Dan Doty, a wilderness guide and former instructor for troubled teens and juvenile offenders, shares his 55-day solo trip with a young man near Lake Superior—hiking, push-ups, and life-changing conversations—that reshaped the participant’s trajectory. He critiques "bootstraps" narratives, arguing systemic trauma (violence, poverty) in places like the Bronx hardwires stress responses, while Rogan agrees privilege skews conventional advice. Both advocate mindfulness over reactive desperation, citing unresolved PTSD and societal momentum as barriers to growth, with Doty’s men’s groups in Montana proving transformative through authenticity. Future tech could "defrag" human behavior, they speculate, but real change demands honesty and time, leaving Rogan urging Doty to launch his own podcast to spread these hard-won lessons. [Automatically generated summary]
And Dan's been on the podcast before with Remy Warren back when he and Remy were releasing that Apex Predator show, which is an excellent show that I guess they're not doing anymore.
If you hear noise, because we're driving, we're on the road right now, and we're passing through some fucking strange shit.
We are about 150 miles or so outside of Reno, I think 170, outside of Reno, Nevada.
Yeah, I got so close that it could have happened once.
One time it legitimately could have happened.
The other time, we got kind of close a few times, but one time, I got inside of 30 yards, and as I was crawling towards them in the bushes, I made too much noise, and they got up and bolted.
There's two deer that were in...
This is too many details.
Catch it on the show.
It's called Meat Eater.
It's on Sportsman's channel.
It's an excellent show.
But this fucking trip has been really interesting.
First of all, it's nice to be off the grid for seven days.
What I've been trying to do lately, I check my phone and make sure nothing important is going on.
Like, I look at my text messages.
Make sure that they're okay.
Nothing's crazy.
No 911 calls or something.
And then I just try to start my day.
But I used to.
I used to hit it hard for like an hour.
Check the news, check all the bullshit, check my Twitter feed, check all the links people post me, check what I'm supposed to be doing, check this, check that.
We watch one video on Bigfoot, and the next thing you know, it's four hours later, and you're like, what the fuck just happened?
You know, you've watched several people get eaten by crocodiles, and I watched this thing, the top crocodile attacks of 2016, and I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with me?
I do a lot of meditation, and in the lineage of meditation that I do, there's a lot of solo practice, or basically solo retreat, where you go either in a cabin or out in the woods or whatever you want to do, and you're just there by yourself doing your thing.
I have not had a chance to do that recently.
I also used to, when I used to be a wilderness guide and would run programs for people, they would always do a solo at the end of their wilderness experiences.
Sit out in the woods, all alone, by themselves, four days, six days, whatever it was.
Yeah, man, it's a weird thing.
It's not something I think that most people are drawn to.
I don't think it's a type of thing that...
You know, I think it is a weird thing for people in our culture, but I think there's something massively valuable to be gained by that.
You want to know how you really feel about things and explore whether or not you're right about things or wrong or whether or not you have a bias or whether or not you have some sort of preconceived notion.
You know, one of the things that I've found That a lot of people do is they have an opinion on something, and then when confronted with new evidence, they do their damnest to try to defend that original opinion.
So the idea of going out to a mountain and being there, to me it's about, I think there's a disconnect in our culture from the actual experience and however you want to say that, your actual physical experience that you're having in the moment, the actual emotional experience or even mental experience.
I think that there's so much controlling experience Us.
You know, we control ourselves and other things.
Other forces control us, but the actual sitting in what's actually happening is, to me, the most compelling part of being alive.
And I think there's a lot of ways that people go about doing that.
But it is challenging, and it's not something that...
And I think it extends to being with other people too.
I think there is something to be practicing, being able to be present in the experience that's happening, right?
I think that different spiritual traditions are searching for that thing.
All kinds of different things that people do to try to...
Feel better and do better at life.
So yeah, the practice of doing it yourself, I think, is one thing.
