#324： How Fitness, Fellowship, and Faith Are the Cure for Sad Clown Syndrome
Episode Stats
Summary
Dave and Tim Whitmire are the leaders of the movement F3, which stands for fitness fellowship and faith, and according to them they ve seen tens of thousands of men not only get physically in shape by attending F3 workouts but reenergize themselves mentally and spiritually. Today, on the show, they share the origins of the F3 movement and how they realized it was solving the problem of Sad Clown Syndrome in the lives of American men. They then tell what the symptoms of the syndrome are and how exactly F3 acts as a remedy.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well if you're
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like many modern men you might have a pretty good life got a decent job a family a home
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maybe a few hobbies you do during your free time yet despite having the appearance of a good life
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you feel empty inside like you're missing something well my guest today would argue that
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what you've got is a case of sad clown syndrome and to get over it you need to get together with
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some other men and do some burpees their names are dave redding and tim whitmire and they're the
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leaders of a grassroots movement bringing men together for free workouts called f3 which stands
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for fitness fellowship and faith and according to them they've seen tens of thousands of men not only
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get physically in shape by attending f3 workouts but re-energize themselves mentally and spiritually
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today on the show dave and tim share the origins of the f3 movement and how they realized it was
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solving the problem of sad clown syndrome in the lives of american men they then to tell what the
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symptoms of sad clown syndrome are and how exactly f3 acts as a remedy we then discuss why male friends
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are so important in a man's life and why the typical guys that men usually call friends well aren't really
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friends we end our conversation by discussing that last f and f3 faith and why it's more about having a
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purpose beyond yourself and less about religion after the show's over check out the show notes at
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aom.is slash f3 where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic
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all right tim whitmire dave redding welcome to the show glad to be here happy to be here well i've had
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lots of requests to have you two on the show you were the leaders of a of an amorphous like what's that
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monster that you cut off its head and it keeps growing another head what's that thing called
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hydra hydra a hydra organization called f3 before we get into what f3 is can you talk a little bit
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about your backgrounds sure uh this is tim and uh i was uh born and raised in california grew up mostly
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in the san francisco bay area came back east for college uh graduated from harvard in 1992 with a
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degree in political science went to work as a journalist uh spent most of 13 years with the
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associated press as a reporter in rhode island new york uh lexington kentucky and then moved to
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charlotte in 2000 left journalism in in 06 and spent most of the last 10 years working for various
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financial services firms here in the uh second largest banking center uh in the country mostly in
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kind of marketing and business development uh positions so that was my background this is dave i grew
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up in connecticut uh but the army sent me south after i graduated college and uh i've never really
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been back i ended up at fort bragg in special forces the last few years of my career and uh went
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to law school at wake forest here in north carolina because i really like the state and uh at law school
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i met my wife who was from north carolina so as it often happens uh yankee comes south goes to college
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meets a girl from north carolina never leaves again we've got a lot of guys in that category so i've
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been practicing law here in charlotte for the last 20 years yes and i should i should say i also i'm
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married a southerner she's from richmond but her mother is from north carolina and we've got uh we've
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got two sons and a daughter so all right well i hear it's gorgeous in north carolina i've been i haven't
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been out there yet it's one of my to-do list though little little steamy this time of year but uh but
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yes it's nice so you guys started this organization called f3 before so what does f3 stand for what do
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you guys do at f3 so f3 is is a men's workout group at its at its most basic uh we have a stated
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purpose the reinvigoration of male community leadership that's why we do it but all that
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was kind of downstream from its uh origins it really just started out as a workout group for men to get
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together and work out outdoors outside of a gym and not pay a personal trainer to do it so it's
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called f3 because that's a description of what it's turned out to be and the first f stands for
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fitness that's the magnet of f3 that's what brings men into our fitness groups the second f is fellowship
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and that's the glue that's what results from working out together under tough conditions and the third f
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stands for faith and that's not any particular denomination or worldview it just means you've become
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aware that there's something outside of yourself that really matters there's a big world out there
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and uh you've stopped thinking about yourself and you're you're addressing it and what you might do
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about it put those three things together you got it free you have a book called free to lead and
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i love how you describe these the organic evolution of this thing and as you said this didn't start you
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guys didn't start off with like you have this grand mission to like reinvigorate male leadership in the
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community it was basically i want to get a good workout so i mean what was that what it was just
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like tim dave like you both felt like you're in a position in your life or like man my fitness is
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really hit hit you know you know it's terrible uh i need to improve in this area yeah so so this is
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tim i i and you know dave and i met at this workout that preceded the creation of f3 and at the time
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i started going to that that group which met at a park here in charlotte and you know 7 a.m.
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on saturday morning for outdoor boot camp style workout i was i had uh i had rode as an undergraduate
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in college at about 190 pounds and i was running about 250 when i started going out to that workout
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in 2008 and uh and so for me it was really this thing of i'm gonna i'm gonna go out and i'm gonna
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start working out with these guys and i'm gonna get my butt kicked out there and i'm gonna want to
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get in shape to kind of keep up with these guys and that involved getting more serious about what i was
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eating and also about doing some other exercises doing some body weight exercises not just running
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all the time which is actually a pretty inefficient way to uh to burn calories um so that was really
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my impetus to go out there and keep going out there and in the course of doing that was you know dave
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came out as well and he and i got to know each other and started talking about what else was bringing
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us out there besides just the fitness part of it and sort of getting this deeper understanding but
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dave kind of had his own reasons for being out there as well yeah i mean when i was in the army
