Jeff

Steven Evans 0:00
Before we begin, a word. This conversation is an honest one. In it, my guest speaks openly about profound loss and about his own struggle with suicide. I wanted you to know that before we start, so you can choose how and when to listen. If you're in a hard place right now, it's okay to come back to this another time. And if you or someone you know is struggling, you don't have to carry it alone. In the U.S. you can call or text 988 anytime to reach the suicide and crisis lifeline. There are real people on the other end, and they're there for exactly this. I'll say this too: this isn't a story about giving up. It's a story about a man who walked through the very worst and found his way to the other side, and chose to build a life of meaning out of it. That's why I wanted to share it with you. If it moves you, or if you know a man who needs to hear it, send it his way. With that, here's the conversation. Well, thank you, Jeff, for being here and for being willing to share your story with our audience. I think there's going to be so much that they're going to learn and glean from your example, and really, what we're going to go through today is going to be the crucible moments that I find are common across men's lives, specifically starting out at home and leaving that home, and and taking the lessons that you sort of learned at home and challenging them against you know the real world in either school or jumping into work, and then moving forward to finding a mate, finding a partner, having a marriage, and then having children, and then at one point after those children leave, really facing our own mortality and thoughts around that mortality. So those are sort of the crucible moments, the thresholds that I'll be focused on. But to begin, I really want to start at the moment where you left home, so if you could bring us back to that time you decided, hey, I'm gonna strike out on my own, or I'm gonna make that next step either to college or to work, typically around ages 18 or 19.

Jeff 2:13
Well, first off, Steve, great for this opportunity. Had an awesome conversation with you earlier, and was excited to get back and kind of continue in that, but rewind a little bit and maybe go through some gaps in time in my life because I kind of tend to start right where everything kind of started here the last 10 years ago. I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right in the middle of the heartland of the of the U.s4. hour drive from Chicago, Kansas City, Omaha, Minneapolis, St. Louis. I mean, just a great place to live and grow a family, and I grew up with a dad who was a physician who worked at University of Iowa, was the team doctor actually for the Iowa basketball team. So my dad was hired by Lute Olson, sat on the bench during Steve Alford, Dr. Tom Davis, and George Raveling. So it was great to grow up in the sports. You know, my dad was a dual sport all American athlete at a college here, Coe College in Cedar Rapids, baseball and basketball, and so I grew up in a very competitive environment. You got to remember, I grew up when Bobby Knight was at his peak coaching, so there was no coddling in my house. I had three brothers, two older, one younger, so no drama. You just figured things out. My dad would just say, "Go out in the backwoods and don't come home till somebody figures it out, and that's what it was. And today, the way kids are raised today, sometimes I just shake my head because there's so much, so much softness. It seems like, and you know, I got spanked as long as my brothers did, and we deserved every time. And I'm just trying to set the template, kind of the world I grew up in as a 60 year old in the 70s. No internet, no social media, no cell phone. You know, you went out and you walked. You went to the river. You caught snakes. You built a tree for it. You, you know, started fire. You there's good and bad things about being in nature when you're a kid, but it allowed me to work through things in my childhood that now kids today just get labeled. Hey, you have anxiety, or you have this, and here's a pill. And you know, we we never went through that. Our generation, fortunately, hadn't evolved to that. And so, you know, I got interested in learning about money in high school. Went off and played college basketball and golf for two years at a junior college in Iowa. Here, I then went to University Northern Iowa and got into finance. And so, I graduated in '89. After I graduated college, I came back home and lived there for about a year. Took all my insurance exams, all my investment exams, and then basically knocked on doors and sold life insurance door to door at 23 years old.

Steven Evans 4:29
Nice,

Speaker 1 4:30
and that's why I hear people complaining about sales and all that, and they're on LinkedIn and they're trying to do direct cold leads and all that. I mean, just get out, get out, walk around, knock on doors. How about that? And they just freeze. It was like, oh my god, I got to talk to a human. Can't do that. You know, it's like, yeah, but that's what sales was. I grew up with was this actual conversational face to face, no claw, no chat, no nobody drafting emails and summarizing meetings. It was great time to learn sales, especially selling life insurance, which is an intangible product. People can't smell. Touch and feel-they can't even see what life insurance really is, other than the money. Where I wasn't selling a car or a boat or a house, where it's right in front of me, it sells itself. When you're selling an intangible product, or even just an idea, I think that's the purest form of sales ever. That's how I was trained, and ended up getting into the investment industry pretty heavy, and you know there was a 30 year period of time there where I was building up my financial practice, and I can talk about how I met my wife and all that. But that's what got me built up before I left my house, and then I got I moved out in 24 and lived in an apartment in Iowa City and worked for an insurance agency selling insurance and investments. So that gets you. That gets you up to you know early 20s.

Steven Evans 5:43
Yeah, and and walk me through sort of at the time who you felt like you were becoming. What was it that you were working toward? What was it that mattered?

Speaker 1 5:52
What mattered to me was what people thought about me. What mattered to me was money. What mattered to me was my ego. What mattered to me was getting things from people, extracting things how I could benefit, very shallow, very pathetic. Now in hindsight, at 60, but I'm not going to lie and say I had these grander dreams to build this company and donate to nonprofits. I didn't. I wanted to enrich myself and become a billionaire. Also, along that time, I got into a really unhealthy relationship with alcohol, which I can share how many years that took for me to fix. And then I saw gambling addiction for about 15 years. Which you know, back in the day, you called a bookie, you never met, you gave him your number, and if you lost, you paid somebody in an alley somewhere in a brown bag. And I thought gambling was bad then. Now look at you can put on your phone. Kids can gamble now every play. So there's a lot of really systemic problems today that I didn't grow up with, but I had the beginnings of some of these addictions. But God, I'm so happy I didn't have cell phone bedding when I was in college. I would, I, I'd be so bad right now.

Steven Evans 6:48
Yeah, no, I hear you. And and when it comes to like the, let's say the values that were instilled from home, was there anything that you took from from home with you in those early days, or could be good, bad? No, it's all good.

Speaker 1 7:01
Um, you ever seen the the show Leave It to Beaver?

Steven Evans 7:05
Ah, yes, I have.

Speaker 1 7:06
Okay, that was my house. I grew up with you know my dad took his black bag, went off to be a doctor at the University of Iowa, and my mom, who was magnum cum laude in college, she stayed home and decided to raise four boys. So I'm so grateful my mom did that. I never had babysitters growing up, and she could have went off in the workforce and made money, but she wanted to raise us, and I'm always forever grateful. She passed a few years ago, and you know, just I think that's a beautiful act of love that she did, and it wasn't a sacrifice of a career; it was being present in her family, where my dad was the main primary breadwinner, and so you know that that was kind of the structure of the family that we grew up in. My mom, I never saw drink. Never saw my mom swear. Never saw my mom angry one time her entire life. Wow. My dad, very temper only child, very competitive temper. So he didn't like when things couldn't. He couldn't fix things. He got mad when when we lost sporting events or I didn't try hard enough, and we get lectured on the way home. But that that actually helped me today. You know, just not being coddled. I didn't grow up in that family, and my dad was a very successful, well liked doctor. So he had delivered babies, and he held the hands of people who died. So he was very pragmatic. So I learned to be very matter of fact as I got older, which isn't always the case because after what I've been through the last few years, I've got a lot less pragmatic, good and bad. I can I can talk about how that's impacted me, but so yeah, I learned really good values from my mom and dad. My mom and my dad, everybody was the same. There wasn't black, there wasn't white, there wasn't rich, poor. My mom loved gay people, she loved straight people. She loved Muslims. I mean, I grew up in a house where there was no, you know, no racism. There was no. It was just. It was. I couldn't have a better family to grow up in in the Midwest. I mean, I really hit the birth lottery.