And then, I think an even more challenging thing is that sort of rawness or simplicity or even connection with somebody else present is even fucking harder.
So I actually think it opens up a way of living life that is...
But it's interesting, too, because it's so perfect for these deer.
The deer are everywhere up there, and they're fucking big and fat and healthy, and all they're doing is eating these sage bushes and then taking naps and running from mountain lions and shit.
Because we found some big, thick ropes of shit that are filled with hair that is either...
The first day we got inside of 30 and I could have had a shot if it wasn't for it.
We only had a tag for a buck.
I should probably explain what a tag is.
We're hunting on public land.
You may not know this because most people don't and I didn't until I started hunting but We the people of the United States of America own massive chunks of land.
It is your land.
It is my land.
It's like that song, this land is your land.
But it really is that.
It's not just in theory.
It's public land.
And it's rare because most countries don't have what we have.
We have these giant chunks of forest that you can hunt in.
And you can fish in, and you can hike in, you can camp in, you can do all these different things, but to hunt in them, One thing that people don't know, especially people that are down on hunting, is that hunting is closely regulated by wildlife agencies that's manned by biologists that are working on science and data for that particular area.
So in the area where we were at, it's not that easy to get a tag.
So Steve Rinella had to use his points to get me in there as well.
And what points are is you put in for a tag...
You have to put in every year, and it takes like a few years.
So if you can hunt in this place, you could probably only hunt here like every three years.
But there's other places like the Nevada Strip, which is on the Utah-Nevada border that is so awesome.
Maybe it's a big empty place but maybe everybody I joke around about that place being a drug-addled shithole, but I've met a lot of really nice people from Nevada.
I mean, it has a bad reputation because Vegas is linked to organized crime and gambling and all the other sordid shit that comes with that.
People think of it as this horrible, sinful place.
But that's just a small area of Nevada.
Most of my friends that I know that live around Vegas, that are involved in the MMA business, they're fucking the nicest people in the world.
And they'll tell you, Nevada is what's outside of the Strip.
It's a great town.
Henderson?
Henderson's a great town.
It's a really nice place to live.
It's real safe.
So there's a lot of good spots in Nevada.
But anyway, point being, we're out here...
It's just a really fascinating, interesting landscape to spend seven days, but bring a lot of fucking water, that's for sure.
I don't know, it's weird though because that one's like heaven and hell.
Like the sun comes out and you don't want to be anywhere else, but then most of the year when it is raining, because it does rain most of the year, it's just, it's fucking miserable.
Yeah, so my first job out of college, I'd been living in Panama with my ex-girlfriend.
We were moving to Utah, and I just needed a job, and I didn't know what I was going to do.
So I went on Craigslist and we looked at the area around Salt Lake City and there was a job advertisement for a wilderness guide or wilderness instructor, they called it.
I didn't know this shit existed at that point.
So yeah, there's a huge industry, and most of it's in the western United States, but they're therapeutic.
Wilderness programs which are tied to a bunch of therapeutic boarding schools.
So, in the most basic sense, there's kids from generally pretty wealthy families across the country that are having trouble, their parents don't know what to do, and they'll send them away, you know, as an intervention.
And usually, the intention is to have these kids go to a boarding school where there's a therapeutic presence also.
In order to get into those schools, those schools require a wilderness stay.
So I worked for a program and went out there and just kind of, it was a The type of program where everything was made by hand.
So you got out there, you were given a half of an elk hide, you were given a knife, and then you were taught some of the basic skills.
So we had to make our own backpacks out of sticks and elk hide.
We would sew our own moccasins, we would do all that kind of stuff.
And then all the fire that we made, we had to Make by hand, you know, with a bow drill.
So yeah, so it was this amazing, it was really life-changing for me because I, you know, I love the outdoors, I love the wilderness and all that kind of stuff, and I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but got out to this place where there's, um...
Literally walked out into the...
Actually, it looks a lot like this where I work.