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uh i was always in very good shape uh but law school disabused me of the notion that that was the result
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of any self-discipline that i had the unit requirements army requirements to be in shape and
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being a leader uh it was incumbent upon me to do so but that was all external uh i gained a lot of weight
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in law school and then after that had a really hard time keeping it off i could i found that i could i
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could lose 40 pounds and gain 40 pounds pretty quickly and i did it a lot then the 10 years in
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between graduating law school and then getting involved in this predecessor to f3 i might have
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gained and lost that 40 pounds five or six times uh so really what i was in search for when i uh was
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invited to this workout was a way to maintain some kind of consistent fitness and what i found was
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that having the accountability of other men there who when you inevitably when you're in good shape
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you know it's a it's a pendulum or parabola or whatever you get in good shape and then you kind
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of start falling out of shape a little bit right there is when you need another man to say to you look
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you look like you gained some weight back or you're slowing how come you haven't been out here and what i
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have three is just just that suggestion by another guy because we're quick to jump on each other
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uh when we haven't uh when a guy's kind of sliding was all i really needed and ever since we started
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f3 i haven't had that up and down problem anymore i've been able to maintain my weight so for me
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that was the reason i started and it's been a big reason why i keep doing it right but uh like as you
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said f3 wasn't f3 when you first started it was just a bunch of guys getting together the workout as
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you said it was sort of a shoot off of another workout group that was going on at what point did you
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guys realize that this f3 workout was bigger than what you thought it was originally yeah so so we
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so the origin of what we came to call f3 came in the fact that the the group that we were meeting with
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the guy who was leading it guy named jeff guillible decided that it had grown too big and it's the irony
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is that the the point at which it had grown too big and in his mind was 25 guys which is just sort of a
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i mean it's kind of crazy considering how big it's become since then but so he shut it down to
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new guys and this was in the summer of 2010 and dave and i had become friends by then and we're
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sort of talking about what this had done in our lives and kind of looked at each other and said
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well this is crazy we we want to get it in front of more guys so let's go start another location you
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know we got too many guys at freedom park let's go to this middle school a couple miles away and we we
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had we both had been in town for about 10 years at that point so we all we had relatively long list
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of guys we knew we put together this email about as i recall about 100 guys and we sent a series of
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emails throughout december of 2010 saying hey you might have heard about this workout group at freedom
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park well we're going to launch another location we'd love you to come out it'll be new year's morning
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you know come come work off your hanger you know start the new year right all the sort of
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resolutionary stuff that people do and we figured we'd get two or three guys out there
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on new year's morning and build it in much the same way that the workout at freedom park had built which
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was sort of by ones and twos and about 10 minutes into the workout after guys started sweating it
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smelled like a distillery out there and and the crazy thing was those guys instead of it being like
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the ymca you know where you can't get a locker the first week in january and it's it's a it's a desert
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again by the end of february these guys kept coming out and kept coming back and wanted to do
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more they want to work out during the week they wanted to to do crazy races and spartan races and
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mud runs and stuff and it just snowballed from there and it got to the point very early that spring where
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we realized okay well this one location isn't enough we're going to plant a couple other locations
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on saturday morning to take the the pressure off of um this one location that now has four year
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guys and part with that challenge came we need guys to lead that because we're not the only we
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can't be the only ones who are capable of leading this so so and again this this workout's free right
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right pay for it yeah okay and you you mentioned it's it's a boot camp style workout i mean
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what does it if someone were to go to an f3 workout this saturday what would they say well it will
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really depend where they go we say boot camp really is kind of the placeholder for what it is
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because f3 doesn't prescribe or prescribe any particular form of exercise it really depends
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on the local leader it's very decentralized so we have groups that cycle groups that run together
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but the typical boot camp workout is going to be a mixture of running and body weight resistance
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exercises and maybe using uh whatever is available in the local area to assist that so if there's say a
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playground you know we'll use the swing set to do pull-ups on for instance but for the most part we
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don't add any gear to that like uh except for maybe kettlebells we'll carry rocks for instance or
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cinder blocks or something that's kind of organic to the area and the whole idea there is to keep those
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barriers to entry down so you know like what we call the eh or the emotional headlock is what we put on
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a guy to recruit them and you know you say to the guy why don't you come out work out this
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saturday of course he says first question what's it cost we say nothing second question is you know
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what do i have to bring and we say nothing you know and that makes it much easier to get a guy to come
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out because they didn't have to worry about buying the gear or having any kind of gear also it depends
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on where you are so it started here in charlotte what we call charlotte metro and got six years ago so
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guys have been doing it here for quite a while if you come to a weekday workout here which is 45 minutes
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long uh weekday boot camp workout you might run four miles in those 45 minutes and still do a bunch
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of push-ups yeah interspersed with a lot squats and burpees right so the the running itself will be at
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a very high pace for brief periods time you might run a quarter mile you might run a mile uh it just
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depends on whatever the leader comes up with we do a lot of running up hills you know or in tough terrain
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to kind of toughen ourselves up but i you know if people ask me what are the components of a workout
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what should it look like i say do what do what you discover what you think works but try to to have
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three s's and two t's and the three s's are strength speed and stamina and the two t's are toughness
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physical and toughness mental in other words do something to accelerate the men's strength you know
