0:00Welcome to the Dad Edge Podcast. The Dad Edge movement creates leaders of men, leaders of families, and leaders of communities. We will not only impact this generation of fathers, but the next generation as well. The kids we are raising will have better chances and odds stacked in their favor because of the amazing example that their fathers emulated for them. We are here to change the world. We are here to change relationships. We are here to positively disrupt this generation of fathers so no man goes to their grave with regrets. We disrupt the drift of busyness and replace it with razor-focused intention, passion, purpose, and direction. We are the Dad Edge and we're here to change the game. John Miles, welcome to the Dad Edge Podcast. My friends, so good to have you. Larry,

1:06so excited to be here at such an honor. It is an honor to have you, man. So you've got two kids, 28 and 22. You've had a marriage for 22 years. You're newly remarried. And I know you've got a lot of exciting things that you're working on today. But I know you've got two dogs too. So hopefully they'll behave in the background today. I know you've got one that might be a barker. But it comes to the door. Yeah, it's the same thing. We're actually getting a washer and dryer delivered today. So we'll see if my dog behaves. But they're not supposed to be here until an hour and a half from now. So I'm thinking we'll be done by then. But we shall see. So well, it's great to have you here, man. Everybody who comes on the show gets a get's an introduction. And your resume is absolutely incredible, man. So I want to introduce you to the crew if you're cool with that. Sounds good, man. All right. So this is a, this is a long resume, man. And this is a, this is something that I think is a real standout for several

2:11reasons, not just all the words and all the accomplishments and all the things you've done. But also how you have pivoted this. And you started asking yourself the different questions. So when somebody looks at your resume, it's probably easy to say like this guy, John, man, he's got it all figured out. You graduated from the United States Naval Academy. You served as a naval officer in a combat veteran. You went into management consulting with booze Allen moved into Arthur Anderson and then found yourself found yourself having to reinvent yourself. When Anderson collapsed in the wake of Enron, you pivoted again. You went into fortune, the fortune 500 world eventually holding a senior leadership positions with companies like Loves and Dell. You became a sea level executive. You moved into private equity. You also became a CEO multiple times. You advised major organizations and helped lead transformations involving cybersecurity, technology, culture, strategy, and billions of dollars in business. By almost every

3:13external measurement we use in this country, a man, John here had made it. But what I find fascinating about your story is that somewhere along the way, success stopped answering the deeper questions. And I see I see this a lot. You've talked openly about reaching a point that you describe as quiet desperation, which by the way, I love that term. Most men live lives of quiet desperation. You had accomplished the things ambitious men are told we're supposed to accomplish. But then you began asking yourself a much more uncomfortable question. And that is what happens when life looks successful from the outside, but no longer feels meaningful on the inside. And that question eventually became a completely different chapter in your life. Today, you're the founder of Passion struck, a best-selling author, research or keynote speaker, and you're the host of the Passion struck podcast, which has reached tens of millions of downloads around the world and has become one of the leading shows in health, wellness, personal development, and intentional living. I love this. You and I have shared some of the same gas, which is really

4:17cool. You've sat across the table from extraordinary people like Seth Godin, Susan Cain, Gretchen Rubin, Arthur Brooks, Daniel Pink, Jim Quick, Robin Sharma, and many, many more to understand what actually creates a meaningful life. Your first book, Passion struck, explored 12 principles for living with greater purpose and intention. But now your work has moved into something that I think is incredibly relevant to the audience, especially my audience. And that's mattering, not achievement, not achievement, not status, not being needed because you can produce something actually mattering. You're upcoming book, The Mattering Effect, explores something I think a lot of fathers in my audience quietly wrestle with, but rarely know how to articulate. What happens when a man begins believing his value is directly connected to what he produces, his paycheck, his title, his performance. How much he provides, how much he fixes, how much everyone depends on him because a guy can become incredibly successful being useful while simultaneously completely, feeling completely unseen. And

5:21that can follow him home. We can provide an incredible life for our families while slowly becoming emotionally absent from the people who we are providing for. So man, I'm really excited to get into this. I got to tell you, man, this is a, this is quite an accomplishment. And I know you also share with me too the experience that you had with the FBI, because I know we touched on that before we hit record today. Well, Larry, first, thank you for sharing that bio. It's moving even to hear it myself, because I don't think we look at our own bios very often. Do we? I got out of the military and my last duty station was in Key West, Florida, ironically, they lead the counter drug, interdiction task force out of Key West. And I always called it ironic because as you were coming out of the command, you could actually see people doing drugs about a football field away

