On this episode of the podcast, the brother and sister duo of the sit down with the man himself, Dan Doty. Dan and I have known each other for a long time and have been friends for almost 5 years now. We talk about how we met and fell in love with each other over the years, how we first met, and some of our favorite memories of growing up together. This episode is a must listen and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did making it. If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron and leaving us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks to our sponsor, First Light WATER! First Light is a Wisconsin based company that specializes in whitewater whitewater rafting and whitewater camping. They have some of the best whitewater adventures I've ever taken and I can't wait to take you out on a boat ride with them in the middle of the Platte River in Montana, AKA the most beautiful state in the entire country. Enjoy the ride! Enjoy and spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Cheers! -The Crew at ThirdLove Crew -Your Hosts: , & . and . . . The Crew is is a production of ThirdLove Podcast Hosted by ThirdLove Media. and ThirdLove Productions. Music by ThirdSpace. Thank you so much love and support. - The Crew at podcast, We are your support is so appreciated! and we appreciate all the love, support, support and support is greatly appreciated. Thank you for all the support we can't thank you, we appreciate you, so much, we can t do it enough! , Thank you, you're amazing, we really appreciate it, so we can do it, we're so much more, we love you, and we're back with you, thank you back, we'll keep you, back, back to you, more than you can see you, Thank you back again, we won't stop, we re back, more, back and more than we can you, thanks, we are back, Thank You, we hear you, bye, we get it, more and more, more coming soon, more in the next week, more of you, coming back, bye bye, bye Thank you.
00:00:28.000Well, that was back when it was October of 2012. I thought there was only two months left in the world because I thought the Mayan calendar was correct and it was December 21st, 2012 was going to end the world.
00:01:08.000For people who don't know, if you're ever in a cold area, it's so important that you have a base layer of merino wool because that shit gets wet and you stay warm.
00:01:16.000Even if you sweat in it, you stay warm.
00:01:18.000And it doesn't stink half as much as the synthetic versions.
00:03:50.000That was when we were in Wisconsin, that video that you just put up.
00:03:52.000But when we did do that, man, that was where Lewis and Clark had made some stops on the expedition.
00:04:01.000And that's one of the coolest things about doing it with Rinella, because he knows so much about the history of the United States and the settling of the United States and also the Nez Perce Indian stories that he would tell us.
00:04:14.000Yeah, and that's when I heard the story about the real story, the original story about the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Revenant, like what really happened before they turned it into a movie.
00:04:25.000Yeah, he told me that story, the actual story about the guy that got left behind and crawled back many, many miles.
00:04:41.000Especially the grizzly bear attack was a real freaky thing.
00:04:44.000The real grizzly bear attacks, though, man, I bet the real grizzly just kind of swatted that dude once, and then he fell down and then it left him alone.
00:08:25.000Yeah, and then they just, it's the easiest, softest part of the animal.
00:08:28.000You just start eating on the back end.
00:08:31.000I was listening to a podcast today about wolves in Idaho where they were talking about how when you go deep into the backcountry where people can't get to or where it's very difficult, really rocky terrain, the wolves are just running rampant out there.
00:09:09.000The most memorable, we were in a valley in Alaska, and it was dusk, and just two massive mountain ranges on each side, and I don't know, it might have been Giannis, somebody yelled, and somebody spotted one across the river, and we went and looked at it, and it was,
00:09:57.000The only thing that ever gives me pause in the woods is a grizzly because, you know, Steve and I, we got charged that once and ever since that happened, my bear radar is more intense.
00:12:42.000What's weird, people are getting really touchy-feely about sharks because they hear all about these sharks getting slaughtered for shark fin soup.
00:13:02.000It's like we were talking before about science, that so many people want to argue things online, but they don't want to actually look into, like, what are the studies that have been done?
00:14:15.000All three species of thresher shark is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because of their declining populations.
00:14:23.000Fishing for them is regulated in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it is not illegal.
00:14:52.000I mean, you can't really control what kind of fish you catch when you go fishing, and if you catch a fish that's illegal, what do you do?
00:14:59.000The problem with catch and release, this is a dirty secret, ladies and gentlemen, because people do go catch and release fishing, and I've released fish before, a lot of them die.
