Full Transcript for The Dangerous Lie Behind Alpha Male Culture

in the back of my mind. And I was not a spiritual person. I didn't go to church. I didn't read any self help books prior to this. So in twenty sixteen, I injured a back injury from football, so now it was partially paralyzed. I had to get a chordal steroid shot in my spine to walk. I scheduled surgery in February of twenty sixteen, and then my business was failing. I had a big business, hundred and some employees with my wife at the time, and I looked at her and realized that I really was pretty unhappy and she had driven a wedge in between my family and myself. I was very close to my parents and my brothers and sisters, and there was a giant wedge in our family. And I started looking back and realizing that how does somebody who tried so hard, I took the risks, I put the effort, I worked hard, and I had all these talents, How did I land so opposite from what I tried to do? And so I thought there must have been another answer. And then upon all these kind of collapses and my rehabilitation for my back surgery, which I didn't have the surgery, I tried to rehabilitating before the surgery, and that gave me a lot of ideas on healing myself and find a good way to upright. And so that's it. So that kind of hit series of the wad these bumps and eventually all added up to a monumental catastrophic failure in life, and they hit the reset line. 00:04:10 Speaker 2: You weren't kidding when you said a whole lot of pain. Definitely, yeah, physical, emotional, mental, I mean, you hit every. 00:04:18 Speaker 3: Block that somebody could hit. 00:04:20 Speaker 2: Family, gosh, and I have to imagine that there was a part of this too where the societal pressure of things that you were supposed to be doing the way you were supposed to perform was also a piece. 00:04:33 Speaker 3: To that puzzle. 00:04:35 Speaker 1: Yeah, so I think one of the pivotal moments. There was lots of steps. Some of it was modeled behavior for my children because I was kind of want to overplay this word, but abused verbal abuse and gas lighting, and I was gonna overachiever and a codependent virtual back then. So I tried really hard, but it was really this passage in the Death of Ivan Illage. It's a book by Leo Tolsi, and Ivan wanted to be a MUSICI his whole life he was a judge, and his wife pushed him into being a judge, and his parents push him into judge. And he'd lived his whole life being a judge, always lamenting if he should have been a musician. And then on his deathbed, he looked up at his family on his deathbed and said, what if I live my whole life wrong? And I hit me like the tin of breg So I'm like, I'm living the whole life how much longer? Wrong? With business? I hated the business with her, I learned I hated her actually after all that, and I hated my life and so I realized every second I wasn't living the right life. I was living the wrong life. So that's where really really turned. And that's where the pain kind of converged with action at that point. 00:05:45 Speaker 2:

And you say it like that, and not a lot of people can read a passage like that and it'll hit him and they'll feel it. But to then say, you know what, I'm going to do something about how. 00:05:54 Speaker 1: That made me feel the pain that got me there? 00:05:57 Speaker 2: Yeah, you had gotten to this point where you were like, there's no turning back. I have to do something differently exactly am. 00:06:03 Speaker 1: And I think that's why I write these books, hope for people not to have to go down that path so far to realize that they're really unprepared for this path and they should stop and get some help. And I think, as a stoic entrepreneurs athlete, football player, contractor that I am what I used to be, what I saw myself as, that was a tough thing to do, to say I need help, and so I was ready. I don't know that that passage would have hit me ten years earlier. 00:06:34 Speaker 2: Yeah, you had just come to the right moment in time, and it found you at that moment in time, and that was really what I was wondering, was saying, like, I need help, I need to change, I need to do this. Unfortunately, we've painted an environment where men often don't feel comfortable in saying that and having that conversation and admitting that. It's often that they have to do the best for themselves that they can, and they just push through it and they work through that. 00:07:01 Speaker 3: So when you did finally. 00:07:03 Speaker 2: Admit that, were you met with just this changing environment or were people adversely responding to it or did you have an open environment when you finally came to that moment of saying I need help and. 00:07:16 Speaker 1: I need to do this. Boy, listening really carefully, so great question. There were a lot of responses. There are mixed responses within myself because it was a new way of looking at the world where I'd looked at the world so differently prior to this moment. And in general, what I've found is although society considers vulnerability a state of weakness, more often than not, I was treated with tremendous admiration for being vulnerable and I think that's the trick and the trap with vulnerability is that it's really an internal feeling that only you kind of have, although others can sense it from the outside that what you did took courage. Only you know that it's vulnerability. They just see the response and so to step into that position of accountability, Yeah, I did this, Go wow, that was brave, And they don't know, and only we know how big of a mountain that is to overcome. And I think as a man, having gone through this, I spend a lot of time trying to get people to understand men, to understand even women, to understand how to open and ask for help before you need help. And that's the hardest thing. And I always say, you don't know what you don't know, So try to learn that. And how do you learn someone that you don't know when you don't know it? And the only answer is you have to ask. You have to say what am

I missing and ask people that have a different set of talents and skills that you do to ask them for help. 00:08:46 Speaker 2: You mentioned it there that this book, while it's addressing alpha's and we typically associate that with men, you're saying it also helps women because I have to think, if I was processing this correctly, that vulnerability is hard regardless of what gender you are, and especially in this day and age where we are constantly being looked at and judged and seen in certain lights. And if you do this way against somebody else's beliefs, then you're the wrong person, right, And I think vulnerability today is a lot different than what it used to look like, and we're more open to it, but we're also more. 00:09:24 Speaker 3: Judging towards it. We have a lot of systems around it. 00:09:27 Speaker 1: When there's a cereal called balls cereal that says get some balls and eat the cereal and be a man, Yes, it's harder to be vulnerable with advertisers out there like that, and I think it is harder. I think the world knows that this is a better way to live, but the world is much more judgmental, and