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challenge them there do something to try to make them a little faster do something to try to give them
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uh more than they can handle for a distance you know so they can build that stamina and that'll give you
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physical toughness you're rolling around in the rain you know in the mud or whatever that makes
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you physically tough and then that that mental aspect of it i mean we meet in the dark we don't
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have a lot of uh safety things that we do we start exactly on time and if you're not there you get left
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behind we don't carry water bottles we don't take breaks and all that uh goes into i think i heard
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one of your earlier podcasts uh brett with the stoicism guy and one of the things he said was
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that uh doing things that make you uncomfortable are good for the soul i'm paraphrasing what he said
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but you know he said uh you know don't wear don't wear enough clothes for the weather in other words
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be a little cold you know expand out your comfort zone and i i heard that i was like wow that's that's
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f3 you know in a nutshell you know because we we just don't bow to anything that would make you
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comfortable he even said something we say which is personal comfort should not be your watchword
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you know if you set yourself aside take on a little pain you know we're a bunch of doctors
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and lawyers and accountants and whatever we are right so this might be the only physically
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difficult thing you're going to do that day but that's a huge part of it so if you if you go to
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a workout you can be pretty sure that you're going to be challenged physically and mentally a little
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bit pushed past where you want to go the leaders are going to be looking for the mean you know they're
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they're not looking to kill anybody but they want to challenge the guys that are on and that's part of
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the leadership is figuring that out how to do that well and then i would just add the other piece of
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it is nobody's nobody's going to get left behind and that's one of the things we really hammer with
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our um with our leaders is lead the workout in a way that you're not going to drop anybody so
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you know a lot of dave was talking about you know there's there's going to be some running
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but the metaphor i use is kind of pearls on a string right so you're never going to run
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more than an eighth or a quarter of a mile at a time and nobody's going to get left too far behind
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at that point when you're done with that running segment everybody's going to plank up you're going
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to wait for what we call the six which is the last man in line to get there and then we're going to do
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some sort of set piece um of body weight exercises maybe we'll just put guys in a circle and count cadence
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and do exercises that's called a circle of pain maybe we'll do something like pick a hill go to the top
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do one burpee run back down go to the top again do two burpees do that to seven and you call it a
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jacob's ladder and so those set pieces are the pearls and the the string is the running through
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the whole thing we're going to keep you moving throughout the entire 45 minutes or an hour and
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that's your basic f3 workout is pearls on a string and i know i'm at a good workout when during the
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running i'm like i can't wait to stop and do some push-ups and we're doing push-ups as i can't
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wait to start running again you know then you know you're getting a good workout
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all right so this thing started growing organically you sent out that email you had 34 guys show up
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and people kept coming back to the point where you had to actually split up and start another
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group somewhere else at this point did you guys still have your mission for f3 like was it was
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it f3 yet like when did f3 become f3 at what point in this this boot camp did it transition to what
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it is today i think it was about it was about two months after we started talking about splitting
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the first location was when we came up with the name because it was one of the guys who had helped
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us plant it originally who said to dave and it was a friend of both of ours hey you know what this
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really is is it's fitness and it's fellowship and it's faith because we had started doing as part of
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our we we do we call it at the end of the workout we have what we call the circle of trust and we all
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sit around in a circle and everybody says their name uh and their age and then they they say their f3
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nickname because we're super tribal about all this stuff and everybody gets given a nickname so that
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you're part of the tribe um and then we usually have announcements of some sort and then we do a
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prayer at the end or or a shout out and it can really be you know around here and in the bible
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bell that usually is a prayer but in seattle sometimes it's just some sort of you know more
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secular words of wisdom or whatever but that that is and that's the only sort of faith-based piece of
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the workout but those were the three f's was he said you guys got the fitness and the guys keep
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coming back because of the fellowship and and you got this faith piece so it's it's f3 and we're like
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hey that's really good we're gonna use that and we had a guy a designer friend of mine do a logo for us
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that was a kind of a military stencil font with the f a little uh a little three that was kind of the
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in the uh the cubed position next to the f put a circle around it and uh put it on some stickers
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and started out to guys and they started popping up on cars all over charlotte and then the next
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thing you know you're driving down the highway going to the beach or something and you see another
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f3 sticker and uh and you realize oh wow this thing's really kind of taken off so so uh i'm
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curious like when did the the circle of trust start like was that something you started off with right
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away with the first workout or was that something that kind of grew organically you thought hey let's
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try this thing no it's kind of funny as many things happen with us it already with an idea of
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practicality initially i was leading most of the workouts and at the end
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we didn't have any formal real system we just kind of ended it and uh we write back blast which
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is just a a short narrative of the workout afterwards we want to list everyone who was
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there and i was trying to do that out of memory and i was having a great time doing that one day
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tim and i were running with another guy and he says you know what you really ought to do is sit
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around in a circle and uh count off and say each other's names we get a chance to to get that done
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and the funny part of this is of course i was looking for a way a mechanism to capture everyone's
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name so the idea appealed to me tim on the other hand immediately rejected it and said that's kumbaya
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bunch of junk we're not going to do that now the funny ironic part about that if you know us
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is i'm more to the right edge and he's more to the left edge so
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you'd have expected me to be the one to say you know that's just some millennial sentimentality
