How would you describe what you do if you meet someone for the first time?
Wow. Um, well what the school does is I bring people out for a week at a time and teach horsemanship.
Um, the basic fundamentals of working with horses and understanding horses.
But that is more of a springboard for life.
Um, I started out, we started out with a YouTube channel where I was just, just wanting to give some basic horsemanship tips and some things for young people who are wanting to get into wrangling or cowboying or packing.
And, uh, and it took on a life of its own.
And, uh, and we started getting a lot of questions, a lot of comments on the channel.
It's like, hey, if you'll start a school, we'll come, you know.
And so it's just kind of grown from there.
So it's, it's hard to say we teach horsemanship, but then we also try to help young people have a more, um, grounded, solid approach to life.
What career did you want to do when you were a kid?
I wanted a cowboy. That was it.
You know, every little boy in this country at a certain age, they want to be a cowboy when they grow up.
The only difference for me was I never outgrew it.
That's all I ever wanted to do.
Talk to me about your upbringing.
What was childhood like?
Uh, definitely not cowboy.
Um, I had a very solid family.
Um, and my dad, my family, I'm the seventh generation of my family born in central Kentucky.
Um, my dad, my granddad and my great granddad and my mom's side of the family too.
And my dad was a Baptist preacher.
And so we moved a lot for his work and, but I didn't grow up my opportunities for, you know, farm work, ranches and stuff like that was when I visited my grandparents back in Kentucky.
And I knew back then, this is, you know, what I wanted to do.
It just, it took a while for me to be able to actually do it.
Um, but I was raised in, you know, a very close knit, very solid, very country, patriarchal family, you know, just very old school Kentucky.
What do the rest of your family think about having a rogue wrangler?
And I don't know, um, the, uh, I was different.
I was a different man back when I was raising my children.
Um, and back as a young man, I was wound really tight.
Um, what do you mean when you say that?
I had a bad temper and I was under a lot of stress for a lot of years.
And so I wasn't the calm laid back, easy going fellow that, you know, people see today.
And so I think, you know, my children are all grown and I think, you know, in a lot of ways, they're still setting back trying to, trying to, uh, compare the old me with the new me that, you know, it's only been about five years that I found the place where I could just, you know, get some self control
and learn how to chill and, and, uh, get a handle on things, you know, so I think in a lot of ways, my family are just, they're just setting back watching and trying to justify the one, what they see now with what they knew for so many years.
What's the story of your initiation into this life?
Um, you into the cowboy life.
I was newly married and we had a baby.
That was just an infant and I was working.
Uh, we were in little town called Alpine, Tennessee, and there was a Birkland furniture factory there that made recliners.
And I was working in the shipping and was not happy.
Uh, didn't like the job.
What age are you here?
Oh, I was 26. Um, and, uh, I was reading Western Horseman and there was a ad in the back in the classifieds about an elk hunting lodge in Idaho that was offering you could come out and if you would work for the summer for free, they would teach you packing.
And, uh, and I just, I said, you know what, I'm going to do it.
I'm doing it. I'm taking the jump.
I'm not spending the rest of my life working in a factory and sitting here and doing this.
I'm going to go chase the dream that I've had since I was a child.
And so my wife and our infant, she flew to Hawaii to stay with her dad and sold everything we had, which wasn't much.
And, uh, I got a saddle and, and my gear and took a Greyhound bus to, uh, up into Idaho and then wouldn't nobody there to pick me up that was supposed to pick me up.
So I hitchhiked from there into chalice, Idaho, and this was way before cell phones.
So I found a pay phone and I called the ranch and the manager of the ranch says, I don't know who you are.
I never heard anything about you.
Uh, the owner is rafting the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon with his girlfriend and he never told me you were coming.
And, uh, but he came and picked me up and I stayed on there for the summer and, and to learn a bunch.
And then, um, I left there and hitchhiked from chalice, Idaho to Cody, Wyoming.
And when I got to Cody, I had like $9.
And, uh, so I found a campground where they'd let me pitch my little one man pup tent.
It was $6 a night. I remember it because, and I stated that one because they had a shower house and I'm like, I'm not going to become a scrubby homeless person, you know?
So I stayed there and I just started calling every ranch, every dude ranch, every outfit, every day, calling, calling, calling.
Um, I ran out of money.
And the lady who owned the, the, uh, that campground there, she told me, she said, uh, my dad needs somebody to haul hay.
So I went and helped him and he paid me $15 for hauling hay like this.
Came back another night state and other supper.
Next day she said, if you'll police the campground for cigarette butts, I'll give you a bowl of soup and a sandwich and another night stay.
So I did. And then the next day, one of the outfits called, called me back.
I came in, sat down and interviewed and I threw my bedroll and everything into the back of their truck and went out and went to work.
And you're doing all of this with an infant.
No, no. They're in Hawaii.
They're in Hawaii. But you're still a part of this system now.
So you're away from your wife, you're away from your first child?
For several months, yeah.
I don't recommend it.
Was that difficult?
In a way it was, in another way, it wasn't as difficult as it should have been.
Well, you've got this tension, right?
You've got this tension between slowly moving toward a dream that you've had for a long time, this career aspiration, this fulfillment of a life purpose, and then also the desire to be a good father, a good husband.
But you also are, you're making these sacrifices in order to create the future.
It's a complex situation.
My wife, and we're still married today, it's 34 years in March.
Congratulations. Thank you.
But I'm six years older than she is.
And we're totally different.
And I had been on my own for a long time when we got married.
And as happens in marriage, you know, we'd hit that two year mark and the luster was gone.
We weren't getting along very well.
You know, so she wasn't, I don't think she was heartbroken at the separation for a while, you know, any more than I was.
And so after I got settled, I had worked for the summer there and then I wound up with another outfit.
And after I got settled, I flew her and the baby out and we'd had enough time apart for all the turmoil and the bubbling to settle down and then we could start working on it again.
So it was in one sense, it was difficult.
Another sense, it was a bit of a relief, you know, that it shouldn't have been.
It doesn't speak well to where I was in my character at the time, but yeah.
Maybe that six month break has enabled a 35 year marriage.
Right. You need to, my wife has come, I've traveled all over the world and I've always been a very restless fellow.
And there's been times where my wife has come to me and sat down and said, honey, I love you, but you got to go, go hunting, go visit a buddy, go do something.
But you can't sit around and drive me crazy all day.
So, you know, she knows and she's been very supportive over the years.
What was the mindset shift?
I'm interested to learn about old Dwayne and new Dwayne and where that calming trajectory, why that happened, what instigated it?
Well, I'll just say I came to a place in life where I just didn't like me anymore.
I looked in the mirror and I'm like, I will not spend the next 50 years with this guy.
Like I have the last 50.
I don't like me. Nobody around likes me.
I can't. We'll just, it just, catalyst just came about and I'm like, I can't, I can't do this anymore.
I was, I had had a small heart attack and I knew it was a heart attack.
And I was at the point, I'm not kidding.
I lay there in bed and I felt it come on and I'm like, I think I'm having a heart attack.
Good. I don't have to fight this anymore.
I'm not going to wake my wife up.
I went to sleep. You were in bed next to your wife having a heart attack.
Yeah. Yeah. I went to sleep.
I woke up next morning.
I'm like, dang it. I'm still, I'm still here.
And so, and I, and I didn't tell her.
And I went to the doctor, I had further heart problems and other problems and I finally went to the doctor and they did the EKG and they're like, yeah, you, you had a heart situation back on this.
And I'm, and it was just kind of, it's like, I can't, I can't continue to live like this, you know?
And the kids didn't like me.
I wasn't abusive, you know, I was never, but I just, I wasn't a very nice person.
And I was just very on edge, very angry, very, and I finally, so I had to make some decisions.
What, what's making me like this?
I need to get it out of my life.
And there were people, including family that I'm like, nope, y 'all are gone.
I stopped watching the news.
I'm like, nope, y 'all are gone.
You know, started changing my diet.
Started spending a lot of time out on the front porch, just smoking cigars, letting the world go by.
And slowly over time, you know, got a handle on stuff and went back to reading, you know, when I was a kid, I read heavily, you know, and got back, went back to reading poetry and Marcus Aurelius and stuff and just kind of got some of my perspective back.
I think that's a hopeful message for young men that find themselves being angry and not in a place where they want to be.
Angry, there's no, there's no benefit to it.
You know, it doesn't fix anything.
Even when you're in a fight, and I was in law enforcement for a while, even when you're in a fight, if you get angry in the fight, yeah, maybe your adrenaline comes up, but you lose your head, you know, you lose your strategy.
And, you know, anger, it just, it just turned out I'm like, this is not profitable.
And this is eating me up inside, and I'm making stupid decisions.
And this, this has just got to end.
You told me as we were talking outside about how horses can detect your emotional state, your heart rate.
And if you enter into an environment with them, they'll match you.
If you enter in all sympathetically aroused, presumably angry and frustrated, they're going to be able to tell.
How did you manage to get through so many years of working with horses still being this angry guy?
And how, how important was learning about yourself through working with horses?
The question is how, how did I not get killed?
How did horses not kill me?
It was always a fight.
