Today’s conversation is between Donna McArthur the writer behind The Bright Life and Bowen Dwelle who writes at An Ordinary Disaster, which includes his serialized memoir of the same name.

Donna and I got together recently a conversation focused on change, including why we are sometimes so resistant to making changes, how we’ve overcome that resistance, some big changes that we’ve made in our own lives, the role of physicality and intuition in change — and, of course, what we’re working on next.

If you value authentic, honest, deep, vulnerable conversations between working writers, we think you’ll get a lot out of this discussion.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some other writers of memoir on Substack, and some questions for you. We’d love to hear from you!

Our Conversation

I usually record video as well, but I screwed it up this time, so just use the audio player at the top of the page ⬆️

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We’ve got some questions for you

* What’s the biggest change you’ve made in your own life?

* Have you experienced resistance to change—and how have you overcome that resistance?

* How do you make your best decisions? What’s your relationship with intuition, and how has that evolved over time?

* How do you prepare for making changes?

Some of our own writing

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Donna writes The Bright Life — a guide to a life of possibility and well-being by examining what lies below the layers of daily life, and taking steps to shift and grow.

Bowen’s writing at An Ordinary Disaster includes memoir and personal essay on men, adventure, addiction, depression, love and money.

Other writers we recommend on Substack

The Recovering Academic Of a Sober Mind Michael Mohr's Sincere American WritingJust Enough to Get Me in Trouble The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum Nolan Yuma’s Born Without BordersThe Abbey of Misrule Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan Homegrown Humans Newsletter Brett Scott’s Altered States of Monetary Consciousness

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Today’s conversation is between Latham Turner the writer behind Get Real, Man and Bowen Dwelle who writes at An Ordinary Disaster, which includes his serialized memoir of the same name.

Latham and I got together recently for a deep and wide-ranging conversation covering writing to explore, how “adventure doesn’t happen by accident,” writing as men and the transition into being an older man, using research in storytelling, how “we all need our own philosophy,” the challenge of positive confrontation and “the Goat Work,” how we relate to our immediate geography, long-distance walking, wayfinding, personal spirituality, the gods we’re praying as — and, of course, what we’re working on next.

If you value authentic, honest, deep, vulnerable conversations between working writers, we think you’ll get a lot out of this discussion.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some other writers of memoir on Substack, and some questions for you. We’d love to hear from you!

Our Conversation

Use the audio player at the top of the page, or watch the interview here ⬇️

⭐️⭐️ THANK YOU FOR LISTENING⭐️⭐️

Some of our own writing

* Latham: The Men’s Movement is Dead; Long Live the Men’s Movement

* Bowen: The Man Pays—on the bittersweet joy of being child-free

* Latham: What Will You Die For —on developing a personal philosophy of life

* Bowen: I’m Here to Tell the Truth—the introduction and table of contents to my serialized memoir, An Ordinary Disaster.

Latham and I will both be posting a piece this coming week on the theme of “Recovery” from a group of men including ourselves, Joshua Doležal Michael Mohr Dee Rambeau and Lyle McKeany. You may recall our previous series on “Fatherhood” from September. Be on the lookout for Latham’s piece on December 11 and Bowen’s on the 13th!

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Latham writes Get Real, Man — a newsletter about growing up after you’ve become an adult. It’s part memoir, part essays, but always exploration of an authentic life.

Bowen’s writing at An Ordinary Disaster includes memoir and personal essay on men, adventure, addiction, depression, love and money.

Other writers we recommend on Substack

Inner Life and The Recovering Academic Of a Sober Mind Michael Mohr's Sincere American WritingJust Enough to Get Me in Trouble Deep Fix Sparks from Culture by David Roberts The Bright Life Make Me Good Soil The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum visa's voltaic verses ⚡️ The Abbey of Misrule Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan Homegrown Humans Newsletter Eleanor’s Substack Poetic Outlaws Siesta in the Storm The Ghost

Further Reading and Listening

* 📚 The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker

* 📚 The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, by Sophie Strand

* 📚 Of Boys and Men by Richard V Reeves

* 🎧 Finding Your Soul in The Darkness w/ Francis Weller on Mark Groves podcast

* 🎧 The Evolution of Masculinity w/ Chris Ryan on The Mythic Masculine podcast

* 📚 Bowen’s complete “for men” reading list.

We’ve got some questions for you

* If you’re a writer, what has writing done for you? And if you’re a reader, what do you get from your time spent reading?

* What is your own relationship to adventure and exploring? What’s familiar—and what would be a new challenge?

* How much does the place where you are impact you, as a writer and as a person?

* If you have children (or even if you don’t, but just care about a child in your life), what are the stories and models you want to raise them with?

* What makes you feel like a whole person? What have you learned becoming your whole self that you would share with others?

* Who else needs to be in this conversation about masculinity and men? Who would you point out as positive role models?

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Today’s conversation is betweenSam Kahn, the writer behind Castalia , who also writes as part of the Inner Life collective, and Bowen Dwelle who writesAn Ordinary Disaster, which includes his serialized memoir of the same name.

Sam and I got together for a deep and wide-ranging conversation covering how we came to writing on Substack, the questions of why write? and is it hard?, figuring out how to tell the truth, the challenges of editing, using addiction as the “hinge” for writing, how life can seem like “a series of compulsions,” how writing can be “salvational,” as well as the power of community for writers. We also get to one of my favorite topics: masculinity and identity, which is as complicated—or as simple—as you want to make it. Either way, as Sam puts it, “it’s a valid topic.” Finally, the epistemological boundary between arguing a point of meaning vs. speaking from personal experience, reconnecting with our wild center, and, of course, what we’re working on next.

If you’re someone who values authentic, honest, deep, vulnerable conversations between working writers, we think you’ll get a lot out of this discussion.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some other writers of memoir on Substack, and some questions for you. We’d love to hear from you!

Our Conversation

Listen in the player at the top of the page, or watch the interview on video:

⭐️⭐️ THANK YOU FOR LISTENING⭐️⭐️

Please subscribe

Sam writes at Castalia on literature, politics, and personal reflections.

Bowen writes memoir and personal essay on topics including identity, masculinity, adventure, alcohol, addiction, depression, sports, not having children, and love, among other things.

Some of our writing

* Sam: Against Branding (and Sarah Fay) 

* Bowen: Sex is Better Sober

* Sam: Gentlemen Prefer B*****s

* Bowen: No, it is not a struggle to find good male role models—and, it’s time we got our heads screwed on straight about the “patriarchy.”

Other writers we recommend on Substack

Inner Life The Recovering Academic Get Real, Man Of a Sober Mind Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble Deep Fix Sparks from Culture by David Roberts The Bright Life Mary Tabor "Only connect ..." Make Me Good Soil Grand Hotel Abyss The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum visa's voltaic verses ⚡️ Sherman Alexie The Abbey of Misrule Persuasion Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan Homegrown Humans Newsletter Out of It The Rewilded Soul if not, Paris

Further Reading

* 📖 The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri

* 👁️ The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine, Sophie Strand

* 🎬 The Conversation

* 📚 Bowen’s complete “for men” reading list.

Men’s Writing Group on Substack

Bowen hosts a monthly group for men on Substack writing memoir, autofiction, personal essay and other first-person informed work. This group already includes several strong writers Michael Mohr Latham Turner Joshua Doležal Lyle McKeany Dee Rambeau. Participation is by request and invitation. If you’re interested in joining us, please complete this questionnaire.

We’ve got some questions for you

* Why do you write? Is there a subject or personal complex that serves as a hinge for your writing?

* What are your own compulsions?

* Is writing redemptive (or just another compulsion)? 

* How does Substack change the way we think about writing, art, and sharing ideas?

Did you enjoy this conversation? Use the heart ♡ below to let us know

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I’m glad you’re here! And—this is a reader-supported publication. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a paying subscriber. As a full-time working writer, I appreciate every reader and everyone who chooses to part with five bucks a month to support my writing. Almost all of this Substack remains free; only contribute money if you feel inclined to do so, but there are a few things that I make available only to paying subscribers, like my long-form handbook on intuition.

Michael Mohr is the writer behind Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing and Bowen Dwelle writesAn Ordinary Disaster which includes his serialized memoir of the same name. In addition to their writing, Bowen offers his intuitive Guide Service, and Michael works with writers as a developmental editor.

Michael and I got together for a deep and wide-ranging conversation that covered a number of topics including how our own writing has changed us, patriarchy and personal responsibility, the psychosexual realm between mothers and sons, love, commitment and addiction, women who inspire and support us, and, of course, what we’re working on next.

If you’re a writer who values authentic, no B.S., honest, vulnerable conversations, we think you’ll get a lot out of this discussion.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some other writers of memoir on Substack, further reading on memoir, and some questions for you. We’d love to hear from you!

Use the ♡ and comments below 👇🏻

Our Conversation

Listen in the player at the top of the page, or watch the interview on Youtube

⭐️⭐️ THANK YOU FOR LISTENING⭐️⭐️

Please SUBSCRIBE to both of our Substacks

Bowen writes memoir and personal essay on topics including alcohol, addiction and depression… adventure, fitness, sports, and nature… identity, masculinity, fatherhood and being child-free, love, relationships and sex, among other things. If you’re not already a subscriber to Bowen’s substack, please do take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Michael writes about everything from identity politics to AA and sobriety to existentialism and death to meditation and more. At Sincere American Writing you get a mix of fiction, memoir, personal essay, book reviews, cultural commentary and much more. If you’re not already a subscriber to Michael’s ‘Stack, please take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Our Writing

Here are two of the more popular pieces we’ve written on Substack:

Writers Versus The World — How Writers are Different from Everyone Else

Think of any daring, talented and interesting writer—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Kerouac, Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Baldwin, Mailer, David Foster Wallace, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ottessa Moshfegh, Zadie Smith, Elif Batuman, etc—and you instantly see that the art stems from an intriguing, even dangerous artist. This is causal: Writers are generally an unusual lot. They are weird, freakish, isolated, individual, “different.” The wild eccentric weirdos who the rest of society seems flummoxed and yet often captivated by… Follow this link to read the rest of Michael’s piece.

Other Writers We Like on Substack

Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble by Lyle McKeanyThe Recovering Academic by Joshua Doležal Get Real, Man by Latham TurnerOf a Sober Mind by Dee RambeauThis Is a Newsletter! by That Guy From the Internet Deep Fix by Alex Olshonsky The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum Sherman Alexievisa's voltaic verses ⚡️ by visakan veerasamy Cured: The Memoir by Sarah FayThe Loaf, with Tim Kreider

Further Reading

Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1), Henry MillerThe Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller, Mary V. DearbornBlackout, Sarah HepolaThe Routine Things Around The House, by Stephen DunnThe Women’s Movement, by Joan Didion

Mens Writing Group on Substack

We host a monthly group for men on Substack writing memoir, autofiction, personal essay and other first-person informed work—which really could include just about anything, including fiction.

This group already includes several strong writers Michael Mohr Latham Turner Joshua Doležal Lyle McKeany Dee Rambeau Bowen Dwelle

Participation is by request and invitation. If you’re interested in the possibility of joining us, please complete this questionnaire.

We’ve got some questions for you

* What is the purpose, in your mind, of writing, of Art, of creative expression? Why do it at all?

* What does it mean to be a woman or a man in 2023 America? How has this changed over the past few decades?

* Why do you read memoir? Is this a very different reason than why you read fiction? Why?

* How do you feel about personal responsibility? Does your race or gender condemn you to a certain kind of existence, or can you transcend that?

* How has your mother or father shaped you as an adult? Have you transcended any of that shaping? Why or why not?

Was this worth your time?Use the heart ♡ below to let us know

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An interview with the author

My friend Michael Lipson interviewed me recently about the development and writing of my book-length memoir An Ordinary Disaster.

I'd love to hear from you after listening, so don't be shy about leaving a comment or a question.

Use the Substack audio player at the top of the page ⬆️ to listen to the interview.

Highlights

13:39 …how it's possible to forget something as important as what I was supposed to be, and then, a long ways down the road, come back to fully remembering—not coincidentally, a the point when I was also finally in a position to pursue that.

14:39 What was it like to begin and what were you seeking by doing that?

15:19 …part of the reason that writing began to resurface was my experience changing my relationship with alcohol.

17:19 I was asked to state my purpose and I said, “I'm here to tell the truth.” That felt true, and a very clear, spontaneous expression of the answer to the question of what I'm here to do in this chapter of life.

19:59 I was tired of feeling like I wasn't expressing myself—and also that I didn't know how to.

21:09 I felt like I needed to speak myself into existence.

23:09 …The process of ‘becoming a writer…’ “I had to let the material work with me.”

27:09 “As I confronted myself with the truth…that cemented my sense of self...”

36:09 …having people that I've known for a long time read my work has “made me feel like another person, like another whole part of myself is alive and present and being seen and active in relationship.”

40:39 “I now have the confidence that I am doing what I should be doing and I will get where I'm going by being myself. I don't really have to think about it much at all. I just now am able to be myself, and let that lead.”

43:39 Q: Where is the book in terms of the pathway of Campbell's hero's journey? A: The book is the return, the gold, the treasure.

46:10 “The creative act is a form of dreaming. When I'm writing and imagery or metaphors come in, it's the dream state—it's the colors arising from the unconscious psyche.”

64:09 “…intuition refuses to be named because it's a function of the unconscious and therefore it cannot be named directly. It’s a defining characteristic of working with anything in the unconscious—the shadow, intuition, dreams. You have to move towards them indirectly.”

1:13:00 “the spiritual power of sport is hugely underappreciated. Outdoor sports have been the primary path to reconnection with myself, and to wayfinding in my own life in a way that feels whole and satisfying.”

1:15:00 “you tell the story of how you responded to those things as you’ve aged, and I see this as you’re actively wrestling with de-adulterating yourself and getting to your pure state. ... the gravity field is reducing, and your presence, your aura, your perimeter is expanding at the same time...”

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Thanks 100K to my dear friend Michael Lipson for the interview! Michael is a master coach who has worked with hundreds of leaders and executives, as well as a leader in the world of mens work, through his involvement in EVRYMAN and the Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend.

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Further Reading

Questions for you

* Which parts of the interview hit home for you most?

* Have you ever forgotten something for many years, and then remembered it at a later time in life, perhaps when you were more capable of realizing that dream?

* How has your relationship with the naked truth of your own life evolved over tim, and how has that affected your sense of self?

* Where are you in terms of Campbell's hero's journey, in your own life?

* Have you experienced the spiritual power of outdoor sports?

* Have you ever experienced a time of a dramatic sense of coming more fully into yourself?

Andy Johns is the writer behind Clues Dot Lifehere on Substack and creator of the Clues.life platform. He brings his personal experience with perfectionism, anxiety, and depression to his work on mental health, personal transformation, and the pursuit of meaning and purpose.

Andy and I got together recently for a deep and wide-ranging conversation on the infinity of consciousness, the connection between identity and purpose, and how to build a sense of identity, finding flow in the outdoors, the shapes and patterns of the natural world, and how physical activity can be a key to identity, the Grail myth and how it reveals that how “the absolute truth can only be nothing,” and how the search for purpose may never end, but we can still find a way to a satisfactory answer.

Especially if you’re someone with questions about purpose, identity, and the meaning of life, or if you’ve dealt with depression, anxiety, or a sense of not knowing yourself or where you’re headed, we think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some further reading, and some questions for you — we’d love to hear from you! Use the ♡ and comments below 👇🏻

Andy and Bowen on Meaning and Purpose

Listen to the audio right here on Substack or watch us on YouTube above.

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Please SUBSCRIBE for more of our writing

Bowen writes memoir and personal essay on topics including alcohol, addiction and depression… adventure, fitness, sports, and nature… identity, masculinity, fatherhood and being child-free, advertising, entrepreneurship, and conferences… creativity, intuition, archetypes, consciousness, symbols, and youth… San Francisco, California, travel… love, relationships and sex, among other things. If you’re not already a subscriber to Bowen’s substack, please do take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Andy writes about perfectionism, anxiety, and depression to his work on mental health, personal transformation, and the pursuit of meaning and purpose. If you’re not already a reader and subscriber of Andy’s work, please take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Further Reading

Here are a couple of pieces related to our conversation:

Writing on Purpose, Identity and Meaning

“Defining Purpose” ManTalks podcast

“F**k Finding Your Purpose” Ari In The Air podcast

Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone — John Daniel

He: Understanding Masculine Psychology — Robert A. Johnson

Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home — Toko-pa Turner

We’ve got some questions for you

* Have you struggled with finding or feeling purpose? What has helped?

* What is your own relationship with intuition?

* How do you feel your own identity relates to your ability to find or feel purpose?

* What’s a favorite story from your own life—especially one that you’re a little bit afraid to tell?

Was this worth your time?Use the heart ♡ below to let us know

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Like most people who’ve lived in San Francisco for many years, I’ve been doing yoga on and off since my twenties. I didn’t discover pilates until much later—but I sure wish it had been the other way around! I blew a disc in my back at the age of thirty and had surgery at that time, and now that I know how transformational—and how simple—pilates can be, I’m sure that I never would have injured myself in the first place if I’d been doing it back then.

When I did start doing pilates, I thought it was all about expensive equipment with springs and straps—and mostly taught by and for women. At a certain point I began to seek out more male teachers for all sorts of things, and when I went looking for a man teaching pilates, for men, Sean Vigue came up as the guy who was doing exactly that. I loved his honest, straightforward, kinda goofy vibe from the start, and his approach to pilates—outdoors with just a mat and no equipment—felt much more me.

I got to know Sean to some extent from using his workouts as part of my own fitness routine, and I could tell that he’s a really unique person with his own deep wisdom about the body, a strong positive presence, and a philosophy about living that comes through in his teaching, and so I was curious to meet him face to face, which is what led me to invite him for an interview on BROTHERS AND TEACHERS.

Sean Vigue is leading online fitness instructor and a true pioneer in bringing simple, effective, mat-based pilates to millions of people through his fitness videos. Before he became an athlete and fitness instructor he was an actor, dancer, and singer, and all of that comes through when you see him teach. He puts his experience as a performer to work as an instructor, and he’s also just really good at being himself. Sean’s been an inspiration both in terms of physical fitness, and for his powerful presence.

If you do enjoy this episode, please do take a moment to click the little heart button 🤍 to like this post here on Substack.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this one: What is your relationship with your own body and your physicality—and how does your body, your strength and your physical wellness relate to your identity as a person,  and to your mental health?

Interview

You can listen using the built-in audio player above or watch the video below, although the audio is cleaned up a bit, while the video is just the raw footage.

Sean and I cover a lot in the interview, including Sean’s history as a performer — From theater to fitness — dance and Pilates — pilates for back injuries — Good posture — Health and fitness in our fifties — Fitness and mental health — Massage — Discipline and serving others — Being himself — Singing — old habits — Losing his father — Are those ducks real? — Getting outside — Flow — Entrepreneurship — Never call when you can talk in person — Getting out of your own way — Fitness for kids — how Pilates is transformational — The ‘core’ message — Do it now — Get off your phone — and, perhaps most important of all: Joy through movement.

Further Reading

You can find Sean at https://www.seanviguefitness.com/ and on YouTube and Instagram. Below are just two of Sean’s books—you can find them all on his site.

You might be interested in some of my other writing on the body, especially

Some questions for you

* What is your relationship with your own body and your physicality—and how does your body, your strength and your physical wellness relate to your identity as a person,  and to your mental health?

* Have you ever tried Pilates — and did you know that you can do Pilates anywhere, any time, with only a mat (just like yoga)?

* What is the relationship for you between fitness and creativity?

* Do you have a favorite online fitness instructor or channel?

Please the conversation in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you!

DECIDE NOTHING is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Did you get something good out of this episode? Use the heart ♡ below to let me know.

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Lyle McKeany is the writer behind Just Enough to Get Me in Trouble as well as a creative coach, and Bowen Dwelle writes DECIDE NOTHING, which includes his serialized memoir in progress An Ordinary Disaster, about a man learning to listen to himself.

One of the most powerful things about Substack is community and connection with other writers. Our goal with this new collaborative interview format is to share something deeper about each others’ work with our readers.

We got together on May 11, 2023 for a deep and wide-ranging conversation that covered why we chose to write memoir, the power of story as a way to write oneself into existence, what memoir is (and isn’t), how writing is like music, the power of reading aloud, the value of having a writing group, the biggest pros and cons of Substack, whether we invested in Substack, writing about writing, what we’re afraid to write about, how men can say “sex”, what it’s like to be writing memoir as a man, the value of writing groups, telling the truth, and our biggest challenge as writers.

If you’re a writer who shares pieces of their personal life on the page, if you’re curious about what it’s like to do so, or if you’re a reader of memoir, we think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation.

Following the interview are links to some of our writing, some other writers of memoir on Substack, further reading on memoir, and some questions for you— we’d love to hear from you! Use the ♡ and comments below 👇🏻

Bowen and Lyle on Men Writing Memoir

Listen to the audio right here on Substack or watch us on YouTube above. We haven’t included a transcript because it’s so darn long, but if you’d like to read this instead of listen, just ask in the comments below ⬇️

⭐️⭐️ THANK YOU FOR LISTENING⭐️⭐️

Please SUBSCRIBE for more of our writing

Bowen writes memoir and personal essay on topics including alcohol, addiction and depression… adventure, fitness, sports, and nature… identity, masculinity, fatherhood and being child-free, advertising, entrepreneurship, and conferences… creativity, intuition, archetypes, consciousness, symbols, and youth… San Francisco, California, travel… love, relationships and sex, among other things. If you’re not already a subscriber to Bowen’s substack, please do take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Lyle writes about his own life as a father to a daughter with cerebral palsy, questions such as How do I define success? and What is normal, anyway?, breaking up with his therapist, his previous life in music, as well as home projects, divorce, time, dogs, exercise, FOMO, living in the suburbs, context switching, travel, not caring so much, small talk, and even couches, among other things. If you’re not already a reader and subscriber of Lyle’s work, please take this opportunity to subscribe now.

