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Hello and welcome back to the show.
Hello, Ben.
We are joined today by our friend Jameson.
Jameson, how are you?
How are you, Ben?
I'm good.
And Ben's good, too.
We're going to speak for Ben.
Ben's not speaking this entire episode.
Ben's doing really good.
Yeah, I don't know who goes first.
I was being a gentleman.
The guy with the mustache goes first.
Oh, good call.
Yes, guy with mustache always goes first.
Jameson, it's great to have you back on.
You've been on, obviously, a handful of times.
You subbed in for Ben a few, I don't know, weeks, maybe a couple months ago when Spencer Nix was on.
Appreciate that.
You've been on a handful of times before that.
Wanted to bring you on this time about, I don't know, gosh, you can tell me the timeline.
Maybe a month ago, you sent me a text with a PDF of something you've been working on.
It's called On Dragons, Lions, and Wolves.
And I think over the course of the last month or so you've sent me like seven revisions of this thing as you continue to work on it.
And at some point in that process, I was like, can you just come on and talk to us about it?
So that's what I'm going to do.
It's like a 52-page book.
I think you're still trying to figure out what you're going to do with it, but we're going to talk about it anyways.
Again, it's called On Dragons, Lions, and Wolves, A Guide to Self-Mastery, Strength, and Service.
So I'm excited to get into this with you.
I want to start with something.
I'm going to read a little bit from it.
You talk about this early in the book and I think it's kind of like if it's not the thesis to me.
When it popped out I was like oh, this is the thesis.
This is what he's trying to work towards, and it's this concept of shared actualization.
So I want to start here.
I'm going to read a two or three sentences to get us into it, to give a little bit of context.
And then I'd love your comments on it.
And then we'll take the conversation where it goes.
You write this.
I'm convinced that Abraham Maslow, who so brilliantly acclimated human needs into a hierarchy, stopped one step short.
His framework ends with self-actualization, but there is a transcendent step beyond it.
One Maslow left out shared actualization.
The point of becoming deeply self-aware is not to fixate on yourself, but to gain the capacity to forget yourself in service to others.
The point of discovering your full potential is to direct those potentialities outward, to build a better world by giving them away.
So I want to start with this concept of shared actualization.
If it makes sense to kind of give us the bigger picture of like, what this is, what the genesis of this was, what the point of the entire exercise project.
For you, feel free to start there.
Yeah, it's exciting to talk about for sure.
And I also haven't.
Not only have I not really decided what to do with this, I don't even really know what to call it.
And so it's like a guide.
It feels wrong to call it a book.
I feel like the way it even like came together, it's like I feel like I have to add some sort of like caveat or qualifier to it, that it's like it's not a real book.
It's an ebook.
It's a booklet.
It's almost a manifesto.
Yeah.
I think that that honestly man, I think that is a great word for it because really, what this is is like my first attempt at trying to organize my own process of growth into like a cohesive narrative and a cohesive storyline.
And yeah, I mean, I love that that's where you started it.
Cause I do think that is kind of the ultimate aim of the process that this is supposed to guide you through.
And it's interesting because what really motivated doing this now, like starting to work on this a handful of months ago, was the fact that I don't really have any interest in in the objective being to create a platform, but there was just this reality of the roles that I have here at the gym, the roles that I have and fill with CompTrain specifically.
It was going to result in organic airtime and FaceTime to people who did not know who I was.
Regardless of however many people that was going to be, however many people that was going to impact, we were going to put out the run as one program documentary from the dirt circuit and share a bit of my story and that.
And it just felt really important to me to have something like this that people could find that was an honest narrative of my process before or aligned with putting out other content about, like the impact I hope to make and the kind of person I hope to be.
It just felt like really important that this lived somewhere to go, like cool, if you guys find this useful and you want to be a part of this and you want to do this with us, whether that be here in our community at Elysium or whether it's in CompTrain, I feel like it's very necessary for people to have the opportunity to know the whole story and go, if there's something here that inspires you.
Let me give you the clearer picture.
And I know we've talked a bit about Modern Wisdom and Chris Williamson and listened to him off and on.
And one of the more recent ones I listened to his podcast, he It may have been with Chris Bumstead.
They were talking about the idea of modeling the rise, not the result.
And so you want to point people to how you got from where you were to where you are now, not just model where you are now that other people might respect or want.
And so this was kind of my attempt at that is like, let me give you the whole picture.
Before you think anything I do is valuable or worth emulating, let's be honest about the process.
And so it That's kind of the timing for all of this.
All of that to say yeah man, the shared actualization aspect is so important and I think can be summarized with the last thing I added to it before I sent you this final version for release was this idea of pointing to the biblical reference of it is better to give than it is to receive.
And the whole idea is it is both so selfish and and so important to be selfless, which is an odd dichotomy and paradox like the most selfish thing you can do is be selfless in service to others because weirdly, it's the most fulfilling thing that you can experience in life and you can't be in service to other people for the purpose of it feeling good for you.
So you do have to forget yourself in the service of others in order to have that fulfillment from it.
But it really is just like this necessary crippling of your, like the narcissistic side of your ego that you have to go to war with so that you can then be in service of other people and personally receive just the immense benefits of that that you can't gain any other way.
So I think where you started is yeah, absolutely the hope that people would go through this process and use this as a bit of a guide and end up way more self-aware, so that they can use that self-awareness to begin to forget themselves in service to other people.
Can you just frame it up?
Dragons, lions, wolves.
What do we mean?
Yeah.
All three of these things have been like metaphors of my own process.
And the second, like little page of this has a Orson Scott card quote that says metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
And I found that to be like, so, so true for me.
Pete Holmes, the comedian, who's also weirdly a philosopher.
He's super fascinating.
He's a fascinating person.
He has a quote about metaphors that says metaphors are always true and only sometimes really happened.
But it is, man.
It's just like, I feel that truth resonates with me through metaphors so effectively.
And all three of these have been metaphors that have been really useful for me.
So dragons are...
It's the concept of like slaying your dragon.
The idea that the treasure that you want is guarded by something stronger than you, bigger than you, scarier than you.
That frightens everyone else.