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engage in but you know we talked about it some more and we decided to try it and we the first
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time we tried it it was a huge hit i mean the guys loved it so we say you know we we first we count
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off so we make sure we know how many guys were there then we say what we call your hospital name
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and that's what your parents named you before they knew what you were going to be then your f3 name
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so we get that down and in your age because it's it's incredibly interesting to know how old guys
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are and what that that age range is and then after that one guy volunteers and as tim said he can pray
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to to anything he wants all we really want to inculcate a feeling of thankfulness for the
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opportunity to have spent that 45 minutes together and to become better men and the prayer just branches
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out from there i've been to a lot of different places in f3 and uh i haven't been out west where i
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guess it's they're going to be a little more you know gaia based or something but uh i'll bet there
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they kind of say the same things you know just this demonstration of thankfulness for being men
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together and getting this opportunity to carve out 45 minutes to make each other stronger that that's
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really the heart of it and then we walk out from there sometimes we'll you know pray for things
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specifically but for the most part that's that's really what it is it's just that it's just that
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demonstration and it's uh hugely popular and i'll i'll uh poke fun at myself because i was the one who
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thought it was the worst idea i ever heard and now it's i mean it's one of the five core principles
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there's only sort of five rules to an f3 workout and one of them is you have to end with a circle
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of trust and and i'm like a lot of other guys in that if i go to another workout and it just sort
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of ends with guys just kind of walking away from each other up see you later like it just doesn't feel
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right like that it becomes the the ritual of it becomes this immensely meaningful thing as a way of
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sort of ending our time together so that's awesome and what but what i love about it is that how
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organic it was like you weren't thinking like this is something that will bring us together was like
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this solves a practical problem but coincidentally it's it it became a ritual that's the way we do
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almost everything yeah i mean we you know you alluded to uh we have a lot of different words for
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everything and that we've tried to cap capture those in our lexicon on our website and really all those
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things we've heard a lot of them come from the military but a lot of them come from movies and
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other things in our culture we share and that's what i think it is it's an expression of the f3
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culture the uniqueness of f3 culture doesn't mean that it's it's not influenced by things outside of
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f3 in fact it all comes from things outside of f3 but when we see or hear a good idea uh and good
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meaning it advances the ball it's missional we're very quick to try to to spread that and capitalize
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on it and by the same token we've had some ideas we've huddled up and had some ideas that on paper
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on the whiteboard look great we've tried them they don't catch on you just throw those away
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you know and we just keep moving if it works we're going to keep doing it if it doesn't we're quick
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to abandon it and brett i would i would say one aspect one thing that really shapes that is the fact
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that it's it is free and it's volunteer led and it's not a revenue-based organization basically the
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only revenue we generate are we we we sell f3 gear go in the the store that's on our website you can
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buy an f3 shirt guys do custom shirts for different locations um we put a 10 tax on the gear sales
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anything that's got the logo on it that's the only revenue we generate and we use that to fund um to
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fund spreading f3 to new cities but because we run that way um we have to be almost i don't know just
00:22:22.600
have a killer instinct about like if something's not working we're gonna drop it if somebody's not
00:22:28.040
working in a position as head of expansion we're probably going to move on pretty quickly from that
00:22:33.000
and if something works we're gonna just grab it and and hold on to it and it makes you uh um it makes
00:22:39.100
you kind of lethal with your your instincts on that stuff because we don't you know we're all we're all
00:22:43.840
trying to make a living other ways and uh and we don't you know you don't you know you don't have
00:22:47.680
time out of uh messing around yeah f3 as an organization resembles a lizard not a bullfrog
00:22:52.580
i mean we're lean and light we keep moving because we have to gotcha so two months in you
00:22:57.600
said you kind of you figured you're onto something bigger you guys talk about in the book that f3
00:23:01.920
solves a problem that many american men are facing today what is that problem that f3 is the solution
00:23:08.660
for so we call that sad clown syndrome and we got that name from the sopranos an episode of sopranos
00:23:15.960
that uh well there's an episode where tony is being psychoanalyzed by his psychiatrist and uh
00:23:21.640
trying to explain she actually asks him if there's a tension or a dichotomy between his family life
00:23:27.740
and trying to portray a family man and the fact that he's a gangster and he misunderstands the
00:23:32.120
question and responds you like yeah everybody expects me to play the sad clown you know happy on the
00:23:36.640
outside sad on the inside and uh both tim and i were sopranos fans we both saw that and uh we're talking
00:23:42.340
about it one day and thought it really aptly described the plight of american man in this age
00:23:49.520
which is you you're you're in high school and your dad says you know study hard why so you can get a
00:23:56.440
good college you're in college study hard why so you can get a good job why get a good job you can
00:24:02.040
have a family especially wise everything leads to another thing but there's no ultimate purpose on that
00:24:07.860
you know there's no answer to any of that and uh you know i think i was in my mid 40s when we started
00:24:14.080
this early on that a lot of guys were around that age range in fact i think the mode age was 43 that
00:24:20.780
was the most common age when we were in those circles of trust what we realized was it was really
00:24:25.180
drawing in a lot of guys who had gone kind of the first 20 years of their career knew what they were
00:24:30.200
doing they weren't really asking their dad for that much advice in fact your dad might have been
00:24:34.380
getting a little bit long in the tooth was asking him for some advice when they're walking in the
00:24:38.760
break room at work and everybody got quiet they realized they were talking about him for the first
00:24:42.460
time heck i'm the i'm the man now and yet felt ill-equipped to deal with that you know something
00:24:49.140
was missing right what this lack of kind of purpose i'm doing these things i'm making money i'm
00:24:54.420
stroking checks somebody asked me to do something i feel like it's the right thing i go to it i go to
00:24:58.360
church you know i volunteered with the boy scouts whatever but if somebody asked me to define why
00:25:05.280
i can't do it and sadness this lack of connection to things eternal you feel obliged to bury it you
00:25:14.240
know you don't want to reflect it on the outside it would be harmful to the people who love and
00:25:17.880
depend upon it's still there and it's not going away and maybe you know tim and i are pretty clear
00:25:23.140
about saying we're not psychiatrists or philosophers or sociologists but we are american men with
00:25:28.020
families with jobs and we can see it and this this problem this syndrome leads to other unwanted
00:25:34.600
behaviors drinking too much gambling being risky behavior things that just are ultimately going to
00:25:40.240
harm your family harm yourself so we tried to play to make f3 this solution to that problem and it turned
00:25:47.320
out that it already was well and i would amend that to say we actually we realized f3 was a solution to
00:25:52.340
that problem after the fact yeah that was sort of you know he as it turned out before and i before he
00:25:59.260
and i even knew each other it turned out we've been going to church together for seven or eight years
00:26:02.860
um and never knew each other but we're part of it was a big escapable church in north carolina
00:26:08.420
neither of us coincidentally goes there anymore but it was this kind of place where guys would show up