So just these massive, brown, dry wilderness areas.
And got out there in these groups of kids.
Some of these kids would stay in these programs for 90 to 120 days.
So literally...
And here's the part that I still very much don't agree with and I don't like is that these programs would literally kidnap you out of your bed.
You can be kind of a heavy or a tough guy that literally goes for an intervention, flies to a family's home, takes the kid out of their bed, and flies them and drops them in the middle of the wilderness.
And it's, as you can imagine, it's traumatic, man.
Yeah, so they have ways to sort of override the age system at times.
Yeah, so these programs are meant to sort of give the kid a chance to look at their lives, how they've been behaving, and an opportunity, just kind of like we were talking about, but reflect and sort of explore and learn.
And there's a lot of good that happens.
It really does help people.
And, in my opinion, there's a lot of bad to you.
I don't think you can ever imagine that you could literally kidnap a kid out of your house and not fuck up the trust you have with your parents, you know?
It's messed up.
Yeah, so I did that for...
I started there, and then I started working in more state-run sort of correctional programs.
So, for a long time, I led trips in Minnesota that were...
It was a 21-day sentence...
But it was basically an alternative to a 60-day juvie sentence.
So basically, you steal a car, you can either go, the judge can either send you a juvie for 60 days or send them to me, and then we'd go on a badass, like, you know, 200 mile hiking trip or something.
For obvious reasons, but then the other reasons too is that these programs are generally run by really grounded good people that treat people well.
At least the ones I always work for.
I work for programs with really exemplary leadership.
I think what these kids could learn in those programs as opposed to going to Juvie and Yeah, I would imagine that's a way, way better option, but just the kidnapping part is crazy.
Like a base camp, you know, where you learn how to do some of the skills and maybe you start...
So the other thing is there's relationships with a therapist at these programs, and that's how it works.
So the people that work with the kids directly are like what I did as an instructor, so usually there'd be two of us, two adults, with a group of ten kids.
And it was all, boy, usually segregated into male and female.
So I pretty much just worked with dudes.
For a long, long, long, long time.
So the instructors would lead the days and you'd usually hike or float or whatever you're doing, you know, most of the day.
And then you would run, you call them circles, or like processing things where everybody would...
Really, a lot of it came down to learning how to communicate and communicating honestly and openly.
It's really good.
Actually, I learned a lot by being there and doing it.
But then once a week or twice a week, a therapist would drop in somehow, magically.
I stay in contact with a ton of the kids that I work with just because, you know, we got to know each other really well and respected each other and became friends.
And I know, I've seen the benefit almost across the board.
Like, good things learned, a lot of growing up happened.
You know, it's kind of like a forced rite of passage in a sense, you know, the idea that...
A forced rite of passage, which I, you know, don't agree with the forced part.
A lot of, I know a bunch of those kids, I could point to 12 right now that I know just kind of turned around, maybe went to college or didn't go to college, but ended up having good relationships with their family, are feeling good about life.
But then there's probably far, far, I know there's far more where that didn't necessarily happen.
I don't necessarily think it was a bad deal for them to go through that experience.
But it's not a cure-all.
But what it does, I think it self-selects for people who really do kind of want to figure shit out because it gives you a break and time to do that.
I mean, yeah, I don't know, 30%, 40%, 50% of just, like, either shutting down completely and not complying with anything or, you know, direct sort of resistance or anger or things like that.
One of the tougher things is that even if it does work, so say you're yanked out of your home and...
Like you just said, your home and your friends and your community has so much to do with how you end up interacting and what you do.
So even if you get sent away for Four months or even years to these programs, and then you may change.
Well, not even may.
You will change, or a kid will, someone will change.
But then, no matter how much you change, and you go back to that situation that you came from, the house, your family, just the culture that you're in, God, is it hard to...
Well, to not slip back into old patterns, but then also even just to fit in.
That's what I've been working with kids lately on, is that they go away and have these big experiences, and then they go home and mom and dad are still exactly how they were.