But ultimately like it lives in a cave and it's not really coming out.
And obviously dragons are a bit of a myth which I don't have an opinion on, that one way or the other.
But the idea is, if you read a lot of lore like dragons aren't necessarily hostile to by nature as much as like they're going to find the treasure and hoard it.
And as long as you don't go after the treasure, they're not necessarily a threat to you.
But if you go after the treasure that you want, that's when you have to face it.
And so there's just like this reality, that your dragon could live guarding your treasure and no one would be the wiser for it, because it's not coming out necessarily to threaten.
It's staying there, just protecting what is rightfully yours and what's rightfully yours, necessary for you to become the person you're supposed to be.
So yeah, that's the.
The dragon's component is like more the metaphor of what's hiding in the cave and what is that thing guarding that really only you are aware of.
Can you give some examples of that for sure yeah yeah, like tee this up for people.
Yeah man, i think for me, like the way that i kind of start this process, the dragon for me was like this deep sense of like uh, purposelessness or aimlessness that i had, and like the secret part of my life where I was being like, rather productive in a positive way throughout like my twenties.
I like I was doing positive things, making like positive impacts, being helpful to the people around me.
That's the part, that's the stage of life that we started the gym.
And so like there was a lot of productivity occurring with a lot of like interior or internal chaos.
I was just like immensely insecure.
The productivity I was chasing was very much like meant to be kind of anesthetic to that insecurity and how unhappy I was with myself.
Things were not going well personally, internally.
Things were not going well for Leslie and I in our marriage.
We got married super young and had no idea what we were doing.
So there was a season of life where we were at best just like kind of cohabitating I'm doing my thing, she's doing her thing.
And there's not a lot of intentionality or pursuit in that.
There's not a thriving friendship in that.
And then that leads to a good bit of resentment between the two of us and dissonance and disconnection.
And we're basically living our own lives separately.
But from the outside looking in, we look fine.
And not only do we look fine, we're doing relatively useful helpful impactful, productive things for businesses, for people around us.
But deep down.
It was like if I'm in my bathroom looking in the mirror like I know what's up and I don't like what I see.
And every external effort was this just like the last ditch attempt to try to solve my insecurity.
So it was just kind of like this secret insecurity that I was just like letting rot away on the inside, which ultimately led to like secret behaviors as well, was like deeply angry man, like I could go from being fine to like completely overwhelmingly angry and like almost enraged in like an instant, like I was at this boiling point all the time, and so like there's a ton of that that I would say I was like deeply ashamed of at the time, but I'd never let people see that and I also wasn't honest with people that that's what I was experiencing and then think it's probably the time in life where most people would turn to things like substances or like addictive habits in that way, but i just like don't really have an inclination to those things, and so i just i started to pursue like productivity, like i needed to chase more stuff, i needed to do more competitions, i needed to hit more prs, i needed to all of those things and make more money do, create more impact, whatever it could have been anything Perform better, perform bigger.
Yeah, dude.
It's all just performative to an extent.
And then the ultimate nature of like hey, that dragon's in the cave and it's standing between you and what you need.
A big, probably the most insidious version of that was like if the treasure that was inside of the cave was the version of the marriage, friendship and relationship that Leslie and I were meant to have.
I wasn't willing to face the dragon that stood in the way of that and be honest about that.
Which ultimately led to having unhealthy relationships with other people that replaced what we were meant to have together.
And the details of that aren't necessarily the most important thing, but it was absolutely wrong and unfaithful to the greatest degree.
And probably not as Gossip Girl-esque as people would like to make it seem in terms of the details, but like reality is reality and it was what it was.
And there was like a replacement of if i'm not getting it from her, i'm i'm gonna start by getting it from performance metrics and this performative approach to life, and that's not going to be enough.
So then i need this person to think i'm awesome and i need this person to fulfill that in me and i need this person's attention and i need this person's friendship and i need intimacy with this person to make me feel more of myself.
And so it really just turned into this like abuse of people i really cared about, and the people around me began to just like feed this just endless black hole of insecurity and ego that i had all culminating in like it all just kind of like came to a head of like this is not okay and something has to change.
And we're either like we're either going to keep owning this business or we're not.
We're either going to stay married or we're not.
We're going to stay in this community or we're not.
And It went from this like everything was a secret struggle to that can't happen anymore.
And it's time to make a decision.
We're going to go one direction or the other.
It was very much like the, you've probably come to this fork many, many, many times and ignored it.
And now you have one final chance in large part of what it felt like.
You have one final chance to choose which direction you're going to go in terms of the fork in the road.
And you're either going to go like the narrow road, that's harder but better, or you're going to keep on this road that seems better but is far more destructive.
Which one are you going to do?
So that was kind of the, the dragon thing is like, so it's the secrets, man.
It's like your secret life.
And there can be so many dragons that guard so many different kinds of treasure.
But ultimately, I think that that treasure, to its greatest degree, is your identity, and something stands in the way of who, who you are and who you're meant to be.
And it could be a lot of different things, but Ultimately, I just wasn't being honest with myself and definitely wasn't being honest with other people about the fact that there even was a gap between who I said I was and who I actually was.
By nature, the metaphor is a bit ambiguous and hard to put exact words to.
You know what I really like, though?
I hadn't really thought about it while reading it, which is this idea that you said that dragons guard treasure, which I think is kind of a brilliant in and of itself, kind of a brilliant metaphor.
And when we think about treasure, treasure tends to be the thing that we say we want.
And so I love this idea of dragons guarding treasure, dragons guarding the thing that we truly want.
And the first part of that is to be honest with ourselves about what we want and about why we want them.
And then it's about having the courage, the bravery, the awareness to face the dragon and get past the dragon.
And those are like, those are in interdependent steps, oftentimes because we think the treasure is one thing.
Right at one point and i've raised my hand to this too like at one point, it's like if i just produce more, if i just do more, if i'm just more productive, more people like me, if more people, whatever then i'll get the treasure.
That's the treasure right.
And then you get close to the treasure and you realize i'm not even in a cave like this.
Yeah, that's not it.
There's no dragon here.
This is just me creating the story of a dragon.
And so i thought you know again, we talked about this already but the power of metaphor metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.