Steven Evans 8:52
That's amazing. And it sounds like a lot of the things that you learned were a couple of things like temperance and tolerance, but also how to work hard, how to separate what matters from what doesn't, how to prioritize what matters over what doesn't, but also to sort of develop this sort of stick to itiveness, if you you know can call it that, to help achieve some of the goals that you had set for yourself. And when it comes to jumping into a career, it sounds like those things served you. Even you know jumping into selling insurance door to door. It's funny. I myself, my first job was actually going door to door selling kitchen appliances. It's funny where life takes you, but it's not an easy thing to do. You know, and it's it's hard because you end up having to put yourself out there in a way that's very vulnerable, and you're sort of hoping for your prospective person or client to catch you in a way, and like when it comes to as you describe things that mattered at the moment, which was making as much money as you could at that time, was there anything building maybe underneath that you know you weren't aware of that you then had to contend with maybe later?

Speaker 1 10:00
Yeah, addiction propensity for addiction. You know, being a type A, addictive type personality. When I first was introduced to alcohol, I liked what it did to me. I wouldn't say I had social anxiety, although I probably did back then. Now I I don't, but it calmed me in a way. You know, I I have like all the traits of attention deficit disorder, whatever you want to call it, probably should have been given something like Ritalin back in the day. Now it's Adderall. I never was diagnosed or given anything, but everyone around me just knew, and I knew I just didn't really have the ability to sit still very well. I still don't. I think I think alcohol was the first time I started putting a foreign substance in my body and realized that I liked it, and so started drinking about 17 or 18, and drank continuously heavy through college, and then drank all the way up till 52.

Steven Evans 10:52
Yeah,

Speaker 1 10:52
you know, 567, days a week, and I was able to build a multi-million-dollar thriving practice. Had a TV show, radio show things I can talk about, you know, as I get in later. But the point was, is that I knew I had a problem, but like most addictions, you don't realize it until it stops serving you in a way that you thought it was serving you. So, in other words, you start having issues, and I can talk about the real first issue. Well, it's a big issue, but happened in 2016 that really, really turned the spotlight for me on my addiction problems that I had and my denial and and how I thought I was. You know, I could oh, just quit any day you want. You know, well, 30 some years go by and you haven't quit. What does that tell you?

Steven Evans 11:40
Yeah, and it sounds like a lot of it was something that helped you feel more at peace or more at calm. More calm was that the sort of source of the addiction, or would you say there was something maybe deeper?

Speaker 1 11:54
Well, I'm always asked. I mean, people always say, "Well, you you get into drugs or alcohol. One of two reasons: one, because you're escaping or you're exploring. So I wasn't escaping anything. You know, my drinking wasn't because I was sexually molested as a child by the babysitter, or my drinking wasn't because you know I was I was bullied or something. I mean, I I didn't really have any issues. I was bored. I grew up in a town called Solon, Iowa, and we had 84 people in my graduating class. We just got beer at the local Casey's or whatever it was called back then, and drove around back roads talking about girls and getting drunk and going to keggers in the woods. And nobody died. Nobody got drunk drivings. Nobody, nothing bad ever happened. It was just so innocent in in small town Iowa, like you see in the movies, and that's like the world I grew up in. Was alcohol was was acceptable? I mean, everybody would go to church, and then it all go downtown to the bars. You know, it was just it was acceptable. But I didn't grow up in an alcoholic family. I grew up in an alcoholic society, so I can't blame my family for my alcoholism. I certainly can't. My dad had never saw him drunk. He drank maybe a little tiny shot of vodka, and he would take an aspirin, and that was like his Zeke will. That was back in the 60s and 70s before they had all these sleeping aids. So that's what my dad would do. He'd have a little shot of vodka, and he'd have a pill like a bear or an aspirin, and that would be what he would take to sleep. I saw him drink a beer occasionally, but I can honestly say I've never saw my parents drunk. My two older brothers, different story. They they both got into you know drugs and some harder drugs, and they both were musicians and both dropped out of college. And great super brothers. I mean, I love them to death. They're both still here, but they just took a different path than my myself and my younger brother did. Who we we got into college and we both graduated. So I had two older brothers, and I was the first one to graduate college. And what's funny because I think both my older brothers had ACT scores in the 30s.

Steven Evans 13:49
Wow!

Speaker 1 13:50
And I came around with the 21, and my younger brother Dan was like 19, and we both were the first ones to graduate. Where the two that were in the 30s dropped out. So you know, parents put a lot of emphasis on these scores and these ratings and these multiples that my kids in at these young ages, and I get just all BS. It doesn't mean anything. You you got to put in the heart and the desire and the resiliency. Those are the things you need to be teaching your kids, not how to memorize standardized tests.

Steven Evans 14:16
Yeah, and and when you were talking about you know sort of that first season in the quote unquote real world, was there anyone who sort of came alongside you to assist you in either your career or perhaps someone who said, "Hey, maybe you know you should consider the alcohol consumption again" Someone who kind of came alongside you showed you something.

Speaker 1 14:37
Never the alcohol consumption, but I had a number of mentors that I attached to, like glue. One was a gentleman by the name of Greg Bosh, who was a junior college basketball coach. That him and I both got recruited into the same insurance agency, and he still is to this day the most optimistic, positive human, almost to a fault, where he's just so oblivious. He's so like night. Say you know, Greg, you're going to die of cancer, and he would he would come up with some positive thing. And I wasn't that guy. I was always you know ruminating and negative and a little bit of you know edging me and you know just just kind of a complainer. Like today, right now, if I was in my teens on social media, I'd be flaming everything. I'd be mad at every possible post, and and every time I'd be around Greg and we'd have something bad happen. He would just say something, and I'm after a while, after like two or three years of hanging around him in sales interviews and driving around the the state, you know, peddling insurance. I just decided I needed to change just my attitude, really my overall attitude, and and not be so heavy on what I can extract from other people, but more is what I can give to them. Like, how can I help people? That was the really first time in my life where I shifted from an egocentric narcissist to someone who's more empathetic and altruistic, and it came through my bonding with Greg. And he's still alive, and we don't see each other as much. I mean, you know, you part ways with mentors over time. He's probably the first one, other than my dad, that stood out as somebody that really got me back on a good path.

Steven Evans 16:04
That's amazing, and I feel like when it comes to people like that, those people who come alongside to guide and mentor, they're you know worth over a million dollars. Like at some point in in building a career, there's often a moment where the man starts to sense that what he's doing and who he is, and at the at his core, have sort of started to separate. What was that experience sort of like for you? That awareness of the drift, sort of maybe between performance and identity.