00:17:50.000A friend of mine caught one, and it was apparently enormous, and he was furious because the guide, they went fishing with the guide, the guide cut the line because it was so big.
00:17:58.000Do you think he just couldn't get it in the boat?
00:18:52.000He had to chew through it over a winter.
00:18:54.000My little brother shot me a deer and gave it to me for Christmas, and it was the first slightly off-tasting animal that I've tasted in, man, seven years.
00:19:05.000You know, and I've been eating a lot of animals, you know, over my course of time.
00:19:10.000You know, we're talking about meat eater, which I worked on for a long time.
00:19:12.000I don't anymore, but I ate a lot of animals, and they all tasted exceptionally good, and my brother shot this one, and...
00:20:54.000It's not just that it's like you went to a restaurant, you had a delicious meal.
00:20:58.000It's like, no, you busted your ass for five days, humping over mountains, finally put a stalk on a deer, shot the deer, killed it, dragged it back to camp, cut it up, butchered it, and then we ate it.
00:21:11.000And then when Steve took that doe head and buried it underground, because, what is that Guthrie book?
00:24:45.000Well, you know, my buddy Adam lives in Australia, Adam Greentree.
00:24:50.000And in Australia, they have wild cows where cows...
00:24:55.000At one time were domestic, but they broke loose, and they've been for many, many, many generations living wild, and they're extremely dangerous.
00:25:10.000Yeah, that's a fucking- Big scary animal, but again a domestic animal that is not fighting off predators It's not I mean, it's just it doesn't want you to fuck with it.
00:25:21.000It's got these giant watermelon testicles and They're just full of piss and vinegar and that we don't eat those people don't know when you buy Meat from a cow you're buying meat from a steer and what a steer is a bull they cut his balls off when he's young so his testosterone stops so his body's mushy and soft and Yeah.
00:25:42.000But these bulls that Adam sees out in the bush in Australia are super aggressive and very dangerous.
00:25:51.000And one of his friends was torn apart by one, gored, like really badly.
00:26:28.000Cam Haines shot a water buffalo in Australia, and he said that he had one piece of meat in his mouth for half an hour trying to chew it down while he was practicing archery.
00:28:23.000You could take a trip for Mexican food.
00:28:24.000Because where you are, it's like, I feel like, I mean, I almost feel like I shouldn't say this on the podcast because I don't want anybody moving to Bozeman.
00:29:34.000But there's so many good things about it.
00:29:35.000And the landscape, like what you get to see when you're there, it's just stunning.
00:29:40.000And the access to the land is a huge thing, too.
00:29:42.000I mean, in Bozeman, from my house, in, I don't know how many, in four different directions, three different directions, you can be at a trail in 15 minutes.
00:30:18.000Yeah, in the lower 48, it's about as wild as it gets.
00:30:22.000And that leads me to what I want to bring up to you today, because I saw this today, where Trump is challenging some of the protection of certain national monuments and some public lands today.
00:30:35.000I told you fuckers, I knew this was coming.
00:30:37.000There were so many people that were telling me that Trump is going to protect our public lands because his son is a hunter and like, listen man, that guy worships money.
00:30:46.000There's money to be made in delisting these public, look at this, Trump order could roll back public land protections from three presidents.
00:30:55.000He's going to have a shitstorm on his hands though, man.
00:30:57.000Play this so we could hear exactly what he says.
00:33:00.000The order which Trump signed the Interior Department could lead to the reshaping of 24 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Parashant National Monument, Grand Staircase, Escalante National Monument, and the Basin Range National Monument, as well as a host of Pacific Ocean Monuments,
00:33:16.000including the World War II Valor and the Pacific National Monument.
00:33:40.000The move comes after Western Republican lawmakers, including Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, complained that Obama overused the law to overprotect land.
00:34:03.000What you know about, and what I think most people don't when you talk about this, the vast majority of the people in this country live in These communities and cities and towns and, you know, even small towns,
00:34:18.000they don't understand how much of this land that we live in is just this incredible, bizarre experiment in, like, the people having, the actual American people owning this incredible swath of public land.
00:34:38.000Like, what you're talking about, like, you can walk for days and days into that stuff.
00:34:42.000Yeah, I think they don't know that it exists, necessarily.
00:34:45.000And I think even, to me, more importantly, they don't understand the impact that that actually has on people and what it actually means to be able to be part of something like that.