I mean, I loved horses, but there was always, it wasn't ever what I wanted it to be.
And I never really realized for the longest time.
And then there's, there's, I'm just going to go, there's a horseman out there.
He doesn't know me.
Okay. And so I'm not, his name's Buck Branneman and he's been my, my biggest influence in the horse world.
Okay. And so a lot of stuff I say is when it comes to horse world, you, man, Dwayne, that sounds really smart.
It's not mine. I'm not taking credit for it.
Okay. But I learned from him that your horse is just a mirror of you.
They're just a reflection of you.
And so any problem that you're having with your horse is just a reflection of a problem that you have inside.
And when I started getting that and I started understanding that and I started taking that to heart, being, learning to calm myself for the horse, you know, so I could accomplish something with the horse, which I should have had enough sense when I was young to do that for my wife or for my kids, you know,
but. Sometimes you need a horse to teach you what a human can't.
You know, Mark Twain said that youth is wasted on the young soul.
But when I started and it started working, you know, there's times I've gone out to work a horse and I was like, man, I just, I'm not in a good place today.
And I've sat down in a chair outside the pen, looking at the horse, lit up a cigar, smoked the cigar, looking at the horse.
Cigars done, light up another cigar.
Maybe it was a pipe, you know, but another one sit there and then go home.
Just wasn't ready that day.
Just I wasn't. And it's like, did I accomplish anything today?
No, but I didn't wreck anything today.
And that's sometimes that's a victory.
Sometimes the biggest victory is, you know, I didn't make a mess today.
It was a good day. And I finally had to start figuring that out.
You've been thinking a lot recently about mundane successes.
These sort of small personal victories that you do in private.
There's no fanfare.
There's no audience.
No one's even going to applaud you.
No one's going to give you a pat on the back.
How boring of a success to say I didn't mess up another horses day today.
There is few lower magnificent successes that you could do.
And yet I think we need language around how that is something that's important.
That is a victory that you should be able to say at the end of the day when you look yourself in the mirror.
Hey, you were gentle with that person when you were frustrated.
This person came up to you and you were all agitated and you chose to put civility first.
Like that's something no one's going to give you a pat on the back for being modestly polite and civilized.
It's cool that you say that.
I really think that more language around being gentle with yourself and appreciating when you have these small, un -magnificent victories is probably something good.
Well, if you look at it, you know, like in math, you know, you study your negative numbers and your positive numbers in math.
Okay, so you've got a chart.
And let's start to my left.
You've got negative five, negative four, negative three, negative two, negative one, zero, one, two, three, four, five.
And in life you're at negative five, you know, and people tend to think and sometimes we tend to think until I'm at two, I didn't accomplish anything.
But you know, getting from a negative five to a negative four, that's a victory.
And then so we are avoiding going from a negative four to a negative five.
Yes. Just staying at a negative five, we didn't go to negative six.
That's a victory. You know, you know, when I was young, come home from work, how was how was your day today, honey?
I didn't I didn't get in a fight.
So it was a good day, you know, and but that is a victory.
It's you know, I, I study and and I.
Well, you name your podcast, you know, wisdom.
Wisdom is not in my studies.
I'm starting to see this.
Wisdom is predominantly not something that you do.
If you study the Book of Proverbs in the Bible, okay, if you study Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and you study these wisdom writings.
There's much more of the wisdom writings that are telling you things not to do.
Then are telling you need to do this to be wise.
But more of it is if you're wise, you won't do this.
And so like what we're talking here, a lot of a lot of victories is just I didn't do that today.
There's an idea from mathematics called never multiply by zero.
So we can have 2 million multiplied by 47 multiplied by 2 .1 multiplied by 20 ,000 multiplied by zero is zero is zero.
So if you spend all of your time working on your health and avoiding seed oils and eating only grass fed organic meat.
But one day decide to drive your car without a seat belt on that's multiplying by zero.
Right. If you get into a wreck and so much of life I think is avoiding pitfalls, not expediting successes.
Because the pitfalls can kick you out of the game permanently or they can do things that are so catastrophic they take much longer to come back from.
And this is in some ways an excuse for being averse to risk.
Right. But I think it's just being clever about risk and knowing where you can take risks that have limited downside, not unlimited downside.
Right. Well, you know, we work a lot with horses, of course, and we've gotten some horses in this year.
They weren't hours.
Like my son had bought a horse last year and the horse was if you knew what you were doing, you could ride the horse.
But the horse was not a broke horse.
He didn't have him for very long.
And then he deployed overseas.
He's in the military.
So we brought him to our place.
And so, you know, there's all these things and the two young men that were working with me, it's like, okay, don't move fast.
Don't jump. You know, don't let's do this.
Let's be calm, you know, because they're a prey animal.
So there's all this stuff that we work with, you know, and and so the young man that wrote he went out and wrote him and he didn't do anything like.
But it was just he reached in the saddle bag and pulled out one of these water bottles and it crinkled.
And and that horse, he just jumped out of his skin.
I mean, he didn't turn into a wreck, but it was just like you spend all of this time moving easy around the horse, working with them real easy and slow, you know, so the saddle, cinching them up nice and slow, cinching by threes and moving all nice and easy.
And then just one thing crinkling a water bottle and it's you just multiplied by zero.
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What have you learned about humans from working with horses?
Humans don't know how to communicate.
Communication is our biggest weakness.
Um, that's not like the number, but that's something that lately this is, this has been just really hammered home to me.
Working with horses and working with humans.
Um, and communication is a much more complex issue.
Then, then I think many of us give it credit for, um, so you take, you take a horse and a human, a relationship with a horse and human.
All right. For that to work.
There has to be communication.
Well, we have a couple of problems here.
First off, the horse doesn't speak English and we don't speak horse.
All right. But as humans, we insist that the horse comes into our world, but we're too arrogant or too lazy or a combination of both to learn to speak horse and horses language is not verbal.
It's all movement. It's all body language.
It's all this. And so that is a problem.
But another problem is, is us in the horse.
We are, um, we're predator animals.
All right. We are, the human is, we're predators.
All right. We're designed to eat meat.
Our eyes are side by side on the front of our face.
We see one picture and we're designed to see what we want and go get it.
The horse is a prey animal.
They are the animal that everything that eats meat wants to eat.
And so they have a complete different instinct.
Their instinct is everything wants to eat me.
You know, we, we, well, we wake up of a morning and we say, you know, I want to be a trophy husband.
You know, that's my goal.
What do I want to go get today?
The horse wakes up and says, I don't want to get eaten today.
Two totally different instinct.
All right. So to be able to build a communication with a horse, we have to move into the world and learn to speak, but learn to think how they think.
Well, I mean, we can say men and women are the same thing.
You know, the women are different from men.
They have a different way of thinking.
And like I said, my wife, I've been married almost 34 years.
And even today there's things I say, and she absolutely what she heard is not what I said, you know?
And so I have to, I have to and vice versa, you know, so communication and you cannot have 34 years of relationship with one person if there's no communication.
Interesting the fact that when you're around a horse, you have this almost like an external barometer or thermometer for you and what's going on.
So I mentioned to you that I'd spent a little bit of time with horses recently.
So I rode my first horse out here in Texas and that was fun.
And then I went and did equine therapy.
So that was caring for a horse and treating its hooves and doing all the rest of this stuff.
And honestly, in retrospect, one of the most embarrassing in a situations with this horse.
So first off, these things are big.
You don't realize unless you're around horses, just how big down the kind of scary because there's a lot of them and they're just muscle.
You know, on stage bodybuilder prep level machine.
So anyway, we're getting used to one of these horses and we're brushing her and she's super chill, really, really relaxed.
And then they said, okay, so we're going to give you this tool.
And this tool is what you can use to clean out the hoops.
And this horse will know what's happening when you bring the tool up.
But you need to make it feel sufficiently comfortable so that it will raise its foot up for you.
You need to be careful about where it puts its foot back down because I had crocs on, which was not a good idea.
Anyway, so you sort of put your hand firmly, upper hind leg, slide it down, little pinch at the ankle, little pull, do this.
So you need to feel relaxed as you walk up to the horse.
You need to imagine that the horse is going to do this.
You need to make it comfortable for it.
It needs to be comfortable with you, so on and so forth.
And I remember walking up to the horse and thinking, if this horse doesn't like me, that's a comment on me.
I really want this horse to like me.
And my self -worth had immediately become outsourced to whether or not this horse I met 10 minutes ago was going to lift its hoof up for five seconds so that I could move a little bit of dirt out of it.
And honestly, that one incident, I'd been calling it horse meditation because I thought, like, it's cute or whatever, but really, how much can I learn about myself from being around a horse?
That one incident, I must think about it every week, every couple of weeks.
This need to be wanted, this need to be accepted, this outsourcing of my own self -esteem to something else and this sort of derogation of how I felt about myself based on whether or not a horse lifted its foot up or didn't.
And thankfully, it did.
But it just really made me think about, where do we put our sense of self -worth and the fact that you have this creature who is, as you say, kind of just reflecting you back at you.
Right. There's nowhere to hide any more from the way that you're behaving, especially if you can clamp down the anger or the aggression or the sadness or the whatever, but inside it's still burbling and vibrating.