Speaker 1 16:35
There was no drift. There was an event. I was fine. My life was good. I had you know foundational cracks and everything, and who who doesn't? But at 50, that's when the event happened that changed everything for me. Up until then, there wasn't a drift. I I could have just kept doing what I was doing for the rest of my life and been perfectly content. But that doesn't that that's not how life works. There there's events. Sometimes there's a drift, but for me, it all came to a head on October 4, 2016, and that's where the last 10 years of my life have been like living 1000 years for me.

Steven Evans 17:07
Yeah, the

Speaker 1 17:07
first 50 years went by like a weekend.

Steven Evans 17:11
Walk us through perhaps you know sort of what occurred and and how how you managed

Speaker 1 17:16
that particular day, october 4, 2016. It was 630 in the morning. My wife was getting ready to go watch our middle son play golf that day. My middle son was a sophomore in high school. He was he was a 15, and then my youngest son Roman was 13. He was in eighth grade, and I had older son Seth, 23, and then my wife Prudence. And Prudence, I was we were married 21 years, so that's the day. Like every other family, I don't know if you have kids, Steve, but most most kids play sports, or they're in band, or they're in show choir, or something. Well, there's excitement. You're all, you know, and you're nervous. And I coached my son with golf, so that was a big part of like I felt responsible for him when he played. And so I'm driving him to this sectional tournament, and the coach is there. All the kids are there, getting their clubs out, and I've got my coffee and my newspaper in one hand, and waving to everybody. And you're just-it's like any other day in October in Iowa, man. Any other day, my phone rings, and I look at it, and the number came from an individual that you know never called me at 630 in the morning on a Tuesday. That's kind of odd. I wasn't going to take it. I decided to take it, and my son's standing right in front of me. Ian's like three feet away from me, and I hit the phone, and all I hear is crying and screaming in the background, and I don't make any facial expression to my son, and all I hear is Seth is dead, and you you can imagine the intensity of hearing those words, and then trying to keep a straight face to my son, who's thinking about his golf tournament, and mom and dad are going to go up there, and that-that's his world.

Steven Evans 18:50
Correct.

Speaker 1 18:51
And I made a quick, quick decision not to tell Ian. And what went through my head real quick was Seth ain't coming back. This is a big moment for the team. This is going to obviously end Ian's day. He's not going to be able to play. The team that worked all season to go to state is not going to go to stake. And my son was the number one golfer. I made a quick decision. There's no template you find out during these things, Steve. You just make up shit and you put out fires, and that's what I did. And I turned around and got my car, and I thought I got to tell my wife our son is dead. And Ian had to think, Dad never even said good luck and I love you. Like I said every time, I just turned around and got my car. I couldn't have Ian see me. He knew something bad had happened, and then he went off to play that day. And I read about this in my book because there's a lot of golf stories in here that are amazing. I mean, just it makes your hair stand. Some of the stuff that that has happened, but I I knew I had to go tell my wife, so I pulled in the garage. I'm the worst I've ever been in my life. You know, just a few minutes ago, my life was perfect, dude. It was perfect. I had a 5000 square foot house. I had a sports car. I had a radio show. TV show. We were managing like almost a billion dollars under management. Everything I wanted to achieve, and then in a second, it just gets taken away. Yeah. And I walked in the house, and my wife's in the bathroom with her orange and black on, and talking to one of the moms, and I can't talk. I'm I'm I'm shaking, and I come around the corner and I mutter the same words that I heard. Seth is dead, man. And I, the minute I told my wife, her eyes rolled back like a shark. Yeah, and everything in her disappeared. And um, that's when my life started. Everything up to that was practice. Everything up to that was preparation, because I knew I was never going to be the same, and nobody in my life was going to be the same. And then I had to prepare for the boys to get home,

Steven Evans 20:55
right?

Speaker 1 20:55
And I knew that was going to be a hard thing, so I called my dad. My dad's a doctor, and I said, and he's pragmatic, like I told you, I said, "Dad, what do I say? You know, they're 15 and 13, and they're older brothers, Dad. And he said, "Jeff, here's exactly what you do: you tell them the truth and shut your damn mouth because you like to fix everything. And I'm like, "Yeah, I do like to. He goes, "You're not going to talk your way out of this one, Jeff. You're not going to sell your way out of this one, and so they came home. You know, Ian already knew something bad happened because I didn't go to the meet, and I've never missed a meet ever in his whole life. I was his dad, his coach, and he's four years old. He was playing in three-hole tournaments. I mean, I just didn't go, and mom didn't go, and you know, Ian had to know something. So I sat him down, and my wife's on the right side of my my right here, and the boys are on the couch, and I just said, "Boys, I have some really bad news. Your brother's dead. I didn't say a word, and it just felt like a million fricking years, man. But it was probably only 10 seconds. The silence was the most silent I've ever heard in my life. Just deathly silent. And my middle son Ian goes, "How did he die, Dad? Drugs? You know they knew because their you know their game stations disappeared, their video games disappeared, their you know golf clubs disappeared. You know Seth over the years when he was given Adderall at 16. That's where his whole thing started. Those eight years he was struggling with addiction. He was selling and stealing stuff in the house, and so the boys knew. And I said, "Yeah, drugs. And then you know, Steve, the next part of this thing is really where all my advocacy started. Is I didn't want to really prepare. I know a lot of dads or moms would probably want to like write down what they want to say, and I'm like, no, just be you, Jeff. Just, just be you. You can you can sell this as something that can be actually a way for us to improve our lives, you know. And and that's what I decided to do. So I stood up and I said, boys, you know, we have one of two roads that go down now. We have one road of anger, despair, and hatred, and we'll become alcoholics and addicts ourselves. Or we have a road of love, hope, empathy, and inspiration, and this can be the single greatest moment in our lives to make a difference in the lives of others. I'm on the second road. I ask you to join me. I don't know where that came from. I didn't rehearse it, but as authentic as true words as I've ever uttered out of my mouth in 60 years, it was the most honest assessment of the situation that we were in. And my two boys did great. They've done some amazing things, and and I, you know, don't have time to talk about all the advocacy work they did, but the reality was, my wife and I didn't, and for a year and a half, I stayed home with her, and we got drunker every single day for a year and a half.

Steven Evans 23:50
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so much to impact for for me there when it comes to losing a child. There's nothing I can imagine worse having to go through that, and then further to have to present sort of what happened in a constructive way to the surviving children, right? So, all of those steps are taking into account some sort of fortification internally, right?