Further Reading

Here are two of the more popular pieces we’ve written on Substack:

Other Writers of Memoir on Substack

Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing The Recovering Academic by Joshua Doležal Men, Myself, & I: Revelations of an Opened Marriageby Minda Lane Deep Fix by Alex Olshonsky A Memoir Worth Writing by Euwyn Goh Living the In-Between Times by Marika Páez Wiesen visa's voltaic verses ⚡️ by visakan veerasamy Cured: The Memoir by Sarah Fay Practice Space by Andrei Șișman DID YOU SLEEP WITH THE MODELS? by SAM STAGGSInner Workings by Rae Katz The Loaf, with Tim Kreider

Writing on Memoir and… Writing

The Art of Memoir — Karr, MaryMethod Writing: The First Four Concepts — Grapes, JackOn Writing: A Memoir of the Craft — King, StephenBody Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative — Febos, MelissaThe Memoir Project — Smith, Marion RoachThe War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle — Pressfield, StevenSexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1) — Miller, HenryBelonging: Remembering Ourselves Home — Toko-pa Turner

We’ve got some questions for you

* If you’re a writer (or reader) of memoir or personal essay, what brought you to that genre of writing?

* Who are some of your favorite writers of memoir and other personal writing on Substack?

* What are the biggest pros and cons of Substack for you?

* Did you invest in Substack? Why or why not?

* What’s a favorite story from your own life—especially one that you’re a little bit afraid to tell?

Was this worth your time?Use the heart ♡ below to let us know

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Today, I'm speaking with Scott Britton

Scott is a fellow writer, who runs two Substacks, Creator Experiments and Consciousness ∞ The Doorway to Human Evolution. He’s also a fellow entrepreneur as a co-founder of Troops.ai, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2022. Scott has written extensively about his own spiritual journey, in particular about the impact that ten-plus years of meditation and on “exploring consciousness and the boundless self while enjoying the human experience.”

If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast and would like to see more episodes like this one, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

In the meantime, if you do enjoy this episode, please do take a moment to click the little heart button 🤍 to “Like” this post here on Substack. Think of it this way: your click on that little heart is the answer to the question—if someone asked you about it, would you recommend this piece to a friend?

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this one: what is your own understanding of what meditation is, what it’s for, and what kind of impact it can have on one’s life?

Show Notes

Meditation as a sport. Harder to feel the feedback loop of change or progress. Feeling something different in your body. “people get discouraged”

…the thing about a sport is that you can feel yourself getting better.

…awakening the feedback loop with meditation and tuning into the physical aspects…

…when I think about all the awesome experiences, that I've had doing various sports, I've thought of those as like putting awesome in the bank… being able to see that meditation could perhaps deliver that same sort of awesomeness…

“cascading perceived benefits” “the supreme benefit is a still mind — and, what does a still mind get you?” “the source of creativity or breakthrough ideas or insights…derives from…a still mind.”

“We're taught to fill the mind versus create space in the mind.”

“…now we are effectively unlearning all of the learned behaviors.”

“when you talk to most leaders in society, many will cite that the best decisions they ever made were from their gut, like from their intuition…we don't really intentionally practice a skillset around cultivation of that…there's clear attribution to this thing that is really good for decision making. And then there's low investment or unclear directive onto how to do more of it.”

“I actually do think that one can learn how to create more direct and consistent intuitive guidance. …the way to do that in my own experience has been to learn how to still the mind and present a question and patiently.”

“it actually very much is an active practice… There comes a point in time where you can develop a level of stillness and you can effectively present something and then wait for an answer to emerge.”

“when I'm getting that type of clear guidance in a quiet mind, I'm connecting to source, I'm connecting to the highest divinity that my consciousness is an expression of, and that divinity is all knowing, it's all aware.”

one of my own tools is to recognize the state of trying to decide, and to stop and allow space for something to emerge.

a lot of people have described intuition as pattern recognition — patterns that we recognize, but that we can also get better at recognizing.

“you can start to be intentional about setting up the conditions to have lots of creativity.”

“that which consciousness poses a question to, or is focused on, solutions tend to emerge.”

“I have a notebook on my bedside. Before I go to bed, I just ask a question that I want an answer to.”

We need to move to think completely… the movement of the body is part of how we interact with the shapes and patterns of the world. It's part of how we connect with you called it source, with the patterns that we are and that surround us, which is a way of practicing intuition.

the physical and emotional feeling of having an intuitive insight is that same feeling of having found my way…It feels incredible.

Further Reading

You might also check out some of the following books:

Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, by Robert A. Johnson

Practical Jung: Nuts and Bolts of Jungian Psychology, by Harry A. Wilmer

The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, by Annie Murphy Paul

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

…Do stick around, I’ve got some questions for you:

* What is what is your own understanding of what meditation is, and what kind of impact it can have on one’s life?

* What is your relationship with your own intuition? How does it feel when you know you’re on the right path?

* Are there any ways that you have been able to cultivate your own intuition?

* What are you own consciousness-raising practices?

Please join the conversation by answering any or all of these in the comments below.

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If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

…or just share this post with some folks that you love:

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this episode by clicking that cute little heart 🤍down below ↓

Today, I'm speaking with Dr. Adi Jaffe. Adi is the author of a best-selling book outlining a unique perspective on addiction called The Abstinence Myth and a nationally recognized expert on mental health, addiction, relationships and shame. He lectured in the UCLA Psychology department for most of a decade and was the Executive Director and Co-Founder of one of the most progressive mental health treatment facilities in the country before starting his own company called IGNTD, through which Dr Jaffe is changing the way people think about and deal with mental health issues. He’s now working on his next book, to be called Unhooked.

Adi and I met through a mens group called METAL, which is best explained by their catch-phrase “Together, we’re better,” which itself expresses a spirit of community and cooperation amongst men that also comes up in our interview.

If you’re a man and you’re not yet familiar with the world of mens work, and you’d like more community, connection and emotional depth in your life, I highly recommend finding a men's group to participate in.

In addition to all of my writing and podcast episodes, paid subscribers get full access to my entire memoir in progress, access to occasional bonus and AMA posts and chats—and the opportunity to order a copy of my book when it comes out for just the cost of shipping. If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast and would like to see more episodes like this one, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

Join nearly 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

In the meantime, if you do enjoy this episode, please do take a moment to click the little heart button 🤍 to “Like” this post here on Substack. Think of it this way: your click on that little heart is the answer to the question—if someone asked you about it, would you recommend this piece to a friend?

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this one: which is what is your own understanding of how abstinence relates to addiction and recovery? And is absolute abstinence, an absolute requirement for recovery from addiction. And if so, why?

Show Notes

WHAT IS ADDICTION?

In an colloquial sense, “Addiction, broadly, is anytime we engage in habits that are bringing us harm of some sort, and we're having a hard time stopping them or slowing them down.”

In more clinical terms, it’s “people being prevented from functioning in their everyday life…”

SAMHSA’s new definition of addiction has about 40 million people, or more than 10% of the U.S. population suffering from one form of addiction or another, “but it's probably seventy to a hundred million people who struggle with the broader version of what we're talking about.”

“You're not really hooked on social media. You're escaping something else.”

“nobody talked to me about addiction until I was using meth all day every day.”

THE MYTH OF NORMAL

“there's a false dichotomy that gets created between ‘normal’ people and ‘addicts’ and ‘alcoholics.’”

There’s a kind of a cognitive misdirection that we have with the concept of normal. It's average—and nobody is the average. It's a statistical myth. Actually the variation within any “normal” is the full infinite range that exists.

“while we all try to be as normal as possible, nobody wants to be normal.”

we want to be different and accepted—different, but part of something…

what we mean by “normal” is included, invited… and understood.

HOOKED

“many people that I work with, part of the reason they developed their addiction is actually because they felt so abnormal, but felt like they had to temper that. They [felt like they] had to squash their individuality…” to be accepted.

…the way that our culture works these days, we're all primed to get hooked on stuff because we're all hungry for something that we're not getting…

“We do get hooked, but it's not the drugs or the porn…it's these feelings and fears and traumatic experiences and pain points from our childhood or earlier on…”

“a lot of people aren't willing to go get help for their addiction issues because they're not ready to quit.” and they’re under the impression that they will need to “quit” to get help. “There's a false notion in the addiction space that people have to be ready to quit from the beginning.” “90, 95% of people with addiction issues don't get help.”

DON’T FOCUS ON STOPPING

“It is actually wrong to try to stop yourself from doing anything. Stop trying to stop drinking—instead, start trying to fill up your life with other things that you love, that are meaningful to you...”

“I'm not against abstinence, I'm against demanding abstinence as the first step in people's recovery process.”

EXPLORE, ACCEPT, TRANSFORM

“The reason you use…is because it actually does resolve some of the problem short term—without actually causing any long term improvement in those problems. The problem [is] that [it] makes you far less aware of what is actually driving your behavior.”

“everybody looks to the alcohol and the weed and whatever the thing is to stop.”

“Drugs will always take back what they gave you. So if the alcohol gave you anxiety relief, it'll make you more anxious on the other side. In order to counter that, you have to drink more alcohol.”

“I always look for the underlying reasons.”

Similarly: depression is a symptom of not living well. “if you don't change it, nothing's gonna get better.”

COMPLEXITY

“our behavior, our environment, and our biology all play a role—You cannot separate one from the other.” “there are a lot of things in life that are just actually complex—So when people ask me like, is it biology or psychology? That's a dumb question. That's like asking me if a cucumber is a vegetable or green.”

our desperate search for attaching a definitive meaning to addiction or depression is a way of avoiding the real complexity of what's going on, which is that the way we live is causing most of these things and we don't really want to admit that because it's overwhelming.

“at the core core level most of us on this planet right now are under chronic stress”

Most people don't know what it feels like to actually be well.

CHANGE IS EASIER THAN IT OFTEN APPEARS

“we always see the world through our own eyes and our perspective.”

“there's a good probability that 10 years from now you will look at the world differently than you do right now… [and] when that shows up, you will have almost forgotten the view you had 10 years earlier.”

“There's not only one way to look at life.”

“one of the other false stories is that this recovery thing has to be really, really hard.”

“we've been told over and over and over that we can't”

for me, that “I can't'“, was like, “I can't by myself.”

“almost everybody I work with is initially so isolated. It's scary. … the drug use is the only time he gets to connect to people.”

“the work on the flip side, is to get connected.”

“you wanna create a life that is so good, so purposeful, so fulfilling you don't want to escape it.”

COLLABORATION

“I used to live in a scarcity mindset—I thought we live in a zero sum world where if I get something, I have to take it away from somebody else…” “I still have to go do the work; I don't just sit back and expect it to happen, but I didn't realize I could shift my mindset from scarcity to abundance in such a complete way.” → great lesson for men in particular, to learn to collaborate instead of compete.

You can find Adi Jaffe, his book, and everything else at https://www.adijaffe.com and his company IGNTD. He’s also on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/dradijaffe/

Wheel of Life assessment — another version

The METAL men’s group—“Together, we’re better.”

SAMHSA—The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The music is “Unhooked” by Drew Barefoot.

Further Reading

You might be also interested in some of my other writing on alcohol and addiction, especially Change of Heart, A Five-Minute Love Affair With Natural Wine, and Five Years Sober*.

I also recommend the following books on alcohol and addiction:

Annie Grace, This Naked Mind — my favorite book on how to change your relationship with alcohol

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain

Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction

Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth

Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal

David Poses, The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery

Holly Whitaker’s Recovering here on Substack

Amy Dresner, My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

Caroline Knapp, Alcohol, A Love Story

Mary Carr, Lit

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

…Do stick around, I’ve got some questions for you:

* What is your own understanding of how abstinence relates to addiction and recovery? And is absolute abstinence, an absolute requirement for recovery from addiction. And if so, why?

* If you’ve ever felt compelled to do something, what was the underlying cause of the compulsion?

* What is your own relationship with addiction and addictive patterns? Even if you’ve never been addicted to anything at all, what do you know, or think you know, about the mechanisms of addiction? Is there anything that you feel that you need to do—and is it something that you also really want to do?

* What do you think “normal” is? Really?

* Have you ever had the experience of making a significant change to how you are living? What was it like before hand? Afterwards?

* Who else would you like to hear interviewed on BROTHERS AND TEACHERS?

Please join the conversation by answering any or all of these in the comments below.

Become a subscriber

Join more than 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

…or just share this post with some folks that you love:

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this episode by clicking that cute little heart 🤍down below ↓

Today, I'm speaking with Charlie Engle. Charlie is an ultra-endurance athlete, author of an outstanding memoir called Running Man, the subject of a documentary film called Running The Sahara, and the founder of the 5.8 Dead Sea to Everest project, in which he will travel under his own power from the lowest to the highest points on all seven continents. Charlie is also one of the most accomplished ultramarathon runners in the world, having placed in hundreds of races in dozens of countries around the globe.

His motivation to run and tackle extreme adventures stems from his battle with addiction to drugs and alcohol. Charlie has been in recovery since July 23, 1992, and he credits a large part of his recovery to the purposeful devotion and emotional release he experiences while running.

Charlie and I met through my friend Todd Eichler, who I met through my friend and previous guest Adam Gayner, who I met through EVRYMAN, one of the leading organizations for men's work and men's groups. If you’re a man and you’re not yet familiar with the world of mens work, and you’d like more community, connection and emotional depth in your life, I highly recommend finding a men's group to participate in.

I want to say thanks to all of you. There are now 750 of you—subscribers to my Substack, that is, and many have also chosen to become paying supporters. Of all the communities that I’ve been involved in, joined, started, and led over the years, this community of readers, listeners, subscribers and supporters, of fellow writers, and of the broader world of writing is the most gratifying, the most real, and the most of myself of them all. Thank you for being here, and as those of you who have felt to inquire know, my door is open, and so if there’s something you’d like to talk about, just ask.

Particularly huge thanks to folks who have become paying subscribers recently, including Mary, Tommy, Sean, Michael, Thom, John, Zoe, Bill, kingultra01, Julie, Tom, Danielle, Jean, Volker, Taryn, my father Duncan, Anthony, Samir, Peter, and Zach—and to the growing list of other Substackers who recommend my work. Check them out when you get a chance: Scott Britton Andy Johns Chris RyanMichael Mohr David Katznelson and Brad Berens.

Join more than 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

In the meantime, if you do enjoy this episode, please do take a moment to click the little heart button 🤍 to “Like” this post here on Substack. One way to think of the 🤍 button is as a Net Promoter Score—your click on that little heart is the answer to the question—if someone asked you about it, would you recommend this piece to a friend?

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this one: what is your own relationship with addiction and addictive patterns? Even if you’ve never been addicted to anything at all—although that’s doubtful—what do you know, or think you know, about the mechanisms of addiction? Most of what I thought I knew for most of my live was wrong, and it’s been highly informative, useful, and interesting to get more familiar with what addiction really is, and how it affects just about all of us.

Show Notes

RUNNING

how “we all ran when we were kids,” and “it's a thing that we are naturally meant to do.”

“Running isn't what people think it is”

“It's not even running that I like that much. It's stopping. It's the feeling that you get of having done something.”

…human scale and human speed movement…when we move through the world on our own two feet…we see the world and in the way that we evolve to see it.

“coming into a village on foot changes everything.”

DISTANCE IS DIFFERENT

There's something about making a journey over the course of many days under your own power—It becomes a pilgrimage…

“nobody remembers the things that are easy.”

“long expeditions allow me to disconnect from the world in a way that I can't in running a marathon or even running a hundred miler.”

“recovery is all about focusing on what's right in front of you.”

“the end was anticlimactic.”

that full immersion in something so real is something that, we don't get a lot of in regular life.

INTEGRATION

“I didn't know how to integrate the lessons that I had learned along the way into my life.”

“today, pretty much everything that I do, I try to ask myself, how am I using this?”

BORED WHILE RUNNING?

“Ultra Runners as a group are not a particularly bright group of people…”

“I've gotta just get through this next class…”

the natural beauty and fascination of the world pulls me along

the natural elasticity of our conscious experience

BODY MANAGEMENT

“People will ask how's possible to run 5,000 miles…? It's not—it's only mentally possible.”

“there's a great trust that goes on.”

I can consciously activate different muscles or certain parts of my musculature or physiology and, change what's happening on the fly.

“we have a brilliant piece of equipment here, that is way smarter than we are.”

“You try to anticipate what may go wrong.”

“almost always the answer is eat something, drink something and walk or slow down for a minute.”

TRANSCENDENTAL MOMENTS

“I yearn for those moments…it's why I actually do the event because that ability to be in a moment where you're completely empty, find a way to get past it…that's what allows me to not panic when something's going wrong with my business or when things get hard in my marriage, or one of my kids is having problems.”

“the biggest mistake most of us make is we make big decisions at really bad moments.”

“I want to go have a new painful experience somewhere.”

“people talk themselves outta stuff because they are afraid…most of the things we're thinking about are probably just going to be really uncomfortable.”

ADDICTION

“this is the difference between adventure and addiction. The adventure usually turned out to be very difficult but rewarding, whereas the addiction turned out to be nothing but a letdown once I got started…”

addiction tends to reward the acquisition of the feeling, but that the feeling itself is really not so rewarding, whereas with more things that we're attached to, it's kind of the other way around…

“it took me a few years to realize how important and necessary my obsessive nature was and what a valuable asset it is.”

“it is about harnessing the superpower of addiction or obsession and pointing it towards positive things.”

“if you are doing a behavior that's not serving you, then why are you doing it? I don't care if you label it or not. If alcohol is no longer serving you in the way that you hoped that it would, then stop doing it.”

“change very often is a catalyst to, not necessarily easier things, but necessary things.”

for me, choosing to stop drinking was the last thing to change. the end result of that was enough of my consciousness surfacing, that it finally became clear to me that this just doesn't really fit for me anymore.

“there was a recognition finally that, nobody was coming to save me. … what I wanted was someone to actually force me to quit.”

“being vulnerable is the best thing that I've learned how to do.”

“I'd gone to AA meetings to learn how to control my drinking because it was really messing up my drug use. … When I finally quit, I didn't quit forever. … [after] 30 days I couldn't come up with a reason not to keep doing it.”

Classical addiction psychology teaches that the “it” that needs to change is the drinking, but the “it” is something deeper.

“not drinking is not that hard, figuring out the rest of life's the complicated part.”

“Too many people get mired in the, ‘why am I the way I am?’ instead of focusing on ‘how do I get myself out of this?’”

the myth of addiction is that it's something unusual. We're all wired this way. We're not in our bodies enough.

MODERATION IS BORING

“Moderation's boring… I don't spend as much time in the middle ground as other people. A lot of times I'm either up here or I'm down here. …I like it that way.”

“if you're not getting out there in nature and testing your body…what the hell are you doing here?”

DEPRESSION

“if you go on a six day crack binge and you spend all your money, you might be a little depressed right after that…”

“the best way to get myself out of a funk was to help somebody else get out of theirs.”

addiction is depressing, both during and as a result.

feeling low was a symptom of not living right, and I had to be willing to see that as true.

“cut myself some slack… allow ourselves to just be, and not feel the pressure of, oh my God, look at all the things I'm not getting done today.”

You can find Charlie, his book, film and 5.8 Dead Sea to Everest expedition project at CharlieEngle.com

Charlie’s favorite song to listen to while running is September by Earth Wind and Fire.

Further Reading

You might be also interested in some of my other writing on alcohol, especially these two prior pieces Change of Heart and A Five-Minute Love Affair With Natural Wine.

Charlie Engle, Running Man

Running The Sahara film

EVRYMAN mens groups

I also recommend the following books on alcohol and addiction:

Annie Grace, This Naked Mind — my favorite book on how to change your relationship with alcohol

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken Brain

Stanton Peele, Love and Addiction

Adi Jaffe, The Abstinence Myth

Gabor Mate, The Myth of Normal

David Poses, The Weight of Air: A Story of the Lies about Addiction and the Truth about Recovery

Holly Whitaker’s Recovering here on Substack

Amy Dresner, My Fair Junkie: A Memoir of Getting Dirty and Staying Clean

Leslie Jamison, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath

Carl Erik Fisher, The Urge: Our History of Addiction

Johann Hari, Lost Connections

Caroline Knapp, Alcohol, A Love Story

Mary Carr, Lit

Marc Lewis, The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction Is Not a Disease

…Please stick around, I’ve got some questions for you:

* What is your own relationship with addiction and addictive patterns? Even if you’ve never been addicted to anything at all—although that’s doubtful—what do you know, or think you know, about the mechanisms of addiction? Is there anything that you feel that you need to do—and is it something that you also really want to do?

* Is there anything physical, or otherwise, that you do that takes you to extreme states of being?

* Can you see how addiction could be reframed as a super-power and redirected towards positive obsessions?

* Is there anything about how you are currently living that you would like to change?

* Are you a runner? What’s your favorite distance and place to run?

Please join the conversation by answering any or all of these in the comments below.

Become a subscriber

In addition to all of my writing and podcast episodes, paid subscribers get super cool DECIDE NOTHING pins, access to occasional bonus and AMA posts and chats—and the opportunity to order a copy of my book when it comes out for just the cost of shipping. If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

Join nearly 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

…or just share this post with some folks that you love:

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this episode by clicking that cute little heart ❤️down below ↓

Today, I'm speaking with Galen Kirkpatrick. Galen is a professional paraglider pilot and coach, and the 2022 FAI Women’s Pan-American Paragliding Champion, which means that she’s a world-class practitioner of the exceptionally rarified and extraordinary sport of sky racing! Racing paragliders is a lot like sailboat racing in that the object is to complete a given course in the shortest time possible, racing around marks or “turn points”—but it’s all in 3D, up in the sky.

In additional to her passion for flying, she’s a skier, improvisational comedienne and a very talented Tetris player, and, I would add, humble, intelligent, courageous, passionate about her sport and about life, and a pioneer.

I’ve been a paraglider pilot myself, which is how Galen and I met a few years ago, and we both know what it’s like to practice something so incredible, that most people don’t even know exists, and also—whether they’re right about it or not—that most people consider ridiculously dangerous.

Galen stopped in for an interview in between flying trips to Brazil and Colombia, both frequent destinations for pilots this time of year, and I’m excited to share this conversation with you. Galen is the both the first fellow pilot, and the first trans woman I’ve had on the show. She is someone who I’ve learned from, and shares the experience of how paragliding has been a teacher for me and so many others.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this: how has your relationship with gender and your own identity evolved over time?

