Dan Doty and Joe Rogan revisit their 2012 Missouri River trip, debating bear attack authenticity and ethical hunting. Doty’s wilderness therapy work—leading youth in Alaska and Minnesota—reveals nature’s transformative power, contrasting with urban isolation. They critique societal dismissal of white men’s struggles while exploring loneliness, emotional suppression, and the need for connection. Doty launched Everyman Podcast to amplify regular men’s voices, shifting from expert-driven advice to raw personal growth, inspired by fatherhood and witnessing suppressed pain. The episode underscores how vulnerability and shared experiences could bridge divides in an increasingly fragmented world. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, that was back when it was October of 2012. I thought there was only two months left in the world because I thought the Mayan calendar was correct and it was December 21st, 2012 was going to end the world.
For people who don't know, if you're ever in a cold area, it's so important that you have a base layer of merino wool because that shit gets wet and you stay warm.
That was when we were in Wisconsin, that video that you just put up.
But when we did do that, man, that was where Lewis and Clark had made some stops on the expedition.
And that's one of the coolest things about doing it with Rinella, because he knows so much about the history of the United States and the settling of the United States and also the Nez Perce Indian stories that he would tell us.
Yeah, and that's when I heard the story about the real story, the original story about the Leonardo DiCaprio movie, The Revenant, like what really happened before they turned it into a movie.
Yeah, he told me that story, the actual story about the guy that got left behind and crawled back many, many miles.
The real grizzly bear attacks, though, man, I bet the real grizzly just kind of swatted that dude once, and then he fell down and then it left him alone.
I was listening to a podcast today about wolves in Idaho where they were talking about how when you go deep into the backcountry where people can't get to or where it's very difficult, really rocky terrain, the wolves are just running rampant out there.
The most memorable, we were in a valley in Alaska, and it was dusk, and just two massive mountain ranges on each side, and I don't know, it might have been Giannis, somebody yelled, and somebody spotted one across the river, and we went and looked at it, and it was, man, my memory is failing.
It was either pure white, I think it was pure white, And it just, I swear to God, it shone.
It just, like, emanated light.
And it was the most, like, regal, beautiful, just, like, perfect.
Perfect.
And it just sort of trotted along the river and disappeared back in the woods.
The only thing that ever gives me pause in the woods is a grizzly because, you know, Steve and I, we got charged that once and ever since that happened, my bear radar is more intense.
What's weird, people are getting really touchy-feely about sharks because they hear all about these sharks getting slaughtered for shark fin soup.
Oh, really?
Yeah, the governor, I think, of New York caught a shark fishing totally legal and not an endangered fish at all.
And he got so much hate.
Because people who...
It's like we were talking before about science, that so many people want to argue things online, but they don't want to actually look into, like, what are the studies that have been done?
All three species of thresher shark is listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature because of their declining populations.
Fishing for them is regulated in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, but it is not illegal.
Oh, okay.
Despite its legality, UN patrons of the ocean, Louis Prug, said the killing in subsequent photos were abhorrent.
Oh, that might be a twat.
And worked against those trying to conserve dwindling shark numbers.
Um, okay.
Yeah.
Alright, well, maybe he's right.
I know that some of them are not.
I don't know, man.
I mean, you can't really control what kind of fish you catch when you go fishing, and if you catch a fish that's illegal, what do you do?
The problem with catch and release, this is a dirty secret, ladies and gentlemen, because people do go catch and release fishing, and I've released fish before, a lot of them die.
A friend of mine caught one, and it was apparently enormous, and he was furious because the guide, they went fishing with the guide, the guide cut the line because it was so big.
My little brother shot me a deer and gave it to me for Christmas, and it was the first slightly off-tasting animal that I've tasted in, man, seven years.
You know, and I've been eating a lot of animals, you know, over my course of time.
You know, we're talking about meat eater, which I worked on for a long time.
I don't anymore, but I ate a lot of animals, and they all tasted exceptionally good, and my brother shot this one, and...
I don't know what it was.
It was cold.
He killed it, and it got dark, and he had to track it early the next morning.
Once we did shoot that deer and we ate it that night, I was like, good lord, it's the best meat ever.
And there's so much connected to it.
It's not just that it's like you went to a restaurant, you had a delicious meal.
It's like, no, you busted your ass for five days, humping over mountains, finally put a stalk on a deer, shot the deer, killed it, dragged it back to camp, cut it up, butchered it, and then we ate it.
And then when Steve took that doe head and buried it underground, because, what is that Guthrie book?
Yeah, that's a fucking- Big scary animal, but again a domestic animal that is not fighting off predators It's not I mean, it's just it doesn't want you to fuck with it.