I try to be impartial.
I don't think I'm good at being impartial, but I try.
Looking and getting to know these kids and all the things that they went through, It's so fucking hard not to point every finger at the family and the parents.
So that's the thing about a wilderness, like a long intervention like that, I think that's what I meant about self-selecting, is it's possible for somebody who really wants to change stuff, you know, to change the momentum of your family, to change the momentum of your past.
It takes a lot of energy to do it.
It takes, like, a lot of dedication, a lot of letting go of a bunch of stuff, but it really is a pretty amazing thing to be a part of it.
That kind of experience does facilitate that sort of thing if one wants to.
But then, like I said, once you get home, it's not like it gets easier.
It's incredibly complicated, very difficult to do, and it's an unbelievably huge responsibility to be in charge of really the future of a life and all the people that life is going to touch.
So if your son is going to grow up and all the things that you teach him and all the experiences that he has with you will reflect on how he interacts with other people and that ripple effect carries on to thousands and millions of people potentially.
I think that, and I don't know, you know, I'm a very new dad, I don't know this, but I think one of the best things that we could do as a people, as a culture, is for, yeah, for parents who are put in that position with all that responsibility, To somehow look at themselves real hard and take that time to, I don't know the best way to put it, but just improve themselves.
Rather than trying to figure out how to parent a certain way or parent better, I really think the best thing we can do is just be better people, be better humans ourselves.
They just get shit done, and they hustle, because their parents were drug addicts, or alcoholics, or jailbirds, or whatever the fuck it was, and they just felt the pain of their family being awful.
learn so I worked with young guys between the ages of 14 and then toward the end of when I did that work I would I'd do more specialty work so I'd do like one on ones so one time I did a 55 day wilderness trip with one kid just him and I that was the entire thing What was that like?
What I was going to say is that what I learned from working with kids so much is that example thing.
There's nothing to compare to that as far as...
What people or kids or guys especially will respond to is that example.
You can tell them I mean, kids, they catch bullshit the fucking second it comes out of your mouth.
You know, if you're saying one thing, but you're not living it, if you're not being honest, if you're not being real about yourself, it doesn't work.
So, I mean, I think that that was a real...
You know, and I did this for five or six years, and I spent probably six, seven hundred days out doing this, and I came back from my experience just seeing this huge gap...
In our culture about role models and mentors and just regular relationships that seem pretty natural and pretty normal.
I would get into a group of these kids and there would be something there.
They would recognize something in me and I'd recognize something in them.
There was generally different categories of kids who would come to these places.
So you'd have your drug abuser, sort of out of control kid.
You'd have your internet addicted, slightly softer guy that was socially awkward.
Sometimes we had emotional outbreaks.
They kind of broke, you know, into categories.
But honestly, the thing is, the cool thing about spending that much time with people is that, you know, like, it doesn't take long to see through those behaviors to really seeing a good kid.
I've worked with hundreds if not thousands of kids and Maybe one.
One.
I can only think of one that I don't think was, like, someone I would go have a beer with or hang out with today.
You know?
Like, they're good kids.
They're really good.
They're great human beings.
I just...
Either in shitty circumstances or made a lot of bad decisions or just were confused.
I mean, whatever, you know.
I think I could have ended up there easy if I would have got busted in high school for a bunch of, you know, drinking and partying.
It's almost everything in terms of your future, you know?
And so many people don't realize that.
A lot of times the really fortunate ones don't realize it because they just think that everybody's got it like this or they just think that, well, my life's hard too.
You know, my life was only challenging in that we moved around a lot.
Like, my mom and my stepdad were really nice people.
Got lucky, you know?
They weren't fuck-ups.
They weren't assholes.
They didn't, you know, they didn't beat me and torture me.
You just hear such horrible, horrible stories of what parents do to their children.
And, you know, you gotta wonder what their parents did to them that started this whole path, this almost, like, unstoppable force of momentum.