Join more than 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

Show Notes

Some of the topics that we cover in our talk:

Becoming a professional paraglider pilot

Flying as a discipline — “we require ourselves to get our s**t together.”

Free flight as a form of self-expression

How flying forces you to get your s**t together if you want to fly well, and safely.

Discipline, and how creating an environment where you can remove yourself from the equation — “I really thrive in an environment where I can remove myself from it.”

How flying “becomes not an escape, but sort of like a higher project, something that's to be worked on.”

Risk and Creativity

Fear and Anxiety

Managing Risk — “by seeking expertise and training really hard and immersing myself in the sport, I can manage all this risk, but I'm still performing in a unforgiving environment.”

Identity and Gender Dysphoria

Gender Euphoria

Limiting Nature of a Binary Point of View

Getting More Specific about "Binary"

Deconstruction of Gender

“Men talk about their feelings and women blow snot rockets.”

Activism and Resistance

The Responsibility of Coming Out

Learned to Stop Learning

Paragliding as an Infinite Game

“it's not about in it to win it, it's in it to live it”

You can find Galen on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/galenmmmk/ and in this profile in Cross Country magazine.

The music that you hear briefly is Flying, by Moon Duo.

Further Reading

You can dig into paragliding racing on airtribune.com and also on the FlyMaster Live Tracking site (although it’s pretty opaque). A great resource if you’re interested in paragliding is Gavin McClurg’s Cloudbase Mayhem podcast. If you want to learn to fly, search up your local paragliding school. In the San Francisco Bay Area, I recommend Airtime SF and Penguin Paragliding.

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of sports, paragliding, and identity, especially The Last Time.

Richard Reeves on Equality Without Androgyny

Kathryn Bond Stockton’s book, Gender(s) and interviewed by Ezra Klein Gender Is Complicated for All of Us. Let’s Talk About It.

Become a subscriber

If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

…or just share this post with some folks that you love:

I’ve got some questions for you… please join the conversation.

* How has your relationship with gender and your own identity evolved over time?

* What is your own relationship with risk?

* Do you experience sport as a form of personal expression?

* What might you possibly come out about?—that is, be more open, forward and direct in expressing about yourself?

* Did you learn anything new listening to this conversation?

* Are you playing a finite or an infinite game?

Please join the conversation by answering any or all of these in the comments below.

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this episode by clicking that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today, I'm speaking with Ashanti Branch, who is a pioneer in education reform and in youth mental health. Ashanti is the founder and executive director of The Ever Forward Club, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting marginalized students in their journey towards graduation from high school by providing them emotional tools and mental health support. Ashanti is a keynote speaker and advisor to the U.S. Surgeon General, a Fulbright fellow, and a four-time TEDx speaker.

Raised in Oakland by a single mom on welfare, Ashanti found his passion while tutoring struggling students in a school with a majority of African-American and Latino students. It broke his heart to see 40% of these students want to drop out at such a young age. By helping to fulfill their deeper emotional needs to feel safe, be seen and heard, The Ever Forward Club has helped 100% of its student members graduate from high school, 90% of them enroll in higher education, and has also achieved a 0% incarceration rate compared to the national incarceration rate, which is 8% for black males, age 20 to 24.

Most recently, Ashanti and The Ever Forward Club have formed The Million Mask Movement, dedicated to helping young people reveal their true selves and find out how much they have in common with their peers.

Ashanti and I met through EVRYMAN, one of the leading organizations for men's work and men's groups, and reconnected at the suggestion of one of my previous guests, Michael McDowell. Ashanti and I are both natives of the San Francisco Bay Area, and we are both passionate about helping young men to grow and become more whole.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this: what is the mask that you're wearing, and what part of yourself would you reveal if you took it off?

Join more than 1,000 other subscribers for writing and audio on identity, addiction, and adventure.

Show Notes

Some of the topics that we cover in our talk:

Choosing to prioritize health, and healthier eating. Wanting to show up as his best self.

The meaning of discipline.

What it means to be an adult.

Intimacy, sex and the range of deep connection.

Thinking “wrong” and giving room to explore someone’s thinking.

The power of positive confrontation.

The Million Mask Movement.

You can find Ashanti at https://www.branchspeaks.com, The Ever Forward Club and Million Mask Movement, as well as @branchspeaks on Instagram.

The music is The Mask by the Fugees.

Become a subscriber

If you’re enjoying my writing and podcast, please consider becoming a paying subscriber.

…or just share this post with some folks that you love:

I’ve got some questions for you… please join the conversation.

* What have you learned lately that has changed the way that you live?

* What values do you embody, in your own life?

* What does discipline mean to you, and what’s your own relationship with discipline? (I wrote about my own in Someone Else’s Discipline…)

* What does intimacy mean to you, especially in a non-sexual context?

* What is the mask that you're wearing, and what part of yourself would you reveal if you took it off?

* How do you confront someone in a positive way, with love and respect?

Please join the conversation by answering any or all of these in the comments below.

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this episode by clicking that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today I'm speaking with Kim Stanley Robinson, a true legend of a writer, and also as an advocate for better stewardship of planet Earth and for sustainable cohabitation with all the species that inhabit this unique gem of a planet. Stan has published more than twenty books including the pioneering Mars Trilogy, 2312, Shaman, The Ministry For the Future, and, most recently, The High Sierra: A Love Story. He has received great recognition for both his creative work, his advocacy—and, although he's quick to qualify it as the work of a novelist, the fact is that he’s made quite a mark with his scientific thinking as well.

Stan and I met through the Long Now Foundation here in San Francisco and reconnected through our mutual love of the high Sierra, in particular through the shared experience of independently coming across Paiute obsidian knapping sites simply by following our intuition in looking for good places to rest while out hiking.

Especially since I'm working on building a third career as a writer, I value very highly Stan's life experience as a working artist who's met with such success—and also as someone who embodies warmth, curiosity, irreverence, adventure, poise, truth, and openness, just to name a few of the values that I see in him.

Topics

Stan and I cover a lot of ground that should be interesting to fans of his writing as well as lovers of the high Sierra of California, including the Cardboard Set Problem, physical places as characters in writing, how he became a writer, poetry, how he feels about formal training in creative writing (and MFA programs in particular), the connection between geography and outdoor sports, intuition and the practice of wayfinding, the difference between micro and macro lost, risk and danger, the spiritual practice of ‘being a dog,’ learning to love the inhuman—and other species of ‘people,’ dualism, escape, and balance, our collective embodiment, moving from a model of masculinity based on dominance to one based on resistance, his relationship with Gary Snyder, civilization and progress as “lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win,” and the Kingdom of San Francisco.

As you read or listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or just consider this: what is your relationship with the natural world? How does it feel to be in nature and to be part of nature? And how does that inform you in your daily life, and as you look towards the future?

The Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson

Bowen Dwelle: Stan, welcome to Brothers and Teachers.

Kim Stanley Robinson: My pleasure, Bowen. Good to be with ya.

[00:03:27] The High Sierra

Kim Stanley Robinson: I know that we're here today also to talk about my most recent book, The High Sierra. And that of course is a whole different thing. It's non-fiction. It has a bit of memoir in it. Never have I written directly about myself as much as I have in that book.

And it was kind of uncomfortable to tell you the truth. But in order to express the Sierra properly, I needed to tell my own story. And it would've been crazy not to. So I went ahead and dove in.

Bowen Dwelle: I really felt that, and it was just a lovely surprise and serendipity to come across your book in the little Mono Lake bookshop there in Lee Vining. I was just on my way back from a visit to the high Sierra, and so it just made perfect sense.

It was so striking to me, this relationship between these two very different worlds of backpacking in the high Sierras of California and the futuristic, fictional worlds that you write about.

If they've read the High Sierra, I'm sure other readers can see the places and the scenes directly lifted from there [like] the fell fields and the Terminator, which reminds me of the sunrise coming up over the high Sierras.

How do those relate for you as a writer? I mean, it seems like you began to spend time in the mountains and became a writer around the same time, so how do you inhabit both of those worlds?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, let me ponder that aloud. I grew up in Orange County, and it was a period of rapid change from agriculture in that it was orange groves, literally when I was a kid, to the city, a portion of Los Angeles, suburban automotive. It was a dreadful transformation of that landscape, and quite shocking, although when you're young, it was just natural.

[00:05:21] The Cardboard Set Problem

Kim Stanley Robinson: I didn't register it much until I went to college at uc San Diego, and I discovered science fiction at that point. When I ran into it, it felt right to me. I think that my experience of seeing Orange County transform so quickly meant that when I read into science fiction, that literature seemed more expressive of how things really felt than ordinary literature did, which now struck me as a kind of historical fiction no matter what.

So there I was as a science fiction writer, quite excited. At this point I was maybe 20 years old, a sophomore in college. Filled with big ideas and dreams. And at that same time, I started going to the Sierra, inspired by my friend Terry.

We had been friends since junior high school. We went to college together to go body surfing, and then we were going to the mountains together. And what struck me, and this maybe took a few years, was that science fiction has a standing weakness in formal terms in that you know that it's made up, it's set in the year 3000.

It's set in the future. It's maybe on another planet. When you're reading, you know it's made up. And I eventually called this the cardboard set problem. And this comes from Star Trek. The bridge of the USS Enterprise was clearly a cardboard set.

[00:06:39] Physical Places

Bowen Dwelle: It's very clear that you're fascinated with the physical places, and they're huge characters in your work.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, but this was a conscious choice as a kind of an overcompensation for a structural weakness that is in science fiction itself. So seeing that, that structural weakness, the reader, they know it's made up, the settings tend to be kind of shaky and one's sense that this is more than a dream, that it's reality, which you really want outta literature- that was weaker in science fiction, I felt, and I had experiences that, that were mostly at that point, Sierra based, that would allow me to say, okay, I'm on another planet. And for me that became Mars and the bodies in the solar system that NASA was revealing to us in the late seventies because of Voyager.

Bowen Dwelle: There is something otherworldly about the High Sierra in particular.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Oh yeah. At least to me there's some cheating involved. Like you have to terraform Mars to make it look like the High Sierra. And of course the rocks are different, et cetera. But the American West with its redness and its bare rock aspect, even more than the High Sierra proper, which is a wetter zone than most of the American West.

It looked martian all over and I had spent some time in the Navajo reservation north of Flagstaff and seen what everyone sees as a Southern California that right behind the coastal range, you've got a desert. So, I thought I can do Mars and if I tell the story of terraforming Mars, the more it's terraformed, the more it looks like a place that I really know quite well.

So that was a big driver, and I must say this evolved over decades of work, but it became a habit.

Bowen Dwelle: I see that, the connection between the other worldliness of the mountains and the American West.

[00:08:31] Becoming A Writer

Bowen Dwelle: It leads me back to when did the seed arise in you of the idea of becoming a writer and the idea that you could?

Kim Stanley Robinson: It begins I think by being a reader and loving reading and loving reading fiction, I've always read nonfiction, but in an instrumental way. I like to learn the information. It's not an aesthetic pleasure, but between novels and short stories and also poetry and also plays theater and plays written down.

These were all really important to me as a reader. And I went to college thinking, well I've gotta learn something useful. And I was thinking I would be a lawyer, but I started taking literature classes on the side, and slowly but surely I realized this is really what I'm interested in. So I became a literature major instead, without a good sense that I was going to do anything with it. To tell you the truth, it was a little bit of a scary thing.

When I came near the end of my undergraduate career, I had no prospects and I had no sense of what to do next. So like a lot of people, I went to graduate school to put off the decision. But from very young age, like maybe 12 or so, I started writing little short stories and I had good critical eye.

I could see that my short stories were not good compared to the ones I was reading and loving. And I realized it's harder than it looks. I would put things aside for years. And then I started writing poetry and I would say poetry is a really great way in. It makes you attentive to language, to the sentence and to phrasing.

And also you can do a poem and then you can revise it 20 times. In many traditions, they're like one page long and you just keep on cycling it through till you have to give up. I was never a very good poet, but I was intense about it and it gave me a self-definition.

And then running into science fiction as an undergraduate. The moment I began to try, I had an idea for a science fiction story. I wrote it, it was better than my younger efforts had been, distinctly better. I could see that myself as a reader. I thought, ah, well maybe it's just a matter of growing up. Maybe it's a matter of having ideas. God knows, I could never figure it out, but it was clear that I was better at it than I was when I was 12 when I began.

And at this point, again, I was about 20. It was a lifelong urge that really only coalesced into something that other people would enjoy reading, possibly, and the test of that is whether an editor will buy it from you and publish it. And that happened relatively early for me. I was maybe 22, and I sold a story to Damon Knight, who was my first teacher and editor, and a lovely man and a kind of a mentor figure.

In fact, you know how in the arts, in the Renaissance, you had a patron and really, Damon Knight was more of a patron than he was a customer or a client because he supported me in my mental life.

He's the one who made me feel like, oh, I am a writer. I'm even a professional writer. Although I was making, you know, hundreds of dollars per year.

In other words, not enough to keep going, but it was something that I could regard as my main thing.

[00:11:55] Poetry

Bowen Dwelle: Thank you for that. You know, one of my writing teachers, Jack Grapes—[he’s] out of Los Angeles—who's just a really interesting cat and a poet and certainly teaches that as part of his practice. For me it's a way to get direct access and exposure to, and to work with the structure of language, like the geology of it, the shapes and feelings of the words and the different textures of language.

Kim Stanley Robinson: I love it still. All my life as a novelist, occasionally in my notebooks, cuz for many years I wrote my novels by hand on the backside of pages. Occasionally a poem would strike me, I'd write it down. A lot of 'em are just forgotten in those notebooks. But when the pandemic hit, I got reacquainted with a fellow student from the first writing workshop I ever took at UC San Diego.

And so the teacher was Donald Wesley, who's retired, but he's still very active and quite the writer. And then this fellow student, Tom Marshall, is really a fine poet and the three of us began to exchange poems as a kind of a pandemic Buddhist exercise of dailiness. Well, that was a lot of fun and it's kind of got me back in the game again of paying attention.

I think actually, if you're interested in writing poetry, then paying attention to the moments that might turn into a poem is one of the most important things you have to do. Once the notion occurs to you and you take it at an informal level, like a Buddhist meditation that isn't meant to last forever or isn't meant to be a perfect how can I say it?

An achieved poem like in the tradition of English and American literature, but just a notation, almost like a diary entry that is made into like a little vase. Well, at that point it's just paying attention. And then quite often, the ideas will come.

Bowen Dwelle: I can see these artifacts of awareness in the High Sierra, there are many of them. These little paintings, these little vases, they do strike me as just that. And then I was able to see more of them sprinkled through other stuff of yours.

[00:14:02] Formal Training

Bowen Dwelle: You have a real formal education in writing, not only a master's, but a doctorate as well. How much of that formal training factored into your becoming a writer? Does it come into play at all at this point, in terms of how you think?.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Oh yeah. I never stopped being a student and I wanna make a distinction here. Except for the occasional workshop, like the one I mentioned, I was not a writing major. I was an English major. It was a scholarly pursuit.

Although I've been involved with the Clarion Writing Workshop for most of my life first as a student in 1975 and then helping it to run at uc, San Diego since 2006, I don't think you can do much to teach writing of fiction. I don't believe in the MFA. I don't believe in taking creative writing courses beyond one or two maybe to give yourself some practice and to learn what writing workshops are all about. You can quickly get what they're about. You can strip mine them for their useful craft tips, which if you were to speak them all at once, would take about a half an hour.

Getting a two year course in it is just an indulgence or it's a cash cow for the universities involved. And for the writers, it's maybe a chance to give them some time to write, but it does no good. It doesn't teach you much about what writing really is because what's teachable is brief and simplistic and too general to be of help when you're really faced with a scene or a sentence.

And then on the other hand, it's not a good job credential. You say you've got an MFA, it's worthless unless you've published a lot. And so, that has become increasingly true of a PhD in English as well. But I got the PhD in English in American literature and I think it always has helped me because I know the tradition, I know the canon. I know what Daniel Defoe did when he was writing novels. And I've read a whole lot of great stuff that doesn't resemble what MFA programs produce now. I think that there's sharp blinkers put on the standard MFA courses even now that quote, literary fiction is a very constrained and small minded subset of what novels and literature can really do.

And the more you know of the whole tradition, the more you're realizing that that is a tiny little island in a giant archipelago of greatness. I think one creative writing course in each lifetime is enoughand more is a waste of your time.

Bowen Dwelle: I didn't study writing, I studied geography, and speaking of job prospects, didn't see that many prospects in that either. And so I went sideways from there into software essentially, cuz I was here in San Francisco and had grown up with computers and that sort of stuff. For me, studying writing has mostly been about forming community with other writers and seeing what it is to be a writer by way of other people who are doing it.

[00:17:00] Geography and Sports

Bowen Dwelle: This connection between geography and writing is so strong. For me, that comes together as wayfinding. Being outdoors in the mountains, in particular off trail is the best possible practice or training that there is for wayfinding, literally physically on your feet, on the ground, in the terrain. That translates down into an ability, and a confidence in finding one's way in the world, also has helped me to find my way through my consciousness and my creativity and helped my intuition to flourish. And so I wonder how this practice and all this wayfinding that you've done in the mountains plays into your life as a writer.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Wayfinding and geography, the relationship between humans and the land that they live on. Well, this is a beautiful topic indeed.

Now it's becoming clear that whether you can make a profession out of it or not, it's one of the main projects we have in civilization today, is to do better at geographical comprehension and expertise you might say.

Cross-country hiking in the Sierra, I think of as a kind of a sport, a particular skillset that resembles other sports.

It involves footwork like a soccer player, and then it involves comprehending a landscape to find the easiest or the best way to get from point A to point B. So, like you say, it's wayfinding. It's something that you can get better at with practice. And it involves abstraction, map reading and keeping in mind things that aren't right there for you to see.

And, judging the land that you can see, knowing that foreshortening is happening and that there are inevitable optical illusions.

The better you get at it, the more fun it is. But it also takes a bit of stamina. That's why I call it a sport. It's a kind of simple, slow moving sport. And it doesn't have rules. You aren't competing against other people and nobody's keeping score.

It's like body surfing in that respect, which we loved when we were kids. And I love a lot of sports, to tell you the truth. I like doing things like that. I'm not particularly good at any of them, but I enjoy a lot of them and I'm just good enough to enjoy when things go well and then despair when things go poorly.

I guess I would say this. It's this summer, it'll be 50 years since I first went to the Sierra, and I've been going as much as I can every year since then, which means I, I calculate now that about two years of my life have been spent up there wandering around and without a whole lot of goals.

The main goal eventually became what I would call circum ambulation, like the way Ginsburg and Snyder went around Mount Tamalpais as a Buddhist ritual, the circum ambulation of a peak. Most of our backpacking trips have turned out to be something like that. Go out, do a big circle, inevitably you're gonna circle some peak and get back to your car.

So, as a sport, it's kind of poorly defined, but it is immensely pleasurable to pursue.

[00:20:22] Wayfinding

Bowen Dwelle: Yes, yes. Absolutely. For me, the feeling of wayfinding, of successfully finding one's way, and finding the right path. Not that there's just one, but a path that feels good is something that So many of us struggle with in a larger sense in life, right?

And outdoors, you can really feel that in such a concrete way. And that feeling is just one of the best feelings there is, you know, to feel like I wanted to get over there, it's not quite clear how to get there. I'm gonna use what I know and what I can see and what I can imagine.

That part of it that is being able to see over the mountain, cuz you know enough about how these things work and then you find yourself there and you're like, it feels good in the body. And I just think that that's so good for us as organisms, but also as conscious beings.

It's a sport, a physical sport, but it's also an exercise of the imagination.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah. And it has an aesthetic quality to it, A clean line, I call it, that you took the route with the least amount of effort and most effectiveness. And I think it's very deep in the brain. I mean, it's obvious humans were intensely nomadic and often had a winter home and a summer home.

And then always going over the next hill to see what was there. And spreading across the surface of the earth in a process took most of 50,000 years. Which is a pretty fast speed when it's foot speed and you're taking your whole life with you. It's very deep. It's a deep pleasure.

[00:21:59] Getting Lost

Kim Stanley Robinson: What you said inspired me to remember that there's something creepy but provocative about being lost. And in this High Sierra, you're never macro lost. I would say what happens is you get into basins that are so, ripped by glacier, the granite that you're in a rock maze.

And so you're locally lost even with a topo right in hand trying to get to out of that basin by the way of a cross-country pass, you can be locally lost. In fact, I'll tell a story. I guess it was two summers ago now. September of 2021, I was guiding a couple of friends who had not been up in the Sierras before over Bishop Pass into Dusy Basin, then over Knapsack pass into Palisades Basin. These are trail-less basins at least Palisades Basin that I know quite well. so right underneath the Palisades on effectively their south side, although you could also call it the west side.

Bowen Dwelle: The south and west side.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, exactly. And God, what a beautiful base. And, I'd tried to find a most beautiful campsite that I'd been to a couple few times before just to impress them with its prospects. Cuz it was like being on a plinth, like a castle keep, and you were looking around in all directions and there were the palisades just a mile away to the north.

And I couldn't find that same little plinth. I was mystified, but, I was only a little bit uneasy because I thought I knew where I was. So the next day I was leading them toward Thunderbolt Pass and getting increasingly uneasy, but not sure why. I didn't even feel like I was lost, but I was uneasy and I should have known I was lost cuz I couldn't find that campsite.

And appeared over a ridge, a man in white. He was wearing like a French foreign legion white hat that covered most of his face. He was in white hiking gear with a almost white backpack, a beige. And he immediately headed towards us and I headed towards him. It was a guy from Tennessee who was hiking the Steve Roper High Route entirely by himself with a map, and the guidebook of Steve Roper.

And he said to me, do you know where we are? And I said, yes, I know where we are. And he said, good, I need some help here. I'm trying to find Knapsack Pass. And I said to him, well, you're looking at it, we just came over it yesterday and I pointed up to it and he said, but where are we in Palisades Basin?