Well, I suspect, I mean, you and I, we only met today, all right?
But you strike me as a kind of person that you don't very often approach another man like that.
Like my self -worth is predicated on whether this guy respects me or not.
Okay. Especially another alpha.
Okay. Now horse is not an alpha.
Okay. That horse is definitely not an alpha.
If you wanted to, you could put that horse on the barbecue for supper that night and there's nothing he could do about it.
Okay. So it speaks to me the fact that you predicated your view of your self -worth on whether another creature whose well -being was in your hands liked you or accepted you or not.
Does that make sense?
It really does. And I've been thinking and talking about this a lot recently.
There is a category of people, of which I'm one, who see other people's emotional states as our responsibility.
Right. If you're not happy, I'm not happy.
Right. And if you're not happy, I have to fix it.
Right. And that's noble in some ways, but it's only noble if it's a choice, if you're choosing to do it to help.
If it's a compulsion, if you're forced to do it through some sense of obligation or whatever, it's not, even though the outcome may be good, it's not quite as virtuous as it may seem.
Well, it becomes un -virtuous when your help of others is about you.
I do this because it makes me feel better.
I do this because it gives me purpose in life.
I do this because you're going to like me more, you're going to respect me more.
That's where it becomes a problem.
But it's not a problem if it's just, you know, empathy.
And so, yeah, I don't know where I was going with that, but there you go.
Is there a particular horse that you have learned a lot from in your life?
Is there a few keystone horses that you had relationships with that taught you an awful lot?
There are, there's several.
So I was riding for an outfit in Alaska, Guiding, and they brought in a mare.
And she was a retired, the best I could understand, she was a retired barrel racing horse from here in Texas.
And so when I signed on, they assigned her to me because nobody else, we couldn't put guests on her.
None of the other ringers wanted to ride her because her, her go -to was run.
If something disturbed her, her head came up and it's run, just run.
That's my answer to escape, to just run.
And it wasn't something that I could physically fight and stop.
And so that horse really made me step outside of the thought process of physically controlling something that has a mental emotional issue.
And getting in her head and figuring out what can I do if the problem is mentally or emotionally, what can I do to get into her head and get into her emotions and fix that for her.
And so what I did, and it's so simple, it probably wouldn't even make sense to a lot of folks.
But while we were sitting there and while she was calm, sitting there at the ranch waiting for others to get on the horses, I would just come in with the lightest little pressure and get her to tip her nose.
Not pull her nose in, just give a signal, hey, tip your nose.
So she'd tip her nose and we'd just do that and just do that.
And then when we get out on the trail and she started getting anxious about something and her head would come up, I would just default to that.
And so she would find something that she would secure the signal and she would calm down and she would come down.
And working with that mayor for the summer, I made huge strides with myself in stepping outside of the norm of trying to physically control something that isn't ideal.
Yeah. I mentioned that I had ridden a horse for the first time in Texas and they gave me whatever the leader of the group is for the horse, whatever that's called.
And I was right far at the back and this horse was eating and the lady that was guiding the group said, just give him a little pull and he'll come along.
I gave him a little pull and he didn't move.
I mean, it is absurd to explain how strong these things next are.
And I'm like, I don't think he doesn't want to come.
She's like, no, no, just a little bit more, a little bit more.
I'm a pretty strong guy, so I was like, right, okay, I'll give it a big pull.
Didn't move. I'm like, and by this time, they're a hundred yards away.
Yeah. He doesn't want to, doesn't seem like he wants, no, like a really big pull.
So I went mixed grip, like you do on a deadlift.
Set my feet into the stirrups and like, like one rep maxed this horse's head up.
And finally he got up.
And that was absolutely not the most efficient way to get him to do that thing.
That would have been a much better way than me.
Right. Well, so your average horse, your average quarter horse size horse, you know, it's going to weigh between 800 and 1100 pounds.
Okay. Now, what I teach folks is I don't want his body.
Okay. I want his mind.
Now, if I physically, like you just went through, if I physically get his body to do what I want, but I don't have his mind, so as he gets a chance, he's going to go back again.
But if I ignore the body and I get the mind, if I have the mind, I have the body.
So in a situation like that, what I do is I don't pull his head up.
Okay. I take the reins and I bounced that bit.
That's in his mouth.
I'm, I bounce it pretty sharp and he decides in his mind.
I don't like that. I think I will, I think I will pick my head up and it's like, I'm not going to pick your head up.
That's what you have a neck for.
Okay. You have that neck.
That's what it's for.
I'm not picking your head up.
I'm going to suggest to you that you decide it's in your best interest for you to pick your head up.
And we go for the mind and how much in life, you know, you've got all these folks working for you here and you have to, you can't physically browbeat and nag and frightened.
You've tried. Does it work?
No, no, no. The belligerent.
Yeah. I've already heard stories.
Yeah. They're abused.
Yeah. But you want to make things so that they decide that if this, this is what Chris wants done, it's in, it's in my best interest.
I want to go do that.
And again, it's communication, you know, and again, it's getting in the horse's mind and working with a horse in that manner.
Um, I'll give you an illustration if I can.
All right. One of the Cardinal sins in my book is when I go to get on a horse and the horse walks off when I'm part way up, you know, I'm stepping up, I swing in my leg over and he's, he's walking, he's leaving.
Okay. That's a Cardinal sin.
So we have a difference of opinion here, me and the horse.
It's like, I want you to plant your feet and I want you to be still while I get on.
And then I'll tell you when I want you to go.
He says, well, I want to go.
So I'm not going to sit there and take pull back and say, whoa, and do that one leg and hop along Cassidy down while I'm trying to get in the side.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm not going to physically hold him back.
I'm going to put my toe on the stir, but I'm going to go to step up and when he walks off, I'm going to step back out and I'm going to make him keep walking in a circle around me eight or 10 times.
I'm like, I wanted you to stand still, but you want to walk.
I tell you what, I'm a nice guy.
I'm going to let you walk.
I'm going to let you do what you want in a controlled manner.
You pick the tune and I'll pick the dance and I'll make him walk around.
He's like, I don't, I don't want to walk anymore, but you said that's what you wanted.
So I'm letting you do what you want.
He's like, I don't want to walk anymore.
Okay, stop. Well, I want you to stand here while I get in the saddle.
And he says, and it may take a couple of times, but he says, you know what?
I think what I want to do is I want to stand here while he gets in the saddle.
You know, so we communicate.
And when I got his mind, when I changed his want to, I didn't have to fight with his body.
And so that that's just, that's how, that's how you approach it.
You understand and you communicate.
I've heard you say that sometimes you have to apologize to the horse for being an idiot.
Yes. How do you apologize to horse?
They don't care. I apologize to the horse for my sake.
I mean, the horse, nothing the horse does is personal.
All right. The horse will buck you off.
They won't come back and apologize to you.
They did what they did because that's what they felt was necessary at the time.
And so they don't operate on that wavelength, but there's times when I do something and it turns out, I'm like, that was my fault.
And that was stupid.
You know, the horse doesn't take it personal either.
And I can apologize to the horse and the horse.
It just isn't in his thing, but I apologize to the horse to humble myself and to bring myself down and to say, look, you need to pay attention.
Dummy and not do that again.
The horse doesn't really, he doesn't want an apology.
He just doesn't want you to do it again.
Sounds like you've learned a lot to do with patience and humility through this.
Yeah. And you know, part of it is, is when you're young, you can pick a fight and you can win some of them.
And when you're older and you're busted up, I got plates and screws in my neck and I got joints, you're out of shape and stuff.
You're not going to win that fight anyhow, not physically anymore.
And so it's that's where you start saying, you know what, I need to approach this in a better way.
Plates and screws in the neck.
But I've heard you say that not most of those were actually from horseing accidents, but you were in a plane crash, a car crash, and you rolled a motor home off a hill?
I was a passenger off a mountain in Alaska.
I need to hear those stories, please.
Wait, I spent a winter in Fort Yukon, which is above the Arctic Circle in Alaska, staying with a fella.
And I had a little 180, a little system, 180 Bush.
I think it was 180 and we were flying out and they were dead a winter.
It was like 30 below zero.
And in the back of that plane, we had like a hundred pound propane tank, a transmission out of a van, some spare tires.
And so we're flying back south to Fairbanks.
And when we landed in, as we're touching down in Fairbanks, we had a crosswind.
And so you kind of tilt the plane as you're landed in that crosswind.
And so as we touch down and I'm setting up on the co -pilot on passenger side, I see the landing gear go wrong, the wheel and everything go rolling off across the tundra.
And so I reach over and I'm like, hey, is that supposed to?
And then that strut came down and hit and we flipped in ground looped and carried on on the runway.
With all of this washing machine ingredients inside.
All in the back. There was a transmission out of a half ton Chevy van and a hundred pound propane bottle.
Just flying around.
Yeah, it didn't hit us, which is good.
But we stood out on that.
Of course, I was wearing cowboy boots.
So we're standing out on the runway in Fairbanks waiting for FAA to come out.
And it's 30 below zero.
And they come out and inspect it.
And then we picked up the wing, a bunch of us, and pushed the plane off the runways and then I had to catch two more flights that day to get back home.
So, yeah. What about the motor home?
Motor home. I was a passenger in the back and we were coming down narrow road off the mountain.
And, um, the lady that was driving, there were a couple of teenagers in the seat right here and they were fussing and bickering.
And so she turned around to tell him to stop fussing.
Hey, y 'all stop fussing.
And he just drove right off.
So we went down. I don't know how far down we went, but we slid down and hit and landed up against a bunch of trees.
No rolling. No, it didn't roll.
Okay. No. Yeah. So you just, just life.
And then, you know, a lot of bucked off, been bucked off a lot.
Just bruises and fractures and breaks.
And you know, landing in places.
And so it's just, it was accumulation of life.
And then I was in, I was in the police Academy.
Uh, and we were studying Brazilian jiu -jitsu and I was doing a backwards tactical role and something popped in my neck.
And I didn't say anything.
And so then we went on a big run and this run was pretty, we'd run for about a mile and then without, then we'd stop and drop and do burpees and bicycles and then jump up and run some more.
And by the time we got back to Academy, my heart rate wouldn't go up.
It would go down. And then I had this weird feeling of like an electrical net in my body and my heart rate would not go down.
So finally they put me in the ambulance and took me to the hospital.
And I was like that far away from severing my spinal cord.
Um, and, but it had, it was already bad way worse than I, I had no idea.
And that tactical backwards tactical role had just, had just, um, brought it to the edge.
So maybe an odd blessing in some ways that it warned you and that didn't occur when you got bucked off a horse.
Right, right. And I don't ride bucking horses anymore.
I mean, I say that you never know a horse is always a horse is a horse, but after so many years, I can pretty well tell when one is a little hanky and I'm like, I don't have anything to prove anymore.
I'm not riding that horse.
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You talk a lot about balance, the dangers of being out of balance.
Explain that to me.
Well, let's take, let's let's take any, okay, raising children.
All right. Um, I like to say that raising children is like holding a wet bar.
So if you squeeze it too tight, it squeezes out of squirts out of your hands.
If you don't hold it tight enough, it slides out of your hands.
You know, raising children, you got to be balanced.
There has to be discipline.
We as human beings need discipline in our life, but there has to be love and grace and understanding.
And so a lot of children who grow up with issues from being raised, you know, those issues are because their parents are out of balance one way or another marriage.
You've got problems in your marriage.
It's usually somebody's out of balance.
You know, they're, they're too distant or they're too clingy.
You know, they're too demanding or they're too permissive.
They don't have personal boundaries.
It's just out of balance.
Um, I think. Oh, heck I'm going to do it.
What are they going to do to me?
Okay. Um, I don't like the trend in this circle, men's motivation circle.
I don't like the hustle culture as is being brought out and taught today.
I don't agree with it because I think it's out of balance.
I think young men need to know that, Hey, it's okay for you to sit down and to read and have a cigar and to chill and to think because I guarantee if you're in the weight room, um, pumping out all these reps and running on the machine and then you're going into the cubicle and you're flipping a computer
and you're not thinking, you're learning, you're taking in, but you're not meditating on stuff and you're not, you're not thinking, but that can be taken so far that young men are made to feel guilty for just setting down and thinking and relaxing.
And I understand that there was a tendency in this country.
We had a lot of young men that were not raised with dads.
They weren't raised to work, you know, and so that is sitting on the couch playing the stupid Xbox, you know, not growing up learning to work.
So that pendulum went too far this way.
So now you've got guys who in order to counteract that they swung the pendulum too far this way and a balanced man needs to be somewhere in the middle.
He needs to be able to work to do what needs to be done to improve himself.
And he also needs to set around by the fire in the backyard and have a cigar and read some Kipling and just stay balanced.
There needs to be balance.
I wrote an essay about that this week.
Did you? Would you mind if I read it to you?
Absolutely not. I think type A people have a type B problem and type B people have a type A problem.
Insecure overachievers need to learn how to chill out and relax and lazy people need to learn how to work harder and be disciplined.
Given that you subscribe to me, I'm going to guess you're probably type A.
Some version of a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity, as Andrew Wilkinson says.
Here's the thing you may have already realized.
Type A people with a type B problem get very little sympathy because a miserable but outwardly successful person always appears to be in a much more preferential position than the content being lazy but on the verge of being bankrupt person.
The problems of opportunity will always get less sympathy than one's obscurity.
One feels like a choice, the other like a limitation.
One is a bourgeois luxury, the other a systemic imposition.
I need someone to teach me how to be disciplined and work harder.
Feels noble and upward aiming and charitable.
I need someone to teach me how to switch off and relax.
Feels dopaminergic and addicted and transactional and opulent.
Every underdog movie ever has a training montage of someone working their life out by working harder.
None included a guy learning how to log out of Slack at 6pm or finally enjoy a beach holiday.
So yes, type A people may have objectively better lives but subjectively, they're ravaged by the sense that they've never done enough.
They wake up every morning feeling as if they've already fallen behind and only if they dominate their entire day flawlessly will they have dragged themselves back up to some minimum level of acceptable output which means they can go to sleep that night without feeling like they've wasted it.
Congratulations, you might be very successful but you might also be very miserable.
Just work harder bro, advice, reliably makes everyone more successful in the only way that they can be judged.
Outwardly. There are very few issues in life which can't be solved by just working harder so everybody treats it like a panacea, not a purpose -built tool.
And on average, maybe more people do need to hear David Goggins shouting in their face to go harder rather than Eckhart Tolle whispering in their ear that they are already enough.
But for a certain, perhaps minority cohort of people, they actually need to hear the opposite message.
We need a parasympathetic Goggins.
Who's going to carry the TV remote and the cigars?
Hashtag Rest Harder Than Me Type B problems are just as tough as Type A ones but they require a much less sexy solution.
Peace. One that you can't achieve by just working harder.
I agree 100%. I have guys come into the school and they're like, they're just...
I'm like, I don't say anything, it's not my business but I'm like, you're gonna die young.
Tightly wound? Just tightly wound and it's never enough.
It's never enough. I'm like, when is it enough?
What is enough? You know, I've been thinking the last couple of weeks, I'm like, you know, the saying is, just keep the main thing the main thing.
But I think where we crash and burn is how we define the main thing.
You know? And it's...
I see myself in a very small, tiny way, infinitesimal way.
I see myself as the anti David Goggins.
I see myself as a guy, it's like, there's places where his message is needed.
I'm not knocking the guy, okay?
There are places where his message is needed.
But his message is not needed for everybody, okay?
I'm gonna... I'm gonna probably step over a line here and you can edit out anything you want, all right?
I'm really bothered by these guys who are financial gurus who will fire you if you don't have a six pack.
There's a problem. There's a main thing, stay in the main thing problem with that viewpoint on life.
And I want to see...
I want to see men that I'm, for whatever reason, whatever way brought into influence, I want to see them find balance.
I don't want to see them find money.
I don't want to see them find six packs.
If that is part of the result of it, fine, okay?
But I want them to find balance and I want them to find that place inside where they're like, my main thing is my main thing and it's enough.
I've heard you say that a good man is born to serve, not born to make money.
Absolutely. What's that mean to you?
Well, if I make money...
And I've heard all excuses because there's guys who have a problem with me saying that, all right?
But if I make money, I make money for me.
Now I've got... My wife definitely benefits from it and my children, although they're grown, they benefit from it.
But ultimately in the end, if I pour all my life into making money, that's for me.
But if I pour my life into as many people as is fitting, and I don't know, their life is better for me having come through.
I ultimately... And I'll never know in some tiny way, what means most to me is that when you leave here today, in some small way, your life is better for us having sat down and talked.
That means more. And so, I think we are.
I think a real man is born to serve.
And serve means provide for those that are in your sphere of you to provide for.
It means to protect.
It means to encourage.
It means to teach and to train.
And sometimes it means to step back and let them hit the wall.
Sometimes the best service you can do for somebody is to, when it's all done, walk up and look down and say, did that hurt?
That's what they needed.
But we won't do that because it makes us look bad, and even in our service to others, we do it for ulterior motives.
But yes, I believe that very strongly.
I believe if you spend your whole life to yourself, for yourself, you have no purpose of being here.
This planet is not in any way better for you having been here.
Is that what a good man is to you?
That's what a good man is to me.
When my wife and I, and we've moved, we've lived all over.
But it's been a thing of ours.
When we leave, we try to leave the house in some way better than when we found it.
And that's how I approach life.
Is that when people come across my path, I try to leave their life a little better than when I found it.
And you know what? That may be just looking at that poor, tired lady, checking out at Walmart with the sore feet and the glazed over eyes and looking right now and I say, how are you doing today?
It don't take much, you know.
But it's like I guarantee in some small way her life was a little better when I passed through that Walmart line than it was before I got there.
And yeah, I think that's a good man.
A good man is a man who can protect and who can provide and who can serve, who can comfort, who can reprimand, who can discipline whatever's necessary to make the world a little better because he passed through.
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What do you think about the balance when it comes for men between strength and softness, sort of rationality, emotionality, rigidity, vulnerability, I think that's a balance that a lot of men struggle with.
