I can grade all of those.
• 1:20:57
  But if all the sudden somebody has a specialty assignment, I
• 1:20:59
  got to think really hard and make it fit into the paradigm.
• 1:21:02
  And all of a sudden now I'm doing 7 hours and 1 of the
• 1:21:04
  entire hours is for this person. So regardless of whether it's a
• 1:21:09
  good idea for them, depending on my overwhelm, I can say no,
• 1:21:15
  right? It's how you say no.
• 1:21:16
  It's a do you explain why? Right, right.
• 1:21:20
  Sometimes it's OK to protect you as the educator's ability to
• 1:21:23
  educate. Sometimes it's about you getting
• 1:21:28
  frustrated and needing to control the people instead of
• 1:21:31
  having authority over the people.
• 1:21:33
  Authority is providing a box for people to play in and let them
• 1:21:36
  go nuts in. Control is dictating step by
• 1:21:39
  step in what the process is going to look like.
• 1:21:42
  Right, I don't like control. I don't really like authority
• 1:21:47
  either, but I I understand that a lot of people need it to
• 1:21:52
  function. That's in the framework people
• 1:21:54
  don't like. It's funny when you look at
• 1:21:57
  managerial leadership and what the complaints about the
• 1:21:59
  different generations are. The boomers are very rigid and
• 1:22:03
  people are very don't like how rigid they are.
• 1:22:07
  Xers are aloof and tend to be a little unengaged.
• 1:22:12
  Millennials have soft, mushy boundaries because they're
• 1:22:15
  uncomfortable with authority. But when you're talking about
• 1:22:19
  teaching, you have authority over those students.
• 1:22:21
  You are a gatekeeper to them finishing the course.
• 1:22:24
  You are the one that gets to assess and say whether they
• 1:22:26
  learned what they learned. You have authority.
• 1:22:29
  And if you don't accept that authority, you give mushy
• 1:22:32
  boundaries. You don't provide the structure
• 1:22:34
  they need to learn. And then occasionally you hit
• 1:22:38
  these points where you're like, I need control.
• 1:22:39
  So you rather than having an acceptance of authority and a
• 1:22:42
  structure around it, you start grabbing randomly for control
• 1:22:45
  and it feels very chaotic to your students.
• 1:22:49
  Right. I mean, I so I and it's fun.
• 1:22:54
  Yeah. Go ahead.
• 1:22:55
  Sorry, please. Yeah.
• 1:22:58
  Well. It's because we, we equate
• 1:23:00
  authority with control, right, Instead of leadership, Yeah.
• 1:23:03
  So the, there's a, there's a, it's not black or white, there's
• 1:23:09
  grey. And paying attention to knowing
• 1:23:11
  when you're going too far into control or too away from
• 1:23:14
  authority, right? It goes back to that, like being
• 1:23:16
  in the middle of the river, I need to accept my authority and
• 1:23:19
  I need to enforce my authority without becoming controlling.
• 1:23:23
  Like how am I just putting structure around these kids so
• 1:23:25
  they learn? Right.
• 1:23:29
  Right, that's what I kind of, that's what I Yeah.
• 1:23:31
  And, and what's cool to see is that there's different students
• 1:23:35
  that funk that that actually perform differently based on,
• 1:23:38
  you know, like some students, I'll just give them a creative
• 1:23:40
  prompt and say go write. You know, it was a dark and
• 1:23:43
  stormy night, Snoopy, you know, go write.
• 1:23:45
  And then on the other hand, there's students that I need to
• 1:23:48
  tell them exactly what I want them to write.
• 1:23:50
  And then they'll, and then they'll apply their own, you
• 1:23:53
  know, their own experience or their own perception to it.
• 1:23:56
  But, but they need to be told they, they need some more rigid
• 1:24:01
  outlines. And it's cool to see how
• 1:24:03
  different, how different people require different instructions.
• 1:24:05
  And it takes me a couple of months to figure out,
• 1:24:07
  unfortunately, you know, when I have a new group of students
• 1:24:10
  who's who you know, and, and how do they learn?
• 1:24:13
  And, you know, that's really, that's really, really important
• 1:24:15
  to consider too. Yeah, I think it goes into the
• 1:24:20
  art of instruction. And so when you're teaching a, a
• 1:24:25
  bad teacher has one way to explain things.
• 1:24:29
  A competent teacher has 2A, great teacher has three.
• 1:24:34
  That's it. That's the distinction, right?
• 1:24:37
  And so for you paying attention to your students and like, OK,
• 1:24:39
  they, the students need to learn this.
• 1:24:40
  I'm teaching them this. If I have three ways to teach it
• 1:24:46
  and I can get to the student with the right way of the three
• 1:24:49
  that they're going to grasp it, 90% of that class is going to
• 1:24:53
  walk away feeling good about what they learned.