that's kind of why the title is officed die really and begin dive into that. But you're absolutely right, there is still a paradox there. We are part of the animal kingdom, and for men and women as an animal, being defenseless is a lower level of survivability, and we choose to survive more often than choose to thrive. And so there's a difference between writing death and learning to live same thing, and they're just opposites of the same spectrum. And I want to teach people to learn to live to thrive rather than just survive. And everything that I share in my book and here is spiritual concept. And I hate to use the word spiritual because it's not dogma, and it's not woo woo. It's just a part of us that has power over our ego, our shadow, our anima, as young would say, our animal side. And these are spiritual practices just to help live the real you versus the you that's a slave to an ego or shadow work or damage as a child, or masculinity, which is a form of ego in a way, masculinity is very powerful driver, and so it's femininity. I have to act this way or be this way. And unfortunately, there's lots of signals that the apposites are winning. So as an animal, if I see that eight hundred pound gorilla winning, or I see that peacock winning with big, flashy feathers, I can draw some feathers in too. Let me drop some feathers in and then I can win just like that autpha, but there's so much pretend now and I think that's why it's become harder, is that it's a social media aspect. 00:11:16 Speaker 2: And it's interesting that you say that, because I do feel like we are in a shift happening, especially when it comes to masculinity and in femininity. There's huge concepts in the structure of those concepts is wildly and rapidly changing as we learn more and as people dissect and understand things more. So talk to me about that. As we're watching that landscape change, how are we best served to look at the environment that it is now? I guess it's from a woman's perspective. 00:11:47 Speaker 1: That's a tough one, yeah, I think I'll answer from the woman's perspective. A woman's perspective, and this is true for both men and women. We have an animal aspect to us, okay, and there are Biologically a woman will be more attracted to someone that it's an alpha. But it's not whether they are or they aren't. It's whether they're perceived to be sense bravado performance, whether it's fake or real. From a biological perspective, they could fool you. So attraction always isn't good for you. And attraction come in lots of different forms physiologically and psychologically, and so as a woman you have to weed through performance and it depends what your goal is. My goal after a seventeen year abusive, unhappy, miserable marriage, although produce wonderful kids again, I have no regrets. But I remarried last year and my goal was to find someone else that wasn't performing. I don't want a woman that performed. I don't want a woman who and I don't not say anything wrong with women that do want that. I'm not making any judgment. I'm just saying for me, I wanted a sustainable, long term, successful relationship, and that was about picking the bird and not the feathers. So I don't want to see the feathers. I don't care about the feathers. I want to know who you are, and me showing my feathers off was not pertinent to getting to know who that other bird was. So I spent no time with bravado or performance or trying to impress or name dropping or anything besides just look at me. Do not look at any feathers. I know you may look like I have x Y and Z, but please don't look at those things. I want you to get to know me for me. And I was looking for that type of reciprocation, so as a woman got to see through what's perception and what's reality. I'd ignore the feathers and get to know the bird. 00:13:29 Speaker 2: Now speak to it for me from the males protection, because I imagine it's a little bit differently, but you're. 00:13:36 Speaker 3: What I perceive. 00:13:37 Speaker 2: In that situation. There was a lot of conversation before I had met my fiance. When I was dating, there was so much conversation around you need this type of guy, and if you're very masculine, then you're surely not going to find a masculine guy. And there was just so much perceived ideas of how I was performing or what it looked like. Right, you are going to be this masculine, independent woman, You're never going to find a masculine man. And I that was never my drive. My drive was much like what you were talking about. I just wanted to find someone who supported me in my life, regardless of if I was independent, if I made my own money, if I didn't make my own money. I just wanted somebody who loved who I was. The rest of the pieces didn't matter to me, but a lot of people tried to paint that narrative as I was dating.

00:14:28 Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think there's obvious reasons why from my research, from an animalistic side, the woman with the female of the species is going to choose a male. It's suitable for procreation. I just hate to break it to you. We're not really animals anymore. 00:14:46 Speaker 3: You don't say yeah. 00:14:48 Speaker 1: And so people talk about this the divine masculine, the define feminine, and the man's got to provide. Yes, And from a biological perspective, that is true, But I hope people evolve outside of that perspective. Now you can't entirely, because it's still we our part of the animal kingdom. But we're the only animal with cognition. And so spirituality is having choices over things like shadows, traumas, animalistic behaviors, ego, having the power to choose. And but I hear what you said is you wanted to choose well, and you wanted them to choose well. And there's nothing about a woman who can provide that makes your less interesting or attractive, or sustainable or successful. If she's in a masculine role. And that's so I think the failure is that everyone's judging it from an animalistic scale and not from a more cognitive, more conscious, more evolved scale. 00:15:41 Speaker 2: Yeah, that's such a good perspective because once you just paint it out that way, I'm like, yes, not tracks, Yeah, why are we not? But then on this flip side, we have things like Manosphere coming out, We have podcasts that are talking a whole bunch about alphas and being the alpha, and the alphas are important, and heck, there was even an alpha school how you should be in alpha. Yeah, but the whole purpose of your book is alpha's dying early. So why we are in this fight right now? 00:16:10 Speaker 1: Where that is. 00:16:11 Speaker 2: A really hot conversation. So give me your perspective on all of that. 00:16:17 Speaker 1: It was if being in alpha worked, then the trend for men wouldn't be where it is the trend for men. If you go to four suicide attempts for men, drug and alcohol abuses up for men, Higher education is down for men. And I say down, I don't mean down relative to women, because it isn't a comparison and there's nothing wrong and there's everything that to be very very praised about women succeeding in all areas of life, But the trends for men against men from previous years is going down in all categories. And so if the alpha animlytic mentality worked, then men wouldn't be going down The path to manhood is not acting more like an animal, it's acting less like one. Now, these concepts I'm sharing are no different, and when Nietzsche shared in the eighteen hundreds. I tripped upon this when I was writing my book The Ubermensch, which is his version of the Omega man that I'm talking about, the Bagafa Ghita, which is a Hindu book which talks about Krishnaan and his conversations with Arjuna about how to live life the spiritual being. These are not new concepts, and the manosphere and these had to be in alphas are a short cut. It's a