Dragons guarding treasure is like well, what's the dragon and what's the treasure?
Yeah, totally dude.
And I think a lot of the dragon metaphor came out of.
I consumed a lot of content at this time, like back in 20.
Early 2019 was a real transition point for me personally, and I just started consuming tons of content from lots of different people who believed lots of different things, and A lot of this dragon stuff came out of, like some Jordan Peterson content where he talks very significantly about like the.
Really the biggest difference between who you are and who you want to be is the fact that you refuse to stop lying.
And I think we think about lying as like you did a bad thing and now you're lying about the fact that you did a bad thing.
But for him it's mostly like you just say stuff you don't believe all the time and you agree with stuff you don't agree with all the time.
And maybe you don't even know what you believe or agree with, because you haven't actually been honest with yourself about those things.
So you agree with everybody, what everybody else says is true.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
And so that was a big piece of like, dude, just stop lying.
And if I'm going to stop lying, I have to figure out what exactly.
To your point, what is the starting point?
What is it that I believe?
What is true?
What is real?
What is the thing that I want most of all?
Yeah.
And I just, the recognition that I was just like very heavily lying to myself at that time.
Yeah.
So the, the dragon piece.
I think the order of operations here does matter, because it's like that thing inside of you, that blocker that exists only to you and yourself, that ultimately you could get away with for a really long time.
And unfortunately, I think people go their whole lives getting away with it, like with never facing it.
It reminds me and I knew we were going to get into this, but it reminds me of something we talked about with Spencer when he was on the show, regarding self-awareness.
And I have a little quote from you, but I want you to remind us where this quote came from and what it means.
This is what you said at the end of that episode with Spencer, self-awareness is to personal growth.
What hip extension is to athletic performance.
If you don't have it, everything else breaks down.
It's the foundational movement pattern of transformation.
And what you just said about the dragons being the place to start, like self-awareness is the place to start.
Can you unpack that a little bit and talk a little bit more about the power of self-awareness and maybe even how did you get to the place where you stopped lying to yourself?
Because it strikes me as you've got to be honest with yourself.
You have to have a really good sense of who you are.
Yeah.
I was probably really confident sharing that analogy because Ben wasn't on the podcast.
So he will have to confirm if hip extension is the crux of it.
I love it.
It's phenomenal.
Yeah, it's actually really interesting.
I think that it connects exactly what we were talking about with Spencer on that podcast.
Because I want to say that Spencer's suggestion for people who wanted to go on this journey of development was to find people who would be honest with you in terms of I think, like he, he referred to the idea of like, sit with somebody who you trust and just be willing to ask the question.
Do you think there's anything I should work on?
And, you know, and Jordan Peterson has a lot of content about that.
Like the most brave.
The hardest thing that you can do is sit at the end of your bed and honestly ask yourself what in your life should you change right now?
So yeah, man, I was just like, I was lying a lot.
I was lying about how I felt.
I was lying about my motivations.
I was lying about my behaviors and my actions to everybody around me.
And what's interesting is I never got personally courageous enough to address it myself.
And I never got angry or ashamed or experienced enough pain to motivate my way out of it.
In my process of it's time to choose, the fork in the road was a conversation with somebody who I knew had my best intentions at heart but was willing to call me on my shit.
And it was my brother and was just like.
I'm just going to say all the things that need to be said and ask all the questions that need to be asked.
And then make it really clear that there's a fork in the road here that you need to decide.
And then it was like, there was not even a moment in which I was angry about that.
It was like a relief.
Like, Thank goodness.
And it initiated whirlwind of pain and extremely difficult process.
But there was, oddly enough, there was never even a time, at any point then or throughout the process, that I was upset with him for doing that.
It was like I would love to say that I had like the nobility, the personal nobility or maturity, to just do it myself and recognize it myself and make the decision myself and turn it around myself.
And everything is part of the process.
So all the work I had done and whatever, it all works together.
But ultimately I needed that person to come and say, dude, you're better than this.
And you need to be better than this.
But there was a lifetime of equity in that relationship that made it so easy to trust and go like.
Yep, you're right.
And so, yeah, man, I think that's the surrounding yourself with the people.
I mean, we say that.
Surround yourself with the people who bring out your best, who want to see you win.
And that doesn't just mean like, hey, good job.
Your mention of Jordan Peterson reminded me of something and I just found it.
He posted this at some point.
I just have it saved.
Slay the dragon in his lair before he comes to your village.
People are often loath to figure out precisely where they are.
They don't want to know, because they'd rather be spread out in a half-blind manner in the fog, hoping that the place that they're at is better than it is, and deluding themselves by remaining vague rather than trying to figure out.
I'm right here, right now, with these specific problems.
But it's better to do that, because if you have a set of specific problems and you narrow them down and specify them, then you can start fixing them, and you can start fixing them incrementally.
Slay the dragon in his lair before he comes to your village.
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I'm excited to get to the lions and the wolves as well.
Dragons are a big conversation though.
Yeah.
I just read all the Harry Potter books, so I'm all for this dragon talk.
You know what's weird?
There is a An odd number of conversations that I've had with Heather about whether dragons existed or not.
And she can't differentiate between dragons and dinosaurs.
Right.
So she's like, they did exist.
There's fossils.
It's like, those are dinosaurs.
That's a pterodactyl.
That's the same thing.
One breathes fire.
This concept, it's something I came across recently. fairly recently reading a book by J. Hendricks.
I think I'm going to get it wrong.
But it's basically about Aristotle.
And Aristotle has this concept.
We've all heard it, but it's resonated so deeply with me because we talk so much about mind body, and then you want to fill in the blank with the next one, right?
It's like, what is that next one?
Mind, body, and spirit.
Mind, body, and soul.
Mind, body, and he uses the word soul, meaning like he being Aristotle.
And Aristotle's definition of it, your soul is you at your best.
Simple, right?
And the simplicity of that is so powerful.
And what ends up happening is, when we are in this fog, as Jordan Peterson talks about it, when we don't have the hard conversations with ourselves and lie to ourselves about our situation, like you were having, what we end up having is behaviors, actions and spending our time in ways that aren't aligned with our soul.