• 1:24:55
  That's a great teacher. You're always going to lose 1 in
• 1:24:59
  10-1 in 10. Students are just not going to.
• 1:25:02
  There's always. I really like the rule of 10 in
• 1:25:05
  social sessions. I I just like the rule of 10,
• 1:25:08
  right? Like you walk into a room, one
• 1:25:10
  in 10 people, you're not going to like 8 out of the 10 people
• 1:25:12
  you're not going to remember in two years and one in one in 10
• 1:25:15
  people, or it's going to be a potential connection, right?
• 1:25:17
  And getting rid of the morality of that and just accepting it
• 1:25:19
  makes teaching so much more fun. Yeah, I never thought about like
• 1:25:23
  that. I have to think about that.
• 1:25:24
  I take it personally with everyone I feel like.
• 1:25:28
  Oh, well, that's because of you're anxious, right?
• 1:25:29
  You like your, your identity as an educator and a person is how
• 1:25:33
  people see you instead of how you are, and we all fall into
• 1:25:36
  it, right? If you care about how you're
• 1:25:37
  perceived, it's because you care about your status.
• 1:25:39
  You care. About how they learn.
• 1:25:41
  They care if they're learning or not.
• 1:25:43
  Well. Right, but if they're judging
• 1:25:45
  you for that, if the kids being surly like that hurts.
• 1:25:48
  Right. Oh, oh, I don't care what they
• 1:25:49
  think of me. I just care that they learn.
• 1:25:51
  I, I, I think if they, if they walk away and they hate me, if
• 1:25:54
  they hate me, like Mr. Hersman was the worst teacher I ever
• 1:25:56
  had. But you know, I learned.
• 1:25:57
  But they learned how to do it exactly.
• 1:25:59
  Yeah, they're like great, That's that's my job, you know?
• 1:26:01
  But yeah, I definitely don't need to be liked by 15 year
• 1:26:04
  olds. That's that's totally OK with
• 1:26:05
  me. Thank God.
• 1:26:08
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:26:09
  Anybody working with teenagers who's more concerned about
• 1:26:10
  whether a teenager likes you versus what they're learning,
• 1:26:13
  you're probably doing it wrong. Yeah, almost certainly, Tim, I
• 1:26:17
  feel like we can go on for another long time.
• 1:26:19
  Maybe we'll do it. Maybe we'll do around 2 in the
• 1:26:21
  in the in the in the future because this was a lot of fun.
• 1:26:23
  I feel like we barely, I feel like you barely scratch the
• 1:26:26
  surface over here. But an hour and a half zip by, I
• 1:26:29
  really, really appreciate your time.
• 1:26:31
  And this is, this is really just so much fun and there's so many
• 1:26:35
  different directions we can go. So I would love to, I'd love to
• 1:26:38
  come back and record another, another part at some point.
• 1:26:41
  But until now, you've been so generous and kind of the time
• 1:26:44
  and so thoughtful. Thank you really so much for
• 1:26:46
  such a great conversation. Yeah, of course man.
• 1:26:49
  Thanks for having me. On of course, and I guess we'll
• 1:26:53
  leave you with your podcast is is called American Masculinity.
• 1:26:58
  We'll put the little post a link with it and I guess we'll just
• 1:27:03
  keep an eye out on that. I wish you lots of success.
• 1:27:05
  We didn't talk about it. He has to talk about it.
• 1:27:09
  We talked about a lot of the topics related, so the the
• 1:27:12
  podcast is just on what's going on with guys in America and the
• 1:27:14
  different facets and ways with experts.
• 1:27:16
  It's really been lovely to have more nuanced conversations
• 1:27:19
  around these topics with people who are smart enough and
• 1:27:22
  educated enough to have informed broad opinions and get out of
• 1:27:25
  that, like black and white to the Gray of these things.
• 1:27:27
  It's been really wonderful to do and I've had a lot of good
• 1:27:29
  times. Yeah, I, I listened to, I
• 1:27:32
  listened to the recent episode of Dyslexia.
• 1:27:34
  I thought it was great. But I.
• 1:27:36
  Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it was really, really, it
• 1:27:38
  was so it was so. And I love the introduction.
• 1:27:40
  I thought that was thoughtful How you how you prepared the
• 1:27:43
  audience for the conversation that was going to happen.
• 1:27:45
  I thought it's really, really great.
• 1:27:47
  And and, you know, keep it up because I think that it it, it
• 1:27:52
  looks great. It's great content and, and it's
• 1:27:55
  really impressive. It's really wonderful.
• 1:27:58
  Oh, thank you so much man. I feel that it feels really good
• 1:28:01
  to. Hear, of course, of course.
• 1:28:03
  Thank you so much for the time today and we'll be in touch.
• 1:28:04
  OK, I'll talk to you later. Have a great day.