It's got these giant watermelon testicles and They're just full of piss and vinegar and that we don't eat those people don't know when you buy Meat from a cow you're buying meat from a steer and what a steer is a bull they cut his balls off when he's young so his testosterone stops so his body's mushy and soft and Yeah.
But these bulls that Adam sees out in the bush in Australia are super aggressive and very dangerous.
And one of his friends was torn apart by one, gored, like really badly.
No, they lived.
Killed?
But they had a med vacuum to safety.
It tore his guts open.
And, you know, he was, I don't even think he was hunting it.
I think, like, he was just in the wrong place, the wrong time.
The lack of testosterone makes them soft and mushy.
Whereas...
Cam Haines shot a water buffalo in Australia, and he said that he had one piece of meat in his mouth for half an hour trying to chew it down while he was practicing archery.
Because where you are, it's like, I feel like, I mean, I almost feel like I shouldn't say this on the podcast because I don't want anybody moving to Bozeman.
I mean, in Bozeman, from my house, in, I don't know how many, in four different directions, three different directions, you can be at a trail in 15 minutes.
And it's just endless.
You know, you can get on a trail right side...
Man, I can't talk.
Right outside of Bozeman.
And you can go, if you wanted to, for days through the Yellowstone ecosystem south and just keep going and keep going and keep going.
I mean, it connects you to, I mean, real big wilderness.
The kind that you can...
I mean, in Alaska you find it even bigger, but I think in the lower 48...
Yeah, in the lower 48, it's about as wild as it gets.
And that leads me to what I want to bring up to you today, because I saw this today, where Trump is challenging some of the protection of certain national monuments and some public lands today.
It was something that came out.
I told you fuckers, I knew this was coming.
There were so many people that were telling me that Trump is going to protect our public lands because his son is a hunter and like, listen man, that guy worships money.
There's money to be made in delisting these public, look at this, Trump order could roll back public land protections from three presidents.
What does it say there in terms of what the actual rollbacks mean and what the issue is?
Here, let's go larger.
The order which Trump signed the Interior Department could lead to the reshaping of 24 national monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Parashant National Monument, Grand Staircase, Escalante National Monument, and the Basin Range National Monument, as well as a host of Pacific Ocean Monuments,
Thank you.
1906, stands in stark relief to years of bipartisan work at conserving lands.
What you know about, and what I think most people don't when you talk about this, the vast majority of the people in this country live in These communities and cities and towns and, you know, even small towns,
they don't understand how much of this land that we live in is just this incredible, bizarre experiment in, like, the people having, the actual American people owning this incredible swath of public land.
Yeah, I think they don't know that it exists, necessarily.
And I think even, to me, more importantly, they don't understand the impact that that actually has on people and what it actually means to be able to be part of something like that.
It's a really deep, important thing, and I think that people just...
You know, you get your postcard tourists and you say, oh, I love the National Force.
I love the national parks and let's drive around and take pictures.
And that's great.
That's fine.
There's a big industry there.
It's very helpful to the economy.
But there's something way deeper, too, that brings a lot of people.
And I would even say culturally something really deep there that we shouldn't be fucking with.
And that's, you know, sort of like the deep time part of that is what really interests me is because, you know, you step out into that in the right context and you're all of a sudden, you know, you're playing with something way bigger and more powerful and more impactful by just being part of a landscape that's...
But you're right.
Yeah, the conservation thing is present and real.
I grew up in Minnesota, North Dakota, and my first wilderness trip was in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.
It's this million-acre wilderness of lakes that are interconnected by trails.
You can go out for weeks at a time and canoe across a lake and then carry your boat to the next lake, and there's campsites, and it's just paradise.
It's where I fell in love with it.
The idea of wilderness, it's actually where I fell in love with the first lady that I fell in love at the same time.
Well, that gets us to what you're doing now, because you stopped working for 0.0, and we talked about on the last podcast that you had done a lot of these wilderness therapy trips.
Where you take, like, troubled kids that have lost their way, and their parents don't know what the fuck to do, and you would take them out into the woods and live with these kids for months.
Like, just the five days that I was out there, six days or whatever, when I first went to Montana with you guys, changed the way I thought about wilderness.
I mean, you're just in hell and all of a sudden you're on the top of a ridge and the sun peeks out and a rainbow pops up.
And the technicolor hyper-vivid, just like crazy green.
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
I have a cold.
Yeah.
That place has a personality, right?
But being in wilderness, I've been in wilderness spots all over the globe.
What's so fascinating to me is how they all have a different vibe.
They all have a different life.
Sure, it looks different, but there's a felt sense or a feeling you get from places.
The Brooks Range in Alaska is the northernmost range of mountains.
It runs east and west, and then above it is the Arctic Plain and then the Arctic Ocean.
There is something about being up there, and especially, I think, in the summer when the sun doesn't really go down.
It is, it is, it feels like being on a different planet, but man, I don't know if I have the words to describe it, but yeah, man, I mean, and that's what I said I'm addicted to.
I am, and I, you know, I moved to Montana for professional reasons, but then also because it's where I wanted to live.
And so I get out hiking all the time.
You know, I train, I hike with, that's kind of how I stay fit.
Um, But I come...
I need to figure this out because I come home from that feeling like I just, like, got started, you know?
But there's something that happens, I don't know, a day, two days, three days, five days in, where you really just kind of let go of the regular.
You know, I don't know.
I think it's actually physiological, some of it, but whatever.
It could be just psychological, too.
But something shifts, you know, when you do a real expedition, when you do a real thing where you're not, your brain's not half stuck back in all the other stuff.
Yeah.
So yeah, I go hiking and I love it, you know, all the time and we get out in the woods, but it just doesn't really do it for me.
So you just got so addicted to being out there completely disconnected that you, when you go on the hike, you know you could always just make it back to town a couple hours.
They might be, I think, I've heard that the Kamchatka brown bears in Siberia, in Russia, across, I don't know if that is Siberia, but across the water there, they might be bigger?
And if there wasn't the existence of Central Park, and I lived in Brooklyn, so Prospect Park, if those two green places didn't exist while I lived there...
I would have probably lost my mind or just moved, right?
I feel like these big areas of wilderness we have, we will not be okay as humans.
I mean, individually, sure.
Here's my worry.
My worry is that...
The general American public or the general public doesn't have enough connection or real life experience to know why to care so much.
Right.
That's a big deal.
There's a lot of different angles you can take on that.
There's so much, but there's just something that I wouldn't...
I mean, if it really gets intense, I'm going to have to basically drop what I'm doing and do everything I can to...
It's like there's places that are perfect for certain things.
Like if you're a comedian, Los Angeles is the best place.
It's either Los Angeles or New York.
I prefer Los Angeles.
There's a lot of clubs.
There's a lot of comedians like most of the best comedians in the world live here It's a great place for us to network and we work together and stuff like that and if you If you want to be in that business, this is probably the best place in the world to do it So that's one of the reasons it keeps me around here plus the podcast and all that jazz but For peace of mind.
You don't want to be that guy in the movie that is storing food in his basement and staying up all night to shoot vandals because people are trying to steal your canned goods.
Have you seen the reports lately showing that the life expectancy or the early death rate of middle-aged white men, specifically lately, has dropped for the first time in, I don't know.
That is so fascinating that, like, feelings have an effect on your health, like the feeling of loneliness, the feeling of despair.
It's not like you could eat your vegetables, you can get your exercise in, and if you feel despair and you feel loneliness, your body is actually, like, being harmed by that.
But there's a real, like, practical reason for that, and that's because we are, when we come out as babies, we are the most dependent individuals.
So, like, our You know what I mean?
Like on your parents, on your mother, we are completely socially dependent when we're born.
Completely.
And so, you know, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, you ever heard of that?
So it's like, you know, to be okay, you have to take care of breathing and water and your basic...
Functions.
But there's been studies recently by these neurobiologists that are showing that these social needs are just as or even, like, come before some of these physical needs.
It's crazy, man.
And there's literally...
There's a book called Social by a guy named Matthew Lieberman.
You got to check it out.
And so what they are finding is that there's like two parts of our operating brain.
And this is, you know, going to be me paring it down.
But one is the analytical thinking, deciding thing.
And the other is this social awareness brain, which...
It's always, like always checking in on how am I in relation to others.
And it's also the part of their brain that actually we can, you know, like the metacognitive part and the part that I can, they call it mind reading.
But really it's just, by us sitting here, I can kind of get a sense of how you feel and what you're thinking, right?
Just by the connection that we have and just it's part of who we are.
So when our analytical brain is offline, this other one, the social one, pops on immediately.
That is, like, the fundamental need for humans in safety and survival, is how are we relating to each other as a group.
But it makes sense if you look, I mean, to me it makes sense in, you know, we are social animals.
We forget that, I think.
But you look at other species of monkeys or wolves or whatever.
I mean, you know, there might be a period of time where, say, a wolf will get kicked out of a pack for a while and he'll go do his thing but eventually come back to a pack.
It's not safe for us as humans and animals, social animals like these, to be isolated.
It's not.
not.
And so there's all these parts of us that just, if we're not connected to other people in a very direct and true way, there's these sort of deep down emotional and physiological fears that come up, right?
And they're real.
And that's what the neurobiology is showing, which is really interesting.
I mean, we can just think about that, but they're actually showing it now that if we're not really connected to each other, we're going to be freaked out.
We're not going to be okay.
And I really believe that this really drives a lot of the internal struggle we have.
And we're really...
And this is part of, you know, getting into it.
That's part of my...
What I'm trying to bring into the world and my platform now is just to, you know, stand up and say, hey, we need each other and we can do it.
It's not...
And for guys specifically, right?
It's such a social stigma of ours to not be real or open or connected or vulnerable with guys.
And...
And it's cool to see the science coming out because I have all this anecdotal evidence of being out in the woods with kids or being in a men's group with guys or running a retreat or whatever this is of how powerful it is to set down all of our differences and just be there.
But now the science is really lighting it up.
Yeah, man.
Loneliness...
I mean, we can all think about it.
Loneliness isn't fun.
It's not...
It doesn't feel good.
But the other...
This is crazy, too.
That they're showing that emotional pain lights up the same centers of our brain as physical pain.
And that one study showed that an insult...
To someone had much more painful and long-term effects than slamming somebody with a hammer hitting their hand with a hammer so like our emotional pain Literally actually exists in the body like it is actual pain and the reason that It's so uncomfortable to feel our emotions which it is, you know, I mean I'll just say it is, is that it actually hurts.
Like, actually hurts.
I mean, and there's like, people say things like, you broke my heart, or I'm dying of heartache, or whatever, but the science is catching up and showing us that this pain is actual.
You know, it's interesting, too, because what you're saying about us being disconnected and how unhealthy it is and how unhealthy loneliness is, it sort of confirms these ideas that I've always had that the human race itself is not...
Not like a group of individuals, but a super organism, much like the human body is.
Like the human body requires all the bacteria in your gut, all the skin flora, all the different things that compose the actual physical structure of the human body.
Whereas we think of it, I think there's some nutty number of how much bacteria, how many bacteria cells are in your body versus how many human cells.
And it's just that we think of ourselves as, I'm Mike, and I put my shoes on and I go to work because I am Mike.
But Mike, you're a system.
You're a system of individual organisms that are collectively keeping this whole thing alive.
And when the imbalance is off, like...
Literally, you've like nuked a part of your civilization.
Yeah, right.
And, you know, to try to save something, like if you had some sort of a surgery and you're worried about an infection, which is kind of like an invading army coming in and taking over part of your leg that you haven't operated on...
I like that analogy, though, of the body as like a civilization or whatever.
Think about if you're one of your, I don't know, one important neuron, one cell, neural cell or something, decided just to go rogue and not be in connection with the rest of you, right?
I mean, I don't...
That wouldn't work so well, right?
I don't know what happened.
Your body would probably get rid of it and get it out of there.
Or, I don't know, maybe...
So I'm just really reaching here, but it's some sort of rogue cell at that point, right?
Like a cancerous cell or something.
It would probably be attacked.
So, yeah, I think that if you take that analogy, you know, our civilization here is we're hurting.
We're really hurting because we're really not...
You know, we are working together, obviously, in practical ways a lot of times, you know, work and commerce.
And, you know, the world is functioning, but I think on a...
Like a health and fulfillment level, we're missing something pretty deeply.
Like, how many people are, like, really lonely in terms of, like, physical touch and communication with friends?
and yeah but they sit in front of their computer all day and they interact with people online which shows you like some of the most unhealthy communities you'll ever encounter are like online message boards and forums where people are just anonymous and interacting with people without what we're talking about earlier like one of the reasons why I like to do podcasts with a person in
I've only done one podcast ever through Skype, and that was with John Anthony West, because he was living in New York, and he's this really important Egyptologist, and I really wanted to talk to him.
The only way I could get him to do it was to do it through Skype, so I did one.
I prefer to sit there with people, because I want to look at them.
I want to feel their energy.
I feel like you and I doing this conversation, you get to understand each other.
No, I get it, and I think I can hear it in your podcast, too, and I think that And again, I'm not going to keep hitting the biology part, but to me, I can sense that something else in me is triggered, right?
If we were just talking on the phone, there is something, and it might be this other part of your brain, but it's lit up right now, right?
Because I can spatially see and feel where you are.
You can sit here and give opinions or whatever all day long, but to what you said, though, it is a weird position, but I think the way that things are going, so we are using these tools, the social media, to connect us and to get messages out, but the way that the millennial generation is going is that...
What they value and what they want to spend their money on is meaningful experiences, which means, you know, generally speaking, a live, in-person event.
And there is a wave of things going back to this.
So, you know, as a tool, we need that.
I mean, this is amazing.
You know, this platform, this podcast you have that touching so many people or just Twitter, whatever it is.
But then it can be used for incredible good to bring people together, I think.
So what's missing in that social media interaction, I don't know, maybe it balances out.
You have to be cognizantly aware, I think, of how other people are going to receive it without actually getting that reception back from them.
You know it's and that's where it gets real weird and you have to like I think apply the same principles that you would in communicating with other people like Without actually communicating with them without seeing them without getting the social cues that looking them in the eye and We're we're a weird thing man This might not make sense,
but I'm gonna bring it back to connect to the wilderness stuff what we're talking about in this sense of this sort of isolation and loneliness that we have and And for me, in my life, where I learned to connect with others, where I really learned to sort of give it up, let go, be present with people, was in the wilderness.
It was doing that job out in the desert with kids, out there for 8 to 20 days at a time with these kids, where that was my job.
It was my job to simply be with them and in a way, to be with them in a way that was...
Obviously, we had a lot of boundaries and everything, but to be really real, just to be totally real and honest and straightforward, call bullshit.
When we saw bullshit, be empathetic.
And it was just like this crazy crash course in human connection.
It'll tie together, but for me, I started to feel way, way, way more human being out there in the wilderness.
Like, just being out there where it was quiet, being out there where, like, you know, if I sat on a rock, I was sitting on a rock, and the sun was on me, and all of my senses were engaged, you know, very aware of my body.
We were in these groups where we were practicing being very aware of what we felt and being able to feel and express that.
And it just felt like...
You know, since then, for me, it all comes back to being out in the wilderness, but since then, all the other things I've engaged in, meditation, the men's group stuff, all the other person, even psychedelics, things like that, all the things that I've experienced, all, for me, tie back to that thing.
It comes down to what I feel is like being totally, as much as you can, truly present.
It's a matter of, I guess, rationing some of that social media stuff or rationing some of that online interaction with other people.
I feel like...
As time has gone on, I've gotten much more of my online interaction in like an educational form in terms of like interesting articles, science things, things that don't involve like social interaction or opinion as much as they involve really fascinating facts.
Yeah.
Something that I found today, they think that North America might have been settled by humans as much as a hundred thousand years earlier than they thought.
Pure curiosity and pure wonder and the imagination goes wild thinking about what it must have been like to be one of these early humans surviving or trying to survive.
And if they didn't, we wouldn't be here.
These Mastodon fossils they found them the bones were shattered and there's rocks nearby that do not seem like they were brought anywhere So it was 1992 they were doing highway construction near San Diego and they found these odd-looking bones and then they started doing these Studies on them and they found their mastodon bones and they didn't have the ability to do carbon testing and get a real Accurate assessment back then some but now they do and so now when they're checking These
bones and the way these bones had been shattered They're pretty sure that they had been shattered purposely like to get to the marrow Wow, yeah, so that yeah, that's a great example of a positive benefit yesterday I I meditated for about 80 minutes or so and then I sat up afterwards and I clicked on my phone and opened Facebook and the first thing I clicked on was a video of a woman in slow motion who stuck her ass out the window of a bus and just shat the stream of shit.
I had to laugh to myself, man.
I was just like in this zone, you know, I was in this beautiful place and then open and watch, I was like, oh my god.
It reminded me of Callan's one joke, the shitting out of the car at 80 miles an hour.
You know, like Bobby, like, I mean, that's the Joseph Campbell story of the hero, that it goes all the way back to the one person who sacrificed their life and got killed by the predator in front of the tribe and so that the tribe could survive and that they worship that person for doing that.
I mean, otherwise, it was just basically a time out.
Oh, okay.
You know, you gotta stay here.
You can't interact with the group.
You're by yourself, whatever.
That's actually not the best example, but I'll just use, so if you swore you could, some programs would, you know, maybe have a point system.
You get penalized.
For curse words?
Yeah.
That seems a little silly.
Yeah, it wasn't really upheld.
I'm reaching for a good example here.
What I'm trying to say is that if you do something shitty, generally you hurt others around you and things happen.
And so what we tried to show is that if kids would do something shitty to pay attention and that they would see the harm they're creating themselves by harming other people rather than just like, you know...
In society, just locking a kid up for breaking the law, it would be...
Maybe if you break a window, you...
In this other way, you would go and actually see and experience the shit that other people had to do to fix the window.
You know, more of a reparative type of justice system rather than a penalty.
Get dropped in a group of eight boys or young men and...
It was so funny.
We worked with therapists.
We had therapists come in and all this stuff.
But the fundamental thing I took away from that experience was that in order for these guys to grow up and sort of move on and get going in their lives, what they needed was just somebody like me to show up.
It was really not complicated, right?
And so just let them air things out and talk about better ways to do things and sort of get some perspective.
Now, you know, we maybe talked about this last time, but then they'd go home and not necessarily have that support anymore and be back in their old arena where, you know, their old friends and their old family dynamic and all that.
And, you know, it's hard.
It's a hard way.
And so I left that whole experience just...
Feeling very strongly that we can, as a community and society, do just way better with some simple changes.
And where this guy contacted Bernie Madoff, he sent him letters, and then finally Bernie Madoff called him, and they did this interview together, where the way it works in prison, I guess, at least the prison where Bernie Madoff is, you get 15 minutes to talk on the phone, and then you have to wait 15 minutes before you could talk again, and then 15 minutes again.
And so this is how they did the interview.
Like 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off.
And after a while, he sort of gained his trust and he went deep into how this whole deception started and how Bernie Madoff, if you don't know the whole story, Bernie Madoff is the guy who had this gigantic Ponzi scheme and stole billions of dollars from people.
It's called Ponzi Supernova is the Radiolab episode.
Well, I also couldn't picture not being able to live with $2 billion either.
What is it?
It's that weirdness of the game, right?
It's like you score a hundred points, you want to score a thousand points.
Score a thousand, you want to score a million.
Score a million, you want to score a billion.
It's like you never stop.
And people never, they never achieve peace.
Like, that's what I always used to say about Bill Gates.
Like, why the fuck is Bill Gates still working?
You hear about him being the richest, and now he's not.
I mean, he really did sort of find some sort of a balance, and now almost all of his work is done towards humanitarian efforts, he's, you know, he donates a lot of money, a lot of charities, I mean, a lot of really good work, like, post his Microsoft career, which is, like, really kind of unique, that a guy sort of found his way, kept a shitload of money, don't get me wrong, you know, apparently he's got some stuff.
Stupid fucking house with a submarine in the Pacific Northwest where, like, if someone tries to break into his house, you can fucking escape in a submarine.
Like, how does that, what is it about people that makes it possible for someone to go, even not to a monster, but how about that young boy that you were working with that had no empathy, that you worried about sleeping near?
Like, what happens?
The developmental process of a human being is way more fascinating to me as an adult with children than it was when I was a young man.
When I was a young man and I was single and I didn't have any kids, I just thought people were fucked up and some people weren't.
The people that are fucked up fucked them and death penalty and kicked their ass.
I'm not trying to say that, but it's a classic novel, an author from Germany, and it chronicles the life of a young guy named Siddhartha.
But the whole book, what it is, is it goes through his entire life, from when he was born until he dies.
And in it are these very specific stages of life.
So he's young, wandering years, and then he needs to work.
So he goes to a city, and he learns from a trader, and then he needs to learn about love, so he gets with a prostitute.
But all in these big stages.
That book did something to me at an early age.
I just got obsessed with this process of maturing.
And there's a term for it called ontogeny, which is the process of an organism's growth over their lifespan.
It's just this natural sort of, like a tree, an ontogeny of a tree.
You know, a seed that drops and then it sprouts and then it roots and then it grows and then it dies.
And it is...
Yeah, it's been an obsession of mine.
And, you know, getting thrown into that work of working with kids and...
Yeah, it's...
I'm so fascinated by it, and I don't have, obviously, any, you know, solid, here's how it goes, but I've been looking into it for, you know, a long time, and I just, I think that, oh, anyway, back to the book, I used to read that book out loud to these groups of kids.
I was working, we'd sit around the fire at night, and I'd read a novel, and we'd be out there for days, so you'd have time to read a novel out loud.
They'll do mixed leadership groups, like a male and a female, for both boys and girls.
But yeah, there's always a girl with the girls.
But yeah, man, I just got obsessed with this.
How do we grow up?
What does it look like?
What does it feel like?
How come it's not happening?
Because that's a big part of what I felt as I looked around, is that I think that a lot of adult, physically adult men, walk around with parts of themselves that are still...
13, 6, 2, 18. There's this human maturation process, this human journey that we all have available to us that I think we're too busy a lot of times to let it actually flow and happen.
Well, I think that's true, but I also think that there's a maturation process that comes from overcoming obstacles that a lot of people just don't encounter.
They don't encounter difficulty, so they don't learn about themselves.
That's part of it, but I think that a lot of times, even if they do encounter difficulty, they don't let themselves actually feel, they don't let themselves experience it.
Right?
Like, everybody has shitty things happen to them, but you can keep that shitty thing at a distance from you, right?
You can, like, kind of address it.
You can sort of, I don't know, act out against it.
But unless you actually feel it...
I mean, think about...
And this gets into things like trauma and resilience and how people are able to move on from hardship, right?
And a lot of the research...
There's a...
Psychiatrist called Bessel van der Kolk never heard of him no fascinating dude.
He's a he started working with the VA in Boston and worked with returned vets from From Vietnam and then did this whole lifetime of study about trauma and how it comes into humans and how you can move through it and I can heal it and all this stuff and it It basically comes down to being able to be more resilient, to be able to get over things.
So say a death in the family or an attack or an assault or whatever that trauma could be.
That if you don't allow the body and your system to actually go through, feel, and process what's going on, you lock it up.
You lock it up.
And it doesn't...
I mean, it's almost like it gets implanted in you somewhere, and then it just festers.
And the cool thing is that the science now is showing the very specifics of this.
I mean, it's still theory, right?
So, I feel like I got off what we were talking about there.
Yeah.
But, yeah, I feel like, like you said, being able to overcome things, of course.
Absolutely.
And part of that is just, to me, again, speaking more from a male perspective here, but part of that, and I think a lot of what our culture says is okay, is...
Then there's this other whole way to get through hardship, which is by actually surrendering to it and letting this brilliant system that we have as humans to process it and get through it.
And that's...
That's a way to wholeness and health in some ways.
I think they're both important.
You need to be able to ignore the pain and power your way up that mountain or save somebody that's getting hurt or whatever.
And then there's this other part I think that needs to be in balance, which is accepting what's happening and Getting through.
Just a way to accept what's happening and let your body do what it needs to do.
Well, I also think there's an extreme lack of discipline that a lot of people have.
And that discipline, a lot of it comes from overcoming difficult obstacles and understanding the work that's required to get things done.
Making these little leaps and bounds, making these improvements in your life, getting better at things.
I think those things are really critical to the human mind.
Yeah.
I think the mind has desires and one of the big desires is it has a desire for improvement and his desire to achieve goals and there's a lot of people that these goals are laid out by other people these goals are like graduating from third grade graduating from fourth grade a lot of shit that you don't want to do so these goals are meaningless to you so you never feel like you've accomplished anything that you actually want to do and next thing you know it you're a 35 year old man working for an insurance company you don't want to be there And you don't have any real part
of you that you've nurtured.
You've just sort of plugged you into these other weird shapes and conformed to them, and then you just want to go fucking crazy.
So, yeah, and that points directly to what I do and what I'm building.
So you take eight of those guys and you set up a room and you say, all right, in this space right here, fuck all that.
We're going to be actually honest and say what we're...
Feeling but maybe can't even really access so like all that frustration all that shit or whatever it could be anything That's so hard for people to do right like what what kind of techniques do you employ?
Sometimes break open, sometimes crack slowly open, but, you know, all of a sudden, so maybe after 35 years of only being in other people's program, you get in touch with what you actually feel, what you actually want, and who you actually are.
It's just like this fucking, it's like, holy shit.
I think for a lot of people it's really difficult to try to do what you actually want to because you've spent so much time rewarding yourself with material items for these little accomplishments that you've become in debt and you really can't escape the system.
I mean, that's a real problem with people.
They have a car that they're leasing, they have a house that they're renting, or even worse, that they bought, and then they're stuck, and then they don't know what the fuck to do.
They have to keep this insurance company job, and it's just rotting them out from the inside.
I mean, there's a whole society built on trying to keep you not who you are, in a sense, I think.
So what we're finding, which is really amazing, is that if you stay on that surface level, if you stay on that sort of...
I don't know.
So trying to improve yourself...
Goes so far, but it's kind of like an iceberg thing, right?
So like, if your goal is to make more money, right?
And here's your goal, and you're going toward it, and you, I don't know, listen to podcasts, or you do all this stuff, and you try to figure out how to do it.
How do I do it?
And you keep hitting the wall.
You keep getting sort of thrown down.
And you don't really understand that underneath, meanwhile, is this massive sort of like pent-up shit.
And If you address that massive pent-up shit, then all of a sudden, getting to that goal is a whole different story.
It's a whole different story.
It's like always trimming the...
Like, if you need to get rid of a tree in your yard, but all you do is every day you chop the leaves off the leaves off.
But if you address the roots, the deeper stuff, and...
And again, there's a stigma against that, especially for dudes.
Guys don't want to go to therapy.
Guys don't want to get into woo-woo, hippie, spiritual shit.
You know bro culture and fluent in you know, like I've I've I've gone down that spiritual route to and When you recognize when the spiritual route is legitimate and when the spiritual route is like a ruse as well Sometimes even the spiritual route is just something that someone has plugged themselves into to try to find some meaning Exactly.
Meanwhile, it's not authentic.
Exactly So how are you doing this, if you don't mind me interrupting?
So you're planning on taking guys, like, say if I'm that 35-year-old guy that works in an insurance company, for example, and I'm just fucked up, and I'm going crazy, man.
And so I'm working with some guides to just take care of the logistical stuff so that I can manage the group stuff more.
That's one offering.
That's kind of our capstone offering.
We're doing weekend retreats, and we've been doing these for the last six months, and they've been just catching on fire.
About 30 guys at a time in a lodge.
Been doing them in the Berkshires, so out in the woods.
A couple hours from New York City.
30 guys there, and just set up sort of an intense weekend experience of practicing the stuff, and we'll hike and do trail work and all that stuff, but more importantly, do with the The self, you know, diving into yourself within the presence of other guys, which is just, you know, I've done therapy.
I've been in therapy.
I'm not a therapist, but it's been very helpful.
Like, if you work with a good therapist that really is really good, I couldn't recommend it more.
But there's something about these men's retreats, which I totally understand sound unattractive to a lot of guys.
We made one of our advertising videos for it, and it just starts out that a guy stands up and says, yeah, I heard about a men's retreat, and the first thing I thought was, this is going to be fucking awful.
So I get it.
But I think we're getting further enough along where the guys that are going through this are literally coming back with the most positive feedback that I could...
I couldn't write the shit.
Like, changing their lives and just, like, literally...
Because it's, you know, back to that thing.
We're offering a place for them to...
Accept a part of themselves that's been offline for a long time.
It's probably also a big fucking deal to just separate from the hive for a little bit and just be outside of cell phone range and be in the woods and just...
Take a big deep breath of fresh air and look around at the wilderness and just realize that this is reality as well.
And you've been plugged into this civilization reality, this city, this urban environment, which is entirely unnatural and has only been a real thing for the past couple hundred years.
It literally didn't exist for the gigantic swath of humanity that existed before that.
It lights up this neurobiology of us as social animals.
I think it goes back to more of a tribal sense of living too.
It's like all of a sudden you went from being isolated and lonely to having 30 dudes who would honestly fucking do anything for you in that moment.
And I got a buddy, a good buddy, is a returned Special Forces operator, and he sits in my men's group in Bozeman with me, and really struggled with coming home, and then found our group, and within a month, his life was back on track.
Wow.
Like, just killing it, man.
Just, like, kicking ass.
And, you know, I mean, there is a connection between, I wouldn't say the general military, but the Special Forces, you know...
You read books and hear about the aspect of brotherhood and how they're there for each other.
This is definitely a very different venue, but I think the bond and connection that is created out of it is...
And this is from his mouth, too.
He went, I don't know how many years, several years in the Special Forces, living within close connection to guys, got thrown home, was all of a sudden isolated, and then came into our group and just had this...
This closeness again and it just, bam, just like back to killing it.
Or through these hunting trips, you know, and these wilderness trips.
But I think people...
Get caught up in the momentum of their daily existence and all the requirements of that daily existence, and they become overwhelming.
You know, like we were talking about your lease that you have on your car, your mortgage that you have on your house, and the credit card bills that keep coming in, your student loans you need to eventually get to.
It's a fucking overwhelming grind.
And sometimes people need something that removes them entirely from it for a certain amount of time that allows you just the fresh air.
Not just literal fresh air, but the metaphorical fresh air of allowing you to just separate from all these weird influences and all this weird energy and momentum.
The momentum of you, the life that you've created or that's been created for you that you're sort of trapped in.
So the podcast that I'm launching is a self-improvement podcast for guys, but instead of going to experts and saying, hey, you know, what's the best morning routine that you can do, designing a routine or whatever, I'm talking to regular guys and asking them to share...
You know, more vulnerable than they normally would because that's what happens in these scenarios is that we learn from each other just as simple human fucking beings.
We're just like, you know, like one guy might share that he's having trouble with his son, for example, or with his kid.
He doesn't know how to do it.
And, you know, like no matter what, I don't care.
Like a bunch of other guys will say like, holy shit, I thought I was the only one feeling that.
Yeah, and I know that I can, you know, even if it's just one guy, whatever it is, but working out there with these kids and seeing all this, it just left me with the deepest, deepest...
Fulfillment, satisfaction, but also a sense of purpose.
And then I tell you what, man, I had a boy, I had a son last year, and when he came out, and there was something inside me that said, if you don't act...
On what you know you can bring.
Fuck you.
Fuck it.
Like, this is your kid.
Like, there is...
I don't know.
I'm also, you know, I was born a fairly sensitive...
I could feel...
I was born a sensitive kid, right?
I could feel other people's pain.
And when I'm, you know, working with these kids and now these men, I mean, I don't know.
I mean, you have a very promising career and a lucrative career with 0.0, so for you to leave that, it has to be, like, a really compelling sort of pull.
I mean, it's obviously beneficial, and it's obviously something you're compelled to do, and it's obviously something that you feel like is very fulfilling.