short cut to early and fast gratification. If I went to a bar, puffed my chest, and drove up in a fancy car and acted a certain way, I would probably be more successful with women that were attracted to that, But it would say a lot about the people that will be attracted to that as well. And so my approach was not color and feathers and display feathers. It was to go on there without any shoes and with my sword down and my shield down and no armor, and be as honest and authentic as I could and match with somebody who valued who I truly was, not someone who valued who I pretended to be. And I think that's a much higher I know scientifically and from a research perspective, it's a higher sustainable relationship. It's based on more authentic principles. And I think the reason why this is hard is that what I had to go through, going through so much pain was a Carlgame would call it undividuated consciousness. And that's a process where you see a crack in your ego and you can see through the ego. When you can see your ego, most people can't see their ego. Cancer patients, people that have life on near death experiences or really tough stressful times can break that. And when you can see across and say, wait a minute, that is a facade of me talking. Masculinity is a facade. I can't say I'm hurt, I can't say I need help because I need to act with this facade. And then we'll throw up a facade because it's really easy. It's really hard to say, Okay, I need to admit that I'm really weak at this, i need admit that I need help, and that's much harder to do. And everyone's taken the easy way out, and that's okay. I have no judgment for that. But if you want sustainable way out, you want the high level of consciousness way out, there are other ways. 00:19:11 Speaker 2: And to your point, it deepens connections. You're having very surface level conversations connections relationships if you're not willing to break. 00:19:20 Speaker 3: Down that facade. 00:19:21 Speaker 2: Yeah, at the end of the day, you want to know why things don't last, why relationships aren't working as much as maybe they used to. I'm not sure the statistics on that, but there's so much conversations around that, and I just have to believe that's part of that story too, Because a facade is fake. You're not giving a real version of yourself. So how can anything last if it doesn't have the real version of you? 00:19:42 Speaker 1: Yeah, and there are a lot of studies that talk about how oxytocin only lasts for nine months, and you can only hold the facade for so long before it kind of begins to show itself, and that's very true, and you see levels of failures seven year itch. Seven years is deciding factor, nine months is a designing factory. Eighteen months as a deciding factor in relationships. And then the animal would say, your brain contemplates constantly. Brain is a supercomputer, and we all think that whatever our brain says is real, but it's really not. Brain is computating, it's beliefs, it's stimulus, it's understandings, it's experiences, its successes and its failures, and so your brain computates. So I leave this really unhappy situation. I'm getting this from this, and I'm getting this from this, and last time when I got these things from it was okay. So maem, I keep trying. The brain is looking for the safest position. Your brain is not trying to give you longevity. It's trying to give you the safest position right there in that second. And then you get safe, and then it thinks, okay, maybe that will computated wrong. Let's rethink this, and then it rethinks again, and it's constantly just trying to survive in the moment. Doesn't have a master plan, and it's back to survival versus thriving. The brain wants to survive. And I was thinking, to the brain is like air to the lungs. I'm bled to the heart. They all have their thing to keep us alive. And the brain's thinking, it's your heart just pumps blood. It doesn't think about it. It just says blood and blood out, your air lungs, air and air out, and brain thinking in theme. That's all it does, and it all picks what's useful at the moment. 00:21:11 Speaker 3: You talk about the survival mode. 00:21:13 Speaker 2: A lot of people are living in fight or fly. We're kind of in that societal right now where there's just a lot of people who because they haven't addressed things, because there's a lot of facades. You just have a lot of people genuinely surviving, they're just trying to get by. 00:21:28 Speaker 1: I think that was me. You don't realize it. I didn't realize it. I had a contant hum of anxiety, which is I'm not surviving. So why wasn't I surviving? Because I wasn't safe big house. I had four houses, I had two boats, had three kids, I had two buildings. 00:21:48 Speaker 2: And from the outside, look safe, looks like you're living great life. 00:21:51 Speaker 1: Is awesome, And I'd say, maybe, why is my life so hard because you have some debt? Okay, So how to solve that game? 00:21:57 Speaker 2: More work? 00:21:57 Speaker 1: Hi, more employees, it's more trouble, they're more risk. So I took on more. And there's no such thing. And I heard that in the book actually in trying to think, might have been doctor Hawkins, David Hawkins. There's no such thing as stability in nature doesn't exist. Safety does not exist. Ask Steve Jobs or Kobe Bryant, or there's that such thing. 00:22:20 Speaker 2: So then why do we chase that? Why are we inherently going after safety? 00:22:26 Speaker 1: When this plant right here is the thing leaves look for light and the roots for water that salt does all day. Every bird out there is looking for worms to eat, to pro create a little shelter to protect everybody. And we're in our DNA. It's the same thing. We're still in the animal kingdom, except we have cognition with only animal on this planet. It's cognition and consciousness or higher levels of consciousness, and so that's part of us. But that doesn't be more than a tree, right, be

