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Episode: #869 - Dry Creek Dewayne - Life Lessons From A Modern Cowboy

Author: Chris Williamson
Duration: 01:54:51

Episode Shownotes

Dewayne Noel is a wrangler, cowboy, educator, and founder of Dry Creek Wrangler School. Hustle culture often tells us that working harder is the only way to succeed—grinding through 80-hour weeks on 4 hours of sleep per night. But what if the real solution isn’t about working harder, but finding

balance? What if true success lies in slowing down, savouring life, smoking a cigar on the porch occasionally and being fully present. How differently might we define success then? Expect to learn who Dry Creek Dewayne’s is, his backstory and upbringing, how to un-harden yourself, how any person can overcome & control their anger, what Dewayne has learned from working with horses, the dangers of being out of balance in work & life, how to have a better relationship with the voice in your head, how to find the right partner & why men need to learn to treat women better, why bad fathers are partly to blame for the downfall of America’s culture, what a day in the life of Dewayne’s life is like and much more…. Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a Free Gift, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom Get expert bloodwork analysis and bypass Function’s 300,000-person waitlist at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with any purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Summary

In episode #869 of Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson interviews Dewayne Noel, a modern cowboy and educator, who shares life lessons challenging the hustle culture. Dewayne reflects on his journey from a turbulent upbringing to pursuing his childhood dream of becoming a cowboy. He emphasizes the importance of personal transformation, finding balance in life, effective communication, and the value of emotional openness. Moreover, he critiques the relentless work ethic imposed by society, advocating for self-care, meaningful relationships, and the significance of leaving a positive impact on others.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (#869 - Dry Creek Dewayne - Life Lessons From A Modern Cowboy) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
How would you describe what you do if you meet someone for the first time? Wow. Well, what the school does is I bring people out for a week at a time and teach horsemanship. The basic fundamentals of working with horses and understanding horses.

00:00:20 Speaker_02
But that is more of a springboard for life.

00:00:28 Speaker_02
Um, I started out, we started out with a YouTube channel where I was just, just wanting to give some basic horsemanship tips and some things for young people who are wanting to get into wrangling or cowboying or packing.

00:00:42 Speaker_02
And, uh, and it took on a life of its own. And, uh, and we started getting a lot of questions, a lot of comments on the channel. It's like, Hey, if you'll start a school. will come, you know, and so it's just kind of grown from there.

00:00:58 Speaker_02
So it's, it's hard to say we teach horsemanship, but then we also try to help young people have a more, um, grounded, solid approach to life.

00:01:09 Speaker_01
What career did you want to do when you were a kid?

00:01:10 Speaker_02
I wanted to cowboy. That was it. You know, every little boy in this country at a certain age, they want to be a cowboy when they grow up. The only difference for me was I never outgrew it. That's all I ever wanted to do.

00:01:25 Speaker_01
Talk to me about your upbringing. What was childhood like?

00:01:27 Speaker_02
Definitely not cowboy. I had a very solid family. I'm the seventh generation of my family born in central Kentucky. My dad, my granddad, my great granddad, and my mom's side of the family too. My dad was a Baptist preacher.

00:01:48 Speaker_02
And so we moved a lot for his work and, but I didn't grow up my opportunities for, you know, farm work, ranches and stuff like that was when I visited my grandparents back in Kentucky. And I knew back then this is, you know, what I wanted to do.

00:02:08 Speaker_02
It just, it took a while for me to be able to actually do it. Um, but I was raised in a, in a, you know, a very close knit, very solid, very country, patriarchal family, you know, just very old school Kentucky. Yeah.

00:02:29 Speaker_01
What do the rest of your family think about having a rogue wrangler in it?

00:02:36 Speaker_02
I don't know. I was a different man back when I was raising my children. And back as a young man, I was wound really tight. What do you mean when you say that? I had a bad temper and I was under a lot of stress for a lot of years.

00:02:57 Speaker_02
And so I wasn't the calm laid back, easy going fellow that, you know, people see today. And so I think, you know, my children are all grown and I think, you know, in a lot of ways, they're still setting back, trying to, trying to, uh,

00:03:16 Speaker_02
Compare the old me with the new me that, you know, it's only been about five years that I found the, the place where I could just get some self-control and learn how to chill and, and, uh, get a handle on things, you know?

00:03:34 Speaker_02
So I think in a lot of ways, my family are just, they're just sitting back watching and trying to justify the one, what they see now with what they knew for so many years.

00:03:43 Speaker_01
What's the story of your initiation into this life? Into the cowboy life?

00:03:51 Speaker_02
I was newly married and we had a baby. It was just an infant and I was working. We were in Little town called Alpine, Tennessee. And there was a Burke line furniture factory there that made recliners.

00:04:06 Speaker_02
And I was working in the shipping and, uh, was not happy. Uh, didn't like the job. What age are you here? Oh, I was.

00:04:17 Speaker_02
26, um, and, uh, was reading Western horsemen and there was a ad in the back and the classifieds about an elk hunting lodge in Idaho that was offering, you could come out and if you would work for the summer for free, they would teach a packing.

00:04:35 Speaker_02
And, uh, and I just, I said, you know what, I'm going to do it. I'm doing it. I'm taking the jump. I'm not spending the rest of my life working in a factory and sitting here and doing this. I'm going to go chase.

00:04:47 Speaker_02
The dream that I've had since I was a child. And so my wife and our infant, she flew to Hawaii to stay with her dad and sold everything we had, which wasn't much. And, uh, I got a saddle and, and my gear and took a Greyhound bus to, uh, up into Idaho.

00:05:10 Speaker_02
And then when nobody there to pick me up, that was supposed to pick me up. So I hitchhiked. From there into Chalice, Idaho, and this was way before cell phones.

00:05:19 Speaker_02
So I found a pay phone and I called the ranch and the manager of the ranch says, I, I, I don't know who you are. I never heard anything about you. Uh, the owner is rafting the Colorado river to the grand Canyon with his girlfriend.

00:05:34 Speaker_02
And he never told me you were coming and, uh, but he came and picked me up and I stayed on there for the summer and, and I learned a bunch and then, um, I left there and hitchhiked from Chalice, Idaho to Cody, Wyoming.

00:05:49 Speaker_02
And when I got to Cody, I had like $9. And, uh, so I found a campground where they'd let me pitch my little one man, pup tent is $6 a night.

00:06:00 Speaker_02
I remember it because, and I stated that one because they had a shower house and I'm like, I'm not going to become a scrubby homeless person, you know?

00:06:09 Speaker_02
So I stayed there and just started calling every ranch, every dude, ranch, every outfit, everyday calling, calling, calling.

00:06:17 Speaker_02
Um, I ran out of money and the lady who owned the, the, uh, that campground there, she told me, she said, uh, my dad needs somebody to haul hay. So I went and helped him and he paid me $15 for hauling.

00:06:33 Speaker_02
Hey, like this came back another night, stay another supper next day, she said, If you'll police the campground for cigarette butts, I'll give you a bowl of soup and a sandwich and another night stay. So I did.

00:06:44 Speaker_02
And then the next day, one of the outfits called, called me back, came in and sat down and interviewed. And I threw my bed roll and everything into the back of their truck and went out and went to work.

00:06:55 Speaker_01
And you're doing all of this with an infant? No, they're in Hawaii. But you're still a part of this system now, so you're away from your wife, you're away from your first child? For several months, yeah.

00:07:07 Speaker_02
I don't recommend it.

00:07:08 Speaker_01
Was that difficult?

00:07:11 Speaker_02
In a way it was, in another way... it wasn't as difficult as it should have been.

00:07:16 Speaker_01
Well, you've got this tension, right?

00:07:20 Speaker_01
You've got this tension between slowly moving toward a dream that you've had for a long time, this career aspiration, this fulfillment of a life purpose, and then also the desire to be a good father, a good husband, but you also are, you're making these sacrifices in order to create the future.

00:07:34 Speaker_01
It's a complex situation.

00:07:36 Speaker_02
My wife, and we're still married today, it's 34 years in March. Congratulations. Thank you. Um, but I'm six years older than she is and we're totally different.

00:07:48 Speaker_02
And, uh, I had been on my own for a long time when we got married and, uh, as happens in marriage, you know, we'd hit that two year mark and the luster was gone. We weren't getting along very well, you know?

00:08:02 Speaker_02
So she wasn't, I don't think she was heartbroken at the separation for a while, you know, any more than I was. And, uh, so after I got settled, I had worked for the summer there.

00:08:17 Speaker_02
And then I wound up with another outfit and after I got settled, she, I flew her and the baby out and we'd had enough time apart for all the turmoil and the bubbling to settle down and then we could start working on it again.

00:08:31 Speaker_02
Um, so it was in, in one sense, it was difficult. Another sense, it was a bit of a relief, you know, that it shouldn't have been. It doesn't speak well to where I was in my character at the time, but yeah.

00:08:43 Speaker_01
Maybe that six-month break has enabled a 35-year marriage. Right.

00:08:51 Speaker_02
My wife has come... I've traveled all over the world, and I've always been a very restless fella.

00:08:56 Speaker_02
And there's been times where my wife has come to me and sat down and said, honey, I love you, but you got to go, go hunting, go visit a buddy, go do something, but you can't sit around and drive me crazy all day.

00:09:10 Speaker_02
So, you know, she knows, and she's, she's been very supportive over the years.

00:09:15 Speaker_01
What was the mindset shift? I'm interested to learn about old Dwayne and new Dwayne and where that calming trajectory, why that happened, what instigated it.

00:09:30 Speaker_02
Well, I'll just say I came to a place in life where I just didn't like me anymore. I looked in the mirror and I'm like, I will not spend the next 50 years with this guy. Like I have the last 50. I don't like me. Nobody around likes me.

00:09:48 Speaker_02
Um, I can't, um, we'll just, it just, catalyst just came about and I'm like, I can't, I can't do this anymore. Um, I was, I had had a small heart attack. And I knew it was a heart attack and I was at the point, I'm not kidding.

00:10:06 Speaker_02
I lay there in bed and I felt it come on. And I'm like, I think I'm having a heart attack. Good. I don't have to fight this anymore. I'm not going to wake my wife up. I went to sleep. You were in bed next to your wife having a heart attack.

00:10:22 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:10:23 Speaker_02
And I went to sleep. I woke up next morning. I'm like, dang it. I'm still here. And I didn't tell her. And I went to the doctor. I had further heart problems and other problems. And I finally went to the doctor, and they did an EKG.

00:10:37 Speaker_02
And they're like, yeah, you had a heart situation back on this. And it was just kind of like, I can't. I can't continue to live like this, you know, and my kids didn't like me.

00:10:50 Speaker_02
I wasn't abusive, you know, I was never, but I just, I wasn't a very nice person. And, uh, I was just very on edge, very angry, very, and I finally, so I had to make some decisions.

00:11:05 Speaker_02
Um, what, what's making me like this, I need to get it out of my life. And there were people, including family that I'm like, Nope, y'all are gone. I stopped watching the news. I'm like, Nope, y'all are gone.

00:11:18 Speaker_02
You know, started changing my diet, started spending a lot of time out on the front porch, just smoking cigars, letting the world go by. And slowly over time, you know, got a handle on stuff.

00:11:31 Speaker_02
and went back to reading, you know, when I was a kid, I read heavily, you know, and got back, went back to reading poetry and Marcus Aurelius and stuff and just kind of got some of my perspective back.

00:11:46 Speaker_01
I think that's a hopeful message for young men that find themselves being angry and not in a place where they want to be. Angry, there's no

00:11:56 Speaker_02
There's no benefit to it. You know, it doesn't fix anything.

00:12:01 Speaker_02
Um, even when you're in a fight and I was in law enforcement for a while, even when you're in a fight, if you get angry in the fight, yeah, maybe your adrenaline comes up, but you lose your head. You know, you lose your strategy.

00:12:15 Speaker_02
And anger, it just turned out, I'm like, this is not profitable, and this is eating me up inside, and I'm making stupid decisions, and this has just got to end.

00:12:29 Speaker_01
You told me as we were talking outside about how Horses can detect your emotional state, your heart rate, and if you enter into an environment with them, they'll match you.

00:12:41 Speaker_01
If you enter in all sympathetically aroused, presumably angry and frustrated, they're going to be able to tell. How did you manage to get through so many years of working with horses, still being this angry guy?

00:12:55 Speaker_01
How important was learning about yourself through working with horses?

00:13:00 Speaker_02
The question is, how did I not get killed? By a horse? How did horses not kill me? It was always a fight. I mean, I loved horses, but there was always, it wasn't ever what I wanted it to be. And I never really realized Um, for the longest time.

00:13:19 Speaker_02
And then there's, there's, I'm just going to go, there's a horseman out there. He doesn't know me. Okay. And so I'm not, um, his name's Buck Braneman and he's been my, my biggest influence in the horse world. Okay.

00:13:34 Speaker_02
Um, and so a lot of stuff I say is when it comes to horse world, you man, Dwayne, that sounds really smart. It's not mine. I'm not taking credit for it. Okay. Um, but. I learned from him that your horse is just a mirror of you.

00:13:51 Speaker_02
They're just a reflection of you. And so any problem that you're having with your horse is just a reflection of a problem that you have inside.

00:14:00 Speaker_02
And when I started getting that and I started understanding that and I started taking that to heart, um, being learning to calm myself for the horse.

00:14:16 Speaker_02
you know, uh, so I could accomplish something with the horse, which I should have had enough since when I was young to do that for my wife or for my kids, you know, but, um, sometimes you need a horse to teach you what a human can't, you know, Mark Twain said that youth is wasted on the young.

00:14:32 Speaker_02
So, um, but when I started and it started working, you know, there's times I've gone out to work a horse. And I was like, man, I just, I'm not in a good place today.

00:14:43 Speaker_02
And I've sat down in a chair outside the pen, looking at the horse, lit up a cigar, smoked the cigar, looking at the horse, cigars done, light up another cigar. Maybe it was a pipe, you know, but another one set there and then go home.

00:15:00 Speaker_02
Just wasn't ready that day. Just, I wasn't. And it's like, did I accomplish anything today? No, but I didn't wreck anything today. And sometimes that's a victory. Sometimes the biggest victory is, you know, I didn't make a mess today. It was a good day.

00:15:16 Speaker_01
And I finally had to start figuring that out. I've been thinking a lot recently about mundane successes. These sort of small personal victories that you do in private. There's no fanfare. There's no audience. No one's even going to applaud you.

00:15:31 Speaker_01
No one's going to give you a pat on the back. boring of a success to say, I didn't mess up another horse's day today. There is few lower magnificent successes that you could do.

00:15:47 Speaker_01
And yet, I think we need language around how that is something that's important.

00:15:53 Speaker_01
That is a victory that you should be able to say at the end of the day when you look yourself in the mirror, hey, you were gentle with that person when you were frustrated. This person came up to you and you were all agitated and you chose to put

00:16:04 Speaker_01
civility first. And no one's going to give you a pat on the back for being modestly polite and civilized, right? It's cool that you say that.

00:16:13 Speaker_01
I really think that more language around being gentle with yourself and appreciating when you have these small, un-magnificent victories is probably something good.

00:16:23 Speaker_02
Well, if you look at it, You know, like in math, you know, you study your negative numbers and your positive numbers in math. Okay. So you've got a chart and let's start to my left.

00:16:34 Speaker_02
You've got negative five, negative four, negative three, negative two, negative one, zero, one, two, three, four, five. And in life you're at negative five.

00:16:44 Speaker_02
You know, and people tend to think, and sometimes we tend to think until I'm at two, I didn't accomplish anything, but, you know, getting from a negative five to a negative four, that's a victory.

00:16:58 Speaker_01
or avoiding going from a negative four to a negative five.

00:17:01 Speaker_02
Yes, just staying at a negative five. We didn't go to negative six. That's a victory. When I was young, come home from work, how was your day today, honey? I didn't get in a fight, so it was a good day. But that is a victory.

00:17:23 Speaker_02
You know, I study and, well, name your podcast, you know, Wisdom. Wisdom is not, in my studies, I'm starting to see this, wisdom is predominantly not something that you do.

00:17:41 Speaker_02
If you study the book of Proverbs in the Bible, okay, if you study Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and you study these wisdom writings,

00:17:53 Speaker_02
There's much more of the wisdom writings that are telling you things not to do than are telling you need to do this to be wise. But more of it is, if you're wise, you won't do this.

00:18:07 Speaker_02
And so like what we're talking here, a lot of victories is just, I didn't do that today.

00:18:14 Speaker_01
There's an idea from mathematics called never multiply by zero. So we can have 2 million multiplied by 47, multiplied by 2.1, multiplied by 20,000. Multiplied by zero is zero.

00:18:31 Speaker_01
So if you spend all of your time working on your health and avoiding seed oils and eating only grass-fed organic meat, but one day decide to drive your car without a seatbelt on, that's multiplying by zero if you get into a wreck.

00:18:47 Speaker_01
so much of life, I think, is avoiding pitfalls, not expediting successes, because the pitfalls can kick you out of the game permanently, or they can do things that are so catastrophic they take much longer to come back from.

00:19:00 Speaker_01
And this is, in some ways, an excuse for being averse to risk, but I think it's just being clever about risk and knowing where you can take risks that have limited downside, not unlimited downside.

00:19:11 Speaker_02
Right. Well, you know, we work a lot with horses, of course, and we've gotten some horses in this year that they weren't ours.

00:19:18 Speaker_02
Like my son had bought a horse last year and the horse was, if you knew what you were doing, you could ride the horse, but the horse was not a broke horse. He didn't have him for very long. And then he deployed overseas. He's in the military.

00:19:33 Speaker_02
So we brought him to our place. And so, you know, there's all these things and the two young men that were working with me, it's like, okay, don't move fast. Don't jump, you know, don't let's do this.

00:19:48 Speaker_02
Let's be calm, you know, because they're a prey animal. So there's all this stuff that we work with, you know?

00:19:56 Speaker_02
And, and so, uh, the young man that wrote, he went out and wrote him and, uh, and he, he didn't do anything like, but it was just, he reached in a saddlebag and pulled out one of these water bottles and it crinkled and, uh, and that horse, he just jumped out of his skin.

00:20:15 Speaker_02
I mean, it didn't turn into a wreck, but it was just like, you spend all of this time.

00:20:20 Speaker_02
moving easy around the horse, working with them real easy and slow, you know, so the saddle, cinching them up nice and slow, cinching them by threes, and moving all nice and easy, and then just one thing, crinkling a water bottle, and it's, you just multiplied by zero.

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00:21:38 Speaker_03
What have you learned about humans from working with horses? Humans don't know how to communicate. Communication is our biggest weakness.

00:21:54 Speaker_02
That's not like the number, but that's something that lately, this has been just really hammered home to me, working with horses and working with humans. And communication is a much more complex issue than I think many of us give it credit for.

00:22:21 Speaker_02
So you take a horse and a human, a relationship with a horse and human, all right, for that to work, there has to be communication. Well, we have a couple of problems here. First off, the horse doesn't speak English, and we don't speak horse.

00:22:35 Speaker_02
All right. But as humans, we insist that the horse comes into our world, but we're too arrogant or too lazy or a combination of both to learn to speak horse and horses. Language is not verbal. It's all movement. It's all body language. It's all this.

00:22:50 Speaker_02
And so that is a problem. But another problem is, is us and the horse. We are, um, we're predator animals. All right. We are the human is. We're predators. All right. We're designed to eat meat. Our eyes are side by side on the front of our face.

00:23:09 Speaker_02
We see one picture and we're designed to see what we want and go get it. The horse is a prey animal. They are the animal that everything that eats meat wants to eat. And so they have a complete different instinct.

00:23:22 Speaker_02
Their instinct is everything wants to eat me. You know, we, we, we wake up of a morning and we say, you know, I want to be a trophy husband. You know, that's my goal.

00:23:33 Speaker_04
I read it.

00:23:34 Speaker_02
Okay. What do I want to go get today? The horse wakes up and says, I don't want to get eaten today. Two totally different instinct. All right.

00:23:42 Speaker_02
So to be able to build a communication with a horse, we have to move into the world and learn to speak, but learn to think how they think. Well, I mean, we can say men and women are the same thing, you know, but women are different from men.

00:24:01 Speaker_02
They have a different way of thinking. And like I said, my wife, I've been married almost 34 years. And even today, there's things I say.

00:24:09 Speaker_02
And she absolutely what she heard is not what I said, you know, and so I have to, I have to and vice versa, you know, so communication and you cannot have 34 years of relationship with one person if there's no communication.

00:24:27 Speaker_01
It's interesting the fact that when you're around a horse, you have this almost like an external barometer or thermometer for you and what's going on. So I mentioned to you that I'd spent a little bit of time with horses recently.

00:24:41 Speaker_01
So I rode my first horse out here in Texas, and that was fun. And then I went and did equine therapy. So that was caring for a horse and treating its hooves and doing all the rest of this stuff.

00:24:55 Speaker_01
And honestly, in retrospect, one of the most embarrassing inner situations with this horse. So first off, these things are big. You don't realize unless you're a round horse, it's just how big they are.

00:25:07 Speaker_01
And they're kind of scary, because there's a lot of them. And they're just muscle. You know, onstage bodybuilder prep level machine.

00:25:16 Speaker_01
So anyway, we're getting used to one of these horses and we're brushing her and she's super chill, really, really relaxed. And then they said, okay, so we're going to give you this tool and this tool is what you can use to clean out the hooves.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
And this horse will know what's happening when you bring the tool up, but you need to make it feel sufficiently comfortable so that it will raise its foot up for you.

00:25:38 Speaker_01
You need to be careful about where it puts its foot back down because I had crocs on, which was not a good idea. Anyway, so you sort of put your hand firmly, upper hind leg, slide it down, little pinch at the ankle, little pull, do this.

00:25:52 Speaker_01
So you need to feel relaxed as you walk up to the horse. You need to imagine that the horse is going to do this. You need to make it comfortable for it. It needs to be comfortable with you, so on and so forth.

00:26:01 Speaker_01
I remember walking up to the horse and thinking, if this horse doesn't like me, that's a comment on me. I really want this horse to like me.

00:26:12 Speaker_01
And my self-worth had immediately become outsourced to whether or not this horse I met 10 minutes ago was gonna lift its hoof up for five seconds so that I could move a little bit of dirt out of it.

00:26:23 Speaker_01
And honestly, that one incident, I'd been calling it horse meditation because I thought like, it's cute or whatever, but really how much can I learn about myself from being around a horse?

00:26:33 Speaker_01
that one incident, I must think about it every week, every couple of weeks, this need to be wanted, this need to be accepted, this outsourcing of my own self-esteem to something else, and this sort of derogation of how I felt about myself based on whether or not a horse

00:26:53 Speaker_01
lifted its foot up or didn't. And thankfully it did, but it just really made me think about where do we put our sense of self-worth and the fact that you have this creature who is, as you say, kind of just reflecting you back at you.

00:27:09 Speaker_01
there's nowhere to hide anymore from the way that you're behaving, especially if you can clamp down the anger or the aggression or the sadness or the whatever, but inside it's still burbling and vibrating.

00:27:23 Speaker_02
Well, I suspect, I mean, you and I, we only met today, all right? But you strike me as the kind of person that you don't very often Approach another man like that. Like my self-worth is predicated on whether this guy respects me or not. Okay.

00:27:41 Speaker_02
Especially another alpha. Okay. Now horse is not an alpha. Okay. That horse is definitely not an alpha. If you wanted to, you could put that horse on the barbecue for supper that night and there's nothing he could do about it. Okay.

00:27:59 Speaker_02
So it speaks to me, the fact that you predicated your view of your self-worth on whether another creature whose wellbeing was in your hands. liked you or accepted you or not. Does that make sense?

00:28:21 Speaker_01
It really does, and I've been thinking and talking about this a lot recently. There is a category of people, of which I'm one, who see other people's emotional states as our responsibility. Right. If you're not happy, I'm not happy.

00:28:37 Speaker_01
And if you're not happy, I have to fix it. And that's noble in some ways, but it's only noble if it's a choice.

00:28:44 Speaker_01
If you're choosing to do it to help, if it's a compulsion, if you're forced to do it through some sense of obligation or whatever, it's not, even though the outcome may be good, it's not quite as virtuous as it may seem.

00:29:00 Speaker_02
Well, it becomes unvirtuous when your help of others is about you. Um, I do this because it makes me feel better. I do this because it gives me purpose in life. I do this because you're going to like me more. You're going to respect me more.

00:29:18 Speaker_02
That's where it becomes a problem. Um, but it's not a problem if it's just, you know, empathy. And so, yeah, I don't know where I was going with that, but there you go.

00:29:29 Speaker_01
Is there a particular horse that you have learned a lot from in your life? Is there a few keystone horses that you had relationships with that taught you an awful lot? There are, there's several. Wait.

00:29:51 Speaker_02
So I was riding for an outfit, Alaska guiding, and they brought in a, a mayor and, uh, she was a retired, the best I could understand. She was a retired barrel racing horse from here in Texas.

00:30:05 Speaker_02
And so when I signed on, they assigned her to me because nobody else, we couldn't put guests on her. None of the other wranglers wanted to ride her because her, her go to was run. If something disturbed her, her head came up and it's run, just run.

00:30:25 Speaker_02
That that's my answer to escape, to just run. And it wasn't something that I could physically fight and stop. Um, and so that horse really made me step outside of.

00:30:43 Speaker_02
The thought process of physically controlling something that has a mental, emotional issue and getting in her head and figuring out what can I do if the problem is mentally.

00:30:55 Speaker_02
or emotionally, what can I do to get in to her head and get into her emotions and fix that for her?

00:31:04 Speaker_02
And so what I did, and it's so simple, it probably wouldn't even make sense to a lot of folks, but while we were sitting there and while she was calm, sitting there at the ranch, waiting for others to get on their horses, I would just come in with the lightest little pressure and get her to tip her nose.

00:31:19 Speaker_02
not pull her nose in, just give a signal, Hey, tip your nose. So she'd tip her nose. And we just do that and just do that.

00:31:25 Speaker_02
And then when we get out on the trail and she started getting anxious about something and her head would come up, I would just default to that. And so she would find something.

00:31:36 Speaker_02
That she was secure the signal and it would, she would calm down and she would come down and working with that mayor for the summer.

00:31:46 Speaker_02
Um, I'm, I made huge strides with myself in stepping outside of the norm of trying to physically control something that isn't ideal.

00:31:58 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mentioned that I had ridden a horse for the first time in Texas, and they gave me whatever the leader of the group is for the horse, whatever that's called. And I was right far at the back, and this horse was eating.

00:32:14 Speaker_01
And the lady that was guiding the group said, just give him a little pull, and he'll come along. I gave him a little pull, and he didn't move. I mean, it is absurd to explain how strong these things' necks are.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
And I'm like, I don't think he doesn't want to come. She's like, no, no, just take a little bit more, a little bit more. I'm a pretty strong guy. So I was like, right, okay, I'll give it a big pull. Didn't move.

00:32:38 Speaker_01
And by this time, they're a hundred yards away. I'm like, still doesn't want to, doesn't seem like you want, no, like a really big pull. So I went mixed grip, like you do on a deadlift. Yeah.

00:32:49 Speaker_01
Set my feet into the stirrups and like, like one rep max this horse's head up. And finally he got up and, uh, that was absolutely not the most efficient way to get him to do that thing. That would have been a much better way than me. Right.

00:33:05 Speaker_02
Well, so your average horse, your average quarter horse size horse, you know, is going to weigh between 800 and 1100 pounds. Okay. Now, what I teach folks is I don't want his body. Okay. I want his mind.

00:33:20 Speaker_02
Now, if I physically, like you just went through, if I physically get his body to do what I want, but I don't have his mind. Soon as he gets a chance, he's going to go back again.

00:33:31 Speaker_02
But if I ignore the body and I get the mind, if I have the mind, I have the body. So in a situation like that, what I do is I, I don't pull his head up. Okay. I take the reins and I bounce that bit that's in its mouth.

00:33:46 Speaker_02
Um, I bounce it pretty sharp and he decides in his mind, I don't like that. I think I will. I think I will pick my head up. And it's like, I'm not going to pick your head up. That's what you have a neck for. Okay. You have that neck. That's what it's for.

00:34:07 Speaker_02
I'm not picking your head up. I'm going to suggest to you that you decide it's in your best interest for you to pick your head up. And we go for the mind and how much in life, you know, you've got all these

00:34:22 Speaker_02
folks working for you here and you have to, you can't physically browbeat and nag and threaten. You've tried, does it work?

00:34:29 Speaker_01
No, no, no, no. They're belligerent. Yeah.

00:34:31 Speaker_02
I've already heard stories.

00:34:32 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:34:34 Speaker_02
They're abused. Yeah. But you want to make things so that they decide that if this, this is what Chris wants done, it's in, it's in my best interest. I want to go do that. Yeah. And again, it's communication, you know?

00:34:48 Speaker_02
And again, it's getting in the horse's mind and working with a horse in that manner. I'll give you an illustration if I can, all right?

00:34:57 Speaker_02
One of the cardinal sins in my book is when I go to get on a horse and the horse walks off, when I'm partway up, you know, I'm stepping up, I'm swinging my leg over and he's walking, he's leaving, okay? That's a cardinal sin.

00:35:11 Speaker_02
So we have a difference of opinion here, me and the horse. It's like, I want you to plant your feet, and I want you to be still while I get on, and then I'll tell you when I want you to go. He says, well, I want to go.

00:35:24 Speaker_02
So I'm not going to sit there and pull back and say, whoa, and do that one-legged hop along Cassidy down while I'm trying to get in the saddle. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to physically hold him back.

00:35:34 Speaker_02
I'm going to put my toe in the stirrup and I'm going to go to step up. And when he walks off, I'm going to step back out and I'm going to make him keep walking in a circle around me eight or 10 times.

00:35:46 Speaker_02
I'm like, I wanted you to stand still, but you want to walk. I tell you what, I'm a nice guy. I'm going to let you walk. I'm going to let you do what you want in a controlled manner. You pick the tune and I'll pick the dance.

00:35:59 Speaker_02
And I'll make him walk around. He's like, I don't, I don't want to walk anymore, but you said that's what you wanted. So I'm letting you do what you want. He's like, I don't want to walk anymore. Okay, stop. Whoa.

00:36:08 Speaker_02
Now, won't you stand here while I get in the saddle? And he says, and it may take a couple of times, but he says, you know what? I think what I want to do is I want to stand here while he gets in the saddle, you know? So we communicate.

00:36:22 Speaker_02
And when I got his mind, when I changed his want to, I didn't have to fight with his body. And so that's how you approach it. You understand and you communicate.

00:36:37 Speaker_01
I've heard you say that sometimes you have to apologize to the horse for being an idiot.

00:36:42 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:36:43 Speaker_01
How do you apologize to a horse?

00:36:45 Speaker_02
They don't care. I apologize to the horse for my sake. I mean, nothing the horse does is personal, all right? The horse will buck you off. They won't come back and apologize to you. They did what they did because

00:36:59 Speaker_02
That's what they felt was necessary at the time. And so they don't operate on that wavelength, but there's times when I do something and it turns out, I'm like, that was my fault. And that was stupid.

00:37:11 Speaker_02
You know, the horse doesn't take it personal either. And I can apologize to the horse and the horse, it just isn't in his thing, but I apologize to the horse.

00:37:22 Speaker_02
to humble myself and to bring myself down and to say, look, you need to pay attention, dummy, and not do that again. The horse doesn't really, he doesn't want an apology, he just doesn't want you to do it again.

00:37:35 Speaker_01
Sounds like you've learned a lot to do with patience and humility through this.

00:37:41 Speaker_02
Yeah. Um, and you know, part of it is, is when you're young, you can pick a fight and you can win some of them. And when you're older and you're busted up, I got plates and screws in my neck and I got joints are out of shape and stuff.

00:37:55 Speaker_02
You're not going to win that fight anyhow, not physically anymore. And, uh, so it's, it's, that's where you start saying, you know what, I need to approach this, um, in a, in a better way.

00:38:08 Speaker_01
Plates and screws in the neck. But I've heard you say that not most of those were actually from horsing accidents, but you were in a plane crash, a car crash, and you rolled a motor home off a hill? I was a passenger off a mountain in Alaska.

00:38:24 Speaker_02
I need to hear those stories, please.

00:38:29 Speaker_02
Wait, I spent a winter in Fort Yukon, which is above the Arctic circle in Alaska, staying with a fellow and, uh, I had a little one 80, a little Cessna one 80 Bush, but I think it was one 80 and we were flying out and it was dead a winter.

00:38:45 Speaker_02
It was like 30 below zero. And in the back of that plane, we had like a hundred pound propane tank, a transmission out of a van, some spare tires. And so we're flying back South to Fairbanks.

00:39:00 Speaker_02
And when we landed in, as we're touching down in Fairbanks, we had a crosswind. And so you kind of tilt the plane as you're landed into that crosswind.

00:39:10 Speaker_02
And so as we touched down and I'm setting up on the co-pilot on passenger side, I see the landing gear go wrong. The wheel and everything go rolling off across the tundra. And so I reach over and I'm like, hey, is that supposed to?

00:39:25 Speaker_02
And then that strut came down and hit and we flipped and ground looped and carried on on the runway. With all of this washing machine ingredients inside. There was a transmission out of a half ton Chevy van and a hundred pound bottle, propane bottle.

00:39:41 Speaker_02
Just flying around. Yeah, it didn't hit us, which is good. But we stood out on that. Of course, I was wearing cowboy boots. So we're standing out on the runway in Fairbanks waiting for FAA to come out. And it's 30 below zero.

00:39:55 Speaker_02
And they come out and inspect it. And then we picked up the wing, a bunch of us, and pushed the plane off the runways. And then I had to catch two more flights that day to get back home. So yeah. What about the motor home motor home?

00:40:09 Speaker_02
I was a passenger in the back and we were coming down narrow road off the mountain. And, uh, um, the lady that was driving, there were a couple of teenagers in the seat right here and they were fussing and bickering.

00:40:23 Speaker_02
And so she turned around to tell him to stop fussing. Hey, y'all stop fussing. It just drove right off. So we went down, I don't know how far down we went, but we slid down and hit and landed up against a bunch of trees down there. No rolling?

00:40:35 Speaker_02
No, it didn't roll. Okay. No. Yeah. So it just, just life. And then, you know, a lot of bucked off, been bucked off a lot, just a lot of- Bumps and bruises and- Yeah, and- Fractures and breaks. Landing in places.

00:40:47 Speaker_02
And so it was just, it was accumulation of life. And then I was in, I was in the police academy. Uh, and we were studying Brazilian jujitsu and I was doing a backwards tactical role and something popped in my net and I didn't say anything.

00:41:07 Speaker_02
And so then we went on a big run and this run was pretty, we'd run for about a mile and then without, and then we'd stop and drop and do burpees and bicycles and then jump up and run some more.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
And by the time we got back to the Academy, my heart rate wouldn't go down. And then I had this weird feeling of like an electrical net in my body and my heart rate would not go down.

00:41:31 Speaker_02
So finally they put me in an ambulance and took me to the hospital and I was like that far away from severing my spinal cord. And, but it was already bad, way worse than that. I had no idea.

00:41:44 Speaker_02
And that tactical, backwards tactical role had just brought it to the edge.

00:41:52 Speaker_01
So maybe an odd blessing in some ways that it warned you and that didn't occur when you got bucked off a horse.

00:41:57 Speaker_02
Right, right. And I don't ride bucking horses anymore. I mean, I say that, you never know. A horse is always a horse is a horse. But after so many years, I can pretty well tell 1-1 is a little hanky, and I'm like, I don't have anything to prove anymore.

00:42:12 Speaker_02
I'm not riding that horse.

00:42:15 Speaker_01
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00:43:08 Speaker_01
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00:43:20 Speaker_01
You talk a lot about balance, the dangers of being out of balance. Right. Explain that to me.

00:43:30 Speaker_02
Let's take, let's, let's take any air. Okay. Raising children. All right. Um, I like to say that raising children is like holding a wet bar. So if you squeeze it too tight, it squeezes out of squirts out of your hands.

00:43:43 Speaker_02
If you don't hold it tight enough, it slides out of your hands. You know, raising children, you got to be balanced. There has to be discipline. We as human beings need discipline in our life, but there has to be love and grace and understanding.

00:43:56 Speaker_02
And so a lot of children who grow up with issues from being raised, you know, those issues are because their parents are out of balance one way or another. Marriage, you've got problems in your marriage. It's usually somebody who's out of balance.

00:44:10 Speaker_02
You know, they're, they're too distant or they're too clingy, you know, they're too demanding or they're too permissive. They don't have personal boundaries. It's just out of balance.

00:44:21 Speaker_03
Um, I think. Oh heck, I'm going to do it.

00:44:28 Speaker_02
What are they going to do to me? Okay. Um, I don't like the trend in this circle men's motivation circle. I don't like the hustle culture as is being brought out and taught today. I don't agree with it because I think it's out of balance.

00:44:45 Speaker_02
I think young men need to know that, Hey, it's okay for you to sit down and to read and have a cigar.

00:44:54 Speaker_02
and to chill and to think, because I guarantee if you're in the weight room, um, pumping out all these reps and running on the machine, and then you're going into the cubicle and you're flip open a computer and you're not thinking you're learning, you're taking in, but you're not meditating on stuff and you're not, you're not thinking, but that can be taken so far that young men are made to feel guilty for just setting down and

00:45:26 Speaker_02
thinking and relaxing. And I understand that there was a tendency in this country. We had a lot of young men that were not raised with dads. They weren't raised to work, you know?

00:45:39 Speaker_02
And so it's sitting on the couch, playing the stupid Xbox, you know, not growing up, learning to work. So that pendulum went too far this way. So now you've got guys who, in order to counteract that, they swung the pendulum too far this way.

00:45:55 Speaker_02
And a balanced man needs to be somewhere in the middle. He needs to be able to work, to do what needs to be done, to improve himself.

00:46:03 Speaker_02
And he also needs to sit around by the fire in the backyard and have a cigar and read some Kipling and just stay balanced. There needs to be balance.

00:46:16 Speaker_01
I wrote an essay about that this week. Did you? Would you mind if I read it to you? Absolutely not. I think type A people have a type B problem, and type B people have a type A problem.

00:46:28 Speaker_01
Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax, and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined.

00:46:35 Speaker_01
Given that you subscribe to me, I'm going to guess you're probably type A. Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says. Here's the thing you may have already realized.

00:46:46 Speaker_01
Type A people with a type B problem get very little sympathy. because a miserable but outwardly successful person always appears to be in a much more preferential position than the content-being-lazy-but-on-the-verge-of-being-bankrupt person.

00:47:01 Speaker_01
The problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than ones of scarcity. One feels like a choice, the other like a limitation. One is a bourgeois luxury, the other a systemic imposition.

00:47:12 Speaker_01
I need someone to teach me how to be disciplined and work harder, feels noble and upward aiming and charitable. I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax, feels dopaminergic and addicted and transactional and opulent.

00:47:24 Speaker_01
Every underdog movie ever has a training montage of someone working their life out by working harder. None included a guy learning how to log out of slack at 6pm or finally enjoy a beach holiday.

00:47:36 Speaker_01
So yes, Taipei people may have objectively better lives, but subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.

00:47:44 Speaker_01
They wake up every morning feeling as if they've already fallen behind, and only if they dominate their entire day flawlessly will they have dragged themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output, which means they can go to sleep that night without feeling like they've wasted it.

00:47:57 Speaker_01
Congratulations, you might be very successful, but you might also be very miserable. Just work harder bro, advice, reliably makes everyone more successful in the only way that they can be judged. Outwardly.

00:48:10 Speaker_01
There are very few issues in life which can't be solved by just working harder, so everybody treats it like a panacea, not a purpose-built tool.

00:48:17 Speaker_01
And, on average, maybe more people do need to hear David Goggins shouting in their face to go harder, rather than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they are already enough.

00:48:26 Speaker_01
But for a certain, perhaps minority cohort of people, they actually need to hear the opposite message. We need a parasympathetic Goggins. Who's going to carry the TV remote and the cigars? Hashtag rest harder than me.

00:48:39 Speaker_01
Type B problems are just as tough as type A ones, but they require a much less sexy solution. Peace. One that you can't achieve by just working harder.

00:48:48 Speaker_02
I agree 100%. I have guys come into the school and they're like, they're just I'm like, I don't say anything. It's not my business, but I'm like, you're going to die young, tightly wound, just tightly wound. And it's never enough. It's never enough.

00:49:06 Speaker_02
I'm like, when is it enough? What is enough? You know, I've been thinking the last couple of weeks, I'm like, you know, the saying is just keep the main thing, the main thing. But I think where we crash and burn is how we define the main thing.

00:49:25 Speaker_02
You know, and it's, I see myself in a very small, tiny way, infinitesimal way. I see myself as the anti David Goggins. I see myself as a guy, it's like there's places where his message is needed. I'm not knocking the guy. Okay.

00:49:44 Speaker_02
There are places where his message is needed, but his message is not needed for everybody. Okay. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna probably step over a line here and you can edit out anything you want. All right.

00:50:00 Speaker_02
I'm really bothered by these guys who are financial gurus who will fire you. If you don't have a six pack, there's a problem. There's a main thing, stay in the main thing problem with that viewpoint on life. Um, and.

00:50:20 Speaker_02
I want to see, I want to see men that I'm, for whatever reason, whatever way brought in to influence, I want to see them find balance. I don't want to see them find money. I don't want to see them find six packs.

00:50:40 Speaker_02
If that, if that is part of the result of it, fine. Okay. But I want them to find balance and I want them to find that place inside where they're like my main thing is my main thing and it's enough.

00:50:57 Speaker_01
I've heard you say that a good man is born to serve not born to make money. Absolutely. What's that mean to you?

00:51:05 Speaker_02
Well if I make money and I've heard all excuses because there's guys who have a problem with me saying that All right. Um, but if I make money, I make money for me. Now I've got, you know, my wife definitely benefits from it.

00:51:19 Speaker_02
And you know, my children, although they're grown, they benefit from it. But ultimately in the end, uh, if, if I'm poor all my life into making money, that's for me, you know, but if I, if I pour my life into.

00:51:38 Speaker_02
As many people as is fitting, and I don't know, um, their life is better for me. Haven't come through.

00:51:47 Speaker_02
I ultimately I want, and I'll never know in some tiny way I would, what means the most to me is that when you leave here today in some small way, your life is better for us. Haven't sat down and talked. That means that means more. Um, and, uh,

00:52:09 Speaker_02
And so we're, you know, I think we are, I think a real man is born to serve and serve means provide for those that are in your sphere of you to provide for, uh, it means to protect, it means to encourage, it means to teach and to train.

00:52:24 Speaker_02
Uh, and sometimes it means to step back and let them hit the wall. Sometimes the best service you can do for somebody is to when it's all done, walk up and look down and say, did that hurt? You know, that's, that's what they needed.

00:52:39 Speaker_02
Uh, but we won't do that because it makes us look bad. And even in our service to others, we do it for ulterior motives, you know, but, but yes, um, I believe that very strongly.

00:52:50 Speaker_02
I believe if you spend your whole life to yourself, for yourself, you have no purpose of being here. This planet is not in any way better for you having been here. Is that what a good man is to you? That's what a good man is to me.

00:53:09 Speaker_02
When my wife and I, and we've moved, we've lived all over, but it's been a thing of ours, when we leave, We try to leave the house in some way better than when we found it.

00:53:22 Speaker_02
And that's how I approach life is like when people come across my path, I try to leave their life a little better than when I found it. And you know what, that may be just looking at that poor, tired lady checking out at Walmart.

00:53:40 Speaker_02
With the sore feet and the glazed over eyes and looking right now and say, how are you doing today?

00:53:46 Speaker_02
It don't take much, you know, but it's like, I guarantee in some small way, her life was a little better when I passed through that Walmart line than it was before I got there. Uh, And yeah, I think that's a good man.

00:54:03 Speaker_02
A good man is a man who can protect and who can provide and who can serve, who can comfort, who can reprimand, who can discipline, whatever's necessary to make the world a little better because he passed through.

00:54:19 Speaker_01
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00:55:14 Speaker_01
That's drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. What do you think about the balance when it comes for men between strength and softness, sort of rationality, emotionality, rigidity, vulnerability? I think that's a balance that a lot of men struggle with.

00:55:37 Speaker_01
I still think that the conversation around emotions, around being open, whether it's with your friends or a partner or even yourself, I mean, you literally denied yourself going to the doctor for a heart attack.

00:55:49 Speaker_01
Like, the male ability to deny that things are wrong, whether they're physical or emotional, is like a reality-distorting power that we all have. Right. How do you come to think about that balance between the hardness and the softness in men?

00:56:06 Speaker_03
I'm still old school. I'm still very old school.

00:56:14 Speaker_02
Now there comes a point where it can be depilated, debilitating to those around me. Okay. Um, if I bottle everything up inside so that I get to the point that I am toxic or debilitating to those around me, then I need to get some help.

00:56:36 Speaker_02
But as long as I'm not, I don't need to add more burden for them to carry.

00:56:42 Speaker_01
That's just me. Can you be a bit more specific about what that is, how that shows up for you?

00:57:01 Speaker_02
My wife has, has been encouraging me for a while now for me to go and talk to somebody. Just there's years and years and years of, I mean, there were a lot of rough years there. Um. But I'm like, I can't, I can't do that.

00:57:18 Speaker_02
You know, I mean the guy, I know the guy gets paid to sit there and, uh, but it's not, it's just not necessary. You know, um, I'm still of, you know, I'm still old enough and I, I'm of the, I'm of the school. It's like just. Just deal with it.

00:57:41 Speaker_02
Suck it up. Suck it up. You know, I broke three ribs one time in a barn, saddling horses, horse to a fit, took eight aspirin and got on that horse and did a four hour ride. Cause I had a job to do. It's my job. Now I know let's, let's go back to balance.

00:58:04 Speaker_02
Okay. I was about to mention that. I understand. I'm with you a hundred percent, but at the same time, your balance and my balance and his balance are different. Um, and so I think, I think a man has to find his own balance. Um, and.

00:58:28 Speaker_02
The, and you're going to get so many messages on here, disagree with this. Um, but I, I think that this thought of men's mental health, emotional health, go get help. Go. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm not saying it's wrong.

00:58:46 Speaker_02
I'm not saying it's out of place, but I think like everything else, I think it could be taken to the point that men just become weak.

00:58:56 Speaker_03
And brother, let me tell you in this day and age, we don't need more weak men. Um, now when you're, when your internal battles come to the point that you need help because they have weakened you, then get help, you know,

00:59:18 Speaker_02
But I think everybody's balance is different. And I fear there was a problem for years on this side, but I fear just like everything else with that subject being pushed the way it is, we're going to get out of balance on the other side.

00:59:36 Speaker_02
And it's like, and everybody needs therapy for everything.

00:59:39 Speaker_01
This is the. nuance I think around what we were talking about, type A problems, type B problems, because it's easy to just take that as a

00:59:50 Speaker_01
one single meal on a plate as opposed to multiple different pieces or a onesie that you put on as opposed to an outfit that's piecemeal and put together. So there's a British writer called Matthew Syed who's coming on the show soon.

01:00:02 Speaker_01
And the interesting thing about tennis as a sports reporter is that you had three phenomenal world champions all at the same time. You had Nadal, you had Djokovic, and you had Federer.

01:00:14 Speaker_01
And he used to go to Wimbledon and he would see how they were warming up and each had a different approach.

01:00:20 Speaker_01
So he'd go and see Nadal, and he's just raw aggression, his top's off, and he's hitting the ball as hard as he could, and he's sort of just fury. And then he'd go and see Djokovic, and he's like a robot. And this guy's precise, precision, rationality.

01:00:33 Speaker_01
Then he'd go and see Federer, and he's playing trick shots. He's laughing, and he's having fun, and he's sort of flirting with the ball girls and stuff like that.

01:00:40 Speaker_01
And each of these guys have won titles while all of them have been playing, and they've traded places, some on this court, some on a different type of surface, et cetera.

01:00:49 Speaker_01
But if you were to look at any of them and say, in order for me to be a world champion, I must be, okay, well, which one? Because all of them are world champions.

01:01:01 Speaker_03
And this is, I think, you're right. The message may largely have swung too far back toward the

01:01:15 Speaker_01
you cannot deal with any difficulty, you must prioritize your internal state over external responsibilities, mindful Mondays and time off Tuesdays and cookie Wednesdays.

01:01:28 Speaker_01
And it's trying to find who's this message for, particularly, and I think really trying to get people that are listening to feed it through the filter of, is this for me? Or is this for someone else?

01:01:41 Speaker_01
And that point around, just go harder, bro, can cause you to have a heart attack laid in bed next to your wife. And you go, okay, that's something that I probably do need to heed. And on the other side, am I a useless blob of emotional nothingness?

01:01:57 Speaker_01
Okay, well, maybe I need a bit more David Goggins in my life. And I think finding that balance and not having a one-size-fits-all answer.

01:02:06 Speaker_02
So how does a man, an individual, pick any individual, how does he find that balance that fits him?

01:02:16 Speaker_01
with difficulty. I think for me, it's come with age. It's come with learning myself. It's come with experience of understanding what happened the last time that this situation occurred and how I felt.

01:02:30 Speaker_02
And trying to- So what would you encourage or advise a young man, 19, 23, who doesn't have the benefit of the age and the experience And what would you advise him and say, look, this is kind of an area that might help you find your balance.

01:02:51 Speaker_01
I think checking in with yourself and not treating your first response as always the correct one. I think the immediate sort of reflex that we often have, especially as young men, young and men,

01:03:10 Speaker_01
is an issue because you haven't accumulated enough experience for you to be able to call it gut instinct wisdom.

01:03:20 Speaker_01
What it is is probably your default response, which is from childhood, from the group that you grew up in, maybe it's dad's pattern, maybe it's mom's pattern, maybe it's the teacher and the way that you have to protect yourself in school.

01:03:34 Speaker_01
It's unlikely that that is the best way for you to deal with things. So I think Don't believe everything you think.

01:03:43 Speaker_02
Can we boil it down to a Booyah base and say, look, when you have the thought, don't trust the thought, I need to do this or I need to do that, what if we start asking ourself why? Why do I need to run 300 miles with two broken legs?

01:04:06 Speaker_02
Because David Goggin said so, you know, why do I need to do that? What is the purpose? Not why for me, but why do I need to do that to make myself the man I need to be for those around me? Why do I need to say, you know what?

01:04:26 Speaker_02
I need to spend more time in the backyard with a cigar. Why do I need to do that?

01:04:35 Speaker_02
And if the answer is because I'm becoming an overwhelmed, overtight, losing my balance, losing my focus on what really matters in life, I'm becoming hard to live with to those that I care the most about, to those who I am the most responsible for.

01:04:52 Speaker_02
So the why is this will make me a better person for those around me, me being able to bench press. 200 pounds, as opposed to 180 pounds does not necessarily make me a better person for those that I'm here to serve. It feeds my ego.

01:05:16 Speaker_02
So maybe a little more time in the gym doesn't answer the why. And a little more time in the backyard with my kids. that gives me a better answer to the why do I need to make this choice as opposed to that choice.

01:05:32 Speaker_02
And maybe that's a little more accessible to a young man without a lot of experience.

01:05:39 Speaker_01
I'm really interested in this blend that you have of real introspection and accepting of your own flaws and faults with the old school mentality of pick up a weight and carry it.

01:05:54 Speaker_01
I think one of the things that men that want to achieve things in their life struggle with a lot is being kinder with themselves when they fall short, even if they tried their best.

01:06:05 Speaker_01
They did everything that they could, reality didn't deliver to them the thing that they wanted, the outcome. How have you learned to have a better relationship with yourself, the voice inside of your head, to be kinder if things go badly?

01:06:24 Speaker_03
Just smiling. I like me. I like me. I would buy me a drink.

01:06:36 Speaker_02
I look at me now and I and I see all the warts. OK, I see all the negatives more than anybody else does. I see the positives and over the whole balance of stuff. I like me and I can give myself the same grace if you and I were friends.

01:06:53 Speaker_02
I can give myself the same grace I can give you because I like me. I like me in spite of my understanding and the reality of my weaknesses and my warts and my scars and everything. But you know, all in all, I'm a pretty good dude.

01:07:11 Speaker_02
And, uh, man, you, you gotta get to that point outside of arrogance. Arrogance is pride mixed with ignorance. All right. That that's the definition of arrogance. I'm not talking arrogance. I'm talking about, look, as a human being, I've failed at this.

01:07:28 Speaker_02
I've succeeded at that. I've wrecked this, but I've built that and all in all, you know, I've tried and, uh, but I like me, someone give me some grace. And it's as simple as that. I would buy me a cigar. I wonder how many men can say that.

01:07:48 Speaker_02
Not as many as should.

01:07:52 Speaker_01
And how many people can say that? How many people say I like me? They would give... more grace, more care, more attention, more love to somebody else than themselves.

01:08:06 Speaker_01
There's a statistic around, I think on average, the likelihood that you are going to complete a course of antibiotics yourself is about 50%. The likelihood of your dog completing it is 95%.

01:08:20 Speaker_01
So we're literally capable of caring for a pet nearly double as well as we can for ourselves. Remembering that if you die, no one can look after the pet.

01:08:31 Speaker_01
So in an odd roundabout way, serving yourself and serving others from a cup which overflows around your own, or the saucer that sits around your cup, is important.

01:08:44 Speaker_01
Without, and again, this sort of tension between being self-serving, being narcissistic, being egotistical, being self-centered, but not meaning that. It's this delicate balance. And this is what comes with growing up. And I think this is why

01:08:59 Speaker_01
one-size-fits-all flaming sword advice seems to die away as people get a little older. You listen to a Joe Rogan, and a lot of what he's saying is hedged in some regard. It's caveated. It's, you know, it's, this is what worked for me.

01:09:17 Speaker_01
Not this is how everybody should do it. And yeah, there's a humility that comes with age. Right, right.

01:09:23 Speaker_02
Because there's If you turn around and look back with open eyes at your life, you see all the scars.

01:09:31 Speaker_02
You know, I mean, you can't, you can't, the only way you can not be humble in old age is when you refuse to look at the reality of your life up to today. You know, that's the only way. Because nobody's skating through it perfectly.

01:09:45 Speaker_02
But this is what drives, this is what drives my, and it sounds ludicrous in my ears, but my business endeavors today. This is the core of what drives me. Okay. There is no business out there that I can take on.

01:10:07 Speaker_02
There is no monetary endeavor that I can take on that is worth the gamble of me losing me. It took me years of, of a lot of grief and pain and work to get to be who I am today in spite of who I was. And I don't want to lose that.

01:10:33 Speaker_02
I don't want to lose myself in business. I don't want to lose myself in trying to earn a better living in trying to get a name and trying to do this. It's like I have turned down.

01:10:47 Speaker_02
I have turned down so much because I've looked at it and I've asked myself, Who's this going to make me be, who's this going to turn me into even a little bit. And it's like, it's just not worth it. It's just not, it's not worth it.

01:11:03 Speaker_02
And so I'm right now trying to find the balance in undertaking something that's not going to alter me that I'm not going to lose myself and then not succeeding at something because I was too afraid to try it.

01:11:21 Speaker_02
Which has never been an issue with me before. I've never been afraid of failure before. But now I've got something I don't want to lose. And that's myself that I actually like. A me that I actually like.

01:11:32 Speaker_01
Does that make any sense? You understand? Okay. The person that you have to spend the most time talking to in your life is yourself. Try not to lose that respect. Right. Right. And I think

01:11:49 Speaker_01
This was a lesson that I realized toward the end of my 20s, where I'd accumulated a lot of success and status in maybe the way that modern society tells a young man that he should, with freedom and notoriety and women and stuff like that.

01:12:05 Speaker_01
And that was cool, and to look back on fun. But it was beginning to get to the stage where I didn't like me all that much. I didn't do anything bad, but I just felt like I was built for more. I was built for different, built for something else.

01:12:27 Speaker_01
And I realized that I wasn't keeping promises to myself. That if I said I was going to wake up at a certain time, the snooze button would be hit three times. If I said that I was going to stick to my diet or go to the gym or do this thing,

01:12:43 Speaker_01
Maybe it would happen, but it wouldn't happen quite the way that I'd meant it to, and there would be some negotiating and some cajoling and some falling short.

01:12:53 Speaker_01
So imagine that you had a friend, and every time that you invited this friend out for lunch, they showed up an hour late, or they didn't show up at all. After a while, you stop trusting them and stop inviting them out at all. Right.

01:13:07 Speaker_01
You are that friend to yourself. Yeah. You know, how can you have faith that you're going to go and do all of the things that you want in life when you can't not hit the snooze button? Right. Or you can't not cheat on your diet.

01:13:20 Speaker_01
You can't not do, you know, you are constructed by the tiny decisions that you make every single day. And even if you think that nobody else is watching, and even if no one is, There's this little ticker in the back of your mind when you go to bed.

01:13:35 Speaker_01
You know, you were gentle with yourself when you got agitated. Good. You were kind with the lady that looked like she was tired at Walmart. You said something peaceful and encouraging to her. Good. These things.

01:13:55 Speaker_01
And it's something that makes you feel not so proud about yourself. And, you know, in some ways, it's a great correcting mechanism because there is no hiding from it.

01:14:04 Speaker_01
And people turn to alcohol and distraction and aggression and depersonalization in order to deal with the fact that they don't like themselves. But ultimately, you need to live with the decisions that you make. You need to live with you.

01:14:21 Speaker_01
There is this set of scales inside of your mind that's just balancing things all the time.

01:14:27 Speaker_02
And if it, you know, you know. Yeah. And people don't know how to like themselves. I mean, people don't know how to like themselves, but it's not complicated.

01:14:39 Speaker_01
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01:14:51 Speaker_01
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01:15:04 Speaker_01
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01:15:08 Speaker_01
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01:15:19 Speaker_01
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01:15:37 Speaker_02
Tell me, how would you like yourself? Find somebody that you like, that you genuinely like, and figure out what it is about them you like. I like that, that's something I like.

01:15:49 Speaker_02
That person is, they're understanding, they're gentle, they're hardworking, they're honest, this is what I like about them. And incorporate that stuff into your own life. If that's the stuff you like,

01:16:04 Speaker_02
Then incorporate that stuff into who you are and then you like yourself. Well, it's not rocket science, you know, because there are things, there are things that you like as a person that wouldn't mean anything to me.

01:16:21 Speaker_02
There are things that you like in another person that wouldn't mean anything to me. There's things that I like in another person just because of how I'm wired and it wouldn't mean anything to you. All right. So that is what I like in a person.

01:16:39 Speaker_02
So if I work at taking on those attributes, it helps me become a person that I like.

01:16:47 Speaker_01
I always used to feel a little nervous when talking to people, and perhaps my horse situation belied this. I always wanted people to like me.

01:17:01 Speaker_01
I was unpopular as a kid, only child, a lot of time in solitude, bullied in school, and I wanted people around me to think that I was fun or cool or interesting or want to be near me or want to be around me or whatever.

01:17:23 Speaker_01
I assumed that that was always this sort of grand, charismatic, out of reach, impressive person. You needed to be impressive. You needed to walk into a room and look at all of the things I can do.

01:17:36 Speaker_01
And then, this was two years ago, my friend George made me realize this, just by virtue of being peaceful and brilliant.

01:17:46 Speaker_01
And I realized that the reason I love being around him wasn't because he was the most charismatic guy in the room, or even the most interesting guy in the room, although he can be, but because he made me feel like the most interesting person in the room.

01:18:01 Speaker_01
And I think this is such an important lesson for people who want to be liked, who want to struggle socially, and want to become better. People like people that make them feel good. They don't care that much about how impressive the person is.

01:18:20 Speaker_01
There's this great story. I think it was Winston Churchill's wife who met the two US president candidates, Truman and somebody else. And she said that she sat down at dinner with both of them within the space of about a month of each other.

01:18:36 Speaker_01
So she left from the first president feeling like he was the smartest man in the world. She left from the second president feeling like she was the smartest woman in the world.

01:18:46 Speaker_01
And it is significantly easier to make someone else feel interesting than it is to be interesting, to make someone else feel charismatic than it is to be charismatic.

01:18:58 Speaker_02
It is, but from an individual, and this is where I see things because of all of the particular comments and questions and emails and stuff I get from young men. Okay.

01:19:14 Speaker_02
Um, you take a young man out there and, and everything you just said is a hundred percent correct. I agree with a hundred percent. It's, it's dead on, but there, there are guys out there that don't have someone like that in their life.

01:19:29 Speaker_02
Someone who's going to be that person that makes them feel good about themselves. But if we become the person. that we like. I have recently come to the play and this drives people crazy. I think, I think it irritates people.

01:19:47 Speaker_02
Um, I have come to the place in my life where when I meet somebody in there and they don't like me and you can tell, I don't care. And when I meet somebody that, that, you know, they're like, they really liked me.

01:20:01 Speaker_02
It's like, okay, but it doesn't carry much weight either. Cause I'm going to be leaving. I'm going to be leaving, you know, we're not staying. I like me and it's enough.

01:20:15 Speaker_02
And so when I meet someone who doesn't like me or I meet someone who does like me, it doesn't alter my sale.

01:20:23 Speaker_01
I suppose that's the vicious circle of.

01:20:28 Speaker_01
if you don't like you, you will continue to outsource your self-worth to the people around you, which makes you more desperate and more needy, which inherently makes you less likable, because people know that you're pliable and malleable and will kind of do whatever you need to do in order to gain their approval.

01:20:45 Speaker_01
Mercifully, the horse did lift its hoof up, but it's a vicious circle, and I get that, and you know, I'm a rehabilitating people-pleaser in that regard. But this is the fascinating thing, I think, about developing as a person that

01:21:05 Speaker_01
the journey that you're on, parts of it will resonate with other people. And they see bits of them in you. They see little bits. I was angry. I'm angry as a young man. I see that in Dwight. I was never angry.

01:21:17 Speaker_01
Anger was never my... My anger was always turned inward, not outward. So for me, it was low mood. It was fear. It was worry. It was concern. Tight. Closed up. It was never out. Not fighting. I wasn't showing aggression. I wasn't being, you know...

01:21:36 Speaker_01
So, okay, well, if I'm the angry young guy, like, intellectually, philosophically, maybe I can say something that's remotely interesting, but I've got no lived experience that's actually going to help you. – Right. – Good to you. – Right. – Right?

01:21:50 Speaker_01
– Exactly. – You're the black belt master at dealing with that. – Right. – And that's where picking different bits apart... But I agree, I think, you know, there's been a lot of talk about crisis of masculinity, role models for men in the modern world,

01:22:05 Speaker_01
the multiplicity of backgrounds that guys are coming from, the unseen fatherlessness epidemic that we had, which has created a vacuum that's required people like you to step in as surrogate patriarchs.

01:22:21 Speaker_01
What are you hearing from the guys in your audience? What are they often asking? What are they coming to you? What are the problems that they're dealing with mostly? Relationships.

01:22:33 Speaker_03
girls.

01:22:35 Speaker_02
Um, they, they were not raised, they were not raised with a dad who said, Hey, this is how you treat a lady.

01:22:44 Speaker_02
You know, this is, this is how, you know, when girls talk and they say this, what they actually mean is this, and I'm not talking about no means no, but I'm talking about, you know, I don't, I don't know.

01:22:59 Speaker_02
You don't have to get me something to eat when you go get something. I don't want anything. Um, but it is. And so young men these days were never taught by another man. How to treat a lady like a lady.

01:23:12 Speaker_02
And they go in to a relationship, girlfriends, marriages, getting all their information from Hollywood. And it's a crash and burn because they don't understand relationships. They don't understand communication.

01:23:27 Speaker_02
Uh, they don't understand the balance between being a man and being a bore, being a buffoon, you know, being a tyrant. They don't know the difference between being. Can I call names on here? Absolutely. Okay. Andrew Tate. Okay.

01:23:45 Speaker_02
Or, or some little milk sob over here, you know, there's, you got the two extremes and they, they can't find that place in the middle. Um, the biggest thing by far as relationships.

01:23:58 Speaker_01
What is your advice from 34 and a bit years of marriage and negotiating with a woman from Venus? What is your advice to young guys on how they can treat a lady better and understand them? Treat her like she's special.

01:24:17 Speaker_02
I mean, for one thing, For one thing, my problem with the feminist movement is why in the Sam Hill was something is something as special and wonderful as a woman want to be equal with a man. Why do you want to bring yourself down to that level?

01:24:36 Speaker_02
You know, as a Christian, God gave two very special gifts to mankind. The first one was a woman and the second was Jesus Christ. Okay. You can teach an ape to work construction. You cannot teach an ape to raise human children.

01:24:56 Speaker_02
I think it's degrading to women to try to be the same as a man is okay. Treat them special. Uh, and, and secondly is communicate. All right. If you don't understand what they're saying, if you're confused, sit down and gently say, look, I'm sorry.

01:25:16 Speaker_02
I don't understand. I don't understand what you're feeling. I don't understand, but I'd love to understand if you can help me and just sit down and communicate, just listen to them.

01:25:29 Speaker_02
You know, a lot of times they don't, they just, they just want somebody to listen to them. They don't want you to fix it.

01:25:33 Speaker_02
They just want you to listen to them while they, while they take all this boiling stuff inside their head and put it out so they can actually hear it. And sometimes that helps them sort out all these thoughts that's in their head.

01:25:50 Speaker_02
They need to just put it out so they can hear it. And they don't need you to demean them by saying, okay, I'll fix this.

01:25:57 Speaker_01
Just listen to them. There's a quote from Timothy Leary that says, women who aspire to be equal with men lack ambition.

01:26:06 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah, I hadn't heard that, but I agree with it. I'm like, I get up and give you my seat because I think you're special, not because I think you're my equal. A guy comes in, he's 57 years old, he's physically equal to me, he's all mine.

01:26:19 Speaker_02
I'm not going to get up and give him my seat, all right? So I give you my seat, not because I think you're my equal. If you're my equal, you can stand just like I do. I give you my seat because you're special. What about the reverse?

01:26:32 Speaker_03
What do you wish more women knew about how men operated? There's 10,000 times more going on inside the head of a man than you have any idea.

01:26:52 Speaker_02
He's carrying burdens that you don't have a clue about, and he don't know how to express them, and he don't know what to do about it.

01:26:59 Speaker_02
And he figures if he puts it out there and communicates it, he's just going to be shot down, called a fool called week. So he carries it inside and you have no clue the burdens and the hell that most men are carrying inside and not even showing you.

01:27:20 Speaker_03
I wish more women understood that. Yeah, it's, uh,

01:27:27 Speaker_01
A strange problem, I think, of the modern discussion around men and why they're struggling, that a lot of the solutions that get put forward, a lot of the only acceptable solutions that get put forward, are, if only you acted less like a man, all of your problems would go away.

01:27:44 Speaker_01
That men are treated like defective women, as opposed to treated like work-in-progress men.

01:27:51 Speaker_02
The average man, I believe, the average real man, does not need to go get therapy for the battles and the burdens he's carried inside.

01:28:06 Speaker_02
What he needs is for those that he's carrying them for to recognize that they're there and to respect it and to be grateful for it. They don't need to talk it out to get rid of it.

01:28:26 Speaker_02
They need the one that they're going through this hell for to recognize it's there and to be grateful that the man is carrying this for them. They don't need therapy. They need gratitude.

01:28:41 Speaker_01
How important do you think it is to communicate that as a man? You've said there are 10,000 things, challenges, trauma, complete inability to communicate it.

01:28:53 Speaker_01
Maybe you can communicate to a horse better than you can communicate to your significant other. What's your thoughts around vulnerability within a relationship? If you're not going to the therapist, perhaps?

01:29:07 Speaker_01
How about opening up about these fears and concerns?

01:29:11 Speaker_02
Well, first off, let's take away vulnerability, because a lot of times men won't

01:29:21 Speaker_02
open up they won't respond because it's looked at as becoming vulnerable and it's like the you know the little dutch boy with his finger in the dike it's a little tiny leak but if i allow this little tiny leak the entire dike is going to give way that's why we can't allow the little tiny leak okay so if if i if i'm sitting here and if i'm one of these guys and my

01:29:50 Speaker_02
I can communicate to her what I need to communicate without being vulnerable. I can maintain my strength and communicate to her. Okay. I can say, look, I'm, I'm working 60 hours a week and the environment that I'm working in is very, very difficult.

01:30:15 Speaker_02
And I come home and I only have. eight hours here at the house. And this is the only place of peace I have in this entire world. And when I come home, you're angry all the time. You're not satisfied about anything.

01:30:32 Speaker_02
You're you want that, you know, whatever the situation is, if you're not going to provide for me that little bit of peace, that this is the only place I can get, what are we doing?

01:30:48 Speaker_02
Now you're not vulnerable, you're not getting walked on, you're not being a jerk, you're not coming in throwing stuff down and saying this, you're just communicating the hard reality truth is. The hard reality truth is,

01:31:03 Speaker_02
Our relationship at this point has boiled down to this. Now you have a beautiful house. You have, you never worry about there being grocery money. You have a car. I put the fuel in your car. Cause you let it go to empty all the time.

01:31:17 Speaker_02
I provide this and this and this. And what I'd like for you is some peace and some understanding. You know, if that's where your situation is, but to communicate it in such a way, not to come in and whine.

01:31:33 Speaker_02
Not to grovel and not to tyrant, you know, not to yell, not to pick a fight. It's like, look, I'm just communicating because I think we have a lack of understanding here. So I need you to understand this is where things are right now.

01:31:50 Speaker_02
And so you can communicate. But how you communicate is just as important as what you communicate.

01:31:58 Speaker_01
Transparent communication like that is so rare. Being able to put across what you mean without ladening it with resentment, passive aggression.

01:32:12 Speaker_02
Right, right. I knew a guy many years ago, he had a little dog. One of those little furry little rat dogs, you know, and his, his, one of his little joys in life was he'd look at that dog and he'd smile and he'd say, oh, you're so stupid.

01:32:26 Speaker_02
You're the ugliest, dumbest, most worthless dog I've ever seen in my life. And that dog would just wiggle and roll over and just, and he'd look at me and say, it doesn't matter what you say. It's how you say it.

01:32:36 Speaker_02
Dog has no idea what I'm saying, but I say it in a loving tone and it's all good. You know? There's a lot of truth to that in communicating with people.

01:32:45 Speaker_02
We can say things that are not necessarily blatantly offensive, but we can say it in a real belligerent, aggressive tone. And all they hear is the tone. They didn't even hear the words.

01:32:55 Speaker_01
Medium is the message.

01:32:56 Speaker_02
That's right.

01:32:58 Speaker_01
They don't even hear the words. What have you learned about the importance of fatherhood? You've got seven children. Seven children. Yeah.

01:33:06 Speaker_03
What have you learned about the importance of fatherhood? All right, I believe God made man, okay?

01:33:24 Speaker_02
And God created man and God gave man the word. And the word at that time was, don't eat of the fruit of those two trees, okay? That was the symbol, that's all the word God gave man at that time. Then God gave man a work.

01:33:39 Speaker_02
And the work was, he said, take care of this garden.

01:33:43 Speaker_03
And then God gave man a woman to help the man. Okay. That man.

01:33:50 Speaker_02
And then the woman God gave him, that became a marriage. And then that man and wife had children and those children had children.

01:34:01 Speaker_03
And then there became governments. Okay. You see where I'm going?

01:34:12 Speaker_02
In this country, this country was founded as a Christian country. This is what I believe. People can do whatever. I believe that this country is only as strong as the churches.

01:34:25 Speaker_02
Even our founding father says, America will remain great as long as America is good. When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. This country is only as strong as the churches in this country.

01:34:37 Speaker_02
The churches are only as strong as the families that make up those churches. Those families are only as strong as the marriages that those families are built on.

01:34:47 Speaker_02
And those marriages are only as strong and good as the man that God built the marriages on. As goes the man, so goes the marriage. As goes the marriage, so goes the family. As goes the family, so goes the churches.

01:35:00 Speaker_02
As goes the churches, so goes the country. Everything is built on the husband and the father. And this country is a failure today because the fathers and the husbands have failed. How?

01:35:15 Speaker_02
Failing to be the example they need to be, failing to be the leaders they need to be, Failing to be the disciplinarians that they need to be, failing to be the providers that they need to be.

01:35:29 Speaker_02
Um, if you don't have, if you don't have the backbone as a husband and as a father to be the bad guy, you've got no business being a father or a husband. There's times when you have to know this is not a good direction for my marriage, for my family.

01:35:50 Speaker_02
And everybody's going to be mad at me. My wife is going to be mad at me. My kids are going to hate me. But in the long run, this is a very bad direction and I'm putting my foot down and we're not doing that.

01:36:02 Speaker_02
And you become the bad guy, but you do it for the longterm strength and safety of the family. And we've lost that. I mean, we've lost that in this country to a very large degree.

01:36:19 Speaker_02
And, and so I think, I mean, our next generation, our next generation is going to run the politics. They're going to run the finances. They're going to run the judicial system, everything in this country.

01:36:35 Speaker_02
And they're going to be the result in a very large degree. And there's going to be those who don't agree with us, but they're going to be the result of whatever their fathers made them or whatever they become because they didn't have a father.

01:36:51 Speaker_03
And so I think fatherhood is paramount.

01:36:56 Speaker_01
I think it's paramount for the future of a society. Speaking of doing things that make your family mad at you, I heard that you didn't let your daughters date until they were in their late teens. Is this right? Right.

01:37:11 Speaker_01
And that you grilled the potential suitors when they started dating them? Every boy had to come to me. Tell me the process, tell me the story there.

01:37:22 Speaker_02
Well, they would come, you know, the boys would come, hey, you wanna, you wanna, and she was taught, you gotta go talk to daddy. We don't even talk about this. You go talk to daddy.

01:37:33 Speaker_02
Two of my son-in-laws today for years, they would come and say, I'd like to, and they would, they'd come to me and they're like, I'd like to, you know, write your daughter. I'd like to, I'm like, no, nope. Well, what about this? No. Why not?

01:37:51 Speaker_02
It's like, look, you're a good, you're a good kid, but my problem with you is you're a kid. All right. Grow up. And the two of my son-in-law state, there were literally years.

01:38:02 Speaker_02
They kept coming back and I'm like, no, let me see what kind of man you're going to become. Okay. My daughter's not marrying a boy and a lot of boys that grow up to not be good men.

01:38:13 Speaker_02
So why let her get into an emotional attachment with a boy who will never grow up? And why am I not protecting her from that heartache in the future? And both of them now are married to my daughters, but there, there came a point years later.

01:38:29 Speaker_02
I'm like, okay, I've watched you. All right. You grew up. You can contact my daughter now. How did that go down with the daughters? I don't know. They wouldn't come first to me, but I think my daughters appreciated knowing they had a father.

01:38:48 Speaker_02
who was not just looking out for them today, their feelings today, their whatever, but looking out for their entire future and putting them on the right road. I brought a man in my office one time and I had a desk along the wall.

01:39:02 Speaker_02
We sat down in front of the desk. He was sitting in front of me. I pulled out the middle drawer and my desk pulled out a Bowie knife about that long slammed it on the desk between us. I said, do you have any questions? He said, no, sir, no, sir.

01:39:17 Speaker_02
I don't have any questions. I said, all right, then put it back to George closed it. And we got up and left. They never had any question. My daughters are married. All my daughters that are married are married to good men, good men.

01:39:29 Speaker_02
And I've told everyone I'm at the wedding. I've pulled everyone. I'm at the wedding aside. I said, if you ever hurt her, they will never find your body. I said, there will be no court.

01:39:43 Speaker_02
There will be no, um, why they call it a, uh, you know, you go down and you swear out a, uh, you can't come with so many protective order. I said, it won't be any of that. If you ever hurt her, they won't find your body.

01:39:59 Speaker_02
She'll be my daughter to the day she dies. And they all, they all know, everybody knows, you know, it's just like, and I think they appreciate it. And I think I'm sure they appreciated that on the wedding day. Yeah. Oh yeah.

01:40:09 Speaker_02
Well, I didn't tell them he may have later, but that's okay. But you know, there's, I think there's a lot of women out there would just say, man, I wish I'd had somebody in my life that, that had that kind of commitment to my safety and to my future.

01:40:31 Speaker_01
Why did people think that you were saying that? Is it because you're a tyrant? Is it because you wanted to domineer over your daughter's lives?

01:40:39 Speaker_01
Or is it because you love them, and you want the best for them, and you want them to be safe and protected and happy? Just that, because I'm not.

01:40:48 Speaker_02
Every one of my children, when they got married, you're adults, and I never interfere in their decisions. Never. I never say you can't go here. You should do that. I never tell their husband, you should get this job. You should do that.

01:41:02 Speaker_02
You, we don't interfere in how they raised their children. My children are not raising their children the way I raised them. I never say anything about it. It's you're an adult. I raised you being adult. You're a parent. Those children are your children.

01:41:18 Speaker_02
I'm not a tyrant at all, but they know from a distance. Zeus is looking from Olympia and he will throw that thunderbolt down if somebody tries. They know that it's like dad's always there.

01:41:33 Speaker_02
He's never meddling, he's never in the way, he's never in our affairs, but he's always there if we ever need him.

01:41:41 Speaker_03
What do you think were the most important lessons that you taught your kids? Or what do you hope that your kids learned? Your word.

01:41:53 Speaker_02
Don't your word is your bond. Don't lie. Now I, I would go to jail for this today, but my kids are grown and gone. Uh, we had a, we had a deal in the house and it's like, and I spanked my children. Okay. There, there it is.

01:42:09 Speaker_02
There's, there's a set penalty for breaking this rule. If you do, if you break the rule, you're going to get that penalty. If you lie about it. The penalty is doubled. So it's like my boys is like, you don't hit girls. You don't hit girls. All right.

01:42:30 Speaker_02
And so, you know, if, if, uh, you know, if they haul off and smack their sister comes in, you know, he hit me, she's crying or red Mark on the side of her face, call them in. It's like, did you hit her now? If it's proven that he did hit her.

01:42:48 Speaker_02
You know, there's going to be like 15 legs. I mean, the penalty was severe. You don't hit women. All right. If he said, no, I didn't hit her. Oh, son, don't do that. No, I didn't hit her. And then two of the other siblings come in and say he did.

01:43:03 Speaker_02
We saw it. Well, he got the 15 licks for hitting a sister, but he got 30 licks for lying about it. So he got 45 licks total. It's like lying is the worst thing. Do not lie. Go through life. You be honest.

01:43:15 Speaker_02
You speak the truth, even to your harm, even to your detriment. You do not lie and you don't hit women. So don't lie. Don't lie. Uh, your, your word is your, a man's most important, a man's most valuable, most important resource is his good name.

01:43:37 Speaker_02
If a man ain't got a good name, he ain't got nothing. So don't lie. Be respectful. You know, be respectful to others, be respectful to your elders, even if Even if they're not respectable, they've still been through life enough.

01:43:51 Speaker_02
Their position earns them what their behavior won.

01:43:56 Speaker_01
You had seven kids. Were you rich? How do you afford seven kids? A lot of people at the moment have a problem. I can't start a family. I don't have enough money.

01:44:06 Speaker_01
I don't have the X, Y, and Z. It's one of the most common reasons people have for not starting families yet.

01:44:12 Speaker_02
No way. So during that time, there were years where my income tax return, like for the year I made 16 to $18,000 for the year. Uh, I worked hard work, two jobs. We were very frugal. I had a guy asked me one time I was working.

01:44:30 Speaker_02
Um, actually I was working, we were living in temple, Texas and I was working at used to be Watson electric was an industrial electrical supply.

01:44:37 Speaker_02
And I was working in the counter when the contractors come in, he said, Dwayne, do you, do you get assistance on the side? I'm like, what do you mean? He said, you know, food stamps, welfare or something. I had four kids at the time.

01:44:50 Speaker_02
I said, no, man, I don't, I don't get anything. He's like, does, does your wife work? I said, no, my wife is a mother of four kids at home. He said, then how do you do it? He said, I know basically what you're making here. How do you do it?

01:45:03 Speaker_02
I said, well, it's a very, very difficult, very complex, um, very mathematical equation. I say, you sure you want to hear it? He said, I want to hear it. I say, you sure? He said, man, I'm sure. How do you do it? I said, we say no.

01:45:17 Speaker_02
We just say, no, no, we're not going out to eat. No, we don't need satellite TV. No, you don't need a hundred dollar pair of basketball shoes. No, we don't have to have TV dinners. No, my wife can cook.

01:45:34 Speaker_02
Uh, you just say, no, no, I, I bought a 1976 Dodge dark paid cash for, you know, for $700. I don't need a car payment. I just need a vehicle that'll get me from point A to point B. I said, just say, no, live within your means. It's amazing.

01:45:57 Speaker_02
I mean, we rented a mobile home. We were in a mobile home, you know, $300 a month, whatever it was.

01:46:03 Speaker_01
How many people lived in the mobile home?

01:46:05 Speaker_02
Myself, my wife, and, and, uh, we had the three children. We had the three children at the time.

01:46:13 Speaker_04
Yeah.

01:46:13 Speaker_02
So it's just live within your means. You don't need near as much as you think you need, you know, and who cares about the status symbol of those around you, what they think you are.

01:46:25 Speaker_02
And, and then you find out when you get up to my age, that the people out there who are super, super, truly super wealthy, for real, most of them, they look like they're living in the mobile home, driving the Dodge Dart. They don't show it.

01:46:39 Speaker_02
You know, I mean, they don't have all the big super cars and everything you're truly. obnoxiously wealthy guys, you know, they're driving Toyotas, they're driving Hondas.

01:46:52 Speaker_01
That's what I like about Austin, the richest people drive the shittest cars.

01:46:55 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. So it's a big circle. And so if you want to get this out of circle, start over here. You know, if you want to get to the level of where you are so rich, you drive the crappiest car, you start by driving the crappiest car.

01:47:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, I think, starting at the end or realizing what do older people do? What do the people that are a little bit further down the line, how do they dress? What do they spend their time thinking about doing? What are they invested in?

01:47:27 Speaker_01
And realizing that if you're going to end up there, and if you can see that most people with age for a good amount of time comes some wisdom and some understanding, you think, well,

01:47:39 Speaker_01
You can probably take some of that now and bring it down into the present moment and speed run this whole wisdom growing up thing a little bit. Right.

01:47:51 Speaker_02
How big was Warren Buffett's mansion? He lived in a little three-bedroom, well, not three-bedroom, little brick ranch house, same house he'd been in for decades. He drove a car. He just wore suits. How does Mark Zuckerberg dress?

01:48:09 Speaker_02
sweats in a t-shirt, you know? How does, what's his name, Amazon? Look at how he dresses. Yeah, Bezos. You know, what are these guys doing?

01:48:20 Speaker_03
It's like, oh, maybe I should learn something. Speaking of famous people, who are some of the role models that you have looked up to over the years? I can't think of anybody famous that was, well, what about private people?

01:48:47 Speaker_02
My dad, um, uh, The cowboy in Kansas I worked with for several years, really respected him. He was a scratchy fella, but he had, he had his honesty and, and, uh, he really had a big effect.

01:49:06 Speaker_02
So just some of the folks I've worked with and been around, but my dad was probably the, my dad and I were not always on the same page about everything, but I've never met a man in my life where I looked at and said,

01:49:20 Speaker_02
That guy's more honest than my dad. My dad was the most honest man I've ever known in my life. And no one has affected me more in that area than he did.

01:49:31 Speaker_01
Think when we're talking about leaving the world in a better place than you found it, not doing things that derogate the well-being of the people that are around you that you're supposed to look after and care for.

01:49:43 Speaker_01
I do think that, you know, if somebody asks the question, who have been the biggest influences? Who have been your biggest role models? I think the goal of every father should be for their son to say, dad, dad. Yeah.

01:49:57 Speaker_01
I think that's usually a pretty good indication that you did a good job.

01:49:59 Speaker_02
Pretty good. Yeah. It's, it's pretty good. Um, and he was, my dad was always himself, but himself was a good guy. Himself was enough. He was never wealthy, never famous, never, but he was very much respected in his field. And, uh,

01:50:24 Speaker_02
There's very little more that a man could ask for when he leaves this world than saying, look, I was known as an honest man, I was known as a very respectable man, and everybody that knew me respected me.

01:50:35 Speaker_02
They may not all liked me, but they all respected me. And everything else is really not that important.

01:50:43 Speaker_01
I'm interested, you have this facility now, which maybe you're going to have to slow down for a little bit and reorganize to make it work. If you were able to design your perfect day, what would that look like? What would an ideal day for you be?

01:51:05 Speaker_01
That I could, like, end my life now? Yeah, your life right now. What does a perfect normal day look like for you?

01:51:15 Speaker_02
Man, my days right now are all over the map.

01:51:21 Speaker_03
Um, that's a really good question. I don't know if I have an answer for that. Um, I. Well, you stunk me, I don't know.

01:51:38 Speaker_01
I wonder if that's an indication of how much sort of change and upheaval is going on inflection and attention and stuff like that for you at the moment.

01:51:52 Speaker_02
I think it's an indication of how the quality of my day is internalized, how it's not affected

01:52:03 Speaker_03
by my environment, by what's going on.

01:52:08 Speaker_02
I think it's more of that. It's like whatever happens, you know, we can whatever I'm doing today, we can make this a really good day.

01:52:20 Speaker_02
instead of thinking more along the lines of, if I can do this and this, and if this can happen, and if I can be here, and if I can have this property, and I can have this schedule, then that's gonna be the perfect day.

01:52:33 Speaker_01
Then I can have a good day. Yeah. Well, that's power. One of my friends, Alex, says, if you can have a bad day for no reason, then you can have a good day for no reason.

01:52:42 Speaker_02
You know, I've been staying, my best friend lives in Temple. And, uh, day before yesterday, I got him, he had to go to work.

01:52:51 Speaker_02
I got up, took a shower, made two or three cups of coffee, you know, and I got online and I said, I know there's cigar lounges around here. There's gotta be. And I found one in Belton. Nice folks.

01:53:02 Speaker_02
And so I went to the cigar lounge and I just sat there and smoked a couple of cigars and talked to folks until about one o'clock. Went back to the house, sat on the porch and, and talked with, um, my buddy's wife about poetry.

01:53:17 Speaker_02
She's real big into poetry. And we just sat on the porch and talked and then he came home and he and I went to a Lone Star Steakhouse and I had a ribeye for supper. And I'm like, today was a really, really good day. You know, what did I accomplish?

01:53:33 Speaker_02
Who cares? What did I break? Nothing. It was just a really good day. You know, it was just the ideal day. And there's something to be said for getting to that place in your life that you don't have to.

01:53:50 Speaker_03
architect, what a good day is going to be. You make good days.

01:53:57 Speaker_02
You make good days out of whatever you got, whatever's there. There wasn't a horse anywhere in sight. I didn't go riding, you know, um, my wife is back home. She wasn't here, but it was just like, this is where I am. This is what I got.

01:54:14 Speaker_02
This is what my good day is going to look like.

01:54:18 Speaker_01
Dwayne, no, ladies and gentlemen. Dwayne, I love everything that you do. You're fantastic. Everybody needs to check out your YouTube channel. Everyone needs to go and follow the stuff that you're doing online.

01:54:30 Speaker_01
I can't believe that you've been hiding away somewhere and now you've sort of broken above the surface. I really hope that so many people are going to be blown away by the things that you talk about. It's very, very impressive.

01:54:44 Speaker_01
I'm really, really glad that you're doing what you're doing. Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I appreciate you too.

01:54:48 Speaker_02
It's been an honor you having me here. I'm very thankful.

01:54:51 Speaker_01
Thank you.