6:25along this chain linked fence. But on that command, we had representatives from every three letter, three letter organization that the federal government has. And I was asked to apply to a bunch of them. And after going through several of the application processes, which if anyone has done it, they're pretty grueling. I think I went through like 10 lie detector tests and multiple physicals, etc. I ended up selecting the FBI and I was a week away from going to my Quantico class when the detailer called me. And this was during the Clinton administration that Congress couldn't pass the budget. Imagine that. And so my class, unfortunately, got recycled. And what I thought was going to be a couple months turned out to be 40 months. And so I didn't have a plan, be man. I didn't know what to do at that point in time. Because I was married,

7:28needed to have income coming in. And luckily, I went back to my Naval Academy roots. And at that point in time, the Alumni Association would send you, because we didn't have the internet, this like three inch thick book of every living Academy grad. And so I randomly just started reaching out to people through that and ended up with three job opportunities. I could become a tester at Qualcomm, a quality control tester. I could work on an assembly line for a Honda plant, producing cars. Or I had this opportunity to go work for Booz Allen in Reston. And I thought that the best transition for me was to go to Booz Allen because I thought, what better place could you go than to learn management consulting and to get a fresh start? So that's what I ended up doing. Yeah, I'm not familiar with Booz Allen. Maybe I should be. Can

8:29you, what is that organization? What do they do? So Booz Allen was really unique. It was the combination of both the strategy firm. So when I was there, we had something that was akin to Bane or the Boston Consulting Group or McKenzie serving commercial clients. And then on the federal side, we were competing with SAIC, striker, large organizations like that. And I came in in a very unique role because I was brought into the cybersecurity practice. So we were serving both commercial and non commercial clients. And ironically, the partner that I was working for at the time was retired vice admiral Mike McConnell on the on the federal side. And the first project I got assigned to was creating the information security. To command center, ironically, for the FBI.

9:31So imagine, imagine that coming full circle. And then eventually they moved me out to San Diego where then I started working for both commercial and government clients. Wow, man. So you definitely leveraged your network. And just just out of curiosity, I'm thinking about this three and a half inch book and all these names in it. I mean, is the story I'm telling myself is from the network that you were in, obviously, the military was, I mean, were people like just super receptive to you? I mean, based on your your commonality in the backgrounds. Actually, no, really. And it was interesting. I was just back at the Naval Academy this past weekend. And we were actually talking about this. I think out of all the service academies and as an Navy guy, I hate to admit this. But I think the West Point alumni community takes care of their own the best.

10:31And so some people that I reached out to would would say to me, you know, what the heck are you doing? You know, you sound desperate. And honestly, at the time, I was desperate. I mean, I was I couldn't send emails. I was writing letters, doing cold calls, probably reached out to 100 different people. But I didn't have an alternative because of the position I was in. But the people who who actually responded to have a more West Point grads and the other was an Air Force Academy graduate. I didn't get a great response from the Naval Academy community or the Coast Guard community. I'm surprised about that. You would you would think like, you know, that common ground. But then maybe I'm maybe not a little surprised by it. But I mean, was that kind of shocking, especially hear that feedback of like you sound desperate? I mean, it was a bit. But yeah, at

11:34the time, even though I was going in the FBI, the transition process coming out of the military was horrible. They didn't prepare you for it. And the unfortunate thing is as I talk to people transitioning even today and it doesn't sound like it's much better. So when people reach out to me, for the most part, I try to be upfront with them about what I have available or not. But if someone needs advisors wanting someone to talk to as a grounding source, I always try to do that for them because my experience was so pivotal to my career. That someone gave me a chance. Yeah, I bet, man. I bet. You know, let's let's move into just some of your experience. I noticed on your on your bio that you've been CEO, how many how many times and how many companies were you the CEO? I was a CEO. I was a CEO three times a CEO twice and then a CEO four times

12:41before I started PassionStruck. Wow. And then served because I was in a private equity group on multiple boards. That is absolutely fascinating. What just out of curiosity, what was out of all the roles that you've done, you've done multiple things. What has been the role? I mean, besides what you're doing today, what was the role that that brought you just the most life and the most fulfillment? And then also I'd love to know if you're willing to talk about it, which role was the one that felt the most heavy and maybe even the most unfathomable and perhaps maybe that was even the pivot point where you started asking yourself different questions? Well, I had two roles early on that that were both great. The Booz Allen role took a really interesting turn. I went to this conference and it happened to be a government focused conference and