more than a bird. And I think we always defall to these behaviors because her mind is thinking them, and we think because we have these thoughts, it's me. This is a good mate. Choose it right the second you slow down and say, wait a minute, let's make sure they see me for me, make sure I see them for them. Why do I want to get into some when that's not sustainable? And so what that looks like in real time is slow down, ask yourself tough questions and don't rationalize answers that retrofit where your minds from a survivor perspective is taking. You doubt your brain, doubt your thought process. Talk to others, and I always kind of caution talking to others because everyone kind of has their own agenda. So you have to filter their filter. Everyone's got to filter. My parents are always very oh, she's not good enough for you. I know your filters always know what's good enough for me, But I'm trying to look for it, judge their behaviors, not whether they're good enough for me or not. Right, So you kind of got to take that with a grain of salt. But in real life practice, you just have to slow down and ask what am I missing? 00:23:54 Speaker 2: As we talk about this evolution, I'm just so curious because there is a conversation that I see a lot on social med and that it's almost like men are not evolving in the same way women are evolving. 00:24:08 Speaker 1: Yes, I think there's some possibility to that. I think women are more geared towards adaptation naturally, men are more geared towards A lot of this is biological and physiological, the divine masculine, so to speak of all from a Hermetic principle, which is some very old ancient texts that go back to Kebalian is basically the collection of these hermetic principles. And I think number seven of the seven pillars of the Hermetic principles is the gender. And so in one end is the man or the male, and it's not gender base and it's not a sexuality. It's the idea of tearing things down and breaking things apart. And the other end of the spectrum is the feminine aspect, which is rebuild and regrowth and at birth and so it's like the circle of life and death. And so the people have adopted these spiritual principles into modern day behaviorshift they're really not they're philosophical understandings, and so the testosterone, and the man tends to break things and tear them apart, and women are builders and they grow, they give birth, and so I think women are adapting much better than men are, and they're adapting to the failures of men. Somewhere along the line, people are judging women for being feminine, and some are junging men for not providing. And there's nothing wrong with anybody. They're just not trained and they're not opening their mind and their heart to new ways of women. They're falling into these traps of survival aspects and believing everything that they hear and read or think, and they're constantly so myopic towards survival. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just advocating there's another way. There's some more sustainable, more fulfilling, deeper, like you said, and more intrinsically valuable than just surviving and preventing death, and that. 00:25:49 Speaker 2: I wanted your perspective on that for this reason, specifically because it is such an important conversation we are in. As much as there's a lot of conversation of operation and the loneliness epidemic, and there's a lot of that conversation, there is also a lot of growth that we're seeing happening, and a lot of change that's necessary. That people are just awakening a lot of pieces to themselves that they've never seen before. Yeah, and so I think that's the piece to the whole conversation that's kind of see is that while this is the conversation and this is important to notice, there's also this really cool side that's happening where we are evolving. We're doing what we're meant to do. You go back to the animal kingdom. We are meant to evolve. That was the purpose. 00:26:35 Speaker 3: And if we're not evolving, then. 00:26:37 Speaker 1: What are we doing? And all evolution begins pain. You have a rock on your shoe and it's painful. You're either going to take the shoe off and take the rock out, or you're going to build a callous to prevent the rock from hurting you. It's just part of evolution. Wind to rocks and water to soil, they're all responses to some form of friction, and then we are evolving. And I think it's a wonderful thing to say, See, I can connect to how deeply pain eye was, and I just kind of hope people wouldn't have to go through that, and I wish I didn't have to, and maybe I did. Could I have seen this without it? Probably not. Had someone kept hitting in the head with it like I do to my kids, I might have paid attention. And I think it is hard because there's always an easy way out, and the easy way out is never sustainable, unfortunately. But there is a magical evolution to everything. You can see it, and I think that's where some of the manosphere kind of gets some of its energy. Is like fighting, kicking and screaming not to evolve, but it feels safer. That's also an animalsic. It's predictive outcomes, so they're fighting for predictive outcomes. 00:27:42 Speaker 3: Yeah, and I can resonate with that, right. 00:27:44 Speaker 1: Change is hard. 00:27:45 Speaker 2: We know that it's not the easiest way, but it's the things I have learned in the course of my life so far is often things that are the easiest are not the most. 00:27:54 Speaker 1: Rewarding in the long term. Yo. 00:27:55 Speaker 2: Yeah, we get a lot more when the things are hard and you go through the crap, unfortunately. Because I think you could sit here today and say that just as you mentioned at the very beginning, that you wouldn't change a thing and there's a reason for that. 00:28:08 Speaker 1: Yeah, and use this great TikTok I always see. It's like ai animation of two philosophers are arguing. It's loud to and needs to your somebody arguing and someone says

who's right. They both make great points. They both are they're both right, but they're both right at different stages in our life. Hear these phrases a lot, and this might be great for your audience. All basic human need is to be with somebody. Connection biological side, all your nerves, your cells will do a lot better when brain is flooded with oxytocin and serotonin, all of these wonderful hormones. That's true. However, on the spiritual side, you don't really need that create that yourself. So people will say, oh, you have to have somebody, Yes, But the secondent you become okay without it is when you'll find it. And so that's the piece that people can understand on a spiritual path is that you work on you, you work on yourself, and you get the love that is where you are, and that will evolve. And so hopefully you've chosen somebody for the bird and the feathers and they'll evolve with you work and they will grow with you. And the part of that it's important is that when you let go of the need for somebody is when you'll find a suitable situation. But that means you're sovereign. That means you're not desperate and you're not picking someone just not to be alone. That desperation of not being alone. And when you become sovereign and self master of your emotions and over your peacocking in your ears and your masks, and you've put them aside and you've locked them in the closet and you go out there completely exposed, you're going to have the highest opportunity to have deepest and most intrinsic situation and anything, work, health, and love. 00:29:47 Speaker 2: It's funny you say that. There was often when I was single, one of the things that people said to me all the time was when you stop looking, you'll find it. I would get so frustrated, so angry. I was like, stop telling that. I understood it, but hearing it, you're like, get it, but I don't know how to make that happen. You're going through it and you're like, okay, what does that mean? And I think you just described that really beautifully of what that actually looks like, and nobody could ever describe it to me until this moments sitting here, because it was it was truly when I did finally meet my fiance, I was in a place of life where I had really I had done no, Yeah, I had come to. 00:30:23 Speaker 3: Terms with where I was in my life. 00:30:24 Speaker 2: I loved who I was, I loved the life that I had built, and I was going to be happy regardless. And it took me a long time to get there. That's not an easy place. 