00:34:54.000It's a really deep, important thing, and I think that people just...
00:34:58.000You know, you get your postcard tourists and you say, oh, I love the National Force.
00:35:02.000I love the national parks and let's drive around and take pictures.
00:35:29.000But the land itself has been there way longer.
00:35:32.000And that's, you know, sort of like the deep time part of that is what really interests me is because, you know, you step out into that in the right context and you're all of a sudden, you know, you're playing with something way bigger and more powerful and more impactful by just being part of a landscape that's...
00:35:50.000Yeah, the conservation thing is present and real.
00:35:53.000I grew up in Minnesota, North Dakota, and my first wilderness trip was in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.
00:35:59.000It's this million-acre wilderness of lakes that are interconnected by trails.
00:36:04.000You can go out for weeks at a time and canoe across a lake and then carry your boat to the next lake, and there's campsites, and it's just paradise.
00:36:23.000But, you know, so what I'm saying as far as it's shaping people and its importance, I mean, that first trip into the wilderness changed my life.
00:36:31.000And that's a pretty mild way of saying it.
00:36:37.000Well, that gets us to what you're doing now, because you stopped working for 0.0, and we talked about on the last podcast that you had done a lot of these wilderness therapy trips.
00:36:47.000Where you take, like, troubled kids that have lost their way, and their parents don't know what the fuck to do, and you would take them out into the woods and live with these kids for months.
00:36:58.000Which is crazy to think about, but makes sense.
00:37:03.000Like, just the five days that I was out there, six days or whatever, when I first went to Montana with you guys, changed the way I thought about wilderness.
00:39:31.000Sure, it looks different, but there's a felt sense or a feeling you get from places.
00:39:36.000The Brooks Range in Alaska is the northernmost range of mountains.
00:39:40.000It runs east and west, and then above it is the Arctic Plain and then the Arctic Ocean.
00:39:46.000There is something about being up there, and especially, I think, in the summer when the sun doesn't really go down.
00:39:53.000It is, it is, it feels like being on a different planet, but man, I don't know if I have the words to describe it, but yeah, man, I mean, and that's what I said I'm addicted to.
00:40:04.000I am, and I, you know, I moved to Montana for professional reasons, but then also because it's where I wanted to live.
00:40:43.000But there's something that happens, I don't know, a day, two days, three days, five days in, where you really just kind of let go of the regular.
00:40:56.000But something shifts, you know, when you do a real expedition, when you do a real thing where you're not, your brain's not half stuck back in all the other stuff.
00:41:15.000So you just got so addicted to being out there completely disconnected that you, when you go on the hike, you know you could always just make it back to town a couple hours.
00:41:24.000Oh yeah, it's just like a little, I'm trying to think of like an analogy, but it would be like a...
00:45:08.000Aren't they the biggest brown bears in the world?
00:45:11.000They might be, I think, I've heard that the Kamchatka brown bears in Siberia, in Russia, across, I don't know if that is Siberia, but across the water there, they might be bigger?
00:45:40.000And people were so angry at him for narrating this thing that they were talking about boycotting Metallica when they played some music festival.
00:46:57.000And if there wasn't the existence of Central Park, and I lived in Brooklyn, so Prospect Park, if those two green places didn't exist while I lived there...
00:47:08.000I would have probably lost my mind or just moved, right?
00:47:11.000I feel like these big areas of wilderness we have, we will not be okay as humans.
00:51:57.000You might be better off if it lands on your head.
00:52:02.000That's what I always say about asteroids.
00:52:04.000You don't want to be that guy in the movie that is storing food in his basement and staying up all night to shoot vandals because people are trying to steal your canned goods.
00:54:38.000What were the numbers of OxyContin or OxyCodone?
00:54:42.000I still don't know what the difference is.
00:54:44.000Have you seen the reports lately showing that the life expectancy or the early death rate of middle-aged white men, specifically lately, has dropped for the first time in, I don't know.
00:56:23.000I don't know how new, but it's called interpersonal neurobiology, which is the science of our brain wiring and physiological wiring on how...
00:57:07.000That is so fascinating that, like, feelings have an effect on your health, like the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of despair.