I still think that the conversation around emotions, around being open, whether it's with your friends or a partner or even yourself, I mean, you literally denied yourself going to the doctor for a heart attack.
Like the male ability to deny that things are wrong, whether they're physical or emotional, is like a reality distorting power that we all have.
How do you come to think about that balance between the hardness and the softness in men?
I'm still old -school.
I'm still very old -school.
Now, there comes a point where it can be debilitating to those around me.
Okay. If I bottle everything up inside so that I get to the point that I am toxic or debilitating to those around me, then I need to get some help.
But as long as I'm not, I don't need to add more burden for them to carry.
That's just me. Can you be a bit more specific about what that is, how that shows up for you?
My wife has been encouraging me for a while now for me to go and talk to somebody.
Just years and years and years.
There were a lot of rough years there.
But I'm like, I can't do that.
I know the guy gets paid to sit there, but it's just not necessary.
I'm still old enough, and I'm of the school.
Just deal with it. Suck it up.
Suck it up. I broke three ribs one time in a barn, saddling horses, horse to a fit, took eight aspirin, and got on that horse and did a four -hour ride.
I had a job to do. It's my job.
Let's go back to balance.
I was about to mention that.
I understand. I'm with you 100 percent.
But at the same time, your balance and my balance and his balance are different.
A man has to find his own balance.
You're going to get so many messages on here disagree with this.
I think that this thought of men's mental health, emotional health, go get help.
I'm not saying it's bad.
I'm not saying it's wrong.
I'm not saying it's out of place.
But I think like everything else, I think it could be taken to the point that men just become weak.
And brother, let me tell you, in this day and age, we don't need more weak men.
Now, when your internal battles come to the point that you need help because they have weakened you, then get help.
But I think everybody's balance is different.
And I fear there was a problem for years on this side.
But I fear just like everything else, with that subject being pushed the way it is, we're going to get out of balance on the other side.
And it's like, and everybody needs therapy for everything.
This is the nuance, I think, around what we were talking about type A problems, type B problems, because it's easy to just take that as one single meal on a plate as opposed to multiple different pieces, or a onesie that you put on as opposed to an outfit that's piecemeal and put together.
So there's a British writer called Matthew Syed who's coming on the show soon.
And the interesting thing about tennis as a sports reporter is that you had three phenomenal world champions all at the same time.
You had Nadal, you had Djokovic, and you had Federer.
And he used to go to Wimbledon and he would see how they were warming up and each had a different approach.
So he'd go and see Nadal, and he's just raw aggression, he's tops off and he's hitting the ball as hard as he could and he's sort of just fury.
And then he'd go and see Djokovic and he's like a robot.
And this guy's precise precision rationality.
Then he'd go and see Federer and he's playing trick shots.
He's laughing and he's having fun and he's sort of flirting with the ballgirls and stuff like that.
And each of these guys have won titles while all of them have been playing.
And they've traded places, some on this court, some on a different type of surface, etc.
But if you were to look at any of them and say, in order for me to be a world champion, I must be, okay, well, which one?
Because all of them are world champions.
Yes. And this is, I think, you're right.
The message may largely have swung too far back toward the...
You cannot deal with any difficulty.
You must prioritize your internal state over external responsibilities, mindful Mondays and time off Tuesdays and, you know, cookie Wednesday's.
And it's trying to find who's this message for, particularly, and I think really trying to get people that are listening to feed it through the filter of, is this for me, or is this for someone else?
And that point around just go harder, bro, can cause you to have a heart attack laid in bed next to your wife.
And you go, okay, that's something that I probably do need to heed.
And on the other side, like, am I a useless blob of emotional nothingness?
Okay, well, maybe I need a bit more David Goggins in my life.
And I think finding that balance and not having a one -size -fits -all answer.
So how does a man, an individual picking the individual, how does he find that balance that fits him?
With difficulty. I think for me, it's come with age, it's come with learning myself, it's come with experience of understanding what happened the last time that this situation occurred and how I felt.
Right. And trying to...
So what would you encourage or advise a young man, 19, 23, who doesn't have the benefit of the age and the experience, and what would you advise him and say, look, this is kind of an area that might help you find your balance.
I think checking in with yourself and not treating your first response is always the correct one.
I think the immediate sort of reflex that we often have, especially as young men, young and men, is an issue because that you haven't accumulated enough experience for you to be able to call it gut instinct wisdom.
Right. What it is, is probably your default response, which is from childhood, from the group that you grew up in, maybe it's dad's pattern, maybe it's mom's pattern, maybe it's the teacher and the way that you have to protect yourself in school.
It's unlikely that that is the best way for you to deal with things.
So I think don't believe everything you think.
Can we boil it down to a Booyah base and say, look, when you have the thought, don't trust the thought, I need to do this or I need to do that.
What if we start asking ourselves, why?
Why do I need to run 300 miles with two broken legs?
Because David Goggin said so, you know, why do I need to do that?
What is the purpose?
Not why for me, but why do I need to do that to make myself the man I need to be for those around me?
Why do I need to say, you know what?
I need to spend more time in the backyard with a cigar.
Why do I need to do that?
And if the answer is because I'm becoming overwhelmed, overtight, losing my balance, losing my focus on what really matters in life, I'm becoming hard to live with to those that I care the most about, to those who I am the most responsible for.
So the why is this will make me a better person for those around me.
Me being able to bench press 200 pounds as opposed to 180 pounds does not necessarily make me a better person for those that I'm here to serve.
It feeds my ego. So maybe a little more time in the gym doesn't answer the why.
And a little more time in the backyard with my kids, that gives me a better answer to the why do I need to make this choice, as opposed to that choice.
And maybe that's a little more accessible to a young man without a lot of experience.
I'm really interested in this blend that you have of real introspection and accepting of your own flaws and faults with the old school mentality of pick up a weight and carry it.
I think one of the things that men that want to achieve things in their life struggle with a lot is being kinder with themselves when they fall short, even if they tried their best.
They did everything that they could, reality didn't deliver to them the thing that they wanted, the outcome.
How have you learned to have a better relationship with yourself, the voice inside of your head to be kinder if things go badly?
You're smiling. I like me.
I like me. I would buy me a dream.
I look at me now and I see all the warts.
Okay. I see all the negatives more than anybody else does.
I see the positives and over the whole balance of stuff, I like me and I can give myself the same grace.
If you and I were friends, I can give myself the same grace I can give you because I like me.
I like me in spite of my understanding and the reality of my weaknesses and my warts and my scars and everything.
But you know, all in all, I'm a pretty good dude.
And man, you got to get to that point.
Outside of arrogance, arrogance is pride mixed with ignorance.
That's the definition of arrogance.
I'm not talking arrogance.
I'm talking about, look, as a human being, I've failed at this, I've succeeded at that, I've wrecked this, but I've built that, and all in all, I've tried.
But I like me, so I'm going to give me some grace.
And it's as simple as that.
I would buy me a cigar.
I wonder how many men can say that.
Not as many as should.
I wonder how many people can say that.
How many people say I like me?
They would give more grace, more care, more attention, more love to somebody else than themselves.
There's a statistic around, I think on average, the likelihood that you are going to complete a course of antibiotics yourself is about 50%.
The likelihood of your dog completing it is 95%.
So we're literally capable of caring for a pet, nearly double as well as we can for ourselves.
Remembering that if you die, no one can look after the pet.
So in an odd, roundabout way, serving yourself and serving others from a cup which overflows around your own, or the saucer that sits around your cup is important.
Without, and again, this sort of tension between being self -serving, being narcissistic, being egotistical, being self -centered, not meaning that.
It's this delicate balance, and this is what comes with growing up.
And I think this is why One Size Fits All Flaming Sword Advice seems to die away as people get a little older.
You listen to a Joe Rogan, and a lot of what he's saying is hedged in some regard.
It's caviated. This is what worked for me.
This is how everybody should do it.
There's a humility that comes with age.
Right, because if you turn around and look back with open eyes at your life, you see all the scars.
The only way you cannot be humble in old age is when you refuse to look at the reality of your life up to today.
That's the only way.
Because nobody's skating through it perfectly.
But this is what drives my, and it sounds ludicrous in my ears, but my business endeavors today.
This is the core of what drives me.
There is no business out there that I can take on.
There is no monetary endeavor that I can take on that is worth the gamble of me losing me.
It took me years of a lot of grief and pain and work to get to be who I am today in spite of who I was.
I don't want to lose that.
I don't want to lose myself in business.
I don't want to lose myself in trying to earn a better living, in trying to get a name, in trying to do this.
I have turned down so much because I've looked at it and I've asked myself, who's this going to make me be?
Who's this going to turn me into?
Even a little bit. It's just not worth it.
I'm right now trying to find the balance in undertaking something that's not going to alter me, that I'm not going to lose myself, and then not succeeding at something because I was too afraid to try it.
Which has never been an issue of me before.
I've never been afraid of failure before.
Now I've got something I don't want to lose.
That's myself that I actually like, a me that I actually like.
Does that make any sense?
100%. The person that you have to spend the most time talking to in your life is yourself.
Try not to lose that respect.