00:30:32 Speaker 3: To get to. 00:30:32 Speaker 1: I know that. Yes, for you forgetting that, it's amazing. 00:30:35 Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but that was such a huge part of that. 00:30:38 Speaker 2: So thank you for beautifully describing something that I wish somebody would have told me for the twelve years people were yelling that at me instead of just saying it actually giving me the concrete advice to work through that, and hopefully that can help some other people that are walking through that right now. But in all of that, you said, I love the saying that two things can be true. Yes, and you very much just described that there were two things kind of coinciding at the same time often in our lives, and I think a lot of people do struggle with that and understanding that it's not black and white. Our lives are actually very much in the gray area. 00:31:14 Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And understanding and giving room for uncertainty is important because there is way more that we don't know than what we do know about the psyche and consciousness and by human nature. And I think with you back to your story, which I think is remarkable because you got there and God bless you forgetting there. And I think what's important is that when you got the life that you wanted, you weren't going to sacrifice it for a veneer. You didn't need to have someone in your life. And I think you still need to look and that's just the universal law of initiation. And the difference is, and this is something that a lot of people don't understand, desire can be fear. If you desire something so much that you think you need it, I think it makes you whole. Then is no longer longer desire and it trips on fear. And what I mean by that is you're afraid that if you don't get it, you won't be sovereign, happy, or a whole. Everybody already is whole, and that's a difficult concept to understand it, and I kind of learned it this way. If my life is gray and there clouds, and those clouds can be full of water and really dark, these clouds can be thin and almost see through. It doesn't matter how thick and dark those clouds are. They're going to move and they're gonna change. They're gonna get dark, and they're gonna get light. And behind every one of those clouds and every one of those storms, the sun is always still there. And so everybody is actually whole, whether it looks like it or not. Everybody has the ability and potential and existence of being enlightened or have an ascension, the religious or Christian capacity. It's there. It's only blocked by a lot of things. Trick is just keep moving these things out of the way, and so when you no longer have fear and you're just desire becomes. This would be great, but I don't need it. I'm good. Sun's shining. I'm shining right. When you add someone, it just makes it shinier. It's not a cloud. You don't need it. It's not fear based desire. 00:33:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I can tell you from a perspective of having been on the other side of that before I was there, and what I needed much what I bet you would relate to, was your first marriage when you thought you needed it. And so the situation you were in was not a situation that was ideal. 00:33:28 Speaker 1: And not sustainable. 00:33:29 Speaker 3: Yeah, and it was not. 00:33:30 Speaker 2: The relationship that you had seen for yourself. But then when you go on to the other side of it and like you say, no longer having that fear, you do attract things

that are much more rewarding and much more important. And it's not driving out of this need to have something, it's driving out of a want and a desire that's much more complete. 00:33:53 Speaker 1: Yeah. And I don't want to overtrivilize the effort that you went through because you, as well as other people who get there, it doesn't mean you get rash and it is dumb mate or possible relationship. Because you are sovereign or more sovereign, you have probably a higher capacity for compassion stage, but you also have high capacity for patients and empathy as well. And she kind of has to assess potential a little bit, not a big way until they get better. But we all have a veneer, all of us, and so if you're a little more sovereign, and you see someone that feels great from a trauma bond perspective and not from a resume perspective, those are no longer variables that should be considered to have a great relationship. But if you find someone who's maybe hasty at times, or maybe raisis or tone a bad tone, now, and again, I get it, you're going through something about what is it? It doesn't mean you throw everything out the window because you're sovereign and somebody at times has moments and I still have moments as well. I'm coming from someone who jumped out of a window with a temper, so I'm not like an inherently calm person. Hey, so now I went from jump out a window when I was eighteen to raising my tone at times. It's a long trajectory, But does it make me not on a path of sovereignty because I lose my tone? One? And so I think where you've gotten, you're able to be a wider array of accommodation, assess things at a deeper level and not so much supervisial. Yeah, very much. 00:35:21 Speaker 2: I think it's something that I wish for everyone. And it's funny until I was sitting down here with you and having this conversation. I don't know that I realized I was doing anything different than anybody else. 00:35:32 Speaker 1: You know what I mean, You're probably different. 00:35:34 Speaker 2: And much of what you're talking about can describe a lot of experiences that I've had. 00:35:38 Speaker 3: And it's often a conversation. 00:35:41 Speaker 2: People reach out to me and say, how do you get to this point or how do I make sure this happens? And I don't ever have an answer because it wasn't a one way path. But sitting here talking to you, I'm like, maybe there's something I can answer. 00:35:52 Speaker 3: To tell you, not at least head in a direction. 00:35:54 Speaker 2: And so it's interesting that this concept, this belief, everything that you've created, especially written about in the book is really an answer to that question. 00:36:03 Speaker 3: Almost. 00:36:04 Speaker 1: I think everything in the book is to get people to do what you did, which is listen. I'm talking to my dad, who's eighty three. He came to Austin for my son's graduation and we're talking about the future, and he said, you know, a lot of my dad says, a lot of my choices. I just