Like, yeah, so one of the kids that, just this amazing, light-filled kid, you know, comes, I don't remember how it happened, I think he came into school one morning, and, you know, his dad had bashed his skull in with a baseball bat.
I think he got drunk and got angry and just beat the fuck out of him.
I remember that morning feeling just so hopeless and just like, you know, nothing I could do to protect this kid.
Like, I could be the best teacher, I could be the best role model and friend of this guy that I ever could be, but every night he has to go back into this just unimaginable, horrible place, you know?
And it's insidious.
There's a lot of weird ways it comes out.
There's another student in my...
A girl, her mom would basically tell her that she was always sick.
There's a name for this.
There's like a condition, I don't remember.
But where a parent needs their kids to be around so much for their own well-being somehow.
But they're filled with that shit every day too, man.
They're told that by, and it is interesting because I was born in North Dakota, I'm about as white as you could ever be, and my students, who, I mean, just for facts, so like the school I worked at in the Bronx completely segregated and was completely black and Latino, so like the school I worked at in the Bronx completely segregated and was completely black and Latino, with And not a single white kid in the entire school.
It's just not that way.
And so there's immediately this odd dynamic for me to go and teach in a location like that that there is a racial dynamic present no matter what.
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My kids would tease me about how white I was all the time.
Yeah, I mean, and I can't officially say this because I haven't studied it officially, but I think that there are, you know, versions, if you call it PTSD, or just stuck in the state of hypervigilance, whatever it is, it's just coming from a place that's not safe, a place that's fucked up, and to be expected to be able to overcome that without any real...
Time or assistance to working is really unreasonable, I think.
Yeah, it's a battleship that's moving 100 miles an hour and you're expected to turn on a dime.
There's a lot of weight and momentum behind that past.
I was talking to Michael Irvin once.
I was on a flight with him.
Just randomly.
And it was all the way to Australia, so it was a long ass time.
And he and I were talking about work that he's been doing with some young kids that come from troubled houses and troubled backgrounds as well.
And he was telling me that when a child is in the womb, And the mother is experiencing intense stress from violence, from crime, bad neighborhoods, that kind of shit, domestic abuse, that kind of thing.
That the child grows up with more of a propensity for violence.
That violence becomes almost in their DNA as a response to any perceived threat.
Whether it's real or not.
And that we have to understand that these children, they're being wired for violence.
They're wired to deal with bad neighborhoods, bad situations, crime.
And it's literally a part of their genetics.
It's in them.
It's their DNA almost.
Or it is.
So the Republican, white, conservative idea that people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is the cliché, right?
They're conveniently ignorant about the circumstances that are involved in creating a child that grows up and has been in juvenile detention since they were a little kid and has been in and out of all sorts of Police custody and been in crime situations from the time they were young.
To say that you need to straighten your act up, they don't have any examples.
The examples that they see on TV might as well be them watching Iron Man.
No, and that's an issue I have with that whole debate or political discussion or however you want to put it, is that to me it's only they're talking about a situation and never is the actual conversation being had.
Conversation between people who it actually affects is rarely brought out and it's just a bunch of people looking at things from the outside and commenting and talking about it, not Actually digging into it.
It's very dismissive of other people's misfortune and not really appreciating or understanding your fortune.
You know, we're all born into totally different circumstances for the most part.
And most of us here in America, we were talking about this yesterday, that people that are in this country are so much more fortunate than someone who's born in some...
You know, terrible third world situation, like we were talking about Liberia, the reality of Liberia, which is a former slave colony.
What they did was they took American slaves that were released and they shipped them back to Africa, literally, and created this horrible, horrible environment through, you know, A bunch of different factors, but Civil War being a big one of them.
And Vice has this really insightful and amazing piece on Liberia.
I think it's Vice's Guide to Travel.
Oh my God, is it awful.
But you can't say that being born to a blue-collar white family in Cleveland Is anything remotely as bad as being a child born in Liberia.