13:42I was listening to a lecture and was just bored out of my mind. So I stepped away from that lecture and went into the break area and there happened to be this gentleman there who was wearing a Corvette jacket and I loved Corvettes from the 1970s and so we stuck up this conversation. And along the way he asked me, does Booz Allen do any distance learning? And his fate would have it. I happened to be back East the week before and we would get these briefings on recent projects that the firm had done and one of them was to install the distance learning ecosystem for the Army National Guard, which probably the largest distance learning program ever completed for the federal government. So I confidently answered yes. In fact, we just did this blah, blah, blah, blah. So conversation keeps going and it turns out he is the lead civilian instructor at Top Gun. And this simple conversation about 18 months later

14:51turns into an initial $5 million contract to build strike fighter online for the strike fighter community for Navy and Marine Corps aviators and ended up becoming one of the most fun projects ever worked on. We brought in two transitioning aviators, both F-14 fighter pilots to serve as our subject matter experts, but we designed this amazing capability word felt like you were sitting in the cockpit of an F-18 and then you would do all the things that they needed to do to do mission prep before going on active missions. And so that was an amazing project. And then once I got out of Arthur Anderson, I went to work for a company called Lennelies and what made that opportunity so incredible. And if people aren't familiar with Lennelies at the time, it was the amazing

15:53company based out of Australia that was one of the five largest companies on the Australian stock exchanged. We owned the second largest bank in Australia and then we owned a real estate investment business. And then the third component was doing construction. So they would use the financial services to feed the construction business and then we served as kind of the general contractor on these large construction projects. For instance, we were the lead contractor on the Tennessee Titans stadium and also rebuilt the the World Trade Center after unfortunately 9-11 happened. But that was a really cool experience because my boss, the CIO at the time was one of the best mentors I ever had. And he put me in this position where I got to redesign all the IT infrastructure, supporting our security and infrastructure side of the business. And that culminated in us

16:59winning Best Managed Project of the Year by Network World Magazine. And man, that was a high to get on the front cover of the magazine and to be honored for what we accomplished. Very cool, man. Very cool. That sounds like a pretty. Guys, I need your attention for just a second because this is one of the coolest opportunities we've ever had for the Dad Edge audience. I was recently contacted by the Arizona Cardinals and they want to host an official Dad Edge day at State Farm Stadium. So on Sunday, November 15, we are taking over Arizona for an absolutely epic day of Brotherhood, football and celebrating the men who are part of the Dad Edge audience. The Arizona Cardinals are taking on the Los Angeles Rams and we have put together something really special for you guys. When you get a ticket through the dadedge.com forward slash NFL, you're not just getting a seat at the game. You're going to get a sign copy of my book,

18:00The Pursuit of Legendary Fatherhood. You're going to get an exclusive Dad Edge iron sharpens iron branded shirt and before the game, we are going to be doing a private meet and greet where I get to hang out with you, shake your hand. We get to take some pictures and spend some time together before we all head into the stadium. Gents, this is going to be an awesome day. I mean, think about it. Hundreds of men from the Dad Edge audience all to show up to one game. We are all over the country, actually all over the world and we're trying to become better husbands, better fathers and better men. But on November 15th, we actually all get to come together. We get to do the meet and greet, we get to celebrate the brotherhood and then we get to walk into state farm stadium together and watch the Cardinals take on the Rams. This is not something we've ever done before and I have a feeling these tickets are not going to last long. So if you want to be a part of the first ever Dad Edge day with the Arizona Cardinals, go to the dadedge.com forward slash NFL right now to get your

19:01tickets. Again, that's the dad edge.com forward slash NFL. Get your ticket, get your sign book, get your iron sharpened iron shirt. Come hang out with me before the game and let's make November 15th a day that none of us will forget and I cannot wait to see you there. Amazing experience and a really unique one too. So let's move into when you started asking yourself different questions, when you had this quiet desperation, like what were some of the breadcrumbs and symptoms, what were you feeling, what area of your life were you in? I'm also so curious. Did you start asking, I'm going to get a little personal here and if it's okay, did you start asking these questions before you got divorced in 2014, was it right in the cusp, was it right after? When did these questions start to arise? No, they actually started long before that and you asked me like what was the down point in my career? A down point for me when I was at a company called Catalina Marketing and I had