This was a lesson that I realized toward the end of my 20s, where I'd accumulated a lot of success and status in maybe the way that modern society tells a young man that he should with freedom and notoriety and women and stuff like that.
That was cool to look back on fun, but it was beginning to get to the stage where I didn't like me all that much.
I hadn't done anything bad, but I just felt like I was built for more, I was built for different, built for something else.
And I realized that I wasn't keeping promises to myself, that if I said I was going to wake up at a certain time, the snooze button would be hit three times.
If I said that I was going to stick to my diet or go to the gym or do this thing, maybe it would happen, but it wouldn't happen quite the way that I'd meant it to, and there would be some negotiating and some cajoling and some falling short.
So imagine that you had a friend, and every time that you invited this friend out for lunch, they showed up an hour late, or they didn't show up at all.
After a while, you'd stop trusting them and stop inviting them out at all.
You are that friend to yourself.
You know, how can you have faith that you're going to go and do all of the things that you want in life when you can't not hit the snooze button?
Or you can't not cheat on your diet, you are constructed by the tiny decisions that you make every single day.
And even if you think that nobody else is watching, and even if no one is, there's this little ticker in the back of your mind, and you go to bed, you know, you were gentle with yourself when you got agitated.
Right. Good. Yeah. You were kind with the lady that looked like she was tired at Walmart.
You said something peaceful and encouraging to her.
Good. Yeah. But you did these things.
Right. Did something that makes you feel not so proud about yourself.
Right. And, you know, in some ways, it's a great correcting mechanism because there is no hiding from it.
Right. And your people turn to alcohol and distraction and aggression and depersonalization in order to deal with the fact that they don't like themselves.
Right. But ultimately, you need to live with the decisions that you make.
You need to live with you.
Right. There is this set of scales inside of your mind that's just balancing things all the time.
And if it, you know, you know.
Yeah. And people don't know how to like themselves.
I mean, people don't know how to like themselves, but it's not complicated.
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Tell me, how do you like yourself?
Find somebody that you like, that you genuinely like, and figure out what it is about them you like.
I like that. That's something I like.
That person is, uh, their understanding.
They're gentle. They're hardworking.
They're honest. They're this.
This is what I like about them, and incorporate that stuff into your own life.
If that's the stuff you like, then incorporate that stuff into who you are, and then you like yourself.
It's not rocket science.
You know, there are things, there are things that you like as a person that wouldn't mean anything to me.
There are things that you like in another person that wouldn't mean anything to me.
There's things that I like in another person just because of how I'm wired, and it wouldn't mean anything to you.
So that is what I like in a person.
So if I work at taking on those attributes, it helps me become a person that I like.
I always used to feel a little nervous when talking to people, and perhaps my horse situation belied this.
I always wanted people to like me.
I was unpopular as a kid, only child, a lot of time in solitude, bullied in school.
And I wanted people around me to think that I was fun, or cool, or interesting, or want to be near me, or want to be around me, or whatever.
And I think I assumed that that was always this sort of grand, charismatic, out -of -reach, impressive person.
It needed to be impressive.
It needed to walk into a room and look at all of the things I can do.
And then, this was two years ago, my friend George made me realise this, just by virtue of being peaceful and brilliant.
And I realised that the reason I loved being around him wasn't because he was the most charismatic guy in the room, or even the most interesting guy in the room, although he can be, but because he made me feel like the most interesting person in the room.
And I think this is such an important lesson for people who want to struggle socially, and want to become better.
People like people that make them feel good.
They don't care that much about how impressive the person is.
There's this great story, I think it was Winston Churchill's wife who met the two US President candidates, Truman and somebody else.
And she said that she sat down at dinner with both of them, in the space of about a month of each other.
So, she left from the first President feeling like he was the smartest man in the world.
She left from the second President feeling like she was the smartest woman in the world.
And it is significantly easier to make someone else feel interesting than it is to be interesting.
To make someone else feel charismatic than it is to be charismatic.
It is, but from an individual, and this is where I see things because of all of the particular comments and questions and emails and stuff I get from young men.
You take a young man out there, and everything you just said is 100 % correct.
I agree with 100%, it's dead on.
But there are guys out there that don't have someone like that in their life.
Someone who's going to be that person that makes them feel good about themselves.
But if we become the person that we like, I have recently come to the place, and this drives people crazy, I think.
I think it irritates people.
I have come to the place in my life where when I meet somebody in there and they don't like me, and you can tell, I don't care.
And when I meet somebody that they really like me, it's like, okay, but it doesn't carry much weight either, because I'm going to be leaving.
I'm going to be leaving, you know, we're not staying.
I like me. And it's enough.
And so when I meet someone who doesn't like me, or I meet someone who does like me, it doesn't alter my sale.
I suppose that's the vicious circle of if you don't like you, you will continue to outsource your self -worth to the people around you.
Yes. Which makes you more desperate and more needy, which inherently makes you less likable.
Because people know that you're pliable and malleable and will kind of do whatever you need to do in order to gain their approval.
Mercifully, the horse did lift its hoof up, but it's a vicious circle, and I get that.
And you know, I'm a rehabilitating people pleaser in that regard.
But this is the fascinating thing, I think, about developing as a person that the journey that you're on, parts of it will resonate with other people.
And they see bits of them in you.
They see little bits.
I was angry. I'm angry as a young man.
I see that in Dwayne.
I was never angry. Anger was never my...
My anger was always turned inward, not outward.
So for me, it was low mood.
It was fear. It was worry.
It was concern. Tight.
Closed up. It was never out.
Not fighting. I wasn't showing aggression.
I wasn't being... So, okay.
Well, if I'm the angry young guy, intellectually, philosophically, maybe I can say something that's remotely interesting.
But I've got no lived experience that's actually going to help you.
Go to you. Right, exactly.
Another black belt master at dealing with that.
And that's where picking different bits apart.
But I agree. I think, you know, there's been a lot of talk about crisis of masculinity, role models for men in the modern world, the multiplicity of backgrounds that guys are coming from, the unseen fatherlessness epidemic that we had, which has created a vacuum that's required people like you to step
in a surrogate patriarch.
What are you hearing from the guys in your audience?
What are they often asking?
What are they coming to you?
What are the problems that they're dealing with mostly?
Relationships. Girls.
They were not raised.
They were not raised with a dad who said, hey, this is how you treat a lady.
You know, this is how, you know, when girls talk and they say this, what they actually mean is this.
And I'm not talking about no means no, but I'm talking about, you know, I don't know.
You don't have to get me something to eat when you go get something.
I don't want anything.
But it is. And so young men these days were never taught by another man how to treat a lady like a lady and they go into a relationship, girlfriends, marriages, getting all their information from Hollywood.
And it's a crash and burn because they don't understand relationships.
They don't understand communication.
They don't understand the balance between being a man and being a bore, being a buffoon, you know, being a tyrant.
They don't know the difference between being.
Can I call names on here?
Absolutely. Okay. Andrew Tate.
Okay. Or, or some little milk sop over here, you know, there's, you got the two extremes and they, they can't find that place in the middle.
The biggest thing by far is relationships.
What is your advice from 34 and a bit years of marriage and negotiating with a woman from Venus?
What is your advice to young guys on how they can treat a lady better and understand them?
Treat her like she's special.
I mean, for one thing, for one thing, my problem with the feminist movement is why in the Sam Hill was something is something as special and wonderful as a woman.
Want to be equal with a man.
Why do you want to bring yourself down to that level?
You know, as a Christian, God gave two very special gifts to mankind.
The first one was a woman and the second was Jesus Christ.
Okay. You can teach an ape to work construction.
You cannot teach an ape to raise human children.
I think it's degrading to women to try to be the same as a man is.
Okay. Treat them special.
And, and secondly is communicate.
All right. If you don't understand what they're saying, if you're confused, sit down and gently say, look, I'm sorry.
I don't understand.
I don't understand what you're feeling.
I don't understand, but I'd love to understand if you can help me and just sit down and communicate.
Just listen to them.
You know, a lot of times they don't, they just, they just want somebody to listen to him.
They don't want you to fix it.
They just want you to listen to them while they, while they take all this boiling stuff inside their head and put it out so they can actually hear it.
And sometimes that helps them sort out all these thoughts that's in their head.
They need to just put it out so they can hear it.
And they don't need you to demean them by saying, okay, I'll fix this.
Just, just listen to them.
There's a quote from Timothy Leery that says, women who aspire to be equal with men lack ambition.
Yeah. Yeah. I hadn't heard that, but I agree with it.
I'm like, I get up and give you my seat cause I think you're special.
Not cause I think you're my equal.
A guy comes in, he's 57 years old.
He's physically equal to me.
He's on my, I'm not going to get up and give him my seat.
All right. So I give you my seat, not cause I think you're my equal.
If you're my equal, you can stand just like I do.
I give you my seat cause you're special.
What about the reverse?
What do you wish more women knew about how men operated?
There's 10 ,000 times more going on inside the head of a man than you have any idea.
He's carrying burdens that you don't have a clue about and he don't know how to express them and he don't know what to do about it.
And he figures if he puts it out there and communicates it, he's just going to be shot down, called a fool, called wheat so he carries inside and you have no clue.