00:26:14.280
everybody would put on their hermes ties and their suit on sunday and go sit in the pews and see
00:26:19.060
and be seen and you you kind of you know slapping other guys back if you saw them in the hall
00:26:23.080
but a lot of guys were just checking the box being there um and and we were among them i mean that's
00:26:28.480
the other thing is we are perfectly happy to admit that yes we were sad clowns as well sure before this
00:26:33.640
this thing happened to us which was the the predecessor workout and before we sort of found this
00:26:38.560
purpose around f3 so it becomes this thing of like looking around and realizing wow turns out
00:26:44.080
i was lonelier than i thought i was i thought i had a bunch of friends but they weren't actually
00:26:48.960
really that good of friends they were just sort of acquaintances now i've got this workout and it's
00:26:55.180
keeping me in consistent shape so i'm not bouncing up and down on the scales anymore i'm going between
00:27:01.100
fat pants and skinny pants um and i've got this consistent group of friends that i see four mornings
00:27:07.060
a week because i'm getting up at 5 30 in the morning and we sweat together and then and we share a bond
00:27:12.860
from that and that in turn has sort of freed me to sort of stop looking at my own navel and wonder
00:27:19.340
why i'm so unhappy and blame my wife for the fact that i'm unhappy and look around and say okay well
00:27:25.440
there's a big world here what can i do to make a difference in it i'm in shape i'm friended i got a
00:27:30.600
lot of energy let me go do something and and that the other thing that i'll say about f3 is we're not
00:27:36.620
going to tell you what to do with that either um we just want you to do something with it i don't i don't
00:27:40.700
care if you use that energy to serve the homeless i don't care if you want to get on a plane and go
00:27:45.420
to peru and and build mission churches i don't care if you want to go plant trees and and do the
00:27:51.300
al gore thing i mean it just it does not matter we just want you to have energy around something
00:27:55.560
the church thing is a funny thing was i actually met tim's wife long before i met him we were on a
00:27:59.980
commission together one day she says you know you you should meet my husband you'd really like him i
00:28:04.240
said tell me about him he said and he was a he's a journalist he was a journalist and i thought and
00:28:08.260
i said of course i said oh he sounds great yeah but inside i'm thinking i hate i'm gonna hate that
00:28:12.700
guy i went to boston college i went across the river so i have a natural antipathy to to harvard guys and
00:28:18.020
i'm a warrior you know why would i want to talk to a uh a guy in the media you know and i and i didn't
00:28:24.140
even know or meet tim in in in the church until long after we started working out together he was
00:28:30.040
teaching sunday school to one of my daughters and i walk in to pick her up and i just i'm just like
00:28:35.540
shaking hands you know superficial and he tim looks at me he says dread because he hadn't seen me in the
00:28:40.600
daylight you know i was like oh obt what are you doing here he's well i go to church here so he says
00:28:45.440
we went to church together for seven i say we went to church apart for seven years i mean it just left to
00:28:51.960
our own devices in some of these institutions that are designed for a higher purpose like church men are
00:28:58.880
just not selecting and uh that that one vignette i think illustrates that disconnect uh in a very
00:29:06.040
clear way so what f3 does let me just kind of summarize you guys attack sad clown syndrome from
00:29:11.740
three points the fitness part i guess a lot of guys who have sad clown syndrome they're like you got
00:29:16.300
like you david like the the pogo 40 like gaining weight losing weight over and over again and that
00:29:22.420
results in just i don't know you just feel like crap no energy um so the fitness the workout part
00:29:27.840
is there to help that the fellowship part i think it's interesting because you say that a lot there's
00:29:33.680
a lot of institutions that bring men together but not really what do you think it is about working out
00:29:38.760
with other men that turns you know turns acquaintances into like really strong relationships
00:29:45.840
mutual suffering i mean yeah sure pain i mean you know why why do dave and i get in a van with four
00:29:52.400
other guys every september and go run 210 miles for 36 hours straight you know it's just mutual suffering
00:29:59.840
i mean the army has this figured out i mean when uh when you go to basic training you know the first
00:30:05.700
part of it is always physical training and just the shared pain and i didn't realize it until after the
00:30:12.040
fact but getting beat down by that drill sergeant and having a you know a common common nemesis
00:30:17.320
who's forcing you into joint suffering together is the quickest wall breaker there could possibly be
00:30:25.260
and it just forces you into fellowship like any sports team or anything like that just doing that
00:30:30.160
together uh sharing that pain does it and it really happens so quickly particularly with the way f3 is
00:30:36.640
designed a guy comes out for his first he's shy doesn't know anybody or just you know he's just a
00:30:42.720
little bit these guys all seem to know each other but the culture that we have is very accepting very
00:30:47.880
quickly but like we like to say we aren't we're not going to leave you behind but nor will we accept
00:30:53.700
you where you are we will encourage you to do better and uh you know of course because we're men and
00:31:00.000
there's no no reason not to we give each other a hard time yeah you know we get out in those workouts
00:31:04.760
we're we're direct with each other and we got we laugh like crazy a lot of funny stuff happens
00:31:10.300
funniest thing that can happen in a workout is a new guy can come out and what we call splash more
00:31:15.200
low that means just throw up and i know that doesn't sound funny and if you're listening to it
00:31:19.300
you're like why would that be funny it's because it's happened to us all it's it's like a rite of
00:31:23.900
passage and when that happens you know you've splashed more low and man you're one of us now because
00:31:29.600
you what you've done is you've subjected yourself to a level of physical training that you could not do
00:31:37.920
for yourself i mean no one will go out by themselves and run themselves into into nausea
00:31:43.080
that requires chasing after another guy and if you're willing to do that and you're willing to
00:31:48.640
subject yourself to that then you're our kind of guy you know i mean you're you you have thrown
00:31:53.320
yourself and you've done the the nested plunge right and we have just found that that forms those
00:31:58.900
instantaneous bonds from which other a deeper relationship can then develop yeah it's interesting
00:32:04.260
you say that you guys give each other a hard time i just got done talking to a psychologist
00:32:07.880
therapist who specializes in like boys and males and he said that uh you know a lot of time men get
00:32:13.600
a bad rap for like not being nurturing men are actually very nurturing they just do it aggressively
00:32:18.240
it looks very very fun the way females do it i mean i right you know i'll take issue with with
00:32:23.060
that idea i think what we're more much more truthful with each other uh you know you can look at the
00:32:27.620
nicknames with each other which are generally not complementary now you know our our parallel woman's group
00:32:32.340
you know there's a lot of buttercups and sunshines you know but we don't you know we don't do that
00:32:36.840
uh in fact i think you're doing another guy a serious service but service no service oh service a
00:32:44.840
service by being frank and direct with them you know of course that come that's going to come from
00:32:49.140
the military but you know and maybe this is a little bit growing up yankee but you know if you grow
00:32:53.960
up in yankee land and you've got a bigger nose than the next guy your nickname is going to be schnoz
00:32:58.160
and then you know a thing that you might carry around uh on your back as a burden gee whiz does
00:33:04.880
everybody think i have a big nose well we get cut right to the chase yeah you got a big nose and you
00:33:08.640
know what you're still one of us you're one of us man we love you for that right you know that that's
00:33:14.080
that's kind of what it is it i think it's helpful for men in a male culture to be that way which
00:33:18.920
have always been that way successful male cultures i only think now you know in our current uh cultural
00:33:25.460
state is this idea where men are not supposed to do that you know i agree that at a point too much
00:33:32.600
directness can become bullying and it really is just a matter of intent if you want to belittle
00:33:37.220
another man to make yourself feel better well congratulations you're a bully but if you are
00:33:42.280
being direct with a guy and direct with yourself and and taking it as much as that you'll give it
00:33:46.720
that's not bullying man that's just being men and we have to as leaders in our communities
00:33:52.100
we have to have enough discernment to be able to see one from the other and and every time somebody
00:33:59.140
gives another guy a hard time that that's not necessarily bullying we've got to be able to see
00:34:03.740
that difference and uh f3 i think aids that so you mentioned so you develop these tight-knit
00:34:09.660
relationships within these workouts because of shared suffering you see sad men with sad clown syndrome
00:34:15.520
what kind of friends they settle for usually well i mean we categorize that there's i mean we talk
00:34:22.520
about this in the book a bit i mean first of all there's the legacy friends right so you're your
00:34:26.860
college buddies and you're like oh yeah we're still friends you know we live we live on the other side
00:34:30.660
of the country from each other but you know we talk at least what once or twice a year so that's that's
00:34:35.800
still one of my buddies we were really tight back when i was 21 22 25 years ago so you got those
00:34:42.040
guys and then um we talk about the mandate which is the guy that is married to the woman that your