20:07an EVP role there and it was a great company, great employees. I hit it at the wrong time. So it had been owned by a private equity group and that private equity group had positioned it for sale and so they had put all the capital into it that they were going to put. It went through this acquisition process, someone gave them a great offer but it was about $100 million less than the private equity group wanted to put into it and so I hit it right after that had happened and so because of that the private equity group didn't want to continue to put more money into it yet I was brought in in many ways to recreate the technology platform that this company was running on and the hard part for me was we needed 100 million plus to do the

21:12overhaul that we needed to do and they were willing to give like millions and like one million, two million, three million to solve a hundred million dollar problem so that the chasm was huge and it was just one of those situations where you knew what you needed to do. You had the strategy laid out but we were unable to execute on it but during this time I was really searching and I think it's important for people to understand who are listening to this that from the moment we are born the human mind is searching for a baseline signal that signal is actually called the matric instinct and that's confirmation that our presence carries weight and this maturing instinct is as fundamental as our need for essential things like safety, belonging or love. I look at it as important as water that we drink and when we have clean water we thrive. When our

22:20water starts getting tainted what ends up happening over time is it doesn't hit us right away when we drink unclean water sometimes it might have an initial quick reaction but oftentimes the results of it happen over the long haul and I think the same thing happens to us so much in modern life. It's something a concept in the book that I call the slow fade and the slow fade is really this concept that goes into this feeling of quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau talked about where people don't suddenly lose themselves they slowly fade from their own lives and at this point in my career this was exactly what was happening to me and I think for many men out there we become so identified with our career, our responsibilities, our accomplishments and what other people need from us that when ends up happening is we slowly lose sight of the person

23:25underneath all those roles and I know this very personally because as you've talked about with my resume as we were just discussing I spent years being very successful leading huge organizations building things, achieving things, getting awarded things and at a certain point of time I realized I was becoming really good at being useful but on the flip side I wasn't necessarily becoming more connected to who I was and at that point when I started seeing this in myself I started seeing this slurry everywhere people who looked incredibly successful on the outside but who were quietly disappearing like I was on the inside. Did you did you realize this because you saw the symptoms or did this come up in when you had deeper conversations with people who were struggling with the same and if so like what were some of the what were some of the things they were saying?

24:25Well it initially came up to me even before I was at Catalina it started I'm a faithful guy and I was doing this man this 32 can't remember if it's 32 or 34 week long course it was like getting a master's degree in the Bible it's called discipleship one and we would meet by weekly with our pastor for two to three hours at night and with a small group and somewhere during the midst of going through discipleship one I started getting these questions in my dreams and then it became like during the day John you're supposed to help the lonely the broken the batter the beaten the helpless the hopeless the burned out that disengaged around the world and man at that time I was a VP at Lowe's I was leading application development and then went on to become

25:27the chief date officer and doing stuff like that but I had no idea like who are these different people like there were so many different groups that I was given I didn't even know where to start solving this challenge that was being given nor did I even have an idea like why me you know I'm this IT guy how am I supposed to help all these people and so the question really started there but when I started asking the question I was looking at it much differently I was really looking at and these are very disparate things that I'm being asked to solve there looks like what does loneliness have to do with disengagement what does hopelessness have to do with being burned out but around the same time I was at cannellina I started doing a lot more research and this was about 11 12 years ago and I really started to to think maybe I had this backward maybe these things

26:35that were we're looking at in the world like loneliness like hopelessness like rising mental health issues like rising suicide rates that there's actually something underneath all of this that is driving all of that and so that became the question that I started to try to answer and coming out of that experience at cannellina and then leading into my divorce a few years after it I think the thing that answered it for me was the fact that I eventually came to the hard conclusion that not only was I searching for an answer I was actually one of those people I was asked to help serve and I realized that I myself was having mental health issues I myself was burned out I myself had become disengaged I myself had become hopeless and broken and I think Larry you know sitting here talking

27:39to you and that was man that was one of the hardest points in my life and when when I reached that epiphany man I was broken and I had hit rock bottom and right at the same point that I discovered this I had one of the most hard things ever hit me since I had been in combat I came home as I was going through this divorce had taken my daughter to school had gone to the gym to work out unfortunate the gym that day I'd been going to Orange Theory had an electrical fire in our panel and I walked in on an active burglary of my house and I had an assailant pointing a gun at me and that moment really challenged me what am I doing with my life as I came out of it and then you know three days