00:57:14.000It's not like you could eat your vegetables, you can get your exercise in, and if you feel despair and you feel loneliness, your body is actually, like, being harmed by that.
00:57:22.000But there's a real, like, practical reason for that, and that's because we are, when we come out as babies, we are the most dependent individuals.
00:57:48.000But there's been studies recently by these neurobiologists that are showing that these social needs are just as or even, like, come before some of these physical needs.
00:58:07.000And so what they are finding is that there's like two parts of our operating brain.
00:58:13.000And this is, you know, going to be me paring it down.
00:58:17.000But one is the analytical thinking, deciding thing.
00:58:20.000And the other is this social awareness brain, which...
00:58:23.000It's always, like always checking in on how am I in relation to others.
00:58:28.000And it's also the part of their brain that actually we can, you know, like the metacognitive part and the part that I can, they call it mind reading.
00:58:35.000But really it's just, by us sitting here, I can kind of get a sense of how you feel and what you're thinking, right?
00:58:40.000Just by the connection that we have and just it's part of who we are.
00:58:45.000So when our analytical brain is offline, this other one, the social one, pops on immediately.
00:58:53.000That is, like, the fundamental need for humans in safety and survival, is how are we relating to each other as a group.
00:59:03.000But it makes sense if you look, I mean, to me it makes sense in, you know, we are social animals.
00:59:10.000But you look at other species of monkeys or wolves or whatever.
00:59:15.000I mean, you know, there might be a period of time where, say, a wolf will get kicked out of a pack for a while and he'll go do his thing but eventually come back to a pack.
00:59:24.000It's not safe for us as humans and animals, social animals like these, to be isolated.
00:59:31.000And so there's all these parts of us that just, if we're not connected to other people in a very direct and true way, there's these sort of deep-down emotional and physiological I think?
01:00:01.000You know, I really believe that this really drives a lot of the internal struggle we have.
01:00:10.000What I'm trying to bring into the world and my platform now is just to, you know, stand up and say, hey, we need each other and we can do it.
01:00:30.000And it's cool to see the science coming out because I have all this anecdotal evidence of being out in the woods with kids or being in a men's group with guys or running a retreat or whatever this is of how powerful it is to set down all of our differences and just be there.
01:00:47.000But now the science is really lighting it up.
01:00:58.000That they're showing that emotional pain lights up the same centers of our brain as physical pain.
01:01:05.000And that one study showed that an insult...
01:01:10.000To someone had much more painful and long-term effects than slamming somebody with a hammer hitting their hand with a hammer so like our emotional pain Literally actually exists in the body like it is actual pain and the reason that It's so uncomfortable to feel our emotions which it is,
01:01:30.000you know, I mean I'll just say it is, is that it actually hurts.
01:01:35.000I mean, and there's like, people say things like, you broke my heart, or I'm dying of heartache, or whatever, but the science is catching up and showing us that this pain is actual.
01:01:51.000You know, it's interesting, too, because what you're saying about us being disconnected and how unhealthy it is and how unhealthy loneliness is, it sort of confirms these ideas that I've always had that the human race itself is not...
01:02:04.000Not like a group of individuals, but a super organism, much like the human body is.
01:02:09.000Like the human body requires all the bacteria in your gut, all the skin flora, all the different things that compose the actual physical structure of the human body.
01:02:18.000Whereas we think of it, I think there's some nutty number of how much bacteria, how many bacteria cells are in your body versus how many human cells.
01:04:00.000I like that analogy, though, of the body as like a civilization or whatever.
01:04:04.000Think about if you're one of your, I don't know, one important neuron, one cell, neural cell or something, decided just to go rogue and not be in connection with the rest of you, right?
01:05:30.000I've only done one podcast ever through Skype, and that was with John Anthony West, because he was living in New York, and he's this really important Egyptologist, and I really wanted to talk to him.
01:05:40.000The only way I could get him to do it was to do it through Skype, so I did one.
01:05:43.000I prefer to sit there with people, because I want to look at them.
01:05:52.000No, I get it, and I think I can hear it in your podcast, too, and I think that And again, I'm not going to keep hitting the biology part, but to me, I can sense that something else in me is triggered,
01:06:44.000So, part of what I do is I help proliferate this idea of men's groups across the country where guys get together for exactly what we're talking about.
01:06:53.000It's just like, you know, the intent of them is to get together to challenge and support each other's growth or personal growth, you know.
01:07:03.000It's just a simple sort of protocol and a simple sort of design or sort of there's a structure to it.
01:07:10.000But the whole point is remedial in a sense.
01:07:14.000It's that, you know, our culture in general, but guys especially in our culture don't have...
01:07:23.000This unfettered place to really show up and actually connect with each other.
01:08:57.000I'm talking about like when I go to someone else's page and I read cunty things, I always go to that, I go, let's see if that guy's blocked.
01:09:07.000It's like this weird thing that people are doing with each other where it's not real interaction.
01:09:12.000And I feel like the people that are perpetrating it are extremely unhealthy, which is why they're saying such nasty, vicious shit in the first place.
01:09:47.000You're projecting your shit out into the world.
01:09:49.000You're not actually slowing down enough to...
01:09:52.000You can sit here and give opinions or whatever all day long, but to what you said, though, it is a weird position, but I think the way that things are going, so we are using these tools, the social media, to connect us and to get messages out, but the way that the millennial generation is going is that...
01:10:11.000What they value and what they want to spend their money on is meaningful experiences, which means, you know, generally speaking, a live, in-person event.
01:10:19.000And there is a wave of things going back to this.
01:10:22.000So, you know, as a tool, we need that.
01:10:46.000You just got to make sure it's a good message.
01:10:49.000You have to be cognizantly aware, I think, of how other people are going to receive it without actually getting that reception back from them.
01:10:59.000You know it's and that's where it gets real weird and you have to like I think apply the same principles that you would in communicating with other people like Without actually communicating with them without seeing them without getting the social cues that looking them in the eye and We're we're a weird thing man This might not make sense,
01:11:19.000but I'm gonna bring it back to connect to the wilderness stuff what we're talking about in this sense of this sort of isolation and loneliness that we have and And for me, in my life, where I learned to connect with others, where I really learned to sort of give it up,
01:11:34.000let go, be present with people, was in the wilderness.
01:11:37.000It was doing that job out in the desert with kids, out there for 8 to 20 days at a time with these kids, where that was my job.
01:11:47.000It was my job to simply be with them and in a way, to be with them in a way that was...
01:11:56.000Obviously, we had a lot of boundaries and everything, but to be really real, just to be totally real and honest and straightforward, call bullshit.
01:12:15.000It'll tie together, but for me, I started to feel way, way, way more human being out there in the wilderness.
01:12:23.000Like, just being out there where it was quiet, being out there where, like, you know, if I sat on a rock, I was sitting on a rock, and the sun was on me, and all of my senses were engaged, you know, very aware of my body.
01:12:35.000We were in these groups where we were practicing being very aware of what we felt and being able to feel and express that.
01:12:44.000You know, since then, for me, it all comes back to being out in the wilderness, but since then, all the other things I've engaged in, meditation, the men's group stuff, all the other person, even psychedelics, things like that, all the things that I've experienced, all, for me, tie back to that thing.
01:13:01.000It comes down to what I feel is like being totally, as much as you can, truly present.
01:13:38.000As time has gone on, I've gotten much more of my online interaction in like an educational form in terms of like interesting articles, science things, things that don't involve like social interaction or opinion as much as they involve really fascinating facts.
01:13:59.000Something that I found today, they think that North America might have been settled by humans as much as a hundred thousand years earlier than they thought.
01:14:16.000Pure curiosity and pure wonder and the imagination goes wild thinking about what it must have been like to be one of these early humans surviving or trying to survive.
01:14:28.000And if they didn't, we wouldn't be here.
01:14:32.000These Mastodon fossils they found them the bones were shattered and there's rocks nearby that do not seem like they were brought anywhere So it was 1992 they were doing highway construction near San Diego and they found these odd-looking bones and then they started doing these Studies on them and they found their mastodon bones and they didn't have the ability to do carbon testing and get a real Accurate assessment back then some but now they do and so now when they're checking These
01:15:02.000bones and the way these bones had been shattered They're pretty sure that they had been shattered purposely like to get to the marrow Wow, yeah, so that yeah, that's a great example of a positive benefit yesterday I I meditated for about 80 minutes or so and then I sat up afterwards and I clicked on my phone and opened Facebook and the first thing I clicked on was a video of a woman in slow motion who stuck her ass out the window of a bus and just shat the stream of shit.