kind of got this idea to go to law school, and then someone said go teach a class in law at junior college, and I did, and those are probably two of the most significant successful things I did in my life. And he didn't know why. He's a product of the fifties. And so from a spiritual perspective, it looks like this. Everyone has a destiny. Okay, we don't know what it is, and it's not what comes at us every day. It's a long term. You're on the right train track put that way, and on the right train of destiny. Things happen, things that make you unhappy happen. But the divider is whether you're making decisions for fear as an animal would survival attachment. I need this. I'm going to play to a fulfill a whole of my shadow. I was neglected as a child, So this person makes me feel good. Someone to ignore a lot of the red flags and just get this need mat right. Those are decisions based on fear, and those are decisions based on an analystic behavior or egotistical or shado work behavior. And those are decisions that will take you off of your destiny. And that's back of the Leo Tolstoi quote. Is leaving your whole life right, is making choices for the right reasons that are open hard or open minded doesn't necessarily mean they're easy. It means they feel right, really deep down inside. And the way to look at intuition versus rationalization is very difficult. And I've been researching this and researching Carl Young papers and trying to give better explanations to how you make decisions based on intuition not rationalization. And I can't give you a great one besides follow your gut and it will lead you the wrong way. And so listen to the subtleties when it led to you the wrong way, and give yourself a couple of years time to judge because you learn periods. But other than that, you did it and you listened. And that's what I hope people can do is learn how to trust and follow their intuition. And if they screw up, don't go out the window. Just say, wait a minute, I may have read it wrong. Let me look deeper at my decision making process. What did I miss? What I thought was intuition, which could have been rationalization. 00:38:23 Speaker 2: Gosh, getting people to live in a more intuitive state than out of fear and out of survival is hard. We're in a very complex state of things, and so it's encouraging people to live the best way that they possibly can for their best life in a way, but I know how hard that can be. I know how hard that decision making process can be. 00:38:44 Speaker 1: And yeah, I had a session with my wife out of this morning. Actually it's a fun story. Actually, I said, I notice a pattern that you're developing. Super Benign was talking about. But I said, it's kind of like my daughter. No, that's not true, and she got kind of defensive. It was being super It was like overordering food or something. And I said, see, you think that defending yourself is a more sustainable and more survivable response than saying, oh really you think

so? I guess I do that and taking accountability, I believe is a much more powerful path of survivability. And so she said, waity am, you're right, that would have been more accurate. And I see how I got a little afraid. I knew that. That was afraid. I feel that, And I said the only reason I'm bringing this up is to help you sort through these internal feelings. And it was a really remarkable moment walking in through Dadtown in Nashville after ordering coffee and saying, hey, you're kind of ordered like my daughter these days. No, I'm not. It was really funny, and so I think you have to shift the belief to say to yourself that there is a higher order of survival as an animal when you're accountable and vulnerable than when you're not. People think because they're afraid, it means lack of safety, and I'm giving their story. Your brain believes that everything that tells itself okay, And so fear is an emotion. So if you ever feeling the emotion of fear, which most people don't understand, and stress is fear, and again desire can be fear, is that behind the emotion there's a thought, and the thought of fear is danger. I believe I'm in danger. Now most people are aware of this pattern, that it's the thought first. That thought you justly escapes them and the emotion pops up and you can't stop emotions. But the second you feel fear, you say I must be in danger. They feel fear. So my wife's thinking, I think I'm in danger, that you're judging me over how I order coffee when that was the opposite. But instantly her mind begins to define the thought of danger. And so when you sort through these and you realize that in danger, but the hormone that goes through your body of fear is the same hormone that went through our ancestors' bodies running through a saber to tiger. It's exactly the same hormone. Your brain cannot tell the difference between danger. I think my husband's kind of teasing me about how I order coffee or your brain's it's like, no, I don't, no, I don't, And instantly it's this hormone of running from the sabriage attiger because it's dangerous. And I think people need to understand that they have to process emotions and ask themselves what am I in danger over? 00:41:10 Speaker 3: And that's so difficult. 00:41:11 Speaker 2: To do right until you had painted everything as fear. I think fear dictates the majority of our lives. 00:41:17 Speaker 1: It does. 00:41:18 Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of moments that everybody can look at in their life and realize that they reacted in fear. 00:41:23 Speaker 1: Yeah, and just look at this way that it's not just fear, it's their identity that you've created for yourself. So masculinity is identity. Femininity is an identity being a supporter as an identity, being a provider as an identity, being heeded as an identity, and then we react from fear from that the near not our core self. And that's what people don't realize is that their identity is responding. I'm afraid that I've been caught. I'm afraid that my identity, which my brain created to help me survive, is being attacked. 00:41:58 Speaker 3: I know that's feeling very well. 00:42:00 Speaker 1: So do I. Many times. 00:42:02 Speaker 2: I know that feeling. I think I have been in that place so many times. Mostly, I think it's really easy human nature just to want to have people perceive the version that you put out, the version of you that you think is the best that they should receive. And so to break down that barrier and just give them who you are without any bells and whistles. That feels terrifying. That feels like there is no protection, there's no security, there's no safety. We go back to that safety feeling. And so to get people into that state of mind, gosh, you're breaking walls down left and right to be able to get there. It makes me want to feel invisible, but it does, and I think there's an uncomfort in that for a reason, just because the world can be very scary, it can be very mean, it can be very hard, and when you put that up against the vulnerability, you don't want to write, you don't want to put those things up next to each other, because a vulnerable much like we've seen and speaking from experience as a woman, being a confident or successful or outgoing or blunt woman is automatically tried to get knocked down. That facade gets knocked down very quickly. So just seeing them break of the two as you're talking about it, I'm like, I could see how that's really difficult for people to do that and get there. So, yeah, I love this because I think everybody's going to need what I'm meeting right now. 00:43:44 Speaker 1: I think when you feel challenged, it's you thinking that your identity is being challenged. If you don't have an identity to be challenged. 00:43:54 Speaker 2: Then those fems and so how do you strip back having those identities? I know we talk about a facade, and we talk about these layers, but how do you really set yourself aside and no longer carry an identity that maybe you've carried for. 00:44:07 Speaker 1: Years a lifetime. Yeah, there's short answers, practice and a lot of people use the word affirmations. I use practice. So the question someone asked me once was could you have done this if you didn't lose your house? I lost my house, lots of business, say lost my I didn't decrit bankruptcy because business debt, personal debt. It was business debt. Sold the house to out the debt anyway, so it doesn't sixteen My ex wife transferred all the money into her name. I had sixteen dollars, just took everything. You see gender roles. First, she managed all the bank accounts. So I'm like, okay, I have sixteen dollars. So the question is how could I have done Could I have done this without giving it to that low spot? And I don't know the answer to that question. Having lost everything and then selling parts of the business to salvage some debt, people would insult me the company's buying part of our company kind of fell under the gas lighting of my ex

wife, and then he would insult me life and and practice was this doesn't define me. And I would say that over and over and over and over. This doesn't define me. Another practice was that I tried to stay present. And I don't mean present like my attention in the present. What I mean by present is I have the past identity that's the past, and I have the future predicted outcome. So just try not to think about the future or know myself as the past. And so I would do tracks like I would sit in the car and I wo'dst look at clouds and say about how miserable your life is. Just look at clouds, okay, and accept I have to accept that. Right now my life is miss I mean sued by unions. I'm in a lawsuit, getting divorced, I have to share my kids. My ex wife, this and that or whatever are calling me names, and employees are getting fired, and I just say, this doesn't define me, This doesn't, this doesn't. It says I am the same person. And in Victor Frankel's book, man Search for Meeting helped a lot because he was in Autchwitz and he was beaten and starving and diseased and frozen, and his family killed and ate people to a bed. And his greatest day was if the food line someone dipped the ladle deeper in the soup because you might get a pee because the peas hung out at the bottom of the soup. Okay, my problems were not looking at deep. The ladle went into a bowl of soup, so I'd say, okay, so maybe I'd go bankrupt, maybe I got to borrow some money from my parents or my brother, or maybe I'm going to go on vacation for a long time. Okay, great, but it doesn't define me. It doesn't define me. It doesn't define me. It doesn't define me. And I would say that a thousand times a day, as many times as I needed to say that, and then I would carry it out. If I believe this, and I had people over for dinner, I'm not going to ask them if they had a nice time because I didn't have them here to have a nice time. I had them here because they wanted them here, and I did my best job, not for the outcome, but because I wanted to it. So it didn't matter because asking them only further define myself in terms of my ego. So don't ask. 00:46:55 Speaker 2: Gosh, I'm going to need that affirmation in my life as I hear that. But it is interesting the perspective to think of if you're able to get to the thought process, the system that where you are right now without hitting a breaking point. I do wonder if there's a way to go about it, because to your point, when everything is stripped away from you and you're just sitting there left with bare minimum, the only way to build yourself back up is to just start believing in who you are and believing to your core that you can do whatever you need to do to get out of this. And there is I think we talk about the animal kingdom in this conversation. I feel like there's an instinct that's happening in there where you're like, I'm going to figure out how to do this, but I'm going to come back even better and I'm going to It's almost like a lion, right the lion gets kicked out. 00:47:50 Speaker 3: If we talk about those groups of. 00:47:52 Speaker 2: Lions and there's only one male that wins out, right, now, does another male come in and win it out? And I think that's a fight in about a Well maybe there's something there. I don't know, but it feels like you had this instinct in you to not just survive, but to thrive because of it. 00:48:10 Speaker 1: Well, I think because I believed that the path I took in the past didn't work. The path I took was conventional. College could a degree, get married, start a business, make risks, work hard, kids, work hard, be smart at tension, take risks. We just book on investment and its book on management. 00:48:29 Speaker 3: You did everything right they were supposed to do. 00:48:31 Speaker 1: And then I failed miserably and I closed to bankruptcy and having no money at forty six. And now my business, I wen't got a job for a couple of years, and in part of business, my business is doing eight figure is consistently every year. Right now, I have a wonderful, easy, fantastic life and I'm so grateful for it. And I don't mean that to say anything other than you can do it, and that there are ways to do it. And I take my spiritual practice with me in every aspect of my life. And that's hard, especially at work as a contractor, I have to look at seductive projects and think, wow, time million, it's nice. I'm much of like the owners. I'm I'm much here of like the team cohesive. My inner voice is saying, you know that bad teams, bad projects a walk, and I do. 00:49:18 Speaker 2: And you're evaluating now from a relationship and a belief system now versus just trying to make money. 00:49:26 Speaker 1: Yeah, And that comes from having the confidence that I've transitioned from survival to thrive. And I know that if my business loses money, which has times that might say lose, it's shrunk. I let go of people, and as bad as that is, I can't live my life and not hurt people. Just the way life is, you have to go okay here, Hurting people just happens. My kids are like, oh, I'm not sure where they go to Moms or your house for Christmas. Look, you're gonna hurt somebody. Just choose something, live with it. Stop deciding based on other people's disappointment. You have to live your life. You can't live your life in their life at the same time. So just do it. And I think for me to let people go in the business shrinks, that's just part of being sovereign and making tough decisions. And so I think I now know this is a higher level of survival. My life now is an example. I'm a guide. I'm not here to be better than anybody. I'm here to say these things are possible. This is what happened to me. Take the pieces that are useful for you and use them. And I guess the main messages and mainly for men and for men who are pretending to be something they're not. I'm a guide here to say, yeah, you can do without having to pretend to be something. 00:50:28 Speaker 3: Ay, yeah,

I think they need it. 00:50:30 Speaker 1: I should do. 00:50:31 Speaker 2: Anybody out there needs to hear that message, but particularly men. And I often have a lot of women on this podcast talking about women topics, but I love giving men perspectives. It's actually hard to find guests to speak to men. 00:50:46 Speaker 1: Men are too afraid to get honest truly, and so. 00:50:48 Speaker 2: I always anybody who's ever willing, and I'm like, let's do this because I want to speak to that side, to that population, because I think more men need to hear these things. 00:50:57 Speaker 1: Yeah, I think women can help. I think as a man first of all, for women and for men. If someone needs to pretend to be stronger, they're not. If you're really strong, why you pret If you're really a catch, why are you trying to make yourself look like a catch? If you're great, you don't need to tell someone you're great. Okay. It doesn't mean that at times you'll get overlook because you will, but you're going to be overlooked from the people that aren't. And so I think women and I, by no means ever mean to blame anyone, and certainly last woman. And I have to say that for men are competitive with other men, and they observe when they're successful when they're not. And hey, John over there, he was kind of a dick. Got that girl. I need to be I need to be more rude. More girls like it when you have a lot of bravado and you show your providers. Women got to advocate for yourself and not put your energy into something facade. And men who do not want those women don't look at it like a loss. Don't look at it like you're losing out. And John's got a better vibe or a better rap than you do, because it's just a match based on something on a different consciousness level. And I'm not saying bad, I'm not saying wrong. I'm saying different. That's it. And I think when David Hawkins again, I love Hawkins. He has a scale of consciousness, and consciousness is an energy field, and some people vibrate at a lower energy field, and lower means more animal, more in survival, they steal, they're violent. A lot of people in lower torn places are just trying to survive and it's a more animalistic state of Homo sapien. And then as you grow up the scale of consciousness, your vibrational energy, your consciousness energy. We hear this word a lot of energy. Energy can be emotions which are transient, and also your consciousness level. As your consciousness expands and you're more open hearted and open minded, naturally will be more interested in different things. And so that's where I want people. I hope people will go to make the world a better place and mostly better for themselves. 00:52:48 Speaker 2: And this is such a great conversation, not just from female male perspective, but it's just a great conversation. 00:52:53 Speaker 1: Human to human. 00:52:54 Speaker 2: We're trying to make the world a better place at the end of the day, and to do that is to have conversations like this. And

I love everything you shared, and I think sitting here, I could go down this rabbit. 00:53:05 Speaker 1: Hole for a really long time. I'm happy to come back. I love Nashville. Keep it in mind, I have to come. 00:53:09 Speaker 2: Back, and it's so good. This is so good for people to hear. But I do want to make sure if there's anything else, because that was typically have everybody in one something inspirational or motivational but I feel like you've shared so many beautiful moments of that. But is there anything we haven't touched on that's heavy on your heart, something that you really want to make sure we share, or a point to get across to everybody today you. 00:53:29 Speaker 1: Think there's a couple of main themes. There's nothing wrong with anybody. Nobody's broken. Please don't think you're broken. And one way to move towards a direction that's more conducive to thriving than surviving is just asking yourself if this works for me. At a very micro level, if the food you eat in the morning doesn't work for you, get new food. If you walk to work and it's not fulfilling. I'm not advocating just saying quitting your job. I'm saying use where you are as a stepping stone to new life. But you have to at least recognize and have some awareness. Awareness is a very key thing. You have to be your own coach, and awareness is a self coach. Coach tells you when to tuck in your chin and you dive, and where to throw your hand when you're pitching. You don't have that coach, and so now you have to have your own coach and say I'm aware that this is not a fulfilling career for me, I'm going to transition into someone that I think is going to be fulfilling. Well, I ride this out. I'm not going to disrupt my life and I'm going to move into a place it's better. Look for places that you think aren't exactly perfect for you and find him that the best life you can. Be selfish, that the best life you can. Don't let anyone stop you from having a perfect life. 00:54:42 Speaker 3: That's so good. You still ended up ending on something inspirational or motovational, which just perfect. 00:54:47 Speaker 2: But much of what you said resonates with have your own agency of your own life. And I think a lot of people are desiring that, they're looking for it, they're trying to figure out how, and this is a great starting place. So make sure you check out Dave's bo Bok Alpha's Die Early, and not just for men, but for women as well, in anybody who's looking to just challenge their thought process, which I think is a great starting place for anyone to head on the path to the perfect life that they want to live. 00:55:14 Speaker 3: So Dave, thanks for being. 00:55:15 Speaker 1: Here, and Margan, thank you for having me, I would come back. You need to for the barbecue, but also also for your show. Fair. Thank you. 00:55:22 Speaker 2: It was fun to do a conversation like this one challenging ideas we've been taught in the discourse around human evolution. It's super fascinating to me. Dave's book is linked in the show notes, as is his social media. If you want to connect with him, you can watch these full interviews on YouTube at Webgrolworking, or you can follow along on the podcast Instagram at take this personally. That's it for now. I'm so happy that you're here. Talk to you next week.