28:42later one of my best friends committed suicide and those two events really propelled me to take a step back and and really think about like what are you doing with your life and why aren't you pursuing this challenge that God gave you and and that's what really led took me a couple years to figure it out and that's what led to my first book passion struck in the podcast and everything else but underlying it was this was this question that I was trying to answer and now I now think I have the answer whoa whoa whoa whoa so first of all my gosh I'm so sorry for your loss with your friend it's crazy you're bringing this up I just had a guy on main Baroque rush and he one of the things that he talks about is a man commits suicide every 12 minutes in this country and the rates actually skyrocket for men to commit suicide over the age of 70 we gave all these stats so

29:44I'm so sorry to hear that I've I've dealt with that myself here in the past year had a friend take his own life it was horrific what happened like how did you get out of this situation being held at gunpoint with this guy with this intruder in your house what what did you do man well I think this is one of the the areas where I had two things that helped me one by time in the military but I also spent time leading the military police during one of my assignments and so I had some police training and uh whoa I mean I walked in the house and at the time I was renting because when I was going through the divorce man I lost everything and so I didn't have enough money at that time because I had given my ex-wife everything so I was I was rebuilding literally from scratch and I couldn't afford to buy a house so I was renting and I had had some some issues going on with our

30:47plumbing system so you know the rental company had a key to the house so I just figured when I came in and saw some some workers boots on the ground that that it was a worker from the company and so I figured when I was calling out as anyone in the house as anyone in the house that the person had earphones in and and was just listening to music and then I started going up my staircase and it had one of those 90 degree turns and right as I'm hitting this platform where I'm making the 90 degree turn I heard it this you know this breathing that you hear of someone who's really excited um who is starting to panic and I'm like oh shit what did I just walk into and as I turn I I are the corner I catch the person at the top of the stairs pointing the gun down at me and I had to make a split second decision either do I rush up the stairs and he was a large guy

31:52and try to take him out or do I like find some way to evade and get the hell out of there and live to find another another day and I wish I could say I took the valiant bursting up the the flight of stairs but in my mind the logical thing that went through my head was that my chance of survival and not getting shot was very low compared to if I if I went an evasive route I could get out of there and then so that's what happened I went out the back door I'm called the police and he ended up going out the front door and his fate would have it it turns out uh he was the the gentleman who worked for the he had been canvassing me and in the house for a number of weeks and uh was the property manager for the uh the property group that was managing the rental. Geez man holy cow but what I didn't know

32:56at the time was whether he was working with anyone else or not was uh how did just had a curiosity there's a reason I'm asking this um right now we're trying to really train our kids to always close the garage door and lock the doors and they're really bad at it and we've been having conversations with them like listen man like you leave the garage door open you're leaving like literally somebody can walk in while we're there while we're not there like this is unacceptable how did he get in man so this is the uh the the scary part well because he worked for the rental company he had a key but I don't but I had an alarm system on the house too so the ironic thing is um is I you know after I'm getting questioned by the police um I hear a couple police officers downstairs laughing and I'm like like what's so funny this really isn't a funny thing and they go we take a look at this so he was in such a hurry to get out of the house that he left the key to the house in the front door

34:01and on the key to the house it had my not only a key to the house it had the the door code that they could use to to signal getting in he didn't use that because he didn't want a time record but it also had the gate code on it and it had my alarm shot off code plus the challenge code so um so he he had it all and that's what gave us every indication at that point that it had to be someone from the property management company who of course when I went and talked to them and this is the unfortunate thing the guy's grandfather went to the naval academy he said there's no way in a million years it could have possibly been us well turns out it was unbelievable man unbelievable well I'm so glad you got out of there so glad you had that training um that could have been absolutely horrific I don't need to tell you that but my gosh I'm so glad you're okay you know I I want to move to a mattering effect you mentioned before we hit record

35:08today that this has been ranked and I apologize I can't remember the organization that ranks this is one of the number one reads for the month of October which is when this is releasing but I want to to your book and and how you know men can really latch on to some of these things that you know we live these lives of quiet desperation we really really do and we we wonder like I think a lot of times a man wakes up in his late 30s maybe early 40s sometimes 50 and it's like wait a second is this really the way I wanted my life to turn out you know you and I are a bit similar I don't have nearly the resume that you do but I spent two decades in med device sales and worked my way all the way up to the executive level I was when I when I left the industry I was a national sales director for one of our med device companies and at the time I was still running this podcast and um I was making on paper I was making great money my wife got to stay home you know all these

36:13things that we deem is like success you know promotion after promotion after promotion and I was freaking miserable man like I would I spent more time in the airport and hotels there were times where I woke up in my hotel room and I couldn't remember what city I was in I was like what a second where am I at now because there were times where I would jump from city to city even in the same week and I had that realization too and the funny thing is is everybody that surrounded me I had a mix of people kind of like you I had people that they were an agony just like me but they really tried to cover it up and then I had people that I really really couldn't relate to like when you're in executive level management you're traveling a lot you don't see your family a lot and I would sit at the dinner table for really nice dinners with all these suits and people would be like oh it's so great to be away from my family so great to have a break so great to be out you know and I'm like I would sit there and be like yeah I don't like this sucks for me like I miss

37:15my family more than anything like this is really not in line with my core values like and it was like this soul sucking experience in in corporate America um but I was surrounded by a mix of people but I want to get to when a man picks up your book and he's maybe feeling some of these symptoms what what are one or two things in the book that I would say actually are most meaningful to you like and I think you and I are both writers I've written five books and sometimes I I feel like I'm writing a book for the advice for my former self like I wish if I had if I if I could sit across from myself you know 10 years earlier and if I could have given myself some advice I wrote it in kind of like that way but for you the mattering affects somebody picks up the book what what is really meaningful for for that man to get from the book. Larry the mattering effect is composed of really two components so in the first three chapters I tried to diagnose what I call systemic

38:19un-mattering why so why is this slow fade happening to us but the rest of the book 75% of the book is really built on if this self if this feeling of un-mattering is happening if you're feeling like you're disappearing inside your own life how do you how do you take it back so that that gives the listener's kind of a larger footprint of the book but one of the the key concepts I think is important for men is there's this research by Morris Rosenberg who's a deceased psychologist now but he came up with this research that really intrigued me between global versus specific self-esteem and what this really gets into is a man can have strong overall self-esteem

39:20but still feel diminished in specific roles and relationships that actually matter most to him and I think this helps explain the paradox of what I think many high achievers and men are going through I know I'm successful so why do I still feel like I'm disappearing and and what I really try to get to in the book is success in one area of your life doesn't guarantee that you feel significant in the areas that matter most in your life so that would be one core thing and I don't know if you have any other other questions about that you would want to ask actually it would just love for you to go just deeper on that like I think what would be really beneficial is you know I think like so for instance when I was in that place of that you know unfaithelman I constantly question

40:21myself I'm like you know you should be grateful for what you have like you should be grateful that your wife gets to stay home you should be grateful that you've got a good paying job you should be grateful that you're in a leadership position stopping and so miserable right so there was a little bit of shame and guilt but I would love for you to talk about even go you know one or two levels deeper than that like the maybe the more sinister symptoms that men might not even be aware of when they're going through something like that yeah well let's make this really real for people yeah so there's a psychologist he's he's in his 70s now but he's he's taught at Cornell for many years named Tom Gillovich and Professor Gillovich is really known for his research on regrets so to give the audience some understanding of how prevalent this this is he's Gillovich has researched thousands and thousands of individuals who were in their third

41:26trimester of life so they're they're in their twilight looking back at their life and 76% of the people he has surveyed regret not becoming their ideal self and what is crazy about this is it mirrors the work of Bronnie where he wrote the book the five regrets of the dying she she was a palliative caranurse and hospice and the number one regret of the dying is exactly that not not pursuing becoming our ideal self and it's interesting are you familiar with the work of dr john de martini i am not no i'm not um he's one of the leading behavioral experts in the world and i happen to be talking to him last night and we were talking about about this that for so so many of us we were a mask for so much of our lives pretending to be someone or not and

42:33this is what i mean by systemic unattering what ends up happening and i believe that this has been going on since the first factory whistle blew during the industrial revolution is that we over time have been judged for what we produce not for who we are and so the issue for so many of us is that it's it's not that we're failing it's that the environments that we interact with day in and day out were never designed to hold our full humanity and so the concept that i bring about in the book is that we are living today in a mattering market which is a system in which human beings increasingly exchange our sense of worth for external measures of value whether that status achievement productivity could be approval visibility utility and so

43:43when those things are happening what what this brings about is the great erasure and that's the gradual loss of individual individuality as people become increasingly interchangeable parts inside the systems that organize their lives and so what that brings about is huge ramifications on every element of our life that that is exactly what is leading to the rise and mental health it's leading to the rise and burnout it's leading to the loneliness epidemic it's leading to the hopelessness that so many people feel and this is not now only my research I have taken this to some of the leading experts in the world and asked them does it resonate with them including dr. D martini and the the consistent answer i'm getting back is is yes this is what is

44:46happening this is what is causing all these things so it has physical ramifications it has physiological ramifications it has emotional ramifications it has relationship ramifications and it has major work ramifications which is leading to 900 million people around the world feeling unfulfilled but here in america it's staggering the belonging barometer which is a study that was produced by the american immigration i can't remember the american immigration society found that 64 percent of americans don't believe that they belong at work 74 percent believe they don't belong in the communities that they surround their lives in in close to 20 percent of americans don't feel they belong anywhere at all and and i have come to the conclusion that it's because of this systemic

45:51unattering and the greater racier that has happened to so many people and i personally i love stats because i think those really send a very strong message when we know statistics like that and i don't doubt that as you're going through that even myself i'm like i keep my own community to be honest like my own neighborhood i don't i don't feel like i'm a part of this in a way it's really weird like when we go to our subdivision pool it reminds me of like the the great school and the high school cafeteria lunch tables it's like you got the cool kids over here you got these people over there and you got these people over there and it's like it's weird it's really weird i can understand like even as adults we we feel that way you know as far as like what what are some of the first steps that a man like i love like in your bio that i read you started asking yourself very very different questions right and i'm a huge fan of

46:55quality of our life depends on the quality of the questions we ask ourselves and others and what is what's a couple questions that a man could get started really exploring this this whole thing yeah well i think one of the most important questions is are you feeling valued and are you adding value because i think this is the single most important piece of research it's actually something that came from unfortunately is recently deceased isak Pralitanski it's one of the single most important research pieces of research explaining the mattering market because what's happening today is in so many of the the high performance environments that we find ourselves in as men these environments have dramatically over emphasized adding value while neglecting feeling

47:55valued so i know that this is what i was feeling and i i was coming home from work completely depleted and i'm i used to be ashamed to say this i'm not anymore because i'm hoping it will help someone i would sit in my car in like my garage for like 10 to 20 minutes sometimes just trying to get uh my emotions back and my energy back because i knew when i walked in the door even though i felt depleted i had to show up for my my life and i had to show up for my kids so in the work environment uh we've created these systems where we're constantly asked to keep adding value but we don't get that reflected back and i think that's why so many people feel disengaged and so many people are being burned out so i think that would be one of the fundamental questions that men

48:58uh should start asking themselves and women too if they're listening because they're there are ton of spouses who give and give and give and give if they're the one who's staying at home but also don't feel that return coming back and then i think many to understand are they living in the in the matter and gap because that's what this creates it's the distance between what human beings need to thrive and what their environments are actually giving them so the second question would be are you surrounding yourself with environments people etc that are giving back that value to you and if not it's a concept i actually talk about in my first book called the mosquito principle you need to identify the mosquitoes in your life and in that book um i chose the concept the metaphor of mosquito because a mosquito is something that's really benign

50:00mean you know we just swap these things away until they bite us and they inflict huge pain in our life so in the book i call them the blood suckers which are kind of your boundary destroyers destroyers you're invisible suffocators who are the people who are always the glass half empty and the pain in the asses and so i i kind of go through in the book this description of what each one is but you can get a sense for it but once you identify those people who are blood suckers and visible suffocators or pain in the asses or the environments that you allow yourself to be in you then need to set boundaries up to protect yourself from them so that those would be two questions and things that that men could do because you know and i've heard the term energy vampires i've heard that before yeah similar concept and um you know i i think we do need to identify those people you know that's why i think men being in

51:03community is so important and the right community where we have aligned visions you know we have um we want this very similar things for ourselves for our family for our vitality even for our joy um just as we brought go ahead can i can i explain one other thing because i think yeah especially if they have kids one of the most important things that i discovered is that not only does this unmattering have consequences inside of us what i really came to the conclusion is that mattering is our social immune system and the issue is similar when you don't when you don't get when you don't get a shot for a potential virus um um when we don't pass the social immune system down to the next generation this spreads like wildfire through bodies relationships families and communities and to just make this real for for your audience like one of the most gut-wrenching things that happen to me when