01:17:04.000You know, like Bobby, like, I mean, that's the Joseph Campbell story of the hero, that it goes all the way back to the one person who sacrificed their life and got killed by the predator in front of the tribe and so that the tribe could survive and that they worship that person for doing that.
01:17:22.000Yeah, the hero goes off, learns a lesson, brings it back to the community, and everybody's better for it.
01:17:27.000Yeah, or you watch the hero get mauled, and he's a martyr, and then you escape while the hyenas are eating him.
01:17:35.000One of the things we taught, or we worked with kids out in the woods, was that we called it natural consequences, right?
01:17:40.000Which just means that when you do something, something else happens.
01:18:43.000That's actually not the best example, but I'll just use, so if you swore you could, some programs would, you know, maybe have a point system.
01:19:02.000What I'm trying to say is that if you do something shitty, generally you hurt others around you and things happen.
01:19:07.000And so what we tried to show is that if kids would do something shitty to pay attention and that they would see the harm they're creating themselves by harming other people rather than just like, you know...
01:19:20.000In society, just locking a kid up for breaking the law, it would be...
01:22:35.000We had therapists come in and all this stuff.
01:22:37.000But the fundamental thing I took away from that experience was that in order for these guys to grow up and sort of move on and get going in their lives, what they needed was just somebody like me to show up.
01:22:54.000And so just let them air things out and talk about better ways to do things and sort of get some perspective.
01:23:00.000Now, you know, we maybe talked about this last time, but then they'd go home and not necessarily have that support anymore and be back in their old arena where, you know, their old friends and their old family dynamic and all that.
01:25:17.000And where this guy contacted Bernie Madoff, he sent him letters, and then finally Bernie Madoff called him, and they did this interview together, where the way it works in prison, I guess, at least the prison where Bernie Madoff is, you get 15 minutes to talk on the phone,
01:25:33.000and then you have to wait 15 minutes before you could talk again, and then 15 minutes again.
01:25:38.000And so this is how they did the interview.
01:25:43.000And after a while, he sort of gained his trust and he went deep into how this whole deception started and how Bernie Madoff, if you don't know the whole story, Bernie Madoff is the guy who had this gigantic Ponzi scheme and stole billions of dollars from people.
01:25:58.000It's called Ponzi Supernova is the Radiolab episode.
01:26:27.000I mean, it's really interesting to see...
01:26:30.000Like, this guy's reaction to Bernie Madoff's lack of empathy and realizing somewhere along the line, like, oh, this guy does not care.
01:26:39.000That was one of the things that the investigators had said about him, that it didn't seem to bother him at all that he had done this to these people.
01:26:46.000That what bothered him was that he had gotten caught.
01:26:50.000But it didn't bother him that these people had been devastated.
01:26:54.000What bothered him was like that people had made money weren't giving that money back.
01:26:59.000Like he called one guy and told him the guy made like nine billion dollars.
01:27:03.000He was worth nine billion dollars rather.
01:27:05.000Seven billion of it had come from Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
01:27:09.000And he told me he had to give that $7 billion back.
01:27:11.000The guy had a heart attack, drowned in his pool.
01:28:00.000And people never, they never achieve peace.
01:28:02.000Like, that's what I always used to say about Bill Gates.
01:28:04.000Like, why the fuck is Bill Gates still working?
01:28:06.000You hear about him being the richest, and now he's not.
01:28:10.000I mean, he really did sort of find some sort of a balance, and now almost all of his work is done towards humanitarian efforts, he's, you know, he donates a lot of money, a lot of charities, I mean, a lot of really good work, like, post his Microsoft career,
01:28:25.000which is, like, really kind of unique, that a guy sort of found his way, kept a shitload of money, don't get me wrong, you know, apparently he's got some stuff.
01:28:36.000Stupid fucking house with a submarine in the Pacific Northwest where, like, if someone tries to break into his house, you can fucking escape in a submarine.
01:28:44.000I kayaked by his house once, actually.
01:30:11.000You know, like, what causes someone to go from, like, you have a boy, what causes someone to go from your cute little baby boy to being some monster?