You just can't.
And then, looking at that person, the child who was born in Cleveland, I'm sure there's a lot of kids that are born there that wish, fuck, why couldn't I have been born in New York City?
Or, fuck, why couldn't I have been...
It's...
Again, it comes back to what you were saying about being a dad and the responsibility of being a good person and being a better person.
Making and developing human beings and creating a community together with these human beings is so incredibly difficult.
And we're handed this responsibility with no instruction manual.
Well, you have some answers, and I think you've got some great ideas, but I think one of the things that we talked about yesterday was...
The amount of children that you had communicated with, that you had taught that found themselves in these horrific situations that you had a kind of experience with them.
And I think that...
Human beings today, at some point in time, we have to realize that we are some sort of a super organism.
We are all connected.
And if this kid who grows up in this horrible environment and is just abused and Subject to all sorts of violence.
That kid's going to go perpetuate more of the same if no one steps in.
If no one offers some solid example that you can do better.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about and reading about and studying both rites of passage in different parts of the world, but then also just this really simple concept of mentoring or mentorship or role models.
I think I got real lucky.
Not only did I have a good family and good parents, amazing parents, I have this string of role models that I had from little kids.
We've talked about this briefly before, but my first one was my Taekwondo instructor when I was a kid, Master Mike.
I was super shy, super very soft as a kid, and then this dude in a sports car drove into Drake, North Dakota, and I started taking Taekwondo with him, and he was just this...
Badass, brash, strong, confident guy.
Man, I looked up to him.
I attribute a lot of the good qualities I value by myself, both to him and to Taekwondo itself, because I think it teaches great things to kids.
So he was a mentor, and then in high school I had this farmer.
I worked on a pig farm.
His name is John Wiersma.
And we didn't talk about shit.
He didn't fill me full of wisdom.
What we did was just work together.
We worked side by side.
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We like shuttled pig shit and dumped it on the field over and over and over.
I had this great mentor who sort of, you know, nonchalantly took me under his wing and kind of on and on throughout my life, man.
I don't know.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and I really, I just really wish that for people or want that for people, you know, because you can't rely on your parents to give you everything you need in this life.
It's just, it's too much pressure for Well, also I think, as we were talking about earlier, their parents didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and their parents' parents didn't know what the fuck they were doing, and for a lot of us, that's, you know, that's the reality that we find ourselves being born into.
But I think...
With doing some of the things that you've done and also with the amount of data and information that's available today, I think we have a chance of affecting our society and our culture and the way we communicate with each other and just who we are as a species.
This crazy, weird, super organism of human beings.
We're in a better position to change that than ever before.
Like, my grandparents came over from Italy and Ireland on a fucking boat.
Nobody knew what the hell was going on.
Their parents didn't know shit when they brought them over here.
They just heard there was a better chance.
There was an opportunity.
I mean, they might have saw a photo of what New York looked like, you know?
They might have.
And they took a chance and they came over here.
The difference between them And the kind of experience and the kind of access to information that your children are going to have or my children are going to have is fucking profound.
And I think we're a part of something that's really interesting right now in that the human race is becoming hyper-aware of all the variables that are fucking it up.
And one of the big ones, of course, is the abuse and mishandling and misraising of children.
So yeah, to that point, there's this thing that I've been paying attention to that I think is happening.
So as we have more information, as things happen faster, as all of this compounds and things go faster, faster, faster, I think that the impact of slowing down becomes...
Very, very valuable.
Very, very quickly.
So, you know, we're talking about all these wilderness experiences.
I also bring up like meditation or any of these things.
I think that as other things speed up, I think that These things, like, have the power to just smack you across your face and, like, change things fast, you know?
And I don't know, this has just been observation for 10 years or so, but I think that, you know, 150 years ago or whatever, in the western United States, if we had slow lives, I don't think we would have had a huge impact by going and camping for a week.