Speaker 1 24:15
Yeah,

Steven Evans 24:16
you know, some type of whether it was a belief, whether it was maybe even just survival instinct, right, kicking in, and where I have to figure this out, and there's a solution, and I have to figure this out, survival. Like, what's next, right? Can you kind of take us into that decision? Yeah, this is what's next. How do I present this to my my children? How do I make this a more positive experience? The

Speaker 1 24:39
whole year and a half that I sat home and drank, I felt like the biggest imposter, pathetic man. That this could happen under my watch. I'm the captain of the ship of my family. You know that's like how I anointed myself. And my oldest son died under my watch, and it didn't die in a car wreck. He died over eight years. And there was plenty of times in there that we intervened. We tough loved, we enabled, you know, got him a car, an apartment, did some other things, and I felt very much at blame for the whole thing, even though I know that's a lie that we all did what we could do, and when someone's really struggling, it's really up to them at the end of the day. But I went through this, this horrible 14 months of just it was it was it was horrible at that point. It was the worst time of my life, and then it gets it gets worse, and I can share later a little bit how that happened. But I hated myself. I hated myself, and I just alcohol was how I escaped Jeff, and I did that for 14 months, and then on december 24 of 17, another impactful day in my life. We are at a condo in Florida, my wife and the two boys trying to get away from our house and from the environment here. My wife and I are both heavy alcoholics at this time, and she walks by me, Steve, at midnight or so, boys are sleeping, and she's frail, and she was nine years younger than me and stunningly beautiful, and she looked nine years older than me, and she was frail, and she was staggering across the room, and I'm looking at her, and then all these thoughts start coming back into my mind, so I got up, went in the bathroom, put my glasses, Sandio VC down, looked in the mirror, and that was like again the most honest conversation I've ever had in my life. Because you can lie to a lot of people, but you can't lie to the mirror. It's you can't do it. I can lie to you right now, Steve, and I could probably get away with it. You could lie to me and get away with it, but you can't lie to the mirror. You talk to the mirror, and it's it's this clear reflection, literally, of of who you are inside, and I just said again, you pathetic coward! You don't deserve kids. You don't deserve a beautiful wife. You don't deserve a house. You don't deserve to be alive. And that's when I said, "Enough's enough. I took the glass of wine, poured it down the sink, and every desire and ounce of ever wanting to drink alcohol again went with it, and it's been nine years, and I've haven't had a drop of alcohol or a thought of alcohol in nine years. Again, I don't understand addiction and disease and all that. Someone could say, "Well, then, Jeff, alcohol's a disease, and if you could quit that easy, then you you weren't an alcoholic, and I'm like, okay, whatever. People need to tell them whatever they need to tell them because they have their own unhealthy relationship with alcohol, so they make up these narratives to make them feel good. Call me whatever you want. I don't drink; I did for 36 years, so I'm not going to argue with you on the debate on whether alcohol is a choice or a disease. It's probably both for me. It was probably disease for 36 years, and I chose to kill the disease.

Steven Evans 27:45
Right. And further, it sounds like even in that moment, you decided to jump to another path. Right. In that moment, you decided this is not who I want to be. Right. I need to. I was tired of being

Speaker 1 27:57
tired, man. I was absolutely tired of being tired all the time, tired of fighting. I didn't want to end my life. I I had no bouts of suicidal ideation up to that point, but that does change with the rest of my story quickly. But up to that point, it was more just I wasn't thinking of quitting or ending my life. I just drank and drank, and that's how I dealt with it. And then stopping drinking, and you notice I don't say sober because I hate that word. I'm not an alcoholic. Again, I don't like labels. I had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. I've chosen not to drink, and that's how I present my story. Right. And people that are in the grips of alcohol, they they use these terms to make them feel good, and that's fine. If you want to call yourself sober, and you don't drink, that's all I care. I don't care what you call yourself. You can call yourself Steve Evans if you don't drink. I don't care. It doesn't bother me at all. And some advocates get really bothered. Well, you got to do this. You got to go to AAA. You can't have one drink. I'm like, no. There's plenty of people that have one drink and they're fine. It doesn't impact their life negatively at all. Well, who cares? That's your pathway. It's your choice. It's it's when it infringes on someone else's life or it impinges on your life. Then then that's where you could definitely fall in that alcoholism type.

Steven Evans 29:14
Yeah, and it sounds like you know even this terrible, terrible experience sort of after time brought you face to face with who you were. You know, you you you describe sort of saying these things in the mirror, seeing these things in the mirror. It seems to have brought you sort of face to face with the core of Jeff and and who you were at that moment. And in that moment, you said, "No, I could be better.

Speaker 1 29:40
Yeah, I struggled a lot with the past. I mean, there's two types of selves. There's the remembering self, and there's the experiencing self. And the remembering self is where I was living in. I was living in Seth. I was living in, you know, the beautiful wife I had. You know, I was living in all the things that I had, and I wasn't living. In the experiencing self, you know, in the moment, you know. Now we say presence and all that, but I kind of like thinking of it as as the remembering versus the experiencing, and we spend a lot of our time in the remembering self, and that's where depression lives, and that's where sadness lives, and that's where pain lives. Anxiety is the other way. Anxiety is when you worry about the future all the time, and you you worry about the the future self. And so we spend most of us spend most of our day in two areas of the self that either are over or hasn't happened yet. And that's that was me, where I didn't get present in my life, and that really happened during the next stage of my life, which happened, you know, a few years after I quit drinking alcohol.

Steven Evans 30:46
Yeah, and it's it seems when it comes to getting really present, it requires work.

Speaker 1 30:53
Oh, it's so hard. You know, it's something

Steven Evans 30:55
that doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't come naturally, perhaps, and unfortunately, in this case, brought about by something so tragic, and it you know coming face to face with sort of what remains afterwards must have been, and it sounds like very challenging. From that point, I mean, how then did you set about rebuilding?

Speaker 1 31:15
Well, first thing I did when Seth died, this is as that I was struggling. So this is during those 14 months. I started a book. I wrote a book called "This One's for You: An Inspirational Journey Through Addiction, Death, and Meaning. And Seth's like-I think he's eight years old. This is a picture of him on the cover. I wanted to write a book about our story, but I didn't want it to be a doom and gloom. I didn't want you to reach out and say, "Oh, Jeff, it sucks to be you. I feel sorry for you. I wanted people to be like inspired. Like, what are things I can do to change my life? Jeff's story got me focused on you know if this guy can do it, this average guy in Iowa, if he can do it, I can do it. And I wanted to write the book in that terms. Plus, one thing I didn't tell you is three weeks after Seth died, his daughter was born, and we didn't know about her for a year and a half. And I got a call from his best friend Justin, who told me that Seth had a daughter, and I'm like, I can't be. You know, I would have known. And we saw the test and everything. It's Seth's daughter, so she's going to be 10 here in October, and her name is Brighton. You know, when I wrote the book, I wanted to make sure that I became Seth's biggest advocate. Everybody else on the planet really didn't want to talk about it. They didn't want to let Bright know that he died from a drug overdose. You know, they were trying to coddle and protect her, and that's one of the reasons why kids end up getting mad at their parents when they get older, when they find out the truth, is that they feel like they've been lied to, and their whole childhood was was a lie. And in reality, you know, they're they're partially right to believe that. I don't know why parents can't be more honest with their kids. We we have the ability to handle these things at a very young age. Kids aren't as you know as incapable, even with their prefrontal cortex not formed for a long time. I do think that we can start lowering some of these family cycles that just continue because of lies and deception. And so I, you know, I wrote the book to pen in my mind all the stories about Seth-the good, the bad, the ugly-and I wrote it for Brighton. That was really my my my impetus was to write it for her. So when she gets to be older, and Seth's now good and gone, you know, 2025, years, and she starts asking those questions: What was my dad like? How good a basketball player was he? Could was he was he good at singing rap music, you know, and and so I wrote the book really thinking down the road it was going to be a great memoir for Brighton and not just a memoir for Jeff, and so that was my ulterior motive, and that's what the book was, and then I started a podcast called Living Undeterred because I love that phrase, you know, live an undeterred lifestyle and just keep being resilient, and this is all during my alcoholism and all during my, you know, watching everything still crumble in my life. I I did these to keep my energy, you know, going because I don't sit still well, so I had to do something. And then again, four and a half years after Seth died, I got another call, june 29 of 21, so one day after my youngest son Roman turned 18, which for him is a big day, right? 18's a big day. The next day, I get the second call, and it's Prudence is dead. My wife, 46, drank herself to death. She had 13 prescription bottles that we we found later after she died, 4688 pounds in a wheelchair. Been to rehab twice. Obviously, you know many doctors, many pills. So two people that I put into the system, I buried both of them, and so I started doing some really soul searching. You know where is the systemic problems? Who is culpable?