So I pointed to the map and I said to him, we're right here. And he goes, no, we're not. He said, I was right there a half an hour ago and we were, I was pointing to a lake shore and they're all unnamed lakes in Palisades Basin, or maybe it was one of the Barrett Lakes and it all suddenly came clear to me. I had spent the previous 12 hours thinking I knew where I was, but I was at the wrong lake, and they were isomorphic. They looked about the same, but they weren't the same. So then what had happened was the men in white, whose name was Tim, but I was so blown away, I never got his last name. He works in music in Nashville, and I hope that someday I meet him again. He thought he was in the wrong place and he was in the right place. I thought I was in the right place, but I was in the wrong place.

We clarified this for each other and I, instead of leading my two friends up and over, I Cecily's pass, which would've been a nightmare I was reoriented, went to the spot that Tim told me about, and suddenly I knew where I was again, with only about a 20 minute adjustment in hiking time and off to Thunderbolt Pass we went.

But I have been so amused at this lesson. There's expert overconfidence and then there's just ordinary overconfidence. But this was a case of expert overconfidence on my part and his was amateur under confidence when he was actually right where he is supposed to be.

So it was a beautiful illustration of you can never really get the Sierras completely wired no matter how much time you spend up there.

[00:26:06] Intuition and Finding My Way

Bowen Dwelle: I heard you say though, that you had a feeling. You know, that you were off, and you didn't quite believe it in a way.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Right?

Bowen Dwelle: To me that's intuition. That's the subtle, you know, the subconscious speaking up, trying to say something and it can't say it perfectly clearly.

And so often we don't pay enough attention. That's part of what I'm getting at, talking about wayfinding. I mean, for me, this physical wayfinding on the ground has helped me to feel better at finding my way in a broader sense.

Kim Stanley Robinson: I think it's analogical, it's an analogy. I'm thinking of my own life, and I wrote about this somewhat in High Sierra. Sometimes you make errors and you know that you've made an error in life. I'm thinking in my own case of I went to Boston for a PhD program and I freaked out.

It was the first winter of my life, and in climactic terms, it was traumatic to me. I thought, I can't live this way. And I bailed out and I returned to San Diego after a single year in Boston. That was a mistake that haunted me for many years afterwards. And the thing is that even when you know you've made a mistake like that one your way finding in your life course has you've maybe explicably, but or inexplicably, you've made an error.

It isn't all that simple to you can't backtrack. You can't go back the point you made a mistake. Sometimes in the Sierras you can go back to the place where you made a mistake, where you lost the trail. And you can try to find it again. You can repeat.

In life, you're kind of stuck with, okay, onward and upward. I'm gonna have to forge on here despite knowing that I made a kind a stupid error, a rookie error or a fearful error. And then you just have to forge on. And this is something I wrote about in my Galileo book. Very often, experience teaches you stuff that is no longer relevant, that it would've been useful to know it when you could have put it to use and now you've learned the lesson.

[00:28:30] Risk

Bowen Dwelle: I want to talk about risk just a little bit. You wrote about this in the High Sierra, and I've heard you talk about it. It seems early on in life you got this idea that danger or risk is kind of decadent, is the word that you've used. And then you explain in High Sierra bit, saying that you've come to not completely write it off, it's just not you, and you didn't feel the need to seek risk in the outdoors in the way that a lot of people, myself included have felt the need to seek more danger, more risk more extreme situations.

In my case, for example, with paragliding, flying in the mountains, the top of your head comes off and stays off. I've since stopped doing it. You know, I kind of had my time flying and I had enough of that. . It was just such a heightened state that I decided I really didn't need it anymore.

I know for a lot of people, seeking that risk is a compensation for some earlier trauma, a need to get out of their heads, get away from something early on.

I was talking to Chris Ryan about this the other day, he's kind of the same way—and I said "maybe you suffer from a lack of trauma."

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, you know, that's one way of putting it. It's a very personal thing and and it could be just a matter of a risk assessment and being easily scared, so that the risk is not felt as a stimulant.

People who like it, one thing for sure, I've seen this in myself and in others, is that whilst you are at risk, you are paying attention. You are in the moment. So if one of the points of meditation and a Buddhist practice is to stay in the moment, well, if you're hanging on a rock wall, then you are in that moment and you're not gonna be thinkin' about tomorrow or yesterday. You are forced to be. So that is attractive to certain people.

I've never felt it, it's too intense for me, the fear factor.

But when I was writing the High Sierra, I suddenly put it together, which is ridiculous cuz it's as obvious as can be. A good childhood friend died of leukemia and I spent a lot of time with him in his last few months. We were 15 years old, so, I'm watching this guy and he's watching me, and we were 15.

We were not articulate, we never talked about it, but on his face, I could see a certain expression, I'm gonna die. You're gonna live. It was a kind of a hunger. I repressed that, that was way too much to take on. And I don't think I properly processed his death for about between say 1966 or whenever it was. I to the point where I don't even know the year 66 or 67 or 68 and then the Winter Olympics where Dan Janssen fell because his sister had died of leukemia.

Bowen Dwelle: The skater you mean?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah. The speed skater. And it was, so that's about that's about a 20 year gap in between for me and when I felt it, so this isn't unusual.

Proust talks about this, the intermittencies of the heart and the literature's by far the best psychological inquiry that we've got, I cuz it doesn't try to generalize and make a generalizations about people that goes to specific cases and yet the generalizations are still there for sure in Prust.

This judgment of climbers, which was intense in me until I got over it, where I was thinking they were choosing to do dangerous things. And that's where I was thinking, this is decadent, this is jaded. They can't get off on anything less than a life-threatening situation. This seems to me to be a blunted sensibility cuz I can get off at looking at a sunset or looking at a piece of granite.

Why can't you, why would you need to take risks to, to get a thrill?

Bowen Dwelle: Like an inability to appreciate the subtle.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, but all that was wrong. That was me misinterpreting the first of all, everybody's different and comes to these things with different motivations. And secondly, there's a lot of behaviors that we're not choosing that are subconscious driven things.

And a lot of climbers, they're just driven to it. It's like, it's more than their religion, it's their nature. If I, you know what I mean? Or maybe not. I'm trying to say that it's so ingrained in their personality that to judge them for it's very inappropriate and in fact, inappropriate analogies while I'm trending in that direction anyway, if you were to judge somebody for their sexual preferences, this would be clearly inappropriate.

And we know that more now than ever before. So that's as intimate as it gets. If somebody also has a set of habits, desires things that they like that you might not like, that's their business. So I had to educate myself by paying attention. Why these strong feelings, why this judgmental quality?

And, you know, to a certain extent, we're always judging ourselves and we're judging other people. And a novelist is always doing, making micro judgements. The stories have morals characters say or do things. You're making judgements all the time. So I'm not saying that it's impossible to be non-judgmental, but you can be a little more discriminating and a little more generous in your sense of judgment.

Bowen Dwelle: Sure, sure. Yeah. I'm aware part of my drive towards more these more extreme sports has been out of a need to compensate for some earlier traumas in a more forceful way, like force myself to get to that state of awareness and attention. It just wasn't enough for me to just kind of sit quietly or, I don't wanna say just, but to walk in the mountains.

I needed something else to kind of do it to me more forcefully, and like I said, in some of those cases along the way, I've gotten my fill of those things, I've felt okay, now, I don't need to do that all the time. I don't need to keep doing that.

And that feels good to have had that realization, and to have moved past some of those extreme states.

Kim Stanley Robinson: I, I have climber friends who are older than me. They're still climbing. They're 75. I don't know how they do it physically, but mentally the thrill is still there for them. And they're obviously, the longer you live as a climber, the more confident you can be that you climb safely that objective dangers exist, but they are low probability and you've got the subjective dangers in hand and it's something that you like to do.

And now I have much more generosity towards that impulse. And I like these climber friends a lot.

[00:35:25] Being a Dog / Frisbee Golf / Sports as a Spiritual Practice

Kim Stanley Robinson: I have a practice that I'll share that has taught me some things. Temple Grandin makes this point, that our brain is conserved and everything that evolution has run us through is still there in the brain so that in very simple terms, we've got a lizard brain at the bottom running autonomous functions, and then a mammal brain in the middle. The temporal lobes that we've been, we are mammals still and mammals all along. And then the human part, the last couple of million years in the prefrontal cortex.

The emotional centers are clustered in the mammal brain. We're feeling creatures very substantially with human thoughts and language on top of that and to turn into a dog. And so my friend Neil and I, we go to a local park that has a Frisbee golf course on it. And we take our Frisbees and we run the course. The crucial thing is to run the course, cuz golf is a finicky and somewhat stupid sport. It's meticulous but with Frisbees, you can, we have more control and we have less care as to scores. We run the course and during that hour we have turned into dogs and you know what I mean?

Park a dog chasing the Frisbee. It leaps in the air, it grabs the Frisbee, it runs back to its person. And then they keep playing that game together. That dog is in the present, and you can return to that part of your brain. It takes a little practice. And I think this is part of what Buddhist practice is, is to practice getting out of past and future and just being in the moment.

And that's experienced as a blessing. And doing it is a kind of a devotional practice. So it's funny that sport, I mean, I've loved it since I was a kid, and partly it might be cause of that mammal aspect that it gets you back in your body and into the present that you're focused on the sport, whatever it may be.

Body surfing was definitely like that. Now, I'm following this train of thought. Walking in the mountains is not quite like that. Walking in the mountains can be thoughtful. You can be lost in your past, you can be thinking about the future. It isn't as point centered as some of these more focused and extreme sports or something repetitive like, the Frisbee running where you turn into a dog. In the mountains, I think you're still fully, all three parts of the brain are fully pumping and there's a lot of time where I'm lost in thought to the point where, oh, I didn't see that last mile of forest or I was thinking about something else.

Bowen Dwelle: Right, right. Well, I think I hear that and I love your description of being a dog and both that and the experience of being in the mountains and climbing, for example, or, I believe me, flying paragliders in mountains, those all to me get to the spiritual nature of sport and something that's often not talked about or lost in our, conception of sport as just the physical doing of it, but the access to other states of mind and to these different levels or, parts of our brain and the different ways of being, and that awareness.

That's something that sport is hugely powerful for. I mean that's part of the reason I love all of the sports that I've practiced over the years and, partly for the physicality, but very much also for the states of being.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah. The two are so close. You can divide 'em up linguistically and it makes sense too. But. At the two in your, in actual experience, they melt together into a oneness that is really and I worry about the younger generation in the way that old people tend to. Has computers, the internet and screens, has that created a massive loss. They talk about nature deficit syndrome and I believe in that, but I also wonder about the physicality deficit syndrome of lost in screens and in ideas. It would be a big loss. It will be bad for your health eventually. And so maybe we're seeing some of that, but also humans are flexible and they'll come around.

I think it might be A problem of some being something new in history, then new and interesting, and then people realize it's not that interesting and maybe they'll pass back into the larger world. You never can tell and everybody's gonna be different on that.

Bowen Dwelle: We are embodied creatures. That's the thing. And going into the future, of course, there's lots of people that just can't wait to get to the disembodied future, because that feels like freedom and immortality and, it's an interesting idea.

[00:40:15] To Love The Inhuman

Bowen Dwelle: But I love being in my body and one of the things that has come up experientially for me in the last several years is this feeling of energetic, connected to sexual feeling that has come up in nature.

It's a feeling of an energetic connectedness, very much in the body. And you can also just say that it kind of turns me on sometimes, just being out in such beautiful, powerful places and being so much in my body.

And this is a bit of a theme I'm starting to see more people talk about. Some people call it ecosexuality, or an energetic intimacy with the world. And I think it does get to this hunger for embodiment and this direct connection that you were just talking about.

Has this ever come up for you? It's an energetic connection. It's not just in the legs, it's in that second chakra, it's in the balls and in the sexual realm.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Being in the mountains is a total experience. And so it's mind, body, and it's all the body. There's a feeling of wholeness and completion, but also an interaction. You can feel that you're an animal and so there's an erotic charge when things are going well, when you're, if you're not in pain, because that can happen too.

And that's a strange state of mind if you have to hike in pain, which sometimes happens. But on the normal state, it's a total body thing that has an erotic component. Very quickly, as a American suburban man up there in the wilderness, you think of mother goddess of the world, which is the Tibetan name for Everest. Mother Nature, the sense that you're in a relationship with a place that is nicely amorphous and undirected. A kind of a surround state rather than a specific interaction. So it gets generalized across the board. And I would say it feels good to be up there in a way that's pretty total.

I don't think of it as specifically sexual, but erotic and all of these words, they cut a little too finely. The feelings are broader and bigger than the words allow typically.

I'll say this, I love to be up there. When I wrote the High Sierra and I put the subtitle, which my editor instantly said is a good idea. A love story. Well, there's multiple love stories in that book that make it very appropriate as a subtitle, but one of the main ones is a feeling. Now how can you love a landscape?

Bowen Dwelle: Oh, but we can, of course.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Oh, absolutely. But a lot of people, when they love a landscape, it's their home. And that you understand completely.

It's where you live. It's a place that you've nurtured and that's nurtured you. It makes sense. When you go out into wild places where you are really a visitor and you are trekking across them, and a landscape that if you were forced to live off of it, you'd be in big trouble. Especially in the winters.

Well, loving that. That's a little bit peculiar. It's a little mysterious to have that intensive a feeling. And it might be aesthetics, it might be that something that it looks beautiful. It doesn't always look nurturing, especially when you get into the higher rocky areas. It looks absolutely alien and inhuman and to love the inhuman this is strange and I think it's worth exploring.

[00:43:56] Meat Packages and Immortaility

Kim Stanley Robinson: I wanna drop back to something that you were saying before, this notion, it's very common in science fiction, they talk about their bodies as their meat packages and that souls or spirits or minds and unfortunately bonded to a meat package.

This is a sign of deep alienation from self self division, and also it's a lie. We're never gonna download our brains into computers. We don't understand brains enough, and computers aren't good enough to do what the brains do, and brains are embodied in fact, a strange form of jelly inside a body. It all works as one.

It's like what you said, this is a dream of transcendence. It's like, I wish I could go to heaven. I wish I could be an angel. And then, what would you do with your days? You'd play your harp on a cloud. I mean, it's all very amorphous. This drive to immortality or to transcendence, to being more than human or being just a mind, it's a replacement for religious ideas. And it might be a fear of mortality that okay, you've only got 90 years or a hundred years. Very often in my science fiction, I say, oh no, you'll get 250 years, which would be great, but you'd still come to an end.

This endedness, this bound quality to our selfhood. A lot of people struggle against that and say, oh, I'd rather be immortal, but you're not gonna be, so there's a certain form of escapism or a lack of acceptance. And this is another reason why I like Buddhism as a way of thinking.

Bowen Dwelle: Buddhism, because it's grounded in acceptance. Is that what you're saying?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes. That it doesn't have an afterlife. I mean, there are forms of Buddhism where they talk about reincarnation, but basically it's always saying, look, we're mortal creatures, we are animals. Pay attention to the moment that you're in.

Bowen Dwelle: Right, right, right. That brings me back to this love of landscape and wild places and certainly for me, that embodied experience of spending time outdoors and active in my body has helped me come to feel a kind of a love for everything, not just people or women or certain places or times or whatever, but for the world on a broader scale.

And like you said, it's a total experience. There is an erotic charge and an activation to that. You know, ask a dog, right? I mean, they feel it for sure.

[00:46:28] Dualism, Escape, and Balance

Kim Stanley Robinson: Although I have to say like when I was younger in particular, there was a dualism going on. If I was in a wild place, I was free. I was happy. And then you'd have to drive back down into civilization, and oftentimes it was like a return to hell.

In fact, we used to stop at a Burger King in order to immediately profane ourselves by doing the stupidest thing possible. Okay, we're back. Let's plug in. Let's not think too hard about what we've just left behind, because, you know, 80% of our time, 90% of our time was gonna be caught in this stupid, post-war American reality that you and I grew up in.

Bowen Dwelle: right? Right.

Kim Stanley Robinson: you'll have to.

Yeah, you gotta free yourself from that [the dualism, the need to escape] somehow.

And so it, it was a good thing for me. Luckily my home life, my life in civilization became very positive and benign. That's another part of the love story of the High Sierra. My wife Lisa and I just celebrated our 40th anniversary. So between that, bringing up children doing the thing of ordinary suburban life, which I would've laughed at when I was in my early twenties, saying, I'm never gonna do that.

And I more or less reproduced my parents' life in Southern California. In a way, it feels ridiculous in a way. It's been profoundly sustaining and I've been lucky. And at that point, going to the Sierras is no longer an escape to freedom and beauty and the wild and the incredible blessing that we have, these wild lands that we are allowed to go up into, which is a privilege and a blessing.

To have the two sides more or less in balance has been a growing thing for me. It's actually quite old at this point, but when it first hit me that I was gonna be just as fine at home as I was up in the wild, that was a major realization.

Bowen Dwelle: I feel you there. Yeah. And I think that's part of what I'm getting at, with my own experience with certain sports and having made the choice to give these things over because, I don't need to escape in that way anymore. And yeah. I'm not just, okay, but very happy and at home and with with less extreme stimulation.

[00:48:48] Trying to Kill Ourselves / Our Collective Embodiment

Bowen Dwelle: There's the one last question that comes to mind, and it goes off this question of immortality or really just human nature. I was reading a bit of ministry for the future over these past several days and I've often been struck myself with the fact that we've managed to create so much beauty and yet also that we're doing our best to kill ourselves and to kill the world along with it.

Your writing about the future is very much an optimistic projection, that we'll continue to create beautiful things. So why do you think that we're caught in this, between creating beauty and trying to destroy ourselves?

Are we just not smart enough yet? Is there some point of evolution of consciousness that we'll get to where we'll get past this destructive nature? Or is that something that just part of humanity forever?

Kim Stanley Robinson: Well, it's a good question. And I have been thinking about it a lot. It's part of being a utopian science fiction writer. Once you say a utopian science fiction writer, you're committed to viewing the positive potentialities that we could make a better world. Therefore, we should make a better world, a social world. I mean, we should make a human society worldwide that is In a great balance with the biosphere. That is our ultimate sustaining support system. And also really our extended body, like you said before,

Bowen Dwelle: it's our collective embodiment

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes. it's our extended body. And it's like we're cutting off our feet in order to make hang glider wings.

It's not a smart thing we've done now, but on the other hand, a lot of that happened by accident. So, I would say the science itself is a project. You try to understand the world. You try to get more control over it. You try to create more comfort, more pleasure. You do these things out of positive motivations. You don't want suffering. You would like to have better medicine. You'd like to have longer lives, healthier lives. You'd like to have more opportunities. You'd like to see the world, which is a very profound pleasure.

And so all these things, developed industrial civilization out of the best of motives, but then side effects like the obvious one, the CO2 burn, the release fossil fuels into the atmosphere, and now we're gonna cook the planet and cause a mass extinction event.

Bowen Dwelle: We were just following a branch on the tree...

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yes, you know, by starting to use oil to power our civilization, we saved the whales who were being killed to use their oil. And so at first, oil was a great blessing for the whales, for instance they would be extinct without these Pennsylvania oil fields leaking oil and the burning of coal, et cetera.

So then the side effects hit, or the negative effects of doing good things hit. And sometimes like now they can be overwhelming and all of the good that we've done can collapse under the side effects of the bad. Now, at that point, you do have a choice to make and it's a moral choice. You can say, well, let's get out of this situation. Let's continue to improve. Let's invent and institute and pay for clean tech, and we can do it. and because we can do it, we should do it, and all will be well, and we will develop a steady state, a permaculture names for it are all over the place. You know what I mean? But there's a certain dark streak, a stubbornness to admit that you were wrong and to get caught up in a mindset of if I have to change or else the world is wrecked, then the world is gonna be wrecked and I am not gonna change.

So there's a narcissism, there's a narcissistic response that in Ministry, I talk about this as the Götterdammerung the last scene in Wagner where the gods, if they're gonna go down, they're taking the world with them. So this is an interesting thing for us to talk about. as privileged Californian older white men because it's a patriarchy thing. It's a capitalist thing. We've led relatively privileged lives despite our scrambles, being in the precariat.

Bowen Dwelle: I think what you're getting at is like being privileged enough to not feel the need to have to change.

Kim Stanley Robinson: right.

Bowen Dwelle: we're not used to having to change. We're not used to having to give things up.

Kim Stanley Robinson: No. And we've been, I, if you look at all of human history, we are in the aristocracy for sure of of world history. We are in that top of 5% in terms of privilege and comfort and security, all these things. So a certain number of and I'm not saying it's entirely confined to men, but it is a kind of a testosterone slash patriarchal stubbornness of like, I'm right. I'm never gonna change. If you ask me to change, you're insulting me. And I'd rather see the world go to hell than change my privileged ways.

And this, I would say is a big portion of the Republican party. I mean, if you have that attitude, you gravitate towards the more right wing part of the Republican party.

And I don't wanna characterize all of them because there are so many good, decent Republicans or there were in this country, that it would be overly partisan to just tag an entire half of the country's population and also the other half being men as opposed to women. All these things are very, very mixed, and I don't wanna overgeneralize, but the Götterdammerung response is mentally ill.

It hurts your own children. And it's a thing that has to be fought and it's an one name for the political battle that we're in, is to convince enough people that the health of the planet is the health of your own body.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes, I love that.

[00:54:48] Gary Snyder

Bowen Dwelle: We've just come around to what could be a whole nother conversation about masculinity and the nature of identity. One of the things that you brought in the High Sierra, I think you were talking about your relationship with Gary Snyder and about how he taught you about this idea of resistance, of moving in masculinity from a dominance to resistance. I agree very much that that's the juncture that, we are at as men certainly in broad terms in this age, that it's our choice to move past where we've been and to resist it.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Yeah, I'd like to talk about Gary a little bit because he's been so important to me, and I talk about this in the High Sierra book, so I'll paraphrase it a little bit that say you wanna be an American male writer, and it's 1965 1968 The role models out there, Jack Kerouac at the, at the outsider, and then all of the New York famous ones as the insiders in American culture.

They were They were really shitty to the women in their lives, and it was standard operating procedure. So there was a lot of alcohol, there was a lot of abuse of women, and this was okay because it was, you were a great writer. You could get away with that and you would still be a great writer even though you were doing these shitty things to the people in your life.

And there were, if you're looking around for role models, it was a kind of a barren landscape for role models that I felt attracted to. And then there was Gary Snyder, which he popped into my view at the same time as the mountains and Buddhism and LSD and writing poetry. And there's Gary Snyder and he's like coming back from Japan and he's saying, no, I'm a family man.

I wanna buy some land. I wanna stay on it forever. I it's marijuana rather than alcohol. It's being a hippie and a Buddhist rather than a Christian and a, and a power tripper of the East Coast. Male writer variety. These shoddy stories of personal excess and pain for other people while you are the genius writer that it, they inhabited America's ins imaginary as to what a writer should be like.

A horrible. Power trip. And so Gary, when I understood what he was up to, and it came with all the rest of the things that were happening to me when I was young, talk about wayfinding. He was like the guy up on the path going, you know, if you come this way, it's really beautiful over here.

It's a much better trip than getting on the freeway and driving down to New York and being on TV, come up this direction and you're gonna have more fun. Well, it blew my mind and it changed my life. And it was only much, much later that I actually met Gary in person and was happy to

see that he's just as rock solid as you might imagine. There is no artifice in him. He's a scholar and a gentleman and a sweet super smart poet living a California life that you could admire. And so I've had a much more suburban existence, much more conventional existence than he has, but he's been a guiding light for me, an exemplary figure.

Bowen Dwelle: That's great to hear. That's part of the reason that I'm doing this as just part of my life and my practice is to expose myself to better examples.

[00:58:11] Lose lose lose lose lose lose, Win

Bowen Dwelle: Back on the question of giving things up, and not being in the habit of having to give things up, or just surrender what can seem to some like such hard won gains.

Are we ever gonna get past this human dilemma of destruction and creation and learn to give up some of what we think of as our power?

Kim Stanley Robinson: We're in such a climate emergency right now that everything is in kind of crisis mode, and that'll be true for the rest of our lives. And it's gonna be a mixed picture. I've been trying to encourage people by emphasizing that they're gonna be a lot of losses and a lot of defeats, like my story of the American Revolution, which goes lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, lose, win.

It's important not to freak out, because the news will be frequently of defeats and losses. But the undercurrent of the larger, longer story, hopefully, it will have that bend in its arc towards justice that Martin Luther King talked about. And all you can do is do your own part and try to encourage people.

[00:59:18] The Kingdom of San Francisco

Kim Stanley Robinson: We are both part of the larger kingdom of San Francisco and as a cultural capital of the world, San Francisco is something to be proud of.

It's really the cultural capital of California and it's a world site. It's physically beautiful, landscape beautiful and culturally beautiful.

And this has to do with diversity, with acceptance of previously unaccepted versions of sexuality and gender. You can be like me, the most ordinary, straight suburban guy, just as boring a life as you could possibly imagine and still benefit from being part of San Francisco culture.

And what the young people there have taught me, cuz they mostly were younger than me by the time I began to live here and get educated by them. What I've learned from them is so encouraging. So it's like I was seeing into the future a few decades, and I trust that the rest of the world will be changing in the same way because it's just more sustainable ecologically, but also in human terms.

We're lucky just to have lived here. Speaking of bringing it back to landscape, that whole California experience is way more than the beautiful hills and valleys and mountains. It has to do with the people that came here and what they made. And so all props and kudos to San Francisco culture and all the people that have made it.

I think as a provincial, like I live in the provinces of San Francisco, cuz Davis is utterly boring little college town. But because we go down to the capital of our province, we have an exciting center to our lives and a place where you can feel that history might turn out okay because just in the last 70 years, San Francisco has changed the world.

And so maybe that will continue.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah. I heard you mention your love of San Francisco. I just listened to your talk that you did with City Arts and Lectures, and as a native San Franciscan, I'm very proud of this place, and I think it comes back to geography.

a, it's a beautiful place, and it's a very stimulating, activating place. There's lots to look at. There's lots to explore, on foot and otherwise, and,

Kim Stanley Robinson: It's human scale. Yeah, human scale, which matters a lot, that you can see the extent of it in all sides when you're on one of the hills. No, you're right, in geographical terms, it's a blessed place and people have done right by it, more or less usually—with the obvious struggles and exceptions.

It's been a comfort, since Davis is kind of like a Midwestern college town, I've got the small college town benefits, and I've got San Francisco benefits within an hour. We're lucky men. That's a good way to end it, I think.

Bowen Dwelle: Absolutely. Yes. It's a great place to be. It's part of the wealth that we've inherited of the place.

Finding Stan

You can find Kim Stanley Robinson’s books everywhere. He’s not on social media himself, but there is a fan site at https://kimstanleyrobinson.info, as well as a KSR subreddit, and he speaks regularly at events in San Francisco and elsewhere.

Further Reading

Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 • The High Sierra: A Love Story • The Ministry For the Future

Davis, Scott, Snyder, Opening the Mountain: Circumabulating Mount Tamalpais

The Long Now Foundation • The Half Earth Project

This interview is part of a series in my podcast right here on Substack, some highlights of which include:

You might also be interested in some of my own writing on the topics that Stan and I covered, including:

Become a subscriber

DECIDE NOTHING is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I’ve got some questions for you…

* If you’re a writer, what sort of formal training have you pursued, and how useful has it been for you? (I’ve taken a bunch of independent classes and workshops, probably the best of which overall have been Jack Grapes’ Method Writing).

* Have you ever been macro lost? (I have to say, I haven’t, and I’m sort of wondering how I might actually get that lost… It’s not that easy).

* Have you experienced how wayfinding in the physical world can contribute to a better sense of finding one’s way in life?

* What’s your own relationship with risk and danger?

* Have you ever experienced an erotic charge from being in the mountains? (I’ve written a bit about this in this piece, and Liz Goldwyn writes well about this in her book Sex, Health, and Consciousness).

* What is your own relationship with the natural world? How does it feel to be in nature and to be part of nature? And how does that inform you in your daily life, and as you look towards the future

* Have you ever consciously given something up? How did that feel, and what were the results? (I write about one of my own experiences giving something up in The Last Time).

* What are some of your favorite science fiction reads? (Aside from KSR, one of my favorites is Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix Plus)

And finally, please let me know that you enjoyed this piece by click the cute little heart 🤍 right below

👇🏻

Today I'm speaking with Chris Ryan, author of Sex at Dawn, Civilized to Death and a very active Substack called Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan as well as his long running podcast by the same name. I came across Sex at Dawn several years ago and that book has played a big part in cracking open my thinking about love, sex, and relationship, as it has for many many others. More recently, I took the opportunity to meet up with Chris at a retreat that he co-hosted in Montana, where we connected as fellow writers, van travelers, hot spring aficionados and former-but-not-current-users of psychedelic substances. Chris mentioned that he and his partner Anya Kaats would be spending the winter in Crestone and invited me to stop by sometime, and so, just a couple of months later, I found myself recording this interview in his little office studio slash guest bedroom... and so... I think it's fair to say that I've been in bed with Chris Ryan.

Especially since I'm working on building a third career as a writer, I really value Chris' life experience as a working artist who's met with some success—and as someone who embodies warmth, curiosity, irreverence, adventure, equanimity, poise, truth, and openness, just to name a few of the values that I see and share.

I'm grateful to Chris and Anya for the invitation to visit with them in Crestone, and for his support of my efforts with this podcast and as a writer. As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or consider just this one: is there anything about yourself that you have come out about—or that you haven't come out about, but could, or would like to embody more openly?

Show Notes

Changing the Relationship with Alcohol

“The problem is the lack of problem.” I suggest that perhaps he “suffers from a lack of trauma.” He feels that he didn’t need to stop, but he “wanted to clearly know that I was in charge.” “It works well when the dog knows you’re the boss.” It’s not so much the question of whether there’s a “problem”—if you feel like changing, that’s reason enough. “A lot of people feel like it’s a failure to give up and let go of things that used to work…”

Maia Szalavitz’s thesis in Unbroken Brain that there is no such thing as an “addictive personality,” and that addiction is a learning disorder. Stanton Peele’s book Love and Addiction. If you have a “hole in your psyche,” the problem isn’t the substance, it’s the hole.

Learning to let go… to choose to close a chapter consciously, not as the result of some catastrophe, or of ‘hitting bottom.’ “If you let go, that's empowering—as opposed to having it ripped from your grasp…” “There's something powerful about letting go… There's power in conscious loss.” We have a culture of attachment… of attainment, of accumulation…

When I choose to let go of things, I can look back and see the gold in the past. “Why would you want to carry around the ashes?” “If you don't put it down, then you can't up anything else.” I write about letting go in The Last Time.

Relationships with other men, and with women, and how coming out is a form of “facing a fire.”

“A lot of straight men are just f*****g boring.” “A lot of my closest male friends have been gay… Those relationships had an intensity and an openness that I rarely find with straight men” “Straight men are fragile.” “To be a gay man…means that you have faced a fire.” “They’ve been through the experience of saying ‘f**k it, I'm gonna be authentic.’” A lot of us remain untempered without some sort of defining challenge.

Homosociality

“I think there's a lot of homoerotic energy in this culture of masculinity.” “Vulnerability and courage are two expressions of the same thing.” Grayson Perry. David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities. Eve Sedgwick. There is a continuum between homosociality and homosexuality. We have a need and a hunger for intimacy and affection that isn’t sexual. “One of the pleasures of watching sports is seeing this unrestrained expression of love and happiness…and joy with a group of men.” We experience homosocial contact—and being in our bodies—vicariously through sports.

Dogs and Children

“If I were living the way humans were designed to live…then kids and dogs are just part of the deal…” “I don't want to be locked into that b******t world by way of a kid…” It always seemed like kindof a bad deal to me. Seth Rogan: ‘If I don’t have kids, maybe I’ll feel bad about that for the two or three months just before I die… but if I do have kids, and it’s a mistake, I’m gonna feel bad about that for fifty years.” “You should never write a book unless you absolutely have to…and I think that way about kids. You shouldn't have kids unless you really really need to.”

Grief Becomes a Constant

“As I get older, grief becomes a constant. … In addition to those people that are gone, there’s also the potential lives that you aren’t gonna live". The “fantasy of what could happen in my life. You get older and it narrows.” There’s just not enough time to do everything. He doesn’t feel conflicted about kids… For me, “allowing myself to feel the grief is part of letting that go.” Chris says that, “I admire that…but I don’t envy it.” Choosing to not have children as a form of resistance to our current cultural and economic model of what it means to be a man. “Kids are like a clock on the wall” that help to keep track of how old we are…

Identity and his own ‘Coming Out’

When do you feel that you became the version of yourself that you are now? the “perfect embodiment of this self…it’s like two images that come over each other and there’s that moment that they line up perfectly…like an eclipse…” That feeling of “this is exactly where I need to be.” A moment of realization that “it was monogamy that was freaking me out…I didn’t understand that because I’d never conceived that there was any other possibility for a way to arrange a relationship…” that led to his own ‘coming out,’ as “not, by nature, monogamous,” and how taking that fork in the road tempered him. The challenge of choosing to honest with himself—and everyone else.

Love

The conflict of being forced to only love one person. Feeling love as a “closure.” “Its not about monogamy or non-monogamy, it’s about authenticity.” “People come to me for relationship advice… The only approach I advocate is authenticity and honesty and sincerity, and compassion for where your partner is coming from.” Love as a vehicle for growth and expansion.

Generosity, Giving and Taking

It’s about balance. “Energy flows through us.” Learning to accept from others… and learning to ask. “We feel weak because a muscle is growing.” Who’s giving, who’s getting, whose stuff is it… “The first forty years of my life was an inhalation, and somewhere around forty…was the beginning of an exhalation.” “You do own something to the celestial bank account…” “Not having kids means you’re able to be generous to a lot more people.”

You can find Chris on Substack at Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan and on the web at https://chrisryanphd.com.

DECIDE NOTHING is a reader-supported publication. To receive new writing and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

References and further reading

I do highly recommend joining me as a subscriber to Chris' Substack Tangentially Speaking with Chris Ryan... and you might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of alcohol, masculinity, identity, fatherhood—especially

…as well as these books and other resources:

Maia Szalavitz, Unbroken BrainStanton Peele, Love and Addiction Grayson Perry on Youtube and his great book The Descent of ManDavid Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial DesireSeth Rogan on not having kids

I’ve got some questions for you…

* What is your own relationship with alcohol, and how has that changed over time? Is there anything about that relationship that you’re aware of wanting to change?

* How do your own relationships with other men, or women, play into your relationships with women, or men, or whichever?

* Is there anything about yourself that you have come out about—or that you you haven't, but could, or would like to embody more openly? What has that coming out done for you—or, what could it do for you?

* Do you have kids? How did you end up as a parent, or not? What has that been like for you?

* Is there anything that you have consciously given up—and what was that experience like?

* And… what would you have asked Chris in an interview?

Happy New Year from San Francisco

And finally, please let me know if you enjoyed this piece by click the little heart below 🤍

👇🏻

This conversation is part of a series of interviews with various brothers and teachers, including many fellow writers, all of which are part of the body of work surrounding my book-length memoir An Ordinary Disaster—one man's proof that we can all learn to listen to ourselves, and to act upon the inner voice of our self, our sanity and our soul.

Today I'm talking with Bill Maeda, a very humbly self-described "54-year old married dad," a lifelong athlete and personal trainer, and, more recently, something of an accidental TikTok star. Although Bill has been into fitness and physical training since he was a teenager, his journey to finding his strength again in middle-age after a bout with cancer and depression is particularly inspirational—and that, along with his warm, open, direct, very strong—and very funny presence is what's led so many people to connect with him on social media. I reached out to Bill out of the blue as someone that I saw embodying positive presence, and he very generously accepted because he appreciated my invitation and wanted to be part of the mission of what I'm doing with the show.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes, or consider this: what is your relationship with your own body and your physicality, and how does your body, your strength, and your physical wellness relate to your identity and your mental health?

Show Notes

Getting into trouble at an early age—and early signs of his physicality being very active. He didn’t want to be a “jock,” but he did start lifting weights, and despite also taking up smoking cannabis at the same time, he showed a strong affinity for weightlifting.

As his fellow high school students started to take notice, he began to teach and train them, and was soon invited back into the gym at the private school that he had had to leave just a couple of years prior due to bad grades.

Becoming his current self—fairly recently. Colon cancer in 2012, long recovery and slide into depression. He had an “arrogant delusion” that “cancer doesn't happen to me,” and had a serious and very humbling struggle to recover his physicality that resulted in a dive in to depression.

Looking back, he sees the roots of his depression in a childhood “shielded from challenge and adversity,” and that he “didn't know what it was like to overcome hardship” until he got cancer. That hardship, and the isolation and repetition of working solo with clients led him to feel alone and a lack of “texture” in his life.

Being challenged by one of his clients to start posting on YouTube brought him into contact with people all over the world, which helped him to realize how much he needed connection and “unpredictable interactions” to feel normal and good.

Bill talks about self awareness and having a “strong moral compass,” that has roots in seeing his dad’s willingness to apologize and another mentor’s focus on finding win-win solutions, and grew into an inclination towards kindness and patience, both of which have been reinforced by his experience as a father.

We talk about what he calls “violent expression” as something that humans have and need to express, for self-defense, and as an objective for physical training. We need to express this “potential energy,” otherwise it will back up in the system, just like any other shadow.

We talk about his journey to fatherhood, and how he always knew that he was going to be a father, but didn’t want to be one until he “calmed down” enough. Now he has two daughters. Even so, at first he didn’t see his first daughter as a ‘person,’ until she told him to “dip it” one day when he was eating tough bread with a bowl of soup. This moment was a paradigm shift and he sees that as “the day where I became a dad.”

I asked Bill what he’s afraid of, and he expressed his concern for the lack of connection and engagement so many of us are seeing and feeling, in part due to how pervasive social media and other technology is these days. He’s doing his part to help people be active and connect with each other—and imagines that it may require something like the Bai Lan phenomenon that’s currently happening in China to shake us up.

You can connect with Bill on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

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Further reading

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of depression, fatherhood, connection, and physicality, in particular The Man Pays and Freedom at all Costs.

…I’ve got some questions for you…

* If you have experienced depression, what is it like? Have you been able to identify any root causes or contributing factors?

* What do you think about what Bill calls “violent expression”? Is this something that you ever feel or have the opportunity to express?

* What is your relationship with your own body and your physicality—and how does your body, your strength and your physical wellness relate to your identity as a person,  and to your mental health?

* Where is your own moral compass pointing? What the values that you hold close and seek to embody?

* What keeps you on your toes?

Finally, please let me know that you enjoyed this piece by clicking that cute little red heart ❤️right here ↓

Today I'm talking with Fernando Desouches, Managing Director of the New Macho strategic division at London-based brand marketing agency BBD Perfect Storm, whose mission is to help brands grow through positive gender narratives. Along the way Fernando led a radical repositioning of Unilever's Axe brand and has worked with many other global brands to help them stay relevant, dispel negative cliches and redefine how they approach and understand masculinity.

It took me a minute to remember how I came across Fernando's name, but it was originally from a blog post that Loic Le Meur did with Michael Katz about meditation and lucid dreaming. I looked up Michael's name and came across a podcast interview that he did, and then from looking through other episodes of that show, I came across Fernando's name…and now he's on the show here.  Fernando's accent can be pretty tricky to understand, so in this case, I have provided the full transcript of our interview below.

It is well worth the slight extra effort in listening, as Fernando is working at the cutting edge of masculinity, identity, and gender—and he kind of blew my mind with what's going on today in the world of brands, advertising and marketing, and how some brands are taking the lead in moving towards a more sustainable relationship with customers, and in helping to inspire people to come into better relationship with themselves.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of the show notes or at least consider just one, which is: what does identity mean to you in the context of gender? And where do you think cultural constructs like masculinity and femininity are headed? I'd love to hear from you, and you can subscribe, recommend, share, and comment right at the bottom of this page or in whatever app you're listening with.

Fernando is doing important work and bringing the conversation around evolving masculinity into the very powerful realm of advertising and marketing. He's someone whose work I respect, who is speaking up with his own voice as a new man and who I want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why  I've invited him to be with us here today.

Transcript

Bowen Dwelle: Fernando, so great to have you with me. So really first question. How did you come to be doing this? What inspired you as a marketing person, a brand strategist, to bring this point of view about the new man and involving masculinity into your work?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah it's interesting. So it is like when you can join the dots from the past , like Steve Jobs said. I work 18 years in a [00:04:00] company called Unilever. Quite famous, big company. Just was certain deputy I realized later that I work most of the time either in brands that talked to men or brands that then I launch a men part.

The Axe Effect

Fernando Desouches: So I worked for Man plus Care three years , and then nine years for Axe. But also I worked for Suave and launched Suave Men in Argentina . What got me the attention is something that happens in parallel. That is my middle age crisis at the moment.

My assignment was to reposition the Axe campaign, the campaign idea what the brand stand for. In the past, the brand was super clear. It has a promise that was called the Axe Effect when you wear the fragrance and then you get as many women as possible. But then we realized that this wasn't working with the same direction anymore, and this was the year 2013. So we did a deep research to understand where men were across the globe in 10 countries. We talked to 3,500 guys. And in the output, we got for that study, there was [00:05:00] a slide that I really engaged to really resonated with me that saysmen are performing their masculinity and not live it.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And I said, I see this all around. We don't need to go to China or in the States. It was all across the globe. But also I was seeing in Iran, I said, Yeah, that is true. So men are performing who they are, not their masculinity. I said, something is very weird, and we need to do something about it. And this is how that changed the brand. And we went for a place that would transform how the brand communicate with men.

From Conquering to Connection

Fernando Desouches: That was through attraction in a very singular way. So attract as many women and as you can and as a conquering game, you conquer women. And we move that to a connection game where we invite men or we show men that their most attract serve is when they are who they are.

And they need to embrace that. And we will give a set of product to hands that, and we have proof of that. We test it also, we ask women are men. And it was very clear. We ask guys, Okay, what do you think [00:06:00] that makes you more attractive in the eyes of women? And they would tell us be muscular or be fit , show off wealth and behave in a manly way. But when we ask women what they like most about men, They told us men that are confident being who they are, and they make the them laugh, have humor.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: So it was very clear and I need to change that.

Bowen Dwelle: this is the Axe body spray, right? That's what you're talking about - you said it wasn't working anymore, and I just want to clarify. And not that the acts body spray wasn't working anymore, as if it ever worked in the first place, but that the message wasn't working with men anymore.

I remember this from, this interview that you did with Mickey Ferre, that you talked about changing the operating principle of this campaign from an attraction game to a connection game, and I just thought that expression was so beautiful.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. The way we say it is move from a conquering game to a connection game.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes. Thank you.

Between Equals

Fernando Desouches: And we've continued, it was a connection game between equals. Its [00:07:00] regarding the gender, so everything in the same level. And the interesting part is that is not only a message that relax either the opposite sex or another gender, but your parent it relax, the person that is interesting in generating that.

Bowen Dwelle: Absolutely. As you said, it becomes a game, which can be a very positive thing, the game of life, a game between equals and a game not about conquering or about dominating or even winning. It reminds me of this concept from this book, The Courage to be Disliked, which talks about this concept of keeping relationships horizontal as opposed to relationships with verticality. It's very much the same thing. It's about equality.

Early Conditioning

Fernando Desouches: This was the beginning. So you asked me how it started, and I realized that after relaunching the brand, I said, There's a lot of work to do. When I started digging on what was happening and realized two major conditioning amongst other that men were having and young boys were the first conditioning when we are 6, 7, [00:08:00] 8 years old.

And what is being a man and that men don't cry and pull yourself together, that part, that boys absorb consciously and act accordingly to keep their parents happy and be part of the male cohort. And that with time, the parent that have is that this repression on certain behaviors and exacerbation of others make that, that the beginning is conscious, then become unconscious.

And when we are teenagers, young adults, we disconnect emotionally. We don't understand very well where we are. But the one that I found super interesting is the one that follows that the second big conditioning for me that was, okay, once we are young adults or teenagers and we aspire to be a successful man, how does it do look like?

And still today it's very narrow and materialistic when men worth for what they have on how they look and not much for who they are. And that marketing can change because marketing can build as an aspiration of men and actually is part of the problem marketing and the media on how we show the aspiration for men. But we can [00:09:00] open that, showing a bigger scope that represents different values for men that could be and bring inspiration because if a brand that has certain respect starts showing different type of masculinities, that will be accepted in the way, the same way they did with different standards of beauty for women or different genders, expressions, or different abilities more recently.