And when we have that, I think you said the words or Jordan did, I can't remember.
It forms a gap.
And that gap is the gap of despair.
It's a gap of disappointment.
It's the gap of I'm not doing what I should be doing, knowing on a subconscious level.
It's not conscious.
But there is this subconscious space where you're like there is some deep rooted stuff and it comes up as unhappiness resentment anger disappointment stress anxiety, all the things that you were kind of leaning.
And I really like that in terms of like what if?
Because I think we all have ideas of what the treasure is right.
But what if the treasure was actually a little bit more connected across humanity?
What if the treasure is our soul, right?
It is like, that's another word that we've used for like fulfillment, right?
Like living your best life.
And for you it might be like the treasure seems like the not optimized relationship with Leslie right.
It seems like that's just one of the areas.
That's like the roles of your soul.
Yeah, a function of it.
A function of it, right.
And the thing that is actually there, it's kind of like a little Pulp Fiction type thing, right?
Like the thing that in Pulp Fiction, the thing that they were all chasing, and you never get to see it, but they lift it up.
And behind the bloggers say that what that actually is is Marcellus Wallace's soul.
Like that's in that case.
And that's why he has the Band-Aid in the back of his head, because he sold his soul to the devil and they're trying to get it back.
I don't know how I actually got on the tangent, other than that, other than the whole movie is about them, basically like chasing this thing which they're trying to chase back, to get your soul back.
Yeah.
That's so interesting.
And the, I guess the synonymous words like used here in this book to soul would be identity.
And that seems like, yeah, those are the same thing.
Like your soul is your identity.
It's you, it's your highest self.
It's the thing.
That's like constantly calling you and saying like like, there's more, there's more, there's more.
And yeah, I I think that was such a crucial not I think I know it was such a crucial part of the process for both Leslie and I to recognize that, like all of the stuff that we thought were the aims were really just symptoms of the problem.
And ultimately like what we've experienced in terms of like kind of growth reconciliation, health.
All of that is in large part because of the choices she's chosen to make to, even though I was the one who made the functional mistakes that would have justified her going.
You know what I'm out.
Like she didn't just choose to give me the grace to come back from that personally.
Like she even took ownership over going.
What are the dragons I'm not facing that also led to this result.
And that's like so significant because there came to be a time where it was like okay, this is just a symptom.
Like this dysfunction, this disunity, this lack of health across all areas of life, like These are just functions and symptoms of the problem, which is like we're both just living weird rat race misguided, misaligned soul, disconnected lives.
And that's going to chase us into everything that we do.
And we will never have the relationship.
We want the business, we want the roles, the jobs, the community, the class experience at our gym.
Like.
We're never going to have any of that unless we address the actual problem, which is the soul level identity issue that's going to carry into every function that we have.
And so I think, like Leslie deserves a lot of credit, not just for being patient with me in my process and gracious with me in my process, but truly going like the extreme ownership aspect of like what role did I have to play in this?
And what we have experienced in the last handful of years of our life, and in the growth that we experienced, would have not be possible with one party in that Going.
Yeah, it's your fault, but I'm just waiting for you to fix it.
So I think that is so significant because there was even a recognition at like the soul level.
There was some stuff that needed to be addressed across the board with everyone involved in the process.
And yeah, I think your soul being your identity, like that thing that you can't quite grasp, like we give that away.
It's dramatic to say that you sell your soul to the devil.
But we just allow our souls and our sense of identity just to get lost in the rat race, in consumerism, in consumption, in this performative mindset, and never really ask ourselves the right questions.
And you end up at 26 years old going like, what just happened?
How did I get here?
Who am I?
That's tough.
That's a tough place to be.
Let's move on to lions.
You write this.
The lion is what you face without.
The threats to your family, your community, your culture.
To leap into the pit is to choose purpose over passivity, service over self, courage over convenience.
Talk to us about chasing lions.
So the lion chaser mentality was, again, like some of the content I consumed.
This is from an author named Mark Batterson, and he wrote a couple of books using this metaphor.
And this is kind of at the biblical proportions of comes out of second Samuel which again, regardless of what you believe, I think you would find second Samuel fascinating to read.
It's just like, it is biblical at epic proportions or epic at biblical proportions.
I don't really, I don't know how you'd say that.
It's the most dramatic story like in the world, in all of history regarding like kingdoms and wars.
And it is, it's like fantasy on the pages for sure.
But there is a story of David, who is the David, and Goliath David who eventually becomes king who whenever, before he slayed Goliath and before he became king, was just a shepherd.
And his statement he makes before he faces Goliath the giants, which is just like the proverbial thing that we all use whenever a team that sucks beats a team that doesn't, or when anyone used to play the Patriots like that's the David versus Goliath thing.
Before he faced the giant, his statement was I chase down a lion whenever it threatened my sheep and when it threatened my flock and I killed it, and I have that as evidence that I'll do the same to this giant.
Which is just so badass, first of all.
But then secondly, he does.
He goes I have proof that I can chase down things that threaten what matters to me, and there is evidence and there is proof from my past experiences that because I have chased things that are threats and I have defeated them, I will do that again now.
And then you fast forward, he slays the giant, he becomes the king.
And then he creates essentially a cohort of what is called like his mighty men.
And they're just like the, the Navy seals of Israel at the time and like the elite fighting force.
And one of these guys is, does the exact same thing.
There's like a lion that's threatening people.
And he, in very imperfect conditions, doesn't wait for the lion to come into the village or to come and threaten what matters.
He goes and finds it and he finds it in a pit on a snowy day, crawls down into the pit in the snow and takes the lion out.
And so it's just like it's weaved throughout that entire story, like the entire Davidic story, in kind of second Samuel.
Or it's like this idea of men and I think, women for sure as well, but in this case, men who protect what matters to them and who fulfill the role that they are meant to fill in their communities and for their families and for themselves, are not men who wait until threats come, but they're the people who discern them, are aware of them, aren't afraid of them or, despite being afraid of them, chooses to go after them anyways.
So I just think it's a really powerful metaphor for this idea that, like cool, you went into the cave and you slayed your dragon and you got what you wanted.