But today, when you're pulled out of your crazy digital electronic life and you go back and you feel that human simplicity for a little bit of time, I think the combination of the two offers a really powerful place, a really crazy impression.
Because if you can get that awareness and sort of the impact of slowing down, compounded with all of the information and the power and everything that we have, So I think we're on the verge of a very ripe place.
I think it's a time where You know, people can really change themselves a lot quicker or maybe even a lot more than they think is.
That's another thing.
I would love for people just to think or believe that things could be different, that they could change, you know?
Because, I mean, that's what I've been involved in for so long.
Well, it's also a lot of times people, they get out of high school, they go into college, they get out of college, they get a job, they get a job, they start their career, they push forth in their career, and before they know it, they're fucking 40 years old, and they can't stop!
Look around and notice how many adults either have shitty lives they don't like or are, like, going through massive amounts of self-help or therapy or all these things at old ages and not, you know...
I'm not denying that there's most certainly quite a few people that have natural chemical imbalances and pharmaceutical drugs can benefit them.
That's true.
Absolutely.
No doubt about it.
But I know for a fact there's a lot of people who get medicated Because they fucking hate their lives.
Instead of picking a life that you enjoy or working towards developing your life into something that you'd enjoy.
Some of the most satisfying email and tweet messages and Facebook things that I've ever gotten is people that have listened to this podcast and said, you know what, I realize I am 36 and I've always wanted to do this and I'm going to quit my fucking job and I'm going to figure out how to do that.
I'm going to work towards that.
I'm going to save up some money.
I'm going to fucking, whatever it is, I'm going to make pottery.
If you've got a good job that you enjoy, that's a great life.
And then your job doesn't feel like a job.
I mean, even though it can be challenging and difficult, if you can find something you actually enjoy doing, your life will be immeasurably better than if you're just grinding it out, waiting for that 5 o'clock fucking buzzer to come.
I mean, I most certainly have been massively influenced by a lot of people that I respected and listened to them or watched them or saw their work or whatever it is.
That's okay.
As long as you eventually figure out who you are.
And it kind of happened to you before you even know it.
When I was young, man, I never felt very secure.
And I always was like, God, I wish I could fucking be someone like all these people that I admire.
I wish I could figure out how to be me instead of wishing I was all these other people.
Somewhere along the line, if you pursue what you actually enjoy, it kind of happens.
It's a process of self-reflection and you've got to be honest.
That's where these moments that you're talking about, like meditative moments or moments where you can go to the mountains and be by yourself, those moments are huge because they give you this Opportunity to maybe examine your ideas a little more closely instead of just constantly being inundated with other people's opinions about what you should do.
You've just got to live and you've got to experience as much as you can, whether that's A trip around the world or traveling or to a different place or a hallucinogenic experience done in a safe way or whatever it is.
I just feel like you gotta, yeah, to find yourself, you gotta test the waters.
It doesn't taste good, but it seems like if you know that that's a possibility What a strange place this is.
There's a lot of these places that we drove through, like how about that one wild west town that was established in 1865, I don't remember the name of it, but they had the old buildings there that were there from 1865 that were in ruins in various state of disarray and decay, surrounded by these more new modern ruins.
Like if you find an old barn, like that old barn that we were passing, that little shack or whatever the fuck it was, that cool old cabin of distressed wood, you look at that and you go, wow, that's kind of badass.
What happened to these people that are robbing these people?
Something bad.
It's not necessarily 100% their fault that that's who they've become.
I'm not taking away ownership of their own actions, but you've got to think about the development of their ideas, how it happened.
I had this friend of mine on the podcast recently, and he was talking about...
He grew up in...
His name is Byron Bowers.
He grew up in a really poor area of Georgia.
And a lot of crime where he was.
Just a lot of, like, really fucked up family environments.
And he was saying that when we thought about, like, robbing something, like going to a store and stealing something, we didn't think it was a bad thing.
That's how you get it.