Performative Masculinity

Bowen Dwelle: This relationship it leads me to a couple of questions. Perhaps first to go back to how your personal evolution relates to where you found yourself professionally. You mentioned a midlife crisis or midlife moment. Was there an awakening for you personally in terms of your own masculinity and your understanding of yourself that contributed to this direction of interest in your work?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. So I think it was that I had everything. I had the work I dreamt of. I was working on that, I was living abroad, I already [00:10:00] have my wife, one kid, but something was missing. So it was that call that, that you get at that stage. It doesn't matter if you get what you want or not, because many people, as we build aspirations in a way that is a ladder, that we need to grow and get that, the ones that don't get it says and I'm not happy because I couldn't get what I want. But that's not true if you're performing who you are, because even though you get it, it will feel empty.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: And that was the call. One day, I was walking in the coast walls here, outside London, in the countryside, feeling not very good. I sat on bench by myself looking at the woods, and this is when the lightning came. I, At that moment, I realized I need to leave. I didn't know where I have to go, but I need to do it. I need to leave. And it wasn't immediate. That was 2014. It took me three years to leave. But from there, that day, the plan started.

Bowen Dwelle: And was that when you had the inspiration to create this agency focused specifically on new masculinity?

His Personal Breakthrough

Fernando Desouches: No, [00:11:00] the answer no. And this is very interesting because at that moment I felt the need of starting the transformation. But as I did a breakthrough transformation, it wouldn't be a breakthrough if I would see it immediately, what I have to do.

I understood that I need to plan for change and that change require a change in behaviors and change in beliefs. Get new insights and experiment something new. And it was a long journey when I prepare, in terms of, get some money out before jumping in, get the conditions. Then when I left the company, I study things, I did coaching, I tried with leadership development. I saw that coaching was very interesting, was one to one. When I get leadership development, the type of leader I face were very difficult to transform. And as for change, because they were very successful and very closed.

And then in a trip, again, in the nature in Scotland is where New Macho appears. And I said, Okay. I was leaving marketing aside. I need to get [00:12:00] marketing back because that will give me the scale.

And this is when by talking to a friend of mine and a company called bbd Perfect Storm that is in London, we decided together to start working on this.

Bowen Dwelle: Amazing. Great. Great. And just to stick with that for a moment, your personal transformation there, as you said, you felt a call and you didn't know the answer yet. You didn't know the direction that you would go, but you knew that you needed to go in a new direction and that you felt to plan for change. And it sounds like nature was a big part of that experience.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah, it's the thing that I joined in the dots from the past and I have a call for nature now, so something is there.

Therapy and Mens Work

Bowen Dwelle: I've heard you mention men's work before in some context, was that also part of this process for you?

Fernando Desouches: Yes, of course. Part of the preparation was not only money, part of the preparation was getting the courage and psychological sustain. I am from Argentina, so the good thing there is that

Bowen Dwelle: Lots of [00:13:00] therapy.

Fernando Desouches: there's lot of therapy and there is not seen as something bad, but something that helps you to grow.

My mother was a therapist and so on, so I had a therapist. Then I started to open up and then I took, I have a very good mentors that, I dunno if they were mentor, but they are the guides that help me to path through this. I have a coach that help me to get the courage. I have another leadership development, and writer friend that also give me a lot of tools to go with change and transformation and help me to understand how is the natural way of transformation that this is very useful for men to understand where I am in this path because in certainty that I am walking the path.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And then I met Kenny, that is a guy that also has been working with men in men groups for more than 20 years. And I started getting in with him and understanding in men's group how other men's were thinking outside of my small corporate circle, all of that. Plus, I went to with [00:14:00] Mexican shamans. So op really open. I was really in a moment of opening.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah. Yeah, that was certainly part of my experience too in the corporate world. I had my own company for many years and it was fantastic experience and interesting, successful, fulfilling in many ways. But I did not have the kind of personal connections, myself in that realm that were inspiring and, helping me to flourish and grow personally. And it wasn't only men's work, but certainly men's work was a big part of that for me. So, fantastic to hear a little bit about that, about your journey.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. This work gave me not only insights about where men were in a different environment, but also connected me with the power of men. That I remember being in a, with the guys from Rebel Wisdom that are guys that, that work with masculinity as well. And I went to a retreat with them, and they call it Vitamin M.

And [00:15:00] it's true when you are in a circle that you hold the space and men open up and sustain each other. It's something I think we lost for quite a generation or two, or more,

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah,

Fernando Desouches: That was new for me. It was very powerful.

Bowen Dwelle: that's, Yeah. Great to hear. I experienced the same thing. I think there's something very simple about being invited, and inviting oneself to participate in a group of other men. And, that's the choice I made as well. At a certain point, I realized that I was missing this vitamin M, in my own life, and I went looking for it.

And not only in men's work, but certainly that was part of it. And, people talk about initiation and, these other kind of rituals or processes that can be part of men's work or, or not. But for me, the foundation of it is simply participating, joining, being invited into a group of other men and experiencing directly, as you said, the power of men and therefore [00:16:00] some of my own power as a

Fernando Desouches: Of course.

Yeah. And for me, it's not necessary to have a group of men. It's the conditions that men are under. No, I play football all my life, soccer, and I have very good friends there and I have very, a good fun, banter all the time, but I didn't felt the energy. Energy was when we were present together, open and in circle.

Something like really even I couldn't go there in Zoom. Have to be person.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah. There's an intentionality, certainly again, which is very simple, to set the intention, I often do it at a dinner party, for example. It's just the difference between a conversation that just happens at random versus a conversation that happens with a little bit of intention to go deeper.

Just to sum up on, on men's work, people ask me, what is men's work? What's it for? How do you define it? And I just describe it as a place and a way to practice connecting.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah,

Bowen Dwelle: Is there a simple short definition that you have?

Integrated Masculinity

Fernando Desouches: No, I think it is [00:17:00] what we need. So if you tell me what men need now, is that this reconnection, connecting with the self, because we are moving from that performing that I describing before to being and this is the journey we are under. It's not just understanding the journey, but part of the journey is reconnecting with myself.

Cause I don't know me have, I am emotionally detached for many years. And interesting part is when I recover the masculine energy to start doing from there. Because some, for many people, the story ends up in being vulnerable and emotionally, or connecting more with the em, feminine compassion and empathy care.

But it doesn't finish there. Once you are there, you need to grab that and do something, Get the masculine bag and do the change through there. From my point, perspective, and through the compassion, from the empathy, from the gap. From there, move.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah. And to integrate these different elements into a more complete being.

Fernando Desouches: indeed.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you.

A Positive Role for Marketing

Bowen Dwelle: To go back to your work then, I read what your client, Carlos Gill at Unilever said about your work, what he said is, [00:18:00] you've allowed our brand to be part of the change we want to see in men and their place in society.

And that's really beautiful praise from a client and also very illuminating, you know what I mean? To hear a corporate client say that there is a change that they want to see in men. Really fascinating. Because of course , as you pointed out earlier, the relationship between marketing and identity is complicated and fraught, that is marketing has often in the past served to narrow our identity, and it's of course helped to create the man box, as it did for women as well. And so what role does marketing and advertising have to play in society and how can that role be more positive?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah, I think I can start with the example of what happened there. Know the one you just read. So the brand Man Plus Care have a care there in the center. And when they approach it, us, they told us, Look, we have a [00:19:00] problem that is they don't care about care. And we want them to care about care, not just in a physical care, but also openly care because the brand is ful brands. We want to get meaning and we want men to care for themselves and others.

The problem that happen is that in the man box and the mantra of being a man, care, when we ask them, they tell us, no, care is a feminine trait or something that is self-indulgence. So what I, in terms of self care, what I would self care, whether care myself. And we said, Okay, but men are dying early than a woman, mental health, violence, drug abuse, and all of the things that we know are affecting more men than women, despite this is not a competition. They have to be for, we want the best for men and women.

The thing is we needed men to care for themself.

And when we understand, okay, we understand why you don't care for yourself though, Tell me, what do you care about? And the first thing they would say is, I care for my family. Perfect. So we needed to convince then that they need to care for themselves to care better for the family. So we did a survey with Equimundo now that is based [00:20:00] there in the us working on communities and gender and Unilever. And we got data from the US that show that when men care more for themself, not just physically, but also emotionally and socially, the more they care for the loved ones and more people and more hours.

So then we have something that marketing can say, that is, when you're caring for others, start by caring for you.

Bowen Dwelle: It makes sense, But going back one level, how did Dove come up with this idea that they needed men to care more for themselves? They came up with this brand concept. Dove, men cares, or dove cares or something. So where did that idea come from?

Sustainability in Marketing

Fernando Desouches: yeah. There are different type of brands. Of course, this brand is a brand itself, personal care product, so they would say, we want men to care more for them to care the skin . But that is a little bit more than that. At Unilever and other companies they have demonstrated that brands that have certain purpose or grow by helping the society [00:21:00] and the environment to grow, have more sustainable growth over time, more brand love and more growth.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: So this is why that brand in particular was looking for a space that bring its products benefit to life, but also the same time should do good. Brands have in general something that is called brand say - what they talk about and the brand do. What is the change they're carrying. In that case, the change they were carrying was bringing that message and start working with fathers and working, in different ways to give space for men to care for themselves, for the benefit of of us.

Bowen Dwelle: I'm not a brand guy. My involvement in the media world came from the publishing and technology side. But this relationship between marketing and culture and identity and brands is very fascinating to me. And what you've just described is like an inversion, a reversal, of the classic kind of [00:22:00] targeted marketing. We're gonna create a product and we're gonna figure out how to sell it to people. It's a reversal of that to, okay, we came up with this cool brand concept, Dove Cares, but there's some real substance to the care. And it's based on the idea of doing something purposeful and meaningful. And then how does that translate down into products And okay, sure, you're gonna sell men face cream, , as part of that. But there's a mission. There's a mission in there.

Fernando Desouches: And this is the power of a brand. So many things can be copies. So how much you can differentiate in the shampoo you have. Creams, snacks, beverages. So the differentiation in a world that changing that fast and the technology we have today lasts very little in time. It could be copied very fast.

So what brings the difference is the brand, and the brand is the emotional relationship you generate with the person that is buying it in certain [00:23:00] space. So what do you do with that emotional space? How do you transform that emotional space in a way that the society needs it? How you can really add value apart from the product you sell? And there are people that believes in that and people that not.

We have data that shows that the brands that are doing it well, benefit from it.

Bowen Dwelle: At this point, we should know intuitively, but we also have evidence that brands that actually do things realize more long term value. And I think you said this earlier, brand love, Is that what you said? More brand love? Yeah.

Yeah that's sweet. Because a lot of us myself included have this idea that marketing is sort of inherently evil, and I have said for years that advertising is obsolete.

And I'd love to get your take on this, that perhaps we could just turn advertising off, all of it, right?

Like, why do we need advertising ? Because of course, if I actually need something, I'm gonna go [00:24:00] find it myself. Now, of course, advertising is a big part of how capitalist economy works, but, as a thought experiment. What if we just turned it off and all that effort went into something else?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. Yeah. You are not alone. 70% of the people, or actually not 70% of the people, but people say that if there are 70 or 75% of the brands disappear in media from what day for the other, nothing would change. But there are brands that make the difference.

What a brand does is give you information, a shortcut about a need that you may have or maybe don't have and you could have, and the quality of the product you are getting.

This is what uh, why maybe you, when you go to buy something, I said, Okay, maybe invest a little bit more and buy something that I know that is a good quality or I share the values or just because I love it. Not many how many years Coke has been working on that.

No, just impress and love and then you open your mouse and then you don't say, gimme a so that, gimme coke. And this is why brands are investing, but it's true that lazy marketing is invisible and more, more now, I dunno, when you work in media before, but, or. Now with all of the channels you have the amount of information you receive per day, if you don't take really meaningful at the right time in the wrong place,

Bowen Dwelle: you disappear. Yeah. Immediate. Yes. Yes. I think that you're right about that, and I think that is a very positive change . [00:25:00] That, . people have much more choice and more immediate choice these days, and so they will react very quickly and move towards what is actually meaningful to them.

Where is Masculinity Headed?

Bowen Dwelle: To get back to masculinity, I do absolutely feel and share the feeling that, something really is changing, with men and with masculinity much as it has for women in such a big way over the past several decades.

You have named this division that you run The New Macho, and it's all about helping brands to work with men, understand men, and to further the conversation about what is the new masculinity.

And so what is your take on that? Where do you feel that masculinity is going?

Just to say one more thing for me. One thing is that, a greater wholeness, a broader view of what it means to be a man is a big part of that. But part of what happens there is that, as our conception of what it means to be a man or a woman gets broader, it gets closer and [00:26:00] closer to what it means to be a person.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah, of

Bowen Dwelle: right?

And less different. And that, that's perfectly fine. But that then leads us again back to the question of, okay so what does it mean to be a man? If it's a lot like being a person.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. And I wouldn't care about that, that, So I think masculinity and femininities are things that we used to synthesize, to summarize the world. So course men have masculinity and femininity in different degrees.

From Performing To Being

Fernando Desouches: Where we are going is from the place you perform it to the place of being, in that place of being that you describe very well as presence. It's from there when you can then engage with certain attitudes that we may call masculine attitudes or feminine attitudes to respond to a situation that happens.

And this is what I like to think that we are going to an individuation, we are going to understand in ourself, detach from the situation, be present, get the tools, not just one set of tools, several, where we can choose from to respond to something, drive [00:27:00] change or whatever we want to do.

I think honestly, I think men are doing the journey. What I don't see maybe is media brand communication following because we have data on that as well. And what would happen, Politicians are not following as well. So what do we do with some of them? So what do We will regress or we will shape the other.

And I'm working certainly in try, not just working with brands, but also working move the industry, get the attention on industry to do things and drive change on how we can help men in this journey that already started to facilitate them and not regress. It's not easy.

Brands as Part of Culture and Identity

Bowen Dwelle: You said it's not easy. Yes. And nobody wants to be alone. We want to feel like we have companionship and support and to feel the resonance of who we are being with others. Like it or not, brands are a big part of our world, and brands can be a huge expression of identity, it's part of our cultural identity.

And so, it can be a very beautiful thing. And so [00:28:00] I really appreciate that aspect of the work that you're doing. That you're, bringing this work into

Fernando Desouches: As we work with aspiration, you can be the brand saying, Okay, I will read where men are and represent that, or you can sense where men are going to or represent that.

Bowen Dwelle: I agree. It's putting something out in front. And taking a leadership position.

Fernando Desouches: Yes, exactly.

The Trap of Progressive Masculinity

Bowen Dwelle: Back to this question of where masculinity is headed. You've used this term of the man box or the man trap, which is often used to describe the narrow conception of masculinity that comes from a kind of patriarchal and performative history. You've also talked or written about the trap of progressive masculinity, and if you could just talk about that a little bit about the man trap and about what's the opposite of the trap.

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. That's very interesting. There is a man box that is not serving men or boys. This is even costing society and there are studies from Equimundo that quantify that. This is the traditional masculinity.

The counter movement of that was we need to be more progressive and we need to realize that men can [00:29:00] be everything they can be, but the traditional one, and then you started to create a sort of conservative–progressive battle that doesn't exist because we are traditional for some things and progressive for others.

So what happened? When we've been a man before, maybe was constraining men, but was very clear and it was a set of rules that were clear when those rules were broken and opened, immediately we went to say, Okay, what is the new playbook? There's no playbook. You write the playbook. So we go from rules to there's no rules, but the ones you make and this is the journey. This is the difficult part, and this is something that is not easy to do.

So many men today feel lost.

I was in an interview last week before the Brazilian elections, Why (Boris) Johnson can be appealing to men? They said, Okay, I give you the playbook back.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: it's not that those men are bad people or evil or silly, it's they are lost and they need something that [00:30:00] even though it's imperfect, can help them to recover some of the clarity.

Bowen Dwelle: And that feeling of being lost, can be a very desperate place and it can lead to a lot of frustration and anger and people like Bolsonario and Trump, et cetera, they express and embody that frustration and anger. And I think that's a big part of the reason why a lot of people identify with them and there's a reason that men are frustrated, as you just said, they're lost, all the rules are gone.

Fernando Desouches: and this is why we talked to Mickey. We broke the rules, but we are not giving the tools

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: because if we break the rules, we need to give the tools. I always said the same. One guy, I was talking in a focus group and I ask about meaning. Cause men are craving for meaning.

They want to do work that brings meaning. And I said to him, Why would you do a more, meaningful job? And he told me, Yes, of course I would like to engage into a more meaningful career, but people judge me for the car I drive.

So this is where we are.

Disconnection

Fernando Desouches: But it is for both [00:31:00] sexes, the disconnection. We were working also for a dating app very recently in Europe, talking to men and women. Men were lost saying that we don't know what to do, if we need to pay the bill. Ask for a kiss. What are the limits? And women were in the same place, saying, 'I want men to, don't ask me what they need to do. Because I think all of these pressure that men are having about the progressiveness come from media. Nobody asked us women.'

So if we don't give the tools or how to navigate, how to recover judgment, to reconnect with yourself , men will continue being lost. And with that, all of what you said, that is where we are very comfortable talking about it because we are very comfortable talking about symptoms of this disengaged, disconnected men.

We talk about violence, sexual harassment, depression, anxiety, excessive sport, work, workalcoholics, alcoholics. So these are the symptoms. The root issue is another one.

Bowen Dwelle: What I was thinking while you were talking about that, is that for me, personally, it comes back to [00:32:00] identity, and so much of what we had grown up with and had in the past about whether it's masculinity or femininity, is a hegemonic definition that comes from outside of ourselves and is external and is not about identity and is it's performative.

So we perform some act so that we can pass as a man, for example. And that gives us, some feeling of identity, but it's not grounded in our own identity. And so the real challenge is to get to a place where, you know, again, whether we're talking about men or women, where we have better tools to understand ourselves, so that the question of masculinity or femininity or whatever-inity becomes less important, actually.

Some of the most beautiful and meaningful definitions or redefinitions of, for example, masculinity that I have read recently have come from Grayson Perry right there in the UK. [00:33:00] And he basically says masculinity should be, " whatever you want it to be."

Another definition comes from David Buchbinder, he says, " we need to get to the place where we're ready to abandon the idea that men must conform to a certain model of the masculine if they are to be counted as men." Because that is what we have had to do, is earn our place as a man by doing some specific things. And come to recognize that masculinity is simply "the totality of how all men might choose to enact socially the fact of their maleness," which is very vague , but it comes back to identity, right? And individuality.

Fernando Desouches: But, I go back. So Identity and individuality. So we are not, we perform because it's also, I go back to the tools. What are the tools? Education, how I been educated by following a curricula that I need to attach to. Nobody raised me as ' Grow my own interests and understanding who I am, what is the world I want to see. What is the difference I want to make in the world?'

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: Those are tools that, Same with work. We have fixed [00:34:00] ladders. This work, as a marketing director worth more that a policeman,

We know what, no, we don't owe the doctor because we get more money. Is it really true? I don't know. I don't think so. But at the same time, so we are, we need to give values and value and validate that.

And this is where, again, brands can work because brands can give value to that aspiration. As we look what happened with covid, all of the sudden nurses, male nurses, became something very appreciated of the value by society, for the effort and so on. This is an example of how culture can give certain tools for men and women to feel validated on their own individuality by following and being who they are.

Examples of Positive Masculinity

Bowen Dwelle: Related to that , can you give some examples of people that are embodying a positive and new masculinity ? Who do you see as examples?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. One that I talk a lot is David Attenborough. He's an elder guy and he's honestly working for a long time on how he can leave a better world that he received.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And regarding his age, he's continue doing the effort in a very engaging way. I think there are men that are breaking the mold. I don't remember now name of the owner [00:35:00] of (Yvon Chouinard ) Patagonia, but doing what he has done by saying, Okay, my main stakeholder is the Earth, so we give my company to the NGOs that are really making a difference there. Brings a new perspective of inspiration, breaking what is not serving to the system. That this, the three months three months profit and loss for companies. So these are the things that I really value in men.

The system is in crisis. Now, we perma-crisis, so the system is in crisis for a long time. So we need to design the new, this is what we need to do. And these people that are showing different perspectives on how you can drive change in an aspirational way are the ones that feel attracted to.

And at macro level, I think these two are great examples of service and change and not small talk change. All actions that come from compassion and care, the planet in this case. And I would imagine this is not easy for them to do. It's not.

Generative Action and Resistance

Bowen Dwelle: I certainly agree with your examples and the principles that [00:36:00] they illustrate, of service and generative action, generative at a very large scale, and also generative not only in terms of equality for humans between men and women and everybody else, but also in terms of our relation to other species and to the planet.

Fernando Desouches: And acting it. Acting it in the sense of, this is where I see the ing coming back know it. We went from this space that with the old man box, that when it, it went hyper-masculine in many cases. Then we said, No, we need to be more progressive care. So what is the integration of both, that warrior, that links with the compassion and drives the change we need. Because the systems are suffering, the environment and people are suffering.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. One of the other beautiful definitions of masculinity that I have come across lately is from another writer that I respect a lot, Kim Stanley Robinson. And he talks about masculinity moving from a model based on dominance to resistance.

The thing about patriarchal masculinity, is that it offers this promise of what's been described as a lottery ticket. You know, that as a man, there's this promise that you might get [00:37:00] power, wealth, status just because you're a man. The problem is almost nobody wins the lottery.

And so, many men end up disappointed, angry, alienated, frustrated, et cetera, especially if they remain complicit or subordinated to the system. And that is what leads us to resistance, right? To re resist that system and work against it, and find something different, outside of it, larger than it, new and more valid really, in the present and in the future.

Fernando Desouches: . Yeah, I totally, I don't know, and I need to think I think out loud if he's resisting and attacking or changing from the, from within. I think the guy from Patagonia changed it from within bringing annual phones as well. Not the guy from Toms, the shoes,

new That are serving.

And Paul Pullman as well in, in Unilever, did something like that?

Bowen Dwelle: . Oh, yeah. No I agree. I don't mean to resist from, Yvonne Ard, who from Patagonia, you know, absolutely played the game. To win. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it's a very successful guy from a traditional point of view in business. And yet he used that success and used capitalism to, to very positive ends.

And so it shows that the, the system itself is not so totally broken that it cannot evolve. It absolutely can, and it is

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. I said in a way that I don't know, because, I don't know, maybe not, It's not I want to believe that it is because I think it's would be less painful.

But I don't know. We reach a point that, I dunno if it's dramatic because of the media or is really dramatic. You see all of the systems are suffering.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes. Yes. Yes. You're definitely doing your part in a unique way. It's really interesting to hear about your work and as we get close to wrapping up here.

Working to Lead Positive Change

Bowen Dwelle: So what are you working on now that's new and interesting for you?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. On the brand front, we are working with a brand in a campaign against gender based violence in Mexico that is quite high. The human violence on how we can, what we can do to change that. Next week. I gonna be on a panel at the Unstereotype Alliance Global Summit. That is in the UN headquarters in New York.

So we'll be talking about that to a big amount of people to, at the global level to, to try to drive change. We are working with Mr. Porter, that is a brand that aggregates and sell luxury product for men on a survey on understanding success and happiness and how we can use luxury [00:38:00] brands to, to change that.

And also I'm working with a Equimundo launch one program that calls Global Boyhood initiative that they go with the Kering Foundation, they launch it together, they go to schools in the UK, US, Italy, France. Mexico and talk to boys four to 13 years old in different themes across their ages, through their teachers about gender expressions, their identity, violence, sexuality, masculinity, all of that. And we are doing the branding work for them while working with them in what we can set. And tomorrow I'm attending to the launch of the Global Boyhood Initiative in the UK with Gary Barker, that is the president and the ceo, Ofo.

Bowen Dwelle: Great. Great. That's beautiful to hear. And I have to say, so impressive and hopeful to hear about all of this very positive work that you and others are doing with brands as leaders of positive change in our culture. Well done, Fernando.

Fatherhood and Raising Boys

Bowen Dwelle: I'm not a father myself, but it very much resonates with me, the importance of working with young people, with boys, on the question of who they are becoming and what it means to be a man and, what the direction is.

You're a father yourself. Yeah.

Yeah. I have

Fernando Desouches: two kids, two boys.

Bowen Dwelle: Two boys. , so [00:39:00] what do you tell them?

Fernando Desouches: I try to listen and be with them, and maybe ask questions. The other day one of my kids that is 12 now, he told me no, there was this guy that is very annoying. And I said, Okay. Did you ask him what happened with him? Did you tell him that what he was doing angers you? Because maybe the answer surprise you.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah. You might learn something. Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: And then try to be with them. When I became a father, it wasn't love at first sight. Is, of course, I always love him, but I needed time. And now they grow. The older they are, the more responsibility I feel. But at the same time, the more enjoyable I find this experience, because I see reflected , I see surprise, and it's interesting. It's not easy.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes. So I've heard . Just last question then since you brought in fatherhood. How did you decide to become a father? Is it something that you pursued as a priority? Or how did that happen?

Fernando Desouches: Yeah. My wife is very wise and I learned a lot from her. And we talk about it. We talk about it, and I said, Okay. We [00:40:00] were like 32, 33, and we said, look, we love each other. It's very likely from statistics that there would be a moment that we split or something that we grow in different paths.

Are we mature enough to understand if we are bringing a son to the world or other to the world that should be at the center of our attention, even though our life goes different ways? And even though there's a lot of love that was quite rational at the moment, agreement, and we felt okay, we are in the right place then to have kids. We try, we.

Bowen Dwelle: Just so I understand you, it sounds like you made the decision to have kids together with your partner as a, in part, as a way of creating more purpose for the relationship.

Fernando Desouches: No, it wasn't. So we love each other. We were perfect without, so we were in a very good situation.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: see many people that have kids when they are struggling and need something new. For the couple we, we were fine as we were, but we wanted to have kids and we were getting an age. So what we wanted to be sure was having a contract of saying, we understand the responsibility that is this.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And two individuals that, her, myself, could in the future, grow in different direction and split would always be mature enough to agree that we need to take care of that person.

Bowen Dwelle: , I see.

Fernando Desouches: I dunno how serious would be, but that conversation existed. We needed that. We needed, I dunno why.

Bowen Dwelle: . That makes sense. So you both knew that you wanted to become parents and you discussed the meaning of that in the context of your [00:41:00] relationship over the long term. Yeah. Yeah.

Did you always know that you wanted to be a father, as a younger person?

Child-Free as a Brave Choice

Fernando Desouches: Yes. the answer is yes. I never doubt it. But when I became a father and realized what it means, I started to respect more people that decide not to have kids. Maybe it's consistent with what I said, understanding the responsibility of bringing a person to the world. And I know people that wanted to have kids and couldn't, but this is different.

I know people that decided not to have (children) and much more now than before,

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: and I found that very brave because of the social pressure. I was talking the other day with a lady that has come from India. Imagine, indian family, and she decided not to have a family and said I don't want, I agree with my husband, but we both don't want, and that cost me the rejection from my in- laws, that I am the disgrace for the family.

So the bravery of this generation that is open in the game, we couldn't have an eternally [00:42:00]growing population. It's killing us.

Bowen Dwelle: a good point. Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And the ones that break the inertia, and said, this is what I want to do. And then of course, open other point of care. So these people in general, in most of the case, are very creative and do what they love because they have less financial pressure and not the frustration of I tried but I couldn't, which is something that they have to be worked on.

Bowen Dwelle: Yeah.

Fernando Desouches: Opens a new set of population and culture that is reaching certain critical mass now and we need to listen and see what happened there.

Bowen Dwelle: Thank you. That's a very positive point of view and also very refreshing. It helps me, as someone who has chosen not to be a father, for several of those reasons. But it also comes with a cost, it comes with the knowledge of, and the feeling of loss, and you pointing to the generative aspect there is very helpful. Thank you.

Fernando Desouches: No welcome. I didn't know that, the whole story, but I really believe so and I respect a lot that and this is when we maybe too close, but if we are saying being a [00:43:00] man is what you want to make about it, that also needs to encompass not being a father, at least a biological father or an adoptive father, but you can act as a father of people without being father.

Bowen Dwelle: Yes.

Fernando Desouches: And that is fine. That is, doesn't make you less as a man or less as a woman because if we feel it as men, women feel it twice. And we need to respect that. When I was talking with this lady the other day, I was honestly humble about the braveness that is brave because one thing is doing it in London or in California and the other is doing it from Indian roots.

Bowen Dwelle: . Well Put. Thank you. Thank you. Fernando, what a pleasure to meet you and speak with you. Thank you so much for the time.

Fernando Desouches: I enjoyed it, Always learn from these things a lot. So thanks for your time and your interest.

Bowen Dwelle: Great. Thank you again, Fernando, a real pleasure. And I really appreciate the work that you're doing.

You can find Fernando on LinkedIn and at BBD Perfect Storm.

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Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of masculinity, advertising, fatherhood,

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* How well does the work that you do align with your own personal values? Is there any way that you would like to change how you live so that you can feel more aligned with your work?

* Where do you think masculinity is headed? Is it some sort of ‘new man’ Or is it a new way of thinking about men?

* Do you see masculinity shifting from ‘a conquering game to more of a connection game,’ “from performing who you are not to being comfortable who you are,” from “dominance to resistance,” or perhaps some other shift happening?

* Do you think that marketing can serve men to open further, as opposed to boxing men in, as it has in the past?

* Are you a father? How did you decide, or end up as a parent, or not?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today I'm talking with my friend James Brown. James and I met through the Battery here in San Francisco where we have both served as Creatives in Residence and produced events together. After an early career in advertising, he became a meditation teacher years ago and has taught thousands of people to meditate and worked with a diverse range of global companies including Summit Series, Salesforce, TRX, and BBDO. His practice is called Vedic Path Meditation.

James is someone that I've learned a lot from, a man that I love and respect and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

As you listen, you might scan the questions at the bottom of this page—or at least consider just one, which is—what does “Flow” mean to you, how do you get into flow, and how is it integrated into you everyday life? I'd love to hear from you after you listen — please subscribe, like, recommend, share, and comment at the bottom of this page.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste in this URL to add the show https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

How “flow” has been seized by “peak experience chasers” and how what Csikszentmihalyi was getting at, and what many more of us can benefit from is what James calls Everyday Flow. “Flow isn't necessarily about the experience you're having, it's about the state of consciousness you’re in…” Little moments of presence. That said, there are some ways of doing that can make flow more available.

Some of us are drawn to extremes… But why? Can you feel that alive when your life is not at risk? We can get into flow through very gentle experiences as well—and things like backpacking, for example, can also take us to extremes of being without taking us to extremes of doing.

Meditation is about getting to that experience of engagement and presence. “Can the aperture remain open when the situation of the moment doesn't demand that it be open?”

What is Vedic meditation? “…it's a way of being in meditation, not a way of doing meditation.” The Beatles didn’t write “Let it Go,” they wrote “Let it Be.” It’s more about allowing as opposed to concentration. “Go” implies gone. It’s more about letting thoughts flow, or letting things be.

Meditation and intuition. Athleticism and intuition. A coalescing of the five senses into a greater knowing, a sixth sense of what feels right. Making yourself available to the layer of consciousness from which creativity and insight flow. You have to stop thinking about the problem to be available to the solution. “…intention is important, but it can only take you to a place from which you can let go of intention.”

How intuition can speak through the body, in words, and also sometimes as a voice that we hear—and how intuition led him to adopt their second son. His father was an alcoholic and not present until later in life—which led James to want to become a father. He was clear on that—and for him, it was very intentional. And, still, impossible to prepare for.

How we only get to live one life, the beauty and the tragedy of that, and the power of acknowledging what we lose as we go through junctures in life—and of giving things up intentionally. “How do you actually know that you love the things you love unless you are willing to let them go for a while?” “I have loved giving up some of the things that I have loved.”

…like alcohol. He likes the taste experience of a cocktail, but no longer enjoys the feeling. It used to feel alive, and now it feels dull.

Freedom, and “the difference between the freedom to choose and the freedom of not having to choose.”

Discipline—moving from negativity and anti-everything to some opening around discipline. “The root of discipline is disciple. … the question really isn't like how disciplined are you, meaning how much willpower do you have, how much determination? The bigger question is: what are you a disciple to?” What are your values? This requires a personal philosophy—a way of living.

Many of us reject “discipline” because it feels like part of old-school, traditional masculinity—and we don’t have to buy into that. That said, there are inertial barriers that can “stand in between you and the person that you actually want to be. And that can require a conscious application of intention.”

Masculinity… not fitting in with ‘the guys',’ and so “my idea of what it meant to be a man was really in the context of my relationship with the women.” Being put off by the idea of “mens work” at first, and then realizing that that meant that there was something there for him. Mens work helps us to develop our sense of identity in relation to other men, so that it is no longer only in relation to women. Physicality, but also openness, generosity. “It's when we let go of the desire to fill out a certain costume that we can really find what it means to be a man, for us.” The search for some sort of exterior definition of “masculinity” is mostly a false search. It's about becoming the person that you are. “That question of masculinity starts to slip away. It's just sort of personality.”

You can find James at Vedic Path Meditation.

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Further reading

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of flow, sports, spirituality, discipline, masculinity, and fatherhood, especially Adventure Doesn’t Happen By Accident (above adventure and flow), The Man Pays (about not becoming a father), The Last Time (about extreme sports and closing chapters consciously), and Episode 4 with T Callahan on Discipline, Safety and Freedom. I also mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson’s book The High Sierra: A Love Story, and James mentioned The Comfort Crisis. You should also check out Grayson Perry on Youtube… and, speaking of flow, I first heard the term from Jamie Wheal, who you can now find here on Substack with his Homegrown Humans Newsletter .

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What does “Flow” mean to you, how do you get into flow, and how is it integrated into you everyday life?

* Do you find yourself drawn to extremes of behavior, or have you been more satisfied without going to the edges so overly?

* Are you a mediator? What method(s) do you use and how do you find that they affect your life in general?

* What are you a disciple to? What are your values?

* Are you a father? How did you decide, or end up as a parent, or not? Is what happened anything like what you wanted, planned, or expected?

* How does your own identity relate to your gender?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today I’m talking with my friend Noah Rainey. He and I met through our mutual love for kitesurfing, and also as fellow event organizers, lovers of adventure and through a shared connection with Summit Series and The Battery here in San Francisco.

Noah is co-founder of Adventure Architects, which produces adventure events for companies, teams, conferences, and community groups, and he lives on Salt Spring Island between Victoria and Vancouver BC with his partner and their two young sons.

Noah is a unique individual, someone that I’ve learned a lot from, a man that I love and respect and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why I’ve invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

What is adventure? “Stepping out into the unknown.” Adventure means different things to different people. The paradox of creating adventure. “Moving intentionally into the unknown.” Leading at the pace of the slowest person in the group, and yet also with the intention of taking people to the edge of comfort.

Postitive role models. Brad Morris Majik Kids and his “commitment to joy and fun.”Salt Spring Island → Toko-Pa Turner. The power of invitation.

Not just how we are but what qualities do we embody? Embodiment is what you express through your body, and what you transmit to others. Values vs. virtues on the A16Z podcast. Esther Perel said ‘A lot of us get turned on at night by the things that we would protest during the day.’ What you believe isn't necessarily what you do in practice, and your virtues are what you do actually practice—what you embody.

Men’s groups… are trending—and most are based primary around talking. Here’s an idea: a men’s group built around adventure and play! And also other types of adventure, like creative expression. Adventure is intentionally moving into the unknown, and moving towards and exploring the territory of fear, which is how we grow.

Unexpected fatherhood at young age. Any parent is going to “get schooled on surrender.” “It’s about the babies now.” Time is different when you’re a parent—there’s certainly no more time for showing the abs on Insta! It’s been a tough initiation. Support from other men, groups and coaches like Trevor Spring. Going through the fire.

Rites of passage for boys. Sacred Sons → Sonz Youth. Young Men’s Ultimate Weekend. Headwaters Outdoor School. At 25 he was enjoying the life of a young man, but still identified in some ways as a boy. Having a child of his own made it necessary for him to carry the responsibility of a “man,” which did lead him to identify more as a man.

He didn’t have the opportunity to struggle with the question of whether to become a father—it just happened—but he was in a puer state, a boy-man suddenly with a son. It was a forcible initiation.

Conscious relationships with alcohol & cannabis. He doesn’t miss alcohol, and has been thinking about reducing his use of cannabis. Wanting to make space for other things.

Adventure sports. His new side project is the Wingfoil Travel group. Dedicating oneself to a single deep, serious, “fanatical” hobby. Stripping away distractions and closing chapters consciously.

You can find Noah Rainey at Adventure Architects. Here is the Wingfoil Travel group that he hosts on Facebook.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

New here? Please make sure that you’re subscribed—and remember, paying subscribers get buttons!

Dig this? Please share with someone else who will too.

Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of fatherhood, adventure, sports and kitesurfing, in particular my piece called The Man Pays about own experience not becoming a father and The Last Time about kitesurfing, kite foiling, wingfoiling, paragliding and consciously closing chapters. You should also check out E08 of the podcast for another story about unexpected fatherhood, as well as E07 for an interview with a someone who, like myself, did not become a father.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* Are you a parent? How did you decide to become (or end up as) a parent, or not? Is what happened anything like what you wanted, planned, or expected? How have your feelings changed?

* What values do you hold close — and what virtues do you embody?

* What is your relationship with adventure and adventure sports?

* What’s your relationship with alcohol and/or cannabis—and how conscious is that relationship?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today, I'm talking with my friend Kenyon Phillips. He and I met through an ex of mine back in the years when I was going to New York on the regular for the conference business that I started in 2000 and sold in 2015. Kenyon struck me early on as one of the most unique people I'd ever come into close contact with, someone who was very much following his own path- and in full rock and roll style. Let's just say that i liked how he was living- and I still do.

As I was editing this episode I was thinking about how one way to look at this podcast is as an opportunity for me to work with people who have been my teachers, which also explains the song that I’ve used in the intro. I mean, look at this guy—you'd be hot for him too!

In the years since, he's gone from midnight cabaret musician and band leader to suburban family man and creative talent with his own podcast called Be Here Tomorrow and an emerging wellness project called CENTER. Kenyon is another man that I love and respect and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste in this URL to add the show https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

What human amimals do—Nature Boner, high school sex and how his sex drive has changed as he’s become a father. Doing it for the tribe. Solitude vs loneliness. Sex is better sober.

How he went from being decidedly nonmonogamous as a king of New York night life to happily married with two kids in the country.

…being a “man” is…being a person… “I think my personhood—my manhood—is resting on my purpose-hood—and what is my purpose? My purpose is to be of service and to do it from a joyful place.”

“It’s important that you find a way to life a pleasant life, and in the best case, support other people that they also find the same. This is what it’s about. No matter in which form you put it in, which cultural background you put it in, that main idea is if you don’t find this way of reducing suffering of your surroundings your suffering won’t stop.” — @vedic_spirituality27 posted by Cat Power

Giving from the interest rather than the principal.

There are just so many experiences in life—and we don't get to have all of them. Fear of f*****g it up. Happening into changing his mind about becoming a father—and then about having a second child. The primal fear of not being able to provide. How the view from the inside always seems normal—and how that view can change radically.

“the only thing constantly changing is change” — Lou Reed, The Raven, which refers to the poem by Edgar Allen Poe of the same name.

Fear of not having enough, not being enough. There’s no floor underneath us. “That’s my number one fear.” Staking our claim and seeking some sense of security.

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” — Helen Keller, The Open Door

How money comes and goes. “It’s funny about money.” — Gertrude Stein. How rootlessness can be painful… and it’s an adventure. ‘I really thought that one day it would all just be easy sailing, and life just doesn't work that way. Once one challenge is met you're presented with the next tougher challenge.’

What does it mean to be a “man,” aside from having a penis? Choosing not to ‘play rough,’ and losing male friends because of it. Putting ‘what does it mean to be a man?’ in terms of what can a man embody? Embrace everyone on their own terms to “vibrate at the highest expression of their being.” The highest form of wisdom is kindness, and the greatest strength is gentleness.

How to embody a masculine energy that is entirely open. We need more examples of men who are doing it differently and doing it well → The author and Jungian scholar Thomas Moore. Cameron Shayne.

Curiosity vs your “one thing,” your hook. Curiosity is the opposite of reduction, it’s about expansion. Getting our nose in it.

You can find Kenyon at https://www.thekenyonphillips.com and his podcast Be Here Tomorrow is here on his own site, as well as on Overcast, Listen Notes and all the usual podcast services, and his healing arts project is called CENTER.

SEX IS BETTER SOBER is one of the messages that I got back in 2017, before I stopped drinking the following year. I could hear my intuition was speaking up more and more clearly, and so I made a series of t-shirts to make wearable artifacts of those messages, which are still available here →

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Back for more? Please share this with 1000 friends!

Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of masculinity, sex, fatherhood, and addiction, in particular Sex at Dawn, Live at Budokon.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What’s your best story about having sex in the wild outdoors?

* How are manhood, personhood and ‘purpose-hood’ related in your own life experience?

* How has fear been a factor in your own identity and personhood?

* Have any great examples of people who embody positive masculine energy?

* Have you ordered your “SEX IS BETTER SOBER” shirt yet? You need one!

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

Today, I'm talking with master coach Robert Ellis, who is the founder of the Coaching From Essence program and of his community of coaches called Futurosity. I met Robert through a close friend of mine who's also a fellow entrepreneur, and I immediately felt his strong, clear, warm presence and his focus on the unique essence of every individual person.

As I was editing this episode, I was struck with this realization about love. In the past, I've often confused the feeling of appreciation of love in the present with a desire to feel that feeling for an infinity of time. What I mean is that, feeling love, my heart aches to expand that feeling into the future, because that seems like the only possible direction that it could expand. What I realized just now, is that the reality is that love is already infinite in the present, and so, my fantasy of its possible expansion in time is often just a distraction from the greater appreciation of love in the present moment.

...and that is a big part of why I'm doing this series of conversations—to take the opportunity to get to know men that I love and respect more deeply…and Robert is certainly one of those men.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste in this URL to add the show https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

We all have a unique essence—we all have a natural way of being in the world that is good. This essence is also our unique medicine (read Toko-Pa Turner for more on this). Most everything when we’re growing up conspires against our essence, and so what most of us do is create a life that is an accommodation to those circumstances, and we create a false self. At some point this false self breaks down. This dark passage can be the “dark ally.” If we won't go to our demons, our demons will come to us.

The difference between a path and a quest. Getting from A to B. For a lot of people, the path to “B” (the goal) comes from the past—and isn’t congruent with who they really are, or could be. Often—like when we are journeying out of darkness—what you actually want is something better than you can imagine. This is a journey into the unknown—an adventure. This is a quest—moving into the unknown, deliberately.

Depression. “What if I’ve been broken all along, and didn’t know it?” Every good quest begins with a question—and his question was, “how can I be whole-hearted?” He needed to build a relationship with his own essence.

“I think of gratitude as the beginner's practice. The first practice is to be grateful for the good things that you have. The advanced practice of gratitude is to be grateful for everything that you have.”

“The practice of generosity helped me to restore my relationship with myself.”

How does he think about discipline? “…discipline is more path- like behavior. B is not a goal because we don't actually want B. We don't want the best thing that we can imagine. We want something better than we can imagine. …discipline is of dubious value. What we need instead is courage and action.”

“Most of us settle for a bonsai dream.”

“begin before you're ready” or “just ready enough.”

“the more you go on the journey, the more the journey draws you.”

“…if you do the work, success is assured. …and by work, I just mean that you're on your quest.”

Intuition… The difference between decisions and choices. How “decide” means “to cut away,” and choose means “to taste” (Latin gustare). When you make a decision, you're saying yes to something, but you're also saying no to something else. “I feel more affinity for decisions than I do for discipline.” Some possibilities are shiny objects and that can lead you to being what I call opportunistic—So how do you decide which possibilities are right for you? “The more congruent I am, the more that feels like intuition.”

So, how do I decide? I ask myself what I call the Three Essence Questions: 1) will this create a life I love? 2) is this my best way of serving from my essence? 3) who will I become?