01:30:20.000Like, how does that, what is it about people that makes it possible for someone to go, even not to a monster, but how about that young boy that you were working with that had no empathy, that you worried about sleeping near?
01:32:10.000I'm so fascinated by it, and I don't have, obviously, any, you know, solid, here's how it goes, but I've been looking into it for, you know, a long time, and I just, I think that, oh, anyway, back to the book, I used to read that book out loud to these groups of kids.
01:32:27.000I was working, we'd sit around the fire at night, and I'd read a novel, and we'd be out there for days, so you'd have time to read a novel out loud.
01:32:51.000Yeah, it's just, it's this weird fascination I have.
01:32:54.000And specifically because, and it all comes, I keep saying, it comes back to that time in the woods, but I only worked with males, with boys.
01:33:01.000And it wasn't, I didn't choose to do that.
01:33:27.000Because that's a big part of what I felt as I looked around, is that I think that a lot of adult, physically adult men, walk around with parts of themselves that are still...
01:33:39.00013, 6, 2, 18. There's this human maturation process, this human journey that we all have available to us that I think we're too busy a lot of times to let it actually flow and happen.
01:33:57.000Well, I think that's true, but I also think that there's a maturation process that comes from overcoming obstacles that a lot of people just don't encounter.
01:34:07.000They don't encounter difficulty, so they don't learn about themselves.
01:34:10.000That's part of it, but I think that a lot of times, even if they do encounter difficulty, they don't let themselves actually feel, they don't let themselves experience it.
01:34:47.000Psychiatrist called Bessel van der Kolk never heard of him no fascinating dude.
01:34:51.000He's a he started working with the VA in Boston and worked with returned vets from From Vietnam and then did this whole lifetime of study about trauma and how it comes into humans and how you can move through it and I can heal it and all this stuff and it It basically comes down to being able to be more resilient,
01:36:12.000And part of that is just, to me, again, speaking more from a male perspective here, but part of that, and I think a lot of what our culture says is okay, is...
01:36:37.000Then there's this other whole way to get through hardship, which is by actually surrendering to it and letting this brilliant system that we have as humans to process it and get through it.
01:37:38.000I think the mind has desires and one of the big desires is it has a desire for improvement and his desire to achieve goals and there's a lot of people that these goals are laid out by other people these goals are like graduating from third grade graduating from fourth grade a lot of shit that you don't want to do so these goals are meaningless to you so you never feel like you've accomplished anything that you actually want to do and next thing you know it you're a 35 year old man working for an insurance company you don't want to be there And you don't have any real part
01:38:32.000So, yeah, and that points directly to what I do and what I'm building.
01:38:37.000So you take eight of those guys and you set up a room and you say, all right, in this space right here, fuck all that.
01:38:45.000We're going to be actually honest and say what we're...
01:38:48.000Feeling but maybe can't even really access so like all that frustration all that shit or whatever it could be anything That's so hard for people to do right like what what kind of techniques do you employ?
01:38:58.000To get someone like say if you got some guy who's closed off and has been bullshitting his way through life And then all sudden here.
01:40:04.000Sometimes break open, sometimes crack slowly open, but, you know, all of a sudden, so maybe after 35 years of only being in other people's program, you get in touch with what you actually feel, what you actually want, and who you actually are.
01:40:18.000It's just like this fucking, it's like, holy shit.
01:40:20.000I think for a lot of people it's really difficult to try to do what you actually want to because you've spent so much time rewarding yourself with material items for these little accomplishments that you've become in debt and you really can't escape the system.
01:40:37.000I mean, that's a real problem with people.
01:40:40.000They have a car that they're leasing, they have a house that they're renting, or even worse, that they bought, and then they're stuck, and then they don't know what the fuck to do.
01:40:48.000They have to keep this insurance company job, and it's just rotting them out from the inside.
01:41:14.000Goes so far, but it's kind of like an iceberg thing, right?
01:41:17.000So like, if your goal is to make more money, right?
01:41:21.000And here's your goal, and you're going toward it, and you, I don't know, listen to podcasts, or you do all this stuff, and you try to figure out how to do it.
01:42:22.000And I mean, I don't know if I pull this off or not, but I feel fluent in...