The burdens and the hell that most men are carrying inside and not even showing you.
I wish more women understood that.
Yeah. It's a strange problem, I think, of the modern discussion around men and why they're struggling.
That a lot of the solutions that get put forward, a lot of the only acceptable solutions that get put forward are if only you acted less like a man, all of your problems would go away.
That men are treated like defective women as opposed to treated like work in progress men.
The average man, I believe, the average real man does not need to go get therapy for the battles and the burdens he's carrying inside.
What he needs is for those that he's carrying them for to recognize that they're there and to respect it and to be grateful for it.
They don't need to talk it out to get rid of it.
They need the one that they're going through this hell for to recognize it's there and to be grateful that the man is carrying this for them.
They don't need therapy, they need gratitude.
How important do you think it is to communicate that as a man?
You've said there are ten thousand things, challenges, trauma, complete inability to communicate it.
Maybe you can communicate to a horse better than you can communicate to your significant other.
What's your thoughts around vulnerability within a relationship?
If you're not going to the therapist, perhaps?
How about opening up about these fears and concerns?
First off, let's take away vulnerability.
Because a lot of times men won't respond because it's looked at as becoming vulnerable.
It's like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the die.
It's a little tiny leak, but if I allow this little tiny leak, the entire dyke is going to give away.
That's why we can't allow the little tiny leak.
OK, so if I if I'm sitting here and if I'm one of these guys and my significant other is sitting there, I can communicate to her what I need to communicate without being vulnerable.
I can maintain my strength.
And communicate to her.
OK, I can say, look, I'm I'm working 60 hours a week.
And the environment that I'm working in is very, very difficult.
And I come home and I only have eight hours here at the house.
And this is the only place of peace I have in this entire world.
And when I come home, you're angry all the time.
You're not satisfied about anything.
You're you want that.
You know, whatever the situation is, if you're not going to provide for me that little bit of peace that this is the only place I can get, what are we doing?
Now, you're not vulnerable.
You're not getting walked on.
You're not being a jerk.
You're not coming in, throwing stuff down and saying this.
You're just communicating.
The hard reality truth is.
The hard reality truth is our relationship at this point has boiled down to this.
Now, you have a beautiful house.
You have you never worry about there being grocery money.
You have a car. I put the fuel in your car because you let it go to empty all the time.
I provide this and this and this.
And what I'd like for you is some peace and some understanding.
You know, if that's where your situation is, but to communicate it in such a way not to come in and wine, not to grovel and not to tyrant, you know, not to yell, not to pick a fight.
It's that it's like, look, I'm just communicating because I think we have a lack of understanding here.
So I need you to understand this is where things are right now.
And so you can communicate.
But how you communicate is just as important as what you communicate.
Transparent communication like that is so, you know, making being able to put across what you mean.
Yeah. Without lading it with resentment, passive aggression.
Right, right. I had a, I knew a guy years, years, many years ago, he had a little dog.
One of those little furry little rat dogs, you know.
And his, his one, his little joys in life was he'd look at that dog and he'd smile and he'd say, you're so stupid.
You're the ugliest, dumbest, most worthless dog ever seen in my life.
And that dog would just wiggle and roll over and just, and he'd look at me say, it doesn't matter what you say.
It's how you say it.
The dog has no idea what I'm saying, but I say it in a loving tone and it's all good.
You know, there's a lot of truth to that and communicating with people.
We can say things that are not necessarily blatantly offensive.
But we can say it in a real belligerent, aggressive tone.
And all they hear is the tone.
They didn't even hear the words.
They didn't even hear the message.
That's right. They don't even hear the words.
What have you learned about the importance of fatherhood?
You got seven. I have seven children.
Seven children. Yeah.
What have you learned about the importance of fatherhood?
All right. I believe God, God made man.
Okay. And God created man and God gave man the word.
And the word at that time was don't eat of the fruit of those two trees.
Okay. That was a symbol.
That's all the word God gave man at that time.
Then God gave man a work.
And the work was, he said, take care of this garden.
And then God gave man a woman to help the man.
That man, and then the woman God gave him, that became a marriage.
And then that man and wife had children.
And those children had children, and then there became governments.
Okay. You see where I'm going?
In this country, this country was founded as a Christian country.
This is what I believe.
People can do whatever.
I believe that this country is only as strong as the churches.
Even our founding father says America will remain great as long as America is good.
When America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.
This country is only as strong as the churches in this country.
The churches are only as strong as the families that make up those churches.
Those families are only as strong as the marriages that those families are built on.
And those marriages are only as strong and good as the man that God built the marriages on.
As goes the man, so goes the marriage.
As goes the marriage, so goes the family.
as goes the family, so goes the churches, as goes the churches, so goes the country.
Everything is built on the husband and the father.
And this country is a failure today because the fathers and the husbands have failed.
How? Failing to be the example they need to be, failing to be the leaders they need to be, failing to be the disciplinarians that they need to be, failing to be the providers that they need to be.
If you don't have the backbone as a husband and as a father to be the bad guy, you've got no business being a father or a husband.
There's times when you have to know, this is not a good direction for my marriage, for my family, and everybody's going to be mad at me.
My wife is going to be mad at me.
My kids are going to hate me.
But in the long run, this is a very bad direction and I'm putting my foot down and we're not doing that.
And you become the bad guy, but you do it for the long -term strength and safety of the family.
And we've lost that.
I mean, we've lost that in this country to a very large degree.
And so, I think, I mean, our next generation, our next generation is going to run the politics, they're going to run the finances, they're going to run the judicial system, everything in this country.
And they're going to be the result in a very large degree.
And there's going to be those who don't agree with us, but they're going to be the result of whatever their fathers made them or whatever they become because they didn't have a father.
And so, I think fatherhood is paramount.
I think it's paramount for the future of a society.
Speaking of doing things that make your family mad at you, I heard that you didn't let your daughters date until they were in their late teens.
Is this right? Right.
And that you grilled the potential suitors when they started dating them?
Every boy had to come to me.
Tell me the process.
Tell me the story though.
Well, they would come, the boys would come, hey, you want to, and she was taught, you got to go talk to daddy.
We don't even talk about this, you go talk to daddy.
Two of my son -in -laws today, for years, they would come and say, I'd like to, and they would, they'd come to me and they're like, I'd like to write your daughter.
I'd like to, I'm like, no.
Nope. Well, what about this?
No. Why not? It's like, look, you're a good kid, but my problem with you is you're a kid.
All right, grow up.
And the two of my son -in -laws, they were literally years.
They kept coming back and I'm like, no, let me see what kind of man you're going to become.
Okay. My daughter's not marrying a boy.
And a lot of boys, they grew up to not be good men.
So why let her get into an emotional attachment with a boy who will never grow up?
And why am I not protecting her from that heartache in the future?
And both of them now are married to my daughters, but there, there came a point years later.
I'm like, okay, I've watched you.
All right. You grew up.
You can contact my daughter now.
No. How did that go down with the daughters?
I don't know. They wouldn't come first to me, but I think my daughters appreciated knowing they had a father who was not just looking out for them today.
Their feelings today, their whatever, but looking out for their entire future and putting them on the right road.
I brought a man in my office one time and I had a desk along the wall.
We sat down in front of the desk.
He was sitting in front of me.
I pulled out the middle drawer in my desk, pulled out a buoy knife about that long, slammed in on the desk between us.
I said, do you have any questions?
He said, no, sir. No, sir.
I don't have any questions.
I said, all right, then put it back in the drawer, closed it and we got them left.
They never had any question.
My daughters are married.
All my daughters that are married are married to good men, good men.
And I've told everyone I'm at the wedding.
I've pulled everyone I'm at the wedding aside.
I said, if you ever hurt her, they will never find your body.
I said, there will be no court.
There will be no, um, why they call it a, uh, you know, you go down and you swear out a, uh, you can't come in and so many protective orders.
I said, it won't be any of that.
If you ever hurt her, they won't find your body.
She'll be my daughter to the day she dies.
And they all, they all know everybody knows, you know, it's just like, and I think they appreciate it.
And I think I'm sure they appreciated that on the wedding day.
Oh yeah. Well, I didn't tell them he may have later, but that's okay.
But you know, there's, I think there's a lot of women out there would just say, man, I wish I'd had somebody in my life that, that had that kind of commitment to my safety and to my future.
Why do people think that you were saying that?
Is it because you're a tyrant?
Is it because you wanted to domineer over your daughter's lives?
Or is it because you love them and you want the best for them and you want them to be safe and protected and happy?
Just that, because I'm not every one of my children when they got married, you're adults.
And I never interfere in their decisions.
Never. I never say you can't go here.
You should do that.
I never tell their husband, you should get this job.
You should do that.
We don't interfere in how they raised their children.
My children are not raising their children the way I raise them.
I never say anything about it.
It's you're an adult.
I raised you being adult.
You're a parent. Those children are your children.
I'm not a tyrant at all, but they know from a distance, Zeus is looking from Olympia and he will throw that thunderbolt down if somebody tries.
They know that it's like, dad's always there.
He's never meddling.
He's never in the way.
He's never in our affairs.
But if he's always there, if we ever need him.
What do you think were the most important lessons that you taught your kids?
Or what do you hope that your kids learned?
Your word. Your word is your bond.
Don't lie. Now I would go to jail for this today, but my kids are grown and gone.
We had a deal in the house and it's like, and I spanked my children.
Okay. There it is. There's a set penalty for breaking this rule.
If you do, if you break the rule, you're going to get that penalty.
If you lie about it, the penalty is doubled.
Okay. So it's like my boys, it's like, you don't hit girls.
You don't hit girls.
All right. And so, you know, if, uh, you know, if they haul off and smack their sister, comes in, you know, he hit me.
She's crying or red mark on the side of her face.
Call them in. It's like, did you hit her now?
If it's proven that he did hit her, you know, there's going to be like 15 legs.
I mean, the penalty was severe.
You don't hit women.
All right. If he said, no, I didn't hit her.
Oh son. Don't do that.
No, I didn't hit her.
And then two of the other siblings come in and say he did.
We saw it. Well, he got the 15 lakes for hitting a sister, but he got 30 lakes for lying about it.
So he got 45 lakes total.
It's like lying is the worst thing.
Do not lie. Go through life.
You be honest. You speak the truth.
Even to your harm. Even to your detriment.
You do not lie and you don't hit women.
So don't lie. Don't lie.
Uh, your, your word is, you're a man's most important, a man's most valuable, most important resource is his good name.
If a man ain't got a good name, he ain't got nothing.
So don't lie. Be respectful, you know, be respectful to others, be respectful to your elders.
Even if, even if they're not respectable, they still been through life enough, you know, their position earns them what their behavior want, you know, you had seven kids.
Were you rich? How do you afford seven kids?
A lot of people at the moment have a problem.
I can't start a family.
I don't have enough money.
I don't have the X, Y and Z.
It's one of the most common reasons people have for not starting families yet.
No way. So during that time, there were years where my income tax return, like for the year I made 16 to $18 ,000 for the year.
Uh, I worked hard, worked two jobs.
We were very frugal.
I had a guy asked me one time I was working.
Um, actually I was working, we were living in temple, Texas, and I was working at USB Watson electric was industrial electrical supply.
And I was working at the counter.
One of the contractors come in.
He said, Dwayne, do you, do you get assistance on the side?
I'm like, what do you mean?
He said, you know, food stamps, welfare or something.
I had four kids at the time.
I said, no, man, I don't, I don't get anything.
He's like, does, does your wife work?
I said, no, my wife is a mother of four kids at home.
He said, then how do you do it?
He said, I know basically what you're making here.
How do you do it? I said, well, it's a very, very difficult, very complex, um, very mathematical equation.
I said, you sure you want to hear it?
He said, I want to hear it.
I said, are you sure?
He said, man, I'm sure.
How do you do it? I said, we say, no, we just say, no.
No, we're not going out to eat.
No, we don't need satellite TV.
No, you don't need a hundred dollar pair of basketball shoes.
No, we don't have to have TV dinners.
No, my wife can cook.
Uh, you just say no.
No, I bought a 1976 Dodge Dart paid cash for, you know, for $700.
I don't need a car payment.
I just need a vehicle that would get me from point A to point B.
I said, just say no.
Live within your means.
It's amazing. I mean, we rented a mobile home.
We were in a mobile home, you know, $300 a month, whatever it was.
How many people lived in the mobile home?
Myself, my wife, and, and, uh, with the three children, we had the three children at the time.
Yeah. So it's just live within your means.
You don't need near as much as you think you need, you know, and who cares about the status symbol of those around you, what they think you are.
And, and then you find out when you get up to my age, that the people out there who are super, super, truly super wealthy for real, most of them, they look like they're living in the mobile home, driving the Dodge Dart, they don't show it.
You know, I mean, they don't have all the big super cars and everything.
You're truly obnoxiously wealthy guys.
Um, you know, they're driving Toyotas.
They're driving Hondas.
That's what I liked about Austin, the richest people drive the shittest cars.
Yeah. Yeah. So it's a, it's a big circle.
And so if you want to get this out of circle, start over here.
You know, if you want to get to the level of where you are so rich, you drive the crappiest car, you start by driving the crappiest car.
Yeah. I think, uh, starting at the end or realizing what do older people do?
What did the people that are a little bit further down the line, how do they dress?
What do they spend their time thinking about doing?
What are they invested in?
And, uh, realizing that if you're going to end up there and if you can see that most people with age for a good amount of time comes some wisdom and some understanding, you think, well, you can probably take some of that now and bring it down into the present moments and speedrun this whole wisdom growing
up thing a little bit.
Right. What, what, how big was Warren Buffett's mansion?
He lived in a little three -bedroom, well, I don't know three -bedroom, little brick ranch house, same house he'd been in for decades, you know, he, he drove a car.
He just wore suits.
You know, how does Mark Zuckerberg dress sweats in a t -shirt?
You know, how, how does, um, what's his name?
Amazon. Look at how he dresses.
Yeah. You know, what are these guys doing?
Um, it's like, oh, maybe it should learn something.
Speaking of famous people, who are some of the role models that you have looked up to over the years?
Um, I can't think of anybody famous that was.
Well, what about private people?
My dad. Um, uh, the cowboy in Kansas I worked with for several years really respected him.
He was a scratchy fella, but he had, he had his honesty and, and, uh, he really had a big effect.
So just some of the folks I've worked with and been around with my dad was probably the, my dad and I were not always on the same page about everything, but I've never met a man in my life where I looked at and said, that guy's more honest than my dad.
My dad was the most honest man I've ever known in my life.
Um, and no one has affected me more in that area than he did.
I think when we're talking about leaving the world in a better place than you found it, uh, not doing things that.
Derrogate the wellbeing of the people that are around you that you're supposed to look after and care for.
I do think that, you know, if somebody asks the question, who have been the biggest influences, who have been your biggest role models, I think the goal of every father should be for their son to say dad.
I think that's usually a pretty good indication that you did a good job.
Pretty good. Yeah, it's, it's pretty good.
Um, and he was, my dad was always himself, but himself was a good guy.
Himself was enough.
He was never wealthy, never famous, never, but he was very much respected in his field.
And, uh, you know, there's a, there's very little more that a man could ask for when he leaves this world than saying, look, I was known as an honest man.
I was known as a very respectable man and everybody that knew me respected me.
They may not all liked me, but they all respected me and everything else is really not that important.
I'm interested you have this facility now, which maybe you're going to have to slow down for a little bit and reorganized to, to make it work.
If you were able to design your perfect day, what would that look like?
What would an ideal day for you be?
That I could like, whatever you want in my life now.
Yeah, your life right now.
What would it, what does, what does a perfect normal day look like for you?
Ma 'am, my days right now are all over the map.
that's a really good question.
I don't know if I have an answer for that.
Um, I, where you stunk me.
I don't know. I wonder if that's an indication of how much sort of change and upheaval is going on inflection and, and, and the tension and stuff like that for you at the moment.
I think it's an indication of how the quality of my day is internalized, how it's not affected by my environment, by what's going on.
Um, I think it's more of that.
It's like, whatever happens, you know, we can, whatever I'm doing today, we can make this a really good day.
Um, instead of thinking more along the lines of, if I can do this and this, and if this can happen, and if I can be here and if I can have this property and I can have this schedule and that, then that's going to be the perfect day.
Then I can have a good day.
Yeah. Well, that's power.
I'm one of my friends, Alex says, if you can have a bad day for no reason, then you can have a good day for no reason.
You know, I've been staying with my, my best friend lives in temple.
And, uh, day before yesterday, I got him, he had to go to work.
I got up, took a shower, made two or three cups of coffee, you know, and I got online and I said, I know there's cigar lounges around here.
There's gotta be. And I found one in Belton, nice folks.
And so I went to the cigar lounge and I just sat there and smoke couple of cigars and talk to folks until about one o 'clock, went back to the house, sat on the porch and, and talked with, um, my buddy's wife about poetry.
She's real big in the poetry.
We just sat on the porch and talked.
And then he came home and he and I went to a Lone Star steakhouse and I had a ribeye for supper and I'm like, today was a really, really good day.
You know, what did I accomplish?
Who cares? What did I break?
Nothing. It was just a really good day.
You know, it was just the ideal day.
And there's something to be said for getting to that place in your life that you don't have to architect.
What a good day is going to be.
You make good days.
You make good days out of whatever you got, whatever's there, there wasn't a horse anywhere in sight.
I didn't go riding, you know, um, my wife is back home.
She wasn't here, but was like, this is where I am.
This is what I got.
This is what my good day is going to look like.
Dwayne Nell, ladies and gentlemen, Dwayne, I love everything that you do.
You're fantastic. Everybody needs to check out your YouTube channel.
Everyone needs to go and follow the stuff that you're doing online.
I, I can't believe that you've been hiding away somewhere and now you've sort of broken above the surface.
I really hope that I, so many people are going to be blown away by, you know, the things that you talk about.
It's very, very impressive.
I'm really, really glad that you're doing what you're doing.
Well, thank you. I appreciate it.
I appreciate you too.
It's been an honor.
You have me here. I'm very thankful.
Thank you.