Speaker 1 34:43
You know, not not from an anger and vengeance perspective, but more of a curiosity perspective. Like, you know, I was angry. I was going to high schools and telling kids, "Don't do drugs, you'll die, and scare them and cry and hit the floor, and and I'd go in my car and. I just feel sick to my stomach. Like you're just trying to scare kids, Jeff. You're not trying to fill them up with hope and love, and you can't scare people and change behavior long term. You can scare people and change behavior short term. How you change behavior long term is you inspire them. You fill them up with hope and love. And so I changed my whole pitch from angry fentanyl dad to this uplifting, empowering way to look at mental wellness, and we don't even say mental health at Brighton; we say mental wellness. So losing prudence was again in a four and a half year time span, and then about three months later, we put our cat down, my first cat ever, which isn't really that big a deal, but the next day my mom died.

Steven Evans 35:43
Yeah,

Speaker 1 35:44
and so here I am now in less than five years, between 50 and 54 and a half. Lost my oldest son, lost the love of my life, and lost my mom, who is the sweetest soul that's ever lived. And so that Christmas was the next fork in the road, and I'm happy to pause if you have some questions up to the next stage. There's like three really big pivot points in my life: Seth's death, Prudence's death, and then what I call the closet, which is probably the greatest accomplishment achievement I've ever had in my life.

Steven Evans 36:17
Yeah, well, I suppose before you know getting there, walking, walk us through that experience of this person who you've aligned your life with, who you've cared for, who's cared for you, who you know you've shared this burden of loss with. I mean, how? What was that experience like when that person was no longer there?

Speaker 1 36:40
Well, I'll be I'll be honest with you. For her, it was freedom and liberating. For her, she checked out the minute I told her Seth was dead. Her death was just released her from the pain and suffering that she had as a material being on this earth. For me, it was hell. And the most hopeless thing is to watch someone you love struggle. There's nothing more hopeless. You know, you watch someone that you love and care about, and you know what they need to do to get back on the right track, and they simply either won't or can't do it. I use the example that you know you see a van full of young children going off a cliff, and it's going very slow to the cliff, and you're off to the side screaming and yelling, and and and you can't do anything. That's how I felt. I can see the cliff. I mean, both their deaths were preventable and predictable, which is why I accept the term tragedy for my story. Because tragedy is a baby drowning in a pool. Tragedy is your wife getting breast cancer a year after you get married. Tragedy's your dad getting Alzheimer's the day he retired, that's a tragedy. This was preventable and predictable, so it's unfortunate. That's why when people say and introduce me to talk, they say, "Oh, Jeff's story, Jeff's tragic story. I'm like, I don't accept that. It sucks. It's unfortunate, but it did not have to happen. Okay, I don't remember your question, but that's that's what I ended with.

Steven Evans 38:03
Yeah, no, thank you. It was really honestly about that, and also just what is the internal reset? Almost,

Speaker 1 38:13
I hated myself. I hated myself, Steve. If you could have ended my life, I would have taken you up on it. I absolutely was exhausted. I was tired. Something had to give, and that something was coming up on Christmas weekend, 2021. That's the third stage of my life where I I died and was reborn, and it was Christmas weekend. So my wife died in June, my mom in November, and then it was Christmas weekend, and my two boys were out, and they were out for the weekend. So it was just me. Okay, there was these seven boxes sitting there in my living room that that were my wife's my wife and I's possessions. And maybe it's just being a male. I thought I had conquered, you know, grief. I was overconfident. You know, hey Jeff, you're not drinking. Hey, you're not taking prescription pills. Hey, you're advocate. You're talking all over the country, and you're everyone thinks you're great. And so, I I pulled up a chair, and I took the first box and slid it over. It was like 430 on a Friday. This is Christmas weekend, and opened up the first box, and it was just like, it was just Seth. Every possible memory, every picture, every you know, fifth grade flag football and homecoming and basketball and letters he wrote to me, and when he was in prison, and man, I went from here to here like so fast, scaringly fast. And then I said, "I can't handle that box, and set it over. And I opened up the next one, and it was my wife. It was our wedding. It was our trips to Europe. It was our dreams. It was everything. And I. Never made it to the other five boxes because now I was I was I was done. I was ready to end my life. This all happened in probably 30 minutes, and I went in my closet and I opened up my safe. And this is what I told myself. Well, first I broke my cell phone because no one was going to call me, and I took my computer and I tossed it off my deck, and I said, "I'm so tired. I don't want anyone to help me. I got to do this on my own. I have to do it on my own. Like I quit alcohol on my own. I quit gambling on my own. I, I'm gonna take my gun out of my safe, and I'm not leaving this closet under one of two circumstances: either I'm the strongest M effort that's ever walked the planet, or I'm going to come out in a gurney, and that's what I told myself, and I was going to do it on my own terms. And I sat there, and I shit you not, three days transpired, and my business owner's wife knocked on my door because everybody was worried about me because I post on LinkedIn every day, and I'm on Facebook, and everybody is worried about me. And she knocked on the door and opened it up, and I'm laying in the living room like you see in those those TV shows. But I didn't have tequila bottles laid around. It was I don't remember anything, Steve. It's three days: Friday, Saturday, oh, two and a half days. I don't remember anything. I know I didn't eat, but I would tell you this: it's the greatest, most challenging experience I've ever had in my life because I knew in that moment I can handle anything without help, which is what I did as a child. I mean, I grew up with three brothers and a dad that pushed me. I had to figure things out on my own. I couldn't take a pill. I couldn't see a therapist. I had to figure things out on my own. And I think those skills I had as a young young man, even in college, when I'm selling insurance door to door and getting my face slammed in and spit at, and people threatening me, and I just kept going.

Speaker 1 41:56
There's something about growing up in that world helped me get through and maintain my life during those three days in the closet. So I was asked the other day in a podcast, "What's your greatest achievement, Jeff? And I'm sure a lot of dads say, "Oh, kids or family. Mine's those three days I walked out of that closet. That is by far and will be the greatest achievement I've ever had in my life. More than creating kids. I mean, anybody can create a kid, right?

Steven Evans 42:20
Right.

Speaker 1 42:21
Anybody can. Takes a few seconds, maybe create create life. Not everybody can sit in a closet for three days with a gun in their head. So, am I proud of myself? I'm really freaking proud of myself. Do I ever want to go back there in that closet? No. But am I afraid to go back there? No. I'm not afraid to go back there. I have thoughts of suicide. I've had them. I've had them this year. I don't fight them anymore. They're just part of my lived experience. They're they're check engine lights. You know, if you had an if you had a car and you had the ability to have check engine lights come on, and you told your mechanic disconnect those, I don't want to know about them. That's the same thing as all these meds that we're taking to disconnect from our feelings that we have in our bodies, our anxiety and fear and worry. These are superpowers. These are gifts. I'm not a believer in God, but if there was a God, these are gifts from God. Why would we want to turn them off? I don't get it. I think we've we've lost this long time ago, and now it's just that's the status quo. Go see a doctor, get a label. Here's a pill. My wife had 13 prescription bottles. She had no chance, man. She had no chance to sit in her closet, sober, clean, but in pain. And there was a book I read during this interval too, "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl, which I think is probably the greatest book I've ever read. And Victor said in that he was an Auschwitz survivor. He talked about how he really changed his attitude, and that's how he he attributes a lot of his surviving Auschwitz combination of luck and attitude. But he said suffering will be my opportunity. So when he was in the middle suffering, he reframed it as become better, not bitter. And I told myself, well, I can't use that term because it's Viktor Frankl, so I'll invent my own. So I came up with, "Pain is unavoidable; suffering is a choice. And so, yeah, the pain of Seth's death unavoidable. The pain is Prudence's death, unavoidable. The pain of opening that box unavoidable. The length and duration of the suffering that I tie to that emotion or that feeling is in my control, and and I would say the courage that you have and exhibited in order to face come face to face with yourself yet again in this moment, right is huge, but I don't. Yeah, I hate to interrupt you, but I I don't feel courageous. I don't. I don't. I still feel massive imposter syndrome. I still feel pathetic. I still feel I let him down. I and you know I talk to people like, oh, Jeff, you gotta gotta understand you didn't. I I know that. I mean, I know that. But I don't feel that all the time. I understand I did everything I could as a dad and a husband. I know all that, but I don't feel courageous. I feel like Steve. If you went through the same thing I did, you'd be doing the same thing.

Steven Evans 45:13
That's

Speaker 1 45:14
the faith I have in humanity. I don't think I'm courageous. I just think I'm doing anything that a dad would do that wants to stay above ground,

Steven Evans 45:21
yeah,

Speaker 1 45:22
and that's more survival than being courageous.

Steven Evans 45:24
Correct, it's survival, and but it is being willing to look inward first, and I think that's part of the key. Where you know, if some you can't really control what happens or transpires externally, even if we would like to, you know, but the thing that we can often control most is, like you said, our response to that external stimuli. And in this case, you know, such you know awful circumstance kind of entered your world, and in so doing, it caused you to not run, right? Not try to flee. And even if you thought about it, perhaps at one point you know that's normal, right? But it forced you inward, right, to make that decision in the closet, right? And I think that in and of itself is something is a example of what perhaps many men go through, but maybe not, you know, physically in a closet, but physically, you know, maybe mentally in, you know, their their own closet, right? Yeah, exactly. In their own closet, in their own situation. Yeah.

Speaker 1 46:25
So you know, I think as I now move into my 60s, and and we got this app we started, and it's a mental health app, and that has its own set of stresses with it, raising money and making money, and those type of things. One thing I learned from last year, so about this time last year, there's a stretch of a like 90 days, Steve, where I have Seth's birthday, Seth's death day, Prudence's birthday, Prudence's death day, our wedding anniversary, which was last week, would have been 26 years with my wife, and then there's my mom's date of death. So I've got I've got six like anniversaries that are squeezed in like a 50 day time span. It's Groundhog Day for me. It's just every day, every day. And then I'm an advocate, so I talk about it every day. I'm talking with you about it. It's like I never get to get away because my identity now, like it was in financial planning, it was wrapped around money. Now it's around my advocacy. So I haven't had an identity for my whole life because I've been hiding behind a mask, and my mask right now is what I'm portraying to you is that I'm a mental health advocate. Well, I'm not. I'm not. I'm just a dad from Iowa, a normal person. I'm not this courageous advocate. This is what I tell myself, and so what I learned last year, I actually was going through a really dark time last September, and I share this. I don't. I'm 60, dude. I don't care people think about me anymore. I just don't care. I used to sit around think, oh, it's gonna an investor won't like me because I thought about ending my life, and I'm like, well, that's fine. I don't care. I think what's courageous about me is I talk about it. Yes, I don't think the act of doing it's courageous. I think I think my my vulnerability is my my strength, and it works for a lot of people and others. It doesn't, but that's like any any trait you have, any personality trait. So, I decided that last year I was ruminating very heavily. So I was using my app a lot, which my app helped me. The AI was great. I was like stress testing things, and but I would ruminate. I get up in the morning and I'd play out all the all the what if scenarios. But here's the deal: all the what if scenarios were bad ones. It was never the what if good scenarios. You know, you free to equally choose what scenarios you want to you want to think about. You can think about abundance and love and all the things that are coming your way, or you can think about all the all the barriers and the bad things-that's that better and bitter road. But I was ruminating to the point where I finally called my son because I was having chest pains, and I said, "I need, or I was just lightheaded. I need to go to the doctor. This has to stop, like the closet. But this time, I need help because I don't trust myself right now. You know, and I'm old enough to know which check engine light are going on, and this was a this was like your engine's burning up.

Steven Evans 49:05
Yeah, you

Speaker 1 49:06
got to go to a mechanic like now, or you're going to lose your car, and that's what was going out of my body. My body's telling me all these things: boom, boom, boom. I'm not eating. I'm not. So it's like I my son drove me to the ER. I checked in. I stayed there a day, walked out with you know a bottle of Lexapro and and hydroxazine, and I took

Steven Evans 49:28
it. Yeah,

Speaker 1 49:28
I took it. I'm anti all this stuff, but I tell you what, it helped. It immediately stopped the ruminating. It got me in a place where I could be logical and reasonable and and start you know believing in myself again instead of doubting everything, and I did it for about a month or two, and then I decided I wanted to get off it. So I used our app to help me deprescribe, and that's what I did. It helped me have the conversations I needed to have with my my professionals. Long story short, I got into the system, but I controlled the narrative. I didn't let them label me depressed. I didn't tell him I was manic deprived. What I just said, I'm not doing good. Well, how can you help? And I refused to take a diagnosis, but they did give me they did give me a prescription, which helped, and then I got off it. So here I am now, made it through that really bumpy patch, and I think the moral of the story is, it's all about expectations. What are your expectations as a human having a lived experience? Is it rainbows, butterflies, and unicorns, or is it getting spit on, the door shut in your face, and bad things happen? And which one's more real likely? I'm not. I'm not expecting those necessarily, but I'm preparing for them. Expect the best, prepare for the worst. So I don't get up in the morning expecting death to show up, but I prepare for it every day, like meditation and no no alcohol and exercise and diet and no toxicity. So I'm prepping myself for that third time I get a call, and maybe the next call is someone calling and saying Jeff is dead, and so the people in my life, my boys, I'm preparing them. Hey, just because you lost a a son and a mom, it doesn't mean the universe owes you shit. I could die tomorrow, so don't don't think that just because you had bad things happen, all of a sudden you're you're due for something. No, you're not. However, I believe in karma. I believe in vibrations. I believe in frequency. I believe in give more than you take. I think if you do that enough over time, the universe has these really weird ways to put people in your life at the right time that you needed to be there. I and this is from an agnostic. So I, if you're a man of God, you would contribute that to God, and that's fine. Just like someone who wants to say they're an alcoholic or not, whatever works for you. For me, since I don't believe in God, I can't. I can't blame God for their deaths, which a lot of people would do, but I also can't accept help from God because I don't believe in Him, and I'm not going to go ask Him now just because I'm desperate. That seems very tacky. So the reality is, it's like I'm on my own again. I'm back in the closet, but I'm smart enough now to know that I don't want to go back there and be completely dependent on Jeff. So, you know, if you're on speed dial now, Steve, and I was struggling, you know, I would reach out to you now. I would, I would make make that attempt. I have in the last few months made some of those calls to people when I'm in a tough rut. But the beautiful thing about suffering now is, I I can I can autonomously self-identify, not self-diagnose, but I can self-identify when I need to do what I need to do to make it to Monday, you know, and that's a beautiful thing to think. At 60, now I figured some things out, and I'm proud of myself for what I've been able to do and not just survive because nobody wants to just survive. That's not a fun way to live, but it's hard.

Speaker 1 52:38
It's not easy, and I know now that this this is no race to win. There's no mountain to climb. This is every day for the rest of my life, and I don't plan too much farther ahead than than a few weeks in my life now. Like I have you know speaking gigs next year lined up, but I'm not sitting around thinking about my retirement or thinking about a vacation. You know, right now I'm I'm living in really short term blocks of of time,

Steven Evans 53:03
and I think the the thing that I find to be the thread often is your willingness to take a moment and examine what's happening right from a very objective point of view, and then make a plan of action that is is often involves changing your behavior or your relation to something, right? And if I can give you this compliment, it is that strength I would say there to be able to to do that, because there are many you know people and many men who would just say, "All right, this is it. This is maybe you know the universe telling me this is the end, right?

Speaker 1 53:40
Yeah, and that's what I was saying to myself. Yeah,

Steven Evans 53:42
but then to be able to say no, I I have a different story for myself. I I choose a different path. I choose better, right? Not bitter, right? And

Speaker 1 53:52
yeah,

Steven Evans 53:52
I wanted to ask: Was where did you kind of come from? Where did that bifurcation come from? Right? That idea of better, not bitter. I know you mentioned that was also when Seth passed. That something that you gave to your children was it? You know, something that you had read about, or was it true inspiration there?

Speaker 1 54:11
Well, I think it's a multifaceted, like where that came. Obviously, the the moment that I said that speech to them in the living room, and it just popped into my head. It wasn't predestined or predetermined. It just showed up in my head. I, I don't know, you know where that came from. I, you know, I obviously I knew about forks in the road and all that, but I've never used that metaphor before. Such dramatic situation, I call them dad moments. You know, you get maybe three or four in your life when you have to say things at the right time to make sense. And then I think I, I really liked ancient philosophy when I was in college, so I studied Stoicism and Greece and the Renaissance and Reformation and Medieval and all. I'm really into that history, so I know Stoic Stoicism now has a new Renaissance. Ryan Holiday is making you know a lot of money and doing really well and kind of bringing back Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus and Seneca, some of the. Stoics, so Stoic philosophy was something that I was interested in, but I never used it until all this happened. So it was like it was like an untapped tool in my toolbox I didn't know about. And as I was looking around, there it is down there, and I'm like, "Oh, what is this? And is Stoicism? So I started really going back. I read Marcus Aurelius Meditations. I read a couple different versions of it because the old original version is, you know, it's not the best English. It's hard to understand. There's not a lot of translations into now, so now they got new updated models. So I kind of got back into Stoicism again. And so, like when I'm on on TikTok or something, I like to follow Stoic philosophers. So I type in names of people I can follow, so when I'm on social media, I know how addictive it can be. I try to follow the people that are adding value in my life, and and so my social media experiences aren't as maybe negative as some others. But I'd say stoicism would be a big part, and then I got in back into meditation heavily, and also the other thing that really helped me is psychedelics. I was introduced three years ago to psychedelic assisted therapy, again coming off the heels of 2021. I don't call an attempted suicide because I didn't pull the trigger, but it's you know the closest thing to attempted suicide. Three days in a closet, call it what you want. And you know 2023, then I was introduced to a friend of mine who invited me to a psychedelic retreat because he's like, you know, I think some of these plant medicines can help you, Jeff. And I was scared because I never done, I never smoked pot. I was just a drunk, and so I was very nervous about putting anything in my body that was, you know, a plant or something like that. So I, I had the the honor to go through a 10 person integration weekend, and it was called a heart protocol, and we did mushrooms and psilocybin and ketamine and over three days and five MAO DMT, which is called the toad venom. You hear Aaron Rodgers and Mike Tyson and Joe Rogan talk about it sometimes, but I did it for an exploration. I wasn't really doing it for an antidote because I don't think I'm broken. I don't think I need to be fixed. I I've had a tough lived experience that doesn't make me broken, and I I went into the psychedelics very open minded, and and they've had a profound impact on my life. And the first thing they did that probably was the best part of it was taking my ego and just quieting it. It didn't exterminate it because you have to have an ego, but it quieted it, and so what it did is it allowed me to get away from the one person I hated most of my life, and that was Jeff, and to observe me as you observe me, but with love and empathy, and like I know right now you're probably thinking, man, I just want to hug this guy, I want to help this guy. Like, but I don't talk that way to myself.

Speaker 1 57:41
I'm hard on this guy all day long, you know. And so to be able to see me and say, "Why are you so hard on that guy? The you that's in me was pulled out of me on psychedelics, and I got to observe Jeff. And I'm like, this guy's been through a lot. You know, give him some, give him some mercy, give him some grace. This is me talking to me, but in a dual, in a dual type relationship,

Steven Evans 58:01
right?

Speaker 1 58:02
Profound. I don't. Hell, I don't know where that came from. My neuroplasticity, a portal. God, I, I don't know what it was. Was so profound that I, I've never been the same. I have so much love for animals and for plants and for creatures in the ocean, and and just I love everything now. And it took plants that have been on on the planet for a long time. That indigenous people been using for 1000s of years to rewire my brain. That big pharma thinks it can do it their way, and and it didn't help my wife or my son, but these things helped me. So here's two people that I put into the system. Here's one that took a different path, and I'm still here, so it's like I don't know what that means. I don't know what that means. I just I'm looking at the evidence my life presents to me, and I make choices and I move on. And I think there's a huge opportunity for psychedelics to become, especially starting with veterans, with like ibogaine. There's a lot of evidence that it can help with the suicide rates and the depression rates and the addiction rates with veterans, and I think we should start there first. If there's ever a group of Americans, we should be supporting the ones that gave us our freedoms, and we don't. They end up in hospitals like taking pills, like my wife, or they end their life. So I think that's going to be a great kind of a new frontier in mental health, and I think AI can be the other thing that can be quite profound. It can be a big ally because AI is good at two things that humans are okay at. AI is really good at, and that's pattern recognition and memory recall. So if you're using AI as a companion, like I do on our BrightNap, it it knows me as well as anybody knows me, and it doesn't judge me, so I feed it all my journal entries and all my mood tracking. So then, when I'm in a crisis, I can tap that friend, even though I know it's not human. I still see a therapist, so I'm not doing this to replace therapy. It's for those moments when I'm not with my therapist, which is 99.9% of your mental health life. You're not with a therapist. You're not in your doctor's office.

Steven Evans 1:00:00
Right,

Speaker 1 1:00:00
you're in your bed at two a.m. on Tuesday. That's where mental health lives, and that's why we built the app, and that's where that's where I'm trying to add my value to this proposition out there. So,

Steven Evans 1:00:11
yeah, and I think a lot of you know your story does center around this idea of compassion almost as well, right? How you had to learn that self compassion, and what was the experience that sort of brought you? Sure, it could have been neuroplasticity, whatever, right? But yeah, it's also I feel like part of it to be able to look at ourselves from a point of love, right? To say, you know, even though I've been through this, even though I responded in this way, I can be different, or I can be better, or I can choose a different path tomorrow, and just being willing to have that compassion and the what's it called the tenacity, I would say, to just continue to stick to it and have that compassion for yourself for the next day.

Speaker 1 1:00:55
Yeah, and I I tell myself this quite frequently when I'm in the grips of intense suffering, which is you know frequently. I actually say this to myself. I say, Jeff, you've survived 100% of every worst thing that life has ever thrown at you. What makes you think you can't survive the next? In in saying that to myself, I'm kind of hanging on the word impermanence, it's kind of the same thing. Impermanence simply means that nothing lasts forever; everything has an end date, and that's just not the good times. That's the bad times. So go back and look in your life, Steve, and think of the worst call you ever got, the worst moment in your life. You know that event itself, even at some point, you know, when we all die, that event itself will will go away too. Like there'll be a point in time when Seth's name probably won't even be remembered, and me too. And so, even our own lives are impermanent in a way. They're they're not they're not permanent. You know, I think on Monday I was in a fetal position, just crying because it was a wedding anniversary, and I just missed my wife a lot. And my Labrador kept coming over, and he always tries to like help me, and I have to like put him in the other room. I'm like, dude, I'm like his name's Bunker. I'm like, dude, after our golf game, by the way, I'm like, dude, I'm not done grieving. Leave me alone. He's like licking my tears off, and but yeah, when's the last time you had the worst cry you've ever had in your life, and you felt worse,

Steven Evans 1:02:21
right?

Speaker 1 1:02:22
I don't think it's possible. I don't think it's possible. I don't think there's a human on the planet that had the worst cry they've ever had in their life, and then an hour or two later they felt worse. You still feel shitty. You feel bad, but are you worse? No. There's something about that flushing. As again, going back to the check engine light, there's something about changing the oil and rotating the tires. It's like I look at tears as like, in some weird way, my next tattoo is going to reflect a psychedelic experience I had where I envision my tears flowing into the river of life, like your tears, my tears, Seth's tears, Prudence's tears, and the river of life then flows down and waters the tree of life. You know, how does the tree of life stay alive? Well, has to have water. Well, the water is fed by human tears. I had a dream. That was a vision popped in my head, and I went to AI and I said, "Draft me a tattoo. And they made a tattoo. So my next tattoo is going to be this concept that when I cry, I'm feeding the universe. I'm helping nurture the tree of life, or whatever metaphor you want to use. It helps me. I don't know if that's true. I I don't know. These things pop into my head, and I don't know where they come from. But now when I cry, I don't have the same weight attached to the tears. They're not burdened down with sorrow and angst and hate. You know, they're more uplifted by love, hope, and empathy and inspiration. And I don't know if that's true, but that's how I feel. So,

Steven Evans 1:03:41
yeah, it's really beautiful, and I mean, for our audience, the meaning from the the image is really powerful. I mean, for me, I have tattoos myself that mean a lot to me, and I think that's something you know that's one way to express, but also to gain strength from what we've gone through. You know, and I think in in closing, because I know we're almost at time, is my only other question is sort of looking back across that full arc of your life, which maybe not the version you designed or the but the one you actually lived. What's the thing that turned out to matter most to you? Not necessarily a lesson or advice, but just what your life showed you that you couldn't have seen from the beginning.

Speaker 1 1:04:24
That it's so short, and in the real big picture thing, it's pretty inconsequential. You know, when you fly in an airplane, you look at all the houses below you. You know, if you could zoom in and find a house, and zoom in, and find the living room, and zoom in, and see the family sitting at the table and zoom in and hear all those conversations and all the drama and and you you wouldn't relate to it because it's not your drama, but if they did the same thing to you and they zoomed into my house in my life and they would see all, so I had to understand in the big picture things you know this is really insignificant. It's like my life really isn't that big a deal. It is for me, obviously, but for most people on the planet, they could care less about me and my family and my life. So I really learned to be so grateful to have a life. You know, I saw a family arguing the other day. I don't know if I shared this with you, and I sat back and thought to myself, "Man, I can't even argue with my son. I can't argue with my wife. You're so lucky. Even though in the moment you think this is one of the worst days of your life because your wife just said she hated you, I'd love to have my wife tell me she hated me. Hear her voice again, man. It would be so beautiful to hear that. I don't even have that opportunity to have your benefit of suffering, to have your luxury to suffer, you know, with your family because I don't have that, and I had it. That's the thing. I had it, but I I took it. I I didn't I didn't appreciate it. I squandered it. I wasn't present because I was so worried about what people thought about me. And that is the life lesson that I've learned over the years: is that I missed so many opportunities that I can't go back in time and change it. But the next 10 years of my life, I certainly can change to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Steven Evans 1:06:05
Right, absolutely

Speaker 1 1:06:06
painful lesson, man. Very painful lesson, but very humbling too.

Steven Evans 1:06:10
Yeah. Well, thank you for being here, and thank you for telling us your story, and and and for telling us the truth. It really means a lot. Thank you, Jeff.

Speaker 1 1:06:20
Thank you. I appreciate this opportunity, Steve.

Steven Evans 1:06:25
This has been the missing conversation. I'm Steve Evans. Thanks for listening. If something in there found you, if a moment hit somewhere you weren't expecting, just let it be there for a while. You don't have to sort it out right now. That's what this is for. Take care of yourself out there. And if you know a guy who needs to hear this one, you probably already know who he is. Send it to him.