01:42:29.000You know bro culture and fluent in you know, like I've I've I've gone down that spiritual route to and When you recognize when the spiritual route is legitimate and when the spiritual route is like a ruse as well Sometimes even the spiritual route is just something that someone has plugged themselves into to try to find some meaning Exactly.
01:42:50.000Exactly So how are you doing this, if you don't mind me interrupting?
01:42:55.000So you're planning on taking guys, like, say if I'm that 35-year-old guy that works in an insurance company, for example, and I'm just fucked up, and I'm going crazy, man.
01:44:16.00030 guys there, and just set up sort of an intense weekend experience of practicing the stuff, and we'll hike and do trail work and all that stuff, but more importantly, do with the The self, you know, diving into yourself within the presence of other guys, which is just,
01:45:05.000We made one of our advertising videos for it, and it just starts out that a guy stands up and says, yeah, I heard about a men's retreat, and the first thing I thought was, this is going to be fucking awful.
01:45:20.000But I think we're getting further enough along where the guys that are going through this are literally coming back with the most positive feedback that I could...
01:45:48.000It's probably also a big fucking deal to just separate from the hive for a little bit and just be outside of cell phone range and be in the woods and just...
01:45:58.000Take a big deep breath of fresh air and look around at the wilderness and just realize that this is reality as well.
01:46:05.000And you've been plugged into this civilization reality, this city, this urban environment, which is entirely unnatural and has only been a real thing for the past couple hundred years.
01:46:19.000It literally didn't exist for the gigantic swath of humanity that existed before that.
01:46:32.000It lights up this neurobiology of us as social animals.
01:46:38.000I think it goes back to more of a tribal sense of living too.
01:46:43.000It's like all of a sudden you went from being isolated and lonely to having 30 dudes who would honestly fucking do anything for you in that moment.
01:46:50.000And I got a buddy, a good buddy, is a returned Special Forces operator, and he sits in my men's group in Bozeman with me, and really struggled with coming home, and then found our group, and within a month, his life was back on track.
01:47:34.000He went, I don't know how many years, several years in the Special Forces, living within close connection to guys, got thrown home, was all of a sudden isolated, and then came into our group and just had this...
01:47:48.000This closeness again and it just, bam, just like back to killing it.
01:48:25.000Get caught up in the momentum of their daily existence and all the requirements of that daily existence, and they become overwhelming.
01:48:33.000You know, like we were talking about your lease that you have on your car, your mortgage that you have on your house, and the credit card bills that keep coming in, your student loans you need to eventually get to.
01:48:46.000And sometimes people need something that removes them entirely from it for a certain amount of time that allows you just the fresh air.
01:48:55.000Not just literal fresh air, but the metaphorical fresh air of allowing you to just separate from all these weird influences and all this weird energy and momentum.
01:49:08.000The momentum of you, the life that you've created or that's been created for you that you're sort of trapped in.
01:50:49.000I mean, that's one of the most powerful...
01:50:50.000So the podcast that I'm launching is a self-improvement podcast for guys, but instead of going to experts and saying, hey, you know, what's the best morning routine that you can do, designing a routine or whatever, I'm talking to regular guys and asking them to share...
01:51:09.000You know, more vulnerable than they normally would because that's what happens in these scenarios is that we learn from each other just as simple human fucking beings.
01:51:16.000We're just like, you know, like one guy might share that he's having trouble with his son, for example, or with his kid.
01:52:22.000Yeah, and I know that I can, you know, even if it's just one guy, whatever it is, but working out there with these kids and seeing all this, it just left me with the deepest, deepest...
01:52:36.000Fulfillment, satisfaction, but also a sense of purpose.
01:52:39.000And then I tell you what, man, I had a boy, I had a son last year, and when he came out, and there was something inside me that said, if you don't act...
01:53:24.000I mean, you have a very promising career and a lucrative career with 0.0, so for you to leave that, it has to be, like, a really compelling sort of pull.
01:53:33.000Yeah, I mean, that job and that career was an amazing wild ride, and in some ways felt like a...
01:53:42.000A temporary sidebar from what I'm really meant to do.
01:54:00.000How long can you ignore the thing inside you that screams at you that says, you have to do this, you have to do this, or you want to do this?
01:54:11.000I mean, it's obviously beneficial, and it's obviously something you're compelled to do, and it's obviously something that you feel like is very fulfilling.