00:34:48.720
wife is friends with and he's a very convenient partner so that the girls can get together and
00:34:53.900
now we can have a couple date and and the couples can can get together but or you know and a lot of
00:34:59.900
times maybe that's the another dad from your kid's soccer team or something like that and you can stand
00:35:04.160
there on the sidelines and talk about oh hey the panthers won boy cam newton looked really good didn't
00:35:08.520
any kind of thing um that's a pretty superficial friendship that's not a friend that you've chosen
00:35:12.880
for yourself that's a friend who's proximate um and convenient or the wife has picked for you
00:35:17.900
and then you know your third category is your work buddy um and that's guys that you work with um
00:35:23.480
there are problems in that relationship though which is that as we all know nobody nobody works for uh
00:35:28.960
for one company for their entire career anymore so that's going to change at some point probably
00:35:33.220
one of you is going to leave you're also in competition with each other um if not explicit
00:35:37.400
competition and uh and that's not somebody that you necessarily are going to open up to um nor are
00:35:42.900
you necessarily going to open up to uh your mandate um because there's you know a cross-collateralized
00:35:49.160
relationship uh between your wife and that man's wife and uh and you're not going to necessarily want
00:35:54.460
to muck around with that and then by the time you open up to your um to your buddy from college
00:36:00.800
it's probably too late because you have picked up the phone for your once yearly call and you're letting
00:36:05.600
him know that yeah my wife and i got separated a few months ago things things weren't going so well
00:36:10.060
well too bad you didn't pick up the phone and call him uh three months before you and your wife got
00:36:14.080
separated to talk about the thing that was going to cause you to separate from your wife so it really
00:36:19.460
we we find a lot of guys you know sort of gliding by with these very super superficial relationships
00:36:26.380
um and there was a guy named billy baker wrote a really good piece in the in the boston globe this
00:36:39.460
spring that got all the f3 guys really um fired up when they saw it because it was about loneliness
00:36:44.960
being a huge problem among among adult men this huge undiagnosed problem and and poor billy because
00:36:51.120
uh he got deluged by f3 guys i think every f3 guy emailed him and said you know there's a solution
00:36:56.360
for that hey by the way you're a sad clown hey you should start f3 in boston hey why don't you
00:37:00.760
start f3 in boston wait wait you don't want us here in boston you must be a sad clown and by the
00:37:04.860
way we discourage people we discourage guys to accuse other men of being sad clown it's not good
00:37:10.760
marketing it's not good marketing right you know when tim was just describing that it reminds me what
00:37:15.040
the narrator says to tyler durden when he describes single serving friends you know i mean so that is
00:37:21.220
really what it is i mean it's it's it's just convenience right you got that you got that far away
00:37:26.340
legacy buddy and you got your old times that you can bask in the glow of you got the the mandate
00:37:31.040
you know but when you get divorced your wife gets the better car and she gets all the friends so he's
00:37:35.560
gonna be gone you know and the work buddy man you go to a new job you don't find a new guy to play
00:37:40.320
golf with i mean that's just the way it goes yeah those friends i think the expression they're not
00:37:44.380
large grain friends yeah they're gonna pass through the sifter out the bottom they won't stick it
00:37:49.540
out when when your life starts shaking apart those kind of friends those single serving friends
00:37:54.160
those small boyfriends yeah they'll just leave you alone right so it sounds like with the the
00:37:59.120
fellowship part of f3 how it's a solution to the sad clown syndrome it's like basically these guys
00:38:04.540
are there for accountability they'll call you on your bullcrap right yep and then also they're there
00:38:09.520
for encouragement like you know when you're there working out they encourage you to push yourself
00:38:13.460
harder than you thought you were able to do sure sure okay yeah sure well let's talk about this the
00:38:19.600
the the final faith part but let's talk about the problem that you see a lot of men today face
00:38:24.300
in the book you describe a lot of men lack of purpose in life and you call these guys reachers
00:38:30.440
after jack reacher what do you mean by you know men being a jack reacher type guy well i think that
00:38:37.080
because we don't face any existential threat at least today in america and haven't really for a long time
00:38:42.880
and there's no draft and we're let's face it historically no people have ever been more comfortable
00:38:49.580
and safe than we are well that might have been the goal of all these things people have been doing
00:38:54.740
for the last 3 000 years suddenly now it's not very difficult right and i think as it turns out in the
00:39:00.520
heart of men and i i'm not excluded don't know because i'm not one but in the heart of men there is
00:39:05.580
this desire to be heroic to be purposeful to to attain something to have your life mean something
00:39:11.740
and without it man is incomplete and uh the reason why we call them reachers and compare them to jack
00:39:20.000
reacher or really any any of these idiosyncratic heroes you know that you find uh you find in our
00:39:27.020
in our current literature is because substitute we substitute in our in our in our suburban lives
00:39:34.540
we substitute the idea of doing something truly hard and dangerous with this kind of fantasy
00:39:41.580
life that we read about in books about men doing things that are truly hard and dangerous and all
00:39:46.100
these idiosyncratic uh heroes or anti-heroes really all share some very basic characteristics one of
00:39:52.980
the most important of which is they're very rarely married they don't have mortgages they don't have
00:39:57.500
stable jobs where they work for someone else you know they're you know they're independent in some
00:40:02.220
way read jack reacher being the the fictional embodiment of all these things right a former military guy
00:40:08.440
leaves the military because it's you know it's it's it's not pure enough for him he travels the
00:40:13.780
country on foot basically hitchhiking with nothing but a toothbrush not even toothpaste he has nothing
00:40:19.320
in his pockets but a debit card i think we've upgraded that now he might have a driver's license
00:40:24.820
because of uh because of 9-11 before he didn't he walks into a town usually someplace out in the
00:40:31.460
midwest or the south somewhere away from an urban area and that town is in the midst of some
00:40:36.860
conflict very clearly good and evil he stumbles into it in some way accidentally and neither side
00:40:44.180
the good nor the bad can figure out initially what side he's on the bad guys want him because he's so
00:40:49.660
huge and menacing the good guys are a little concerned about him but they're able to do some
00:40:53.400
research and find out that he's a former military policeman and he always chooses the good side by the
00:40:58.740
way along the way he hooks up with some woman who's usually from the the law enforcement side of the
00:41:05.060
house of the fbi agent or something and they have a very hot set relationship let me guess she's
00:41:10.240
beautiful but damaged but beautiful but damaged but you know he also makes it very clear to her
00:41:15.020
from the start that he's basically at the end of this he's leaving because he has to because it would
00:41:21.220
destroy this thing they have for him to stay there i mean that is just male fantasy life 101 and
00:41:27.380
one fantasy pile on top of one fantasy pile on top of another and and to make that uh that really
00:41:33.620
is diverting to men leading these lives that we're leading where being heroic really is what i mean
00:41:38.880
going out in the rain to get another box of diapers and coming back and changing your kid i mean that's
00:41:43.100
that's real heroic right going home at night bringing your paycheck home going home taking care of your
00:41:47.760
family being making your marriage work making your marriage work being a model to your sons is how
00:41:52.700
a man should act being a model to your daughters is whom they should look for in a mate and doing
00:41:57.800
that pretty much every day with a couple of mistakes you know that's that's a heroic existence
00:42:03.340
but you're really not going to set type of man glorified in today's uh fiction in today's culture
00:42:10.480
so i i have to say here being being the high-toned harvard guy i don't read genre fiction
00:42:15.400
or whatever so i had never never read any jack reacher novels but but i was a big uh 24 fan
00:42:22.280
back uh back in the day right and and and i remember dave describing the whole jack reacher
00:42:27.400
thing to me the first time i was like oh that's basically jack bauer that's why i love jack bauer
00:42:31.660
or we got rid of the wife at the end of the first season and from then on you know it was uh it was
00:42:36.480
free and clear or travis mcgee from an earlier era or philip marlowe was another one yeah philip marlowe
00:42:42.700
that well i mean when you think about breaking think about the whole thing in breaking bad why did people
00:42:47.040
hate skylar so much because she had these strings tied to wall right they wanted to be the free
00:42:52.740
right free to be the badass that he always wanted to be right so then then you know uh there has
00:42:57.540
always been this kind of in literature to be to be fair to women too they're often inserted as kind
00:43:04.400
of the killjoy resistance to a guy being like barbara hersey in hoosers yes i mean this guy saved
00:43:10.340
this town saved this kid he's trying to silver uh shoot her up and get him back with his son
00:43:16.100
and barbara hersey's driving to the next town to get all the dirt on him i mean you know so
00:43:20.500
you know this kind of male fantasy doesn't it doesn't serve us well though in our daily lives
00:43:26.020
because because male heroism is really starts with your wife and then your children and then your