52:07i was at fact Catalina uh company is um i remember my kids uh were were and i just happened to be in in washing in dc watching a couple of my young cousins doing this they would build blocks and then another one would knock them down and they're they're having so much fun and laughing and playing and while they were doing this uh at the time my my young son looked at me and he said dad why don't you ever laugh anymore and it was just it was like a gut punch but a few years later when i didn't deal with this the way i should have i realized that both my son and my daughter started to retrench themselves because they look to us as their mirror and when one of parents is checked out like i was and i had become emotionally numb it it spreads to the people that matter most in our lives and so if you're feeling this in any way and and the the only way i can describe it

53:10Larry's it it was just like i couldn't put my finger on it but my life was just getting a little dimmer every single day and and that's what the slow fade does it it's like you just don't feel as alive as you used to be you're feeling that go out there and start talking to someone about it i wish i had a lot sooner than i did because i i would have saved myself i man a ton of uh my ton of negative ivory precautions i think so many things in a man's life could be avoided when um when number one he's when he's not asking himself these really powerful questions you know i i think even about i started doing this work about 15 years ago you know when i was about 36 years old and you know i look at it as my at the time my oldest was six at the time my youngest was literally just born we just had our third kid and i was just like

54:13wasted six years of my life in a way and but i also have a lot of gratitude that i woke up from that from that coma i would call it you know from that from that life of desperation and uh the the thing that my hope is i know yours yours is two is to positively disrupt the minds and the hearts of men who feel this exact same way i mean that that that's the whole purpose for the book is if i could help anyone not have to get through the agony and despair that i went through that i ultimately feel uh took the life of my friend Tim as well um if it just impacts one person perhaps i've saved a life you know i would i would agree you know a lot of people ask me about you know my mission with with the data edge and i say the same thing i was like if i can just help one guy you know pivot his life

55:13then mission accomplished you know and i i tell i say this all the time i'm client zero like the biggest reason i do this podcast is because you know i people refer to me as a dad expert and i correct them immediately i'm like i'm not a dad expert i'm a dad student yeah i know well yeah well i mean the unfortunate thing and where we early on started this discussion is is that uh suicides especially among men are are rising and yeah as i went back to the naval academy uh we've had more academy classmates uh die because of suicide than anything else and when you look at the suicide rate especially in veterans friend of mine did a TED talk on this so TED TED had to verify the statistics that he put out and the statistics that he put out and this was like four years ago is in the war on terror there were about five thousand deaths somewhere five thousand six thousand well

56:22as of four or five years ago there were over 150,000 suicides related directly to the war on terror and that and that is very telling it is really telling i got to tell and speaking of this so just last week we had um just him pickering on he's a former uh special forces green beret he's been on ten deployments he's uh seen a lot of combat and he just wrote a book on this exact topic and one of the things that he shared was i lost more brothers stateside outside of combat that i did in in combat and that's the statistics are staggering so i'm so glad you're on this mission man and i'm so glad you're your podcast as as big as it is just as we wrap up here today i want to give you an opportunity to just share with the audience work and then find the book work and then find your podcast work and they find you if they want to connect with you what are the best places

57:26yeah so so thank you for recognizing the the award that the book just got it was selected by the next big idea club which is curated by Susan Kane Malcolm Gladwell uh Dan Pink and Adam Grant to be one of their missed or read books so to me that's that's better than any best seller list i could possibly hope to get on um they can find that at matteringaffect.com but you the book is available uh everywhere books are sold through penguin random house and um if you want to learn more about me and my speaking um the best place to do that is john rmiles.com and if you're interested in the podcast or the other services that passion struck offers best place to go is passionstruck.com by god's your man well guys you won't have to remember all that if you guys go to the datedge.com forward slash 1543 we'll have all the links in the show notes also don't forget uh if you join the alliance like you heard in the middle of the show today uh i'm just i'm releasing a brand new

58:28ebook called the marriage drift stop chasing and start leading uh this is a book i wrote based on the cohorts that we've been teaching roommates to soulmates so uh you'll get a fresh copy of that before it actually releases in january so that's one of the giveaway's i'm given so again guys go to the datedge.com forward slash 1543 for this show all the links everything we talked about john thank you so much for coming on today this was awesome and thank you for sharing your knowledge and thank you too for asking yourself some really tough questions early on that that actually developed in what you're doing today man because this absolutely matters no pun intended well larry thank you so much for having me it's quite the honor. oh you bet man