“The journey that I've been on is from self- interest status- seeking, scarcity and survival, to what I think of as essence, abundance, service, and trust. …What I'm trying to do is create a life that is big enough for my essence to express itself.”

For me, expression is part of my essence. To speak myself into being. That was the light that fed the flower that began to bloom into what eventually began to feel like abundance, and gratitude for everything.

“Writing is a really good discipline. It's a good essence practice because the challenge is to write something that's true.” — this also points out that another way of thinking about “discipline”—in addition to courage—is simply “practice.”

“…the reason I didn't want kids is it was too scary. I was afraid I wasn't enough. I didn't think I could take care of anybody else.”

While I certainly think of myself as a man. I think of myself more as a person.

When I do [change my mind], I get to be right again.

The difference between something that you want and something that you want to want. “I don't have to be a father.”

“Penetrating Divine Illumination is the idea that just in the way you experience the healer, you feel better before you even take the medicine.”

To me, love feels like breathing colorful attention, and how these men I’ve been talking to are beacons of love.

You can find Robert, his Coaching From Essence program, and his community of coaches called Futurosity at https://coachingfromessence.com.

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Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of masculinity, fatherhood, adventure, depression, intuition, and coaching — in particular What is Intuition? — as well as these books:

Toko-Pa Turner, BelongingNassim Taleb, AntifragileSteven Pressfield, The War of Art

…stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What’s your understanding of your own unique essence?

* Have you had your own dark passage of the soul? How did you get through it and what did you learn?

* Have you ever had a hard time with decisions? Does this distinction between “decide” and “choose” make sense? Does it help?

* What does love mean to you? Is there a way that you visualize or conceptualize it?

* Are you a parent? What was your journey to parenthood—or not—like?

* Who are some of you favorite examples of people who embody positive masculine energy?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by smashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓↓↓

Today, I'm talking with my old friend, Anthony David Adams. Anthony and I go back almost 20 years to when we were in grad school together in Wisconsin and we've had a lot of adventures together since then. We've been down to Baja together in my old F-250. We started a company together called CreditCovers, and most recently we were in Corsica doing the GR20 over two weeks in May and June of this year.

Anthony has done a lot of activism and therapeutic work with psychedelic medicine. He was the first person to administer underground MDMA on national television on a PBS series called the The Mysteries of Mental Illness, which came out in 2021. He now works providing coaching and advising for visionary leaders through a program called Earthpilot Alchemy.

Anthony is someone that has worked very hard to turn his own shadow into gold and he's a man that I truly love and respect, which is the main reason that I invited him to be here today. And—as much as I'm looking forward to my own book, I can't wait to read his, because there aren't all that many people who have successfully cured themselves of serious mental illness and lived to tell the tale.

“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” —
Joseph Campbell, Psychology of the Future

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Show Notes

“It takes work for us to be able to come around, to be able to appreciate our fathers.”

“Before there was a self, there was a relationship.” The self emerges from relationship → George Herbert Mead on the ‘social self’

When do we become a “man?” It feels like becoming an adult, and “a function of responsibility.” “I made a conscious decision to feel my emotions…” “I consciously took responsibility for my internal world and was able to assign and explore the meaning and the value in the difficulty of it.” “I think that's what being a man is—I think that that's what being an adult is. Being a man is becoming an adult in the male body.”

It can seem unlikely that a traditional ceremonial initiation into adulthood could be replaced by some modern thing that you just sign up for over the internet—but, it in our experience it does seem that there’s something very powerful in simply showing up and recognizing oneself as one of many others—many other men, or women, or people—who have all chosen to show up in that same way, and being accepted as one of that group, and in that moment being able to see oneself as one of them. No magic, and not even really any ceremony necessarily, in part because any ceremony that some sort of random dude from the internet might cook up would be unlikely to be very authentic anyhow. Our culture lacks ceremony, so we can’t just create it out of thin air. That very simple experience of showing up and joining, being accepted, and being seen can have a lot of power.

“The magic is in the divinity is in the humanness, and in the vulnerability of your presence.”

On moving through psychosis and depression, and taking it on as his dharma:

“There was a specific moment where I said [to myself], ‘you've been diagnosed with this thing and you can choose—this diagnosis can be your dharma or your dogma.’”

“if you choose to take it on, completing that journey will be beneficial, not just for you, but for other people—you'll wear the path a bit more [so] that somebody else might be able to go deeper into themselves and come through it.”

…recognizing psychosis as an alternate state of being: other guys “…spend a bunch of money to go into the jungle and experience a state of consciousness for a weekend that you might experience just by breathing in a certain way.”

“the psychotic or the schizophrenic is the one who is willing to sit at the seat at the table, no one wants to sit at.” “…there's a shamanic phenotype…”

That was the journey, “to move past the rejection, from diagnosis into gnosis…” “Becoming a functional person, becoming human…”

it “wasn't just about some ongoing mental health coping. That was not the game that I'm playing.” “I really do feel so grateful to be alive. And just so like with so much possibility, and even in the mundane shitiness of life, there's a beauty and an opportunity to just take it on as grist for your spiritual journey.”

I had a similar experience in changing my relationship with alcohol. There was a moment that I realized that I no longer enjoyed the effects of alcohol, and that I could see the possibility of moving past it. And once I could see that possibility, then there was a pretty rapid shift that I experienced just in moving into a new normal. There was no white knuckling or great use of willpower involved. Drinking alcohol was very closely tied to a long standing low level chronic depression.

“This is the cliché that we're kind of sold early in life, but that no one really demonstrated.”

“…you get good at what you do. And so, if you practice something negative, you get good at that too.”

‘Nature boner’ → “bursting with energy and excitement”

The practice of actual, physical wayfinding and how that attunes us finding our way in the world, and builds real confidence in things working out.

Making things “medicine”. Doing the bus work, the van work, the goat work, and the clown work. When you have myth in your life, there's something deeper to connect to.

Anthony and I doing the goat work up on the Mammoth Crest, looking very alive after swimming in the 11,000’ mountain lake that’s just over his shoulder.

Thanks for listening! Please share this episode with a friend and on your social media.

You can find Anthony David Adams at anthonydavidadams.com. His Instagram is @majikbus.co and his Alchemy coaching program is here.

Decide Nothing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Further reading and viewing

PBS: The Mysteries of Mental Illness: EP4 New Frontiers

Joseph Campbell Foundation

Andrew Horn → We Junto: A Community for Modern Men’s Work

George Herbert Mead on the ‘social self’

Dr Martin Shaw and his Mystery School storytelling course

The Corsica GR20 — intro and day 1

In this episode I talk with relationship coach and a men’s alchemist Bob Conlin, who runs coaching programs including the Alchemy of Men and Living in Love. I came to know Bob recently through Traver Boehm’s Man Uncivilized community, and we hit it off right away based on warm, open, strong presence and his focus on relationship. Bob is a man whose presence I admire, and that I wanted to get to know more deeply, which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show notes

How being a coach is being an “alchemist,” helping men turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, getting them connected to their own ‘gold.’ How heating oneself in a ‘crucible’ can serve to transform dark material in our psyche into more conscious parts of ourselves. What I sometimes call ‘eating the shadow’ is building a relationship with that part of us. It’s not You, it’s a part of you.

What part of himself has he developed a relationship with, that was unconscious and then became conscious? Yes—his relationship with alcohol. And—harboring resentment against other people—and learning to release that. And also—developing a relationship with fear, and realizing that fear is just a message. Drinking and drugs were a symptom of a “hole in my soul” of not feeling “connected to something greater than me.”

The bugbear of Purpose. What do I do if I don’t know my purpose? A rare few are born with it. Most of us discover it along the way by following what feels good, what feels aligned. It helped him to be guided in a specific conversation focused on “why are you here?” His purpose is “to make a difference.”

How a broad feeling of purpose allows for more possibility. The feeling of purpose is something that emerges along the way when the we’re on the right path—so how do I know I’m on the right path? By having some sort of personal philosophy, some guiding principles to steer by. The singular nature of “purpose” is illusory. It’s more of a path and not an object. This is akin to the buddhist concept of Ren, or a “sensibility of goodness.”

How wanting to make a difference in a child’s life was a big part of what led him to want to become a father—and also that he realized he didn’t have to wait to become a parent to do that.

Surprising statistic: only 60% of American men become parents (same for women). Like me, Bob lived most of his life thinking that he wouldn’t have children. Meeting his wife and experiencing love opened him to want create a being together with her, based on their love for one another. Becoming a father felt like “I’m here, I’ve arrived.”

Learning to be parents together has opened a new dimension in his relationship with his wife. Everyone that we’re in relationship with is our ‘guru.’

My own experience—which I wrote about in The Man Pays is that I have chosen many times by way of my actions (as “observed in the wild”) not to become a father—and, that it hurts. Both are true. It is bittersweet. And courageous.

Are there ways of loving that are unique to men? Container. Father. Holding… and yet, of course, women and mothers do this holding as well. My own theory is that we need men to love with more truth so as to heal the wound caused by perpetuating the falsehood for so long that men don’t need love. Men say they don’t need anything. Men are lonely. Men need love. “Be a beacon of love.”

Examples of men with presence. Linel Harris.

You can find Bob Conlin at conlincoaching.com and on Insta @relationship_alchemist

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Love reading?

Check out my writing on the subjects of love, men’s work, fear, purpose, and fatherhood, in particular The Truth About Love, as well as:

Puett and Gross-Loh, The Path: What Chinese Philosophers Can Teach Us About the Good Life. U.S. Census report: Men's Fertility and Fatherhood: 2014U.S. Census report: Fertility of Women in the United States: 2012

Now I’ve got some questions for you…

* Is there a part of yourself that you have developed a relationship with, that was unconscious and then became conscious?

* Have you struggled with purpose? Is is helpful to think of purpose as something that emerges along the way when the we’re on the right path?

* Are you a parent? What was your experience finding your way to becoming—or not becoming a parent?

* Do you think there are unique ways that men love, or aspects of the love of men?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

In this episode I speak with T Callahan, a fellow writer who focuses on the intersection of people, planet and place. I invited him to have a conversation because of something that he wrote about discipline that really got me thinking, and although we’ve never met, T is a deep thinker, a man that I love and respect, whose presence I admire, and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Notes for this episode

We met by way of Kyle Thiermann and the “one year no beer” group that he launched July 1 of this year (2022) and that we both joined soon thereafter. The value of being part of a community of shared intention.

Discipline and our orientation towards time. “Everything that has happened will happen and is happening.” The linearity of time is illusory—and also, the appearance of linearity of time is one of the gifts of human consciousness. How discipline “can get a bad rap if we’re inclined to apply it just to the future,” and the value in “recognizing discipline in hindsight,” and that “it might help to think of everything we call discipline as rising from a seed that eventually grows habit.” Perhaps we can recalibrate “discipline” as an accumulation of experience that results from day-to-day decisions, as opposed to a matter of willpower.

Recognizing evidence of having acted with intention over time can help us choose to move forward consciously in a way that feels disciplined.

“Discipline is only difficult until it becomes a habit.” — Colin Hudon

How our obsession with discipline is born of the conceptual—and illusory—split between mind and body. A recasting of discipline can shift from an idea of authoritarian dominance over ourselves to humility with ourselves. Discipline can be a way of taking yourself out of the process of building a habit.

Wanting life to have many chapters, and to be read like a book, not watched like a movie. It’s not possible to be everything all at once, and discipline is one of the tools that allows us to explore the chapters of life. It takes discipline to stop trying. Trying Not To Try, by Edward Slingerland.

There are beginnings and endings in a life of chapters. My recent piece The Last Time, about recognizing and appreciating endings. Discipline is required to begin and end chapters. Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki — and the concept of “right effort.”

The connection between discipline and freedom. Freedom as levity—the lack of weight on your shoulders. Discipline is choosing to steer your ship to a new and different course—and then just to keep that heading.

Changing and healing my relationship with alcohol has not been an ongoing struggle with willpower—it was the result of a realization about how I wanted to live, and that drinking didn’t fit any longer with who I wanted to be. Once that sank in, I was able to steer my ship to a new heading.

We often think that “freedom” is the freedom to choose at any moment—but there’s a greater freedom in not having to choose.

Freedom and safety. We usually think of being safe from things and free to do things. Consider reframing this as safe to explore and express ourselves, and freedom from judgement, pressure, and constraint.

SAFE from & FREEDOM to → SAFE to & FREEDOM from

To recognize that you’re safe and then choose to take risk is the ultimate freedom. There’s a small, fragile, static safety and there’s a much larger, elastic, growing safety. We don’t get safe by doing safe things.

You can reach T Callahan at thelandoft.com and on Twitter at @thelandoft

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Dig this? Please share with someone else who will too.

Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of depression, love, men’s work, and identity. Trying Not To Try, by Edward Slingerland. My recent pieces The Last Time and The Man Pays, and Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What is your relationship with discipline? Does the redefinition that T proposes make sense to you?

* What is your relationship with alcohol?

* How about freedom? Is T’s reframing of SAFE from & FREEDOM to → SAFE to & FREEDOM from interesting to you?

* Are you a parent? What was your experience finding your way to becoming—or not becoming a parent?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here. And please do check out the other episodes!

Show Notes

Life has chapters. Ending things can be healthy, despite how we tend to look at endings as a tragedy.

All-male environments and experiences and the connection to spirituality.

Leaving to avoid things we don’t want to face. Homesick. Disconnecting “the head and the heart” so as to feel less. How the cocktail of distractions from self can also lead us back to a realization about self.

The Grail myth, and how we often get a glimpse of our true self, or our purpose (same thing) in early life, but then lose sight of it or even forget about it entirely until we get a second change, in middle age (see Robert A. Johnson’s He for much more on this).

Is it possible to make a mistake in your life path? Or would you really “not change anything at all”? Is there a realm of real error—or at least, confusion? I say yes—and Lucas points out that “not listening to the inner voice teaches you to listen to the inner voice.” Turning towards home.

How can we get better at listening to ourselves—and why do a lot of younger men seem to be at least incrementally more in touch with their inner voice, which is also perhaps the voice of integrity?

Good men = good people. At the core, men want to be good, and men are good. Being good feels good. And we can practice being good. Groups like EVRYMAN are a place to practice relating, and a place to practice being yourself. It’s about “relational fitness.” Practice “showing up” so that men can embody that so that they can take that skill out into the world.

The power of group work is due to our hard-wired need for connection. How somatic practice gives us a way to communicate and connect that is elementally true and doesn’t require any interpretation. It creates a foundation for understanding—and it also connects us to the joy of the present moment. This is what it means to be grounded — to be connected to the physical experience of the body in the present moment, which is the fundamental place where self resides.

Disconnection from self. Connection to self needs to be bottom-up. It needs to be embodied to be generative and sustainable. Self-awareness begins in the body. Taking feelings as messages vs. all-encompassing experiences that take over. This is what allows us to regulate our responses—not to ‘control’ ourselves, but to understand and see our feelings before we just respond to them. This somatic self-awareness in feeling the body can lead directly to greater self-awareness at ‘higher’ levels—emotional, intellectual, spiritual.

How love can expand with what men can bring to it. “The love that is trapped in men’s hearts is the most underutilized resource in the entire world.” Men are used to having to “earn our way into being.” The blessing of acceptance and belonging is a form of love. So is truth—saying what we mean and meaning what we say. We are bored with the lack of truth—it makes the world less interesting. The truth is intrinsically interesting.

Every man has love in his heart. We’re all tired of not loving enough. “There are a lot of men that are angry because they are not receiving love. If we’re denied this nutrient that we need to exist, then…we get angry.”

The experience of love relationships between brothers, and how much of that experience is the same as with romantic relationships. The richness of those relationships—and the emptiness that I felt without the fulfillment of relationships. The energy that comes from love is a superpower.

You can reach Lucas at lucas@evryman.com and EVRYMAN.

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Dig this? Please share with someone else who will too.

Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of love, men’s work, and identity.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What is your experience with acceptance and belonging — do you feel like you belong? Like you’ve been invited in?

* Have you felt the need to earn your way into being?

* What is your experience with the love of men—and between men?

* What is your experience with connection—and disconnection from yourself?

* Do you think it’s possible to make a real mistake in life, or are things pretty much destined to go as they are meant to go?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

In this episode, I talk with my friend Michael “Roddy” McDowell, a former Navy pilot instructor who now flies wide-body commercial jets and is also a year into a Master of Social Work program at NYU Silver. He’s one of the most interesting guys that I know, and also one of the first people to come into my life directly by way of my writing.

Roddy is a man that I love and respect, whose presence I admire, and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

Rock star status // what makes for “interesting.” Freedom to be ourselves.

The cloak of inadequacy. The pivotal moment, taking in sense of being somebody. Becoming a social worker / therapist / guide. Embodying changing identity. Excited curiosity vs tentative fear. Endings vs beginnings—and, “there is no place where I will conclude.”

Depression—and feeling shame about sharing that. Doing something—perhaps something radical—as a response to depression to get the wheel turning the other way. Turning over the card.

“I practice loving myself.” Everything’s a practice. We get good at what we do. You can practice anything, but you can’t just declare yourself to be something. Practice does not “make perfect.” There is no end—you practice.

Daily practices—not as a strict list, but as a collection of tools. The critic as a teacher.

What is “mens work?” A place to practice relating—and a sort of relational yoga. Relating is expressing, so practice relating is also practice being yourself.

The love of men. Respect. The story of love is incomplete. Our experience of the absence of love, and guarding against that leads to the conclusion that “I don’t need love,” and the soul doesn’t come alive (see the writing of Richard Rohr). The cultural stories that we tell about men not needing love, in an attempt to make ourselves feel OK with not having enough of it—to try to survive without love (see the writing of Warren Farrell and also bell hooks).

Roddy coins an expression: “The periodic table of love.” Expression. Play. Camaraderie. Brotherhood. Listening. Presence. Connection.

Access to love is access to joy.

Somatic practice. Feeling vs sensing. Interoception = the physical sensations in the interior of the body (see The Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul). EVRYMAN method & Owen Marcus. Taking note of and expressing internal sensations deepens our experience.

Thoughts are not feelings. Emotions are fundamentally based in physical sensations. When you voice your physical sensations it gives me a way to understand what you are feeling that is grounded in physical reality. It’s a way of communicating more directly—it’s a practice of expressing the basic truth of what you’re feeling.

In addition to his work at NYU, Roddy is also trained as an EVRYMAN facilitator and has started offering coaching and therapy hours. You can reach him at roddypilot@gmail.com

New here? Please make sure that you’re subscribed—and remember, paying subscribers get buttons!

Dig this? Please share with someone else who will too.

Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of depression, love, men’s work, and identity. Check out the writing of Richard Rohr, Warren Farrell and also bell hooks, and The Extended Mind, by Annie Murphy Paul.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* Have you felt the cloak of inadequacy, and/or the moment of becoming yourself? What did that feel like?

* Have you experienced depression? What does it feel like, and how have you moved through it, and/or come to live with it?

* Do you have any daily, or regular, practices that help you to be yourself?

* What is your experience with the love of men—and between men?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓

In this first episode, my friend and collaborator Adam Gayner and I talk about how safety, freedom, expression and leadership contribute to a richer life. Adam is the guy behind the genius brand FRED Water, runs a very successful brand and strategy agency and is in the process of launching a new company in the longevity space.

Adam is the guy who introduced me to the phrase “love and respect,” a man whose presence I greatly admire, and that I continue to want to get to know more deeply, all of which is why I've invited him to be with us here today.

If you’d like to listen to this show in your favorite podcast app, just paste this URL into where it says “add by URL” → https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/25958.rss — further instructions are here.

Show Notes

Adam: Feeling safer with myself is more able to be myself. A “looser me.” More present, more calm. More sensitive. It’s a physical sensation, a joyful release.

Bowen: In terms of communication and expression, “I didn’t grow up boys don’t cry, I grew up everybody does nothing. It wasn’t gendered.”

Safe and free are two sides of the same thing. If I feel safe, I feel free.

Group dynamics. Framing and containers for safety—not being judged, and not getting/giving advice. And—it’s a personal practice. Groups can provide a place to practice being ourselves.

“Safety” in groups often becomes bureaucracy. This sort of safety that depends on a lot of rules is very fragile (see Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile). We get safe more by practicing being ourselves than from a “safe space.”

The western equation is that we have to work to get free, but it’s the other way around. If we focus on getting free, then we actually have the energy to do good work.

What’s not there in society that is present in groups, in terms of safety and freedom? In some ways, nothing. It’s mostly about one’s own internal, personal practice. We’re all here to be ourselves as much as possible, and the more we practice expressing ourselves, the easier it gets. As a result of the practice that I’ve had in groups, I feel more free to express myself in general. As a result of that practice, I don’t feel much different in a group, in therapy, and out in the world.

How judgement, and ‘feedback’ from others can take us out of ourselves and put us in a defensive position. Feeling safe is slowing down, receiving someone’s reflection and then clarifying. Safety leads to clarity.

Material that isn’t expressed creates shadows; it takes on a life of its own. Integration requires expression. Sexuality. Things that happen ‘at night.’ Bringing it into the light. Talking about it during the day. The invitation to bring any material into the light. And, the invitation is also a request for help to grow, and an offer to help grow. That’s what we’re here to do. That’s what relationship is for—to grow together.

Freedom to be your fuller self. More integrated. See Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family systems (IFS) model. How to integrate the younger parts of ourselves. Bringing the night into the day. “Grow up” is often code for “shut up.”

Feeling safety allows us to offer safety to others. Safety creates space for leadership. You have to lead yourself first—and that creates opportunities for others.

The invitation creates a safe space, which leads to a richer life, and…Jed’s a millionaire.

You can find Adam here on LinkedIn.

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Love reading?

You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of freedom, safety, invitation, and men’s work. I also recommend Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile, and Adam mentioned Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family systems (IFS) model.

Please stick around — I’ve got some questions for you…

* What does safety feel like to you? What’s the relationship between safety and freedom?

* Do you have any experience with group work, or men’s work? If so, what have you learned from that?

* Have you had the experience of bringing something from your shadow, or dark side, into the light—expressing it? What has that been like for you?

And finally, please don’t forget to let me know that you enjoyed this piece by mashing that cute little red heart ❤️down below ↓