Your soul is intact.
Your identity is something that you're aware of.
You know who you are now.
And now you use that sense of identity to know.
Well, I'm the kind of person that chases these things down that threaten other people as well.
Yeah, you're right.
Lions left unchallenged devour more than sheep.
They devour communities, cultures, and legacies.
Yeah, to chase a lion is to confront the threat before it becomes a crisis.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that the obviously we're partial to the idea of chasing here, but I think that's the part that I think is that stands out to me.
It's not that there are lions out there and you should be aware of the lions, but it's that there are lions out there.
And it's, you know, it's similar to the Jordan Peterson quote, right?
Like go to the dragons before the dragons come to your village.
It's like, go to the lions before the lions come to your village.
Right.
And I think so, connect the dots a little bit between the dragons and the lions and And because you said already, there is some sequence to that, which is one of the things I wanted to talk to you about
And I assume that sequence is like until you've slayed your dragons, it's unlikely that you will have the.
I'll let you fill in the blank there, but it's unlikely that you'll have the.
What to go after?
Go chase the lions.
Clarity, courage, capacity, character, to use some of our brand adjacent terms.
And yeah, I think like again the phrase before David goes to face Goliath.
He's like dude.
I've done this before.
And it was a lion before.
What's a giant to a lion?
Like, I got this.
Like, I've I've done this before.
That's the cliche.
Like you, don't rise to the level of the challenge, but to the level of your preparation, essentially something like that.
So yeah, I think until you choose to face the dragon, you don't have the capacity for it, for sure.
You don't have the evidence.
You don't have the experience.
You don't have the skill.
You don't have any of those things.
But you also just aren't the person who does those things.
To assume that when that lion comes and you hear it roar and it threatens what matters to you, to assume that in that moment, prior to that moment, you've done absolutely no work to prepare for that moment, to assume that you will rise to the level of the occasion to go after that thing is pretty wild.
That's assuming a lot about, like your ability to defy and deny everything that you have naturally trained yourself to be, which is frankly, a coward if you know the dragon is there and you don't go after it every day, that you choose not to go after it is just like cowardice in practice.
So okay, the lion's here now and it's threatening what matters to you, what makes you think you're going to choose not to be a coward when that time comes?
And so yeah, I think, like you develop the capacity, you develop the character, you develop the courage to no longer be a coward.
And again, being a coward doesn't mean it doesn't scare you.
It is going to have risk, but like you do it irrespective of that.
And to be honest with you, I don't know if it would be easier.
We don't have the luxury of knowing whether or not it would be easier if these were actual lions and actual dragons versus the metaphorical ones because, like an actual lion, who will actually eat things that actually matter to you, who knows, dude like you probably would have a higher percentage of rising to the level of that occasion.
But you have to be so dramatic now to go like, well, what are the lions?
Like, because you can just be so passive, because there are no real threats anymore.
You could just passively exist through your entire life, never facing anything that threatens you or anybody, because you have to go looking for it.
And you have to go like, what's the problem around?
And again, like I've talked to about consuming a lot of content.
Well, this podcast was a lot of the content I was also consuming at this season of life.
And there was a point where you guys talked about the problem process power framework.
And I think that's the lion.
I think the lion is the what's the problem?
And then what power do I have?
And what is the process I can go through to address that problem?
It might be easier if it was a real lion and your options were to kill it or be killed by it.
But now that threat is just so much more like ambiguous and is a slow decay.
And yeah, it's not as like clear.
That is the thing.
It's like what are the problems threatening you and your community and the people around you, and what process and power can you go through to address those problems?
And I also think that if you haven't faced the dragon, you won't have the ability to even ask your.
You don't have the self-awareness to even ask yourself that question.
So you have to like develop the self-awareness first, then go Now being aware of myself.
What power and capacity do I have to be aware of the problems around me that I can maybe help solve and address.
You say, I don't know if it would be easier or not if it was real actual lions.
I don't know if it's easier or not, but the clarity it brings brings forth probably more urgency.
When you are in a war, when you are in a battle, the clarity of what's at stake is rises dramatically.
And to your point, we live in a time in a society with so little true catastrophic threats.
Yeah.
But that doesn't mean that they don't take different forms.
Yeah.
And they're just quieter.
But the threats are every bit as real.
They're just, they lie dormant until it's too late.
I really like this idea of like, it's not about killing the lion when it comes to your door.
It's about going and seeking it out. finding it in the pit on a snowy day, chasing lions.
I love that idea of chasing the threat, going to it, not waiting for it to come to you.
Yeah.
You know, the don't wait thing.
It's very, very much to me, this idea of you know, it's much better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war right.
It's like build up this capacity, build up prepare, even in peacetime, because the threat will come.
And whether that threat is decrepitude later in life, which now your family has to take care of you.
If you haven't done the work to prepare for that, now you are a burden on your crew, your team, your community.
So you have to do the work beforehand.
You have to go and, as you said, be dramatic about it.
Yeah, I like that a lot.
The other part of it is no matter who we are at some point in our lives and this is again me it sounds dramatic.
We're going to get the proverbial call in the middle of the night.
If you haven't done not just the physical but the mental preparation, as you said, if you're not ready to answer the bell, then again you are not living out your life to the fullest.
We need to know consciously and subconsciously on all levels that we are ready.
And if we aren't, again, there's that gap between us and our best selves.
Our best selves are part of, it goes back to that shared actualization.
Our best selves are there to support and lift and hold and protect and contribute to the greater good.
If we end up being the drag, the anchor, the anchor in a negative way, the thing that is a burden on those around us.
It might be that type of thing.
Again, we're, and I, Lying is so like black or white.
I don't know if it's that we're lying to ourselves.
It's that we haven't dug deep enough to root this up.
So it just sits underneath.
It sits underneath a covering of dust.
It doesn't take a lot.
I actually don't think it takes a lot.
Just blow the dust away.
It's not like you have to like spend years and years to figure this thing out.
It just takes a little bit of like honest conversations like your brother did with you.
It was like one conversation with someone you trusted that you were like, whoa. got it.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
It's the chasing thing, like going and seeking it out.
And yeah, I mean we've talked about this.