That's how you get things.
You gotta go get it.
You gotta go steal.
And that it was just, that's what you grew up with.
Now, he's a successful comedian, he's doing well, and he can step back and have the hindsight vision of his current state and realize, oh, that was why I thought that way.
And I'm sure these guys have robbed you.
I mean, they didn't have a fucking pretty upbringing.
It's not like they went from a gated community to robbing people in Peru.
Yeah, someone should come along and just make the perfect human razor.
No, obviously not.
I'm sure you're going to do a great job, but for people whose parents are going to do a shitty job, I wonder if they're going to come up with technology one day, and I think they will, that will be able to install better memories and a better pattern of behavior into a person's brain.
Almost like they're going to be able to defrag your hard drive.
There's a lot of recent research and study that has happened specifically with PTSD and in that realm that shows how memories and our experiences when we're young and older,
how they truly are stored in our body and that there are It's not psychology in the sense of just talk therapy or just figuring things out or analyzing anything.
It's much more body-based.
So the idea is that if there's an experience that happens, The natural human range is to, if it's overwhelming, right?
You fight, you run, or flight, or you freeze.
And it's the freezing that These people will argue that things literally get locked and etched into your bodies.
Either your cells or your musculature.
I don't know.
Wherever it is.
But that through processes of awareness and relaxation and being able to go into that, you really can open and release a lot of that.
So it's not an automatic hit a button, defrag the entire thing.
But there are things that people do that truly work in that way and in that direction.
And it's...
Not mainstream at all.
I think it will be one day.
I actually really think it will be.
unidentified
But I think that there's proof now that things are more malleable.
Well, I think it's being more and more accepted and I think people are understanding now more and more that there's a method that the human mind has sort of undergone in order to take these memories in in the first place.
And if there's a way to re-examine those initial ideas and form new ideas based on better data and a better understanding of how your mind works.
Very few people know how their mind works.
They just know that I get mad when this happens or this pisses me off.
One thing that's a beautiful idea that has been going around is Look at something when it happens and decide how to make that a positive for you and decide how to give that thing meaning because nothing truly has any meaning other than the meaning that you give it and the meaning that What I might have to something might be very different than you would have for the exact same experience.
And we don't even know who's right or wrong until you look at where that path takes you.
And I might look at it and go, you know what?
Dan Doty was right.
I should have just let that brush off my shoulders.
Look, he did, and now he's doing great.
Me, I'm still carrying around that one fucked up experience.
I mean, there's people that are still repeating arguments that they had in the ninth grade while they're in their car.
They're sitting there going, this motherfucker thinks he can get away with that?
I think one of the best tools to begin that entire process is simple mindfulness practices.
So what that means is that when something fucked up happens and you're going to immediately have that knee-jerk reaction, all it is is that you give it a little fucking space.
I like what you said about, you know, taking things as learning opportunities, you know, in general, that just anything in life that happens to you, whether it's good or bad, is an opportunity you can capitalize on.
Because it'll make a little incremental change in a certain direction.
And then over time, that could be a gigantic factor in determining your happiness or your unhappiness, depending on, like, how you choose to behave and think.
I think there's a big stigma too against self-help.
I think for guys especially, but probably for everybody, that we just got to get over that shit.
Yeah, we got to get over that.
It's got to be okay.
I don't know.
Because all of that self-help, what the fuck, spiritual type stuff that's made fun of, made fun of for good reasons, but there's some things in there that...
That aren't all that weird and are just incredibly helpful.
But I think your life experiences and what you're trying to do is very noble, dude.
And I think what you're trying to do and what you have done is very exceptional.
And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this with you.
Because the stories that you were telling me over this past week and all the other times that we've hung out together over the past few years, since I met you in 2012, was that a cop?
You hit the brakes for the cops.
The fuzz, baby.
Is that a cop?
Nope.
Those stories are powerful, man.
I think it's nice for people to know there's people like you out there.