00:43:32.440
friends and then the younger men who into whom you're whoring and pressing on positive habits and
00:43:37.460
then finally you know finally it is work you know it's the least uh most important thing in your life
00:43:42.740
so when we say reacher that's really our way of saying come on man all that you know focus on the
00:43:49.100
thing right in front of you the thing that god put us on earth to do and that's that's to be a great
00:43:53.220
husband and father and man in community you know what uh you know the the word that match match
00:43:59.360
right yeah yeah be a match you know be that guy and so the virtues that we try to extol in f3
00:44:06.200
are those virtues and instead of these uh idiosyncratic heroic virtues that are that are
00:44:12.420
sometimes over celebrated in the literature right so the the third f then faith you make it very clear
00:44:18.340
in the book it's not pushing a particular denomination or even religion really it's just
00:44:23.720
faith is like a purpose outside of yourself yeah i'll uh yeah so look i mean dave and i are both
00:44:29.800
practicing christians we are both more than happy to talk about our faiths at length with any man who
00:44:34.820
wants to have a conversation about that i would argue we probably have slightly different views on
00:44:40.320
it within the realm of christianity but that's also immaterial to us in the context of f3 what we want
00:44:47.260
is men to come in and and have the energy and the desire to act on whatever their faith is and it many of
00:44:56.140
them are christians and many of them do take that energy into their churches and into their what we call
00:45:00.840
down here in the south their daily faith walk right um but but i we don't really care about that what
00:45:05.920
what we want is to see men acting with purpose to affect the world outside their simple daily survival
00:45:12.660
and that of the the nuclear family that might depend on them right so you take the uh the stoic guy
00:45:17.920
that uh brett that you interviewed you know and he he talked about this what the trilateral mission
00:45:23.760
of man or whatever it was you know but you had to recognize those things over which you had
00:45:27.620
absolutely no control and don't worry about them don't think about them and you had to look at
00:45:31.440
those things over which you have some control some influence you know put some time and energy into
00:45:35.660
making those right but those things that you can control that you can affect uh and have impact on
00:45:42.560
well that's where you should be put most of your energy and time and that's what we tell guys too
00:45:46.660
don't sit in your house and and watch fox tv and yell at those people on tv they're not hearing you i mean
00:45:52.200
you're never going to meet president trump you know you don't have to speak your mind to him
00:45:56.500
but there's there's men and women and children in your community who you could and should impact and
00:46:02.020
influence towards those things that are virtuous as americans that we hold most dear and for those
00:46:08.340
things you have an obligation of your community as a man to be a leader in those ways and that's what
00:46:13.520
we that's just what we mean about faith you know believing that these things are more important than you
00:46:18.700
and being willing to do something about it put your money where your mouth is you know it's really
00:46:23.760
most people say well you know you this guy doesn't preachers really the problem we have my belief is
00:46:29.360
that it's men who won't preach what they practice guys who are leading these objectively virtuous lives
00:46:35.000
they're doing great things with their family but they won't talk about it they think it's judgmental
00:46:39.900
or they've been beaten you know they've been beaten down into keeping it to themselves and we encourage
00:46:43.880
guys to go spread that out talk about it help other men be the same way i mean if it
00:46:48.680
works for you it might well be working for for it might well work for another thing another
00:46:52.840
thing that said was he didn't say he had the answer he said he had a answer a purposeful way
00:46:59.160
of living his life and he felt like it was helpful to other people and that's why he wrote the book
00:47:03.360
in fact that guy's a perfect candidate to be a leader in f3 even though i don't i didn't hear him say
00:47:08.100
he's a christian i think he said he was a buddhist stoic but no right but we would embrace that
00:47:13.460
and say man you're you are with us that is exactly what we think so i mean what do you what do you
00:47:19.260
think it is about the the fitness in the fellowship part that energizes men to look beyond themselves
00:47:25.660
because you you guys talk about this in the book that you started doing the workouts on a regular
00:47:28.720
basis then organically you had guys getting together and saying hey we want to do habitat for
00:47:33.660
humanity or hey we want to take up this cause in the community what's going on there what is it about
00:47:39.140
working out together with other men that energizes men to to look beyond themselves they are uh they
00:47:45.140
are in community with each other i mean look i i i studied at harvard under a name robert putnam
00:47:52.300
about five years yeah so about five years after i graduated he wrote you know what has become a
00:47:57.740
seminal book in american sociology called bowling alone that talks about the atomization of american
00:48:03.180
society that in the in the 1950s you know grown men used to gather on a regular basis in bowling leagues
00:48:10.440
and rotary clubs and knights of columbia and veterans of foreign wars halls and something happened in the
00:48:17.220
60s and i mean the crazy thing about the book is it's sort of a murder mystery you know who killed
00:48:21.200
american community and he never really comes up with a satisfying answer he thinks it might have been
00:48:25.720
the television um it might have been the political uh upheavals of the 60s and so forth never get a
00:48:31.520
really satisfying answer but something has happened over the last 50 years that has caused people to
00:48:37.440
retreat from one another and from community in the society so the book at the time it came out i found
00:48:43.280
it tremendously disturbing a lot of what's happened you know kind of politically socially since then
00:48:48.120
has reinforced the concern and the thing that i've i've loved about f3 since we sort of reverse
00:48:54.880
engineered what it was doing was it is this organic solution to the bowling alone problem it creates
00:49:01.280
community um almost everywhere we planted and it doesn't matter if we planted in statesville north carolina
00:49:07.200
or hickory north carolina both relatively small more rural towns in in charlotte um in on in the san francisco
00:49:15.360
bay area it takes root and all of a sudden you've got guys coming together in a way they have them together
00:49:21.200
and willing to work with each other in a way that you haven't been willing to work with each other since since the
00:49:27.280
the 1950s and the 1960s so i it's really it's it's really community sam you you were talking about
00:49:33.600
this with jason mccarthy a few weeks ago we're both sitting here referring to all your past podcasts which
00:49:37.760
is i guess a testament of of loyalty i mean that is go ruck is building instant community during those
00:49:44.240
challenges and we've both done a number of the challenges and that is absolutely one of the points is
00:49:49.120
build an instant community of 30 people right we use challenges in our iron project leadership school
00:49:55.200
we use that pressurization jason you know we're both special forces soldiers although 10 or 15
00:50:00.480
years apart it sounds like but putting men under stress and women as well putting people under stress
00:50:06.800
in leadership position uh and making right against that is just a great way to teach leadership and to
00:50:12.640
and to form a cohesive team and he talked about how you have to spend that first couple of hours
00:50:18.400
you know in that welcome party until people figure out how to work together right how to work instead of
00:50:24.560
stop thinking about me how do i work together and uh i mean we've been doing this in the military
00:50:30.080
for 300 years in in america and and worldwide it's been you know i've listened to your your your roman your
00:50:36.240
greek and roman type it's it's that's how you build build a cohesive team and nothing's really ever
00:50:41.200
changed along those lines it's still the right way to do it so for us putting men together and putting
00:50:47.200
them under pressure and building them into leaders because that's the dirty secret of f3s it looks like a
00:50:51.280
workout but it's actually a leadership machine that that puts turns them into leaders and in turn
00:50:58.240
builds community builds bonds and and repairs basically repairs the breach um in this country
00:51:04.240
and in a small way i'm not saying we've solved the whole problem obviously it's still a huge problem but
00:51:08.880
i you know if if you put me in front of president trump i wouldn't necessarily fuss at him but i would
00:51:13.760
tell him uh you know mr president i i gotta tell you we've got a small piece of a solution that we started
00:51:19.920
down here in charlotte so if a man walks into f3 for the first time a sad clown that's the archetype
00:51:27.360
what are what's the archetype you guys are going for as a result like what should he look like
00:51:32.480
a month two months after doing an f3 workouts so we call we call that first post the first bell
00:51:41.120
so you know i guess that's a wonderful life kind of reference but so we call it the first battle the
00:51:45.680
second bell is his first leadership experience the leader at f3 is called the cue so you the leader of
00:51:52.320
a workout is the guy who cues it and the first cue is the second bell and that is usually a dumpster
00:52:00.400
fire because it's a guy that has never led anybody in that situation before and he makes some classic
00:52:07.120
errors but the best part of it he gets that he gets that out of the way and once he's done that
00:52:13.280
and gets some feedback from the other guys in the workout of course they're going to say yeah here's
00:52:17.840