When it comes to like stuff we choose to do and things with comp train in specifically, it's like what is the point of running around the woods for 24 hours?
What's the point of doing challenging things like that?
What's the point of training every day?
Honestly, because I think also people see running around the woods is 24 hours and training every day as two entirely different things.
And, running around the woods for 24 hours is definitely not training.
So I don't suggest it as a training format, but what it develops in you to do that and also train in your garage alone every day are similar things.
And they are growth that you're willing to chase and seek out.
And what we know is that if we did exist in a world where there were real dragons and there were real threats and there were real lions, like The necessity to train in your garage every day or to go run around the woods for 24 hours, really wouldn't be a thing, because life itself would force, function you into it.
And the type of training that we do physically replicates the most humanly necessary level of preparation and that we should do in order to be capable as human beings.
But like if the world were what it used to be, we would have to be capable or we would be dead.
And so now it's like, now we're going to be dead, but it's going to be slow and decaying.
And it's going to be a miserable existence between now and then.
And it's not going to be living into our fullest potential.
And so it's like training in your garage alone every day or running around the woods every 24 hours is often the first step for most people to begin, just like having this conversation.
Right. the dragons, the lions, the wolves, the whatever metaphor.
It is like your own mini Misogi of sorts that forces this like oh okay, I need to think about the fact that I maybe have a soul and I am a person and I'm supposed to make an impact on the world and I shouldn't just consume my way through existence until I become a liability to everybody around me.
So the chasing thing, it is like problems find problems that you can solve for yourself and for the others around you.
But it's also like find challenges that help continue to refine you.
Because I also think it's a process, like using the metaphor that this comes from like with David.
It's like okay he, what was the order of operations here?
He, he killed a lion, he killed a giant, and then he became a king.
And then there's a whole bunch left of the story where he does a whole lot of things really well.
And he does a whole lot of things poorly.
It's like, There's a lot of ebbs and flows and ups and downs.
So it's also not like, okay, lion, check, giant, check, king, check, done.
It's like all of those parts of the process still were embedded into the future of his process.
Because his greatest failures came long after the lion, long after the giant, long after he became king.
And I imagine there's a lot that we don't know that's not written down as well.
And it's like, dude, this is not a one shot.
You got to keep chasing this stuff.
So you keep becoming who you're supposed to be and you don't take your foot off the gas and you don't go backwards and you use your prior experiences as evidence that you can do it again.
And you can do it again, and you can do it again, but you also have to do it again.
You know, it's like, man, all this ties together for me.
So it's like the athletic forever thing.
It's like, nobody cares what you could do.
Nobody cares that in high school you could run of 440.
Nobody cares in high school that you could deadlift X amount of weights.
Like the people who need you now don't care what you could do.
Then they care what you can do now.
And what you did then should give you a sense of like competence and confidence that you could do it again or do whatever version of it you should do now.
But what matters is what you can do now.
So like, cool, you did kill the lion.
Cool.
You did slay the giant.
What can you do now?
And can you draw upon those past experiences so that you continue to do those things in the ways that you're supposed to do them now?
So it really is like a call to be like, none of this is one shot, man.
Like it's always going to be calling you and you always have to answer the call one way or the other.
And you're always either going in one direction or the other here.
So I think it is important that you draw upon past experiences, but that you also continue to chase experiences that continue this process.
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I really like what you said there in terms of that's what, not what you could do then, it's what you, what you can do now.
But i even like what you said like, which is, continue to find challenges that refine you.
Dot, dot dot.
So you can keep becoming.
It's almost like, I don't really care where you were, where you are right now is cool.
But what I really want is where, what am I becoming?
Michelle Obama wrote a book and it was called Becoming.
I just love that because it's like, it's not the hats I've worn before.
It's not the hat I'm wearing now.
It's who am I becoming in the process of doing this?
And it's always like, It's just like, it's still this like growth mindset.
It's just still this like well, you say it's like okay, like giant lion or lion, giant king, not done.
Like we're always becoming, it's this never ending evolutionary process of like, yup.
And guess what?
You wake up tomorrow and you work at it again.
You wake up the next day and you work at it again.
I really like the word becoming a lot.
That speaks, you're never done, right?
And it takes effort and work.
This is what you write about wolves.
The wolves are what you must reconcile within.
The paradox of wildness and wisdom, strength and restraint, fire and calm.
To tame them both is to choose wholeness over fracture, belonging over isolation, maturity over immaturity.
What do you mean by that?
What do we mean by wolves?
And maybe start with the story that we've talked about here on the show before, where you've got two wolves and it depends on who you feed.
Because you added a little context to it that I like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I put that in there because I also I mean, I do love that.
And it's such an important and like powerful perspective on you become what you feed and fuel and focus on.
And so the like, the metaphor within the metaphor.
Here is like the story where the you know grandson talk asks his grandfather which wolf wins and the grandfather's telling him there's two wolves inside of you.
And ultimately the punchline is like well, the one that wins is the one that you feed, and so you, you have inside of you the yin and the yang, the good and the evil concept, and whichever one of those happens to be the most predominant in your life at the time is the one that you're fueling, the one that you're feeding.
Well, so it is just like kind of the simplification of like you are what you consume dude, you are the result of the five people around you, you are the result of the six podcasts you listen to the most.
You are the result of all of that.
You're the result of your habits, and so The version I put in here is not necessarily the antithesis of that, but rather kind of like the maybe more nuanced view of it.
And I just like, I'm fascinated by wolves in general.
Like the pack mentality, the way that they approach things.
I'm like a big canine guy anyways.
I've learned this year.
The thing that I've done that I've learned the most from is go to dog training with our dogs.
Like you can just learn so much about being a person from training dogs and the lessons from that.
This is probably my favorite of the three metaphors, particularly just because of like it pointing to that kind of the culture and even like the species that it's about.
But ultimately it builds on this idea that yes, you have those inside of you and the wildness and wisdom thing is kind of the two versions I would point out.
It's like you do have that wild, just primal, mammalistic thing that inside of you, that animalistic thing that exists inside of you.
And then you also have like kind of the docile, not weak, but wise, calm, mindful side of you.
And you could take that in into whatever, however many paradoxes or like juxtapositions you would like like.
Inside of you is both versions of everything.
And they are extremes.
And so I think that it is the case that One of those two things is more predominant or overwhelms the other, based off of what you feed it and how you fuel it.
But I also don't think that the aim is to eliminate one or the other.
So the whole contention here and the whole suggestion here is don't get rid of the wildness, as if the wisdom is all that matters.
And don't eliminate the wisdom because being aggressive and being wild gets stuff done.
And They are both necessary at different times to different extremes, based off of the circumstances that you are in.
And one of them is not necessarily better.
It's just like the wildness or the wolf of intensity and aggression if you ignore, it will grow feral and dangerous and angry.
But the docile wolf, the wise wolf, will sterilize you as a man.
It will make you ineffective.
It will remove the parts of who you were supposed to be that can make an impact on the world.
And so it really is like this taming of, and the harmony of the wild and the harmony of the wise together that makes you most effective.
And I think it ties to the chasing lions thing, to Ben's point of when or if a threat truly does present itself.
If you haven't done the work of taming those two things inside of you and you have only eliminated the intensity and you've only eliminated the aggression and you have oppressed and suppressed it so much because people tell you it's wrong, it's wrong, it's wrong, it's toxic, then when the true threat reveals itself, guess who's not going to war to protect you?
The people that you have sterilized by telling them that being aggressive and being wild and being intense is wrong.
And I just think about the World War II era and culture where you would look at like obviously nothing is binary, nothing is all good or all bad.
But there there was a real influx of like, honorable masculinity at that time.
Because you had a bunch of young dudes who got fit, who got capable, who got sent to fight a war against a measurably wrong thing.
Like the Nazi regime, they had a reason.
It wasn't this like weird arbitrary hidden.
Nobody really understands what you're fighting for thing.
It's like, There is an evil that is threatening.
I'm gonna go protect it.
I'm gonna develop the capacity physically to protect it.
And then I'm gonna come back, having been the conquering hero, and use that to like cultivate a better society.
Well, if that generation of men had just been told that, that wolf inside of you that answers that, call the aggression, the intensity, the bravery, the courage, the hostility, even the capacity for danger, the capacity to be dangerous.
If all of those men had just suppressed that and gone, you know what?
It's the other one that matters.
Let's feed the other one.
Let's feed the calm.
Let's feed the docile.
Let's feed the wise.
Let's feed that one.
They're not answering that call.
They're not going to protect what needs to be protected.
So the whole concept here is like stop pretending that it is binary and recognize that it's all really just temperance and harmony, and both are necessary inside of you, and the harmony of both is what makes you who you're supposed to be, not the elimination of either one.
It reminds me of we had you.
You join us for another episode.
A couple months ago.
We talked about i think we called it like the anti-modern neighborhood or something like that.
We talked about this kind of thought experiment of how to build a neighborhood for us and our crew, And I remember we talked about the Rudyard Kipling quote the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.
And you said something like, we were talking about that.
We were talking about being in community and you said something like the pack is weak because the wolf is weak.
Do you remember that?
And can you talk about that a little bit more?
Cause I feel like it fits into this conversation about the two wolves and the wildness part of it.
Yeah.
I think it fits super well into how you started the conversation and like, ideally ties it back to the beginning of shared actualization.
Is you got to slay the dragons to discover what even is inside of you in the first place?
You have to recognize that there is something that you should constantly be chasing that calls you to a higher standard, a higher level that protects the people around you.
But ultimately, like what's the point?
And the point is to exist in relationship to other people in a way that is a net positive to the people around you and protects the people around you but serves the people around you, but also allows you to not just contribute to but enjoy the benefits of being a part of.
So the transition in the pages of part three about the wolves goes from step one when it comes to taming your wolves is recognizing that you do have both inside of you.
You are a living paradox.
You are multidimensional and multifaceted and you need to have the ability to hold space for all of those things and know when it's time to be whatever version you need to be.
And that is step one to existing with these tamed wolves.
Step one is to realize that there is no such thing as a lone wolf.
Like the lone wolf out in the wild is not cool.
He's just dead.
Like that's how it works.
It's literally where they go to die.
Like you get ostracized, dead.
But I think there's this concept of like, I'm the lone wolf.
Like, dude, it's not even really a thing.
Like that's not a badge of honor.
That is like a death sentence.
So the idea of you have to exist in a pack dude and this ties so much to like everything we know about longevity in humans is what's the one thing that seems to matter the absolute most, whether it's causal or correlative or all of the above, it's your relationships.
It's who you surround yourself with.
It's having happy, healthy and fulfilling relationships that you don't just contribute to, but you also get to consume from and you get to experience.
And so the whole point of like the dragons, the lions and then taming your inner wolves is to be a positive member of this pack and this community that you exist into.
And I've never really done anything.
I don't think that I haven't used that quote in like, well, it's like my, one of my favorite quotes.
And I love, I love the jungle book anyways, but it is like the strength of the wolf is the pack and the strength of the pack is the wolf man.
And the wolves are weak.
I think because for trying to back out of the metaphor a little bit you, as a wolf in the pack, are weak because you haven't faced your or slayed your dragons and you haven't chased down the lions and you haven't tamed what's inside of you.
And now you're existing in this pack with this lack of identity that probably isn't contributing and is only taking from and, to pull on Ben's words, you are likely just a liability to the pack that you're in.
You're probably not an asset.
You're probably not a contributor to it.
You're probably just consuming resources and not really producing anything valuable for what's in it.
And the best way to enjoy the pack that you exist into is to contribute to it.
And you can't do that without going through this self-discovery process first.
So yeah man, I think there's so much you must do to become a valuable member of your community, of your pack, of your relationships, of your families, of your friend groups.
And there's also just nothing more rewarding, I think, than becoming a highly contributive member of that pack and going like dude.
I can protect these people.
I can provide for these people.
I can enjoy these people, yes, but I can cultivate something that makes these people's lives better.
And At the end of the day, like that doesn't become arrogance.
If you've gone through the order of operations appropriately.
It's like the most fulfilling thing is to go like there's just nothing better than to exist in community in that way.
But I also can't imagine anything that pulls you out of that more than a lack of self-awareness, where you got these dragons in the cave protecting all of the treasure.
It just means you're not present.
You're not in the room.
You're not actually a part of the pack.
So yeah man, the whole point of like the taming the taming the wolves is to understand like Don't get rid of the stuff.
Don't get rid of the stuff that other people are afraid of because it could be dangerous.
Good.
The capability of being dangerous is a good thing.
And you can use that productively.
And also, don't get rid of the stuff that people tell you is weak, because it's probably not weakness.
It's probably meekness.
And those are very different things.
To be meek and to be gentle is so different than to be weak.
Being weak sucks.
Nobody likes being weak.
And so you should address the things that are weak in body and mind in every way.
But choosing to be weak is like a long process.
Like you become weak over time.
But meekness and gentleness is only gentleness if you have the capability to not be gentle.
Like if you're weak, you can't even really be gentle, because you're not even capable of not being gentle.
You're not even capable of being a threat.
But being able to be a threat and then to actively choose to be gentle Like dude, that's the whole thing.
That is the balance.
That is the harmony.
I think it's a little bit more nuanced.
It's the part I had the most trouble with of like, dude, I don't even know if this makes sense.
Like it makes sense to me, but I don't actually know if this is going to make any sense to anybody that's reading this, because it does feel a little bit more nuanced and maybe just kind of like personally complex.
But it's the part that I feel like is the whole point.
Like what's the point of the dragons and what's the point of the lions if it's not eventually for you to exist alongside other human beings in a contributive way and in an enjoyable manner?
Last thing you write this, the process is not about becoming perfect.
It is about honesty and showing up to the cave, the pit and the pack again and again until you become someone who is dangerous to darkness and dependable in the light.
Was dangerous to darkness and dependable in the light.
Can you talk about that briefly?
Cause I think you wrote that a few different times and all the times I circled them and highlighted it and put a star next to it.
So can you just talk to us about that for a minute?
Yeah, this whole thing is just Man.
I think what you called it as a personal manifesto is absolutely what this is.
And so it's just like that phrase was one that I had written down in my journal.
I had written it down on a card and put it in my car for a period of time because I wasn't those things.
And I think that this transformative process for me was about becoming the kind of person that was dangerous.
To darkness, darkness being... wrong, evil, pain, whatever would hurt people.
And then being dependable to the people who were around me.
And I wasn't those things.
Like I was performative and I was doing some relatively effective, impactful things but ultimately, like in the darkness, I was not.
I was not a threat to the evil things.
I was just a part of them, honestly.
Yeah.
So I think that It made its way in here multiple times, because it was a bit of a mantra for myself at the time of like the darkness is the secret stuff too.
It's like, dude, I just don't want to live with any secrets anymore.
So that the other people who are living with secrets, the other people who are just kind of like shrouded in this, like darkness in their life, in lots of different capacities and lots of different ways I can help be dangerous to that in their own life.
I can help people come out of that themselves.
I can help people walk through that darkness, walk through that wilderness, walk through that shroud of confusion, walk through that lack of knowingness, that purposelessness.
I want to help be dangerous to that for other people.
And I want to be a dependable person.
I want to be somebody that people can rely on, that people can trust, that is steady, that is constant.
And I think all of that sounds like so noble of like, okay, so you just want to be a great person.
Cool.
But it's also like, it's so self-serving.
It's so much better, man.
And so it's interesting timing, dude.
Yesterday at the gym, right before coaching the 430 class one of our younger members, she was like waiting outside the bathroom.
And well, there was a crew of people waiting outside the bathrooms to go into change for the class.
And she was like hey, you can't get mad at me if I'm late for the class because I'm waiting on the bathroom.
And then I just laughed.
And one of the other members who was back there said, hey, I don't think I've ever seen Jameson mad.
That'd be crazy to see.
And I was like, whoa, that's crazy.
And I was like I told them in the moment how grateful I was that they thought that and that they were willing to say that, but also how untrue that was of me five years ago.
Like dude oh man, there are a lot of holes and a lot of walls because of my reactive hostility to my own anger with myself.
And dude, like that moment, I'm like, cool.
Like, that's great.
I'm glad that that's how you feel.
But like, nobody is more fulfilled by the fact that that's reality than me.
Nobody gets to enjoy the benefits of the fact that I'm not an angry, reactive person anymore.
Like I get to enjoy those benefits.
And I want to help other people now like experience, that kind of like freedom and that fulfillment, that man in the darkness that they can overcome those things.
And they truly can go from, they can experience this story of I used to be one way and now I'm another.
And so like, I just think it's very important.
It's very important to me to have the integrity to go like.
I'm glad that you can appreciate what you see now.
Let's be honest about where it came from.
And let's be honest about the process required to go through to get here.
And also that it's like so far from being done.
Like.
This is a very ongoing process and I have just as many, if not more, things that I need to slay and chase and tame now as I ever have.
But I'm not like, scared of the process anymore.
It's almost exciting.
That's like the whole point is, is to continue to slay and to chase and to tame.
So yeah, I think that's why that phrase made it in there a handful of times is because it's the exact opposite of what I was and it's what I want to be.
Love it.
And it's also a nice metaphor in and of itself, metaphor inside of a metaphor, a metaphor fed by metaphors.
This book is like those Russian, the Russian nesting dolls.
They just like, you just keep pulling more and more and more metaphors out.
Jameson, thank you.
This has been great.
I'm going to point people and we'll link to your sub stack where I think you're going to start to put some of this stuff out so folks can get a chance to actually read it and engage with it and chat with you about it.
So thank you.
So we'll link to that.
Check out the show notes for those.
Jameson.
Thank you, ben.
Thank you, we'll see everybody next week.
Thanks, guys.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
Two quick things before we go.
The first if you want even more from this episode, i do recommend you check out the full listener guide where we break down all the big ideas, we ask reflection questions, we give you steps to put these ideas into action.
The link is in the show notes.
And the second thing While you're there, check out the Chase Club.
It's our premium membership, where we include bonus content, ad-free episodes and the brand new Chase Tracker app.
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