everything you did wrong but we loved it do it again and and gets his kind of leadership feet on the ground
00:52:23.040
starts learning these time-honored leadership skills never though these have never really changed
00:52:28.720
starts learning how to influence other men and to motivate them he starts taking that into
00:52:34.240
other aspects of his life and ultimately becomes what we call a high impact man or a him h-i-m
00:52:41.040
and a high impact man is just is a guy who's willing in the various institutions and organizations of his
00:52:46.480
life he is a man who's willing to take responsibility for the outcome he visualizes things that would give
00:52:53.120
advantage to his groups make them accelerate he articulates those visions in a way that other people
00:52:58.880
can understand them he persuades other people to follow him to do the to pursue these outcomes and
00:53:05.680
he exhorts them to fight through the obstacles that are going to appear to any uh to any effort and in
00:53:13.040
that way he becomes that leader that person that makes things happen uh that disruptive force that high
00:53:18.640
impact man ultimately we see it in every group that's been going on you know as long as soon as
00:53:24.880
they get two or three months old it seems like it happens guys starts to work out at a homeless
00:53:29.040
shelter which seems anomalous right why would guys at a homeless shelter want to work out turns out they
00:53:33.520
do or they get together with a group that needs help in any way you know raking leaves cleaning gutters
00:53:40.400
you name it it just becomes that outgrowth he sees a problem a need in his community he has a
00:53:47.200
bunch of guys that he knows he calls him he asks for their help he tells him what he wants to do
00:53:52.560
and they get in behind him and they do it and uh that's the high impact man so brett just and just
00:53:59.440
to explain a little further we come within f3 that's called the reverse flow incubator and it comes out
00:54:04.480
of the fact that we want guys to come to us with ideas and we want f3 to be their platform for extra
00:54:12.080
ideas as opposed to a top-down approach where you know we're not gonna we're not dave and i aren't
00:54:18.480
ever going to sit here or whoever else gets the leadership of f3 is never going to sit here and
00:54:22.400
say you have about the homeless because that happens to be what we care about in fact we share
00:54:28.480
one thing which is that neither of us feel particularly rationally about no we just don't
00:54:32.160
um it just it's not our thing like we get that other people do but our thing has always been
00:54:37.440
actually adult men who need to become leaders um but it's it instead it becomes this thing of
00:54:44.480
you care about the homeless that's great hey we've got this platform of we think about 16 000
00:54:50.400
men out in the across the nation working out together i bet there are a few other people
00:54:54.960
who care about the homeless who are out there and want to band together with you
00:54:58.480
to have an impact on the homeless so you know we say that the best uh a guy with an idea looks like
00:55:03.920
a volunteer you know volunteer to lead it if we were a political party and somebody asked our platform
00:55:09.360
we'd say we don't have one other than seek virtue in your community whatever that happens to be
00:55:15.440
because how could we possibly know i mean we're not there uh so we encourage men and their
00:55:22.240
communities and their organizations to be better leaders to be virtuous leaders in those nations to
00:55:28.080
discern for themselves what needs to be done now we'll help you all day long as long as it's not
00:55:32.800
gonna hurt anybody yeah we'll show up for them oh yeah yeah as long as it's not you know obviously
00:55:38.960
harmful you know i mean there's plenty of things i do that i don't i don't really believe in the
00:55:44.640
underlying cause as being a major problem but you know what i believe in the man who believes in it
00:55:50.400
so he comes to me and he says i want to do this what do you think i said if you believe in it man do
00:55:54.960
it i'll you know i'll help you do it as best as i possibly can but but don't ask me to believe in it
00:56:01.440
i mean i believe in you and i think that's the difference between our organization and say
00:56:06.640
you know other very fine organizations like the ymca or habitat humanity they have you know targets
00:56:14.880
and outcomes and specific things that they want to see happen and they marshal resources and volunteers
00:56:20.800
and money to try to make those happen and we're just the reverse of that we don't have anything that
00:56:26.160
we think should happen other than people men should do things and to the degree we heart who we harness
00:56:32.080
anything to our motto men should do things men should do things right you know that that's the
00:56:36.640
solution to to our problem which is male is dormant male leadership you know we believe that in
00:56:42.400
communities where the men have ceased to lead and we have agreed to disagree uh agreed not to discuss
00:56:49.200
as an organization how it happened it doesn't matter to us how it happened it just happened so here we
00:56:55.520
look out in the landscape and we see men failing to lead like in the church where we were both
00:57:00.960
members and somehow managed not to bump into each other over the course of seven years well the
00:57:06.080
solution to that we believe is reinvigorated leadership and that's that's what we attack and
00:57:11.440
that's what we think f3 does very well the f3 platform is it helps reinvigorate male leadership
00:57:17.920
in a very organic way you all are starting a new outreach from that sort of teaching leadership
00:57:22.560
based on f3 principles talk a little bit more about that yeah so we call that the iron project
00:57:27.680
and that refers to the uh the line in proverbs about uh um sharpening one another as iron sharpens iron
00:57:34.480
and uh that's been sort of a core principle of f3 so i think dave alluded earlier there is a
00:57:40.080
sister organization called fia which stands for females in action that that sprang up alongside f3 about a
00:57:46.800
year after we started and so dave and i have pulled some folks from some leaders from fia and some
00:57:53.520
leaders from f3 and what we want to do is just basically take the leadership lessons that we've
00:57:58.320
learned in f3 and help other organizations build their own leadership machines i mean so if you think
00:58:05.120
about that sad client who comes in one end of the f3 machine and comes out the other end an energized
00:58:11.600
leader um we feel like there are a lot of organizations that could be doing that that
00:58:16.720
don't do that very well and so we want to come in and help teach them how to build their own leadership
00:58:23.600
development pipeline and empower their own people one of the things we haven't hit on this specifically
00:58:28.880
but one of the really key attributes of f3 and fia is that if you come in this is that second bell
00:58:35.200
dave was talking about earlier you are expected to eventually lead a workout if you're going to come
00:58:39.040
take part in this and it's going to be free we want you to lead as well and and that that vision
00:58:44.640
of shared leadership where it becomes your workout the day that you actually lead it it's not dave's
00:58:50.320
and my workout anymore it's it's it's all of our workout that's that's something that's desperately
00:58:55.120
needed in a lot of different organizations so we try to get in and really show people how to draw on
00:59:01.200
the different uh leadership uh possibilities in their people how to raise them up give them a chance to
00:59:06.480
succeed but also a chance to fail and then after they've failed find another place for them to lead
00:59:11.760
where they're they're better suited so that's that's kind of the vision um and we're uh we're out there
00:59:16.720
we're working with corporations um we're we're going to be trying to work with some college athletic
00:59:21.520
departments um and uh and we're going to be uh we're going to be working with f3 and and fia groups as
00:59:26.880
well um so the website for that is uh www.theironproject.com um and we're also on twitter at
00:59:34.560
at project iron with that been a great conversation guys um let's say there's a guy listening to this to
00:59:39.680
try an f3 workout where can they go to find out where they could www.f3nation so the letter f the
00:59:46.960
number three nation.com um that is our our national website you've got a map on there where you can put
00:59:54.240
your zip code in and find the nearest workout we are currently primarily concentrated in the southeast
01:00:00.640
but we made a big push into the ohio river valley this spring so we're now everywhere from pittsburgh
01:00:06.960
all the way across to indianapolis and the the i guess the southeastern suburbs uh we're going to go
01:00:12.560
to into chicago this fall um we're also down in texas and dallas uh san antonio and houston and
01:00:19.200
austin this fall and we're going into st louis this fall as well next year where we've got an
01:00:24.480
outpost on the west coast in seattle and we're going to be working our way down the west coast
01:00:28.880
and up into the northeast over the next couple of years awesome well tim whitmeyer dave redding
01:00:33.520
thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure absolutely thank you brett yeah thanks
01:00:36.880
for the opportunity my guests today were dave redding and tim whitmeyer they're the leaders of the
01:00:40.720
f3 workout movement you can find out more information about them and even find a workout near you
01:00:46.320
by going to f3nation.com also check out their new leadership project it's the iron project the
01:00:51.920
ironproject.com and check out our show notes aom.is slash f3 where you can find links to resources
01:01:09.840
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
01:01:14.080
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com if you enjoy this
01:01:18.080
show you've got something out of it i'd appreciate if you take one minute to give us review on itunes
01:01:21.840
or stitcher it's all it takes it really does help out a lot as always thank you for your
01:01:25.520
continued support and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly